I decided to write this post eight days ago, when Florian and I were starting our 770-mile drive home from Columbus to Boston. We’d just stopped off at my cousin’s house in Worthington to say our further goodbyes, and I’d pulled over into a McDonald’s just short of the onramp to I-71 North. While we waited curbside for delivery of my Diet Coke, I thumbed into the Music app on my iPhone and saw that Apple had suggested a playlist.
It was “Psychedelic Rock Essentials” (Apple Music), and scrolling through the first third of it I saw that it carried down through the years, or at least alternated vintage ’60s tracks with more recent recordings in a psychedelic mode. If you click that link above you’ll see the first five listed tracks are “Astronomy Domine” by Pink Floyd (Apple Music, Spotify), Neutral Milk Hotel’s “The King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. 2 & 3” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Are You Experienced?” (Apple Music, Spotify), the Flaming Lips’ “She Don’t Use Jelly” (Apple Music, Spotify), and—put a pin in this one—“Heroin” (Apple Music, Spotify) from The Velvet Underground & Nico. So yeah: 1967, 1998, 1967, 1993, and 1967.
Some other tracks this playlist had pulled in from the 1990s: “6 A.M. Jullandar Shere” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Cornershop, the aforementioned “Lazarus” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Boo Radleys, and the short form—alas—of Stereolab’s “Jenny Ondioline” (Apple Music, Spotify). Let’s put aside for a minute how creepy it is that Siri knows me this well. This was a fun selection of songs, some 85% of which I knew already and liked a lot, and I welcomed the idea of turning on to the rest during the long drive ahead. Not Florian’s first choice, for sure, but we would turn to one of his considerably longer playlists later in the drive.
We were somewhere just short of Akron when the shuffle play served up “I Think I’m in Love” (Apple Music, Spotify). I’m not sure where this one ranks among my All-Time Favorite Songs, but right now I’d be hard-pressed to name ten songs I like more than this banger from Spiritualized. It would have debuted in my Personal Top 40 sometime in 1997, which now that I look back on it was a hell of a year for music, and especially in England. The Brits were just starting to shake loose of Blur and Oasis’s sleeper hold on their music scene (not that I was complaining), so that ’97 had brought us Urban Hymns, OK Computer, and Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time.1 Spiritualized’s release in that year, Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, takes a back seat to none of these records.
I bought Ladies & Gentlemen straightaway after I heard “Come Together” (Apple Music, Spotify) playing over the PA in a record store in Manhattan—I think it was the HMV in Herald Square. It would turn out that “Come Together” was the least interesting track on the album. Funny how that happens: you hear a song, it sounds like other bands in your collection, and on the strength of that similarity you buy the album. Then the rest of the LP is altogether new and different and mind-blowing.
For its first two and a half minutes, “I Think I’m in Love” is a heroin song. It’s a sad thing, but there’s a rich rock tradition of heroin songs down through the years, from “Brown Sugar” (Apple Music, Spotify) through “Chinese Rocks” (Apple Music, Spotify) to “There She Goes” (Apple Music, Spotify). And it just so happened that heroin addiction was epidemic in Britain in the late 1990s of Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. Trainspotting came out in ’96, when we were all hopped up on Tarantino films and craving artsy, edgy cinema. We all thought the movie was terrific, even if Danny Boyle’s depiction of drug-zonked Edinburgh struck us middle-class Yanks as fantastical. It all became a bit clearer to me on my summer ’98 travels of England, Scotland, and Ireland, when I was finding used syringes on the floors of rail station toilet stalls. You like to think that’s the sort of thing station managers would want swept up quickly, but even so the sanitation staff were failing to keep up. And of course there was the incident in the Christian Charity Tent at Glastonbury. See “Loaded”/ “Sorted for E’s and Wizz.”
