Bureau of Lost Culture
Bureau of Lost Culture collects curious, rare, and half-forgotten countercultural stories and oral testimonies. Host Stephen Coates and guests explore tales from the underground and beyond. The podcast delves into hidden histories and alternative perspectives often overlooked by mainstream culture.
Episodes
A Countercultural History of the Universe
Has 20th-and 21st-century physics moved away from the brute materialism of the nineteenth century toward ideas that resemble the world’s ancient mystical traditions?
Might many of the discipline’s greatest figures — Einstein, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and others - have been privately motivated by philosophical and sometimes mystical questions about consciousness, reality and
Levitating the Pentagon and other Stories
She's 82 but is firing on all cylinders, still crazy after all these years, as Paul Simon sang, well, still crazy enough to believe the world can be changed for the better, that it's her duty to try to make that happen and crazy enough in her youth to try to levitate the Pentagon.
Born into a communist family in Brooklyn, NANCY KURSHAN was involved in Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War protests w
Peace is a Fire: The Monk Who Set Himself Alight
There are some images that don’t simply record history—they change it.
On the morning of 11 June 1963, at a busy crossroads in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, calmly sat down in the lotus position while fellow monks poured petrol over his robes. He struck a match and, as the flames engulfed him, he remained perfectly still.
The Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne captured th
The Road to Rebellion - Part 1
Roc Sanford is a British writer, artist and climate activist whose life has been a countercultural journey from an alternative childhood through academia to a remarkable experiment in off-grid living and ecological resistance as a catalyser for Extinction Rebellion and Ocean Rebellion.
For more than three decades he has been associated with the remote Hebridean island of Gometra, where he lives
Free Radicals - Tripping in the 18th Century.
In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic science.
We explore the world of the 'Pneumatic Institution' in Bristol, a community of scientists, poets, philosophers, and industrial entrepreneurs who formed a kind of proto-counterculture led by t
The Shadow of the Counterculture
Ever thought the so-called ‘golden decade’ of the 1960s was only about peace and love? Think again. Beneath the surface, it was riddled with violence, paranoia, and chaos, even in its most iconic moments.
So says James Riley, a writer whose work explores the darker edges of late-1960s and 1970s counterculture. His 'The Bad Trip' is an acclaimed study of apocalypse, occultism, paranoia and the co
21st Century Mutoid Man: Joe Rush - Part 2
This is the second part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the initiator, mentor, and driving force behind The Mutoid Waste Company, that extraordinary countercultural endeavour to turn the waste of our industrial civilisation into art, performance, street theatre - and a way of life.
If you haven’t heard the first part, you might want to start here:
https://bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/e/20th-
The Revolutionsts: How The Counterculture Turned to Terror
The Weather Underground, The Baader-Meinhof Group, The Red Brigade, Carlos the Jackal, The Japanese Red Army.
The counterculture has always had a shadow side. There have been bad actors, casualties, the needle and the damage done - and in this episode, we dive into the world of revolutionary and political violence, exploring how radical groups emerged from countercultural movements and evolved in
Sex - Men - War
Beyond the official story, the myth, of the Second World War — its maps and medals, courage and sacrifice — there is another hidden narrative. Written in rare memoirs, or in letters and diaries never meant to be read by us, it tells of a kind of underground culture that was secret, transgressive, forbidden
With millions of young men and women on military service, the transitory nature of life unde
20th Century Mutoid Man: Joe Rush - Part 1
If you had been at the Glastonbury Festival in 1987, you may have seen a familiar silhouette emerging in the dawn light - upright monoliths arranged in a circle. Was it Stonehenge - magically transferred here across the Salisbury plain?
No, it was ‘Carhenge'- a circle of upright cars, their chassis standing like monoliths, the archaeology of the automobile age
And imagine ‘Tankhenge', a gateway
The Library of Lost Maps
In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, behind a scruffy turquoise door, the world lies folded into drawers.
Here are maps that survived wars, regimes, and revolutions — not because they were valued, but because they were forgotten.
Some were reused when paper was scarce - a map of Cuba mounted on the reverse of a Second World War map of Berlin, the roads of one ruined city shining faintly through
In + Out of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - Part 2
This is the second part of a conversation with Alaura O’Dell / Mistress Mix, formerly known as Paula P-Orridge.
