I went to see the Usurp Chance Tour featuring Stewart Lee at the Komedia in Brighton a couple of weeks ago. Now before pretentious musos start shouting at their computer screens, yes I knew it wasn’t going to be a comedy show.
I mean, lots of people there didn’t realise this and expected some Comedy Vehicle type laughter, but I knew it was alternative music.

So me and my chum Jack BK (he’s in a play at the Brighton Fringe, go see it woop woo) are both big fans of being a bit wanky and listening to alternative music, subverting the artistic experience yada yada, so we thought this would be right up our street, especially as it featured spoken word as well. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Tell you what, here’s the description on Stewart Lee’s website:

Usurp Art Gallery presents two dynamic, ensemble performances, exploring perceptual concepts of chance, time, listening and humour, and the breadth and parameters of improvisational approaches in new music.
“Indeterminacy” was originally recorded in 1959, with John Cage reading aloud 90 stories, each lasting one minute. For this performance, Stewart Lee assumes Cage’s role accompanied by contemporary pianists, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford improvising on pianos and objects. *Note: he played the piano once. When I say once, he played one note, then left it.*

“The Conspirators of Pleasure” featuring Poulomi Desai (augmented sitar), Simon Underwood (modified, toys + electronics) and Seth Ayyaz ( daaf + electronics), create improvised soundscapes, twisting technology and transforming organic sounds into eerie calls with intense waves of noise, pulsating rhythms and melancholic, lyrical interplay.

The performances draw upon contemporary narratives of, the role of the performer as composer; control, response and liberation in shared music-making, and, extricate the sonic and political potency of instruments, subaltern identities and recycled objects.

Fellow liberal, slightly up themselves people will probably think that sounds awesome. It. Was. Not. Normally I’m incredibly positive about pretty much every show I see; I mean hey, they’re probably doing a better job than I ever could so good on them. Not this show. This is the first show I have ever walked out of. The first half was ‘The Conspirators of Pleasure’ (named after some film nobody has ever seen, I believe) which literally consisted of 45 minutes of sound. I don’t mean, ‘oh, I didn’t realise that object could make that sound!’ I mean a woman hitting a wire with an axe. Or a man rolling a marble around in a bowl. I’m sorry to be so negative but I won’t lie, even if Stewart Lee is fantabulous.

The second half was much the same, but with the accompaniment of Lee reading Cage’s 1 minute stories over the frankly dull and unlistenable music. I walked out after 10 minutes of this and went to the pub, a far more enjoyable experience for sure.

If I have made this sound even remotely interesting, I have failed. The only entertainment I had was watching other people look as astounded as me that people has paid to see this, and astounded that a group of adults thought that it was acceptable to class this as ‘entertainment’.

*Sorry for being so mean. I really don’t like doing it, but really this show was that bad.

Stewart Lee, if you ever read this, you are a comedy hero of mine, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a alternative music hero of mine too…does it?*