Bureau of Lost Culture
120 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings*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, Lisa Law, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Jill Drower, Peter Coyote and Johnny Marr in conversation.
*Listen live on Saturdays at 9.00am on London’s premier independent station Soho Radio or via catch-up on all major podcast providers:
*The Bureau is now collected at The British Library Sound Archive
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Episodes
The Rise and Fall of the '80s Free Festival
April 16, 2024 18:35 - 1 hour - 154 MB*Who do the green roads and wide open spaces of Albion belong to? *This episode is a story is about a collision of two cultures - the counterculture of the twin tribes of urban free party ravers and new age travellers - and the mainstream culture of landowners, the legal authorities, English Heritage and right-wing politicians. *In the first of a series on '80s and '90s counterculture, Aaron Trinder, director of the documentary 'Free Party: A Folk History' came to the Bureau to tell how t...
Child of the Commune
March 31, 2024 13:02 - 57 minutes - 132 MBWhat was it like to live in a commune? What was it like to grow up in a commune? NANCY THOMPSON came to the Bureau to tell us. She was born in The Shrubb Family Commune - one that was set up in a big old farmhouse in rural Norfolk in 1970 - and, remarkably, one that is still going today. In the early to mid '60s many Western cities were magnets drawing the young and hip in from the regions, shaking off the austerity of the '50s, joining their urban peers in experimenting with new and radic...
Liberation Part 2: Glad to be Gay
March 17, 2024 12:03 - 58 minutes - 134 MBBeing the further adventures of English musician broadcaster and LGTBQ activist TOM ROBINSON, as he gets deeply involved in the gay counterculture of London in the '70s whilst on his journey to having a huge hit with the song 2-4-6-8 Motorway We hear about the genesis of another hit - (Sing if You're)Glad to Be Gay - a remarkable, unprecedented protest song that climbed into public consciousness in the late 70s (despite the best efforts of some in the establshment), and about Tom's later hi...
Liberation with Tom Robinson - Part 1
March 05, 2024 08:19 - 1 hour - 138 MBTom Robinson is an English songwriter who rose to fame in the 70s as an LGBT and anti-racist campaigner. He has released over 20 albums and is an award-winning much-loved broadcaster who has made many programs on all six BBC radio channels. In this, the first of two programs, we trace his story from troubled youth through a suicide attempt and recovery in an alternative community to coming out in the gay counterculture of '70s London. We hear about his early activism and music, signing t...
Liberation Part 1: Coming out in the Counterculture
March 05, 2024 08:19 - 1 hour - 138 MBTOM ROBINSON is an English songwriter who rose to fame in the 70s as an LGBT and anti-racist campaigner. He has released over 20 albums and is an award-winning much-loved broadcaster who has made many programs on all six BBC radio channels. In this, the first of two programs, we trace his story from troubled youth through a suicide attempt and recovery in an alternative community to coming out in the gay counterculture of '70s London. We hear about his early activism and music, signing t...
The Beat Goes On: The Sounds of Allen Ginsberg
February 17, 2024 18:35 - 1 hour - 137 MBYOUTH, producer of a huge range of artists (including Kate Bush, Crowded House, The Orb, KLF, The Verve, Guns ’n’ Roses and Primal Scream) and Jesse Goodman of the Allen Ginsberg Estate come to the Bureau to talk of the beat poet’s impact on music and the British counterculture. We hear about Youth's 'Iron Horse' project and two albums of interpretations of Ginsberg's Fall of America poems by an astounding range of artists and we get deep into counterculture, the power of poetry, creativit...
London's Lost Street of Song
February 05, 2024 15:47 - 59 minutes - 135 MBBritain’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 ot...
Countercultural Libido: A History of 'Perversion'
January 20, 2024 22:48 - 1 hour - 151 MBWarning: this episode contains discussions of sexual and other adult themes. Julie Peakman is a historian of eighteenth-century culture who specialises in the study sexuality and pornography. She is the author of 'Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890', 'Whore Biographies 1700-1825', The Development of Pornography in 18thC England' and many other books. She came to the Bureau to discuss her latest: 'The Pleasure's All Mine - A History of Perverse Sex' which contains many affecting stories of how...
