Stew writes the sleeve notes to Glowering Figs' debut release.

Improv trio made up of Dave Fowler (drums), Ivor Kallin (upright electric bass/vocal), and Jerry Wigens (guitar).

The trio was formed in 2015 drummer Dave Fowler and bassist Ivor Kallin already provided the powerhouse rhythm section of free jazz group Ya Basta! and had developed a close understanding over nearly three decades, while Kallin and Wigens knew each other from the London Improvisers Orchestra and a shared interest in the fortunes of Leyton Orient FC. It was here that the idea of the trio emerged during one half-time interval. A purely instrumental unit at the outset, the Figs would soon integrate Kallin's unique vocal talents as part of their live set.

The name 'Glowering Figs' derives from a loose amalgam of the letters in 'Fowler' and 'Wigens', an angrier option than the initial 'hippier' alternative, 'Flowering Wigs'. The music in this recording is a selection of material from more than two hours of improvised live playing that took place on a one-day session in Autumn 2016.

The Thracian slave Aesop is historically lauded as the master of the fabular form, pitting simplistically symbolic creatures – the wily fox, the lascivious bat and the slothful sloth – against each other in tales that have delighted fans of prescriptive anthropomorphic narrative for generations. But the current race towards No 10 has an audacious illustrative purity that even Aesop would have balked at.

For this election has represented naught so much as the titanic struggle of two tortoises, and not a hare in sight, slouching towards Downing Street to be born, their mouths full of masticated Byron’s burger and fumbled bacon respectively, meaty drool and hot butter spotting their wattled chins.

And beneath a shady tree on a green hilltop, Nicola Sturgeon, a confectionery-gobbling bunny in a pink scarf, her paws wet with tempting chocolate, taunts them both in a husky regional accent. “Haven’t you heard of Cadbury’s Caramel? You’ll just have to take everything easy!”

A vast swath of polls, all open to different interpretations, has attempted to inject drama into the minuscule differences in the rates of the two testudines’ progress.

The pattern is becoming predictable. On Mondays the Tories surge. Then, at around 10.14pm that evening, the two parties are neck and neck. By Friday, Labour is in the lead. So, working on a hunch, I met my eclipse-chasing showbiz science friends Professor Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain, the Judith Chalmers and Cliff Michelmore of space, on Westminster’s College Green, to see if they could suggest any explanation.

From behind a portable Casio keyboard, Cox communicated with me by doing a bendy-legged bee-like dance, and appeared to interpret the data thus. At the weekend, corpulent Tory voters stuff themselves with pheasant and gala pie, while traditional Labour voters exist on gruel and hope. The gravitational effect of the moon then pulls the now heavier Conservatives momentarily into the lead until the collective muscle mass of the traditional Labour voter, bulked up by his weekday physical toil in a dying manufacturing industry, gives Miliband’s party the midweek edge. Then equilibrium is once more achieved on Friday.
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I wanted to tell the moon-mad musical professor that his idea was stupid, based on out of date stereotypes, but Ó Briain was standing between him and me, and Cox was entirely obscured. And I thought what an amazing cosmic coincidence it was that God, or nature, or whatever, had made Ó Briain, if stationed in a particular position, exactly the right size to obscure Cox so perfectly.

(You must never look directly at Professor Brian Cox, remember. Always view him through a colander or a hole cut in a cereal box, or you will become impotent.)

Other, more reliable, experts suggest the two tortoises’ apparent progress rates are skewed by the methods used to harvest data.

Polls taken online score higher for Labour and Ukip, while Conservative voters appear to favour the telephone, as this device can also be used to order groceries from Waitrose and leave messages with the duty log saying that the BBC is leftwing; Liberal Democrat supporters respond best to voting intention surveys posed in the form of cryptic crosswords, to be completed around the kitchen table by all the family, in a bonding session that is both fun and educational, during which perhaps some of the older teenagers are allowed wine, cider, tobacco, marijuana or LSD; SNP voters, meanwhile, prefer to communicate their preferences via a series of burning braziers mounted on a chain of Pictish hill forts, as they prepare flaming brands, ready to torch English cities and destroy our collective way of life for ever, as surely as Adolf Hitler and his Nazis set out to in the second world war.

Other experts point to the simple human emotion of shame as a factor in clouding the polls. Door-stepped by a clever-looking researcher, they say, many Ukip supporters may be too embarrassed to admit their true voting intentions. But having been on tour around Britain these last few months I think this position displays a degree of metropolitan ignorance. Outside major multicultural population centres, Ukip is sometimes viewed as a genuinely legitimate political option.

Indeed, in Yeovil, I had already ordered myself a baked potato in the cafe opposite St John’s church before I realised the eatery was festooned with Ukip banners. In my north London rainbow utopia an establishment decorated thus would soon be deserted, but here the man behind the counter carried on as if it were normal to proffer toasted sandwiches while professing support for a party that did electoral deals with Polish Holocaust sceptics. My potato arrived. It was tiny, overcooked and horrible. I sat alone and ate it resignedly, purple pound bunting fluttering around my ears.

Easter is the time of eternal symbols: the fictitious egg-abandoning rabbit; the female mantis, biting off its mate's head during a loveless copulation; and, perhaps most profound, the newborn orphan lamb's greedy suckling at the laughing prime minister's eagerly proffered teat, a scene re-enacted every Easter by a local actor in the village of Chadlington, before a barn of frightened Oxfordshire children and their sympathetically lactating nannies.

Centuries pass, nature's ancient cycles overlaid by each epoch's successive blooming of ephemeral religious belief. But this year, Easter was the time of election campaigns and, tired from my standup tour but obliged to file the second of my "a comedian observes the election" columns, I was vulnerable to symbols.

On Good Friday, I took my children to Trafalgar Square to witness a re-enactment of Christ'
s passion. Jesus, a charismatic Russell Brand figure from biblical times, excited a populace desperate for answers, but seemed reluctant to give specific ones, preferring to pronounce mysteriously about wineskins, his profound thoughts eventually forming the basis of an enduring bestseller.

The production was given a surprisingly contemporary air of tragedy by the 21st-century passerby's tendency to wander along, pose for a selfie with the agony of Christ as a diverting backdrop, and then wander off again to the Trocadero centre. "Here's me and Josie with the expiring saviour." Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

My own Easter epiphany, during the actor-Christ's actual crucifixion, was itself compromised by a lady from the theatre company handing me an out-of-date leaflet saying, "Buy tickets for The Life of Christ and receive 20% off The Nativity if booked before 31 March 2015." How dare they do this in my father'
s house? The actor who played Jesus was brilliant. He had to get down off the cross, clean his wounds, re-engage with the character, and then do the 90-minute show again for the 3pm matinee. Truly this man was the son of God.

The last time I'd stood all day in Trafalgar Square was 25 years and one week ago, in the poll tax demonstration, my buttocks squashed against the Imperial Units plaque by phalanxes of mounted police, unaccountable in those pre-camera-phone days, clumsy protesters bumping their teeth out against truncheons right, left and centre.

Today we know that most of the supposed troublemakers were probably undercover police officers. Indeed my first marriage fell apart four years in when I discovered that "Jean", whom I met that very day beneath the trampling hooves of a horse named Raisa, was in fact junior police constable Alan Ripley in blond dreadlocks and a Back to the Planet T-shirt, with his winky tucked permanently between his legs.

Current legislation would make it impossible to arrange a similarly sized protest today, though driving a tank through central London to reinstate a punchy TV personality can be organised at a moment's notice. And the massed re-enactment of Jesus's maddeningly obtuse calls for social justice, in front of thousands of members of the public, was also fine, as no one ever listened to anything Jesus said anyway.

Though necessarily painted with broad strokes, the epic production showed how the gamesmanship of religious leaders and Roman administrators led to Christ's crucifixion. But I found myself seeing the saviour's face not in that of David Cameron, despite the lamb-suckler's attempt to portray himself as our political messiah, but in the face of another idealist who, like Jesus, found himself caught in a political crossfire. You know him. His name is Nicholas William Peter Lemsip Nutkin Horsebrass Bladderwrack Clegg. The man better known to you as Nicholas "Nick" Clegg.

Nick Clegg too was betrayed, not by a kiss in the Gethsemane garden, but by a handshake in the rose garden. And, selflessly, Nick Clegg sacrificed his career, if not his life, to keep Cameron's most savage Conservatives muzzled, so that we might not suffer quite as much as we might have done otherwise. And given a choice between him and some actual criminals, you would choose the latter, and abandon him to his fate. Nick Clegg. King of the Liberal Democrats. You did not recognise him when he came.

And now I wonder, what of that suckled lamb, the unwitting political pawn? The naked children climbing the Giant's Causeway on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy were so traumatised by their childhood association with the group's first dodgy album that they all grew up to be attention-seeking TV chefs - Stefan Gates, Gregg Wallace, Rusty Lee, and the Hairy Bikers. In 10 years, when you see a violent and red-faced sheep, drunkenly bleating its shame in a Cotswold field, will you recognise it as, like Nick Clegg, just another casualty of this filthy campaign?

Some of the music I saw live in my 1st ten years of gig going

Our first ever guest on Book Shambles was Stewart Lee, and with his new book, March of the Lemmings, just released he’s back in the studio this week with Robin to chat about it. Given the new book is about Brexit, there’s a lot of chat about Brexit, finding the comedy in, but also talk of Steve Jones, William Blake, Marvel comics and what Robin and Stew need to do to make sure they remain members of the metropolitan liberal elite…

To hear the extended edition of this, and all, episodes, support the podcast at patreon.com/bookshambles

My first DVD, a recording of the 2004 Edinburgh show, "Standup Comedian".

Recorded at The Stand in Glasgow in March 2005 & released by 2Entertain in October of that year.

Within days of release, despite superb reviews, 2entertain decline their option to do a second one.

The 2007/8 show was recorded at The Stand, Glasgow on April 7th '08 and was released on 28th of July through Real Talent.

This is an audio CD version of the show that was filmed for DVD.

Last Wednesday our chief Brexiter Boris Johnson dressed up in a Sikh costume to visit a Bristol gurdwara. There he told the alcohol-abstaining supplicants to take bottles of Johnnie Walker to Indian relatives to speed post-Brexit booze exports, leading one to comment that had he made that suggestion in India the foreign secretary would have been killed immediately. Another successful Boris Johnson PR exercise.

That said, I don’t think Boris Johnson was seeking to pique the Sikhs. Indeed, Boris Johnson’s own wife, Marina Wheeler QC, is half-Sikh, though it is not clear which half, so it is difficult to deduce anything from this. It might be just her leg and some bits of one of her arms. I don’t know. This notion is a minefield of potentially explosive cultural sensitivities, both gender- and faith-based.

Personally, I think the Sikhs’ reaction is a perfect example of that Political Correctness Gone Mad™ that they have now. In respect of his pernicious Brexit lies, it is not necessarily wrong that Boris Johnson should be punished indiscriminately by the full force of whatever belief systems are most unforgiving, but he shouldn’t be slain for saying “whisky” to a Sikh. No one should.

Nonetheless, an expensively educated hominid like Boris Johnson, doing the sensitive job he does, should have a subliminal awareness of cultural taboos. The Sikhs’ offence is Eton college’s failure. Perhaps fewer soggy biscuit competitions after lights out, and more comparative religion, headmaster!

And gurdwara-gate definitely calls into question Boris Johnson’s fitness for the role of foreign secretary, a position he is unlikely to occupy after 8 June anyway, especially in the event of a Corbyn win.

But Boris Johnson’s biggest cultural cringe happened earlier in the week, in far away Newport, south Wales. The Conservatives consider Wales invisible to mainstream media, which is why they sent Boris Johnson there in the first place. But my friend the Welsh mystic Carlton B Morgan sent me the following email.

“Apparently, Boris Johnson came to Newport market yesterday. I had sadly just vacated the place having ate a vegan breakfast with Fakin’ Bacon, so there but for the space-time continuum goes a smart-alecky remark I could have made to the odious sap.”

“Anyway,” the vegan punk visionary continued, “this have I gleaned: BJ approached the Negative Zone comics stall and said to the comics man, ‘Oh! When I was a youngster I wanted to be the Incredible Hulk™. The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets!’ I thought you might like to know. Nos da.”

Sure enough, Wales Online was now reporting the story of Boris Johnson™’s disastrous visit to the Gwentish market. Apparently Boris Johnson™ declined to eat a suspected hash cake; said, “this is one of those cakes that you can both have and eat”, but then, illogically, did not eat the cake which he had; painted some concrete letters that spelled out his name, like a clever fat baby; placated a weeping Nigerian; was booed about the miners; and having told the Negative Zone man that his favourite character was the Incredible Hulk™, was met with the response, “You’re halfway there, if you don’t mind me saying, Boris”. Pow!

In less than a minute, I found four interviews, from 2009 to 2015, in which Boris Johnson™, each time citing the comic book quote “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets”, said he would like to be the Incredible Hulk™.

Perhaps quoting a comic book is one of those little tricks clever Boris Johnson uses to appear down with the normal people, irrespective of his actual feeling for the work itself, having long since made the concepts of truth and expediency indivisible in his own mind.

Johnny Marr told David Cameron he wasn’t allowed to listen to the Smiths; Bruce Springsteen disavowed Ronald Reagan’s absorption of Born in the USA; and 80s anarcho-punks Flux of Pink Indians were privately dismayed by the Countryside Alliance’s misappropriation of their album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks to soundtrack its campaign against rural post office closures.

And likewise, Boris Johnson™ absolutely cannot have our Incredible Hulk™ – no way man! You’ve taken our future. At least leave us our comic books.

I emailed various comics creatives to solicit their opinions on Boris Johnson™’s desire to actually be the actual Incredible Hulk™, the most succinct coming from exiled Hulk artist Gary Frank.

“I can’t help feeling that Boris Johnson™ slightly missed the point of it all,” wrote Frank, “in that Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, doesn’t actually want to get angry, become stupid and then smash everything to fuck. Do you think Boris Johnson™ misread the Hulk comics as a sort of Tony Robbins self-help guide to fulfilling your potential?”

But dig a little deeper into the Hulk’s genesis, and it seems Boris Johnson is right to identify with the creature, but not for the reasons he imagines. The early American comic book superheroes were authored almost exclusively by liberal Jewish visionary autodidacts, and lean heavily on Hebrew mythology.

Hulk was created by Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) in 1962, and though influenced by Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the character is best understood through the 16th-century tale of the Golem of Prague, as indeed, is Boris Johnson™ himself.

Having made a man-monster from magic mud to protect his community, Rabbi Loew soon finds he, like Bruce Banner after he unleashes his inner Hulk, loses control of the creature, which heads off on a psychotic rampage, destroying everything, though stopping short of telling Sikhs to buy whisky.

Finally the golem is subdued and stuffed back into the attic, leaving the rabbi – like Theresa May or Donald Tusk, depending on your politics – to clear up the mess the deranged creature has made.

At the end of the second issue of The Incredible Hulk (July 1962), Bruce Banner wakes from the fever-dream of a night spent as the monster, dimly aware of his responsibility for the destruction around him. In torn rags, he says, “Tell me – quickly – what happened? I – I can’t remember – it’s like an ugly fading nightmare!”

Banner’s haunted face recalls nothing so much as the face of Boris Johnson, as he emerged the morning after the Brexit vote, in denial of the destruction that his own inner Hulk had wrought.

Boris Johnson was always the Hulk, all along. And he always was the golem. The ancient legend claimed him at birth, and it knew Boris Johnson better than Boris Johnson knew himself, as legends are wont to do. And now his attic awaits.

Stewart Lee is touring his new show, Content Provider, throughout 2017; see stewartlee.co.uk for details

NonCensored is a weekly round up of Harriet Langley-Swindon's very popular, very real daily radio show, completely non-Censored (but with all of the rubbish edited out).

This week Harriet and Producer Martin are joined by the Telegraph's Siobhan Connery to explain the genius thinking behind Trussonomics; the current Diversity Correspondent Eshaan Akbar takes a leaf out of Stormzy's book; and The New Statesman's Tim Dalton gives us the inside scoop on the current state of the Labour congregation.

There's also an extended interview with comedian Stewart Lee, who talks to Harriet about being part of the woke elite, whether dogs will ever learn to fly, and why Ant & Dec are cowards. Stewart's stand-up specials Snowflake and Tornado are currently available on BBC iPlayer, and his new show Basic Lee is at the Leicester Square Theatre until mid-December, and then tours nationwide until April 2024.

Thanks to Rosie Holt (@RosieIsAHolt), Brendan Murphy (@NotMurphy), Eshaan Akbar (@EshaanAkbar), Sooz Kempnner (@soozUK), Bethany Black (@beffernieblack), Gareth Gwynn (@garethgwynn), Stewart Lee and Ed Morrish.

Stop me if I’ve told you this one before, but 20 years ago, a BNP-supporting aunt of mine forwarded me a document, purporting to be a scholarly explanation of why Muslims were inhuman, by a particular academic from a particular university. Even back in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days, I still did a quick fact check, before calling my aunt to say: “You have to be a bit careful with these sort of things, Auntie. Neither the professor that wrote that article, nor the university it says he’s from, actually exist.” “That’s as may be,” she said, “but I still think he makes a lot of valid points.”

The fact that my aunt knew the anti-Islamic man was not real did not stop her using his work to reinforce her prejudices. If I had realised the extent to which her adoption of the research of a man she knew did not exist was a prophecy of the way the whole country was soon to think, I would have joined my friend Roger in emigrating to the Pyrenees before Brexit to set up a pinball machine renovation business.

It was during the Brexit era that feelings trumped facts, and now not being able to prove anything is no barrier to policy and public pronouncement. But Tuesday’s Sky News appearance by the Ipswich Tory MP Tom Hunt, when he doubled down on his belief that “it’s not xenophobic to not want to feel like you’re living in a foreign country”, marked a new fact-free high-water mark. Hunt’s translucent interview with Sophy Ridge pivoted on words such as “feel” and “think”, while details and statistics remained conspicuously absent. “Well, I think it’s, you know,” Hunt explained, “I think if you walk into your town centre, I think if you’re, you know, you’re hearing almost people speaking English is almost a rarity.” Perhaps Hunt is confused. What he is actually hearing is a Suffolk accent, where a man talking about a “waddledickie” is a describing a donkey and not simply suggesting another Tory MP has done something unspeakable to a duck. Allegedly.

The fact that 88% of people in Ipswich speak English as a first language did not deter Hunt from his opinion-based opinion. “Well, I think that lots of people do find that,” he continued, “lots of, lots of people, lots of people when they walk into their town centres and city centres across the country often feel that way.” Oh well. If we feel it, it must be true. Facts? So pre-Brexit!

Hunt went on to conflate failure to integrate with a rise in shop theft. “In the town that I represent we’ve got shop theft on the rise and there is one community that is disproportionately behind the shop theft.” Presumably the “community in question” was an ethic minority of the type that spoke their own language in a town centre, a city centre, otherwise there would be no link between shop theft and integration, but Hunt felt obliged to whistle his dog discreetly. Presumably, the “community in question” responsible for shop theft wasn’t, for example, simply the Shop Theft Community. But, Ridge asked, did Hunt have any data to back this opaque assertion up?

“I’ve been to 12…” Hunt began, “…only a few months ago I went to 12 different shops in the town centre.” It is good, at least, that the shops were different shops, and that Hunt didn’t just question the same shopkeeper over and over again, as that would have invalidated his research. “They all said exactly the same thing,” he asserted. “It’s something which nobody disputes that locally. Nobody disputes that locally. There is analysis done, and there’s lots of… and every single shop we went to said that… And I think that actually that view I have expressed is actually a mainstream view shared by the majority of people in the country.”

It may well be that “the community in question” are responsible for Ipswich shop theft. But if your geography GCSE coursework was based on talking to 12 shopkeepers and didn’t take into account a comparative study of how low income affects shop theft in other communities, it would be invalid. Statistics are tricky like that. But Hunt isn’t really that interested in the truth. He just wants a common enemy to consolidate his Conservative customer base. His own party has filtered millions of pounds of public money to donors and supporters via questionable Covid equipment provision schemes, but ignore the Industrial Scale Fraud Community, and let’s go after the bloke from the “community in question” stealing a Twix.

This is who Hunt, Conservative MP for Ipswich, is. Before entering politics he picked radishes. He picked leeks for a week, but his employer soon returned him to radish work, leeks presumably being too complex for him; he wants to make flying the union flag compulsory in all schools; he does not believe Boris Johnson should have been fined for his Covid parties; and, predictably, he believes the National Trust is “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’”. (He is another reminder to National Trust members to make sure they vote online by 3 November in the AGM to prevent the board being stuffed with culture war candidates who share Hunt’s views, from the Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust.)

I love Ipswich – for its historic clock, for its innovative and resolutely regional Eastern Angles theatre company and because it was the home of Alan Davey of Hawkwind and Hawklords – but if the people of Ipswich return Hunt at the next election, then when their town centre, or city centre, is finally claimed by the rising seas, I shall not mourn its passing, nor the fen-drowning of its waddledickies. The functions of citizenship are the glory of the citizens.

I am a standup comedian. Last Tuesday, I attended the British comedy awards, my first since 1991. Today an edited Channel 4 highlights package from a Wembley warehouse, back in ’91, in their second year, the awards were a primetime ITV Saturday-night live spectacular in a big South Bank studio. I wrote for Radio 4’s On the Hour, which was up for best radio comedy, a category which, like best live comedian, has now been dropped to make space for TV faces. Broadcasters are no longer required to honour their general arts coverage remit, so there’s more time for revenue-generating film of newsreaders eating insects. Slaves, rattle your chains. Are you all enjoying your new freedoms? What a difference 23 years makes.

I was working the next two times I was up for British comedy awards, nearly two decades later, and absconded. But people had raised money for the rights to release the third series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle commercially, which was nominated this year, so I thought I should go, as it’s hard to make the stake back in a world where the public expect to steal all content for nothing.

Besides which, I have become the sort of person who declines to attend events on principle, but where my absence is not noticed anyway. When I won two British comedy awards in 2011, it wasn’t mentioned in any newspapers. And my 2012 Bafta acceptance speech was cut from TV, perhaps because I told the presenter, Kate Thornton, that acclaim was a random phenomenon, like cloud patterns, into which you read significance at your peril.

Nonetheless, the thought of going to the British comedy awards was terrifying. In a possibly psychosomatic state, the flesh on my lower left leg had taken on a play-dough texture, and I could move it around in clumps beneath my skin. Could the thought of having to sit alongside celebs I’d done routines about have brought this on? Or was I a new kind of human, like Sir Ian McKellen or Janelle Monáe? Then I thought, what if I don’t go? What if I sent a different version of myself instead, more confident, better dressed?

Hiding in plain sight, barely in regulation black tie, I arrived at Wembley in a tassled Native American jacket, rodeo shirt, braided bola necktie, and snakeskin boots. I was a half-breed tracker, a bounty hunter, behind the lines in enemy territory. I ploughed straight through the mandatory photo-ops corridor un-photographed, the Ghost Who Walks, and into the hospitality room, where I shook hands with people I’d ridiculed and sipped red wine, his drink, not mine. And when Jonathan Ross slagged me off from the stage the outlaw me was still reading the awards programme unaware of what was said. The camera caught this, and I transcended the whole charade. “Are you laughing at my mule?”

They got to my categories, best male TV comic and best comedy entertainment programme. Lee Mack got the first, and Graham Norton the second. And I realised I’d been lying to myself. Through a mixture of indefensible arrogance and mathematical logic, I had assumed, without acknowledging it, I’d win both. I’d won both for the second series, three years back, and the third series was demonstrably better than the second, so what had changed?

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think for a moment I am the best standup in Britain, and if this was an award for live standup, and I was up against any of the hundreds of inspirational acts I see on the live circuit, then I would never have been arrogant enough to assume that I deserved anything. But this was TV standup, live standup’s idiotic attic-bound relation, and a world through which I soar like a mighty eagle through a cloud of diseased gnats.

Lee and Graham accepted their awards on video. My acceptance speeches, which I realised with a sudden regretful surge, I had composed unconsciously in my head that week, had things positive and not untrue to say about the other nominees, but Lee said nothing and Graham said he didn’t even know who he was up against. I was shocked. I realised I had convinced myself I was here to help the DVD investors, but I had been entangled by vanity and ambition. I had chosen to attend the British comedy awards which, once attended, could not be unattended, like the worm-ridden dog egg in the infant school playground which, once seen, cannot be unseen.

There were six people on our table. The bottle of red had disappeared, and with it my cowboy-Indian creation. I had turned to pear cider in search of answers and soon I was me again, fearful and drowning. The button popped on my rodeo shirt. It wasn’t mine to wear. Jack Whitehall won king of comedy for the third year running, and I found myself shouting out “shame!” and, inexplicably, “class war!” When the filming ended people started asking me to do interviews, but I growled them away because he’d gone and I was just me. I couldn’t find my wife and descended into a kind of prima donna panic attack, like the husband in The Vanishing, and then we grabbed a cab, the last helicopter out of Saigon, and got home and watched a 70s George Carlin DVD, and in the morning my zombie leg was human again.

On Wednesday, I went to do a benefit show at the Bloomsbury. None of the standups there were even aware the awards had happened, and when I saw the TV coverage later that night, my shouting had been surgically erased and vast swaths of the night seemed unfamiliar. Was Danny Dyer, who suggested slashing your errant girlfriend’s face with a knife in a lads’ mag agony column, really invited to hand out best comedy entertainment programme? My mind was blank, as if I had shut down, like the mice in our hallway that go catatonic as they wait for the cat to kill them.

It seems unlikely there will be another British comedy awards. In the end, they chased the capricious populist audience with their phone-ins, even as the former award-winners’ votes drove them towards neglected gems such as Toast of London, and ended up in a curious no-man’s land between Nuts and the Independent on Sunday. Even Jonathan Ross couldn’t save them. It was interesting to attend twice, a quarter of a century apart. But I know now that I will never, ever go to anything like that again. Maybe the bounty hunter will come out of the wardrobe. I’ll need to lose some weight to get into his trousers. Good. I could do with looking after myself a bit. I’m in this for the long haul. There are no short cuts.

William Blake wrote that we can see heaven in a wild flower and hold infinity in the palms of our hands. He also thought a massive flea with a bald man’s face and no pants on came into his bedroom at night, and I speak as a fan. But, like Blake would, I think we can see the world – and everything that is wrong with it – in a National Trust scone. Bear with me.

Until November last year, the Conservative-appointed Victoria and Albert Museum trustee Zewditu Gebreyohanes, formerly of the Tufton Street-linked thinktank Policy Exchange, was the director of Restore Trust. This is an organisation dedicated to parachuting its own preferred right-leaning candidates, including the evangelical Stephen Green, who has denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals, on to the seemingly impregnable board of the supposedly “woke” National Trust. What even is woke, anyway? It’s the kind of word Jonathan Gullis MP uses to describe anything he doesn’t like, like a Welsh-language edition of the Highway Code, olives on a pizza, or women in lace-up shoes.

Restore Trust is backed by Neil Record of the Tufton Street climate crisis denial bodies Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch. In November last year, Restore Trust director Gebreyohanes left to join the pro-Brexit free-market cheerleader the Legatum Institute, which shares senior fellows with various Tufton Street thinktanks and is funded by businessman Christopher Chandler’s Dubai-based Legatum Group. Legatum is also the chief backer of the loss-making GB News, along with the former banjo-playing twat from Mumford & Sons’ dad, Sir Paul Marshall, the would-be Telegraph buyer, who has shared Islamophobic material online. There are ponds full of frenziedly spawning toads with more dignity than this financier clusterfuck.

Having failed to discredit the National Trust at Restore Trust, Gebreyohanes made it her first job at the Legatum Institute to publish a report on 21 March called National Distrust, calling for the secretary of state for culture, media and sport and the Charity Commission to intervene in National Trust governance.

A 2019 report penned by Gebreyohanes’s former Tufton Street-linked Policy Exchange shaped Sunak’s criminalisation of climate protesters, so these documents are dangerous in the hands of a failing government desperately looking to create enemies it can appear to defeat. I’m going to write a report blaming the Princess of Wales for all potholes, bedbugs and haemorrhoids and see if it can get any traction in Sarah Vine’s Daily Mail column. But I suppose I’ll have to wait until Kate is well enough to be a legitimate tabloid target again.

Gebreyohanes’s National Trust report was immediately amplified in the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, by the former National Trust chairman Sir William Proby, who repeated a false claim about National Trust procedures – namely, that National Trust trustees in effect select the National Trust council themselves – that the Telegraph, which appears to run whatever messages Restore Trust wants it to, has already had to apologise for when it printed it for the first time in November last year, so that apology obviously worked.

Currently, the Restore Trust website, reeking of desperation, criticises the National Trust not for wokeness, but for its inability to make “decent scones”, in response to a story that conveniently ran last weekend in the Mail. “Critics have condemned the use of a vegetable-based spread instead of butter in the baking as a ‘virtue-signalling betrayal’, in what looks like yet another woke row involving the charity,” reported both Chris Pollard and Daisy Graham-Brown, working as a Woodward and Bernstein-type team. The offending vegan scone was then pictured alongside a pot of decidedly non-vegan clotted cream.

In the same Mail story, Restore Trust’s chair, Cornelia van der Poll, a retired lecturer from the now closed private Oxford college St Benet’s Hall, “slammed the move”, seeing the scone as symptomatic of a wider malaise and saying: “It is unfortunate that the National Trust can’t even get scones right, let alone bigger issues such as properly looking after the properties in its care.” The report also quoted a sickened 64-year-old National Trust member from Bury St Edmonds (sic), who said: “I can’t stand the taste of the new scones,” adding: “They are flatter, drier and have an unappealing texture.” And the Eurosceptic MP Bill Cash, who, Pollard and Brown reported, “often has tea and scones in the House of Commons”, rose from his coffin of moist earth and rats to wonder, utterly nonsensically, if the National Trust will “stop selling Madeira cake because of historical events in Madeira”. But what are the Madeiran historical events Cash worries about? The island appears most notable for its six different species of identifiably different indigenous mice, each separated by high hills, ensuring they do not mix, a situation Cash, in his opposition to freedom of movement, would surely approve of.

But then the bombshell! Within days, the National Trust’s tirelessly diligent and heroic director of communications, Celia Richardson, had wasted her precious time to reveal that National Trust scones have been vegan for “many years”, and indeed in 2018 the Daily Mail itself invited readers to celebrate “truly scrumptious recipes from a new book by the National Trust”, including scones featuring no butter and “115g (4oz) of soft margarine”. Stick your Madeira cake in your Notting Hill bolthole, Bill Cash! Cornelia van der Poll!! You know nothing of scones, so why should we trust your opinions on the maintenance of historic properties? And guess what, National Trust member, 64, of Bury St Edmonds!!! The scones are the same! There’s something wrong with your mouth!!! And Bury St Edmonds isn’t even a real place!!!!

But why does Restore Trust want control of the National Trust so badly? Is it about the properties? The land? Or can it really be that Legatum’s Dubai-based backers just really love scones made with butter? I think we should be told.

YOU CAN PROVE ANYTHING WITH FACTS - IN T-SHIRT FORM !!!

Crime is down 14%, but only if you ignore Fraud, which has bloomed under lockdown, in which case it is up.
Boris Johnson didn’t attend any parties under lockdown, except all of the ones which he did attend under lockdown.
The vaccine could only be developed because we had left the EU, even though it was developed before we left the EU.

There has never been a time where the very nature of facts has been so in doubt.
There has never been a better time to own an ethically crafted Stewart Lee ‘You can prove anything with facts’ leisure garment.

There has never been a better time to celebrate in fabric a statement gifted to us by a furious taxi driver somewhere near Shepherd’s Bush in the Spring of 1999.

You can prove anything with facts, so order a You Can Prove Anything With Facts garment today!
Wear your bewilderment with pride!

Make a bold and yet vague statement of uncertainty!!
Tell the world in no uncertain terms that you are certain of nothing!!!
Other catchphrases are available

Wax-face have made them in black and a Navy / indigo blue version, on Anthem Organic Tee Shirts who are a UK based ethical tee shirt manufacturer.
They cost £20 each and will start shipping from Tuesday 15th February 2022.
Content Provider facemasks cost £15 each and are in stock and shipping now!
Hoodies of Content Provider and All The Cheeses are also in stock and shipping now. They cost £35 each.

2. BASIC LEE

I will be launching a new Stand-up tour, BASIC LEE. The London Autumn 2022 dates are on sale w national 2023 dates to follow

LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE

Tues - Sat from Sept 20th to Dec 17th 2022

(EXCEPT Oct 18th - 29th and Nov 11^th)
7pm (4pm performance Saturday 12^th November

After a decade of ground-breaking high concept shows involving overarched interlinked narratives, massive sets and enormous comedy props, Lee enters the post-pandemic era in streamlined solo stand-up mode. One man, one microphone, and one microphone in the wings in case the one on stage breaks. Pure. Simple. Classic. Basic Lee. "The world's greatest living stand-up comedian." The Times

TICKETS HERE

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3. EDINBLUR 2022

Two shows, on sale March 3^rd. A w-i-p at 10 am and a final go on the Snowflake half of Snowflake Tornado at 1.50pm

Basic Lee (Work In Progress)

Stand 1, 10am (10.00hrs) - 3^rd – 27^th August (days off 15^th & 16^th Aug)

Early morning work-in-progress towards the 2022/3 stripped-down, mobile, reactive new stand-up show. One man. One mic. And another mic in the wings in case the stage mic goes down.

