MY
FAULT - BILLY CHILDISH
If I was to vote in one of those Greatest Living Englishman polls,
for me it would be a toss up between Mark E Smith and Billy Childish
though I suspect Billy Childish would win it by a whisker which, when
taking his moustache into consideration, would make sense. It
certainly wouldn't be Sir David Attenborough or Stephen Fry, or even
Nicholas Parsons for that matter.
What makes a man an artist? Or rather, what makes a man a great
artist? Must you suffer for your art or must you have suffered? If
so, does this explain Billy Childish? Picked on, beaten and bullied
by his father and elder brother. Shat on, spat on and made to eat
soap. Betrayed by his mother, dragged into school and yet more misery
where - as Childish puts it - 'specialness' is destroyed. The
world of nature, innocence and imagination erased. Then raped by a
friend of his family.
Childhood is a horror show, no better exemplified by Billy Childish's
account not of his molestation and rape by an older man or the
physical and psychological violence inflicted upon him by members of
his own family but by the cruelty that children themselves are able
to inflict through the bullying of their weaker classmates and
through the torture inflicted upon lesser creatures. A case in point
being his description of him and his friend glueing matchsticks to
wasps then burning them alive like some sadistic Japanese prisoner of
war camp game, followed by Childish demanding his friend (whose
father is a vicar) spit on a cross: 'Come on, God’s kid, fuckin'
spit on it, you fuckin' Christ lover! Jesus ain't gonna save you now,
so spit on it! Spit on it, you wanker!'
Suffer little children to come unto me.
Billy Childish is an artist, poet, writer, photographer, film maker
and musician; and despite being diagnosed dyslexic at the age of 28
has published more than thirty poetry collections and three novels.
He's recorded over one hundred albums on a variety of record labels
and exhibited paintings all over the world. According to the late,
great John Peel he's 'a cult-rock icon'. Billy Childish is a
one-man art movement and My Fault is his memoir of his
childhood and teenage years.
'All characters in this publication are fictitious and any
resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental',
as it states in the disclaimer at the start of the book but clearly
that's not the case at all. Tracey Emin, Childish's ex-girlfriend,
for example, can be identified fairly easily and the things he's got
to say about her are... interesting, to say the least. No wonder
she'll no longer talk to him: 'There's nothing that bitch liked
better than a thick one up her arse, looking over her shoulder,
mascara like a spider. Then I'd pull it out, feeding it into her
mouth, and she'd take it full in the face, laughing and coughing
through the sauce,' he confides to the world and its mother. It's
the kind of confession that might sour any relationship, you'd have
thought? Or maybe not?
Other episodes are equally identifiable such as him relaying a
conversation conducted among workmen at Chatham Naval Dockyard one
day as they sit drinking cups of tea and reading the newspapers:
'"Lucky for me I ain't got kids, but still, in front of my
wife, six o'clock, it's bang out of order!"
"Fucking
disgusting!"
"But
this idiot in here, it says he kicked his TV set in, two hundred
quid's worth! It says it here in black and white. Here, take a look
for yourself, read it! What do you make of that? Two hundred quid's
worth of television, it's a bloody joke! The man's an idiot!"
"I'd
have just switched it off."
"Exactly!"'
Without mentioning them or going into any further detail, Childish is
clearly referring to the Sex Pistols and the Bill Grundy incident
that made headlines in 1976, catapulting them to world-wide infamy
and without realising it himself at the time, planting a tiny seed
inside of him that would inform everything he would do in the future.
By this I mean Punk Rock and the spirit of independence and
'do-it-yourself', where art and creativity are guiding lights and the
highest ideals for man to attain to.
Other episodes in the book are - if not identifiable due to being
local to the area Childish grew up in - familiar due to almost
everyone having experienced something similar. He mentions, for
example, the destruction of the woods at the back of his house where
he and his friends played: 'The woods, our woods... They moved in
and flattened the lot! Crushed to the ground! Without so much as a
'by your leave'. Age old and noble. There's no doubt that those woods
belonged to us kids, us kids, the dickie birds and the occasional
adder. One day rabbits, spiders and birds, the next: bulldozers!'
I feel the same about the Stonehenge Free Festival that was so
violently smashed by out-of-control police in the summer of 1985,
known now as the Battle of the Beanfield. Unleashed by the Thatcher
government in the wake of the miners strike the previous year. It
still makes my blood boil after all these years. I still want it to
be avenged.
'People have no rights and kids have less than none. They knocked
down our world with no warning, with no consultation. Their only
emotion: contempt! An atrocity that should never be forgotten. I
write it down, here for all to see, to be documented for future
generations. The holocaust against our friends the trees, the
grasses, the flowers and all their myriad of friends and relations,
four-legged, six-legged, eight-legged, and wings of the sky. I swear
to Christ, it makes me see red, even after all these softening
years...'
For Childish, however, this event led to his involvement with the
Walderslade Liberation Army, a highly disciplined ecological
terrorist unit comprised of him and his gang of fellow
eleven-year-olds, led by a political mastermind called Goldfish. "We
need guns and we need politics!" Goldfish would declare as
he wiped the snot from his nose "The politics of our
situation!"
Armed with crude, home-made guns made out of old metal pipes and real
bombs made from chemicals stolen from the school lab and typical
bomb-making materials such as weed-killer, sulphur and saltpetre
bought from any hardware shop or chemist, Goldfish led his men into
battle with the developers who were trashing their woods. "The
first thing an army needs is discipline! Discipline! Food! Guns! And
Glycerine!"
I wonder what became of Goldfish? What did he grow up to be? I wonder
if Billy Childish even knows? Maybe he went on to form Class War?
My Fault is funny, disturbing, brilliant and harrowing
all at the same time. Within its pages are echoes of Charles
Bukowski, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, and Henry Miller - and that's a
very good thing indeed. Billy Childish is an example to us all. An
example of triumph over adversity, of art over commerce, and of
integrity of intention. An example of creativity being the heart and
soul of mankind.
And Billy Childish gets my vote for the Greatest Living
Englishman.
John Serpico
