March 2005
GQ Magazine
For the past thirty years, Billy Childish has played with countless bands, toured a dozen countries, and, astonishingly, recorded over a hundred albums. His scorching music (and multiple costume changes) have influenced icon from Kurt Cobain to Jack White, and he is worshipped as the godfather of garage rock. So why haven't you ever heard of him?
THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE PUBLICIZED
by JAMES O'BRIEN
DON’T CALL BILLY CHILDISH AN ARTIST. He may be a writer of surreal poetry and gritty fiction, a painter of vibrant, Impressionistic oils. He may be the godfather of garage rock. But an artist? No way.
"Most people want to say they're artists because they want a bigger house,” he says. "They want more girlfriends. They want to be more special. You can't deal with people who are artists, because artists are the worst scum on earth. You know, poets, artists, musicians, and dentists. I'm not one of them! Because when they start lining them up and shooting them, I can say, ' It wasn't me."
At his row house in Chatham, Kent, on a stifling summer day. Childish insists l have a cup of piping mint tea to cool me. He is shirtless, sinewy, pink-hued. His mustache is perky and neat and flanks his narrow cheekbones. One of his bottom teeth is gold. At home, his very English face is the intrepid, bony, optimistic face of beleaguered miners in old black-and-white British films.
Childish is a miner, deep in the seam of all the precious raw material of rock ‘n’ roll. While others may have abandoned the treasure-filled darkness for the limelight, Childish toils away three miles underground, producing an endless mother lode of punk, garage, blues, and R&R. When he surfaces, he doesn’t like what he hears others doing with the geology of rock. And so he listens to very little music. He hates it all, from Elvis Costello to Coldplay.
“Professionals ruin everything,” he says. “They’re like a dose of the bloody clap, really. They’re depressing. It’s like a Sunday-afternoon-and-you’ve-got-school-tomorrow feeling. The whole things’ hollow. That really goes for the whole music industry. It’s just like a big hollow facade. It's like papier-mache over a balloon. It's not something anyone intelligent would really want to be involved in.”
Nevertheless, for going on thirty years now—in the Pop Rivits, the Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, the Buff Medways (his current band), and in equally fertile girl groups like the Delmonas and Thee Headcoatees, for which he's played impresario (and guitar)—Childish has thumbed his Roman nose at the industry by making some of the most angst-ridden, urgent, joy-inducing, truly independent rock 'n' roll ever conceived. There are followings in England and the States, in Japan, in certain northern and central European countries still partially populated by pale punk rockers. One Milkshakes record may have sold as many as 6,000 copies. (He's not sure.) He thinks a Buff Medways record might have even grazed the British charts a few years back.
But his anonymity endures.
I'm still stunned every time another music lover tells me he's never heard of Childish. This is a man who recently released (by some counts) his 105th album, who has tirelessly fertilized the soil for current It-band imitators like the White Stripes and the Hives (whom he calls, collectively, "the Strives"). If his music weren't so consistently exhilarating, if you didn't always want more, you could accuse Childish of being too prolific.
Flooding the market seems to be one of the many innovative ways the outsider has washed away any likelihood of success. Indeed, when the Milkshakes' label said they were putting out too many records, the band released four records in one day. "They told us it was commercial suicide,” he says, "and we sort of liked that idea.” All along he has eschewed agents and major labels (record and genre), insisted on using low-tech equipment in makeshift studios, and stubbornly cultivated obscurity in a dying military town southeast of London.
It's the bed he's made for himself, even if lately he's begun kicking at the covers. To be sure, he is still an iconoclast, still a committed fameophobe. But he is also 46 now. He's a father now. And today he's witnessing, with the emergence of bands like the White Stripes, the Vines, and Kings of Leon, the commercial coming-out of a musical sound and style he absolutely owns. It is passing him by with barely a nod.
"I'm waiting to be exploited," he tells me, and sips his tea. "But no one wants to exploit me."
