For the past 25 years, Billy Childish has been bulldozing the boundaries of the art world. With over 100 LPs, 2,000 paintings, two novels and 30-plus volumes of poetry to his name, Mr Childish has been nothing if not prolific.  He talks to Derek O'Connor about living on the edge

When dealing with a cult legend like Billy Childish, it serves you well to expect the unexpected. Childish is a genuine cult legend, as opposed to yet another flavour-of-the-week attempting to pass off his resolute lack of commercial recognition as a virtue. Over the past quarter-century, resolutely British artist William Charlie Hamper - aka Billy Childish - has wilfully forsaken the mainstream, recording some 100 LPs, turning out 2,000 odd paintings, writing two novels and penning 30-plus volumes of poetry en route. When initial arrangements are being made for this interview, however, Billy can't come to the phone - it transpires he's working with his four-year-old son on a treasure map. A perfect metaphor, in glib journalistic shorthand, for the Billy Childish approach to art; while others talk it, he's busy making it. Living it. And never underestimate, after all, the virtues of a decent treasure map.

The media always tends to view a polymath with scepticism, and in recent years Childish's critical reputation - as a painter of considerable ability,an author of note and a man with a passion for raw, primal rock 'n' roll who has fronted a stream of lauded bands - has taken second place to the man's ongoing public dialogue with ex-girlfriend (and Britart pin-up gal) Tracey Emin. Disillusioned with the self-serving vapidity of the Sensation years, Childish went so far as to establish his own Stuckist movement (working from the principle that all modern art is "stuck", unable to move forward), whilst remaining a true believer in the transcendence of the artistic process.

"In art, as in music," he says, "people don't value wisdom very much, they place much more emphasis on what you might call knowledge. Or education. People seem to think that somebody who is educated is automatically intelligent. I've had no formal education at all, so I take exception to the idea that that means I'm not intelligent. I haven't read the books that people go to university to read, I couldn't read or write until I was 13. With everything I have read, however, I've tried to find the books that don't have any bullshit in them, ones that speak to me. Education gives people something that I term as a simulated experience of thinking. You're very good at offering other people's opinions, but don't have any of your own."

The man's own very definite opinions have taken shape over a quarter-century of proudly following his own particular muse. Born in 1959 in Chatham, Kent, young William Hamper left secondary school aged 16, an undiagnosed dyslexic. Denied entry to his local art-school, the future Mister Childish began work as an apprentice stonemason at Chatham Naval Dockyard. During his six months on the job he produced some 600 drawings in what he now describes as the 'tea huts of hell'.

"I do everything for me," he says today. "And that's always been what I'm about. By 'me' I'm thinking of a kid 30 years from now, one who's looking for inspiration the way I was back then, one who is looking around and asking 'Why is all this shit out there?' Someone who's looking for someone who really believed in what they were doing, who meant what they did - that's what I pick up from Van Gogh and Dostoevsky and people like that, and I see myself as a torch bearer in the same tradition. That may sound very pretentious, but maybe that's because I'm very pretentious. So what? I'm doing this for someone like me, because I know how much I need inspiration. I try to put into the work what I think is missing, the love of life that's missing, the love of doing things that's missing, so that it's an inspiration. I want everything that I'm doing to be an inspiration."

London's St Martin's School of Art came calling for young Billy - unfortunately, personality differences (due, reputedly, to his outspoken views and rude writing) saw him expelled and on the dole. Embracing the life of "the artist", Childish has continued to paint, write and make music independently ever since, forming his first band, The Pop Rivets, against the heady background of the punk explosion. Over a succession of bands - Thee Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Headcoats - Billy Childish honed a deceptively adept garage rock sound, given full flight by his current outfit, The Buff Medways. Unwittingly, he now finds himself patronised by the new generation of back-to-basics rockers; when Top Of The Pops refused to let The White Stripes bring Childish onstage to paint as they played, Jack White performed with Childish's name scrawled on his arm.

Childish laughs. "People always ask about The White Stripes and The Hives, all these groups, which The Buffs collectively call The Strives, about the helping hand they've given us, and I always say that we're happy for any crumbs that fall from the table, but we haven't been crushed by any yet." Another admirer is former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, who now releases The Buff Medways' records - most recently, the rather splendid 1916 album - on his Transcopic label. Naturally, Childish remains healthily sceptical about Coxon's intentions. "We don't make much money from it," he offers, "but we get some kudos and a little publicity. Graham's a very nice chap, and I count him as a friend - I always say he accidentally got into a famous band, he can't have done it on purpose - but we don't really get the benefits he gets. When Graham's records come out, (parent label) EMI put the push on. None of that for us. We're the scum. As normal."

In recent years, the "Wild" Billy Childish of old has returned to his Kent roots, living a contented suburban existence, continuing to produce art at a prolific rate, embracing Buddhist meditation and yoga practice and - as ever - waiting for the world to play catch up. The locals, however, are still trying to get their heads around his (admittedly impressive) handlebar moustache. "People shout in the street, but I don't really care. I was getting grief from a group of punks the other day, and I said 'I used to have spiky hair, now I have a spiky moustache ­ what's the problem?'"

Billy Childish and The Buff Medways play the Orchard Inn, Letterkenny, on Thursday, July 15th as part of the Earagail Arts Festival. Childish and Gerard Mannix Flynn will be reading from their work and discussing the artistic process with Ticket editor Hugh Linehan on Saturday, July 17th at the Donegal County Museum. An exhibition of paintings, I've Been Lying All My Life, runs until the end of August at the same venue www.earagailarts.ie