Book Extract: Where Songs Come From - The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs by Jim Bob

For a few months a couple of years ago, when you googled the name Jim Bob, although you’d get a lot of information about me, Jim Bob, the lead singer from 1990s UK indie punk heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, the main image would be a picture of Donald Trump. I never fully understood why. I think it had something to do with the name "Jim Bob" being a thesaurus entry for "redneck".

Anyway, here’s a chapter from my new book Where Songs Come From – The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs. It’s my first ever book of lyrics. I like to think of it as a memoir or autobiography as well. This chapter is titled "London". It’s about the songs I’ve written about the city I was born and have always lived in, but also about my first job and my first band and meeting my life partner and how all these things have shaped me as a person and artist.

"From the brothels of Streatham to the taking of Peckham" – "Twenty Four Minutes From Tulse Hill"

LEFT SCHOOL in the summer of 1977. Academically I’d let myself go. I’d let the school down, I’d let myself down, but most of all I’d let the school down. I didn’t bother sitting most of my exams. Just an English CSE grade C and a History CSE grade D.

The big mistake the school made was to give us six weeks off to revise for the exams, thinking that’s what we’d do. Punk rock didn’t help. The Jam didn’t look like they were revising. The Stranglers certainly weren’t. Eddie and the Hot Rods were literally telling me to do anything I wanted to do. So, I left school. I took two gap weeks off and then went for a couple of job interviews. I got both jobs (it was 1977). I picked my favourite, a foot messenger for an advertising company just off Tottenham Court Road. For £25 a week plus luncheon vouchers, I walked around Soho and the West End of London in my red plastic Mister Byrite bomber jacket and my bumper boots, delivering and collecting artwork. Sometimes I’d have to go a little further, taking a tube or a bus across London to the Fleet Street newspaper offices, or on a train to Thorn Electricals in Enfield with an idea for a new lightbulb.

Occasionally I’d have to go all the way to Terry’s in York with a Chocolate Orange magazine advert or with the artwork for the less popular and short-lived Terry’s Chocolate Lemon. I’d be given enough money out of the petty cash tin to buy an expensive peak train ticket, I’d wait until 9:30, catch an off-peak train and pocket the difference. By the time I got to York, delivered the artwork, and returned to King’s Cross, it would be time to go home. I would have had a nice day out and made more than enough petty cash for a sandwich, a Coke and a KitKat on the return journey.

I kept the job for long enough to be promoted to head of the despatch department, which meant I was now in charge of the petty cash, and also ordering the art and stationery supplies. This came in handy because you get through a lot of Letraset when you need to make badges and record sleeves for your band’s imaginary music career.

There were aspects of the job I didn’t like. I had to get lunch for the company’s three directors, and the office manager who would always insist the bacon in his sandwich had to be “Burned to a fucking crisp.” If it wasn’t sufficiently burned, I’d have to take the sandwich back to the café, who’d refuse to replace it, and so I’d buy him a second bacon sandwich, which would be equally as unburned to a fucking crisp, but he’d say, “That’s better.”

One time, one of the directors gave me a fiver and sent me to Selfridge’s to buy him some underpants. Bearing in mind it’s only recently that I’ve had the courage to buy my own pants, buying enormous (he was a big man) pairs of white Y-fronts for somebody else, wasn’t what I’d been planning on doing with my life. Luckily, I was about to be a huge pop star. My band Jeepster had our first gig booked and I handed in my notice. Malcolm and Sue from the art department made me a framed gold disc as a leaving present.

I often wish I still had that job. I could do without the bacon sandwich orders and the indignity of buying another man’s pants, but I liked walking around town on my own. I wrote my first London song when I was out walking, or when I was on the bus to work.

Every morning I’d catch the 137 to Oxford Circus – some of them painted silver for the Queen’s Jubilee – from a stop directly opposite my house in Streatham. I’d sit upstairs and look out of the window as the bus went past the big department stores on Oxford Street and I’d see the office and shop workers on their way to work. They looked glamorous and confident, so unlike me. I wrote the words to the Jeepster song "Oxford Circus", about "the girls I know I’ll never meet".

Most Jeepster songs were about me not having a girlfriend or me needing to find a girlfriend. I really couldn’t see any way of that ever happening. School had been my social club. My Facebook. My Tinder. When I left school, it was all gone. Overnight. It was as though a neutron bomb had gone off with the final school day’s pips and I suddenly had no friends. And more crucially, no girlfriends.

