The Last Bohemians

"Often women artists do all their best work when they're older

You feel stronger, you feel like you've got nothing to lose"



Experimental film-maker Vivienne Dick moved from Ireland to New York in the late-70s and was at the heart of a scene called no-wave, an avant-garde music and art movement where people like director Jim Jarmusch, artist Basquiat, photographer Nan Goldin and musicians Sonic Youth and Debbie Harry mingled together.





Inspired by this DIY community downtown, she picked up a Super 8 camera and started shooting the women around her, in films like Guerillere Talks and She Had The Gun All Ready. Lydia Lunch, one of the most charismatic of Vivienne’s subjects, described No Wave as a “collective caterwaul that defied categorisation and despised convention."





Presenter Kate Hutchinson first heard Vivienne’s name in the song Hot Topic by dance-punks Le Tigre, which reels off a list of artists, writers, activists and feminist firebrands, putting her alongside the likes of Yoko Ono and Sleater-Kinney. 



Vivienne is still an experimental film-maker to this day and has never sold out her vision. The Last Bohemians visited her at her Dublin home, as she was putting the finishing touches to her latest film New York, Our Time, which has since won the Film Critics Circle Award for Best Documentary. It transports Vivienne back to the city she left in 1982 and sees her reconnecting with some of her old friends. 



Our story starts, however, in Donegal, Ireland, where a young Vivienne couldn’t wait to leave...






This episode was produced by Ali Gardiner.





Music in this episode (sourced via Bandcamp, freemusicarchive.org and archive.org):

Tryad – The Rising

Blue Dot Sessions – Campfire Rounds

Fields Ohio – Anti-Saloon League

Gallery Six – Moel

Plastic Sunday – No Tomorrow

Chocolate Billy - Assedic No Wave

Lee Rosevere – Ennui

Revolution Void – Someone Else’s Memories

Phlox.s – Obey The Sun

Gallery Six – Hydroscope

Chris Zabriskie – Virtues Inherited, Vices Passed On

Chris Zabriskie – Heliograph

Chris Zabriskie – Candlepower

Chris Zabriskie – Oxygen Garden






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Gee Vaucher isn’t perhaps as well known as some of her punk peers, but she should be: she’s one of the artists who defined punk’s visuals of protest in the 1970s, especially with her arresting photo-montage covers for Crass, the cult band and art collective she was part of, who put anarchy into practice.





She had a stint in Manhattan as a political illustrator for The New York Times and she’s also designed album sleeves for bands like The Charlatans and experimental hip-hop group Tackhead. Her piece for the latter, Oh America, in which the Statue of Liberty covers her face with her hands, went viral and was published on the front cover of newspapers when Trump was elected as President of the United States. 





Gee's art continues to be confrontational, whether she’s painting or, as she shows us, making an absolutely enormous book filled with millions of hand-drawn stick figures – one for every single person that died in World War I. 





She is radical in every sense of the word. In this episode, Gee invites us to Dial House, on the edge of Epping Forest in Essex – a tumbling old cottage with a difference: it’s run by Gee and her collaborator Penny Rimbaud as an anarchic “centre for radical creativity” where anyone can turn up at any time for a cup of tea and a chat. So that’s just what we did, to hear Gee talk about her working relationship with Penny, why punk was a disappointment and the 'perverseness' of her art.






This episode was produced by Mae-Li Evans.

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Judy Collins is a folk music legend, with a career spanning six decades, from the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene to California, as the Flower Power movement took root, to now, at 80, still gigging hard every year with her guitar. 





Judy is what The New York Times called a “master song collector”. She is celebrated for reinterpreting other people’s tracks, with an eclecticism that comes from her father, who was a blind radio DJ, singer and pianist. Notably, she covered Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, making both of their careers.





In the first episode of The Last Bohemians series two, Judy talks about the importance of art and activism, such as the time she signed a statement declaring she’d had an abortion, in her friend Gloria Steinem’s Ms Magazine – a year before it was made legal in America. 



Frank and funny, she recalls former lovers like Stephen Stills, getting mixtapes from Leonard Cohen, and going tattoo shopping with Antony Bourdain's mum, but also surviving the darkness of the hippie era, and the demons she’s battled along the way.





Trigger warning: this episode contains themes of addiction and suicide, and so listener discretion is advised.





This episode was presented by Kate Hutchinson and produced by Shola Aleje, with intro music by Emmy The Great.






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The Last Bohemians returns for series two with eight maverick women and fearless firebrands in arts and culture: folk legend Judy Collins, iconic British designer Zandra Rhodes, soul survivor PP Arnold, anarchic punk artist Gee Vaucher, witch queen Maxine Sanders, experimental film-maker Vivienne Dick, 80s club kid Sue Tilley and literary maven Margaret Busby.



Each episode will be released weekly and the portraits by Laura Kelly published on Instagram: @thelastbohemianspod.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelastbohemians.substack.com/subscribe

Pamela Des Barres is the definitive groupie who moved to Hollywood in the 1960s, embraced free love and hippiedom, and frolicked with musicians like The Who’s Keith Moon and The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger. She documented it all in her iconic tell-all book I'm With The Band and she inspired the character Penny Lane in the film Almost Famous.