In the first part, we traced Alaura’s journey from meeting the musician and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in East London, to becoming a central actor in the underground art band Psychic TV and the occult network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY).
What is a Shaman?
Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels.
In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power.
Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and
This is Penny Rimbaud - Part Two
This is the second part of a conversation with the poet, musician and thinker Penny Rimbaud, co-founder, with Steve Ignorant, of the anarcho-punk band and activist art collective Crass
Crass emerged as a band in 1977, but quickly became something more complex, rejecting rock stardom, record industry norms, releasing records on their own label and using their platform to challenge war, nationalis
A Supernatural History of the Atlantic
The sea, its myths, and the supernatural is the theme of this special New Year edition of the Bureau when we leave behind our usual waters to set sail into the past of a very unusual counterculture.
For most of human history, the sea has been both a road and a riddle. It promises fortune and freedom — but it also swallows ships whole. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Britain’s
Tales from the Ambient Underground
In early 1990s South London — a time when rave culture was mutating and London’s squats were pulsing with creativity, Aphex Twin, Global Communication, Nightmares on Wax, Autechre,Andrea Parker, Scanner — could be found DJ-ing and performing in spaces where a strange new sound-world was blooming.
This is the story of Telepathic Fish, the ambient afterparty scene created by the Openmind Collective.
In + Out of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - Part 1
There are figures in counterculture whose names appear only in the margins of the story — whose influence is eclipsed, overshadowed, even dismissed, by more mythologised personalities.
Alaura O’Dell — known to many under her earlier name, Paula P-Orridge - is a musician, artist, occult practitioner, and was a co-conspirator in the band Psychic TV
For a long time, Alaura was described almost exclus
Geiger-Counterculture: A Journey Through Atomic Albion
We are on the brink of a new nuclear age - the energy crisis, the push towards net zero and the gargantuan power requirements of AI demand it - or so we are told.
But here in Britain, the old nuclear age isn’t just a historical footnote - it’s etched into the very landscape.
Tom Bolton went on an epic journey around the UK to explore the extraordinary, imposing locations in that landscape,
The Spell of David Lynch
When the filmmaker David Lynch died earlier this year, fans created shrines filled with coffee, doughnuts, cigarettes and blue roses; a level of spontaneous mourning more common for dead rock stars or royalty than filmmakers. His auctioned belongings sold for staggering sums, almost as if they were relics, showing how many people felt deeply connected to his work.
Why?
David was that unusual figur
This is Penny Rimbaud - Part One
Penny Rimbaud , who has spent more than half a century living the ideals that most of us only talk about, has been described as an activist philosopher, an anarchist, a Zen Buddhist. Though he would likely not recognise those descriptions, he is certainly a poet, a musician, an artist.
Born Jeremy John Ratter in 1943, in the late 1960s, together with artist Gee Vaucher, he founded Dial House, an o
Who Owns The Ground Beneath Our Feet?
We walk the streets every day — and through parks, across squares and pavements and along beaches, and mountains, over 'The Commons' — without much thought for who really owns them.
These apparently public spaces have often been battlegrounds over public rights. From the rural enclosures that fenced off England’s open fields, through the city squares where protesters have clashed with police, to
Roots, Radical and Rockers - With Billy Bragg
As musician and activist BILLY BRAGG makes a welcome return as a voice of countercultural sanity, we revisit the Lost History of Skiffle as he takes us on an extraordinary whirlwind tour through the music that the counterculture forgot.
Along the way, we hear about the emergence of The Teenager in post-war Britain, the massive impact of Rock Around the Clock, the Soho espresso bar culture of the
The Dark Counterculture of British Folk Tradition
In the old towns and villages of Britain, before the police, before the tabloids, before social media shame-storms, there were other ways to deal with those who stepped outside the rules. Noisy ways. Cruel ways. Dangerous ways - the 'Rough Music' rituals — part punishment, part performance, part pagan magic — at the dark edge where community, cruelty and celebration collide.
Liz Williams, the Gla
Ghost, Trolls and the Hidden Folk
Iceland is one of the last remaining Western countries where a substantial proportion of the population believes in the presence of other beings - The Hidden Folk.
