The Trouble With … Jim Bob From Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine

How to screw up your already finished music career without even trying

Take a bow Jim Bob Morrison, once of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine (once called Jamie Wednesday, until one gig where only two band members turned up and they told the irate bar owner that the band had split but they would fulfil the show themselves as Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine – as nice a bit of thinking on your feet as was ever done), the sixth best thing to have come out of Streatham §

Your promotor is busy trying to sell those last few tickets for next year’s gig (this year you only did seven because no one wants to book you).

But all of a sudden.

But, but, but it was all going so well!

Maybe Mr Ollington got a little bit pissed at finding the artist he was trying to help posting this?

Why not go the full Monty and write ‘don’t buy the tickets – only the crap ones are left’ and be done with it?

Good work as well posting the following up.

That’s a good idea. Fantastic. Dash the hopes of those going to your gigs in the vain hope of Fruitbat appearing as a ‘special guest’, and you ‘just happen’ to do some old Carter stuff, and, even better, you ‘just happen’ to announce you are getting back together like every other 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s band who were famous for five minutes and have been floundering ever since like a man with no arms and legs in the sea whose name is ironically Bob.

It’s been the only reason these people (like my uncle) have been still buying tickets to your shitty gigs to hear your shitty solo songs when there’s ten times the talent busking on the underground (don’t laugh, a certain Ed Sheeran did two years around the Hammersmith and Picadilly line, oh yeeeeeeah!).

Deep down you know it. Why else do you keep having to put a ‘from Carter U.S.M.’ suffix to everything you do up to and including taking a shit other than the hope that someone will now care?

Yeah, you did a get together before but found the world wasn’t beating a path to your door and so went back to seek complete obscurity in your own rights. You even had an autobiography out, although none of the bookshops would touch it – they’ve enough trouble trying to sell the crap they’ve got as it is unless they can find a way of tying it in to some nanoscopic link to J. K. Rowling.

But now your former fans will be hitting their midlife crises. It will become twenty times worse when they find out Ed Sheeran’s the Christmas number one (bar some miracle) and will wonder why kids today are even more beige that their parents’ favourite matching comfy weekend casuals, why their generation of crusties and goths (who ‘changed the world’ by not changing it) have produced children with all the passion and angst of a bowl of Rice Crispies with cold milk poured into it. Get them in 2018 when their alienation from a world that’s given them nothing but broken dreams (Brexit, England’s humiliation at another World Cup Final, Brexit) will be complete, and you’ll be able to flog any old shit to them so long as it is a ‘new album’ as they try to recapture their youth and the sunny glow of a 21st century future when the world was going to be a better place and the idea of someone like Trump ever ruling the planet would have reasonably generated the question which one because no way would it be Earth.

Why not? It worked for ‘Jeff Lynne’s ELO’.

McCartney is shit without Lennon. Paul Weller and Scones are shit without the Jam. You are shit without Fruitbat. Get over yourselves. Get back with yourselves.

Forget Christmas, why not give your middle aged fanbase something to celebrate this Christmas, tell them you are both getting back together for good, gigs for good, records for good, and flush that stupid solo nonsense down the toilet?

Just saying.

§ Behind Hywel Bennett, Ken Livingstone, Paul Merton, Roger Moore and Denis Wheatley – not in that order. Paul Merton’s the best thing to have come out of Streatham. There was also Lieutenant-Commander William Boaks who lived in Streatham when he got up to all his public safety silliness in the 1950s and 1960s, but he was from Walthamstow and that part of London needs to have an association with something good or it will be living down E17 until the fall of civilisation. Yes it did produced Benjamin Disraeli, Ian Dury and William Morris, but who remembers them?