Ty Matejowsky on how a London trio plunged audiences headlong into the warped contours of a gonzo Reagan-era America.
“…into the displacement of another America entirely… out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral – into the indigenous American berserk” – Philip Roth, ‘American Pastoral’ (1997)
Few bands emerging out of mid-eighties’ college-radio/post-punk successfully mined what writer Phillip Roth later dubbed ‘the indigenous American berserk’ – a darkly violent counter-narrative of national aspiration and apocalyptic impulse – with more artistic panache and morbid humour than The Screaming Blue Messiahs. Remembered today less as an incendiary cult outfit whose live shows delivered a transcendent gut-punch of visceral musical ferocity and more as a novelty act whose biggest hit on either side of the Atlantic was 1987’s retrospectively regrettable ‘I Wanna Be A Flintstone,’ this London-based power trio comprised of Bill Carter (guitar/lead vocals), Chris Thompson (bass/backing vocals), and Kenny Harris (drums) fused rockabilly, R&B, pub rock, and punk influences into an unholy hybrid of choppy guitar stylings, Burundi-like beats, revival tent theatrics, and absurdist pop-culture lyrics about guns/girls/GTOs, all but demanding contemporary audience rediscovery, reappraisal, and, most crucially, resurrection.
With a name that evokes the animated bad guys of the Beatles’ surrealist cartoon movie Yellow Submarine (1968), Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask (1982), and Hindu supreme deity Vishnu the Preserver, the Messiahs earned accolades from the likes of David Bowie during their heyday, with a trifecta of Elektra Records releases – Gun-Shy (1986), Bikini Red (1987), and Totally Religious (1989) – the first two of which with Vic Maile (Motorhead, the Godfathers, Tom Robinson Band) behind the production console.
Non-stop touring across Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere (whether as headliners or in support of established acts like The Cramps or Echo and the Bunnymen) and a well-received John Peel session on BBC Radio 1 and honed the band’s performative chops and live show savagery during these years even if it failed to move the needle much commercially speaking beyond whatever traction ‘I Wanna Be A Flintstone’ ultimately garnered.
As ascendent shoegaze, grunge, and later Britpop scenes came to dominate alternative music in the late-eighties and early-nineties, the Messiahs began a long slow slide into obscurity, depriving future audiences of Carter’s frenetic Wilko Johnson-inspired fretwork and incomparable stage persona. Indeed, the man cut a singular figure stalking around the microphone what with his low-slung guitar, dark suits, deadpan countenance, and sweaty baldpate that skewed way more Apocalypse Now-era Brando than, say, Right Said Fred. All this showmanship enhanced by the solid rhythmic foundation that a simpatico Thompson and Harris consistently laid down on bass and drums night after night.
Revisiting the band’s limited eighties output nowadays, listeners can’t help but notice a discernible through line of comic book mayhem, animating its catalogue with an unbridled intensity that approaches blunt force trauma. As the group’s sole songwriter, Carter plunged audiences headlong into the warped contours of a gonzo Reagan-era America – a media-saturated pre-apocalyptic landscape of material excess and soulless corporatism. Giving no short shrift to souped-up muscle cars, guns/military hardware, and go-go girl sexuality, the group released a string of singles with titles such as ‘Twin Valentine Cadillac’ (1984), ‘Smash The Market Place’ (1986), ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ (1986), ‘Bikini Red’ (1987), and ‘I Can Speak American’ (1987). Add to these deep cuts and fan favourites including ‘Killer Born Man,’ ‘President Kennedy’s Mile,’ ‘Nitro,’ and ‘Four Engines Burning (Over the USA),’ and few would fail to grasp Carter’s obsessive interest in cartoon manifestations of Roth’s still-unlabelled ‘indigenous American berserk.’
Lyrics from Gun-Shy’s second single ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ – ‘Me and my boy had some fun / Well we danced to the moonshine / Danced to the gun / And now that all of the killings done / Dance to the good cash money son’ – bear testament to this transgressive artistic bent, evoking both pioneering electronic duo Suicide’s infanticidal ‘Frankie Teardrops’ (1977) and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ (1982) which recounts Charles Starkweather’s 1959 Midwest murder spree via filmmaker Terrence Malick’s brutally balletic Badlands (1973).
Springsteen, in fact, recently featured the Messiahs’ ‘Jesus Chrysler Drives a Dodge’ on his Sirius XM ‘From My Home to Yours’ radio show, labeling them as “one of the great bands of the ‘80s.” Billy Corgan also namechecked the group in a 2021 Rolling Stone interview, placing them alongside other ‘bands that I really like that have been swept aside a bit by history.’ In 1987, David Bowie named the band The Screaming Blue Messiahs as his favourite British band, calling them the best band he’d heard in a long time. Beyond these music industry luminaries, The Screaming Blue Messiahs earned unlikely praise from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld of all people, who chatted with the reclusive Carter on a 2017 podcast, billing the frontman’s comeback appearance as “his first interview since the band broke up in 1989.”
What to make of these big name figures waving The Screaming Blue Messiahs’ flag so many years after the group’s unceremonious split? Does such media spotlighting, however modest, portend some kind of coalescing popular resurgence of this obscure eighties band? More significantly, does it suggest a future onstage reunion is possibly in the works? Conversely, is the all too apparent realization of Roth’s ‘indigenous American berserk’ in twenty-first century U.S. political life creating contexts where artistic explorations of its dark topographies – whether done in serious or absurdist ways – become both necessary and inevitable? Or, finally, is good music simply too vital to remain interminably overlooked and/or unsung? Whatever the case may be, it seems readily apparent that The Screaming Blue Messiahs are but just one well-placed television or movie needle drop away from career resurrection.
❉ Listen to The Screaming Blue Messiahs on Spotify.
❉ Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He has published various pieces with We Are The Mutants, The Middling Spaces, and Sports Literate. His book Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary (University of Alabama Press) came out in 2022. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ty-matejowsky-86026a92/
Header image credit: Portrait of the band Screaming Blue Messiahs, left to right, Chris Thompson, Bill Carter and Kenny Harris, at the Metro in Chicago, Illinois, September 13, 1986. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)
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