Reviews of Jim Bob's book. If you've seen a review elsewhere, let us know via the contact page.

FONT COLOR="#FF0000">AN UNSTOPPABLE READ - ILFORD RECORDER
If Bob Dylan is a legend of world order, for those of us of a certain vintage, Jim Bob - or Jim Morrison to give him his full rather daunting title - was certainly fairly important for a time.

Goodnight Jim Bob is the story of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, the band he formed with longtime sparring partner Fruitbat back in 1987. Ten years, 14 top 40 singles and seven albums, including a UK number one, later, he decided to call it a day.

This is their story, told in the inimitable pun-laden writing style that made Jim Bob one of the finest, but scandalously under-rated, songwriters of the past 20 years.

Carter lived and loved the rock and roll lifestyle but always with their tongue firmly in their cheek.

And it is perhaps that inability to take anything too seriously - and their refusal to play the record industry game - that prevented Carter from being a lot bigger for a lot longer.

But it didn't stop them having fun in venues, small and large, the length and breadth of the country.

This, after all, is the band who started a riot in HMV Oxford Street, sent the world's music media a brussel sprout, rugby-tackled Philip Schofield live on national television and once nearly met Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Add to that a penchant for T-shirts that made Carter shirts the third most popular fashion item among readers of the NME in 1992, and a compere who made "You Fat B****d" the nation's most popular singalong at the same time, and you have some idea of the effect Carter had on teenagers and 20-somethings.

While over in Ibiza, a few DJs were busy inventing something called acid house, we were having parties of our own in the numerous fleapits Carter chose to make their home.

For it was in the live arena that Carter truly lived, performing some 800 gigs, all of which are listed here and through which I have discovered I saw the band 29 times. I just don't know if that makes me a bit sad or pretty damn impressive. It clearly shows I wasn't doing a lot else other than going to Carter gigs for a few years. It's probably just as well I got married when I did.

FONT COLOR="#FF0000">LOGO MAGAZINE - JULY EDITION 2004 (3.5 out of 5):
Two road books you should read are Kerouac's indispensible beat masterpiece 'On The Road', and an insider's account of the sex, drugs and more sex of Cosby, Stills and Nash - should it ever be written. Avoid the rest, they're generally arid, boring and routine - this being an apt description of a life touring.

Here's one exeption to the rule though, but only because Jim Bob's account of life in Carter USM reads more like a sermon composed in five-minute bursts, probably in a boozer after three or four too many. It's a far from fans only
offering as well, a good job given that perhaps only one in ten thousand music fans could hum the melody to Sherriff Fatman.

Instead it offers an insight into culture shock (missing your flight because you can't figure out how to open the door of a Japanese tram), getting drunk, taking the piss out of the media (joking to a NME hack that Carter were booked to support U2, only to see it reported as a full page news spread the following week), getting drunk, being accused of murder at passport control at JFK airport, getting drunk... you get the picture.

Jim Bob's prose is as irreverent and frequently as lough out loud funny as his music, his anecdotes leaving you wondering why on earth anyone would want to be
in even a moderately sucessful band.

OK MAGAZINE - JUNE 2004:
Carter were to the early 90's what The Darkness are today: a phenomenon in silly clothes who played the rock game. Singer Jim Bob's memoirs are a hoot, as if Hunter S.
Thompson had gone on the road with Spinal Tap.

CHANNEL 4 TELETEXT - JUNE 2004 (8 out of 10):
Does the world need the autobiography of Carter USM singer in 2004? Oh yes.

Hilariously self aware of Carter's standing in musical history, Mr Bob writes touchingly of the joy he felt on stage for an hour a night - and with an Alan Bennett eye about the 23 hours of tedium that goes with it. Killingly funny about CUSM's brief time at the top, it makes his despair at the slow decline all the more poignant. Laughter, tears and more bad puns than is humanly decent. Cult smash please.

DROWNED IN SOUND - AUGUST 2004 4/5:
Jim Bob's first book is - inevitably - an autobiography focusing on his adventure as half of incendiary south London punk-pop duo Carter USM. They were frantic duelling guitarists, accompanied by drum-machine, loudly undermining their intelligent politicised songs with a hearty appetite for destruction and naughtiness. Carter polarised opinion at the time and distance has only increased that split. So they're either remembered fondly as an essential part of early 90s growing up and discovering 'real' music, or they're a joke. Goodnight Jim Bob could go some way to reconciling the two views. Laugh-out-loud bitesize chunks of deranged pop excess mix freely with embarrassed nostalgia. In one fell swoop, Jim proves both his ability and underlying decency - hopefully re-opening doors and giving his low key solo career a decent kick up the arse.
Because there's a lot of - perhaps too much - humility here. It was one big accident, a pile of crazy gigs and a sense of fun giving way to fat record deals - seemingly without game-plan or cynicism. Here is a fine account of that odd relationship between corporate industrial intention and entertainer fecklessness. Hindsight proves all too clear.

