Good morning,
Ted here. Do you know Billy Childish? You must do.
Over 150 albums of raw rock’n’roll, punk, blues and folk since the first in 1979 with The Pop Rivets, followed by The Milkshakes, Mighty Caesars, Headcoats, Buff Medways, CTMF and several other bands. Dozens of confessional poetry volumes and starkly autobiographical novels, too, and none of those pastimes are even the day job: that’s his work as a painter, a task at which he is now extremely successful, his oil paintings shown around the globe with some work sold regularly for six figures. He’s Britain’s most prolific and uncompromising creative force.
You’re fascinated by Billy Childish, aren’t? Good, because I’ve written a book about him that’s out this Thursday, July the 4th. It’s called: TO EASE MY TROUBLED MIND: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish. I spent a year interviewing him, his family, old band mates, lovers, friends, former friends, his breath therapist, etc, to paint a picture of the man’s life and work. The limited edition of 500 is now sold out, but the classic hardback is available to all via White Rabbit. Did we start a Substack in 2020 so that I could flog a new book every two years? No, but that’s the way it’s ended up.
Billy will be appearing at Rough Trade East on July 4th to help launch it alongside Stewart Lee, Laura Barton and me. There are around a dozen tickets left. Please join us. That same day, Billy has a double-album compilation of his music released on Damaged Goods, From Fossilised Cretaceous Seams: A Short History of His Song & Dance Groups. I went back to Billy’s house in Rochester, Kent, last week to talk specifically about his music, because if we wanted to talk more broadly about his output it would probably take up an entire book. Some of the music we discussed is not included on the compilation because we couldn’t remember what was and wasn’t in the moment. A few of my favourite Childish, songs Billy couldn’t even remember writing. That’s how it goes when you’ve recorded nearly two thousand of them, I imagine. Feel free to enjoy my by-no-means definitive fifty favourite Billy Childish songs while you read…
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris.
Start The Week With…Billy Childish
You’re making lots of music at the moment. Why’s that?
I’ve done music for a long time.
I know! But you’re very active currently.
I think we’ve done five or six albums in the last few months. I’m not really in charge of it all. Things suggest themselves and I do them. The important thing that people need to understand is that no one is asking for more. And maybe that’s why we’re supplying it. It’s exactly the same as the painting and writing. Nobody needs any more. My wife Julie always says to me, ‘Do we need that?’ And I say we don’t need anything. I don’t necessarily mean music.
Why have you got so many groups on the go?
That’s something I was wondering about.
How many are active?
Three or four. Luckily, we don’t play live much. We only really play with the Chatham Singers and the North Kent Folkways Revival and we’re not even doing that. Julie doesn’t like playing. I don’t mind being on stage, but I don’t like getting on stage. With all the old equipment we use, it’s always a bit of a headache too. The days of coming home at 3:00 am and unloading the PA are over, thank God. But the days of making records hasn’t stopped for some reason. It’s just a hobby that’s got out of control.
I’ll interview you one time and you’ll say you’ve given up music. Then the next time you’ll tell me you’ve made five albums this year.
It’s like plugging a hole in a dam, isn’t it? You think you’ve solved the problem, but then another crack appears and threatens to destroy the local community.
Let’s start with the Pop Rivets.
What’s your favourite Pop Rivets song?
I’ve always liked Kray Twins.
That’s not on this compilation, is it?
No, Fun in the UK is. I think I’m from a different strand of punk rock than most people. My idea of punk was that it would be things I liked when I was young, like Little Richard, Bill Haley, the Beatles – things like that. The reason I really liked the Jam then was because they did that Beatles cover, Slow Down. Until I heard that I was scared of the reported violence at punk rock gigs, so I didn’t want to see the bands, but when I went to see the Jam I realised it was all baloney. But even then, we were getting the correctors in, who were all politicised. People banging on about Rock Against Racism and Right to Work, and I really didn’t want to work. I didn’t want to go and fight the National Front. I really liked The Sex Pistols and Anarchy In the UK, but I was more into having some fun in the UK. It’s a bit pathetic and to tell you the truth, I didn’t really know what anarchy meant. We were more into Stingray and Thunderbirds, the pathetic elements of 60s culture.
