COLD LIPS Kirsty Allison

 Jón Sæmundur Auðarson of Dead Skeletons with his paintings at Icelandic Embassy talks about the impending volcano explosions, HIV, Hep C, strong tea with Kirsty Allison.  

There is a film version of this online made by Gil De Ray Insta @coldlips_ and Cold Lips website and Gil De Ray and Cold Lips YouTube.

Kirsty Allison speaks with legend DJ Martin Green about the 90s.  Without Martin Green, would there be Britpop? His weekly club night Smashing, defined an era in underground culture, and was the coolest club of the 90s.

Some people earn the tag of legend - and for five decades Derek Ridgers, the London-based photographer has captured the Dark Carnival of the British underworld in our most radical club nights, from Blitz and Skin Two through to today’s Wraith Club.  Growing up in the 60s, and making his name photographing punk clubs, and taking rock shots of the world’s greatests, he is a hero to many working photographers and fans of subculture, alike.   Humble, brilliant, and with a rock n roll gallows humour to match his dark lens, now 70, in this Goth Shop X Cold Lips podcast, it’s a pleasure to have a conversation attempting to span his archive, and talk about voyeurism and documenting the cultural politics of the underground.

Derek Ridgers stands alone in his preservation of the fleeting expressions of the night.   His limited silver bromide and C-type signed and numbered Derek Ridgers Editions are available via the wonderfully curated Goth Shop:

 gothshop.co

Recorded September 2020, on a balcony in the east, looking down towards the spree river with Berghain between.  I’m sitting with Rob Doyle, the author of my favourite book so far this year, Threshold.  It's published in the UK and the US by Bloomsbury, so he takes throne as a leader in a new school of digital existentialist modernists, who take a post-millenial ego, and ask questions about the Author’s physical space on the page.

Rob Doyle is very tall, he appears at the door wearing a black polo neck and black pegs, looking total jazznik, because later tonight he’ll be on stage with a strain of the Fat White Family in Neukolln, playing percussion at a reassuringly fun evening, where the super-spreading qualities of the flute can be ignored, as we travel in an alt reality, away from the claws that birthed us all. Ex pat life, where universal globalisms of Me Too, BLM, Terf-wars, squish in the Q-Anon malestrom of denial and manipulations of the maleducated grip for sense and logic mean the novel has not felt as relevant and required in counterculture in my lifetime.

Threshold sits as a hologram, in an era where the individual is manipulated into the spectrum of hashtag identity politics, and good/bad - like/dislike polarisations mean we are the product, smashed beneath a data-driven duvet in a privatised society. 80% predictable, asking if that too is corrupted as any other statistic,the novel remains relatively data-proof, its nuance its strength, the unsearchable, between the lines facts being far truer than any single sentence or status update.

Thanks for listening. I’m making this on Sunday 27 September in Berlin. The music is by Gil De Ray. We’re on a residency in Mitte at the Neurotitan Gallery as guests of the wonderful artist Danielle De Picciotto - whom you can hear a past conversation with in the trenches of all your favourite podcast outlets, via Anchor, Spotify, iTunes, many more, and our own coldlips.co.uk. I also share these on kirstyallison.substack.com, where I gratefully send out thank yous of my new poetry book, Now Is Now, a collection since 007, to paying subscribers.

Rob Doyle's Threshold is out now, and the film This Is Ritual is coming soon. Follow him on https://www.instagram.com/skullhotel/

https://coldlips.co.uk/2020/09/12/modern-poetry-live-in-berlin/

Recorded February 2020, at Studio 65 in Wedding, Berlin, when Cold Lips released Martyn Goodacre's Whos Fuckin Planet book to accompany his exhibition as Das Gift

Released in anticipation of Danielle De Picciotto's GESAMTKUNSTWERK show at Neurotitan Gallery, Berlin.  12 September > 03 October where Kirsty Allison will be artist/writer in residence with Gil De Ray

Please do support these efforts by subscribing to kirstyallison.substack.com

Kirsty Allison took part in Mehmet Sander's life changing workshop at the Chisenhale Dance Space.  His world-class 'action architecture' defies EVERYTHING in contemporary dance.  Punk, hardcore, radical, revolutionary.

https://coldlips.co.uk/2018/07/05/mehmet-sander-dance-company/

https://youtu.be/K3RIteQb5p4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR50gEdpKwc