Monocled Alchemist

Cynthia Rose gets all shook up with The Milkshakes, as Wild Billy Childish puts the froth on the garageland daydream

Article published in NME, 2nd October 1982

The Milkshakes | Shake Some Action | TIME WAS when you could stroll down many a suburban street at twilight and hear the whole Top 40 colliding at once, via earnest emanations from every garage on the block.

Sure, ever since the ’60s garage bands have all sounded alike —mean, macho and dirty thanks to the sax, Farfisa and fuzztone guitar — but then that’s because, as Lester Bangs succinctly put it, they offer “20 years of rock and roll history in three chords, played more primitively every time they’re recycled”.

The thing about genuine garage bands is that they will remain forever ‘modern noise’, however much flavour of the month stuff surrounds or buries them —because their subjects (suburban repressions, hormonal torment, geographical ennui) remain both awesome and topical to successive interpreters.

And recently — after enduring a week’s worth of ‘moderne’ Mooch atmosphere at the ICA (accurately described by one attendee as “trying to pretend there’s a party in a Tube train”) — I chanced to rediscover one of the real articles. They’re five years old, they’re called The Milkshakes, and they hail from Kent’s Medway Towns —round which they usually play.

The Milkshakes’ story comes courtesy of Wild Billy Childish — nee Stephen Hamper — of Chatham. Billy’s a painter and a poet whose stuff puts our self-publicised ranters well in the shade.

But, good as it is, that’s a separate story. “When I write rock and roll songs,” says Billy, “I write all in cliches ’cause I think they’re great and I don’t give a shit about it . . . Look at those old blues geezers who write about things, they use just a little bit of imagery, comparisons. Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson . . . As far as I’m concerned, I like real tough things.

“And it’s good because you can be real . . . sexist they call it, in rock and roll . . . stuff about women, really be hard with ’em.

“All I’m really interested in with music is getting back to some sort of basics. Like in the ’60s you got all these soapy Americans — Paul Anka and all them. And that was after that really hard sort of music, Link Wray and Bo Diddley, them sort of people. A real hard time, then this real soapy time.

“These days everything lasts for such a short period. Look at punk — it lasted about three months, then it went completely downhill, got all sort of ponced-up, worse than it was before.”

Billy was “quite young then” and “only cottoned on in ’77” when he started a combo called TV21. (“We did things like ‘Stingray’ and ‘Fireball XL5’.”) By March of ’78, TV21 had metamorphosed into The Pop Rivets.

The Rivets were “all dressed up as mods because we thought that was funny; we did a song called ‘LambrettaVespaScoota’ as a pisstake of mods — I mean, we wrote songs like ‘Beatle Boots’ too — but we got a really good review in NME and it said we were trying to jump on the mod bandwagon!”

The group’s self-produced debut LP (‘Pop Rivets!’ 1979) also got a good NME review — a rave, in fact, from local sympathiser Monty Smith (“the finest, most honest rock’n’roll record I’ve heard this year”).

“The drummer in The Milkshakes, Bruce, was the guitarist for The Pop Rivets,” says Billy. “And like, Monty Smith called him ‘a blissfully cliched and erudite guitarist’. I asked my Dad what erudite meant and he said it’s like he’s accomplished – and he is.

“He can do all these cliched ol’ things and he’s ever so funny the way he does it.”

The Milkshakes | Shake Some Action

‘Pop Rivets!’ was financed with £300 “borrowed from a mate who’d got back pay off the dole”. The band made the LP, then “the drummer’s girlfriend, who was Swiss, had to go over to sort out some tax so we went too and that was the start of us playing in Germany; we got loads of gigs round small clubs.”

Whilst in Germany, The Milkshakes became the first band since the Fab Four to play Hamburg’s Star Club, now the Salambo Erotic Sex Theatre.

“We were playing down Hamburg docks and they were all wearing badges and stuff. Then their interest was in English things; now they’ve got a whole load of arty old music of their own.”

Back in Blighty, the Rivets produced a second LP (‘Empty Sounds From Anarchy Ranch’), toured again, guested on John Peel, cut an EP titled ‘Going Nowhere’ (“about us”) and split up.

Milkshake Micky and his Jamaican mate Bertie, however, had roadied round Germany for The Pop Rivets and — since they’d written songs with Billy — decided to make a joint LP.

“Fortunately,” relates Billy, “Mick got involved in a road accident where his car got smashed, which provided some cash.”

That LP was ‘Talking ‘Bout —Milkshakes’, the artefact which sparked my interest in this whole saga. Art it ain’t, but it’s a lot less simple than it sounds on a first spin. L

yrics like, “They tell me you love another / For your sake don’t let it be true . . . If I catch you walking . . . Gonna chop off your hand / Don’t you kiss another boy cause this boy just don’t understand” evoke The Cramps as much as anybody. And Billy likes The Cramps.

But this music is the “basic stuff” Billy alludes to — as basic in its way as the simulated gang-fight of Link Wray’s classic ‘Rumble’ or The Beatles‘ raunchy ‘Live In Hamburg’. The sax on ‘Pretty Baby’ (Martin Waller’s) recalls Steve McKay’s on The Stooges’ ‘Funhouse’; the string thangs on ‘Shed Country’ reiterates the pulsing lineage of those instrumental groups I alluded to earlier.

The Milkshakes | Shake Some Action

But it’s all The Milkshakes’ own — all those Kinks riffs and Beatles bits; all those wandering vocals and withering guitars. The come-ons aimed at underage girls (Billy’s lyrical and poetic speciality), the handclaps on ‘Ruhrge Beat’, the sheet-metal-workeresque idea of how to bang out a new macho musical ethic.

“Because we use guitars,” says Billy, “and because we record it all to sound Jive, like we really play, people think that maybe we’ve got big ideas about ourselves as revivalists.

“But there’s nothing wrong with a drum that sounds like a drum and not a piece of plastic. You know how The Human League go on, saying Oooh, I don’t want to play guitar cause guitars hurt my fingers — so you get women’s music for women to listen to. That includes women and men of course, before the bloody feminists start up.

“Leadbelly, Link Wray, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday, the early Kinks — there’s no bullshit at all in those recordings. You get the real toughness of things, before they’re watered down.

“Remember how good The Damned were back when they wrote ‘Idiot Box’? I mean, I liked Television, I liked ol’ whatsisname — Richard Hell. Now he’s a man that knows good rock and roll —he’s got ‘I Gotta Move’ on his new LP. But you listen to it and it ain’t as good as The Kinks cause it ain’t got the bass.

“I saw Hell when he was playing over here in ’77, with The Clash. I really like him, he’s one of my favourite modern music geezers there is. ‘You Gotta Lose’ is a classic.”

Give The Milkshakes’ ‘For She’ a few hearings and it’s not surprising to find Childish admiring Hell — inseparable as the latter is from sideman Robert Quine.

“Oh yeah, he’s great . . . he starts off trying to play a solo, then he gets bored and he turns into a sort of jazz version of Jimi Hendrix. Funny old fucker — he starts getting annoyed with it all, hittin’ his guitar.

“We don’t take ourselves very seriously,” finishes Wild Billy. “Sometimes we play good gigs, sometimes we make a shambles trying to work out new songs. Same as everybody . . .

“I mean, if no one takes any notice, you gradually slow down and give up, if you haven’t got some real underground following. Unless you’re self-motivated, you gradually slow up anyway. The Pop Rivets might as well have become ‘highly commercial’ — at least bought a car or something! Don’t matter, though . . . you’re not gonna make much money being in a band anyway, are you?”