To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish <\/i><\/a>(White Rabbit, 2024)<\/p>\nWho is Billy Childish, a.k.a. William Ivy Loveday, a.k.a. Steven John Hamper, a.k.a. Virgil, a.k.a. Horatio Hamper, a.k.a. Kurt Schwitters, a.k.a. William Charlie Hamper, a.k.a. Bill Hamper, a.k.a. Bill Hamper-Childish, a.k.a. Guy Hamper, a.k.a. Old 4 Legs, a.k.a. Dr Albirt Umber and Karl Lampenshwarts, a.k.a. Jack Ketch, a.k.a. Charles Hangman, a.k.a. Sir Quentin Gaydish, a.k.a. Rolling Slim, a.k.a. Danger Bill Henderson, a.k.a. Xerxes, a.k.a. William Claudius, a.k.a. Gus Claudius, a.k.a. Odysseus? What place or void in our cultural landscape is marked by this cacophony of signposts? Tedd Kessler\u2019s To Ease My Troubled Mind<\/i> begins with a straightforward answer, introducing Childish as \u2018the UK\u2019s most prolific creative force \u2013 a painter, poet, photographer, musician, memoirist and novelist who is in constant production of the goods\u2019:<\/p>\nBilly Childish has released well over 150 albums with numerous different groups since his first with the Pop Rivets in 1979. He has published a dozen autobiographical novels and at least fifty collections of poetry, a couple of memoirs, along with several printed collections of his photography and art. He has produced thousands of paintings and his work is exhibited around the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Indeed, Childish\u2019s output is so vast, and his back catalogue so deeply buried, that only he is familiar with its full extent; the rest of us have to make do with whatever fragments we can lay our hands on. Plus, the art, literature, and music scenes are all so thoroughly siloed nowadays that it isn\u2019t uncommon for, say, admirers of his paintings to know nothing about his records, or for listeners of those records to care little, in turn, about the paintings (Postmodernism only ever paid lip service to the idea of effacing the High\/Low divide: if the gallery and the street ever got too close, the one would lose too much cash, the other too much cool; historically, Childish has cared little for either). Hence, \u2018Who is Billy Childish\u2026?\u2019 is immediately complicated by another question: \u2018Whose <\/i>Billy Childish?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Are all of your secrets in your work?\u2019 asks Kessler in an interview titled \u2018Ten Minutes on the Phone with Billy Childish, March 2021\u2019. Childish responds in the affirmative: \u2018Most of me is available for inspection, yes\u2019. On the one hand, this cannot be doubted. Childish\u2019s work leaves no stone unturned, no aspect of his self unexamined \u2013 from the neglect and abuses which he suffered as a child, to the shame and failures which he experienced as an adult. On the other, his prolifigacy diminishes his work\u2019s ability to give reliable testimony, to lend proper expression or adequate weight to his \u2018secrets\u2019. His output is so large, so single-handedly inducive of Museum Exhaustion Syndrome, that any one part of it feels less like a true confession, less like the ultimate or definitive revelation of some authentic self, and more like spit in the ocean, a meaningless drop in the bucket (a single instance of self-expression has the potential to possess integrity, but a multitude, as Sigmund Freud said of doubles, places \u2018the subject\u2026into doubt as to which his self is\u2019). In addition, much of Childish\u2019s oeuvre has the estranging quality of excessive repetition: his songs seldom feature more than three chords and his writing constantly returns to the same subjects and themes (\u2018My favourite criticism of what I do\u2026\u2019 he explained to Uncut <\/i>in 2020, \u2018is that I only do one thing and it\u2019s all the same\u2019). It altogether eschews Realism and repeats none of that movement’s pretensions to objectivity, preferring instead to flaunt its own constructedness: his records are riddled with hisses and crackles \u2013 that is, with the defects of the recording tech itself (he does not perform live anymore, precisely because modern PA systems have too few of these defects); his paintings, meanwhile, are impasto-thick with the excess physicality of the paint itself. Plus, his work has an unapologetically palimpsestic or derivative quality, bearing too many traces of too many bygone movements: his woodcuts could be Kollwitz\u2019s, his photomontages H\u00f6ch’s, his poster and book-cover designs are Dadaist pastiches, his poetry reads like Bukowski\u2019s, and his music often sounds like the Troggs or early Kinks (when the White Stripes\u2019 Jack White accused him of plagiarism in 2006, Childish retorted in an open letter, \u2018I always stay well within the music industry recommended guideline of never plagiarising more than 50% of my material). Hence, the difficulty with searching Childish\u2019s work for signs of Childish is this: on the one hand, it is utterly saturated with those signs \u2013 Childish is all over everything, and in unreservedly personal detail; on the other, as Childish himself puts it to Kessler, \u2018I don\u2019t feel overly identified with what I do once I\u2019ve put it out there\u2019 \u2013 in fact, as Childish once put it to Local Authority<\/i>, \u2018I don\u2019t really identify as Billy Childish\u2019. <\/p>\n