By the time Jason Pierce and Spiritualized submitted their entry in this category, Brett Anderson had already released the obvious “Heroine” (Apple Music, Spotify), and Damon Albarn the less-so “Beetlebum” (Apple Music, Spotify). The Suede song quotes Lord Byron and sounds like Bowie. The Blur song sounds like Blur, if they were congealing in amber. For his part, Jason Pierce was an ardent admirer of all things Velvet and Underground, and as such he would of course compose a heroin track (pun … oops!) in much the same vein (again!) as the Velvets’ “Heroin” (Apple Music, Spotify)—i.e., a magnum opus in excess of seven minutes long, droning, beautiful, and ambivalent as The Light that features in a near-death experience. In “Heroin” Lou Reed speaks to the deadening power of the opiate high, announcing over his own, Cale’s, and Sterling Morrison’s thrumming strings a determination to nullify my life.
Phase One of “I Think I’m in Love” simulates the drug-hum with a smear of synth, dropping in a six-note bass line and flares of wah-wah guitar at regular intervals. Harmonica, slide guitar, piano, and mellotron each find their own unique points of entry into the mix. It’s an impeccable arrangement, and into this cumulus of backing tracks Jason injects these last lines in near-monotone:
Love in the middle of the afternoon. Just me and my spike and my arm and my spoon. Feel the warmth of the sun in the room, but I don’t care about you,
and I’ve got nothing.
Here the music drops out, giving rise to a delicious ambiguity. I transcribed the lyrics above with a period (.) after nothing. That would be consistent with Reed’s glazed embrace of nullity in “Heroin.” But consider that an earlier, similar verse ended with I’ve got nothing to do. It could be that Jason broke off before finishing the line, so that an em-dash (—) or ellipsis (…) would be a more appropriate choice. How often in the movies—or God forbid, in real life—have we seen the user take the hit and slump over, or kick backward, in the middle of a sentence or a breath? Is this nihilism per se or boredom interrupted? And is that very question the essence of addiction—the Doper’s Dilemma?
If the song ended here, it would likely have a different title—“Nothing” seems like a good choice—and we might celebrate it as a worthy update of what the Velvets accomplished with “Heroin” thirty years earlier. Krautrock fans will elbow into the room to note that the synth layer and bass line at the very least recall—and probably borrow directly from—“You Play for Us Today” (Apple Music, Spotify), the first track on Berlin quintet Agitation Free’s 1972 Malesch LP. Play the Agitation Free and Spiritualized songs, one after another, note their strikingly similar beginnings, then consider the divergent paths they take from there. Pretty damn cool, and I’m not gonna fault Jason Pierce for wearing his influences on his sleeves—at least not when he’s flashing Lou Reed on his left arm and Lüül Ulbrich on his right.
Thing is, there’s a Phase Two to this track, five-plus minutes long and giving rise to the notion that at least one of these two mentors may need to take a few steps up the biceps to make room for … Billy Joel?
All right, look: I have no direct evidence to support the proposition that Jason Pierce was listening to Billy’s Glass Houses record while composing “I Think I’m in Love.” Based on what we know about Spiritualized, it feels like the longest of long shots, and probably nothing anyone associated with the band would ever cop to. But consider the lyrical flow of the second stage of the song, where in odd-numbered lines Jason thinks out loud, making Golden God suggestions that an alternate, sober and skeptical Jason undercuts in the evens:
I think I can fly.
Probably just falling.
I think I’m the life and soul.
Probably just snorting.
I think I can hit the mark.
Probably just aiming.
I think my name is on your lips.
Probably complaining.
Am I crazy to hear this and be thinking about the Square Billy/ Hip Billy exchanges in “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” (Apple Music, Spotify)?
What’s the matter with the clothes I’m wearing?
Can’t you tell that your tie is too wide?
Maybe I should buy some old tab collars.
Welcome back to the Age of Jive.
