The Buff Medways – The Dirty Water Club, The Boston Arms, Tuffnell Park, London, 27th of October.
SUNDAY TIMES NOVEMBER 2006

The Dirty Water Club, housed in a function room above a North London pub, hosts weekly live performances by musical recidivists wielding fuzzy guitars and familiar 60’s riffs. Billy Childish, whose current band The Buff Medways played their final show there to a sell-out house, is the scene’s spiritual king. During his three decade career, including over a hundred albums, Childish periodically drifts from his Chatham home, briefly circling the planet of popular taste, before retreating to the shadows. Jack White was the latest rock star to bend down to pet him, recoiling with his fingers firmly nipped, and Childish’s distant entanglement with Tracy Emin has ensured the profoundly independent poet, painter and musician art-history footnote status. But Childish has watched fashions come and go, whilst developing an infinitely sustainable cult status.

The Boston Music Room is unusual amongst rock venues in that its stage is visible from all areas of the hall, but tonight it serves as standing room, overlooking a small, low platform stage right. Opening act The Buffets, an all-girl trio which includes Childish’s wife Nurse Julie in her professional uniform, clamber onto it to cover a selection of Buff Medways classics, reducing the muscular, Mod dynamics of the originals to a spirited thrash. Childish’s trio follow, dressed as World War One soldiers, framed by two precariously balanced stacks of 19th century gas-powered speakers. Childish eschews modern trappings, like the mixing desk, so everything you hear comes directly from the stage. In small spaces this yields spectacular results. But tonight, the ten foot circle at the front of the 500 capacity crowd feels like a Who show in a London basement circa 1966, whilst a few yards away from the stage you risk being a disconnected spectator. For the faithful, the gap is closed, but for some, it is rarely bridged. When the unsecured speakers wobble over the flailing moshpit, Childish’s handlebar moustache flutters as he explains, “We want to play gigs like the ones we saw when we was kids, so this means you have to behave like ladies and gentlemen.” His rigorously defined aesthetic means that every performance is undeniably pungent, yet sometimes quietly contrived, like The Sealed Knot endlessly recreating the skirmishes of the English Civil War.

Highpoints of the Buff Medways’ catalogue are swiftly despatched, many of which, as if in some odd cubist experiment, we have already heard in different guises from The Buffets. Covers of The Who’s A Quick One While He’s Away, and Hendrix’s Fire, benefit hugely from the frenetic playing of Wolf Howard, one of the few contemporary drummers equiped to do them justice. The Buff Medways capture perfectly the moment when the British beat boom felt the first flowerings of psychedelia, though its occassional freeform flourishes seem a little decadent for Childish’s puritanical approach. His 80’s band The Milkshakes channeled the Hamburg Beatles. In the 90’s, The Headcoats played British invasion beat music. Childish is moving through the 60’s at the rate of a new genre every half decade or so. As his trio line-up, salute the audience, and are joined by the Buffets for a rousing revival of Thee Headcoatees’ Davey Crockett, The Buff Medways brand is laid to rest, and one wonders where the Doctor Who of garage rock will turn up next.