The first time I saw the name Billy Childish it was embroidered inside a tent at the 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy. The tent was a construction by Tracey Emin, the conceptual artist and controversialist, entitled Everybody I’ve Ever Slept With: 1963-1995. Of the 102 names listed, Childish’s - as he is wont to remind you - is the largest: a fitting reflection, perhaps, of the part each has played in the other’s life.

Emin and Childish were lovers for five years in the Eighties, and they have been locked in what might best be described as a love-hate relationship ever since. But this is not the most interesting thing about Billy Childish. Like Emin, Childish is an artist; in his case, a painter, a musician, a poet and a novelist - although Childish himself would balk at being described as any of these things. He prefers to describe himself as ‘an amateur.’

In the past 20 or so years Childish has recorded some 80 albums of his own music; he has published 30-odd volumes of poetry, written two novels (with a further two in progress) and executed more than 2,000 paintings. The stakhanovite nature of this productivity is staggering enough in itself. But what makes it all the more intriguing is the subject matter of all these works. You might call it ‘The Saga of Billy Childish.’

This is a strange and terrible tale. It tells of his damaged upbringing; his relationship with his violent, alcoholic and suicidal father; his treatment at the hands of the family ‘friend’ who sexually abused him when he was nine years old; his fraught encounters with alcohol and his chaotic love affairs - not least his relationship with Emin. And if it has a happy ending, that is because Childish has written, painted and performed it himself.

My first meeting with Billy Childish occurred on the pavement outside a pub in north London. Childish and his sometime group, Thee Headcoats, were playing there that evening; they had driven up from Chatham in Kent in a battered Telecom van, and were humping amplifiers and equipment on to the stage.

At first sight, Childish is a disconcerting apparition. He is 40, tall, thin and wiry, with a bony cadaverous face, sharp eyes, and an expression that suggests he’s up for anything. His short back and sides and waxed moustache lend him the appearance of a caddish fighter-ace. He wears stovepipe trousers and working-men’s boots and, when the mood takes him, one of an unusual selection of hats. When he walks into a room people tend to look twice and take one step away.

There were about 150 people in the audience. Among them was a girl named Inga, who had come all the way from California to make a film about Childish, and a group of Japanese, for whom a pilgrimage to see him perform is seemingly as mandatory as a visit to Madame Tussaud’s and Camden Market. The music was loud, hard and basic; retro punk and R & B. Childish’s musical oeuvre has been described as ‘rewriting the same three chords 500 times over’ - which sounds about right.

But around the stage people jostled and pogoed energetically, punched their fists in the air and seemed to know all the words. Thee Headcoats never rehearse, which means that while the well of songs is theoretically bottomless, they tend to play the same 20 or 25 over and over again. Childish has no roadies, no manager, no agent. All of his albums have been produced on the cheap (often in his own home); he organises the artwork, the manufacture, the promotion himself.

In more than 20 years, he has never come within sniffing distance of having what you’d call a hit, yet he has a cult following in America, Japan and all over Europe. Established stars such as Beck, the Beastie Boys and Blur have commended his music for its authenticity and raw excitement. The late Kurt Cobain was an enormous fan. And, somewhat improbably perhaps, so is Kylie Minogue, who was so admiring of one of Childish’s volumes of poetry, Poems to Break the Harts of Impossible Princesses, that she named an album after it.

But Childish has never attempted to capitalise on this patronage: indeed, it seems, he has done everything he can to subvert it. He has turned down offers to record for big record companies and to stage proper tours, preferring to play in clubs using his own antique, lo-fi equipment guaranteed to produce a raw Fifties-style authenticity.

For Billy Childish, this resolute amateurism - this abhorrence of anything that might be said to remotely resemble a career - is tantamount to an article of faith. Like his records, his volumes of poetry are self-published . (His novels are published through a small, independent house in Brighton).

His poems are raw, unmediated, bruisingly shocking in their candour and utter lack of sentimentality. Childish is dyslexic, and his poems are published exactly as he writes them, which lends them a curious vulnerability. This from a poem called Invincible, about his grandfather: ‘when he was lien on his back in/hospital waiting to die/he looked more like a strange/kind of baby/and apparently he cried to one of/his daughters that he couldn't/die happily because of my father.

