Jim Bob interview

Acclaimed author and legendary musician, Jim Bob, tells Bobbysix.com about his new novel, his solo tour and his gigs later in the year as frontman of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine:

As your second novel, did you find it easier or harder this time round? Was it your Difficult Second Album or did the lessons you learnt from writing your first novel stand you in good stead for this one? 
From start to finish it was a lot quicker. Six months instead of six years. I wouldn't say it was easy but I possibly had a better idea of what I was doing and once I'd decided it was ok to have illustrations in the book again, I had my own writing style, which made it slightly simpler. I did worry at various stages about whether or not it was any good. I think it is though.

When we talked about your first novel, Storage Stories, you said that you wrote it in the same way you would write a concept album, in that you spilt it up into smaller parts and went off at tangents. It was, you said, the only way you could actually write a full-length story. Has that changed this time round? Is Driving Jarvis Ham structured more traditionally?
It is more traditional in structure definitely, but it is still broken up into smallish chunks. So, I'm still writing in the same way. Chapters that are almost self-contained, with a beginning and an end. It may have as much to do with all the films and TV I've watched. Like I'm writing cliffhangers. I doubt whether I could write a book with few and long chapters.

In terms of themes and tone, how does Driving Jarvis Ham compare to Storage Stories? Is it similarly funny, sad and sweet?
It is still all of those but apparently it's a lot darker. Certainly the second half is. I do like stories – books and films etc – that are funny and sweet and then suddenly kick you in the teeth. But hopefully with a satisfying ending – happy or sad.

Do you get much time to sit down and read? What have you been reading lately? 
I'm always reading. I have to have a book on the go. I'm reading The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy at the moment and before that I read Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles, which is brilliant. Sometimes I think if I could sit down somewhere nice and read and never do anything else again, I'd be happy.

You're taking the book on tour along with your guitar. Would you say you are now an author that also sings songs, rather than a musician that also writes books? 
I think most people would see me as a singer who's written a book. And I'll always be that. Maybe when I've written more books and they've been more successful that might change. Or I'd have two different audiences, the book one and the music one.

Do you still get a buzz out of playing live? 
Yes. I enjoy the act of doing it rather than the thought of doing it, if that makes sense.

Totally. Talking of playing live, the Carter USM reunion gigs over the past few years have been incredibly successful, do you have any more of them lined up? 
Two in November. After that, I don't know. I doubt it can go on forever. I don't want to take the piss.

Can you tell us what else you've got going on at the moment? You were involved in theatrical production Gutted not too long ago, any other stuff like that in the pipeline? 
No offers for theatrical stuff. I think my acting days were short and prematurely over. You never know though. I had no plans to be in a musical, or to write songs for a pantomime. Things just happen sometimes.

And in terms of your writing, have you already started working on your next novel? 
I have started a new novel. It's what I most want to do at the moment. I'm looking forward to spending more time on it. I've written about twenty thousand words and made loads of notes that I need to sit down and piece together. Now that I have an agent who asks me from time to time how the new book is going, I have a small amount of pressure to finish it. Which is good, because I'm lazy.

Driving Jarvis Ham will be published by The Friday Project on 10th May 2012. You can pre-order it here, or here. Check out Jim playing songs and reading (out loud) from his book this May and June.

Interview by Bobby Townsend.

Exclusive Jim Bob interview for Bobbysix.com

I have a few heroes: the legendary Tom Waits, genius wordsmith/artist Jeffery Lewis, footballing god Bobby Zamora, charity good-egg Sophie Epstone, supercool Jarvis Cocker... the list goes on. One man who would sit towards the very top of that list though, is unquestionably Jim Bob. I first saw him perform as frontman of indie/pop/dance/punk band Carter USM at Brixton Academy in 1993 and have followed his career very closely ever since, through his solo work over the past few years right up to his recent reincarnation as an author. So when the man who I spent my teenage years singing along to in various sweaty venues around the country headed to the small town in which I grew up, I simply had to grab a few words with him.

