Know Your Enemy

"I was never into any of that Sub Pop stuff. Mudhoney? Never liked them. It was too Status Quo for me, all that long hair on stage. I'm a punk rocker. You don't go around waving your hair. You don't put three vocals on a song."

Punk rock dos and don'ts courtesy of Billy Childish in the December issue of Plan B.

With his insistence on brutally simple two-chord garage, analogue recording and periods of at most three or four days in the studio, Childish is a man for whom the label "rockist" was invented, and his bristling moustache and chimney-sweep's aesthetic are more than faintly ridiculous. But I've been meaning to investigate his stuff for ages, and you can't really argue with the likes of 'Date With Doug' and the particularly bitter and curmudgeonly 'Joe Strummer's Grave' from the MySpace page for his new outfit, Wild Billy Childish & The Musicians Of The British Empire, even if Christmas single 'Christmas 1979' - as enthused over by his Plan B interviewer, editor Everett True - isn't great, chorus aside (and even then it was trumped by Malcolm Middleton's effort, 'We're All Going To Die').

Incidentally, I still can't quite believe that, despite inevitably mentioning that Childish puts out albums as often as most people get out of bed, True doesn't risk broaching the subject of quality control...