Wry, observational singer-songwriter and author, Jim Bob, one half of ‘90s ‘punk Pet Shop Boys’ and indie-rockers, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, is releasing two-brand new studio albums on the same day (August 22) – the full-band record, Automatic, and its dirtier, punkier cousin, Stick, which was made with a power three-piece.
To celebrate the release of both 11-track albums, Say It With Garage Flowers is running two interviews with Jim Bob. This one focuses on Automatic, while the second chat, which will be online later this month, just ahead of the release date, will concentrate on Stick.
“Maybe I should’ve done a double album – it would’ve been easier,” he tells us.
Q&A
So, you wait two years for a new Jim Bob album and then two come along at once… What was the thinking behind releasing two records on the same day?
Jim Bob: You have a good idea and then as it becomes real, you realise all the reasons why it’s not such a good idea…. A double album would have made more sense…
Did you have such a big batch of songs that you needed to make two albums?
Jim Bob: I’ve never got a batch of songs – I don’t have a single song that isn’t out… It’s always been a nightmare – it was the same with Carter.
When a label would say: ‘We want to put out some bonus tracks,’ we would say: ‘Well, we haven’t got any…’ We didn’t even make demos with Carter – apart from in the very beginning before we had a record deal.
So, how did the idea for the two new albums come about?
Jim Bob: I wrote the songs for Automatic first – quite quickly, as I got on a roll. They existed as simple home demos, and then I went for a drink with my manager, Marc [Ollington] and we were talking about how you could make a physical album more attractive to people to buy it, when they’re just listening to music on subscription.
We thought about all the usual stuff, like adding extras, and we were going to do a live DVD of a gig, but that didn’t happen.
So, I was thinking about when Bright Eyes released two albums on the same day [I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn] and they were kind of different, so I said it would be great if we could do that. I was drunk by that point, and I didn’t really think it through. I thought I could do an acoustic one and an electronic one, but I didn’t really want to do an acoustic thing, and electronics are not something I know about.
‘At one point, the idea was that the songs on Stick are the B-sides of the songs on Automatic’
So, I thought I’d just do a kind of simple, punk-type thing, and write about anything that came to my mind – and then I woke up in the morning and thought, ‘Shit – I’ve got to write another set of songs quite quickly…’
At one point, the idea was that the songs on Stick are the B-sides of the songs on Automatic, but that was before any of them existed. The only rule that came out of all that was that there should be the same number of songs on each album, so that’s why there’s 11.
At the last minute, I thought, ‘Maybe we should do a double album – it’ll be easier…’ As soon as both albums went on sale in advance in a couple of shops, both shops only sold one of them – it was like the computers couldn’t cope with two albums…
So, let’s talk about Automatic. It opens with Victoria Knits The Wars, which was also the first single – it’s a big song that turns into a sing-a-long. What was the inspiration behind it?
Jim Bob: Initially it came from the idea of those post box toppers – I kept on seeing a lot of those, and they were normally The Wombles or snowmen at Christmas, and then I got the idea of somebody who was knitting more sinister versions of them, like re-creations of battles. I’ve since found out that people have actually done that – not necessarily wars, but they’d do soldiers for Remembrance Day or whatever, so it is a thing.
I had the chorus – the ‘Victoria’ bit, which I realised was very similar to Victoria by The Kinks, but different enough to get away with it. I was aware of it when I was doing it – I was listening to a lot of Kinks at the time, so that may have been directly responsible for that.
It’s a sort of story-type song – I’m aware I’m doing that more… I don’t know if I’ve always done it… Maybe I’m replacing the hole left by The Smiths – they used to do those kinds of songs.
Balloon Release For Arthur is a sad and poignant song – it’s about the death of a child, but it’s hopeful too…
Jim Bob: I’m aware that if I honed in on my last six albums or something, I do repeat myself a lot. I write a lot of songs about young kids dying in tragic circumstances – I can’t seem to stop myself.
I had the idea from two songs that both came from posters – (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais [by The Clash] and Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite! by The Beatles. I was imagining that it was supposed to me just singing the words from a poster that was advertising a celebration of a kid’s life – it’s not real but it could be.
‘I write a lot of songs about young kids dying in tragic circumstances – I can’t seem to stop myself’
You mentioned writing about recurring subjects – one of the themes that runs through both albums is tech in society, whether that’s the use of social media, privacy issues, phones and tablets… Scream If You Want To Go Slower, which is on Automatic, is a song about escaping from the chaos of the modern world – all that fake news and celebrity culture… You sing about moving away to somewhere quiet and small, and putting your phone in a box… You’re a musician who needs to use social media to promote yourself, but how do you feel about social media – is it a necessary evil?
Jim Bob: I’ve been fine with it, but in recent years it’s got a bit dark…I’d love to be strong-willed enough to not be on it, but I know that’s kind of daft. I left Twitter – or X – but I was still on there just using it to advertise stuff. I found myself looking at it again. That’s the worst one to look at, isn’t it?