’His painting is similarly uncompromising. Billy Childish described himself as a ‘Sunday painter’, which is literally true. Each Sunday he drives from his home in Chatham to his mother’s terrace house in Whitstable, where an upstairs bedroom serves as his studio. Too accomplished to be described as primitive or ‘outsider art’, Childish’s portraits of himself and his friends, and narrative episodes from his life, have an artless simplicity which suggests that they are produced, like everything else he does, for no one but himself.

‘The thing to know about Childish,’ says his friend Eugene Doyen, ‘is that all his life everybody has wanted to batter him into being a particular type of person: an idiot. He was always being told, you’re no good, you’re never going to add up to anything. But instead of battening down and doing what he was told, it was always a case of “Sod you, I’m going to do what I want to do.”’

Billy Childish was born in Chatham, and Chatham is where he continues to live, in a terrace house in bedsit land, on a hillside overlooking the town. Chatham is a bleak and grimy town going to the dogs, and Childish’s neighbourhood is, frankly, insalubrious. Taxis refuse to come after dark, he says, and by morning the pavement is littered with the broken glass from car windows and wing-mirrors. But Childish seems to like it. The edgy seediness and quiet desperation of Chatham is as central to his work as the industrial landscape of Salford was to Lowry.

The downstairs rooms are a shambles of paintings, guitars, amplifiers, books, papers, bric-a-brac and incongruously, a brand-new pushchair and cot. When I visit, Childish’s Belgian girlfriend, Kyra, is on the brink of giving birth. It will be their first child. Only the kitchen shows any sign of ordered habitation; a cosy room with a brightly painted Welsh dresser and a wood-burning stove, wholefood products neatly arranged on the shelves.

Childish stopped drinking altogether six years ago when he realised that it was killing him, and now polices his body with an almost fanatical zeal. In restaurants he orders a cup of hot water and produces a herbal infusion from his pocket. Kyra, a vision of serene expectancy, fixes lunch and talks about the impending birth. The baby is in breech position, and she has bought a torch and is working on turning it round by shining it against her belly.

Japanese flute music trickles softly from a battered cassette-player. Childish never listens to rock, on the grounds that ‘it’s good fun banging in nails, but not listening to anyone else do it.

’Billy Childish is, of course, a pseudonym, given to him by a friend, ‘Button-nose Steve’, in the days when Childish was editing a punk fanzine and required a more fitting nom de guerre than his given name of Steven Hamper. His father was a commercial artist, the son of a merchant seaman, with pretensions to grandeur, an exaggeratedly dandified figure - ‘like a waxwork’, says Childish - who drove a Rolls Royce and squandered his money on women and drink while his family economised by turning off the electricity and living on fried eggs.

He left the family home when Childish was six, but would return intermittently ‘to shout a lot and fall down drunk.’ Childish has an abiding memory of his father in a drunken stupor, driving him around Chatham, and fearing for his life. ‘I now realise that he was suicidal,’ he says ‘and wanted to take me with him.’

If his father was one baleful male influence on Childish’s life, another was the family friend who sexually abused him when he was nine, on a family holiday in Seasalter. He had no idea at the time, he says, that something terrible had happened. ‘I thought it had something to do with the facts of life that my father hadn’t told me. It was only later I realised it was very wrong. Most people who have suffered abuse like that will tell you that the real problem is that you feel somehow responsible.

’The incident gave rise to feelings of guilt, shame and a confusion about his own sexuality, which he says he suppressed for years. ‘And I’m sure it helped me become an alcoholic.’ It was only much later that he was able to talk about it, through his poetry and his music. A few years ago, he released a record entitled Paedophile. The cover shows an old holiday snap of the man who abused him. ‘I wanted to send it to him. But he’s probably dead.’

Childish has an elder brother, Nicholas, who went on to grammar school (he is now an art teacher). Childish went to the local secondary- modern, which he hated. He was frequently bullied - ‘I’m a very visible person’ - and considered disruptive by his teachers. ‘All I was good at was doing pictures,’ he says. ‘I was told I was thick and stupid. I felt like an outsider.’

He left school at 16 with a single CSE in art. He applied to, and was turned down by, his local art college, and instead took a job as an apprentice stonemason at the Naval Dockyard, Chatham, where he stayed for a year, at the same time working on his drawings in what he calls ‘the tea huts of hell.’

