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 theatre, experimental noise, elaborate and crude costumes, chaotic rituals, and gory props like pig heads and fake blood – lots of blood – built a cult following and predated Lady Gaga’s meat dress and Peaches' raucous stage antics and costumes by decades.
Johanna’s shows were wild, depraved and often grotesque, boldly taking on themes like female pleasure and menstruation. Take her 1988 performance Passion Container, in which she pulled giant bloodied tampons out of a silk vagina and chucked them into the crowd – this was pre-riot grrrl and before L7’s legendary tampon-flinging performance at Reading Festival in 1992.
Many aren’t sure where Johanna Went went but The Last Bohemians: LA, supported by Audio-Technica, found her living a quieter life, in the beach town of Ventura, California. Across her garden table, she looks back at her transgressive work and talks about the magic of the 1980s punk scene, growing up an outsider, the beauty of performance art and why embracing ageing is the punkest move of all.
CREDITS
Presenter and Exec-Producer: Kate Hutchinson
Editor: Georgie Rogers
Additional production: Holly Fisher
Mixing and mastering: Mariana Sousa Aguiar
Photography: Kate Hutchinson
With thanks to Sarah Cooper at the Getty, Alice Bag, Mara Carlyle and all at Erased Tapes.
MUSIC
Theme music: Pete Cunningham, Ned Pegler and Caradog Jones
Piano Scapes 3
Written and performed by Qasim Naqvi
Courtesy of Erased Tapes
Angelus Novus
Written by Saki Sugimoto
Performed by Hatis Noit
Courtesy of Erased Tapes
Away With These Self-Loving Lads (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Pearl (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Bowlface en Provence (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Bonding (Instrumental) - Mara Carlyle
Nerveskade - Sickhead
Apache Tomcat - Alright Rock N Roll
FURTHER READING/LISTENING
X-Trax
Hyperallergic
ArtForum
Bandcamp
instagram.com/thelastbohemianspod
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