With that in mind, on A Song By Me, which is the first track on Stick, you sing: ‘Every day I hate myself for taking the clickbait – I could chop my fingers off for raising the hit rate…’
Jim Bob: Yeah – I’ve got a TikTok channel. I hardly use it, but if I look at it it’s all fighting, shoplifting and car crashes. But it’s very hard not to look at things, isn’t it? If you see a video of two blokes about to have a fight, you find yourself looking at it, and you go, ‘that’s horrible…’
On some of the new songs there are references to drones, tablets, smartphones, and Google Maps… You write about society’s relationship with technology…
Jim Bob: I’m going to badly quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said something about novelists who don’t include modern technology in their work are the same as those in the 18th century who didn’t include sex… I think it was Jack White who said you can’t have technology in blues lyrics because it sounds wrong: ‘I picked up my iPhone the other day…’ But I think you can do it in pop and rock – it’s interesting and I quite like hearing it because they’re not traditional things…
You mentioned The Smiths earlier – a good example of mentioning tech in a song is Bigmouth Strikes Again, when Morrissey sings: ‘And now I know how Joan of Arc felt, as the flames rose to her Roman nose, and her Walkman started to melt…’
Jim Bob: Yeah – even if it’s just using words that people don’t use. A lot of songwriting is fairly route one – just finding a word that rhymes with another one.
‘I’m going to badly quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said something about novelists who don’t include modern technology in their work are the same as those in the 18th century who didn’t include sex’
There are some great lines on both of your new albums. I like the part on Baby On Board when you sing: ‘Wars don’t end, baby – like boy bands they just go on hiatus…’ That made me smile…
Jim Bob: I like that one… There are lines where I find myself going, ‘oh yeah, that’s quite good…’ and I’m quite pleased with myself.
So, from boy bands to rock bands… One of my favourite tracks on Automatic is Can You Hear Us At The Back of the Hall? which must break the world record for including the most amount of band or rock star names in a song – just for a start there’s Squeeze, T-Rex, X-Ray Spex, The Pastels, PiL, Bikini Kill, Bowie, Prince and Sneaker Pimps… It’s a song about a young woman in a band who feels that her music is misunderstood by people, including journalists, and a lot of older blokes, who constantly harp on about the golden age of music…
Jim Bob: That’s exactly what it is. I know I’m guilty of that – you hear a young band and think, that’s just the Buzzcocks… It’s somebody reacting to that. Initially, I was trying to think of lots of hip bands that people like to sound like, but then I ran out of bands… There’s a longer version of it…
I love the lines: ‘When her parents and her teachers were young they had The Cure and The Smiths, Johnny Marr’s riffs, The Cramps and the Pogues, The Teardrop Explodes, but what does he know?’ I really like it when you rhyme ‘The Smiths’ with ‘Johnny Marr’s riffs…’
Jim Bob: I ummed and ahhed over that, thinking it was too clumsy, but now I really like it.
One of the darker songs on Automatic is Buckaroo! It mentions a drone strike on an orphanage and a sword fight at a petting zoo, and you also get a nice half-rhyme in the lyric – ‘power-hungry cunts’ and ‘Kerplunks…’
Jim Bob: Yeah – I like to slip in a C-word that people don’t necessarily notice. I do it, but not in an aggressive way.
Automatic ends with Our Forever Home, which is the warmest song on the record. Unlike Scream If You Want To Go Slower, which is about moving away to escape from everything, it’s about staying put in your own house, in your local neighbourhood, with your family…
Jim Bob: I think there’s a kind of theme that runs through both albums… It could almost be conceptual… I’ve been in the same relationship for most of my life… Scream If You Want to Go Slower, Thank You Driver, Baby On Board and Our Forever Home are all the same in my head – it’s the same people… a couple with a child.
When I was writing my book about songs [Where Songs Come From – The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs – 2024 ], I realised how few songs there were about ‘me and you…’, so I sort of subconsciously started writing some songs about that.
I’ve got a granddaughter now – she’s three and a half – and, at this moment, she’s probably the most important thing to me… It must have an effect on me…
When you have kids and you look at the world, you’re thinking of their future, and then they grow up, and another one comes along, and you think, ‘Christ – what’s it going to be like for them?’
Look out for the second part of this interview, which will be online during the week of August 18: Jim Bob tells us about the album Stick, and we talk about songs to listen to when the world’s gone to shit, walking in the park, dictators, gigging and mixing pop and politics.
Automatic and Stick are both released on the same day – August 22, on Cherry Red Records.
To launch the albums, Jim Bob and co will be playing Stick in full at Banquet Records in Kingston (August 22) and Automatic in full at Rough Trade East (August 23).
https://jimbob3.bandcamp.com/album/automatic
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