I finally managed to find a way into the music of Billy Childish a few weeks ago, via the excellent My First Billy Childish Album compilation. There’s a spoken-word piece called I Am The Strange Hero Of Hunger that concludes the album, which I absolutely love. The specifics don’t always apply to me, but the overall tone of one particular section sums up my current mood quite nicely:
“Naturally, I have no heroes: I am my heroes. I am my brothers and sisters. I feel myself joined by the soul with all beauty. My heart sings with every brave endeavour. With the strange wings of impossible butterflies, with every rock that breathes life into the world. I stand shoulder to shoulder with all denouncers of meanness. I honour spirit and faith and uphold the glorious amateur. I’m in love with desperate men with desperate hands, walking in second-hand shoes searching for God and hearing God and hating God. I’m a desperate man, buckled with fear, I am a desperate man who demands to be listened to, who demands to connect. I’m a desperate man who denounces the dullness of money and status. I’m a desperate man who will not bow down to accolade or success. I’m a desperate man who loves the simplicity of painting and hates galleries and white walls and the dealers in art. Who loves unreasonableness and hotheadedness, who loves contradiction, hates publishing houses and also I am Vincent Van Gogh, Hiroshige and every living artist who dares to draw God on this planet.”
In this extract, which concludes the piece, I hear a man entranced by life, asserting his faith in the unknown, the unseen, the mythical, the mystical and the magical. Demanding to connect, he calls it, which is a fantastic phrase. One of the many things I’ve re-discovered over the past six months is that I stand firmly beside him.