Billy Childish Guide
One artist, three forms: how the Chatham-born songwriter, painter and poet built a huge body of work on the same rough, self-made method.
Photo: AnnFran Morris / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Billy Childish is not just a musician but a cross-disciplinary Medway figure whose music, painting and poetry are all part of the same self-made practice. The best way in is to treat him as one artist working in three forms: start with a compilation of his bands, then look at the paintings and the poems.
Who he is
Billy Childish is the performing name of Steven John Hamper, born in Chatham, Kent, on 1 December 1959. He has been described as an English painter, author, poet, photographer, filmmaker, singer and guitarist. He did a foundation year at the Medway College of Design, then won a place on the painting course at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, which expelled him in 1982.
His work has often been filed under punk, and he did start out in the punk era of the late 1970s, but his music looks further back, to 1950s and 1960s rock'n'roll, garage and raw blues. He prefers rough, lo-fi recording on vintage equipment over clean studio polish, for reasons both financial and aesthetic.
Music: the basics
Billy Childish has recorded a huge output of records, more than 100 independent albums by most counts, many of them on small labels such as his own Hangman Records. His bands form a long chain: the Pop Rivets, Thee Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, The Buff Medways, The Musicians of the British Empire and, later, CTMF. The White Stripes' Jack White was an admirer and once wrote Childish's name on his arm for an early Top of the Pops appearance.
A BBC Music review of the compilation Archive From 1959: The Billy Childish Story describes it as clarifying a "labyrinthine lo-fi career", and it is the main way to start: a collection spanning decades of his bands. The rough sound quality is part of the point.
Art, poetry and Stuckism
Childish has also published more than 40 poetry collections and made thousands of paintings. In the late 1970s he was a founder member of the Medway Poets, a punk-based poetry performance group that read in Chatham pubs. In the 1980s he was in a relationship with Tracey Emin, then an art student in Medway, who took part in later Medway Poets readings.
In 1999 Childish co-founded the Stuckists with Charles Thomson, a movement of figurative painters opposed to conceptual art. Thomson took the name from one of Childish's poems, in which Emin tells him his paintings are "stuck". Childish left the group in 2001, so treating Stuckism as his main claim to fame is misleading.
His painting has had serious recognition since: in 2010 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London gave him a major exhibition, and in 2014 the University of Kent awarded him an honorary doctorate.
For a first listen, start with Archive From 1959 or any Thee Headcoats or Thee Milkshakes record, then move on to the later bands to hear how little the method changed. For the paintings, check gallery and museum listings for exhibitions; for the poems, look for his small-press collections. Whichever door you use, the same outsider method runs through the catalogue, the paintings and the poems.
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