An Evening of Poetry and Film with Billy Childish

An Evening of Poetry and Film with Billy Childish

01 March, 2010
by: Katuschka

As part of the major retrospective of his work at the ICA, Billy Childish puts on an evening of poetry and film. Kate Weir is there.

Billy Childish cuts a dapper figure. With an impressive handlebar moustache, bowler hat, three-piece suit and pocket watch, he’s a steampunk Grandpa who you half expect has just stepped out of a time machine from 1920s Chatham Dockyard. Part Lord Kitchener, part Joe Strummer, this unassuming troubadour has been namechecked by Kurt Cobain, The White Stripes and even Kylie Minogue and remains a well-respected curio on the British art scene with his legacy as one of the co-founders of Stuckism (which he left in 2001).

Even at the ICA in an audience of hipsters embracing the vintage aesthetic, Childish cuts a unique figure. His first comment is that he would never attend a poetry reading himself and he’s baffled that we have. His quintessentially British self-deprecation and his humble cockney-esque demeanour are at odds with his brutal, heartbreaking poetry, which hints at a debauched and mis-spent life, full of absent fathers, failed relationships and alcoholism (The Bitter Cup) and a humanist love of the simple and cosmic (The First Green Horse God Ever Made). He reads from his book The Idiocy of Idears in between anecdotes about how these are excuses for poems and complaining about how slippery the chair armrest is.

There's also a screening of short films by The Chatham Super 8 Cinema Club, which is the brainchild of Childish and a group of friends with a flea-market camera and a penchant for folly.

There are films ranging from the comic, such as Smoking Yoga, which sees Childish in various yogic contortions whilst dragging on a pipe to more serious odes to the First World War, which play like pathe newsreels. There are even musical clips, like the cheeky, sexist ode to girls who do your washing I Love That Girl Ammonia (“scrubbing with a brillo on her knees, she’s everything a man could ever need”).

Childish’s influences are astoundingly broad for a man who doesn’t own a TV or listen to a radio. From Victoriana (The Artist Goes to Work) and punk (Punk ist Nicht Tot) to sideshows (The Death-Defying Shoulder Leap) and rhythm and blues (Billy Childish Sings ‘Dead Letter Blues’), he pursues each of his passions with the vigour and flair of a man with a firm belief in the success of the end result.

A victim of bullying, dyslexia and sexual and physical abuse, Childish’s happy-go-lucky demeanour hides a sensitive and troubled character. He concerns himself with man’s condition, naming Dostoevsky and Knut Hamsen as influences, but he is also a contented, affable, former wild child who in his ode to his son (Huddie Poem) proclaims to never love poisonous women again. Childish may come across as rough and ready, but at heart he’s a sensitive and visionary creator with a lot of love in him. It's an irresistible combination of pure and honest tongue and inflamed and errant soul. 

Read Lauren's interview with Billy Childish.
Billy Childish - Unknowable but Certain  is at the ICA until 18th April 2010.

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Katuschka