Untitled Document

Childish became the dominant influence in Emin’s life, shaping her painting and her subject matter. ‘Everything Tracey did was very much a caricature of what Billy did, in terms of what she painted, what she said, what she wrote,’ remembers a contemporary. ‘You’d think, is this Tracey or is this Billy?’

By all accounts the relationship was totally obsessive, sexually extreme, marked by tempestuous rows about her possessiveness (her love ‘was like wearing a mattress on your head,’ according to Childish) and his infidelities.

‘Tracey was always creating scenes,’ says Eugene Doyen, who was a student at Medway. ‘She and Childish were always at each other hammer and tongs.’ He remembers Childish turning up on one occasion with his ear torn and bleeding from Emin’s bite-marks.

Doyen made a short film with Childish and Emin based loosely on their relationship and that of Brady and Hindley, which he describes as being ‘about how two people develop a craziness together, lose their parameters and descend into a sort of evil. It very much mirrored Childish and Tracey’s relationship. He had his history: she’d been messed up in her Margate childhood. Without necessarily voicing it, we were all aware but there was this element of raveling in abuse and having been abused.’

The fragment that survives shows Childish and Emin rowing violently and then reconciling in a bout of violent love-making. ‘It was a massive love affair, really,’ says Doyen. ‘Total adoration from both sides, total need, and at the same time, total madness.

’One story, perhaps, illustrates the curious nature of their relationship more than any other. Emin has recounted how, on Childish’s birthday in 1982, she was preparing a treat when he suddenly announced that he was ‘going out’ for the day on his own. It was only six months later, reading his diary, that she discovered he had actually spent the day in London, getting married to a previous girlfriend, Sheila. The marriage was never consummated. Sheila, Childish now says, was ‘someone I could talk to. I didn’t feel lust for her, and yet I still loved her. And it was a massive gift for me that I was capable of liking a woman beyond it being a sexual relationship, because I’d always had this sickening feeling that I wasn’t capable of that.’ The marriage to Sheila was finally dissolved in 1988.

As with everything in his life, Childish chronicled the affair with Emin with a compulsive, brutal candour, turning every row, every sexual aberration into fuel for his poetry. ‘Nothing was sacred,’ Emin would later complain. ‘Because you knew it was going to be splurted all over some poxy little book and he’d be standing there, reading, giving it away to someone, making a mockery of the situation, only seeing it from his perspective.’ (Childish later wrote a poem about that too, called I’d rather you lied.)

Once asked what she felt she had learnt from Childish, Emin replied, ‘Never to let anyone do that to me again.’ Yet friends now say that the raw, autobiographical candour of Emin’s conceptual art - her unblushing accounts of her teenage promiscuity, her abortion, her despair - can all be traced directly to Childish’s influence.

‘Billy gave Tracey the tools by which to become an artist,’ says Eugene Doyen. ‘He showed her that you could use expressionism and you could use autobiography; you don’t need to pretend to be a nice girl and get on with people; you can shock and be outrageous. You can use yourself for what you want to do with your art and it’s not a question of pandering to people. She has her own thoughts, she works in her own medium, but without Billy Childish there wouldn’t be any Tracey Emin as an artist.’

The pair finally separated in 1986. Emin set off on a path that would take her to the Royal College of Art, Turner Prize nominations and newspaper notoriety. Childish remained in Chatham, writing his poetry, recording his music, making his paintings.

When I contacted Emin, she declined to discuss Childish, saying only that their relationship was ‘a growing-up thing that was in the past.’ She then said that she thought it was ‘a bit rude for people to keep prying into my past and my private life the way they do.

’When I pointed out that the major body of her work was actually to do with exploring her past and her private life she said that she was ‘moving away from that now.’

Yet even now they seem unable to let each other go, bound together in a curious dance of love and recrimination. Childish continues to worry at the relationship in his poetry, his painting and his conversation, one minute accusing Emin of deliberately editing out his contribution to a recent television documentary on her life, and not giving him the proper credit for the part he played in shaping her as an artist; the next talking of how he still cares for her, and fretting that she’s destroying herself with her success, her fashionable new friends and her drinking jags.

Kyra leaves the room while he talks about all this. She and Childish started going out when he was still seeing Emin. You could say that Billy chucked Tracey for Kyra. Or perhaps Tracey chucked Billy. They still argue about that too.

