J.B. Morrison

When I was in my twenties, I spent a considerable amount of time jumping up and down in fairly mindless fashion to the excitable rock-and-roll stylings of a beat combo with the tireless moniker Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine (or, for the purposes of the BBC censor, Carter USM).

There was no other band quite like Carter. There were only two of them, for a start: a fellow in shorts and a baseball cap who played the guitar and was called Fruitbat, and another fellow called Jim-Bob who also played the guitar and sang.

They were backed by a fearsome wall of synths and drums, and came along at the same time (at least, in my memory) as a bunch of other bands who seemed to make one want to jump up and down a lot in old baseball boots, with one’s hat on backwards and cheap lager sloshing around in one’s belly. They were huge, massive, relentless FUN.

What made them different to those other bands, though, was the content of their songs. E.M.F sang in abstract terms about someone being unbelievable, Jesus Jones had some hand-wavy hippy nonsense about how great it was to be alive right now. Carter (lyricist: Jim-Bob) sang about an altogether more down-to-earth bunch of gypsies, travellers, thieves, grebes, crusties and goths – a list which I have mercilessly stolen from Carter’s own song, The Only Living Boy In New Cross.

Jim-Bob’s lyrics were filled with pop-culture references – The Only Living Boy In New Cross features, among others, David Frost, Evita, Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. There were puns – the Evita reference is ‘fill another suitcase with another haul’, which in a song about life at the bottom end of the heap is fabulously on it – and there was a good deal of anger about the state of post-Thatcherite Britain and its dreary selfishness. Perhaps their most famous song, Sheriff Fatman, is an early one from 1989, which rails at slum landlords, including Rachman and, in Jim-Bob’s own deathless adaptation, ‘Nicholas van Whatsisface’.

Oh, and they headlined Glastonbury.

But I come here not to praise Carter USM, but to bury them. Their last ever gig will be this November (and I can’t go, chizz chizz chizz), and these days Jim-Bob is a solo recording artist. His last album, What I Think About When I Think Of You, is fantastic and I commend it to you.

So Jim-Bob hasn’t gone. But he has begun to change, like Seth Brundle in The Fly, into an altogether more disturbing creature: a novelist.

There have been two novels under Jim-Bob’s name already: Storage Stories and Driving Jarvis Ham. I commend them both to you. His third, though, is under a new name: J.B. Morrison. I don’t know why he changed it. Perhaps it’s considered more grown-up. But I’m delighted to say the novel, The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick Age 81, is full of everything that I loved about Carter and everything I love about Jim-Bob, but without the wall of synths and the beer in the belly. It’s a charming story, beautifully told, about an 81-year-old man living on his own and the relationship he develops with the woman who comes to care for him for an hour a week.

I couldn’t help feeling some sadness reading this; my dad died in 2008, and he’d be touching on the same age as Frank Derrick by now. And Frank’s story does have its sad moments and its tiny tragedies. But Frank’s brain is as sharp as those old Carter lyrics – as sardonic and bitter but also as witty and affectionate. His hair is too long, and his best mate is an ex-punk called Smelly John. He loves films and had once planned to build a cinema in his shed. His wife Sheila died years ago, lost to dementia – and Jim-Bob/Morrison’s use of sea-swimming as a metaphor for the loss of Sheila’s mind is as fine and terrible a piece of writing as I’ve read this year.

The novel rescues the elderly for us, paints them as just older versions of ourselves, with the same anchors in shared popular culture and the same wish to be interested, involved, inspired. There are no easy answers in Frank’s life, and the novel doesn’t pretend there are. At one point, I thought the novel was going to settle for a bleakly obvious ending, and it does toy with us as if it might. But it doesn’t. It carries on – Frank carries on – with warmth and acceptance and, ultimately, love. It made me realise, actually, that love was what Carter were on about, a lot of the time, too.

I put it down, and I phoned my Mum.
… (meer)

The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81 – Quirky & fun

J.B. Morrison, better known as Jim Bob, has written a quirky and fun novel in The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81. Everyone who reads this story will recognise someone in Frank Derrick, me Derek across the road who just happens to be 81 has home help and gets taken to, Lidl, Morrisons and a posh shop at Waitrose (yes we have them up north).

Frank Derrick is 81 and gets run over by a milk float while out buying a pint of milk so his daughter hires him a care nurse while he recovers. Like many widowers he is independent, cannot be bothered with the fussy outside world and certainly does not want or need some nurse bossing him about.

Kelly Christmas comes in to his life as his care nurse and a breath of fresh air in his life. She is the reason why he goes from looking and acting like Compo to an aging English Don Juan in his West Sussex flat. So rather than his life being going to the local shop and visiting Smelly John in his care home, Kelly breathes new life in to him. She takes him out to the beach and the big Sainsbury’s shows that he can live once again instead of waiting in death’s waiting room.

As the end of his care sessions near Frank tries to raise the money to keep Kelly on, he tries pawning his charity shop buys, cleaning out his shed. But he has to admit to himself that he has no money or savings he just is not good with money, it was his later wife who handled the purse strings. With Kelly moving on he feels as if his life is going to fall to pieces.

This is a funny and quite quirky story that touches your emotions as we all know someone like Frank. Frank is nothing special and his life has not been remarkable or been a disaster he was just ordinary like the rest of us. I am sure there are many men can see their own traits in Frank, I am fortunate no male in my family lives to their 81 otherwise I am Frank!… (meer)