For centuries, and until fairly recently, ghosts, revenants, trolls and elves were regarded as an integral part of everyday life. Their stories were shared during the long nights of winter gatherings, and they felt just as real to Icel
EVP - Voices From the Other Side
They called them the voices of the dead. Whispers in the static. Words in the hiss. Messages that—so believers said—slipped through the veil between worlds and onto magnetic tape
The story of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP begins in the late 1950s, when Swedish artist Friedrich Jürgenson was out in the countryside recording birdsong. On playback, he heard not only the birds but what he swore
5000 Years of Queer History
Amongst its pages, there are many familiar names—Oscar Wilde, Quentisn Crisp, Sappho, James Baldwin, Freddie Mercury — but also many we might not expect: Florence Nightingale, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, J. Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tchaikovsky, Greta Garbo, Richard the Lionheart, even Abraham Lincoln, along with 1000 other stories of artists, generals, politicians, kings, despots and ma
A Brief History of Nakedness
What does it mean to be naked, in body or in spirit? Why has human nudity so often been revered, feared, sexualized, or weaponised?
This episode was recorded on July 17 - International Naked Day. Our guest Philip Carr-Gomm is a writer, psychologist, spiritual teacher, and for 30 years, leader of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids—one of the largest Druid organisations in the world.
His book
The Bureau meets Aquarium Drunkard (Bonus Episode)
This is a special edition when The Bureau meets Jason Woodbury of Aquarium Drunkard for a joint transmission.
Los Angeles-based online music magazine Aquarium Drunkard is a one-of-a-kind map to the sprawling and often overwhelming landscape of independent music.
Founded in 2005 and piloted for over twenty years by Justin Gage, it has served as a curator, a passionate advocate, and a communit
The Forger's Apprentice
Elmyr De Hory was the greatest art forger of all time.
By the time he was exposed in 1967, it's estimated he had created over 1000 works that had been sold as by Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Derand, Duffy, and various other modern masters, and many of which remain undetected in institutions and private collections around the world.
But does it matter if we believe it's a Picasso and we enjoy
Stonehenge and The Battle of the Beanfield
The ancient temple of Stonehenge is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world and one of the most visited sites in the UK.
Yet, despite hundreds of years of archaeological investigation and speculation, to some extent it remains a mystery. And it is a mystery that is deep at the heart of the British psyche, for Stonehenge has been a gathering place for thousands of years, and rem
The Sonic Explorer of the Psychedelic Frontier
Doug McKechnie is an unsung pioneer of electronic music, a visionary who traversed the fringes of sound and consciousness at a time when technology, art, and radical thought were colliding to reshape culture.
Emerging from the explosive counterculture scene of San Francisco in the late 1960s, Doug was one of the first musicians to experiment extensively, and the very first to play live, with th
Ibiza and The Meteoric Rise of Club Culture - From Arty to Party
Sunshine + Love, Beats + Drugs
How did a sleepy island off the coast of Spain, metamorphose from an artistic, countercultural haven into the global epicentre of electronic dance music, lighting the touch paper that caused the explosion of club culture?
Alexis Petridis, chief music writer for The Guardian, and Dean Chalkley, one of the UK’s leading photographers of British subculture (both se
The Victorian Freak Show
The Bearded Lady, Zip the Pinhead, Major Tom Thumb, The Elephant Man, The Hottentot Venus - we delve into one of the more controversial corners of popular entertainment: the world of Victorian freak shows — where the abnormal, the extraordinary, and the misunderstood were paraded as spectacle and sold as wonder.
But who were these so-called “freaks” - vulnerable human oddities driven to make
Becoming Black: A 2-Tone Story
"I was never going to be a nice little white girl" she says.
Instead, she became an underground star, had hit records with the 2-Tone band The Selector, became a style-icon, an actor, a TV Presenter - and author.
Whilst Margaret Thatcher was reshaping Britain and promoting her very own particular vision of what it meant to be British, in the urban jungle of Coventry, a young woman whose imag
Alan Moore on Magic
Alan Moore first gained recognition in the 1980s with his work for the comic 2000 AD, and DC Comic's Swamp Thing. He went on to create Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, From Hell, an extraordinary take on the Jack the Ripper story, and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.
