BEDDING DOWN WITH CARTER, 1991
Shortly after Entec moved into its current Northolt premises during the icy January of 1991, a relationship began to be cultivated with Jim ‘Jim Bob’ Morrison and Les ‘Fruitbat’ Carter, otherwise known as south London’s finest socially-conscious indie rock duo, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine (USM) – an act that rose sharply from the club and university circuit to score 12 Top 40 singles and four Top 10 albums, and a headline performance at Glastonbury.
The band’s reputation for onstage eccentricity was in no small part due to Jon ‘Fat Beast’ Driscoll, a larger-than-life club promoter who became their resident lighting designer and MC. “Jon would come on stage to get the crowd going, wearing only a pair of shorts and various rude messages written over the vast acreage of his chest, and then make a sharp exit towards FOH to operate the lights!” laughs Richard Hutton, Carter’s dimmer tech and board op.
“Although Jon had great vision and perfectly able to push a lot of buttons to the music, he needed people around him to make it all happen, technically. The first of those was Pip Rhodes, who was a lighting tech with the band prior to becoming LD.”
Entec’s association with Carter USM as lighting provider began when the band were preparing to film a show at Brixton Academy for their video release ‘In Bed With Carter’. Pip recalls: “We were given some money for audience lighting and just blew it on a bunch of Martin MiniStars, Pulsar strobes and other gear that we could take on the road for 12 months. That didn’t go down too well, of course, and to help us top up the rig, we went to Entec, having already been booked for the Reading Festival.”
“Paul Weber was then Entec’s MD and Noreen O’Riordan was his assistant,” says Richard, who has remained an Entec freelancer since touring with Carter. “During that very busy early ’90s period, Noreen was grooming a lot of small acts who then went on to be pretty big, and Carter was just one of them.”
Carter USM were second on the bill when they played the Saturday night at the heavily indie-flavoured Reading in August ’91. Richard was onstage that night, piloting a Celco Gold desk to run Entec’s lighting extras. “We had audience blinders on the floor and a grid of 48 PAR cans at the back, made from 6-way bars, that Entec had rigged overnight,” he comments.
“Everything had to be programmed blind, which shouldn’t have been an issue, but I was a bit concerned that I couldn’t see the grid from where I was standing.The first song was ‘Surfin’ USM’ and the idea was for the grid to read ‘USM’ with me mashing flash buttons. Jon had taken most of the first song to get to FOH, by which time he called me on the comms and yelled, ‘What the fuck’s going on? Our ‘USM’ is all upside down and back to front!’
“Unknown to any of us, there had been a monstrous error in the desk patching and what the audience saw was ‘nZW’! Of course, the NME lapped this up with their headline ‘Carter USM in Shock Name Change’!”
MAXIMUM SUPPORT
As the band’s popularity snowballed, so did their lighting wish list and Entec responded positively with maximum support, supplying an expanded package for Carter’s 1991 winter tour, including several Clay Paky Mk.II Golden Scans.
As Pip remembers, fortune (and fixtures) moved up a gear when the band’s second album, 1992 – The Love Album, shot to No.1 within a fortnight of release, just as Jon Beast decided to leave the band to focus on his ambition of becoming a stand-up comic. Pip Rhodes was now LD.
He says: “We wanted to mimic the European flag from the cover of The Love Album, so we built a 12 foot truss circle upstage centre with Golden Scans representing each of the stars, plus a mirrorball in the middle as well as the usual strobes.”
Carter’s most profound moment was still to come. On Friday 26th June at the Glastonbury Festival, they headlined the Pyramid Stage. “They tore it apart… but not without a large dose of mayhem!” laughs Richard. “We rolled out our entire touring rig as a floor package and, as we wanted to make an impact with a lot of smoke, we took with us a demo version of what became the Jem Roadie. Without any kind of remote control, the only way to work the Roadie was to literally press the button on top of the machine.
“My brief to crew mate Simon ‘Boff’ Howarth was to press that button when the band came on and keep it pressed until he heard me say ‘stop’ through his headset. What could be simpler? We just didn’t realise that a few seconds after running, the machine’s fan would automatically go into high speed mode to disperse the smoke. Boff was sucked into the back of the machine, he fell over and his headset came off. Being the pro he was, he continued to hold down the button and very soon the Pyramid Stage couldn’t be seen!
“Still with his finger on the button, Boff scrambled around and located his headset, only to find that just one comms channel was working. He heard the video crew shouting at each other because one of the TV sets in the makeshift video wall wasn’t working. Poor old Des Fallon, who was having his first touring video experience with Carter, was screaming at everyone from FOH.
“I’d given up trying to talk to Boff by this point and just let it go. Eventually, the machine ran out of puff and the stage gradually reappeared. It had been a massive smoke and strobes orgy, and the audience loved it despite our frustrations.”
RIDING THE WAVE
Even after all this excitement, there was still one more trick up Carter’s collective sleeve, thanks to tour manager Terry Coyle, who went on to production manage Blur’s arena tours and, later, Gorillaz.
Pip comments: “Terry was responsible for bringing us all together. He decided it would be a hell of a wheeze to print the album logo on 20,000 green foam tennis balls and hire a couple of industrial grain blowers to fire them over the Glastonbury audience as part of the encore. Michael Eavis was still finding these balls around Worthy Farm many years later!”
Sadly, Jon Beast, Terry Coyle, Des Fallon and dimmers tech Jim McCarthy are no longer here to tell their stories and, despite Carter’s loyal fanbase, the band’s star was waning by the middle of the decade but while they were riding the wave, Pip says, they were the best of times.
“In a relatively short time, we went from blagging gear on the college circuit to having the rock solid support of Entec and, as a result, found ourselves knee deep in the production world.”