Eastbourne's Gildredge Park was resplendent in the early evening sunshine as it acted as the setting for our interview. With birds merrily whistling in the background and trees dancing in the breeze, Jim and I talked about writing, about music and about the upcoming Carter gigs, before the affable Londoner headed across the road to the ancient Lamb Inn, where he would perform a 30-minute set to a sold-out room.

Below is the interview, along with a few musical snippets from his acoustic performance (note: you might need to whack the volume up to eleven as it came out a little quiet after the upload to Youtube and I'm too much of a luddite to know how to fix it). If you like what you hear from Jim Bob, you can find out more about all of his current projects by visiting his website.

Interview by Rob Townsend
For more stuff like this, follow Bobbysix at Facebook. Also, you can read my review of the gig here, and check out my previous interviews with Jim Bob here and here.
 

Jim Bob - Storage Stories

Where do old pop stars go to die? Well, if they are the protagonist of Jim Bob's debut novel, they go to work in self-storage, where they meet interesting people and fall in love with women who look like French movie star Juliette Binoche. They meet others who look like weirdly bearded paedophiles. Should the opportunity arise, they are not adverse to having sex with a widow in a pub toilet while their thirteen-year-old son plays pub games in the bar with a bubblewrap fetishist.

A fictional autobiography told in short stories and pictures, Storage Stories is laugh-out-loud funny, gripping and often rather touching. Anyone familiar with the lyrics of the former Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine singer will recognise the lovely rhythm and flow to his words. As with his Carter lyrics, here Jim finds beauty, comedy, sadness and absurdity in the everyday things that would go unnoticed by most amid a world that has long-since gone to the dogs. As Jim Bob combines darkness with the wonderfully witty and surreal, he gives a strange sense of doomed romance to an otherwise mundane, miserable and menacing England.

Storage Stories is unputdownable in a Nick Hornby kind of way. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

You can purchase Storage Stories here.

Want to know more about Jim Bob? Read my interview here.

Jim Bob interview

"I don't know how to deal with new music anymore. I will no doubt change my mind but at the moment I have no desire to make, or rather sell, any new music."

In the 90s, James Robert Morrison - Jim Bob - was the spaghetti-haired singer of South London indie/punk/dance band Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. After the duo became a trio and eventually a six-oh, they called it a day in 1997. Since then, he has continued with various solo projects, while sometimes getting back together with his old bandmate Fruitbat for the occasional reunion gig. With the release of his first novel, Storage Stories, this month, it seems the singer is destined to walk a new career path.

"When I was doing the final proof reading of Storage Stories I felt so good about the way the book had turned out that I wanted to write another one. I wanted to be an author. Around the same time I'd written a couple of new songs. It felt satisfying to be able to do that but then I thought, 'What do I do with these songs? Write more and make another album that nobody buys?' I'm sure there'll be another Jim Bob album but I need to find my mojo again. Whatever a mojo is."

Anyone familiar with the clever wordplay that Jim Bob employed in his Carter lyrics will hardly be surprised that he has made the step from lyricist to novelist. Whether dealing angrily with political issues or singing melancholic love songs, he had the ability to consistently combine a wry wit with genuinely touching emotion. However, while admitting he has always wanted to write a book, he says that he used to find it annoying when people told him so. "I always thought what they really meant was that I should stop writing songs."

While Storage Stories is Jim Bob's debut novel, it is not his first book. A few years back, he brought out Good Night Jim Bob, the story of his life in Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, from the early days of catching buses to their own gigs, through the Smash Hits drama, the number one album and then being shat out the other side of a music business that seemed desperate to sweep them under the carpet. "Fruitbat said recently that Good Night Jim Bob was pretty much a work of fiction anyway, so I'd had the practice. I wouldn't say the Carter book was easy but I did have the story already and just had to find a way of putting it in some readable entertaining order. I think the only way I've managed to write a complete novel is by finding a way of splitting it up into smaller parts. The way Storage Stories goes off at tangents and has short stories contained within the bigger story, that's my way of managing to write something of full length. I've tried before, but I've found it hard to write a straightforward novel in the more conventional way. I wrote a novel in the way I'd write a concept album, split up into individual songs/stories."

