I’ve been off-and-on obsessed with the output of Wild Billy Childish since the late ’80s, when I heard Heavens To Murgatroid, Even! It’s Thee Headcoats! (Already), the fourth album by Thee Headcoats but the only one to be released on Sub Pop. The label later put out the 2CD set I Am The Billy Childish, which claimed to contain one track each from 50 different releases (not quite, but close enough), which I also bought and loved. He’s got a huge discography, the majority of which I’ve never heard, though I dove pretty deep for this Shfl guide last year. A book, Ted Kessler’s To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorized Unauthorized History Of Billy Childish, was published last year in the UK and this year in the US; I haven’t read it yet but I plan to.

Music isn’t even his primary project; he’s also a painter and an author. In a 2024 interview, he said, “I like to say I’m a hobbyist, which I like because it’s also silly and also to have done so much and do it as a hobby. I do consider music a hobby. I think people should have more hobbies and less jobs.”

His writing, whether accompanied by fuzzed-out guitar riffs or not, seems to serve a purgative function. In 2003, he told another interviewer, “There is an anger deep in my unconscious… I would have killed people if I didn’t have art or writing.” A lot of his songs mine a deep vein of anguish, rage, bitterness and spite. But he can also be goofy and very funny. Billy Childish is a land of contrasts.

Thee Headcoats were Childish’s fourth band, following the Pop Rivets, the Milkshakes, and Thee Mighty Caesars. Personnel often overlapped, with one or more members sticking around post-name change, and the sound was fairly consistent. Childish favors an early ’60s garage rock style, mixing covers of songs by Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and others with originals that sound like an early Kinks record someone left out in the rain. Occasionally he makes side trips into folk music, more traditional blues, and even avant-garde sound art and poetry, but his roots are always in garage punk.

In a 2002 interview, he said, “I like early rock ’n’ roll, and I like early R&B, I like early jazz and early crossover stuff when they first do it. It always has such power and I don’t like it when they become formulated or that they rely on that formulation in the sense that they parody themselves a lot or [become] easy to deal with. The rough edges all disappear. So I like the primitive in things because I like the rough edges being there. I like that because the energy is still there.” He added, “[Music] is about sound. That’s what its all about. Good songwriting? No. You can have a really good song and no one else can do it good. It’s not how it’s played it’s the sound. It’s what it sounds like. It’s using equipment that sounds good… So I found things that sounded good, that had energy in them. And people mixing the sounds you make makes it go away. It dissipates.”

For this reason, Childish produces his own records and makes them on old-school equipment, often releasing them in mono. Thee Headcoats made close to 20 albums between 1989 and 2002, every one a short, cranked-up blast of distortion and clatter, with Childish’s raw, earnest vocals leaping out of the speaker. The only thing that really set them apart from his previous bands was visual: as seen in the photo above, the members all sported tweed deerstalker caps (with brims at both front and back, like Sherlock Holmes).

After their breakup, Childish continued on with a slew of other projects, and then, out of nowhere and in response to absolutely no public demand that I’m aware of, Thee Headcoats reunited! In 2023, they released Irregularis (The Great Hiatus), a 12-track collection that could have been recorded at any point during their original run. And now, two years later, they’re still here, having just released The Sherlock Holmes Rhythm’n’ Beat Vernacular.

The group consists of Childish on guitar and vocals, John Rowlands on bass and vocals, and Bruce Brand on drums. When they first reunited, Rowlands said (in the press materials for Irregularis), “I think we were all surprised how it all just worked. If I remember correctly, we kicked off role playing like we detested each other. Then we got started and well, you can hear the result.”

Similarly, Brand said, “The weirdest thing for me was how weird it wasn’t. It was like time compressed, but to the ‘good old days’, early on. I was wary that it ‘wouldn’t be like Thee Headcoats’, but it was.”

Sherlock features 12 new songs — 10 by Childish and covers of Bo Diddley’s “Dearest Darling” and Slim Harpo’s “Got Love If You Want It.” Some of the originals are autobiographical and/or self-referential (the horrific “100 Yards of Crash Barrier”, the goofy “The Friends of the Buff Medway Fanciers Association”), while others offer a kind of dark poetry rooted in English rural life (“A Common Disease,” “The Goddess Tree”) and still others are a spit in the face to bourgeois society (“If People Don’t Like It (It Must Be Good)”). It’s actually a fairly slick production by Childish standards, with a vivid sound and judicious reverb effects; some songs even fade out! It all blasts by in just 34 minutes, leaving you wanting more.

Fortunately, there is more. Childish Industries has also put out a new album (and two bonus 7” EPs) by Thee Headcoatees, a four-woman vocal group with Childish et al. as backing band. Man-Trap has 14 tracks, including several written by Childish (the title cut, “The Double Axe,” “Signals of Love,” “Modern Terms of Abuse”) and covers of the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away” and “He’s Gonna Kill That Girl,” the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” Dead Moon’s “Walking On My Grave,” and Fang’s “The Money Will Roll Right In” (you’ve probably never heard the original, but Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Metallica have all covered it; it’s a good ’un).

The four vocalists are Ludella Black, Kyra LaRubia, Bongo Debbie and Holly Golightly, and each has a unique vocal style. Ludella (who’s recorded three solo albums and guested with numerous bands) has a clean, somewhat sad voice reminiscent of a young Marianne Faithfull, while Debbie (who’s usually a drummer) has a gentle, almost spoken-word approach, Kyra is a harsh and excoriating punk frontwoman, and Holly is a self-assured rockabilly singer (with nine solo albums to her credit and multiple other projects). They back each other up on several tracks, too; the version of “He’s Gonna Kill That Girl,” with Debbie on lead vocals, sounds more like a lost Shangri-Las track than the Ramones.

Some songs are gender-flipped, while others are not: the Beatles’ “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” becomes “You’re Gonna Lose That Boy,” while in “The Money Will Roll Right In,” Kyra still roars, “I’ll get to fuck Brooke Shields.” The music is a little less primitive than on Sherlock, even featuring violin on a couple of tracks, but the hobbyist energy is the same throughout both projects.

Billy Childish does not make garage rock music of the retro/fashionable variety. He makes quick, bash-’em-out records that mask their intelligence and earnestness with technical primitivism, a coating of distortion and mono sound. And yeah, his songs mostly all sound alike, but while they’re playing they’re the greatest songs you’ve ever heard — something you could just as easily say about Jimmy Reed, to pick just one example. To quote the title of an old Headcoats album, The Kids Are All Square — This Is Hip!