BASIC LEE (Work In Progress) TICKETS HERE

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STEWART LEE: Snowflake

The Stand’s New Town Theatre (Grand Hall), 1.50pm (13.50hrs) - 3^rd – 28 August (days off 15^th & 16^th Aug)

Snowflake. Last chance ever to see the culture-war themed second act of the Snowflake Tornado double bill that toured 2019-2022. The other half, Tornado, played the same venue in pre-pandemic 2019. Satire! Swearing!! Retching!!! And a song!!!!

SNOWFLAKE TICKETS HERE

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4. THE SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO TOUR

After the abrupt end of the covid-cancelled sell-out tour of Snowflake/Tornado in March 2020, Stewart Lee, “the world’s greatest living stand-up” (Times), returns to more than 60 towns and cities in the UK.

The tour, a double bill of two 60-minute sets, back-to-back nightly, will include new material for 2022.

The Snowflake half has been heavily rewritten in the light of the two years the show has been laid off, looking at how the Covid-Brexit era has impacted on the culture war declared on lovely woke snowflakes by horrible people.

The Tornado half questions Stew’s position in the comedy marketplace after Netflix mistakenly listed his show as “reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.”

All shows are 14+ apparently. If you are under 14 you are too immature to enjoy my swearing and farts.

March 2022

Thursday 3rd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS

Friday 4th March 2022 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS

Saturday 5th March 2022 - Playhouse, Salisbury - TICKETS

Sunday 6th March 2022 - De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill On Sea - TICKETS

Wednesday 9th March 2022 - Theatre Royal, Wakefield - TICKETS

Thursday 10th March 2022 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS

Friday 11th March 2022 - The Courtyard, Hereford - TICKETS

Saturday 12th March 2022 - Grand Theatre, Swansea - TICKETS

Monday 14th March 2022 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS

Tuesday 15th March 2022 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS

Wednesday 16th March 2022 - The Sands Centre, Carlisle - TICKETS

Thursday 17th March 2022 - Royal Hall, Harrogate - TICKETS

Tuesday 22nd March 2022 - Churchill Theatre, Bromley - TICKETS

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS

Thursday 24th March 2022 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS

Friday 25th March 2022 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS

Saturday 26th March 2022 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS

Sunday 27th March 2022 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS

Tuesday 29th March 2022 - City Hall, Sheffield - TICKETS

Wednesday 30th March 2022 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS

Thursday 31st March 2022 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS

April 2022

Friday 1st April 2022 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS

Saturday 2nd April 2022 - Storyhouse, Chester - TICKETS

Tuesday 19th April 2022 - Wyvern Theatre, Swindon - TICKETS

Wednesday 20th April 2022 - Rose Theatre, Kingston - TICKETS

Thursday 21st April 2022 - The Hawth, Crawley - TICKETS

Friday 22nd April 2022 - The Hexagon, Reading - TICKETS

Sunday 24th April 2022 - Mayflower Theatre, Southampton - TICKETS

Tuesday 26th April 2022 - Cliffs Pavilion, Southend On Sea - TICKETS

Wednesday 27th April 2022 - The Central Theatre, Chatham - TICKETS

Thursday 28th April 2022 - Derby Theatre, Derby - TICKETS

Friday 29th April 2022 - Lyceum Theatre, Crewe - TICKETS

Saturday 30th April 2022 - Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield - TICKETS

May 2022

Tuesday 3rd May 2022 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS

Wednesday 4th May 2022 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS

Thursday 5th May 2022 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS

Friday 6th May 2022 - St. George's Hall, Bradford - TICKETS

Saturday 7th May 2022 - Gala Theatre, Durham - TICKETS

Sunday 8th May 2022 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS

Tuesday 10th May 2022 - Palace Theatre, Watford - TICKETS

Wednesday 11th May 2022 - Palace Theatre, Watford - TICKETS

Thursday 12th May 2022 - Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells - TICKETS

Friday 13th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS

Saturday 14th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS

Sunday 15th May 2022 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS

Tuesday 17th May 2022 - Corn Exchange, Cambridge - TICKETS

Wednesday 18th May 2022 - Corn Exchange, Cambridge - TICKETS

Thursday 19th May 2022 - The Baths Hall, Scunthorpe - TICKETS

Saturday 21st May 2022 - New Theatre, Peterborough - TICKETS

Sunday 22nd May 2022 - The Grand, Wolverhampton - TICKETS

Monday 23rd May 2022 - Hippodrome, Bristol - TICKETS

Tuesday 24th May 2022 - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - TICKETS

Wednesday 25th May 2022 - The Forum, Bath - TICKETS

Friday 27th May 2022 - Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe - TICKETS

Saturday 28th May 2022 - Winding Wheel, Chesterfield - TICKETS

June 2022

Tuesday 7th June 2022 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS

Wednesday 8th June 2022 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS

Sunday 12th June 2022 - Queen's Theatre, Barnstaple - TICKETS

Friday 17th June 2022 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS

Saturday 18th June 2022 - Hippodrome, Darlington - TICKETS

Sunday 19th June 2022 - Festival Theatre, Edinburgh - TICKETS

Monday 20th June 2022 - Perth Theatre, Perth - TICKETS

Tuesday 21st June 2022 - Perth Theatre, Perth - TICKETS

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 - Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen - TICKETS

Thursday 23rd June 2022 - Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen - TICKETS

Sunday 26th June 2022 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS

Wednesday 29th June 2022 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

Thursday 30th June 2022 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

July 2022

Friday 1st July 2022 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

Saturday 2nd July 2022 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

Sunday 3rd July 2022 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

Sunday 3rd July 2022 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

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KING ROCKER DVD/SCREENINGS

Our critically acclaimed doc KING ROCKER is available on DVD, and the s/track is out on various formats too.

https://www.firerecords.com/product/king-rocker-ost/

Following the huge recent success of ‘King Rocker’, spotlighting The Nightingales as one of the best bands in Britain, comes the soundtrack and DVD to one of 2021’s break-out films. This special ‘King Rocker’ bookback DVD/CD deluxe package includes the full length feature film with over 90 minutes of extras and unseen footage alongside the soundtrack.

This collector’s edition is beautifully encased with 20 pages of unreleased behind the scenes photos and liner notes from Michael Cumming and Stewart Lee.“Lee tells Lloyd’s story with skill, passion and verve” The Times. Comedian Stewart Lee and director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast Of London) investigate a missing piece of punk history. Robert Lloyd, best known for fronting cult Birmingham bands The Prefects and The Nightingales, has survived under the radar for over four decades. But how, if at all, does Robert want to be remembered?

The anti-rockumentary ‘King Rocker’ weaves the story of Birmingham’s undervalued underdog autodidact into that of the city’s forgotten public sculpture of King Kong, eschewing the celebrity interview and archive-raid approach for a free-associating bricolage of Indian food, bewildered chefs, vegetable gardening, prescription medicines, pop stardom and pop art.

All of the highlights from the film are here, along with rarities which won’t appear on any of the deluxe reissues of the Nightingales’ catalogue, among them 7″ versions of “Use Your Loaf”, the Bob Luman hit “Let’s Think About Living” and “Black Country”, a glam remix of crowd favourite “Thick And Thin” and a version of Christy & Emily’s “Ghost” which rivals the Nightingales’ take on TLC’s “Unpretty” for sheer beauty.

The only act with roots in the punk era that have gone on to make records more captivating, cutting and entertaining today than at any point in their past; 2022 will be a busy year for the Nightingales, with months of live dates planned, a limited edition remix 12″, deluxe reissues of both ‘Hysterics’ and ‘In The Good Old Country Way’, and a hardcover book collecting Robert’s lyrics.“An inspiring comeback story that feels profoundly necessary” The Quietus

I will be hosting a number of screenings of the film this Summer, including at some festivals:

Bluedot (21^st-24^th July https://www.discoverthebluedot.com) w Bjork Sugarbabe, The Mogwais, Spiralized 3, Bionic Radio Workshop, Adam Bufftone, Andrew O’Neil’s History of Metal, Kiri Te Pritchard-Mclanna, Robbie Nince, David Olusoga, Ahir Shah, Garrett Millerillerick, Tim’s Twitter Party, Ardman Animatronics, Clangers, and Delia Derbyshire O’Day

Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham Thurs 28^th July https://macbirmingham.co.uk/event/king-rocker-q-a

Deer Shed (29^th - 31^st July https://www.deershedfestival.com) w Dry Cleaners, Billy NoMates, Treeboy & Archie, Yard Actors, Snapped Angles, The Love Eggs, and David O’Doherty

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6. SAVE THE WYE

I love the Wye. Let’s save this brilliant river from human foulness.

https://action.wildlifetrusts.org/page/86529/action/2

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7. I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME 2022 HAPPENINGS

OXIDE GHOSTS: THE BRASS EYE TAPES + Q&A JAN 29^TH - MARCH 5^TH

I will be hosting the Crouch End screening of this March 21^st

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Brass Eye, a rare opportunity to see Michael Cumming’s cult film Oxide Ghosts, which will only ever be screened at these live events.

January 29th – March 5th are important dates for the director Michael Cumming and for television history. Twenty-five years ago, in 1997, that six-week period saw the transmission of Chris Morris’ groundbreaking and controversial comedy series, Brass Eye.

Directed by Michael, Brass Eye was the start of a career that saw him go on to work with a veritable who’s who of comedy talent: Stewart Lee, Matt Berry, Mark Thomas, Jo Brand, David Walliams, Matt Lucas, Sir Lenny Henry, Rashida Jones, Omid Djalili, Mark Steel, Doon Mackichan, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Jon Hamm & Larry David to name but a few

Michael is still directing cutting edge work. His latest series - Toast Of Tinseltown - aired on BBC2 during January & February 2022, to both critical acclaim and Twitter trending.

Made from hundreds of hours of unseen and behind the scenes footage from his personal archive, Oxide Ghosts shares insights into the process of making the legendary TV series Brass Eye. Michael directed the series and both pilots and, over a two-year period, witnessed the highs and lows from a very personal perspective. The film carries the blessing of Chris Morris and provides a unique glimpse of his extraordinary working practices.

At these special 25th anniversary shows, in his introductions and post film Q&As, Michael both builds and shatters Brass Eye myths.

This event is a must for fans of the series but will appeal to anyone with a curiosity about how great comedy is made.

Michael Cumming is a director & filmmaker whose back catalogue - aside from Brass Eye - contains such gems as The Mark Thomas Product, Snuff Box, Mark Steel Lectures, Lucas & Walliams in Rock Profile, Matt Berry’s BAFTA winning sitcom, Toast Of London and its follow up, Toast Of Tinseltown and, with Stewart Lee, the critically acclaimed, break-out music film of 2021, King Rocker.

‘Oxide Ghosts offers a well-judged and very rare insight into (Brass Eye’s) making, encapsulating the fun and covert excitement that went on while the project was still under wraps, before all the legal wrangling kicked in. If you're an admirer of the show and the opportunity should arise for you to see Oxide Ghosts, have some self re-cocking-spect and do so without hesitation' – Andy Murray, Chortle

Produced & directed: Michael Cumming. 2017.
Featuring: Chris Morris, Ted Maul, David Jatt, Austin Taseltine. Event duration: 100mins approximately.
Intro: 10 min + Film 60 min + Q&A 30 min (approx.)

MARCH
2^ND Lancaster Dukes,
3^rd Kendal Brewery,
5^th Glasgow Stand,
6^th Edinburgh Cameo,
7^th Leeds Hyde Park Picturehouse,
8^th Newcastle Stand,
9^th York City Screen,
10^th M’cr Chapeltown Picture House,
11^th Liverpool FACT,
12^th Bangor Pontio,
14^th Birmingham MAC,
15^th Wolverhampton Lighthouse,
16^th Halifax Square Chapel,
17^th Wigan Old Courts,
18^th Derby Quad,
19^th Oxford Phoenix,
20^th London Gate,
21^st London Crouch End Picture House,
22^nd London Chiswick cinema,
23^rd TBC,
24^th TBC,
25^th Southampton Harbour Lights,
26^th Brighton Duke Of Yorks,
27^th Worthing Connaught,
28^th Cambridge Arts Picturehouse,
29^th London Fulham Rd Picturehouse,
30^th London Finsbury Park Picturehouse,
31^st London Hackney Picturehouse,
APRIL 1^st London Brixton Ritzy

http://www.michaelcumming.co.uk/oxide%20ghosts/

STEW SAYS - ‘I have attended Michael’s Oxide Ghosts screenings and it is a brilliant and hilarious art/comedy experience. The film can never be seen anywhere except at these screeingings which makes the whole evening very special.’

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Echo & The Bunnymen Scally psych-survivors APRIL 6^TH Bexhill De La Ware (I just saw them in London. It was superb!!!)

The Bohman Brothers Various outgrowths of the fabulous surreal sound-artists The Bohman Brothers are suddenly active. You must see them at least once in your life. BOHMAN BROTHERS March 4^th Nottingham Rammel Club, 5^th M’cr Anthony Burgess Foundation, April 29^th Reading Rising Sun Arts. SECLUDED BRONTE March 20^th Rotterdam ?, 26^th Amsterdam OCCII, 27^th Rotterdam Worm, April 19^th Zurich Institut, 20^th Geneva Café 12, 21^st Paris Les Instants Chavires, 22^nd Brussels Les Ateliers Claus, 23^rd tba, 25^th Café Oto London. MORPHOGENESIS - ORIGINAL LINE-UP OF ART NOISE LEGENDS June 12^th Café Oto London

Stiff Little Fingers Still impossibly inspiring NI punk survivors MARCH 10^th Bristol Academy, 11^th Cardiff SU, 12^th B’ham Academy, 14^th Nottingham Rock City, 16^th Troon Hall, 17^th Glasgow Barrowlands, 18^th Newcastle City Hall, 19^th Leeds Academy, 21^st Northampton Roadmender, 24^th Bournemouth Academy, 25^th M’cr Academy, 26^th Camden Roundhouse AUGUST 4^th Blackpool Rebellion, OCTOBER 1^st- 2^nd Sheffield Academy

Robyn Hitchcock Psychedelic surrealist MARCH 17^th Cambridge Storey’s Field, 19^th London QEH, 20^th Leeds Brudenell, 22^nd M’cr Night & Day

Doug Stanhope As all serious fans of stand-up know, the American iteration of the artform is currently lagging somewhat compared to the manifestations produced in other English speaking territories, but the mighty Doug Stanhope - the desert compound king of crudely eloquent despair - is an exception. A reformed Libertarian with a compelling stage presence, Stanhope is one of those rare comedians with the skills and talent to make you laugh, against your will, on his terms, whether you agree with his worldview or not. MARCH 24^th Glasgow Academy, 25^th Newcastle City Hall, 26^th Sheffield Academy, 27^th Leeds Academy, 30^th Birmingham Academy, APRIL 1^st M’cr Apollo, 3^rd London T&C.

Melt Banana Endlessly inspiring Japanese pop-art-noiseniks MARCH 31^st Margate Elsewhere, APRIL 1^st Reading South Street, 6^th Cambridge Portland Arms, 9^th Huddersfield Parish, 12^th Edinburgh Caves, 13^th Glasgow Stereo, 14^th York Crescent, 17^th Bristol Exchange, 18^th Cardiff Ifor Bach, 22^nd Brighton Patterns

Alex Winter London Prince Charles Cinema 31^st March - April 3^rd. A series of events featuring live contributions from Bill & Ted star, Death Wish III actor and innovative director Alex Winter. I met Alex over 30 years ago on a chat show when he was promoting his deeply eccentric film FREAKED and he was a sincere and talented man, ploughing his own furrow.

https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/Seasons?e=419

Wet Leg Sure to be briefly massive, these waspish Amish-styled Boston-indie-circa-1989-sounding barnstormers hit the road APRIL 17^th Edinburgh Mash, 19^th Leeds Brudenell, 20^th M’cr Gorilla, 21^st Bristol Trinity, 23^rd B’ham Institute 3, 24^th Norwich Arts, 26^th London Scala, 27^th Southsea Wedgewood, MAY 28^th Warrington Weekender

The Nightingales Birmingham post-punk leg-ends and stars of KING ROCKER in their biggest ever tour and their biggest ever venues APRIL 19^th Glasgow Cathouse, 20^th Liverpool Cavern, 23^rd M’cr Deaf Institute, 24^th Leeds Key, 26^th Norwich Epic, 27^th Oxford Academy, 29^th Brighton Patterns, 30^th Birmingham Academy, MAY 2^nd Bristol Thekla, 3^rd London Garage, 5^th Leek Foxlowe Arts, 7^th Nottingham Bodega

Red Guitars Reunited 80’s politicised Hull post-punks w afropop inflections in original line-up configuration. APRIL 19^th Leeds Old Woollen, 21^st M’cr Night & Day, 22^nd Glasgow Attic, 22^nd Hull Adelphi, 23^rd Brighton Green Door, 29^th London 100 Club, 30^th Birmingham Institute

Maria Bamford As all serious fans of stand-up know, the American iteration of the artform is currently lagging somewhat compared to the manifestations produced in other English speaking territories, but the mighty Maria Bamford - the Empress of Embarrassment - can hold her own against the best British, Irish and Antipodean acts, and she has an utterly unique comic persona, a kind of crippling bafflement. She is making some rare - and typically modest - British and Irish appearances. APRIL 21^st Dublin Liberty Hall, 25^th Glasgow Glee, 27^th Birmingham Glee, 28^th M'cr Academy, 30^th London Hackney Earth

Low Mormon minimalists APRIL 25^th Edinburgh Queen’s Hall, 26^th Dublin Vicar St, 27^th M’cr Cathedral, 28^th Brighton St George’s, 29^th London St John At Hackney, 30^th Bristol Trinity

Bridget Christie - Who Am I? Woke comedienne. APRIL 26^th - 30^th, Leicester Sq Theatre London.

Flamin’ Groovies - You must see these superb ‘70s American Stones/Byrds/Beatles styled survivors. MAY 3^rd York Cowgirl, 4^th Newcastle Cluny, 6^th Glasgow Room 2, 7^th London 100 Club

Peter Case performed the original version of Hangin’ On The Telephone with The Nerves, perfected powerpop with The Plimsouls, and then invented Americana as we know it as a solo artist in the ‘80s. Today he looks and sounds like some ‘60s Greenwich village blues-folk legend and is touring the UK with the country-punk-bluegrassman and former Long Ryder Sid Griffin. MAY 27^th London Water Rats, 29^th High Wycombe Kingsmead House, 30^th Hambrook Village Hall, JUNE 1^ST Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen’s Club, 2^nd Birmingham Kitchen Garden cafe.

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8. IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS 2022

Sydney Poitier - woke actor (1927)
Magwa - woke Cambodian landmine hunting rat (2013)
Burke Shelley - bass Budgie (1950)
Ronnie Spector - woke Ronette (1943)
Rachel Nagy - Detroit Cobra (1975)
Robin Le Mesurier - Womble (1954)
Andy Ross - Disco Zombie/nice man of Britpop (1956)
Barry Cryer - King Of Comedy (1935)
Norma Waterson - Mighty Folk Matriarch (1939)
John Nolan - man Behind The Magnolia Curtain (1966)
Betty Davis - She Might Get Picked Up! (1944)
Ivan Reitman - He was not afraid of no ghost! (1946)
Mark Lanegan - Screaming Tree rehabilitee (1964)
Bruce Anderson - MX-80 man (1950)
Anna Karen - ‘70s public transport icon (1936)
Sam Lay - Howlin’ Wolf/Butterfield/Dylan drums (1935)
Mikey Chung - Reggae session regular (1950)
Fred Van Hove - Belgian stringbender (1937)

'I'd imagine watching this at home would be incredibly tedious.'

That's Stewart Lee's own verdict on the second series of his Comedy Vehicle. It comes in the second episode, during an apparently interminable conversation he has with a fictitious estate agent that turns into a running meta-commentary on the progress of the show. 'Unbearable' is another description that crops up; 'problematic' another.

Lee takes self-criticism to new levels. Not only is his stand-up strewn with references to how acutely aware he is that his languid, repetitive delivery style will be anathema to many, but the routine is interspersed with snippets of awkward interviews with Armando Iannucci, mordantly interrogating him over his inaccessibility and lack of actual jokes.

Iannuci is the headmasterly voice of reason, asking: 'You're not going to go on about crisps for the whole fucking show are you?' Lee is the schoolboy, trying to be belligerent, but knowing he's been caught out.

These tense Frost/Nixon-style exchanges, shot in stark monochrome, were hidden 'red-button' extras on the first series; here they form a more integral part of the show's  fabric - adding extra judgmental layers to Lee's relentless self-analysis.

It's not the only change. Budget cuts have expelled most of the sketches, although both the first two episodes - at least - feature a closing film to tie up various threads, with Lee taking centre stage. But the more intense focus on the stand-up is to be welcomed.

The show has also moved to a later transmission time after Newsnight 'so we don't have to compete against actual entertainment,' as Lee dryly notes. It will make little difference. Those in awe of his dense, alternative stand-up will seek him out whatever the timeslot - but it's always going to be a hard sell to recruit more casual viewers.

This is the antithesis of the big shiny-floor stand-up shows like Michael McIntryre's Comedy Roadshow. Atmospherically shot in the more intimate confines of Mildmay Working Men's Club in North London, the Comedy Vehcile recreates the more alternative feel of the best 'above-a-pub' style clubs, rather than the neon-soaked glitz of an arena tour. Which again means, as if the point needs underlining, that it's not for everyone.

During that imaginary estate agent dialogue, Lee morosely points out that 300,000 people turned off during a similarly drawn-out piece of futility about rappers in series one. Like the doorman of an exclusive club, he takes satisfaction in dispelling those who don't live up to his exacting standards; though doing so brings him no joy, just affirmation of a futile existence.

The first episode, going out tomorrow night, revolves around charity - a multi-threaded yarn that starts and ends with his grandfather living in a strange nest on an unvarying diet. Along the way, he slips in the C-word with rare artistry and takes a perfectly-aimed shot at the nastiness underpinning Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights, while exposing all the inner workings of his stand-up. The second episode is titled London, and contrasts family life in the capital - including the lengths to which parents go to get school places for their children - with the tedium of living in the countryside.

They are extended routines which Lee worked though in live shows in the second half of last year, and the thought and artistry that goes into both writing and performance should shame any soundbite comedian tossing out easy gags on panel shows. They will always be more famous than Lee, but the perceived 'difficulty' of Lee's approach is what makes these half-hour jewels of stand-up so richly rewarding.

* Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle returns to BBC Two at 11.20pm on Wednesday May 4.

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a hedgehog and known that it wanted to die? I have. But wait, I am getting ahead of myself.

On Halloween, as we headed west in our Volkswagen Passat, I realised the most horrifying thing in the vicinity was our own family estate. With our car belching toxic death, courtesy of a secret cabal of heartless engineers hellbent on the end of humanity and the ecosystem as a whole, I joked to my wife, “Next Halloween I’m going dressed as a Volkswagen!” “You should,” she replied, stony-faced and expressionless, like a cement yak, “and you certainly wouldn’t have any trouble providing the noxious emissions.”

(This may seem like amusing marital banter to you, but my wife knows full well that I have had a long history of painful bowel problems, beginning with an unexpected bout of ulcerative colitis as a teenager, and culminating in hospitalisation as a result of diverticulitis in my late 30s, a condition which still requires careful daily management and, admittedly, can lead to occasional and unpleasant flatulence. I include her supposedly amusing comment here only to bolster the legal dossier I am preparing in advance of our divorce.)

I think it was the TV fisherman Robson Green who said, 'You cannot step twice into the same river'

When I was a child in the 1970s, my mother would take me out into deepest rural Worcestershire, on the Saturday before 5 November every year, to see the ageless traditional celebrations in the tiny village of Monk’s Norton. We stayed each year with the elderly Dr Hemming, for whom she had worked as a medical receptionist in Birmingham, before he retired in the mid-60s after a scandal involving a missing carton of Drinamyl, some ancient manuscripts, a replacement aortic valve, and a dead weasel.

“How nice to see you again, Dr Hemming,” I would say politely, as my mother had rehearsed me in the Hillman Imp, “I hope you have had a pleasant year.” “Years are meaningless, boy,” he would reply, vaguely, “Time is an illusion. Flesh is a gossamer shroud. One day I will take on any body I choose. Would you like some hot eels?” I always enjoyed our visits.

As the flames flickered outside his window, Dr Hemming would stare at them in a thaumaturgic trance through a haze of self-prescribed temazepam and hand-pulled Watney’s Party Seven, and my mother and I would head out into the famished night to seek out the ancient pagan England of our collective northern European subconscious, and some sausage. You have not known sausage until you have known it while watching an effigy of Joe Gormley burning on a bonfire in 1975 in a solidly Conservative-voting Worcestershire village.

While I applaud how the American tradition of trick or treat has taken off in my London neighbourhood, I worry it has made Halloween too commercial. This year our neighbours were ritually intimidated by resentful children dressed respectively as Siri, the Playboy Bunny logo, and an Amazon Fire TV Stick. Another satirically minded youngster appeared inside the severed head of a pig with a Conservative party rosette pinned to its face, which I thought inappropriate, as we live in an orthodox Jewish area.

But I wanted my own children to enjoy the same festivities that I experienced as a child, and so it was we loaded up the Deathwagon last Saturday morning and headed to Monk’s Norton. The hamlet was hemmed in now by the heavy traffic of the M5 and the M50, and smells more of fuel than it did 40 years ago, but is still identifiably itself. Dr Hemming was long dead, I expect, but as we drove at dusk down the leafy lane past the vicarage where the obtuse physician had lived, I saw a small white-faced boy staring all-knowingly from the window, as if heavy with the apprehension of eternity, and then withdraw.

I think it was the TV fisherman Robson Green who said, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” I had perhaps been foolish to expect the Monk’s Norton festivities to have remained unchanged. In the 70s, each year an effigy of a trade unionist burned on the pyre – Jack Jones, Derek Robinson, Len McCluskey, Mick McGahey – but now even in relatively homogenous rural Worcestershire, Britain was clearly divided in who it chose to demonise.

Upon the village green, by torchlight, in the flickering shadows of the tall Tudor houses, rival factions squabbled, dragging different effigies towards the unlit bonfire. Here was Jeremy Clarkson, innocently piling his fist into a selfish minion’s face; and here was a selfish minion, stupidly allowing his face to connect with Jeremy Clarkson’s fist, denying us future Top Gear; and here was David Cameron, in farm girl’s frock and bonnet, borne aloft in plywood pigsty, fair Chloris, innocent and pleased; and here, a papier mache Martin Winterkorn, head of Volkswagen, strangling the green earth with his clean hands. And so on, and so on, a multitude of villains and no clear candidate for the conflagration.

And then a shrill voice cut through the commotion: “Burn them all.” It was the little boy from the window, in pantaloons and waistcoat, with a cold authority beyond his years. As the people of Monk’s Norton surrounded the bonfire, hurling their hated effigies onto it, I was sure I saw him crawl between their legs and into the pyre. Before the head of the Round Table, dressed amusingly as a sponging Pacific Islander displaced by rising sea levels, could light it, I persuaded him to let me crawl inside. The boy was not there. But a hedgehog was. I recognised the look in its eyes. It knew its time was up.

When I was a child, there were 30 million hedgehogs in the UK. We were cavalier about their abundance, and their tyre-squashed early morning bodies were so commonplace it seemed they must be in almost endless supply. Now – because of climate change and the collapse of their food chain – there are less than a million. We can’t even save the hedgehog. How do we expect to save the world?

Last month, we imagined there was a hedgehog in our garden, by virtue of a telltale track, and we invested in hedgehog food from an online outlet. But it has proved to be a phantom hedgehog, and our nightly replenishment of the illusory hedgehog’s saucer was an act of delusional wish-fulfillment. I think the cat ate the hedgehog food. That would explain why he has developed bristles and a taste for worms. There should have been a warning on the box. I think so anyway.

A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 until 8 Jan. Stewart Lee is the curator of next year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, at Prestatyn Pontins, 15-17 April 2016

CONTENT PROVIDER BBC2

A 2 hr film of the Content Provider Tour is PROBABLY on BBC2 on Saturday 4th August, I think, at 11 pm, not 28th July or July 8th as previously announced.


This is to give the material the best possible chance of being out of date as the political structure of the UK collapses around us.

---

COMEDY VEHICLE ON I-PLAYER

All four series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle will be going live on lucky Friday 13th of July at 10am as a box set on the BBC I-player.
To save you all the bother here's a series breakdown.


The first series was filmed ten years ago this year. What a different world it was then!



Series 1) (2008) ragbag of unrelated routines of a reasonable quality interrupted with sketches that have been decreed of mixed virtues, with Stew in a suit at execs' insistence.



Series 2 (2010) and 3) (2013) Routines specifically worked out and written for half hour format with a single film item each week and Stew in a suit jacket.

Series 2 featured a guitar.



Series 4) (2015) The most stylistically extreme routines of the project performed, to an often baffled crowd compromised by BBC liggers and people's suspicious friends, by Stew in a shirt.

---

NIGHTINGALES DATES

I am supporting Birmingham post-punk Legends The Nightingales doing 15 mins of my 80s material on seven of their autumn tour dates.


Thu SEPT 20 OXFORD, THE CELLAR

https://www.seetickets.com/event/the-nightingales/the-cellar/1227777


Fri SEPT 21 BRISTOL, THE EXCHANGE

https://www.seetickets.com/event/nightingales/exchange/1227678


Sat SEPT 22 PORTSMOUTH, WEDGEWOOD ROOMS

https://www.seetickets.com/event/the-nightingales/wedgewood-rooms/1225457


Tue OCT 2 BIRMINGHAM, HARE & HOUNDS

https://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Birmingham/Hare-And-Hounds/The-Nightingales/13216234/


Wed OCT 3 LONDON, MOTH CLUB

https://www.seetickets.com/event/nightingales/moth-club/1227677


Thu OCT 4 CAMBRIDGE, PORTLAND ARMS

https://www.wegottickets.com/greenmind/event/439332


Sat OCT 6 BRIGHTON, GREEN DOOR STORE

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/439847

---

CAPRI-BATTERIE W STEWART LEE

You can buy Bristol Fashion, an industrial jazz album which we improvised in an hour, here for £7.


https://capri-batterie.bandcamp.com/album/bristol-fashion

---

Meanwhile, I Arrogantly Recommend

1) David Grubbs - Cafe Oto, London - Sat 11th Aug. Cage-ian Americana minimalist



2) Sun Ra's Arkestra - Union Chapel, London - Thurs 16th Aug. Space-jazz veterans in massive ensemble.



3) Stiff Little Fingers. Still buoyant N Irish punks.


3rd Aug - Cheese and Grain, Froome

24th Aug - Academy Dublin

25th Aug - Custom House S1, Belfast



4) Bridget Christie - What Now? (New stand-up show)



SEPTEMBER 2018


Friday 7th - WHAT NOW? - Tobacco Factory, BRISTOL - 8pm - 0117 902 0344 - TICKETS

Saturday 8th - WHAT NOW? - Tobacco Factory, BRISTOL - 8pm - 0117 902 0344 - TICKETS

Thursday 13th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Thursday 20th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Friday 21st - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Saturday 22nd - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS



OCTOBER 2018


Friday 5th - WHAT NOW? - Theatre Royal, WINCHESTER - 8pm - 01962 840 440 - TICKETS

Saturday 6th - WHAT NOW? - Corn Exchange, EXETER - 7.30pm - 01392 665938 - TICKETS

Tuesday 9th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Wednesday 10th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Thursday 11th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Friday 12th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS



NOVEMBER 2018


Thursday 1st - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Friday 2nd - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Saturday 3rd - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Tuesday 6th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Wednesday 7th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Thursday 8th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Friday 9th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Saturday 10th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS

Saturday 24th - WHAT NOW? - Nuffield Theatre (NST City), SOUTHAMPTON - 7.30pm - 023 8067 1771 - TICKETS

Tuesday 27th - WHAT NOW? - The Junction, CAMBRIDGE - 8pm - 01223 511 511 - TICKETS



DECEMBER 2018


Monday 3rd - WHAT NOW? - Playhouse, NORWICH - 8pm - 01603 598598 - TICKETS

Tuesday 4th - WHAT NOW? - Playhouse, NORWICH - 8pm - 01603 598598 - TICKETS

---

EDIN FRINGE FEST

I am not in the Edinburgh Fringe this year but if I was I would remind you to prioritise looking beyond the Big 4 at Free Fringe, Stand, Summerhall etc, and I would see the following 32 shows this August.



ATHENA KUGBLENU - New stand-up. U'belly, Bristo Sq. 1st - 26th. 5.30pm

BEANS ON TOAST - Scatalogical satirist songsmith. Voodoo Room 14th-26th

BLUESWATER PRESENTS BLUES - Surgeon's Hall 3rd - 25th

BLUESWATER PRESENTS QUEENS OF THE BLUES - Surgeons Hall 3rd-25th

BLUESWATER PRESENTS SMITTEN - See this trio! Jazz Bar, 3rd, 20th, 21st.

CARMEN FUNEARE - Unmissable devised spectacular. EICC. 16th - 19th. 9.30

DAVID KAY - Surreal Scottish s-up. Stand 3rd - 12th. 6.30pm

DAVID O'DOHERTY - Low energy whimsy. Assembly George Sq. 1st - 27th.

DRENCHED* - Folkloric comedy drama. Pleasance Ctyrd 3pm 1st - 27th

DYLAN MORAN - Wobbly literary s-up. Stand. 14th - 26th.

