A Quote by Billy Childish

I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.
The first thing that got to me was seeing David Bowie on a children's TV show, but Bowie was way beyond my aspirations. The Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch came out in 1977 and it had a breakdown of the recording costs, then you saw Pete Shelley playing a broken guitar from Woolworths. We already had an idea of the kind of music we wanted to do, but punk showed us a way to do it.
I don't even know what a hippy is. I mean, hippy is an evolution of the Sixties movement. A time when people were trying to make a difference, trying to write songs that were political. People grow old. The hippy camp kind of breaks off into different sects.
At the time of Woodstock, I was just 13, but I used to see these exotic hippy creatures and I did look on with envy. How could you not? In an ideal world, I would have loved to have been a hippy - but I might have been a bit strait-laced. It was my fantasy.
The music industry went through such a strange stretch in 1977, especially in this country, with the whole punk rock thing coming about. Punk was rebellious-and justified in that response-but it had very little to do with music, and so it created a highly-charged but frighteningly floundering atmosphere that I found very, very disheartening. Musical quality for me has always been an important part of rock'n'roll-and winning recognition for that has long been an uphill battle all the way. Punk seemed like rock'n'roll utterly without the music.
Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.
Yes, I was a hippy - absolutely a hippy.
The only good political movement I've seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.
It's all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves
It's all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves.
Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens.
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.
I don't know how my mom put up with us. We'd walk around school in torn jeans, put on this punk-rock image and sing ballads everywhere we went.
If you're a little hippy and full-bosomed, don't try to remake yourself in the image of a skinny fashion model. It won't work. You can trim down your hips. You should always concentrate on special movements to keep your breasts firm and lifted and young. Hippy and bosomy can be very nice, very desirable. Accept it.
Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn't even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that's been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.
I used to do that routine about my daughter being a hippy with the dirty sneakers and dirty blue jeans, but why a beard? And you know people would actually come to me and say, 'Does your daughter really have a beard?' I'd say, 'No, I made her shave it, but I let her keep the mustache.
Growing up in Oakland, we did things like white t-shirt, blue jeans and Nikes. That was my get down, how I was going to rock. And if you look at me right now, I'm pretty much black tee, blue jeans and some sneakers.
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