Wild Thing

By Oscar Mardell.

Ted Kessler, To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish (White Rabbit, 2024)

Who is Billy Childish, a.k.a. William Ivy Loveday, a.k.a. Steven John Hamper, a.k.a. Virgil, a.k.a. Horatio Hamper, a.k.a. Kurt Schwitters, a.k.a. William Charlie Hamper, a.k.a. Bill Hamper, a.k.a. Bill Hamper-Childish, a.k.a. Guy Hamper, a.k.a. Old 4 Legs, a.k.a. Dr Albirt Umber and Karl Lampenshwarts, a.k.a. Jack Ketch, a.k.a. Charles Hangman, a.k.a. Sir Quentin Gaydish, a.k.a. Rolling Slim, a.k.a. Danger Bill Henderson, a.k.a. Xerxes, a.k.a. William Claudius, a.k.a. Gus Claudius, a.k.a. Odysseus? What place or void in our cultural landscape is marked by this cacophony of signposts? Tedd Kessler’s To Ease My Troubled Mind begins with a straightforward answer, introducing Childish as ‘the UK’s most prolific creative force – a painter, poet, photographer, musician, memoirist and novelist who is in constant production of the goods’:

Billy Childish has released well over 150 albums with numerous different groups since his first with the Pop Rivets in 1979. He has published a dozen autobiographical novels and at least fifty collections of poetry, a couple of memoirs, along with several printed collections of his photography and art. He has produced thousands of paintings and his work is exhibited around the world.

Indeed, Childish’s output is so vast, and his back catalogue so deeply buried, that only he is familiar with its full extent; the rest of us have to make do with whatever fragments we can lay our hands on. Plus, the art, literature, and music scenes are all so thoroughly siloed nowadays that it isn’t uncommon for, say, admirers of his paintings to know nothing about his records, or for listeners of those records to care little, in turn, about the paintings (Postmodernism only ever paid lip service to the idea of effacing the High/Low divide: if the gallery and the street ever got too close, the one would lose too much cash, the other too much cool; historically, Childish has cared little for either). Hence, ‘Who is Billy Childish…?’ is immediately complicated by another question: ‘Whose Billy Childish?’

‘Are all of your secrets in your work?’ asks Kessler in an interview titled ‘Ten Minutes on the Phone with Billy Childish, March 2021’. Childish responds in the affirmative: ‘Most of me is available for inspection, yes’. On the one hand, this cannot be doubted. Childish’s work leaves no stone unturned, no aspect of his self unexamined – from the neglect and abuses which he suffered as a child, to the shame and failures which he experienced as an adult. On the other, his prolifigacy diminishes his work’s ability to give reliable testimony, to lend proper expression or adequate weight to his ‘secrets’. His output is so large, so single-handedly inducive of Museum Exhaustion Syndrome, that any one part of it feels less like a true confession, less like the ultimate or definitive revelation of some authentic self, and more like spit in the ocean, a meaningless drop in the bucket (a single instance of self-expression has the potential to possess integrity, but a multitude, as Sigmund Freud said of doubles, places ‘the subject…into doubt as to which his self is’). In addition, much of Childish’s oeuvre has the estranging quality of excessive repetition: his songs seldom feature more than three chords and his writing constantly returns to the same subjects and themes (‘My favourite criticism of what I do…’ he explained to Uncut in 2020, ‘is that I only do one thing and it’s all the same’). It altogether eschews Realism and repeats none of that movement’s pretensions to objectivity, preferring instead to flaunt its own constructedness: his records are riddled with hisses and crackles – that is, with the defects of the recording tech itself (he does not perform live anymore, precisely because modern PA systems have too few of these defects); his paintings, meanwhile, are impasto-thick with the excess physicality of the paint itself.  Plus, his work has an unapologetically palimpsestic or derivative quality, bearing too many traces of too many bygone movements: his woodcuts could be Kollwitz’s, his photomontages Höch’s, his poster and book-cover designs are Dadaist pastiches, his poetry reads like Bukowski’s, and his music often sounds like the Troggs or early Kinks (when the White Stripes’ Jack White accused him of plagiarism in 2006, Childish retorted in an open letter, ‘I always stay well within the music industry recommended guideline of never plagiarising more than 50% of my material). Hence, the difficulty with searching Childish’s work for signs of Childish is this: on the one hand, it is utterly saturated with those signs – Childish is all over everything, and in unreservedly personal detail; on the other, as Childish himself puts it to Kessler, ‘I don’t feel overly identified with what I do once I’ve put it out there’ – in fact, as Childish once put it to Local Authority, ‘I don’t really identify as Billy Childish’. 