The Incredible String Band Part 2: Inside Looking Out
January 08, 2024 12:25 - 1 hour - 157 MB*In this, the second of a two parter, we hear more of the crazy countercultural life and times of The Incredible String Band - from the inside looking out - with Rose Simpson *Rose was one quarter of the band during what many regard as their creative and countercultural peak in the late 60s and early 70s. •Her memoir 'Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden' is an incredible story, relating how she rocketed (as a student without any particular interest in music or the counterculture), via an acc...
The Incredible String Band - Part 1: Outside Looking In
December 25, 2023 11:00 - 52 minutes - 120 MBThey were artists, myth makers, story tellers, tribe leaders, psychedelic troubadours; they pioneered "world music” with albums like The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter; they experimented with theater, drugs, film and lifestyle and inspired The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Pet Shop's Neil Tennant, The Lilac Time and many, many others. They lived the hippie dream of communes and free love, dressed like mediaeval princes and princesses, were the very essence of the Scottish countercult...
In the ’60s: The Birth of the British Underground
December 11, 2023 08:57 - 1 hour - 152 MBHe was friends with Burroughs and Ginsberg, wrote their biographies along with those of The Beatles, Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kereouc and penned books on The Beat Hotel, Pink Floyd, The Stones - amongst about 70 others. Barry Miles (known just as Miles) came back to the Bureau to tell us all about it. We hear how he set up Indica Gallery where Lennon met Yoko, started International Times - the bible of the underground - was instrumental in the UFO club and the 1...
How to Expand Your Consciousness Part 3: The Dreaming
November 27, 2023 10:23 - 55 minutes - 128 MB*Niels Bohr discovered the structure of the atom in a dream, Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after a dream, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by a dream, Hergé ’s 'Tintin in Tibet' - the first of many Tintin stories - the same. *Keith Richards claimed to have dreamed the riff to 'Satisfaction', Paul McCartney the melody to 'Yesterday’ - the most covered pop song in history. Hell, even Aphex Twin says that 70% of his album 'Selected Ambient Works Volume II' was written whilst lucid dreaming...
Remembering the Crazy Diamond
November 11, 2023 18:58 - 1 hour - 137 MB•Cult icon, enigma, recluse, crazy diamond, he was the founding member of one of the world’s most famous and succesful rock groups, but the life of Syd Barrett is full of unanswered questions. •Was he a drug casualty of the sixties? Did he walk away from the pressures of the commercial music world? Did he suffer from an undiagnosed mental illness, did his muse abandon him? Was it a combination of these - or was it something more mysterious, something we can never really understand? •'Ha...
How To Expand Your Consciousness Part 2: Tripping
October 31, 2023 12:34 - 59 minutes - 137 MB*Psychedelics have made a comeback but they remain deeply mysterious. *They may be now seen as potential 'breakthrough therapy' for mental illness but we still have only a vague idea how they work, and there is a limit to what studies in labs can reveal. Any one who has used them knows that to really understand them, we must broaden our experience of what they actually are. *Neuropsychologist ANDY MITCHELL decided to investigate for himself, taking ten different drugs in ten different sett...
Songs of War and Peace - with Boris Grebenshikov
October 16, 2023 09:28 - 59 minutes - 137 MB*He is perhaps the biggest name in Russian rock music, famous as the leader of the band Aquarium throughout his homeland and 'Outer Russia’ (as the huge and growing number of Russian emigres are called), but he is now listed as a “foreign agent” - basically an anti-patriot, a traitor, for criticising Russia’s war *Aquarium were pioneers of the clandestine homegrown rock scene that was born in early '70s USSR before emerging from the underground to become the pied pipers of perestroika, sell...
Riding The Oblivion Express - with Brian Auger
October 02, 2023 11:57 - 58 minutes - 133 MB•He’s played with Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Boy Williamson, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Billy Cobham, Spencer Davies, Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart, John McLaughlin, Tom Jones, Eric Burdon and many, many more. •With Julie Driscoll he had a huge hit with a masterful psychedelic rendition of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire” •He's been hailed as the godfather of acid jazz, sampled by hip hop stars and nominated for a Grammy Award. •At 82, BRIAN AUGER is still moving, grooving, sharp ...