Childish and Kyra have been together for 12 years, but they are no longer, strictly speaking, boyfriend and girlfriend. Ironically, perhaps, they made the decision to separate on the night their baby was conceived. Then they discovered Kyra was pregnant. And so they have resolved to remain on the best of platonic terms, to bring up the baby together.

Kyra is serene and beautiful and, you think, sensible: and - you also think - it can’t have been easy, living with ‘The Saga of Billy Childish,’ the poems, the paintings, the history - and living, in a sense, with Emin.

‘Tracey has been my muse all the way through. And me for her, in a sense,’ says Childish. ‘This incarnation of Tracey as the brave confessionalist - this rude and loud alcoholic person - is me 15 years ago. But I’m not like that any more.’

And it is true; it is hard to equate the good-humoured, gentle, ironic figure Childish now presents - with his herbal infusions and his daily yoga practice - with the destructive, alcoholic, self- described ‘potential psychopath’ of 15 years ago.

Looking back on his life, Childish says it has been his work - and only his work - which has saved him. ‘Without the work, I’d have hurt myself irrevocably, or hurt others irrevocably. Or I’d have drunk myself to death. Without being melodramatic, I couldn’t have survived without it.’

You might say he has written and painted and played his way to a sort of sanity. It’s a strange thing, says Childish, but he gets letters from fans, aspirant writers, almost envying the material his life has given him. ‘I always say it’s OK to come from it, but it’s not a good place to stay: and you don’t need to go there if you’re not there already.’ He gets other letters - from people in America, Italy, Japan - telling him that his story is their story too and he’s saved their lives.

In recent years he has developed an interest in Buddhism, and he riffles through his bookshelf in search of a quotation from a book by the Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa. ‘It is said, I think in the Lankavatara Sutra, that unskilled farmers throw away their rubbish and buy manure from other farmers. But those who are skilled go and collect in their own rubbish in spite of the bad smell and unclean work, and when it is ready to be used they spread it on their land and out of this they grow their crops. That is the skilled way.’

He pauses. That describes it, he says, using the manure of his life to grow the crop of his work. ‘And maybe that’s why I’m still in Chatham. Because I’m still working it out. Because that’s where the manure is. And I’m not running away.’

An exhibition of Childish’s paintings is opening that evening in Folkestone, and darkness is falling as we set off in my car - the windows and wing-mirrors mercifully intact. Childish suggests that on the way we should drop in at his mother’s house in Whitstable, where he does his painting.

Driving through the Kent countryside, we talk about the ‘Stuckist’ movement, a loose alliance of painters - founded by Childish and a fellow artist and Medway poet Charles Thomson - which received a burst of publicity last year in the run-up to the Turner Prize.ch

The Stuckists take their name from a comment allegedly made by Tracey Emin to Childish, that while she had moved on in her life and her art, he was ‘stuck, stuck, stuck’ - stuck in Chatham, stuck in his unreconstructed punk rock, his bleak paintings, his raw, solipsistic poetry.

The Stuckist manifesto proclaims itself ‘bitterly opposed’ to virtually the entire body of contemporary art, ‘including, but not limited to, performance art, installation art, video art, conceptual art, minimal art, academic art and particularly any so- called art which incorporates dead animals or tents.’

Stuckism, on the other hand, is ‘a quest for authenticity.’ The Stuckist is not ‘mesmerised by the the glittering prizes’; it is the Stuckist’s duty ‘to explore his/her neurosis and innocence.’ This is partly a prank, of course, an art strategy - a way of poking fun at the new Brit-art establishment, in much the same way that in the Twenties the Dadaists mocked conventional ideas of ‘fine art’ by exhibiting urinals and painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa.

But, joking aside, the Stuckist manifesto is making serious points about the commodification of art as fashion and the tyranny of the marketplace; and its strident neo-conservatism - ‘Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists’ - they strike a sympathetic chord with anyone baffled by the elevation of Damien Hirst’s picked shark to iconic status, even if they might not recognise Childish’s grimly haunting portraits as the most alluring alternative.

But then again, you can’t help wondering if part of Childish’s interest in the Stuckists isn’t to do with settling old scores with Tracey Emin - that reference to ‘any so-called art which incorporates dead animals or tents’ - and venting a resentment that her success and recognition is built on ideas seeded by him. Could it be that Childish is actually envious?

Perhaps there’s a part of him, he says, that would like to win the Turner Prize (and pigs will fly), but artworld success is really a hoax, ‘a delusion.’ ‘I think,’ says Eugene Doyen, ‘that Childish thinks fame is a compromise. It’s that thing of “I’m not going to suck up and preen for it.” It’s a massive egotism in one way.’

