New album: Wild Billy Childish & CTMF || Failure Not Success

Prolific British all-rounder Wild Billy Childish strikes again. Earlier this month he released the single Full Time Plagiarist, one great song recorded by two of his bands (Thee Headcoats and CTMF). According to the record sleeve it was “a failure not success production” and lo and behold, now there’s a new full-length album with that title. Although Full Time Plagiarist isn’t part of the twelve songs on the Failure Not Success LP, you can’t overlook its theme. The opening song is a raucous version of Richard Hell’s Love Comes in Spurts (covered before by the artist with both Thee Headcoats and The Pop Rivets), and further on there’s a fiery take on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Fire (you heard the same tune recently also from The Guy Hamper Trio, but completely different), and also new recordings of previous original single Bob Dylan’s Got a Lot to Answer For and a few tracks from The GHT’s All The Poisons In The Mud. Once again all this is inexplicable, but certainly not cases of plagiarism, rather a matter of not remembering how it was played before and then following intuition.

In explaining the album title, Billy Childish states that he considers his projects successful from the outset by doing what he wanted the way he wanted, and while only he himself can decide what success is – “Not a critic, the world, or public opinion” – we can only conclude that this record is anything but a failure. Although the output is hard to keep up with, and the songs here are not all really brand new, this album sounds as raw, enthusiastic and authentic as possible, one that you still want to add to your record collection..

Failure Not Success is out now digitally, on CD and vinyl LP through Damaged Goods.

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