ELEANOR TIERNAN - Ace Irish s-up. Banshee Labyrinth. 4th - 26th 1.40pm

GAMES - Henry Naylor play on far right. Gilded Ballon. 2nd - 27th. 4.30pm

GOBLIN - Italian prog s/track specialists. Summerhall 5th, 6th. 5.20 & 8.30

JO CAULFIELD - Dependably caustic veteran. Stand 3rd-26th. 7.40pm

KEN - Terry Johnson on Ken Campbell. Pleasance Dome. 1st - 27th. 3.20pm

LEWIS SCHAFFER - Miserable US s-up. Laughing Horse. 2nd - 26th 8.30pm

LLOYD LANGFORD - Welsh weirdo s-up. Banshee Labyrinth. 4th - 26th. 10pm

LOVE ON BLUE CANVAS 1890 - New drama. Space. 20th - 25th. 7.05pm

NISH KUMAR - TV satirist. Monkey Barrel. 2nd - 26th 4.30pm

PAUL CURRIE - Irish surrealist clown. Heroes@Hive. 3rd - 27th. 8.40pm

PAUL FOOT - Slithery absurdist s/up. U'belly, Cowgate. 2nd - 26th. 7pm

PAUL SINHA - Smart political s-up. Stand 1st - 26th 4.55pm

PHIL KAY - Improvisational Scotts s-up. Heroes@Boteco 2nd-12th 4pm

PUSSY RIOT - Putin bating Russian punks. Summerhall 10th - 19th. 7pm

MICHAEL ROTHER - Krautrock veteran of Neu fame. Summerhall 12th

SACRED PAWS - Afro-rock flavoured indie band. Summerhall 24th.

SATANIC RITES OF ROBIN INCE - Horror s/up. Stand 14th-26th. 7.35pm

SEYMOUR MACE - Outsider s/up. Stand 2nd - 26th 1.30pm

SIMON MUNNERY - The comedians' comedian. Stand 3rd - 26th. 3.20pm

SPOON CARVING WORKSHOP - White Stuff. 8th, 12th 1.30pm

TONY LAW - Canadian surrealist s/up. Monkey Barrel. 2nd - 26th. 3pm

TREVOR LOCK - Psychedelic s-up. Bannermans. 4th - 26th. 3pm



*Daniel Drench. West Cornwall's most prolific and unstable storyteller, presents a bewildering and potentially moving interpretation of the classic Cornish folk tale 'The Mermaid of Zennor'.

Drenched is a one man comedy-theatre piece, challenging the form of a traditional solo performance with a combination of storytelling, character comedy and physical theatre. 1-27 August - Pleasance Courtyard @ 3pm

A dead ant has more dignity than Boris Johnson. In north London, the day that Johnson inconclusively resigned was also Flying Ant Day, when thousands of frenzied male ants, and a few new queens, fly the nest to mate. The males are largely useless and, after spaffing, expire on the pavements and die. But unlike the noble male ants, having been commanded to leave his nest, Johnson, his spaff spaffed, refuses to budge. Look at a dead ant, Boris Johnson, look! And learn what it means to serve.

Last weekend, Rupert Murdoch’s mysteriously motivated Sunday Times released a recording of then London mayor Johnson talking to a woman he appeared to know well. He loses his temper as he gives her the brush-off – “I’ve been incredibly fucking busy! I tried to meet you! Jesus fucking assholes!” – and explains that Kit Malthouse has been unable to give her a job because she was considered “too friendly” with Johnson. Did anyone notice that story? What did it mean? Johnson’s serial shit no longer makes any impact. How do we satirise it? I am worn down.

I hoped music could respin my mojo, planning to see five gigs in the tiny window between my last tour and the try-outs of the new one. Three were poleaxed by Covid and kids, but on Monday I made it to a purpose-built arena on waste ground in east London for the amazing Robots of Abba ™ ® show. Four completely convincing robots of the 1970s Abba performed disco-futurist anthems in a Ballardian post-industrial wasteland of cultural death, before a happy audience of soma-satiated citizens in a sham democracy. Apart from one misguided section, when the quartet were reimagined as petrified Norse gods in a baffling animated saga, it was magnificent. Only the dead would not have danced.

But the unreal entertainment also made me remember bleak 1970s sci-fi such as Logan’s Run, Westworld and Rollerball as much as the joyous ’74 Eurovision. Somewhere at the back of the room I am sure Iain Sinclair was lurking, trousers bicycle-clipped, penning a distressing London Review of Books piece about the Abba dystopia. But the concept was utterly owned. The robots of Abba even went off before the encore for a break, presumably for a nice drink of refreshing oil.

Afterwards, in the black night of an outdoor breeze-block and plywood bar, still discharging Abba hits, I met an old university friend, at her somewhat desperate-sounding request, who had been part of the project’s programming team. Like the anonymous woman who sent her phone recording to the Sunday Times last week, Lovelace – let’s call her that – wanted to purge. She thinks these so-called “columns” mean I am a journalist and will know how to proceed. That’s true desperation.

Lovelace was the chief bioengineer for the Agnetha Fältskog robot – the blond one from Abba, to you. Invited to an early demo of the technology in June 2019, in order to smooth over the siting of the arena, Johnson had been quite taken with the replicant. If you’ve seen the show you will understand why. “Johnson asked me, outright, without a hint of shame,” Lovelace confessed, voice trembling, “if there was some way he could spend the night with the Agnetha robot. He was the prime minister, after all, he explained, and because the robot wasn’t alive, it wouldn’t count as infidelity. It would, he told me, in all honestly, ‘be the same as spaffing into a dishwasher. Or a concrete mixer.’”

Lovelace took a second sip of whisky and continued, shaking: “You’ll understand, Stew, if you work on these robots, you begin to feel almost a friendship for them, but the financiers leant on me, and Johnson arranged to have Aggie delivered secretly to what he called ‘the Daylesford entrance’ of Downing Street. I don’t know what happened – she’s a gentle soul, really – but the next thing we heard, Aggie was on a rampage through central London at 4am, trying to find her way back here to Pudding Mill Lane, the only home she knew, and using her considerable robot strength to maim, and sometimes even kill, any overweight blond white men she encountered.”

I found Lovelace’s tale implausible, blaming it on the stress of working on the project. Why hadn’t any of this made the news? “Do you think a government mouthpiece like Chris Mason is about to tell BBC viewers that Boris Johnson provoked a robot of Agnetha Fältskog into killing fat men? Aggie hid out in the old Hackney marshes filter beds for a day. The Anni-Frid robot knew Aggie better than anyone, so we changed her programming and set her loose the following night to bring her in. The two robot Abba girls battled to a standstill in the West Ham stadium sometime around 2am, redhead against blond, like someone’s sick fantasy. God help us if the security footage ever surfaces. Aggie’s not been the same since. She just goes through the motions on stage. Like a robot. But what do I do? Who do I tell?”

The next night I was at Gloucester’s 19th-century Guildhall for the 45th anniversary tour of Belfast punk survivors Stiff Little Fingers. The 64-year-old Jake Burns looks as much like his teenage self as 72-year-old Agnetha does hers, but has heroically elected to avoid replacing himself with a hot robot, and instead leads the band through an unmediated set of timeless and inspiring punk protest songs, as a friendly crowd of mainly fiftysomething fans stress-test the sprung floor. Good as the robots of Abba were, real people are much better than machines, and as SLF encored with a coruscating Alternative Ulster I thought about how Spaffy Johnson’s bungled protocol may yet unravel the fragile but functional agreement that had seemed unimaginable in 1978. Which is where we came in.

AMONG the customary luvvie banter, there came in The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday) a significant revelation. Kirsty Wark was hosting the writers and cast of Jerry Springer: The opera, the show which, in the early 2000s, progressed rapidly from Battersea to Edinburgh to the National Theatre, found more than a million viewers on BBC2, and from there went on tour, pursued by crowds of protesters. The revelation was not that the participants were surprised by the fury of their opponents — though they might have anticipated some push-back when a show notorious for its depiction of Christian figures was rewarded with licence-payer funds; rather, it was that Jerry Springer himself — who had always publicly praised the show — was secretly incensed.

One of the co-writers, Stewart Lee, told the story. Springer visited the show in Edinburgh and was delighted by the first half. But, with Act Two, when the action moves to a cartoonish Hell, a message emerges which Springer found deeply insulting. As one lyric has it, “Nothing is wrong, nothing is right.” The moral relativism, Springer declared, was tantamount to Holocaust denial.

The anecdote passed without further reference by Ms Wark’s guests; nor did Mr Lee, in the course of a lengthy vilification of his Christian critics (which included a riff on the involvement of Tufton Street lobbyists), find the opportunity to address this most damning of accusations. It is one thing to bat away those faith-affiliated protesters: “nice people” who had all apparently been manipulated by Stephen Green and Christian Voice. In an ironic twist, the threat to freedom of speech posed by Mr Green and others backfired, and led to the abolition of the Blasphemy Act. But the objection raised by the show’s real-life hero deserves more respect.

Since it was founded in 1982, The Wire magazine has covered a vast range of alternative, experimental, underground and non-mainstream music. Now some of that knowledge has been distilled into The Wire Primers: a comprehensive guide to the core recordings of some of the most visionary and inspiring, subversive and radical musicians on the planet, past and present.

Each chapter surveys the musical universe of a particular artist, group or genre by way of a contextualizing introduction and a thumbnail guide to the most essential recordings.

A massive and eclectic range of music is celebrated and demystified, from rock mavericks such as Captain Beefheart and The Fall; the funk of James Brown and Fela Kuti; the future jazz of Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman; and the experimental compositions of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Genres surveyed and explained include P-funk, musique concrète, turntablism, Brazilian Tropicália, avant metal and dubstep.
The Wire Primers is a vital guide to contemporary sounds, providing an accessible entry point for any reader wanting to dig below the surface of mainstream music.

Stewart has written a chapter on The Fall for this book.

Last Monday I attended the worst family dinner I have ever experienced. It honoured a visiting American with whom we were barely acquainted, but were somehow obliged to entertain.

A few years previously our guest had suggested on a radio show that, despite thinking she was “crazy”, he could have “nailed” my late mother. She feared he was “stalking” her. Our guest had then clarified that he would only have had sex with my mother if she had an Aids test, perhaps because she had shaken hands with Aids sufferers.

Our guest had also called my own wife “nasty”, and dismissed climate change, a cause close to my green father’s heart, as a hoax. We made uneasy small talk with the American’s wife, whom we all knew he had cheated on with an adult film actress. It was a dreadful, awkward evening.

And then I woke up. I was not Prince Harry. And I was not having dinner with Donald Trump. I had merely fallen asleep in front of coverage of Trump’s state banquet after eating a red leicester.

In reality, selfless Prince Harry sucked up his humiliation, and the insults to his wife and dead mother, and did his royal best to secure the buccaneering post-Brexit trade future already guaranteed by his fellow diner Long John Liam Fox. But the reality of Trump’s visit was arguably more bewildering than any cheesy dream.

At the banquet held in his honour, Trump praised the allies’ joint wartime effort against the tyranny of the Nazis, whom he seemed to view as uniformly bad. And yet, in 2017, Trump had said the neo-Nazi groups at Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, where an anti-fascist protester was murdered, contained “some very fine people”.

American Nazis, of course, are likely to be “very fine”, reflecting as they do the understandable anxieties of the ordinary American voter. But second world war European Nazis were just bad, period.

Trump tweeted that he had been welcomed to the UK by thousands of well-wishers, but he demonstrably wasn’t, to our national shame. Trump was welcomed, instead, by a pathetic statue of him sitting trouserless on a toilet, and a childish Trump-baby shaped barrage balloon, later burst by a woman who is forbidden by law to approach water.

And in a field below Trump’s incoming flight, an infantile student had mown a frankly immature massive penis into the grass which, though it lacked the flecks of ejaculate and hairy testicular sack normally present on such images, was nonetheless utterly puerile. The anti-Trump demonstrators need to learn that, though they were entitled to dislike Donald Trump himself, it was wrong to disrespect the institution of the American presidency, which existed as an entity entirely separate from its incumbent.

In a similar fashion, Rick Jones, Monica Rambeau and Carol Danvers have all been Captain Marvel at different times, dumbass. Given the medical inaccuracy of their mown penises, it is not surprising that none of the stone-cold losers in Parliament Square on Tuesday understood this.

As Trump touched down on Monday, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt described the decision by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to boycott Trump’s banquet as “virtue signalling of the worst kind”.

Previously, the phrase “virtue signalling” had been confined to the sticky pages of Spiked, or angry YouTube rants posted by involuntarily celibate 33-year-old men still living in their mothers’ basements until Steve Bannon recognises their talents and gives them a job at Breitbart.

It was good to see Jeremy Hunt introduce the phrase “virtue signalling” into the mainstream, as it can only help elevate a national political discourse that is rapidly becoming unhelpfully polarised and terminally toxic. Perhaps Hunt can heal broken Britain.

At his royal banquet, Trump paid tribute to the 24,000 British, American and Canadian troops that fought the Nazis in the D-day landings. But, having listened to the rhetoric of the preceding days, I had begun to wonder if the allied troops that plunged into those cold and foreboding French waters weren’t just virtue-signallers of the worst kind themselves. They seem rather too keen to let us all know how much they disliked fascism.

Led astray by that Marxist liberal elitist Winston Churchill, the allied troops of the D-day landings were unable to distinguish their dislike of Adolf Hitler from the institution of the chancellorship of Germany, which existed as an entity entirely separate from its incumbent, and deserved their respect. And there were, after all, probably “some very fine people” in the Nazi ranks.

I am joking of course, and attempting to turn the values of Trump’s apologists back on themselves, though one has to make this explicit in these irony-free days, where all comment is shorn of context and shat out into the shitosphere. But, I confess, I did look in on Tuesday’s anti-Trump protest.

On The Mall, I fell into step behind a trio of middle-aged men in purple Harringtons, loudly looking for trouble. When they got to Parliament Square they targeted elderly protesters and phone-filmed themselves accusing them of disrespecting “our boys”, though there was no anti-armed forces angle evident.

I thought about Prince Harry, one of “our boys”, who fought on the frontline in Afghanistan as a helicopter gunner; who flew towards fate and did not dodge duty, despite the Taliban’s declared intent to kill him.

And I thought of Harry at Monday’s events, hugging the tail end of Trump’s train, like a dishonoured cuck, as the alt-right would say, absorbing the humiliation of his wife and mother, rained down by the visiting alpha male in a stinging golden shower.

The prince, whose family has been forced to dine on the wrong side of history’s table, was obediently impotent in service of the national interest, and a compliant pawn in Trump’s re-election campaign. We owe our war heroes more than this sorry capitulation. Don’t we?

"It's not as good as I remember it," says the Stewart Lee quote on the front of this box set, no doubt prompting shops up and down the country to reinforce their doors for fear of being crushed by marauding punters blinded by such giddy hype. The quote, however, sums up Fist of Fun's appeal perfectly - not in the sense that it's no good, but that it trades on exactly this kind of cynical, studenty humour.

Fist of Fun was Stewart Lee and Richard Herring's first TV outing, airing on BBC2 in 1995 and sometimes notching up 3 million viewers a week, according to the reams of added commentary included here. Yet it's never had a DVD release before and has gained something of a cult reputation, largely down to the standing of its creators: Lee in particular, who went on to co-write Jerry Springer: The Opera before reinventing himself as one of the best modern standups around.

For many, the appeal of the show, which combined sketches and standup, will be largely of the nostalgia trip variety. Lee and Herring arrived at a time when comedy was dubbed "the new rock'n'roll" (unlike now, when Mumford and Son's success is proving that rock'n'roll is the new comedy) and Fist of Fun traded on this notion while simultaneously mocking it. So you'd get the obligatory loud shirts, dizzying camera angles and apologies flashing up onscreen explaining that Bill Oddie wasn't in any way sexually excited by birds, but you'd also get Herring revealing to the live audience that Lee's entire idea for the show was to "just copy Newman and Baddiel".

This art of being more knowing, yet ultimately less successful made Lee and Herring a sort of Blur to Newman and Baddiel's Oasis. And that ropey metaphor just about holds up to their fondness for variety and invention. Series one contains a mix of surreal one-liners ("I like my women like I like my coffee ... in a cup"), double-act banter and filmed sketches. There's also much juvenile humour and your enjoyment will rely partly on how much you laugh at jokes about gnats' chuffs. Sadly, as a 31-year-old man, I still laugh at jokes about gnat's chuffs.

Lee's True Fables, which seem to provide the most direct link between the chaotic nature of Fist of Fun and his standup, are especially enjoyable. His retelling of the tale of the hare and the tortoise (as the tortoise and the man) involves the man getting bladdered but still winning the race, because "the tortoise had failed to grasp the man or the race even existed - being only a reptile it had little or no concept of competitive sports."

The show helped propel the careers of a long list of future comics and writers, including Rebecca Front and Al Murray. However, the claim in the sleeve notes that the price of the box set is alone justified by a previously unseen clip of Lee slapping Alistair McGowan dressed as Jesus might be stretching it somewhat. Nice as it is to see McGowan get slapped whatever he's wearing, I'm not sure the box set is worth £25. The bounty of extra material thrown in here to justify the price (scripts, a pilot episode, even incredibly boring press releases) adds new depths to the term "for completists only". But then Fist Of Fun spawned an obsessive, geeky kind of fan. And even though Lee and Herring have both progressed towards more thoughtful comedy, it's fascinating to trace their roots back to these early, anarchic days.

Live vs. Televised Comedy

A comedy audience is a capricious animal. Sometimes it cackles on cue, lapping up punchlines with an almost-Pavlovian predictability. At other times, it merely stares back at you, seemingly unresponsive to the highly crafted material it’s fed. The responses are not always binary like this. Often, the organism mutates and divides into multiple parts, all of which behave differently. One part laughs, a second lays dormant, another walks out of the room altogether.

To anybody who has seen comedy live, this is hardly a novel observation. Humour by its very nature is subjective; not everyone’s going find a performer funny. Not everyone will “get” a joke, appreciate a comic’s intent, or understand a cultural reference. Even when a routine or joke is received as funny, audience reactions will admit of varying degrees. So far, so obvious.

It’s up to the comedian then, drawing on their years of experience, to shape such a heterogeneous lump of bodies into a coordinated, laughing unit. Of course, by virtue of the subjectivity of humour, this (assuming 100% of the audience is not already positively disposed to the performer) is an impossible task. The comedian will try nonetheless. In addition to staple routines and jokes, they’ll utilise improvised riffs, audience interaction, impromptu lines, heckle put-downs, and whatever else is in their comedy armament to tame the beast. Watching a comedian try to win over an audience is akin to watching a bullfight, but one free from any awkward ethical implications and one where the risk to the performer is psychic (a shared feeling of embarrassment) rather than physical. Regardless of whether such risk becomes realised, it’s captivating to watch.

Moreover, this gladiatorial spectacle adds an extra frisson to live comedy that’s largely absent in its scripted, televised counterparts. Shows such as BBC’s Live at the Apollo or Channel 4’s Comedy Gala seemingly fail to broadcast this struggle between performer and audience. The former walk on stage to the latter’s whooping and cheering. They’re onside from the beginning. Sitting at home, the TV viewer will merely see a preformed cult of personality. There’s no contest, no struggle, kein Kampf.

Naturally, comedy observed behind a phosphor screen is going to lack the raw, sensorial stimulation of sitting in a live comedy audience. That’s a truism. Technology can’t yet replicate the immersive experience of being surrounded by other dimly lit sentient beings, their collective gaze focused on the moment-to-moment nuances of the living, breathing performer just 20 metres ahead; quietly judging him as he navigates his way through a background hum of drinking and asynchronous laughs. True, but it isn’t just technological constraints beyond our control that suck the authenticity from live comedy as it’s etched onto TV; the editing process does this too. And editing is within our control. Unfortunately, Live At the Apollo edits its clips with an excessive benignity; performers are cast in an artificially flattering light.

Just ask Nick Helm, a comedian who professed to have “died on stage” at Hammersmith’s Apollo Theatre in September 2015, prompting a thousand audience members to walk out. The edited and subsequently televised clip spins a different tale; a performance peppered with laughs and one that, to the undiscerning viewer at home, “looks like a good gig”.

Just as doctoring pictures of Stalin expunges any signs of the dictator’s political opposition, an overly favourable editing process removes the air of vulnerability from comedy. As a result, the comedian’s stoicism and skill-against-the-odds goes undocumented, leaving us with something that, although funny, is glib and anodyne: a matador pitted against a bull with sawn-off horns.

Of course, editors don’t have to do this. Across four seasons of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, we’re given a window into the pure, unplanned, and unrefined machinations of comedy. Editing each season into six 30-minute episodes ensures the series is televisable, but, in doing so, doesn’t divest us of a crucial layer of entertainment: the comedian vs. the audience contest.

Televised Struggle

Shot in Hackney’s Mildmay Club, a working men’s club that’s a far cry from Hammersmith’s packed 3,632-seater stadium, Comedy Vehicle‘s modest setting more closely resembles the types of rooms in which the bulk of live UK comedy unfolds. The club has a dull, sodium glow.  Audience members are sat around tables. Their faces are weakly illuminated by small, table-top lamps, while pint glasses glint softly in the background. The effect of this setup is to create a kind of low-energy aura that seems more conducive to a jazz ensemble rather than a man hawking his highly polished jokes.

Comporting with such a relaxed affair then, the performer doesn’t walk on to rapturous, sycophantic cooing; Lee’s greeted by more measured applause. This is the beginning of the struggle. The comedian’s the underdog; he’ll have to win them over.

Having performed stand-up comedy since the late ‘80s, Lee’s clearly in his element under such conditions. With an arguably warranted swagger, he plays off the audience, deliberately splits the room and makes sardonic, off-the-cuff comments directly to the camera. Naturally, laughs ensue.

Stand-up comedy, conceivably more so than theatre or live music, relies on two-way interaction between the audience and performer. In its most primitive form, this involves going through routines as mandated by audience laughter. A punchline’s uttered; the audience laughs; the performer pauses accordingly and then proceeds to the next bit. A more evolved exchange sees the performer make comments explicitly about the audience laughter. This, in turn, generates more laughs.

Lee’s a fine exponent of this so-called “meta-humour”. A good example is at the end of “Shilbottle” (Season 3, Episode 1), where Lee is engrossed in a phone call with an imaginary “customer”. By describing the audience reactions to the (non-existent) person at the end of the phone, he’s able to snowball small audience laughs into much larger ones:

Stewart Lee (to customer on phone): “I then say … especially following hot off the heels of the Paxo incident.”

(Mild audience laughter)
(Stewart Lee looks around room to gauge audience response)

Stewart Lee (to customer): “Well a bit, but not enough for it to be a closing ….”
(Stronger audience laughter)

Stewart Lee (to customer): “Well, I don’t know how I’m gonna end this one … To be honest, I was hoping if I keep you on the line long enough, something might come up … The next reasonable sized laugh I get, I’m gonna slam down the phone, call for a blackout and say ‘That’s the end’.”
(Mild audience laughter)

Stewart Lee (to customer on phone): “No that wasn’t enough.”
(Stronger audience laughter)

Such interplay between Lee and the audience is an exemplar of what Erika Fischer-Lichte, Professor of Theatrical Studies at Berlin’s Free University, dubs an “autopoietic feedback loop”:

“Whatever the actors do elicits a response from the spectators, which impacts on the entire performance. In this sense, performances are generated and determined by a self-referential and ever-changing feedback loop. Hence, performance remains unpredictable and spontaneous to a certain degree.”
- Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance (2008:38).

Not all of such audience-performer interaction, however, is “unpredictable and spontaneous”. Sometimes, what may appear to be runaway improvisation is in fact premeditated script, unveiled with impeccable timing. Through clever writing, Lee engineers the predicted audience responses into his routines, thereby setting up further punchlines. As evidenced in “Religion”(Season 1, Episode 1), these lines work synergistically so that a routine builds to large laughs:

“There was a knock at my door…it was one of those Born-Again, Christian evangelists. He said to me, ‘Sir – the answer is Jesus. Now, what is the question?’ And I said to him, ‘Is the question, “For which role, was Robert Powell nominated for a Bafta?”’ And he said, ‘No, it isn’t that.’ I said, ‘Can I have another guess?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Is the question, “Complete the name of this popular early 1970s item of hippy footwear, The – Blank – Sandal?” ‘And he said, ‘No, it isn’t that.’ I said, ‘Can I have another guess?’ …He said, ‘Yes.’  …I said, ‘Is the question “Complete the name of this influential but little-known late 1980s Chicago rock band, The - Blank –Lizard?”’ (Mild audience laughter)  He said, ‘I’ll warn you, if you’re considering recounting this conversation as some kind of stand-up routine…that reference, the Blank Lizard, has a very specific demographic reach.’” (Stronger audience laughter)

In “Childhood” (Season 4, Episode 6), we’re treated to a mixture of both planned and spontaneous audience interaction. Early in the episode, Lee plants humorous phrases, which he’ll repeat later on for further laughs (a widely used comic tool known as a “callback”). That’s the planned part. When he does eventually repeat these lines, he exploits the audience’s different reactions, toying with them in a masterful but nonetheless aleatory fashion. It’s upon this hinterland of improvised crowd-work that he then sculpts perhaps the funniest line in the fourth series: “Audiences like you as good as murdered Robin Williams”.

This is where Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle excels: we, the viewers at home, are given a sense of the comedian’s craftsmanship and finesse, the wielding of skill over an audience. The behind-the-performer camera angles accentuate this sense of mastery, making Lee and his audience look like a conductor and his orchestra. And what is the apotheosis of all of this? Artistic appreciation combined with rapturous laughter—live comedy at its best. But, in contrast to the pristinely edited Live at the Apollo, the viewer is privy to all of the naked comedic groundwork upon which such laughter emerges. To the viewer behind the screen, Stewart Lee has earned those laughs. His struggle is televised. The visible underdog has won.

Raw Comedy

“You are not married to any of this shit – if something happens, taking you off at a tangent, NEVER go back and finish a bit, just move on.”
-Bill Hicks

As enshrined in the fifth of Bill Hicks’ 12 Principles of Comedy, it’s the remit of a stand-up comedian to improvise when things go awry. And in live comedy, things do go awry. Often. Hecklers heckle, glasses smash, and people leave the room, thereby forcing the comedian to “just move on”.

But it isn’t simply a case of “just moving on”. Without wanting to get mired in a discussion of aesthetics, a crude proxy of whether or not something counts as comedy is whether or not it makes you laugh. Stripped of this proclivity, comedy becomes inseparable from a piece of theatre or an interesting lecture. By extension then, improvisation that falls within the realm of comedy also has to be funny. Stewart Lee has little problem here.

In “Satire” (Season 3, Episode 3), Lee enters a routine that ostensibly requires of the audience some sort of familiarity with Animal Park, a wildlife show aired on the BBC. On asking the audience, only one man discloses his knowledge of the show. Later in the routine, Lee returns to him for his input, only to find out the man has left the room and gone to the toilet. This provokes Lee into a long, impromptu but nevertheless hilarious diatribe:

“He’s gone to the toilet? See the fucking level of contempt there! There’s a guy there, he knows this is for a recording for telly, he’s the only person in the room that can help me with this bit; and he’s left… he’s left, leaving no one with any working knowledge of Animal Park in the room! He’s gone to the toilet!

And not only that, but you won’t know this at home, before the recording started, I expressly forbid people from going to the toilet! Not only has he gone to toilet, in direct contravention of my instructions, but he has gone taking with him a piece of knowledge which could have saved this whole bit!

Can I just confirm as well, that this is actually really happening. I don’t want to fucking go on the Internet, and see everyone go, ‘Oh it’s brilliant when he faked that bloke going to the toilet.’ I haven’t.

An actual man, who is the only person here who knows what I am talking about, has left.”

Arguably, someone leaving for the toilet at an inopportune moment is a naturally humorous event; laughs would occur regardless of the comedian’s improvisation. Of course, not all unforeseen events are so congenial.

In “Stand-up” (Season 2, Episode 4) an audience member leaves the room as Lee is playing a song on a guitar, eclipsing a camera shot as he departs. A visibly angry Lee interrupts the song, pointing out the ruined camera shot out before maligning the audience member as a “horrible man”. It isn’t funny. It wasn’t supposed to be. But now there’s an awkward tension in the room. And, as with all such situations, inside or out of a comedy venue, it will have to be diffused with something that is funny: “I’m not having the public in to shows again. If only there were some way of eliminating you from the equation. It was just me and broadsheet journalists.””

On the surface, such a line reeks of hubris. Nevertheless, the audience laughs, and the tension in the room is successfully diffused. Why? According to the Superiority Theory of humour, proponents of which included Plato and Thomas Hobbes, we laugh when we feel a sense of superiority over a person or over a former version of ourselves. Perhaps it is in this instance (as well as in the aforementioned Animal Park scene) that Lee’s vulnerability, his patent lack of control over the audience, leads us to feel superior to him. As a result, we laugh.

Lee certainly does make an effort to appear inferior to his audience. He often turns to the camera, directly acknowledging the mixed responses evoked by his material. Frequent self-deprecatory interview skits (with either Armando Iannucci or Chris Morris) only augment this “comedy pariah” facade.  Again, if there’s a tacit comedian vs. audience contest, it’s obvious who’s the underdog. And, once more, we must praise the editing of Comedy Vehicle. By keeping in all the gory details: the people walking out, the smashed glass during a lengthy routine about Rod Liddle (in “Migrants”, Season 4, Episode 5), as well as the comedian’s improvisations around such setbacks, we’re given a rare taste of the volatility that comes with live comedy.

Given this fidelity to warts and all live comedy (without even mentioning the series’ politically incisive material and the intelligent structure of each episode), it’s a shame that Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle hasn’t been re-commissioned for a fifth season.

Seasons one to three of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle are available on Netflix.

Last Sunday, diners from the Salisbury Zizzi were belatedly advised to burn all their clothes as a precautionary measure; as was anyone who had ever visited a Jamie’s Italian, but for different reasons. Enemies of Putin expire and nuclear threats are proliferating across the Earth. Perhaps the trademark robust diplomacy of the foreign secretary Boris Johnson, deployed via scatological limericks in his chickenfeed Telegraph column, might defuse the tension?

Needless to say, shameless remoaners are already exploiting the Salisbury poisoning to sabotage Brexit. Is there no pig trough low enough into which they will not now stoop themselves? Even given Russia’s nuclear threats, we must not be so weak as to go dunce’s cap in hand to the Brussels fat-cats who gerrymandered us into building wheelchair access ramps in libraries and planting wild flower meadows. Brexit means Brexit.

Unfortunately for diehard traitors, when Mrs May described “an indiscriminate and reckless act against the UK, putting innocent civilians at risk”, she was talking of the Salisbury poisoning, not hard Brexit.

Brexiters must remember that Britain’s real enemy is not our anti-EU ally Russia and her toxic novichok. Britain’s real enemies are Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker, Peter Stringfellow, Lily Allen, Marcus Brigstocke, all high court judges, and endless bloody red tape! Better to live free for a day in a Britain full of rogue killers roaming Italian restaurants with nerve agents, than to live a thousand years as the straight banana slaves of Brussels.

We have all seen the famous film of an untrousered Putin riding wild boar piglets bareback in the snow. Is it time to be talking of freezing our Front National-funding Russian allies’ assets, especially when Putin’s own assets seem resistant to cold?

Christ, I can’t keep this forced nonsensical tone going any more, even to provoke the usual online Kremlin gremlin comments. I’m on tour and it’s Tuesday in a Dundee hotel. I have to file this tomorrow from Perth by close of business, and the story unravels as quickly as I can rewrite it. Since I started scribbling, Rex Tillerson’s disappeared, the Sun says a Russian’s been strangled in New Malden, and even Stephen Hawking’s and Ken Dodd’s deaths look like Putin might have had a hand in them. Did anyone toxicity test the telescope and the tattyfilarious tickling stick? Thought not.

The Brexit British are a joke nation now. Putin knows no one will stick their neck out for those wankers. I don’t know anything about Russia anyway. Someone online in Russia has a tattoo based on one of my standup routines. And I have a Russian relative who is nice.

My only other Russian experience was a fever dream, frozen in the few winter weeks between the death of my mother and the birth of my daughter. In the dying days of December 2010, I was on a train through the falling snow from London to Worcester with my three-year-old son. I had to visit my bereaved stepfather, my wife at home in the painful throes of a problematic pregnancy.

Coincidentally, my friend the poet John Hegley was in the same carriage, I remember, and we said goodbye and good luck at Oxford, where the train surrendered to rapidly worsening weather, and the railway company bundled us into optimistic black cabs towards our respective onward destinations.

My son and I found ourselves sharing our ride through the suddenly Siberian Cotswolds with a groomed Russian businessman and his younger English companion, a glamorous, cut-glass woman who said she worked “in fashion”. They were on their way to a party at a country house in Worcestershire, swaddled in designer coats that mocked our cagoules, their eyes darkly ringed, their demeanours distracted. The pair seemed to have nothing in common with one another and no shared frame of reference. They were not delighted by the sudden beautiful world beyond the window. They did not hold each other’s cold hands in hot wonder.

I tried to make small talk. The fashion woman could not elaborate on her fashion job criteria, and they both looked away from us, out of the windows in different directions, as the snow fell hard and thick upon the darkening wolds. It came out that I was a comedian but they did not find this especially interesting; nor were they engaged by my eloquent and delightful infant, whose cherubic curls and indefatigable innocence created an angelic counterpoint to the black mood of the taxi’s interior.

