Billy Childish has made more than 150 albums, which run the extremely limited gamut from raw garage rock to raw country blues. He has self-published countless novels and poetry collections, and produced thousands of paintings in a visceral, Van Gogh-influenced style. But there is one overriding subject at the heart of all this creativity: himself.
He has been an influence on everyone from Nirvana to the White Stripes, although endorsing Childish doesn’t necessarily guarantee his approval. When his brief love-in with Jack White of the White Stripes went inevitably wrong in the early 2000s, Childish declared: “I have a bigger collection of hats, a bigger moustache, a more blistering guitar sound and a fully developed sense of humour.”
His former girlfriend Tracey Emin (“One of the most clinging, difficult people. I know how harsh that sounds, but I’m just telling you the truth,” Childish claims) committed a bigger crime by becoming extremely successful without his permission. This prompted Childish to form an anti-postmodernist group called the stuckists as a churlish response to a comment she made about him, although he has since become a successful painter himself, so all is forgiven.
From his home town of Chatham in Kent Childish has led his life as a cottage industry: unquestionably talented, totally driven, charming when he wants to be, and exhausting in his all-consuming self-obsession. Taking a piecemeal approach that includes interviews with the people who know him, personal recollections and prose and poetry from the man himself, the former NME writer Ted Kessler — getting over the fact that Childish almost had a hit in 1993 with a song called We Hate the F***in’ NME — does an admirable job of getting to grips with a complex, contradictory man.
Judging by his dysfunctional childhood, it would have been a miracle if Childish, born Steven Hamper on December 1, 1959, had turned out any other way. His father was a commercial artist who lived beyond his means. He ended up in jail because of his sideline in drug dealing. His father was also cursed with preposterous vanity: he built a glass panel into his garage so the neighbours could see his Rolls-Royce, but disabled the central heating to save money.
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Childish’s brother Nick, “a complete arse”, according to one friend, went to the local grammar school and was seen as the star of the family, while Childish, who is severely dyslexic, ended up at the rough secondary modern. “My dad didn’t like him. I don’t think he’s ever liked him,” Nick says of his brother. “We tended to gang up on Billy when he was young because he was so difficult.”
Childish was also sexually abused by a family friend — it took place over three nights in a holiday chalet when he was nine. Childish appeared to have dealt with it all by building his own world, one rooted in the past and protected from the vulgarities of the present. Punk rock made him realise that he could put out records, publish books and stage exhibitions himself, so in 1977 he ended an intended career as a stonemason at Chatham docks by deliberately smashing his hand with a hammer and his life as an artist began. By the early 1980s Childish was doing frequently remarkable work, turning his band Thee Milkshakes into a kind of rock’n’roll art project committed to whatever concept of authenticity he was following at the time.
While Kessler plays along with Childish’s self-mythologising to a point, he also includes dissenting voices from those who know him best. Bruce Brand, the drummer in countless Childish-led groups, calls him “his lordship”. Graham Day, of another Chatham band, the Prisoners, says: “We’re all his friends, but will we invite him to our birthday party? Probably not. He finds it very easy to hold court. Sometimes people just want to have a bit of fun without that kind of stress.” As Ian Ballard of Damaged Goods, the independent label that releases most of Childish’s albums, points out, “He’s called Childish for a reason.”
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Being with someone so fully consumed with their vision of themselves sounds exhausting, but it can be inspiring too. “Billy was a really good influence on me. Really pushed me to draw and to paint,” says Emin, who has good reason to be less generous about her former boyfriend since, she tells Kessler, he gave her gonorrhoea, then married an old girlfriend while he was still going out with her. For the entirety of Childish and Emin’s three-year relationship in the early 1980s his father insisted on calling her “the Turkish whore”, but they did make for a striking couple. “We looked like we’d just walked off a film set,” Emin says. As for Childish, he isn’t quite so magnanimous. “Tracey believes her own delusions,” he says, which is a bit rich coming from him.
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All this adds up to a portrait of man as fascinating as he is flawed, someone who is committed to exposing truths about himself while creating all sorts of fabrications. One wonders how much the hand of the subject has hovered over the writing, but no matter: Kessler’s detached, freewheeling biography is ultimately about someone who, for better or worse, has unquestionably done it his way.
To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish by Ted Kessler (White Rabbit £30 pp336). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
