Me and Billy at his Lehmann Maupin opening NYC 2015
I met Wild Billy Childish (William Hamper, Stephen Hamper) in September 1977. We met in the lobby of Medway College of Art, the first day of our Foundation Course and pretty much lived in each others pockets that year up on the hill overlooking Chatham and beyond.
I commuted from Whitstable to Chatham on the train wearing my mother’s green woollen tights and various punk get-ups. Braving a torrent of abuse. Bill was in a band called the Pop Rivets and interviewed Polly Styrene for his fanzine. He knew about Kurt Schwitters and German Expressionism and wood cutting and Celine’s Death On The Instalment Plan. He was very generous with what he knew and I was hungry to learn it.
When we left Medway… after a ten year pause we were friends for pretty much two decades. We collaborated on my performance art posters and I bought art from him when I had the money and he needed it.
I think he sent me every book he ever published, every album he ever pressed… and I have every punk fanzine he produced at Medway. He was a machine. Painting, printing, writing, singing, playing the guitar.
Charismatic bad girls flocked to him.
Billy’s girlfriend whilst at Medway was a beautiful woman called Rachel Waller who, when she was done with Billy, married the Olympian Steve Ovett.
While we were at Medway, Billy and Rachel took me under their wing. He recognised another tormented soul and she wanted a gang. However, he could be unashamedly homophobic and treated women as he saw his dad treat his timid mother, June… not very well.
One night Billy and Rachel took me to dinner at the expensive Windmill Restaurant in Whitstable with some money his dad had given him. They missed the last train home to Chatham from Whitstable and my step father refused to let them crash at the house. I was mortified.
After we left Medway he went to St Martin’s School of Art and I lived in Paris and changed my name. We didn’t really speak until 1990.
I did not know Billy when he was married to Sheila although when I met Sheila recently at the RCA she showed me her Billy brand on her upper arm. The hangman tattoo. He married Sheila when he was still with Tracey Emin which devastated Tracey. He could be a real twat.
Billy’s dad was not a good man. Billy seemed all at once in awe of him and terrified. Billy was brought up in Walderslade, a genteel and affluent neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chatham. His parent’s house was well appointed, decorated with real art and art books.
Bill’s father wore velvet collared coats and his Mother, June was a potter. When I was a teenager I liked visiting Billy’s house because it was so different from mine. I thought to myself, Billy and his brother would never want for anything.
Billy is terminally nostalgic and even when we were kids Billy took teen me to old men’s outfitters in Rochester and made me buy braces and homburg hats and I willingly followed his lead. I was his clueless project and soon I was wearing ripped tweed, argyle and caps. He was without doubt (until I met Fred Hughes) my greatest style influence. He was so sure of everything he said and I believed in him. He was the surest 18 year old I had ever met. I would ever meet.
The time I knew Billy the best was when he was married to Kira and had his son Huddy. June moved to Whitstable from Chatham and I was invited to Sunday lunch every weekend for years. Sometimes it was the only proper food I had. As June roasted a chicken, boiled vegetables and made crumble I sat in her spare bedroom which doubled as Billy’s Sunday studio watching him paint. I lazily listened to him talk about painters and painting and Tracey. Always Tracey. I sat and listened to him talk about politics, his health, Peter Doig (who we both knew) but as Tracey gained traction in her career so Billy became more agitated. The Emin tent with his name appliquéd in it… her painting which he felt Tracey owed him a thank you, but rather than be grateful she described him as… stuck. So he created a movement around Tracey calling him stuck, which is what a narcissist does I suppose.
The truth is, Billy was stuck. Stuck in his ways, enslaved by routine. Intransigent.
He tolerated my theatre success. It didn’t mean anything to him but after I met Joe and bought the Peter Cushing house and started making movies he shared that he found my success deeply concerning.
“I never want to talk about your work and I won’t come and see your movies.”
It was at this time Billy became aware I was friends with Jay Jopling who I met in Edinburgh whilst I was working for Ricky DeMarco. Jay and his YBA circus. Jay often visited the cottage at 13 Island Wall in Whitstable and brought his star acts with him. Billy would ask for an introduction to Jay or a studio visit (as did all of my artist friends) but Jay who represented Tracey Emin at White Cube described Billy as ‘tricky’ and refused to meet him or see his work. I remember exactly where that conversation happened and how I dreaded telling Billy… Jay wasn’t interested.
It was his separation from Kira that showed Billy at his worst. Billy’s new American girl now wife Julie inserted herself into all of our lives and frankly, it didn’t feel very good. I liked Kira. She was firm but kind and I respected her authority.
After Kira left and Julie moved in I tried having lunch with them as usual but I couldn’t just pretend things hadn’t changed so I stopped having Sunday lunch with June, Billy and Julie. I continued buying his work. Things came to a head one Sunday afternoon when he visited the Cushing house with Julie and we got into some verbal argy bargy. I told him I thought the way he treated women was despicable. It was then, and only then, he threatened me with physical violence. Sometimes you see people exactly for who they are. Later that evening he called and apologised for his behaviour but it was too late… I had seen him.
I saw Billy recently at Frieze. He gave me a hug and said he thought he might see me. He told me to call.
I didn’t call.
Then, coincidentally I met Billy and Kira’s son’s Australian girlfriend who works in a gallery along side the RCA. Causing me to meet Huddy as an adult, an artist whose work is very similar in style to his father’s.
The last time I saw June she said,
“I’m 90.”
She died shortly after. I heard from Whitstable locals Billy didn’t visit very often.
All in all what do I feel about Billy now? We will continue to bump into each other. We are in the same orbit. I feel as if I was dumped when I saw the worst of him, but Billy never had the courage to tell me why he gaslights me.
I’m left with the paintings, the books the records and stacks of drawings. The paintings I have? Nobody really wants the old stuff. Billy now paints like he actually wants to sell his work. The early work… jarring colours and equally jarring subject matter now ditched for Doig like forests of silver birch and sunsets.
He painted me a cat. I said, “Can you paint it pink?”
I think he probably sneered… but he painted it anyway.
Billy Childish oil on canvas Cat