On the basis of this work he was accepted at the Medway College of Art, and then St Martin’s in London, beginning a long altercation with the educational establishment which resulted in his being expelled from St Martin’s for non-attendance. For most of this time Childish was living on the dole, ‘expert,’ as he puts it, ‘at not having a job or not being given a job.’

Swept up in the excitement of punk rock, he formed the first of a series of bands, producing and releasing his own records. At the same time he had begun writing poetry as a way, he says, of ‘trying to understand what had happened in my life and why it had happened.’

Childish’s second novel, Notebooks of a Naked Youth, which was published in 1997, is based on this period. The book tells the story of William Loveday, described on the jacket as ‘an acned youth possessed of piercing intelligence, acute self-loathing and great personal charm…haunted by intense sexual desires and the ghosts of his childhood…’

Like a character out of Dostoevsky or Hamsum, Loveday leads an impoverished existence, shambling from his squalid bedsit through the lowering Chatham days, falling into a hopeless infatuation with a young girl and encounters with the police, the social security and his violent, overbearing father.

The book’s pervasive air of bleak alienation barely hints at the darkness that enveloped Childish’s life at the time. He was drinking heavily, oppressed by thoughts of death, sometimes burning himself with cigarettes and cutting himself with razor blades ‘just to see if I drew blood.’ He developed a fixation on the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. At that time Hindley was incarcerated at the nearby Cookham Wood Prison. Childish wrote a series of letters requesting a meeting, but Hindley never replied.

It was a period, he now recognises, when he was bordering on psychosis, engaged in ‘a very sick flirtation with evil,’ and ‘fascinated with the idea of murdering people’ - specifically his own father. ‘What happens is that you come to a stage where you don’t believe you’re really alive, and therefore there is no significance to anyone being alive’ says Childish. ‘I’d had recurring nightmares about murders I’d committed, and wake up convinced I’d done it. But I’ve got two very big aspects to myself, and luckily that one never won through, because I’m also very sensitive, very gentle and not very keen on violence.’

However, his intention to murder his father was quite genuine, he says. He could not see an end to the horror that his behaviour was inflicting on the family. ‘I thought the only way to end it was to kill him.’

One night his father turned up at the family home and refused to leave. There was a row, which resulted in Childish beating him up and pushing him down the stairs. Shortly afterwards his father took up with another woman, and vanished into a spiral of drinking binges, a prison sentence, temporary stays in mental hospital and numerous failed suicide attempts. He has since remarried and is living on the south coast. Childish is the only member of the family to have remained in contact with him, his obsession continuing to fuel his work. A recent poem is entitled Failer: “My father has been practicing his suicides again and failing miserably his wife calls me he has taken two overdoses in the last two days/and crys that he wants to die…’ It concludes bluntly: ‘always he has fluthed every golden opportunity.’

By the early Eighties, Childish had become a member of an informal group known as the Medway Poets, giving readings in pubs and colleges. Friends from the period describe him as a volatile, unpredictable presence, hair shorn, dressed in thrift-shop clothes, frequently drunk. ‘He had an aura, a real air of danger,’ remembers one contemporary. ‘The way he was dealing with very confessional work and using his life in his art, he was doing things and saying things the rest of us only thought about, and if people didn’t like it that was their problem.’

It was around this period that he met Tracey Emin. With a Turkish father and English mother, Emin had experienced a rackety upbringing in Margate, absconding from school at 13, at the same age losing her virginity in a date-rape, and spending the next two years engaged in a frenetic round of sexual promiscuity.

Emin was 18 when she met Childish, a fashion student at Medway College of Design. But, inspired by Childish, she began to concentrate on painting and enrolled at Maidstone College of Art. Emin has described herself at the time as being ‘so nihilistic I wanted to die. I weighed six and a half stone: I had projectile vomiting, drank tea excessively and snakebites with Pernod in.’

She and Childish quickly became inseparable. He had started publishing his poetry under his own Hangman imprint (a venture commemorated by the tattoo of a gallows on his left arm). Emin would hustle the books at Childish’s readings, standing off to one side in a beehive hairdo, stiletto heels and a Betty Boop bathing costume. The proceeds would be spent on drink.

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