He's often been at odds with publishers and with Hollywood, and in recent years has removed himself from t
Myths of the Magic Mushroom
The evolutionary leap from ape to human was precipitated by primates eating psychoactive fungi, there is an ancient shamanic lineage of psychedelic plant use in the West, mushrooms have their own consciousness, drinking Reindeer piss can get you high.. there are many myths about magic mushrooms.
Meanwhile, we are living through a kind of psychedelic renaissance: psilocybin is often in the press,
The Myth of Easter Island
The giant stone heads of the fantastically remote Easter Island have gazed out mysteriously for over a 1000 years, fascinating the world since Dutch sailors came across them in the 18th century.
They were created by some lost civilisation it was said, or perhaps they may not have been made by humans at all, but by extra-terrestrial visitors. Most commonly the story has been that the original peo
Burroughs, Bowles and The Tangier Interzone
Tangier was a magnet for artists, writers, musicians, and political exiles throughout the mid-20th century, amongst them the writers Paul Bowles and William Burroughs
From 1924 to 1956 the city operated as an international zone under the joint administration of several European powers. This status created an environment of legal ambiguity, which, combined with the city’s strategic location at t
The Birth of British Youth Culture
Teddy Boys (and Teddy Girls)emerged in Britain in the early 1950s, becoming the UK's first distinct youth subculture.
Born in the aftermath of World War II, these working-class teenagers rejected post-war austerity and embraced a bold, rebellious style of dandyish suits, long drape jackets, narrow trousers, velvet collars, patterned waistcoats - and of course pomaded quiffed hair for the boys
Soho Night + Day
Scar-faced, ex-jailbird Frank Norman was part of the '50s and '60s Soho bohemian set and friends with Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Dylan Thomas and other habitues of the infamous Colony Room club.
After being abandoned as a child, growing up in institutions, and working as a fairground worker, he landed in Soho, became a petty criminal and spent time in prison where he learned to paint and writ
Spirit, Soul and Rock 'n' Roll - with Mike Scott
The Waterboys' MIKE SCOTT grew up in the '60s in Edinburgh and said: “I accepted the incredible happenings of that decade — with all its rapid evolution, colour, revelations and magic — as the normal order of things".
At the age of 4 he had his first mystical experience and remembers that from the minute he bought "Last Night in Soho" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich in 1968 he knew he
The Boy Who Became a Girl
She says: ‘I was reared Catholic but got over it, was born male but got over it, stopped sleeping with boys about the time I stopped being one and am much happier than I was when I was younger'.
ROZ KAVENY is a poet, a novelist, a writer of science fiction, a reviewer, a cultural critic, a literary journalist and a celebrated activist.
She has also been a sex worker - a hustler - as she would
The Man Who Burns Money
This morning I sat in my house, took a twenty pound note from my wallet, lit a match and set the note on fire.
Why? How did I feel as I watched it burn? Was it a waste, an immoral or stupid thing to do - or was it a deeply countercultural act?
Jon Harris, came to the Bureau to talk about his life - as a pornographer, as a rock 'n' roll tour manager, as a bankrupt - and, most importantly, as The Hi
The History of the Self - Made Record
We are joined by oral historian and broadcaster Alan Dein.
We discuss the history, culture and technology of the coin-operated machines that allowed ordinary people to make a record of themselves in the West (and, in adapted bootlegged form, to create records of forbidden music in the Soviet Union) long before the advent of tape or digital recording.
We hear a selection of extraordinary recordings
The Return of the Mystic
What is a mystic, what is mysticism, what is the mystical?
Many of us have sense that there is something mystical, or at least mysterious, underpinning things, some countercultural force that defies explanation but survives even in our 24/7 social-media drenched, junked up internet world of money, career and self promotion.
Philosophy, along much modern science and many formal religions, poo-poos
The Cut Up Life of Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis P-Orridge was a performance artist, neo Pagan, Industrial music innovator, the co-founder of COUM, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV and an arch provocateur. He was variously described as a wrecker of civilisation, transgressive and blasphemous, accused of being a Satanist and of sexually abusing his children (a lie - in fact he was a loving father and grandfather), and claimed to be a thre
Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream
In the turbulent late 1970s, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside.
