Wild Billy Childish & The Buff Medways - Medway Wheelers

UK garage don Billy Childish and his Chatham gang get “groovy”.

“Cars are an inevitability, but the bicycle is what we need. It’s an invention of genius,” the Buffs’ shamelessly anti-modernist leader Billy Childish told MOJO in 2003. Eighteen months on and Childish renewed his call for a return to the days of the two-wheeler by naming this fourth Buffs album after his mother’s old 1950s cycling club. Indeed, the stomping title track – released as a single – found itself accompanied by a charming olde worlde video (shot on Super 8 film, of course) featuring Ma Childish riding through Whitstable. If reinventing the wheel has never been Childish’s bag, Medway Wheelers is nevertheless one of his most progressive and satisfying sets to date in a career that spans close to 30 years and over 50 long-players. Alongside three-chord nuggets like The Man I Am and the instrumental frenzy of Dustbin Mod, you get the Kinks-like put down of I’m Glad I’m Not Like David Wise, the art-school-bashing, Who-inspired Private View and the piano-kissed romanticism of The Poets Dream. Overall, it makes for a clattering, caustic and wonderfully human triumph. With the former Thee Headcoats leader having disbanded the Buffs and now fronting his new band, The Musicians Of The British Empire, Medway Wheelers – along with its chilling predecessor 1914 – is as a good a place to start for anyone seeking to discover just why Childish has inspired everyone from Kurt Cobain to Blur and Beck.

Phil Alexander

Wild Billy Childish & The Buff Medways
Medway Wheelers (2001)

Vinyl rip 320

Tracks:
1. The Man I Am
2. A Distant Figure Of Jon
3. Karen with a C
4. 22 Weeks
5. Dustbin Mod
6. Medway Wheelers
7. (I'm a) Lie Detector
8. Private View
9. The Poets Dream
10. You're Out The Band Sunshine
11. Poundland Poets
12. I'm Glad I'm Not Like David Wise

Medway Wheelers