Where are the songs about booze and civilians, banning the bomb and abusing the children?
I'm seriously considering starting a blog about Birmingham's alternative scene-- politically and musically speaking. (Randomly-- I've thought ever since I considered the plethora of weird place names-- seriously, the city centre has a Needless Alley tucked behind the Tescoes-- and bonkers, beautiful street-level geography that there should be a Birmingham Psychogeographic Society, imagine my surprise when I found there's one alive and flourishing.)
Thank you for your advice on my last post, flist, it was really greatfully recieved. I've applied for another, much saner job-- shorter hours, better pay-- and I should hear in the next couple of days. If I don't get that, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. I haven't decided yet.
I took a sick day today, because I genuinely actually am quite ill (aching joints, fuzzy head, coughing madly, sneezing repetitively, the whole deal.) I was due to do a ten-hour shift (9-7), so had I not rung in sick I'd still be there right now, instead of in bed with a cup of tea, wearing a shirt reading NEVER MIND THE BOSSES / JOIN THE RMT UNION. It's a hideously ugly shirt (puke green with puke pink/black wriitng) flogged to me by a fellow leftie in the city. When buying it I had two warring impulses: my pure hatred of The Sex Pistols and my pro-union politics. The latter won out.
So music's pretty much being my salvation recently. (Like my namesake: YOU KNOW HER LIFE WAS SAVED BY ROCK AND ROLL.) I'm having a weird throwback to being a teenager: living in the bedroom I grew up in, obsessing over bands, living for the weekends. It's like I was never at uni. I'm listening to music like it's the nineties: Crass, Conflict, Angelic Upstarts (well, eighties), Chumbawumba, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Coil and Orbital.
I get hours and hours on my commute every day to listen to music. My lunchbreak is thirty minutes long, so I usually eat my food really quickly and get outside as quickly as possible, so I can spend the last twenty minutes walking up and down and up and down Bristol Road, listening to The Murder of Liddle Towers and The Love Album. Bristol Road, weirdly, looks like the leafier bits of Oxford, except the buildings on either side are not colleges but The Priory (behind a huge fuck-off wall) and boarded up hotels, posh houses, and council towers, all shoved together on one miles-long strip.
It reminds me of when I used to walk to school and back every day-- because I was an unpopular shit and people threw things at me and took the piss out of my shoes on the bus, sob sob-- and used to make these incredibly crunkly, jumpy tapes to listen to on my walkman to listen to on the way. Me being fourteen the music I was listening to consisted of really shit nu-metal from HMV (I actually really used to dig Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory), Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, and stuff that I'd downloaded online and laboriously transferred to tape: Bright Eyes, Silver Mt Zion, GYBE, Butthole Surfers, Filter, Glassjaw, Radiohead. Obviously Radiohead. I don't exactly have nostalgia for that period, but I miss the feeling of all music being intensely new and exciting and life-affirming.
God, I wish I'd heard Crass and Conflict when I was fourteen. Occasionally I say this to people ('I wish I'd heard/seen/read that when I was a teenager, I would've loved it') and it's taken as a snub ('my tastes have matured so much more since then') but it's not: I think I've developed a patina of irony, I've lost the ability somewhat to be unbelievably and viscerally moved by How Real And True And Deep a band is. I wonder if that's got something to do with why people take E at raves and gigs: to recapture the sense of being open-wide and credulous again.
Crass and Conflict would've been brilliant for me as a teenager. All the shit nu-metal and 'greebo mosher music' I was listening to back then made me focus all my anger and disgust inwardly, they were all about I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. With the honourable exception of the Manics- and I listened mostly to the bits about being depressed anyway- I don't think I remember being into any political bands. If I'd've been introduced to the concept of class war a bit earlier than university I think things would've gone a lot smoother. Well. Maybe smoother is the wrong word: I would've had a greater focus for my anger than myself.
Anyway. Right.
Speaking of bands I wish I'd encountered earlier, I've been meaning for a while to write a long post about Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine-- aka Carter USM, aka THE GREATEST POLITICAL INDIE BAND OF THE NINETIES. I've had it saved in draft form for ages, so here it is. It was gonna be the first post on my BRAND NEW BLOG but let's face it I'm as lazy as fuck and will never begin.
Cater USM wrote incredibly catchy, insanely bitter songs. I like to imagine that around the time they split up, the ironic, cynical, political spirit flowed out of them and rose up and became The Indelicates; and the spirit that liked singing catchy songs about getting drunk and pulling a sickie from work the next morning became Art Brut.
This post is getting rather lengthy, so, click the cut tag for:
Before we start off: the singer out of Carter USM is called Jim-Bob and the guitarist and occasional back-up singer is called Fruitbat. Their band were really very big on a very small scale in the early nineties.
Fruitbat's real name is Les Carter and apparently the band got the name because he used to do a lot of shagging. This is a picture of them looking embarrassingly sweet together.
Right. The songs.
1. The Only Living Boy In New Cross.
My sudden refusal to embark on a love affair with London aside: if you only listen to one Carter song, make it this.
Yes, the title is an unsubtle Simon & Garfunkle reference. And yes, it's about watching your friends die of AIDs. It's also one of the least maudlin songs I've ever heard. It starts mock-serious, with a funeral piano, then builds in anger and energy, until it emerges as a triumphant fuck-you song, all about partying with the outcasts after something terrible has happened.
It starts out as being, as far as I can tell, a guy first rejoicing in 'the comfort and the joy of being lost / with the only living boy in New Cross', and is about being miserable on tour. Then the narrator talks about how much he really fucking loves hippies, right, and wants to give peace, love and kisses to the whole world. (It edges a nice line between sarcasm and wide-eyed earnestness here.) Then the singer rejoices in the company of various freaks and geeks: greebos, crusties, goths, travellers, gypsies, thieves.
The last verse is a eulogy to everyone the singer knows that's died of AIDs. It starts out abstract:
two fat ladies in 88, safe sixteen lovers who lied
Purley's queen and mother makes five
Butchered bakers, deaf and dumb waiters
Marble Arch criminals and Section 28ers
Autiers, authors, plastered outcasts
Locked up daughters and rock and roll stars
and then gets personal. It's got a long list of names known to the singer ('goodbye Rudie, Abraham and Rosie...') that's absolutely gutpunching to listen to.
Despite all that it's not a miserable song at all, any more than Up The Wolves by the Mountain Goats is miserable because it's about child abuse. It is visceral and mournful, yeah, but I challenge you to feel anything other than awake and alive when you listen to it.
The video is one of my all-time favourites, despite lacking anything remotely approaching a budget. It starts out faux-maudlin, the band around a piano in a funeral home. By the time the guitar kicks in they're jumping around in what appears to be a giant warehouse, surrounded by the "crusties, greebos, goths" mentioned in the song, all looking drunk and really happy and alive.
Here's a link to a copy of a live version, as well. Notable because near the end, when Jim-Bob starts shouting through a list of dead friends, the audience all join in.
In Jim-Bob's autobiography, there's a nice little story about Carter USM playing this live in the US. He was explaining to the audience what it's about, when some fucker in the front row started shouting FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT! At which point Jim-Bob said yeah, I am, why don't you come up here and I'll suck your cock for you?
Anyway, in conclusion, the opening riff of the song ('du du du du du daaaaa der', actually impossible to transcribe, repeated throughout the song) makes me glad I'm not dead, which is all I want to say further on the subject,
2. Bloodsport For All. A song about racist abuse in the military, written around the time a major military bullying scandal hit the papers. Released and then promptly disappeared from the charts as it coincided with the outbreak of the first Gulf War and consequently got zero radio-play.
It's from the perspective of a black recruit in the army, which the video makes even clearer. The lyrics are vicious.:
Suffer in silence, said Brigadier General Holmes
Or change your name to Smith or Jones
Stand up and beg, said Sergeant Kirby
Lay down and die for Di and Fergie.
My favourite bit happens near the end, when Fruitbat starts singing this chilling little melody-- 'the coldest Stream Guards of them all / sang God Save The Queen, bloodsport for all'-- over and over in the background. Lyrically it's a nice little pun, musically it just sounds...good. Possibly because Fruitbat doesn't sing much on Carter records so it stands out, partly because he's got this voice that sounds like he's concentrating all the time, it comes out as unbearably earnest, but in a good way.
3. Do Re Me So Far So Good.
It starts with the lines 'despite of what you heard about Elvis / the good die old and helpless.'
