Billy Childish
The Major General of the garage rock Home Guard selects his favourite platters. No Beatles beyond the Star-Club!
THE BEATLES live at The star-Club 1977
This is their best album by far – it’s back when these groups believed they had a function, as entertainers. No-one thought they were gonna be stars for life, but once these bands got more chicks and had their drugs, they all thought, ‘We’re better than what we like’, and that’s when the music became ugly, about ’67. I agree with John Lennon when he said the best things The Beatles ever did were never recorded. You could say the only thing that gets you there is the Star-Club – they did ballads, dance numbers, they had to make “mach schau” and entertain. I like all of that.
JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE smash hits 1968
In ’67, ’68, my brother started bringing back Hendrix albums. It took me six months to get used to the sound, then I was a fan. I was very interested in the pop Jimi. I like pop, not rock music. I say to people, “Hendrix in Beatle boots, not moccasins”, so Smash Hits is down on my list. It led me to listen to lots of blues later on after reading his interviews. If you think of “Voodoo Chile”, it’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”, isn’t it? That’s the idea, the lyrics, and the ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’… he thought, ‘Well, I’m a voodoo chile, then.’
THE CLASH The Clash 1977
This is a great British rock’n’roll album. We didn’t have a lot of info on punk rock, being out in the sticks [Chatham, Kent], so I just thought, ‘Well, that looks like a punk-rock album, so I’ll buy it.’ Nobody I knew was into punk, so there was no-one you could ask. I was working in the dockyards as an apprentice stonemason, and I’d go up for two-week blocks to the Stockwell School Of Building to do my City & Guilds, so I stayed with my brother at his squat in Chalk Farm. I saw The Clash in ’77 – you’d see members of all the groups there, and maybe be brave enough to have a chat.
BUZZCOCKS spiral scratch 1977
You couldn’t buy punk-rock records down here… nobody liked it. But there was an old lady who ran a gramophone record shop by the old cinema. Every now and then, punk-rock singles would appear in it, and she had “Spiral Scratch”. Again I thought, ‘Wow, that looks like an amazing punk-rock record, I’ll buy it.’ Now it’s one of my favourite records of that period. I really like the demos, too. One thing that disappointed me about punk was that it quickly turned into new romanticism, which is what I thought we were going to annihilate! I thought it was all going back to ’66.
LINK WRAY link Wray & The Wraymen 1960
In The Pop Rivets we had an old Transit to tour Germany in ’79. We stayed near Dusseldorf, and our bassist, Big Russ, must have gone to a record shop there as this is the time we heard Link Wray. It was a real big revelation, “Run Chicken Run”, etc. We started putting Link Wray songs into The Milkshakes’ set in ’81. We were an anachronism – people weren’t playing guitar rock’n’roll. We’d listen to the LPs and try to work out how they’d got it sounding so good – initially you think it’s about volume, then you find it’s about small amps, energy and spontaneity.
ATV The image has Cracked 1978
This was a big eye-opener. The Pop Rivets played with ATV down here, and we always revered that album. It’s got live stuff at the 100 Club and studio tracks, and it must be the only time that Jools Holland has done anything worthwhile – he plays piano and synth on it. It starts with “Alternatives”, a live track with a skinhead shouting at the audience and all sorts of mayhem. You’ll notice I never go for second albums! I did get Vibing Up The Senile Man, the second ATV album, but they lost the pop element – once you desert the pop, you’re in trouble.
RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS Blank Generation 1977
We saw the Voidoids supporting The Clash at Hastings Pier. I wasn’t really into it, I wanted to see The Clash, but then Bruce [Brand], who played guitar in The Pop Rivets, he had the album – I listened to it and realised how much I liked it. We used to do “Love Comes In Spurts” in The Pop Rivets. Robert Quine is one of those people who twiddles and sort of overplays, but doesn’t destroy it, which is quite unique. He’s like a jazz Hendrix with a bandaged finger! And Richard Hell’s singing style is just fantastic on this.
SON HOUSE death letter 1965
A big influence on Thee Headcoats, we were bunging all these things into our set. “Grinning In Your Face”, etc… [it sounds like] a toothless janitor who’s forgotten how to play guitar, being dug up and put in front of a camera! The thing Son House brings to it is this spiritual intensity. Muddy Waters said something like ‘You can’t do this music without God’… And people are afraid of God and that spiritual angle of the music that Son House manages to imbue his stuff with. I listened to a lot of blues music from ’84 on – Lead Belly, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed…