In 1997, at the height of the Brit-pop binge, an album was released that was destined to go down in the annals as one of the most important in the entire history of rock music.

It was released by a band from Rugby, a provincial English town halfway between London and the new British music capital, the Gallagher brothers’ Manchester.

Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space takes its name from the philosophical novel The World Of Sophia by Gaarder and is released in a box similar to a medicine box with a blister from which the disc is taken out and a CD-book printed like an information leaflet.

NME appointed it as album of the year, music and packaging aroused curiosity making it an iconic object.

The Spiritualized was born in the early 1990s from the ashes of Spacemen 3, a psychedelic project of the previous decade founded by Jason Pierce.

The band’s history saw the succession of a large number of members and turntables, but everything revolved around Pierce’s visionary genius and ego.

A complex character, a psychonaut who experiments with acid, uses and abuses it for a long time, dives into alcohol but somehow manages to come out of it.

He faces illnesses more or less serious, isolates himself, treats himself but always remains on his feet.

Each phase he goes through elevates him, broadens his perspectives, and reshapes his visions.

In all his lyrics, you can find the theme of the fragility of existence, declined in a mystical or earthly key.

Always a gospel fan, Pierce’s ambition is to explore the essence of the individual through his various forms of ecstasy, desires, religion and addictions.

Starting with early psychedelia and shoegaze, the band’s music becomes infused with narcotic sounds, incorporating blues influences and melancholic pop veins.

The care of the sounds became more and more meticulous over the years, reaching a symphonic level that evokes ethereal and lush atmospheres in live performances.

In the latest album, Everything Was Beautiful (2022), Jason Pierce plays sixteen instruments and for the track Always Forgetting With You (2014) uses sounds recorded by the Voyager probes.

From their nebula floating in the cosmic winds, the Spiritualized are among the most influential bands of the 1990s.