Billy Childish can talk. And talk.
At school he was told he had verbal
incontinence, and it seems that hasn’t changed. He paints, writes and
makes music no less abundantly. He has produced 2,500 pictures,
published 40 books of poetry and four novels, and released more than 100
full-length albums – about half as many again as the Rolling Stones, who
have been at it twice as long. “I’m Sagittarius to the power of a
million,” Childish explains. “And I have that with Jupiter, so I can
never do enough – absolutely unlimited, pffft!”
Despite his extraordinary output, the
chances are that you have not heard of Childish, or you only know
vaguely that he once went out with the artist Tracey Emin. In 2006 he
declined a lucrative offer to appear on Celebrity Big Brother. Indeed,
Childish does not watch television, or listen to the radio, or read
newspapers, and hasn’t done so for years. He doesn’t “do” e-mail or
mobile phones, and the last time he went to a gig, other than as
performer, was in the 1970s. This helps to explain how he has the time
to produce so much work. It also explains his extraordinarily scanty
grasp of popular culture. “People think I’m being cute when I don’t
recognise the names of people they mention,” he says.
Nevertheless, Childish has himself
been a cult hero to successful people such as the late Kurt Cobain, P J
Harvey and Robert Plant. The White Stripes asked Childish to paint live
on stage with them on Top of the Pops. Kylie Minogue phoned him to ask
if she could use part of the title of one of his poetry books for her
album Impossible Princess. (“She was very polite and very nice,” he
reports.) His poetry has twice won him National Poetry prize
commendations. The poet laureate, Andrew Motion, said of Childish: “He
looks like he’s having more fun being a poet than I am.” As for the art
world, Emin has acknowledged his profound influence on her own work, and
a new critical study of Childish by the artist and writer Neal Brown
describes him as “one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood,
figures on the British art scene”. Brown “discovered” Childish in the
course of writing a book about Emin for the Tate. He couldn’t fathom why
nobody was writing similar books about Childish.
“I think it’s because Billy has done
such a lot of work,” Brown tells me, “and because of the sheer range it
covers. Also, there’s a sense of embarrassment because of the sincerity
of the work. Painterly nuance is not necessarily the point. A
conspicuous emotional register is – particularly moods of poetic
exhilaration.”
The artist Peter Doig, who has known
Childish for many years, agrees: “A lot of people are embarrassed by
work like Billy’s – but that’s what’s great about it as well. He is very
honest.” For the record, people who have found his work embarrassing
include critics writing in Time Out (“nothing more than a Bayswater
Road-style dauber”), Virgin’s in-flight magazine (“infantile
paintings”), and the East Anglian Daily Times (“some of the worst
painting I have ever seen on public show”).
Childish has been compared to William
Blake and D H Lawrence – like them, he both writes and paints. He also
shares their sincerity and eccentric otherworldliness. When I mention
these names to Childish, he thinks for a moment, then says: “I’m not
unique. I come from a tradition which only seems to pop up
occasionally.” He pauses. “I can imagine how arrogant that will sound,
written down.” (He is frequently accused of arrogance.)
“But what I mean is that I’m just not
intimidated. I don’t take it too seriously. I’m confident enough to do
things regardless of ability. I don’t sweat over them. I’m not fussy.
It’s like cooking: I’m good at that, and I don’t need recipes.”
As a journalist, I’m accustomed to
meeting creative people who know they are rather special. I’ve also met
a number of crushed souls who, believing themselves to be useless,
daren’t try their hand at anything. Childish is a stunning exception:
passionately creative in any discipline, but also substantially
indifferent to worldly success. Having followed him for several months –
to an exhibition of his paintings in London, and a combined poetry
reading and music event – and talked with him at great length, I find
that Childish has quite some influence on me. I have written poems,
produced dozens of sketches and paintings and not a few lino-cuts. So I
have come to see him at home to offer him a challenge that I wouldn’t
dream of suggesting to most serious artists: can we do some painting
together? In principle, he has agreed. But he is not feeling well today.
He looks uncharacteristically glum and says he has been for certain
unspecified medical tests and has had to cancel gigs during the summer.