On Fridays, I’d go to Capital Radio’s Best Disco in Town at the Lyceum Ballroom. I’d dance to the funk, disco and soul music and stand on my own at the bar when the penultimate record of the night played. It was always "Three Times a Lady" by the Commodores. And then the DJ would follow it with "Hi Ho Silver Lining", the “Can you all just fuck off home now please” song. Which I’d do. I’d fuck off home. Alone. Always alone. In the rain. In my uncomfortable jelly shoes, writing another song about it. Suffering for my stupid fucking art.

This period of my life, between leaving school and leaving my first job, is full of chronological anomalies. Everything seems to happen at the same time. I was a punk and a new wave fan, I was singing in a band who were loosely connected to the mod revival, which hadn’t happened yet, and every Friday I went to London’s biggest funk and soul disco where they played Jeff Beck records?

It turned out that leaving work might have been a bit hasty. The first Jeepster gig was also our last. According to bored teenagers dot co dot uk, on Sunday 25^th March 1979 Jeepster supported Back To Zero at the Alan Pullinger Youth Centre in Southgate. Say what you like about mods, but they certainly know how to run a detailed online gig archive. Otherwise, I would have had no idea exactly where and when the gig had been. Brian, the lead singer with Back to Zero was 1975 Radio One Pop Quiz champion. He would have known. Brian’s party trick was to ask you your date of birth and tell you what record was number one on the day you were born (‘It’s Now or Never’ by Elvis Presley). Brian also once told me that no band whose name ended in ‘ter’ had ever been commercially successful. He was certainly right about Jeepster.  

Before our first and last ever live show, Jeepster rehearsed in bass player Derek’s flat. It was above the bowling alley where I was stabbed in "Blood on Your Shoes". One afternoon some local girls came to watch us rehearse, and the one sitting on the left. Reader, I married her. If it wasn’t for Jeepster and our one gig, and that rehearsal above the bowling alley, all those London songs I would one day write might have been quite different – "Piccadilly Circus", about the girls heading in to work at the Trocadero. "Regent Street", a serenade to the woman demonstrating the bubble machine outside Hamleys. "Bond Street Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (But Not With Me)", and so on, and on, round and round the Monopoly board of unrequited romance, do not pass go, do not collect £200.

But now, with my love life completely sorted, I could focus on writing songs about crime on Peckham housing estates, riots in Brixton, boys from New Cross, and train journeys to Tulse Hill.

I’d celebrate my surroundings like the American songwriters did. I’d sing about the British versions of the New Jersey Turnpike, the freeways, the boardwalks and the boulevards. Instead of cruising down the ’66 to the Piggly Wiggly in my Chevy or my Cadillac, I was going to drive along Norwood High Street to Londis in my Ford Fiesta. Without it sounding like a parody.

I’ve always thought the twenty-four-minute duration of the train ride to Tulse Hill was based on an actual journey and not just a pun on the Gene Pitney song. But I can’t now work out where I would have been travelling from. I’m sure I was going to Les’s house, which was opposite Tulse Hill station. We’d meet there and write future hits. If this was when I was living in Mitcham, and I took the train from Tooting station, the journey would have taken nine minutes. From my new home near Gipsy Hill station, it would have been just seven minutes. Wikipedia says the song was about a journey to Tulse Hill from Central London. Allowing for possible changes in train speeds since 1988, I still can’t get the journey past twenty minutes. It’s just a Gene Pitney pun, isn’t it.

Apart from the duration being suspect, the route the train takes in the song is a bit like the geographically incorrect route a character might take when driving across London in a Hollywood romcom. It’s more of a train ride through my past. It takes us "past the house where I was born" and past "the dole and the Silver Blades". That’s the dole office where I used to sign on. It was opposite the rehearsal studio where I first met Les. The Silver Blades was the ice skating rink where I spent a lot of my teenage years smoking and avoiding being beaten up.

The train travels "from the brothels of Streatham to the taking of Peckham". A reference to Cynthia Payne – "Madam Cyn" – who ran a brothel in a large but ordinary-looking house in Streatham, where men would pay for sex with luncheon vouchers. It was less than four minute’s walk from where Les lived at the time. "The taking of Peckham" is a callback to a song we must have only just written. For clarification, I’m not suggesting there is any relevance to the brothel’s proximity to Les’s house. 

