Billy Childish Biography [2]

In the past 20 or so years Childish has recorded some 80 albums of his own music; he has published 30-odd volumes of poetry, written two novels (with a further two in progress) and executed more than 2,000 paintings. The stakhanovite nature of this productivity is staggering enough in itself. But what makes it all the more intriguing is the subject matter of all these works. You might call it ‘The Saga of Billy Childish.’

This is a strange and terrible tale. It tells of his damaged upbringing; his relationship with his violent, alcoholic and suicidal father; his treatment at the hands of the family ‘friend’ who sexually abused him when he was nine years old; his fraught encounters with alcohol and his chaotic love affairs - not least his relationship with Emin. And if it has a happy ending, that is because Childish has written, painted and performed it himself.

My first meeting with Billy Childish occurred on the pavement outside a pub in north London. Childish and his sometime group, Thee Headcoats, were playing there that evening; they had driven up from Chatham in Kent in a battered Telecom van, and were humping amplifiers and equipment on to the stage.

At first sight, Childish is a disconcerting apparition. He is 40, tall, thin and wiry, with a bony cadaverous face, sharp eyes, and an expression that suggests he’s up for anything. His short back and sides and waxed moustache lend him the appearance of a caddish fighter-ace. He wears stovepipe trousers and working-men’s boots and, when the mood takes him, one of an unusual selection of hats. When he walks into a room people tend to look twice and take one step away.

There were about 150 people in the audience. Among them was a girl named Inga, who had come all the way from California to make a film about Childish, and a group of Japanese, for whom a pilgrimage to see him perform is seemingly as mandatory as a visit to Madame Tussaud’s and Camden Market. The music was loud, hard and basic; retro punk and R & B. Childish’s musical oeuvre has been described as ‘rewriting the same three chords 500 times over’ - which sounds about right.

But around the stage people jostled and pogoed energetically, punched their fists in the air and seemed to know all the words. Thee Headcoats never rehearse, which means that while the well of songs is theoretically bottomless, they tend to play the same 20 or 25 over and over again. Childish has no roadies, no manager, no agent. All of his albums have been produced on the cheap (often in his own home); he organises the artwork, the manufacture, the promotion himself.

In more than 20 years, he has never come within sniffing distance of having what you’d call a hit, yet he has a cult following in America, Japan and all over Europe. Established stars such as Beck, the Beastie Boys and Blur have commended his music for its authenticity and raw excitement. The late Kurt Cobain was an enormous fan. And, somewhat improbably perhaps, so is Kylie Minogue, who was so admiring of one of Childish’s volumes of poetry, Poems to Break the Harts of Impossible Princesses, that she named an album after it.

But Childish has never attempted to capitalise on this patronage: indeed, it seems, he has done everything he can to subvert it. He has turned down offers to record for big record companies and to stage proper tours, preferring to play in clubs using his own antique, lo-fi equipment guaranteed to produce a raw Fifties-style authenticity.

For Billy Childish, this resolute amateurism - this abhorrence of anything that might be said to remotely resemble a career - is tantamount to an article of faith. Like his records, his volumes of poetry are self-published . (His novels are published through a small, independent house in Brighton).

His poems are raw, unmediated, bruisingly shocking in their candour and utter lack of sentimentality. Childish is dyslexic, and his poems are published exactly as he writes them, which lends them a curious vulnerability. This from a poem called Invincible, about his grandfather: ‘when he was lien on his back in/hospital waiting to die/he looked more like a strange/kind of baby/and apparently he cried to one of/his daughters that he couldn't/die happily because of my father.

’His painting is similarly uncompromising. Billy Childish described himself as a ‘Sunday painter’, which is literally true. Each Sunday he drives from his home in Chatham to his mother’s terrace house in Whitstable, where an upstairs bedroom serves as his studio. Too accomplished to be described as primitive or ‘outsider art’, Childish’s portraits of himself and his friends, and narrative episodes from his life, have an artless simplicity which suggests that they are produced, like everything else he does, for no one but himself.

‘The thing to know about Childish,’ says his friend Eugene Doyen, ‘is that all his life everybody has wanted to batter him into being a particular type of person: an idiot. He was always being told, you’re no good, you’re never going to add up to anything. But instead of battening down and doing what he was told, it was always a case of “Sod you, I’m going to do what I want to do.”’