Jim's cohort Les 'Fruitbat' Carter is a mighty character to work with. He jumps off the page, skittering from Neil Cassidy to Dennis The Menace. This book has poo in. Always being sick or planning a prank, an addled Fruitbat's key set piece (and a moment of history) is the Sacking of Schofield, when he drunkenly rugby-tackles the smug TV presenter to the ground live at the Smash Hits Poll Winners' Party. It's beautifully told: enough extra embellishment from backstage to freshen up a familiar legend. But he maintains this average throughout, from darkest corners of Europe to the Hull Adelphi.

With excellent prose and sophisticated layering, Jim Bob has written a better book than one would reasonably expect, though it should've been obvious from a decade of bittersweet lyrics. There must be serious pressure to write more. It will be fascinating to see - now he's used up his core subject - whether he puts fingers to PC again.

Less salubrious critics still run scared from praising Jim Bob or Fruitbat's solo efforts, because of the dreaded 'uncool' of Carter. A songwriter who once scored an ultra-rare 10/10 in NME is overlooked by pissy free mags like Logo or that Barfly one (forgot the name) because he's not 19 and playing thicker-than-thou punker garage. But he still commands a crowd and writes a blinding chorus. And if this hilarious account does anything, it should remind people that actually, during the grunge years, we did ok. A finely printed calling card for the good life on the road.


MOJO MAGAZINE - SEPTEMBER 2004 3/5:
Memories of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine by the third of the band who was neither Carter nor a drum machine.

With a vogue afoot for the memoirs of 1990's music writers (synopsis: all musicians are losers, journalists are civilising influence on them), it refreshing to find a former hitmaker giving a fair and balanced account (synopsis: we were losers but the journalists were so insignificant they are hardly worth mentioning) of the grind that climaxes in a Number 1 album, huge followings in Croatia and boredom and ends with three people ignoring you in a pub. Carter were one of the 1990's over-achievers, but what comes across is how little that meant by 1997. And if you can't remember the duo (then trio, then sextet, but nobody cared by that time), with their pun laden songs about South London, it matters nought; this is a book about an everyband, and should be read by every other band when they aren't watching Spinal Tap. I laughed, I cried. I wrote On The Road With Cambodian National Ballet 1990-93. Any takers?
David Hutcheon

PLAN B MAGAZINE - AUGUST 2004:
Carter USM were infuriating. The hairstyles didn't help. Neither did the overactive puns. Fourteen Top 40 singles in the UK is plain absurd as all those lip-curdling puns, self righteous snippets of social commentary and FUCKING T-SHIRT SLOGANS. It was embarrassing to be caught tapping a toe to a Carter song in public, expecially that bloody 'Sheriff Fatman' - and yet their live shows could be a riot of exhiliration and exhaustion, bruised shins and alcohol. Or, alternatively, crap.
Jim Bob's sprawling biography/travelogue is just as irritating and petulant and inspirational as the band it portrays. Sometimes its an absurdists delight of televised Philip Shofield punch-ups and asshole immigration officials with weird humour. Other times it's a dreary litany of missed shows and Adrian's Magic Pants.
But what the teaspoon. Carter USM were better than all that Suede and Verve and Wonder Stuff crap, and this book is a sometimes bitter sweet, sometimes smug, always evocative look at a time that I, for one, would rather forget.
Everett True

SHREDDING PAPER (US) MAGAZINE - AUGUST 2004:
This book chronicles the rise and fade of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, a band that barely made cult status and modern rock airplay here in the US but made it big in the UK (at least for a while), straight from the mouth of its leader. From the usual humble pre-band beginnings you'll get the inside scoop concerning bad gigs, good gigs, near death experiences, the tackling of presenters live on TV, celebrity near meetings, bizarre bath injuries and buggered legs (or how to kill a bands momentum in one misstep), the origin of the famed "You Fat Bastard" cheer, and Freddie Mercury nights (don't ask), as both stature and size of band (going from 3 members to finally 6) increase, and finally the journey back down (depressing college gigs and empty US halls), all in Jimbo's chatty style. JB does meander a bit at times (an editor could have got him back on course when needed) but overall this is a pleasant enough read even for non fans and never heard of thems.