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Great interview of Billy Childish by Steven Keevil. on Kent Local Authority News. Published 31st March 2024.
Read the full interview HERE.
Steven Keevil: …Is this Heckel’s Horse?
Billy Childish: Yes, which I really enjoyed doing, it’s my favourite work.
Steven Keevil How did Heckel’s Horse start?
There’s this group called the Stuckists, I was not really ever interested in that. I mean, I was nominally a founder member, which Charles (Thomson) asked me to do because it’s something out of the remnants of the Medway Poets, and I never got on with Charles in the Medway Poets, it was always war. He asked me if I would consider being in this group that he wanted to do. Charles had seen something in the paper, an article about Tracey Emin, and he said thought that when he was reading it, because he knew Tracy back in the day, and I met Tracey after I was expelled from St. Martin’s, and I came back down to Medway and she knew I was a painter and she was doing fashion at Medway College of Design. She knew some of the people I knew, and she’d seen my work, and she was interested in doing painting. We got together and she subsequently went and did printmaking at Maidstone. She left fashion and she helped me run Hangman Books, although she was very against my confessional writing right that I did. Anyway, I wasn’t the greatest boyfriend, she wasn’t the greatest girlfriend. Charles lived in Maidstone, and he knew me through Medway Poets and Tracey would sometimes call around on the way down to the station to see Charles and have a cup of tea and tell him what an arsehole I was. Charles had considered himself someone who was on friendly terms with Tracey. Me and Tracey split up in about ‘85 when she went to the Royal College to do painting. She subsequently said you couldn’t make any money painting and gave up painting.
After that, she did run into these Brit art people. She was going out with Carl Freedman, who happens to be my gallerist at the moment. Carl was friends with Damien Hirst and helped make him work. And Sarah Lucas, who’s another of the Brit artists, and Tracey sort of tagged onto these people and then decided you could do art again, which she tried to get me to endorse. This was five or six years after we’d split up. I was still on friendly terms with her. Then she decided to fashion herself as a confessional artist, which she definitely isn’t. When an article was written about her at the early time of her success in the mainstream press, Charles couldn’t believe that he was reading this stuff from her, which he thought would be about me. Regardless, Charles is someone who likes fame and position. Tracey had this little museum thing that she ran, like an old taxi office, talking to conservatives, which Jay Jopling had paid rent for a while, because Jay Jopling’s from the Jopling family of the conservatives, which says a lot about that situation. Charles went along to see Tracey and have a cup of tea, and Tracey can be very charming and very friendly, and she can be very unfriendly and not interested. Unfortunately, on the day Charles went to have a chat, he wasn’t welcomed with open arms as a person who used to give her a cup of tea and had a shoulder to cry on. He was treated more as like ‘Who the hell are you?’ This would definitely anger Charles Thomson.
Charles, having seen some of my poetry about British art things and the poem where Tracey complained that I was stuck. Tracey always wanted me to endorse that stuff, and I would mock it, even though we were friends. Then he said, ‘Will you join this group called Stuckists? We’re naming it after your poem.’ I said, ‘Sure, and I’ll write a manifesto.’ I then went along to the first exhibition and said, ‘This is rubbish, I’m leaving.’
Three or four years later, I’m seeing some of Edgeworth’s work online, and he formed some sort of Stuckist group in North London. During the 90s, I specialised in proving that I couldn’t draw or paint by doing it left-handed and not exhibiting any of my natural inborn talents. I was interested in doing things in a simple way, not using my intellect or my ability to impress anyone, which did manage to convince people I couldn’t draw, so it worked. Edgeworth liked this type of work, and I saw some of it online, and I said, ‘I quite like your work. Why don’t you want to pop down to the studio?’ He’d come down, and I saw the work and it’s quite small and more careful than I imagined. I said, ‘Why don’t you paint in the studio and rather than doing it on this cheap canvas? Why don’t you do it on cardboard because it would be more thrown away?’ Then he was doing a couple, it’s not quite what I would have done.
I asked to show him what I would do. Edgeworth’s a nice reasonable guy. He said, ‘Yeah, great.’ I painted a bit of this picture, and we found out that we really liked painting together and because I’m now enslaved by the style of painting I do in the sense that the ability or the subject or the way that my mind is, as I paint now, means that I get really bossed around by the painting because true art and true music and true creativity and actually the truth of most things is that you obey what you’re doing’s requirement. You serve what you’re doing. It’s not what you want, it’s what it wants. These paintings that I do now, they are telling me what to do, which is all very well, nice and consuming because I enjoy painting, not art galleries or art people. That’s all very well, but what happens is I feel they’re too bossy. The fact that I then can walk across the studio and paint with Edgeworth in the same free flow stuff that I really enjoyed doing without maybe exhibiting what people mistakenly consider ability or technical skill. It gives me this freedom that is essential to my feeling of wellbeing.
Read the full interview HERE.
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