There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes
Spiritualized - 'Cop Shoot Cop' (Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space - 1997)
These days, when I think about the closing track of Spiritualized’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, the other all-time classic released on 16th June 1997 in the UK, it brings to mind two different types of needles; one should be evident to anyone familiar with the song, the album and the band, the other is more of a time and place-bound memory of mine.
Let’s start with the more obvious one. The song, ‘Cop Shoot Cop’, is named in reference to the New York industrial noise band, Cop Shoot Cop, of the late eighties and early nineties. They were so-called in partial reference to a newspaper headline reporting a botched police raid, in which one cop shot another, and the cycle of heroin addiction; cop, shoot, cop.1
The closing track on the album is also not the only one you can pick up that vibe on; the whole record is bathed in religious imagery, heartbreak2 and drug references. The latter was a familiar refrain in music made by Jason Pierce. His output before 1997, through the two earlier Spiritualized records and Spaceman 3 recordings, had seen his own documented use of heroin in the mid-1990s and the unapologetic usage of fellow Spaceman 3 member Pete Kember in the mid-1980s.
It is more than just the title; the song opens by acknowledging country singer John Prine’s ‘Sam Stone’. A song in which a returning Vietnam veteran moves from morphine addiction to heroin addiction and eventual overdose. It features the refrain;
There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose
which Pierce turns around to be about his own arm. Incidentally, my favourite version of ‘Sam Stone’ isn’t the original, or even Johnny Cash’s live version but instead by the American soul and R&B singer Swamp Dogg3.
Pierce, or J Spaceman as he sometimes went by, then expands on this in the rest of ‘Cop Shoot Cop’ by singing “Hey man” and telling us about holes in his head and his reasoning and that alongside Jesus, his friends and his love have also died.
By this point, the song has walked through three verses and a chorus, spilling out to over five minutes. This is because the music has been a luxurious stretch for those first few minutes at the end of a long album packed with ideas and ambition. It isn’t until we are 140 or more seconds in that we hear the vocals, and almost five minutes before the 2nd chorus is finished. We then move on to what might be called an instrumental break, but that phrase doesn’t do justice to the almighty cacophony of noise that ensues for the next six minutes. There’s a wailing mariachi horn, white noise, jazz freak out and waves of psychedelia battering us from all directions.
After it drops back, we come to a spectral choir intonating the melody that is a knowing reference to Pierce’s discography. The melody is from the Spaceman 3 song ‘Call The Doctor’ from 1987’s The Perfect Prescription. Both songs seem to have a sense of detached and fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable and play the role of the final track on their respective albums well.
As the choir continues, they battle for our attention with the piano riff that took a back seat during the cacophonous middle section. In 2009, Clash magazine interviewed Pierce and asked him to elaborate on how the man that plays that piano, New Orleans blues musician Dr John, came to do so and what that meant for the song.
I rang him up. It just seemed like it was right for him to play on it. Somewhere in my mind the track was like a trip across New York, from Chinatown right out to this desert, like the Joshua Tree. The middle bit was picturing the entire range of the States and it seemed like the kind of thing that Dr John should be playing on. So I sent him the track and he loved it. I went out to New York and let him do his thing. … he played the track as you hear it now. It was like he blessed it. He played the piano, sang the choruses, played the national anthem for the middle section and just made it seem like it was finished.
You can hear Dr John’s ‘National Anthem’ section isolated on the special edition of LAGWAFIS from 2009 as well as a demo and the string sessions mix. So you have the interplay between the lilting riff that bookends the song and this riotous explosion of music in the middle, which starkly contrasts the predictable nature of the start and end.
There was a period around 2001 when the band would open with the song in concert, but typically it has been a set closer or pre-encore track - you can hear it on the 1998 Live at the Royal Albert Hall album as the penultimate track.
Live performances bring me to the second needle I associate with this song. The second needle is because, on 8th November 2016, I was lucky enough to see Spiritualized perform the album in full at London’s Barbican Centre. While there was an encore of ‘Out of Sight’ and ‘Oh Happy Day’, it was ‘Cop Shoot Cop’ that dominated the run time towards the end of the show. Before the opening of Crossrail this past year, it used to take a while for us to get back home from anywhere east of Charing Cross, so the journey back across London and then out to Reading was a long one, with the show finishing close to the 2300 curfew.
By the time we were on a slow train back to Reading, the first results from the US Election had started to roll in. Until about 1 am on what was now Wednesday UK time, it looked like, as expected from polling, Hillary Clinton was going to become the first female president of the USA rather than Donald Trump becoming the 2nd star of the screen to occupy The White House. At this point, just arriving at Reading Station, I was introduced to the other needle.
The New York Times election tracking one.
By 3 am UK time, many people, like Neil Young, had seen the needle and the damage done, as it moved from the pre-results expectation of 85% Clinton win to 95% Trump win.
This is a needle in which the drug of choice of election junkies is not the milk of the poppy but incremental reassessments of who will win a race at county, state and national levels. Each new piece of data updates the priors and makes the needle move, but the choice to make it twitch upset many people as much as the slowly dawning realisation that the 2016 Presidential Election might not be going as they thought and hoped it would.
Two years late, it turned up as a Halloween costume in advance of the 2018 midterms.
And many people seemed to speak of some deep-seated trauma and PTSD this needle seemed to give them, at least until Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Hey, man, there's a hole in my head where information goes.
There is a final, personal coda to my association with this song and album, less than 12 hours after it finished ringing in our ears in Central/East London, we were at the hospital for a scan to discover that my pregnant wife was expecting a daughter; this was very happy news on a day when we were all still trying to process what Trump’s win might for the world. My wife and I had been married for 18 months at that point, and the processional music we chose for our wedding was a song that incorporates the wedding standard, Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D Major’.
The album’s opening title track.
Meaning, acquire heroin, use heroin, acquire more heroin.
Pierce was heartbroken after his girlfriend, Spiritualized keyboardist at the time, Kate Radley, left him to marry The Verve singer Richard Ashcroft.
I spent the days leading up to that election in Pensacola, Florida- a place riddled with Trump supporters. The next morning was surreal, and no one (from either side) seemed quite sure what to make of it all.
Excellent piece! I don’t really know this song or the album but it didn’t matter as you guided me right into it. It’s clear how much the album and song means to you and adding the personal and political contexts gives it added depth.