A box of Screaming Blue Messiahs

A box of Screaming Blue Messiahs

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by Sylvie Simmons

There’s a white Madonna and a black Prince, a metal Priest and a buffy Saint Marie and three Screaming Blue Messiahs: Bill Carter, Chris Thompson and Kenny Harris. I’ve got Bill, he’s got me, he’s been drinking, I haven’t, I’m not happy but Bill is positively wretched. He’d be tearing his hair out if he had some. It would seem he’s just discovered the hopeless position of the artist who has to put his creativity in a box to sell it, and boxes and creativity don’t get along. He’s fighting. But I’ve got tradition on my side—boxes build tradition, same as tradition builds boxes, and though he draws on a tradition of iconoclasm (people like Beefheart, to a great extent, and John Lee Hooker to a lesser one), it’s boxes all the same—and he’s just got a Budweiser. On a dull, heavy afternoon in London we’re facing off across a record company desk. I’m here because of an album called Bikini Red, “eine Jukebox, ” the Germans said “fur einen perfekten Planeten,” which is good enough for me. A cathedral built of parts from a freeway-crash of styles. Mutant Beach Boys, Cramps, Beefheart, Velvets, polka, waltz and blues. I like your album a lot, Bill Carter.

"I don’t.”

You’re in the minority then. Bowie likes you, Rolling Stone likes you, America, the London Times, cynical rockcrits like you. A rare achievement; shows how you’ve managed to be all things to all men. ‘‘What do you mean? Is that a trick question? I’m trying to think, I’ve just been in the pub, hang on.” He puts the tape on pause. Time for me to tell you that the album he doesn’t like is their third record, an EP announcing their arrival in ’85, Good And Gone, the full-length Gun Shy confirming it. They spent a lot of time touring the States, sometimes headlining, sometimes with the Cramps; oh, here’s Bill back again:

‘‘I couldn’t handle it at first, America. I couldn’t take it in. The whole deal. I just couldn’t believe that it existed. It just seemed like...” he grabs the back of his skull and tries to pull it down over his forehead, “Oh, it’s what everybody says.” What? “They’re like Martians, the bodysnatchers, that’s what it seemed like. I think if you stay there you end up being one, you don’t have much time before you become an American, there’s no way out. I’ve seen so many people who’ve come from England floundering. Concentrate1” (I’m cleaning off the coffee I spilled on an official-looking file.) “It’s alright, it’s only contracts.” But I just rubbed a few noughts off someone’s deal. “Good.” So, America makes you flounder?

“It sucks you in, I think. It’s a very powerful culture. If you don’t join in, you’re out. That kind of power is frightening.” More head-rubbing, like he’s trying to erase himself. Tough business to be in if you don’t want to be the center of attention.

“You could turn up there and say ‘I’m Bill Carter’ and this and that, and if I wasn’t in a band I’d be eaten up. I’ll probably be eaten up anyway.” So why keep going back then? “Because I like it, the excitement. It’s also got diminished responsibilities. You don’t have to think,” he laughs.

Which is why a lot of people say they join bands. Because they don’t have to think, someone else thinks for them, looks after them—“That’s true, that’s true, but I don’t like people looking after you and, in fact, that’s one thing I’m trying to stop. The thing about music is it’s a diminished. . . toytown. What’s going on everywhere else doesn’t count. Anyway.” The silence decides it’s cold outside and comes back in to join us.

What was it—can you remember—that got you into music? One apocalyptic moment? A blinding flash? “Are you talking about me personally?” The silence shrugs and looks the other way. “It took me a long—a lot longer than I imagined it would to become competent at doing it. What got me into it was the same things that get everybody into it. You see doors to a different world and you can see that it’s possible to exist and to do something. You can fulfill. Everybody’s got talent,.every single person. What am I doing?” Making sense, I think. “Every single person has talent but most people don’t have a chance or don’t find an outlet or don’t fulfill it for some reason. They can’t make a living at it, or... I know what it’s like to feel underestimated. The one thing about music is it’s a fair deal, you get up there and do it—and if it works, it works, and there’s nothing can stop it, there’s no class system, no prejudices, no nothing, and that’s what attracted me to it. If you were just yourself there must be a way of just being yourself, but it’s hard just keeping being yourself because you can turn into a caricature of yourself.” The theory of “If you’re soft enough you’ll expand to fit the box you’re put in.” Me, enemy boxmaker. Well aware of this I shut up and drink my coffee.

