vinyl

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 us about him and why he matters.
Despite his prodigious output, his inability to finish songs, and the genre-busting uniqueness of much of his music, meant that he released only two albums under his own name in his lifetime. But in the decades since his death, a series of posthumous releases have generated a deep love and admiration in many who have been lucky to come across his music.
 
We also get into indie record shop culture, music sobbery, the underground New York club scene of  the mid seventies and ask the question: 'How do you know when, a song, a book or a piece of art is finished?'
Thanks to Dan Papps at Faber, to Steve Knutson of Audika Records and Cat Corrigan of Beggars Banquet who have posthumously released much of Arthur's unpublished work, for permission to include his music.
We also included two selections from Matt Wolf’s film 'Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell'
Image by Joel Sokolov/Courtesy of Audika Records
 
#arthurrussell #newyorkclubs #avantagarde #philipglass #audikarecords #richardking #faber #hiv #music
 

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 collective Spiral Tribe came to the Bureau to tell some of their story - and about his own journey up and down the spiral. His book A Darker Electricty published by uber-cool electronic music publisher Velocity Press is a rollocking, rumbuctious, beautifully written testament to a deeply countercultural spirit and time. 
 
We dive deep into the free party scene of the early 90s and talk squatting, sound systems, Ladbroke Grove, doing things for free, police brutality, the 'new age’ travellers, the tragedy of Castle Morton, ongoing inspiration, community - and the power of bass..
 
A Darker Electricity- Mark's book
A Darker Electricity- The Audio book
Free Party: A Folk History - Aaron Trinder’s wonderful documentary of the last 80s and early 90s free festival scene
 
#festivals #counterculture #freefestivals #spiraltribe #squatparty #travellers #newagetravellers #battleofthebeanfield #hippie #castlemorton #techno #drugs #lsd #soundsystem #raveculture #raves #breakbeat #stonehenge 

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 Beck. A popular rendezvous was La Gioconda, an Italian cafe which most visited at some point or other – David Bowie was said to practically live there.Later when Malcolm McLaren was looking for a rehearsal space for The Sex Pistols, he was delighted to find room in Denmark Street, installing his upstarts in the heart of the traditional music industry - like Greek soldiers inside the Trojan Horse. 
 
Journalist Pete Watts returns to The Bureau to tell us tales of this lost street of dreams  - and at least of one nightmare.
 
Pete's wonderful book on Denmark Street is HERE
 
 
#hipgnosis #pink floyd #london #pop music #london #musichistory #counterculture #soho #musicpublishing #music  #1960s #jimihendrix #thesexpistols #davidbowie #the kinks #the beatles #DenmarkStreet #tinpanalley

The Lost World of Cambodian Rock ’n’ Roll

*In the swinging 1960s, after nearly a century of colonisation, Cambodia was ready to rock. Young musicians from the countryside flocked to the vibrant cosmopolitan capital city of Phnom Penh. The city was a melting pot of sound: old fashioned rock’n’roll, early heavy metal, crooners and swooners and love duets. 
 
*Then on 17th April 1975, the music stopped.
the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and began a genocide. Around 90% of the musicians died in the killing fields.
 
*DEE PEYOK joins us to talk about 'Away From Beloved Lover'(Granta), her extraordinary book detailing the lost world of amazing music that flourished between 1955 and 1970 in Cambodia.  
*And we hear of Dee’s own journey - an extraordinary odyssey into the heart of darkness -  and light -  in search of this lost world.
For more on Away From Beloved Lover: https://granta.com/products/away-from-beloved-lover/
For The Bureau of Lost Culture: www.bureauoflostculture.com
#Cambodia #KhmerRouge, #Sinsisamouth, #DeePayok, #PhnomPenh, #killingfields, #surfrock, #censorship, #Cambodiarocks, #Vietcong,  #genocide #vietnamwar
 

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 #

On the Road ... with Johnny Marr

* From Colin Wilson to Tony Wilson, Patti Smith to Mark E Smith, what was it like coming of age in the counterculture of Manchester in the 60s, 70s and 80s?
 
* Johnny Marr has just released his latest record and his band's on tour with Blondie. He's worked with Billie Eilish on the Academy award winning theme for the Bond blockbuster No Time to Die and with all sorts of other artists including Hans Zimmer, Modest Mouse, The The and The Pretenders.
 
* He’s had chart hits with Electronic, and, oh yeah, he co-piloted one of the best loved and influential British bands of all time - The Smiths.
 
* We don’t really talk about that - but we do dig deep into archetypal psychology, northern peak experience, clothes, records, books, youth culture and reading the road signs along the way to your destiny..
 
* Image credit: Andy Cotterill
 
* For More on Johnny: https://johnnymarr.com
 
* 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 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
 
* 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 

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 
Follow Us:
* Bureau Home www.bureauoflostculture.com
* Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bureauoflostculture/
* Get the Bureau Newsletter  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/N0ZYoFu/BOLC 

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
 
----------
Get the Bureau's Newsletter
 
Support our wild endeavours
 
The Bureau of Lost Culture Home
 
Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directlybureauoflostculture@gmail.com
We'd love to hear from you.-------------
 
 

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 Robhttp://www.rob-chapman.com
----------
Get the Bureau's Newsletter
 
Support our wild endeavours
 
The Bureau of Lost Culture Home
 
Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directlybureauoflostculture@gmail.com
We'd love to hear from you.-------------

The Lost History of Skiffle - with Billy Bragg

BILLY BRAGG pays a visit to the Bureau to lead 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 50s and the birth of British youth culture.
 
We explore why Skiffle, which soundtracked that youth culture for a few intense years and was the inspiration for musicians in The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Rolling Stones, has been oddly forgotten.  And Billy explains why, as the first British DIY musical revolution, Skiffle provided the template for the Punk movement of the 70s that was to inspire him.
 
Along the way, we get educated about the post war 'trad jazz' movement, the cultural stranglehold of the BBC - and the terrific transformatory power of a guy - or a girl - with a guitar.
 
For more on Billy and his book Roots, Radicals and Rockers:
https://www.billybragg.co.uk/product/roots-radicals-and-rockers-how-skiffle-changed-the-world-hardback-signed-by-billy/
 
Billy's Top Five Skiffle Tunes
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZtMpev7GhPIi-e2ajPxUd_FVyUQxMBbB
 
For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture
www.bureauoflostculture.com 
 
 

Days of the Underground: The Life and Times of Hawkwind

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

Barney Bubbles: Designing the Counterculture

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 
 

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 of strange, moving voices from Alan’s collection and learn how the records were used to send messages home from the war, record visits to tourist destinations or to capture the sounds of loved ones in a way that had never been possible before.
For More on X-Ray Audio
www.x-rayaudio.com
For More on Bureau of Lost Culture
www.bureauoflostculture.com