They would share their new home with over fifty other residents - idealists from all over the world - armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism and drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the wo
The Man Who Wrote the Joy of Sex
The Joy of Sex was published in 1972 and for years, was rarely out of the bestseller lists, generating sequels, revised editions and a lot of imitators - so how could it be countercultural?
For two reasons: firstly that Dr Alex Comfort who wrote it was a deeply countercultural figure, and second, because its publication represents the moment when the sexual revolution of the countercu
High Society - Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture
*Every society is a high society. Getting high has been a pursuit of civilisations throughout time.
*Every day, people drink coffee in European cafes, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets, nibble coca leaf on Andean mountainsides and smoke tobacco in every nation on earth.
*Mind-altering drugs have been part of virtually every human culture that has ever existed - from prehistory to
The Underworld
“Imagination thrives in darkness”
We talk about The Undergound often at the Bureau - not London’s subterranean rail sytem, but the countercultural alternative society of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
But that is just one of the undergrounds - the underworlds - that are the subject of this episode
Dizzying ossuaries, freakish creatures of the deep sea, astounding colors of agates, lava and crys
Dope Girls - The Birth of the British Drug Underground
*In 1918, Billie Carleton, a West End actress, came off stage, went partying with friends, returned to her flat and was found dead the next morning - apparently of a cocaine overdose. A few years later, Frieda Kimpton, a dancer in Soho bars, committed suicide - with cocaine.
These events blew up into a huge media dope drama - with a cast of characters includes villians - Brilliant Chang, a Chine
Rubin and The Yippies
In 1964 he was a working class hippie student crossing Haight Street, a road in San Francscso, when hit by a vision - and life as he knew it was over
In 1994, he was a multi-millionaire new-age entrepeneur crossing Wilshire Boulevard, a road in Los Angeles, when hit by a car - and life as he knew it was over.
In the years in between, along with the co-founder of The Yippies Abbie Hoffman, counte
The Strange and Beautiful World of Arthur Russell
When musician ARTHUR RUSSELL died in 1992, at age 40, of complications related to HIV-AIDS, he was an obscure figure — though a legend in the 70s and 80s underground music scenes at downtown New York clubs such as The Loft and Paradise Garage.
RICHARD KING, author of 'Travels Over Feeling'(Faber) a poignant and evocative visual chronology of Arthur's life and times, came to the the Bureau to tell
Forward the Revolution - with Spiral Tribe
They helped inspire a whole generation of young ravers and lit the fuse for what was to blow up with Technival and Burning Man - as well as more mainstream festivals across Europe and the US - but their (counter)cultural contribution remains largely unacknowledged in their home country.
Marc Angelo Harrison, one of the orginal founders of the people’s sound system, techno, free party, DJ collec
Dreaming of Ancient Gods
*Whatever happened to the Greek Gods? if you are a teenager living half way up a 1970s tower block listening to Drill, should you even care?
*On this epside we travel in time and space to Ancient Greece, the classical psycho-geographic birthplace of Western Culture (and therefore of counterculture), specfically to the mythic landscape of Epidavros and the sacred temple of Asclepius.
*Our guide and
The Queer Life of Pop - with Jon Savage
How Queer Culture Shaped Pop Culture
"The 1972 version of David Bowie didn’t spring from nowhere. Although he refused to affiliate himself explicitly with gay liberation, he had found both artistic and social inspiration in the gay world, in particular the renewed sense of freedom and possibility that rippled through the British gay subculture in the early 1970s."
We finally lured the award-winni
Angels on Haight Ashbury
'Health care is a right, not a privilege'
*Whilst many of his fellow physicians became business entrepeneurs rather than healers, Dr. Dave opened the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in 1967, ministering to the thousands of young people and hippies flocking to San Francisco during the Summer of Love.
*Over the years, the patients using the clinic shifted from idealistic hippies with STDs and bad
Post-Punk Druidry - with Youth
*"Punk taught us the future had only just begun” he says
*For him that future was to include the bands Killing Joke, The Orb, Brilliant and The KLF; starting various record labels; hit records; producing and remixing a massive range of artists including Paul McCartney, The Verve, Tom Jones, Maria McKee, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, Guns N' Roses, Primal Scream, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Art of Noise,
The Women at the Heart of Britain's Biggest Acid Bust
*Julie Taylor was a police officer who gave her name to
'OPERATION JULIE', the biggest drug bust in UK history and one which resulted in the conviction of over a hundred individuals involved in the trafficking of LSD, including some of the most prolific chemists of the era.