“But I just thought there’s no other way to do it, to actually get yourself—the things that you feel inside you—to work. You couldn’t get it to work in driving a van, you couldn’t get it being an architect, you couldn’t get it doing paintings; the only way you could do it is to be yourself. And the hard part is that you have to live with yourself and it starts becoming slightly public and it’s a bit vulnerable and it’s like hearing your voice on a tape recorder—you don’t like it.”

Back to what you were saying about not liking the album—

“I’ve been through a bad patch with this album.” Certainly wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. “What did you think it was going to be then?” An extension of the first, like most people’s second albums. Less witty, I thought, more intense, aggressive like the live show, more in your face.

“Well, a lot of people think we should do that.” Your band, your fans, your record company? “There aren’t ‘a lot of people’ in the band, only three.” I know; what did you think? “I don’t know. At the time, to do the album how we did it was probably alright. Because you’re never in an ideal position.” He laughs hopelessly. “I feel like Montgomery, did you see that thing?” A TV program the night before, featuring the Field Marshall, a British war hero, defeater of the wily Rommel in the Middle East, and evidently a screwedup dwarf. The program implied he won the war foe us because his good wife died and his bad mom beat his buttocks with a riding whip.

‘‘It’s the same in bands,” says Bill. “Most people who are driven to do things like that are usually pretty inadequate in one way or another. They’ve usually got something missing. Because if you feel happy and you’ve got everything going for you, you don’t do anything. There’s a lot of them about. Or do you think everyone has their own weight of misery?” I do, as it happens. “/ do.” So why make this album that I like and you don’t? Why all these different styles?

“The reason we did it is because we’d been doing a lot of touring and I was really bored doing the same kind of vibe all the time. I didn’t want to come in and just do the same thing again. I got really disgusted with shouting my head off every night—I don’t know, you can start off doing something and it just becomes a nightmare. And I just wanted to do something—I didn’t want to do anything, until about now. Are you interested in hearing what I’m saying? You ask me questions and I answer them and—it just doesn’t seem worth it sometimes.” I know what you mean, but the box is half-built already and it beats working for a living.

“I didn’t want to do anything until now.” But record companies don’t work that way. “I said we’d do some demos and this album is really demos—we’d do two, three songs and then we’d have a couple of weeks and do another two songs— there was a lot of distance between songs. Also because I wanted to do things that had some sort of feelings about new, different feelings. At the time you just do the best you can, that’s it.” So you never intended it to be a lasting monument? “You always think when you start that that’s what it could be, a lasting monument, and when it’s over you wish you could never see it again. But that’s part of the process. Doing anything you’re just putting yourself in a vulnerable position, anyway.”

America sounded, I persist, a major inspiration—the mutie surf of the title track, metallic-spray-painted C&W, hillbilly polka, sillybilly Flintstones, Dodges, Chryslers, Eddie Cochran—even an American accent.

“Yeah, well America’s a new—I don’t know. What’s the question? Well it’s a good place to get material from, America. I like America. What I like is the way they use the language—very creative way of speaking English. For example, instead of saying, like in England, ‘30 mph speed limit,’ there’s 55 in big letters and then ‘That’s The Law,’ and underneath it, ‘Drive Friendly.’ I like things like that. Like what does ‘Drive Friendly’ mean? Nobody would say it here.” They might have if the same-named single he did for an indie label with Motor Boys Motor, his band before Messiahs, had gotten more exposure. Chris Thompson was in Motor Boys Motor, Kenny Harris wasn’t. He says he “knew them both, really,” though Kenny joined in after regularly going to see them play and “we changed the name when we thought it sounded good; we kept the old name while it wasn’t very good.” This band is “about three years old, maybe four, I don’t know.” He formed it because “I wanted to do something. I didn’t want to be sitting around and being on the dole or being pissed off. It’s like an obsession, really. It’s very hard to talk about it now and say, oh why did you want to do it, because you don’t actually feel that way about it, you originally start playing because you want—to be like a hero or something. It’s stage by stage. You don’t start off thinking you want a big record deal or anything like that. It was never that ambitious, really.”

