Back in the mid-Eighties, a band emerged from Rugby, in Warwickshire, to create the blueprint for what came to be called the "shoegazing" sound.

Spacemen 3 was the creation of Peter "Sonic Boom" Kember and Jason Pierce, a pair of unashamedly drugged-up spacerockers specialising in monotonic, dissonant synthesiser drones and down-tempo blues.

Drawing on influences as diverse as Suicide, the MC5 and John Lee Hooker, the pair's sound was hypnotic, spellbinding, aggressive and disturbing.

By the early Nineties Spacemen 3's career had run its course. Sonic went on to release solo albums filled with tracks of mostly one chord, while Pierce, naming himself J. Spaceman, developed his two and three-chord songs into a successful career as Spiritualized.

This gig saw Pierce play tracks from throughout his career, backed by three gospel singers and a four-piece string section, with his band's guitarist, Doggen, on Rhodes piano.

His selections proved how carefully he has remained within the songwriting rules he set for himself more than 20 years ago - as Lou Reed said, if it has more than three chords, it's jazz - while the lush orchestration lifted his pleading vocals and simple lyrics from repetitive figures into soaring moments of emotional transportation.

If Sonic and Jason were the Lennon and McCartney of Spacemen 3, then Jason is McCartney.

Melodically gifted, he lacks the edge of his former partner to contrast his fragile tunes.

But Pierce is hardly McCartney: his songs speak of heartbreak only in the distant past.