***
WILLIAM CHARLIE HAMPER adopted the nom de punk Gus Claudius as a teenager back in the mid-'70s. But it didn't stick. ''A mate of mine called Buttonnose Steve came along and said, ‘You're not Gus Claudius, you're Billy Childish.’ You're given your name and you stick with it.”
His sublime new moniker and good looks attracted attention. He joined a band at 17. "I was a punk rocker, and there wasn't any other punk rockers, and they said, 'Do you want to sing in our group?"' He learned to play guitar. Listened to Leadbelly, Link Wray, and Bo Diddley. Later came the Troggs and the Seeds. A sound began to emerge: jangling but jagged, lurching, often catchy, but always brewed from the life of a dirty town rife with alcohol and sex and failure.
I first heard his work in the '80s, when an adventurous roommate brought home a Milkshakes record because of the cool black-and-white picture on the cover. The aggressive, twangy opening guitar lick of "Please Don't Tell My Baby" tore into my mind and set up permanent residence there. And every time another of his seemingly infinite discography reveals itself in a dirty old record bin, it is like hearing the rare, spare rock 'n' roll perfection of the Troggs or the Seeds or Link Wray for the first time. As a friend once told me, ''After you listen to Billy, everything else seems boring.”
Musically, Childish is always purposely going the wrong way on a one-way street. The Milkshakes were a roots-rock reaction to the arrival of puffed-up groups like Spandau Ballet. Thee Headcoats were punk and R&B in a decade of alt-country and power pop. The influences are highly concentrated. He will base an entire band on one song he's heard: the Troggs' "I Want You," the Kinks' "Gotta Get the First Plane Home." He'll spend years seeking to plumb every possibility suggested by the sound of Link Wray's guitar. It's crazy, but when you hear him channel Wray's blazing and shrill leads on a Delmonas record or marry Bo Diddley's rhythmic rumble to the dark country blues of Dylan's "Ballad of Hollis Brown;' you know it's been worth the long, dark days in the mines.
The Buff Medways' entire four-LP output is inspired by one part of one song (which they cover brilliantly): the anthemic tail end of the Who's 1966 classic nine-minute-long ''A Quick One While He's Away:' Brooding Graham Day, once the drummer for Thee Mighty Caesars, plays for the Buffs a heavy, thumping John Entwistle-style bass and sings harmony in a slightly off-key rock 'n' roll tenor, like a young Pete Townshend. Wolf Howard is boyish and big, with a wry sense of humor and a Ludwig drum kit that sets the tone: loose and loud.
Onstage, the Buffs wear brass-buttoned martial outfits derived from World War I-era military bands. They salute as well as bow. The evolving sartorial affectations are nearly as interesting as the music. The Milkshakes looked like run-of-the-mill skinny, close-cropped, handsome, leather-jacketed punks. Thee Headcoats often wore Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hats and neo-Edwardian attire. (Childish still has an Edwardian look to his everyday clothes.) The Caesars preferred togas.
Childish says uniforms are fun, and indeed, in the tomelike Childish songbook, the trials and troubles of a man who drank “a lot, a lot, a lot,” who abused himself and others violently, who says he literally fought with his ex-con father, often come out with humor and wit. Even some of his eldest songs, particularly those from Thee Mighty Caesars, can swing. But always the bitterness and defiance are reflected in the song titles: "I'm a Confused Man,” "The Double Axe,” "Troubled Times,” "The Gun in My Father's Hand,” "I've Been Fuckin' Your Daughters & Pissing on Your Lawns.
"No one has ever done what we've done before," Childish says. "And probably no one else can do it. That's why the big boys are jealous."
* Billy Childish and the Milkshakes perform at the Hope & Anchor in London, 1983.
***
BILLY CHILDISH LIVES with his American wife (Julie Hamper, the bass player for one of his current side groups, the Chatham Singers) on a side street just off a hillside municipal green topped with a graffiti-scarred bandstand from which you can see a bend in the muddy, moribund Medway River. Once the home of an important British navy yard, Chatham has entered a lost, despairing postindustrial era. And maybe because of that despair, it seems to birth boys with a loud, frantic, reckless sound already echoing in their brains. It's the territorial imperative. They form groups with names like the Prisoners and the Daggermen, out of which his current bandmates in the Buff Medways emerged.
Childish has never had to look far for bandmates or ideas. Walking the streets, he points out where the dairy stood, where the last remaining factory building stands, and where he saw the "dealer boy" smack his "bird" (as described in perhaps his most belligerent song, "Shirts Off"). Here in the burning daytime, you can sense the very thing you hear in Billy's music: an unfocused anguish that hums like a power line in a heat wave. It expresses its full, menacing fury in the restless Chatham nights, when prostitutes prowl the New Road and unseen drunken yobs howl and shatter beer bottles in the dark lanes that wind down to the water. Childish was born in this bleak town and has lived and worked here almost all his life.
"It's a very rough place," he tells me. "Very uncultured. It's got worse [since he was a kid] , but it's always been rough."Later, back at home, he is sitting at his kitchen table talking happily about his tastes and distastes, his influences, and his hometown. There's an unforeseen Zen-like calmness in this yoga devotee that belies his outsize passions. He assumes a relaxed pose but betrays an occasional trace of tension by picking out on his guitar what I recognize to be the bluesy, repetitious notes of Thee Headcoats' ''A to Z of Your Heart." When the interview becomes tiresome, Childish's attention shifts to a spider building a web in the window. He marvels at the industrious creature: "That's the fastest spider I've ever seen. Running around like crazy out there." Kindred spirits. Many of his best records have been performed and mixed in two days.
"I do get bored," says Childish, "and that's why I like to do everything quick. I want to record the thing in a day because I don't want to be doing the thing next week. I'll paint a picture in an hour because I want to have me tea. I do what I'm doing, and then I do something else."
The Many Faces Of Billy
***
A BUFF MEDWAY is a breed of chicken, and Billy Childish is the cock of the walk. Even if you agree with him, even if he leans back in his chair and laughs heartily (his gold tooth glinting) when he makes his sometimes truculent proclamations, it can be jarring. "No one has ever done what we've done before,” he says, "and probably no one else can do it. And that's why some of the big boys are sort of jealous. You know. because we really do do what we do."
Some of the "big boys" from the music industry may be jealous, but many are Childish fans. They come sometimes from unexpected places. Seattle's grunge scene was a hotbed of Childish worship. Kurt Cobain's record collection was full of Childish. Mudhoney helped bring Childish onto the Sub Pop label for a spell. Eddie Vedder has made the pilgrimage to Chatham.
"There's an urgency in the vocals and the hands hitting the guitar,” says Vedder, "and you know it's real.” Vedder says that when he plays Childish's music for people, "they just lose their shit." To see Childish play live, he says, is "like seeing Buddy Holly. It's just perfect music to me.'' Coca-Cola pitchman Jack White wasn't "doing any press" when I was working on this story, and wouldn't comment on his relationship with Childish, who has played shows with the Hives and the White Stripes and appreciates their admiration. Childish says Jack White even invited him to go on the Letterman show with the White Stripes, but it never happened. Possibly White was put off by a confrontation onstage prior to a blues show in London.
"During my sound check,” says Childish, "he's trying to play along with me when I'm on a fifteen-amp and he's on a hundred-amp, and I told him not to do that.” And anyway, says Childish, these neo-garagistes have nothing to do with him, musically. "I can't listen to that stuff. They don't have a good sound. The Hives aren't into the sound; they're not into the music. Jack's half into the sound and the music, but then he wants to be a pop star as well, so you've got a big problem. You can't pull it both ways. Someone compared us to the White Stripes, and I said, 'They're heading to the stadium with all their might: We'll play the stadium if we have to. They want the fifteen yards between them and the audience, and the big PA. It's a different animal.”
