FRI., JULY 24, 2009
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eMusic Q&A: Billy Childish
by Andrew Perry
He has released more than 100 albums in over 30 years of indefatigable garage-rocking, so the average listener may find it a little daunting, trying to break into the lo-fi world of Billy Childish.
This year, in advance of his imminent 50th birthday, a new 51-track sampler called Archive from 1959: The Billy Childish Story has been compiled, providing entrée for the curious. For the first time ever, trashy early recordings by his New Wave-era combo, the Pop Rivets, can be heard alongside those by subsequent Childish groups such as the Milkshakes, Thee Headcoats, the Buff Medways as well as his latest trio, who operate under the proud banner Wild Billy Childish & the Musicians of the British Empire.
Raised — and still resident — in Chatham, Kent, Childish has also been prolific as a painter, a poet and author, earning plaudits in each field. As a recording artiste of relentless inspiration, he has been a hero to numerous alt-musicians over the years, including Beck, Kurt Cobain, Jack White, right through to Andrew Weatherall, the techno producer, who worships Billy's uncompromised vision.
Despite Childish's undeviating and often outspoken manner, he is every bit as charming as the owner of a pre-War handlebar moustache ought to be.
Did someone put Archive from 1959 together for you? As such a prolific musician, you're surely not the kind who regularly looks back over their oeuvre.
That's true, I don't. I asked Ian at Cherry Red to put a rough collection together, then I'd go through it and see what I thought. That way, I'd have somewhere to start. I think Ian listened to everything, whereas I did only a couple of things. I don't remember stuff we've done until I hear it, because often, I write a song, we go down to record it somewhere, I play the song once to the other people, then we record it, and we never play it or hear it ever again — things like "It Ain't Mine," which is on there. I just had a vague recollection of liking the lyrics.
People do have a preconception of you as bashing away at the same old three chords, in low fidelity, but the compilation shows a wide range of audio quality, musical style and mood.
I think so. A lot of the things I read about me say, "They're all the same song, they're all ‘Louie Louie' and ‘You Really Got Me', and that's that." Well, yeah, maybe there's a little bit of truth in that, but it's true for all rock & roll music!
There's no harking back to old music, with me. I use this sound because it's the best one. They're all on the shelf — the idea of having them all is you can then use the one that sounds exciting to you. To me, that's the live, slightly care-free approach to recording. You don't have to reconstitute the orange juice. It's the real thing, it's squeezed oranges. We're too intelligent to waste our time in the studio. The reason most music sounds like it took six months to shit out, is because it has. Pop music doesn't need that much gestation period.
But [‘Archive from 1959'] is still quite diverse, even though we left off some of the poetry, nursery-rhyme and more classical-sounding stuff. We've used a digital 16-track studio, and a cassette player. Some of the songs are quite complex, while some have got quite a few chords in 'em! Some are quite original sounding, some quite derivative — again, like most rock & roll."
Some songs, like "I'm Hurting," are bilious tirades at your abusive father, while "Headcoat Lane" is a light-hearted celebration of the rustic, Sherlock Holmes-associated hat, the deerstalker!
There is lot of humour in what we do. Some of it's straightforward and aggressive, some quite tender. Then there are funny ballads, and the Flemmish song. I think it's quite broad, but apparently some people prefer to call it narrow. We always used to get reviews in the Milkshakes that seemed to think we must be trying to sound like Wham!, but didn't quite know how to manage it.
You grew up listening to 1960's rock, as it came out. You were 16 when punk happened. Did it have a big impact on you?
In 1975, all the other blokes at school were into David Bowie, Genesis and those things. I was listening to The Beatles at Hollywood Bowl, which was released that year, trying to get some idea of what is exciting in music. Then I saw The Jam and The Damned and all that, and I thought, Oh great, here we are. It wasn't grandma music, it wasn't disco music, and it wasn't David Bowie. It was all the things it wasn't. It wasn't a bunch of po-faced prats! Hahaha! I became disgusted with it, though, because it turned into New Romanticism so quickly.
Was your first band, The Pop Rivets, all about carrying the torch for punk at a time when Duran Duran ruled the airwaves?
