Sex as a Weapon

“It was absolute fucking mayhem. There was this one bloke who got on top of a squad car, kicked the windscreen in and then jumped down and walked past half-a-dozen officers as if he didn’t have a care in the world. People talk about youngsters nowadays not having their act together but that’s the best bit of mindless hooliganism I’ve seen in years. Milwall ought to snap him up.”

Nope, it’s not John Bruton trying to induct the Young Anarchists’ Party into his Rainbow Coalition by extolling the virtues of civil disobedience. Those wayward words of wisdom belong to a certain Mr. Fruitbat who’s doing his John Giles-style post-riot analysis of the events which accompanied Carter USM’s recent visit to the Cork Forum.

Details of this festive over-exuberance remain somewhat sketchy but eyewitnesses talk of guns being brandished outside, assorted Frank And Walters having to exit the venue through a toilet window and a member of another local band destroying Linford Christie’s 100 metre world record as he legged it from the Garda Siochana.

In the interests of balance, fair play, objectivity and all those other words journalists bandy around without really meaning, I’m going to do my ‘Disgusted of Leeside’ bit and suggest that the indie right-on brigade are wrong to snipe at the police for merely doing their jobs. I mean, try ‘phoning the Levellers the next time your house is burgled and see how far it gets you.

“Point taken,” concedes the newly-peroxided punk provocateur. “I’m not saying that putting on a uniform automatically makes you a bastard but there’s a far higher proportion of vindictive little twerps in the police force than there is in other walks of life. They might join with the intention of upholding the law and serving the public but it doesn’t last. Vested interests come into play, a ‘them and us’ attitude develops and unless you conform to the very narrow British definition of ‘normal’, you’re going to get hassled. You might just get away with walking down the street after 10 o’clock at night if you’re white and middle-class but if you’re black, Asian, gay or have a daft haircut, forget it.”

Cue more righteous indignation from Fruitbat’s partner-in-punnery JimBob who’s today defying his reputation as one of the scruffiest men in rock by sporting a very snazzy silver ensemble that if he was 10 – oh, alright then – 15 years younger would earn him a place in Boyzone.

“As far as I’m aware,” he proffers, “no one’s gone to jail because of the Levellers making crap records but you only have to look at the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six to see what happens when the Police screw-up. You get these dickheads going on about us having the best legal system in the world when it’s obvious to anyone with even half a brain that ‘the good old British bobby’ is the John Major equivalent of Hitler’s Brownshirts.”

Before you dismiss JimBob as a particularly loose-screwed member of the loony left, allow me to recall my own experiences of Her Majesty’s Constabulary. In the 10 years since moving to Ireland, I’ve been stopped once on the scurrilous – and erroneous – grounds that I might be carrying drugs. Back in Blighty, I average at least one ‘’ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s going on here?” a week with the occasional trip to the local nick and cavity-search thrown in for good measure. That’ll teach me to walk round with a loud leather-jacket and offensive girlfriend!

“Where the politicians and police are clever, though, is in the way they manage to manipulate public opinion,” he continues. “The Criminal Justice Bill is perhaps the most repressive, fascist piece of legislation ever passed by Westminster yet the way it was presented to the man-in-the-street is that it’ll stop people squatting in their house and parking caravans in their garden when they go on holiday.

“They knew there’d be some professional rioters at the protests, so they ensured that when the trouble started it was smack in front of the cameras. The story should have been 100,000 people marching peacefully through London but instead the images on TV were of pitched battles and poor defenceless police-horses getting hurt. The Government got exactly what they wanted.”

It was only in the final stages of the Criminal Justice Bill’s indecently swift passage through parliament that Joe and Josephine Bloggs started twigging that it wasn’t just heroin-injecting hippies that’d be effected by its sinisterly pervasive powers.

“Court orders have virtually been done away with under the CJB,” resumes Fruitbat. “All that it needs now is for one officer to suspect that you’re thinking about breaking the law and you’re a criminal. Technically, six people turning up in their cars to play cricket on the local common can be done for illegal assembly. My only hope is that this time Major and his cronies have gone too far and you’ll get more demonstrations of the type when those environmentalists climbed up on Peter Lilley’s roof. Personally, I’d have torn the house apart brick by brick but it was a start.”

This brings us neatly to Carter’s soon-to-be-released Worry Bomb album, a veritable ‘fuck you’ of a record which directs a well-aimed Doc Marten at such worthy targets as the Ku Klux Klan (‘Gas Man’), child neglect (‘Young Offenders Mum’) and public apathy (‘Senile Delinquent’). There’s also the not inconsequential matter of Jim and Fruity suddenly turning Luddite and finding themselves Wes, a real live drummer who’s been entrusted with taking care of the ‘USM’ part of the moniker.

“He’s our bitch magnet,” explains JimBob with not so much a pinch as a catering-size pack of salt. “We saw Take That and East 17 only having to grab their crotches to get to number one and decided we needed a bit of teen sex appeal ourselves. Unfortunately, the best we could do was Wes who’s only slightly less wrinkly than us but we’re hopeful that he’ll get us into Smash Hits and Just Seventeen.”

A quick check confirms that there’s no unsightly tangle of wires coming out Wes’ back, so can we assume that he’ll be given more leeway than the drum-machine and allowed to participate in the songwriting?

“Sound-wise, things have been evolving at a furious pace,” Fruitbat enthuses. “You won’t notice it so much on this album because the songs were written before Wes joined but the B-sides we’ve recorded for the next couple of singles were jammed-out in the studio and there’s a spontaneity about them that we’ve maybe lacked in the past. The other benefit is that whereas we take certain experiences for granted, Wes hasn’t done Top Of The Pops or been to America and his enthusiasm has rubbed off on us.”