Childish calls the White Stripes' Polish-flag look, which he has been told some see as charismatic, "one of the shabbiest gimmicks that's ever sold a group on God's earth, a fucking red T-shirt. And I've been told off for saying that, and I say, 'Look, it's no disrespect saying they are not charismatic. It's like saying cornflakes ain't roast beef.' It's not rude; I'm just not playing that game. I'm not getting into some sort of silly notion of an uncharismatic group being charismatic.''
Still, when he meets his better-known fans, he likes them personally, calls them "nice, polite boys." And he inevitably suggests they record one of his songs so that he can get some cash. He's said it to the Stripes, to Beck, to R.E.M. "Don't keep telling me how much you like me—just do one of my songs so I can get some money."
But something invariably gets in the way. "Yeah, well, it's usually me.” he says. "Because I'm too opinionated. Because I'm the real deal, and they don't want the real deal. Because the real deal's a pain in the ass. And the only time a real deal is recognized – is allowed to be a real deal – is when they're dead and contained. "I can't suck up to somebody.'' He's rolling now, humming like the power line. "I mean, I can be very polite to somebody, and I can get along, and I can do all sorts of things. Go on the David Letterman show or whatever it's called with Jack, no problem. But you know, we're using my amplifier, and we're choosing the songs, and we're not having this and we're not having that. Because it's got to be good." It's no wonder no one will exploit him.
"I'm the real deal," Childish says. "And the only time a real deal is recognized is when they're dead."
***
THIS REFUSENIK, borderline-Luddite ethos seems to have bolted itself inextricably to his soul, particularly as Childish has battled and then split with bandmates who wanted to move to more modern studios and adopt smoother, more marketable sounds, and as he's watched more and more good rock 'n' roll bands get lynched by fame and fortune.
Spend a few days with him and you realize that, like an unavoidable, rather spooky reminder of the verdict of fame and the perils of the ego, images of the gallows are everywhere in Childish's life. There they are, in the eyes of scarred characters in his paintings and woodcuts, on the covers of the funny, painfully honest, and occasionally downright filthy books he's written. There's even a small one tattooed on the guitarist's slender white left arm. But the noose is always empty, the executioner and his quarry always lurking just outside the visible.
Others may go to the gallows willingly, but Billy Childish is having none of it. If anything, he is the executioner, even occasionally recording under the name of a famous seventeenth-century executioner, Jack Ketch.
"The geezers in the '60s,” he says in his thick, working-class British accent, "they worked with what they had, and then, as soon as they could, they wandered off toward the plush wallpaper."
But what made that moment so ripe, so perfect that we should never leave it? "The gear was at its zenith, I suppose,” he says. "You could do really great recording on two tracks, four tracks. And it made the sound good and exciting and vibrant. The amplifiers at their best, the drum kits at their best. It's just a nice moment. They had it dumped in their lap, and then they just sold it down the Suwannee. Because people like to pretend that they're evolving.
"We can make it work from nothing says Childish. "Because we know that it's not us, it's the music, and all we care about is the sound and the feel. And we're not pretending that we care about it. We do. And you can't pretend with this stuff. You either do or you don't.”
Childish says that early British Invasion bands could make two, maybe three good records before commercial self-regard usurped the music and everything went to hell.
"The ego can't resist being stoked,” he tells me. "When the Stones become fans of themselves or it becomes 'Mick Jagger,' the thing's over."
So a band like the Beatles, which I might think of as the personification of progressiveness, Childish sees as the personification of rock's betrayal for fame and self-indulgence. For Billy, Sgt. Pepper, which some see as the Beatles' greatest achievement, is more an epigraph on a fancy tombstone. "It's still very good music for children,” he says. "It's just not rock 'n' roll.
