Billy Childish

When we first met, ten years ago, you were just putting together the anti-establishment Stuckist manifesto. Yet now you're showing at the ICA and concurrently at White Columns in New York. What happened?
'People in the art world have said that I'd be accepted in 20 years time, or when I'm dead. The ICA has just brought that forward a bit. I'm quite pleased. I don't really like gallery spaces - they're a bit antiseptic, like hospitals without the blood - but I've had an association with the ICA for a long time. I've read there, played there and was a judge on the Beck's Futures Prize - until, that is, I nominated myself, which didn't go down too well.'

You co-founded the Stuckists with Charles Thomson to champion painting in 1999. Why did you then leave just two years later?
'I always said that I would leave the Stuckists after the first exhibition. Groups can be a means of confronting the world in different ways. I love naming them but I don't like being held to them. Most of them are really non-organisations. I've just started one called The Damp Tweed and Hobnails Walking Association. It will happen and involve lots of damp tweed, hobnails and walking, but I prefer it as an idea.'

Isn't that all a bit conceptual for you?
'I've always been interested in conceptual ideas. It's only the ideas that don't actually have any concepts that aren't any good.'

What about the British Art Resistance and National Art Hate Week?
'That was another non-organisation. We made some small gold bullion bars. It was about cutting out the middle man by not bothering with the art and just selling the money. National Art Hate Week began as a poster idea. It did become a loose week of events last year, but I wasn't really interested in organising it. I think that this year we're going to have World Art Hate Day. The anti-art stuff tends to be instigated when things get too comfortable around the painting but it's about having fun. And it has to be gleeful.'

You've created several aliases for yourself and your bands constantly change names and line-ups. Why's that?
'It's about a lightness of touch and understanding that one isn't an occupational persona. Like the groups, they're all different vehicles for negotiating the world.'

You had a troubled childhood but the subjects of your paintings can be quite traditional - vases of flowers, self-portraits, boats on the Medway…
'It's important to have an acknowledgement of suffering and confession in art but not to just focus on it to gain attention and become a bigger victim. For me, art has to be about personal growth and have meaning, otherwise I'm not interested. So if I paint flowers, it's about trying to make a bigger island for myself.'

What examples of your music and writing are going to be in the show?
'Those elements are there partly for background because it will include material going back to the late 1970s, whereas the paintings are all recent. It's also there because all these activities are part of the same philosophy. People find that difficult because I'm not part of any one club, but I find specialisation and lack of breadth can be more of a problem. It's like living on a diet of one food. That's what irritated me about Brit-art; it became the only thing on the menu.'

If I interviewed you in another ten years, what do you think you'll be doing?
'Ever since I was a kid I've always wanted to have a museum full of bits of old guns and other detritus. I'd have to think up a good name for it though.'

What about the title of your new exhibition, 'Unknowable but Certain'?
'It comes from one of my poems. It's a bit like being inevitable - once that happens you can't do anything about it. I'm always a moving target but they're never going to get me.'