Wild Billy Childish & CTMF
‘House on Fire’ / ‘Keep Mojave Weird’ EP – Damaged Goods
Three years on from Failure Not Success, CTMF return sounding anything but rested. ‘House on Fire’ is exactly what the title promises: scorched, restless, and lit from underneath by that familiar Medway voltage. The formula hasn’t dimmed. If anything, it’s been sharpened. The racket is intact, the blues strood lights still flicker, and Billy sounds like he’s trying to blow a hole in the studio wall just to let the ghosts out.
The album opens with ‘The Magpie’s Flown’, a local-history lament that feels like a walk through Chatham’s demolished institutions. Billy’s birthplace, the dockyards, the sense of a town built for war and then abandoned by it. The song carries that weight without dragging. It’s a personal archaeology dig set to a clattering beat.
‘Shapes of Things’ follows, a Yardbirds cover that CTMF treat like a live wire rather than a relic. They don’t honour the original so much as reclaim it. Same with ‘Untitled’, a Saints cover sung by Julie, which shifts the album’s emotional weather. Her delivery is cool and cutting, a reminder that CTMF is a band with more than one centre of gravity.
‘Trafalgar’ pulls the record back to the Medway mud. Chatham looms large again, the bugles of war echoing around the shipyards. You can almost see the fog rolling in off the river. It’s a track that makes history feel like a pressure system rather than a memory.
‘Beneath Your Touch’ is a modern Childish classic, which is an oxymoron in itself. Frantic, accusatory, triumphant, full of those tossed-off lines that land like hammers. It’s the sound of someone sprinting uphill while shouting back over their shoulder.
‘Traces of You’, one of Julie’s, is oddly heartbreaking. A slower dance around the floor, but with eager hands grabbing at anything they can take hold of. Tender without being soft. Vulnerable without losing its footing.
‘Blues That Kills’ is offbeat in every sense. A crooked rhythm, a sly grin, and a lyric that traces the blues from its Celtic roots “across the German sea to kiss the knees of the North Kent hills“. They migrate from “Carolina swamps to Rochester”. Billy sat at the crossroads with the devil on his lap. It’s funny, mythic, and absolutely rooted in the way he hears lineage: not as purity, but as drift.
‘House on Fire’, written by Julie, starts as a love song and mutates into a revenge number. It’s one of the album’s emotional pivots, a rolling blues tune with teeth. ‘A Surprise to You (No Surprise to Me)’ changes the pace again. Dusty and fruity organ trills, a sense of portent, and Billy delivering a bit of evangelical brimstone like a preacher in a plywood chapel. It’s theatrical without tipping into parody.
And then there’s ‘Keep Mojave Weird’, the best track he’s written in a long time. Instrumentally, it’s the horseshoe hidden in the bottom of a boxing glove, the sharpened spikes on a football boot, the elbow in someone’s face at the Tesco reduced chiller. Not so quietly devastating. A desert hallucination full of UFOs, lone phone boxes, Mojave Indians weaving Blue Flax, and Beefheart nods. It’s the hinge between the album and the EP, the moment where the familiar Medway grit meets the sun‑bleached American detour, and something sparks.
The ‘Keep Mojave Weird’ EP, released the same day, extends that detour. ‘Memphis Tennessee’ is a Bo Diddley‑shaken Chuck Berry cover that sounds like it was recorded in a corrugated desert bar. ‘Wile E Coyote’ returns in a new version, all cartoon physics and stubborn momentum. ‘Thalypo Fuel Station’ is a brand-new instrumental that feels like a mirage on the roadside, a dusty mood piece that deepens the EP’s sense of place.
Together, the album and EP form a kind of double exposure: Chatham’s demolished past on one side, the Mojave’s UFO-lit horizon on the other. Billy Childish still sounds like Billy Childish, but the world around him keeps shifting. The racket remains, the blues still limps with purpose, and the stories keep widening. No dimming of the lights. Not now, not ever.
Daz Lawrence