As singer with Cult indie heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, Jim Bob had a number one album, toured the world and headlined Glastonbury. Since Carter, Jim has released fourteen solo albums, published six novels and three memoirs and appeared in a musical. A genius and national treasure, still humble enough to admit to writing his own publicity blurbs.
I’ve been writing my own press biographies for as long as I can remember. Updating them whenever I’ve got a new album or book to promote. Just a few short boasts to accompany a press release, either focusing on me as a singer or me as an author, depending on what’s being plugged. My baby bios always open with my two biggest boasts: a number one album and headlining Glastonbury, because otherwise it would be like saying that Hitler was a painter and dog owner.
I expect writing my own press bios will be another thing AI will do for me soon. It might make my life more interesting. A recent Google AI search of my own name led to something about me being a paper aeroplane champion. It was a joke I’d made on the internet at some point, and it had found its way into the brainbox and fucked up memory banks of AI as a fact. Searching ‘Jim Bob biography’ just now, the paper plane champion fact has gone, but I was pleased to learn I used to be in a band with a fruit-machine repairman.
Talking of baby bios, many years ago, Mrs Jim Bob made a diluted mix of the liquid plant fertiliser in a Perrier bottle and left it by the kitchen sink. Obviously, I was thirsty one day and took a big old swig from it. As a result, to this day, I still have to be pruned every winter.
In the baby biography blurb for my Thanks For Reaching Out album, I wrote that ‘Jim Bob is one oil painting exhibition short of being Britain’s greatest living renaissance man.’
It turns out my medium is acrylics. I’ve been painting. I’d call it a hobby. Possibly my first ever hobby, or at least since I stopped assembling Airfix kits and collecting marbles. But I’m not sure it is a hobby. I signed one of the paintings the other day. I’ve bought a lot of paint, palettes and palette knives, my first ever canvases, spray varnish, gesso (no, me neither until last week). After just a couple of weeks of painting, I was thinking of my first pile of pictures as a collection. I gave the collection a name. I found myself looking up the entry Ts and Cs for the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition. I started to believe I might one day get my own exhibition, the one I’d threatened in my 2023 bio. I wondered which Tate they would rename after me: Jim Bob Modern, Jim Bob Britain, maybe Jim Bob Liverpool or St.Ives. Perhaps I should move to Paris. Grow a moustache.
I don’t even think my paintings are any good. Definitely not accomplished. They don’t look like the work of a man who went to art college, learned how to paint properly and then deconstructed that knowledge to create my own primitive looking and yet somehow brilliant art. Like what they say about performing jazz: that you have to learn everything note perfectly and practice, practice, practice, and then for the performance, play whatever the fuck you like.
My granddaughter is four, and she did her first self-portrait this week. It might be better than anything I’ve managed so far.
Luckily, I have a get-out clause for when The Guardian give my exhibition two stars for being primitive and childish. Shortly after I bought my first paintbrushes, I scribbled this in a notebook:
So it’s deliberate.
Since I started painting, I wake up most mornings, way too early, and full of doubts about what I’m doing. I feel diluded and ridiculous. I feel the same way about new music. I’ll write a song and think I’m the genius and national treasure that my press biography says I am, only to wake up very early the next day, thinking the new song is awful, the lyrics are rubbish, and I should give up. But hey, what do I know? Apparently, as singer with Cult indie heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, Jim Bob had a number one album, toured the world and headlined Glastonbury.
PS: Apart from signing paintings, I also signed 750 copies of a new EP this week. There are only a handful of copies left. Available exclusively from Cherry Red.
And there aren’t many tickets left for this gig either.
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