Odd chap flies under the radar

Wild Billy Childish (centre) favours early 20th-century military fashions.

Wild Billy Childish still paints in the front room of his mum's house every Sunday. The fortysomething Englishman with the World War I dress sense religiously does the 50km trip from his hometown of Chatham in Kent every weekend.

However, he will miss this Sunday's session because he and his band, the Buff Medways, are playing at Auckland's Kings Arms. He's also reading his poetry at the Odeon Lounge tomorrow night.

Childish is a musician/writer and painter.

He has released more than 100 albums - both solo, and as part of bands such as the Pop Rivets and the Milkshakes - making him one of the most prolific of modern musicians. And as well as producing hundreds of paintings he has also written around 40 books.

But if ever there was a little-known rock'n'roll animal, then it is him. "[Painting] is just a way of trying to keep working," says Childish.

"I take the painting quite seriously, as in it's something I try to do regularly. The reason I paint each week is to have discipline," he says, cagily.

On the other hand, he says: "[With] music I generally wait to feel inspired."

At this point it has to be said that Childish is deeply strange to talk to. He's not difficult, in fact he's intriguing, it's just that he is an odd chap. He's dyslexic for a start and because of that, he explains, he has to have the lyrics written down in front of him when he plays live.

"Because I'm dyslexic I've got a really weird sort of ... I can remember odd details, and the complete overall specifics of what went on, but I can't remember things like ... "

He stops, and gives an example: "I can't remember lyrics or dates, [but] I remember Strange Kind of Happiness [from his 2003 album Steady the Buffs], and what it's about. It's about death," he deadpans.

Also, he says, he can't remember how to play songs after he has written them.

"I only know my music by doing it off by heart. A lot of our songs we don't play live because I can't play 'em because we play them once when we record them, and we never play it again and so I don't know how it goes. I have to learn it off by heart and do it regularly to keep it in mind."

Not many people know about his music - a mix of catchy, yet raw and authentic rock'n'roll. As the man himself says: "I'm not known for anything. I just do things."

In recent years a few accolades have got him a bigger profile, especially his friendship with Jack White from the White Stripes who is a big admirer of his work.

Childish's musical influence has also been praised by everyone from Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Graham Coxon of Blur, to film director Mike Leigh, to obscure German industrial band, Einsturzende Neubauten.

He first started making music in 1977 with the Pop Rivets. "We played rock'n'roll. That's what punk rock music is. It is rock'n'roll. It's only when things become rock music that you've got a problem," he says. He describes his sound not as an old sound but an "exciting sound". "The only thing that matters in music is sound and performance," he professes.

"It just so happens that nowadays people don't care about sound, so they don't get a good sound. That's why nobody has surpassed [late 50s/60s guitar legend] Link Wray, or a couple of early sixties recordings, because the equipment at that time was at its peak, whereas at the moment you've just got a load of sophisticated boom boom.

"You've just got a load of noise because people think volume equals power. But we know it doesn't," he says.

I ask him about all the women's names in his song titles off the last two Buff Medways albums, Steady the Buffs and 1914, and he insists on telling me about every one of them. So here are a few of Billy's ladies, starting with the most important, his wife Julie.

"We call her Juju, but her real name is Julie. She always tells Wolf (the Buff Medways' bass player) what he needs to do when he's ill which is very often. So he calls her Nurse Julie."

Barbara Wire is a song about an old girlfriend of Billy's from when he was 17. "She was two years older than me. I think she lives in Australia and married Steve Ovett [the British long distance runner]. She was like my girlfriend and she used to treat me pretty roughly and I used to call her Barbara Wire as a nickname."

Caroline is the girl next door "who I was in love with".

"When I was really little she used to take me catching butterflies. When I was about 3 she told me people died and that depressed me. She got to go and see the Beatles in 1965, or 66, down in Canterbury but my parents wouldn't let us go. And we'd bought some jelly babies to throw at them, too, but we weren't allowed to go."

He's an odd chap, this Billy Childish, but anyone prepared to throw lollies at the Beatles is sure to put on a great show.* The poetry of Billy Childish at Odeon Lounge tomorrow night; Wild Billy Childish and the Buff Medways at the Kings Arms, Sunday.