If The Indelicates didn't intend The Last Significant Statement to stand as a reference to this song (at least obliquely), or if it didn't somehow inspire it, I will be greatly surprised. Also, how Indelicates are these lines:
Where are the songs about booze and civilians?
Banning the bomb and abusing the children
With their pop music guitars-- who'll one day grow up to be pop stars?
Video link not MP3 included because I surely cannot be the only one curiously attracted to Jim Bob and Fruitbat's early nineties slacker garb. The bit at the end where they start shouting DO, RE, ME, SO, FAR, SO, GOOD and swapping places to the catchy backing vocals (NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA) is awesome too.
4. Anytime Anyplace Anywhere.
Jesus jumping christ, I love this song. OK. It's about alcoholism: about being an alcoholic, and living in a society surrounded by alcoholics, heavy drinkers, boozers. Brought to you by a band famously fuelled by alcohol. It's the dark side of, oh, every song ever written praising booze. Despite having a tune you can hum, it's almost unbelievably dark.
Starts off with a brief soundscape of the inside of a pub at kicking out time, then these heavy doom-laden synths come straight down like the hammer of god, then Jim-Bob starts singing like it's the end of the world:
The tequila sun is rising
and the Harvey's Bristol moon is sinking
Put the Binatone on snooze
open up some Special Brews
and start drinking
This song almost caused a law-suit because the title is actually taken from an old Bacardi ad, showing someone sitting on an island sipping a bacardi, with the slogan 'Anytime, anyplace, anywhere: there's a wonderful world you can share'.
There's this great interview I saw with the band where Jim-Bob is mumbling his way through his answers then suddenly comes out, full of rage, with a paragraph about how alcohol companies love to show drink as being cool and sexy and glamorous, "and then suddenly you have to wake up at 6 in the morning so you can start drinking Special Brew." O rly Jim-bob.
Anyway, in a career of angry and bitter songs, the chorus to the song is possibly the pinnacle:
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere
there's a wonderful world you can share
Try agrophobic, schizophrenic,
paranoid attacks of panic
Epileptic fits of laughter
Twenty five million mornings after
Fucking hell but it sounds good. The best bit is that there's no focus for the anger-- it's not specifically about drinks companies, it's not about irresponsible marketing, it isn't really about private self-disgust, it sounds like the unfocused, all-consuming rage you get after drinking four pints too quickly and thinking about how much you hate your life, staggering out onto the street, wanting to kick someone's head in.
Anyway the song gets angrier and tighter, the lyrics get faster, until it ends up with this litany of alcoholic drinks:
There's no such thing as Dr Seuss
vodka and tomato juice
Disneyland or dipsomania
name your poison, pick a flavour
Moonshine, firewater, Captain Morgan, Johnnie Walker,
Southern Comfort, mother's ruin, happy hours of homeless brewing
Galloway's sore throat expectorant,
after-shave and disinfectant,
Parazone and Fairy Liquid
if it's in a glass you'll drink it
anytime, anyplace, anywhere
The video is ace, too. Soho at kicking out time, documentary-style.
5. Suicide Isn't Painless.
The title is an obvious reference to Suicide Is Painless by the Manics. It serves as an apt protest to the popular veneration of suicide in certain musical circles of the early nineties. It's about growing older, facing your problems, and realising grand gestures like suicide are squalid, not noble.
For some reason I imagine the narrator singing this is the same narrator out of Art Brut's I Will Survive, but a few years down the line.
Suicide isn't painless
It hurts like hell
It's set aside for the famous
A little suicide sells
So nothing lasts for ever: then nothing ever did.
It's big but it's not clever
(And it's really not that big)
So no more tears
You're a big boy now
We'll have a few more beers
We'll sort it out some how
It fucking breaks my heart right in half is what this song does. Why isn't this played to every child in Britain the moment they turn thirteen? Fuck the Samaritans-- if you're going through a bad patch you should be able to call a special toll-free line and have Jim-Bob tell you it's all going to be okay.
6. Lean On Me I Won't Fall Over.
Like Suicide Isn't Painless but lengthier and shoutier.
It's about attempting to reach out to a friend when they're depressed, wishing they'd confide in you, and knowing they probably won't/can't.
