Showing 47 results for: 2025
‘Did he really play on Petula Clark’s Downtown?’ Stewart Lee on his guitar hero Derek Bailey - September 2025 The Guardian - By Stewart Lee - September 15th, 2025
Today’s episode of BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives is my third attempt to use my limited comedy fame to foist the non-idiomatic music-making of the Sheffield-born guitarist Derek Bailey on an unsuspecting public. In 2009, I chose Derek as my specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind, beating the comedian John Thomson, who chose James Bond villains.…
FROM STEWART LEE – Sept 25 – As slippery as a greasy pig since 1968 - September 2025 September 1st, 2025
IRISH ANNOUNCEMENT Stewart Lee will tour to Dublin, Drogheda, Derry, Wexford, Cork, and Waterford in June 2026, his first tour to Ireland in 14 years. June 2026 Monday 1st June 2026 – 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin – TICKETS Tuesday 2nd June 2026 – Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin – TICKETS Wednesday 3rd June 2026 – The…
Richly illuminating new podcast asks What Happened to Counter-Culture? - August 2025 The Financial TImes - By Fiona Sturgess - 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…
Is counterculture dead – or mainstream? - August 2025 The Observer - By Katherine Cowles - 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…
Radio review #4: What Happened to Counter-Culture? - August 2025 Simon Warner's Substack - By Simon Warner - August 7th, 2025
IT IS HARDLY unhelpful, for the readers of this website, to report that a new BBC radio series on the history of the transatlantic counterculture begins with Allen Ginsberg reading in a 1950s performance of ‘Howl’ in the US and ends with the same poet speaking with a similar and distinctive tone at 1965’s International…