Let’s talk about For She by The Milkshakes, my favourite song by them.
Yeah, I like that one. I don’t know what I was up to there. It’s about [second girlfriend, and huge heartbreak] Sanchia. I was totally besotted by her. It was heart-breaking when we split up, even though she laid down a few rules that I couldn’t abide by. It’s obviously me trying to write a riff like The Kinks, then Mick {Hampshire] does a great solo. We do that thing where I’m playing lead and then we swap, and I go on to rhythm. We didn’t have rules going on. Mick was a few stages ahead of me on guitar playing, which isn’t a lot but it’s something that most people have.”
Out of Control is a great Milkshakes song, which you performed on Channel 4’s Tube. It probably introduced a lot of people to your music.
We were disappointed that we had to pretend we were doing that live, at the Pinder of Wakefield. Same with the Prisoners. So, you can see both bands change their clothes during it, the Prisoners swap their shirts. We took the piss out of the TV people, because they were scared. My memory of the song was that Nick Garrard, nominally our manager, said to me that The Milkshakes were out of control, so I thought, ‘Oh I’ll use that.’ Written by me and Mick, that one.
What was the idea behind The Milkshakes?
Well, Mickey and The Milkshakes was Mick’s band. He and Bertie were driving, doing some roadie work for The Pop Rivets. Pop Rivets wanted to get rid of me because they said I should be more like Jimmy Pursey…
That still annoys you, doesn’t it?
Yes, that one stuck. Pretty rude, isn’t it? Mick really liked Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Beatles at the Star Club. I, through [bassist] Big Russ, listened to blues, Bo Diddley and Link Wray. We thought, well, this is the good stuff. Let’s do a group. We just cajoled people into it. We made [Pop Rivets guitarist] Bruce [Brand] play drums. We had a big sign up in the rehearsal room saying. ‘No drum rolls!’ We really hated where punk rock had gone. We couldn’t stand synthesizers. We were stand-alone in using drum kits and guitars the way we did, doing everything the wrong end of the see-saw – which is one of my favourite places to be. Also, Mick has a merciless sense of humour. I have. Bruce is pretty comic, Big Russ too. We were brought up on adversity and undermining anything up itself.
I was listening to the live version you did of Red Monkey on one of those Klub Foot compilations from the early ‘80s and you’re so antagonistic. When they’re applauding at the end you just say, ‘Yeah, shut your faces!’
People would call out for songs which was the worst thing you could do. Our motto was ‘keep your nose out of band affairs!’ We didn’t like psychobillies or rockabillies, which was a problem at Klub Foot as it was a psychobilly night. We were desperate enough to play it, but we weren’t happy about it. We just hated the audience, and we also hated the other groups. We wanted nice people who danced, boys and girls, to come instead. But these people just wanted to thump each other. We said, ‘What are you lot meant to be? French Teddy Boys?’ We were always trying to find ways to insult them, because they were so stupid. And we always managed it.
The next song is by Thee Mighty Caesars, You Make Me Die. Although my favourite by them is You’ll Be Sorry Now.
You’ll Be Sorry Now is a complete rip-off a Troggs song, I can’t remember the name. But it’s a direct rip-off. We were totally based on The Troggs. The Troggs are gods, Thee Mighty Caesars were sods. You Make Me Die is a bit of mean song, really. Me and Tracey Emin split up in 1985 and then she went to the Royal College of Art. Once she got there, she started painting very much in the way she learned off me. Understandably, she was striking out. I’d already been expelled from art school. I hated art school, and I hated art speak. Tracey got to the Royal College and started doing art speak, that week. I’d see Tracey as a friend once a month up until the early ‘90s. I’d go see her, give her some money I’d made from selling records, and she’d do this talking. I used to have to listen to this stuff, so on the way back from seeing her I wrote You Make Me Die. I mean, I do have to say that while Tracey discovered a gold mine for herself, she also provided a gold mine for me in song lyrics and poetry. We’re still friends and we communicate with each other, but she might not realise what she’s given me.
