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NME BALLISTIC KISSERS To the passer-by, the badly scratched, beat-up 1968 Chevrolet Camaro 350 SS may not look like much but next to his group The Screaming Blue Messiah it is Bill Carter's biggest thrill, a blue dream on wheels. Sometimes just before dawn he gets in the car, fires the engine and, as the fitfull sputters give way to a reassuring purr, he'll set off out of London. Where he'll end up doesn't really matter, it's the getting there that's important, just as long as he's moving. There's not many people around at this time of day but gradually they start to appear; heading to the shop, the office, the unemployment exchange, cogs in the machine that keeps sleepy old England ticking over. Sometimes when he thinks about it long enough, it can all seem a bit depressing to Bill. He moves faster; he may not know where he's going but there's much he wants to leave behind. For a while at least he is cut off from the grind, the obligations, the sheer numbing monotony of the daily struggle. It's as if he's watching a reel of film unrolling before his eyes. He doesn't feel aloof or superior (Carter's spent enough of his 35 years on what they call the social scrapheap to know better), but being in the driver's seat gives him an independence and sense of control that is hard to find in a world where things are rapidly slipping out of anyone's control. "I think being in a car, the whole feeling of it must be one of the last forms of freedom available to anyone," he says, earnestly. At 35 Bill Carter is not exactly a young white hope but The Screaming Blue Messiahs – a group it has taken him ten years to put together – are currently one of the most obsessively atmospheric and vital live acts in the country. For a power trio they make an incredibly broad and calamitous noise. Carter builds waves of guitar over the pulverised funk and booming detonations of Chris Thompson's bass and Kenny Harris' drums. It's a sound trapped at the point of self destruction and implosion. There's links with the past, certainly – the speed-sharp adrenalin rush of early Who and Wilko-era Feelgoods – but The Screaming Blue Messiahs move these influences into the '80s – nuclear age rhythm and blues. Because just as surely as the group keep a surging beat, Carter has definitely got the blues. His songs are filled with loathing, frustration, fear, psychosis, and a weary resignation; scatterfire visions of a world embroiled in it's own destruction. Not that the Messiahs are miserable gits, far from it – seeing and hearing them push the limits of extremism rebounds with a big belly laugh. Maybe the last laugh. "I've never seen it as an old-fashioned band, I've always thought it was streets ahead of most bands; I really thought we had our finger on the pulse, and I don't mean on pop music, but what was happening all around. That's why 'Good And Gone' had war stuff and things in it – you have that sort of thing thrown at you every day." In the way that American bands of the late '60s were tagged 'post Vietnam', The Screaming Blue Messiahs come over as post-Falklands or post-Belfast. Their sound has a pervasive violence and mania. "Well, it's hard to ignore all those things isn't it? It's not so much political as a bit extreme but I think it's harmless enough. "What happens when we play isn't what would have happened if we sat down and thought about it beforehand. It's just three people who make a helluva noise and they've got a lot of something inside them that they want to come out, and when it comes out it makes this funny atmosphere which is dead exciting. I try and use imagery to channel that energy but the images are just my preoccupations. The power is from the people in the band. It's quite unusual these days to get a band that does that, a band that has a feel. Like the way Bo Diddley used to have a feel, well we've got that only now it's more modern." Naturally suspicious and taciturn, Carter is not the most forthcoming of interviewees, shying away from discussing specific songs and, by his own admission, not overly articulate. "What I do is emotional, tempered with a little experience, basic intelligence, perception and awareness of the world I live in. But I wouldn't want to analyse or intellectualise on it to the point where I knew what I was doing because I think once I knew what I was doing I would panic." When you first catch sight of Carter with his pug face, blubbery bottom lip, devil pointed Pixie ears and the shaven head, he looks a little like his band sounds – obsessive, punchy, slightly unhinged. Even after two meetings it's not an impression that is completely eradicated. His answers to questions are filled with long pauses usually broken by a desultory "I don't know". Occasionally he makes an obscure joke and breaks into a bout of nervy laughter. But he's keen to accommodate, taking time both over the photographs and the interview. After years of seething with frustrated ambitions, smashing against endless disappointments, he's aware that The Screaming Blue Messiahs are at a fever pitch which only comes once in a group's career. "It's like a trip, it's something that's hard to duplicate in any other way. I didn't realise until the band started getting exciting how good it really was and I'm sure it won't last, but it's a very special feeling. I suppose it's selfish really but the fact there's a lot of people there and everybody's involved – it's not adulation, we don't get that, we're not that sort of band – sort of justifies it for me."