I offer to go away, come back another time. But he says that won’t be
necessary, makes me a cup of green tea in a glass cup, and sits down for
a long talk.
Childish lives in Chatham, Kent,
around the corner from where Dickens once lived very miserably. The
house, owned by Childish’s mother, stands in a terrace of bedsits. He
shares it with his wife, Julie, and his young son (by a previous
girlfriend), Huddie. It’s like something from another time: there seems
to be nothing plastic. On the wall in the kitchen is an ancient
telephone that still works. There’s a wooden desk, a Buddha, colourful
flags, innumerable hats, guitars and many paintings by Childish. Over
the door to the garden the wall is decorated with primitive animal
images scratched into wet cement. He commissions a lot of work from
others, much of it practical: a hefty ladder leading to the loft, wall
panelling, a wooden washboard. Some have been paid for with art: in
return for the ladder, he painted the carpenter’s daughters.
Like the house, Childish himself
appears to belong to another era – not only because of his pointy
moustache. Today he wears a collarless work shirt of the sort worn by
Victorian navvies. I’ve also seen him in walking boots with real nails
in the soles, and a set of replica 1912 Royal Flying Corps overalls –
all items specially made for him by friends.
He was born Steven John Hamper on
December 1, 1959. (He adopted the name Billy Childish in 1977, but uses
several others too.) He was sexually abused, aged nine, by a male family
friend. “We were on holiday. I had to share a bed with him. It happened
for several nights, then I refused to go near him. I didn’t tell
anyone.” He has subsequently made up for that, spilling the beans in his
early poetry and two of his novels, My Fault, and Sex Crimes of the
Futcher. (Severely dyslexic, he declines to have his unusual spellings
amended.) He has written a great deal of other personal material, on
subjects including his years of alcoholism, and a youthful experiment in
sexual relations with a dog.
Recently his work has become mellower.
This has a lot to do with giving up alcohol and taking up yoga in 1993,
but he also acknowledges the influence of Jesus Christ and Buddha.
“We’re all stardust,” he might say these days. “Nothing new is coming
into being. Everything just changes shape and form. My nose, for
example, was once a tyrannosaurus’s toenail.” Or: “You have to take life
very seriously, and realise that it’s all a joke. That is the art of
living.”
His own sense of humour is still dark.
“I amuse myself with base homophobic jokes,” he tells me. “I’m English
and I was brought up in the provinces.” He likes racist humour as well.
“My wife is black and American Indian. She says that she’s allowed to
make those jokes but I’m not… Humour is next to taboo. It can be
playful. It can be hurtful too, but I don’t use it that way.”
When he left school, he decided to
devote himself to art but was refused an interview at the local art
college, so he worked as an apprentice stonemason at the naval dockyard
in Chatham. One day he purposefully smashed his hand with a 3lb club
hammer and declared he’d never work again. He was 16. He no longer
wished to carve identical blocks of stone every day. It was to be his
last prolonged period of employment.
He was accepted into Saint Martin’s
School of Art under a “genius clause” – his many drawings made up for
his poor academic record – but was expelled. Shortly afterwards, in
1982, he met Emin. She was in her late teens, a nihilistic fashion
student at Medway College of Design. “Billy was the first person I’d met
who was doing what they wanted to do,” she later recalled.
“That was a very subtle and important
influence. I was really in love with him as well.” In her famous “tent”,
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, Childish’s name was displayed
prominently. Their friendship ended when Emin found success. “Once upon
a time she acknowledged me as a ‘major influence’,” Childish has said,
“but when I didn’t applaud her stuff she got the knife out. I have gone
from being thanked by her for my endless support to being some kind of
Charles Manson figure.” He mentions Emin fairly often, but usually asks
me not to repeat what he says because it will “cause more aggravation”.
Not long ago, Emin popped in to see his mother, to whom she has long
been close, and he says he doesn’t want to spoil things.
Some might suspect he just wants to
get on the good side of Emin, more successful than him in so many ways.
