Bureau of Lost Culture

Roentgenizdat - The Hidden History of Bone Music

*During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own extraordinary discs of forbidden jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film. 

 

*Today’s special guest is, er… me, Stephen Coates

 

*My new book BONE MUSIC details how the x-ray bootleggers worked, and reveals for the first time, the hidden history of their archivist precursors in Budapest. Who were they? Why did they do it and how was this Roentgenizdat (private pressing on xray) even possible? 

 

*Cultural Commentator TRAVIS ELBOROUGH returns to the Bureau and we swap seats so that he can run the show 

 

*We dig deep into the culture of the Soviet X-Ray Underground, the character of the bootleggers, cold war culture, cultural repression and ask if Bone Music has anything to say about current censorship in Russia.

 

*For More on BONE MUSIC the book: https://www.x-rayaudio.com/bonemusicbook

*The Bureau of Lost Culture: https://www.bureauoflostculture.com

 

#bonemusic #x-rayaudio #xrayaudio #sovietunion #coldwar #forbiddenculture #roentgenizdat #bonerecords #rockonribs #

The Last of the Merry Pranksters

*In the summer of 1964, a very strange vehicle was seen making its way across America. it was a school bus covered in psychedelic colours, driven by NEAL CASSADY, a beat generation character made famous in JACK KEROUAC'S beat generation classic On the Road and piloted by KEN KESEY, the best selling author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

 

*The bus contained a raggle-taggle crew of crazy psychonauts calling themselves The Merry pranksters allegedly dispensing LSD in orange kool aid to all and sundry in attempt to turn on America.

 

*In this episode, we leave Soho to travel to the far west of the USA, to a farm in Oregon to meet KEN BABBS the last of The Merry Pranksters.

 

*We talk of all sorts of things - Ken Kesey, the Magic Trip and the Acid Tests of course, plus Kerouac, Ginsberg, Viet Nam, Timothy Leary, spontaneity, the good life and dreams.

*And at the end we hear some very positive news about a question that I suspect is troubling many of us

 

*For The Bureau of Lost Culture https://www.bureauoflostculture.com 

 

#bureauoflostculture #kenkesey #kenbabbs #tarot #themerrypranksters #kerouac #ginsberg #themagicbus #lsd  #acid #tomwolfe #counterculture #psychedelic #thegratefuldead #acidtests #nealcassady #beatgeneration 

 

 

The Cabaret of the Nameless

*Performance artist, actor and underground cabaret star Madame LePustra leads us on a journey back in time in search of the Berlin Cabaret and Kabarett of Weimar Republic era Berlin.

 

*We learn of the strange and progressive Golden Years of the 1920s when queer and trans identiities were accepted, even feted, within an underground culture that briefly flowered in the city between the wars.

 

*We meet some of the extraordinary women performers who pushed artistic, theatrical and social boundaries before the Nazis jackbooted the doors of the clubs and theatres and brought the era to a tragic close.

 

*And we hear of Madame Le Pustra’s work to remember and reinterpret the times through their re-imagined ‘Cabaret of the Nameless’.

 

For more on Madame Le Pustra https://madamelepustra.com 

The Bureau of Lost Culture https://www.bureauoflostculture.com

Image courtesy Madame Le Pustra  / Michel Dierickx 

 

#berlincabaret #weimarcabaret #madamelepustra #cabaretofthenameless #counterculture

Smells Like Teen Spirit

*"Teenage savages go wild in a jungle of lust and lawlessness!"

 

*Countercultural commentator and writer JOHN HIGGS comes to the Bureau. We head out into the feverish febrile pheromone filled phase of self consciousness, sex drugs and rock’n’roll known as adolescence as we investigate the birth of the teenage in the late 40s and 50s.  

 

*Was it all really kicked off by Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti?    

 

*We chart the rise of youth culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain and debate that while ‘all you need is love’, ‘you can’t always get what you want’ as we trace counterculture through beats, mods, hippies, punks, ravers, grunge and britpop, touch down briefly on gender politics and the death of Kurt Cobain and wonder if 70 will one day be the new seventeen.

