'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’: 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

 

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 

 

'Paradise' Launch at The Horse Hospital, Friday 6 December

 

On Friday 6 December, I'd be delighted if you could please join me and Strange Attractor Press in celebrating the completion of my monumental Trash Project with the publication launch for Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash at The Horse Hospital. The event will also celebrate twenty years since Strange Attractor’s first book event at this most blessed and favoured venue.

I will be reading from Paradise, alongside a performance from Howlround’s Robin The Fog on reel-to-reel tape recorders. You will of course know us better as The Howling.

Copies of all three volumes – Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise – will be on sale, along with their companion volume The Trash Concordance; and I will be signing copies of all four titles while stocks last.

‘Virtuosic in its scope…never less that compelling in its sheer erudition’ 

Chris Hill, Fortean Times

‘Energetic and enthusiastic, Hollings’ conception of trash is poetic, exaggerated and true to the conceptual and ultimately confrontational nature of the underground.’

Laura Jacobs, Art Monthly

In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic self-indulgence.

 

Here are the details

December 6th
Doors 7pm
The Horse Hospital
Colonnade
London 

Free Entry

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

'Paradise' is Here - And It's Brought a Friend

I’m very happy to announce that Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, the third volume of my journey into the domains of trash culture and trash aesthetics, is available now Strange Attractor Press.This volume completes a trilogy of works that began with the publication of Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture back in 2019, and continued with Purgatory: Towards The Decay Of Meaning in 2022. 

Customers who buy the book directly from Strange Attractor Press will also receive a complimentary copy of The Trash Concordance: A Guide to The Divine Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me. And you can find that offer by clicking here. 

Here’s a quick overview of Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash taken from the back of the book: 

In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tell the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic self-indulgence

 If you’re new to The Trash Project, Strange Attractor are happy to offer, for a limited time only, the complete set of works at a discounted price of £45.00 plus P+P. Check out their webstore here while stocks last. This will bag you all four books, ie the three main titles, plus The Trash Concordance, a fully-illustrated limited edition bonus volume that maps connections between the Trash Project and its structural inspiration, Dante's Divine Comedy. 

The bundle includes: 

 - Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture (2019) 

 - Purgatory: Towards The Decay Of Meaning (2022) 

 - Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash (2024) 

- The Trash Concordance: A Guide to the Divine Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me (2024)

 The whole of The Trash Project has been beautifully designed by Tihana Sara assisted by Baphorock on Paradise and The Trash Concordance.

There will be some very special launch events coming up in the autumn, so look out for these - announcements will made in all the usual places on social media. 

 The long journey is nearly over - the end is in sight. 

Paradise

The Psychoanalysis of Trash 

by Ken Hollings 

 £17.99 

 ISBN: 9781913689858 

 352 pp. | 130x 182mm 

 35 illustrations 

 Pack shots above by Rachel Hollings

Let Me Die a Monster @ Camden Art Centre

 

To celebrate the publication of the long-awaited Strange Attractor Journal 5, my publishers hosted a special launch event at Camden Arts Centre on Thursday April 27, which included the staging of a couple of scenes from Let Me Die a Monster, an exploitation movie script I had cowritten with ‘the Truffaut of smut’ (BBC Radio 3) David McGillivray at the distant start of 1997.

 

The experience took me back nearly 25 years to the end of the previous century and the start of the new millennium. There were two things that struck me about this unique period. The first was a sense of looming catastrophe. It was a very apocalyptic time: one of mass suicides, technological terrors, potential alien invasions and the collapse of civilization itself. The message was in the mainstream media, out on the streets and in the air: everything must end. The second and more encouraging thing about this period was the sense of frivolity that went with the apocalyptic mood – if the whole thing was about to come crashing down, people’s attitude seemed to say, let’s at least have a party while it’s happening.

 

Living on the edge of a disaster that hadn’t happened yet produced a strange kind of gallows humour – and the screenplay that David McGillivray and I worked on together back in 1997 remains a good example of it. I have written a short account of how the project came about as a preface to the published version of the screenplay in Strange Attractor Journal 5 for those who wish to learn more. Perhaps a better introduction to the script might be to consider some of the forces driving it. At the time it seemed perfectly normal that the production company who had initially approached me and then later brought David and I together to write Let Me Die a Monster should be called Trash 2000 – it suited the times, or at least it suited how I understood those times. Trash 2000 had been making videos for Stereolab, Cornershop and Leftfield, which were using a lot of the imagery and attitudes that appealed to me, so when filmmaker Nick Abrahams approached me on behalf of Trash 2000 to ask if I had any ideas, I was ready.