When I tell my friends about Billy Childish, when I try to bring them to grips with the sheer enormity of his output, their question is always, \u2018But is it any good?\u2019 The assumption here is that quantity and quality exist in inverse proportion to one another, that an abundance in one is always accompanied by a scarcity in the other. Childish doesn\u2019t adhere to this assumption: he is prolific and not bad (\u2018actually\u2026 I have a lot of quality control\u2019, he reminded Stuart Jeffries in a 2011 interview for The Guardian<\/i>). But he doesn\u2019t exactly thwart it either: he is prolific, but he is not entirely good \u2013 at least, not in any straightforward sense. \u2018You mustn\u2019t call him a genius,\u2019 Sanchia Lewis (Childish\u2019s former lover and a wonderful artist in her own right) tells Kessler. Childish himself would concur. In a 2010 interview for the Tate\u2019s \u2018Sound and Vision Series\u2019, he explains, \u2018I\u2019m interested in the elemental, not impressing others, and not impressing myself\u2019. Graham Day (an accomplished musician and former bandmate) gives further clarification, telling Kessler: \u2018Billy has got this thing about wanting things to be crap\u2019. It is, I think, a characteristically British stance. As Owen Hatherley writes in Militant Modernism<\/i>, \u2018What still marks out British Art [by which, Hatherley explains in a footnote, \u2018I am in no way referring to the gallery-bound games and third-hand poses of the 90\u2019s \u2018Young British Art\u2019\u2019] is essentially a certain crapness<\/i>, a refusal of ease and slickness in favour of angularity and harshness\u2019. And at the heart of that refusal is the Brechtian\/Punk compulsion to dismantle the so-called \u2018Fourth Wall\u2019 between creator and crowd, art and life, authority and layman (I mean, genuinely dismantle, not just haughtily address a camera \u00e0 la <\/i>BBC Three and Amazon’sFleabag<\/em>). As Childish put it in the open letter to White, \u2018We\u2019re aiming to close the fifteen feet between us and the audience\u2019. Even today, it feels like a deeply transgressive gesture \u2013 think of the wrath which the breakdancer Raygun incurred when she succeeded in closing some of that gap at the Paris Olympics (\u2018the rage\u2019 in Oscar Wilde\u2019s words, \u2018of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass\u2019). And it is as one such gesture that we should read Childish\u2019s latest \u2013 and perhaps most baffling \u2013 project, The William Loveday Intention\u2019s \u2018New and Improved Bob Dylan\u2019. Clearly, the \u2018Intention\u2019 here is to re-folk or de-canonise Bob Dylan \u2013 to salvage Dylan the radiant amateur who was one with the people around him from Dylan the towering genius and Nobel laureate (in his manifesto for the Stuckist movement, of which he was a co-founder, Childish explains, \u2018The Stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur (amare<\/i>, Latin, to love)\u2019). What makes the Dylan project so charming is the sense that, as the usual attack on modern art has it, \u2018I could have done that\u2019 or \u2018my child could have done that\u2019 (personally, I wish you and your child would do that instead of just drawing Pok\u00e9mon or building Lego). Even for those of us who do not know Childish personally, his work possesses the sentimental value which we reserve exclusively for our own creations or for our kids\u2019. He is not a genius; he is better, more valuable, precisely because he is worse. He is living proof of G.K. Chesterton\u2019s maxim, \u2018If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly\u2019. <\/p>\nIt\u2019d be tempting to read Childish\u2019s hyperproductivity, his one-man art-factory, as a hyperbolic satire of capitalist productivity. It would sound clever, perhaps, but Childish has long been suspicious of cleverness, even writing in the Stuckist manifesto that \u2018if it is the conceptualist\u2019s wish to always be clever, then it is the Stuckist\u2019s duty to always be wrong.