The Soho Bibles: The Secret Porn of Post-War London
September 18, 2023 10:07 - 59 minutes - 135 MB*Under the counter-culture.. *They were handmade illegal obscene books, a little like early punk zines, typewritten mimeographed manuscripts with two or three pornographic stories or a novella. *Many contained drawings or photographs and were sold in post-war London and provincial second hand bookshops Thousands were produced, but only a small proportion survive today. *Titles like Orgy Twins, Lust and Agony in Double Domination Nunnery Versus Fuckery or Discipline in the Home gav...
How to Expand Your Consciousness Part 1: Philosophy
September 03, 2023 11:50 - 52 minutes - 121 MBPhilosophy as Counterculture? *For thousands of years, humans have been trying to expand this mysterious thing called consciousness, not only by drugs, dancing, art and spiritual practice but just by thinking, talking and arguing. *Is philosophy for anyone - or just for the elite in their ivory towers and universities? Can it be of the street, can it be counterculture? *We try and find out - in the company of philosopher Robert Rowland Smith, author of several books including The Re...
How to Expand Your Consciousness: Part 1
September 03, 2023 11:50 - 52 minutes - 121 MBPhilosophy as Counterculture? *For thousands of years, humans have been trying to expand this mysterious thing called consciousness, not only by drugs, dancing, art and spiritual practice but just by thinking, talking and arguing. *Is philosophy for anyone - or just for the elite in their ivory towers and universities? Can it be of the street, can it be counterculture? *We try and find out - in the company of philosopher Robert Rowland Smith, author of several books including The Re...
The Music of the Cults
August 20, 2023 12:37 - 1 hour - 138 MB*Their number encompasses the darkest bogeymen of countercultural nightmares- including Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh and the Reverend Moon -as well as saintly figures devoted to the good of others; outright charlatans, narcissistic psychopaths, deluded New Age prophets as well as genuine gurus. *Since the 1950s, certain charismatic individuals have taken it upon themselves to collect others around them in ‘cults’, rejecting mainstream religion and society in favour of a claim to s...
Rock, Radicals and Racism
August 06, 2023 09:53 - 59 minutes - 137 MB*Roger Huddle is a born and bred Londoner, a working class music-mad mod who grew up in the 50s, got radicalised in the 60s and became a co-founder of one the most successful activist groups of the 70s - Rock Against Racism (RAR). *RAR was a political and cultural movement which emerged in 1976 in reaction to a rise in racist attacks on the streets of the United Kingdom and increasing support for the far-right National Front at the ballot box. •Between 1976 and 1982 RAR activists organis...
So You Say You Want a (Sexual) Revolution?
July 23, 2023 17:05 - 57 minutes - 132 MBThe pill, Profumo, pornography. Love, liberation and libido. Larkin, Lady Chatterley, Lolita, *No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and more vilified than the 1960s. *For some it was a time when music, fashion and drugs enabled young people to express their individuality and freedom and their hopes and dreams of a better world. For others, it marked the advent of the permissive society, the undermining of authority, family values and common decency. *And at the hear...
Knocking On Heaven’s Door
July 09, 2023 09:01 - 57 minutes - 133 MB*As the 60s turned into the 70s, and as some of the technicolour idealistic visions of the first summer of love started to fade, many of the denizens of those decades began to seek Utopia outside the cities of America and Europe. *Communes and communities sprang up in rural areas as spiritual seekers, hopeful hippies, fugitives, folkies, freaks and wild wanderers on the seas of fate tried to create new societies, living by their own values - often away from the watchful eye of the authoritie...
A Short History of The Pagan
June 25, 2023 11:15 - 1 hour - 137 MB*'This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius' claimed the first song in the hippie musical Hair in 1967. And perhaps it was. *As thousands gathered at Stonehenge to welcome the summer solstice sunrise and hundred of thousands gathered at the Glastonbury festival, Ethan Doyle White came to the Bureau of Lost Culture to talk about Paganism. *Glastonbury itself is regarded by many as a ‘pagan place’ and many of those 8000 people who gathered at Stonehenge might describe themselves as 'pag...
