Bureau of Lost Culture

As the pace of change accelerates, it seems that yesterday’s fantasies about the future may become today's reality. Ideas about whether technology might remove, replace or rewire bits of our brains, control our thoughts, stimulate our pleasures, deliver religious experiences or even transport us into entirely artificial realities, seem very current.

But what if these were ideas that scientists, inventors and governments have been pursuing for centuries?  What if there is a whole lost culture of fears and dreams about technology in the history of consciousness?

These are the...

Britain has always been home to people who live differently. Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers, Showmen/women who carry the fairgrounds from town to town, families who made their homes on the waterways, and, more recently, the New Age Travellers who emerged from the 70s counterculture, the free festival movement and the rave scene. --------------------- Join our Patreon HERE --------------------- Today that tradition continues in new forms through a new generation of travellers, vanlifers, boat dwellers and people trying to establish off-grid homes on small pieces of land.  

DICKY DREAD is the pen name of Richard Leach, whose life has b...

If you're going to watch your local football team this weekend, or perhaps catch a big match on a TV screen in the pub, do you know that you may be unconsciously participating in an ancient ritual? And as you're shouldering your way to the bar from the mosh pit at some gig and grinning at those you pass, are you aware that the artist you were watching may be embodying some spirit of transformation?

That was the radical proposal of the book The Death and Resurrection Show that Rogan Taylor published in 1985, a book that is...

For centuries, it seems Britain’s magic mushrooms remained hidden in plain sight—growing in fields, parks, and hillsides. When knowledge of them did emerge, it passed between people through rumours, oral testimony, underground publications, and increasingly, reports of court cases.

Robert Dickens of The Psychedelic Press came to the Bureau to tell the extraordinary story of the Psilocybe Pickers: the kids, the Psychonauts, the countercultural explorers, and amateur mycologists who helped elevate a small native fungus into part of Britain’s psychedelic history, folklore, legal case studies, and relationship with the landscape.

We get into t...

Has 20th-and 21st-century physics moved away from the brute materialism of the nineteenth century toward ideas that resemble the world’s ancient mystical traditions?

Might many of the discipline’s greatest figures — Einstein, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and others - have been privately motivated by philosophical and sometimes mystical questions about consciousness, reality and humanity’s place in the cosmos? 

Jonathan Black came to the Bureau to talk about A Secret History of the Universe - a countercultural narrative of science that has been obscured by a mainstream insistence on secular materialism, and one that r...

She's 82 but is firing on all cylinders, still crazy after all these years, as Paul Simon sang, well, still crazy enough to believe the world can be changed for the better, that it's her duty to try to make that happen and crazy enough in her youth to try to levitate the Pentagon.   Born into a communist family in Brooklyn, NANCY KURSHAN was involved in Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War protests while at high school, became, along with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, one of the founders of The Yippies, the theatrical protest group whose activities included trying to run a...

There are some images that don’t simply record history—they change it.

On the morning of 11 June 1963, at a busy crossroads in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, calmly sat down in the lotus position while fellow monks poured petrol over his robes. He struck a match and, as the flames engulfed him, he remained perfectly still.

The Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne captured the moment; within hours the photograph had travelled around the world and in the years since has become one of the defining images of the 1960s: one that...

Roc Sanford is a British writer, artist and climate activist whose life has been a countercultural journey from an alternative childhood through academia to a remarkable experiment in off-grid living and ecological resistance as a catalyser for Extinction Rebellion and Ocean Rebellion.   For more than three decades he has been associated with the remote Hebridean island of Gometra, where he lives much of the year without mains electricity, running water or many of the conveniences of modern life.    Roc was born to parents who deliberately turned away from wealth and privilege and chose to live closer to the working-class world the...

In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic science. 

We explore the world of the 'Pneumatic Institution' in Bristol,  a community of scientists, poets, philosophers, and industrial entrepreneurs who formed a kind of proto-counterculture led by the extraordinary talents of polymath Thomas Beddoes and the boy genius Humphry Davy.

We hear about Davy's use of nitrous oxide - laughing gas - and the self-experiments and consciousness-expanding trips he...

Ever thought the so-called ‘golden decade’ of the 1960s was only about peace and love? Think again. Beneath the surface, it was riddled with violence, paranoia, and chaos, even in its most iconic moments.

This is the second part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the initiator, mentor, and driving force behind The Mutoid Waste Company, that extraordinary countercultural endeavour to turn the waste of our industrial civilisation into art, performance, street theatre - and a way of life.

If you haven’t heard the first part, you might want to start here:

https://bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/e/20th-century-mutoid-man-part-1/

This time, we covered a huge amount of ground — Joe's personal story, the birth of the Mutoids and the UK counterculture of the ’80s and ’90s: squatting. We hear abo...

The Weather Underground, The Baader-Meinhof Group, The Red Brigade, Carlos the Jackal, The Japanese Red Army.