It starts with the narrator stuck in a tube on the Hammersmith and City line, worried about his friend. It then proceeds to the narrator shouting a list of advice he wishes he could give his friend:
stop punching walls! don't cut yourself!
just shift the burden onto someone else!
don't give up hope, if you think you can't cope!
we should keep in touch if it gets too much!
have faith in yourself, for the sake of your health!
STOP SNIFFING GLUE!
try something new!
confide in your friends! you'll get by in the end!
if nothing else works-- have you tried the church?
And then the song ends with the narrator repeating over and over: lean on me, I'm made of steel and stone cold sober, lean on me, I won't fall over. lean on me! lean on me! lean on me! lean on me!
I have included exclamation marks because they are obviously vocalised.
It really works because it's so incredibly earnest (are you sensing a theme?) and actually a bit painful to listen to. The singer/narrator knows that the advice is, honestly, a bit rubbish and isn't going to work, but tries anyway. I keep making the comparison, but it's very Eddie Argos.
Also, this song contains the greatest anti-heroin line ever: chasing the dragon like you're Saint fucking George or someone.
7. A Bachelor For Baden-Powell.
This is an autobiographical song by Jim-Bob about being sexually abused by a Boy Scout master. There's not really any way I can gloss over that bit. I've included a link to the live version, notable because:
a) Jim-Bob opens it by ripping the piss out of the song and his history before anyone else gets a chance, while a small violin actually does play in the background (no joke)
b) Fruitbat's harmonising right at the end is really quite lovely
c) Jim-Bob starts singing the Scout classic 'Riding Along On The Crest Of A Wave' halfway through in the bitterest tones known to man
8. Rent.
Pet Shop Boys cover. Not at all homoerotic, a duet between a client and a rent-boy.
I love you, you pay my rent.
9. After the Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way).
Even if you didn't know anything about the personal history of the band, this song would make you blink a bit. It's about child abuse and child murder. Jesus, it's heavy. (Tuneful, though. Sounds bouncier than it should, though that's not a criticism.)
Conjures up a very specific feeling of not quite nostalgia, but strong feeling of time/place for me, so I've got difficulty separating how much I like the song from how I felt at the time of hearing it. During November 2009 I reckon I listened to this song hundreds of times: over and over on a loop every morning on my way to my new job, over and over again while I was feeling depressed in the evenings. Occasionally I swapped it with Anytime Anyplace Anywhere, just for the variety, like.I almost don't want to listen to it again.
Basically, it's about child murder and it provoked a law-suit because part of the chorus is cribbed from a Rolling Stones song (Ruby Tuesday.) This bit of the chorus in question consists of Jim-Bob shrieking like he's lost his mind: GOODBYE RUBY TUESDAY! COME HOME-- YOU SILLY COW! WE'VE BAKED A CAKE! YOUR FRIENDS ARE WAITING!
Scanning through the lyrics, it's full of uniquely British cultural reference points:
Exhibit F, the reporter said
Loved you to death after the watershed
Between the Open University and closedown you were dead
It's desperately upsetting. There's a bit in the middle which plays around with nursery rhymes ('all the Kings Social Workers, the ghurkas and the cops / couldn't put you back to life again now'.)
The video makes me cry.
This song is was the one involved in the incident that most people remember Carter USM for: the time where Fruitbat rugby tackled motor-mouthed children's presenter Philip Schofield live during an award's ceremony. The Smash Hits Awards, no less. It's on youtube.
It's actually quite beautiful to watch.
Firstly, there's a band called Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine playing a song about the murder of a child, live, at the Smash Hits, watched by a rather confused audience. Then there is Philip Schofield, taking sartorial direction from the Dark Lords of Chaos Magick Ipswich Division-- no, really, look at what he's wearing. Then it becomes really really obvious that Carter are mindfuckingly drunk and miming along badly to a backing track, taking the piss, then Fruitbat starts kicking over mic stands. Then they get cut off.
The camera cuts away, Philip Schofield mock them, then suddenly out of nowhere he is flung to the floor by an irate tiny man, Fruitbat. Security descend.
...It's not only me that gets a puerile sense of joy out of this, is it? I mean Philip Schofield IS one of the most annoying men to ever live. (Apparently the next night Carter USM were due to play live and arrived onstage to a spontaneous mass chant of PHILIP SCHOFIELD / WHAT A WANKER / PHILIP SCHOFIELD / WHAT A WANKER.)
