Jack Intrepid Reports

GIG REPORT
SPIRITUALIZED
WORTHING ASSEMBLY HALL
22.10.25

I don’t have a definition of Rock an’ Roll. Do you?

I know what it is, and what it isn’t; and I know that my idea of it perfectly aligns with yours, but I struggle to explain it to anyone outside the gang.

In my lifetime RnR has made the move from cultural dismissal to legitimate art form. In the beginning it was mocked and blocked, characterised as simplistic noisy nonsense made by talentless, unskilled, rowdy, show-off wastrels.

But for us lot, fleeing from consensus society and facing a world refusing to yield any quarter to non-conformity, Rock an’ Roll was the only thing that made any sense. Everything else that had truth or resonance was locked up secretly inside us, or in other people, or isolated in books and films, or preserved in places to which we had no access. The things that were meaningful to us were either private, separated, or diverted away from shared experience. We were lonely.

RnR gave us a reason to gather and share. We’d listen to records and cassette tapes, measure our knowledge of the Top 40 or TotPs, share the bands we’d discovered or (if lucky or rebellious enough) seen in gig halls and dark peculiar pubs. Rock an’ Roll was where we found connection and confederacy, a place where our own stories of rage and sorrow, of our defiance, were metamorphed and crafted into rebel-yell campfire songs that broke through the lonely.

There’s an urgent, energetic hunger native to Rock an’ Roll that is definitive both of the music, and of those who love it. That’s why it feels like home. And we know that, regardless of musical differences and conflicts, everyone across every music tribe holds RnR sacred in the same way we do ourselves.

Deep down at its roots and in the way it’s coded, Rock an’ Roll is folk music; and as with folk music, acceptance turned it into capitalist fodder: the very concept of music made by outsider mavericks and reprobates was now commodified and sold back to us. But the soul deep roots stuff - the song of those who won’t be yoked - is still the music that keeps us spellbound at the hearthside.

We might listen to the music in isolation, but when we go to to stare at bands in late loud dark rooms, that urgent energetic hunger is invoked and expressed, then resolved and satisfied by the show, and by the very act of attending a gig. The band performs the ritual of expression; the crowd receives and absorbs it. This is a mutual exchange, and something deep is soothed. The stage is our hearth; the show is the fire.

People ask “Does it have to be so loud?” Yes. Yes it does. Lemmy asking at every gig “Is it loud enough for ya?” - always met with a roar from the crowd - acknowledges the necessity for total involvement: don’t talk, don’t look away, be absorbed.

And so, Spiritualized: playing the Worthing Assembly Hall to raise funds for My UHSussex. It’s an odd room, more like a school hall than a gig venue. The light and sound desks are temporary, boxed in behind those ubiquitous crowd-control barriers you see everywhere but never look at. Security make us queue in an orderly fashion for the bar. The marshals look kinda nonplussed, even though it’s their house. The crowd is mostly men, and they’re so similar that they look like they all went to the same school. It doesn’t really feel like a gig. It feels like being in a holiday rental: all the necessaries are present and correct, but it’s not a home.

In this gawky atmosphere, support band Insecure Men work hard to jam up the holes where the vibes are leaking out. Their plaintive skewed wind-across-the-moors music builds an attentive and focused stillness in the room. It sounds like the lament of the lover reaching for succour.

This is serious song making. Cohesive, alluring, beautiful synthesis of form and function, so that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. All this is just word salad really; what I want to say is that these are gorgeous songs that land in a very tender spot inside me. Feeling my own hurt expressed like this makes things less lonely.

Suddenly, almost shocking me, I’m plunged into Spiritualized. It’s immediately immersive, as if waiting for the show to start never happened. This is all there is, this full body experience of total music. I have to move back: the power of it knocks me back on my heels. I notice that I’m standing motionless. I’m holding my breath.

I’ve seen Spiritualized over the years, somewhere between several and many times. Every time feels like talking with a friend and finally hearing their full truth, like everything I hoped they’d share is freely offered at last. You know what Spiritualized sounds like, but if you’ve not seen them live you don’t know what they feel like. Here, tonight, Spiritualized feels like glory.

There’s so much structure and architecture here. I can see the elements, I can see the work of the build, it’s generously apparent. But it’s not bulky or clunky, not clumsy; there’s confident elegance here. And it’s honest about being this good, this fu***ng good. I love knowing I’m in the presence of greatness, I can lean back on the nearly physical bulk of the music and enjoy the ride. I don’t have to think, only feel, receive.

It’s simultaneously a complex wash of sound that covers me like a wave breaking, and a filigreed web of different elements that fascinate, like the waves that follow, each follow, each isolate, each disparate.

And just as the tide turns, so does the night. The band draws back, the crowd is released from the connection; our collective experience is dissolved, and we each resolve back to our separate selves. We turn to look at each other; we’ve all been through this together, and now it’s becoming an inner private experience, and very soon a memory. There’s a brief hush, like a sigh, before we begin the business of leaving and going home.

Maybe it’s this that defines RnR: this collective trust and mutual immersion in music made by artists who, like us, feel completely at odds with consensus society.

But bands like Spiritualized - people like Jason - make music because they have to, because if they don’t, they’ll die. And sharing it with an audience who truly honours the gift of it is a fundamental element of RnR. I know as surely as I know anything that RnR has saved my life too. It’s gigs like this that remind me that I matter, that I’m a person worthy of the making of this music, the playing of it.

So long as people like me understand music like this, people like Jason will go on making it. So may it be.