Beyond the official story, the myth, of the Second World War — its maps and medals, courage and sacrifice — there is another hidden narrative. Written in rare memoirs, or in letters and diaries never meant to be read by us, it tells of a kind of underground culture that was secret, transgressive, forbidden

With millions of young men and women on military service, the transitory nature of life under threat of sudden and violent death created a charged atmosphere in which conventional boundaries loosened. In London the darkness of the blackout became both cover and catalyst.

Writ...

If you had been at the Glastonbury Festival in 1987,  you may have seen a familiar silhouette emerging in the dawn light  - upright monoliths arranged in a circle. Was it Stonehenge - magically transferred here across the Salisbury plain?

No, it was ‘Carhenge'- a circle of upright cars, their chassis standing like monoliths, the archaeology of the automobile age

And imagine ‘Tankhenge', a gateway made from abandoned Soviet tanks assembled in Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall — the wreckage of the Cold War turned into a piece of anarchic sculpture

Or imagin...

In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, behind a scruffy turquoise door, the world lies folded into drawers.

This is the second part of a conversation with Alaura O’Dell / Mistress Mix, formerly known as Paula P-Orridge.

In the first part, we traced Alaura’s journey from meeting the musician and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in East London, to becoming a central actor in the underground art band Psychic TV and the occult network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). 

While public accounts often focus on TOPY’s founder, Genesis P-Orridge, we heard about Alaura's role in the organisation — not just as a participant, but as an organiser and practitione...

Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels.

In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power.

Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites. 

But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the orig...

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...

This is the second part of a conversation with the poet, musician and thinker Penny Rimbaud, co-founder, with Steve Ignorant, of the anarcho-punk band and activist art collective Crass   Crass emerged as a band in 1977, but quickly became something more complex, rejecting rock stardom, record industry norms, releasing records on their own label and using their platform to challenge war, nationalism, consumerism, sexism, and state violence.   

In this second part of the interview, we about the events that led to Crass and hear more about Dial House, an old rambling farmhouse in rural Essex, a long-running experiment in collective lif...

The sea, its myths, and the supernatural is the theme of this special New Year edition of the Bureau when we leave behind our usual waters to set sail into the past of a very unusual counterculture.  

For most of human history, the sea has been both a road and a riddle. It promises fortune and freedom — but it also swallows ships whole. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Britain’s empire spread across the globe, the sea became seen, not just as a physical frontier, but as a psychic one  — a vast, perilous deep where faith, science...

In early 1990s South London — a time when rave culture was mutating and London’s squats were pulsing with creativity, Aphex Twin, Global Communication, Nightmares on Wax, Autechre,Andrea Parker, Scanner — could be found DJ-ing and performing in spaces where a strange new sound-world was blooming.

This is the story of Telepathic Fish, the ambient afterparty scene created by the Openmind Collective. Telepathic Fish parties and club rooms were DIY countercultural happenings with turntables, psychedelic installations, living-room lamps, photocopied zines and a lot of imagination, becoming a meeting place for bohos, ravers, multimedia explorers and a new wave of electr...

There are figures in counterculture whose names appear only in the margins of the story — whose influence is eclipsed, overshadowed, even dismissed, by more mythologised personalities.

Alaura O’Dell — known to many under her earlier name, Paula P-Orridge - is a musician, artist, occult practitioner, and was a co-conspirator in the band Psychic TV

For a long time, Alaura was described almost exclusively in relation to her then-husband, the arch provocateur and musician Genesis P-Orridge but she joined us to talk about life before Genesis,  the formative years of Psychic TV: the chaos, the energy, the experimen...

We are on the brink of a new nuclear age - the energy crisis, the push towards net zero and the gargantuan power requirements of AI demand it - or so we are told.     But here in Britain, the old nuclear age isn’t just a historical footnote - it’s etched into the very landscape.  

Tom Bolton went on an epic journey around the UK to explore the extraordinary, imposing locations in that landscape, from the 16 vast concrete cathedral-like power stations on remote coasts to the hidden nuclear missile silos that cast a long, physical, cultural and environmental shadow o...

When the filmmaker David Lynch died earlier this year, fans created shrines filled with coffee, doughnuts, cigarettes and blue roses; a level of spontaneous mourning more common for dead rock stars or royalty than filmmakers. His auctioned belongings sold for staggering sums, almost as if they were relics, showing how many people felt deeply connected to his work.

Why?

David was that unusual figure - an artist who had mainstream success but seemed to remain defiantly and deeply countercultural.

How?

And, this was a man who had an adjective  - ‘Lynchian’ - nam...

Penny Rimbaud , who has spent more than half a century living the ideals that most of us only talk about, has been described as an activist philosopher, an anarchist, a Zen Buddhist. Though he would likely not recognise those descriptions, he is certainly a poet, a musician, an artist.

Born Jeremy John Ratter in 1943, in the late 1960s, together with artist Gee Vaucher, he founded Dial House, an open community and creative refuge in rural Essex. It became both a home and a hub — a living experiment in anarchism, art, and radical living, from which emerged Crass, a band t...