Billy Childish was born in Chatham, and Chatham is where he continues to live, in a terrace house in bedsit land, on a hillside overlooking the town. Chatham is a bleak and grimy town going to the dogs, and Childish’s neighbourhood is, frankly, insalubrious. Taxis refuse to come after dark, he says, and by morning the pavement is littered with the broken glass from car windows and wing-mirrors. But Childish seems to like it. The edgy seediness and quiet desperation of Chatham is as central to his work as the industrial landscape of Salford was to Lowry.

The downstairs rooms are a shambles of paintings, guitars, amplifiers, books, papers, bric-a-brac and incongruously, a brand-new pushchair and cot. When I visit, Childish’s Belgian girlfriend, Kyra, is on the brink of giving birth. It will be their first child. Only the kitchen shows any sign of ordered habitation; a cosy room with a brightly painted Welsh dresser and a wood-burning stove, wholefood products neatly arranged on the shelves.

Childish stopped drinking altogether six years ago when he realised that it was killing him, and now polices his body with an almost fanatical zeal. In restaurants he orders a cup of hot water and produces a herbal infusion from his pocket. Kyra, a vision of serene expectancy, fixes lunch and talks about the impending birth. The baby is in breech position, and she has bought a torch and is working on turning it round by shining it against her belly.

Japanese flute music trickles softly from a battered cassette-player. Childish never listens to rock, on the grounds that ‘it’s good fun banging in nails, but not listening to anyone else do it.

’Billy Childish is, of course, a pseudonym, given to him by a friend, ‘Button-nose Steve’, in the days when Childish was editing a punk fanzine and required a more fitting nom de guerre than his given name of Steven Hamper. His father was a commercial artist, the son of a merchant seaman, with pretensions to grandeur, an exaggeratedly dandified figure - ‘like a waxwork’, says Childish - who drove a Rolls Royce and squandered his money on women and drink while his family economised by turning off the electricity and living on fried eggs.

He left the family home when Childish was six, but would return intermittently ‘to shout a lot and fall down drunk.’ Childish has an abiding memory of his father in a drunken stupor, driving him around Chatham, and fearing for his life. ‘I now realise that he was suicidal,’ he says ‘and wanted to take me with him.’

If his father was one baleful male influence on Childish’s life, another was the family friend who sexually abused him when he was nine, on a family holiday in Seasalter. He had no idea at the time, he says, that something terrible had happened. ‘I thought it had something to do with the facts of life that my father hadn’t told me. It was only later I realised it was very wrong. Most people who have suffered abuse like that will tell you that the real problem is that you feel somehow responsible.

’The incident gave rise to feelings of guilt, shame and a confusion about his own sexuality, which he says he suppressed for years. ‘And I’m sure it helped me become an alcoholic.’ It was only much later that he was able to talk about it, through his poetry and his music. A few years ago, he released a record entitled Paedophile. The cover shows an old holiday snap of the man who abused him. ‘I wanted to send it to him. But he’s probably dead.’

Childish has an elder brother, Nicholas, who went on to grammar school (he is now an art teacher). Childish went to the local secondary- modern, which he hated. He was frequently bullied - ‘I’m a very visible person’ - and considered disruptive by his teachers. ‘All I was good at was doing pictures,’ he says. ‘I was told I was thick and stupid. I felt like an outsider.’

He left school at 16 with a single CSE in art. He applied to, and was turned down by, his local art college, and instead took a job as an apprentice stonemason at the Naval Dockyard, Chatham, where he stayed for a year, at the same time working on his drawings in what he calls ‘the tea huts of hell.’

On the basis of this work he was accepted at the Medway College of Art, and then St Martin’s in London, beginning a long altercation with the educational establishment which resulted in his being expelled from St Martin’s for non-attendance. For most of this time Childish was living on the dole, ‘expert,’ as he puts it, ‘at not having a job or not being given a job.’

Swept up in the excitement of punk rock, he formed the first of a series of bands, producing and releasing his own records. At the same time he had begun writing poetry as a way, he says, of ‘trying to understand what had happened in my life and why it had happened.’

Childish’s second novel, Notebooks of a Naked Youth, which was published in 1997, is based on this period. The book tells the story of William Loveday, described on the jacket as ‘an acned youth possessed of piercing intelligence, acute self-loathing and great personal charm…haunted by intense sexual desires and the ghosts of his childhood…’

Like a character out of Dostoevsky or Hamsum, Loveday leads an impoverished existence, shambling from his squalid bedsit through the lowering Chatham days, falling into a hopeless infatuation with a young girl and encounters with the police, the social security and his violent, overbearing father.

The book’s pervasive air of bleak alienation barely hints at the darkness that enveloped Childish’s life at the time. He was drinking heavily, oppressed by thoughts of death, sometimes burning himself with cigarettes and cutting himself with razor blades ‘just to see if I drew blood.’ He developed a fixation on the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. At that time Hindley was incarcerated at the nearby Cookham Wood Prison. Childish wrote a series of letters requesting a meeting, but Hindley never replied.

It was a period, he now recognises, when he was bordering on psychosis, engaged in ‘a very sick flirtation with evil,’ and ‘fascinated with the idea of murdering people’ - specifically his own father. ‘What happens is that you come to a stage where you don’t believe you’re really alive, and therefore there is no significance to anyone being alive’ says Childish. ‘I’d had recurring nightmares about murders I’d committed, and wake up convinced I’d done it. But I’ve got two very big aspects to myself, and luckily that one never won through, because I’m also very sensitive, very gentle and not very keen on violence.’

However, his intention to murder his father was quite genuine, he says. He could not see an end to the horror that his behaviour was inflicting on the family. ‘I thought the only way to end it was to kill him.’

One night his father turned up at the family home and refused to leave. There was a row, which resulted in Childish beating him up and pushing him down the stairs. Shortly afterwards his father took up with another woman, and vanished into a spiral of drinking binges, a prison sentence, temporary stays in mental hospital and numerous failed suicide attempts. He has since remarried and is living on the south coast. Childish is the only member of the family to have remained in contact with him, his obsession continuing to fuel his work. A recent poem is entitled Failer: “My father has been practicing his suicides again and failing miserably his wife calls me he has taken two overdoses in the last two days/and crys that he wants to die…’ It concludes bluntly: ‘always he has fluthed every golden opportunity.’

By the early Eighties, Childish had become a member of an informal group known as the Medway Poets, giving readings in pubs and colleges. Friends from the period describe him as a volatile, unpredictable presence, hair shorn, dressed in thrift-shop clothes, frequently drunk. ‘He had an aura, a real air of danger,’ remembers one contemporary. ‘The way he was dealing with very confessional work and using his life in his art, he was doing things and saying things the rest of us only thought about, and if people didn’t like it that was their problem.’

It was around this period that he met Tracey Emin. With a Turkish father and English mother, Emin had experienced a rackety upbringing in Margate, absconding from school at 13, at the same age losing her virginity in a date-rape, and spending the next two years engaged in a frenetic round of sexual promiscuity.

Emin was 18 when she met Childish, a fashion student at Medway College of Design. But, inspired by Childish, she began to concentrate on painting and enrolled at Maidstone College of Art. Emin has described herself at the time as being ‘so nihilistic I wanted to die. I weighed six and a half stone: I had projectile vomiting, drank tea excessively and snakebites with Pernod in.’

She and Childish quickly became inseparable. He had started publishing his poetry under his own Hangman imprint (a venture commemorated by the tattoo of a gallows on his left arm). Emin would hustle the books at Childish’s readings, standing off to one side in a beehive hairdo, stiletto heels and a Betty Boop bathing costume. The proceeds would be spent on drink.>Childish became the dominant influence in Emin’s life, shaping her painting and her subject matter. ‘Everything Tracey did was very much a caricature of what Billy did, in terms of what she painted, what she said, what she wrote,’ remembers a contemporary. ‘You’d think, is this Tracey or is this Billy?’

By all accounts the relationship was totally obsessive, sexually extreme, marked by tempestuous rows about her possessiveness (her love ‘was like wearing a mattress on your head,’ according to Childish) and his infidelities.

‘Tracey was always creating scenes,’ says Eugene Doyen, who was a student at Medway. ‘She and Childish were always at each other hammer and tongs.’ He remembers Childish turning up on one occasion with his ear torn and bleeding from Emin’s bite-marks.

Doyen made a short film with Childish and Emin based loosely on their relationship and that of Brady and Hindley, which he describes as being ‘about how two people develop a craziness together, lose their parameters and descend into a sort of evil. It very much mirrored Childish and Tracey’s relationship. He had his history: she’d been messed up in her Margate childhood. Without necessarily voicing it, we were all aware but there was this element of raveling in abuse and having been abused.’

The fragment that survives shows Childish and Emin rowing violently and then reconciling in a bout of violent love-making. ‘It was a massive love affair, really,’ says Doyen. ‘Total adoration from both sides, total need, and at the same time, total madness.

’One story, perhaps, illustrates the curious nature of their relationship more than any other. Emin has recounted how, on Childish’s birthday in 1982, she was preparing a treat when he suddenly announced that he was ‘going out’ for the day on his own. It was only six months later, reading his diary, that she discovered he had actually spent the day in London, getting married to a previous girlfriend, Sheila. The marriage was never consummated. Sheila, Childish now says, was ‘someone I could talk to. I didn’t feel lust for her, and yet I still loved her. And it was a massive gift for me that I was capable of liking a woman beyond it being a sexual relationship, because I’d always had this sickening feeling that I wasn’t capable of that.’ The marriage to Sheila was finally dissolved in 1988.

As with everything in his life, Childish chronicled the affair with Emin with a compulsive, brutal candour, turning every row, every sexual aberration into fuel for his poetry. ‘Nothing was sacred,’ Emin would later complain. ‘Because you knew it was going to be splurted all over some poxy little book and he’d be standing there, reading, giving it away to someone, making a mockery of the situation, only seeing it from his perspective.’ (Childish later wrote a poem about that too, called I’d rather you lied.)

Once asked what she felt she had learnt from Childish, Emin replied, ‘Never to let anyone do that to me again.’ Yet friends now say that the raw, autobiographical candour of Emin’s conceptual art - her unblushing accounts of her teenage promiscuity, her abortion, her despair - can all be traced directly to Childish’s influence.

‘Billy gave Tracey the tools by which to become an artist,’ says Eugene Doyen. ‘He showed her that you could use expressionism and you could use autobiography; you don’t need to pretend to be a nice girl and get on with people; you can shock and be outrageous. You can use yourself for what you want to do with your art and it’s not a question of pandering to people. She has her own thoughts, she works in her own medium, but without Billy Childish there wouldn’t be any Tracey Emin as an artist.’

The pair finally separated in 1986. Emin set off on a path that would take her to the Royal College of Art, Turner Prize nominations and newspaper notoriety. Childish remained in Chatham, writing his poetry, recording his music, making his paintings.

When I contacted Emin, she declined to discuss Childish, saying only that their relationship was ‘a growing-up thing that was in the past.’ She then said that she thought it was ‘a bit rude for people to keep prying into my past and my private life the way they do.

’When I pointed out that the major body of her work was actually to do with exploring her past and her private life she said that she was ‘moving away from that now.’

Yet even now they seem unable to let each other go, bound together in a curious dance of love and recrimination. Childish continues to worry at the relationship in his poetry, his painting and his conversation, one minute accusing Emin of deliberately editing out his contribution to a recent television documentary on her life, and not giving him the proper credit for the part he played in shaping her as an artist; the next talking of how he still cares for her, and fretting that she’s destroying herself with her success, her fashionable new friends and her drinking jags.

Kyra leaves the room while he talks about all this. She and Childish started going out when he was still seeing Emin. You could say that Billy chucked Tracey for Kyra. Or perhaps Tracey chucked Billy. They still argue about that too.

Childish and Kyra have been together for 12 years, but they are no longer, strictly speaking, boyfriend and girlfriend. Ironically, perhaps, they made the decision to separate on the night their baby was conceived. Then they discovered Kyra was pregnant. And so they have resolved to remain on the best of platonic terms, to bring up the baby together.

Kyra is serene and beautiful and, you think, sensible: and - you also think - it can’t have been easy, living with ‘The Saga of Billy Childish,’ the poems, the paintings, the history - and living, in a sense, with Emin.

‘Tracey has been my muse all the way through. And me for her, in a sense,’ says Childish. ‘This incarnation of Tracey as the brave confessionalist - this rude and loud alcoholic person - is me 15 years ago. But I’m not like that any more.’

And it is true; it is hard to equate the good-humoured, gentle, ironic figure Childish now presents - with his herbal infusions and his daily yoga practice - with the destructive, alcoholic, self- described ‘potential psychopath’ of 15 years ago.

Looking back on his life, Childish says it has been his work - and only his work - which has saved him. ‘Without the work, I’d have hurt myself irrevocably, or hurt others irrevocably. Or I’d have drunk myself to death. Without being melodramatic, I couldn’t have survived without it.’

You might say he has written and painted and played his way to a sort of sanity. It’s a strange thing, says Childish, but he gets letters from fans, aspirant writers, almost envying the material his life has given him. ‘I always say it’s OK to come from it, but it’s not a good place to stay: and you don’t need to go there if you’re not there already.’ He gets other letters - from people in America, Italy, Japan - telling him that his story is their story too and he’s saved their lives.

In recent years he has developed an interest in Buddhism, and he riffles through his bookshelf in search of a quotation from a book by the Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa. ‘It is said, I think in the Lankavatara Sutra, that unskilled farmers throw away their rubbish and buy manure from other farmers. But those who are skilled go and collect in their own rubbish in spite of the bad smell and unclean work, and when it is ready to be used they spread it on their land and out of this they grow their crops. That is the skilled way.’

He pauses. That describes it, he says, using the manure of his life to grow the crop of his work. ‘And maybe that’s why I’m still in Chatham. Because I’m still working it out. Because that’s where the manure is. And I’m not running away.’

An exhibition of Childish’s paintings is opening that evening in Folkestone, and darkness is falling as we set off in my car - the windows and wing-mirrors mercifully intact. Childish suggests that on the way we should drop in at his mother’s house in Whitstable, where he does his painting.

Driving through the Kent countryside, we talk about the ‘Stuckist’ movement, a loose alliance of painters - founded by Childish and a fellow artist and Medway poet Charles Thomson - which received a burst of publicity last year in the run-up to the Turner Prize.ch

The Stuckists take their name from a comment allegedly made by Tracey Emin to Childish, that while she had moved on in her life and her art, he was ‘stuck, stuck, stuck’ - stuck in Chatham, stuck in his unreconstructed punk rock, his bleak paintings, his raw, solipsistic poetry.

The Stuckist manifesto proclaims itself ‘bitterly opposed’ to virtually the entire body of contemporary art, ‘including, but not limited to, performance art, installation art, video art, conceptual art, minimal art, academic art and particularly any so- called art which incorporates dead animals or tents.’

Stuckism, on the other hand, is ‘a quest for authenticity.’ The Stuckist is not ‘mesmerised by the the glittering prizes’; it is the Stuckist’s duty ‘to explore his/her neurosis and innocence.’ This is partly a prank, of course, an art strategy - a way of poking fun at the new Brit-art establishment, in much the same way that in the Twenties the Dadaists mocked conventional ideas of ‘fine art’ by exhibiting urinals and painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa.

But, joking aside, the Stuckist manifesto is making serious points about the commodification of art as fashion and the tyranny of the marketplace; and its strident neo-conservatism - ‘Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists’ - they strike a sympathetic chord with anyone baffled by the elevation of Damien Hirst’s picked shark to iconic status, even if they might not recognise Childish’s grimly haunting portraits as the most alluring alternative.

But then again, you can’t help wondering if part of Childish’s interest in the Stuckists isn’t to do with settling old scores with Tracey Emin - that reference to ‘any so-called art which incorporates dead animals or tents’ - and venting a resentment that her success and recognition is built on ideas seeded by him. Could it be that Childish is actually envious?

Perhaps there’s a part of him, he says, that would like to win the Turner Prize (and pigs will fly), but artworld success is really a hoax, ‘a delusion.’ ‘I think,’ says Eugene Doyen, ‘that Childish thinks fame is a compromise. It’s that thing of “I’m not going to suck up and preen for it.” It’s a massive egotism in one way.’

‘I wouldn’t be able to live with myself doing the things that a lot of people do for fame,’ says Childish. ‘Because I can’t believe in it. It’s not real. It’s almost like paying people to like you. That’s no good to me.’ Childish is staring out into the darkness. ‘I want to be really loved.

’Childish’s mother, June, lives in a two-up, two-down Edwardian terrace on a backstreet in Whitstable. It is a shrine to her son’s work. Paintings hang on every inch of the walls: self-portraits; portraits of Kyra, Tracey, Sheila and his mum. A chillingly stark black and white picture of an old man sitting on a chair, entitled Despair, takes pride of place in the cosy sitting-room. Childish painted it when he was working for a short time in a psychiatric hospital.

June has a visitor; an elderly neighbour, whom Childish introduces as ‘Killer’, on the grounds that he was once a champion boxer in the Navy. Killer pantomimes an exchange of blows, then settles down with a copy of the Sun, while June makes the tea. June has lately taken up ceramics, specialising in large pots, shaped as cats: not cute cats, but horror-show cats, all over the house, scowling at Childish’s paintings.

Childish paints upstairs in the front bedroom. It is tiny and impossibly congested. Canvases are racked up around the walls. Two works in progress stand side by side in a space near the window: Childish’s early works - painted in what he refers to as his ‘alcoholic’ period - are universally dark, all lowering blacks and greys: a startlingly vivid expression of his state of mind. Looking at them, one is reminded of the work that emerges from art-therapy classes in psychiatric hospitals. Nowadays he’s working in vividly bright citrus colours. But the subjects are mostly the same, variations on portraits of himself, Kyra and Tracey.

Childish has exhibited all over Europe, but he has no gallery in Britain, no agent, and sells most of his work himself ‘by post.’ at prices between £400 and £1,000.

The exhibition in Folkestone is a retrospective of Childish’s work from the past 20 years. It is being held at the Metropole Arts Centre, a space sponsored - somewhat improbably in the circumstances - by Saga, the travel company for the over-50’s. The preview audience is divided between Childish’s friends (shorn haircuts, ill-fitting suits, combat boots ) and the centre’s more regular patrons (blue rinses, car-coats, comfy shoes), some of whom are openly bemused by his portraits.

But by the end of the evening, 10 of the 50 works have been sold. One elderly couple settle on a huge, vividly coloured canvas for their new home, ‘because it’s the right shape, basically,’ and invite Childish to tea when it’s been hung.

A few days after the Folkestone exhibition, Childish telephones to tell me that Kyra has given birth to a son. They are calling him Huddie, after the American folk singer Huddie Leadbetter, better known as Leadbelly. A propitious name, Childish believes. Leadbelly wrote Goodnight Irene and Rock Island Line. ‘But then again,’ Childish muses, ‘he also killed a man.’

We talk about how fatherhood will change him. He says it won’t at all, ‘because I’ve already changed… I’ve dealt with a lot of things that would have been a real big problem to pass on.

’He and Kyra will not be living together ‘as husband and wife.’ They will not be ‘a model family of any type. But we’re going to be the parents together. I’m quite good at caring for people,’ he says. ‘I know what I wanted, and I’ll give him what I wanted.’

He has written a poem about his new son, he says, which he’d like me to read. It arrives the next morning by fax, an epic. ‘Huddie,’ it begins, ‘I may be the strangest father/but I welcome you…’ It goes on to talk about his son’s conception, his birth in the hospital on a hill overlooking Chatham, ‘my ugly home town,’ about the pain of Kyra’s childbirth, and Billy’s joy. ‘You are so beautiful, Huddie/you came into this world to teach me love, and I welcome you.’

It concludes with a promise: ‘you will not be abused as I was abused/I will not allow it/you will not be told you are ugly/as I was told I was ugly/or that you are backwards or stupid/if you are slow to writing or mathmatics/then damn writing and mathmatics/you will not be told you cried too much/or that you were too clingy and needy/as I was told I cried too much/and was too clingy and needy/love cannot spoil a child/ if you wish to sing then you shall sing/ if you wish to dance then you shall dance/and you will not be told you have a god- awful voice/or that you are tone death/or that you have 2 left feet/your desire to be will be your reason to be.’

© Mick Brown.

All woodcuts taken from Billy Childish: Selected poems 1980-1998
[Codex Books]

This article first appeared in the Telegraph Magazine [29 January 2000] title "The Growing Pains of Billy Childish"