We played our first gig in '77, so it wasn't like that then. We weren't really referring to ourselves as a punk rock group — although we were one. We were listening to lots of rock & roll — Little Richard and that — but we thought we were more like mod music. We used to dress mod, because we thought it was funny. But then there was a mod revival, so we had to stop.
Is that something that drives you — going against the grain?
It's for fun, basically, and it isn't fun if it's going along with fashion. It's got to have vim and vigour, and things that are sanctioned don't, because they are being sanctioned to nurtur… No, to n… — what is it when you cut a thing's balls off? Neuter? That's what sanctioning is. To take the life out of it, emasculate it. That chap who died last week, Michael Jackson, yeah, he was like the emasculated James Brown. And that's meant to be some kind of victory!
You only started to play the guitar in your second band, The Milkshakes. Did your dyslexia make that difficult?
No, I didn't play guitar at first. I'm not very good at patterns, and I think dyslexia has a lot to do with that. Playing guitar was difficult for me, as was memorizing lyrics. Some people think I'm a brilliant guitarist, though, and that I do what I do really well. Some guitarists are envious of the oddness of the way I do it, because I'm a beginner all the time.
Do you think it's the tension of your straining against the limitation of your dyslexia that kind of makes your music work?
I don't know, but I do play the guitar harder than anybody I know. The most strings I've broken in one hit is four. I can hit the strings off the bridge of virtually anyone's guitar, just playing regularly. I put it out of tune almost immediately. Which means I can very rarely borrow other people's guitars. I have to change strings every single show. I'm not strong or anything, I've just got a slightly aggressive guitar style.
The Milkshakes became renowned as much for churning out records, as their actual content. Were you being wilfully uncommercial?
Somebody once told us we were recording too much, and it was commercial suicide. At that time, we had four releases ready, but after this bloke said that we thought, "Well, let's do this properly and release them all on one day!"
We were nice kids, but we were really into excessive drinking, and we were really rude to the audience. We'd tune up as long as we wanted to, and played what we wanted. If they voiced any opinion, we'd tell them to take their nose out of band affairs. We had to stop those psychobilly people from coming to see us. We didn't like people pushing and shoving and stopping girls dancing. I thought whole point of being in a group was to have girls dance.
Was there a conscious change in the music, when each band started?
The change from the Pop Rivets, where I was just a singer, to the Milkshakes, was that I learned to play guitar. That was a four-piece, then with Thee Mighty Caesars we hit upon the idea of doing a three-piece, which is a more exposed and difficult format to play in — and I think, the best. So we carried that on with Thee Headcoats, though we sometimes had the Headcoatees [female backing singers, aka the band's girlfriends] with us as well. Thee Headcoats were initially more R&B, then turned bit more punk.
Thee Headcoats suddenly became very hip in America, thanks to the patronage of Mudhoney and Nirvana. Did you welcome that?
I'm easily flattered by pop stars liking us. I'm just always disappointed that they don't cover our songs so we can make some money from it. Then I'd be sitting on — what? — a gold-encrusted chaise longe [sic].
People assume that you're against making money from music. Is that not the case?
I don't want the celebrity, because I don't like being other people's property. Money would be fine for me, but I'm one of these people who won't do anything to get it. I do some things to get it, but not anything. Other people, maybe they'll swallow more than I would. With me, it gives me the heebee-geebees.
Is that what happened with Jack White? He'd taken you under his wing when The White Stripes were on the up, but then you fell out very publicly, apparently because of your unwillingness to backslap in the media.
I did an interview for GQ, about me, and they asked Jack what he thought about my music. He said he'd never really heard it, and didn't really want to talk to them about it. They were, I think, a bit pissed off with him for saying that, like he was taking the mick. Independently, they'd asked me what I thought about The White Stripes. I said, Well, they don't strike me as charismatic, and I don't think the dressing up's much good, and it's not my type of music. So they went for him, and used my stuff selectively to go for him.
Then Jack wrote a really nasty thing about me on the internet, which he quickly removed. I e-mailed him, and said, "Sorry if I upset you, it's just not my cup of tea, the music." I never heard anything back from him until I got a phone message from him the other week, being very apologetic and friendly. I wanted to respond and say no problem, no hard feelings, but I haven't got his phone number or his e-mail anymore, so I couldn't.