When I tell my friends about Billy Childish, when I try to bring them to grips with the sheer enormity of his output, their question is always, ‘But is it any good?’ The assumption here is that quantity and quality exist in inverse proportion to one another, that an abundance in one is always accompanied by a scarcity in the other. Childish doesn’t adhere to this assumption: he is prolific and not bad (‘actually… I have a lot of quality control’, he reminded Stuart Jeffries in a 2011 interview for The Guardian). But he doesn’t exactly thwart it either: he is prolific, but he is not entirely good – at least, not in any straightforward sense. ‘You mustn’t call him a genius,’ Sanchia Lewis (Childish’s former lover and a wonderful artist in her own right) tells Kessler. Childish himself would concur. In a 2010 interview for the Tate’s ‘Sound and Vision Series’, he explains, ‘I’m interested in the elemental, not impressing others, and not impressing myself’. Graham Day (an accomplished musician and former bandmate) gives further clarification, telling Kessler: ‘Billy has got this thing about wanting things to be crap’. It is, I think, a characteristically British stance. As Owen Hatherley writes in Militant Modernism, ‘What still marks out British Art [by which, Hatherley explains in a footnote, ‘I am in no way referring to the gallery-bound games and third-hand poses of the 90’s ‘Young British Art’’] is essentially a certain crapness, a refusal of ease and slickness in favour of angularity and harshness’. And at the heart of that refusal is the Brechtian/Punk compulsion to dismantle the so-called ‘Fourth Wall’ between creator and crowd, art and life, authority and layman (I mean, genuinely dismantle, not just haughtily address a camera à la BBC Three and Amazon’sFleabag). As Childish put it in the open letter to White, ‘We’re aiming to close the fifteen feet between us and the audience’. Even today, it feels like a deeply transgressive gesture – think of the wrath which the breakdancer Raygun incurred when she succeeded in closing some of that gap at the Paris Olympics (‘the rage’ in Oscar Wilde’s words, ‘of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass’). And it is as one such gesture that we should read Childish’s latest – and perhaps most baffling – project, The William Loveday Intention’s ‘New and Improved Bob Dylan’. Clearly, the ‘Intention’ here is to re-folk or de-canonise Bob Dylan – to salvage Dylan the radiant amateur who was one with the people around him from Dylan the towering genius and Nobel laureate (in his manifesto for the Stuckist movement, of which he was a co-founder, Childish explains, ‘The Stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur (amare, Latin, to love)’). What makes the Dylan project so charming is the sense that, as the usual attack on modern art has it, ‘I could have done that’ or ‘my child could have done that’ (personally, I wish you and your child would do that instead of just drawing Pokémon or building Lego). Even for those of us who do not know Childish personally, his work possesses the sentimental value which we reserve exclusively for our own creations or for our kids’. He is not a genius; he is better, more valuable, precisely because he is worse. He is living proof of G.K. Chesterton’s maxim, ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly’. 

It’d be tempting to read Childish’s hyperproductivity, his one-man art-factory, as a hyperbolic satire of capitalist productivity. It would sound clever, perhaps, but Childish has long been suspicious of cleverness, even writing in the Stuckist manifesto that ‘if it is the conceptualist’s wish to always be clever, then it is the Stuckist’s duty to always be wrong.’ Plus, it would reek of liberal elitism, whereas ‘One of [Childish’s] big hatreds…,’ Kessler learns from Kyra De Coninck (another of Childish’s former lovers, now a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Kent) is ‘left-wing intelligentsia, Guardian readers’ (I worry that I might have become one of them, though I still feel most at home among the anarchist factions of the booboisie; even this, however, would still be too elitist a position for Childish, who in 1979 fixed The Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy In The UK’ with The Pop Rivets’ ‘Fun In The U.K.’). This, it seems, is partly why De Coninck fell for Childish in the first place. ‘My family are very political,’ she explains to Kessler:

my grandparents were communists…it was about your role in society, about making it a better place. I think for me to go off and live with Billy, it was the furthest away from that, because everything was about him, everything was about the self. There was a disillusionment with wanting to change the world. I think that’s what really attracted me about punk, and that’s what really attracted me about Billy.