 

For more on John https://johnhiggs.com

 

The Bureau of Lost Culture https://www.bureauoflostculture.com

#counterculture #littlerichard #teenage #rockandroll #kurtcobain #beatles #rollingstones #hippie 

The Low Down LA Life of Tom Waits

*Musician and actor TOM WAITS is one of the great countercultural artists of our time, His '70s albums documented low life America in an LA that no longer exists

 

*Filmmaker Alex Harvey, author of 'Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles’ comes to the Bureau to tell how Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination.

 

*We hear how Tom blended real life with the mythic, turning autobiographical details into songs that were both romantic and disturbing -  and created a vision of LA as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

 

*For more on Alex http://alexanderharvey.org/

*For Song Noir: http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789146639

*For more on Tom Waits: http://www.tomwaits.com/

*For The Bureau of Lost Culture https://www.bureauoflostculture.com 

#counterculture #tomwaits #rickieleejones  #thetropicana #LA #kathleenbrenan 

The Life and Times of Dubmeister Dennis Bovell

* He stepped off a plane from Barbados onto a wet and windy runway at Heathrow airport in 1965 aged 12.

* Now he’s a DJ, multi-instrumentalist and producer of hundreds of records spanning reggae, lovers rock, soul, dub, punk and pop.  

 

* Dennis Bovell's life in music is populated by a countercultural cornucopia of artists as wide ranging as Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Slits, Madness, Bananarama, the Pop Group, Fela Kuti, Orange Juice, Marvin Gaye, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and most recently, Radiohead, The Animal Collective and Spoon.

* He's even got an MBE.

* We dig into all that - or as much as we can - plus Hendrix, sound systems, cutting dub plates, sound clashes with Lee Scratch Perry, police harrasment, wrongful imprisonment and the youthful joys of eating breadfruit on the beach.

* For More on Dennis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Bovell

 

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* The Bureau Newsletter  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/N0ZYoFu/BOLC 

Countercultural Broadcasting: Urban Pirate Radio

* Ninja Tune head honcho and Coldcut co-pirate Jonathan More returns to the Bureau to talk about his adventures hi-jinxing and hi-jacking the airwaves in the Wild West of South London. 

* For the second in our trilogy on illicit broadcasting, we hear tales of DJ derring-do during the birth Of Kiss Fm, once one of the coolest of the urban pirate radio stations and its transition to the commercial mainstream.
 

* And in the mix, we debate how the mainstream is dependent on the underground, the culture feeds on the counterculture, and along the way go crate-digging into how Jon caught the disease of collecting vinyl, putting on warehouse parties, life-changing meetings in London taxis, pirate TV, Coldcut's Solid Steel show - and nuclear power station ephemera..
 

* For Jon and Coldcut http://coldcut.net

* Jon’s Soho Radio show Out to Lunch https://sohoradiolondon.com/profile/jon-more/ 

Thanks for audio samples and info:

* DJ Food https://www.djfood.org/

* The Pirate Radio Archive https://www.thepiratearchive.net/

* AMFM.0rg https://www.amfm.org.uk/

* Death is Not the End https://deathisnot.bandcamp.com/album/london-pirate-radio-adverts-1984-1993-vol-1 

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Raving Upon Thames

Soho and Chelsea have always been hailed as the epicentres of swinging London.

 

But there was a third, and now rather forgotten place which gave birth to The Cool - a place that was the home to one of the most influential jazz clubs of the 50s before providing a launchpad for The Rolling Stones and the bourgeoning British R+B and psychedelic scenes of the 60s. It was a place that went onto to host an extraordinary roster of artists including Cream, The Yardbirds, pre-Bowie David Jones, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Jimmy Page, Genesis, Yes and many, many others before morphing into a hippy commune in the 70s.

