Oh yeah, I’m the boy who doesn’t do ‘guilty pleasures’, that’s right. All the nostalgia stuff, I despise it: you either like a song or you don’t, damn it, and the songs you like you come right out about, you don’t sit in a bedroom sipping beer and dragging the cursor back on the PC Player three, four times, feeling stupid, remembering being eighteen and singing at the top of your lungs in the empty old schoolroom. Good is good and bad is bad, yes? You don’t hear those old songs and blush when you realise you still know all the words.
Carter were an awful band, though, weren’t they? Addicted to puns, crass and visceral and mouthy, which we never like: cheap too, with that fucking drum-machine rap-rap-rapping away under every song. Actually no, really, they were a bad band – they hectored you about things you already knew and they were sentimental as shit. In fact they were the living spirit of 10:45 in the pub, talking rubbish with your arm around a mate you hardly know. When I was a kid and didn’t go to the pub often, that state seemed rather blessed to me, and so I listened to Carter a lot. Ten years on I wonder if I wasn’t right, at least about the pub. However dreadful they were, “Falling On A Bruise” is still “November Rain” on snakebite and black, and when Carter riff on “Born To Run” at the end, you’ve got to grudgingly admit they’ve earned it.