Is that right? “If I was climbing a mountain, I’d have done everything I
could to stay on the right side of Tracey. My ambition is much bigger
than that. My ambition is to do what I want to do, the way I want to do
it, and do it right.” For what it’s worth, I believe him. Far from
sucking up, Childish has a tendency to fall out with people
unnecessarily. He once told GQ magazine that he couldn’t listen to the
White Stripes, who greatly admire him. “It’s a shame it came over that
way; I was asked about the White Stripes, but in truth I’m not into the
modern sound at all, so I don’t like the modern groups – or many old
ones, for that matter. I’m not a music fan, if you like.” (Having
released 100 albums himself, he must surely mean only that he doesn’t
much like other people’s music.)
He also fell out with the influential
group of artists he helped to form: the Stuckists. The group took its
name from a poem Childish wrote, based on a conversation he had with
Emin. She accused him of being “stuck” in a particular approach to art.
The Stuckists achieved considerable press coverage, fuelled by Emin’s
nomination for the Turner prize in 1999 – indeed, Childish was thrown
out of the Tate for distributing anti-Turner-prize manifestos.
He stands by the trenchant manifestos
he wrote for the Stuckists, but he will tell you that he left the group
in 2001 and did not show any work in the large Stuckist exhibition of
2004. Childish has made a life’s work of founding groups and writing
manifestos, then quitting. But he remains on good terms with the group’s
co-founder, Charles Thomson, who interviewed him recently and said:
“I’ve known you for over 25 years and spent a lot of time trying to work
you out, in particular some apparent contradictions. For example, you
can take a very big, deep, philosophical view on things, have a lot of
compassion and understanding for others and help people out… You can
also be very damning and critical, showing little empathy for anyone
that doesn’t fit in with your values.”
Childish rejoices in
self-contradiction, and to say he can be damning and critical is an
understatement. “My least favourite of the Stuckists,” he says, “was a
guy who was good at drawing but pitched it just wacky enough to get the
c***s to buy it.” Does he mean that art that attracts a buyer is
therefore less worthwhile? Are people who buy art necessarily “c***s”?
“The question of what is art is “very, very simple”, he says. “Would the
person do it if he wasn’t being paid? This would eradicate all of
contemporary art! You don’t pickle sharks in your shed for 20 years
because you believe in it. The good thing about art is, no matter how
bad it is, if it’s lying in the street, people recognise it as art.
Whereas a lot of the work we have these days wouldn’t be.”
People should do more art, he
believes. “George Orwell, working as a policeman in Burma, had to
practise drawing because they didn’t have cameras. This happened a lot
in the services. My grandfather was a carpenter in the navy and he had
to be able to draw. And the officers too. You had to be able to record
things, to convey ideas. And that enables you to see rather than just
look.
“When I was a kid, from three to six,
my painting was loose. Then it was colourful from 11 to 16, then dark
and graphic as a 21- to 33-year-old drunk. Since 33, I’ve just been
working backwards again. That’s when I became an adult, at 33, and gave
up drink and inverted anger.”
Other people don’t produce half as
much work as him. Why is that? “I have to pretend I don’t do as much as
I do, because it embarrasses me. People sometimes ask me and I pretend I
haven’t done anything recently.” He is prolific, it seems, not only
because he doesn’t watch telly or read the papers but because he is
fast. “I paint a picture in 15 minutes, maybe 20, sometimes
three-quarters of an hour; if it’s all going to hell, three hours.
Sometimes time and effort rescues it, but usually it just tortures it.
Most times I like the first go, then come back a couple of hours later
and decide whether to add one tiny brush mark; that’s the touch that
pleases my soul.”
He’s sometimes asked to teach in art
schools. As a result, he says, the students produce more in one
afternoon than in the rest of the term. “I try to get them to let go and
use no skill whatever. This is an absolute block. They’re so tied up
because they can’t bring themselves to do rubbish.” But isn’t the point
of being students that they want to move beyond making rubbish?
“When people say their kids could do
such-and-such a painting, my smart answer is, ‘Well, I would expect your
kids to do it, but can you?’ It takes a lot of work to get that free and
easy – to be natural. Skilful means effortless. You can get that with
beginner’s luck, but after that you have to do some more work to
recapture it, which is what Picasso talked about. I’ve been working
between the tension of my skill and allowing the painting to be as it
wants to be since I was 33. The first trick was to not care what others
might think of my work. The next was to paint and not care what I
thought about it myself. That’s why I work quickly, and why I don’t look
at it again for another week.” (He paints on Sundays, at his mother’s
house.) “So I can see it as if it was done by someone else.” He seems
relaxed about work that turns out badly. “I saw some of my paintings
today and I’m appalled by them.” For most artists to say that would be
devastating, but to Childish it’s just five minutes’ annoyance.
