Nikki Giovanni was one of the greatest poets of her generation and it was an honour to sit with her for a special episode of The Last Bohemians, recorded in Spring 2024 in London, while she was promoting what would become her final anthology, Poems: 1968-2020 (Penguin Classics). When we saw she was in town, we jumped at the chance to speak with her and we're very grateful to have been granted an audience. A poet, author and activist, Nikki was considered a key figure in the Black Arts Movement o...
Mar 07, 2025•35 min
Rewind to the 1980s and London nightlife was an explosion of creativity – the new romantics were in, dramatic fashion looks were everywhere and at the back of the club, having a gossip, there’d be Sue Tilley, also affectionately known as Big Sue. She was the best friend of the outrageous performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery, who became known for his shocking stage shows and about whom she wrote a biography. Sue worked at the Job Centre during the day and the door at his infamousl...
Feb 28, 2025•27 min•Season 2Ep. 6
The inspiration for this series, Molly Parkin is a painter, erotic novelist and a former fashion editor who was once just as famous for her bedroom liaisons with the movers and shakers of London. She is never without a bejewelled turban on her head or a saucy anecdote at hand. Now 87, she lives on the iconic World’s End estate in Chelsea, in a kaleidoscopic apartment filled with her art and clothing. In this candid – and fairly explicit! – episode The Last Bohemians meets her at home, where she ...
Feb 03, 2025•26 min•Season 1Ep. 1
For the final episode of The Last Bohemians: LA, supported by Audio-Technica, we meet French fashion disruptor and true original, Michéle Lamy. She’s been married to the designer Rick Owens, her former pattern cutter, since 2006 and is often referred to as his 'muse'. But Michéle is a chameleonic creative in her own right, forever staging art happenings, musical collaborations and style projects around the world, as well as co-designing the furniture for the Rick Owens line. She’s so in-demand t...
Sep 21, 2022•26 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Penny Slinger was a mover and shaker in Swinging London's art scene – though you might not have heard of her. She went to Chelsea Art School at the height of the Pop Art boom and, inspired by Max Ernst, went on to mix up self-portrait, collage, film and sculpture to create surreal and feminist images that still provoke today. Among these were her “full frontal collages”, including ones where Penny appears inside a wedding cake, the slice between her legs removed. Her 1977 collage masterpiece, An...
Sep 07, 2022•41 min•Season 4Ep. 7
Speak to anyone from the 1980s punk scene in Los Angeles and they’ll tell you: Johanna Went is an underground legend. While the bands like Black Flag, Fear and X were thrashing out their three chords and the truth, Went would take to the stage at clubs like The Masque, Club Lingerie and Hong Kong Cafe and perform between the live shows. The crowd hadn’t seen anything like it before. She wasn’t a punk musician per se but the “hyena of performance art”, whose transgressive spectacles of New Wave t...
Aug 18, 2022•35 min•Season 4Ep. 6
In the north of Los Angeles, in a neighbourhood called Glendale, an unassuming bungalow is home to one of the first women in Hollywood to cut men’s hair. Today she goes by the glitziest of names, Madelynn von Ritz, but back in the 60s she was called Lynn Castle and hung out with key people of the era, lopping off Jim Morrison, the Byrds, Sonny Bono and Neil Young's locks . She was also a secret musician. But despite her childhood friends being musical svengalis like Phil Spector – who she once d...
Aug 11, 2022•45 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Our LA series, supported by Audio-Technica, returns this week with a Last Bohemians first: in a very special episode, we speak to three generations of an American artistic dynasty up in the leafy hills of Laurel Canyon: the incredible Betye Saar, her daughter Alison Saar and and granddaughter Maddy Leeser. Betye Saar, 96 (she was 95 at the time of making this podcast), is a revered assemblage, collage and installation artist, known for her use of found objects, and was part of both the Black Art...
Aug 03, 2022•46 min•Season 4Ep. 4
The Last Bohemians returns with a brand new series set in Tinseltown, supported by Audio-Technica. From forgotten feminist artists to Sunset Strip sexpots and from punk performers to subversive style disruptors (and one Californian arts dynasty!): these are some of the most maverick women in LA, whose stories each say something different about the city. In episode two, Team TLB head up to the valley and to the incredible home of Linda Ramone, wife of the late Johnny Ramone – guitarist in one the...
Jul 20, 2022•31 min•Season 4Ep. 3
The Last Bohemians returns with a brand new series set in Tinseltown, supported by Audio-Technica. From forgotten feminist artists to Sunset Strip sexpots and from punk performers to subversive style disruptors (and one Californian arts dynasty!): these are some of the most maverick women in LA, whose stories each say something different about the city. Episode two is with 1970s Bond Girl, Gloria Hendry. She made film history when she snogged 007 in Live and Let Die, becoming Bond's first Black ...
