Spiritualized’s J Spaceman and John Coxon announce Music for William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton

In 2015, Spaceman, Coxon, and friends performed a new original score live at a special film screening at the Barbican Gallery in London. The recording sat on a shelf for ten years, and will finally be unveiled through this release. In addition, Spaceman and Coxon will perform the work in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Eggleston’s hometown of Memphis, on the invitation of the photographer’s son Winston Eggleston.

"With Memphis, I grew up with and I fell in love with that whole part of the world and the music that came from there,” explains Spaceman. “Memphis is infused with this magic, then this dreadful poverty as well. There’s a strangeness to it. It’s a place where I never felt comfortable."

Restored and re-edited by Eggleston in collaboration with the author Robert Gordon, the 77-minute film was screened in 2015 as part of Doug Aitken’s Station to Station, a 30-day arts festival in London and Aitken recruited J Spaceman to provide a live score.

For the screening, Spaceman brought along guitarists Coxon and Tony “Doggen” Foster, and drummer Rupert Clervaux, who has played both with Spiritualized and with Coxon’s project Spring Heel Jack. Using a pedal, Spaceman could control the volume of the film while cueing the band to play against certain sequences, usually those in which an indistinct ranting seemed to be going on. He and Coxon also prepared a set of instrumental pieces that could have been off-cuts from Exile on Main Street.

Tracklist:

1. I was stranded in Canton
2. Last week I took a trip
3. It’s not gospel
4. What train blues
5. I don’t know what I can possibly do
6. Mother’s milk
7. Back Up William
8. Everybody in their life at one time or another
9. Love for the asking
10. Credits roll