Bureau of Lost Culture

Roc Sandford 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 they wanted to understand and write about. Amongst other works, his mother Nell Dunn was the author of Poor Cow and Up the Junction, and his father Jeremy Sandford was the author of Cathy Come Home, all made into groundbreaking hugely influential British New Wave films by Ken Loach in the 60s.
 
Their life choices carried Roc from Belgravia, to Chelsea to Battersea, and then to a remote valley in Wales where the family lived a very alternative life.
 
We hear about that and get into the tensions that can emerge when idealism meets reality.  We hear about Roc's unusual schooling, his years during the AIDs crisis in New York, studyomg the ideas that shaped his thinking about perception, systems, and the way we interpret the world.
 
And we head to Soho, meet Francis Bacon and Genesis P Orridge again, and hear about his first brush with British law.
 
Roc has led - is leading  - a big countercultural life - so this is the first part of a double-header conversation. 
 
More on Roc, his work and life
 

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Hello!
 
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Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  
 
Stephen

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 of strange, moving voices from Alan’s 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 X-Ray Audio

www.x-rayaudio.com

For More on Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  

Stephen

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 first British DIY musical revolution, Skiffle provided the template for the Punk movement of the 70s that was to inspire him.
 
Along the way, we get educated about the post war 'trad jazz' movement, the cultural stranglehold of the BBC - and the terrific transformatory power of a guy - or a girl - with a guitar.
 
For more on Billy and his book Roots, Radicals and Rockers:
https://www.billybragg.co.uk/product/roots-radicals-and-rockers-how-skiffle-changed-the-world-hardback-signed-by-billy/
 
Billy's Top Five Skiffle Tunes
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZtMpev7GhPIi-e2ajPxUd_FVyUQxMBbB
 

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture
www.bureauoflostculture.com 

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  

Stephen

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 and his friends experienced as a gateway to radical societal ideas and revolutionary thought, laying the groundwork for later countercultures and today's psychedelic renaissance.

More on Mike and his book Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science.

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  
 
Stephen

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.

 
So says James Riley, a writer whose work explores the darker edges of late-1960s and 1970s counterculture. His 'The Bad Trip' is an acclaimed study of apocalypse, occultism, paranoia and the collapse of the hippie dream at the end of the 1960s.

 

We examine the romanticised narrative of peace, love, and idealism, revealing how beneath the surface lurked a shadow of violence, paranoia, and societal fractures. How figures like Charles Manson emerged not as aberrations, but as products and archetypes of the era. 
 
We talk Jung, LSD, The Trickster archetype, Manson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the committee for The Summer of Love, to see how the darkness beneath the light reveals more about human nature than the utopian stories we often tell, and how it was the inspiration for some truly great art.
 
For the list of countercultural films we discuss - and more - go HERE 
 

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  
 
Stephen
 

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