Jim Bob

English musician and author James Robert Morrison, who performs under the name Jim Bob, first reached listeners in the early 1990s as the lead singer of the inventive and polarizing Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. Once that group dissolved in 1998, he launched a solo career whose recordings moved away from the propulsive second-wave punk energy that defined CUSM, favoring instead his knack for memorable tunes paired with sardonic words. A memoir appeared in 2004, followed in 2010 by his debut novel; several years of literary work ensued before he resurfaced musically with the 2020 single “2020 WTF!”

He and guitarist Les Carter, known as Fruitbat, formed Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine in 1987 after both had played in the jangle-pop outfit Jamie Wednesday, whose fusion of punk, power pop, and art-rock carried satiric lyrics alongside the samples and sequenced beats then emerging from club culture, setting the group apart from other Brit-pop acts of the era. Mainstream breakthrough arrived with the gold-certified albums 30 Something and 1992: The Love Album; by the 1998 split, CUSM had issued six studio LPs, placed a dozen singles inside the U.K. Top 40, and moved more than a million units overall.

Jim Bob’s first solo outing, Jim’s Super Stereoworld, surfaced in 2001, with JR—credited under his complete legal name—appearing soon afterward. Additional releases under the Super Stereoworld, Jim Bob, and James Robert Morrison banners followed across the next two decades, among them Goodnight Jim Bob (2003), A Humpty Dumpty Thing (2007), and What I Think About When I Think About You (2013). The 2004 memoir Goodnight Jim Bob – On the Road with Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine was succeeded in 2019 by the second autobiography Jim Bob from Carter, while fiction writing began with Storage Stories in 2010. Early 2020 brought the single “WTF 2020!,” his first new recording in nearly ten years, and the album Pop Up Jim Bob arrived months later, entering the U.K. charts and prompting further studio sessions with the Hoodrats that yielded the mid-2021 release Who Do We Hate Today.