You are almost unbearably honest sometimes. Don't you think other people might find that a bit hard to cope with sometimes?
I told Mudhoney they're a load of long-haired music that sounds like Status Quo. They don't mind. They just thought, that's what Billy's like. It wasn't in the contract that I should like what they do. But some of these groups, it's slightly like you're meant to like 'em back. Graham Coxon — he knows I don't like Blur. I think it's girls' music.
That's a good thing, surely!
No, I mean, they play like a bunch of girls, hahaha! It's too near disco for me.
In The Musicians Of the British Empire, your lyrics have quite a sharp, polemical edge.
I find it really weird that people don't notice what a genius lyricist I am. I'm a bit baffled, really. "Cool Britannia, Jesus saves/Rupert Murdoch rules the waves/Richard Branson doesn't shave/Joe Strummer's moulding in his grave" I think that's pretty much on the button. I deserve a medal.
In your First World War uniform, you're perfectly attired to be decorated.
Yeah, I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go. That "Snack Crack" song we did, that's two years ago — "manufactured pop, we're building all the time, mediocrity isn't such a crime, here's a little sweetie to rot your perfect teeth, here's instant credit to help you have belief, the ice cap's melting but the weather's looking fine" — it's all these current things.
People are always amazed that you've never sold out. Are you financially secure?
Not really. I sold a lot of paintings a couple of years ago, but the trouble was I then had to pay back all the dole money I'd had over the preceding 15 years, like tax! My royalty statements are in the hundreds of pounds for a quarter. I don't understand how that works. I should've thought I've worked hard enough to have a modest income from music. If some people had enough sense to use our stuff in their stupid films, we'd be alright.
How will you celebrate your 50th birthday in December?
Julie, my wife [and bassist in the MBE's], was gonna take me to St. Petersburg. It's her birthday at the same time, and I really love Dostoyevsky and Russian writing. But now we're celebrating by having a baby. She's due on 18th December. It all seems to be on course. We're having a little girl.
Well, congratulations to you both. But please keep on rocking for us!
Ha! I been trying to stop since the Caesars. I've been saying, I can't keep doing this, but I just keep going.
This year, in advance of his imminent 50th birthday, a new 51-track sampler called Archive from 1959: The Billy Childish Story has been compiled, providing entrée for the curious. For the first time ever, trashy early recordings by his New Wave-era combo, the Pop Rivets, can be heard alongside those by subsequent Childish groups such as the Milkshakes, Thee Headcoats, the Buff Medways as well as his latest trio, who operate under the proud banner Wild Billy Childish & the Musicians of the British Empire.
Raised — and still resident — in Chatham, Kent, Childish has also been prolific as a painter, a poet and author, earning plaudits in each field. As a recording artiste of relentless inspiration, he has been a hero to numerous alt-musicians over the years, including Beck, Kurt Cobain, Jack White, right through to Andrew Weatherall, the techno producer, who worships Billy's uncompromised vision.
Despite Childish's undeviating and often outspoken manner, he is every bit as charming as the owner of a pre-War handlebar moustache ought to be.
Did someone put Archive from 1959 together for you? As such a prolific musician, you're surely not the kind who regularly looks back over their oeuvre.
That's true, I don't. I asked Ian at Cherry Red to put a rough collection together, then I'd go through it and see what I thought. That way, I'd have somewhere to start. I think Ian listened to everything, whereas I did only a couple of things. I don't remember stuff we've done until I hear it, because often, I write a song, we go down to record it somewhere, I play the song once to the other people, then we record it, and we never play it or hear it ever again — things like "It Ain't Mine," which is on there. I just had a vague recollection of liking the lyrics.
People do have a preconception of you as bashing away at the same old three chords, in low fidelity, but the compilation shows a wide range of audio quality, musical style and mood.
I think so. A lot of the things I read about me say, "They're all the same song, they're all ‘Louie Louie' and ‘You Really Got Me', and that's that." Well, yeah, maybe there's a little bit of truth in that, but it's true for all rock & roll music!