De Coninck’s diagnosis is spot on. As Simon Critchley (via the young Johnny Rotten) phrases it in conversation with Andrew Gallix for Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night: ‘1977 was the inversion of the emancipatory drive of 1968… we were not going to change the world and the world was rubbish anyway, just another council tenancy’. But if this disillusionment is what endeared Childish to Punk (and DeConinck to Childish), it is also what landed him in hot water at the Vortex Club with an ex-public-schooler going by the name of Joe Strummer. As Childish and Steve Simmons, an old friend from school, tell Kessler: 

BILLY: [The Clash] were telling off our friend Gabriel. Gabriel was a black guy wearing a Nazi armband. They told him he had to take it off, we told them to leave him alone. 

STEVE: He had a swastika on his arm. I mean, the Sex Pistols had done it, and Siouxsie Sioux. He was just a kid, he’d gone along with the look like punks do… We’re just standing in the Vortex chatting, and Joe Strummer comes up, spitting thunder, ‘What are you fucking wearing that for, my fucking grandad was persecuted by the Nazis!’ We’re saying nothing, he’s going on and on at him, but he went on about ten seconds too long. So we went, ‘Fuck off, leave him alone!’

Nor has Childish himself been above using such imagery. In July 2009, he and Steve Lowe of L-13 Light Industrial Workshop (a ‘Private Ladies & Gentlemen’s Club for Art, Leisure & the Disruptive Betterment of Culture’) hosted a National Art Hate Week. The accompanying exhibition – at Cork Street Gallery in Mayfair – included, as Lowe recalls to Kessler,  

a ‘Jews Against Art’ poster featuring a huge swastika with the Star of David… And we also did the Artschwitz poster. Adam [Wood] and I had done a campaign for the mayor of London, where we said, “Bring back the smokestack.” With this, we turned the Tate back into a power station, powered by burning art. So that got adopted into Art Hate, and then it appeared on a poster behind the Auschwitz-style gates that Billy had come up with: Art Brings Freedom. Then Adam came up with the title Artschwitz and we pissed ourselves laughing about it, but very nervously.

Lowe explains, ‘We’re from that generation who thought it was our job to go out and really push people’s buttons.’ But has a line been crossed here? Unfettered capitalism has landed us with a society in desperate need of being made into a better place (virtually every council tenancy has been sold off, for starters), a world in urgent want of being changed. But is Childish’s egotism so rabid, his cynicism so extreme, as to render his work #irrelevant?

Of course, Childish’s egotism has – or at least has developed – limits. Of the 20 x 8 foot mural of his face that has gone up in Rochester, for example, he tells Kessler, ‘It’s odd some people imagine I had something to do with it. I’m not that much of a maniac!’ Nor, of course, is Childish even remotely right-wing. Earlier this year, he made a beautiful poster depicting Nigel Farage accompanied by the text ‘SEND THE CUNT TO RWANDA’ (it came with a ‘trigger warning’: ‘This “artwork” contains foul political personalities that some people will find revolting… All proceeds go to buy a one way ticket to Rwanda for Mr Farage (sorry Rwanda)’). Last year, he did a similar one depicting Boris Johnson and the text ‘YOU LYING SPINELESS CUNT’. Plus, the swastikas sported by Siouxise, the Pistols, and the scene around them were more politically complex than is often acknowledged. As Mark Fisher put it in a K-Punk blog post entitled ‘Fear and misery in the third reich ‘n’ roll’:

Punk’s very 1970s, very British fixation on Nazism posed ethical questions so troubling they could barely be articulated explicitly: what were the limits of liberal tolerance? Could Britain be so sure it had differentiated itself from Nazism (a particularly pressing issue at a time that the NF was gathering an unprecedented degree of support)? And, most unsettling of all, what is it that separates Nazi Evil from heroic Good?

In the ‘Ten Minutes’ interview, Childish himself insists, ‘I’m not very political’. Of course, the left-wing intelligentsia would be quick to point out that, as the Australian Labor MP Joan Kirner once expressed it, ‘There is no such thing as being non-political’: that apoliticism is itself an inherently political position, a tacit endorsement of a status quo which is by definition a political construct. This, however, would miss (or maybe just paraphrase) the point. Childish’s resentment for the ‘left-wing intelligentsia’ has less to do with politics as such and more to do with his disdain for what in his autobiographical novel My Fault he describes as ‘a world filled with experts’. And at the heart of this disdain is, again, the Brechtian/Punk compulsion to dismantle the ‘Fourth Wall’, to close ‘the fifteen feet between us and the audience’. For Childish, the problem with the left-wing intelligentsia is that it is still too fond of those fifteen feet – that it is insufficiently democratic, in other words,  too right-wing (that, or that it adheres too strictly to Classical Marxism’s exclusively materialist worldview: unusually for someone reared on Punk, Childish retains a decidedly spiritual bent). 

