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Growing up in Chatham, Steven John Hamper was an
outsider. Bullied at school by students and teachers
alike, the young boy devoted his spare time to making
guns, setting fires, and petty theft. At school, he was
slammed by his teachers for his 'eccentric behaviour'.
On leaving school he became an apprentice stone
mason at Chatham Dockyard, where he produced
numerous drawings during his tea breaks in order to apply for art school. He got in. And was kicked out in
his first year. By the mid-1970s a future of unskilled
manual labour was clearly mapped out for him.
Then came the 1977 punk rock explosion. Hamper
saw all the major punk bands and vowed never to
work again. He produced a series of punk fanzines
including Bostick Haze and Chatham's Burning, and
changed his name to Billy Childish. Energised by the
do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk and ATV's anthemic
song 'Action Time and Vision', Childish emerged as a
renaissance polymath: a musician, poet and painter.
Over the following years, Childish was the vocalist
for Pop Rivets, but it was when he picked up the
guitar that things really began to get moving. Between
1981 and 1989 Childish began a series of blues-based
garage punk bands: the Milkshakes, Thee Mighty
Caesars, and perhaps his best-known group, Thee
Headcoats. Touring continually, the various bands
recorded literally dozens of albums, on one occasion
releasing four Milkshakes albums simultaneously in
an attempt, as Childish has described it, "to commit
musical suicide". When Thee Headcoats assembled to
record Headcoatitude the studio were forced to cancel
the session. Rather than gripe about it or descend into
narcotic lethargy as so many bands would, they
merely went to their rehearsal room and recorded a
lo-fi album of covers. The delayed recording session
was completed a few weeks later.
SOMETHING HAPPENING IN KENT
Alongside these musical projects, Childish also wrote several solo LPs and collaborated with fellow musical rogues and outsiders like transvestite troubadour Sexton Ming. The apparently endless stream of records were released on numerous labels, but that didn't stop Childish from seizing the means of
production and founding his own record label Hangman's Daughter in 1986. The
label also released LPs by Thee Headcoatees (the female version of Thee
Headcoats). Largely ignored by the transient-craze-fixated British music press,
Childish's numerous records were nevertheless popular enough to inspire the likes of Nirvana and Mudhoney, who began to mention him in interviews, thus finally awakening journalists to the possibility of something happening
in Kent. It didn't matter: by then Hangman were already established, outside of the London media circuit, building a cult following through dedication and
hard work. But that was only part of it... Childish had been writing poetry
since 1977, and had been reading it on stage for longer than he'd been singing. These poems were short, brutal, realistic, and built on equal parts of
self-loathing and self-aggrandisement, but, importantly, they were punctuated with grim stabs of black humour. Founding Hangman Books in 1981, he published
more than 30 volumes of his own poetry, as well as works by Sexton Ming and Joe
Corkwell. In 1983, Childish chanced upon the work of misanthropic French writer Celine, and was so impressed that he subsequently translated and
published Celine's Cannon Fodder in 1988.
ART OR ARSE
In 1996 Childish completed his 'fictional biography' My Fault, which was rapidly
followed by Notebooks of a Naked Youth (1997). Through these books Childish,
through his alter ego William Loveday, emerges as a sex obsessed existentialist anxious to prove his literary, artistic and musical talent to a world that remains indifferent to all but money. Or, as the dyslexic Childish wrote in one of his poems, "...money: the langwidge of all the arsholes" Billy Childish is also an artist, creating the expressionistic lino and block prints that often
appeared on Hangman record and book covers, as well as numerous paintings and
drawings which have been exhibited around the world. One-time collaborator Tracey Emin, who since became the darling of Brit Art by producing quasi-
postmodern tributes to Dada, condemned her work with Childish, whom she described as "stuck". Childish responded by producing a song 'Art Or
Arse (You Be The Judge)' on his CD and art book "17% Hendrix Was Not The Only
Musician", which condemned what he saw as pretentious, critic-Ied,
shallow Brit Art. Childish also co-founded the Stuckist movement - a group of artists, including Charles Thomson, Sanchia Lewis and Wolf Howard, who, despite the fashion for installation, video art, and found art, are proud to be painters and have no interest in the pretentious trappings of the award, prize and gallery circuit. Living in Kent, painting, writing, and playing music with his latest band the Buff Medways, Childish symbolises everything that made punk radical.
Billy Childish - Approved!
A new poetry collection, Chatham Welcomes Desperate Men, is available from February 1 on Tahoma Books. My Fault, Notebooks..., and I'd Rather You Lied are on Codex Books. 17% Hendrix Was Not The Only Musician CD/Book available via Slab-O-Concrete. Codex and Slab C/o PO Box 148, Hove, BN33DQ, UK. The Buff Medways' new single 'Don't Hold Me Back', is available on the Damage Goods label, PO Box 671, London E17 6NF
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