"You watch The Beatles Anthology and you see there's just a very, very sad destruction going on. They start off as a good little tight rock 'n' roll group and then turn into these caricatures of themselves.”
Today's bands succumb even faster, says Childish: It's one good record – maybe – and the hangman's trapdoor bangs open. "They don't stay with the soul of the thing, because they're all worried about mortgages. And at some point, art has to not be about mortgages and selling Levi's jeans."
"We could do a bit more marketing. But then we'd have to deal with the problem of being successful."
* Billy Childish and Sexton Ming (in the Childish side project Major Dog and the Gissyoms), circa 1981.
***
ON THE MORNING after a London gig with the Buffs, Childish sits on the dusty floor of his house, cheerfully wrapping for the postman old buttons and T-shirts he's sold on eBay to make ends meet.
"We're doing eBay stuff because we've got no money. So I've dug out these badges, all of this ancient stuff that we've got lying around. We sell a few bits and bobs. We've gotta pay the bills.” He laughs.
"We could sort of do a little bit more of marketing what we do,'' he says, "but then we'd have to deal with the problem of being successful. Which would be harder than not having any money. So you've just got to choose which devil you want to work with.”
All this talk of money has him worried the interview will come off as one big "whinge.”
"I mean, we have it bloody easy, really, don't we?" he says. "We're not starving on the street. To not have certain things is probably easier than having things a lot of the time. That doesn't mean you try and stay exactly where you are.”
His ambivalence is palpable, fed by certain facts: He needs money to live, and rock 'n' roll is one way he makes money. But it is a precious, aboriginal sound; it must remain raw in every sense of the word. It must be protected. And it is perpetually in danger of being superseded by ego and stardom. What to do?
On a cheap cassette player, Childish listens to alternate cuts for a forthcoming record, invariably choosing the ones with the most off-key vocals. The songs are soulful, one or two of them swing, and as usual I'm struck by how, even as the band names and personnel change, the energy level remains remarkably buoyant, the sound still rooted in a few chords, echoing microphones, crackling amps, blasted Chatham.
"After you've managed to not be worried about impressing other people,'' he says, "then you can start trying not to impress yourself, and that's when you allow the thing to go through with the bad vocal on it-because the thing wants to be like that."
His latest solo release is half blues (recorded in his kitchen and sung with his wife) and half poetry. It isn't his first blues record, but it might be his most stripped-down and crude. It will not sell; it will not make him famous.
Meanwhile, perhaps as a reaction to the copycat harshness of some of his recent imitators, the latest Buff Medways record features Childish's warmest, most refined composition yet, in the emotionally complex, Jam-like title cut, "Medway Wheelers.”
The song, about Billy's mum's World War II-era cycling club, is charmingly sloppy and catchy. Set in that difficult year in England, 1944, its lyrics are culled from fragments of her adventures with the Wheelers, the kind of lines retained from stories told at long-ago Sunday dinners: stopping for tea in Clovelly, riding around North Wales, getting lost in fog, a rider killed in London when his wheels get caught in train rails. At the end, the song picks up steam. Childish sings over and over, above an increasingly intense rhythm, the haunting line They thought they'd never get there .... They thought they'd never get there ....
Literally, he's referring to a bike trip sixty years ago, perhaps figuratively to the war's end. But you have to wonder if somewhere deep down he isn't singing about his own reluctantly sought-after due.
Sometimes it seems as if Childish is afraid that anything beyond his too modest fame will mark the very death of his soul. You can hear it in his requiem for great bands corrupted young. You can almost smell his resolve in the gas fumes that hover inside the rickety old ambulance the Buffs take to gigs. If fame is the devil and rock 'n' roll is Billy's soul, then hardship is holy water. Obscurity is a crucifix.
"I always have said, I'm not an artist, I'm not a poet, I'm not a musician, I just happen to do things sometimes. Because otherwise, you're mad."