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Other / Miscellaneous PressRichly illuminating new podcast asks What Happened to Counter-Culture?

By Fiona Sturgess in The Financial TImes Posted on Monday, August 25th, 2025

It was “the most glorious, bravest, the most splendid music”, says British folk singer Shirley Collins of her time collecting folk songs at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the 1950s. “It was all recorded out in the open, so there was a wonderful echo there.” Collins, the one-time leading light of the postwar British folk revival, was travelling across the US’s rural South alongside the American archivist Alan Lomax. On that trip, they also recorded songs by the Appalachian singer Texas Gladden and by Mississippi Fred McDowell, who would go on to inspire The Rolling Stones and tour the world.

Collins, now 90, is talking on the new BBC podcast What Happened to Counter-Culture?, hosted by the writer and comic Stewart Lee. The title of this delightfully meandering and richly illuminating series is self-explanatory: Lee wants to know whether counterculture, as a concept, is dead. But, before we get to the present day, he must define it, which is much like trying to trap water in a sieve. He calls it “an intoxicating brew of alternative music, independent ideas, of underground presses, writing and art, of activism . . . A philosophy of liberation that swept across western societies in the second half of the 20th century.” And that’s before you get to LSD and the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream (a 1967 event headlined by Pink Floyd at London’s Alexandra Palace).  Exploring the evolution and legacy of counterculture, Lee — a wryly engaging host — interrogates themes of sex, class, politics, protest and the avant-garde. Along for the ride are commentators John Harris and Jon Savage, author Olivia Laing, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner and Brian Eno, the one-time Roxy Music synth wizard who has written extensively about art and culture. The series comes in five parts, though it’s clear the theme could stretch to twice that and still not provide a complete picture.

The opening episode traces the countercultural philosophy back to Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. The latter’s arrestingly lugubrious tones can be heard in a clip in which he reads from his transgressive masterpiece Naked Lunch.  Back in Britain, Collins and her peers were laying the groundwork for a folk explosion that would transform music and culture. As producer Joe Boyd tells it, she created “a bridge between folk, which was its own kind of counterculture in Britain, and this transatlantic influence.” Talking with Collins about how history is created, Lee hits the nail on the head. “You can be in the middle of these things, and they don’t make sense until after the event.” This was evidently the case when Collins was working at the Troubadour club in London where an unknown American named Bob Dylan came to perform in 1962. “He wasn’t impressive,” Collins recalls, adding that she wasn’t the only one who thought so. “And his reaction was to go into the loo and lock himself in for the rest of the night.”

Written by Fiona Sturgess in The Financial TImes on 25th August 2025. Filed Under: 2025, Radio, Radio Documentary, What Happened to Counter-Culture?
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