I asked the Russian what he thought of gay rights at home, and of Putin, whom I found newly comical, as he had recently been photographed wrestling a bear naked while shooting an assault rifle. Or something. The Russian explained forcefully that I needed to understand that there was a vodka-fuelled crisis of manhood in Russia, and that Putin was selflessly providing a role model to inspire the men of the nation. The discussion was closed.

To me the pair seemed shrouded in shame, as if they had committed a crime, the presence of a chirruping child magnifying their corruption. I think the kid saved me from going under that evening – a psychic lifebuoy. They were my own devils, come for me, I think. That black cab was my blues crossroads.

At Worcester Shrub Hill, the taxi’s elastic limit, our farewells were not fond. I left the silent couple awaiting collection, halogen-lit in the falling flakes, and my little boy and I struggled onward through the drifts into the shadow of the Malvern Hills.

I will never forget our odd quartet’s awkward three-hour black cab journey in that snow-shrouded English twilight, an iconic British brand traversing the worsening terrain, a global darkness drawing in behind it. But the Russian was just passing through. The land and its people were a playground for him.

And I often think of the quiet woman, Komarovsky’s Lara reimagined. I hope that fashion thing worked out for her.

I have been on holiday in an isolated Pyrenean shack for two weeks. I enjoy not being approached by people who think I am the lead singer of UB40 all the time, my wife delights in juicy tomatoes and the kids love eating snails, befriending local snails and swimming with snails in the streams and lakes.

One day, having booked months in advance as required, we joined a party of 20 to venture through a secured airlock into an ancient cave and walk an hour underground to see the visionary animal artworks of our ancestors. The cave in question offers the only opportunity worldwide to see a prehistoric depiction of a weasel, which was something I had wanted to tick off my bucket list.

The guide told us, in English, that a British visitor had urinated in the hermetically sealed and temperature-controlled cavern the previous week, despite all the warnings about contaminating the cave paintings, and requested that any British people present please refrain from doing so, as the incident had left the archaeologists utterly distraught. It is always interesting to learn how others see us.

The art was so far beneath ground anthropologists assumed the artists never intended it for public display, so perhaps the urinating culprit was someone who felt the content providers should be punished for failing to monetise their work as part of a free-market economy?

I was suitably embarrassed by my compatriot’s behaviour, but wondered what British person could have such contempt for art, history and human culture that they would deliberately book months ahead on an exclusive tour only to try and despoil the unique works with their hot urine.

Returning home, I checked the itineraries of the culture secretary, John Whittingdale, and his predecessor, Sajid Javid, but they had not been in France, and yet the fact that I assumed one of them must be to blame was an indicator of how events at home were playing on my mind.

I had been worried about leaving the country in the care of the new government, like a parent trusting their family home to unruly teenage children, only to return to find a fortnight-long laughing-gas party has destroyed every precious heirloom.

Granny’s commemorative coronation commode lies shattered in the garden; Auntie Gladys’s Queen Mother-faced gas mask has been used as a bong; and the smashed remnants of the BBC have been stuffed into the lavatory and defiled.

I don’t have an iPhone, and there was no TV in the mountain shed, so the news from home came in disturbing dribs from British newspapers picked up at the nearest town, 70 miles away, of which I found only two in the entire fortnight, a Guardian dated 24 July and an international edition of the Daily Mail from 28 July.

When you are far away, and one copy of the Daily Mail is all you have to go on, the world distorts like a fairground mirror. The front page said a Labour peer had been taking drugs with prostitutes. It is to be hoped that George “Pencils” Osborne, when he is leader of the government, will take his thick brown pencil and ban from public office anyone who has ever had even the slightest connection with cocaine and call girls.

Meanwhile, on page 14, the demonstrably inaccurate writer Quentin Letts rubbished institutionalised attempts to encourage social mobility in an incoherent column that included the genuine sentence: “Middle-class parents are middle class because they have learned what it takes to succeed.”

The sentence, of course, does not bear a moment’s analysis, attempting to assuage readers’ guilt by assuring them their privilege is deserved. But it seemed so bizarre to me that such a sentence could actually be written without shame, only 12 days after I had left the country, only two and half months after the Conservative victory, that I wondered what was really going on at home.

In his 1952 short story, A Sound of Thunder, the writer Ray Bradbury, after whom I named my hamster as a child, posits a form of time-travel tourism. Clients may visit any point in the past, but must stay on a floating metal walkway, for fear of interacting with history in such a way as it alters the future.

A time tourist, Eckels, is frightened by a dinosaur, falls momentarily from the path, and returns to the future with a butterfly crushed on the sole of his shoe, only to find the world now subtly changed. Everyone is speaking Latvian and people have penises for hands. Or something like that. It’s 36 years since I read it.

Experiencing Letts’s strange Daily Mail sentence, I wondered if the unopposed Conservative juggernaut’s unstoppable forward motion meant that something indefinable was happening to the collective consciousness of Britain while I was away that would irrevocably alter the very idea of what could constitute truth itself, which would render the world I returned from my holiday to as unrecognisable as Bradbury’s Latvian penis-hands dystopia.

In the edition of the Guardian dated Friday 24 July, which I found abandoned in a campsite lavatory two days after I read Letts’s column, I saw an article on the suspension of a UK ban on crop sprays containing neonicotinoids, thought by most scientists to harm bees.

On this occasion, apparently, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs abandoned its normal practice of publishing the minutes if its meetings in order to avoid “provoking representations from different interest groups”.

I wondered what the sentence meant. It appeared to mean that Defra, which is now mainly run and owned by the commercial outsourcing company Capita, wasn’t going to make available any information that it felt people might take issue with.

You get the result you want by concealing any information that might challenge that result? I am sure this sort of thing hadn’t been acceptable practice when I went on holiday two weeks ago. Had somebody somewhere stepped off the path?

I was afraid. I phoned my father in Coventry to see if everything was OK. His accent seemed vaguely eastern European. He seemed to be having trouble holding the phone.

Suddenly, the rain came down. I sat under an awning and rolled my red wine around in my hand, Letts’s column, the cocaine bust exposé and the Defra story spread out before me. An electrical storm crackled over the Pyrenees, vast flat planes of light flashing behind the clouds, giving the impression of impossibly powerful forces moving somewhere out of sight.

The enigmatic, multi-talented, and all round good guy Stewart Lee is this episode’s very special guest. As he is currently touring his show Content Provider throughout the UK, it is a great privilege to welcome him to the show. Hands down the most critically acclaimed British comedian of his generation, Stewart Lee is also a BAFTA award winner, and part owner of four Laurence Olivier awards for his work with Jerry Springer – The Opera. He has written innumerable music reviews of - mostly obscure artists, recently performed on a tribute record for Shirley Collins, and has seen his collaboration with Capri-Batterie recently released.

Stewart talks with authority on his creative processes, passionately about his relationship with music, and speaks his mind about how artistic output is valued in the digital age. His experience, and views on the future of the creative arts is both eye-opening and frightening as he explains the almost Orwellian control of the big companies and their controlled for-profit evolution and monetization.

This episode was recorded 48 hours before the passing of Mark E. Smith of The Fall, and Stewart spoke fondly about their influence on his work - ‘When he finally doesn’t do it anymore- I don’t know what it’ll take to stop him – when it finally isn’t happening it’ll be, for a normal person, like if Manchester United were to suddenly not exist anymore.... I would have had a very different life without them’

I feel sorry for Theresa May. And that Rudd one, who looks like she is wearing a rubber Halloween mask based on her own face. What if, because you were all going on about how great Ukip were, and how Nigel Farage was only saying what people had been thinking all along, and all these people coming over here, May and Rudd thought you wanted them to be racist too, like you are? And so back in 2013, to please you, they did some racism, and wrote racist stuff on racist vans and drove them around laughing.

And in so doing, May furthered the creation of The Hostile Environment, which sounds like an irradiated wasteland where teenage amazons get sent to die in The Hunger Games. May probably wasn’t really all that racist herself, and only did the racism because she thought you wanted it, you racists.

And now look what’s happened. Last week Mrs May spilt a massive silver tureen of hot sticky racism right into the laps of diners at the Commonwealth Heads of Government slap-up supper, leaving the poor old Queen to get down on her knees between Andrew Holness’s Jamaican knees and sponge up all the racist mess herself: “Never mind Theresa, it’s probably best if I do it. You’ve done enough.”

When the royal family, their 1930s Nazi sympathies now walled up in a sealed room at Windsor Castle, are your secret weapon for papering over the racist cracks, you know you’re in trouble. But Prince Philip’s embarrassing colonialist gaffes of old seem now like the charming handmade racist woodcuts of a delightful artisanal bigot, compared with the mechanised Model T Ford production line racism of the current government. May’s industrialised prejudice, a vast Amazon.com of nastiness, aimed to put the corner shop snug-bar Ukip supporter out of business. And suddenly, small-time racists everywhere are nostalgic for the days before racism went mainstream.

Franz Kafka’s novels of bureaucracy gone mad have given us the adjective Kafkaesque, without which it would be impossible to describe the experience of being billed twice as two slightly different addressees by British Gas; and then, when threatened with the bailiffs for not paying the bill of an address that didn’t exist, finding the best way out of the situation was to pretend on the phone to be an old confused pensioner who had forgotten his own name, while your wife pretends to be his carer, who doesn’t speak English as a first language. There was no 12b Shanley Road. It was “basement flat, 12 Shanley Road”. And I am not 84 and senile. My wife is not Latvian.

But this was not my most Kafkaesque situation. In Prague last summer, having booked four tickets online to visit the Kafka museum, and then finding they had been issued with the name Kafka on them instead of Lee, the guide advised us to pretend to be the Kafka family named on the ticket, to save time, and to satirise administrative incompetence as a celebration of dead Kafka himself. How we laughed. The children, three and six, could not have enjoyed their tour of the dimly lit literary tomb, with its morbidly fading handwritten letters and projected images of death, more.

An American family called Kafka arrived soon after us, visiting their distant relatives’ home town, and were denied entry, as their tickets bore our name, until the guide came out and advised them to pretend to be us. This was undoubtedly the most Kafkaesque situation any of us had ever been in, and we all had a good laugh about it in the cafe afterwards, before becoming fixated on the absurdity of existence and crawling away on our bellies to die. To die like dogs.

In Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque novel The Trial, which no one has ever read, the protagonist Danny K makes a complaint about two arresting officers, whose treatment of him, eating his breakfast and trying to steal his clothes, he felt was unfair. The next day Danny opens a store cupboard at work to find the officers being flogged for his benefit, but far more violently than he would have hoped. Danny protests, but the flogger explains that K had set wheels in motion.

Likewise, it now appears you didn’t want May and Rudd to be too racist after all, and now there’s all this unpleasantness, old guys homeless and living in storage units, and old ladies told to pack their bags, and no medical treatment for pensioners who paid in for decades. But that wasn’t what you wanted at all, was it, you racists?

Deporting and depriving those nice old black people who have been here for ever was wrong. And when they came for that Canadian dinner lady in Wolverhampton, who was actually white, and told her to go home as life in Britain was about to become “increasingly difficult” for her, that was definitely too much.

How could someone who had lived in Wolverhampton for 47 years, breathing toxic smog, dancing to Slade, and eating only faggots and peas, be expected to readjust to the land of clean mountain air, the thoughtful roots rock of the Tragically Hip, and light and fluffy blueberry muffins? It is inhumane.

No, it wasn’t the dinner lady and the nice black family from the electrical shop who had to go. It was the other foreigners. The bad ones, who scrounge and steal and are lazy. Not the ones that were like people you knew, harmless tropical fish caught in a dragnet sweeping for sharks. It’s the anonymous parade of frightening brown faces on that Vote Leave poster. They’re the bad ones.

Tough British cheddar. You stoked this hate volcano, racists. And now it has exploded all over your front garden and melted your Ford Focus. Is this what you wanted?

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Pre Order NOW and Shipping starts on 30th November  They cost £20.00 each plus shipping. https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee

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2. RARE 47 MINUTE EDIT OF THE SNOWFLAKE GERVAIS BIT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWBodOgWRs

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3. TV SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO

Snowflake and Tornado are both on the BBC iplayer now.

Snowflake is here. & Tornado is here.

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4. SOUTHBANK DATES

SOUTHBANK CENTRE’S ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL - 28 June – 2 July 2023

After a sold-out 3-month season at Leicester Square Theatre, London (ends 17th Dec), BASIC LEE will tour throughout 2023. (See full schedule below) and play the Southbank Centre’s ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL in the summer for six performances.

Booking for these performances opens at 10am on Wednesday 16th November 2022.

Tickets onsale here from 16th November 2022.

"Basically, basic Lee is better than most" **** The Telegraph

"Basically, Basic Lee is very funny" **** The Times

"Basically, back-to-basics Basic Lee is anything but" **** Mail on Sunday

"It’s brilliantly choreographed, razor-sharp and laugh-aloud hilarious, but anything but basic" Louder Than War

SOUTHBANK CENTRE’S ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, LONDON 28 June – 2 July 2023

Dates: Wednesday 28th, Thursday 29th*, Friday 30th June, Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd July 2023
Times: Performances at 8pm (Wednesday-Saturday), 7.30pm (Sunday) plus Sunday matinee 3pm
Booking: 020 3879 9555, southbankcentre.co.uk [insert direct booking link]
Ticket prices: Band A £35 & Band B £25 plus booking fees
*Thursday 29th June BSL interpreted performance

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5. BASIC LEE

The new stand-up show, BASIC LEE, started to come together in Edinburgh.
The London Autumn 2022 dates are on sale w national 2023. More dates to follow.

LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE

Tues - Sat until Dec 17th 2022. 7pm.

TICKETS FOR LEICESTER SQUARE RUN, HERE.

After a decade of ground-breaking high concept shows involving overarched interlinked narratives, massive sets and enormous comedy props, Lee enters the post-pandemic era in streamlined solo stand-up mode. One man, one microphone, and one microphone in the wings in case the one on stage breaks. Pure. Simple. Classic. Basic Lee. "The world's greatest living stand-up comedian." The Times

The show will then tour until Spring 2024.
These are the currently confirmed dates. More will be added to the gigs page as they are confirmed.

January 2023

Saturday 21st January 2023 - Festival Theatre, Chichester - TICKETS
Monday 23rd January 2023 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS
Tuesday 24th January 2023 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Wednesday 25th January 2023 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Thursday 26th January 2023 - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 27th January 2023 - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - TICKETS
Monday 30th January 2023 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Tuesday 31st January 2023 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS

February 2023

Wednesday 1st February 2023 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Thursday 2nd February 2023 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Friday 3rd February 2023 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Saturday 4th February 2023 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Monday 6th February 2023 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Tuesday 7th February 2023 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th February 2023 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Thursday 9th February 2023 - DeMontfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Friday 10th February 2023 - DeMontfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Saturday 11th February 2023 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Sunday 12th February 2023 - Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton - TICKETS
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Thursday 23rd February 2023 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Friday 24th February 2023 - Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe - TICKETS
Saturday 25th February 2023 - Palace Theatre, Southend On Sea - TICKETS
Sunday 26th February 2023 - Palace Theatre, Southend On Sea - TICKETS
Tuesday 28th February 2023 - Grand Theatre, Swansea - TICKETS

March 2023

Wednesday 1st March 2023 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 2nd March 2023 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Friday 3rd March 2023 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS
Saturday 4th March 2023 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS
Monday 6th March 2023 - Rose Theatre, Kingston - TICKETS
Tuesday 7th March 2023 - Rose Theatre, Kingston - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th March 2023 - Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes - TICKETS
Thursday 9th March 2023 - Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes - TICKETS
Friday 10th March 2023 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Saturday 11th March 2023 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Monday 13th March 2023 - Eden Court, Inverness - TICKETS
Tuesday 14th March 2023 - Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen - TICKETS
Wednesday 15th March 2023 - Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen - TICKETS
Thursday 16th March 2023 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Friday 17th March 2023 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Monday 20th March 2023 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Tuesday 21st March 2023 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Monday 27th March 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS
Tuesday 28th March 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS
Wednesday 29th March 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS
Thursday 30th March 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS
Friday 31st March 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS

April 2023

Saturday 1st April 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS
Monday 3rd April 2023 - Hippodrome, Bristol - TICKETS
Thursday 13th April 2023 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Friday 14th April 2023 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Saturday 15th April 2023 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Tuesday 18th April 2023 - Forum Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Wednesday 19th April 2023 - Forum Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Thursday 20th April 2023 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Wednesday 26th April 2023 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Thursday 27th April 2023 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Friday 28th April 2023 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Saturday 29th April 2023 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Sunday 30th April 2023 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS

May 2023

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
Wednesday 3rd May 2023 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
Thursday 4th May 2023 - Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Friday 5th May 2023 - Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Saturday 6th May 2023 - Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Friday 26th May 2023 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Saturday 27th May 2023 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Saturday 27th May 2023 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Sunday 28th May 2023 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS

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6. I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME 2022 HAPPENINGS/THINGS

HARRY HILL Big collared loon, and one of thee great live comics, makes a rare excursion beyond his badger-filled bathroom.

NOVEMBER
15th - Cheltenham Everyman Theatre,
16th - Chatham Central Theatre,
17th - Cheltenham Everyman Theatre,
18th - Northampton Derngate,
19th - Southend Cliffs Pavilion,
20th - Surrey Richmond Theatre,
24th - Dorking Halls,
25th - Tunbridge Wells Assembly Theatre,
26th - Shepherd's Bush O2 Empire,
27th - Brighton Theatre Royal,

JANUARY 2023
23rd - Liverpool Philharmonic,
24th - Guildford GLive,
25th - Bournemouth Pavilion,
27th - Cork Opera House,
28th - Belfast Waterfront,
29th - Dublin Vicar Street

AND ALSO THE TREES Big In Europe literary-styled goth veterans from ‘80s Birmingham play one date in their homeland at London’s Lexington on Nov 19th

COWBOY JUNKIES Somnambulant Americana shoegazers NOVEMBER 20th Edinburgh Assembly, 27th London RFH

STEREOLAB Krautrockin’ cocktail-drinkers hit the autobahns once more NOVEMBER 24th Brighton Concord, 26th Leeds Stylus, 27th M’cr New Century Hall, 28th Edinburgh Liquid Room, 29th Glasgow TV Studio, DECEMBER 2nd-3rd London Earth

ELIZA CARTHY English folk godhead back in active service NOV 28TH Birmingham Glee, 30th Cardiff Glee. DEC 5th Cambridge Junction

THE CHAMELEONS Most convincing line-up for years of the always emotionally edifying Big Music should-have-beens. DECEMBER 7th Coventry HMV Empire, 8th Liverpool Cavern, 9th Leeds Brudenell, 10th Stoke On Trent Sugarmill, 11th Gloucester Guildhall, 12th Oxford 02, 13th B’ham 02, 14th Cottingham Civic Hall, 16th Huddersfield Parish, 17th M’cr Academy, 18th Blackpool Waterloo

7.IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS 2022

Sydney Poitier - woke actor (1927)
Magwa - woke Cambodian landmine hunting rat (2013)
Burke Shelley - bass Budgie (1950)
Ronnie Spector - woke Ronette (1943)
Rachel Nagy - Detroit Cobra (1975)
Robin Le Mesurier - Womble (1954)
Andy Ross - Disco Zombie/nice man of Britpop (1956)
Barry Cryer - King Of Comedy (1935)
Norma Waterson - Mighty Folk Matriarch (1939)
John Nolan - man Behind The Magnolia Curtain (1966)
Betty Davis - She Might Get Picked Up! (1944)
Ivan Reitman - He was not afraid of no ghost! (1946)
Mark Lanegan - Screaming Tree rehabilitee (1964)
Bruce Anderson - MX-80 man (1950)
Anna Karen - ‘70s public transport icon (1936)
Sam Lay - Howlin’ Wolf/Paul Butterfield/Dylan drums (1935)
Mikey Chung - Reggae session regular (1950)
Fred Van Hove - Belgian free-jazz stringbender (1937)
Ian McDonald - Crimson saxophonist King (1949)
Gary Brooker - Synesthesiac Hackney musician (1945)
Nicky Tesco - Suburban soundman/comedy fan (1956)
Dallas Good - Sadies guitar slinger (1974)
Philip Jeck - Art Noiseman (1952)
Margaret Curtis - Callanish visionary (1942)
Jordan - punk fashionista (1955)
David McKee - Then the shopkeeper appeared (1935)
Chris Bailey - Lordly protopunk, wit, raconteur (1957)
Gilbert Gottfried - That ‘Too Soon’ guy (1955)
Audrey Henshall - Scottish Neolithic expert (1927)
Eric Chappell - Rising Damp (1933)
Klaus Schultze - Tangerine Joker (1947)
Neal Adams - Woke progressive comics creator (1941)
Judy Henske - Greenwich psych-folkstress (1936)
George Perez - Best Avengers artist ever (1954)
Don Craine - deerstalking Downliner (1945)
Richard Polodor - acid rock engineer (1936)
Gavin Martin - music rag wit (1962)
Fred Ward - Worm Warrior (1942)
Vangelis - Apocalypso-Maestro (1943)
Bob Neuwirth - Gelb/Dylan adjacent beatnik (1939)
Cathal Coughlan - Microdisney Man (1960)
Rick Price - Move bassist (1944)
Ric Parnell - Tap/Rooster drummer & gardener
Alan White - Ono drums (1949)
Ray Liotta - has let himself go (1954)
Ronnie Hawkins - Canadian rock wellspring (1935)
Harrison Birtwistle - When Things Fall Over (1934)
Grachan Moncur - Jazz trombonius (1937)
Ray Hill - anti-Nazi mole (1939)
Paula Rego - pastel radical (1935)
Julee Cruise - Peak voice (1956)
Bruce Kent - God’s peacenik (1929)
Jean-Louis Trintignant - mute spaghetti hero (1930)
James Caan - Rollerballbearing and Elf-father (1940)
Barbara Thompson - saxophonist whose time I wasted (1944)
Chris Broderick - singing loin
George Kinney - Golden Dawn (1946)
Alan Grant - Bat-Scot (1949)
Bernard Cribbins - Who Hole (1928)
David Warner - Your ominous Montreal compatriot (1941)
Nichelle Nicholls - interracial kisser (1932)
Raymond Briggs - hilarious genius of the tragi-comic (1934)
Drummie Zeb - Aswad Vox-pulse (1959)
Nicholas Monro - The great lost pop artist (1936)
Mark Astronaut - resilient Hitchin micro-punk (1954)
Vittorio De Scalzi - New Troll (1949)
Philip Drucker - Savage Republican (1959)
Van Christian - Naked Prey’s desert rock pioneer (1960)
Anton Fier - Feelie Palomino (1956)
Hilary Mantel - Wolf of the Hall (1952)
Pharoah Sanders - cosmic jazzman (1940)
Joe Bussard - ‘78 king (1936)
Sacheen Littlefeather - Native American Voice (1946)
Loretta Lynn - birth control balladeer (1932)
Bobby Sutliff - largely undigitized paisley windbreaker
Angela Lansbury - gaslit socialist Clanger cousin (1925)
Rustic Rod Goodway - Ethereal counterbalancer (1946)
Irene Papas - Aphrodite’s voice (1926)
DH Peligro - Dead Dead Kennedy (1959)
Patrick Haggerty (Lavender cowboy, 1944)
Justin Gosling (Principal philosopher-poet, 1930)
Mark Long (post-punk in Opposition, 1955)

The Flash is a book put together to raise funds for Amnesty International.

There are 100 stories from 100 different writers.

Stewart has a short story in this collection.

Stewart Lee's final, and most punishing, BAFTA and multiple-British Comedy Award winning BBC2 stand-up series;

recorded live at The Mildmay Club in Stoke Newington, it features six half hour sets on Wealth, Islamophobia, Patriotism, Death, The Migrant Crisis, and Childhood Memories.

Chris Morris returns as the hostile interrogator, picking apart Britains most consistently critically acclaimed stand-up.

A family-sized bucket of extras includes deleted routines, film items, unreleased audio, and gut-spilling interviews.

1) More Tickets For Edinburgh Fringe Released.

Dear List

My week long Wok-In-Progress Edinburgh run (9-15th August) has sold out at the Edinburgh Fringe website (here), but I am told The Stand will be releasing their ticket allocations tomorrow - Tuesday June 11th - at approximately midday via their website, here.

So if you missed out on tickets via Edfringe, or want to come, then...

CLICK HERE FOR EDINBURGH FRINGE TICKETS VIA THE STAND FROM MIDDAY TOMORROW.

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2) LONDON WOK IN PROGRESSES

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, I am also doing several more work in progress shows at the Bill Murray pub in Islington.

They are not on sale yet, but will go on sale some time on Wednesday 12th June.

The dates are;

Tuesday 9th July (9.30pm - 10.45pm)
Wednesday 10th July (8pm - 9.15pm)
Thursday 11th July (8pm - 9.15pm)
Tuesday 17th September (9.30pm - 10.30pm)
Wednesday 18th September (9.30pm - 10.30pm)
Thursday 19th September (8pm - 9.30pm)
Sunday 22nd September (7.00 - 10pm w/interval)

You will be able to get these tickets by clicking here when they are released or by signing up to Angel Comedy's mailing list.

“A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
LET’S HOPE IT’S THE FIRST ONE
WITHOUT ANDREW NEIL!”

Dear All.

Thanks for your ongoing support.  This tour show took a bit longer than usual to come together but is really working now, sadly partly because the general downward turn of global and national events has helped focus some of the ideas in it. I think it will only get funnier as things get worse.

I don’t know how letting people know about my shows will work in the future as obviously the BBC is no longer an option, much social media has been algorithm-driven to the right, traditional news media no longer has much space for culture comment and review, and I’m not about to trash a lifetime’s dignity and do my own podcast, so if you see the live show and love it please tell your friends.

And please bear in mind, most of any negative stuff you see about me personally on-line isn’t true, but I don’t have the energy to engage and correct it. One battle with the management of Mumsnet was enough for one lifetime.

In the meantime I hope you will check out some of the things I enjoyed this year and please support the artists involved if you like their work.

Have a great 2025.

1.NEW MERCH

Along with WAXFACE’s usual line of Stewart Lee merch there are new for 2025 t-shirts and hoodies on the Man-Wulf theme, all of the highest quality. I’d wear them myself but I’d look arrogant. Waste the money your Nan gave you for Xmas here

wax-face.com/stewart-lee

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2.MAN-WULF BY THE PRIMEVALS

Glasgow’s garage punk veterans The Primevals announce a new single as featured in the new Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf upcoming U.K. tour.
There are 3 versions
Side a I’m The Man-Wulf
Side b I’m The Man-Wulf (long nail edit)
Plus a 9 minute I’m The Man-Wulf (long nail version) (I LOOOOOVE THIS!!)

Vinyl sides a&b released on a 7” 45 in January.

https://primevals.bandcamp.com

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3.BASIC LEE IS ON NOW TV

https://www.nowtv.com/ie/watch/entertainment/collections/ultimate-comedy/asset/stewart-lee-basic-lee.../A5EK6949itCVNKaChrDXN

You’ll have to subscribe though.

Here is a thorough, and not entirely positive, review from a thoughtful young man on Youtube, still better than most pro-critics.
https://youtu.be/kdOYgqCzJ4s?si=1uIZBn8tMWsAiS0h

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4. STEWART LEE VS THE MAN-WULF

John Mackay & Sally Homer, in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present
STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF BRAND NEW SHOW
LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE, LONDON

2 – 17^th January 2025 AND UK TOURING THROUGHOUT 2025

NB: TICKETS FOR THESE SHOWS WILL REMAIN AT THE ADVERTISED PRICE. SURGE PRICING IS IMMORAL AND TICKETMASTER AND OASIS ARE WANKERS, ENCOURAGED BY SUCCESSIVE TORY CULTURE SECRETARIES IN THEIR CRIMINAL ENDEAVOURS.

In this brand-new show, Lee shares his stage with a tough-talking werewolf comedian who hates humanity. The Man-Wulf lays down a ferocious comedy challenge to the culturally irrelevant and physically enfeebled Lee. Can the beast inside us all be silenced with the silver bullet of Lee's unprecedentedly critically acclaimed style of stand-up.

STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF Opened at Leicester Square Theatre in December 2024 the new show will tour to UK cities throughout 2025.

Leicester Sq Theatre, London 2^nd – 17^th Jan 2025 7pm.

0207 734 2222 www.leicestersquaretheatre.com

STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF 2025 TOUR SCHEDULE

January 2025

Sunday 19th January 2025 - Mayflower Theatre, Southampton - TICKETS
Monday 20th January 2025 - Dorking Halls, Dorking - TICKETS
Tuesday 21st January 2025 - Dorking Halls, Dorking - TICKETS
Wednesday 22nd January 2025 - The Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
Thursday 23rd January 2025 - The Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
Friday 24th January 2025 - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - TICKETS
Saturday 25th January 2025 - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - TICKETS
Sunday 26th January 2025 - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - TICKETS
Tuesday 28th January 2025 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Wednesday 29th January 2025 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Thursday 30th January 2025 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Friday 31st January 2025 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS

February 2025

Saturday 1st February 2025 - Theatre Royal, York - TICKETS
Monday 3rd February 2025 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Tuesday 4th February 2025 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Wednesday 5th February 2025 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Thursday 6th February 2025 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Friday 7th February 2025 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Saturday 8th February 2025 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Monday 10th February 2025 - The Marlowe, Canterbury - TICKETS
Wednesday 12th February 2025 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Thursday 13th February 2025 - De Montfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Friday 14th February 2025 - De Montfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Saturday 15th February 2025 - Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe - TICKETS
Sunday 16th February 2025 - Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe - TICKETS
Tuesday 18th February 2025 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Wednesday 19th February 2025 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 20th February 2025 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Friday 21st February 2025 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 22nd February 2025 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS

April 2025

Tuesday 1st April 2025 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS
Wednesday 2nd April 2025 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd April 2025 - New Theatre, Peterborough - TICKETS
Friday 4th April 2025 - Palace Theatre, Southend - TICKETS
Saturday 5th April 2025 - Palace Theatre, Southend - TICKETS
Sunday 6th April 2025 - Palace Theatre, Southend - TICKETS
Tuesday 22nd April 2025 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS
Monday 28th April 2025 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Tuesday 29th April 2025 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Wednesday 30th April 2025 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS

May 2025

Thursday 1st May 2025 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Friday 2nd May 2025 - The Mach Arena, Machynlleth Comedy Festival - TICKETS
Saturday 3rd May 2025 - The Mach Arena, Machynlleth Comedy Festival - TICKETS
Sunday 4th May 2025 - The Mach Arena, Machynlleth Comedy Festival - TICKETS
Tuesday 6th May 2025 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Wednesday 7th May 2025 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Thursday 8th May 2025 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Friday 9th May 2025 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Saturday 10th May 2025 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Monday 12th May 2025 - Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton - TICKETS
Thursday 15th May 2025 - King's Theatre, Portsmouth - TICKETS
Friday 16th May 2025 - The Forum, Bath - TICKETS

July 2025

Saturday 5th July 2025 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Sunday 6th July 2025 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Sunday 6th July 2025 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Saturday 12th July 2025 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Sunday 13th July 2025 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Sunday 13th July 2025 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS

September 2025

Monday 8th September 2025 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS
Tuesday 9th September 2025 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS
Wednesday 10th September 2025 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - TICKETS
Thursday 11th September 2025 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Friday 12th September 2025 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Saturday 13th September 2025 - Westlands Entertainment Venue, Yeovil - TICKETS
Sunday 14th September 2025 - Westlands Entertainment Venue, Yeovil - TICKETS
Tuesday 16th September 2025 - New Theatre, Cardiff - TICKETS
Wednesday 17th September 2025 - New Theatre, Cardiff - TICKETS
Thursday 18th September 2025 - New Theatre, Cardiff - TICKETS
Friday 19th September 2025 - New Theatre, Cardiff - TICKETS
Saturday 20th September 2025 - New Theatre, Cardiff - TICKETS
Wednesday 24th September 2025 - Hippodrome, Darlington - TICKETS
Thursday 25th September 2025 - Gala, Durham - TICKETS
Friday 26th September 2025 - Theatre Royal, Glasgow - TICKETS
Saturday 27th September 2025 - Playhouse, Edinburgh - TICKETS
Sunday 28th September 2025 - His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen - TICKETS

October 2025

Friday 3rd October 2025 - Aberystwyth Arts Centre – Great Hall, Aberystwyth - TICKETS
Tuesday 7th October 2025 - Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th October 2025 - Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes - TICKETS
Thursday 9th October 2025 - Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Friday 10th October 2025 - Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Saturday 11th October 2025 - Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Wednesday 15th October 2025 - Grand Theatre, Swansea - TICKETS
Thursday 16th October 2025 - Grand Theatre, Swansea - TICKETS
Friday 17th October 2025 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Saturday 18th October 2025 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Tuesday 21st October 2025 - Storyhouse, Chester - TICKETS
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 - Storyhouse, Chester - TICKETS
Thursday 23rd October 2025 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Friday 24th October 2025 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Saturday 25th October 2025 - The Baths Hall, Scunthorpe - TICKETS
Wednesday 29th October 2025 - Cast, Doncaster - TICKETS
Thursday 30th October 2025 - Cast, Doncaster - TICKETS
Friday 31st October 2025 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - TICKETS

November 2025

Saturday 1st November 2025 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - TICKETS
Sunday 2nd November 2025 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - TICKETS
Monday 3rd November 2025 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Tuesday 4th November 2025 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Friday 7th November 2025 - The Anvil, Basingstoke - TICKETS
Saturday 8th November 2025 - Rose Theatre, KIngston - TICKETS
Sunday 9th November 2025 - Rose Theatre, KIngston - TICKETS
Tuesday 11th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Wednesday 12th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Thursday 13th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Friday 14th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Saturday 15th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Monday 17th November 2025 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Tuesday 18th November 2025 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 19th November 2025 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS

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5. SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO

Stewart’s 2019 touring show Snowflake/Tornado, which was originally broadcast as a BBC Special in Autumn 2022 is now available to buy or rent “on demand” from www.mediagarageproductions.com

Both shows also appear to be free as part of the current Amazon Prime rosta.

