BILLY CHILDISH & CTMF

In 1976–77, the man who would soon become Billy Childish—in addition to serving as head of research for the county’s first fortress study group, the Medway Military Research Group—was working as an apprentice stonemason at the Chatham shipyard. After seeing a segment on punk on the London Weekend Show, Billy thought he wouldn’t mind at all being the singer in a punk rock band himself.

Childish promptly quit his job and suggested to a few old high school friends that they form a band right away. “What about a name?” they asked. “Simple,” replied Wild Billy, “we’ll be called CTMF.” Button Nose Steve, who would soon give Billy Childish his punk moniker—and even owned a Woolworth’s guitar—and Dave Marsh, a classmate who said he might buy a drum kit one day, both nodded slightly.
Thirty-six years later, CTMF has finally come into being.

No one’s sure where Dave Marsh is now, but Button Nose Steve is busy feeding pigs and ducks on his small farm in New Romney, and Billy Childish, along with other friends, has recorded enough material for an LP—and half a dozen 45ss for various destinations around the globe—using lyrics first jotted down for the original CTMF lineup in 1977.
Billy describes the CTMF group as “the epitome of modern” and their sound as “the sound of yesterday, tomorrow.”
All of their records are released under the name CTMF. Some say this stands for Copyright TerMination Front, while others claim it is simply short for Clarity Through Fuzz.

There have been numerous rumors that Jimmy Cauty plays bass and that it is none other than Bill Drummond who can be heard on the xylophone. Billy, however, muses that although he is indeed friends with Jimmy Cauty—and has corresponded with Bill Drummond in the past—he has never knowingly heard of the KLF, as he “gave up on music after punk turned crap at the end of ’77.” Those in the know can confirm that all of this is, in fact, true.