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Alannah Currie (born 20 September 1957) is a
New Zealand musician and artist, best known
as a former member of the British pop group
Thompson Twins.
Born in in Auckland, New Zealand, Currie
emigrated to England in 1977, as a drop-out
rock journalist. Currie squatted in various
places in South West London, ending up in
Lillieshall Road, Clapham Old Town. This
turned out to be a major step on the road to
stardom with the Thompson Twins. In 1979,
with her across-the-road neighbour, Trace
Newton-Ingham (Traci Newton), she co-founded
the dread-punk-improvising group, The
Unfuckables. The Unfuckables performed one
especially memorable gig at an
Anti-Psychiatry Conference in early 1980,
held in the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square,
London. For this particular gig the group
comprised of the two co-founders, plus an
array of musicians from London's
'underground' music scene - Viv Albertine
(The Slits), Gareth Sager (The Pop Group),
Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (This
Heat), Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Jimmy
Cauty (later of The KLF) and improviser Steve
Beresford, amongst others.
Soon after this, she joined the Thompson
Twins and much later still the more
experimental Babble... as lyricist,
percussionist and visual artist. In 1992 she
returned to New Zealand working primarily as
a glass artist and environmental activist.
She was founder of the women's anti-GM
movement MAdGE. In 2004 she designed a series
of protest billboards that caused huge
controversy in New Zealand but won several
international art / science awards.
Currie currently lives and works in London
where she is a student of the little known
art movement, armchair destructivists.
The Thompson Twins were an English New
Wave/pop band normally associated with the
1980s. The band formed in April 1977, and
disbanded in May 1993. Massively popular in
the mid-1980s, the band scored a string of
hits in the UK, broke into the USA and Canada
and enjoyed huge popularity around the globe.
Total worldwide record sales are estimated at
50 million. The band was named after the two
bumbling detectives in Hergé's comic strip,
The Adventures of Tintin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alannah_Currie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_Twins
Tags : NZ Kiwi New Zealand Music Thompson Twins |