While writing the novel, the Londoner had to split his time between being Jim Bob the solo artist, Jim Bob the Carter singer and Jim Bob the author. Over the past three years, Carter have played sold out shows at, amongst other grand venues, The Brixton Academy, while Jim has also written and toured a solo album, Goffam. He admits it's been hard to balance his time between these three distinct creative projects. "Anyone who's ever worked with me in a managerial way has found it difficult; the way I can't stick at one thing for a decent length of time. I do tend to get quite bored with something once it's out in the open and I want to move on to something else. I know I'll always be Jim Bob the singer with Carter, no matter what it is I'm doing at the time. I'm not complaining about that by the way. I find the best way is to mix things up a bit; write a novel, then go on tour and play some solo songs and Carter classics whilst reading from the novel. Apparently multi tasking is good for the brain. I think it was Doctor Kawashima on Nintendo DS Brain Training who taught me that."

And so it's not surprising that Jim's book promotion takes on a suitably multi-tasking dynamic. Before performing on the literary stages of festivals and doing some readings in bookshops, he'll be taking his book and his trusty old acoustic guitar on the road for a nationwide tour. "The plan is that I'll read about three chunks from the book interspersed with a load of everybody's favourite songs. There are a lot of illustrations in the book, so I'm going to have a projector and screen to show them on when I'm reading. I'll have a little remote control. It's going to be like a Powerpoint Presentation. Whatever they are."

So, if you see a familiar face at a motorway service station in May, then, yes, it might well be the man who used to wear shorts and stomp around the stage at a university venue near you a couple of decades ago. While his live show has changed, the way he gets from venue to venue is just like the old days. "The way I tour now – three men in a car – is the same way Carter started out touring. And that is my fondest remembered period of Carter touring. I still like a lot of the same things about it, which tends to be stopping at service stations and buying crisps and getting more crisps out of the vending machine in the hotel after the gig. It's all about the crisps mainly."

And so, once the songs are sung, the chapters are read and the crisps are eaten, what's next? While there doesn't seem to be the fire in his belly for selling any new Jim Bob music, one wonders whether the overwhelming success of the Carter comeback gigs would ever make him consider recording some new material with Fruitbat, or if that would be too much of a regression? "I'm not really sure what Carter should sound like today," he shrugs. "If we recorded something new, it might end up sounding like a pastiche of a Carter song. The live shows have been so successful and haven't dirtied the name of Carter. I'd hate to record something new that nobody was interested in or wasn't actually very good. One of the reasons the recent Carter shows have been so amazing is because we're playing those classic songs. I fear it wouldn't be so good with a load of new material."

I ask Jim how he thinks Carter would get on now, if they were a couple of lads just starting out in the business. With music being more accessible thanks to the internet, but with record companies struggling, would a 2010 Carter do better or worse than the Carter of the late 80s and 90s? "I think things were maybe more fun when Carter first started. You didn't need to worry about career plans and brands and business models and all that nonsense. We always had a feeling that it was us and our audience against the world. I doubt you could do that now. It would have to be us and our audience plus Tom from Myspace and various Facebook groups against the world sponsored by Topman or Levi's."

While Jim's love of music is still strong (his current favourites include Laura Marling, The Eels, Fionn Regan and Adam Green), his future does seem to be with the written word rather than the sung verse. "I've got the beginnings of a second novel, which I'd like to sit down and write properly," he confirms. "See if I'm a writer or just a bloke who's written a book."

For more information on Storage Stories and how to order, follow this link.

For Jim Bob's upcoming UK tour dates, click here.