Does songwriting come easy? “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I haven’t written one for a bit. I usually write them if somebody turns around and says ‘Unless you write two songs you’re going to get kicked off the label.’ ”

Here’s a question: why does a creative person need a kick up the arse from an uncreative mercenary institution to make them open the box?

“Why? I don’t know. This isn’t getting anywhere, is it?”

A pause as long as a tour bus. They’re off to tour Europe at the start of ’88; another American tour follows. Headlining this time, it looks at the moment. You might have seen them with the Cramps.

“The Cramps. Oh,” Bill grabs his skull. “It was a good tour. The audiences were good audiences. The only thing was that Lux abuses his microphone and they complained because we were spitting in the microphone or something.” Well, he has to put it down his pants; maybe he’s sensitive about hygiene. “Yeah, and he expects you to sing through it and then complains because you’re filling it up with gob. I thought that was funny!

“I don’t like touring that much, but sometimes I really enjoy it. Quite often it’s better than hanging around in London. Most people in a band, we have to get out, we have to tour really, get out of the country, leave. But you know what touring’s like. It’s boring, mindlessly boring. I’m doing as least as possible.”

The usual line is it’s worth it all for the hour or so onstage.

“It’s not, no way.”

Why do it then?

“Why does it have to be those alternatives? Why does it have to be like a big star trip or ‘part of the job?’ There could be another way of looking at it.” There is, thousands at least. “Yeah, well. It isn’t like that. It’s personal. The reason why you do things is personal. Personal. It’s not necessarily just a job, and in some ways it is. It is a job, I suppose—you wouldn’t choose to play every night. It’s supposed to be special, and the more you do it—you do two nights in a row and stuff—it just becomes dissipated and meaningless. So you have to combine the fact that you’re on a record label and you’ve got an album and you’re supposed to tour, and it doesn’t sit that well. It’s not something I’m very comfortable with. I would prefer to play when I feel like it. On the other hand, you look at some of these old blues, guys and they play—they just play all the time.” He looks defeated by his own argument. The sky’s blackenings outside.

“I don’t like the systemization of music. I don’t like the way when you go on a record company everything slows down to the point of crucial boredom. This album that’s come out now is six months old. I don’t want to hear it! When you’re actually doing it it’s gone, it’s over. And it’s like, well why don’t you just go back to the clubs and busk, play what you want, just do that, and that’s a good question. I get very frustrated by the staticness. You put 12 tracks out and that’s an album for a year, it doesn’t represent the band, it doesn’t represent the live gigs, it doesn’t represent one good moment in a live gig, it’s a product. I’m signed to a record label to make money. No other reason at all. It’s not because I want to go around being liked by people. To keep on doing that, to jump onto the gravy train for want of a better word, sticks in my throat, I don’t like it.” Fair enough. But then if you only write songs when the record company takes a gun to your back—“Yeah, well, that’s a contradiction. You’ve got two choices: you either write songs when you feel like it, or when people say you have to. It can become a job, a thing. I don’t know.”

Neither do I. An hour tossing convolutions back and forth like one-armed ancient racquetball-players gets a little bit exhausting. Whether Bill and his Messiahs give a holy shit or not, their records are quite wonderful, their live shows even better.

“I don’t know, music’s never seemed a total way of life to me, it never seemed to answer everything. There’s nobody I’d like to be—you look at pop stars or you look at people, supposedly successful people. I wouldn’t want to swap places with them. I know what a lot of people have to sell to get what they want.” he rubs his head. “It’s a fine line.” s