\u2019 Plus, it would reek of liberal elitism, whereas \u2018One of [Childish\u2019s] big hatreds\u2026,\u2019 Kessler learns from Kyra De Coninck (another of Childish\u2019s former lovers, now a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Kent) is \u2018left-wing intelligentsia, Guardian <\/i>readers\u2019 (I worry that I might have become one of them, though I still feel most at home among the anarchist factions of the booboisie; even this, however, would still be too elitist a position for Childish, who in 1979 fixed The Sex Pistols\u2019 \u2018Anarchy In The UK\u2019 with The Pop Rivets\u2019 \u2018Fun In The U.K.\u2019). This, it seems, is partly why De Coninck fell for Childish in the first place. \u2018My family are very political,\u2019 she explains to Kessler:<\/p>\nmy grandparents were communists\u2026it was about your role in society, about making it a better place. I think for me to go off and live with Billy, it was the furthest away from that, because everything was about him, everything was about the self. There was a disillusionment with wanting to change the world. I think that\u2019s what really attracted me about punk, and that\u2019s what really attracted me about Billy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
De Coninck\u2019s diagnosis is spot on. As Simon Critchley (via the young Johnny Rotten) phrases it in conversation with Andrew Gallix for Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night<\/i>: \u20181977 was the inversion of the emancipatory drive of 1968\u2026 we were not going to change the world and the world was rubbish anyway, just another council tenancy\u2019. But if this disillusionment is what endeared Childish to Punk (and DeConinck to Childish), it is also what landed him in hot water at the Vortex Club with an ex-public-schooler going by the name of Joe Strummer. As Childish and Steve Simmons, an old friend from school, tell Kessler: <\/p>\nBILLY: [The Clash] were telling off our friend Gabriel. Gabriel was a black guy wearing a Nazi armband. They told him he had to take it off, we told them to leave him alone. <\/p>\n
STEVE: He had a swastika on his arm. I mean, the Sex Pistols had done it, and Siouxsie Sioux. He was just a kid, he\u2019d gone along with the look like punks do\u2026 We\u2019re just standing in the Vortex chatting, and Joe Strummer comes up, spitting thunder, \u2018What are you fucking wearing that for, my fucking grandad was persecuted by the Nazis!\u2019 We\u2019re saying nothing, he\u2019s going on and on at him, but he went on about ten seconds too long. So we went, \u2018Fuck off, leave him alone!\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nor has Childish himself been above using such imagery. In July 2009, he and Steve Lowe of L-13 Light Industrial Workshop (a \u2018Private Ladies & Gentlemen’s Club for Art, Leisure & the Disruptive Betterment of Culture\u2019) hosted a National Art Hate Week. The accompanying exhibition \u2013 at Cork Street Gallery in Mayfair \u2013 included, as Lowe recalls to Kessler, <\/p>\n
a \u2018Jews Against Art\u2019 poster featuring a huge swastika with the Star of David\u2026 And we also did the Artschwitz poster. Adam [Wood] and I had done a campaign for the mayor of London, where we said, \u201cBring back the smokestack.\u201d With this, we turned the Tate back into a power station, powered by burning art. So that got adopted into Art Hate, and then it appeared on a poster behind the Auschwitz-style gates that Billy had come up with: Art Brings Freedom<\/i>. Then Adam came up with the title Artschwitz and we pissed ourselves laughing about it, but very nervously.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Lowe explains, \u2018We\u2019re from that generation who thought it was our job to go out and really push people\u2019s buttons.\u2019 But has a line been crossed here? Unfettered capitalism has landed us with a society in desperate need of being made into a better place (virtually every council tenancy has been sold off, for starters), a world in urgent want of being changed. But is Childish\u2019s egotism so rabid, his cynicism so extreme, as to render his work #irrelevant<\/i>?<\/p>\n
Of course, Childish\u2019s egotism has \u2013 or at least has developed \u2013 limits. Of the 20 x 8 foot mural of his face that has gone up in Rochester, for example, he tells Kessler, \u2018It\u2019s odd some people imagine I had something to do with it. I\u2019m not that much of a maniac!\u2019 Nor, of course, is Childish even remotely right-wing. Earlier this year, he made a beautiful poster depicting Nigel Farage accompanied by the text \u2018SEND THE CUNT TO RWANDA\u2019 (it came with a \u2018trigger warning\u2019: \u2018This \u201cartwork\u201d contains foul political personalities that some people will find revolting\u2026 All proceeds go to buy a one way ticket to Rwanda for Mr Farage (sorry Rwanda)\u2019). Last year, he did a similar one depicting Boris Johnson and the text \u2018YOU LYING SPINELESS CUNT\u2019. Plus, the swastikas sported by Siouxise, the Pistols, and the scene around them were more politically complex than is often acknowledged. As Mark Fisher put it in a K-Punk blog post entitled \u2018Fear and misery in the third reich \u2018n\u2019 roll\u2019:<\/p>\n
