Sounds From The Junkshop #1 - Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
So with me starting a new blog, it seemed like a good enough idea to try and relaunch this whole idea all over again. Sounds From The Junkshop was actually very nearly the title of this blog as it seemed to kind of encapsulate the whole jumble sale "mixing a load of different genres without any real grand plan or pattern" mentality of this blog but I didn't quite go with it in the end as it suggested this would be a blog all about glam-punk Thunders/Hanoi Rocks style stuff and, while it's true that does account for a fair bit of the stuff I covered on here, I didn't want it to seem like it was the be-all and end-all of everything.
So instead, I'm gonna use that title for this feature on great forgotten and semi-forgotten bands. And I figured there's no better way to start than the first band I saw live at a gig at Bradford Uni in 1992 (despite being a mere 13 years old at the time I was allowed in but warned not to take the piss by trying to order alcohol. The bouncer was a big lad so I sensibly didn't). The band in question being Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine who I'd first got into a year or so before when their omnipresent indie disco anthem Sheriff Fatman was troubling the lower end of the Top 40. Me and my mates, flush with excitement about actually getting into the gig, made a beeline for the front, not quite realising how frenetic the moshpits at Carter gigs were. By the time they'd careered through 24 Minutes From Tulse Hill, Rubbish and Do Re Me So Far So Good, we were genuinely worried one of us was going to end up maimed by the end of the gig. Luckily, they slowed it down a bit for song number four, the poison waltz of A Prince In A Pauper's Grave and we were able to stagger our way to watch the rest of the show from a bit further back.
Now I know Carter aren't exactly a forgotten band - you can't really discuss the whole post-Madchester pre-Suede era without mentioning them, but I think time has been slightly unkind on their legacy as they're often held up as an example of everything that was wrong with indie music before Britpop took it into the mainstream. This, to me, is grossly unfair - sure, the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and Radiohead may be more revered by smoking jacket-clad alt-music hacks but none of them (at least not in that era) had songs which would effortlessly ignite an indie disco or get a big concert venue bellowing along the way Carter did. It's about time that people recognised it - Carter were a bloody good band and should be much more respected than they are.
Rewind slightly...the early part of Carter's discography is a bit of a difficult one to trace as so many of their early singles got rereleased that it all gets a bit higgledy-piggledy. Sheriff Fatman had originally come out in early 1989 but it was when it was re-released in the summer of '91 that it finally broke into the charts and became the first of many Carter singles I would end up buying (the ferocious B-side RSPCE was an absolute belter as well - I'd go so far as to say it was arguably the first proper punk song I ever heard so that's another thing I might just have Jim and Fruity to thank for as well).
I think I might actually have heard of Carter slightly before the re-released Fatman became a hit actually as I remember its predecessor Bloodsport For All (another vitriolic Carter classic) being on the ITV Chart Show a couple of months beforehand. Unfortunately the outbreak of the Gulf War saw it quickly pulled from TV and radio and it stalled just outside the Top 40. Shortly afterwards, their label Rough Trade went under and they were snapped up by a major label Chrysalis who also bought up their two albums to date (101 Damnations which Sheriff Fatman had come off and 30 Something which had spawned Bloodsport and its predecessor Anytime Anyplace Anywhere).
The next single, a new song After The Watershed was...well, if I'm honest, I thought it was a bit disappointing after Fatman although I know a lot of Carter fans who still swear by it. The main memory for me was them being invited to perform it at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party of all places where Fruitbat, annoyed with the band being patronised by Philip Schofield, promptly rugby-tackled the gopher-bothering goon to the horror of SAW-loving middle England and turned the band into legends of the alternative music scene almost overnight.
