“You make it sound so romantic”

What Steven asked Kyra De Coninck and Chris de Coulon-Berthoud, survivors of the Medway music scene

In this first part of a two part interview, Steven went to the home of married couple Kyra De Coninck and Chris de Coulon-Berthoud to discuss their names, playing the bicycle wheel, what happens when you are in band of girlfriends when the relationships end, and in a first, a geek empowering love story. Our conversation was so expansive that we’ve had to split it over two editions.

Chris de Coulon-Berthoud and Kyra De Coninck.

Please spell your name for the record.
Kyra: It's K-Y-R-A. Next word, D-E. Next C-O-N-I-N-C-K. Kyra De Conink.
Chris: C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R small d-E C-O-U-L-O-N B-E-R-T-H-O-U-D. Christopher de Coulon Berthoud.
Kyra: Are you just Chris? You don’t have to be Christopher.
Chris: It can be Chris, sorry.
Kyra: Nobody calls you Christopher. Sorry, I should not disagree even with the name.

Are you known by any other names?
Kyra: (deep breath) A really long time ago, Kyra Kalida.
Chris: Kyra La Rubia
Kyra: but that's a long long time ago.

You both have de in your names. Is that coincidental?
Kyra: That's purely coincidental.

Where were you born?
Kyra: I was born in Belgium.
Chris: I was born in Canterbury.

What's the history of your surname?
Chris: It's part Huguenot, part Swiss. The de Coulon’s were, in the 19^th Century…
Kyra: (giggling) I’m sorry.
Chris: Neuchâtel refused to levy a militia in the Sonderbund War November 3 to November 29 1847. It was the Protestant and Catholic Swiss fighting each other, a 12-day war. Afterwards, Neuchatel faced very heavy fines, because of the way Switzerland was confederated. The Coulon’s were a wealthy mercantile family. It would have pretty much bankrupted Neuchatel, all the public buildings would have had to be sold off. Paul Coulon paid it all off out of his personal fortune. So the Prince of Neuchatel, who was Ludwig of Bavaria, ennobled them. That's why it's a small d. That was something I didn't really know about.
Kyra: Because my name is with a big D, I'm not aristocratic at all. But his is with a small D. It means that theirs is aristocratic.
Chris: That's a kind of aristo convention. It was your dad who mentioned that because I hadn't done family history at that point. “Blue blood, eh?”
Kyra: I think I mentioned that to you as well, but you'd forgotten.
Chris: The Berthoud part, Huguenot family from Southern France. Ended up in Switzerland in merchant banking. That all went tits up in 1911, after investing heavily in South American railway bonds. Hence, I live in this degraded state.
Kyra: I'm the granddaughter of communist revolutionaries in Belgium. And he is the great-grandson of bankers, basically.

What brought you to the Medway Towns?
Kyra: I fell in love with an English man called Billy Childish. I'd met him in Brussels and thought it might be good for my English to come over for six months. 37 years later, I'm still here.
Chris: I've always had a sort of link to Medway. My brother went to art college here. He knocked around with Tracey Emin and through that, knew Billy and moved into 107 Rochester Street, which was the cool house. I would come up for parties and go and see The Milkshakes and stuff like that. Later I had been married, and that didn’t work out, and Kyra had been in a relationship and that hadn’t worked out and we…
Kyra: We got together when email first started. I remember that we had like an AOL.com account. Nothing wrong with that. We just used to exchange these fantastic emails, which was a very new thing at the time.

How did that start?
Kyra: Well, he was my customer. I mentioned this to someone.
Chris: Yeah, I think you need to clarify.
Kyra: (laughs) He used to come to the gigs and used to buy records and books, so I knew his name. He was in my Rolodex.
Chris: I still have every one of the first releases of the Hangman Records. A complete set, until Billy started releasing them again. I’ve got like the first 52, and I would do things like, ‘32? There was a gap in the catalogue numbers’. I would message saying ‘I noticed there isn't a…’
Kyra: He was basically a really annoying customer, and he would come up at gigs saying ‘Have you got the lemon vinyl, instead of the orange vinyl?’ He was one of those. Then we somehow started talking about films.
Chris: We'd meet in London.
Kyra: I was heavily pregnant at the time, thinking I would never meet anybody. Nobody's going to want to be with me, who's pregnant with somebody else's child.
Chris: We would have these relatively elaborate dates, which would involve, you think of a country, you try and wear something from that country, a piece of poetry from that country, see a film from that country and then go for something to eat from that country. Which we did a few times.
Kyra: But it was like with a group of friends. It all felt like this funny thing that we would do and then I think gradually everybody got sick of it. It was too difficult to find a piece of clothing. But because he's such an avid collector, of course he would have a scarf from Mongolia or of course he would have a hat from Montenegro and he would know where to go, to see films from which country and then we were basically the two left over from that group.
Chris: You make it sound so romantic.
Kyra: It was, it was really romantic.
Chris: She was pregnant and homeless, and he was the last man standing.
Kyra: (laughs)

What you are telling me is that you are the geek zenith. You met somebody you were a fan of, bothered her with your hyperfixations, and then married her.
Chris: Yeah, I know. It sounds so lovely.
Kyra: I know, it sounds so bad.