 

So, did I have any ideas? Well, no – I didn’t. It was only after the initial meeting that I recalled that there was a story I was very interested in writing – and that was the one about the American movie actor Nick Adams. He was one of a small bunch of Hollywood stars, including Russ Tamblyn and Joseph Cotton, who had made monster movies for Toho films in Japan. At the time, I’d been a consultant for a BBC2 history of the horror movie, dealing specifically with the kaiju phenomenon in general and Godzilla in particular. Nick Adams had appeared in one extraordinary Godzilla movie, known in the West as Monster Zero AKA Invasion of Astro Monster. 

 

As far as I was concerned, Godzilla was the apocalypse incarnate. What made the Nick Adams connection so fascinating was not only that Adams died relatively young, overdosing on pills, but he had also been close friends with two other mythically self-destructive figures: Elvis Presley and James Dean. This connection was the starting point for Let Me Die a Monster. I developed a story that begins with Adams’ suicide – the pills producing a powerful hallucination in which Nick sees himself back in Tokyo making one last kaiju movie; but things are not going so well for him. His part keeps being rewritten, and he’s gradually being upstaged by a second American actor, who’s clearly after the starring role. Adams starts cracking up. The script for Let Me Die a Monster concerns itself with the flashbacks and fantasies unfolding in the dying actor’s brain.

 

For the Camden Art Centre reading David McGillivray selected two scenes and assembled a wonderful cast to interpret them. I am particularly indebted to him, Kamura Atusko, Iain Stirland, Daryl Crick and Henry Galvan for such an extraordinarily special event.

 

Pictured above:

Strange Attractor Journal 5

David McGillivray and KH posing for the camera

Stirland and Crick in character

The cast and the writers from right to left: Henry Galvan, Daryl Crick, Iain Stirland, Kamura Atsuko, David McGillivray and KH

 

 

Strange Attractor Presents ‘At the Gates of Purgatory’ @ Iklectik April 5

 

On the evening of Wednesday April 5 at the fabulous Iklectik Lab I will be presenting an extended reading from my latest book Purgatory – The Trash Project Volume II. In the past I have always given short readings based on extracts from my work, but increasingly I have had members of the audience coming up to me afterwards saying that they would have liked to hear a little more. So, I thought I would give them a lot more. 

 

You can find more details and book tickers by clicking here.

 

At The Gates of Purgatory is a special ‘live audiobook’ adaptation featuring support from Lori E Allen, Martin McCarrick, Mark Pilkington and Howlround, incorporating voice, cello, electronics and tape loops. I have worked with each of these wonderful performers individually in the past; but this is the first time I’ve collaborated with all four of them at the same time. Expect a long deep dive into digitally looped cello, shimmering electronics and raw analogue tape effects. This is going to be a unique spoken-word experience.

 

The Trash Project is a three-part work modelled upon Dante’s Divine Comedy. Inferno, the first volume, deals with US underground and exploitation movies made during the 1960s, while Purgatory examines how nineteenth-century European attitudes towards Beauty and Sin, Art and Morality continue to influence the way we think about Trash today. The first nine essays of Purgatory correspond directly to Dante’s account of the journey made by the dead to reach the gate to Mount Purgatory, where they will eventually atone for their sins. This may be a long reading for me, but it’s going to get very weird very quickly.

 

In the second part of his Divine Comedy, Dante describes the souls of the dead arriving on the shore of Purgatory, a mountainous island in the middle of an empty sea. The dead must then journey upwards on a steady incline past many perils until they reach a gate set in a wall. Once beyond this gate they begin the long and painful climb up the terraces of Mount Purgatory, shedding their sins as they go, until they reach the Earthly Paradise at the summit.

 

Over the course of At the Gates of Purgatory, horror and violence, corruption and desire become inextricably entwined as we travel from the pleasures of the Palace of Art during the day to the terrors of the Wax Museum at night. Along the way we meet Anthony Hancock and Dorian Gray, Lola Montez and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Daphne and Apollo, Aphrodite and Medusa. 

 

NOTE: At the Gates of Purgatory is a continuous performance without any breaks or intermissions. You are welcome to come and go as the mood takes you, listen to as much or as little as you wish, but please be mindful of the other audience members when entering or exiting the hall. 

 

My sincere thanks are due to Lori E Allen, Martin McCarrick, Mark Pilkington, Howlround, Lucie Štěpánková and Isa Ferri for their unstinting support of this project.

