“Every artist knows that if they get something in a sketch it can be impossible to recapture that energy in another medium. And that’s the kind of energy I’m trying to get into everything. When you paint, you’re in the moment. Creativity is the only thing that engages with life. It’s the joining of mind and material. It’s a spiritual thing – and all of life should be like that.”
The Sunday Times published a fascinating feature on Billy Childish last month. I’ve read numerous interviews with Childish over the years and I’ve been intrigued by his outlook on life, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I finally started to make sense of his music via a compilation called My First Billy Childish Album (and particularly, its spoken word piece I Am The Strange Hero Of Hunger).
“I’m in love with desperate men with desperate hands, walking in second-hand shoes searching for God and hearing God and hating God.”
The rawness of tracks like The Day I Beat My Father Up seems to have become a common theme in much of my listening over the past eighteen months, but when I look back I can see that it’s always been present in the output of many of my long-term favourites like Patti Smith, Kristin Hersh and Gavin Friday. That intensity and honesty of expression seems to be something that I’m repeatedly drawn to.
The day was breathing without a sound
The dog was dead, buried in the ground
The sun shone like sixteen golden fingers
It glistened like diamonds in my mother’s windows
In this recent interview, Childish talks about the need for immediacy in art and his “no sweat” attitude towards creativity. His apparent insouciance stems from a belief that it’s important to just get on with things and not care too much what others think, or indeed what you think of them yourself. He associates skill with effortlessness and his philosophy of “the glorious amateur” offers a robust rebuttal to that reactionary Andrew Keen nonsense.
“People think I’m an amateur. That’s become a derogatory term, like I don’t know what I’m doing. But an amateur is someone who does things out of love.”
This interview has crystallised my thoughts on how I relate to artists and musicians. Childish is an especially strong example of the artistic and personality attributes most likely to draw me in. I’ve started trying to define these things that engage me, to make their common themes more explicit. I’ve been scribbling notes and drawing mind maps, getting to grips with what my choices say about the art I love and, in turn, what they say about me.
At its heart, it’s the encapsulation of a particular creative archetype: the definition of a recurring strand of artistic DNA that I find eternally fascinating. This is very much a work in progress, but it’s something I want to write about at greater length once I’ve spent more time on it. I suppose I’m struggling to get to grips with what universal conclusions I can draw out of it to make it accessible to other readers, rather than just pure navel-gazing on my part.