Born in rural Teesside, Bill remembers his childhood as a happy one. It's no surprise to learn that the man who appears on the cover of his new LP, 'Gun-Shy', pinpointed by a rifle target, enjoyed many hours setting fire to his toy soldiers, constructing battlegrounds in his back garden. When he took to wearing an eye patch, with a subsequent debilitating affect on his sight, the family GP recommended he should be encouraged to use hi eyes in anything that required acute concentration. His parents bought him several guns and rigged up practice targets in the garden. "I didn't really do my eyesight any good bit I think the birds got a bit worried." Does this maybe explain his fascination with military machinations, the three fighter planes cruising on the cover of The Screaming Blue Messiahs' debut mini-LP 'Good And Gone', the lyrical allusions to battle, life seen through a combat zone? He had a drum kit at first but then Bill went to see The Who. The sight of Pete Townsend smashing his guitar, eyes burning, while all around the group crashed and rose in cacophonous fury somehow set things in perspective for him. "I was just a kid but I found the whole thing incredibly glamorous, exciting, everything I was looking for. Unfortunately it's hard to sustain that, people only have a certain life but at the time they were absolutely fucken' phenomenal, just really fucken' exciting. It wasn't like considering their musical qualities or anything, you just got off on them – to me that's what music is all about." A soon-shattered illusion that life would be more exciting in London lead Carter to Bromley Art College when he reached 20, but while friends now paraded in flares and kaftans, he clung fervently to the sound and style of the early '60s. "Not so much mod as conservative, sensible. I sort of missed the boat. I always miss out. I think I had the wrong attitude. Y'know, I didn't like anything, I wouldn't like anything but The Who for five years, I wouldn't even consider anything else." For most of the '70s Carter stayed on the dole, did a few driving jobs, got fucked up on drugs and remembered the glory days. A loner? "I don't know really, I mean I like people but I don't like to get too close." By now he was listening to Captain Beefheart, Howlin' Wolf, a little Hendrix, all elements that would eventually emerge in The Screaming Blue's frenzy – from Beefheart's bug-eyed lyrical jabber to Hendrix/Hubert Sumlin's splintered electric minefield. But it was Dr Feelgood's live appearances around 1974 that made him realise "I can do that, gis' a job." It wasn't the quick easy ride he expected. Not until the end of the decade did Carter start to make headway with the grungy Motor Boys Motor, but by then the vagaries of style were working against him. "We used to play in pubs but nobody wanted to go to pubs then. It was all your new pedantics or New Romantics; people wanted to go and see people in Habitat." Confused and depressed, the group split after one LP. Piecing together The Screaming Blue Messiahs months later Carter had to overcome some nagging doubts. "If you were picking people to be in a band, we'd be the last ones you'd pick. When I started I just felt I don't look right, I don't feel right, this just doesn't seem right. But if you do it 200 per cent, do it the best you can, something comes that hopefully is worth having and if not you'll soon know." The mini-LP 'Good And Gone' in 1984, proved Carter had indeed something special to offer and it's a promise consolidated by this year's 'Gun-Shy' – delayed in the making by a bust up (and a subsequent litigation) with two producers. On 'Gun-Shy' the maverick spleen of Carter and hurricane dynamics of the band are fine-tuned and channelled without losing any of their fearsome edge. Embodying an old rock 'n' roll ethos, their music is purely cathartic, much more frantic, more dangerous, than anything that's gone before. "It's a fine line trying to keep an edge without being malicious. I see it more as mischievous or teasing... I think of it personally as being a little bit dodgy to do it night after night. Standing on stage having a lot of people watch you while you smash a guitar and shout your head off is not a normal way to behave. I wouldn't like to have to do it 24 hours a day or you'd end up feeling very ill, I think. "It's sort of psychotic music and if you take it too seriously you'd end up believing it; you have to laugh at it. It's like you can laugh at bits of 'Apocalypse Now' like Robert Duvall surfing on the beach, you can't take things too seriously." Is the possible misinterpretation of the violent undertones something that concerns him? "I care what people think but I don't worry about it. Like I met