Bureau of Lost Culture

Peter Whitehead was an innovative English writer and filmmaker who documented the counterculture in London and New York in the late 1960s.   His film Wholly Communion captured The International Poetry Incarnation, a groundbreaking event at The Royal Albert Hall in 1965 that was to prove pivotal in the evolution of the underground  scene. The film featured poetry readings by Beat poets including Al...

One our foremost living writers on the esoteric, Gary Lachman, enters the Bureau purportedly to talk about one of our most important, if rather forgotten, dead  writers on the esoteric, T C Lethbridge.   We do get around to exploring Lethbridges's various incarnations as a rogue psychic archaeologist, dowser and parapsychologist but only after some serious digressions into Gary’s various incarnati...

Journalist Tom O Neill, author of 'Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties’, joins us to reveal the truths, untruths, secrets and conspiracies behind the most famous crime of the 60s.   The Tate-Labianca murders and the subsequent trial of 'The Manson Family' were among the events that marked the turning of the countercultural tide and the darkening of the hippy dream....

We return for the second part of our trip through the terrific, tortuous and terrible times of Michael Hollings(acid)head with psychedelic historian Andy Roberts.   We reconnect with Hollingshead as he is returning to England to set up the London Psychedelic Centre in Chelsea. He has introduced Timothy Leary to LSD and thus played a momentous part in the history of the counterculture in the USA.  ...

In the first of an occasional series of broadcasts around the subject of LSD, psychedelic historian Andy Roberts takes us on the first part of a trip through the extraordinary life and times of Michael Hollingshead.   Hollingshead's assertion that he ‘turned on the world’ may be wildly immodest, but he did introduce Timothy Leary (and many others) to acid and thus played an essential role in the e...

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. B...

Enter the labyrinth. Perambulator and psycho-geographer Robert Kingham leads us down the twisting, turning tunnels and lost highways of the London labyrinth to meet author, mystic and cockney visionary Arthur Machen.   We explore Machen’s odd life and books - and some  strange parts of the city - as we uncover the ways he was to influence the folk horror movement and countercultural cult authors H...

‘America’s leading scholar of High Strangeness’ Dr. Erik Davis, enters the Bureau. We hear about Erik’s career charting the highs and lows of counterculture, esoterica and psychedelia in America and meet three of the most influential radical psychedelic characters of 1970s - the writers / thinkers / lunatics Philip K Dick, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson. Each had extraordinary mystical ex...

Mike Jay, the UK’s foremost historian of psychoactive plants, joins us to talk about the deeply strange hallucinogen/drug/medicine/sacrament mescaline - a substance derived from the peyote cactus. Whilst other psychedelic compounds are more popular - and much more in the news - Mike tells us why mescaline was actually the very first psychedelic. We hear strange stories of drug use in 19th century...

We meet with film director Olivia Litchenstein and BBC Russian Arts presenter Alexander Kan to hear about the extraordinary musician Sergey Kuryokhin, ‘the Soviet Punk Frank Zappa’ who with his underground cohorts in Leningrad tried to soundtrack perestroika as the cold war crumbled around them. Olivia tells of the strange circumstances of the making of the BBC TV series Comrades during the twilig...

This Episode explore three stories of cold war era radio in the USSR: Soviet Radio Jammers, the Russian ‘Woodpecker’ and the Soviet Radio Hooligans We meet with Russian broadcaster Vladimir Raevsky to talk about radio jamming in cold war era Soviet Union. As East and West super powers square up to each with nuclear weapons, a parallel invisible war is being fought in the airwaves. Hundreds of mill...

For the first, and probably the last, time the bureau are joined by a member of royalty - Prince Michael of Sealand   The Principality of Sealand claims  a population of 27, is around 4500 m2 and lies 7.5 miles off the coast of the UK - it is situated on a World War Two Maunsell fort and claims to be an independent sovereign state.   It is one of several micro-nations dotted around the globe and i...

Was counterculture possible in the oppressive, repressive circumstances of the Soviet Union? Join us as we meet with broadcaster, author and cultural commentator Artemyi Troistsky - the 'Russian John Peel’ - to find out. We hear some entertaining, comical, tragic, moving and frankly strange stories including tales of the ‘Stilyagi' Soviet Hipsters, the first disco in Moscow, Che Guevara and Lenin...

We meet with writer Barry Cain, punk correspondent for Record Mirror during the incendiary years 1977 - 1979. Barry tells of his London journey from a Kings Cross council estate to touring with the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the greatest bands of the punk generation. We hear of early meetings with The Stranglers, Sid Vicious and John Lydon, a fantatsical financial fraud perpetrated on a transatlan...

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 ve...

We meet with legendary drummer and songwriter John Alder / Mohammed Abdullah, best known as Twink, who played for the In Crowd, Tomorrow, The Pink Fairies, The Pretty Things, Hawkwind, The Aquarian Age, Pink Wind and Stars - amongst others legendary acts. One of the foremost figures of the late sixties London music scene, he tells us what it was like - from the inside. We hear what Jimi Hendrix sa...