Bureau of Lost Culture

* Ninja Tune head honcho and Coldcut co-pirate Jonathan More returns to the Bureau to talk about his adventures hi-jinxing and hi-jacking the airwaves in the Wild West of South London.  * For the second in our trilogy on illicit broadcasting, we hear tales of DJ derring-do during the birth Of Kiss Fm, once one of the coolest of the urban pirate radio stations and its transition to the commercial mainstream.   * And in the mix, we debate how the mainstream is dependent on the underground, the culture feeds on the counterculture, and along the way go crate-digging into how Jon caught the disease of collecting vinyl, putting on warehouse parties, life-changing meetings in London taxis, pirate TV, Coldcut's Solid Steel show - and nuclear power station ephemera..   * For Jon and Coldcut http://coldcut.net * Jon’s Soho Radio show Out to Lunch https://sohoradiolondon.com/profile/jon-more/  Thanks for audio samples and info: * DJ Food https://www.djfood.org/ * The Pirate Radio Archive https://www.thepiratearchive.net/ * AMFM.0rg https://www.amfm.org.uk/ * Death is Not the End https://deathisnot.bandcamp.com/album/london-pirate-radio-adverts-1984-1993-vol-1  Follow Us: * Bureau Home www.bureauoflostculture.com * Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bureauoflostculture/ * Get the Bureau Newsletter  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/N0ZYoFu/BOLC 

Cannabis, psilocybin, mescaline and LSD were not enough to fulfil Joey Mellen’s quest to expand his consciousness to the furthest limits 'in search of the miraculous'. So in 1968 he used an electric drill to self-trepan himself by boring a hole into his skull.   Now a delightful and very lively 82, Joey visits the Bureau to tell how an upper middle class English public schoolboy tuned in, turned on and dropped out, became a psychonautic beatnik and carried out the act of self surgery that made him infamous in countercultural London.  Along the way we dig deep into acid evangelism, how to avoid bad trips, the blood chemistry of the ego and the strange life of Bart Hughes, the dutchman whose theories inspired Joey, Amanda Fielding and various others to seek enlightenment through trepanation.     And we ask Joey if he acheived his goal of getting high and never coming down.   This episode was sponsored by the artist known as The Real Tuesday Weld    Joey’s book Bore Hole   Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home

The last violet seller in Piccadilly Circus, the Canvey Island Oil refinery, the bascule chamber of Tower Bridge, the song of The Muffin Man. In the twelve years before his early death in 2021, Ian Rawes engaged in a Quixotic endeavour to capture - and collect - the sound of London.    With over 2000 field recordings, historical audio pieces, sound maps, writings and images, The London Sound Survey he created is an idiosyncratic but wonderfully accessible, evocative and often arresting series of sonic snapshots that aim to track a changing city.   Tony Herrington of The Wire magazine comes to the Bureau to remember Ian and celebrate his work. We hear various selections from the Sound Survey and talk counterculture, field-recording, bells, anarcho-punk activism - and of course, independent music publishing, along the way.   SIGN UP TO JOIN US   The London Sound Survey Website   Tony's obituary for Ian   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------

Multi-award winning writer, musician, editor, essayist and inventor of the multiverse, Michael Moorcock, beams into the Bureau for the first episode exploring his deeply countercultural life in literature and London   It’s an action-packed hour involving The Beats, William Burroughs, Soho, J G Ballard, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, anarchists, a Rolls Royce, myth, skiffle, fanzines, comics and books, books books.   We hear how a precocious teenage Michael sets out on a career that led to the writing of over a hundred books and the creation of the well-loved characters including Elric and Jerry Cornelius who inhabit them, and we hear a revelation that will surprise even die-hard Moorcock afficionados..   For more on Michael http://www.multiverse.org   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------  

We revisit the wonderfully odd, lost culture of the coin-operated machines that allowed ordinary people to make a record of their voice long before the advent of tape or digital recording.(Jack White has been using one, The Voice O Graph, more recently to produce terrific lo- fi caught-in-the-moment records, including an album with Neil Young).   We are joined by oral historian and broadcaster Alan Dein to hear a selection of recordings of strange, moving ghostly voices from his collection and learn how the records were used to send messages home from the war, record visits to tourist destinations or to capture the sounds of loved ones in a way that had never been possible before.   For more on Alan’s award winning work https://www.facebook.com/alan.dein ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------   Image courtesy Museum of London

