Spiritualized play Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space for Don't Look Back.

Every Christmas I tell myself I'm going to get to a Christmas Carol concert, and every year I forget. This year I went, inadvertently, and it's made my Christmas already.

Ladies and Gentlemen... is being re-released with the studio layers separated out and sequenced for fans to dig into, and the Presley estate-approved version of the title track (with interpolations of 'Can't Help Falling In Love With You') restored. But live the layers are all present: a string section followed out by a brass section, a choir, a percussionist replete with glistening brass kettle drums, then by Spiritualized themselves, and finally Jason Spaceman taking a seat, a guitar, and resting his foot on a pedal.

No intros. A hush descends, a clip of the processed voice that introduces the record, and everything starts to unfold. The Don't Look Back concerts can hoover up great bands and put them into an LP-shaped box to meet the demands for familiarity that middle-aged indie fans require from their gigs, but here the faithfulness to the album is tempered by the absolute power and grandeur of it. The LP is clearly exactly as it's meant to be, and here it's reproduced with such power, craft and collective intensity as to sound born anew and borne aloft. Everything crackles and burns or pulses or hums, discordance piled on harmony, a perfect midpoint between Phil Spector, Steve Reich, Brian Wilson and Suicide. Lazy references to bands as midpoints of venns of other bands count here, as Jason is in love with those bands, and has set out to evoke them throughout his career - but by dint of his confidence and ability he's never buried by them.

Come Together is utterly stunning and powerful, with not a single part of the orchestra wasted, but it’s surpassed by I Think I'm In Love, which builds in diaphanous, towering layers from hymn to prayer to sermon. It is a record about retreat from heartache into love for opiates, but this doesn't sound like retreat; it sounds as thrilling as escape. The switch from buckling, intense, jazz-psych freakouts (although always deliberate and plotted) to blissed-out nursery rhymes carries on, and the sheer intensity of it all doesn't let you disengage for a second. Later, a battery of strobes join in to try and take the audience away through a total sensual assault, and it cracks right through.

After Cop Shoot Cop's loping, jaw-grinding intensity ebbs away, Jason thanks the crowd, claps the band and orchestra, and leaves, but is soon back out for a non-album treat – finally Silent Night is given the full dope-bliss Spiritualized treatment. Agog with happiness and Christmas cheer, I stumble out of the Barbican, drunk on something better than mulled wine.