SOUNDS
28th October 1989
By David Cavanagh
Photos Ian T Tilton

SATANIC VERSES

The last year has been a traumatic time for Screaming Blue Messiahs during which they almost disbanded. Now back with a new LP, Bill Carter tells David Cavanagh that he's still a desperate man. Hot shot by Ian T Tilton.

The last year has been a traumatic time for Screaming Blue Messiahs during which they almost disbanded. Now back with a new LP, Bill Carter tells David Cavanagh that he's still a desperate man. Hot shot by Ian T Tilton.

Bill Carter is the first man I've ever met who made the harmless invitation of a beer sound like an offer to introduce you, post mortem, to the internal structure of a motorway bridge.

No, better than that, it sounds like a simple fact: you, son, are coming for a beer. Get your jacket on.

Well, I've no objection. As it happens, Bill Carter has a few answers that need questioning and the locale of a spicy West London pub at lunchtime sure beats the original idea of gentlemanly coffees at the hotel.

"So how's it looking from the psycho-analyst's chair?" he asks good-humouredly as we sit down.

Like this. Screaming Blue Messiahs release their fourth LP, 'Totally Religious', at the end of this month. After a two year nothin' doin' interim which saw the band go through a lot of frustration and grief, this record is a brilliant way to refamiliarise themselves with the glare.

Bill Carter agrees that it's the band's best work yet, but with one proviso. He doesn't think any of their records were any good.

He means it. 'Bikini Red'?

"Terrible".

'Gun-Shy'?

"Useless".

The explosive 'Good And Gone' mini album?

"I dunno how we got away with it".

He's not taking the piss, although when he asks me to keep an eye out for anyone who might be interested in joining the band – "Cos we might be pretty good if we had another guitarist," – you can't help laughing out loud.

"I played the new album to Tony Moon (his former writing partner) and he cried all the way through it. Said I'd blown it completely."

When he explains he could really have done with another ten thousand quid – "then we'd have had an album" – it's much more than the pained urbanity of the effortless genius. It's the howl of desperation from a man who can honestly say he is "not satisfied".

This lack of satisfaction, with music and TV and people and everything else that involves being alive and shaven-haired and intense and 38, has been written down, mutated, mixed and produced and is now ready for public consumption on 'Totally Religious'.

"So how's it looking from the psycho-analyst's chair?"

Hmmm. Difficult to say at this stage. Tell me about the recent past, Mr Carter.

"Um... well..."

He remembers something.

"We nearly split up."

Screaming Blue Messiahs did indeed think of winding it all up last year. Lack of money, management problems, record company problems (they recently switched from Warners to Elektra) and a debilitating back injury for Carter were compounded by the death of their friend and producer, Vic Maile.

Quite apart from losing "a great, close friend and I really miss him", Carter thought he might have lost the only person who can produce the Messiahs. When he talks of producing it's as though it's a sacred act or a salvation enterprise; cathartic yes, redemptive no. He figures Howard Gray and Rob Stevens, who produced this one, probably won't ever want to work with him again.

"Producing this band is a nightmare for anybody. It's almost impossible to record what we're about and make it listenable. We're lucky that in one or two of these tracks there's a little bit of something on it. But it's not easy. You'd think it would be, but it's not.

"I saw that Hendrix thing (South Bank Show) the other day, where Chas Chandler was talking about Hendrix getting in that cab and losing the B-side to the album. And then going in and recording it all again overnight. I thought, Jesus!"

If you had packed the band in, what would you have done?

"Start another band. But probably... I mean, the Messiahs is a three-piece band that plays in a certain way, and there's only a certain amount of life in it at the best of times. There's a lot of things we can't do. We can't do, uh, a rap record."

Well, 'Mega City One' and 'Martian' off the new album convince me that you could. You've got the beat down exactly.

"Well, maybe. I actually like a lot of that stuff. But if the record company wants a rock album that's what you gotta give them. Cos we ain't gonna be doin' a lot of rap gigs," he laughs.

"I've been living in Baltimore for six months, which is 80, 90 per cent black, and that's all I ever hear. Comin' out of cars, windows."

It's a similar idea to the Messiahs, isn't it? A really uncompromising vision of freedom.

"It starts to make a lot of sense after a while. It's just such a determined bloody force. The rhythm, the beat."

Yes, but I meant more the declarations of intent in the lyrics.

"Yeah, you got to watch all that," he mutters. "But I don't really understand half of 'em. Heavily political? I suppose they must be. There's a lot of people in Baltimore who don't have a chance. Don't have a chance..."

Freedom, whether it's the cocky fuck you brand voiced in rap music or the perceived idyll of democracy desperately strived for in East Germany or Tiananmen Square, is a recurring metaphorical theme in a lot of Messiahs songs.

So I ask Carter what he thinks of recent events in those places.

"Well, I try not to think too much, to be honest. About anything. I find the whole business pretty unacceptable."

There seems to be a slight move away from conflict, though, in Europe. Green issues, 1992 and so on. There's more of a consensus now. Does he feel that?

"Well, I mean to a lot of people life's about conflict. It's like that Star Trek thing when they all beamed down to the Planet of Love or something. And it was pretty boring. Plus you got executed if you walked on the grass, that was the rule. Can't remember why.

"I just think that's what life's about. Conflict. And if you didn't have it it would reappear in another form. You can't stop it, you're never gonna get it levelled out so it's a wonderful world. People try and you have to keep on trying, but it always seems to reassert itself."

And you may as well write about it as long as it's there. But Carter feels that the freedom motif in the Messiahs songs has had rather too much made of it. He suspects that somewhere in that patented Messiahs vocabulary of guns, cars and stifling glass palaces he may have created "a monster".

"I would rather people didn't pinpoint the imagery so much. I would rather it didn't have any... specific connotations," he tells me.

The problem is, Screaming Blue Messiahs just can't seem to escape the specific connotations. As the man said, people are strange, when you're a stranger.

"The studio where we recorded the album was built on top of a disused nuclear silo. It was really creepy. And the caretaker was one of those Hitchcock characters who always seem to come round the corner at the exact moment you're talking about them. Which didn't help. And owner was a guy named Van Horne, which is the devil's name in The Witches Of Eastwick. I thought, 'Ello!

"While we were recording I was playing with an F16 flight simulator. They're exactly like the real thing. You gauge your weight, weapons, radar, all that. And you actually simulate the flight.

"So I can fly one now I reckon. If I saw one parked up, like, and I thought I could get over the fence..."

From the psycho-analyst's chair comes a nervous laugh.

And as he strolls away, this peculiar soul in torment, as he strolls away to get his photograph taken, I feel the least I can do is to reassure him that – whatever else has gone wrong – his album stands up as a great record. Cheer up, I chirp, it could get worse!

Oh man. The look Bill Carter throws me as he goes off to meet the camera... you'd think I was offering him a dollop of Brylcreem to help him on his merry way.