I wanted to ask you about one of your old home-recorded blue songs next, I Remember.
Oh, we’ve just a good version on the new Chatham Singers album, which is out…tomorrow! I think. There’s three hundred copies, all with original woodcut.
I Remember…Hmm. Probably about Sanchia, vaguely anyway. I recorded it at home on cassette, with Kyra [De Connick, ex-partner and Headcoatee] on backing vocals. Some of those home recordings had something, didn’t they? I did an album of those called Made with A Passion, the cover was a photo of me with my teeth out and a flaming sword from when I was about seven: hand-me-down jumper, hand-me-down trousers, a bamboo cane that I dipped in petrol and set on fire, fedora I bought for three pence from a jumble sale. My father was at home and took that photo of me. It’s one of those rare things where there’s a photo of you and it’s actually how you see yourself.
Pocahontas Was Her Name, good number.
“From a very young age I was always designated as the Red Indian in Cowboys and Indians with my brother. He’d shoot me, basically, but I always liked that stuff, read Wounded Knee very early on. When I was 14, I saw the statue of Pocahontas in Gravesend, because that’s where she died.
I did not know that.
Yeah, she was captured by English colonists in the early 1600s, married a tobacco planter. She was taken around London, as a sort of celebrity, but then before they sailed back to America she got sick and died in Gravesend. So, she’s six miles away.
What’s your favourite Headcoats song?
Cor, that’s a tough one! What’s yours?
(We Hate The Fucking) NME.
Oh, I like that one! That’s a funny one.
Tell you my favourite…it’s The Same Tree, probably.
It’s partly from Carlos Castaneda, who I read because my brother was reading him when I was about 14 and had just learnt to read. There’s a bit when Don Juan makes a guy look at a leaf fall from a tree and then he looks again and it’s the same leaf falling from the same tree. I was also really obsessed with Edward Lear, nursery rhymes and Dada, so it’s also lifted out of old nursery rhymes. I love nonsense lyrics. That’s why I love Bo Diddley. I was allowed to go do a poetry reading in Holland in the early ‘80s and there were these Dutch beat writers who asked who my favourite poet was. I said Bo Diddley. They shook their heads sadly and backed away. But Who Do You Love!
I walk 47 miles of barbed wire
I use a cobra snake for a necktie
I got a brand new house on the roadside
Made from rattlesnake hide
I got a brand new chimney made on top
Made out of a human skull
Now come on take a walk with me Arlene
And tell me who do you love?
It’s just fantastic! There’s nothing better than that.
One song that’s not on your compilation that I love is Shirts Off, with Armitage Shanks.
Apparently, it’s a rip-off of Fast Cars by Buzzcocks, though I had nothing to do with the music. The story behind it is that there’d been a prostitute murdered the night before and three of us were walking home at about two in the morning. We came across the bloke with this woman on the deck, she was screaming. So, we stopped, said ‘are you alright love?’ He ripped his shirt off, and he’s one of the scariest Gypsy fighters around here, and shouted, ‘Do you want some fucking shirts off or what?!’ He’s fighting us and she’s egging him on!
Tell me about Medway Wheelers by the Buff Medways.
That’s a tune for my mum, who was in the [cycling club] Medway Wheelers. Pretty self-explanatory. We’ve just done a folk version of that, it’s out soon I imagine. Thing I always liked about it is my mum saying, ‘Well, I had this fixed wheel with a crossbar made-to-measure bike.’ But I’d say, ‘It was made for measure – but for someone else’. It had a crossbar. Her father bought it second hand. The Medway Wheelers cycled from Medway down to Torquay, which people said was impossible. Too far and dangerous in those days, but they did it in two days. My mum said one rider died, got their wheels trapped in tram lines…I’d just be down at hers listening to her nonsense, writing it down. If I write something down it normally becomes a song because I’ve booked a studio, we need some songs. What have I got in my notepad?