The ’4000 Year Old Rock ’n’ Roll Band’
June 11, 2023 09:43 - 50 minutes - 115 MB*In a remote village in the Ahl Srif tribal area of Northern Morocco, dwell a collective of Sufi musicians. They play a form of trance music which is used for healing. Timothy Leary called them The 4,000-year-old Rock’N’Roll band - rather superficial hyperbole perhaps - though it is true that what The Master Musicians of Joujouka play is thousands of years old - and shares something in common with the wildest and most inspired of rock music. Record producer, film-maker and Beat historian ...
The Life and Psychedelic Times of the 13th Floor Elevators
May 27, 2023 20:14 - 59 minutes - 136 MB*They were psychedelic outlaws holing up in hill country hideouts to escape police harassment, dealing drugs to survive and blasting out a mix of LSD evangelism, mystical philosophy and grooved up rock’n’roll. *In their short existence, The 13th Floor Elevators succeeded in blowing the lid off the musical underground, logging early salvos in the countercultural struggle against state authorities, and turning their deeply hallucinatory take on jug-band garage rock into a new American institu...
The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift
May 14, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 142 MB*If they were a cult, they were a very British cult. *In the 1920s if you had seen strangely attired groups of people walking in formation along southern England's pagan pathways and round its prehistoric stone circles, you may have encountered The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. *They shared their initials - and a predeliction for arcane symbols, pointy hoods and cloaks - with the Ku Klux Klan but that's where the similarities end. *They thought they were spiritual samurai, rebuilding Brit...
The Secret History of Psychonauts
April 30, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 138 MB"You do it to yourself" sang Radiohead Well that was certainly true of some of the subjects of this episode. Historian of the mind MIKE JAY returns to the Bureau to tell of the intrepid scientists, artists, writers and thinkers who were experimenting with psychoactive substances and recording their experiences in the Victorian age and onwards. But the notion that researchers might partake of drugs if they were going to have something valuable to say about them became unacceptable. ...
The London Psychonauts
April 30, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 138 MB"You do it to yourself" sang Radiohead Well that was certainly true of some of the subjects of this episode. Historian of the mind MIKE JAY returns to the Bureau to tell of the intrepid scientists, artists, writers and thinkers who were experimenting with psychoactive substances and recording their experiences in the Victorian age and onwards. But the notion that researchers might partake of drugs if they were going to have something valuable to say about them became unacceptable. ...
The Vision Collectors
April 16, 2023 15:54 - 57 minutes - 132 MB*Do you believe it's possible to know the future? *Deep in the heart of the countercultural 60s, when the boundaries of consciousness were being explored and pushed forward, when human achievements were coming thick and fast, a psychiatrist and a rather un-counterculural science journalist, prompted by a terrible disaster, carried out a peculiar experiment with time.. *Writer SAM KNIGHT comes to the Bureau to tell their strange story and that of The Premonition Bureau - an attempt to ha...
Moss Side Story - with Barry Adamson
April 01, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 141 MBHe was a member of some of the most influential post punk bands: Magazine, The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds. He's collaborated with a whole range of artists including Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galas, David Lynch, Jarvis Cocker, Atticus Ross and Depeche Mode. He's written film scores, made films himself, made many solo records and recently published an extraordinary memoir of youth: 'Up Above the City and Down Beneath the Stars.’ The Jazz Devil Barry Adamson came to the Bureau to ta...
The Life and Times of Peter Coyote 2: Buddhism in Babylon
March 19, 2023 12:00 - 59 minutes - 136 MB*From heroin to Hollywood, Here is the second part of our conversation with the writer, countercultural activist, Zen priest and erstwhile movie star PETER COYOTE at his farm in Sebastopol California. *Last time, we left him isolated and lost in the throes of drug addiction as the countercultural dream had started to turn sour. Now we pick up the story in the American communes of the early 70s, hear how he transitioned to become a successful actor appearing in over 160 films, and dig dee...
The Countercultural Life and Times of Peter Coyote: Part 1
March 06, 2023 10:09 - 59 minutes - 136 MB*You've probably seen him in a film - he’s performed in more than 130 as an actor for some of the world’s greatest directors including Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderberg, or maybe you have heard his voice - he's an Emmy Award-winning narrator of over 200 documentaries. *He is a writer, a poet, an ordained Buddhist priest who has been practicing Zen for over 50 years. *But that's not the half of it - as we find out in this, the first of two episodes chart...
