By this time we were solely using the Revox G36 to record in the very small basement of the terraced house I was living in. The Troggs were a big influence on Thee Mighty Caesars – I’ve always loved The Troggs and I used to love winding up Beatles fans by arguing that the great band of the ’60s were The Troggs and not The Beatles. This heavy trio’s finest moment is arguably this raw LP, with “You Make Me Die” especially ferociousĪcropolis Now, haha! You can take that back to one of my favourite books, Heart Of Darkness. One story was called ‘Love Can Lose’, I seem to remember. Me and my girlfriend at the time used to be really into these teenage angst comics for girls. Because we always listed the producers on our records as British comedians, like Tony Hancock, we needed a German comedian for this one, so we asked Hansi for someone from back in the day! “Love Can Lose” was one of the very first songs I ever wrote. Karl Valentin is a real person, I think he was a German comic from the ’20s. ![]() As a favour to him we let him release this. Our friend Hansi, who The Milkshakes met out in Germany, was inspired by the way we did things, so when he moved to Berlin he set up his own one-man label, Wall City Records. That’s what I’m interested in in music – not so much songs, but sound. The obsession we’ve always had is with sound. It circumnavigated the difficulties of working in studios at the time – they all had this obsession with ‘proper recording’, which meant making everything sound as processed as possible, with very little life or energy left. We’d often record backing tracks onto our Revox half-track machine, then take them to the studio and pop some vocals on. ![]() I’m not saying that we’ve found it, but that’s what I’ve wasted a lot of my life looking for!”īILLY CHILDISH: Big Russ used to work at a television repair shop and they had an old garage out the back where we used to rehearse. “I can appreciate musicianship, but there’s something else that needs to be found. “Musicians are ten-a-penny – I’m not one of them!” he says. From Troggs-inspired rock’n’roll and Great War song cycles to the very fine new CTMF record, Last Punk Standing, these selections are raw, vital and in line with his favoured musical traditions. ![]() It’s like cooking – if your basic ingredients are good, you don’t need fancy sauce.”Ĥ2 years into his career, the Chatham singer and guitarist is currently rehearsing his CTMF group for gigs in Margate and the US, and working on short stories and a novel (“I’ve done about 18 drafts over the last few years”), but he takes a couple of hours out to talk Uncut through nine of the finest albums from his vast discography. Just because I’m interested in the elemental in all aspects of life doesn’t mean that it’s one element, it’s the elemental within anything. “But I write novels and poetry, do blues, country, punk rock, rock’n’roll, some vague psychedelia, and I’m a painter. “My favourite criticism of what I do is that I only do one thing and it’s all the same,” laughs Billy Childish.
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