Let’s talk about Every Bit of Me, which you’ve done a few times, originally with the Headcoats as an angry punk thing, but I really like The Singing Loins version, which is like a sea shanty…
I don’t even remember that one. Did we do that? Blimey. Well, the song is me trying to work out what happened to me. I’d probably stopped drinking by then and was doing a lot of therapy, trying to exorcise some demons and then talk about those things in songs. I’d been doing it in poetry, but that’s when I worked out it’s manure, I could put it to work in music too. It’s about self-contempt, hatred, alcoholism brought about by being sexually abused as a kid. The violence that comes across in the Headcoats version is cathartic in the way I do it, the performance, but I’m not actually someone in touch with my anger. I’m really afraid of violence. I suppose it's all an escape valve.
It might be why you make so much music.
It could be, but don’t forget it’s not all misery. Some misery, some silliness, and occasional bits of love.
Archive from 1959 is good one.
Like them all, probably just a silly idea I’ve turned into a song. I think of the word ‘archive’ and then, well, what am I? I’m an archive from 1959. And the ‘Girl from ’62’ is Jeanine, who was a squeeze who I met up with her again in Hamburg when I was there with Mudhoney. I was quite smitten with her.
I wanted to ask you about the car pictured on the inside cover of the compilation…That’s Bruce’s rusting wreck. It had a crocodile clip holding the wing on. We went down to play Glastonbury with ATV in that car, a very early Glastonbury, and the wing of that car used to really bang on the motorway. We were arrested by the drugs squad.
What?! The Pop Rivets?
Yeah. Mark of ATV said we should come down with them to play this place called Glastonbury. OK. So, we turned up at this field, there’s a stage with tarpaulin, but the water poured through it. Everything was wrecked. Weird hippies running the place. We were with some Medway hippies we knew and the twins of the bloke who wrote Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss, Oliver Postgate: the Postgate twins. Our drummer Little Russ knew them. The Postgates had a tent, they were a bit ponced-up. Little Russ smoked dope, but none of us did anything like that. There was a girl who had speed, which we didn’t do either. We decided to go camping away from the non-event hippy festival, and that’s when we were all arrested early one morning: I was arrested for possession of Aspros, with Aspro [brand-name Aspirin] printed on each pill in a sealed packet of Aspro. I had a bag of salt for cooking that they said was cocaine. I said, ‘Why not taste it to see?’ And the policeman went, ‘I’m not getting addicted!’
And they arrested you?
They took us to the police station. One of the Postgates got belted around the head by a rozzer, which we thought was highly amusing. This is in the New Forest, so they brought the drugs squad up from Southampton. But the girl had dumped her speed, the others had got rid of their dope and all they had was a roach in a packet of Rothmans that one Postgate had. We’re all locked up and then interrogated for a day. I’m booked for Aspros, but they wouldn’t believe that they were. And for the salt! They wouldn’t just taste it. They spoke to all our families, including Oliver Postgate. Once they done that they said to Stephen Postgate, (West Country voice), ‘I think we’ll just forget about this, shall we?’ And dropped the roach in the bin! I was still booked for a court appearance six months later, but that was eventually dropped – presumably when they finally tasted the salt.
Classic.
Why did I tell you that story? What song were we on?
Archive From 59.
How could I possibly have got there? Really went round the lake. But Archive: ‘I played the last of my stupid tricks/left school in ’76…I just fell out my tree/now everybody’s picking on me’. I’m quite an easy and nice person, but I say things that people think aren’t funny and I get it in the neck. That’s what that one is about.
Another song with a year in it: Christmas 1979.
That was about the Pop Rivets coming back from touring in Germany. Bruce stayed out there after we’d finished because he’d met a German girl, one of his great regrets because they had fish soup for Christmas dinner. We had to crawl back because all four tyres had blown, driving at 5MPH and we could see the last ferry about to go, but we just about made it. Then we were arrested at Sheerness when we landed.
What for?
Having leather jackets. We were always being pulled for drugs. I was strip-searched in this derelict back room at the Austria border with bird cages in it by this really weird sexual guy. A little Himmler fondling my veins. Anyway, the song ends with my dad throwing the TV across the room on Christmas Day, which did happen though I wasn’t there, I got in after the event. We didn’t have a TV, he came in pissed with one and said, ‘Here’s your fucking TV’ and threw it across the room, then went up to pass out in bed.
