— Tim Southwell
Top pop-jazz-rock critic Andrew Male recently Tweeted a passage from a bio or memoir or some sort of music retrospective which argued that Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (note to all who may be interested: I have never liked referring to them as either 'Carter' or, worse yet, 'Carter USM', I like their name in full) were "written out of history" because they fell through the cracks between acid house (presumably this anonymous writer is including offshoot scene Madchester in with it) and Britpop. "Yes", Male commented wryly, "that's why [they] were written out of history".
I like Male and I understand disliking a band like this one but there is some truth to this assertion. While Britpop no doubt has its critics, there wasn't a major genre or subgenre that was looked down upon as consistently as grebo, the unruly Birmingham-area scene that gave rise to the likes of The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, as well as groups like Jesus Jones, Kingmaker and EMF, found a home along with all those longhairs who all seemed to hail from some town called Stourbridge. A lot of them used samples, weren't averse to dance grooves but were also comfortable thrashing about on their "pop music guitars". Over in North America, it was easy to confuse them with Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses but for the lack of a druggy vibe and a distinct lack of cool.
Since they weren't tripping on a daily basis at the Hacienda Club in Manchester, some of these groups had a tougher, angrier sound. When The Wonder Stuff's Miles Hunt pointedly placed "Astley in a Noose" as the B side to their first Top 40 hit "It's Yer Money I'm After Baby" he was serving notice that this manufactured pop rubbish wouldn't do. Not everyone followed suit but Ned's Atomic Dustbin would eventually deliver the punky "Kill Your Television" and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine would write and record a protest song of their own in "Do Re Mi, So Far So Good".
It isn't a terribly well-remembered hit for Jim-Bob and Fruitbat. Ask a Brit who happened to be a mopey, spotty youth in the early nineties and they'll likely tell you that they only remember one or some of the following: "Sheriff Fatman", "After the Watershed" and "The Only Living Boy in New Cross". While not quite their three biggest hits (the forgettable "Rubbish" actually outperformed "Sheriff Fatman" on the charts), they were the standouts then and they remain their signature tunes to this day. Yet, "Do Re Mi" represents both their sole Single of the Fortnight Best New Single in Smash Hits and, of greater significance, the only Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine single to appear on a Now That's What I Call Music compilation. Not bad for a song few remember and not a whole lot of people seemed to like even then. (Fun fact: it only spent two weeks in the Top 40; hit singles having chart "runs" of a fortnight or less would become common in the nineties)
Being on a Now is also ironic given the song's subject matter. If you happened to own Now 22 (as I did), you may have come for Take That and — yikes! — Nick Berry but you would've also been exposed to a trio of angsty indie-rock from Shakespears Sister (with "I Don't Care", a sentiment that ought to have appealed to teenagers or was I the only one?), Ugly Kid Joe ("Everything About You": again, hating everything is what teens do) and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine laying waste to the throwaway pop scene that surrounded them.
The only problem was, the message didn't connect the way the efforts of both Shakespears Sister and Ugly Kid Joe did. Jim-Bob (or was it Fruitbat? I only just realised I have no idea who did what in ver Machine) had that thick accent which muffled an awful lot of the words. There's also the racket. And even then, did the lyrics do a decent job communicating this distaste for nineties' pop? Much as I would love for their to be a football club called Antarctic Thistle, I don't know what purpose their big match is meant to serve in this song. Billy Bragg had a way of making silly rhymes work but in the hands of the Unstoppables it just seems like the sort of verse I would have churned out at fourteen or fifteen, convinced of it's worthiness as a masterpiece.
A hint of where Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine went a bit wrong was their ages. Q Magazine praised their number one LP 1992: The Love Album but admitted that it was "undignified" that thirtysomethings would go by the handles of Jim-Bob and Fruitbat. More to the point, they were attempting to do something to attract the attention of teenage good-for-nothings such as myself but couldn't really pull it off because they hadn't been teens since Jim Callaghan's Winter of Discontent.
"Sheriff Fatman" had been about low income renters dealing with a slumlord. "After the Watershed" was about youngsters discovering sex on the telly. "The Only Living Boy in New Cross" was about the AIDS epidemic. All of these touched people in one way or another. "Do Re Mi, So Far So Good" may have been good fun and a nice reminder of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine as heirs to the rock 'n' roll bombast of Meat Loaf and the trashy rock-synth of ZZ Top and Billy Idol but what it represented meant next to nothing to ver kids. And isn't that's what matters when you've spurned pop in favour of using your place in music to be a good influence? And if not, why not?
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Roy Orbison: "I Drove All Night"
With all due respect to Jim-Bob and Fruitbat, the rightful Single of the Fortnight Best New Single is from the late, great Roy Orbison. Originally a hit in the spring of 1989 for Cyndi Lauper, the Big O recorded this Billy Steinberg-Tom Kelly classic but it wasn't released until nearly four years after his untimely death. Both versions are good but there's no competing with Orbison's voice even if you're Lauper. (They're both miles better than Celine Dion's lifeless reading a decade later) It was a big deal at the time that TV star Jason Priestley appeared in its video but as a hormone-fuelled teen I was focused on Jennifer Connelly. She still looks great but now I'm all about Roy Orbison. Who else could sing so well despite seeming like he was putting in the minimal effort to do so?
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