There's no harking back to old music, with me. I use this sound because it's the best one. They're all on the shelf — the idea of having them all is you can then use the one that sounds exciting to you. To me, that's the live, slightly care-free approach to recording. You don't have to reconstitute the orange juice. It's the real thing, it's squeezed oranges. We're too intelligent to waste our time in the studio. The reason most music sounds like it took six months to shit out, is because it has. Pop music doesn't need that much gestation period.
But [‘Archive from 1959'] is still quite diverse, even though we left off some of the poetry, nursery-rhyme and more classical-sounding stuff. We've used a digital 16-track studio, and a cassette player. Some of the songs are quite complex, while some have got quite a few chords in 'em! Some are quite original sounding, some quite derivative — again, like most rock & roll."
Some songs, like "I'm Hurting," are bilious tirades at your abusive father, while "Headcoat Lane" is a light-hearted celebration of the rustic, Sherlock Holmes-associated hat, the deerstalker!
There is lot of humour in what we do. Some of it's straightforward and aggressive, some quite tender. Then there are funny ballads, and the Flemmish song. I think it's quite broad, but apparently some people prefer to call it narrow. We always used to get reviews in the Milkshakes that seemed to think we must be trying to sound like Wham!, but didn't quite know how to manage it.
You grew up listening to 1960's rock, as it came out. You were 16 when punk happened. Did it have a big impact on you?
In 1975, all the other blokes at school were into David Bowie, Genesis and those things. I was listening to The Beatles at Hollywood Bowl, which was released that year, trying to get some idea of what is exciting in music. Then I saw The Jam and The Damned and all that, and I thought, Oh great, here we are. It wasn't grandma music, it wasn't disco music, and it wasn't David Bowie. It was all the things it wasn't. It wasn't a bunch of po-faced prats! Hahaha! I became disgusted with it, though, because it turned into New Romanticism so quickly.
Was your first band, The Pop Rivets, all about carrying the torch for punk at a time when Duran Duran ruled the airwaves?
We played our first gig in '77, so it wasn't like that then. We weren't really referring to ourselves as a punk rock group — although we were one. We were listening to lots of rock & roll — Little Richard and that — but we thought we were more like mod music. We used to dress mod, because we thought it was funny. But then there was a mod revival, so we had to stop.
Is that something that drives you — going against the grain?
It's for fun, basically, and it isn't fun if it's going along with fashion. It's got to have vim and vigour, and things that are sanctioned don't, because they are being sanctioned to nurtur… No, to n… — what is it when you cut a thing's balls off? Neuter? That's what sanctioning is. To take the life out of it, emasculate it. That chap who died last week, Michael Jackson, yeah, he was like the emasculated James Brown. And that's meant to be some kind of victory!
You only started to play the guitar in your second band, The Milkshakes. Did your dyslexia make that difficult?
No, I didn't play guitar at first. I'm not very good at patterns, and I think dyslexia has a lot to do with that. Playing guitar was difficult for me, as was memorizing lyrics. Some people think I'm a brilliant guitarist, though, and that I do what I do really well. Some guitarists are envious of the oddness of the way I do it, because I'm a beginner all the time.
Do you think it's the tension of your straining against the limitation of your dyslexia that kind of makes your music work?
I don't know, but I do play the guitar harder than anybody I know. The most strings I've broken in one hit is four. I can hit the strings off the bridge of virtually anyone's guitar, just playing regularly. I put it out of tune almost immediately. Which means I can very rarely borrow other people's guitars. I have to change strings every single show. I'm not strong or anything, I've just got a slightly aggressive guitar style.
The Milkshakes became renowned as much for churning out records, as their actual content. Were you being wilfully uncommercial?
Somebody once told us we were recording too much, and it was commercial suicide. At that time, we had four releases ready, but after this bloke said that we thought, "Well, let's do this properly and release them all on one day!"
We were nice kids, but we were really into excessive drinking, and we were really rude to the audience. We'd tune up as long as we wanted to, and played what we wanted. If they voiced any opinion, we'd tell them to take their nose out of band affairs. We had to stop those psychobilly people from coming to see us. We didn't like people pushing and shoving and stopping girls dancing. I thought whole point of being in a group was to have girls dance.
Was there a conscious change in the music, when each band started?
