Bureau of Lost Culture

Stephen Coates
  • 5.0 (25)
  • HISTORY
  • UPDATED SEMIMONTHLY

*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast rare, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and tales from the underground. *Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests, including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation. Support us on Patreon *Listen live on London’s premier independent station, Soho Radio or via all major podcast providers. The Bureau is collected at The British Library Sound Archive

  1. MAR 17

    20th Century Mutoid Man: Joe Rush - Part 1

    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 imagine a huge mechanical creature crawling across the desert at the Burning Man festival in Nevada These strange and spectacular visions all come from the same source: The Mutoid Waste Company— a collective that, since the early 1980s, has been transforming the debris of industrial civilisation into giant sculptures, mutant vehicles and temporary worlds built from waste. This is the first part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the artist at the centre of it all. It takes us into the world of late 1970s West London, the punk years, the alternative communities and squats of the People's Republic of Frestonia, and the signpist along the way to becoming a Mutoid... And if you're listening in March 2026 it coincides with the opening of his latest exhibition -Unnatural - at The Bomb Factory Photograph: Courtesy of Guy Mayhew #BureauOfLostCulture #JoeRush #MutoidWaste #ScrapArt #IndustrialArt #BurningManArt #Counterculture #RecycledArt #PostIndustrial #UndergroundCulture

    1h 2m

  2. MAR 3

    The Library of Lost Maps

    In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, behind a scruffy turquoise door, the world lies folded into drawers. Here are maps that survived wars, regimes, and revolutions — not because they were valued, but because they were forgotten.   Some were reused when paper was scarce - a map of Cuba mounted on the reverse of a Second World War map of Berlin, the roads of one ruined city shining faintly through another place entirely, a haunting map of Hiroshima printed just weeks before destruction. Britain’s only Professor of Cartography, James Cheshire's book The Library of Lost Maps, explores the hidden collection of thousands of maps in a room at University College London. He joins us to tell us why paper maps still matter.   Maps tell us what was ignored, how ideology, hope and catastrophe have been drawn onto paper; they tell us how power wanted the world to look, and they reveal hidden patterns in everyday life. And when map libraries disappear, it isn’t just paper that vanishes — it’s memory.   #maps #maplibrary #hiroshima #ordnancesurvey #mapping #cartography #johnsnow #tubemap

    59 min

  3. FEB 17

    In + Out of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - Part 2

    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 practitioner, the one “who handled the workings”: the practical magick behind the grand metaphysical ideas.   In this episode, we rejoin Alaura and Genesis as they are in Kathmandu with their kids. Caress and Genesse. Back in Britain, the police have raided their home, prompted by unfounded accusations of moral deviance and child abuse in the media, during the infamous 'satanic panic'of the 1980s.  We hear how they embarked on a life in exile in California, finding unexpected refuge with the family of Winona Ryder and entering a new West Coast countercultural milieu that included encounters with Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. before hearing about Alaura's life after Psychic TV, TOPY and Genesis. Psychic TV, was a multimedia art and music project that blurred boundaries between performance, ritual, and experimentation in sound and imagery, imbued with a sense of magick (in both the occult and transformative senses) Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY),was  a loosely structured global network of artists, occultists, and seekers that emerged in the 1980s.  #AlauraODell #PaulaP’Orridge #GenesisP’Orridge #TempleOvPsychicYouth #Counterculture #SacredSites #PersonalReinvention #SpiritualAwakening #TraumaAndHealing #CreativeExpression #ExileAndResilience #TimothyLeary #terencemckenna #PsychicTVHistory

    57 min

  4. FEB 3

    What is a Shaman?

    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 original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation. Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised.  Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss. #counterculture, #shamanism, #shaman, #tuvan, #galba, #newage, #spiritualisn, #magic, #ancestor

    57 min

  5. JAN 19

    This is Penny Rimbaud - Part Two

    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 life — part commune, part refuge, part creative hub. It was here, where he still lives, that Penny's music, philosophy, artwork, debate, and daily survival are entangled. And we hear about the founding of the Stonehenge Free Festival and the death of Wally Hope, cultural terrorism, Penny's work since Crass, and his thoughts on art, spirituality and the self. Music played:  Futility and The Soldier’s Dream (The War Poems of Wilfred Owen) So What (Crass) The Song of Self (With Louise Elliot) You Brave Od Land (With Youth)   For more on Penny and his work   #counterculture #crass #pennyrimbaud #anarchism #capitalism #dialhouse #artschool #wallyhope #stonehengefreefestival

    1h 2m
  6. A Supernatural History of the Atlantic

    JAN 6

    A Supernatural History of the Atlantic

    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, fear, and fantasy collided. This is the story the British cultural historian Karl Bell tells in The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic, his epic study of sailors’ lore, ghost ships, sea monsters, superstitions, omens and uncanny maritime experiences. We hear about 'the caul' - the protective embryo of an unborn baby said to keep sailors safe, the 'jonah', a scapegoat eyed suspiciously by those on board as responsible for the ship's misfortunes, H P Lovecraft, cross-dressing pirates and  more. This is not a history of battles or trade routes, but of dreams, fantasies and terrors — of the sea as it existed in the minds of those who sailed upon it The Perlious Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic

    1 hr
  7. Tales from the Ambient Underground

    12/21/2025

    Tales from the Ambient Underground

    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 electronic musicians.  Now, as a new vinyl compilation and a beautifully illustrated 20-page booklet, The Telepathic Fish has resurfaced to rave reviews, Kevin Foakes — DJ, designer, archivist and cultural custodian — returns to the Bureau to talk squat party ‘finstallations’, Aphex Twin, Mira Calix, illegal Roundhouse raves, ambient zines and what DIY culture can do when technology, community and youthful imagination collide. The Telepathic Fish Compilation For Kevin  / DJ Food #ambientmusic #aphextwin #autechre #miracalix #orbital #theorb #counterculture #diyparties #diyculture #telepathicfish #djfood

    57 min

  8. 12/10/2025

    In + Out of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - Part 1

    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 experiments with magick and media, the turbulent times of TOPY - Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - the global network of seekers and outsiders, where she was not merely a participant but an organiser — the one who handled the workings,  the practical magic behind the grand metaphysical gestures.  Alaura’s life didn’t end when she parted ways with the band, with Genesis, or with the Temple. In fact, in many ways, it began anew. We will be hearing more about that in the second part of our interview in a future episode. For more on Alaura and connect with her here (as Mistress Mix)  #psychictv #TheeTempleOvPsychickYouth #paulp-orridge #genesisp-orridge #throbbinggristle #satanist #satanicpanic  #counterculture #coseyfannitutti #occult

    1 hr
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5
out of 5
25 Ratings

About

*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast rare, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and tales from the underground. *Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests, including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation. Support us on Patreon *Listen live on London’s premier independent station, Soho Radio or via all major podcast providers. The Bureau is collected at The British Library Sound Archive

Information

  • Creator
    Stephen Coates
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    159
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Bureau of Lost Culture

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