Category: Billy Childish

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6 Records.

I wrote about selling my record collection recently. And in that post, I went over the new parameters I’ve set up for myself moving forward. Maybe parameters isn’t the best word?

Limitations.

Here’s the brief preview if you don’t feel like going back to that entry: “What if I kept 10 records at a time? No more. Just less. And once I get to 10, in order to buy a new record or two, I’d have to bring a record or two in to trade? With the five I have, I got room for five more!

Enter “Blues That Kills” by “Wild” Billy Childish and The Chatham Singers, now standing as the 6th acquisition in my newly-revived record collection. (Check out the hand-printed woodcut cover by Billy (printed on brown Kraft card stock) with hand-stamped titles on the back of the sleeve and on the white label in an edition of 300 numbered copies. I ended up with #149.)

I actually ordered this record from The L-13 crew before I sold my collection, but I had it sent to my place in Arizona. There it sat on a stack of unread mail until just recently. What a nice surprise. Billy’s been a friend of synaethesia since The Strangest One of All which was printed and published back in my San Francisco grad school days. Billy’s association came via Johnny Brewton at X-Ray Book & Novelty Co. Thanks again Johnny!

I got to meet Billy once. His band The Buff Medways played Bimbo’s 365. I’m pretty sure it was 1998. It also could have been 1999, and it could have been when he was playing with his band Thee Headcoats. So to confirm I just texted Johnny to ask and he says it was Thee Headcoats — so there ya go.

And here we are. Six records — with room for four more.

 

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Volta

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Volta is my homage to Wallace Berman.

It’s also an assemblage and a little magazine that’s published whenever I can make it happen.

I named it after James Joyce’s one and only (failed) business venture. It was called The Volta Theater. The Volta was located at 45 Mary Street in Dublin. Opened in 1909, it was Ireland’s very first movie house. Although the very first movie to ever screen in Ireland didn’t take place at The Volta. Which is probably why it failed? I mean it takes a really shitty businessman to open a movie theater in 1909 only to have it fail. Thank goodness. What if The Volta was a success?

Some have even claimed The Volta as myth, as far as it being Ireland’s very first movie house, but that really doesn’t matter, does it?

The first issue of Volta was published in an edition of 50 copies, all of which were sent to the friends, the enemies, and the heroes of the synaesthesia press.

Essentially Volta is a junk shop of sorts, as I take whatever paper scraps I have laying around from completed projects, found scrap paper from thrift stores, and various found objects that I’ve yet to use, and then I just run ’em through one of my presses — after I set the type and proofed it all.

Contents for the first Volta include poems by Bukowski, Brautigan, Litzsky, Denander, and Catlin; there’s one of the many “overs” I had in my archives of the Childish woodcuts that accompanied “The Strangest One of All“, as well as an assemblage / found piece by Jim Pritchard.

John Martin called Volta a “brilliant little piece of publishing”, which made me squeal like a little girl; I squealed a bit louder when he sent me 6 Bukowski poems for future issues.

You can’t buy a copy. It simply arrives at your door.

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Billy Childish — The Strangest One of All

Johnny Brewton introduced me to Billy Childish.

Billy Childish is a musician/poet/artist. And, instead of writing something up here on my own, I took this straight from his website: “A cult figure in America, Europe and Japan, Billy Childish is by far the most prolific painter, poet, and song-writer of his generation. In a twenty year period he has published 30 collections of his poetry, recorded over 70 full-length independent LP’s and produced over 1000 paintings.

Born in 1959 in Chatham, Kent. Billy Childish left Secondary education at 16 an undiagnosed dyslexic. Refused an interview at the local art school he entered the Naval Dockyard at Chatham as an apprentice stonemason. During the following six months (the artist’s only prolonged period of employment), he produced some six hundred drawings in ‘the tea huts of hell. On the basis of this work he was accepted into St Martin’s School of Art to study painting. However, his acceptance was short-lived and before completing the course he was expelled for his outspokenness and unorthodox working methods. With no qualifications and no job prospects Childish then spent some 12 years ‘painting on the dole’, developing his own highly personal writing style and producing his art independently.

My name is Billy Childish. I was diagnosed dyslexic when I was 28.
I have published 30 collections of poetry and 2 novels. I have made about 100 independent LP records and painted over 2000 paintings. When I was 17 I had a bank account under the name of Kurt Schwitters. I lived on the dole for 15 years.

I am self taught.
I do not like fashion culture.
I do not hate anyone.”

Billy created the woodcuts for Barry Gifford’s The Strangest One of All. Every woodcut is the same subject — William S. Burroughs — the subject of Barry’ s book.

There’s a single woodcut of WSB peering through the die-cut window on the cover of the chappie; and, if you have the edition of 26 lettered copies, you got two bonus woodcuts of WSB, all wrapped up in a nice manila envelope.

Billy fondly calls William Burroughs “the old duffer”; I think that’s pretty funny.