Punk\u2019s very 1970s, very British fixation on Nazism posed ethical questions so troubling they could barely be articulated explicitly: what were the limits of liberal tolerance? Could Britain be so sure it had differentiated itself from Nazism (a particularly pressing issue at a time that the NF was gathering an unprecedented degree of support)? And, most unsettling of all, what is it that separates Nazi Evil from heroic Good?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In the \u2018Ten Minutes\u2019 interview, Childish himself insists, \u2018I\u2019m not very political\u2019. Of course, the left-wing intelligentsia would be quick to point out that, as the Australian Labor MP Joan Kirner once expressed it, \u2018There is no such thing as being non-political\u2019: that apoliticism is itself an inherently political position, a tacit endorsement of a status quo which is by definition a political construct. This, however, would miss (or maybe just paraphrase) the point. Childish\u2019s resentment for the \u2018left-wing intelligentsia\u2019 has less to do with politics as such <\/i>and more to do with his disdain for what in his autobiographical novel My Fault<\/i> he describes as \u2018a world filled with experts\u2019. And at the heart of this disdain is, again, the Brechtian\/Punk compulsion to dismantle the \u2018Fourth Wall\u2019, to close \u2018the fifteen feet between us and the audience\u2019. For Childish, the problem with the left-wing intelligentsia is that it is still too fond of those fifteen feet \u2013 that it is insufficiently democratic, in other words, too right-wing (that, or that it adheres too strictly to Classical Marxism\u2019s exclusively materialist worldview: unusually for someone reared on Punk, Childish retains a decidedly spiritual bent). <\/p>\n
If it came to it, the left-wing intelligentsia would probably go to town on Childish. First, it would point out that the path of eccentricity has only been available to him because of the advantages that he wields by virtue of being white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, male, and (albeit only recently) financially successful. As Shola von Reinhold puts it in Lote<\/i>: <\/p>\neccentricity is tethered to the idea of a rarefied and semi-fragile aristocracy. For it to work, unconventional elements require a foil of idealised social stability, hence why the history of eccentrics is even more populated by the white, privileged, and wealthy than other histories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Perhaps for this reason, Childish (who, in spite of his good grades, was kept in the remedial class at school on account of his \u2018eccentric behaviour\u2019) often seems intent on downplaying the extent of his eccentricity from Kessler, or in depicting it as a misleading caricature that has been projected onto him (this, incidentally, is not unprecedented: in 2014 Childish told The Guardian<\/i>, \u2018I consider my work mainstream\u2019). Across the interviews and excerpts contained in To Ease My Troubled Mind<\/i>, Childish admits to having encountered a flying saucer, the Beast of Blue Bell Hill, a ghost, his dead cat walking, a dog-sized ant, a \u2018real live goblin\u2019, as well as \u2018flesh and blood demons\u2019. He appears to believe in the Sasquatch, and that Jimi Hendrix was murdered. He is reluctant, however, to discuss these topics at length, explaining:<\/p>\nPeople want you to be weird. They want you to be mysterious and eccentric. I\u2019ve read things about me where I\u2019m portrayed as eccentric when in fact I\u2019ve been very level and sane with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Accordingly, the picture that emerges from To Ease My Troubled Mind <\/i>is not one of normality securing its position by reaching down from its pedestal, of the centre \u2018slumming it\u2019 out at the margin. Nor is it (as in many mischaracterisations of Childish) one of a jealous outsider railing at the gates of the establishment, desperate to be let in. It is much less scandalous, much less dramatic \u2013 boring, even (Punk, it should be noted, shared Heidegger\u2019s fascination with \u2018profound boredom\u2019 and Wilde\u2019s with \u2018ennui, that terrible t\u00e6dium vit\u00e6<\/i>\u2019). It is simply a picture of someone doing their own thing and trying their best to keep it from being defined or assessed from without. As Childish\u2019s Transformational Breath\u00ae therapist Rachel Hudson describes it to Kessler (in, I think, appropriately trite terms): \u2018I enjoy the element of him who chooses to live life on his own terms. I enjoy that he controls his narrative.\u2019<\/p>\n
