And so we begin.
Warning: this newsletter contains swearing, sauciness and is NSFW.
I’m going back to series one, episode one, the inspiration behind The Last Bohemians: Molly Parkin. She’s a potty-mouthed Welsh poet, painter and, a former fashion editor, purveyor of bejewelled turbans and dazzling cloaks. A hilariously funny lass, Molly once toured a one-woman stand-up show and performed at Edinburgh Festival and was a mainstay on television in the 1970s talking about her saucy exploits – until she was banned by the BBC for swearing.
Today is her 93rd birthday (happy birthday Molly!).
It’s wild to think that she hadn’t yet turned 80 when we started emailing.
The story goes as follows…
Taken from a piece I’ve written for Konfekt Magazine, out in spring:
The first email arrived in November 2009: a burst of erotic verse titled ‘Cock Size’ and ‘Viagra’...
For reasons I still can’t work out, I’d been asked to do a reading at that most east London of things back then, a literary salon in a Shoreditch basement hosted by the bearded drag queen Jonny Woo. I thought one of Parkin’s poems would suit, so I dug out her details and asked her to send across some favourites.
It kicked off a short correspondence – all in CAPS, I might add – that inspired a project that would define my mid-thirties.
At the time, I was in my twenties and working at Time Out magazine, on the nightlife pages, and had heard about Molly because she was throwing a new regular party with her daughter and granddaughter called, brilliantly, The Parkin Lot. This soirée had, she told me, “jiggled her senses” and she started writing lusty new poetry for me to read. They were typically naughty and eye-poppingly shocking, though they wrestled with potentially new themes, like ageing.
An excerpt from ‘Viagra’:
I went to my doctor for Viagra.
two years and a bit before my 80th birthday
She suggested I may not care for the side effects,
a chronic headache at the base of the skull
for a full week,
and (here’s where she put me off)
uncontrollable, incontinent, diarrhoea>>>
meaning to say that I could expect
a shit in the middle of the shag.
So that was the genesis of my podcast: how to capture brilliant, bold, bizarre bohemians like Molly whose lust for life had not dulled. How to celebrate those who’ve lived spectacular lives (thanks, Financial Times!), still did, and who carved out paths for themselves that were beyond the norm –not only did Molly have an incredible creative CV, she was also, for the most part, a single mum. (Hedonistic excess had, though, she says later in the poem, been swapped for cocoa).
It took me years to conceive of The Last Bohemians and follow it through but I finally pulled together the first series, almost half a decade ago now, calling on the photography skills of my friend Laura Kelly (who encouraged me to make The Last Bohemians from day one) and various audio producers who I’d met through doing broadcast bits and bobs over the years.
From a piece I wrote in The Independent:
I had wanted to create an audio platform that didn’t exist before, and working with a collective of women, who produce an episode each, felt in the spirit of the series. But I also wanted evidence of different outcomes for how my life might pan out. As I continue to hurtle through my thirties, single, working too much, worrying about what other people think, I’m hungry for alternative paths that show that I don’t have to be living in a Victorian terrace with bi-fold doors and a husband who works for a design agency. Maybe, like countess and LSD researcher Amanda Feilding, a star of series one, I’ll be going to Burning Man in my seventies. Or, like Eighties club kid and the late Leigh Bowery’s best friend Sue Tilley, taking up DJing in my sixties.
Fast-forward to 2018 and myself, producer Alannah Chance and photographer Laura Kelly are knocking on Molly’s front door, ready to record our first episode. Until last year, she lived on the World’s End Estate in Chelsea, west London, in a fuchsia pink bedsit covered top to toe in her DayGlo paintings. We were late, Laura remembers, and a bit nervous, but we needn’t have been: almost immediately Molly took out her dentures to pose for photos and have a laugh.
I was aware of some of her stories – losing her snogging virginity with none other than legendary jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, just one – but we were not prepared for what she told us about her daybreak routine and quite what that involved.
Alannah recalls “the drab concrete block of flats as we approached the World’s End Estate, then the burst of colour as soon as you opened her door; her love of the garden; looking up at the sky; talking about her morning wank. She reminded me of a bird of paradise. Do you remember when she started talking about shagging every player in the Welsh rugby team?” (Molly: “Several couldn’t even raise an erection, so nervously virginal were they”.)
Another highlight: when she gestured to one of her paintings hanging on the wall of a bacchanalian scene, titled Just Another Orgy, about “organising orgies’,” said Molly, “which I did in the Chelsea Hotel when I lived in New York.”
But beyond the titillating tales about licentious liaisons from decades past, Molly’s episode cemented the essence of The Last Bohemians in another way. “Her episode put aging into perspective,” says Laura. “Molly and the other women in the series have been hugely creative into their eighties and nineties.”
The last email she sent me, in 2014, was another poem: ‘Ruminations of a Sequined Relic’. She might not be going out head-to-toe in gold lamé anymore, but life can still surprise and delight you as you enter your golden years:
I'D NEVER REALISED BEFORE
THAT THERE ARE DIFFERENT TREATS IN STORE
LIFE BRINGS US GIFTS, THE SPIRIT LIFTS
US HIGH ABOVE WHAT WE'VE ONCE BEEN
WHILST OFFERING A SWEETER DREAM
Snogging and sexual antics aside, we can all take something from that.
Further reading
– Molly’s memoir Welcome To Mollywood.
– Watch Molly on BBC2, aged 64.
– Molly’s daughter Sophie Parkin runs the wonderful club, Vout-O-Reenees, and her IG is filled with photos and stories about Molly.
– Sophie is also author of The Colony Room Club: A History of Bohemian Soho, a biography of the famous spot where her mother hung out with Francis Bacon.
A final word…
I hope you enjoy these glimpses behind the scenes and that they’re not TLDR! My idea is to post one each month for subscribers, alongside regular posts like “lost bohemians” from history, interviews I’ve done that have never been published and more. If you have suggestions of things you’d like to see and read, please do pop them in the chat. And if you like what you read, please do consider paying for a subscription:
I’ve pinged this out on a Monday because of Molly’s birthday today, but going forward, I’ve decided that Tuesday is the most bohemian day of all and because I can’t resist the chance to sign off “cu next Tuesday”.
Look out for a new episode too, friends. I’ve got a stunner waiting for you.
Share this post