ETA: This post WAS going to include songs about the Gulf War and apathy, but then I realised I'd been typing this for about two hours and got really bored and my back hurts.
Thank you for your advice on my last post, flist, it was really greatfully recieved. I've applied for another, much saner job-- shorter hours, better pay-- and I should hear in the next couple of days. If I don't get that, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. I haven't decided yet.
I took a sick day today, because I genuinely actually am quite ill (aching joints, fuzzy head, coughing madly, sneezing repetitively, the whole deal.) I was due to do a ten-hour shift (9-7), so had I not rung in sick I'd still be there right now, instead of in bed with a cup of tea, wearing a shirt reading NEVER MIND THE BOSSES / JOIN THE RMT UNION. It's a hideously ugly shirt (puke green with puke pink/black wriitng) flogged to me by a fellow leftie in the city. When buying it I had two warring impulses: my pure hatred of The Sex Pistols and my pro-union politics. The latter won out.
So music's pretty much being my salvation recently. (Like my namesake: YOU KNOW HER LIFE WAS SAVED BY ROCK AND ROLL.) I'm having a weird throwback to being a teenager: living in the bedroom I grew up in, obsessing over bands, living for the weekends. It's like I was never at uni. I'm listening to music like it's the nineties: Crass, Conflict, Angelic Upstarts (well, eighties), Chumbawumba, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Coil and Orbital.
I get hours and hours on my commute every day to listen to music. My lunchbreak is thirty minutes long, so I usually eat my food really quickly and get outside as quickly as possible, so I can spend the last twenty minutes walking up and down and up and down Bristol Road, listening to The Murder of Liddle Towers and The Love Album. Bristol Road, weirdly, looks like the leafier bits of Oxford, except the buildings on either side are not colleges but The Priory (behind a huge fuck-off wall) and boarded up hotels, posh houses, and council towers, all shoved together on one miles-long strip.
It reminds me of when I used to walk to school and back every day-- because I was an unpopular shit and people threw things at me and took the piss out of my shoes on the bus, sob sob-- and used to make these incredibly crunkly, jumpy tapes to listen to on my walkman to listen to on the way. Me being fourteen the music I was listening to consisted of really shit nu-metal from HMV (I actually really used to dig Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory), Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, and stuff that I'd downloaded online and laboriously transferred to tape: Bright Eyes, Silver Mt Zion, GYBE, Butthole Surfers, Filter, Glassjaw, Radiohead. Obviously Radiohead. I don't exactly have nostalgia for that period, but I miss the feeling of all music being intensely new and exciting and life-affirming.
God, I wish I'd heard Crass and Conflict when I was fourteen. Occasionally I say this to people ('I wish I'd heard/seen/read that when I was a teenager, I would've loved it') and it's taken as a snub ('my tastes have matured so much more since then') but it's not: I think I've developed a patina of irony, I've lost the ability somewhat to be unbelievably and viscerally moved by How Real And True And Deep a band is. I wonder if that's got something to do with why people take E at raves and gigs: to recapture the sense of being open-wide and credulous again.
Crass and Conflict would've been brilliant for me as a teenager. All the shit nu-metal and 'greebo mosher music' I was listening to back then made me focus all my anger and disgust inwardly, they were all about I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. With the honourable exception of the Manics- and I listened mostly to the bits about being depressed anyway- I don't think I remember being into any political bands. If I'd've been introduced to the concept of class war a bit earlier than university I think things would've gone a lot smoother. Well. Maybe smoother is the wrong word: I would've had a greater focus for my anger than myself.
Anyway. Right.
Speaking of bands I wish I'd encountered earlier, I've been meaning for a while to write a long post about Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine-- aka Carter USM, aka THE GREATEST POLITICAL INDIE BAND OF THE NINETIES. I've had it saved in draft form for ages, so here it is. It was gonna be the first post on my BRAND NEW BLOG but let's face it I'm as lazy as fuck and will never begin.
Cater USM wrote incredibly catchy, insanely bitter songs. I like to imagine that around the time they split up, the ironic, cynical, political spirit flowed out of them and rose up and became The Indelicates; and the spirit that liked singing catchy songs about getting drunk and pulling a sickie from work the next morning became Art Brut.