If it came to it, the left-wing intelligentsia would probably go to town on Childish. First, it would point out that the path of eccentricity has only been available to him because of the advantages that he wields by virtue of being white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, male, and (albeit only recently) financially successful. As Shola von Reinhold puts it in Lote: 

eccentricity is tethered to the idea of a rarefied and semi-fragile aristocracy. For it to work, unconventional elements require a foil of idealised social stability, hence why the history of eccentrics is even more populated by the white, privileged, and wealthy than other histories.

Perhaps for this reason, Childish (who, in spite of his good grades, was kept in the remedial class at school on account of his ‘eccentric behaviour’) often seems intent on downplaying the extent of his eccentricity from Kessler, or in depicting it as a misleading caricature that has been projected onto him (this, incidentally, is not unprecedented: in 2014 Childish told The Guardian, ‘I consider my work mainstream’). Across the interviews and excerpts contained in To Ease My Troubled Mind, Childish admits to having encountered a flying saucer, the Beast of Blue Bell Hill, a ghost, his dead cat walking, a dog-sized ant, a ‘real live goblin’, as well as ‘flesh and blood demons’. He appears to believe in the Sasquatch, and that  Jimi Hendrix was murdered. He is reluctant, however, to discuss these topics at length, explaining:

People want you to be weird. They want you to be mysterious and eccentric. I’ve read things about me where I’m portrayed as eccentric when in fact I’ve been very level and sane with them.

Accordingly, the picture that emerges from To Ease My Troubled Mind is not one of normality securing its position by reaching down from its pedestal, of the centre ‘slumming it’ out at the margin. Nor is it (as in many mischaracterisations of Childish) one of a jealous outsider railing at the gates of the establishment, desperate to be let in. It is much less scandalous, much less dramatic – boring, even (Punk, it should be noted, shared Heidegger’s fascination with ‘profound boredom’ and Wilde’s with ‘ennui, that terrible tædium vitæ’). It is simply a picture of someone doing their own thing and trying their best to keep it from being defined or assessed from without. As Childish’s Transformational Breath® therapist Rachel Hudson describes it to Kessler (in, I think, appropriately trite terms): ‘I enjoy the element of him who chooses to live life on his own terms. I enjoy that he controls his narrative.’

The other thing that the left-wing intelligentsia would doubtless point out is that Childish appears to have – or, at least, to have had – a disturbingly chauvinistic streak. He maintained a multinational harem comprised of women across Britain, Europe, America, and Japan. Whilst the two were lovers, he gave Tracey Emin gonorrhoea (which he had contracted from a sex worker in Hamburg), wrote and published a whole bunch of misogynistic vitriol about her (which he subsequently had her pedal to bookshops), and secretly married his ex-girlfriend. Particularly creepy, to my mind at least, is when Childish attempts to convey the impression which Emin first made on him by informing Kessler of her measurements: ‘36-18-36’. De Coninck adds to the picture, explaining, ‘He used to write a lot to Page 3 girls: he was a member of the Linda Lusardi fan club and the Suzanne Mizzi fan club! He used to send them his poetry books.’ To his credit, Kessler doesn’t shy away from discussing this streak, writing:

It is hard for people who love the work of Billy Childish – who think his mind is a precise tool for making sense of the human condition, who laugh loudly at his cutting jokes, his daring turns of phrase, and who admire his well-considered sense of place and humility, his powerful spirituality – to think too deeply, or even at all about the way he behaved towards the women who loved him, and who he supposedly loved, for twenty-odd years of his adult life, between 1980 and the early part of the twenty-first century…

And Emin even tries to defend Childish, telling Kessler:

It was the beginning of the eighties, it was still the Dark Ages. It wasn’t like now, where people have a lot more conviction about their moral compass and what’s politically correct. There was none of that stuff then…

I don’t know. But all I can say is that I’m sure that for Billy, looking back on that now, he wouldn’t be proud about hurting people like that. 

More interesting, however, than this retroactive attempt to justify Childish’s misdemeanours, is how Childish himself attempted to justify them at the time. As Emin puts it: 

Billy would say, ‘But I’ve told you the truth.’ He’d sleep with someone on tour. He’d come back, tell me and go, ‘Well, I told you the truth.’ Like the truth made up for what he did wrong. 

Of course, the truth alone does not make up for anything. Confession doesn’t equal acquittal, and there is something deeply puerile about supposing otherwise (although, to accuse Childish of being, or of having been, well, childish, would only be to state the obvious, to bring against him a criticism which he already brings against himself. That, and it might actually get to the heart of what attracted him to Punk and what made him so good at it. As Gallix writes in ‘The Boy Looked At Eurydice’: ‘All we can say for sure is that, more than any other subculture before or since, Punk was afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome… Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism – ‘To be premature is to be perfect’ – had found its ideal embodiment’. But the ethical blunder – grave as it might be – offers clues, I think, to Childish’s aesthetic success (if ‘success’ is even the right word here: ‘Your ambition and success,’ he decries in ‘You Make Me Die’, ‘are what I detest’). 

‘Truth’ is a recurring theme throughout To Ease My Troubled Mind. In the ‘Ten Minutes’ interview, Childish warns Kessler, ‘I’m really intense. I like truth, and things like that.’ Sharing his version of his relationship with Emin, he explains, ‘I never lied to Tracey. I believe in truth more than anyone’. Shortly afterwards, he proffers the following auto-analysis:

So many people live in this weird fantasy world where things aren’t said and didn’t happen and are not true. I’m happy for them to all do that, but I ain’t doing it. For me, everything is the truth and the integrity of something, whether it be good or bad. What happened happened, and you can’t lie about it, you can’t change it. It is really dangerous and unsafe for me not to know what is happening. In my family, no one said what was really going on: that’s caused me to require everything to be clearly designated, because otherwise it’s really dangerous. That might be the psychological reasoning behind my crazy output and my crazy requirement for facts and truth. 

But what does Childish mean by ‘truth’ here? Famously, Stuckism took its name from Emin’s insistence that Childish’s art was ‘Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’, and the opening words of the movement’s manifesto declare, ‘Stuckism is the quest for authenticity’. Hence, there is a strong possibility that Childish’s searing honesty, his uninhibited ‘truth’, like Stuckism’s ‘authenticity’, might simply be a reactionary one: a stance against the glibness, posturing, and irony of Postmodernism in general and Emin in particular. But Childish left the Stuckists, as he puts it in his poem ‘the every when’: ‘imeadiatly… upon seeing/ their 1st shit/ exhibition’. Was it that their devotion to ‘authenticity’ somehow left little room for the ‘truth’? How could that even be the case? Thinking back on his own time as a Punk, Critchley explains: 

the worst thing one could be was a poser. Everyone feared that. But I don’t think punk was about authenticity. It was about exposing the layers and layers of inauthenticity that make art possible. That was the Warholian element in punk. But – and this is important to me – punk was about an experience of truth, of felt, heard truth that was made possible through inauthenticity, mediation and fakery. 

A similar dynamic seems to play out through Childish’s work. On one hand, its driving impetus appears to be an absolute and dogged aversion to (perhaps even a fear of being accused of) poserism or dishonesty – an uncompromising commitment to articulating this ‘experience of truth, of felt, heard truth,’ unpolished and unadulterated. On the other, there is, I think, a calculated inauthenticity in Childish’s work, which combines the factory’s scale of production, the dandy’s taste for artifice, and the forger’s indifference to copying and plagiarism. He is the obverse, in this respect, of David Bowie, who was Emin’s favourite, incidentally, and whose ‘truth’, as Critchley writes in Bowie, ‘is inauthentic, completely self-conscious, and utterly constructed. But it is still right…or it has the quality of feeling right’. Childish’s ‘truth’, by contrast, is fiercely authentic, unselfconscious to the point of naivety, and blood raw. And yet, in spite of all this, it is ultimately hollow: two-a-penny, phoney, and unoriginal; ‘pretty vacant’ – or, as the Stuckist manifesto put it – ‘wrong’. Childish’s ‘truth’ is that which is so dense that it implodes on itself and becomes indistinguishable from meaninglessness. ‘i believe in god,’ he explains to Kessler in one email, ‘which makes me the same as someone who doesnt believe in god’. 

Thank God that Kessler did not attempt to write a definitive biography. Compiling essays, excerpts, emails, and interviews, alongside Kessler’s own research and reflections, this ‘Authorised Unauthorised History’ – suggested by Childish, but unlikely to be read by him – succeeds in tracing the cracks and contradictions of its subject where a straightforward ‘life story’ never could.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Oscar Mardell is a teacher and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. He is the author of Delirious New Lynn, forthcoming from 5ever Books.