During the waves of feminism that have come since, however, Pamela's candid tales have been criticised, the supposed sexual liberation of the halcyon rock’n’roll days reevaluated. 





She sat down with The Last Bohemians in east London record shop Matters Of Vinyl Importance for a controversial insight into her wild past, her thoughts on whether musicians deserve to be idolised, and looks at her groupie history through the lens of the #MeToo movement.



Presenter: Kate Hutchinson

Producer: Shola Aleje

Photos: Laura Kelly

www.thelastbohemians.co.uk

@thelastbohemianspod

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelastbohemians.substack.com/subscribe

When it comes to uncompromising musicians and artists, Cosey Fanni Tutti is in a league of her own. As part of Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s, she helped pioneer industrial music and her solo shows, modelling work and ‘actions’, as she calls them – including those that were part of the cultish collective and commune COUM Transmissions – blurred the lines between performance art, sex and subversion. Once considered shocking, her gallery shows shut down, now her vision is celebrated.



After TG, Cosey and her partner Chris Carter formed the musical duo Chris and Cosey and moved to the Norfolk countryside, where Cosey takes great pride in her blooming garden. It’s quite a contrast with the machine-led music that comes out of their home studio, which is where Cosey made TUTTI, her first solo album since 1982, released in 2019.
 
Cosey's autobiography, Art Sex Music, depicts a truly alternative thinker for whom acceptance is the last thing on her mind. An audience with Cosey is a real insight into a life dedicated to the decidedly unsubtle art of not giving a fuck and here she takes us into her beloved garden one sunny afternoon to explain just how she does it.
​

Presenter: Kate Hutchinson


Producer: Ali Gardiner

Photos: Laura Kelly

www.thelastbohemians.co.uk

@thelastbohemianspod

 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelastbohemians.substack.com/subscribe

Think of punk and ska in 1980s Britain and you may well picture bands like The Clash and The Specials. Pauline Black, however, is the original rude girl. As the driving force behind Coventry 2-tone group The Selecter, she was a rare woman of colour making her way in music and sticking two fingers up to the skinheads while she was at it.



Today Pauline is a style icon and a cultural force, with her signature fedora, Doc Martens and formidable attitude, as documented in her book, Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir. She invited The Last Bohemians into her immaculate home in the Midlands to discuss how she became the first lady of 2-Tone, its multicultural vision, and the fight to make her voice heard.

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Presenter: Kate Hutchinson

Producer: Renay Richardson

Photos: Laura Kelly

www.thelastbohemians.co.uk

@thelastbohemianspod


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelastbohemians.substack.com/subscribe

Amanda Feilding is flying the flag for the medical benefits of recreational drugs like cannabis and LSD with her pioneering work at The Beckley Foundation. Based out of the 75-year-old's tumbling country pile in Oxfordshire – which is ringed by a moat and has an island encircled with temple-like pillars – the foundation funds leading research into the medical benefits of psychedelics and mind-altering substances.
 
Amanda is also a countess whose lineage traces back to Charles II of England. In the 1960s, after travelling around Sri Lanka on her own, she discovered acid and hung out with the beat poets of the era, never without her beloved pet pigeon Birdie by her side. She met the Dutch scientist Bart Hughes, who introduced her to the shamanic practice of trepanation – essentially drilling a hole in one’s head, which she performed on herself in 1970.
 
Needless to say, a conversation with Amanda Feilding, with the wind blowing through the trees, is quite a trip in itself…
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Presenter: Kate Hutchinson


Producer: Lucy Dearlove

Photos: Laura Kelly

www.thelastbohemians.co.uk

@thelastbohemianspod



Music:

Blue Dot Sessions - Disinter
Blue Dot Sessions - Solemn Application
Blue Dot Sessions - Slow Casino
Blue Dot Sessions - Thread Magenta

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Chicago-raised Bonnie Greer is instantly recognisable in the UK as a television pundit, playwright and critic. She famously took on former BNP leader Nick Griffin on BBC's Question Time and has written five books and numerous plays that skewer politics, identity and race.



The Last Bohemians meets Bonnie in Soho, London, where she explores how the 1970s New York of Basquiat and Warhol shaped her an an artist, as well as her far-ranging ideas on making work about race, ageism, navigating the art and opinions of problematic personalities, and how not to play it safe as an artist.



Presenter: Kate Hutchinson

Producer: Isis Thompson

Photos: Laura Kelly

www.thelastbohemians.co.uk

@thelastbohemianspod


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelastbohemians.substack.com/subscribe

The Last Bohemians is an independent new audio series that meets female firebrands and controversial outsiders from significant eras in culture and the arts. From subversive musicians and rock'n'roll groupies to groundbreaking artists and game-changing style icons, these are women who have lived life on the edge and still refuse to play by the rules

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelastbohemians.substack.com/subscribe