The Life and Times of Peter Coyote 1: Diggers to Dharma Bums
March 06, 2023 10:09 - 59 minutes - 136 MB*Angels in London *You've probably seen him in a film - he’s performed in more than 130 as an actor for some of the world’s greatest directors including Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderberg, or maybe you have heard his voice - he's an Emmy Award-winning narrator of over 200 documentaries. *He is a writer, a poet, an ordained Buddhist priest who has been practicing Zen for over 50 years. *But that's not the half of it - as we find out in this, the first of ...
The Divided Self of R.D. Laing
February 18, 2023 11:58 - 1 hour - 145 MB*In 1965 the psychiatrist R.D.LAING formed a commune in an East London community centre called Kingsley Hall where the psychotic and the schizophrenic could live on equal terms with their carers. There were no locks and no anti-psychotic drugs but there were all-night therapy sessions, dinners with visiting mystics and high grade LSD available to any who chose to take it *The Neuro-psychiatrist Anthony David came to the Bureau to talk about Laing and about how his groundbreaking book The Di...
The Lost World of Cambodian Rock ’n’ Roll
February 07, 2023 13:19 - 1 hour - 138 MB*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...
BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE - Flashing on the Sixties Part 2
January 22, 2023 17:14 - 1 hour - 149 MBFeeding the Woodstock thousands, acid, the Summer of Love, the Haight Ashbury, Timothy Leary, anti-Vietnam war protests, the problems of free love and living in communes, the Monterey pop festival, The Diggers, Wavy Gravy, Owsley, Bob and Sarah Dylan, Peter Coyote, helping Dennis Hopper though a bad trip.. In this episode we sat down again with 80 year old photographer LISA LAW in her home in Mexico to hear more extraordinary tales from the her life on the frontiers of counterculture. We...
Flashing on the Sixties Part 2
January 22, 2023 17:14 - 1 hour - 149 MBFeeding the Woodstock thousands, acid, the Summer of Love, the Haight Ashbury, Timothy Leary, anti-Vietnam war protests, the problems of free love and living in communes, the Monterey pop festival, The Diggers, Wavy Gravy, Owsley, Bob and Sarah Dylan, Peter Coyote, helping Dennis Hopper though a bad trip.. In this episode we sat down again with 80 year old photographer LISA LAW in her home in Mexico to hear more extraordinary tales from the her life on the frontiers of counterculture. We...
Flashing On the Sixties: Part 1
January 08, 2023 10:00 - 52 minutes - 120 MB*Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, The Beatles, Otis Redding, Nico, Peter Fonda, Denis Hopper, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg and many, many more - Lisa Law's images are extraordinary. But then her story is extraordinary. *On Christmas eve, Lisa sat in her home in Yelapa, Mexico and recounted some of her countercultural life and times in this, the first of two episodes that provide an unparalleled glimpse into the music scenes of the 60s and 70s and California's blosso...
La Rocka! The Life and Looks of Lloyd Johnson
December 18, 2022 18:55 - 1 hour - 149 MB*Starting in 1966, LLOYD JOHNSON not only sold clothes to a multitude of street smart, cool kids, but contributed to the very look of rock ’n' roll fashion. In the decades since, he has helped style Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Jack Nicholson, David Bailey, The Clash, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Barry Adamson, Johnny Marr, Nick Cave,The Stray Cats and The Pretenders. *On top of that, his designs have appeared on many record sleeves including albums by Rod Stewart and Madness, in videos like George Mi...
Roentgenizdat - The Hidden History of Bone Music
December 04, 2022 15:56 - 57 minutes - 131 MB*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 t...
Punk, Porn and Performance
November 20, 2022 15:43 - 59 minutes - 137 MBShe worked as a go-go dancer, stripper and glamour model. She's been a performance artist of masochistic tangos and twisted mambos, a ballroom dance teacher, a street arts choreographer and a punk-rock drummer. She worked with Throbbing Gristle, Genesis P Orridge, Monte Cazzaza, and Derek Jarman. *And she was there at the formation of Adam and the Ants and the Monochrome Set. *Dorothy Max Prior joins us to talk about her wonderful book '69 Exhibition Road Twelve True-Life Tales from the F...
