Bureau of Lost Culture

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The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast curious, rare, half-forgotten, half-remembered countercultural stories, oral histories and tales from the underground.

Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests including musicians, writers and cultural commentators like Billy Bragg, Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore in conversation.

Listen live on Sundays at 11.00am on London’s premier independent station Soho Radio or via catch-up on all major podcast providers: https://linktr.ee/BureauOfLostCulture

The Bureau is now also collected at The British Library Sound Archive

For more on the Bureau:
www.bureauoflostculture.com

The Bureau produce publications, films, events, broadcasts and installations that tell half-forgotten or lost narratives driving human endeavour. We create immersive experiences with unique perspectives that connect people to hidden stories. +

We celebrate the self-made, inventiveness and ingenuity driven by need. +

We resonate with those who have taken risks to go against the establishment, beyond censorship and outside the forbidden. +

The Life and Times of Dubmeister Dennis Bovell

April 11, 2022

* 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

* The Bureau Home https://www.bureauoflostculture.com

* The Bureau Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bureauoflostculture/

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

The Lives and Times of Michael Moorcock - Part 1

January 18, 2022

Multi-award winning writer, musician, editor, essayist and inventor of the multiverse, Michael Moorcock, beams into the Bureau for the first episode exploring his deeply countercultural life in literature and London

It’s an action-packed hour involving The Beats, William Burroughs, Soho, J G Ballard, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, anarchists, a Rolls Royce, myth, skiffle, fanzines, comics and books, books books.

We hear how a precocious teenage Michael sets out on a career that led to the writing of over a hundred books and the creation of the well-loved characters including Elric and Jerry Cornelius who inhabit them, and we hear a revelation that will surprise even die-hard Moorcock afficionados..

For more on Michael

http://www.multiverse.org

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Days of the Underground: The Life and Times of Hawkwind

January 3, 2021

Hawkwind: Never in fashion but never out of it, piratical pagan proto-punks, avatars of the underground, figureheads of the free festival scene, innovative heralds of the rave generation, cosmic space rockers with street fighter spirit - there is no one like them.

We meet with Joe Banks author of “Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia” (Strange Attractor Press) to explore the story of a much loved band that have gradually come to win the respect of many of the most cynical of critics - perhaps partly just by virtue of still being around, but mainly by sticking to their fiercely independent, idiosyncratc, anti-corporate, psychedelic ethos.

And we return to the West London musical, social melting pot we have previously explored with Nick Laird Clowes to uncover the fertile countercultural ground that gave birth to Hawkwind and in which they played such an important role.

For more on Joe Banks

https://www.daysoftheunderground.com

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com

Which One’s Pink? Managing the Counterculture

December 1, 2020

One afternoon in the mid 1960s, Pete Jenner left off marking exam papers at the London School of Economics and popped into the Marquee club. There was a band playing, They changed his life - and he changed theirs.

Pete enters the Bureau of Lost Culture to tell us about discovering The Pink Floyd, the band he and Andrew King guided from darlings of the underground to early commercial success.

But that was just the beginning. We hear about Pete' early life as the son of a radical vicar and how politics and music blended in his involvement in the early days of the West London Underground scene: The London Free School, The Tabernacle, The UFO club and the start of the Hyde Park festivals.

We learn about the tragic disintegration of Syd Barrett who Pete and Andrew King chose to back whilst Pink Floyd went onto to global stardom, and we learn something about the ins and outs of a life spent in music, fostering the careers of Marc Bolan, Roy Harper, Ian Drury, The Clash and Billy Bragg amongst many others..

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com

Days in the Life: The Language of Counterculture

November 1, 2020

Chick.Trip.Dope, Pad. Heavy. Cool. Scene. Man. Beat. Freak. Weed. Bang. Square. Blast. Cat. Gas!

In an action packed episode, we spend a Soho afternoon with 'Mr Slang’ Jonathon Green discussing his amazing life in the counterculture, writing for Rolling Stone and the underground magazines including IT, OZ and Friends.

Then we dig deep into his ground breaking catalogue of the counterculture: ‘Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground' with its interviews of over a hundred figures involved in the counterculture including Paul McCartney, Barry Miles and Jenny Fabian.

And, as Jonathon is our foremost lexicographer of slang, he takes us on wander into the weird and wonderful world of countercultural language, exploring where all those hippie and beatnik words came from and discovering why ‘Fuck' is not in fact a swear word.

For more on Jonathon’s books

http://jonathongreen.co.uk

For more on Jonathon’s Slang Dictionaries

https://greensdictofslang.com

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com

Barney Bubbles: Designing the Counterculture

September 16, 2020

Writer and cultural commentator Paul Gorman takes us on an exploration of the countercultural designer Barney Bubbles. It is an extraordinary story, magic and tragic by turn.

Bubbles, who, despite his effervescent alias, was so modest that he declined to have his name included on the many extraordinary album covers he designed, has rather faded from public awareness since his untimely suicide. But he remains much admired by lovers of album cover art and has influenced a growing coterie of graphic designers.

Paul, who has championed him with a biography and three exhibitions, traces his life and work from the hard boiled world of advertising and commercial graphics in the 60s, through the psychedelic West London underground scene of the early 70s, to the post punk era of Stiff Records and beyond. Along the way we hear of some of the outpourings of the cornucopia that was Bubbles’ mind, including the designs of Frendz magazine, the Hawkwind Tarot, The Specials' Ghost Town video - and those album covers..

And we hear about Paul’s own journey and, as usual, speculate on the nature of this creature called ‘counterculture’.

For more on Paul Gorman

https://www.paulgormanis.com

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com

Drugs, Doctors and Rock ‘n Roll

September 13, 2020

In this episode, we meet with radical doctor Sam Hutt who ministered to countercultural London in the 1960s and with Hank Wangford, English Country and Western singer par excellence.

Sam tells us about growing up in a 1950s communist household in a posh part of London. We hear stories of sixties Soho and psychedelic marmite, about buying heroin from Boots and about prescribing cannabis for some very famous musicians.

We learn how Sam frequented underground clubs like The Flamingo, dropped acid, made one of the greatest psychedelic singles of all time, hung out with rock stars and witnessed the tragic decline of Syd Barrett

Hank tells how Sam Hutt became Hank Wangford after a broken love affair. We hear how he and Keith Richards were turned onto country music by Gram Parsons and about his days as part of the Red Wedge anti-Thatcher movement in the 1980s - all along with two tunes recorded live at Soho Radio.

For more on Hank Wangford

www.hankwangford.com

For more on Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com