Bureau of Lost Culture

Bureau of Lost Culture

*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast rare, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and tales from the underground. *Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation. *Listen live on London’s premier independent station Soho Radio or via all major podcast providers. The Bureau is collected at The British Library Sound Archive

Episodes

The Forger's Apprentice

June 23, 2025 • 68 mins
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 it as such?   Mark Forgy came to Eu...

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Stonehenge and The Battle of the Beanfield

June 9, 2025 • 75 mins
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 remains a nexus where prehistoric cult...

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The Sonic Explorer of the Psychedelic Frontier

May 25, 2025 • 60 mins
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 the Moog synthesiser, using it not me...

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Ibiza and The Meteoric Rise of Club Culture - From Arty to Party

May 11, 2025 • 59 mins
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 seasoned ravers), witnessed this extr...

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The Victorian Freak Show

April 27, 2025 • 60 mins
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 a living the only wa...

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Becoming Black: A 2-Tone Story

April 16, 2025 • 60 mins
"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 image couldn't be more different than M...

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Alan Moore on Magic

April 1, 2025 • 49 mins

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 the main...

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Myths of the Magic Mushroom

March 17, 2025 • 59 mins
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, hailed as a potential treatment, f...
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The Myth of Easter Island

March 3, 2025 • 65 mins
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 people who made them brought about the...
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Burroughs, Bowles and The Tangier Interzone

February 19, 2025 • 42 mins
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 the crossroads of Africa and Europe,...
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The Birth of British Youth Culture

February 1, 2025 • 58 mins
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 and equally sharp threads for the g...

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Soho Night + Day

January 21, 2025 • 57 mins
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 write.   Back in Soho on leaving jail, ...
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Spirit, Soul and Rock 'n' Roll - with Mike Scott

January 6, 2025 • 62 mins
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 had to live a life in music. In th...
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The Boy Who Became a Girl

December 24, 2024 • 54 mins
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 say, and has been both celebrated a...
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The Man Who Burns Money

December 8, 2024 • 56 mins

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 High Priest of The Church of Burn.

We...

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The Return of the Mystic

November 27, 2024 • 54 mins

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 mystical - relegating it to th...

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The Cut Up Life of Genesis P-Orridge

November 12, 2024 • 60 mins
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 threat to society. He could be both ver...
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Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

October 28, 2024 • 63 mins
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 world.  They did not leave for fift...
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The Man Who Wrote the Joy of Sex

October 15, 2024 • 67 mins
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 countercultural years of the late '50s and ‘...
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High Society - Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture

September 29, 2024 • 64 mins
*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 present day. They have shaped ...
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