We have arrived at the place now where my own internal critic has questions, starting with Are you actually providing a service with these posts, or are you the proverbial Fonz on waterskis, jumping the shark? After all, only here, on Take Take This Noise, can you find a writer thrashing around in this particular kind of agony, pointing out elements of Krautrock and mid-career Billy Joel in the same eight-minute shoegaze anthem. You can point that fact toward either conclusion, service or shark, as you please. This right here is Post #78, after all. That’s a big number, and it could suggest either that I’m tapping an inexhaustibly rich vein of ideas or that the well is verging on bone-dry. In a word, Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space is Jason Pierce’s brain on drugs—or in other words, a masterpiece. By contrast, this post is me on a Saturday night, with a bellyful of sesame chicken and yang chou fried rice.
On that score, let’s set aside the self-reflection and swing the attention back to Phase Two of “I Think I’m in Love.” All the cycling elements of Phase One are here—same bass line, wah-wah, and hits of harmonica, slide guitar, piano, mellotron—but now there are persistent drum and organ tracks stitching these recurring elements together, along with further lead guitar, horns, and backing singers. Stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks, and it all snaps and locks together in a perfect rhythmic system.
Reports are that Jason Pierce was a bit of a fine-tuner with this record. He wrote fourteen songs in eleven days in 1995, recorded most of what we hear in first takes, then spent eighteen months personally mixing Ladies & Gentlemen into the Swiss clockwork, note-perfect masterpiece we hear today. It’s been suggested Pierce threw himself into the work after longtime girlfriend and Spiritualized keyboardist Kate Ridley—that’s Kate’s voice on Side 1, Track 1, reading off the album’s title—left him for the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft. I’ll never say out loud I am grateful for anyone’s heartbreak. I’ve felt it myself (see “New York City”), and I wouldn’t wish it on the Devil himself. But if it’s true we have this meticulous mix of Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space because Jason Pierce was left holding his time and his heart and soul in his hands and needed somewhere to put them … well, I am forever glad he found this particular answer.
I won’t close the book on this Spiritualized record today without calling out “Stay with Me” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Electricity” (Apple Music, Spotify), and the original version of the title track (YouTube), which sadly is not available on the streamers. In its place is a scrambled-up arrangement that makes little artistic sense (to me) and (to me) suffers miserably in comparison to the 1997 release. We discussed this song last year on The Mixtape Diaries (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), and Bob was able to get to the bottom of what happened here. It turns out that back in the day Pierce had recorded a version of “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” that borrowed heavily from Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (Apple Music, Spotify), but he couldn’t get the requisite permissions to release it. So instead he had to content himself with an alternate mix that included just the four-word snippet: Only fools rush in. That’s the version we all heard and learned to love, but for Pierce it was always second-best.
Apparently now the copyright issue has been cleared, we’re able—required, actually, by Apple Music and Spotify—to hear the record as Pierce originally intended it, and it’s muddled and jarring and difficult for me to accept. This of course begs the question: is the 1997 version I have ripped to my computer, iPod, and phone actually, objectively better than the “Elvis version” Jason Pierce himself favored, or am I just caught in that trap2 the March of Time sets for aging American men, where we get set in our ways and cling to old and imperfect things, resentful of change? Am I stuck on this song the way too much of the American electorate is stuck on the 1950s? Because of the way brains work, I am disqualified from answering these questions.
And in any case, De gustibus non est disputandum.
Oasis released its cocaine-mediocre Be Here Now in ’97, and Cornershop supported them on their U.S. tour starting the following January. I hopped a flight to DC to see the show at the George Mason arena. Tjinder Singh and Cornershop were worth the trip, at least.
Talk about your Elvis songs—if I’m gonna jam up a track with thick gobs of Presley reference, I’m going right to “Suspicious Minds” (Apple Music, Spotify).
I’m so sorry but I was looking forward to ur piece today because I was certain u would calmly give a sensible explanation to deal with the supreme court’s un explicable decisions and the sudden hysteria of Biden’s age, like nobody knew his age before the debate……. I’m searching everywhere to understand if I’m crazy or everybody else is🤦♀️