Jul 20, 2022•32 min•Season 4Ep. 2
The Last Bohemians returns with a brand new series in Tinseltown, supported by Audio-Technica. From forgotten feminist artists to Sunset Strip sexpots and from punk performers to subversive style disruptors (and one Bond Girl!), these are maverick and radical women whose stories each say something different about the City of Angels. Recorded in spring 2022, host Kate Hutchinson decamped to Hollywood with producer Holly Fisher and photographer Lisa Jelliffe to find inspiration from cult figures, ...
Jul 20, 2022•37 min•Season 4Ep. 1
The Last Bohemians has gone to LA for a brand new series, supported by Audio-Technica, starting in July and starring LA icon Angelyne , subversive fashion disruptor Michéle Lamy , punk-rock widow Linda Ramone , feminist surrealist Penny Slinger , punk performance artist Johanna Went , artists and sculptors Betye Saar , Alison Saar and Maddy Leeser , cult musician – and LA's first female barber – Lynn Castle and Bond girl Gloria Hendry . Heartbroken and feeling adrift during the pandemic, host an...
Jun 15, 2022•3 min
Cleo Sylvestre (1945-) is a woman of many firsts: she is the first Black woman to play a leading role at the National Theatre in London, one of the first Black actors to have a recurring role in a primetime British soap and one of the first Black Brits to release a single in 1964 – with none other than her friends, The Rolling Stones. The Guardian called her “the Black actor who should have been one of Britain’s biggest stars”. So why isn’t she a household name? Sylvestre was born in Euston, Lon...
Mar 23, 2022•34 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Dana Gillespie (1949-) is one of the few remaining women who was at the centre of the Sixties and Seventies in London and in New York, having been best mates with David Bowie and pretty much anyone who was anyone back then. Eric Clapton was very nearly her guitar teacher, Led Zep’s Jimmy Page played on her early folk records and she was in and out of the tabloids with Bob Dylan as a teenage girl. She has recorded with Elton John, had her portrait screen printed by Andy Warhol's Factory, and shar...
Mar 17, 2022•41 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Maggi Hambling (1945-) is a British painter and sculptor whose visceral work spans portraits of her bohemian friends past – from Soho dandy Sebastian Horsley to Henrietta Moraes, once the 1950s queen of London bohemia and muse to Francis Bacon, then Maggi’s own – and divisive public works that include her giant scallop on a beach in Suffolk on the English coast, near where she grew up, her Oscar Wilde bench in London and most recently, her 2020 bust of early women’s rights advocate Mary Wollston...
Mar 08, 2022•35 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Maxine Sanders is one of the country’s most iconic and possibly most controversial witches. In the 1960s and 70s, she and her late husband Alex Sanders were at the centre of Britain’s witchcraft boom. At the height of their fame, they were featured weekly in tabloid newspapers and starred in numerous documentaries and films where they would recreate their dramatic rituals… It was the era when Flower Power and the sexual revolution were in full swing. The Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951 makin...
Apr 13, 2020•54 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Zandra Rhodes OBE has spent 50 years at the forefront of British fashion, having dressed everyone from Freddie Mercury to Princess Diana in her signature printed chiffons. Her work was adopted by the Studio 54 crowd in the 1970s, her gold lamé dresses modelled by the likes of Donna Summer and Pat Cleveland. Then she lacerated her chiffons with safety pins and was dubbed the Princess of Punk, a name that matched her trademark fuchsia bobbed hair. To this day she remains independent, having never ...
Mar 30, 2020•33 min•Season 2Ep. 5
P.P. Arnold isn’t called a soul survivor for nothing. She recently made a comeback with her first album in 50 years, following a long, hard fight, at the age of 73, to get her music career back on track. In America, she had been an Ikette with Ike & Tina Turner and then moved to London at the height of the Swinging Sixties, where she hung out with Jimi Hendrix, had a sexual awakening among the rockstars of London, and was signed by Mick Jagger to his label, Immediate. She released the hit si...
Mar 23, 2020•37 min•Season 2Ep. 4
"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...
Mar 16, 2020•32 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 pi...
Mar 09, 2020•42 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 a...
Mar 02, 2020•43 min•Season 2Ep. 1
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 epi...
Feb 27, 2020•2 min
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...
Mar 04, 2019•28 min•Season 1Ep. 6
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, Cos...
Mar 04, 2019•29 min•Season 1Ep. 5
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...
Mar 04, 2019•23 min•Season 1Ep. 4
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 th...
Mar 04, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 3
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 a...
Mar 04, 2019•36 min•Season 1Ep. 2
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/...
Feb 19, 2019•2 min
