Hermine Demoriane

New wave diva and chatelaine Hermine Demoriane is a “slapstick Nico-esque” singer, writer and former tightrope walker. She has sung with Rod Melvin, The Moodies and the Damned’s offshoot band, The Subterraneans. Two “intoxicating, mysterious” albums released in the 1980s - The World on My Plates and Lonely at the Top - have recently gained a new audience thanks to the internet. Hermine’s witty, folksy third LP, Who’ll Come Walking, came out last year.

Cult entertainer Hermine Demoriane has published two books: Lifestar, a journal of her pregnancy, and The Tightrope Walker, which documents her early 1970s fascination with the wire. She performed with Genesis P. Orridge and the Grand Magic Circus in Paris, and appeared in films by John Maybury and Derek Jarman, among them as Chaos, in Jubilee, singing Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ while walking across a washing line. She also took part in Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World.

Hermine has written three plays: Lou Andréas Salomé (starring Richard O’Brien), He Who Is Your Lord Is Your Child Too, and The Knives Beside the Plates (with the Neo-Naturist Cabaret), between 1978 and 1980. She then performed wry musical interludes at The Comic Strip, a pioneering café-theatre in Soho with comedians such as Rik Mayall, Jennifer Saunders and Keith Allen, which led to Hermine providing musical pastiches for French and Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous. She also put on various performance art shows around London.

Hermine is now based at the Château de Sacy, a Picardy country house she inherited in 1994, where she organises artists’ residencies and exhibitions. She is also secretary of the Blondin Memorial Trust. At this year’s Port Eliot Festival her band will include her husband, the poet Hugo Williams, on Cajun triangle.

“The French no doubt have a word for ‘mixed bag’ and Hermine Demoraine would know it well”
The Guardian

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Hermine Demoriane singing in her vaudeville style:

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