somebody in Germany who said 'you're a fascist band' because we had three aeroplanes on our cover. As far as I can see that's just a fascist reaction to a nice picture. If you're talking about politics and military stuff everyone thinks they know everything about it. "They ought to be looking at people with who there's no room for misinterpretation – it's just a bullet in the head. This is just music, it's toytown. "I'm quite aggressive in my approach to things but I'm aware of the position I'm in and I've seen bands I thought were harmful and I didn't really like that abuse. "You take Sigue Sigue Sputnik; I found their use and appreciation of violence a little off the mark for this day and age. It's a little bit tasteless, there's something wrong with it, it's evil. What we do is an exorcism of violence, it's not a love of violence. It's the opposite, really. I mean, I'm not... malevolent, but you have to get that out of you." Like this year's other great rock record (PiL's 'Album') 'Gun-Shy''s drive and power draws on Carter's cynical iconoclastic stance, free of any dogma or prepacked ideology. 'Smash The Market Place', the LP's single, has been tagged as his first directly political song. It's not a suggestion that he welcomes. "I never really think of it like that. I suppose it is, but who cares? Politics is a sickness y'know, it's like putting on someone else's jacket. Life's got more to offer than that. It seems to me that everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. If people just got on with their own lives, tried to be creative and fulfil themselves, the world would be a much better place. When you get involved in politics and music then you start to think, and you're not supposed to, that fucks everything up. Musicians are just meant to play music and get people excited. "I mean, there's a lot of things I feel strongly about but I just try to put forward a beautiful picture really. I want it to be evocative, I don't want to be a politician or a preacher. I want it to be intangible, shifting, exciting and moveable, like a phenomenon, eternal. A vibrant shimmering fucken' thing the excites. It's not about anything that I want to be categorical, it's about nothing at all, 45 minutes of meaningless nothing. "I'm not that happy about the way things are. It's terribly depressing, ball crushing, this country can kill people y'know, it takes all the life out of them. The only way you could happily live here is to be on the right side of the fence or you're fucked." Apart from his car, Bill Carter – who hasn't been to the cinema in five years, can't stand lifts, has been trying to read the same book for a year – has little to interest him outside the band. Being in it, watching it grow, and developing his responsibility, has definitely changed him. Character development he calls it. Previously he lacked motivation, he missed many chances, failing to turn up for gigs and not getting it together to write songs. That's all different now. He doesn't do drugs any more. He says when he's on stage and the band are in full flight it's ten times better than a drug, a real flying natural high. Sometimes Bill Carter thinks if he had money he'd just get in his car or on a plane and head off somewhere. Then he remembers his recent holiday in a little island off Libya just a few weeks after the American raid on Tripoli. He's booked the holiday before the hostility and it was too late to bottle out. It wasn't that the people there gave him a hard time, even though he looked like an American soldier on leave, or that the prayer calls coming from the loudspeakers outside the Mosques at dark made him think of the film 'Midnight Express'. It was just that after a couple of days he was at his wits end, didn't know what to do with himself. He needed to be back with the Messiah monster machine. He puts it down to inadequacy, that's why he has to do this, why he needs it. But he's convinced that the effect of this searing, tensed noise is for good rather than evil. In between dual-edged love songs like 'Twin Cadillac Valentine' and mock-hard raps like 'Killer Born Man', there's snatches of soul searching, depictions of faith under fire while everything else is falling away. "I believe in something. I believe there's a devil, I've seen evil, you can see it all the time, just look at the news. For that not to take over completely there must be good. That's why people like Martin Luther King or anybody doing good always get shot, they always do. But the fact that there are people doing that keeps the flag flying otherwise you'd get your Hitlers and people like that taking over because they're all there. Just waiting."
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