And what’s the new recruit’s view of his initiation into the grandest of British indie-pop institutions?

“It might’ve been difficult if I hadn’t known the lads beforehand,” he reflects, “but when they asked me along to rehearsals, it was a case of playing with mates rather than auditioning for a ‘name’ band. There was obviously a period of readjustment – JimBob and Fruitbat were used to having only themselves to worry about and suddenly there was this extra body on the bus who had to be fed, watered and kept out of trouble. What I appreciate most is that I’ve never been made to feel like the hired-hand. If decisions need taking, I’m always consulted and the only time I stay out of it is when they’re having one of their daily rows.”

“You fucking liar,” interjects JimBob sweetly. “You wait to see who’s winning and then you take their side. Look, you can see his brown nose!”

Five years ago you’d have gotten generous odds on them outliving their hipper and decidedly baggier ‘Madchester’ counterparts but whereas Shaun Ryder and Co have returned to the margins from whence they came, Carter USM have managed to keep body and soul intact long enough to notch up ten top 30 singles and a bona fide chart-topper in the form of 1992: The Love Album. Not bad for a couple of cockney wideboys who were supposed to enjoy their prerequisite 15 minutes of fame and then toddle off to obscurity.

“The two things we had in our favour over the Happy Mondays,” JimBob continues, “is that we weren’t part of any scene or movement and we didn’t take hard drugs. Rich people whinging whilst shovelling shitloads of chemicals into their system is the worst rock ‘n’ roll cliché there is and the reason why I haven’t written to the Pope demanding a sainthood for Kurt Cobain.

“Our egos are also resilient enough to accept that in any career there are going to be ups and downs. If it was 1992, I’d expect Worry Bomb to go top 5 but circumstances change, ‘New Mod’ is where it’s at as far as the kids are concerned and we’ll be happy to achieve mid-chart respectability.

“We have this theory that it goes in peaks and troughs and if you hang around long enough, you’ll eventually come back into fashion – like flared trousers. I was a mod in the ’70s, so I know what it’s about, but I’d feel a right prat suddenly zipping round on a Lambretta and getting cast members from Quadrophenia to appear in our videos. It’s too obvious.”

At this particular moment, the word ‘Blur’ springs to mind, executes a triple-somersault and then dismounts with a perfect back-flip.

Save for a collection of B-sides and outtakes which rejoiced under the cheery title of Starry Eyed And Bollock Naked, 1994 was almost a non-year for Carter at home, the band preferring instead to clamber back into their long-suffering Transit and making a beeline for such rock ‘n’ roll hotspots as Minsk and Vilnius.

“Lithuania was weird,” Fruitbat recalls. “We were expecting everyone to be in party-mode following their independence but instead most people are sitting around waiting for the Russians to return. They’re convinced that once Boris Yeltsin has got himself sorted at home, he’s going to start empire-building again and they’re afraid to move forward in case it’s taken away from them. They’re also very aware that since Moscow pulled out, they’ve been bombarded with cheap American culture. The Yanks’ attitude is ‘reject communism and we’ll give you Pizza Hut’ but that’s not what Lithuania or the rest of Eastern Europe want.

“I remember these two kids walking down the street in Poland with back-to-front baseball caps on and everyone laughing because they were trying to look American. The initial euphoria of being free has worn off and now it’s down to quality of life.”

“Personally,” adds Wes, “I think Amnesty International should campaign for a U.N. embargo on crap bands being sent to Poland. When we did a festival there, 80% of the local groups sounded like Rage Against The Machine and the rest thought they were The Toy Dolls. Forget ‘Anarchy In The UK’ or ‘London Calling’, for the average Pole ‘Nellie The Elephant’ is the punk rock anthem.”

Bearing in mind Fruitbat’s assertion that Britain has just taken its first jackbooted step towards becoming a police state, what does he say to East Europeans who are still labouring under the misapprehension that all is sweetness and bulging bank balances in the west?

“We’re the anti-Tourist Board,” he laughs. “We travel round the world telling people how shit Britain is whilst similtaneously blubbing our eyes out because we’re homesick for London. It’s not the country we hate but the wankers running it. The reason everybody takes ‘E’ is that they’re desperate – even for a few hours – to feel positive about life. When was the last time a party political broadcast did that?”

Whilst admitting that they’d quite like to emulate Eddie Vedder and bemoan the horrors of selling ten million records, Carter won’t be considering alternative employment if Worry Bomb fails to turn into precious metal. Pay dirt or bargain-bin, whatever the album strikes, the Unstoppable Sex Machine has no plan to grind to a halt.

“I can’t stand the thought of all those journalists who hate us rubbing their hands together and saying, ‘I knew they’d fuck-up in the end!,” explains JimBob. “The Fall have got it sussed – releasing an album every year, playing a few gigs and then dropping out of sight to do whatever it is Mark E. Smith does do when he’s not pissing people off. Actually, don’t print that or he’ll be threatening to break my legs!”

If the most miserable man in Leeds besides Howard Wilkinson did decide to indulge in a spot of Kray-style retribution, it could pave the way for a novel JimBob Morrison/Dolores O’Riordan wheelchair-bound duet.

“Yeah, the Cranberries,” he chuckles. “The victims of outrageous good fortune. No, fair fucks to them. They were in the right place at the right time and will soon have the seafront condominiums in Malibu to prove it. I don’t think I’m Celtic or windswept enough to do a song with Dolores but ask Fruitbat – he’s got the same hair!”