'Trash: An Autobiography' Is Now Available Online

 

 

 

I am very pleased to announce that the edition of Bad Punk broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 10 July is now available on Mixcloud – and you can find it by clicking here.

 

The show went out live at 22.00 BST on a very hot night. There was nobody else in the studio apart from Johny Brown and me, and we had to switch the aircon off while we were broadcasting. It was a very special occasion, not just because of the heat and the sense of that Johny and I were the only ones in the studio late on a Friday night. It became a piece of live theatre. I was reading extracts from all the three volumes of The Trash Project – from Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise – and from essays that had previously appeared in Noon and émergent magazines, which will be included in the forthcoming Ken Hollings Reader from Strange Attractor Press. I also included drafts from my autobiography, a long-term writing project that is already producing some surprising and exciting material.

 

I am of course very grateful to Johny Brown for creating such a fabulous show around my reading of ‘Trash: An Autobiography’ parts one through three, and also most beholden to  Strange Attractor Press for publishing the Trash Project and to Noon and émergent for featuring my work. 

 

Anyone who attended my recent ‘Trash Trilogy’ lecture at the BFI will know what to expect from this show, and I hope you will enjoy it. Bad Movies on Bad Punk is a reality!

 

 

Bad Movies on 'Bad Punk' On for Friday 10 July

 

STOP PRESS: UPDATE – this is to confirm that my appearance on ‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and the Band of Holy Joy on Resonance 104.4FM is now happening on Friday 10 July. The show starts at 22.00 BST and can be followed online via the Resonance website – please see my previous post for 22 June for details.

 

At a glance:

Ken Hollings ‘Trash: An Autobiography’

‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and The Band of Holy Joy

22.00 – 23.30 

Friday 10 July

Resonance 104.4 FM

 

Pictured above: Tandra Quinn as Tarantella stealing the show in Mesa of Lost Women 

Bad Movies on ‘Bad Punk’: Ken Hollings on Resonance 104.4 FM with Johny Brown

 

I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining the fabulous Johny Brown and members of The Band of Holy Joy live on Friday 26 June for another episode of ‘Bad Punk’, a show Johny has been hosting for almost twenty-five years.

 

Last time I appeared on ‘Bad Punk’, it was with Howlround for a ninety-minute show devoted to our work together as The Howling, first broadcast in April 2025. For more details of that event, please click here.

 

This time around, it will just be me with a microphone and a script, plus Johny and The Band of Holy Joy dismantling the airspace around me in real time. 

 

I will be presenting ‘Trash: A Personal Education’, comprising extracts from the three volumes that make up my Trash Project, cut together with some new thoughts and autobiographical musings on the theme of bad movies and why they remain so fabulous. 

 

Trash has been an abiding passion of mine for some time now, and ‘Trash: A Personal Education’ will also contain snippets from essays I have written in the past for Noon and Emergent and are to be included in The Ken Hollings Reader, due out next year from Strange Attractor Press. Look out for more details on this in the coming weeks.

 

In the meantime, be prepared for 90 minutes of hypnogogic beauty and uneasy easy listening on Resonance 104.4, starting at 22.00, Friday 26 June. For that day’s complete schedule on the Resonance website, please click here. 

 

At a glance:

Ken Hollings ‘Trash: An Autobiography’

‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and The Band of Holy Joy

22.00 – 23.30 

Friday 26 June 

Resonance 104.4 FM

STOP PRESS: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this show has been postponed until July 10 - look out for more details in a future post.

Pictured above: Bad Movies and Bad People go together –  KH, Maria Montez in Cobra Woman, El Santo, the Mutant from Metaluna, I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, She Devils on Wheels, Bronx Warriors

 

 

Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise: Talking Trash at the BFI

 

As part of the BFI’s ‘Trash!’ season at the South Bank, I have been invited to give a lecture on my three-part Trash Project, published by Strange Attractor Press. Comprising three volumes, plus an additional Trash Concordance, this expansive and fragmented study contains personal reflections on Trash and Trash Culture developed over the years. Divided into Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, the Trash Project presents a complex but structured mosaic of perceptions on everything from alchemy, beauty and sovereignty to sexploitation, biker movies and underground cinema. It was always intended to be wide-ranging but never definitive.

 

Thanks to the BFI, I have been given the opportunity to look back on the whole thing for the first time since the Trilogy was completed. I will be reflecting in particular on the relationship between movies and Trash, starting with the ‘Purple Death’ episode of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe and then moving further into the deep spaces opened up by Jack Smith, Doris Wishman, Kenneth Anger and Mario Bava. I’m not saying that it won’t get messy, but it will be interesting – so do please join me.

