Jason Pierce, of Spiritualized, may claim that his new album wasn’t inspired by a spell in intensive care after a bout of double pneumonia that almost took his life, but its title, Songs in A&E, gives the game away. “The songs were written before it happened,” says Pierce, a quietly spoken man whose face is intermittently illuminated by a mischievous glint. “Although when I returned to them over a year later I was trying to capture that low-level atmosphere you find in hospitals. You get this sense that if people were given a chance they’d all run around with their arms in the air, screaming: ‘We’re in trouble!’ But there is a lid on it; the atmosphere is held down by the fact that everything is supposed to be calm and clean.”

We’re in a gentrified pub in the East End of London. That Pierce is here at all is against the odds; that he’s managed to return with his best album so far is incredible. In June 2005, two days after a gig in London, Pierce found himself unable to breathe. A few hours later he was hooked up to tubes at the Royal London Hospital, fluid filling his lungs and preventing oxygen from reaching his blood. He was very close to death. But after a month in hospital, his weight down to six stone (38kg), he returned, wondering whether he had the strength to finish the handful of songs he had been working on before the illness.

“The original idea was to write songs about a family that wasn’t mine,” says Pierce, who resolved to finish the album after the director Harmony Korine commissioned him to write the soundtrack for his film Mister Lonely. “ The Waves Crash In is about an old man, full of pride and regret, saying goodbye to his daughter as she leaves home – I thought if I wrote with characters in mind I could get away from myself. But then I got out of hospital and returned to these songs and it really did sound like the whole thing had been predicted. So the songs were about me in an odd way; a way I hadn’t envisaged.”

Since his days with Spacemen 3, the influential group he formed with Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember as a teenager in Rugby in the mid1980s, Pierce’s music has been inextricably linked with what’s been going on in his life, despite his best intentions. Spacemen 3’s drone-heavy, feedback-drenched, minimalist rock’n’roll was a product of the duo’s shared love of drugs as much as their love of Sixties garage bands and free jazz. When the band split up in 1991 Pierce took his psychedelic mission on to a new level with Spiritualized, making music that captures the highest of highs and lowest of lows and adding everything from gospel choirs to 100-piece orchestras to realise his vision.

“Circumstances under which songs are written get less important over time as they come to mean different things for different people,” says Pierce on the suggestion that he has documented his life in music, however elliptically. “This album seems hinged on the fact that I was ill, but my whole life is a product of accident and emergency. There has never been any carefully laid out plan in anything I do.”

This is no idle boast. The conductor Charles Hazlewood remembers leading the BBC Symphony Orchestra through a concert with Spiritualized at the Barbican in London. “There was no rehearsal at all,” Hazlewood recalls. “Jason turned up and said: play in G, bring it up slowly and then take it down again. Orchestras panic if they don’t have sheet music in front of them, so for them to be given these totally vague instructions was the most terrifying thing imaginable.”

“We don’t play cabaret,” says Pierce, when I remind him of the concert (which he only vaguely recollects). “Our performances are never the same. For example, we couldn’t afford to take our regular choir for a recent concert in New York so we picked up a gospel choir from Queens who approached the songs in a totally different way, singing the words with their hands on their hearts. It was beautiful. With Spiritualized we incorporate people, and they learn the expression of it and it starts to come together, and most importantly, evolve.”

After two decades of making hypnotic, experimental, improvised music, Pierce might have evolved into something he never envisaged: a singer-songwriter. It’s tempting to think that illness has mellowed him, and that Songs From A&E, which still has the swooping highs and lows with which Spiritualized are associated but also a raw, intimate quality that wasn’t there before, is a product of this new temperament. Pierce disagrees. “I’m driven by the same forces I always have been,” he concludes. “I was 17 when I started. That was the year I found Raw Power by the Stooges in the Rugby branch of Boots the Chemist. To find the Stooges in a pharmacy . . . there you have the whole of my life, mapped out ahead of me.”

Songs in A&E is released on Monday on Universal

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