Shortly after Watershed, Chrysalis re-issued another old Carter single Rubbish (which had originally come out between the two albums in 1990) and it well and truly broke them above ground. After seeing them do something of a legendary live performance of it on Top of the Pops (combined with the Pip Schofield incident) I think the deal was pretty much sealed with regards to Carter being my favourite band (well, it sort of rotated between them, the Wonder Stuff and the Senseless Things but I'll cover the other two of them on here in due course). And when I heard they had a new album out in April and were touring, I managed to persuade my parents to let me get a ticket for the gig (the condition was that we would go along with one of my mates' older brothers who was 17 at the time and could be relied on to keep an eye on us)
Which brings me back to that gig in May 1992. A couple of weeks earlier, Carter had released what would become their biggest hit The Only Living Boy In New Cross, propelling them to number 7 (one place above Michael Jackson as Jim Bob would gleefully remark at the gig). I'd bought the album 1992: The Love Album the day it had come out which, coincidentally, was the day before the gig and come the weekend it would be number one in the charts. New Cross is still a great song all these years later and it properly sums up everything that was great about the band - a full tilt disco-punk chantalong assault. I would end up buying 30 Something a couple of weeks later and picked up 101 Damnations by the end of the year to complete my Carter albums collection.
The trouble is that when you're at the top, the only way to go is down. Subsequent releases from 1992 stalled outside the Top 20 (a pity because Do Re Me So Far So Good, the follow-up, is probably one of Carter's best and most ferocious singles, a vicious diatribe against the manufactured pop music that I hated so much at the time meaning it quickly became my favourite song on the album along with the vitriolic Suppose You Gave A Funeral And Nobody Came). After an unsuccessful attempt to get a Christmas number one with a cover of the old Man From La Mancha number The Impossible Dream, Carter wouldn't reappear until late 1993 - only 18 months later but by this time, the musical landscape was starting to change with groups like Suede and Blur, regarded as much more glamorous and ambitious by the stuck-up journos at the NME and Melody Maker, being the "in thing" and it all kind of made Carter's down-to-earth approach seem a bit "last year's thing" by comparison.
Possibly as a reaction against their sudden stardom, the fourth Carter album Post-Historic Monsters was a much darker and angrier effort (put it this way, the opening lyrics were "Fe Fi Fo Fum/I smell the blood of Nazi scum/I want my Dad and I want my Mum/A Sherman tank and a load of guns..."). By the time it came out, my "number of gigs attended" count had increased...to two, the second having been Leeds indie heroes Cud supported by the Senseless Things (a band who I'm pretty sure I'll be covering in this column soon enough) at a free festival at Temple Newsam in the summer of '93. As that line-up suggests, I was still listening to most of what I had been a year or so before at this point - I'd bought a copy of Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish (still their best album imo) and enjoyed it although to be honest, it would take me another year or so to get into Suede (probably somewhere between Stay Together and Dog Man Star) who at the time I thought had some good singles but hadn't interested me sufficiently to want to check their album out.
I did, however, rush out to get Post-Historic Monsters on its release and, if I'm honest, it kind of threw me for a loop at the time. With song subjects including suicide (first single Lean On Me, I Won't Fall Over) child abuse in the Scouts (A Bachelor For Baden Powell), being beaten up by the BNP (Being Here), and societal breakdown (Cheer Up It Might Never Happen!), this was definitely the sound of a band biting the hand that fed them. Unlike the other three albums, this one definitely needed repeated listening to get into and as a 14-year-old with a crap attention span, I seem to remember it getting relegated to the back of my cassette rack after its first listen only for me to dig it out and persevere with it a bit more about three or four months later and it to slowly worm its way into my regular listening. Possibly as an angry teenager who wasn't into grunge, it kind of gave me an outlet for my general frustration with life - certainly bawling along to the second single, the anti-AOR thrash of Lenny And Terence, which Jim Bob later joked the label had given in and let them release only because there was literally nothing else on the album they could see being a better choice commercially, was quite therapeutic.
I would stick with Carter from hereon out but they would never again be as "big" as they were when I saw them at that first gig. 1994 saw them put out the under-appreciated Glam Rock Cops single just as the New Wave of New Wave scene spearheaded by These Animal Men and S*M*A*S*H* (both of which Carter could claim a kinship with in terms of political anger and punk sensibilities, indeed they covered the former's Speeed King and Salv from the latter would later join them on bass) broke through before they released Worry Bomb, their final effort on Chrysalis, in 1995 preceded by another under-rated classic Let's Get Tattoos. By this time, Jim and Fruity were slowly adding new members to the band with drummer Wez joining for Glam Rock Cops followed by his brother Steve on guitar and bassist Salv who joined from the wreckage of S*M*A*S*H* when they self-combusted in 1995. Annoyingly I had the chance to see them again in late '94 just after Tattoos came out but I seem to remember I couldn't scrape the money together from my Saturday job at Netto and ended up missing it.
