Hermine Demoriane was born in Neuilly near Paris in 1942. In 1966, at the age of 23, she moved to London and married poet Hugo Williams. The couple have a daughter, Murphy. Lifestar, published in 1969, is a journal of her pregnancy. A visit to an exhibition by the artist Robert Morris at the Tate Gallery in 1971 inspired Hermine to take up tightrope walking, which would become her obsession for the next five years. Her experience during this period is fully documented in her book The Tightrope Walker and inspired her role as Chaos, a mute biker girl, in Derek Jarman's 1977 film Jubilee.

Having abandoned the tightrope and returned to writing, she producing three plays between 1978 and 1980, Lou Andréas Salomé, He Who Is Your Lord Is Your Child Too and The Knives Beside the Plates. One of which was seen by David Cunningham, the art-pop musician and producer behind The Flying Lizards. He invited her to record a cover version of “Torture,” the John D. Loudermilk lament famously recorded by the Everly Brothers. The subsequent single with “Veiled Women” on the B-side, a Nico-esque original, was released on her own Salomé Disc imprint in August 1980. She would later license the tracks to Human Records, who expanded the single with two addtional trcks into an EP - Foxes Will.

From October 1980 to early 1981 Hermine performed musical breaks at The Comic Strip, the pioneering alternative comedy club in Soho. The connection came about after Hermine was introduced to Strip writer/director Peter Richardson by members of the band Furious Pig, and would in turn bring her into contact with comedians such as Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Keith Allen, and later Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.

Hermine's second single, recorded in 1981, coupled a version of Dory Previn's “Valley of the Dolls” with the original song,“TV Lovers.” It would be her last release with Human Records before her move to Crammed Discs. The first release for that label came in April 1982, The World On My Plates, a six-track mini-album, comprising minimalistic cover songs and an iconic sleeve image featuring Hermine loading singles into a dishwasher.

Although supported by the label throughout a series of world tours in 1982 and 1983, plans to release her first proper debut album through Crammed fell through. After rejections from 40 different labels, Lonely At The Top was eventually released through a revived Salomé Disc in July 1984. Produced by Dominic Weeks and Cass Davies (of Furious Pig), the ten-song album was a mix of skewed covers and Weeks/Davies/Demoriane originals.

Distributed by Rough Trade, Lonely At The Top sold out its pressing of 2,500 copies and was to become Hermine last record. Sessions for a second album, recorded in Switzerland, went unreleased, and live dates with Einsturzende Neubauten in Europe in June 1984 were something of a mismatch. Subsequent theatrical performance projects included Stanhope (1985), Fountain of Youth (1987, at ULU swimming pool), Masculinity (1988), L'éternelle monotonie de la passion (1988), Share-Out 89 (1989) and Moonlight and Roses.

In 1989 Secker & Warburg published her book The Tightrope Walker in combination with her London diarys between April 1971 - March 1975 and a pictorial history of funambulism. Despite the lack of any new recordings since 1984, viewers of French & Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous will have heard Hermine Demoriane most recent vocal projects. She is the distinctive Continental femme fatale voice on several pastiche numbers in both shows.

In the mid-1990s Hermine returned to Picardy, in northern France, having inherited her family home, which she has since developed into an arts center.

(text adapted from the James Nice LTM Recordings biography)