Carter will not just lie down and give up, will they? With their singles compilation now out. they are touring again and at Cov Uni again. Tim and Tony found the Sex Machine in good working order.

Carter were the soundtrack to our teenage years..
Fruitbat: Yeah, ours too

But these days, that age group are more likely to be listening to Blur, or Menswear. Do you think you're still picking up new fans?
F: I think we're picking up new fans at about the same speed as we're losing the old ones. There are always new fifteen-year-old kids, who must be new fans because they wouldn't have been old enough to go to gigs a few years back.
J: There are a lot of people who heard 'Let's Get Tattoos' first and got into us after that. I think the radio is really important for picking up new fans, more so than the press, because not everyone necessarily reads the NME.
F: We also get a lot of people who haven,t seen us since 1992 or something and still think they have to shout "You Fat Bastard".

Yeah, when are you going to start kicking out people who shout that?
F: If we did that, the venue'd probably be empty. Not every night, it doesn't always happen. It didn't happen last night.

Do you resent the fact that the music press has more or less turned their back on you?
J: We're not really that bothered about the press.
F: We sort of expected it to happen, so we can't really resent it.

As elder statesman of the indie scene, what do you think of the current crop of Britpop bands?
F: Some bands are good, but I think they'll suffer as a result of the scene, of everyone jumping on the bandwagon. W: Who were the first people to get that Britpop tag?
J&F: Menswear.
J: And Supergrass a bit, but not so much. It basically means a band who get in the charts who are a bit alternative, not Take That. Which I suppose is good, because we get Pulp at Number Two in the charts.
W: Yeah, that's good, getting a bit of Pulp in there.

Speaking of bandwagons, most of the bands of your era, EMF, Neds, Senseless Things have either split up or become a bit of a joke now- how do you think Carter have retained their credibility?
W: Are we credible?
F: No, we're alternative.
W: Oh.
J: I think it's because we're really together in it. We all want to carry it on. All three of us are still into doing it, but in those other bands, if one member gets pissed off with it then the whole thing goes wrong.
F: I think they couldn't take being Flavour Of The Month one minute, then being ignored. That'd already happened with me and Jim in the last band, so we were expecting it.
J: Money has a lot to do with it as well, the amount of money a label is willing to put into a band.

Why did you decide to release a singles collection?
J,F&W: We didn't.
W: It was the record company. Basically, they would have done it whather we'd said yes or no, so we said yes, so that we'd get some money and so that we could make sure it had a decent cover and wasn't called 'Carter Greatest Hits'.
J: We were talked into it. They quoted The Beautiful South as an example, because they released a Greatest Hits and now they're huge.
W: Are they? Where are they now?
F: Playing Wembley, I think.
J: The difference is that The Beautiful South was marketed properly and our record company won't really do that.
W: Well, what's left of it.
F: Yeah, Chrysalis is only about four people now. EMI sacked the rest.

Was 'Starry Eyed and Bollock Naked', the b-sides collection, your idea?
J: Yeah, we wanted to do that. We wanted to make those songs available to people who hadn't bought the singles. We kept getting letters from people in Germany, or France, wanting to know where they could get hold of this track or the other. I suppose that's sort of the idea with 'Straw Donkey', if people didn't get the singles.
W: But most of the singles were on album at some point.
J: True.

'After The Watershed' is on 'Straw Donkey'. Does that mean that all the legal wrangling is sorted out now?
F: Sort of.
W: If you look on the sleeve, it now says 'written by Morrison / Carter / Jagger / Richards'.
J: It was a compromise, really.
W: A bit of give and take. We gave and they took.
J: But as soon as one thing is sorted out, another thing crops up. They nearly made us take it off the video. It's all these different legal companies dealing with different aspects of it.
F: Actually, I think the 'Straw Donkey' video collection is more valid than the album, because nobody ever saw the videos.
W: There are fifteen of them.
J: And none of them ever got shown on the telly.

But now you have got this retrospective compilation available, how do you think the records stand up now?
F: 'Retrospective compilation'. I like that. Erm.. I still like all of our records. I think they stand up well. Some of them quite amuse me, though.
J: Yeah, I find some of them quite funny. And I look back and if we were to do them again I'd do them really differently. Like a lot of the stuff on '30 Something', there's too much stuff going on, so many layers that you can't hear everything properly.

What would you say the high points have been?
J: Well, not while we were really big, when we were number one in the album charts. That was really miserable.
F: We spent so much time arguing...
W: Probably closer to splitting up then than at any other time.
F: So many people hated us, we couldn't go anywhere without security guards. It was like it is for Menswear now.
J: The high points are always the live shows. The first American tour with Wez was great. And when we played in Croatia- it's always good to play new places.
F: It gets a bit depressing when we get to a place and we already know where the dressing room is, where the toilets are. But we're playing Northampton Roadmenders on this tour and we've not played there before, so that should be good.
J: We have played there.
F: No we haven't
J: We'll argue about it later.

If someone was making a compilation tape of indie classics to put in a time capsule, which Carter song would you put on it?
W: 'After The Watershed'. That's still my favourite Carter song.
J: I suppose it'd have to be 'Sheriff Fatman'. That's like 'Our Generation', isn't it? It's the one everybody knows.
W: But we'd have to re-record it with me on it.
F: No we wouldn't. I'm never playing that song again. I wouldn't want people to remember us just for that one song.

How do you think Carter has progressed over the years?
W: There's more of us.
J: We're more competent. We can play now. And we know how to make better records.
W: Also, just by being successful you get to spend more time in the studio, working on things.
F: It's still very do-it-yourself, though.
J: But we're more professional about it now.

'Worry Bomb' was very much a return to the sound of the first two albums, the big Carter anthems. Was that a conscious decision?
J: A lot of people said that, but we couldn't see it really, so no.
F: I can sort of understand it. Personally, I think 'Post Historic Monsters' stood out as being very different from the rest of the albums, which is why I like it. I like the industrial stuff on it.
J: That's the album I'm happiest with the lyrics on, mainly because they were so painful to write.

Speaking of lyrics, they've also changed a lot over the years, become less social comment, more personal...
J: Yeah. I look back at some of the early lyrics and I can see why people hated us so much. there's some that I'm quite embarrassed about.
W: But it's like anything, isn't it? You get better at your craft the longer you spend practicing it.

So, what kind of a show can we expect from you tonight? Is it going to be 'Straw Donkey - the singles - the tour'?
F: No. Not at all.
W: Well, there's eight or nine singles in the set.
J: But there's also a lot of new stuff. We basically chose the songs we wanted to play and didn't think too much about the audience. But it seems to be going down okay.

Was there ever a time when you felt you had to finish with 'GI Blues'?
F: There was a time when we wouldn't have dared do a show without playing 'Fatman'. We're doing 'GI Blues' on this tour because there is no 'Fatman' at the end.
J: You have to finish with a classic. It's no good ending the night on a song that no-one knows.

And how's the back, Fruitbat?
F: Still bad. I'm still sitting down. I was okay towards the beginning of the tour, but got gradually worse and I'm having to sit down again
W: Too much rockin' out in your chair during the earlier gigs.

Was it a particularly big bath?
F: No. It was just something that had been building up for about a year.
J: What, the bath?
F: No, the grime. It had been building up for ages and it took so much effort to clean it off that he hurt his back!

Carter USM were talking to Tim and Tony, in October 1995.