101 Damnations (1990)
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine’s debut album depicted a South London wrecked by Thatcherism, via the prisms of American popular culture and of organised religion.
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Content warnings: Suicide; Violence; Flashing images (in video).
Two-and-a-half years after forming in 1987, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine – a pairing of South Londoners Jim ‘Jim Bob’ Morrison and Les ‘Fruitbat’ Carter – released their debut album, 101 Damnations, on independent label Big Cat Records in January 1990. It begins with ‘The Road to Domestos’: a short recording of a choir singing the hymn ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’, ending with machine gun fire. Then comes the dramatic A Wonderful Life-inspired, suicide-themed ‘Every Time a Church Bell Rings’, followed by the pulsating ‘Twenty-Four Minutes to Tulse Hill’, in which Jim Bob delivers an absurdist, scattergun narration of a train journey through South London.
Track four is ‘An All American National Sport’, a first-person account of a homeless man subjected to a horrific and senseless arson attack. The fifth song, ‘Sheriff Fatman’ (see below), is one of the band’s signature songs, about a monstrous slum landlord; released as a single two months earlier, it would give them their first UK Top 40 hit on reissue in 1991. Side one concludes with the waltzing ‘Taking of Peckham 123’, detailing the experience of violence and crime in a high rise block of flats.
Side two commences with a surging instrumental, ‘Crimestoppers A’ Go Go’, while ‘Good Grief Charlie Brown’ is about Jim Bob’s parents’ divorce, sung almost as a dialogue with his father. ‘Midnight on the Murder Mile’ is a surreal account of being assaulted while walking home to Crystal Palace. The penultimate ‘A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb’ furiously and paranoidly links urban violence with nuclear warfare. The album’s closer, ‘G. I. Blues’, drops the tempo significantly, sung from the perspective of an emaciated, traumatised veteran; it builds to a rousing finale, before concluding with ‘Dixie’ played on a fairground organ.
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