*Christine Bott was a practising doctor living a classic 1970s rural countercultural life in mid Wales, growing organic v
The Sounds of Black Power
*A time when musicians were viewed as revolutionaries and revolutionaries might be considered pop culture icons
*Crate digger / rock critc / reissue producer and archivist extraordinaire Pat Thomas came to the Bureau to tell how black power intersected with counterculture and influenced folk, rock, soul and jazz in the years between 1965 and 1975.
*We hear astonishing stories from his book 'L
The Rise and Fall of the '80s Free Festival
*Who do the green roads and wide open spaces of Albion belong to?
*This episode is a story is about a collision of two cultures - the counterculture of the twin tribes of urban free party ravers and new age travellers - and the mainstream culture of landowners, the legal authorities, English Heritage and right-wing politicians.
*In the first of a series on '80s and '90s counterculture, Aaron T
Child of the Commune
What was it like to live in a commune? What was it like to grow up in a commune?
NANCY THOMPSON came to the Bureau to tell us. She was born in The Shrubb Family Commune - one that was set up in a big old farmhouse in rural Norfolk in 1970 - and, remarkably, one that is still going today.
In the early to mid '60s many Western cities were magnets drawing the young and hip in from the regions, shakin
Liberation Part 2: Glad to be Gay
Being the further adventures of English musician broadcaster and LGTBQ activist TOM ROBINSON, as he gets deeply involved in the gay counterculture of London in the '70s whilst on his journey to having a huge hit with the song 2-4-6-8 Motorway
We hear about the genesis of another hit - (Sing if You're)Glad to Be Gay - a remarkable, unprecedented protest song that climbed into public consciousness
Liberation Part 1: Coming out in the Counterculture
TOM ROBINSON is an English songwriter who rose to fame in the 70s as an LGBT and anti-racist campaigner. He has released over 20 albums and is an award-winning much-loved broadcaster who has made many programs on all six BBC radio channels.
In this, the first of two programs, we trace his story from troubled youth through a suicide attempt and recovery in an alternative community to coming out
The Beat Goes On: The Sounds of Allen Ginsberg
YOUTH, producer of a huge range of artists (including Kate Bush, Crowded House, The Orb, KLF, The Verve, Guns ’n’ Roses and Primal Scream) and Jesse Goodman of the Allen Ginsberg Estate come to the Bureau to talk of the beat poet’s impact on music and the British counterculture.
We hear about Youth's 'Iron Horse' project and two albums of interpretations of Ginsberg's Fall of America poems by a
London's Lost Street of Song
Britain’s own Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street was once alive with the sound of hammered pianos, and sung melodies and choruses. Its songwriters knocked out tunes on the fly and rushed to the street to sell them to pay for the next round of drinks.
In the '60s, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks came here, so did Donovan and Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Elton John, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff B
Countercultural Libido: A History of 'Perversion'
Warning: this episode contains discussions of sexual and other adult themes.
Julie Peakman is a historian of eighteenth-century culture who specialises in the study sexuality and pornography.
She is the author of 'Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890', 'Whore Biographies 1700-1825', The Development of Pornography in 18thC England' and many other books.
She came to the Bureau to discuss her latest: 'The
The Incredible String Band Part 2: Inside Looking Out
*In this, the second of a two parter, we hear more of the crazy countercultural life and times of The Incredible String Band - from the inside looking out - with Rose Simpson
*Rose was one quarter of the band during what many regard as their creative and countercultural peak in the late 60s and early 70s.
•Her memoir 'Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden' is an incredible story, relating how she
The Incredible String Band - Part 1: Outside Looking In
They were artists, myth makers, story tellers, tribe leaders, psychedelic troubadours; they pioneered "world music” with albums like The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter; they experimented with theater, drugs, film and lifestyle and inspired The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Pet Shop's Neil Tennant, The Lilac Time and many, many others.