The original idea for "Twenty Four Minutes From Tulse Hill" is not mine. It came from the Tom Waits song "9^th & Hennepin", where Tom speak/sings about everything he sees through the window of a train. Musically, "9^th & Hennepin" is closer to "The Taking of Peckham 123", a song that was also so like "Evelyn" by Pop Will Eat Itself, that not long after me and Les had written "The Taking of Peckham", we went to see Pop Will Eat Itself live, and although it was a song we’d never heard before, when they played "Evelyn", I almost threw up thinking we’d stolen it from them.

There’s a theme tune to a popular fantasy TV show that sounds a lot like "The Taking of Peckham 123". I’m sure it’s coincidental. People sometimes send me videos of it and other songs that sound like Carter or Jim Bob songs. A few of them have been incredibly alike. But I’m the last person who needs to get involved in accusing other people of musical theft.

Because of songs like "The Taking of Peckham" and "The Only Living Boy in New Cross", a lot of people think I must live in Peckham or New Cross. The same goes for Tulse Hill and Brixton. But I never have. I have always been within spitting distance (disgusting way to measure things) though – Herne Hill, Streatham, Mitcham and Crystal Palace. My whole life I’ve never moved as much as four miles away from "the house where I was born".

When you’re writing a novel, it helps to have a sense of place in your head. Somewhere familiar you can use as your own interior Google Maps. If a character steps out of their front door and turns right, you’ll know what the first shop they’ll come to sells, where their local pub is and how long it will take to get to either of them. You can go into that shop or pub and see how it’s all laid out. You can buy a pint in the pub and check whether the toilets are clean and read the graffiti on the wall next to the mirror. You can breathe in the air and feel how sticky the carpet is beneath your feet. And then reproduce it on the page when it’s needed. Even if you set your story in a completely different place.

Walking around the West End of London delivering packages in 1977, was like when black taxi drivers "do The Knowledge", without the indignity of a rickety moped and a clipboard. It helped me much later in life when I came to write songs set in London, like "TRUCE", "Cartoon Dad" and "Battling the Bottle (Fighting the Flab, at War with the World)". I knew the physiography within the songs.

Just as spending a lot of time in Brixton helped when I wrote the words for "And God Created Brixton". I knew where the prison was in the second verse and where the cinema would be in relation to the prison in the third verse.

"And God Created Brixton" is about the night we celebrated Les’s birthday in the back room of a Brixton pub. We were having such a good time that we managed to completely miss the enormous riot going on outside. When we eventually left the pub at the end of the party, the streets were deserted. It was very 28 Days Later. Smashed-up and burned-out cars. The title of the song came from a sign I saw outside the Brixton Hill Methodist church.

There are fewer mentions of South London in Carter songs than you might imagine. Even I thought there were more. Tulse Hill, New Cross, Peckham, and Brixton. And then Elephant and Castle is in "A Prince in a Pauper’s Grave", the Crystal Palace Tower in "Midnight on the Murder Mile", "the tubes of the Bec and Broadway" (both in Tooting) in "The Final Comedown", and Clapham in "Alternative Alf Garnett" and "Cheer Up, It Might Never Happen". In both songs I rhyme it with "happen", so other than being a convenient rhyme, I suspect the location might be irrelevant. No offence, Clapham.

In "Billy’s Smart Circus", the "underfunded O.A.P.s" who "turn to life of crime" in "The Great Cucumber Robberies of 1989" are sent down and banged up "in a South London maisonette", and there’s a reference to north-south taxi envy in "Glam Rock Cops": "And I can't even get a taxi to the safety of my house / The driver gets a nosebleed if he travels that far south". When I wrote it, it was almost impossible to get a black taxi driver to take you south of the river. It wasn’t an urban myth.

East London gets a mention in "Everytime a Churchbell Rings": "There ain’t no gold in Silvertown".  North and West London (Kilburn and Chelsea) feature in "An All American National Sport", which despite its title, tells the true story of a homeless man being set on fire in London, the kind of horrific pastime that at the time only really happened in America.

Chelsea is also in the last verse of "Sheriff Fatman" and "London 2012", a song I wrote as a reaction to all the pre-London-Olympics goodwill. "In Fortnum & Mason in Chelsea and Kensington / They’re popping a cork to the nouveau Dickensian / London 2012". 

London itself, is namechecked in several songs. "The Music That Nobody Likes", "Turbulence", "Hanging Around", "Men", "Born on the 5th of November", "The Children’s Terrorism Workshop", and "Always the Bridesmaid Never the Bride" ("With the same name as a London railway station you were cursed/ To always keep on moving"). The station is Victoria by the way. I think the song was written with my older sister, Vicky, in mind. I can’t remember why exactly – she was the bride twice.

