Music journalist John Doran travels the country in search of the musicians of New Weird Britain, an underground movement which is blossoming in the margins of Britain.

Artists of all stripes have been driven out of the city centres by soaring rent prices and hit hard by the dwindling revenues of the digital economy. A new wave of musicians are splintering away from convention to stage bizarre one-off performances that fly in the face of austerity. They live off-grid, building their own instruments out of electronic junk, staging strange rituals with priests smeared in clay or performing with a team of dancers dressed as anatomically correct vaginas which squirt cream over the audience.

In this episode, John Doran heads to the ultimate edgelands of Britain, to hear from the musicians who have sought out refuge in the broad horizons of the coast. In Kings Lynn we hear from the transgressive performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, one of the founding members of the radical group Throbbing Gristle from the late 1970s, to understand how New Weird Britain can also be seen as a response to the current political turmoil. We also interrogate what the idea of Britain means to this community of artists in 2019.

Other contributors include Rhodri Davies, Kemper Norton, Jennifer Lucy Allen, Hannah Catherine Jones, Jennifer Walshe and Lee Patterson.

Produced by Alannah Chance
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4

Photo: Rhodri Davies
Image credit: Kuba Ryniewicz Show less