They lived the hippie dream of communes and free love,
In the ’60s: The Birth of the British Underground
He was friends with Burroughs and Ginsberg, wrote their biographies along with those of The Beatles, Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kereouc and penned books on The Beat Hotel, Pink Floyd, The Stones - amongst about 70 others.
Barry Miles (known just as Miles) came back to the Bureau to tell us all about it.
We hear how he set up Indica Gallery where Lennon met Yoko, starte
How to Expand Your Consciousness Part 3: The Dreaming
*Niels Bohr discovered the structure of the atom in a dream, Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after a dream, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by a dream,
Hergé ’s 'Tintin in Tibet' - the first of many Tintin stories - the same.
*Keith Richards claimed to have dreamed the riff to 'Satisfaction', Paul McCartney the melody to 'Yesterday’ - the most covered pop song in history. Hell, even Aphex Twi
Remembering the Crazy Diamond
•Cult icon, enigma, recluse, crazy diamond, he was the founding member of one of the world’s most famous and succesful rock groups, but the life of Syd Barrett is full of unanswered questions.
•Was he a drug casualty of the sixties? Did he walk away from the pressures of the commercial music world? Did he suffer from an undiagnosed mental illness, did his muse abandon him? Was it a combination
How To Expand Your Consciousness Part 2: Tripping
*Psychedelics have made a comeback but they remain deeply mysterious.
*They may be now seen as potential 'breakthrough therapy' for mental illness but we still have only a vague idea how they work, and there is a limit to what studies in labs can reveal. Any one who has used them knows that to really understand them, we must broaden our experience of what they actually are.
*Neuropsychologist A
Songs of War and Peace - with Boris Grebenshikov
*He is perhaps the biggest name in Russian rock music, famous as the leader of the band Aquarium throughout his homeland and 'Outer Russia’ (as the huge and growing number of Russian emigres are called), but he is now listed as a “foreign agent” - basically an anti-patriot, a traitor, for criticising Russia’s war
*Aquarium were pioneers of the clandestine homegrown rock scene that was born in ear
Riding The Oblivion Express - with Brian Auger
•He’s played with Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Boy Williamson, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Billy Cobham, Spencer Davies, Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart, John McLaughlin, Tom Jones, Eric Burdon and many, many more.
•With Julie Driscoll he had a huge hit with a masterful psychedelic rendition of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire”
•He's been hailed as the godfather of acid jazz, sampled by hip ho
The Soho Bibles: The Secret Porn of Post-War London
*Under the counter-culture..
*They were handmade illegal obscene books, a little like early punk zines, typewritten mimeographed manuscripts with two or three pornographic stories or a novella.
*Many contained drawings or photographs and were sold in post-war London and provincial second hand bookshops Thousands were produced, but only a small proportion survive today.
*Titles li
How to Expand Your Consciousness Part 1: Philosophy
Philosophy as Counterculture?
*For thousands of years, humans have been trying to expand this mysterious thing called consciousness, not only by drugs, dancing, art and spiritual practice but just by thinking, talking and arguing.
*Is philosophy for anyone - or just for the elite in their ivory towers and universities? Can it be of the street, can it be counterculture?
*We try an
The Music of the Cults
*Their number encompasses the darkest bogeymen of countercultural nightmares- including Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh and the Reverend Moon -as well as saintly figures devoted to the good of others; outright charlatans, narcissistic psychopaths, deluded New Age prophets as well as genuine gurus.
*Since the 1950s, certain charismatic individuals have taken it upon themselves to collect o
Rock, Radicals and Racism
*Roger Huddle is a born and bred Londoner, a working class music-mad mod who grew up in the 50s, got radicalised in the 60s and became a co-founder of one the most successful activist groups of the 70s - Rock Against Racism (RAR).
*RAR was a political and cultural movement which emerged in 1976 in reaction to a rise in racist attacks on the streets of the United Kingdom and increasing support fo
So You Say You Want a (Sexual) Revolution?
The pill, Profumo, pornography.
Love, liberation and libido.
Larkin, Lady Chatterley, Lolita,
*No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and more vilified than the 1960s.
*For some it was a time when music, fashion and drugs enabled young people to express their individuality and freedom and their hopes and dreams of a better world.
For others, it marked the advent of the permi
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