Bureau of Lost Culture

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 i...

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 rem...

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 th...

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 seas...

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 l...

"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...

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 t...

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,...

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 peo...

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 th...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 Hi...

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...

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...

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 thre...

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 wor...

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...

*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 prese...

“Ima­gin­a­tion thrives in dark­ness”  We talk about The Undergound often at the Bureau - not London’s subterranean rail sytem, but the countercultural alternative society of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. But that is just one of the undergrounds - the underworlds - that are the subject of this episode Dizzying ossuaries, freakish creatures of the deep sea, astounding colors of agates, lava and crysta...

*In 1918, Billie Carleton, a West End actress, came off stage, went partying with friends, returned to her flat and was found dead the next morning - apparently of a cocaine overdose. A few years later, Frieda Kimpton, a dancer in Soho bars, committed suicide - with cocaine.   These events blew up into a huge media dope drama - with a cast of characters includes villians - Brilliant Chang, a Chine...

In 1964 he was a working class hippie student crossing Haight Street, a road in San Francscso, when hit by a vision  - and life as he knew it was over In 1994, he was a multi-millionaire new-age entrepeneur crossing Wilshire Boulevard, a road in Los Angeles, when hit by a car - and life as he knew it was over. In the years in between, along with the co-founder of The Yippies Abbie Hoffman, counter...

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 te...