To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish

(Hardback)

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Description

For forty-five years now, Billy Childish has been making visual art, performing and recording in garage punk bands, and writing novels and poetry. His output and productivity are truly phenomenal, and it has all, up to now, been an underground pursuit by an artist who refuses to compromise, pander to the Establishment, or sell out.

This book will tell the remarkable story of Billy Childish, artist, poet, novelist and musician. About the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of a family friend. How his father ended up in prison for smuggling hashish. It will explain how he self-sabotaged a career as a stone mason in Chatham Docks as a teenager, why he was expelled from St Martin's Art School. The impact that seeing the earliest London gigs by The Clash and Jam had upon him, how he took his own band The Milkshakes to live in Hamburg in homage to The Beatles, the trouble they found there. It will explore his artistic philosophy, detailing the powerful impact it had upon his girlfriend throughout the mid-'80s, his relationship to Tracey Emin, and much more.

Ted Kessler's relationship to Billy Childish stretches back to 1990, when he first interviewed Childish for Lime Lizard fanzine. He has subsequently profiled him for NME, Q and The Observer Magazine. Childish also contributed a chapter for Kessler's My Old Man anthology of writing about fathers, published in 2016.

Author Bio

Ted Kessler was on the staff at NME as a writer and editor between 1993 and 2003, before joining Q magazine's staff, working there for 16 years. He was Q's editor for four years, until it closed in 2020. He also devised and edited the acclaimed MY OLD MAN: TALES OF OUR FATHERS, published in 2016 by Canongate.