Smash hit

Did he ever hit Emin? “I hit Tracey once in a pulled blow. It was a domestic row. She punched me. She drew blood so many times and I never retaliated. I did throw her across the room once.” Why? “Her snoring was so loud.” As he speaks all I can think, dejectedly, is that hell really is other people’s relationships.

They went out for four years, he says, from 1982 to 1986. She was “completely and utterly besotted” with him, but he couldn’t live with her. Does he still love her? “Yes, I think she’s great but I can’t stand her,” he replies. “My other girlfriend at the time, Sheila, was anorexic and Tracey identified with her. Whatever she identified with, she became. That’s why she’s not a truly confessional artist. Everything with Tracey is an invention but an invention on her own terms, so maybe that counts as a confession of a kind.”

Is he jealous? He hasn’t made it, she has. “If I had wanted to have been successful I would have been, wouldn’t I?” he says testily. “When I was better known than her she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do.” When he heard Emin had said she wanted to be a household name, his retort was, “What, like Harpic?” Emin was “bullying and manipulative”, he claims. “I have been eradicated from her biography, which makes me angry and irritated, but I don’t hate her. I wouldn’t want to be friends with her — it’s a demanding, exhausting job.” He cites many examples of her “copying” him, such as a picture she exhibited of herself surrounded by money called I’ve Got it All. He had a photo of him above his bed surrounded by money and guitars called I’ve Got Everything.

A few years ago she asked Childish to contribute 200 words about their relationship for a catalogue. Childish wrote: “Any amount of honesty I use will only expose my neurotic and twisted mind. I was the love of your life, so you tell me, but I feel towards you as I have always done — I feel resentful, jealous, protective. I forced you to destroy your love for me. A man cannot tolerate such dog-like devotion from another human being. You copied my work. You begged me to love you and only you and to abuse you again and again which I did lustfully and self-loathingly. When you went to art college, I thought it was treason but I still love you. Billy.”

Childish complains that the papers always report him and Emin as if it were a catfight. “It’s not black and white,” he says, then gets this jab in: “The thing that gets me about Tracey is the lack of content: some tapestries, a bed, some doodles of birds, where’s the bloody work?” For her part, Emin just wishes Childish would shut up. In 2003 she said: “I don’t find it funny, I find it a bit sick, and I find it very cruel, and I just wish people would get on with their own lives and let me get on with mine.”

As Emin’s star rose, Childish carried on painting, making his woodcuts, writing lyrics, performing in bands. In 1999 he co-founded the Stuckists, a name derived from Emin shouting at him that he was “stuck, stuck, stuck” in his musical and artistic tastes. “The idea was that the Tate, and galleries like White Cube, had a very narrow view on how contemporary art was defined,” says Childish. “They ran modern art like a Victorian salon.” Ever the maverick, Childish moved on a year later. “I don’t like being in groups.”

Beck, Kurt Cobain, Jack White, Kylie have all sought to work with him, but he says celebrities are ultimately repulsed by what attracted them in the first place — his uncontrollability. He recalls going to a party in the mid-Nineties “and Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don’t like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen. Tracey needs to be famous. I don’t need it.”

The gallows features a lot in his woodcuts, the condemned man; his lyrics are pretty depressing too, but he claims to be interested in “darkness” rather than being a depressive. He’s just started another band, Musicians of the British Empire. Childish looks to a picture of an angelic boy on the wall. “That’s my son, Huddie, he’s 7.” By his wife Julie? “No with Kira, she lives in Rochester. I pick him up from school every Tuesday and Thursday and see him at weekends.” Has fatherhood had a settling effect on him? “It’s the next notch. I tell Huddie about all kinds of ideas, and that it’s up to him to make up his own mind. My father’s mottos were ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ and ‘Presentation is what counts’. I tell Huddie it’s what inside that counts.”

Childish insists he does not have any ambitions. “My fantasies are all to do with money — lots of it,” he says. “The one thing I’ve always wanted to do is hardcore porn advertisements on billboards for everyday things.” And is he really fine about being so consistently under the radar, a Tracey Emin footnote? “Being disappeared is fine by me. It means I can do what I like. I always feel more comfortable being on the wrong end of the seesaw because you’re awake then, and I like being awake.”

Gun in my Father’s Hand and Thoughts of a Hangman are published by The Aquarium (£8.99 and £19.99); distributed by Turnaround (www.turnaround-uk.com)