We are currently preparing a physical release of these shows but it’s got delayed as I have been bogged down in picking through a wealth of possible, and very exciting, audio extras, where the material worked much better than in the broadcast show itself.

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6. FESTIVAL STAND-UP SETS 2025 (the usual 30 mins greatest hits shit)

24th May 2025 Bearded Theory, Derbyshire

Iggy Pop, The Manics, Thee Sisters O’ Mercy, Yard Act, Left Field, Throwing Muses, The Selecter, The Lovely Lovely Eggs, my pals Asian Dub Foundation, Cool distaff Japanese Ramones Shonen Knife, Beans on Toast, dub legends Zion Train, Angeline Morrison, Miki Berenyi from The Lushes and more TBA.
www.beardedtheory.co.uk.

More TBA

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7. OUT OF THE VOID

This book, about the sleeve art of Rocket Records’ releases, with a foreword by me, is out now. https://rocketrecordings.com/products/out-of-the-void

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8. A KICKSTARTER FOR THE FINE FOLKIES LISA KNAPP and GERRY DRIVER.

When I was first in London, loads of us lived happy and broke in a lovely big cheap damp old vicarage full of slugs in Tooting. The various housemates’ bands that rehearsed in the spare room represented a successful vision of multiculturalism; unfairly unfamous metal shoegazers Peach (checkout You Lied with me mumbling low in the mix and Tool’s Justin Chancellor on bass); my failed Alt Country effort Dust Harvest; an Afrobeat band run by a Nigerian bloke called Papa J; Simon Munnery’s punk pastiche Alan Parker’s Urban Warriors; Dave Cohen’s Jewish Guns’n’Roses parody Guns’n’Moses; Harry Hill’s Pub Band; and Mike Cosgrave’s world-fusion band Sin e, featuring future percussion superstar Ansuman Biswas and the fiddler Gerry Driver (Their Gentle Art Of Wee Weaving is the drum’n’bass/Irish pub session crossover that never happened). This is where Lisa Knapp, who I worked with years later on the Shirley Collins documentary fundraising circuit, comes in. LISA SAYS – “Advent greetings to you all !! I have a brand new DUO project with my partner and long time musical collaborator, Gerry Diver.  Known, somewhat imaginatively, as 'Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver' (haha!) we've been hard at work creating our debut album, HINTERLAND.... but now we need your help to take the next steps, ie, producing the physical formats like CDs and vinyl, a plethora of promo materials and preparing for a proper release. So, we have launched a KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN.  We're launching this album independently and so we are asking for help from our amazing community.

B A C K   O U R   K I C K S T A R T E R   H E R E
B A C K   O U R   K I C K S T A R T E R   H E R E
B A C K   O U R   K I C K S T A R T E R   H E R E

We’ve lined up some fantastic rewards for our backers including 🎁 Signed albums 🎁 Exclusive experiences and loads of other surprises.  I am delighted to be offering online folk singing & folk fiddle classes as well as a one day workshop in person with me - time tbc.  As well as that I am offerering to compose a brand new tune from scratch for you or as a gift to a loved one.  Have a wee browse at the offers and please share on your social media, it really helps. NB. Kickstarter is an ALL-OR-NOTHING platform so your help really, really matters and every single pledge counts!! This project is truly a labour of love, and we can’t do it without you. Your support means everything to us and keeps independent music alive and thriving.”

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9. SAVE HITCHIN’S CLUB 85

https://www.gofundme.com/f/club-85s-battle-fund

Here’s a go-fund me to preserve the punching-above-its-weight local venue Hitchin’s Club 85, another iconic regional grass roots space, in the town where the Fall recorded half of Hex Enduction Hour and which gave us resilient hippy-punks The Astronauts.

When it’s gone it’s gone, and so is another piece of the patchwork that holds the arts in the UK together in the face of gvt indifference and active hostility from tech-bro’s and the right.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4geeynkklzo

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10.I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME HAPPENINGS

VANESSA BELL – MILTON KEYNES GALLERY -  23^rd Feb 2025

A World Of Form And Colour. Thorough retrospective on the hot Bloomsbury freak. Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was a pioneering modernist painter and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of influential English artists, writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. This exhibition – her largest-ever solo show – provides an in-depth overview that includes drawings, paintings, ceramics and furniture. Bell’s pioneering work was at the forefront of British abstraction. At the same time, she helped to create conditions in which artists, including women, could flourish. This involved organising the ‘Friday Club’ for artists to meet and co-founding the experimental design collective, Omega Workshops. Collaboration formed an essential part of Bell’s approach to art, including with her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf, and the artist Duncan Grant. https://mkgallery.org/event/vanessa-bell/

SCENT AND THE ART OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITES – BIRMINGHAM BARBER INSTITUTE UNTIL JANUARY 26TH

https://barber.org.uk/scent-and-pre-raphaelites/

Scent is a key motif in paintings by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements. Fragrance is visually suggested in images of daydreaming figures smelling flowers or burning incense, enhancing the sensory aura of ‘art for art’s sake’. Scent was also implied in Victorian painting to evoke hedonism – pleasure in exquisite sensations – and a preoccupation with beauty; or to reflect the Victorian vogue for synaesthesia (evoking one sense through another) and the penchant for art, like scent, to evoke moods and emotions.

EVELYN DE MORGAN – W’HAMPTON ART GALLERY – 9^th MARCH 2005

https://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/whats-on/edm/

Stew says, “This late Victorian visionary’s work can come across a bit Advanced Dungeons and Dragons ™ ®, but that probably tell us more about how she anticipated, or even influenced, the populist art of the future. I have a real soft spot for her. Her partner William De Morgan, initially of Stoke Newington, was also a proto-science fiction author, and ceramicist, whose decorative tiles pop up in the oddest places – there may be some in a once swanky pub near you.  Anyway, the last time EDM had her own exhibition was 1907 so get on down, and get some lovely Gray Pays & Bacon from the Great Western Pub by W’hampton Station while you are at it”

They says, “Featuring thirty artworks, Painted Dreams reveals De Morgan’s progression as an artist and her technical mastery as one of the most impressive artists of the late Victorian era. Discover De Morgan’s exploration of challenging subjects and painterly responses to enduring social and political issues of the day, such as feminism, inequality, war and pacifism. Painted Dreams revisits the historic 1907 show, reuniting several of De Morgan’s most significant works in Wolverhampton. The original exhibition was a remarkable achievement, challenging Victorian prejudices and the notion that being a professional artist was a male occupation and unsuitable for a woman of De Morgan’s class. Her ability to layer contemporary issues into mythological tales was well received, with one reviewer for the Wolverhampton Express and Star describing the pictures as ‘painted dreams’. Painted Dreams presents De Morgan as a pioneering artist who explored new, challenging subjects that delved into the fundamentals of human existence. The artworks are displayed in chronological order to show the progression of De Morgan’s talent as an artist and demonstrate her painterly responses to enduring social and political issues of the day, such as feminism and inequality, mental health and the impact of war. By recreating De Morgan’s 1907 solo show as faithfully as possible, Painted Dreams highlights a career that has been historically overshadowed by her male contemporaries.  The exhibition is curated by Sarah Hardy, Director of the De Morgan Museum, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. The exhibition is a partnership between the De Morgan Foundation and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. The Gallery is funded by Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation, and City of Wolverhampton Council.”

TIRZAH GARWOOD: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery London, until 26 May 2025. 

https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/about/press-media/press-releases/first-major-exhibition-of-modern-british-artist-tirzah-garwood-among-2024-highlights-at-dulwich-picture-gallery/

The first major exhibition devoted to the artist and designer Tirzah Garwood (1908–1951) since 1952. Best known until now as the wife of Eric Ravilious and as the author of the autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield, Garwood excelled as a fine artist and printmaker. Her diverse and enchanting works are gems of the mid-20th century.

DISCHARGE Black country D-beat deadbeats

JAN 4^th – London 100 Club
FEB 2^nd – Bristol Fleece

THE GENTLE SPRING Former Field Mouse Michael Hiscock returns from his French fastness as The Gentle Spring, semi-acoustic indie-pop in hand.

17 Jan 2025 - Rainham, The Oast
18 Jan 2025 - Brighton, The Brunswick
19 Jan 2025 - London, Betsey Trotwood (Album launch)
23 Jan 2025 - Birmingham, Rock n Roll Brewhouse
24 Jan 2025 - Sheffield, Hallamshire Hotel
7 Feb 2025 - Edinburgh, Leith Depot
8 Feb 2025 - Glasgow, Glad Cafe

THE FALLEN LEAVES Mod-punk veteran assassins

JAN 24^th – Water Rats London,
FEB 28^th Bristol Thunderbolt,
MARCH 1^st Guildford Holroyd,
8^th Brighton Hope & Ruin,
22^nd London Hope & Anchor,
MAY 3^rd Stockton-On-Tees Volume,
4^th N’Castle Billy Bootleggers,
31^st London Dublin Castle,
June 8^th Southsea Edge of The Wedge,
SEPT 27^th London Dublin Castle.

LAURA CANNELL Fenland dronemadchen

FEB 1^st London King’s Place

ITHELL COLQUHOUN – BETWEEN TWO WORLDS Tate St Ives, Feb 1^st – May 5^th. 

Coincidentally, I have a routine about Ithell in the new show!

“The first major exhibition of visionary artist Ithell Colquhoun. One of the most radical artists of her generation, Ithell Colquhoun was an important figure in British Surrealism during the 1930s and 1940s. An innovative writer and practicing occultist, Colquhoun charted her own course, investigating surrealist methods of unconscious picture-making and fearlessly delving into the realms of myth and magic. Colquhoun explored the possibilities of a divine feminine power as a path to personal fulfilment and societal transformation. Her understanding of the world as a connected spiritual cosmos brought her to Cornwall, where she deepened her creative explorations, inspired by the region’s ancient landscape, Celtic traditions, and sacred sites. This landmark exhibition of over 200 artworks and archival materials traces Colquhoun’s evolution, from her early student work and engagement with the surrealist movement, to her fascination with the intertwining realms of art, sexual identity, ecology and occultism. It culminates in a room dedicated to Colquhoun’s interpretation of the Tarot deck – her most accomplished fusion of her artistic and magical practice. Explore Colquhoun’s enthralling, multi-layered universe through writings, drawings, paintings, early theatre projects and mural designs, many of which have never been shown publicly before. The exhibition will debut at Tate St Ives in February 2025, journeying to Tate Britain from June to October 2025.”

THE MAGPIE ARC Fabulous young British country-folk-rock act on the road, augmented by the mighty guitar legend Martin Simpson

FEBRUARY
Friday 7th – International Arts Centre, Leicester Buy Tickets
Saturday 8th – Indoor Festival of Folk, Cecil Sharp House, London
The Magpie Arc, Edgelarks, The Bookshop Band, Sam Carter, Frankie Archer and “The Guv’nor” of folk rock Ashley Hutchings in conversation with Matthew Bannister Buy Tickets 
Sunday 9th – Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham-by-Sea Buy Tickets
Monday 10th – Colchester Arts Centre, Colchester Buy Tickets

APRIL

Thursday 17th – The Glasshouse, Gateshead Buy Tickets
Tuesday 22nd – The Phoenix, Exeter Buy Tickets
Thursday 24th – Chapel Arts, Bath Buy Tickets

RICHARD DAWSON Unmitigated art-folk genius, and funny with it

FEB 14^th London Rough Trade East, 15^th Brighton Resident Music, 17^th Bristol Rough Trade, APRIL 23^rd & 24th M’cr Stoller Hall, 25^th Kendal Brewery Arts, 27^th Leeds City Varieties, 29^th London Clapham Grand, MAY 1^st Cardiff Gate, 2^nd Notts Metronome, 17^th Gateshead Glasshouse, 20^th Edinbro Pleasance, 21^st Glasgow St Lukes, 22^nd L’pool Philharmonic, 23^rd Brighton St Georhe’s , 24^th Folkestone Quarterhouse.

CHUCK PROPHET  Chuck’s last live tour was one of the greatest rock and roll shows I ever saw – real huckster guitar slinger stuff that they don’t make anymore. The Mount Rushmore of sandblasted country noir is on the road here again in 2025. Don’t miss. Honestly.

FEBRUARY
19th - Oxford - The Bullingdon
20th - Leeds - Brudenell Social Club
21st - Manchester - Yes Pink Room
22^nd - Newcastle - The Cluny
23rd - Glasgow - St Lukes
24th - Sheffield - Greystones
25th - Leicester - The International
26th - Nottingham - Metronome
27th - Cambridge - Portland Arms
28^th - Norwich - Arts Centre

MARCH

1st - Hassocks - Mid Sussex Music Hall
2nd - Bristol - Lantern
3rd - Birmingham - Hare & Hounds
4th - Southampton - 1865
5th - London - The Garage

NAPALM DEATH Birmingham’s grindcore godparents

MARCH

4^th - Dublin Academy
5^th – Glasgow Galvanisers’ Yard
6^th – Newcastle Uni Union
7^th – London Electric Ballroon
8^th – Liverpool Academy
9^th – Birmingham Institute

EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD Groovy mininalists

MARCH 8^th London ICA
APRIL 20^th Colchester Arts

STIFF LITTLE FINGERS Indefatigable punk progenitors

MARCH 11^th Brighton Concorde, 12^th Nottingham Rock City, 14^th M’cr Academy, 15^th N’castle City Hall, 17^th Glasgow Barrowland, 18^th York Barbican,

THE LOFT I never saw Pete Astor’s pioneering indie-folk-rock janglers The Loft, like an English middle class mid-60s Dylan with a post-punk rush, first time around, though I saw the Weather Prophets loads, and regular doses of Astor solo over the decades have been pleasurably unavoidable. But I am thrilled at the possibility of this, and new recordings show the band on great form.  Age suits them it seems.

MARCH

13^th – M’cr Gullivers
14^th – B’ham Castle & Falcom
15^th – Nottingham JT Soar
20^th – Ramsgate Music Hall
21^st – Bristol Thunderbolt
22^nd – London Lexington
23^rd – Brighton Prince Albert
27^th – Leeds Lending Room
28^th – N’castle Cluny 2
29^th – Glasgow Mono

HAWKWIND 2025. Another implausible trip for the psychedelic survivors, Dave Brock still imperious, even from his octogenarian stool.

APRIL
17th – Gateshead Glasshouse
18^th – Guildford G Live
19^th – Bournemouth Pavillion
20^th – B’ham Symphony Hall

MAY
9^th – Aylesbury Waterside
10^th – Liverpool Auditorium
11^th – M’cr Bridgewater Hall
23^rd – Sheffield City Hall
25^th – Cambridge Corn Exchange
26^th – London Barbican

MACHYNLLETH COMEDY FESTIVAL The greatest comedy festival in the world. Book your bell tent now to avoid disappointment. I am doing MAN-WULF 3 times, John Shuttleworth is on, Celya AB etc etc.

May 2^nd-4^th. Once visited, never forgotten. DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT.
https://machcomedyfest.co.uk

SAMANTHA CRAIN Heart-rending Choctaw country-folk

MAY
19^th Brighton Green Door
20^th London Neon 194
21^st M’cr Gullivers

THE NIGHTINGALES Birmingham post-punk leg-ends hit the road again. When will it end?

MAY
21^ST Leeds Brudenell
22^nd Newcastle Think Tank
23^rd Glasgow Stereo
24^th M’cr Deaf Institute
25^th B’ham Castle & Falcon
27^th Bristol Exchange
28^th Brighton Chalk
29^th Cambridge Junction
30^th London Oslo
31^st Swansea Bunkhouse

LEN PRICE 3 Durable punk-mods

JUNE 18^th – 229 London

MILLIONS OF DEAD COPS / MDC American hardcore heroes

AUG 4^th – New Cross Inn, London

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11. MY CULTURAL YEAR 2024 DEC 29 2023 – 30^th DEC 2024

“I haven’t seen any of Stewart Lee’s nasty little lists… but this is dark stuff... a form of bullying, intimidation and shaming that Joseph McCarthy or The Stasi would recognize.” John Robinson, Radio X

This is everything I saw, read and heard this year. I try to write everything down. Somethings get missed off by accident. *****s represent what that work meant to me in that moment and its aftermath. They are not the same as the attempts at critical evaluation I would make for a newspaper or a magazine.

Maybe I was happy because I was drunk, or was reminded of something from my past.
Who knows? The things I have given * to were actually a bit rubbish though.

ONE FILM – Sasquatch Sunset (David & Nathan Zellner)
ONE BOOK – Pariah Genius – Iain Sinclair
ONE TV SHOW – Mr Bates Vs The Post Office (ITV)
ONE PLAY – This Is Memorial Device (David Keenan/Graham Eatough)
ONE COMEDY SHOW – Alfie Brown, Open-Hearted Human Enquiry
ONE GIG – Richard Dawson/Lankum (Hammersmith Apollo)
ONE NEW ALBUM - Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad – In The Merry Month of May
ONE EXHIBITION – The Universe Of William Blake (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge)

NEW FILMS (2023/24) (28)

The Three Musketeers: D’Artganan (Martin Bourboulon)
Retribution (Nimrod Antal)
The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)*****
Dream Scenario (Kristoffer Borgli)*****
Anatomy of A Fall (Justine Triett)*****
In The Land of Saints And Sinners (Robert Lorenz)
American Star (Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego)*****
American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)*****
Sasquatch Sunset (David & Nathan Zellner)*****
Late Night With The Devil (Colin & Cameron Cairnes)
Meg 2 : The Trench (Ben Wheatley)*
Loch Ness Horror (Tyler James)*
Road House (Doug Liman) *
Infested (Sebastien Vanicek)
The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green)
Night Swim (Bryce McGuire)
Starve Acre (Daniel Kokotajlo)
Guardians Of The Galaxy 3 (James Gunn)*****
Blink Twice (Zoe Kravitz)*****
Longlegs (Osgood Perkins)*
Speak No Evil (James Watkins)*****
The Last Voyage Of The Demeter (Andre Ovredal)
Little Eden (Rob Curry & Tim Plester)
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)*****
The Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt) *****
Wallace & Gromit – Vengeance Most Fowl (Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham)*****
The Dead Don’t Hurt (Viggo Mortensen)
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)*****

OLD FILMS

Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1989)*****
Measure for Measure (Dominic Dromgoole/Globe, 2015)*****
Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion (David Mirkin, 1997)*****
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)*****
Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973)
Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022)
Humanoids From The Deep (Barbara Peeters, 1980)
The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1988)*****
Love Thy Neighbor (John Robins, 1973)
Commandos (Armando Crispino, 1968)
Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)*****
Paradise Lost (John Stockwell, 2006)*
Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022)*****
Eurocrime (Mike Malloy, 2014)
An American Werewolf In London (Jon Landis, 1981)*****
Howl (Paul Hyett, 2015)
Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990)*****
The Night Of The Devils (Giorgio Ferroni, 1972)*****
Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic, 2001)*****
Wonderboys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)*****
Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1953)*****
Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965)*****
Decision To Leave (Park Chan-Wook, 2022)
Gang War In Milan (Umberto Lenzi, 1973)
The Heroin Busters (Enzo Castellari, 1977)
Othello (Oliver Parker, 1995)*****
Madman (Joe Giannone, 1981)
Christine (John Carpenter, 1983)
Paris Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)*****
The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970) *
Freeway (Michael Bright, 1996)
Meet The Applegates (Michael Lehman, 1990)*****
Round Midnight (Bernard Tavernier, 1986)*****
Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)*****
Dead Man’s Shoes (Shane Meadows, 2004)*****
The Boss (Fernando di Leo, 1973)
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)*****
The One I Love (Charlie McDowell, 2014)
Blacktop (TJ Scott, 2000)
The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)*****
Team America, World Police (Trey Parker, 2004)*****
Evil Dead (Sami Raimi, 1982)
Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977)
Street Law (Enzo Castellari, 1974)
Blood & Diamonds (Fernando di Leo, 1977)
Blazing Magnum (Alberto di Martino, 1976)
Violent City (Sergio Sollima, 1970)
Dr Zhivago (David Lean, 1965)*****
The Wolfman (George Waggner, 1941)
Summer In February (Christopher Menaul, 2013)
Once Upon A Time In The West (Sergio Leone, 1968)*****
The Meg (John Turtletaub, 2018)
The Fiend/Beware My Bretheren (Rupert Hartford-Davis, 1972)
Tony Arzenta (Duccio Tessari, 1973)
The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)
North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)*****
Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973)*****
Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)
Sisu (Jalmari Helander, 2022)*****
Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)*****
Moon Of The Wolf (Daniel Petrie, 1971)
The Italian Connection (Fernando di Leo, 1972)
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)*****
Teeth (Mitchell Lichenstein, 2007)*****
Colt 38 Special Squad (Massimo Dallamano, 1976)
The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)*****
800 Ballas (Alex de la Iglesia, 2002)
Ebirah Horror Of The Deep (Jun Fukuda, 1966)
Spy (Paul Feig, 2015)*****
The Circle (Peter Callow, 2017)
The Stranger & The Gunfighter (Antonio Margheriti, 1974)
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)*****
Piranha (Joe Dante, 1978)
The Lair (Neil Marshall, 2022)
Road House (Rowdy Herrington, 1989)*
Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977)*****
Stan & Ollie (Jon S Baird, 2018)
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)*****
Ondine (Neil Jordan, 2009)*****
The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017)*****
Mark Of The Devil (Michael Armstrong, 1970)*
Basket Case (Frank Hennenlotter, 1982) *****
Interview With The Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994)
The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent, 2018)
Mimic (Guillermo Del Toro, 1997)
Star Crash (Luigo Cozzi, 1978)
Hotel Coolgardie (Pete Gleeson, 2016)
Seven Deaths In The Cat’s Eyes (Antonio Margheriti, 1974)
Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)*****
Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)*****
Apostasy (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2017)
Fresh (Mimi Cave, 2022)
Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)*
Red Sun (Terrence Young, 1971)
A Death Occurred Last Night (Duccio Tessari, 1970)
No, The Case Is Happily Resolved (Vittorio Salerno,1973)
How Did We Find Ourselves Here? (Emile Spoelder, 2022)
Goodbye & Amen (Damiano Damiani, 1977)
The Day Of The Owl (Damiano Damiani, 1968)
The Psychic (Lucio Fulci, 1977)*****
Death Ship (Alvin Rakoff, 1980)*
Tenebrae (Dario Argento, 1982)*
Don’t Torture A Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)*****
Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)*****
The Housesitter (Frank Oz, 1992)
The Antichrist (Alberto Di Martino, 1974)
Limbo (John Sayles, 1999)*****
The Long Days Of Vengeance (Floresto Vancini, 1967)
China 9, Liberty 37 (Monte Hellman, 1978)
The Designated Victim (Maurizio Lucidi, 1971)*****
Four Of The Apocalypse (Lucio Fulci, 1975)*****
Contraband (Lucio Fulci, 1980)* (This film has no redeeming features)
Tales That Witness Madness (Freddie Francis, 1973)
Backbeat (Ian Softley, 1994)*****
Return Of The Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985)*****
Smile (Parker Finn, 2022)
The Witches (Cyril Frankel, 1966)
Oxide Ghosts (Michael Cumming, 2017)
The Sect (Michael Soavi, 1991)
God Told Me To (Larry Cohen, 1976)*****
Manic Cop (William Listig, 1988)
Unman, Wittering & Zigo (John Mackenzie, 1971)
Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971)*****
The Reptile (John Gilling, 1966)
The Nanny (Seth Holt, 1965)
Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980)*****
The Brain (Edward Hunt, 1988)
Rising Damp (Joseph McGrath, 1980)
So Sweet … So Perverse (Umberto Lenzi, 1969)*****
The Prey (Edwin Brown, 1982)*
Duck You Sucker! (Sergio Leone, 1971)*****

NEW BOOKS

Robin Ince - Bibliomania
Josie Long – Because I Don’t Know What You Mean And What You Don’t
Iain Sinclair – Pariah Genius *****
Rosie Holt - Why We Were Right
Ted Kessler – To Ease My Troubled Mind
Steve Wynn – I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True
Richard Pascoe & Kirstie Hawkes – The Versatile Performer
The Haunted Trail – ed Weird Walk
Jakko M Jakszyk – Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair?
Daisy Johnson – Hotel *****
Andrew Michael Hurley – Barrowbeck
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson – Code Damp

OLD BOOKS

Ray Bradbury – Now & Forever (2008)
Brigid Brophy – Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953)*****
Philip Larkin – High Windows (1974)*****
Barbara Comyns – Sisters By A River (1947)*****
Andrew Michael Hurley – Starve Acre (2019)
Daisy Johnson – Fen (2016)

OLD TV

Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place (C4, 2004)*****
Guardians of The Galaxy Holiday Special (Disney, 2022)
Mystery Road S1 (ABCTV, 2018)*****
Mystery Road S2 (ABCTV, 2020)*****
Dark Winds S 1 (AMC, 2022)*****
Mystery Road Origin (ABCTV, 2022)*****
Ghost Stories For Christmas, No 13 (BBC, 2006)

NEW TV

Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV) *****
True Detective S4 (HBO)
Baby Reindeer (Netflix)*
Deadloch (Amazon Prime)
Channel 4 Election coverage (C4)
Inside No 9 series 9 (BBC)*****
Joe Rogan – Burn The Boats (Netflix)*
Rivals (Disney +) *****
Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country (BBC3)*
Dark Winds S 2 (AMX, 2023)
Christmas Day Dr Who (BBC1)
Ghost Stories For Christmas, Woman Of Stone (BBC)
Sky news (Sky)

MAGAZINES AND PAPERS

Shindig, Record Collector, Viz, Mojo, Guardian, Machenallia, Faunus, Observer, Guardian, London Review of Books, Weird Walk, Wire, Vala, Larkin About, Shuck, Hellebore, Fortean Times.
Adrian Childs’ Guardian columns
Jay Rayner’s Observer restaurant reviews
Marina Hyde’s Guardian columns
Nesrine Malik’s Guardian columns
John Crace’s Guardian columns

RADIO NEW AND OLD

James O’Brien (LBC) *****
Nick Ferrari (LBC) *
Shelagh Fogerty (LBC)
BBC News esp L Kuenssberg *

INTERNETS, YOUTUBES AND PODCASTS

Backlisted *****
Sonic Fields
Music Maps
Sid Griffin Calling All Coal Porters *****
Looks Unfamiliar
European Cryptids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I-Nc4ERr-U

THEATRE/DANCE/RITUAL/EVENTS (18 performances)

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s Nelken – Sadler’s Wells *****
St Piran’s Day Parade, Bodmin
Othello (dir Ola Ince, Globe)*****
This Is Memorial Device (Riverside)*****
Nye (Tim Price, National Theatre)
This Is Memorial Device (Riverside)***** (again)
Mnemonic – Complicite (National Theatre) *****
Mnemonic – Complicite (National Theatre) ***** (again)
Prime Meat (York University, Space, Edinburgh)
The Signalman (Zoo, Edinburgh)
Simon Raymonde & Will Hodgkinson talking (End Of The Road)
Waiting For Godot – dir James MacDonald (Haymarket, London)
Othello – dir. Tim Carroll (RSC, Stratford-Upon-Avon)
Tales of The Weird Event (British Library)
Abney Park Remembrance Sunday Event (Stoke Newington, London)
So Watt! Jazz & Improvisation On British TV 1972-75(Barbican, London)
Dick Whittington  - dir Clive Rowe (Hackney Empire)
All’s Well That Ends Well – dir Chelsea Walker (Globe)*****

COMEDY (30 shows)

Daniel Kitson – First Thing (Summerhall) (2023 omission)*****
Garth Marenghi’s Incarcerat (Leicester Comedy Festival)
Maurice Grumbleweed (Blues Café Bar, Harrogate)*****
Harland Williams (Bill Murray, London)
Henry Morris (Theatre Mwldan, Cardigan)
Rosie Holt – That’s Politainment (Chipping Norton Theatre, days after election) *****
Ben Pope, Alex Kealey, Helen Bauer (Bill Murray, London)
Jo Long, Celya AB,  Athena Kugblenu, Sara Barron (Bill Murray, London)
Barry Ferns, Jon Long, Maddie HW, Archit Goenka, Alex Farrow (Bill Murray, London)
Kevin Eldon (Tommyfield, London) x 4*****
Noncensored Election Special (Museum of Comedy)
John Cooper Clarke (Latitude)
Reece Shearsmith vs Black Shuck (St Mary’s Church, Bungay)
Rosie Holt – Why We Were Right (Underbelly, Edinburgh)
Alfie Brown – Open Hearted Human Enquiry (Caves, Edinburgh)*****
Eliot Steel – Soft Boi Core (Underbelly, Edinburgh)*****
Josie Long, Thanyia Moore, Pappy’s Fun Club (End Of The Road)
Harry Hill, Jon Culshaw, Jan Ravens, Rory Bremner, Ronnie Golden, Steve Coogan, Laura Mvula, Alfie Brown (Steve Brown Night, Savoy) *****
Harry Hill (Tommyfield, London)*****

GIGS (58 events)

What a great year for seeing music, somehow, in between all the nights I worked and couldn’t see stuff. I totally got my mojo back and was rewarded. It was like being in my teens and 20s again, with things I’d never seen before that nailed me, and yet lots of the same acts from my youth suddenly still exploding decades down the line too!!  Maybe seeing some stuff through my kids’ eyes reawakened me as well. I loved being 56 and down the front!

(I have bundled festival acts together by day as one event, against my better judgement, as there was some criticism online of me dividing individual festival performers’ shows up into distinct items, rather than amalgamating them into one ‘gig’.)

