The Screaming Blue Messiahs

One of the greatest "also-ran" bands of the '80s

The Screaming Blue Messiahs (L-R: Kenny Harris, Bill Carter, Chris Thompson)

Before we begin…

Book update! I have adapted portions of the final chapter of In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor into a feature, which you can read in the current issue of DownBeat (Jacob Collier cover). If/when the article appears on their website, I’ll share a link. In the meantime, the book itself is available from Amazon, directly from the publisher, and likely many other places as well.

On the website: The avant-garde metal band Mamaleek have released a new album, Vida Blue, and Todd Manning has reviewed it. Here’s the link.

On Stereogum: My latest Ugly Beauty column is up! I interviewed author Mike Smith about his book In With the In Crowd: Popular Jazz in 1960s Black America, and trust me, this is a book you need to read. I also review new albums by Wayne Shorter, Marquis Hill, Meshell Ndegeocello, Asher Gamedze, and others. Here’s the link.

Burning Ambulance Music update! Our record label has two new releases coming out in early October. Tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman and trumpeter Nate Wooley have recorded a third volume of duo improvisations, Polarity 3, deepening their ongoing artistic conversation. We’ll be offering a special package deal so you can get all three volumes for one discounted price. Also, Ukrainian bassist and electronic musician Sergey Senchuk, aka Tungu, has assembled Irrational Thinking of the Subject, a collection of duos with a wide range of improvisers from around the world including Noël Akchoté, Phil Minton, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Ayumi Ishito, Gebhard Ullmann, and many more. Links to pre-order CDs and digital music will be available soon.

It was the summer of 1986 and I was visiting my dad’s Brooklyn apartment. He had cable, and back at my mom’s house, we didn’t even have TV. So I took visitation weekends as a chance to soak up MTV like a sponge. I wasn’t seeing much that surprised or impressed me, but I watched because when you were 14 in 1986, you watched MTV. One afternoon, I saw something that took the top of my head off. It was a video by a band with a slightly cross-eyed, bald-headed lunatic frontman who was literally jumping up and down on his guitar at one point, and whose drummer played louder than anyone I’d ever heard. I was amazed. What the hell was this? (Skip to about the one-minute mark.)

I never saw that video again, but I never forgot it, either, and sometime in the next year or so, I bought the Screaming Blue Messiahs’ major label debut, Gun-Shy, and tucked it into my Walkman for extended periods. I’ve been listening to their albums ever since.

The three members of the Screaming Blue Messiahs came together on the English pub rock scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Guitarist Bill Carter and bassist Chris Thompson were in the Small Brothers, who released a three-song 45 in 1980; then they joined Motor Boys Motor, who put out a single in 1980 and a self-titled album in 1982. In 1983, after MBM split up and Carter decided to start singing, they recruited drummer Kenny Harris, formerly of garage rock band the Cannibals, and the Messiahs were born.

The band connected with producer Vic Maile, who had worked with the twitchy, hostile pub rock band Dr. Feelgood. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson was a major influence on Carter’s playing style, and on postpunk writ large; you can draw a straight line from his playing with Dr. Feelgood to Andy Gill’s work in Gang of Four, among others. Maile had also worked with Motörhead, and the first Screaming Blue Messiahs release, the Good and Gone EP, kinda sits at an imaginary intersection point between Dr. Feelgood and Motörhead. The first track, “Happy Home”, opens with a guitar figure stolen straight from Dr. Feelgood’s “Roxette”, laid over a crash-bang rockabilly beat, and on the song’s bridge, Thompson’s bass is almost as loud and blown-out as Lemmy’s.

Several songs from the Good and Gone session (which yielded 11 tracks, though only six were released at the time) also appeared on Gun-Shy, the band’s debut for Elektra Records. This was likely due to the somewhat chaotic recording process. The band wanted to continue working with Vic Maile, but Howard Gray (better known as an engineer at that point) was hired instead. When he only had enough time to make half the record, Maile was brought in after all.