‘I wouldn’t be able to live with myself doing the things that a lot of people do for fame,’ says Childish. ‘Because I can’t believe in it. It’s not real. It’s almost like paying people to like you. That’s no good to me.’ Childish is staring out into the darkness. ‘I want to be really loved.

’Childish’s mother, June, lives in a two-up, two-down Edwardian terrace on a backstreet in Whitstable. It is a shrine to her son’s work. Paintings hang on every inch of the walls: self-portraits; portraits of Kyra, Tracey, Sheila and his mum. A chillingly stark black and white picture of an old man sitting on a chair, entitled Despair, takes pride of place in the cosy sitting-room. Childish painted it when he was working for a short time in a psychiatric hospital.

June has a visitor; an elderly neighbour, whom Childish introduces as ‘Killer’, on the grounds that he was once a champion boxer in the Navy. Killer pantomimes an exchange of blows, then settles down with a copy of the Sun, while June makes the tea. June has lately taken up ceramics, specialising in large pots, shaped as cats: not cute cats, but horror-show cats, all over the house, scowling at Childish’s paintings.

Childish paints upstairs in the front bedroom. It is tiny and impossibly congested. Canvases are racked up around the walls. Two works in progress stand side by side in a space near the window: Childish’s early works - painted in what he refers to as his ‘alcoholic’ period - are universally dark, all lowering blacks and greys: a startlingly vivid expression of his state of mind. Looking at them, one is reminded of the work that emerges from art-therapy classes in psychiatric hospitals. Nowadays he’s working in vividly bright citrus colours. But the subjects are mostly the same, variations on portraits of himself, Kyra and Tracey.

Childish has exhibited all over Europe, but he has no gallery in Britain, no agent, and sells most of his work himself ‘by post.’ at prices between £400 and £1,000.

The exhibition in Folkestone is a retrospective of Childish’s work from the past 20 years. It is being held at the Metropole Arts Centre, a space sponsored - somewhat improbably in the circumstances - by Saga, the travel company for the over-50’s. The preview audience is divided between Childish’s friends (shorn haircuts, ill-fitting suits, combat boots ) and the centre’s more regular patrons (blue rinses, car-coats, comfy shoes), some of whom are openly bemused by his portraits.

But by the end of the evening, 10 of the 50 works have been sold. One elderly couple settle on a huge, vividly coloured canvas for their new home, ‘because it’s the right shape, basically,’ and invite Childish to tea when it’s been hung.

A few days after the Folkestone exhibition, Childish telephones to tell me that Kyra has given birth to a son. They are calling him Huddie, after the American folk singer Huddie Leadbetter, better known as Leadbelly. A propitious name, Childish believes. Leadbelly wrote Goodnight Irene and Rock Island Line. ‘But then again,’ Childish muses, ‘he also killed a man.’

We talk about how fatherhood will change him. He says it won’t at all, ‘because I’ve already changed… I’ve dealt with a lot of things that would have been a real big problem to pass on.

’He and Kyra will not be living together ‘as husband and wife.’ They will not be ‘a model family of any type. But we’re going to be the parents together. I’m quite good at caring for people,’ he says. ‘I know what I wanted, and I’ll give him what I wanted.’

He has written a poem about his new son, he says, which he’d like me to read. It arrives the next morning by fax, an epic. ‘Huddie,’ it begins, ‘I may be the strangest father/but I welcome you…’ It goes on to talk about his son’s conception, his birth in the hospital on a hill overlooking Chatham, ‘my ugly home town,’ about the pain of Kyra’s childbirth, and Billy’s joy. ‘You are so beautiful, Huddie/you came into this world to teach me love, and I welcome you.’

It concludes with a promise: ‘you will not be abused as I was abused/I will not allow it/you will not be told you are ugly/as I was told I was ugly/or that you are backwards or stupid/if you are slow to writing or mathmatics/then damn writing and mathmatics/you will not be told you cried too much/or that you were too clingy and needy/as I was told I cried too much/and was too clingy and needy/love cannot spoil a child/ if you wish to sing then you shall sing/ if you wish to dance then you shall dance/and you will not be told you have a god- awful voice/or that you are tone death/or that you have 2 left feet/your desire to be will be your reason to be.’

All woodcuts taken from Billy Childish: Selected poems 1980-1998
[Codex Books]

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