Apparently, the avalanche of releases we’ve witnessed by Billy Childish’s latest musical vehicle is part of a motion to have “a career in a year” as The William Loveday Intention. To that end there have been at least fifteen, that I know of, releases under this moniker since 2020 and consequently, as brilliant as they are, this prolific momentum tends to push them into the margins when record buyers start reckoning with their albums of the year. But I cannot leave this out for of all the albums by the Intention, this one is perhaps the one where the inspiration at the heart of the project is most thrillingly realised. Billy himself says on the Damaged Goods website that the LP “should move and sound like the contents of a thinking mind”, it does and it is a mind that has been split wide open by the work of one man.

Bob Dylan was on the radar of Childish since childhood thanks to an early acoustic Dylan album being in the family home. However, he has been firm in assertion that he was never “a fan” of Bob and he comes to this heavily Dylan influenced sound by a sideways entrance, checking out the original version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ because he felt the Hendrix version over produced and at a relatively advanced stage of his career, believing he could merge his own poetic writings with his music (two worlds kept separate previously) he found that his Dylan lightbulb could plug into a Childish shaped garage-rock socket and a wonderful wild-mercury sound could emerge; a new improved Bob Dylan indeed and so it has proved to be.

It is not merely that the Intention have captured that mid-sixties ragged electric sound, although they do, especially on ‘The Baptiser’ album, pump it out with an immediate, first-take, harp blowing screaming intensity. No, the genius is in the way that Childish turns the tables on Dylan by doing the very same thing the man himself did from that first 1962 record onwards. Think ‘Song For Woody’ was Dylan’s first great composition, do you? Well, it kind of was but the extent it lifts from Woody Guthrie’s own ‘1913 Massacre’ song renders the idea that Dylan had written a brand-new song almost obsolete. He did this all the time, if you think that ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’ is an early Dylan classic, which it is obviously, just take a listen to the opening of Paul Clayton’s 1960 song ‘Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons’ to be left in no doubt where the seed was sown for Bob’s song. He was blatant about it, and he continues to this day. On his 2020 album a song called ‘False Prophet’ uses a riff and progression that is a direct lift from Billy The Kid Emerson’s 1954 Sun record ‘If Lovin’ Is Believing’.

The point is that the result of all that blatant lifting is a brand-new song, a new creation with echoes of something that has gone before, an important element in folk music tradition and if truth be told a thread that runs through most recorded music, good and bad. The secret to genius is that thinking mind Billy Childish refers to and his William Loveday Intention Dylan inspired albums have thoroughly plunged the sink of the man’s creative mind. Yes, he is using Dylan as a springboard but that is all, no one has tapped into that mid-sixties grain with this much conviction before now. The definitive article is ‘A Painted Pantomime Dame’, framed in the style of a classic ‘Positively 4^th Street’ attack song, each verse a swirling whirlpool of devastating critique climaxing with the spitting out of the ‘Pantomime Dame’ putdown. You see the parallels everywhere, ‘Mister Smith’ a distant acquaintance of Mr Jones perhaps? ‘A Framed T-Shirt Remnant’ carries all the kudos of a leopard skinned pill-box hat by the time Billy has finished with it. Best of all, like Dylan, Childish carries no respect for short attention spans, he gives these tunes as many verses as they need until he’s got his point across. A fairly faithful cover of ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ is a direct nod to the source but the meat here is all Billy Childish and his spinning wheels of sound, the Dylan genius has rarely been tapped into and advanced with such authentic class and style.

Buy the album on vinyl here: https://www.discogs.com/release/23028734-The-William-Loveday-Intention-The-Baptiser