We walk the streets every day — and through parks, across squares and pavements and along beaches, and mountains, over 'The Commons' — without much thought for who really owns them.

These apparently public spaces have often been battlegrounds over public rights. From the rural enclosures that fenced off England’s open fields, through the city squares where protesters have clashed with police, to the gated plazas and shopping malls of today — the story of The Commons is the story of who belongs, who is excluded, who can gather, and who makes the rules.

In this episode, we’re di...

As musician and activist BILLY BRAGG makes a welcome return as a voice of countercultural sanity, we revisit the Lost History of Skiffle as he takes 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 Ze...

In the old towns and villages of Britain, before the police, before the tabloids, before social media shame-storms, there were other ways to deal with those who stepped outside the rules. Noisy ways. Cruel ways. Dangerous ways - the 'Rough Music' rituals — part punishment, part performance, part pagan magic — at the dark edge where community, cruelty and celebration collide.

Liz Williams, the Glastonbury-based author, folklorist and pagan, came to the Bureau to talk about them.  Her latest book Rough Music: Folk Tradition, Transgression and Alternative Britain, explores often violent, forgotten traditions of noise, mockery, and ritual humiliation — and how the...

Iceland is one of the last remaining Western countries where a substantial proportion of the population believes in the presence of other beings - The Hidden Folk.

For centuries, and until fairly recently, ghosts, revenants, trolls and elves were regarded as an integral part of everyday life. Their stories were shared during the long nights of winter gatherings, and they felt just as real to Icelanders as the people sitting beside them. 

Ethnologist Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir came to the Bureau to talk about the role of these mythical and supernatural beings in Icela...

They called them the voices of the dead. Whispers in the static. Words in the hiss. Messages that—so believers said—slipped through the veil between worlds and onto magnetic tape

The story of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP begins in the late 1950s, when Swedish artist Friedrich Jürgenson was out in the countryside recording birdsong. On playback, he heard not only the birds but what he swore were voices—some speaking to him directly, including that of his deceased mother.

Latvian-born psychologist Konstantin Raudive took up the work, making thousands of recordings and publishing his...

Amongst its pages, there are many familiar names—Oscar Wilde, Quentisn Crisp, Sappho, James Baldwin, Freddie Mercury — but also many we might not expect: Florence Nightingale, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, J. Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tchaikovsky, Greta Garbo, Richard the Lionheart, even Abraham Lincoln,  along with 1000 other stories of artists, generals, politicians, kings, despots and many more figures drawn from 5000 years of hidden culture.

Keith Stern came to the Bureau to talk about his extraordinary encyclopaedia ‘Queers in History’, what drove him to write it, and why it matters.

The book is more than a who...

What does it mean to be naked, in body or in spirit? Why has human nudity so often been revered, feared, sexualized, or weaponised? 

This episode was recorded on July 17 - International Naked Day. Our guest Philip Carr-Gomm is a writer, psychologist, spiritual teacher, and for 30 years, leader of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids—one of the largest Druid organisations in the world.  

His book A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion, is a rich, wide-ranging exploration of the role nudity has played in religion, protest, art, and performance, from the ancient world to the mo...

This is a special edition when The Bureau meets Jason Woodbury of Aquarium Drunkard for a joint transmission.     Los Angeles-based online music magazine Aquarium Drunkard is a one-of-a-kind map to the sprawling and often overwhelming landscape of independent music. 

Founded in 2005 and piloted for over twenty years by Justin Gage, it has served as a curator, a passionate advocate, and a community for those seeking sounds beyond the mainstream.

The Aquarium Drunkard podcast - Transmissions - hosted by Jason Woodbury, has become a massive resource for deep dives into music and culture via conversations and wit...

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 it as such?   Mark Forgy came to Europe as a 20-year-old backpacker in 1969, bumped into Elmyr on a quayside in Ibiza, and lived with him for seven of the years between his exp...

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 remains a nexus where prehistoric culture, mainstream culture and counterculture interact - and sometimes collide.    40 years ago, in June 1985, an incident occurred near Stonehenge that saw the largest mass arrest of c...

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 the Moog synthesiser, using it not merely as an instrument but as a portal into new dimensions of experience.   

"I wasn’t interested in playing melodies. I wanted to find out what electricity sounded like when i...

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 seasoned ravers), witnessed this extraordinary rise from the underground at Mixmag, the clubbers’ bible, and have documented the subsequent transformations.   Alexis takes us on a trip through the island’s bohemian past and tells how its unique combination of natural b...

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 living the only way they could, cictims of exploitation, or pioneers of performance who found power in their difference?

We’re joined by Dr. John Jacob Woolf, historian and author of 'The Wonders: Lifting t...

"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 couldn't be more different than Maggie's, was presenting a radically different vision of what it meant to be British    Belinda Magnus, born on 23 October 1953 was given away as the baby of a w...

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 the mainstream, focusing on writing novels, esoteric pursuits, and the practice of a particular kind of Magic. 

This is a slightly unusual episode. 

It's a rec...