"Lean on Me I Won’t Fall Over" is a London-based song. It was written after I received a letter from a fan telling me they were going to take their own life. I’d never felt so ill-equipped to do anything to help. Allowing for the time it would have taken for their letter to be collected, sorted, and delivered to me, anything I could have done would have been futile anyway.

Not knowing what else to do, I wrote back. My sister, who helped run the Carter mailing list spoke to the Samaritans, asking for guidance in case it happened again.

In "Lean on Me I Won’t Fall Over", I read the letter when I’m on the Tube – "Stuck in a tunnel on the Hammersmith and City Line" because the writer of the letter has thrown themselves under a train up ahead. The rest of the song is about my guilt for not doing more to help. I met the person who’d sent me the letter at a gig some months later. I didn’t know whether to hug or strangle them.

I have a temperamental love/hate relationship with my hometown. In the chorus of "Glam Rock Cops", I’m "sincerely, bored of London". Thirteen years later, on "Cartoon Dad", I was "tired of London". These days I’ve learned to sort of tolerate the place.

Just before I wrote "Cartoon Dad", I was invited to step a long way outside of my comfort zone and write a song for a pantomime (Oh no you weren’t!). Oh yes, I was. The Barbican production of Dick Whittington and His Cat would be the theatre’s first ever pantomime. Mine too. I submitted two songs, "The Lord Mayor’s Show" and "The Victory of Evil Song". I started a third with the line, ‘I thought the streets were paved with gold" but didn’t finish it. Keeping the first line, I later wrote "Cartoon Dad", a song about a Fathers 4 Justice dad, climbing the tower of Big Ben dressed as Mighty Mouse.

One of my biggest regrets is not filming or at least recording the audio from a performance of Dick Whittington and His Cat. Witnessing my simple songs, arranged, and transformed into big production numbers was one of the proudest moments of my songwriting life.

At the press launch for the show, after sharing a lift and a press pic with the panto’s star, Roger Lloyd Pack, I met musical director, Sarah Travis, who had just won a Tony Award for a Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. I apologised for the embarrassingly basic demo recordings of my two songs. I felt like I should at least have presented her with some sheet music or a few suggestions in Italian. If I’d thrown a legato or an andante into the conversation, she might not have thought I was a complete novice. I didn’t even know what a legato or an andante were. I think the second one is the ideal consistency for cooking pasta, but I could be wrong.

I’m always embarrassed working with musicians who know the language of music. If I ask them to play a certain rhythm or try a change of key, I sound like an English person on holiday, shouting egg and chips slowly at a waiter.

At the Dick Whittington press launch, Sarah Travis was sweet enough to say that she liked my songs. I thanked her and apologised again for my amateur recordings. She checked that nobody else was listening and quietly told me she’d been winging it for years and had no real idea what she was doing. She’d been winging it! All the way to a Tony Award!

I have no formal music education. Apart from two guitar lessons at secondary school, where I was so bored by the theory, that I didn’t go to the third one. I had no interest in what my fingers were called when I was picking the strings on a classical guitar. It’s P.I.M.A. by the way. From the Spanish for the thumb (pulgar), index (indice), middle (medio), and ring finger (anular).

But I didn’t want to play classical guitar. I didn’t want to fingerpick the strings, I wanted to strum them with a plectrum. Hard. I wanted to learn how to play power chords and how to windmill like Pete Townshend. I wanted to learn how to play the guitar with my teeth before I set fire to it and threw it at the drummer. Most of all, I wanted to play some songs. When my friend’s brother taught me how to play Eddie Cochran’s "C’mon Everybody" and "Something Else" by holding one finger across the guitar fretboard and moving it up and down, that was all the formal musical education I would ever need.

I went to see Dick Whittington and His Cat three times. Each time was as thrilling as the last. "The Lord Mayor’s Show" was played on a loop on the Barbican’s float at the actual Lord Mayor’s Show. I didn’t get a video of that either. Nor did I record Newsnight Review on BBC2, when the pantomime was reviewed by Rosie Boycott, Lionel Shriver, Sarfraz Manzoor, and Michael Gove. Gove absolutely hated it. He thought the songs were "sub-Disneyesque". At the time it infuriated me. But I can see now that I missed a bullet. Do you remember the band Thrashing Doves who got a good review from Margaret Thatcher on Saturday Superstore? I rest my case.

• Where Songs Come From - The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs is available from Thursday 31st October

Below: Listen to "24 Minutes From Tulse Hill" by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine