Jack White: Hello Billy
Billy Childish: Hello Jack

JW: So what do they {Dazed & Confused] want?
BC: This interview, and for me to do a painting of you. That's not so easy 'cos I don't really know you. You know for me I've got to, like, try and get past the surface appearance. It's the same with everything, I suppose, music and writing - you have to try to get beyond the surface in a world that is obsessed with the surface...

JW: How is it you're famous in the USA and Japan, but people over here don't seem to be able to get what you do?
BC: Well, for one thing I've refused to play their game. When we were on Sub Pop in the early '90's I refused to do an interview with the NME. You see, they had a press agent working for them and I asked him why they were interviewing me. Was it because I'd done 15 years of independent music or because Sub Pop has a press agent? And the NME said: 'It's because Sub Pop have a press agent.' So I said 'Okay, we can do the interview if we can talk about that' and the NME said no. Also, our music is too purist for the English. When I say 'purist' I mean that I am always trying to find the essence. To draw, paint and write unclothed. We're too interested in sound to be popular, and everything in music is the sound for me - I'm not interested in the other aspects of it. I still have problems because we don't dress a certain way, whereas in America it's not so organized; they still understand rock'n'roll.

JW: Yeah, that's what I think. I couldn't believe it when we first came over here and all they talked about was about how we dressed.
BC: It's the idea of making choices, because we make choices about sound and how we record and that doesn't fit in with fashion, and I think fashion is what is wrong with society. Fashion means selling people what they didn't know they needed. People don't stop to think - the deepest they go is to be interested in something, and to just interest isn't good enough. For culture to matter it must be made with a passion. People just want entertainment, music like wallpaper. My experience of America is that they get what a rock'n'roll group is. They understand what we are trying to do, whereas the English just don't understand rock'n'roll.

JW: Yes, I agree.
BC: And here we are doing an interview in a magazine that is very much in that sort of area.

JW: If The Milkshakes [one of Billy's former groups, 1981-84] had become gigantic and huge and sold a million records, what would you have been doing afterwards? Would you have done all the other things you've done?
BC: I would have just killed myself with alcohol. You know when I look at things, I really think that there are pure angels involved in protecting me from myself. Giving me time to grow and get a bit of maturity and understand a tiny little bit of what is behind life. You get little glimpses of that now and then, I think. What sort of chance would I have had with a load of people telling me how clever I was, rather than telling me how useless I was?

JW: I think that the stuff we did with our first records on 45 were our best. I'm really glad that we didn't go out on tour and didn't get any information about where, or how many of, our records were selling. It seems that you have that initial anger that initial excitement and energy. With a lot of bands their first album is their best. After that they can't really do it.
BC: Yeah, you get these groups like the Rolling Stones and they could do two or three good albums. By the time of punk, they could just manage one good album if they were lucky. The further you go back, the longer the lifespan. When you listen to blues artists, they used to be able to knock out ten good albums in a lot longer period and still maintain that initial energy because those groups weren't so exposed to the mass media. The Rolling Stones were really good first off because they were great fans of black blues; they only became shit when they stopped being fans of that style of music and instead became fans of themselves... I still us the paintings I did when I was nine or ten years old, because I can still paint like that if I allow myself. Once I quit drinking when I was 32, and dealt with a lot of the psychological abuse that happened to me when I was a kid, I was able to go from feeling 32 to 11 again.

JW: When I was younger I was fascinated with World War I and World War II. I built models of planes, forts in the back yard... I keep noticing that you have a similar passion for those themes. Why do you like them so much?
BC: I don't know - I used to make bombs when I was a kid... I think that the First World War in particular had such a massive effect ton the psyche of our parents' and grandparents' generation and out collective unconsciousness. Such a massive effect that I think the uselessness of our contemporary culture is a direct result of that terrible shock. The glibness of everything is a direct result of all that, and I think it's very reactionary. After losing God, everything was done in a very material way and the world's still stuck in that. So I think that our world is still in a massive shock from these world wars, and I think that's why the culture is so immature and useless... I feel like the best of art was done before those big shocks around the First World War...

JW: I think you're right, because to me, since say WW2, the only major thing I can think of is Andy Warhol, which is the glorification of commercialism and pop culture. I was thinking about your relation to the past of music, and our relation to the past of music. 'What kind of music is the White Stripes' music?' And my first thought was 'folk music'. The only thing people really want and what I want to hear in music is storytelling. Rhythm and melody to me is just anything original in art is kidding themselves. Just using electronic music and recording it on the computer? Kraftwerk did that 25 years ago.
BC: And they did it in quite a funny way.

JW: Exactly. If it's going to be music, you need it to have storytelling and rhythm. That's what music has always been for thousands of years.
BC: I think that is probably what art is for generally, and I think folk music is a very good term for this. It's story music. A lot of what is missing in a lot of things is a sense of humour... There's a few things here where we are definitely on the same plane.

JW: I think so, yeah. Glad to hear about it too 'cos sometimes I see other people's records and I think there's the same ideas and stuff, but you never know until you ask. Well I guess I'm gonna go and sound check here. I can hear Meg sound checking her bass drum in the background.
BC: Well I'll see ya later. Pop along when you get back.

JW: Well, thanks a lot.
BC: Cheers mate.

JW: Cheers bye