The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
April 1992
Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine—former London buskers Jim Bob (Jim Morrison) and Fruitbat (Leslie Carter), now two guitarists, synth adepts, manic samplers, and catchphrase thieves—know how to play the pop game. Starting with their name: if you may not exactly remember it the first time you hear it, neither are you exactly going to forget it. The name is hard to use; its exchange value is unstable. Go into a record store and ask for a disc by Carter-the-Unstoppable-Sex-Machine and you'll probably feel like a teenager buying condoms. It's not just the "Sex" in the moniker. There are too many syllables to get out easily. “Carter the Unstoppable Threshing Machine" would be just as bad, and just as apt. Souls fall by the acre in the tunes, and the Grim Reaper is everywhere, setting derelicts on fire, smashing children, most often leading those with nothing better to do to suicide, and always grinning: "It was midnight on the murder mile/ Wilson Pickett's finest hour." An acronym is no help. The touch of dyslexia most people carry around on any busy day can translate "CUSM" into "U.S. Marine Corps"—also appropriate, given "Bloodsport for All" or "G.I. Blues," which combines the sentiments of the legless soldier's ballad "Waltzing Matilda" with a brutal, shaking rewrite of "Dixie." You can't keep up with this group, and they mean to set you on edge.
Carter-the have a new EP out, Bloodsport for All—an old single, a couple of waste tracks, covers of half-forgotten songs by Soft Cell and the Monkees—pretty much a stopgap.
So far, the action remains on their 1990 debut, 101 Damnations, and last year's 30 Something—both released in the U.S., like Bloodsport, by Chrysalis. Here a whole world is made out of half-told tales of random terror, seamless cruelty, practical jokes played by the same God who was featured in Randy Newman's bitter "God’s Song (That's Why I Love Mankind),” drunkenness, war, hate, cynicism, and panic. And this world, as shaped by Carter-the’s music, is exhilarating, thrilling, before it is anything else.
In all of Carter-the's best work, rhythm tracks are looped and looped and looped again, guitars scrape until there are no notes, only insensate fanfares broken into themes Jim Bob's singing can ride like a train. It's Phil Spector's Wall of Sound on the cheap, but led by vocals so addled and compulsive that the image which forms in your mind might be one of walls toppling, in endless replay. The group has been compared to the Pet Shop Boys, and the comparison makes sense, but only because behind all the noise are melodies as implacable as the one the Pet Shop Boys found for "Rent," the most seductive record of the last five years. The difference is that Carter-the don't use melody to seduce, they use it for suspense. Their melodies are fierce. The building sense of tension that drives "Midnight on the Murder Mile," "A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb," or "Billy's Smart Circus" convinces a listener that something tremendous is about to happen—something wonderful, something awful, you just want to know what. There's some of the feeling of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" all through the music, though with the heaviest wind coming not from orchestral flights up the mountains of the muse, but from the pure speed of the performance.
Mostly, that speed is in Jim Bob's singing, which is really ranting. Words slam into each other, the singer trips, he flees as if he's trying to escape the music itself, as if he's going to be killed before he can reach the last line, where he'll tell you what he means, if he can remember what it was. The pace is so emotionally fast—sometimes the tempos are formally fast, sometimes they aren't—that when stray lyrics leap out of the storm they can seem like secrets let loose on a society dedicated most of all to keeping them hidden, like confirmations of rumors you've almost forgotten. When a chorus breaks out of the roller coaster of "A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb" with an enormous chant of "DON'T-PUSH-ME-'CAUSE-I'M-CLOSE-TO-THE-EDGE," you might think, Yes, I know that one, and maybe a strong memory of the first time you heard "The Message," by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, comes back. When you hear Jim Bob say "Long distance information, get me Jesus on the line" (from "Midnight on the Murder Mile"), you might remember Chuck Berry's "Memphis," and wonder at the way his heartfelt plea has turned into fright. When you hear a reference to “the great cucumber robberies of 1989" (from "Billy's Smart Circus"), you might even think you remember that.
"Dedicated to everyone we've harangued into a corner," it reads on 101 Damnations. That old busker's spirit—which calls up the original Ranters, the everyday Antichrists of the English Civil War era, as surely as screamers on our own streets—is as present in "Shoppers' Paradise" (the ultimate department store: "First and second floors, third and fourth World Wars") as it was in the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen." Johnny Rotten may be the real voice behind this one: you can hear the same heedlessness, the same lack of self-censorship, the same glee, the same apprehension of horror, tyranny, and shame, the same will not so much to triumph over such things as to make them real. It's not a voice I've heard anywhere else, for years—not in pop music (though some hear it in Public Enemy or Ice Cube), not in politics. You can hear the fear on the evening news, but not the art.
It might not have been much fun to encounter Jim Bob and Fruitbat when they were singing for spare change on London street corners. You might have paid your money just to get away. It's great fun now; there's even a veneer of camp, occasionally, to let you wonder if the world Carter-the collapse, song by song, isn't some kind of joke. But that veneer never lasts for more than a phrase or two. The singer finds the violence he's looking for and burns it right off.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, April 1992.
Love those records and that band. Thank you.
Let's hear it for the forward momentum and Cockney swagger of English punk. And Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down!