 

The lecture will be taking place in the Reuben Library on the evening of Wednesday 29 April. You can find more details and book tickets by clicking here.

 

I will also be signing copies of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise in the BFI bookshop before the talk and would be delighted to say hello to anyone who drops by. 

 

Here are the basics:

Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise

Ken Hollings’ Guide to the Trash Underworld

Wednesday 29 April 2026 at 20:00

In the Reuben Library

The BFI South Bank

 

Ken Hollings Live and In Person at Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

 

I am excited and delighted beyond words to announce that I will be giving a talk at the  Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies on the evening of March 10. As with all their previous live events, it will be taking place at the Horse Hospital. Please click  here for more details.

 

The talk I am giving is called ‘Terminal Desert: From Trinity Site to the Ends of the Earth (via Bronson Canyon)’ and deals with some of my favourite subjects: deserts, monsters, postapocalyptic survivalists and Tura Satana. 

 

‘Terminal Desert’ begins with the anguish and horror at the end of Eric Von Stroheim’s 1924 silent classic Greed. In the middle of Death Valley, a hundred miles from water or safety, the movie’s tragic protagonist finds himself chained to the corpse of the man he has just brutally murdered. Staring at tinted images of blood-spattered sand and scattered gold coins, he realizes that he is a dead man. Shot on location in Death Valley under torturous conditions, this scene anticipates the development of a movie genre in which the desert becomes a home for monsters and mutations, violent criminals and homicidal drifters. ‘It's alive and waiting for you,’ declares the scientist hero of It Came from Outer Space. ‘Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you or the cold at night…a thousand ways the desert can kill!’ The first atomic bombs were tested in the Southwest American desert, after all, creating an even greater sense of desolation. ‘Terminal Desert’ visits some of the desert locations used in horror flicks such as The Beast of Yucca Flats, Mesa of Lost Women, Them! and The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes, examining their connection to this wild irradiated wasteland. During the 1950s and 1960s the Mojave Desert and New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto slowly took over from LA’s Bronson Canyon as Hollywood’s low-budget backdrop for alien worlds.

 

Following the monsters, space invaders and mad scientists, came biker movies like Satan’s Sadists that built on the reputation of Russ Meyers ‘roughies’ such as Motorpsycho and Faster Pussy Cat Kill! Kill! The alkaline expanse became a blank screen upon which to project serial fantasies of unspeakable torture, madness and murder. By the 1980s, the desert became the signifier, thanks to foreign imports like Mad Max and The New Barbarians, for the postapocalyptic world of isolated communities of freaks and survivalists attempting to make something out of the desolation. These characters become the inhabitants of an endless postmodern shoreline in movies such as World Gone Wild, which features Bruce Dern, who had starred as a biker in The Wild Angels and The Cycle Savages, Anthony James as a sympathetic cannibal, plus Adam Ant reverently quoting the words of Charles Manson to his own desert-based murder cult. 

 

Further mutant strains include Tremors, in which a desert community make a desperate stand against giant earth-boring creatures, and Resident Evil: Extinction, where zombie crows crowd the skies over the Nevada desert, taking us full circle. ‘Terminal Desert’ questions what constitutes a horror movie and what its aesthetics might include. It reveals how madness, cruelty and violence don’t always lurk in the darkest shadows but in the brightest sunlight. And they are not hidden inside enclosed spaces, but standing out against a flat unforgiving plane.

 

We dare you to see it!

 

Terminal Desert 

at The Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies

19.00 

Tuesday 10 March 

The Horse Hospital

Colonnade

Bloombsury

London WC1N 1JD

 

Pictured above: Greed, Mesa of Lost Women, It Came from Outer Space, Them!, Beast of Yucca Flats, 
Motor Psycho, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Got My Name In The Paper: Ken Hollings Reads at Helen of Troy

 

Issue Two of the ambitious newspaper project Agapius hit the street on Tuesday 16 December with a new text by me on its front inside page. It was great to have the opportunity work with such a large format, and ‘Permanent Threat’ is the result. Its theme of constant societal collapse and menace has been carefully balanced by the editors with Jeremy Deller’s more reassuring ‘Community Centre’ text on the back inside page. In between, Agapius offers a wide range of subjects, styles and techniques. From Satanism in Bolivia to a Queer History of Diamonds, everything in this newspaper is a reflective surface.

