40 Years of Childish! Career-spanning compilation! Triple Gatefold Vinyl! Sleevenotes by Stewart Lee! Billy Childish is an English musician, painter, author & poet.

Since the late 1970s, Childish has been prolific in creating music, writing and visual art.

He has led and played in bands including the Pop Rivets, The Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats, Buff Medways & CTMF.

primarily working in the genres of garage rock, punk and and releasing more than 130 albums.

How did Billy come to be? Holed away in the distant inter tidal marshland of mid-Seventies Kent, breaking rocks in the hot sun as a teenage dockland stonemason, undiagnosed dyslexia and general insubordination denying him the educational path he might have taken, Childish took the punk gospel Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols preached in 1976 as revealed scriptural truth.

Forty-two years later Childish is the last man standing, the most enduring, uncorrupted and prolific of the class of `77.

And some heroic fool has now tried to sum him up in a mere forty-eight songs, from the thousand or so he has recorded.

This compilation provides tiny tasters of each of Childish's phases, and some snippets of short-lived side-projects too.

Administered correctly, it will make an addict of you. You have been warned. Here's a field guide to the many faces of Billy Childish.