CTMF

Medway’s most tireless artisan, Billy Childish, has passed through more groups than most listeners could tally on both hands and feet ever since he first hammered out three-chord anthems during the closing years of the 1970s. Throughout the 2010s his principal outlet was the power trio CTMF, whose sound fused punk’s relentless drive, garage rock’s cocky strut, stray filaments of Merseybeat and psychedelia, and Childish’s own signature barked delivery paired with unflinching lyricism. The unit announced itself forcefully via the 2013 album All Our Forts Are with You and thereafter maintained its customary breakneck schedule of singles and LPs. Departures from the usual Childish blueprint included bassist Nurse Julie contributing and performing a handful of tracks on every release, together with sporadic displays of six-string dexterity, most notably the solos that surfaced on 2019’s Last Punk Standing…. The 2021 LP Where the Wild Purple Iris Grows introduced a folk-tinged undercurrent beneath the group’s habitual punk-and-garage assault.

Although CTMF issued no recordings before the present decade, the project’s lineage reaches back to 1977, when Childish was employed as an apprentice mason at a Chatham, Kent dockyard. After watching a television segment on the rising punk movement, he resolved to launch a band and claim his portion of the spotlight. Two acquaintances, Button Nose Steve and Dave Marsh—the latter distinct from the rock critic—endorsed the idea, and the three settled on the name CTMF, variously interpreted as Copyright TerMination Front or Clarity Through Fuzz. The proposed trio never progressed past discussion, however, and only in 2013 did Childish activate the moniker with bassist/vocalist Nurse Julie, also known as Julie Hamper, and drummer Wolf Howard. Both musicians had previously appeared in several of Childish’s ensembles and proved ideally suited to delivering the requisite force and definition behind his material. Howard’s tenure with Childish began in the early 2000s with the Buff Medways; subsequently the pair worked together in the Musicians of the British Empire and the Spartan Dreggs before forming CTMF. Damaged Goods, the imprint that has chronicled the bulk of Childish’s output, released the debut album All Our Forts Are with You in 2013. Later that year the band issued a double 10-inch EP titled Die Hinterstoisser Traverse to accompany an exhibition of Childish’s visual work at London’s Carl Freedman Gallery; originally issued by Squoodge Records, the set was later reissued by Damaged Goods and, like certain subsequent releases, credited to Wild Billy Chyldish & CTMF.

A third album, the characteristically garage-oriented Acorn Man, appeared in 2014 and contained the quintessential Childish number “Punk Rock Enough for Me,” in which the singer wryly enumerates everything he deems sufficiently punk. The following release, 2016’s SQ1, broadened the trio’s palette with keyboards, harmonica and additional percussion while allowing Nurse Julie to contribute and perform several of her own compositions. Scarcely pausing, the group delivered Brand New Cage in December 2017; its songs addressed Brian Jones, Childish’s first encounter with punk, the vaudeville nature of rock & roll, and Montana. In early 2018 Damaged Goods brought out the 10-inch In the Devil’s Focus, comprising radio sessions recorded in July 2017 for Marc Riley and Gideon Coe’s BBC 6 Music programs. The year 2018 yielded only two singles, one a tribute to the early Rolling Stones that applied the Childish treatment to “Not Fade Away” and “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The band resurfaced in July 2019 at California’s Burger Boogaloo festival, an occasion marked by Burger Records’ limited-edition LP Brave Protector. Shortly afterward Damaged Goods issued the sixth studio album, Last Punk Standing…, which retained the group’s signature garage attack yet also ventured into wah-wah-inflected guitar solos, an early-R&B-styled ballad, and several lower-intensity numbers. On 2021’s Where the Wild Purple Iris Grows, Childish and his CTMF colleagues reaffirmed their rock & roll credentials while acknowledging his folk leanings through a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and the pastoral imagery of the title track.