“Wild Blue Yonder”, “Let’s Go Down to the Woods” and “Holiday Head” were re-recorded, and greatly improved in the process, while “Someone to Talk To”, “President Kennedy’s Mile”, and a cover of Hank Williams’ “You’re Gonna Change” were just ported straight over. “Someone to Talk To” in particular is one of my favorite SBM songs. Its clanging, echoing riff has the same flag-waving quality bands like U2 and Big Country strove for at the time, but with much more of a jagged edge; if you got too close, it would cut you. Carter’s lyrics, meanwhile, were a kind of impressionistic nightmare of a terrified soldier confronted with something incomprehensible and deadly.

Gun-Shy was released in early 1986, and the band toured relentlessly, but still managed to find time to make a follow-up. Bikini Red, released in 1987, is their best album. It’s also their most popular, for the worst possible reason.

The album, entirely produced by Maile this time, was packed with absolutely killer rockabilly-metal anthems like “Sweet Water Pools”, “Too Much Love”, and “Jesus Chrysler Drives a Dodge”, not to mention the almost Beach Boys-ish (except for the surreal lyrics about an alien lady bewitching Carter) title tune. But one of the tracks was a reimagining of an old Motor Boys Motor song called “Here Come the Flintstones” retitled “I Wanna Be a Flintstone”. Naturally, the label released “Flintstone” as a single, and it took off. It’s their best-known song by far. (Interestingly, former Motor Boys Motor singer Tony Moon was a crucial behind-the-scenes figure for the Messiahs at this time, co-writing multiple songs on Bikini Red.)

The stretch from 1987 into 1988 was definitely the Messiahs’ peak in terms of commercial success and public profile. They even got an endorsement from David Bowie, who spoke glowingly of them in multiple interviews (“The band this week — I’ve only just discovered them, so they’re my pet project — is the Screaming Blue Messiahs. They’re the best band I’ve heard out of England in a long time”) and invited them to open two UK shows on his Glass Spider tour.

By late 1988, though, things were starting to slip. They were famous but not rich, having to go back to their day jobs when not on tour, and for a group of guys closing in on 40 (Carter was born in 1951, making him already relatively old when the band started) that must have been a hard pill to swallow. They spent time in three different studios — two in the US and one in England — to make their third album, and were working with Howard Gray again, which may explain why Totally Religious, released in 1989, sounds completely different from their earlier work.

It’s a slower, heavier record, and Harris’s drums are bathed in so much reverb he sounds like he’s at the bottom of a well. There are multiple layers of guitar on every track, some clean and some wildly noisy, but all slapped together in a thick impasto of sound. And it doesn’t seem like the label liked the music much. They shot a video for the opening track, “Four Engines Burning (Over the USA)”, but it was never officially released as a single.

Things went bad fast at the end of 1989. The band’s A&R man left, and his replacement saw them as a waste of Elektra’s money. Totally Religious was released in November, but pulled from distribution — along with the entire rest of the band’s catalog! — a month later. By the end of the year, the Screaming Blue Messiahs effectively ceased to exist, except for some previously booked gigs.

For decades, they were more of a legend than a band. I owned all three of their albums, and at one point sold my long out-of-print CDs of Gun-Shy and Bikini Red for sizable sums. And then, out of nowhere, in 2016, their entire catalog — all 11 tracks from the Good and Gone session; a Peel Session; all three albums; B-sides to all their singles; and a fistful of live recordings — was remastered and reissued as the Vision in Blues boxed set, not on their former label Elektra or even Warner Music’s vaunted catalog imprint, Rhino, but on the UK indie Easy Action. And now, in 2024, Good and Gone, Gun-Shy, Bikini Red, Totally Religious, and a live recording of one of their final gigs, from Zurich, Switzerland in December 1989, are all on streaming services as well. Check them out, and if you like what you hear, buy a copy of Vision in Blues, which amazingly still seems to be available.

That’s it for now. See you next week!