Did the TV work?
Yeah. So, it was a happy Christmas after all.
The song I play anybody who asks why I like your music is Punk Rock Enough for Me, because it has all the best bits: a good riff and brilliant lyrics, your voice high in the mix.
I like that one too. It was just me explaining what is punk rock to me, because we get people coming up to us and saying, ‘I love punk rock too!’ Oh, great. ‘Yeah, like Nirvana.’ Pardon?! It’s like Status Quo, all the hair and that. It’s a bit silly. It’s normally just stuff I’ve written down waiting for a train, that’s how I do lyrics. Or in the old days in an Indian, waiting for a biryani.
I love the musical structure of it, too, the cyclical nature.
I probably ripped it off one of those groups I would never admit to ripping off, Iggy Pop or The Stooges.
Maybe the Cramps?
No, I would never stoop so low as to rip off the Cramps. That singer guy (Lux Interior) was very pleasant, he was nice to us. The lady (Poison Ivy) wasn’t, she was disgusted with our gear when we played with them because we were using 50-watt amps. They were like a hideous rock group. How could you not understand a 50-watt Vox? She was probably sick to death of doing it, and who can blame her? Mark Perry gave me their first album: “you like Link Wray, you’ll like this.” It went straight in the bin. I do like Link Wray and that’s the reason I don’t like this.
Someone you do like is Bob Dylan, and my favourite one of yours that’s in his mould is It’s Happened Before (Will It Happen Again?).
I don’t know that one.
Really? It’s only three years old. The lyrics sound to me to be obviously about Tracey…
We’ll have to listen to it. I don’t remember it.
[Attempts to play song on same device I’m recording on fail, so I’m reduced to trying to recall lyrics: “you said we’d been friends for years/but you didn’t speak to me for ten/when you hear this song perhaps it’ll happen again…”]
Oh yeah, vaguely. It’s funny, someone for a newspaper interviewed me and asked what my favourite song on the compilation was and I said, Ooh, probably Fire In the Mountains and Lions Walk The Trail. Did the interview, said goodbye and I had a look on the album: it’s not on there! Hahaha! The album title From Fossilised Cretaceous Seams is actually a line from Fire in the Mountains too.
Why’s it not on there then?
Just a minor oversight. I have no idea what’s on there. I mean, how many songs have I written? 1500 at least. I have no idea about most. You asked me about It’s Happened Before, well, that will have been the only time we played it. I would have shown the people playing it how it goes ten minutes before we recorded it.
And you never played it live.
I don’t know what it is!
And your favourite song is the one about [wife] Julie.
Yes, two versions of it, Fire in the Mountains and Lions Walk The Trail.
[There follows a short interlude where we find It’s Happened Before (Will It Happen Again?) and play a snatch]
A long song of me moaning and taking the piss, and people will think it’s something I feel very strongly about but I have no memory of it, and I never think of it. We need to convey that. It’s not a big statement, I probably wrote it the night before. It’s one of ten songs on ten albums we recorded that year. It’s not my life’s artistic statement.
Let’s finish up with what you have coming up, then.
We have the exhibition of my paintings in Berlin now, that’s on for a month. An exhibition in Seoul, starts at the end of the month. We’ve got a new album, the Blues That Kills by the Chatham Singers. The new album Dog Jaw Woman, by the Guy Hamper Trio. Cape Trafalgar by the North Kent Folkways Revival.
Who will be performing at the thing we’re doing in August at Little Medway Theatre.
That’s right. The Chatham Singers’ Step Out, another album by the North Kent Folkways Revival… but I can’t remember what it’s called. Got a new poetry book, too. In October there’s a new solo representation of my painting at the Armory in New York, then at Frieze in London there’s a solo representation by Lehmann Maupin. Then next week I’m recording a secret album that may involve time travel…
You’re quite busy.
And we’re doing a limited-edition beret too. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something else.
Don’t forget the book launch on Thursday at Rough Trade East with Stewart Lee we’re doing together…
Is that Thursday?! I thought it was Saturday. Yes, OK.
TK
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