The Last Bohemians

The Last Bohemians

The Last Bohemians is an award-winning, critically acclaimed podcast that meets maverick and radical women in arts and culture and takes listeners on an evocative trip through their extraordinary lives. From subversive musicians and style icons to game-changing artists, these are women who have lived life on the edge and who still refuse to play by the rules. The series was created in 2019 by host and journalist Kate Hutchinson and is produced by a team of rising women and non-binary talents in audio, with photography by Laura Kelly. Season 1 features Molly Parkin, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Pauline Black and more; Season 2 stars Judy Collins, Gee Vaucher, Zandra Rhodes and P.P. Arnold; Season 3 is with Maggi Hambling, Cleo Sylvestre and Dana Gillespie; Season 4 goes to LA with Angelyne, Gloria Hendry, Linda Ramone, Penny Slinger, Johanna Went and more. In 2020, The Last Bohemians published a lockdown special with performance artist Marina Abramović and the series returns in 2025 with the late Nikki Giovanni. The Last Bohemians has been a podcast of the week in the Guardian, Observer New Review, The Financial Times and on Radio 4. It has been featured in The New Yorker, Frieze, Another, Dazed, Refinery29 and many more. The podcast won silver for Best New Podcast at the British Podcast Awards 2020 and was a finalist for the Grassroots Production Award at the 2021 Audio Production Awards. Follow us at http://www.instagram.com/thelastbohospod. PRAISE FOR THE LAST BOHEMIANS “This series is a delight… Run to this podcast right now” The Observer "Unusually intimate portraits of spectacular lives… Buoyed by exquisite production, these conversations are atmospheric, contemplative and fabulously candid" Financial Times "A beautifully intimate set of portraits made by an all-female audio team – what more could you ask for to celebrate International Women’s Day?" The Guardian Feisty, heartfelt and bursting with wisdom" NME "A rhapsodic, necessary retelling of trailblazer stories" Dazed thelastbohemians.substack.com

Episodes

Nikki Giovanni: the late great poet on integrity, self-care and Tupac tattoos

March 7, 2025 • 34 mins

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...

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

February 28, 2025 • 27 mins
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 ...
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Molly Parkin: the grand dame of British bohemia on Soho's glory days, Louis Armstrong and self love

February 3, 2025 • 26 mins
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 thi...
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Michéle Lamy: the subversive style shaman on couture, chaos and Kim Kardashian

September 21, 2022 • 26 mins

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-desi...

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Penny Slinger: the feminist surrealist who was too erotic for the art world

September 6, 2022 • 41 mins

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...

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Johanna Went: the cult performance art-punk on feminism, fake blood, embracing ageing and inspiring Lady Gaga

August 18, 2022 • 34 mins
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 musicia...
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Lynn Castle: LA's first lady barber on Elvis, the LSD-soaked Sixties and her secret music career

August 11, 2022 • 45 mins
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...
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Betye Saar, Alison Saar and Maddy Leeser on creativity, mysticism and motherhood

August 3, 2022 • 45 mins
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 i...
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Linda Ramone: the NYC punk in LA on love triangles, legacies and keeping rock'n'roll alive

July 20, 2022 • 30 mins
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 ...
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Gloria Hendry: the Live and Let Die star on Bond, Playboy Bunnies and the blaxploitation era

July 20, 2022 • 32 mins
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. Sh...
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Angelyne: the magic and mystery of LA's original influencer

July 20, 2022 • 37 mins

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 p...

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The Last Bohemians: Los Angeles - Trailer - New series launching July 2022

June 15, 2022 • 2 mins

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 ...
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Cleo Sylvestre: the veteran actor on resilience, rejection, the Rolling Stones and representing the working class

March 23, 2022 • 34 mins
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”...
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Dana Gillespie: the Swinging Sixties wild child on sex, spirituality and Ziggy Stardust

March 17, 2022 • 41 mins
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 Jo...
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Maggi Hambling: the great British artist on controversy, criticism and being a queer icon at 76

March 8, 2022 • 34 mins
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 ...
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Maxine Sanders: the witch queen on casting spells, surviving persecution and the power of sex magic

April 13, 2020 • 53 mins
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 er...
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Zandra Rhodes: Studio 54, punk and the power of fuchsia with the British style icon

March 30, 2020 • 33 mins
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 f...
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P.P. Arnold: the soul survivor surveys the Swinging Sixties, sexual revolution and Mick Jagger

March 23, 2020 • 36 mins
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 awakenin...
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Vivienne Dick: the experimental feminist film-maker digs back into New York's 1970s no wave scene

March 16, 2020 • 31 mins

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

March 9, 2020 • 41 mins
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 s...
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