The interesting thing about painting
pictures, he concludes, is painting pictures. And with music, the
interesting thing is playing it. “When I was a child, people got
together and played in the pub and in the car park. And people knew how
to do a turn. People think I’m an amateur. That’s become a derogatory
term, like I don’t know what I’m doing. But the amateur is someone who
does things out of love.”
That said, when I went to see him
perform – to an audience of 100 or so in the basement of his London
gallery – he confessed to being not very good at tuning his guitar and
asked the audience: “Is that flat or sharp?”
In keeping with the amateurism is his
cussedly uncommercial approach. At his gallery, his dealer, Steven Lowe,
showed me Childish’s latest novel, The Idiocy of Idears. It was the
second edition, the first having been printed with a notice saying that
shoppers should refuse to pay anything for it. Similarly, after being
told that he was committing commercial suicide by releasing too much
music, one of his bands, Thee Milkshakes (sic), released four LPs in a
single day. Plainly, he doesn’t care about money. “If you want to be
rich,” he tells me, “value what you have got.” I ask him why, as
somebody who has no time for the media, he has given me so much of his
time over the past few months. He gives it a moment’s thought. “I like
to influence people.”
He takes me into the office and sits
in front of Julie’s gleaming Apple computer – the first piece of plastic
high-tech I’ve seen in the house. He opens various music files: tracks
from his latest album, Thatcher’s Children. He plays them and every so
often laughs unashamedly at the lyrics. It turns out that several of the
songs were written by Julie, and sung by her too: “Most of my
girlfriends have ended up painting or singing.”
If there’s one thing that being with
Childish has taught me, it’s this: “Creativity is our birthright. But
the English don’t like people who are self-taught. They haven’t passed
the driving test. It’s not about whether you can do it, but did you go
through the right channels?” This is an incredibly empowering idea, and
all the more worthwhile because – to put this bluntly – not absolutely
everything Childish does seems to me to be brilliant. I hugely admire
the energy of his music, and share his amusement at many of the lyrics,
but on balance it’s sometimes a racket.
I remind him that he has promised to
do some painting with me, but we’re running out of time. A friend of his
– a member of the Band of Historical Hillwalkers – is coming soon to
dress up in tweed, wool and leather (Velcro and Gore-Tex are
discouraged,) then set out to breathe the air (as the Hillwalkers’
manifesto, by Childish, puts it) and engage with the world by making
pinhole photographs and painting. Childish whizzes me back into the
kitchen. Looking through my sketchbooks, he says my drawings look a bit
“tight”, but stops to commend one hasty study of pine cones. We tear
pages from a sketchbook and throw tubes of paint all over the floor, and
in the next 15 minutes we make no fewer than eight paintings of each
other. The colours are in no way realistic, and the shapes aren’t always
right, either. “Is my head really that heart-shaped?” he asks at one
point.
Some days later, Childish sends me an
e-mail – itself rather a surprise. I almost junk it because he uses one
of his many pseudonyms, William Claudius. It consists of a poem he wrote
the previous night, inspired by our conversation: “some say im/ laurence/some
say im/ blake/ some say im/ true/ some say im/ fake,” it starts.
I phone to thank him, and ask why he
wanted me to paint so fast. He has talked often enough about the need
for sincerity and authenticity in art – couldn’t I have achieved those
at a slightly slower pace? Or was it simply that we had run out of time?
Not at all, he insists. We worked fast, he explains, to feel truly
alive: “Every artist knows that if they get something in a sketch it can
be impossible to recapture that energy in another medium. And that’s the
kind of energy I’m trying to get into everything. When you paint, you’re
in the moment. Creativity is the only thing that engages with life. It’s
the joining of mind and material. It’s a spiritual thing – and all of
life should be like that.”
