DAMAGED GOODS 13th November 2026
Rough and ready rock and roll like a punky Kinks; banging blues, furious tempos, raw guitars and a one-take type ethos. If you want to hear the mid-sixties garage scene bottled and uncorked fresh with contemporary lyrics, this is it.
Full disclosure: The week I received Billy’s bundle of his latest four album projects, I stumbled on “To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish” and disappeared down the rabbit hole. It seems Billy has turned out a hundred and sixty plus albums in four decades. With a full year between the last two albums and this four, he seems to be slowing down. Perhaps it’s age, perhaps it’s his burgeoning art career (an overnight sensation in the gallery world after a mere forty years); who knows. Either way, these albums aren’t carefully curated and polished – if you want the ‘best’, head for one of the compilations (usually out of print, like most of his back catalogue).
Thee Headcoats are determined to knock out that rough rock in as short a time as possible, offering the Childish lyrical themes that rotate through his projects. There’s masturbation, bits of autobiography (wandering the streets in his Mum’s dress, being solicited into girly bars in Soho, being sexually abused as a boy,….), an instrumental punctuated with the word “hacksaw”, Beatle Boots, a paean to glorious failure and a determination not to aim at commercial success, a ‘you don’t know me’ song of the sort of strutting The Who used to do when they started out. My favourite track is the glorious racket of ‘The Reason We Didn’t Sound Like The Smiths’ – the answer is: “because we wanted to sound like this!”.
Solos are brilliantly short and to the point with the musical focus on garage excitement. Thee Headcoats are in awe of Downliners Sect, an amazingly obscure R&B band from the sixties, allegedly once described as making The Pretty Things sound suave in comparison. Billy Childish, Johnny ‘Tub’ Johnson and Bruce Brand have succeeded in making an album to match the simple recording and vicious excitement of the early days of rock and blues.
The band go for a special aesthetic, making vintage-style album sleeves featuring three men in tweeds and deerstalkers (this one is a homage to a Downliners Sect LP) – it’s a long-running theme, as is involving long-term collaborators – there are four simultaneous releases – Thee Headcoatees, Ludella Black and Armitage Shanks. All are collations of friends and lovers, part of the wider circle of collaborators, whether regulars or draftees. If you’re into crate-digging and legend-building, that’s part of the fun. If you just like your rock rare and bloody, you can happily bypass the nerdism and I strongly suspect Billy Childish would like you to do that.
Check out also:
November 2026’s Medway Scene albums
https://www.vanguard-online.co.uk/thee-headcoats-children-of-the-sect-garage-excitement/
November 2025’s Medway Scene albums
https://www.vanguard-online.co.uk/thee-headcoatees-man-trap-vital-stripped-down-primal-rock/
Ross McGibbon