 

Author Andrew Humphreys comes to the Bureau to tell the strange story of Eel Pie Island - a bucolic bit of London in the middle of the river Thames - an island which for 15 years played an essential role in the history of British counterculture.

 

For more on Andrew and his book Raving Upon Thames

http://www.paradiseroad.co.uk

 

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The Art and Craftiness of Sampling

Jon More, one half of cut-and-paste collage kings Coldcut and co-founder with Matt Black of Ninja Tune record label, joins turntablist, crate digger Strictly Kev of  DJ Food as we dig deep into the wild and wonky world of sampling - the borrowing, plundering, adapting and re-imagining of existing audio, songs and sounds to create new audio, songs and sounds.

 

Sampling  might have started off as a countercultural underground cut-and-paste technique used by experimental artists but it ended up powering a huge amount of hip-hop tunes and some very big hit records.

 

We hear some of Jon and Kev's favourite sampling selections, learn about the creative use of the tape recorder pause button, and delve into sound art, musique concrète and pop cultural pick-pocketing down the ages.

 

For more on Jon and Coldcut

http://coldcut.net

 

For more on DJ Food / Strictly Kev

https://www.djfood.org

 

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William Burroughs and Friends

The ghosts of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, John Giorno and Bob Cobbing make an appearance at the Bureau - as curator Steve Cleary plays us a  selection of super rare  recordings from the British Library Sound Archive.

 

The Archive is one of the biggest curated resources of audio in the world and includes over 1 million discs, 185,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings from around the globe  Steve takes us on a wander through its unparalleled counterculture collection.

 

We also hear from the capital's foremost chronicler of the counterculture, Barry Miles, on Burroughs' life in London  - along with a live recording of the beat writer at Manchester's Hacienda, a sampling of his cutups, some deeply strange sound poems and a wonderful recording of Kerouac jazz scatting at Neal Cassidy’s house.

 

For more on the British Library Sound Archive

https://sounds.bl.uk

 

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The Lost World of Pirate Radio - Part One

PIRATE RADIO first erupted in the UK in the early 1960s when stations such as Radio Caroline and Radio London started to broadcast from ships moored offshore or disused WW2 forts in the north sea. They were set up by wildcat entrepreneurs and music enthusiasts to meet the growing demand for the pop, rock and underground music not catered for by the BBC who had a monopoly on the airwaves.

Music writer ROB CHAPMAN returns to the Bureau to tell the story of this first golden age of illicit broadcasting.  We hear of the extraordinary life of pirate-in-chief Ronan O’Rahilly anarchist founder of Radio Caroline, of legendary broadcaster John Peel and his ground breaking show ‘The Perfumed Garden’, and of the oddities of life aboard the radio ships precariously sailing the airwaves.

Initially, the stations got round the law because they were broadcasting from international waters to delighted young people across the country before they ran foul of the authorities and were shut down in 1967. But their impact lived on: the government caved into youth demand for pop music with the creation of Radio 1 and many of the pirate radio DJs including Tony Blackburn, Kenny Everett, Johnnie Walker, Emperor Rosko went on to mainstream success with the BBC and commercial stations of the seventies and beyond.

For more on Rob
http://www.rob-chapman.com

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London’s Lost World of Yiddisher Jazz

London’s East End and Soho were the centres of a unique musical culture in the years between the 20s and the 50s.

 

Award wining oral historian and radio producer ALAN DEIN returns to the Bureau to tell stories of songs that soundtracked that world and feature on ‘Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World', the album of super rare tunes by London jewish jazz artists he has unearthed.

 

We hear tales of poverty and glamour, Soho gangsters, ghettos, vaudeville swing, comedy, cuisine and cabaret - and of some of the musicians who escaped the squalid streets of Whitechapel to become international stars. And we discuss what it means to be an oral historian, the power of story and how much radio still matters.

For more on Alan’s work

https://www.facebook.com/alan.dein

For Don't Log off

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jxzy9

For the ‘Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World’ album

https://jwmrecords.bandcamp.com/releases

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Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly
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