This post is getting rather lengthy, so, click the cut tag for:
Before we start off: the singer out of Carter USM is called Jim-Bob and the guitarist and occasional back-up singer is called Fruitbat. Their band were really very big on a very small scale in the early nineties.
Fruitbat's real name is Les Carter and apparently the band got the name because he used to do a lot of shagging. This is a picture of them looking embarrassingly sweet together.
Right. The songs.
1. The Only Living Boy In New Cross.
My sudden refusal to embark on a love affair with London aside: if you only listen to one Carter song, make it this.
Yes, the title is an unsubtle Simon & Garfunkle reference. And yes, it's about watching your friends die of AIDs. It's also one of the least maudlin songs I've ever heard. It starts mock-serious, with a funeral piano, then builds in anger and energy, until it emerges as a triumphant fuck-you song, all about partying with the outcasts after something terrible has happened.
It starts out as being, as far as I can tell, a guy first rejoicing in 'the comfort and the joy of being lost / with the only living boy in New Cross', and is about being miserable on tour. Then the narrator talks about how much he really fucking loves hippies, right, and wants to give peace, love and kisses to the whole world. (It edges a nice line between sarcasm and wide-eyed earnestness here.) Then the singer rejoices in the company of various freaks and geeks: greebos, crusties, goths, travellers, gypsies, thieves.
The last verse is a eulogy to everyone the singer knows that's died of AIDs. It starts out abstract:
two fat ladies in 88, safe sixteen lovers who lied
Purley's queen and mother makes five
Butchered bakers, deaf and dumb waiters
Marble Arch criminals and Section 28ers
Autiers, authors, plastered outcasts
Locked up daughters and rock and roll stars
and then gets personal. It's got a long list of names known to the singer ('goodbye Rudie, Abraham and Rosie...') that's absolutely gutpunching to listen to.
Despite all that it's not a miserable song at all, any more than Up The Wolves by the Mountain Goats is miserable because it's about child abuse. It is visceral and mournful, yeah, but I challenge you to feel anything other than awake and alive when you listen to it.
The video is one of my all-time favourites, despite lacking anything remotely approaching a budget. It starts out faux-maudlin, the band around a piano in a funeral home. By the time the guitar kicks in they're jumping around in what appears to be a giant warehouse, surrounded by the "crusties, greebos, goths" mentioned in the song, all looking drunk and really happy and alive.
Here's a link to a copy of a live version, as well. Notable because near the end, when Jim-Bob starts shouting through a list of dead friends, the audience all join in.
In Jim-Bob's autobiography, there's a nice little story about Carter USM playing this live in the US. He was explaining to the audience what it's about, when some fucker in the front row started shouting FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT! At which point Jim-Bob said yeah, I am, why don't you come up here and I'll suck your cock for you?
Anyway, in conclusion, the opening riff of the song ('du du du du du daaaaa der', actually impossible to transcribe, repeated throughout the song) makes me glad I'm not dead, which is all I want to say further on the subject,
2. Bloodsport For All. A song about racist abuse in the military, written around the time a major military bullying scandal hit the papers. Released and then promptly disappeared from the charts as it coincided with the outbreak of the first Gulf War and consequently got zero radio-play.
It's from the perspective of a black recruit in the army, which the video makes even clearer. The lyrics are vicious.:
Suffer in silence, said Brigadier General Holmes
Or change your name to Smith or Jones
Stand up and beg, said Sergeant Kirby
Lay down and die for Di and Fergie.
My favourite bit happens near the end, when Fruitbat starts singing this chilling little melody-- 'the coldest Stream Guards of them all / sang God Save The Queen, bloodsport for all'-- over and over in the background. Lyrically it's a nice little pun, musically it just sounds...good. Possibly because Fruitbat doesn't sing much on Carter records so it stands out, partly because he's got this voice that sounds like he's concentrating all the time, it comes out as unbearably earnest, but in a good way.
3. Do Re Me So Far So Good.
It starts with the lines 'despite of what you heard about Elvis / the good die old and helpless.'
If The Indelicates didn't intend The Last Significant Statement to stand as a reference to this song (at least obliquely), or if it didn't somehow inspire it, I will be greatly surprised. Also, how Indelicates are these lines:
Where are the songs about booze and civilians?
