Bureau of Lost Culture

DICKY DREAD is the pen name of Richard Leach, whose life has bridged two seemingly contradictory worlds as a physics professor and an active participant in traveller communities, free festivals and off-grid culture.

He came to the Bureau to talk about who gets to belong in Britain, and on what terms. We also get into drug addiction, 

Dicky's  book Living on the Road, Waterways or Off-grid in the UK, draws together decades of his lived experience into an extraordinary manual of how to live in alternative Britain.

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#vanlife #off-grid #offgrid #travellers #gypsy #counterculture #newagetravellers #battleofthebeanfield #gypsies 

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 exceedingly difficult to get hold of now but one that became the inspiration and touchdown for my guest in this episode.

David Bramwell returned to the Bureau to talk about The Ghosts of the Medicine Show, the book he's written about the themes of Rogan Taylor's Death and Resurrection Show. It is also a personal memoir of something most of us can relate to -growing up and being transformed by seeing musicians and artists and actors.

David asks: 'What if the musician, the actor, the clown, the circus performer, the rock star — even the celebrity — are the latest manifestations of something that began much, much earlier'

For most of human history, before temples, books and organised religions existed, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their knowledge could not be written down; it had to be remembered, performed and embodied.

The figures who carried this knowledge were the shamans—storytellers, healers, singers, dancers, magicians and guides who used performance to preserve culture, bind communities together and lead people through experiences of suffering, transformation and renewal.

Where are they now?

We also get into football, funerals - and ABBA..

For more on David and The Ghosts of the Medicine Show

#bureauoflostculture #medicineshow #shaman #shamanism #psychedelic #football #theatre #music #tripping #art  #consciousness #thedeathandresurrectionshow #rogantaylor

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 that, explode some myths, talk about the power of landscape, fairies and hear about a strange magic mushroom incident in the 18th century

Psilocybe Pickers - A Short History of Bemushroomed Britons

Myths of the Magic Mushroom - Interview with Andy Letcher

More on Rob and The Psychedelic Press

All Things Fungi Festival 

#bureauoflostculture #magicmushroom #psilocybin #terencemckenna #psychedelic #wasson #mariasabina #libertycaps #tripping #psychoactive #psychedelicpress #psilocybinmushroom 

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 reveals how biographers have routinely downplayed their subjects' metaphysical leanings. 

In 2007, after getting rejected by every major UK publisher, Jonathan's book The Secret History of the World became an international bestseller. The public resonated with an idea the publishers had not: the possibility that many pivotal cultural developments were shaped by ideas transmitted through occult rather than mainstream institutions, 

A Secret History of the Universe continues the theme.

We get into all this and talk about consciousness, relativity, quantum physics, prayer, mystical experience, magic, and ideas as entities.

For more on Jonathan and his work

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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 shocked governments, altered international opinion about Vietnam, inspired artists and activists and introduced many people to a very different understanding of Buddhism.

In this episode, I’m joined by Canadian-born US-based Professor James Shields, one of the leading scholars of Buddhist ethics and engaged Buddhism. We explore the story behind that extraordinary photograph, the long history of self-sacrifice in Buddhist tradition and how these dramatic acts have been understood over the centuries.

We branch out into the wider history of self-immolation as political protest and ask: if Buddhism generally rejects both violence and suicide, how does it distinguish between self-sacrifice and self-destruction? And what might it have to say about contemporary debates surrounding euthanasia and assisted dying?

It’s a conversation about protest, conscience and the extraordinary power of a single human act to change the course of history.

Photo: Malcolm Browne 

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.

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 about the Peace Convoy, the Battle of the Beanfield, the free festival scene, the warehouse party scene, and how those worlds were pushed into exile in Europe, where they helped spark whole new cultural movements of festivals, parties, and creative rebellion including 'Tanghenge', the repurposing of abandoned Soviet MIG fighter jets after the fall of The Berlin Wall and much more..

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Stephen 

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