Hermine

Hermine has been played on NTS over 30 times, featured on 31 episodes and was first played on 4 July 2019.

Hermine Demoriane (Hermine, Hermine Williams) (born 1942) is a French singer, writer and former tightrope walker. Daughter of an engineer and a journalist, she married the British poet Hugo Williams in 1965, with whom she has a daughter, Murphy Williams, also a writer and journalist.

At the end of the 1960s she contributed to International Times, a hippy magazine, carrying out interviews with Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Garrel, Len Lye etc.

In the early 1970s she spent time as a tightrope walker (see her book The Tightrope Walker), performing, for example, with COUM Transmissions (pre-Throbbing Gristle), and spending a season with Jérôme Savary's Grand Magic Circus in Paris in 1974, acting in Copi's play Goodbye Mister Freud. She played the character of Chaos, singing Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien", in Derek Jarman's Jubilee. She also took part in Alternative Miss World, organised by the artist Andrew Logan.

Hermine wrote three plays; Lou Andréas Salomé (starring Richard O'Brien and Jenny Runacre), He Who Is Your Lord Is Your Child Too (starring Anne Bean) and The Knives Beside the Plates (with the Neo-Naturist Cabaret), between 1978 and 1980. From October 1980 until 1981, she performed musical interludes at The Comic Strip, a pioneering café-theatre in Soho with comedians such as Rik Mayall and Jennifer Saunders. In addition she performed and organised various evening shows of performance art.

She acted in John Maybury's Court of Miracles in 1982 and Hilda Was a Goodlooker by Anna Thew (London Film-Makers Co-Operative) in 1986.