Jason Pierce has never been shy about his drug use. But rather than it being something that happened alongside the music, it was, for many years at least, an intrinsic part of his artistic output. His first band Spacemen 3 earned a reputation as chemical dustbins through outspoken interviews extolling the virtues of recreational narcotic use. Song titles and the constant theme of falling headlong into heroin addiction in his lyrics hammered home the point. Spacemen 3's 1990 collection of demos Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To not only accurately described what was happening in the music, but summed up Pierce's MO full stop. "Love in the middle of the afternoon, just me, my spike in my arm and my spoon," he sang on 'I Think I'm In Love' from Spiritualized 's 1997 Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space , an album which came in a blister pack along with prescription-style liner notes and recommended dosage. When Amazing Grace came along in 2003, Pierce called time on his hedonism, the intravenous kind, anyway; the album's sleeve a simple, bold photo of his arm, sans the track marks that would've once been there. The song titles still harked back to addiction gone by -- 'She Kissed Me It Felt Like A Hit' for one -- but musically, the stripped-down sound backed up the clean-start allusions of the cover. In place of the blissed-out haze of instrumentation Pierce had become synonymous with, came noisy, back-to-basics garage rock.