 

Strange Attractor Presents At the Gates of Purgatory

At Iklectik

Wednesday 5 April 2023

Doors: 7.30pm 

Start 8.00pm

 

Pictured above

KH (photo by Rachel Hollings)

Lori E Allen 

Martin McCarrick (photo by Nelle Strange)

Mark Pilkington (photo by Rachel Hollings)

Howlround 

Purgatory (cover by Tihana Sare)

‘As Above, So Below’: Literature, Divination and Lisa Marie Presley

I cannot remember the exact sequence of events that led up to it, but I had been invited by Mar A Rodrigues, who runs a podcast series out of Portugal called ‘As Above, So Below’, to be interviewed by her for a new episode. MAR had approached me because she wanted to talk about my book The Space Oracle, which had inspired her to create the podcast series in the first place. We were finally able to meet online and talk on the morning of Wednesday January 11, and it turned out to be an absolute pleasure. Lisa Marie Presley hadn’t been part of the story at that point.

 

MAR and I discussed literature and the divinatory arts, history and science fiction, plus some of my earliest memories of space, astrology and magic. Other topics covered in no particular order included:

 

Destroy All Monsters, the Gulf War and 9/11

The Bright Labyrinth, science, magic and eroticism

Dante, The Divine Comedy and The Trash Project 

Purgatory, alchemy and the planets

Strindberg in Paris, the events of May 68 and Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik

Comic books, spiritualism and clairvoyance

 

I enjoyed it all very much – especially when we went on to astrology, a subject about which MAR knew a great deal more than I did. Overall, the conversation lasted about an hour and a half, which has resulted in the first episode of ‘As Above, So Below’ to be broadcast on Spotify in 2023. You can find it by clicking here.

 

Or if you prefer, there is also a video version of our conversation on YouTube, which can be found by clicking here.

 

And then there was Lisa Marie. I am currently finishing Paradise: the third and final part of my Trash Project for Strange Attractor Press. I’d reached the point of compiling a Glossary of Names and References, as I have done for the previous two volumes. These compilations of entries cover all of the individuals mentioned in the text. As a large part of this new book is devoted to Elvis Presley, there were a lot of references to both him and his family entered under ‘P’. I took time away from working on this to record the interview with MAR. I did a little more work on it the following day and managed to complete all the Presley references, except for one. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say about Lisa Marie, so I had deliberately left her until the end. I rose very early on the morning of Friday 13 January, around 5.50 am, specifically to complete the glossary entry for her. As I was preparing to start work, I had the phrase ‘with a heavy heart’ running through my head. I switched on the computer, checked the news headlines, and the first thing I saw was a statement from Priscilla Presley that began ‘It is with a heavy heart…’ announcing her daughter’s death. 

 

To discuss the relationship between writing and divination is interesting enough in the abstract. To go from that to the intuitive foretelling of a death in a couple of days is matter for further conjecture. MAR and I swapped some fascinating messages over the course of the morning, extending the correspondences between writing and divination further still – as if they were ever going to stop. ‘There,’ as Karlheinz Stockhausen once said to me regarding an equally strange connection. ‘I leave that with you.’

 

 

Pictured above

 

MAR

The Space Oracle (2018), available from Strange Attractor Press

MAR and KH on the mic

Purgatory (2022), available from Strange Attractor Press

 

Purgatory Launch Event at the Horse Hospital November 17

 

On the evening of 17 November, Strange Attractor Press is holding a launch party for my new book Purgatory at the world famous Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. This is Volume II of The Trash Project which I began in 2020 with the publication of Inferno. There will be movies and music, and copies of both books will be on sale, along with some choice items from my Strange Attractor back catalogue.

Following my reading from Purgatory at Iklectik in September and my recent lecture at the BFI, this will be the main event to welcome the second part of The Trash Project into the world. All are welcome, so I hope you will come along and help me celebrate.  I will present a reading from Purgatory and signing copies over the course of the evening. Join me and the wonderful people from Strange Attractor Press and The Horse Hospital if you can.

You can find more details from the Horse Hospital website by clicking here. But here's the basic information:

Where: The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

When: from 19.00 until Roger gets tired of the whole thing and kicks us all out

Pictured above: Strange Attractor invite to the Horse Hospital event (Tihana Sare); copies of Purgatory and Inferno on sale at the BFI bookshop; KH concluding his lecture at the BFI's Reuben Library - Thank You