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Other / Miscellaneous PressIs counterculture dead – or mainstream?

Stewart Lee goes underground to uncover the roots of alternative scenes.

By Katherine Cowles in The Observer Posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2025

Shirley Collins didn’t think much of Bob Dylan when she first saw him play at the Troubadour in London. He was an American, singing American songs, badly. Worse, he wasn’t wearing a Stetson, which might have helped to set pulses racing. “We didn’t know what to make of him,” she tells Stewart Lee in his new series What Happened to Counter-Culture? about the history of the movement, from its fighting days to what may reasonably be called the MIA years of the present. “His reaction was to go to the loo and lock himself in for the night.”

That’s the tricky thing about trying to define a cultural phenomenon: one minute, it’s killing time in the toilet, then before you know it, it’s Bob Dylan. Or as our host says: “You can be in the middle of these things and they don’t make sense until after the event.”

Lucky for us, we have the benefit of both hindsight and Lee to try to make sense of what were once called “happenings”; an “intoxicating brew of alternative music, independent ideas, underground presses, writing and art”, not to mention the fashion, the protests, the drugs and the 14-hour Technicolor dream.

It all makes me wish I could wade, like some barefoot bohemian nymph, out of the mainstream: but where would I go? Is there counterculture left for me? Lee (formerly of this parish) will attempt to answer this question when finally he arrives at our dismal digital age. But, for now, he helpfully reminds us that big business has always betrayed alternative culture by “co-opting its allure for commercial gain”.

In the first episode, Lee speeds, Jack Kerouac road trip-style, through a postwar landscape from which rose the Beats, underground jazz, the folk revival and the mods of the 1950s. It’s enough to make you carsick, but the show is expertly steered by Lee and his guests – Collins, Brian Eno, the writer Olivia Laing and Steel Pulse’s Mykaell Riley among them.

This subterranean generation were rebels with a cause, they argue; the cause being to defy their parents, who only cared about security because they literally “got bombed”. Yet even by 11 June 1965, when Eno saw Allen Ginsberg perform Howl at the Royal Albert Hall, one of the poets there noted: “the underground is now on the surface”.

Later in the series, Lee will cover the 1968 protests, the new liberation movements, punks and hippies, then march on to the counterculture of today – and the question of its whereabouts. Perhaps it’s regressed so far rightwards, from mod to trad, that I’d be happy to remain in the realm of convention. If that’s the case, it’s definitely in the toilet.

Written by Katherine Cowles in The Observer on 10th August 2025. Filed Under: 2025, Radio, Radio Documentary, What Happened to Counter-Culture?
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