S4 Ep5: Lynn Castle: LA's first lady barber on Elvis, the LSD-soaked Sixties and her secret music career
11 August 2022 - 45 mins explicitIn 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 dated – as well as Jack Nietzcshe and Lee Hazlewood, it took her a while to reveal her talent. Eventually, however, she cut a number of intimate, melancholy demos in the hazy 60s with Hazlewood, who l...
S4 Ep10: The Last Bohemians Live at Tate Lates: Hilma af Klint with Lily Cole and Amrita Dhallu
In this very special live episode of The Last Bohemians, as part of Tate Lates, host Kate Hutchinson talks to actor, model and activist Lily Cole and Amrita Dhallu, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, to discuss the life and work of Swedish pioneer of abstract art, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Cole stars as one of De Fem ('The Five'), af Klint's Stockholm-based spiritual group who communed with spirits during séances in the late-1800s, in Lasse Hallström's brand new biopic of the artist. Dhallu is part of the team who put together Tate Modern's latest exhibition, boldly pairing Klint's extraordinary paintings with those of Piet Mondrian and asking us to consider the role that the natural world played in their work. Together, they consider how great women artists throughout history have been criminally overlooked, the legacy of af Klint's work today and why the af Klint renaissance is in full-swing.
46 mins
25 May 2023 Finished
S4 Ep9: Julia Cameron: the bestselling author on addiction, creative energy and The Artist's Way
explicitAn audio addendum to our LA season this year, The Last Bohemians hopped over to Santa Fé to meet the one and only Julia Cameron. Our series is dedicated to creative women who've lived their lives outside the norm. Julia has spent hers guiding others, with her creativity manual The Artist's Way. Very sadly, Julia had just lost her beloved dog when we arrived one afternoon, but she soldiered on. It's a whistlestop tour through her early days, breaking into the boys club of 1970s journalism, through her wild thirties in Hollywood married to Martin Scorsese, and eventually how she turned her life around by relocating to Georgia O'Keefe country, with its endlessly inspiring landscapes, and discussing addiction and recovery, harnessing the creativity spirit, sexism and psychic powers, how she helped to write Taxi Driver, her friendship with Eve Babitz and much more. Presenter and Exec Producer: Kate Hutchinson Editor: Georgie Rogers Photography and recording: Anna Kooris
29 mins
16 November 2022 Finished
S4 Ep8: Michéle Lamy: the subversive style shaman on couture, chaos and Kim Kardashian
explicitFrench fashion disruptor Michéle Lamy is known as the wife of designer Rick Owens but she's is a chameleonic creative in her own right, forever staging art happenings and musical collaborations around the world, as well as co-designing the furniture for the Rick Owens line. She’s so in-demand that she’s tricky to track down: we did this interview partly in London, at Claridges, and partly at the Chateau Marmont in LA, where Michéle lived until the early 2000s. In those days, she was better known as the owner of cult Hollywood nightspot Les Deux Cafe, where she performed smoky jazz numbers in her thick drawl. Now Michéle is more nomadic, attracting beautiful freaks wherever she goes. A gothic style icon, her signature look is ink-dipped fingers, a line of kohl on her forehead and a cigarette always in her hand. Listen out for her many bangles too, which clank as she speaks about her style awakening in the Moroccan desert, why she loves collaboration and much more.
26 mins
21 September 2022 Finished
S4 Ep7: Penny Slinger: the feminist surrealist who was too erotic for the art world
Penny Slinger is the British feminist surrealist whose work in the 1960s and 70s was groundbreaking – but then she disappeared. Now living in Los Angeles, she talks to The Last Bohemians about her incredible life: being pals with Lee Miller, living in a turret with pet falcons, finding her way in a male-dominated art world, how tantra revitalised her life and work, performing a real-life sex scene in the only feature film directed by a woman in the 1970s, sensual and sexual liberation – and why desire doesn't diminish with age. She just hopes she lives to see her first retrospective.
41 mins
7 September 2022 Finished
S4 Ep6: Johanna Went: the cult performance art-punk on feminism, fake blood, embracing ageing and inspiring Lady Gaga
explicitThe Last Bohemians LA, supported by Audio-Technica, meets the “hyena of performance art”, whose transgressive spectacles of New Wave theatre, experimental noise, elaborate and crude costumes, chaotic rituals, gory props like pig heads and blood – lots of blood – built a cult following in the 1980s LA punk scene and predated Lady Gaga’s meat dress by decades
34 mins
18 August 2022 Finished