 

The paper launched in grand style at Helen of Troy, a louche little hangout on Hanway Street in the West End of London. This marvellous dive’s interior lighting concept favoured deep shades of red, thus making it almost impossible for any text to read indoors. Charlie Hills, who coedits Agapius with Kay Basil Fletcher, had asked me to read ‘Permanent Threat’ at the paper’s launch, but I wasn’t sure how that would be possible under the circumstances – besides, everybody was having far too good a time to stop what they were doing and listen to me. Charlie, however, had the inspired idea of inviting me to read my text to the sizeable crowd smoking and vaping on the pavement outside Helen of Troy. Hanway Street feels more like a back alley in old Paris than something that leads off Oxford Street – even this close to Xmas – so I decided to do just that.

 

Long story short: doing the reading outdoors turned it into a small piece of theatre that ended up involving pedestrians and bystanders in the action. At one point a taxi dropping off a passenger had to inch its way past me, but I didn’t stop reading – no, not even for a second.

 

You can find more details about Agapius issues One and Two by clicking here. Support independent publishing wherever and whenever you can.

 

Pictured above: Ken Hollings reads ‘Permanent Threat’ to those attending the launch of Agapius Issue Two at Helen of Troy, Hanway Street, 16 December 2025 – photographs by @lahollings – also pictured above: Agapius Issue Two, a detail of ‘Permanent Threat’, plus the Agapius promotional badge. 

 

So Long, Noon - I'm Writing for After Noon now!

 

I have some wonderful news for all you culture freaks out there. After a brief absence following the Covid pandemic, Noon is back – glossier, more relevant and more ‘post-everything’ than ever. Except now it’s called After Noon, and has recalibrated itself for the end of 2025 by going back to issue 01

 

When Jasmine Raznahan told me she was launching After Noon, I immediately agreed to contribute something. I like working with her very much and was very happy to contribute to issue 01 as I have been a regular contributor to Noon since Jasmine first invited me to write something for issue 2 back in 2014. In fact, I have contributed something to every issue right up to the magazine’s recent post-Covid hiatus. While writing for the magazine, I developed a very strong sense of what Jasmine wanted from me, especially for the ‘theme’ issues. I was aware that she was looking for texts that would complement the visual content of the magazine but would also take the reader off on some interesting and unusual tangents. 

 

It usually takes Jasmine and I one conversation to come up with the right tangent. She told me that the theme was ‘Borders’. And my immediate response was to write about New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The memory of this event had started haunting me again: Donald Trump was in the White House ordering airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites. Back then he had been boasting that the destruction of the World Trade Centre meant he now had the tallest building in New York – spoiler alert: he didn’t, and he never had. I was actually in Manhattan in the middle of October 2001 with my bride Rachel. As newlyweds, we had always planned to honeymoon there and were determined not to change our plans, despite the terrible tragedy that had just unfolded. What Rachel and I encountered there still surprises me to this day. 

 

I have always tried to make every text I wrote for Noon as different from the others as I possibly could. Jasmine has always given me the space and the opportunity to experiment with new ideas and approaches. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited to be working with her magazine again. ‘The Safest Place on Earth’ is different from a lot of my previous writing in that it is highly personal – I have rarely used the first person in my previous work, but I’m finding that autobiographical and autoethnographic writings are increasingly useful instruments for probing whatever the hell it is that’s happening to us today. One thing is clear to me, however: at some point, every writer worthy of the title owes their readers a life – and I’m trying to pay back some of that debt right now. 

 

The After Noon 01 launch took place last week at Claire de Rouen, a chic little bookshop in London’s East End. You knew it was chic because someone had dumped one high-heeled shoe and an empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the trash. 

 

Buy yourself a little happy with After Noon (01) – and check out some Noon back issues by clicking here.

 

Dazed digital currently has a feature on the reincarnation of Noon as After Noon, and you can read it by clicking here.