Steve Noble, John Edwards & Alan Wilkinson (Café Oto, Dalston)
Rexes Hollow (Butcher’s Arms, Yeovil)
A Covers Guy (Scholar and Gentleman, Birmingham)
Jackdaw With Crowbar (Coventry Belgrade)
Cosse/The Water Chestnuts (Library Pub, Oxford)
Deathcrash/Jesus & Mary Chain (Camden Roundhouse)
Hawkwind (Wulfrun Hall, Wolverhampton)
Lenny Kaye/Rat Scabies/Jim Jones/Dave Tregunna/Brian James/Cheetah Chrome/& two superb go-go dancers, egregiously uncredited by any of the men on stage (The 100 Club, London)*****
Martin Newell (St Mattias, Stoke Newington, London)
Jasmine Minks (Waiting Room, Stoke Newington)*****
Josephine Foster & Lydia Samuels, Monde UFO, Immaterial Possession, Jane Weaver & The Dream Syndicate, Bas Jan, Graham Reynolds, Marta Del Grandi, Kirstin Hersh, Islet, Giant Sand, Giant Syndicate (Earth, Dalston) *****
The Girl With The Replaceable Head (Waiting Room, Stoke Newington)*****
Peter Case/Sid Griffin (What’s Cookin’?, Leytonstone) *****
The Black Keys (Brixton Academy, London)
Ex-Easter Island Head/Dean McPhee (Stoke Newington church, London)
The Bevis Frond (Lexington, London)*****
The Prisoners (Roundhouse, London)
Dexy’s Midnight Runners (Koko, London)
Rain Parade(291, London)*****
The Primevals (Lexington, London)*****
The Shadracks (Lexington, London)
The Fallen Leaves (Lexington, London)
The Cosmic Psychos (Dome, London)
Patti Smith Quartet – (Somerset House, London)*****
Orbital (Latitude Saturday)
Lankum*****, Duran Duran, English Teacher (Latitude Sunday)
Laura Cannell (St Mary’s Church, Bungay)*****
Wreckless Eric/Stiff Little Fingers (Cambridge Junction)
Laetitia Sadier (Lexington, London)*****
Swansea Sound (Lexington London)
David Lance Callahan & Darren Garrat (Lexington London)*****
Islet, Sleaford Mods (Green Man Thursday)*****
Jesus & Mary Chain (Green Man Friday)
Nightingales, Lonnie Holey, New Eves, Tinariwen, Osees (Green Man Saturday)*****
Boca 45, Zalizo, 86TV’s, Idles *****(Bristol Academy)
Secluded Bronte, Eliza Skelton, Alison Cotton, Bevis Frond, Phsyics House Band (Brighton Psych Fest, Komedia)*****
Slowdive (End Of The Road, Saturday)*****
Lambrini Girls, Yo La Tengo, Yo La Tengo acoustic (EOTR, Sunday)
Robyn Hitchcock (Earth, London)
Steve Wynn (Walthamstow Trades Hall, London)
Steve Wynn (Rough Trade, London)
Ride/Bdrmm (St John’s, Hackney, London)
The Long Ryders (291, London)*****
Richard Dawson/Lankum (Hammersmith Apollo)*****
New Eves, Boss Morris, Goblin Band, Daisy Rickman (Earth, Hackney)*****
Jody Stephens’ Big Star (St John’s, Hackney, London)
The Cure (Troxy, London)*****
Bevis Frond Acoustic Trio (Rio, Dalston, London)
The Room – Bar Love (Notting Hill, London)*****
Bob Dylan (Royal Albert Hall, London)*****
North Kent Folkways Revival, Singing Loins & Chatham Singers (Rochester Medway Little Theatre)*****
Yo La Tengo As Little Black Egg (Café Oto, London)
The Chameleons (Shepherd’s Bush Empire)*****
The Lovely Eggs (100 Club, London)*****
The Damned (Roundhouse, London)
Steve Noble, John Edwards & Alan Wilkinson (Café Oto, London, again)*****
The Fallen Women (Lexington, London)*****

RECORDS I LISTENED TO OLD SCHOOL IN ONE SITTING AT A LISTENING DEVICE

NEW RECORDS – 2023/2024 (71)

The Bevis Frond – Focus On Nature *****
Black Bombers – Vive La Revolution
The Smile – Wall Of Eyes
The Pink Fairies – Screwed Up *
The Room – Restless Fate
Drop Nineteens – Hard Light
The Silversound – s/t *****
The Sand Pebbles – The Antagonist
The Rebel – Mublatpecnoc
Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project – The Task Has Overwhelmed Us
V/A – A Tribute To Roky Erickson, May The Circle Be Unbroken
Jesus & Mary Chain – Chemical Animal
Shadow Show – Fantasy Now!
Serious Sam Barrett – A Drop Of The Morning Dew
Alison Cotton – Engelchen
The Bohman Brothers – Room Service
Laetitia Sadier – Rooting For Love *****
Kim Gordon – The Collective
Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther
Hawkwind – Stories from Time & Space
Acid Mothers Temple & Melting Paraiso UFO – Paralyzed Genius Brain
Jasmine Minks – We Make Our Own History
Black Keys – Ohio Players
The Prisoners – Morning Star
Shellac – To All Trains
The Lovely Eggs – Eggsistentialism  *****
Charley Stone – Here Comes The Actual Band *****
The Janitors – An Error Has Occurred
Buffalo Tom – Jump Rope
Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad – In The Merry Month of May *****
Rain Parade – Last Rays of A Dying Sun
Rain Parade – Last Stop On The Underground
Dead Pioneers – s/t
Sun Dial – Message To The Mothership
Various artists/Rhodri Davies - Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn/Relics Of The Horsehair Harp
SnarskiCircusLindyBand – I Know I Know *****
The Smile – A Light For Attracting Attention
Idles – Tangk
40 Watt Sun – Little Weight *****
Guru Guru – The Incredible World Of
Kim Gordon – The Collective
Stephen Pastel & Gavin Thompson – This Is Memorial Device
Kosmischer Läufer – Track Club EP
Howe Gelb – Weathering Some Piano
Sid Griffin – The Journey From Grape To Raisin
Steve Wynn – Make It Right
Chuck Prophet with Qiensave? – Wake The Dead
The Girl With The Replaceable Head – Sometimes She Lives In The Dark
Daisy Rickman – Howl *****
Lankum – Live In Dublin *****
Goblin Band – Come Slack Your Horse
Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined *****
Julian Cope – Friar Tuck
The Room – The Telling *****
The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World
The Smile – Cutouts
House of All – Gaudy Pop Sensations
The Octopus Project – Sasquatch Sunset
Lucinda Williams – Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road
New Starts – More Break Up Songs*****
David Lance Callahan – Down To The Marshes *****
Nada Surf – Moon Mirror
Thurston Moore – Flow Critical Lucidity
Wild Billy Childish & The North Kent Folkways Revival – Cape Trafalgar *****
Wild Billy Childish & The North Kent Folkways Revival – The Speech Of Karaktakus
Dave Graney & Clare Moore – Strangely Emotional
Dave Graney & Clare Moore – I Passed Through A Minor Chord In A Morning
Hugo Race – 100 Years
Guided By Voices – Strut Of Kings
Rip Van Winkle – The Grand Rapids *****
Tindersticks – Soft Tissue
Rob Snarski – Waiting For The Bell*****
The Primevals – I’m A Man-Wulf 3 track bandcamp d/l *****

NEW OLD RECORDS - reissues, archive & comp’s

Bardo Pond – Volume 9 (2001?)
Alan Tomlinson – At The Red Rose (2006-7)*****
Sonic Youth – Walls Have Ears (1985)
Can – Live In Paris (1973)
Joe Henderson – Power To The People (1969)*****
The Fall – Slates Live (1980-82)*****
Alice Coltrane – The Carnegie Hall Concert (1971)
Sun – Sun 1972 (1972)*****
The Waterboys – 1985 (1985)
The Telescopes – Growing Eyes Become String (2013)
The Prefabs – Dec ‘77 Before The Wall (1977)
The Shop Assistants – Will Anything Happen? (1983-89)
The Green Pajamas – Live At Terrastock 4 (2000)
Howe Gelb – ZEQE 24.088 (1977-79)
The Desperate Ones – 1906 (2013)
McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson – Forces Of Nature (1966)*****
The Fall – Grotesque (After The Gramme) Live ! (1980-82)*****
V/A - Brown Acid The 19^th Trip (1968-1978)
Miles Davis – Miles In France (1962-3)*****
Children’s Crusade – A Duty-Dance With Death (1984)

OLD RECORDS

Ozark Mountain Daredevils – s/t (1974)
The Allman Brothers Band – s/t (1969)
Canned Heat – s/t (1967)*****
Canned Heat – Boogie With (1968)*****
Canned Heat – Vintage (1970)
Canned Heat – Living The Blues (1968)*****
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)*****
Pure Prairie League – Bustin’ Out (1972)
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Safe As Milk (1967)*****
The Byrds – Long Way Back (1974)*****
Chuck Prophet et le Mission Express – Live A Paris (2017)*****
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Clear Spot (1972)*****
Nina Simone – Here Comes The Sun (1971)*****
Danny Thompson Trio – Live (1967)
David Soul – s/t (1976)
Seatrain – Watch (1973)
Al Kooper – Act Like Nothing’s Wrong (1977)
Mike Bloomfield – Try It Before You Buy It (1975)
Butterfield Blues Band – Original Lost Elektra Masters (1964)
Head Machine – Orgasm (1970)
Uriah Heep – Very ‘Eavy Very ‘Umble (1970)
The Beat – I Just Can’t Stop It (1980)*****
The Beat – W’happen? (1981)
The Leaving Trains – Fuck (1987)*****
Tom Verlaine – s/t (1979)
Tom Verlaine – Dreamtime (1981)
Richard Hell & The Voidoids – Destiny Street (1982)*****
Dave Alvin – Romeo’s Escape (1987)
Divine Horsemen – Snakehandler (1987)*****
Divine Horsemen – Time Stands Still (1984)
John Doe – Meet John Doe (1990)
V/A – Girls With Guitars Gonna Shake! (1964-9)
Died Pretty – Pre-Deity (1984-5)*****
Died Pretty – Free Dirt (1986)*****
Gentle Assassins – They Knew Too Much (2006)
’68 Comeback – Mr Downchild (2012)
The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump – s/t (1970)
Kaleidoscope – Tangerine Dream (1967)
The Tangerine Zoo – s/t (1968)
Cotton Mather – Kontiki (1997)*****
Tom Verlaine – Words From The Front (1982)
Tom Verlaine – Cover (1989)
The Violent Femmes – The Blind Leading The Naked (1986)*****
The Violent Femmes – Hallowed Ground (1984)*****
The Beach Boys – Surf’s Up (1971)
Bread – s/t (1969)*****
Deviants – Resident Reptiles (2018)*****
Twink – Think Pink III (2018?)
The Nils – Green Fields In Daylight (1983-86)
The Nils – st (1987)
Indian Summer – s/t (1971)*****
Alexander Skip Spence - Oar (1969)*****
Moon Attendant – One Last Summer (2020)
Christian Bland & The Revelators – Pig Boat Blues (2012)
Freedy Johnston – Can You Fly? (1992) *****
Freedy Johnston – This Perfect World (1994)
Jasmine Minks – Cut Me Deep (1984-2014)*****
Chilliwack – s/t (1970)*****
MC5 – Black To Comm (1968)
MC5 – Kick Out The Jams (1969)*****
MC5 – Back In The USA (1970)
MC5 – High Time (1971)*****
Destroy All Monsters – Bored (1978-9)*****
James Williamson & The Pink Hearts – Across The Sky (2018)
Eddie & The Hot Rods – Teenage Depression (1976)
Eddie & The Hot Rods – Life On The Line (1977)
Buzzcocks – Live! (1995)
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Doc At The Radar Station (1980)*****
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Amsterdam (1980)
Buzzcocks – 30 Live In London (2006)
Buzzcocks – Love Bites (1978)*****
XTC – White Music (1978)
XTC – Go2 (1978)
The Room – Jackpot Jack (1985)*****
XTC – Drums & Wires (1979)
Captain Beefheart – Somewhere Over Egypt Live (1981)
XTC – Black Sea (1980)*****
The Soul Movers – On The In Side (2009)
The Soul Movers – Testify (2017)
Morphine – Good (1993)****
Elvis Costello – My Aim Is True (1977)*****
The Pontiac Brothers – Big Black River (1985)*****
Can – Tago Mago (1971)*****
UFO – Phenomenon (1974)
American Music Club – California (1988)*****
13^th Floor Elevators – Psychedelic Sounds Of (1966)*****
John & Beverley Martyn – Stormbringer (1970)
The Verlaines – Juvenilia (1982-4)*****
The Verlaines – Live At The Windsor Castle (1986)
The Verlaines – Hallelujah All The Way Home (1985)
The Church – Of Skins & Hearts (1981)
The Church – The Blurred Crusade (1982)
The Sound – Jeopardy (1980) *****
Mark Kozelek – Rock ‘n’ Roll Singer (2000)*****
Red House Painters – Old Ramon (2001)
The Master’s Apprentices – Nickelodeon (1971)*****
Buffalo – Volcanic Rock (1973)*****
Kahvas Jute – Wide Open (1971)*****
Levi Smith’s Clefs – Empty Monkey (1969)*****
The Human Instinct – Stoned Guitar (1970)
The Fourmyula – Alive (1970)
Space Waltz – s/t (1975)
Francois Hardy – Soleil (1970)*****
Carson – Blown (1972)
Leo De Castro & Friends – s/t (1971-3)
The Master’s Apprentices – A Toast To Panama Red (1971)
The Church – Séance (1983)
The Waterboys – s/t (1983)
The Violent Femmes – 3 (1989)
Primitons – Happy All The Time (1987)
Elvis Costello – My Aim Is True (1987)*****
Wapassou – Ludwig (1979)
Kostas Tournas – Aperanta Chorafia (1973)
Arthur Jones – Scorpio (1971)*****
Area – Arbeit Macht Frei (1973)****
Balleto di Brozo – Ys (1973)*****
Claudio Rocchi – Essanza (1973)*****
Le Stelle Di Mariano Schifano – Dedicated To (1967)
Blue Phantom – Distortions (1971)
Zarathustra – Zarathustra (1973)
Alan Sorrenti – Aria (1972)*****
Sensations Fix – Fragments Of Light (1974)
Area – Areazione Live (1976) *****
Sensations Fix – Boxes Paradise (1977)
Terje Rypdal – s/t (1971)
Jan Garbarek Quartet – Afric Pepperbird (1971)
Secret Oyster – s/t (1973)
Archie Shepp/Lars Gullin – The House I Live In (1980)*****
Giuseppi Logan Quartet – s/t (1964)
Ellufant – Release Concert (1972)
Shocking Blue – Singles A’s & B’s (1967-74)*****
Cosmic Couriers – Other Places (1996)
Fleetwood Mac – Then Play On (1969)*****
John Lee Hooker – Detroit (1948-49)*****
Colour Haze – Los Sounds De Krauts (2003)
Bevis Frond – What Did For The Dinosuars (2002)*****
Bevis Frond – Hit Squad (2004)
Bevis Frond – The Leaving Of London (2011)
Game Theory – Blaze of Glory (1982)
Samsara Blues Experiment – Long Distance Trip (2010)
Jacques Coursil – Black Suite (1971)
Bauhaus – The Bella Session (1979)*****
Bauhaus – In The Flat Field (1980)
Gene Parsons – Kindling (1973)*****
Terry Melcher – s/t (1974) *****
The Beau Brummels – Bradley’s Barn (1968)
Sun Kil Moon – This Is My Dinner (2018)*****
Johnny Rivers – Rio Fangoso (1969)
Raspberries – Raspberries (1972)
Polvo – Cor-Crane Secret (1992)*****
Naked Prey – Kill The Messenger (1988)
Trembling Bells – Carbeth (2009)*****
Lloyd Cole – s/t (1990)
The Doublehappys – Nerves (1984-5)
Straitjacket Fits – Hail (1990)*****
Art Objects – Bagpipe Music (1979)
Bored! – Chucks (1988-94)
World Party – Private Revolution (1987)
Explosions In The Sky – How Strange, Innocence (2000)
Nanci Griffith – There’s A Light Beyond These Woods (1978)*****
Kris Kristofferson – Kristofferson (1970)*****
John Lee Hooker & The Groundhogs – On The Waterfront (1965)
Sonny Boy Williamson & The Yardbirds – Live (1965)
Lightnin’ Hopkins – Free Form Patterns (1968)
Howlin’ Wolf – The Howlin’ Wolf Album (1969)
Muddy Waters – After The Rain (1969)*****
ZZ Top – La Futura (2012)
John Lee Hooker – Simply The Truth (1969)*****
Lowell Fulson – It’s A Heavy Bag (1969)
John Lee & Earl Hooker – If You Miss ‘ Em(1970)*****
Roedelius – Durch Die Wuste (1978)
Cluster – s/t (1971)
Cluster -Cluster II (1972)
Harmonia – Deluxe (1975)*****
La Dusseldorf – s/t (1976)*****
Michael Rother – Flamende Herzen (1977)*****
Michael Rother – Sterntaler (1978)
La Dusseldorf – Viva (1978)
Mick Hanley & Micheal O Domhnaill – Celtic Folkweave (1974)*****
The Bothy Band – Out Of The Wind Into The Sun (1977)*****
Horslips – Book Of Invasion (1976)
Jakob – Jakob (1999)*****
Graham Parker – Heat Treatment (1976)
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
Jesus & Mary Chain – Damage & Joy (2017)
Jesus & Mary Chain – Psychocandy (1985)*****
Jesus & Mary Chain – Darklands (1987)
Jesus & Mary Chain – Automatic (1989)
Jesus & Mary Chain – Honey’s Dead (1992)
Jesus & Mary Chain – Stoned & Dethroned (1994)
Elvis Costello – Almost Blue (1981)*****
Jesus & Mary Chain – Munki (1998)
Chameleons – What Does Anything Mean Basically? (1985)*****
Billy Bragg – Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy (1983)*****
Hawkwind – Warrior At The Edge Of Time (1975)*****
The Cleaners From Venus – Number 13 (1990)
Red Chair Fadeaway – Curiouser & Curiouser (1991)
Red Chair Fadeaway – Mesmerised (1993)
Razorcuts – The World Keeps Turning (1989)
Millions of Dead Cops – s/t (1982)*****
Ry Cooder – Music By (1980-1995)*****
Bobbie Gentry – Ode To Billie Joe (1967)*****
Slowdive – Just For A Day (1991)*****
Nick Drake – Bryter Later (1971) *****
John Lee Hooker – Endless Boogie (1971)*****
Cocteau Twins – Treasure (1984)*****
Sonic Youth – Sonic Nurse (2004)*****
The Smiths – The Smiths (1984)*****
Cocteau Twins – Head Over Heels (1983)*****
Elliot Smith – X/O (1998)
The Byrds – Mr Tambourine Man (1965)*****
The Byrds – Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965)*****
Pylon – Gyrate (1980)*****
Pylon – Chomp (1983)*****
Hannah Marcus – The Hannah Marcus Years (1993-2004)
Edgar Froese – Stuntman (1979)
Jasmine Minks – One Two Three Four Five Six Seven (1984)*****
Guadalcanal Diary – Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (1984)
Tony Joe White – Black & White (1969)*****
Willie Nelson – Red Headed Stranger (1975)*****
The Go-Betweens – s/t (1981)*****
The Go-Betweens – First Five Singles (1978-82)*****
Slobberbone – s/t (1987)
Volebeats – Up North (1994)
Volebeats – Sky & The Ocean (1997)
Westlake – s/t (1987)
Blue Mountain – Dog Days (1995)*****
Blue Mountain – Home Grown (1997)*****
Blue Mountain – Roots (2001)*****
Mr Henry – As Good As The Ground (1995)
The Triffids – In The Pines (1986)*****
Lou Reed – New York (1989)*****
Katie Spencer – The Edge Of The Land (2022)
Oliver Nelson – The Blues And The Abstract Truth (1961)*****
UFO – UFO 1 (1970)*****
The Blackeyed Susans – All Souls Alive (1993)
Possum Dixon – s/t (1993)*****
The Prisoners – A Taste Of Pink (1982)
Trader Horne – Morning Way (1970)
The Prisoners – Thewisermiserdemelza (1983)
My Bloody Valentine – Tremolo (1991)*****
Slint – Spiderland (1991)*****
Jeff Buckley – Cabaret Metro (1995)
The Byrds – Untitled (1970)*****
Dillard & Clark – Through The Morning, Through The Night (1969)
The Byrds – Ballad of Easy Rider (1970) *****
The Byrds – Dr Byrds & Mr Hyde (1969)
Burrito Brothers – The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969)*****
Dick Gaughan – Handful of Earth (1981) *****
Dick Gaughan & Andy Irvine – Parallel Lines (1982)
The Electric Flag – The Trip (1967)
Lawrence Hammond – Coyote’s Dream (1976)
Mad River – The Paradise Bar & Grill (1969) *****
Nanci Griffith – Last of The True Believers (1986)
Suzanne Vega – s/t (1985)*****
Nick Drake  - Five Leaves Left (1969)*****
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Let The Record Show (2016)*****
The Waterboys – This Is The Sea (1985)*****
The Fall – Room To Live (1982)*****
Scott Walker – Climate of The Hunter (1984) *****
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Searching For The Young Soul Rebels (1980)*****
Ride – Nowhere (1990)
Sisters of Mercy – BBC Sessions (1982-4)
Sisters of Mercy – Reptile House (1983)
Sisters of Mercy – First And Last And Always (1985)
Sisters of Mercy – Vision Thing (1990)
Rain Parade – Crashing Dream (1985) *****
Catheads – Hubba (1987) *****
Coffee Sergeants – Moonlight Towers (1993)
Glen Campbell – Galveston (1969)
The Waterboys – Fisherman’s Blues (1987)*****
Bettie Serveert – Palomine (1992)*****
The Triffids – Treeless Plain (1983)*****
The Triffids – Raining Pleasure (1984)*****
Lawson Square Infirmary  - s/t (1984)
The Triffids – Calenture – (1988)*****
Felt – The Splendour Of Fear (1983)*****
Felt – The Strange Idol’s Pattern (1984)*****
Arzachel – s/t (1969)*****
Salad – Drink Me (1995)
John Lee Hooker – The Country Blues Of (1959) *****
John Lee Hooker – Travelin’ (1960) *****
John Lee Hooker – House Of The Blues (1952)
John Lee Hooker – That’s My Story (1960)
John Lee Hooker – The Folk Lore Of (1961)
The Catherine Wheel – She’s My Friend ep (1991)
The Catherine Wheel – Painful Thing ep (1991)
The Catherine Wheel – Ferment (1992)
The Catherine Wheel – Chrome (1993)
The Cosmic Psychos – Down On The Farm (1985)*****
The Cosmic Psychos – s/t (1987)*****
The Folk Devils – Best Protection & Peel Sessions (1987)*****
Johnny Rivers – Slim Slow Slider (1970)*****
Johnny Rivers – Home Grown (1971)
40 Watt Sun – Wider Than The Sky (2016)*****
Big Thief  - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (2022)
Jeff Buckley – Live At Wetlands (1994)
Red House Painters – Down Colourful Hill (1992)*****
40 Watt Sun – Perfect Light (2020)*****
The Cure – Seventeen Seconds (1980)*****
Del Fuegos – Boston Mass (1985)
Red House Painters – s/t aka Rollercoaster (1993)
Jeff Buckley – Live From The Bataclan (1995)*****
Bert Jansch – Edge of A Dream (2002)*****
Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)
Slowdive – Just For A Day (1991)
Scott Walker – Scott 4 (1970)*****
The Doors – Morrison Hotel (1970)*****
The Smiths – Hatful of Hollow (1984)*****
Sun Kil Moon – Ghosts Of The Great Highway (2003)*****
Echo & The Bunnymen – Ocean Rain (1984)*****
My Bloody Valentine – Loveless (1991)*****
Led Zeppelin – III (1970)*****
The Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good (1988)
The Doors – s/t (1967)*****
Help Yourself – s/t (1971)
The Doors – Strange Days (1967)
Mazzy Star – So Tonight That I May See (1991)*****
Stiff Little Fingers – Inflammable Material (1979)*****
Stiff Little Fingers – Nobody’s Heroes (1980)
Miles Davis/Bill Laswell – Panthalassa (1969-74)*****
Frank Morgan – Mood Indigo (1989)*****
Frank Morgan – City Nights (2004)*****
Grachan Moncur III – Evolution (1963)
Steve Wynn – Kerosene Man (1990)
Steve Wynn – Dazzling Display (1992)
Steve Wynn – Fluorescent (1993)
Gutterball – s/t (1993) *****
Steve Wynn – Take Your Flunky & Dangle (1994)
Gutterball – Weasel (1995)*****
Steve Wynn - Melting In The Dark (1996)*****
John Coltrane – Live At The Village Vanguard (1961)*****
John Coltrane – Coltrane (1957) *****
Paul Chambers – Chambers’ Music (1957)
John Coltrane & co – Interplay For 2 Trumpets (1957)
John Coltrane & Tad Dameron – Mating Call (1958)
John Coltrane – Traneing In (1958)
John Coltrane –  Blue World (1964)*****
Miles Davis – Steamin’ (1957)*****
Stereolab – Super 45 (1991)*****
Stereolab – Switched On (1992)*****
Johnny Rivers – Road (1974)
Giant Sand – Chore of Enchantment (2000)*****
Eric Quincy Tate – s/t (1970)
Tramp – Put A Record On (1974)
Sonny Rollins – Standard Sonny Rollins (1964)
Sonny Rollins – Alfie (1966)
Dexter Gordon – Our Man In Paris (1963)*****
Idles – Crawler
Dexter Gordon – Soul Sister (1963)
Dexter Gordon – One Flight Up (1964)*****
Dexter Gordon – Montmartre 1964 Live (1964)
Marion Brown – Sweet Earth Flying (1974)*****
Paul Bley Trio – Closer (1965)
Husker Du – Candy Apple Grey (1986)*****
Husker Du – Warehouse (1987)*****
Husker Du – The Living End (1987)
Swervedriver – Raise (1991)
Oasis – Be Here Now (1997)
Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul (2008)
The Loft – Magpie Eyes (1983-85)
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand (2007)
Oasis – Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (2000)
Highway – s/t (1971)
Gene Clark w The Gosdin Brothers – s/t (1967)*****
Robyn Hitchcock – Eye (1990)*****
Jimi Hendrix – Woodstock (1969) *****
The Move – Message From The Country (1971)
Carson – On The Air (1973)
Carson – Travelling Highway Blues (1970-73)
Chain – Towards The Blues (1971)
Chain – History of Chain (1970-71)
Felt – Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty (1982)*****
Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland (1968)*****
The Miracle Workers – Primary Domain (1989)
The Green Pajamas – Lust Never Sleeps (2002)*****
The Green Pajamas – Seven Fathoms Down & Falling (1999)*****
Ten Years After – Stonedhenge (1969)
Naked Prey – Under The Blue Marlin (1986)
Naked Prey – 40 Miles From Nowhere (1987)
Naked Prey – Live In Tucson (1990)
The Wonderful World Of Depressing Country Music – v/a (1940-1965)
Billy Boy Arnold – Checkin’ It Out (1979)
Tom Robinson Band – Power In The Darkness (1978)*****
The Dream Syndicate – The Medicine Show (1984)*****
Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (1965)*****
Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde (1966)*****
Bob Dylan – Self Portrait (1970)*****
Ultravox! – s/t (1977)*****
Ultravox! – Ha!-Ha!-Ha! (1977)*****
The Icicle Works – s/t (1984)*****
Kris Kristoferson – Border Lord (1972)*****
The Psycho Daisies – 30 Milligrams of Your Love (1990)*****
PW Long – We Didn’t See You On Sunday (1997)*****
The Fall – Dragnet (1979) *****
The Fall – Imperial Wax Solvent (2008)*****
The Fall – Fall Heads Roll (2005)*****
Ride – Going Blank Again (1992)
Ride – Smile EP (1990)
The Fall – Grotesque (1980)*****
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will Circle Be Unbroken? (1972)*****
Pure Prairie League – s/t (1972)
Concrete Blonde – Free (1989)
Ry Cooder – The Border (1982)
Pure Prairie League – Live In America (1974)*****
Dumptruck – For The Country (1987)*****
Dharma Bums – Haywire (1988)*****
The Cure – The Top (1984)
The Cure – The Head On The Door (1985)
Suzanne Vega – s/t (1985)*****
Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)
Bob Dylan – Blood On The Tracks (1975)*****
Bob Dylan – New Morning (1970)*****
Victoria Williams – Loose (1994)*****
Pieta Brown – Remember The Sun (2007)
Pieta Brown – Freeway (2014)
Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend (1991)*****
The Beatles – Revolver (1966)*****
The Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour (1967)*****
Doug Sahm & His Band – s/t (1973)*****
Kathy Dalton – Boogie Bands & One Night Stands (1974)
The Dils – Class War (1977-80)
The Zeros – Don’t Push Me Around (1976-80)
The Dils – Dils Dils Dils (1977-80)
The Nuns – The Nuns (1980)
Bang – Death of a Country (1971)
Jim Ford – Harlan County (1969)
The Jimmy Cake – Dublin Gone Everyone Dead (2015)
Lynched – Cold Old Fire (2015)
Kollektiv – S/t (1973)
Tetragon – Nature (1971)
Chris Foster – Layers (1977)
Boys of The Lough – Good Friends Good Music (1977)
Irene Schweizer Trio – Jazz Meets India (1967)*****
Daisy Rickman – Donsya A’n Loryow (2022)
Randy Burns – The Exit & Gaslight Years (1965-69)
Eliza Skelton – The Lookerer (2023)*****
Kath Bloom – Finally (1987-99)*****
Kris Drever – Black Water (2006)*****
REM – Fables of The Reconstruction (1985)*****
John Coltrane & Alice Coltrane – Cosmic Music (1966-68)*****
Alice Coltrane – A Monastic Trio (1968)*****
Black Uhuru – Sinsemilla (1980)*****
Dragoon – The Offending Party (2010)
The Cure – Bloodflowers (2000)
King Tubby – Meets Rockers Uptown (1976)*****
Fugazi – Fugazi (1988)*****
Llama Farmers – Dead Letter Chorus (1999)
‘O’ Level – A Day In The Life Of Gilbert & George (1977-80)
TV Personalities – And Don’t The Kids Just Love It (1981)*****
X-ray Spex – Germ Free Adolescents (1978)*****
RL Burnside – First Recordings (1968)*****
Rick Roberts – Windmills (1972)
The Desert Rose Band – s/t (1987)
Sonny Stitt & Red Holloway – Live! Legends of The Saxophone (1976)****
Lou Donaldson – Blues Walk (1958)
Drugstore – S/t (1995)
Bob Dylan – My Rough & Rowdy Ways (2020)
Van Der Graaf Generator – The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other (1970)*****
Cubby + Blizzards – Desolation (1966)
The Byrds – Farther Along (1971) *****
The Byrds – Byrdmaniax (1970)
Cubby + Blizzards - Groeten Uit Grollo (1967)
Skip James – Greatest Of The Delta Blues Singers (1964) *****
Skip James – She Lyin’ (1964)
June Tabor & Martin Simpson – A Cut Above (1980)
Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill – Live In Seattle (1999)*****
Billy Childish & The Chatham Singers – Heaven’s Journey (2005)
Billy Childish & The Chatham Singers – An Image Of You (2008)
J-Jazz Deep Modern Jazz From Japan Vol 1 (1969-84)
Charles Cauldwell – Remember Me (2004)
The Primevals – Disinhibitor (2011)
Delivery – Fool’s Meeting (1968)
The Vapors – New Clear Days (1980)
Tracey Thorn – A Distant Shore (1982)
Warm Dust – And It Came To Pass (1970)
Dry Ice – s/t (1969)
Gin Blossoms – New Miserable Experience (1992)*****
John Parker Compton – Live At Turk’s Head (1968)*****
Wolf People – Fain (2013)*****
The Cure – Three Imaginary Boys (1979)*****
Bjork – Homogenic (1997)
Nico – Venue Edinburgh (1987)
Nico – Do Or Die In Europe (1982)*****
Joe Henderson – The Inner Urge (1966)*****
The Hi-Alerts – Conjure Time (2015)
The Primevals – So Extra EP (2018)
Wall of Voodoo – Call Of The West (1982)*****
V/A – Swedish Meatballs Hard Rock Psyche Underground (1971-7)
Robert Pollard & Doug Gillard – Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department (1999)*****
Keene Brothers – Blues & Boogie Shoes (2006)*****
Jimmy Webb – Land’s End (1974)
Jimmy Webb – And So On (1971)
Jimmy Webb – Letters (1972)
The Undisputed Truth – s/t (1971)*****
The Undisputed Truth – Face To Face With The Truth (1972)
Frankie Armstrong – Lovely On The Water (1972)*****
Frankie Armstrong – Songs & Ballads (1974)
Jan Garbarek & Hilliard Ensemble – Officium (1994)*****
Jan Garbarek & Hilliard Ensemble – Officium Novum (2010)
V/A – Rough Guide To Delta Blues Vol 1
Byard Lancaster – It’s Not Up To Us (1968)
Sunny Murray – An Even Break (1968)
Brigitte Fontaine – Comme La Radio (1972)*****
Eric Andersen – Today Is The Highway (1965)
Tim Hardin – Suite For Susan Moore & Damion (1969)
Tim Hardin – Bird On A Wire (1971)
Tim Hardin – Painted Head (1973)
The Fall – The Light User Syndrome (1996)*****
Gene Clark with The Gosdin Brothers – s/t (1967)*****
The Octopus Project – Sharp Teeth (2013)
The Octopus Project – Fever Forms (2013)
Mississippi Fred McDowell – I Do Not Play No Rock’n’Roll (1969)*****
The Chameleons – Script of The Bridge (1983)*****
Cactus World News – Urban Beaches (1986)
Steeleye Span -  Ten Man Mop (1971)
The Bothy Band – Old Hag You Have Killed Me (1976)
June Tabor – Aqaba (1988)*****
June Tabor & Maddy Prior – No More To The Dance (1988)
Autohaze – Mild Steel Flat (1992)*****
Guru Guru – UFO (1970)*****
Guru Guru – Live In Essen (1970)*****
Guru Guru – Hinten (1971)*****
Ash Ra Tempel – s/t (1971)
Ash Ra Tempel – Schwingungen (1972)
Paul Butterfield Blues Band – s/t (1965)
The Blues Project – Projections (1966)
Ronnie Hawkins – s/t (1959)
Ronnie Hawkins – Mr Dynamo (1960)
Ronnie Hawkins – Folk Ballads (1960)
Ronnie Hawkins – Sings The Songs Of Hank Williams (1960)
Steeleye Span – Below The Salt (1972)
Quickspace – Superplus (1995)*****
Manassas – Pieces (1972-3)
Annie Ross – You And Me Baby (1971)*****
Lankum – The Livelong Day (2019)*****
Bob Dylan – Brandeis University (1963)*****
Paul Butterfield Blues Band – East West (1966)*****
The Damned – Damned Damned Damned (1977)*****
Richard Harris – A Tramp Shining (1968)
Richard Harris – The Yard Went On For Ever (1968)
Glen Campbell – Meet Glen Campbell (2008)
The Groundhogs – Split (1971)*****
The Groundhogs – Thank Christ For The Bomb (1970)*****
Echo & The Bunnymen – Crocodiles (1980)*****
David Westlake – My Beautiful England (2022)
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters – Smashed Full Of Wonder (1987)
The Sea Urchins – Stardust (1987-91)*****
Howe Gelb & Lonna Kelly – Further Standards (2017)*****
Maki Asakawa – Live (1971)
The Fall – Slates (1981)*****
Giant Sand – Valley of Rain (1985)*****
The Monkees – s/t (1966)*****

