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. +
When Leslie Woodhead was asked by Granada TV to film a new young music group in a club in Liverpool in 1962, he had no idea what he was in for - and neither had the rest of the world. He was witnessing the birth of a phenomenon that was about to have a huge impact on both the culture and the counterculture. But by then he had already had another extraordinary experience - serving a stint as a cold war spy, learning Russian on a remote Scottish pig farm and spending time eavesdropping on Soviet pilots from West Berlin.
These experiences continued to influence his life as a multi-award winning film maker, finally coalescing in his documentary ‘How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin’.
In this episode, we trace the almost unbelievable transformational effect the Fab Four had on young Russians in the 60s and 70s - an effect that many believed was more significant than all the cold war western propaganda and the threat of nuclear attack combined, in helping to bring about perestroika and the fall of the Soviet empire.