Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Lucy Burns.

And this week more than 70,000 people are gathering in the middle of the desert in Nevada for

Burning Man, a week-long festival dedicated to radical self-expression and self-reliance.

This year it's the event's 30th anniversary, and I've been speaking to founder and chief philosophical officer Larry Harvey about how they first got

started.

There was no plan.

It amounted to me calling a friend and saying, hey, let's burn a man on the beach today.

And he said, would you say that again?

And I did and we did, and that's how it began.

It was June 1986. Larry Harvey was 38 and living a bohemian life in San Francisco.

It happened to be the anniversary of a broken love affair.

That story has been inflated forever. I was burning my

girlfriend, you hear that, I was burning my girlfriend's a lawyer, I made that one up

just to make it interesting, but in fact it wasn't in my mind at all I played no part my

conscious process but where the man came from I don't know where does any

creative thing come from and then called a few

called a few friends.

It must have been about eight, nine, ten people at the most.

Larry and his friends took the statue of the man they had made out of wood

down to Baker Beach overlooking San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and set it on fire.

People came running from all over the beach of course and several people joined in. You, you're often affected by a stranger's

enthusiasm more than maybe even a loved ones. Had it been a private affair and

...