The change from the Pop Rivets, where I was just a singer, to the Milkshakes, was that I learned to play guitar. That was a four-piece, then with Thee Mighty Caesars we hit upon the idea of doing a three-piece, which is a more exposed and difficult format to play in — and I think, the best. So we carried that on with Thee Headcoats, though we sometimes had the Headcoatees [female backing singers, aka the band's girlfriends] with us as well. Thee Headcoats were initially more R&B, then turned bit more punk.
Thee Headcoats suddenly became very hip in America, thanks to the patronage of Mudhoney and Nirvana. Did you welcome that?
I'm easily flattered by pop stars liking us. I'm just always disappointed that they don't cover our songs so we can make some money from it. Then I'd be sitting on — what? — a gold-encrusted chaise longe [sic].
People assume that you're against making money from music. Is that not the case?
I don't want the celebrity, because I don't like being other people's property. Money would be fine for me, but I'm one of these people who won't do anything to get it. I do some things to get it, but not anything. Other people, maybe they'll swallow more than I would. With me, it gives me the heebee-geebees.
Is that what happened with Jack White? He'd taken you under his wing when The White Stripes were on the up, but then you fell out very publicly, apparently because of your unwillingness to backslap in the media.
I did an interview for GQ, about me, and they asked Jack what he thought about my music. He said he'd never really heard it, and didn't really want to talk to them about it. They were, I think, a bit pissed off with him for saying that, like he was taking the mick. Independently, they'd asked me what I thought about The White Stripes. I said, Well, they don't strike me as charismatic, and I don't think the dressing up's much good, and it's not my type of music. So they went for him, and used my stuff selectively to go for him.
Then Jack wrote a really nasty thing about me on the internet, which he quickly removed. I e-mailed him, and said, "Sorry if I upset you, it's just not my cup of tea, the music." I never heard anything back from him until I got a phone message from him the other week, being very apologetic and friendly. I wanted to respond and say no problem, no hard feelings, but I haven't got his phone number or his e-mail anymore, so I couldn't.
You are almost unbearably honest sometimes. Don't you think other people might find that a bit hard to cope with sometimes?
I told Mudhoney they're a load of long-haired music that sounds like Status Quo. They don't mind. They just thought, that's what Billy's like. It wasn't in the contract that I should like what they do. But some of these groups, it's slightly like you're meant to like 'em back. Graham Coxon — he knows I don't like Blur. I think it's girls' music.
That's a good thing, surely!
No, I mean, they play like a bunch of girls, hahaha! It's too near disco for me.
In The Musicians Of the British Empire, your lyrics have quite a sharp, polemical edge.
I find it really weird that people don't notice what a genius lyricist I am. I'm a bit baffled, really. "Cool Britannia, Jesus saves/Rupert Murdoch rules the waves/Richard Branson doesn't shave/Joe Strummer's moulding in his grave" I think that's pretty much on the button. I deserve a medal.
In your First World War uniform, you're perfectly attired to be decorated.
Yeah, I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go. That "Snack Crack" song we did, that's two years ago — "manufactured pop, we're building all the time, mediocrity isn't such a crime, here's a little sweetie to rot your perfect teeth, here's instant credit to help you have belief, the ice cap's melting but the weather's looking fine" — it's all these current things.
People are always amazed that you've never sold out. Are you financially secure?
Not really. I sold a lot of paintings a couple of years ago, but the trouble was I then had to pay back all the dole money I'd had over the preceding 15 years, like tax! My royalty statements are in the hundreds of pounds for a quarter. I don't understand how that works. I should've thought I've worked hard enough to have a modest income from music. If some people had enough sense to use our stuff in their stupid films, we'd be alright.
How will you celebrate your 50th birthday in December?
Julie, my wife [and bassist in the MBE's], was gonna take me to St. Petersburg. It's her birthday at the same time, and I really love Dostoyevsky and Russian writing. But now we're celebrating by having a baby. She's due on 18th December. It all seems to be on course. We're having a little girl.
Well, congratulations to you both. But please keep on rocking for us!
Ha! I been trying to stop since the Caesars. I've been saying, I can't keep doing this, but I just keep going.
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