Banning the bomb and abusing the children
With their pop music guitars-- who'll one day grow up to be pop stars?
Video link not MP3 included because I surely cannot be the only one curiously attracted to Jim Bob and Fruitbat's early nineties slacker garb. The bit at the end where they start shouting DO, RE, ME, SO, FAR, SO, GOOD and swapping places to the catchy backing vocals (NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA) is awesome too.
4. Anytime Anyplace Anywhere.
Jesus jumping christ, I love this song. OK. It's about alcoholism: about being an alcoholic, and living in a society surrounded by alcoholics, heavy drinkers, boozers. Brought to you by a band famously fuelled by alcohol. It's the dark side of, oh, every song ever written praising booze. Despite having a tune you can hum, it's almost unbelievably dark.
Starts off with a brief soundscape of the inside of a pub at kicking out time, then these heavy doom-laden synths come straight down like the hammer of god, then Jim-Bob starts singing like it's the end of the world:
The tequila sun is rising
and the Harvey's Bristol moon is sinking
Put the Binatone on snooze
open up some Special Brews
and start drinking
This song almost caused a law-suit because the title is actually taken from an old Bacardi ad, showing someone sitting on an island sipping a bacardi, with the slogan 'Anytime, anyplace, anywhere: there's a wonderful world you can share'.
There's this great interview I saw with the band where Jim-Bob is mumbling his way through his answers then suddenly comes out, full of rage, with a paragraph about how alcohol companies love to show drink as being cool and sexy and glamorous, "and then suddenly you have to wake up at 6 in the morning so you can start drinking Special Brew." O rly Jim-bob.
Anyway, in a career of angry and bitter songs, the chorus to the song is possibly the pinnacle:
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere
there's a wonderful world you can share
Try agrophobic, schizophrenic,
paranoid attacks of panic
Epileptic fits of laughter
Twenty five million mornings after
Fucking hell but it sounds good. The best bit is that there's no focus for the anger-- it's not specifically about drinks companies, it's not about irresponsible marketing, it isn't really about private self-disgust, it sounds like the unfocused, all-consuming rage you get after drinking four pints too quickly and thinking about how much you hate your life, staggering out onto the street, wanting to kick someone's head in.
Anyway the song gets angrier and tighter, the lyrics get faster, until it ends up with this litany of alcoholic drinks:
There's no such thing as Dr Seuss
vodka and tomato juice
Disneyland or dipsomania
name your poison, pick a flavour
Moonshine, firewater, Captain Morgan, Johnnie Walker,
Southern Comfort, mother's ruin, happy hours of homeless brewing
Galloway's sore throat expectorant,
after-shave and disinfectant,
Parazone and Fairy Liquid
if it's in a glass you'll drink it
anytime, anyplace, anywhere
The video is ace, too. Soho at kicking out time, documentary-style.
5. Suicide Isn't Painless.
The title is an obvious reference to Suicide Is Painless by the Manics. It serves as an apt protest to the popular veneration of suicide in certain musical circles of the early nineties. It's about growing older, facing your problems, and realising grand gestures like suicide are squalid, not noble.
For some reason I imagine the narrator singing this is the same narrator out of Art Brut's I Will Survive, but a few years down the line.
Suicide isn't painless
It hurts like hell
It's set aside for the famous
A little suicide sells
So nothing lasts for ever: then nothing ever did.
It's big but it's not clever
(And it's really not that big)
So no more tears
You're a big boy now
We'll have a few more beers
We'll sort it out some how
It fucking breaks my heart right in half is what this song does. Why isn't this played to every child in Britain the moment they turn thirteen? Fuck the Samaritans-- if you're going through a bad patch you should be able to call a special toll-free line and have Jim-Bob tell you it's all going to be okay.
6. Lean On Me I Won't Fall Over.
Like Suicide Isn't Painless but lengthier and shoutier.
It's about attempting to reach out to a friend when they're depressed, wishing they'd confide in you, and knowing they probably won't/can't.
It starts with the narrator stuck in a tube on the Hammersmith and City line, worried about his friend. It then proceeds to the narrator shouting a list of advice he wishes he could give his friend:
stop punching walls! don't cut yourself!
just shift the burden onto someone else!
don't give up hope, if you think you can't cope!
we should keep in touch if it gets too much!
have faith in yourself, for the sake of your health!
