5.1.22 - Think I'm In Love

 I'm playing this on vinyl. And I'm playing it quietly. Very, very quietly. Which isn't how I'd normally do things.

Living at home as an eighteen year old, when being questioned by my dad on whether I really needed to play music at that volume, I'd offer up the opinion that music is recorded loud so playing it quietly would be disrespectful.

Yes, my hearing is a bit buggered. It wasn't then but it is now. A mix of self infliction, nearly thirty years in record shops and a night in a rehearsal room where the singer said something through the PA and I *felt* my ears go. Can't have everything.

This album - THIS album - demands volume. Demands that you bathe in the sound, be surrounded by the sound, surrender to the noise, the volume, the pain and the beauty.

But I'm playing it quietly because J's on a work call in the living room while I'm in the study doing this as a preparation for everything else I intend to do today. (There will be a degree of lifting the carpet on the stairs and in Tom's old room - he moved out last summer, now has a flat on the other side of town with mates - so that the new carpet can be fitted tomorrow. And then there's the obvious resulting trip to the tip. But there'll also be pitching ideas and writing up ten page documents.)

J's doing real work that requires silence, I'm making stuff up and that requires volume. A fine balance. This may be a recurring theme: J does real work, I make stuff up. I'd argue that 'making stuff up' is real work but none of us are going to believe that.

The point I've just reached in the album that we're going to talk about? It's the point I reached last night as J entered the study to carry out some admin at her desk (two desks in the room, one at either end, a full stereo set up - deck, amp, speakers, Cd player - two guitar amps, a Vox and a small Marshall, seven guitars, a bass, a banjo, two ukes, about a million CDs, similar number of books, mostly unread. Everything you need basically.)

And so this is the point where I lifted the needle and remained in silence for a while. I knew how J would feel about this bit. 

This bit is the bit where Cop Shoot Cop unfolds/collapses from a hypnotic dream state groove and becomes a miasma of feedback encrusted atonal free jazz. It's anxious and broken and utterly glorious and far from the only time that what is now a double LP on vinyl pulls this manoeuvre. It happens on The Individual and No God Only Religion as well. No names mentioned but years ago I worked with a lad who couldn't listen to the more outer tracks on this as they gave him very intense flashbacks. 

The legendary Dr John - New Orleans' Mac Rebbenack - played on this album and told Jason Spaceman aka Jason Pierce, the man who formed Spiritualized after extracting himself from the end days of Spacemen 3 - the band whose intent was signalled in the gloriously titled 'Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To' album - that he hadn't heard music like *this* for thirty years. Jason neglected to ask Dr John where he'd last heard music like this. There isn't much in life quite like Cop Shoot Cop and it's the key to the album. 

It's also key to how naive I am in life. I took 'Cop Shoot Cop' to be a description. A police officer shooting another police officer'. It's a routine. It took me decades to realise it was a routine.

(Sideline - trumpets, saxophones, orchestras, feedback: these are the sounds we're discussing, you might need to know that)

'Cop' in this case signifies the buying of a drug. Heroin specifically. You cop it, you shoot it, you cop it. And repeat.

(There will be those who'll know more about this than I who may want to correct me on all of the above - again, this is all memory and instinct and may be way off the mark.)

Spiritualized's 'Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space' (as that's the album we're talking about) concerns itself in drugs. Drugs and love and broken hearts. 

It knows what it's doing, it winks at you about the subject matter in its original packaging. The album, the CD, produced to replicate a packet of tablets, the contents blister packed in a manner that meant that you had to destroy the packaging to play the contents. 

The art doesn't become complete until it reaches the audience, until it's experienced. I'll probably return to that idea over and over again. 

Last week I bought the vinyl for this glorious piece of art. It's the first time I've ever owned a finished copy. 

My original is a promo copy in a clear case, and in a version that never reached the public: the opening track, the title track, leans heavily on Elvis's 'Can't Help Falling In Love With You.' Now, it leans heavily on it, at the time it encompassed it entirely. Which meant the album was delayed by about a month (again, we're on memory here, no research) while a new version of the title track was created to usher in the work and avoid copyright issues. 

I was reviewing for The Echo's listing magazine offshoot, Bigmouth, at the time. I'd had my copy in then post from a press company. I'd had it early, so early that I managed to put into print only the second ever review of the album. Again, literally no way of verifying that for you, we're on my recall of events here, but I recall it clearly, it's a thing of pride that I was in early on it, I remember the first listen, I remember the shock as the drums crashed into the reverie of Think I'm In Love and made it something else. I remember that it was like nothing else.

(Another aside - first printed review of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs, swear to god.)

So I had this album that I was raving about and nobody else could hear. And *that* is the holy grail for any self confessed music snob.

Comparisons are awful things but I'm still happy to be awful on things like this - I've never got the idea that people thought OK Computer was the greatest album of all time. I mean, it's an excellent album but it wasn't even the best album that came out in 1997. It wasn't even the best album that came out in the space of thirty days in 1997. And if it hadn't been for that title track issue it might not have even been the best album that came out on one specific day of one specific week in one specific month twenty five years ago.

Still sounds like nothing else you've heard.