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The Last Bohemians

Arts & Culture Podcasts

The Last Bohemians is an award-winning portrait/podcast series that meets female firebrands and maverick outsiders who have lived live on the edge and who still refuse to play by the rules – from subversive musicians and rock'n'roll groupies to groundbreaking artists and game-changing style icons. The series is created and presented by journalist Kate Hutchinson and is produced by a team of women in audio, with portraits by Laura Kelly. Season 1 featured Molly Parkin, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Pauline Black and more; Season 2 stars the likes of Judy Collins, Gee Vaucher, Zandra Rhodes and P.P. Arnold. It won silver in the Best New Podcast category at the British Podcast Awards 2020.

The Last Bohemians is an award-winning portrait/podcast series that meets female firebrands and maverick outsiders who have lived live on the edge and who still refuse to play by the rules – from subversive musicians and rock'n'roll groupies to groundbreaking artists and game-changing style icons. The series is created and presented by journalist Kate Hutchinson and is produced by a team of women in audio, with portraits by Laura Kelly. Season 1 featured Molly Parkin, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Pauline Black and more; Season 2 stars the likes of Judy Collins, Gee Vaucher, Zandra Rhodes and P.P. Arnold. It won silver in the Best New Podcast category at the British Podcast Awards 2020.

Location:

United Kingdom

Description:

The Last Bohemians is an award-winning portrait/podcast series that meets female firebrands and maverick outsiders who have lived live on the edge and who still refuse to play by the rules – from subversive musicians and rock'n'roll groupies to groundbreaking artists and game-changing style icons. The series is created and presented by journalist Kate Hutchinson and is produced by a team of women in audio, with portraits by Laura Kelly. Season 1 featured Molly Parkin, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Pauline Black and more; Season 2 stars the likes of Judy Collins, Gee Vaucher, Zandra Rhodes and P.P. Arnold. It won silver in the Best New Podcast category at the British Podcast Awards 2020.

Language:

English

Contact:

07786016296

Episodes

8: Maxine Sanders: the witch queen on casting spells, surviving persecution and the power of sex magic

4/13/2020
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...

Duration:00:53:29

7: Sue Tilley: the 1980s club kid and artist on Leigh Bowery and modelling for Lucian Freud

4/6/2020
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...

Duration:00:27:11

6: Zandra Rhodes: Studio 54, punk and the power of fuchsia with the British style icon

3/30/2020
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...

Duration:00:33:16

5: P.P. Arnold: the soul survivor surveys the Swinging Sixties, sexual revolution and Mick Jagger

3/23/2020
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...

Duration:00:36:39

4: Vivienne Dick: the experimental feminist film-maker digs back into New York's 1970s no wave scene

3/16/2020
"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...

Duration:00:31:46

3: Gee Vaucher: the visual artist behind Crass on curiosity, communal living and where punk went wrong

3/9/2020
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....

Duration:00:41:51

2: Judy Collins: the frank and fearless folk legend on touring at 80, art and activism, and making Leonard Cohen famous

3/2/2020
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...

Duration:00:42:41

1: The Last Bohemians – Series Two Trailer – Launching 2 March 2020

2/27/2020
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...

Duration:00:02:02

7: Pamela Des Barres: the definitive rock'n'roll groupie discusses Led Zeppelin, her wild past and the #MeToo movement

3/3/2019
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...

Duration:00:28:24

6: Cosey Fanni Tutti: sex, subversion and class with the artist and industrial music pioneer

3/3/2019
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,...

Duration:00:29:06

5: Pauline Black: the original rude girl on female empowerment, intersectionality and being a music trailblazer

3/3/2019
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...

Duration:00:23:05

4: Amanda Feilding: beat poets, psychedelics and self-trepanation with the leading LSD campaigner and countess

3/3/2019
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....

Duration:00:30:24

3: Bonnie Greer: the playwright and critic considers Basquiat, Madonna, making work about race and how not to play it safe as an artist

3/3/2019
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...

Duration:00:32:09

2: Molly Parkin: the grand dame of British bohemia on Soho's glory days, Louis Armstrong and self love

3/3/2019
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...

Duration:00:26:03

1: The Last Bohemians - Trailer - Launching 4 March 2019

2/19/2019
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

Duration:00:01:52