Tripping the Light Fantastic
November 06, 2022 13:19 - 1 hour - 140 MB*You couldn’t turn up at at any self respecting psychedelic hangout, countercultural club, happening, be-in or even disco in the late sixties and seventies without being immersed in the cosmic cloud of swirling dreamy liquid images, shapes and colours of the light shows illuminating and enhancing the music. *Our counterculural companion in arms, Kevin Foakes, DJ Food, turntablist, graphic designer-par-excellence - and now author - returns to the Bureau to talk about his wonderful new book ...
The Last of the Merry Pranksters
October 24, 2022 14:40 - 56 minutes - 129 MB*In the summer of 1964, a very strange vehicle was seen making its way across America. it was a school bus covered in psychedelic colours, driven by NEAL CASSADY, a beat generation character made famous in JACK KEROUAC'S beat generation classic On the Road and piloted by KEN KESEY, the best selling author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. *The bus contained a raggle-taggle crew of crazy psychonauts calling themselves The Merry pranksters allegedly dispensing LSD in orange kool aid to all ...
The Lost Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare
October 10, 2022 08:33 - 51 minutes - 117 MBIt is a tale of lost treasure, it is a tale of a lost - or rather forgotten - artist, a mystic, a cockney visionary. •Curator Jonathan Allen comes to the Bureau to tell of AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE and the strange and wonderful Tarot Deck that lay for decades in the archives of The Magic Circle, undisturbed and forgotten. •Now a growing influence on artists, writer and chaos magick practitioners including Alan Moore and Jimmy Page, Spare became largely unnoticed in his lifetime. •We hear of h...
The Cabaret of the Nameless
September 25, 2022 10:18 - 52 minutes - 121 MB*Performance artist, actor and underground cabaret star Madame LePustra leads us on a journey back in time in search of the Berlin Cabaret and Kabarett of Weimar Republic era Berlin. *We learn of the strange and progressive Golden Years of the 1920s when queer and trans identiities were accepted, even feted, within an underground culture that briefly flowered in the city between the wars. *We meet some of the extraordinary women performers who pushed artistic, theatrical and social bounda...
Smells Like Teen Spirit
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 139 MB*"Teenage savages go wild in a jungle of lust and lawlessness!" *Countercultural commentator and writer JOHN HIGGS comes to the Bureau. We head out into the feverish febrile pheromone filled phase of self consciousness, sex drugs and rock’n’roll known as adolescence as we investigate the birth of the teenage in the late 40s and 50s. *Was it all really kicked off by Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti? *We chart the rise of youth culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain and debate that...
Song Noir: The Low Down LA Life of Tom Waits
August 29, 2022 12:47 - 51 minutes - 117 MB*Musician and actor TOM WAITS is one of the great countercultural artists of our time, His '70s albums documented low life America in an LA that no longer exists *Filmmaker Alex Harvey, author of 'Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles’ comes to the Bureau to tell how Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. *We hear how Tom blended real life with the mythic, turning autobiographical details into son...
The Low Down LA Life of Tom Waits
August 29, 2022 12:47 - 51 minutes - 117 MB*Musician and actor TOM WAITS is one of the great countercultural artists of our time, His '70s albums documented low life America in an LA that no longer exists *Filmmaker Alex Harvey, author of 'Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles’ comes to the Bureau to tell how Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. *We hear how Tom blended real life with the mythic, turning autobiographical details into son...
Sowing the Seeds of Love
August 15, 2022 07:31 - 53 minutes - 122 MB*Timothy Leary may have wanted to cause a revolution your head with LSD, The Beatles in your heart with Love, but countercultural activist and entrepreneur CRAIG SAMS went for the Gut. *After bringing himself back from death’s door by curing the amoebic dysentery and hepatitis he contracted on the Central Asia hippie trail, he embarked on a mission to change the world and raise consciousness through food. *We sit down with him for a feast of of fabulous food fables from feeding the freaks...