HISTORIC SITES/WALKS

St Giles’ Church, Wrexham
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral
Liverpool Anglican Cathedral
Leicester Cathedral & Tomb of Richard III
Knaresborough Riverside Walk
Nine Stones Close, Derbyshire *****
Arbor Low Henge, Derbyshire
Gib Hill Barrow, Derbyshire
Brand End Standing Stones, Derbyshire *****
Wappenbury Village Hillfort, Warwickshire
Stanton Drew Stone Circle, Somerset
The Tristan Stone, Fowey
Holy Trinity Well, Rackenford, Devon
Chastleton House, Oxfordshire *****
Godstow Abbey, Oxford
The Grapes Pub, Sheffield
Mary Watts’ Watts Chapel, Guildford *****
Waggoners Wells Wishing Well, Hampshire
Ingatestone, village of concealed sarsens, Essex
Danbury Christian-ised Hillfort, Essex
Norwich Anglican Cathedral
Oakehampton Castle, Dartmoor *****
Devil’s Humps, Stoughton *****
Bury St Edmunds Cathedral
Mettingham Castle, Beccles, Norfolk
Walberswick Marshes Bird Walk (Marsh Harrier, Bittern, Buzzard, Cetti’s warbler)*****
Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury
Swanage coast path walk, Dorset *****
St Aldhelm’s chapel, St Aldhelm’s Head
Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain *****
Hotel la Louisiane, Paris *****
Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris – Beckett, Tzara, Gainsbourgh, Sartre, De Beavoir
La Coupoule café, Paris
Sainte Chapelle, Paris *****
Café de Flour, Paris
Saint Germain L’auxerrois, Paris
Port Sunlight, Wirral
St Winnifride’s Holy Well, Flintshire
Mitchell’s Fold Stone Circle, Shropshire *****
Shelagh-Na-Gig, St Laurence’s Church, Church Stretton, Shropshire
Skirrid, Hillfort & St Michael’s Chapel (ruins), Black Mountains
Llanthony Priory, Black Mountains *****
St Issui’s Church, Patrishow, Black Mountians *****
St Ishow’s Holy Well, Patrishow, Black Mountains *****
Tintern Abbey, Forest of Dean
The Devil’s Pulpit, Forest of Dean
The Virtuous Well, Monmouthshire *****
The Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire *****
Jeremy Bentham Mummified Corpse Walk, London
Saville Row Apple Beatles gig site
Mason’s Yard, London – ‘60s site of Scotch of St James, Indica, Gered Manowitz Studio & White Cube
Dartington Hall & gardens, Totness
Cantrell stone rows, Dartmoor
Fenton House, Hampstead
Caerwent Roman village and temple, S Wales
Caldicot castle, S Wales
Sudbrook Hill Fort, S Wales *****
Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff
Hereford Cathedral, Mappa Mundi & Magna Carta
St Mary The Virgin, Capel-y-ffin
Hay Bluff walk
Sugar Loaf, Brecon Beacons
All Saints’, Newland, Forest of Dean (newly restored)*****
St Mary The Virgin & grave of St John Kemble, Welsh Newton
Church of St Peter, Great Livermere, Suffolk
Church of The Holy Innocents, Great Barton, Suffolk
Ickworth House, Suffolk
St Edmund’s Cross, Hoxne
St Mary & All Saints’ Sculthorpe, Norfolk
A Warning To The Curious location, Wells Next The Sea
A Warning To The Curious location, Holkham Beach
Holkham Park Walled Garden, Norfolk
River Titchwell seal colony, Norfolk *****
Blickling House and Estate, Norfolk
Castle Acre Castle, Norfolk
Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk *****
Crickhowell Castle, Crickhowell
St Edmund’s church, Crickhowell
St Wystan’s Church & Crypt, Repton
Painswick Beacon, Gloucs
Blackfriars Priory, Gloucester
St John’s Hackney, London
The Hawk Stone, Oxfordshire
Maen Llia stone, Brecon Beacons
Maen Madoc stone, Brecon Beacons
Creake Abbey, Norfolk
Walsingham Abbey, Norfolk
Walsingham Shrine of Virgin Mary, Norfolk
Warham Camp hillfort, Norfolk*****

MUSEUMS

Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum
Battle – The Art Of British War Comics, Oxfordshire Museum
Musee de Cluny, Paris
Grant Zoology museum, London *****

RECOMMENDED BOOKSHOPS

Foyles, Charing Cross Rd, London
Oxfam Canterbury ***** (always excellently curated)
Oxfam books, Harrogate
Oxfam books, Coventry ***** (superb SF & comics)
Oxfam books, Oxford
The Last Bookshop, Oxford
Oxfam books, Chelmsford *****
Oxfam books, Exeter *****
Shakespeare & Company, Paris *****
Word on the Water, Granary Sq, King’s Cross, London *****
The Poetry Bookshop, Hay On Wye
Brazen Head Bookshop, Burnham Market, Norfolk

RECOMMENDED RECORD SHOPS

Probe, Liverpool’s psychedelic survivor
Room 33, Bodmin, Cornwall – Tha Muthalode!
Harbour Records, Emsworth, Hampshire
Backbeat, Edinburgh – The Legend! *****

ART

Fantasy : Realms of Imagination – British Library
Gwen John – Holbourne Museum, Bath
St Giles Church, Wrexham - Burne-Jones windows, doom painting
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral – Elizabeth Frink, Ceri Richards, John Piper

Walker Gallery, Liverpool*****; Alexis Harding – Slump; Dan Hays – Harmony In Green; John Hoyland – Broken Bride; Barbara Hepworth – 2 Spheres In Orbit; David Hockney – Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool; Lucien Freud – Interior At Paddington; Albert Richards – Sappers Erecting Pickets In The Snow, The Seven Legends; Ceri Richards – Mother & Child; LS Lowry – The Fever Van; Paul Nash – Telecommunications; Duncan Grant – Farm In Sussex; Laura Knight – Spring In St John’s Wood; Bernard Fleetwood-Walker – Amity; Walter Sickert – Summer Lighting, Bathers Dieppe; Elizabeth Forbes – Blackberry Gathering; John Singer Sergeant – Vespers; Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale – The Little Foot Page; Osman Hamdi – The Young Emir Studying; GF Watts – Love & Life, Love & Death, Katie, Hope, Eve Tempted, Eve Repentant ; John William Waterhouse – Echo & Narcissus; Ralph Peacock – William Holman Hunt; Thomas Cooper Gotch – A Pageant of Childhood; Edward Austin Abbey – O Mistress Mine Where Are You Roaming?; John Byam Liston Shaw – Love’s Baubles; Edouard Vuillard – Madame Hessel au Sofa; John Roddam Spencer – Expulsion From Eden; George Clausen – Kitty; William Shakespeare Burton – Auto-da-fe; Evelyn De Morgan – Life And Thought Emerging From The Tomb; Charles March Gere – The Finding Of The Infant St George; Frederic Leighton – Perseus And Andromeda, Elijah In The Wilderness; Maurice Greiffenhagen – An Idyll; Robert Fowler – Ariel; Albert Joseph Moore – A Summer Night; Louis Edouard Fornier – Funeral of Shelley; Philip Hermogenes Calderon – Ruth & Naomi; Stanhope Forbes – To The Fishing Ground, A Street In Britanny; George Clausen – The Shepherdess; Henry Holiday – Dante & Beatrice; Frederick George Cotman – One Of The Family; William Frederick Yeames – And When Did You Last See Your Father?; James Tissot – Catherine Smith Gill & Two Of Her Children; William Holman Hunt – Triumph Of The Innocents; John Atkinson Grimshaw – The Custom House Liverpool Looking South; Briton Riviere – Daniel In The Lion’s Den; Arthur Hughes – As You Like It; Gustave Dore – Flower Sellers; Sophie Anderson – Elaine; Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Dante’s Dream; Edward Burne-Jones – Study For The Sleeping Knights; John Ingle Lee – Sweethearts & Wives, Going To Market; Daniel Maclise – Death of Nelson; John Brett – The Stonebreaker; Ary Sheffer – The Temptation of Christ; James Campbell – The Dragon’s Den; William Davis – The Courtyard At Speke Hall; Paul Delaroche – Napoleon Crossing The Alps; John Martin – The Last Man; Richard Andsell – Dead Pheasants; Samuel Drummond – Death of Nelson; Giacamo De Maria – Death of Virginia; George Stubbs – Lincolnshire Ox,  Gnawpost And Two Other Colts, Horse Frightened By A Lion, Molly Long Legs; Joseph Wright of Derby – The Annual Girandola, The Old Man & Death; Giovani Paolo Panini – Ruins Of Rome

Liverpool Anglican Cathedral – Tracey Emin, Elizabeth Frink, Giles Gilbert Scott

Leeds Art Gallery *****; Edward Armitage – The Siren, Retribution, Return of Ulysses; Francis Bacon – Painting 1950; Lady Elizabeth Butler - Scotland For Ever; Thomas Cooper – Landscape With Sheep & Goats; Alan Davie - In The Face Of The Witch; Ronald Dunlop – Melissa; Jacob Epstein – Modernity; Terry Frost - High Yellow; Anthony Gormley – Brick Man; John Atkinson Grimshaw - Reflections on The Thames at Westminster, Leeds Bridge, Sunday Night Leeds, Iris; Arthur Hacker - Temptation of Sir Percival; Edward Matthew Hale – Mermaids’ Rock, The Drums of The Fore & Aft; Oliver Hall – Interior Of A Wood; Benjamin Haydon – Mary Queen of Scotts When An Infant; Barbara Hepworth – Single Form; Frank Holl – I Am The Resurrection; William Holman Hunt - Shadow of Death; Albert Kindley – Burnham Beeches; Haynes King – An Interesting Paragraph; Leon Kossoff – Fidelma No 1; Jacob Kramer – Rites of Spring; Edmund Blair Leighton – Lady Godiva; Frederic Leighton – Return of Persephone; Daniel Maclise – Noah’s Sacrifice; John Millais - Old Age, Music, Infancy & Manhood; Paul Nash – Circle of The Monoliths, Only Egg; Adelsteen Normann - The Sognefjord; George Bernard O’Neill – Public Opinion, Last Hours of Mozart; Victor Passmore – Girl With A Handbag; John Pettie – Fixing The Site Of An Early Christian Altar; Fiona Rae – Present Party For You; Stanley Spencer - The Sisters, Family Group; William Stott- A Snowstorm; James Tissot – The Bridesmaid; John Tunnard – Davy Jones’ Locker, Painting, Port & Starboard, Red & Black Balance, Yellow Balance; Edward Alexander Wadsworth – Slump, Marseille; Frances S Walker – The Convent Garden; James Whistler – Harmony In White & Blue; JB Yeats – Off The Irish Coast.

Pauline Boty – Gazelli Art House, London
Don Van Vliet – Michael Werner Gallery, London *****
Douglas Gordon – Gagosian, London
Spencer, Lowry, Hockney, Ceri Richards - St Edmund Hall SCR, Oxford
Patrice Moore – St John’s College, Oxford
A Bridget Riley – Wolfson College, Oxford
Matthew Conduit, Land – Sheffield Graves Gallery
Sheffield Graves Gallery – Bridget Riley, Adrian Heath, JMW Turner, Mary Adshead, John Bratby, Frank Brangwyn, Prunella Clough, Roger Fry, Nahem Shoa, John Hoyland and more.
Terry Frost, Flowers Gallery, Cork St, London
Elizabeth Frink – St Edmund, Bury St Edmunds

The Universe of William Blake (Including John Linnell, John Flaxman, Samuel Palmer, John Henry Fuseli, George Richmond, Catherine Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Philip Oto Runge, Joseph Wright,  – Cambridge Fitzwilliam *****

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Alan Beeton – Posing; Vanessa Bell – Portrait of Mrs M; William Blake – An Allegory Of The Spiritusl Conditio Of Man; Ford Maddox Brown – Cordelia’s Portion, The Last Of England; Paul Cezanne – Landscape, Undergrowth; Edgar Degas – At The Café; Alfred Elmore – On The Brink; Harold Gilman – Nude On A Bed;Spencer Gore – The Green Dress; Augustus Edwin John – Dorelia Wearing A Turban; Gwen John – The Convalescent; Stanislawa de Kalowska – Lock On The Canal;  Frederik Leighton – Clytie; John Linnell – William Blake Wearing A Hat; Henri Matisse – Woman Seated In An Armchair; John Everett Millais – The Twins, Mrs Coventry Patmore, The Bridesmaid; Armedeo Modigliani - Portrait Of A Young Woman Seate; Claude Monet – Poplars, Rocks At Port Coton; Charles Fairfax Murray – The Flaming Heart; Paul Nash – November Moon; William Nicholson – Augustus Edwin John, The Girl With The Tattered Glove; Glyn Warren Phillpot – Siegfried Sassoon, The Dog Rose; Camille Pissaro – In The Garden At Pontoise; Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Place Clichy; Dante Gabriel Rosetti – Girl At A Lattice; Walter Sickert – The Glance; Stanley Spencer – Landscape In North Wales, Self Portrait With Patricia Preece; George Stubbs – Gimcrack; Marie Louise Von-Motesicksy – At The Dressmakers, Mother In Bed.

The Lady & The Unicorn – Musee de Cluny, Paris *****

Monet’s Water Lilies – Musee d’Orangerie, Paris *****

Anthony Gormley – Another Place, Crosby Beach *****

Doom painting, St Issu’s church, Patrisow

Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunglight – Lawrence Alma-Tadema – Favorite Poet; Frank Brangwyn – The Shipbuilders; Gerald Brockhurst – Jeunesse Doree; Ford Maddox Brown – Cromwell on his Farm; Edward Burne-Jones – The Tree of Forgiveness, The Annunciation, The Beguiling of Merlin, Azarias, Ananias; Herbert Draper – The Kelpie; William Etty – The Three Graces, Hesperus, Autora & Zephyr, Bather Left, Bather Right, Andromeda, Prometheus, The Judgement of Paris; Joseph Farquharson – The Shortening Day; Elizabeth Forbes – Blackberry Gathering; Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale – The Forerunner; Edward John Gregory – Boulter’s Lock; Hubert von Herkomer – The Last Muster; William Holman Hunt – May Morning On Magdalen Tower, The Scapegoat; Louise Jopling – Blue & White; Laura Knight – Ballet; Frederic Leighton – Clytie, Fatidica, Psamathe, Daphnephoria, The Garden of Hespidres; George Lesley – Midsummer Morning; John Linnell – Woodcutters, At The Cottage Gate, Woodcutters In A Forest, Woodcutters’ Respast; John Everett Millais – An Idyll of 1745, The Black Brunswicker, Cymon & Iphigenia, A Dream Of The Past; Frederic Morgan – His Turn Next; Alfred Munnings – The Fresian Bull; Dante Rosetti – The Blessed Damozel, Sybilla Palmifera; John Singer Sargeant – On His Holiday; Sydney Vosper – Salem; JMW Turner 0 The Falls Of The Clyde; John William Waterhouse – The Enchanted Garden; G F Watts – She Shall Be Created Woman.

The Last Caravaggio - National Gallery *****

National Gallery Permanent Collection; George Bellows – Men Of The Docks; Paul Cezanne – The Grounds of the Chateau Noir; John Constable – Cenotaph In Memory of Joshua Reynolds, The Cornfield; Honore Daumier – Don Quixote & Sancho Panza; Edgar Degas – Combing The Hair, Ballet Dancers, Eleanor Carafa, Young Spartans; Paul Delaroche – The Execution of Lady Jane Grey; Thomas Gainsborough – The Market Cart, The Watering Place; Lake Keitella – Akseli Gallen-Kallela; Edouard Manet – The Execution of Maximillian, Music In The Tuilleries; Henri Matisse – Portrait of Greta Moll; Claude Monet – Water Lillies, Water Lillies Setting Sun, Beach At Trouvet, Thames Below Westminster;  Pablo Picasso – Fruit dish, bottle & violin; Camille Pissarro – The Cotes des Boeufs;  Pierre Auguste Renoir – The Skiff; Henri Rousseau – Surprised!; Georges Seurat – Bathers At Asnieres, Study for Bathers, The Rainbow, The Morning Walk;  George Stubbs – Sir Peniston & Lady Lamb, Whistlejacket; JMW Turner – Rain Sea And Speed; Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, The Evening Star, Dido Building Carthage, Sun Rising Through Vapour;  Vincent Van Gogh – A Wheatfield With Cypresses, Van Gogh’s Chair, Sunflowers; Julius Schnorr Von Carolsfield – Ruth In Boaz’ Field; Joseph Wright of Derby – Experiment On A Bird;

Flaming June – Frederick Leighton (Royal Academy)

Ithell Colquhoin – Elemental (Ben Hunter Gallery, London)*****

Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff; Dante Gabriel Rosetti – Nativity Triptych; Edward Burne-Jones - Altar ceramics; Jacob Epstein – Christ In Majesty; The Bishop Marshall Panel.

National Gallery of Wales; Merlyn Evans - Beechwood By Moonlight; Harold Gilman - The Kitchen; Augustus John - loadsastuff incl Dylan Thomas; Gwen Johns - loadsa stuff; David Jones - Portrait of a Maker, Crucifixion, St Francis, Jeus Mocked, Landscape in kent, Elephant, Siphon & Salver; RB Kitaj - TeDeum; LS Lowry - Six Bells; Monet - Waterlillies, Rouen; John Nash - Plage; John Piper; Ceri Richards; Stanley Spencer - Switzerland; Kyffin Williams; Christopher Wood - Rug Seller.

All Saints’, Newland, Forest of Dean – Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s rederos *****

Church of The Holy Innocents, Great Barton, Suffolk -Edward Byrne-Jones’ stained glass

Ickworth House, Suffolk – John Flaxman’s Fury of Athamas

Norwich Castle Museum; lots of John Cotman;  lots of Thomas Lound; Alfred Munnings – Gypsy Horses Grazing and many more; Emma Sandys – Lady In A Yellow Dress; Frederick Sandys; lots of Joseph Stannard; lots of John Thirtle. A great overview tying in Turner w a particular school of East Anglian visionary landscape painting.

St Mary & All Saints’, Sculthorpe, Norfolk – Edward Burne-Jones stained glass

Blickling Hall, Norfolk. Herbet Gunn – Phillip Kerr; Hans Holbein Younger – Henry VIII; Valentine Prinsep - Lisa.

Houghton Hall, Norfolk – Anthony Gormley’s Time Horizon

Houghton Hall, Norfolk, Permanent Collection. Ryan Gander – More Really Shiny Things; Richard Long – White Deer Circle, Houghton Cross, Full Moon Circle, A Line In Norfolk; James Turrell – Houghton Hut; Rachel Whiteread – Hut. *****

ARTWORKS I DIDN’T SEE THIS YEAR AS THEY HAD BEEN WITHDRAWN FROM DISPLAY IN THE GALLERIES I VISITED, OR BECAUSE THEY WERE CLOSED, PERMANENTLY OR TEMPORARILLY.

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery is closed indefinitely (permanently?) due to a wood problem, so I didn’t see Duncan Grant - Farm Buildings (1951); Kiffyn Williams - Pony on LLanddwyn Island; and their lovely Charles Keeping lithograph. Again. Can something be done?

MY FOOD JOURNEY (highlights - this isn’t everything I ate in 2024)

My Corbyn Coddled Eggs
My Year End Vegetable Wellington
Bungay Lemon Chicken
My Stoke Newington Sage Eggs
My Joseph Conrad Bacon Sprouts
My Ermine Street Chorizo Scallops
My Mr Kurtz Vegetable Curry
Cork & Bottle crispy pork
My Shepherd’s Pie Pour Dawson, with Chestnut Chili Sprouts
Gloucester (Westmorland) Services’ chicken shawarma
Duck confit, Wreck Bistro, Liverpool
18yr old Highland Park & Guinness, The Dakota Hotel bar, Leeds
Lamb curry, Kayal, Leicester *****
Lamb madras, Calcutta Club, Nottingham
Lamb chili curry, MemSaab, Nottingham
My Easter Chicken Solitaire
My Timoleon Vieta Vegan Curry
Gray Pays & Bacon, Great Western, Wolverhampton *****
Emsworth Sibling Quinoa
Hare & Hounds, Stoughton, Sunday Lunch
Au Bougnat, Paris, Sausage & Mash
Café de Flore, Paris, boiled egg
My Alchemyst’s Sunday Vegetable Wellington
Naga chili lamb curry, Café la Raj, Chipping Norton
My Baked crusted haddock a la migraine
My Sasquatch Sunset Mushroom Pie
My Crispy Chorizo Stir Fry de Hogan
International Welsh Rabbit Centre, Defynnog, Brecon
Kedgeree, Bircham Stores, Norfolk
My Christmas Day Gray Pays
My Christmas Mushroom Wellington
Ben’s wet onions
Grandad’s steamed Irish gammon
Smoked Canadian friend’s relative’s lake salmon

IN OUR LAMENTATIONS 2024

Tony Oxley (Sheffield’s Sunny Murray, 1938)
John M Burns (His modesty blazed, 1939)
John Pilger (News terrier, 1939)
David Soul (The covered man, an inspiration 1943)
Annie Nightingale (Gateway drug, 1940)
Pitchfork (Signal to noise, 1996)
Mary Weiss (She led the pack, 1948)
Chris Karrer (Archangel’s Thunderbirdman, 1947)
Iasos (Greek space muso, 1947)
Phil Niblock (NY art noise, 1933)
Pluto Shervington (Ram Goat Liver Eater, 1950)
Tisa Farrow (Zombies ripped her flesh, 1951)
Norman Jewison (Rollerball Superstar, 1926)
Neil Kulkarni (Era-enhancing music critic, 1972)
Wayne Kramer (He kicked out the jams motherfucker, 1945)
Steve Brown (He left Avalon and taught the world to sing, 1954)
Christopher Priest (Dorset future-ist, 1943)
Aston "Family Man" Barrett (dub bass headcase, 1946)
Ian Lavender (Don’t tell him, Pike, 1946)
Damon Suzuki (Krautrock witness cuddled me & Noel Fielding, 1950)
John Rotheroe (Shire Book Seer, 1935)
Steve Wright (massive old-skool pro made it look easy, 1954)
Alan Tomlinson (Jazz trombonist, dry northern wit, beatnik, 1947)
Ewen Mackintosh (Office secondary superstar, 1973)
Jenni Nuttall (Chaucerian)
Richard Lewis (Worthwhile American comedian, 1947)
Nick Dimbleby (Sculptor of note, scholar, gentleman, comedy fan, 1946)
Edward Bond (Whitehouse-infuriator, 1934)
Karl Wallinger (Waterboys’ prime period pianist, 1957)
Eric Carmen (Raspberry sensation, 1949)
Wally Shoup (Hard-blowin’ hero, 1944)
The Wye Salmon (pollution-fucked fish)
Paul Brett (Crazy World guitarist, 1947)
Shane Baldwin (Vice Squad drummer and punk scribe, 1963)
John Sinclair (Beatnik, 1941)
Carl Andre (None more brick, 1935)
Graeme Naysmith (Pale Saint)
Marian Zazeela (Eternal Musician, 1940)
Shelley Ganz (Unclaimed but claimed, at last, 1959)
Steve Albini (Big blackhead, 1962)
Dennis Thompson (He also kicked out the jams motherfucker, 1948)
Gary Floyd (Double happy dick punk, 1953)
Roger Corman (King of the Bees, 1926)
Doug Ingle (The Iron Butterfly, 1945)
Gerry Conway (Folk drummer for hire and tool of anti-CND propaganda, 1947)
Nicholas Ball (His house bled to death, 1946)
Larry Page (Wild thingy, 1936)
Francois Hardy (Chanteuse genieuse, 1944)
Arthur Gaps Hendrickson (Selectaman under pressure, 1951)
James Chance (He contorted himself, 1953)
Donald Sutherland (Kilroy was here, 1935)
Dexter Romwebber (Guitar jet, 1966)
Clarence Frogman Henry (Anthropomorphic blues amphibian, 1937)
Randy Fuller (He fought the law also, 1944)
Lucy Rimmer (She fell briefly on a birthday)
Callum The Highland Red Deer (Killed by twat tourists)
Mark Found (Sound recordist and model railway specialist)
Shelly Duvall (She shone, 1949)
Wendy Ritson (Centipede violinist, 1934)
Jean Williams (Complex Feminine bassist, 1951)
Bob Newhart (I ripped him off, 1929)
Toumani Diabate (Mali kora master, 1965)
Jerry Miller (He was purple and lived under the sea, 1943)
John Mayall (Bluesbreaker broken at last, 1933)
Irene Schweizer (German jazznius, 1941)
Jack Karlson (Succulent Chinese meal, 1942)
Catherine Ribeiro (Oh! My heart is broken! An angel! A true star!1941)
Anthony O’Neill (Brú naBóinnearchitect)
Pete Bailey (Josefus/Stone Axe vox)
Brian Trueman (Dangermouseman, 1932)
Rebecca Horn (Concerto anarchist, 1944)
James Earl Jones (He made shit sparkle, 1931)
Dean Roberts (Thela-maturgist, 1975)
Brother Marquis (He had 99 problems and a bitch weren’t one, 1966)
Zoot Money (Ran madly towards Tim Kirkby’s dad’s beach hut, 1942)
Herbie Flowers (He walked on the wild side, 1938)
Pat Collier (He vibrated,1952)
Steve Kille (Dead Dead Meadow Man)
Gavin Webb (Master’s Apprentice,1947)
Alan Delon (Man In A Girl On A Motorcycle, 1935)
Maggie Smith (The grande dame!, 1934)
Kris Kristofferson (The Border Lord, 1936)
Tim Darvill (Cotswold archaeologist, 1958)
Irwin the Malmesbury Emu (He loved cold showers and cuddles)
Glen Hutchinson (Cambridge performance poet)
75% of all animal life on earth since 1974 (1974)
Phil Lesh (Bassful Dead, 1940)
Ron Ely (Ooo-e-o-e-o-e-o-e-oooo!, 1938)
Nick Gravenites (Buttered quicksilver, 1938)
Janey Godley (Street level satirist, 1961)
Lou Donaldson (Hornblower, 1926)
American democracy!!! (1965)
Frank Auerbach (Auerbout a painting of Camden please Frank, 1931)
Tim West (He ate royal jelly and turned into a human-bee, 1934)
Roy Haynes (Snap Crackle Bop! 1925)
Pete Sinfield (Crimson King Courtier, 1943)
Johnny Duhan (Granny’s Intention, 1950)
Richard Andrew (Black Cab Underground Lover)
John Prescott (Mr Punch, 1938)
Jim Abrahams (Rapid fire comedy genius, 1944)
Andy Leek (Original midnight runner, 1958)
Slim Dunlap (Replacement Replacement, 1951)
Jimmy Carter (Peanutocrat peacemaker, 1924)

Even though I am an atheist, I am nonetheless a creative artist. And so the gods regularly manifest themselves to me in my hours of need. Perhaps you envy me my ability to hear the voice of the divine? I in turn envy you non-artists the peaceful silences of your own empty minds.

On Wednesday lunchtime, the goddess Athena, an owl upon her shoulder, appeared to me in the toilet cubicle of a Chinese restaurant near Leicester Square. I was frustrated by both my inability to write this column against the backdrop of political chaos, and a problematic absence of lavatory tissue.

The goddess handed me a piece of paper. “Thank you, my lady,” I said, bending over gratefully. “No, mortal. Read,” Athena boomed from behind her glistering helm. The paper was a set of bullet points towards this week’s column, a satire of the news essentially dictated to me by the goddess herself.

I believe it was I who wrote, on 9 September in the Observer, on the subject of attempts to force Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Turds Johnson to take No Deal off the table: “If No Deal is successfully legislated against, and Dominic Cumming is unable to force an election by some backdoor method, then Turds may be trapped in ineffectual office, a Netto Prometheus, chained to the dispatch box, his liver pecked out anew every day by the Eagle of Truth.”

And this week, Turds went to the UN to compare Brexit itself to long-suffering Prometheus. But Turds’s attempts to invoke myth have been blowing up in his face of late, after the wily Irish taoiseach, a bumboy by the rules of Turds’s own lexicon, threw his allusion to Hercules back at him on live TV, like a nailbomb made of legends.

Varadkar’s suggestion that Turds was, like Hercules, an out-of-control psychopath who needed the Athena of Ireland to restrain him was an ultra-high-level hip-hop burn, but only dope classics professors could feel its full heat.

As a rule, the artistic subjects of Turds’s comparisons don’t want his patronage. The Godfather is Turds’s favourite film and includes the lines: “Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks”; “I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them”; and “We are all honourable men here. We do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.”

Having heard, on 9 September, that Turds was a Godfather fan, the usually reclusive director Francis Ford Coppola broke his monastic silence to tell the Financial News’s Tom Teodorczuk he hoped his work would not provide “encouragement to someone I see is about to bring the beloved United Kingdom to ruin”. Ooh! Ooooh!! Ouch!!!

The Godfather, it should be noted, also includes the line: “A man who is not a father to his children can never be a real man”, particularly if his own Wikipedia page is unable to say exactly how many children he has, or what their names are.

And I believe it was also I who, two years ahead of the cultural curve as usual, first exposed Turds’s suddenly celebrated Hulk fixation in this very paper, on 21 May 2017. Turds had compared himself, as he had many times before, to the Hulk while talking to a comic shop owner in Newport market, where he was booed by ex-miners and mocked with a hash cake. Hulk creatives were quick to deny Turds’s appropriation of the character.

“I can’t help feeling that Boris Johnson slightly missed the point of it all,” Hulk artist Gary Frank told this paper at the time, “in that Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, doesn’t actually want to get angry, become stupid and then smash everything to fuck. Do you think Boris Johnson misread the Hulk comics as a sort of Tony Robbins self-help guide to fulfilling your potential?”

During his Tory party leadership campaign, Boris boasted of his love of buses, and his favoured bus company Wrightbus went into voluntary administration last week, despite turning a huge profit, because bosses suddenly felt the very idea of a bus was now tainted beyond redemption.

To date, the American model and businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri, star of the Bollywood sex comedy Naughty @ Forty, of whom Turds is a huge fan, is the only artist the prime minister likes yet to make a public statement disassociating themselves from his enthusiasm for their work.

Given that most of the artists Turds reveals affection for immediately try to sever their links to the lying PM, I wondered how the fire-stealing Prometheus himself felt about being cited by Turds at the United Nations as a metaphor for Brexit. So I held tight to the feet of the owl of Athena, as it swept me on the space-winds to the rock upon which the mythic titan himself lies eternally chained, his liver perpetually pecked by an eagle.

Raising his head from the blood-soaked slab, Prometheus said he was pleased I had mentioned him in the Observer earlier this month. His role, as he understands it, is to provide a mythical archetype to help humanity understand its own predicament, and he sometimes feels he is having his liver pecked out every day for no real reason.

But Prometheus disagrees with the comparison of his predicament to Brexit. “No. Boris Johnson himself is Prometheus,” he explained, “trapped in office and pecked to pieces every day by parliament. I thought he studied classics at Eton. Ow ow, my liver!”

1) SAVE THE CELLAR BY NOVEMBER 27TH PLEASE

OXFORD was a weirdly difficult town for me to find venues to play in in the 00's as I got more popular, as the main venues there were owned by big chains with strange surcharges and policies, although now I am happy doing long runs at the Playhouse.

Paddy Luscombe and the Cellar crew promoted me at The Cellar, and also at a now closed cinema up the Cowley Road, and The Cellar has been an important venue for Oxford music and comedy since I was there in the '80s.

Obviously it is threatened by all the usual factors, on this occasion new fire regulations meaning there are construction costs, that kill live art in our cities, and it needs help.
I am going to do something concrete next year at the venue all being well.
In the meantime... The venue must reach its &pound80,000 goal by Tuesday 27th November.

There are loads of great rewards, including the chance to win Radiohead's snare drum and loads of random Stewart Lee free stuff straight from my own cellar, so please donate here.
This actually looks achievable which is great.

DONATE HERE

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2) BENEFITS

Dec 4th Comedians Sing Christmas, Bloomsbury Theatre, London.

Harry Hill spearheads a musical fundraiser featuring comedy's biggest names.
The full-line of Comedians Sing the Christmas Hits! is:
John Bishop,
Jo Brand,
Alex Brooker,
Rob Brydon,
Alan Carr,
Jimmy Carr,
Roisin Conaty,
Nina Conti,
Tom Davis,
Jack Dee,
Nick Helm,
Harry Hill,
Stewart Lee,
Sean Lock,
Matt Lucas,
Joe Lycett,
Jason Manford,
Al Murray,
Sara Pascoe,
Vic Reeves,
Liza Tarbuck,
Paul Whitehouse and
Josh Widdicombe.

The gig takes place at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London on December 4 and will be raising money for Action Duchenne. The charity helps those with Duchenne muscular dystrophy,a rare and complex genetic muscle wasting condition.
Many of those with Duchenne lose the ability to walk in early adolescence and typically live into their late twenties. Hill, who is patron of Action Duchenne, said: "I'm thrilled at the response of my comedy friends. Inside every great comic is a singer waiting to burst out A great cause deserves a great show. Earplugs advised!".
Hill became involved in the charity when the son of the graphic designer who worked on all of his TV shows, including TV Burp, was diagnosed with the condition.

TICKETS

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Dec 9th, Stand-Up For Refugees, Playhouse, London
Benefit aiming to raise vital funds for refugees.
The Choose Laughs Festive Special in aid of Help Refugees takes place on December 9 at the Playhouse Theatre in London.
Help Refugees is a group of everyday people, taking joint action to improve the lives of refugees. In less than three years, they have become the biggest facilitator of grassroots aid on the continent, with more than 80 projects across Europe and the Middle East.
Boosted by the support of high-profile musicians, filmmakers, comedians and actors who joined have joined the Choose Love campaign, they believe that together with their ever-growing network of volunteers, fundraisers, and supporters they have pioneered a new movement in humanitarian response. Acting quickly and flexibly, their structure enables ordinary people to help those in need in the most direct of ways. Josie Naughton, Help Refugees CEO says: "We are absolutely overwhelmed by the support of all the brilliant comedians coming together to help raise funds for refugees this winter.