STOP SNIFFING GLUE!
try something new!
confide in your friends! you'll get by in the end!
if nothing else works-- have you tried the church?
And then the song ends with the narrator repeating over and over: lean on me, I'm made of steel and stone cold sober, lean on me, I won't fall over. lean on me! lean on me! lean on me! lean on me!
I have included exclamation marks because they are obviously vocalised.
It really works because it's so incredibly earnest (are you sensing a theme?) and actually a bit painful to listen to. The singer/narrator knows that the advice is, honestly, a bit rubbish and isn't going to work, but tries anyway. I keep making the comparison, but it's very Eddie Argos.
Also, this song contains the greatest anti-heroin line ever: chasing the dragon like you're Saint fucking George or someone.
7. A Bachelor For Baden-Powell.
This is an autobiographical song by Jim-Bob about being sexually abused by a Boy Scout master. There's not really any way I can gloss over that bit. I've included a link to the live version, notable because:
a) Jim-Bob opens it by ripping the piss out of the song and his history before anyone else gets a chance, while a small violin actually does play in the background (no joke)
b) Fruitbat's harmonising right at the end is really quite lovely
c) Jim-Bob starts singing the Scout classic 'Riding Along On The Crest Of A Wave' halfway through in the bitterest tones known to man
8. Rent.
Pet Shop Boys cover. Not at all homoerotic, a duet between a client and a rent-boy.
I love you, you pay my rent.
9. After the Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way).
Even if you didn't know anything about the personal history of the band, this song would make you blink a bit. It's about child abuse and child murder. Jesus, it's heavy. (Tuneful, though. Sounds bouncier than it should, though that's not a criticism.)
Conjures up a very specific feeling of not quite nostalgia, but strong feeling of time/place for me, so I've got difficulty separating how much I like the song from how I felt at the time of hearing it. During November 2009 I reckon I listened to this song hundreds of times: over and over on a loop every morning on my way to my new job, over and over again while I was feeling depressed in the evenings. Occasionally I swapped it with Anytime Anyplace Anywhere, just for the variety, like.I almost don't want to listen to it again.
Basically, it's about child murder and it provoked a law-suit because part of the chorus is cribbed from a Rolling Stones song (Ruby Tuesday.) This bit of the chorus in question consists of Jim-Bob shrieking like he's lost his mind: GOODBYE RUBY TUESDAY! COME HOME-- YOU SILLY COW! WE'VE BAKED A CAKE! YOUR FRIENDS ARE WAITING!
Scanning through the lyrics, it's full of uniquely British cultural reference points:
Exhibit F, the reporter said
Loved you to death after the watershed
Between the Open University and closedown you were dead
It's desperately upsetting. There's a bit in the middle which plays around with nursery rhymes ('all the Kings Social Workers, the ghurkas and the cops / couldn't put you back to life again now'.)
The video makes me cry.
This song is was the one involved in the incident that most people remember Carter USM for: the time where Fruitbat rugby tackled motor-mouthed children's presenter Philip Schofield live during an award's ceremony. The Smash Hits Awards, no less. It's on youtube.
It's actually quite beautiful to watch.
Firstly, there's a band called Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine playing a song about the murder of a child, live, at the Smash Hits, watched by a rather confused audience. Then there is Philip Schofield, taking sartorial direction from the Dark Lords of Chaos Magick Ipswich Division-- no, really, look at what he's wearing. Then it becomes really really obvious that Carter are mindfuckingly drunk and miming along badly to a backing track, taking the piss, then Fruitbat starts kicking over mic stands. Then they get cut off.
The camera cuts away, Philip Schofield mock them, then suddenly out of nowhere he is flung to the floor by an irate tiny man, Fruitbat. Security descend.
...It's not only me that gets a puerile sense of joy out of this, is it? I mean Philip Schofield IS one of the most annoying men to ever live. (Apparently the next night Carter USM were due to play live and arrived onstage to a spontaneous mass chant of PHILIP SCHOFIELD / WHAT A WANKER / PHILIP SCHOFIELD / WHAT A WANKER.)
ETA: This post WAS going to include songs about the Gulf War and apathy, but then I realised I'd been typing this for about two hours and got really bored and my back hurts.