The other thing that the left-wing intelligentsia would doubtless point out is that Childish appears to have \u2013 or, at least, to have had \u2013 a disturbingly chauvinistic streak. He maintained a multinational harem comprised of women across Britain, Europe, America, and Japan. Whilst the two were lovers, he gave Tracey Emin gonorrhoea (which he had contracted from a sex worker in Hamburg), wrote and published a whole bunch of misogynistic vitriol about her (which he subsequently had her pedal to bookshops), and secretly married his ex-girlfriend. Particularly creepy, to my mind at least, is when Childish attempts to convey the impression which Emin first made on him by informing Kessler of her measurements: \u201836-18-36\u2019. De Coninck adds to the picture, explaining, \u2018He used to write a lot to Page 3 girls: he was a member of the Linda Lusardi fan club and the Suzanne Mizzi fan club! He used to send them his poetry books.\u2019 To his credit, Kessler doesn\u2019t shy away from discussing this streak, writing:<\/p>\n
It is hard for people who love the work of Billy Childish \u2013 who think his mind is a precise tool for making sense of the human condition, who laugh loudly at his cutting jokes, his daring turns of phrase, and who admire his well-considered sense of place and humility, his powerful spirituality \u2013 to think too deeply, or even at all about the way he behaved towards the women who loved him, and who he supposedly loved, for twenty-odd years of his adult life, between 1980 and the early part of the twenty-first century\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And Emin even tries to defend Childish, telling Kessler:<\/p>\n
It was the beginning of the eighties, it was still the Dark Ages. It wasn\u2019t like now, where people have a lot more conviction about their moral compass and what\u2019s politically correct. There was none of that stuff then\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I don\u2019t know. But all I can say is that I\u2019m sure that for Billy, looking back on that now, he wouldn\u2019t be proud about hurting people like that. <\/p>\n
More interesting, however, than this retroactive attempt to justify Childish\u2019s misdemeanours, is how Childish himself attempted to justify them at the time. As Emin puts it: <\/p>\n
Billy would say, \u2018But I\u2019ve told you the truth.\u2019 He\u2019d sleep with someone on tour. He\u2019d come back, tell me and go, \u2018Well, I told you the truth.\u2019 Like the truth made up for what he did wrong. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of course, the truth alone does not make up for anything. Confession doesn\u2019t equal acquittal, and there is something deeply puerile about supposing otherwise (although, to accuse Childish of being, or of having been, well, childish, would only be to state the obvious, to bring against him a criticism which he already brings against himself. That, and it might actually get to the heart of what attracted him to Punk and what made him so good at it. As Gallix writes in \u2018The Boy Looked At Eurydice\u2019: \u2018All we can say for sure is that, more than any other subculture before or since, Punk was afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome\u2026 Oscar Wilde\u2019s famous aphorism \u2013 \u2018To be premature is to be perfect\u2019 \u2013 had found its ideal embodiment\u2019. But the ethical blunder \u2013 grave as it might be \u2013 offers clues, I think, to Childish\u2019s aesthetic success (if \u2018success\u2019 is even the right word here: \u2018Your ambition and success,\u2019 he decries in \u2018You Make Me Die\u2019, \u2018are what I detest\u2019). <\/p>\n
\u2018Truth\u2019 is a recurring theme throughout To Ease My Troubled Mind<\/i>. In the \u2018Ten Minutes\u2019 interview, Childish warns Kessler, \u2018I\u2019m really intense. I like truth, and things like that.\u2019 Sharing his version of his relationship with Emin, he explains, \u2018I never lied to Tracey. I believe in truth more than anyone\u2019. Shortly afterwards, he proffers the following auto-analysis:<\/p>\nSo many people live in this weird fantasy world where things aren\u2019t said and didn\u2019t happen and are not true. I\u2019m happy for them to all do that, but I ain\u2019t doing it. For me, everything is the truth and the integrity of something, whether it be good or bad. What happened happened, and you can\u2019t lie about it, you can\u2019t change it. It is really dangerous and unsafe for me not to know what is happening. In my family, no one said what was really going on: that\u2019s caused me to require everything to be clearly designated, because otherwise it\u2019s really dangerous. That might be the psychological reasoning behind my crazy output and my crazy requirement for facts and truth. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But what does Childish mean by \u2018truth\u2019 here? Famously, Stuckism took its name from Emin\u2019s insistence that Childish\u2019s art was \u2018Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!\u2019, and the opening words of the movement\u2019s manifesto declare, \u2018Stuckism is the quest for authenticity\u2019. Hence, there is a strong possibility that Childish\u2019s searing honesty, his uninhibited \u2018truth\u2019, like Stuckism\u2019s \u2018authenticity\u2019, might simply be a reactionary one: a stance against the glibness, posturing, and irony of Postmodernism in general and Emin in particular. But Childish left the Stuckists, as he puts it in his poem \u2018the every when\u2019: \u2018imeadiatly\u2026 upon seeing\/ their 1st shit\/ exhibition\u2019. Was it that their devotion to \u2018authenticity\u2019 somehow left little room for the \u2018truth\u2019? How could that even be the case? Thinking back on his own time as a Punk, Critchley explains: <\/p>\n
the worst thing one could be was a poser. Everyone feared that. But I don\u2019t think punk was about authenticity. It was about exposing the layers and layers of inauthenticity that make art possible. That was the Warholian element in punk. But \u2013 and this is important to me \u2013 punk was about an experience of truth, of felt, heard truth that was made possible through inauthenticity, mediation and fakery. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A similar dynamic seems to play out through Childish\u2019s work. On one hand, its driving impetus appears to be an absolute and dogged aversion to (perhaps even a fear of being accused of) poserism or dishonesty \u2013 an uncompromising commitment to articulating this \u2018experience of truth, of felt, heard truth,\u2019 unpolished and unadulterated. On the other, there is, I think, a calculated inauthenticity in Childish\u2019s work, which combines the factory\u2019s scale of production, the dandy\u2019s taste for artifice, and the forger\u2019s indifference to copying and plagiarism. He is the obverse, in this respect, of David Bowie, who was Emin\u2019s favourite, incidentally, and whose \u2018truth\u2019, as Critchley writes in Bowie<\/i>, \u2018is inauthentic, completely self-conscious, and utterly constructed. But it is still right\u2026or it has the quality of feeling right\u2019. Childish’s \u2018truth\u2019, by contrast, is fiercely authentic, unselfconscious to the point of naivety, and blood raw. And yet, in spite of all this, it is ultimately hollow: two-a-penny, phoney, and unoriginal; \u2018pretty vacant\u2019 \u2013 or, as the Stuckist manifesto put it \u2013 \u2018wrong\u2019. Childish\u2019s \u2018truth\u2019 is that which is so dense that it implodes on itself and becomes indistinguishable from meaninglessness. \u2018i believe in god,\u2019 he explains to Kessler in one email, \u2018which makes me the same as someone who doesnt believe in god\u2019. <\/p>\n
Thank God that Kessler did not attempt to write a definitive biography. Compiling essays, excerpts, emails, and interviews, alongside Kessler\u2019s own research and reflections, this \u2018Authorised Unauthorised History\u2019 \u2013 suggested by Childish, but unlikely to be read by him \u2013 succeeds in tracing the cracks and contradictions of its subject where a straightforward \u2018life story\u2019 never could.<\/p>\n
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER<\/strong>
\nOscar Mardell<\/a> is a teacher and writer from T\u0101maki Makaurau \/ Auckland. He is the author of Delirious New Lynn<\/em>, forthcoming from 5ever Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Childish\u2019s output is so vast, and his back catalogue so deeply buried, that only he is familiar with its full extent; the rest of us have to make do with whatever fragments we can lay our hands on. Plus, the art, literature, and music scenes are all so thoroughly siloed nowadays that it isn\u2019t uncommon for, say, admirers of his paintings to know nothing about his records, or for listeners of those records to care little, in turn, about the paintings (Postmodernism only ever paid lip service to the idea of effacing the High\/Low divide: if the gallery and the street ever got too close, the one would lose too much cash, the other too much cool; historically, Childish has cared little for either). Hence, \u2018Who is Billy Childish\u2026?\u2019 is immediately complicated by another question: \u2018Whose<\/em> Billy Childish?\u2019<\/p>\nOscar Mardell<\/strong> reviews To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish<\/em> by Ted Kessler<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115600"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115607,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115600\/revisions\/115607"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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