This expressive excitement is not necessarily pleasant but always emotionally vital, and resonates through the artists painting, writing and music.” A conspicuous emotional register is – particularly moods of poetic exhilaration. Painterly nuance is not necessarily the point. Also, there’s a sense of embarrassment because of the sincerity of the work. “I think it’s because Billy has done such a lot of work,” Brown tells me, “and the sheer range it covers. He couldn’t fathom why nobody was writing similar books about Childish. The poet laureate, Andrew Motion, said of Childish: “He looks like he’s having more fun being a poet than I am.”Īs for the art world: Emin has acknowledged his profound influence on her own work, of which more later, and a new critical study of Childish by the artist and writer Neal Brown describes him as “one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood, figures on the British art scene.”īrown “discovered” Childish in the course of writing a book about Emin for the Tate. His poetry has twice won him National Poetry Prize commendations. (“She was very polite and very nice,” he reports.) Kylie Minogue phoned him to ask if she could use the title of one of his poems for one of her albums. The White Stripes asked Childish to paint live on stage with them on Top Of The Pops. Graham Coxon of Blur once drummed for Childish’s band. They include the late Kurt Cobain, PJ Harvey, Robert Plant, and Beck. Nevertheless, Childish has himself been a cult hero to people around the world, including many who are themselves well known and successful. “People think I’m being cute when I don’t recognise the names of people they mention,” he says.
It also explains his extraordinarily scanty grasp of popular culture. This helps to explain how he has the time to produce so much work. The last time he went to a gig, other than as performer, was in the 1970s. He doesn’t “do” email or mobile phones, and his web presence is taken care of by somebody else. Indeed, Childish does not watch TV, or listen to the radio, or read newspapers, and hasn’t done so for years. In 2006, he declined a lucrative offer to appear in Celebrity Big Brother. Or if you have, you only know vaguely that he once went out with Tracey Emin, the artist who has since been showered with acclaim and money.Ĭhildish holds Emin’s worldly success in disdain. “And I have that with Jupiter, so I can never do enough – absolutely unlimited pffft!”ĭespite his extraordinary output, the chances are that you have not heard of Childish. “I’m Sagittarius to the power of a million,” Childish explains. He’s produced 2,500 pictures, published 40 books of poetry and four novels, and released more than 100 full-length albums – about half as many again as the Rolling Stones, who have been at it twice as long. He paints, writes, and makes music no less abundantly. At school he was told he had verbal incontinence, and it seems that hasn’t changed.
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