 

Pictured above:

After Noon 01 cover – Katherine Hamnett by Juergen Teller

After Noon 01 cover detail

After Noon trash at Claire de Rouen

After Noon spine

Dazed screengrab

KH flashing ‘The Safest Place on Earth’ at Claire de Rouen (pix by Max King)

‘The Safest Place on Earth’ detail

 

 

The Ruins Launch with The Howling for London Design Week

There is going to be a very special launch event on Saturday September 20 as part of this year’s London Design Festival. Illustrator Matthew Frame and I have been collaborating on The Ruins, an elegant stand-alone publication that combines his sharply inked panoramic images with some of my sharply inked panoramic writing. Matt’s subject is 1950s dystopian sci-fi movies, drawing upon scenes from the likes of The Time Machine and This Island Earth. My text, written at his request in response to Matt’s illustrations, is a section-by-section reworking of Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ considered from the perspective of Beyond the Time Barrier, a 1960 B-movie involving a US jet pilot who finds himself in the divided future of...2024. It is the latest in a short series of reworkings I have undertaken of this key Benjamin essay, which was only published after his death by suicide. The book has been beautifully designed and laid out by Patrick Fry and is absolutely gorgeous. It is being published in a limited edition by Jaune Press, so get them while you can. 

 

The Howling will be performing. Matthew Frame will be speaking. There will also be a chance to play videogames and to experience ‘Paradise’, an amazing site-specific installation by the sculptor Max King.  

And there will, of course, be you.

 

Here are the details:

 

Where – Free Play City, 199 Eade Road, Harringay Warehouse District London N4 1DN

 

When – 20 September, 19.00-22.00

Admission – free, no ticket required, but you are requested to RSVP via this link, which contains a lot of useful extra information. 

 

Pictured above: some views of The Ruins by Matthew Frame and Ken Hollings, design by Patrick Fry

The Trash Project Does Little Atoms

 

I was recently given the opportunity by Neil Denny to appear on his show Little Atoms to not only talk about my latest book from Strange Attractor Press, Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, but to discuss The Trash Project in its entirety. With Neil’s kind encouragement, I was able to go over the origins of Inferno, how it developed into the alchemic arcana of Purgatory and then ended with a protracted meditation on the relationship between sovereignty and waste in Paradise. There was also time to outline the complex generative relationship between The Trash Project and Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy. The result was a lively hour of conversation, which you can either download here as a podcast – or if, like me, you still think of radio as an event, a slightly shorter version of this episode of Little Atoms is being broadcast by Resonance 104.4 FM on Monday 13 January at 11.00. Feel free to listen in. And a Happy New Year to all my readers, to Resonance 104.4 FM and to everyone involved with Little Atoms.

 

Pictured above: obligatory packshots – The Trash Project, Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise and The Trash Concordance 

 

Ken Hollings, The Howling and Howloween at Margate Caves

 

I am very excited to announce a very special site-specific show taking place at Margate Caves on Thursday 31 October. Thanks to Seadog Books, I am happy to announce Howloween, an evening of clammy weirdness and strange darkness that none of you should even dream of missing. You can find more details and order tickets by clicking here.

 

As part of Howloween, I will be giving the first public reading ever from Paradise, my latest book for Strange Attractor Press, on a suitably subterranean theme: namely, the fabulous Venus Grotto of King Ludwig II. Seadog Books will be selling copies of Paradise at the Caves, along with complete sets of The Trash Project for all you completists, and I will also on hand to sign copies. 

 

My reading will be followed by the premiere of ‘Be Quiet In This Church’, the latest live performance by The Howling. This is an ambitious project inspired by a bizarre series of texts posted as comments under a YouTube video, where they were discovered by Robin The Fog. Either produced by a chatbot or in response to a homework assignment, the texts offer a set of grammatical permutations on the same remarkably similar sentences. Who wrote them or how they ended up as comments posted under an old music infomercial remain a mystery. We decided not to alter or edit the texts in any way but simply arrange them for five speaking voices. The result is a fractured meditation on repetition and variation in which every sentence is transformed into a haunting subterranean experience. The performance will feature the additional voices of Claire Breach, Xanthe Horner, Hamzah Aldimi and Martyna Wielgopolan, to whom The Howling would like publicly to express their gratitude.

 

Some of the BQITC crew visited Margate Caves during the summer to experiment with voices and acoustics to see what would work in this cavernous space. Xanthe also brought her gong, which will be featured in the 31 October performance. You can see from the pictures above that we will be performing in a fabulous set of vaulted spaces that was once an old chalk mine. Due to the size and capacity of Margate Caves, there is a strictly limited audience capacity, and we are already down to the last twenty tickets. If you’re in the Margate area or in the mood for a Halloween excursion, this may be exactly what you are looking for.

 

Pictured above:

Two views of the Margate Caves interior

Xanthe, Claire and Robin reacting to some of the Cave Paintings

More Cave Paintings

Xanthe + gong

Robin + cassette recorder

Paradise + back cover