DIANA CRAWSHAW's countercultural journey took her from a small north Yorkshire town to the centre of swinging London and the glamour of St Tropez; from selling, designing and making clothes in 60s London's hippest boutiques Lord Kitchener's Valet, Mr Freedom and Paradise Garage,to reading palms at the Holland Park office of Richard Branson.   One of our most modest and delightful guests, Diana tells tales of her times with the designers that dressed the great the good and the glitterati, including David Hockney, Picasso, Rock Hudson, The Beatles, Elton John and Freddie Mercury. We hear how she set out to find herself, how she made Dennis Hopper cry and how she fixed Raquel Welch’s hot pants.   Diana reads palms at Wilde Ones in the Kings Road https://wildeones.com/tarot-readings/   Thanks to Paul Gorman http://www.paulgormanis.com   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------  

Writer, film maker, poet, flaneur, metropolitan shaman, curator of lost cultures, beat aficionado, and underground poet Iain Sinclair takes us on a walk through his life in the counterculture.    We have brief encounters with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, J.G.Ballard and Nicholas Hawksmoor as we hear tales of the poetry underground, life working as a Hackney council gardener, blacklegging in the London docks, cigars in Clerkenwell, an epic ancestral journey from Leadenhall Market to Peru, DIY-publishing, writing, writing, writing, and of course The City, as we circle towards hearing Iain reading selections from Lud Heat, the epic 1975 piece that was destined to become the root text of London psychogeography.   For more on on Iain and his work: www.iainsinclair.org.uk   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------  

Gary Lachman, the original bass player of Blondie (as Gary Valentine), returns to the Bureau to tell of his time in the New York underground music scene of the 1970s.   Now the UK’s foremost writer on the esoteric, with 24 books under his belt including works on Aleister, Crowley, Jung, Gurdjieff, Magick and the occult, Gary was once deep in the heart of New York's 'Blank Generation'.   We hear about living with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in a loft on The Bowery, playing CBGB and Gotham's underground clubs, hanging with The Ramones and Patti Smith, touring with Television and Iggy Pop and living the countercultural life on the Lower East side in the years before and beyond new wave.   For more on Gary www.garylachman.co.uk   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------  

Soho and Chelsea have always been hailed as the epicentres of swinging London.   But there was a third, and now rather forgotten place which gave birth to The Cool - a place that was the home to one of the most influential jazz clubs of the 50s before providing a launchpad for The Rolling Stones and the bourgeoning British R+B and psychedelic scenes of the 60s. It was a place that went onto to host an extraordinary roster of artists including Cream, The Yardbirds, pre-Bowie David Jones, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Jimmy Page, Genesis, Yes and many, many others before morphing into a hippy commune in the 70s.   Author Andrew Humphreys comes to the Bureau to tell the strange story of Eel Pie Island - a bucolic bit of London in the middle of the river Thames - an island which for 15 years played an essential role in the history of British counterculture.   For more on Andrew and his book Raving Upon Thames http://www.paradiseroad.co.uk   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------  

Jon More, one half of cut-and-paste collage kings Coldcut and co-founder with Matt Black of Ninja Tune record label, joins turntablist, crate digger Strictly Kev of  DJ Food as we dig deep into the wild and wonky world of sampling - the borrowing, plundering, adapting and re-imagining of existing audio, songs and sounds to create new audio, songs and sounds.   Sampling  might have started off as a countercultural underground cut-and-paste technique used by experimental artists but it ended up powering a huge amount of hip-hop tunes and some very big hit records.   We hear some of Jon and Kev's favourite sampling selections, learn about the creative use of the tape recorder pause button, and delve into sound art, musique concrète and pop cultural pick-pocketing down the ages.   For more on Jon and Coldcut http://coldcut.net   For more on DJ Food / Strictly Kev https://www.djfood.org   ---------- Get the Bureau's Newsletter   Support our wild endeavours   The Bureau of Lost Culture Home   Go on - follow, rate and review us - or be in touch directly bureauoflostculture@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. -------------