Worry Bomb is a bit of an odd album, a step back from the stubbornly anti-commercial Post Historic Monsters but still less immediate than the first three albums. Despite that it's still got its moments - the anti-record label tirade of Me And Mr Jones, the gloriously foul-mouthed Senile Delinquent and the slow-fast Airplane Food/Airplane Fast Food are all good stuff even if there's a little bit of filler here and there. However, if Carter had been regarded as yesterday's men when Post Historic Monsters came out, by 1995 and the era of Britpop they were being regarded as the day before yesterday's men and the album scraped the Top 10 before disappearing with an anvil round its neck. One more single (the kitchen sink drama of Born On The 5th November which should really have been a much bigger hit than it was), a hurried greatest hits album and they were gone from Chrysalis.
They would stick around for a little while afterwards though, signing to indie Cooking Vinyl and putting out the A World Without Dave mini-album in late 1996, their first with the full band line-up (now augmented by keyboardist Ben). A very different proposition to anything that had come before it, it saw the band in a more downbeat and mournful mode but it actually worked really well - I would honestly put Before The War and Nowhere Fast off it up there among my favourite Carter songs and the rest of it is pretty damn good as well.
A few months later in early '97, the band announced a massive three month UK tour including a gig at Leeds Cockpit. Having missed them the last time they'd played Leeds, I wasn't about to do so again and promptly snapped a ticket up. It was a very different proposition from the one I'd been to in Bradford five years earlier with six people on stage instead of two and in a venue about half the size of the Uni but I really enjoyed it - it was a good mix of the old and the new and hearing New Cross and Bloodsport For All detonate a venue again after all this time was a great feeling.
Unfortunately the mammoth tour would come close to breaking Jim Bob and Fruitbat both mentally and physically (they were keeping a tour diary on the website at the time and you could sense the frustration they were evidently feeling in it) and by the end of 1997, Carter were no more. A disappointing posthumous album I Blame The Government would surface the following year and that, it seemed, was that. Jim and Fruity would move on to other projects, namely Jim's Super Stereoworld and Abdoujaparov respectively and both would put out some pretty good stuff.
In about 2002 (I think - I was drinking a lot back then so my memory's slightly clouded), I heard that Jim's Super Stereoworld and Abdoujaparov were teaming up to do a tour and persuaded the bassist in my band at the time, a fellow Carter fan, that we should head along and check out their gig at the New Roscoe, a tiny pub venue at the east end of Leeds city centre which I think my band had actually played at a few months previously. We'd heard rumours leading up to the gig that the two bands might be combining to do a set of Carter songs afterwards (Salv was in JSS with Jim, Ben was in Abdoujaparov with Fruity and Wez and Steve's new band Resque were opening the evening) but thought nothing of it...until Jim's Super Stereoworld's headline set unexpectedly finished at around 9:30. When the lights went back down, the cheers and traditional Carter chants of "You fat bastard!" were deafening and when the band came onstage and kicked in with Surfin' USM, it nearly took the roof off the place.
The next few years would see sporadic Carter reunions usually for a big Christmas gig before Jim Bob and Fruitbat (by this point back to performing in the traditional two men and a drum machine format) finally brought the curtain down for good in 2012. I didn't manage to make the final gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire but I was lucky enough to win tickets for a special gig at the BBC's Maida Vale studios which went out live on Radio 6. Again, I attended with a fellow Carter-loving bandmate (the singer in my group at the time on this occasion) and we had a feckin' awesome evening (unexpectedly briefly meeting Steve Lamacq whose Radio 1 evening session show I'd listened to religiously as a teenager in the crowd was just the cherry on the cake really!)
So there you go, the story of the first guitar band I ever saw live and one of the first that I really became a fan of in four gigs and bunch of other memories. While I wouldn't quite describe Carter as my favourite band of all time (with all due respect, the Wildhearts would take that award and I'll explain why when I come to cover them in this column), they would easily walk into my Top 5, maybe even Top 3. Jim Bob and Fruitbat are still out there making music today and as this cut from Jim's new album shows, he's done anything but mellow with age...
Hope everyone's enjoyed this slightly unhinged ramble down memory lane. Expect another "Sounds From The Junkshop" in a couple of weeks!
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