Freezing temperatures are just around the corner and people need warm clothes, blankets and nutritious food to stay healthy and safe. This night is all about laughter and love, bringing people together to have a great time while doing something practical to help". This will be a BSL Interpreted Performance.
The full bill is:
Simon Amstell (Nickelodeon),
Angela Barnes (Mock The Week),
Sofie Hagen (Roast Battle),
Nish Kumar (Durham Review)
Stewart Lee (Multiple BAFTA, Olivier, British Comedy Award and Chortle award winner),
Rose Matafeo (New Zealand), &
Mawaan Rizwan (The Big Asian Stand Up).

Choose Laughs Festive Special, Sunday December 9th 2018, 7.30pm Playhouse Theatre, Northumberland Ave, London WC2N 5DE Tickets on sale price &pound12.50 here.
0844 871 7615
Charity Website: HelpRefugees.org
Twitter: @ChooseLaughs

TICKETS

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BELTER FOR THE SHELTER, 19th Feb 2019
BELTER FOR THE SHELTER, Hackney Empire, London, 19th Feb 2019, 7.30.
Join us for a spectacular evening of comedy in aid of Hackney Winter Night Shelter.
Going into its 5th year with an incredible line up at the Hackney Empire to help raise money for the Shelter's vital work with local homeless people.
All money raised on the evening goes towards keeping people off the streets of Hackney, providing them with a hot meal and warm bed throughout winter.
Providing the gags for the evening will be;
Bridget Christie (News Review),
Kevin Eldon (TIE),
Sofie Hagen (Scandinavia),
Harry Hill (Tooting Medics' Review),
Athena Kugblenu (Nish Kumar's Edinburgh Nights),
Nish Kumar (Nish Kumar's Edinburgh Nights),
Rosie Jones (Nish Kumar's Edinburgh Nights),
Robert Newman (Steve Wright's Radio 1 Posse) and
Stewart Lee (Richard Herring's Fist of Fun)
(compere to be announced).

£10-£20.

TICKETS

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3) CAPRI-BATTERIE W STEWART LEE, BRISTOL FASHION out on vinyl

CAPRI-BATTERIE. A trio comprised of Kordian Tetkov on drums, Tim Sayer on trumpet and electronics and Matthew Lord on Bass and Saxophone.
With an unrestricted approach to improvisation that embraces the philosophy of 'freedom', as an affront to oppression in all its modern day manifestations, this is music making unafraid of ideology and charged with abstraction.
The intensity levels achieved by Capri-Batterie are uncharacteristic for a small ensemble and the belligerent and anarchic fervour with which they coalesce the aesthetics of industrial rock, free jazz and noise art render their performances a highly energetic and intense undertaking.

YOU CAN GET IT HERE

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4) Bridget Christie

My wife continues to be the most critically acclaimed British stand-up of the 21st century, while I am in painful and obvious decline.

December 2018
Monday 3rd - WHAT NOW? - Playhouse, NORWICH - 8pm - 01603 598598 - TICKETS

Saturday 8th - WHAT NOW? - Minerva (Festival) Theatre, Chichester - 8pm - 01243 781312 - TICKETS

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5) TREES 21st DEC CAFE OTO LONDON

I am one of a number of singing guests at this.
THE ON THE SHORE BAND PLAYS THE MUSIC OF TREES £18 £15 ADVANCE £13 MEMBERS

The On The Shore Band plays the music of Trees featuring Bias Boshell & David Costa (Trees) with guest appearances from Stuart Estell, Stewart Lee & more.
'If you are about to listen to On The Shore for the first time, then you are to be envied. In an era of mass communication and commercial misappropriation, there are few genuinely lost treasures to be discovered.' - Stewart Lee .

Signed to CBS in 1969, Trees put down two albums within one year, The Garden Of Jane Delawney and On The Shore. Shortly after the release of the second album, and after two years of intensive live work, the original members had begun to go their separate ways, and their brief appearance and small body of work was left to posterity.
Since then their music - described variously as acid-folk, psychedelic, gothic, arcadian, 'a perfect mixture of west coast acid rock with dark lilting English folk, timeless and beautiful' - has continued to achieve mythical status and the acclaim of a growing band of devotees, mostly not even born at the time Trees disbanded.

The On The Shore Band is a collective of like-minded musicians from a variety of bands (Friendly Fires/Pattern Forms, Corinthians, more) and genres (psych, pop, drone), working alongside two of the original members of Trees to produce a contemporary and inventive soundscape, exploring a selection of tracks from the two albums.
There's no intent of facsimile or reproduction - simply one of inspiration drawn from the originals, and of the sheer enjoyment of the music of Trees.
ontheshore.uk

TICKETS

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6) Late Junction/s ON RADIO 3

Stewart Lee becomes a Radio 3 presenter sharing his eclectic musical tastes. Stewart Lee is to host a series of eclectic musical programmes on Radio 3 this Christmas.
The comedian takes over as guest editor of the Late Junction for three nights, being joined by Tim Key for one of them.
Radio 3 says: ‘From his time spent in record shops as a teenager, to more recent work moonlighting as a music critic, comedian Stewart Lee has had a long-time fascination with music. Over the years he has built up a deep collection, with improvised works, post-punk and folk traditions all well-represented.'
On Christmas Day he will be joined by folk musician Richard Dawson; on Boxing Day by fellow comic and fellow leftfield music fan Tim Key, who has a special love of Soviet-era Russian tracks; and on December 27 he presents a mixtape from recorder player and violinist Laura Cannell.

The shows go out at 11pm nightly.

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7) Meanwhile, I Arrogantly Recommend

1) Dan Stuart. Former Green On Red frontman, hard-bitten novelist, and compelling solo performer in soul-bearing country-blues mode. Dec 2nd - Brighton Prince Albert.
I have written the intro for his new novel. With Sid Griffin, alt country pioneer and Gram Parsons biographer of Long Ryders/Coal Porters fame.

2) Mudhoney. Trump-hating grunge pioneers. Dec 1st - Glasgow St Luke's.

3) Shopping. Angular afro-pop inflected post punks. Dec 1st - Hackney Arts centre.

4) The Heads. Bristol's undisputed overlords of intestine-churning heavy-psyche. Nov 30th - M'cr Deaf Institute, Dec 1st - London 100 Club.

5) Bevis Frond. Lone local album launch show from overlooked national treasure Nick Saloman in his contradictory sensitive-songwriter/crazed guitar wrangler combo. Dec 8th - Hastings Blackmarket.

NEW LONDON CONTENT PROVIDER DATES

Because all the London Leicester Sq Content Provider dates sold out here is another three month block of the SAME SHOW at the SAME VENUE, Leicester Sq Theatre, with the SAME JOKES at the SAME TIME, 7pm, from November this year until Jan 2018. Leave voters planning to walk out in disgust will need to book early.




Weds 1st Nov - Sat 9th Dec 2017

Tuesday to Saturday except there is a performance on Monday 4th December



Tues 2nd Jan to Wed 31st Jan 2018

Monday to Saturday



Not Fri 24, Sat 25, Thur 30 Nov 2017 (DAYS OFF)

Not Tue 9, Sat 13 Jan 2018 (DAYS OFF)




CLICK HERE FOR THE LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE BOX OFFICE



All dates listed in full at the gigs page.



Other extra dates by other comedians are available.

CONTENT PROVIDER TOUR

Autumn 2017 dates are currently being booked.


More dates will be added as they are confirmed.

All updates will be made at the gigs page.

April 2017

Saturday 29th - Content Provider - MACHYNLLETH COMEDY FESTIVAL - The Mach Arena - 7pm - SOLD OUT

Sunday 30th - Content Provider - MACHYNLLETH COMEDY FESTIVAL - The Mach Arena - 7pm - SOLD OUT

May 2017

Wednesday 3rd - Content Provider - SOUTHAMPTON - Mayflower Theatre - 7.30pm - 02380 711811 TICKETS

Thursday 4th - Content Provider - COVENTRY - Warwick Arts Centre - 8pm - 024 7652 4524 TICKETS

Friday 5th - Content Provider - KINGSTON - Rose Theatre - 8pm - 020 8174 0090 TICKETS

Saturday 6th - Content Provider - KINGSTON - Rose Theatre - 8pm - 020 8174 0090 TICKETS

Monday 8th - Content Provider - BROMLEY - Churchill Theatre - 8pm - 020 3285 6000 TICKETS

Thursday 11th - Content Provider - COVENTRY - Warwick Arts Centre - 8pm - 024 7652 4524 TICKETS

Friday 12th - Content Provider - DERBY - Derby Theatre - 8pm - 01332 593939 SOLD OUT

Saturday 13th - Content Provider - CAMBRIDGE - Corn Exchange - 8pm - 01223 357851 TICKETS

Sunday 14th - Content Provider - CANTERBURY - Marlowe Theatre - 7.30pm - 01227 787787 TICKETS

Wednesday 17th - Content Provider - YORK - Barbican - 7.30pm - 0844 854 2757 TICKETS

Thursday 18th - Content Provider - NEWCASTLE - City Hall - 7.30pm - 08448 11 21 21 TICKETS

Friday 19th - Content Provider - NEWCASTLE - City Hall - 7.30pm - 08448 11 21 21 TICKETS

Monday 22nd - Content Provider - SALFORD QUAYS - The Lowry - 8pm - 0843 208 6000 TICKETS

Tuesday 23rd - Content Provider - SALFORD QUAYS - The Lowry - 8pm - 0843 208 6000 TICKETS

Wednesday 24th - Content Provider - SALFORD QUAYS - The Lowry - 8pm - 0843 208 6000 TICKETS

Thursday 25th - Content Provider - SALFORD QUAYS - The Lowry - 8pm - 0843 208 6000 SOLD OUT

Saturday 27th - Content Provider - Wells - Cedars Hall (Comedy Festival) - 7.30pm - 0333 666 3366 SOLD OUT

Sunday 28th - Content Provider - Wells - Cedars Hall (Comedy Festival) - MATINEE 1.30pm - 0333 666 3366 TICKETS

Sunday 28th - Content Provider - Wells - Cedars Hall (Comedy Festival) - EVENING 7.30pm - 0333 666 3366 SOLD OUT

June 2017

Monday 5th - Content Provider - BURY ST EDMUNDS - The Apex - 8pm - 01284 758000 TICKETS

Tuesday 6th - Content Provider - COLCHESTER - Mercury Theatre - 01206 573948 TICKETS

Wednesday 7th - Content Provider - COLCHESTER - Mercury Theatre - 01206 573948 TICKETS

Thursday 8th - Content Provider - TUNBRIDGE WELLS - Assembly Hall Theatre - 8pm - 01892 530613 TICKETS

Friday 9th - Content Provider - BASINGSTOKE - The Anvil - 8pm - 01256 844244 TICKETS

Wednesday 14th - Content Provider - BUXTON - Opera House - 8pm - 01298 72190 TICKETS

Thursday 15th - Content Provider - BUXTON - Opera House - 8pm - 01298 72190 TICKETS

Friday 16th - Content Provider - DONCASTER - Cast - 8pm - 01302 303959 TICKETS

Saturday 17th - Content Provider - BRADFORD - Alhambra Theatre- 8pm - 01274 432000 TICKETS

Sunday 18th - Content Provider - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse - 7.30pm - 0113 213 7700 TICKETS

Monday 19th - Content Provider - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse - 7.30pm - 0113 213 7700 TICKETS

Tuesday 20th - Content Provider - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse - 7.30pm - 0113 213 7700 TICKETS

Wednesday 21st - Content Provider - WOLVERHAMPTON - Grand Theatre - 7.30pm - 01902 429212 TICKETS

September 2017

Monday 11th - Content Provider - OXFORD - Playhouse - 7.30pm - 01865 305305 TICKETS

Tuesday 12th - Content Provider - OXFORD - Playhouse - 7.30pm - 01865 305305 TICKETS

Wednesday 13th - Content Provider - PRESTON - Charter Theatre - 7.30pm - 01772 80 44 44 TICKETS

Thursday 14th - Content Provider - LIVERPOOL - Philharmonic Hall - 0151 709 3789 - 8pm - TICKETS

Friday 15th - Content Provider - LIVERPOOL - Philharmonic Hall - 0151 709 3789 - 8pm - TICKETS

Saturday 16th - Content Provider - DURHAM - Gala Theatre - 8pm - 03000 266600 - TICKETS

Wednesday 20th - Content Provider - SHEFFIELD - City Hall - 8pm - 01142 789 789 - TICKETS

Thursday 21st - Content Provider - SHEFFIELD - City Hall - 8pm - 01142 789 789 - TICKETS

Friday 22nd - Content Provider - STAFFORD - Gatehouse Theatre - 8pm - 01785 619080 - TICKETS

Saturday 23rd - Content Provider - PORTSMOUTH - King's Theatre - 7.30pm - 023 9282 8282 - TICKETS

Wednesday 27th - Content Provider - DERRY / LONDONDERRY - Millennium Forum - 8pm - 028 7126 4455 TICKETS

Thursday 28th - Content Provider - BELFAST - Waterfront - 8pm - 028 9033 4455 TICKETS

October 2017

Tuesday 3rd - Content Provider - CHESTER - Storyhouse - 0845 647 7868 - 8pm - ON SALE SOON

Wednesday 4th - Content Provider - SCARBOROUGH - The Spa Theatre - 01723 821888 - 8pm - TICKETS

Thursday 5th - Content Provider - HARROGATE - Royal Hall - 01423 502116 - 8pm - TICKETS

Friday 6th - Content Provider - NOTTINGHAM - Royal Concert Hall - 0115 989 5555 - 8pm - TICKETS

Sunday 8th - Content Provider - BRISTOL - Colston Hall - 0844 887 1500 - 7.30pm - TICKETS

Monday 9th - Content Provider - BRISTOL - Colston Hall - 0844 887 1500 - 7.30pm - TICKETS

Thursday 12th - Content Provider - NORTHAMPTON - Royal & Derngate - 01604 624811 - 8pm - TICKETS

Friday 13th - Content Provider - CRAWLEY - The Hawth - 01293 553636 - 8pm - TICKETS

Saturday 14th - Content Provider - St. ALBANS - Alban Arena - 01727 844488 - 8pm - TICKETS

Tuesday 17th - Content Provider - LINCOLN - New Theatre Royal - 01522 519999 - 8pm - TICKETS

Wednesday 18th - Content Provider - CHELMSFORD - Civic Theatre - 01245 606505 - 7.45pm - ON SALE SOON

Thursday 19th - Content Provider - READING - Hexagon - 0118 960 6060 - 8pm - TICKETS

Friday 20th - Content Provider - BEXHILL ON SEA - De La Warr Pavilion - 01424 229111 - 8pm - TICKETS

Saturday 21st - Content Provider - WINCHESTER - Theatre Royal - 01962 840440 - 8pm - TICKETS

November 2017

Wednesday November 1st - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday November 2nd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday November 3rd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday November 4th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday November 7th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday November 8th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday November 9th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday November 10th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday November 11th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday November 14th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday November 15th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday November 16th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday November 17th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday November 18th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday November 21st - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday November 22nd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday November 23rd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday November 28th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday November 29th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

December 2017

Friday December 1st - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday December 2nd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Monday December 4th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday December 5th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday December 6th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday December 7th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday December 8th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday December 9th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

January 2018

Tuesday January 2nd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday January 3rd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday January 4th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday January 5th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday January 6th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Monday January 8th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday January 10th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Monday January 15th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday January 16th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday January 17th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday January 18th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday January 19th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday January 20th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Monday January 22nd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday January 23rd - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday January 24th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Thursday January 25th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Friday January 26th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Saturday January 27th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Monday January 29th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Tuesday January 30th - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

Wednesday January 31st - Content Provider, Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm TICKETS

More dates TBC June, Sept, Oct, Nov.

Check the LIVE PAGE ON WEBSITE.

Tours by other comedians are available.

Global Globules with Baconface

On Wednesdays at 11pm on Resonance 104.4 fm and on the station website, the barely present cult Canadian stand-up comedian Baconface continues to play lengthy and mainly uninterrupted selections from his late brother's extensive record collection of '60s and '70s psychedelia, progressive rock, free jazz, folk, acid folk, folk rock, acid rock, electronic music, and ethnoforgeries.

In association with the Chilliwack Office of Leisure. [Repeated Saturday 4am.] The shows can also be heard here.. http://www.baconfacecanada.com/listen

And also here, with pictures...
http://www.baconfacecanada.com/global-globules/
Resonance is a groundbreaking 24/7 radio station which broadcasts on 104.4 FM to central London, DAB to Greater London, nationally on Radioplayer and live streamed to the rest of the world.



Other fictional men with masks made of bacon playing vintage psychedelia are not available.

More DAILY TELEGRAPH BULLSHIT

As usual, The shit Daily Telegraph is full of utter shit and naked political bias where its comedy coverage is concerned.
In a desperate and contrived article from April 4th, by Rozina Sabur, the paper suggests that comedians' careers are being harmed if they perform anti-Brexit material, and it achieves this mainly by cut and pasting comments made by Marcus Brigstocke somewhere else, and twisting them to appear to say something they probably didn't. It may be the case that the premise of the article is true, but there is no hard evidence in Sabur's piece to back this up.



According to Sabur, "a number of comedians have described scripting their take on Britain leaving the European Union for left-wing audiences in London, only to face unamused audiences when they take their acts out to the rest of the country", but it is only able to find Marcus Brigstocke as an example of this 'number'. The only other comedian Sabur mentions is me, in a vague non-committal sentence which says, "Comedian Stewart Lee has also spoken of some audience members' reactions to his material poking fun at leave voters during his shows.", but does not clarify what the reaction I am talking about is, or where I said this, which would make a massive difference.



I have spoken about this idea on stage as a joke, and in print about how it might affect circuit comedians whose audiences expect their Friday night fun demands to be met, as has Stephen Grant prophetically on Chortle. In reality the reaction to my Brexit material on the road has been only positive, though I suggest on stage that it may not be, for dramatic and comic effect. I am playing to the biggest and most enthusiastic audiences of my career at present all over the UK, hopefully comprised exclusively of Guardian reading liberal Remain voters, and the bit where I call Leave voters racists and cunts provokes a delighted reaction during and after the show, from grateful punters, many weeping hot tears of snowflake thanks, especially in heavily Leave voting areas, where they are clearly desperate for the comforting release of pent-up emotion that sometimes only laughter can provide.



A simple five second Google would have found Sabur more examples of touring stand-ups, (Nish Kumar, Josie Long, Bridget Christie, Al Murray), doing well, nationally, out of anti-Brexit-themed shows than it would of comics suffering from covering the subject, although again this does not necessarily prove anything, as the experiences of the unknown foot-soldiers of club comedy won't show up in searches, so the impression would be skewed. But Sabur didn't bother to check anyway.



Nonetheless, when I wrote unpaid for photocopied fanzines in the '80s and '90s they told us we needed three examples of something before we were allowed to identify a trend. The Daily Telegraph thinks barely two will do, presumably having downgraded the numbers required in order to justify their twat comedy critic Dominic Cavendish's ongoing quest to prove there's a new vanguard of popular right wing comedians on the Edinburgh Fringe, of which he also can only ever seem to find the same two every year. If only there were a third!



Here is a link to Sabur's stupid article, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/04/comedians-tell-anti-brexit-jokes-damaging-careersas-audiences/, but it will drive revenue-generating traffic through the shit Daily Telegraph's website, which is even more shit than the paper itself, so here is the piece itself. That said, you should click the link if you believe that content, however shit, should be paid for.

---

"Comedians tell how anti-Brexit jokes are damaging their careers as audiences outside of London walk out in offence.

Rozina Sabur.



Comedians have told how anti-Brexit jokes are killing their careers as audiences outside of London walk out in offence. A number of comedians have described scripting their take on Britain leaving the European Union for left-wing audiences in London, only to face unamused audiences when they take their acts out to the rest of the country.



Marcus Brigstocke has been touring the country with a set that includes 20 minutes of material on Brexit, it is his first tour that has seen members of the audience walking out "every night" in anger. He revealed that a number of his fans were unlikely to return to his shows in future, following the jokes. "People have been angry; people have walked out of shows and people have booed. A lot of the people that I think of as my audience will not be back - they won't come again - they're that angry," he told BBC Radio 4.



Brigstocke said he did not want to turn his audience off, but said, "for the first time ever on tour I have people walking out every night - not hoards, but some. That's unsettling. I have never before dealt with a subject as divisive and upsetting (including passionate criticisms of religion etc.). It's a challenge I would usually enjoy but (perhaps because I'm not doing it well enough) it is proving to be a nightmare. It seems that for the most part Brexit is not just the hideous social and political turn we have taken as a country but is also comedic poison."



Comedian Stewart Lee has also spoken of some audience members' reactions to his material poking fun at leave voters during his shows.



Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide, said: "I consume a lot of comedy - mostly TV, also some live - and would say the comedy world's reaction has been almost exclusively negative. Many jokes essentially paraphrase as 'shooting ourselves in the foot', and the rest rely on lazily branding 52 per cent of the voters as racist." "

---

Sabur writes, "Comedians have told how anti-Brexit jokes are killing their careers as audiences outside of London walk out in offence."

But all Sabur actually has to go on is that Marcus Brigstocke has said some people walked out and may not come back. To extrapolate from this that his career is being 'killed', whether you like him or not, is nonsense. It maybe that the people that didn't walk out will all come back and bring two Remain-voting friends next time. And to make the singular comedian Brigstocke into the plural 'comedians', without naming a single other example of the trend you are trying to imagine, is fundamentally dishonest and an example of bad journalism that should have been rejected by any decent editor, and sent back to substantiate its claims.



From a nakedly commercial point of view, it would make sense for a comedian to be pro-remain. It's sad but true that the elderly Leave voting audience will die off sooner than they younger Remain voting audience, and the Remain voting audience have higher disposable incomes to spend on comedy.



In the 172 comments below Sabur's thick piece, no-one mentions me, which is superb as it means I am off the radar of these moronic Daily Telegraph reading cunts, as I am with Daily Mail reading cunts too, although Telegraph reader Paul Mynn is annoyed with the imagined material of a fictional comedian; "Lee Herring is a twerp. Let's build a wall round London to keep the toerags in. And they can pay for it!" Where I am concerned, the inaccurate paper has the readers and writers it deserves.



Nonetheless, the shit Daily Telegraph has still managed to put me in a bad mood on my birthday. And it makes me worry, if the right wing press can be this shoddy and biased covering comedy about Brexit how can we trust what they tell us about Brexit itself? And if you are a journalist reading this, no I am not prepared to comment on this in your crappy clickbait paper, or appear on bent Radio 4 news either.



POST-SCRIPT - I have just checked my email and found this Sabur tried to contact me yesterday, at 3.59 pm on April 4th, via my agent, for comment for this piece before it ran at 6.49 pm the same day, an doubtless labour-intensive intensive 2hrs and 50 minutes later. I am camping in a wood and don't have a smartphone, so didn't get the email, a narrow escape. Nonetheless, the piece is still rubbish. And so is Brexit.

Laura Cannell - Violin & Voice is joined by Stewart Lee - Writer & Comedian, the Contemporary Irish Cellist Kate Ellis, the Writer & Broadcaster - Jennifer Lucy Allan and Musician& Writer Polly Wright.

“Wherever we lay our heads, in cities, villages, marshes or borderlands, in this century or the next, we will have the melding of clay, the walking in marshlands, the equinox and the old stories. This is our personal and collective folklore”

Laura Cannell August 2020

These Feral Lands Volume 1 melds together words and music inspired by feral animal sounds, ancient stories and personal folklore. The ten tracks were built upon a set of unreleased violin improvisations by Cannell titled Buzzard A-H. They were recorded at the beginning of 2020 while watching and being watched by a buzzard sitting on a pole in the farmyard opposite her house. The Buzzard recordings may not always be audible but they are always there, like the Buzzard itself.

Cannell then invited Stewart Lee to create and record stories inspired by landscape, leaving him free to bring his own meaning and the results are some of the most personal he has written. Recent discoveries about parts of his family geography had come to light, in the area close to where Cannell is from on the Norfolk/Suffolk borders, and also in the Welsh borderlands.

"In 2019 the composer/curator Alex Groves approached me with a commission to compose a new piece for his SOLO series for the cellist Kate Ellis, one of Irelands leading contemporary classical musicians. I immediately said yes, knowing her reputation. In dreaming up a piece for Kate I had been listening to the deers barking at dusk in the churchyard next to my cottage, stark animal cries with disrupted repetition, I stayed for a while imagining what wild animals were in Kate's homeland Ireland.
I transcribed early recordings of wolves howling, a wild thrashing and lonesome being emerged. INHABITED: The Last Wild Wolf in Ireland' was born.

Ongoing conversations with friends and collaborators Jennifer Lucy Allan - writer and broadcaster and Polly Wright - musician and writer led us down new exploratory paths so I invited them to create new works.” LC.

All parts were recorded individually in the performers homes during the early summer of 2020.

Mixed and produced by Laura Cannell.

These Feral Lands are about our time, our space and pulling together the ragged threads of our real and imagined landscapes.

Last Monday the International Panel on Planet-Threatening Demi-Gods presented the most peer-reviewed scientific paper in all human history, giving unarguable evidence that Earth will be destroyed by a malevolent super-being called Malignos at teatime (GMT) next Tuesday. I was on tour, sitting in Belfast airport departure lounge, when I read about it in the Guardian. It seemed like an important story, but I noticed other passengers skipping it in their papers in favour, for example, of a charming Daily Mail centre-spread of Photo-shopped pictures of tiny people in a world made of massive vegetables. There was some giant broccoli that a bike had crashed into and a little white man was standing next to it looking at the buckled wheel, scratching his head in astonishment. He simply couldn't believe it. He had driven his bike straight into some giant broccoli!

Malignos the Titan, according to the scientists' report, was four times the size of the Earth, and wore pink Speedos, purple motorcycle boots, and a lilac headdress, similar to Princess Beatrice's royal wedding hat, but almost infinitely larger. Apparently, the hungry space god has been drifting towards the Earth since the early 70s, in full view of astronomers, while shouting: "Resistance is useless. I will drain your planet of all air, water and minerals in an instant. Then everything will die." Scientists and politicians admit that they had some initial difficulty in comprehending the scale and seriousness of the threat. They weren't alone. I nudged the young woman next to me on the departure lounge sofa and showed her a photo of the giant evil god drifting past Mars, and the headline explaining that the world would be destroyed on Tuesday. She pursed her lips, tutted at it, and went back to reading an autobiography of David Walliams.

A big screen in the lounge was showing Lorraine Kelly's ITV morning show. The producers were looking for the fun showbiz angle on the story of the forthcoming destruction of the planet. Varg Vikernes, of the Norwegian Black Metal band Burzum, was among the celebrities already expressing disappointment in their online blogs about the sudden end of all life. Lorraine had a link-up to him deep in the ancient Scandinavian forest, wherein he dwelt.

"I had hoped human civilisation would grind inexorably to a halt in violent disputes over land and resources," Varg told Lorraine Kelly, his white painted face glowing in the primordial gloom, "plunging us back into a second dark age, pitting man against man, race against race, in a barbaric struggle for survival. This sudden end of everything, instantly, has no dignity to it, no nobility. We have been cheated of glory, betrayed by God." And Varg disappeared back into the womb-dark of Mother Forest.

Then Lorraine turned to her studio guest, the transvestite Irish comedian Brendan O'Carroll, titular star of the award-winning Mrs Brown's Boys, who said that the imminent end of everything was "… a fecking shitty thing to happen, and no mistake". People in the departure lounge laughed at the "fecking" bit. I don't think they were really listening to what Brendan and Lorraine were talking about. O'Carroll went on to mention his tour dates, but Lorraine said there would be little point trying to attend them as the world was certain to be destroyed on Tuesday. And they were all sold out anyway.

I flipped the channel to News 24. In an effort to maintain balance, the BBC had finally found someone to dismiss the threat of Malignos the space titan. Appearing live from Oodnadata in the outback, where he was presenting an abandoned upturned tin bath to local people as a reward for good behaviour, Tony Abbott, leader of the Australians, said: "This space-god looks like a poofter to me in his nancy boy hat and shirt-lifter's boots. Send him down here and we'll kick his arse into the back of next week." An Australian tourist on one of the seats behind me applauded and laughed. "Go Tony! Legend!"

I flipped again. On CNN a female news anchor was playing Sarah Palin footage of Malignos, and explaining the god's intent to destroy our planet. Palin laughed, shook her head and said, "There's only one god, ma'am, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't wear Princess Beatrice's royal wedding hat." I'm not a religious man any more, but I went to find the airport's multi-faith prayer room, suddenly moved to address the god I grew up with. But there seemed to be some argument going on in there about whose turn it was to use the prayer mat, and about which religion's prayers were going to be most effective in the light of the current crisis. I went to the bar instead and started drinking.

Later, as I walked back towards the departure lounge, I looked at all the books on the shelves of WH Smith, the classics in a little cluster near the floor. Hardy, Dickens, Eliot, Brontë. It seems trivial I suppose, but it suddenly struck me that all this would be lost too, our finest thoughts, our noblest artistic endeavours. Then I saw a new Jeremy Clarkson book, A Life of Certainty, at the top of the bestsellers' shelves. Perhaps we are getting what we have deserved all along. We are scum. We can't even save the rhino from extinction, and the very thing we're killing him for, his supposedly magical horn, has no medicinal value whatsoever. Come Malignos, come, I found myself thinking, come now, and purify this filthy sphere in space.

Back on News 24 the forthcoming end of the world was already being bumped down the top stories list. A paper that used to be run by Nazi sympathisers had said some bloke's dad was once a communist. The father of a famous lady's son wasn't who we had thought it was. A woman politician had nice shoes. Then Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, came on, to voice his opinion on the IPPTDG's confirmation of Tuesday's apocalypse. "People get very emotional about this subject," he said, "but remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than sudden mass extinction due to the planet-eating ambitions of a world-destroying demi-god. I actually see this report as something we need to take seriously but what it is saying is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting." I stood up and started shouting: "We're fucked. We're absolutely fucked." "Sit down and be quiet sir," said a member of staff, "you're upsetting everyone."

Stewart Lee is currently on tour with his new stand-up show, Much A-Stew About Nothing. See www.stewartlee.co.uk for details.

Superyachts seek safe havens. Property portfolios dissolve. Lawyers are engaged, accountants contracted. Politicians confect plausible denials over ostentatious donations. Tory party co-chairman Ben Elliot deletes online boasts of his company’s “15 years’ experience providing luxury lifestyle management services to Russia’s elite and corporate members”. It seems there were oligarchs everywhere, all along. We’ve been living in an oligarchy, and no one knew, except all the silenced journalists and stifled inquiries that tried to tell us.

Six years ago, after meeting him at a urinal, I briefly befriended the now penitent oligarch Roman Abramovich. Ten songs into a brilliant set by Americana legends the Long Ryders at Under the Bridge, the venue attached to the football ground Abramovich owned, I dashed to the gents, just after Ivory Tower and during The Light Gets in the Way, my prostate gland and my enthusiasm for plangent country rock in mortal combat.

“That Ivory Tower song is so good. We do live in an Ivory Tower,” the urinating oligarch next to me moaned drunkenly in an anglicised Russian accent, “And an Ivory Tower can fall down, any time, my friend! Fantasticheskiy!” And with that, the edified oligarch began to weep hot tears that splashed down into the urinal bowl, diluting the champagne-flavoured micturate his tiny penis had squirted weakly there. I am not a fan of football, kleptocracies or smelting. I did not know I was being addressed by the oligarch, and newly converted Long Ryders fan, Roman Abramovich.

“I agree,” I said, innocently. “The Long Ryders work within the country rock genre, I suppose, but they invest it with levels of real tenderness, insight and originality, magically greater than the sum of its parts.” “You are an intellectual, my fat companion. A shoe-shine boy of the elite. You overanalyse,” said my new oligarch friend, suddenly stabilising. “I never knew this group before, but the sound is Clash, but on a farm! Makes Robbie Williams seem shit.”

“Have you seen Robbie Williams live?” I asked politely, zipping up my flies, and wondering how a Russian Robbie Williams fan had found his way into a reunion show by some not well-known 80s alternative country pioneers. “Williams played the New Year’s Eve party I threw for Vladimir Putin two years ago. Then he writes an offensive song obviously about me and the loans-for-shares privatisation programme: ‘It takes a certain kind of man with a certain reputation to alleviate the cash from a whole entire nation.’ Happy to take my money though, eh? Asshole! I should sue him. Like Catherine Belton and HarperCollins in the future. At least I was never in Take That!”

Now I was confused. “You threw a party for Putin? Who are you?” Without washing his hands, my oligarch companion clasped my face in his palms. “You do not know who I am? Ha! Fantasticheskiy!” And then he kissed each of my cheeks in turn. “Come Shoe-shine! We’ll drink champagne. You explain this ‘alternative country’ to me and watch the cowboy farm band, yes?”

As we were served, very quickly, at the bar, the Long Ryders kicked into the countrified powerpop of their signature NRBQ cover, I Want You Bad. “Fantasticheskiy,” enthused Abramovich, as a woman poured us champagne, “But I have never heard them before. Their failure to penetrate the wider marketplace is surely due to poor business decisions by record labels in the 80s. All is business. I bought a painting of a big woman for £17m. George Lucas, yes? I invited him to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers play at my 2011 New Year’s party. Ideal party band. Those Ewoks in Return of Jedi, yes? They are no fucking good. I asked Lucas, ‘The Ewoks are Wookiees, yes, from the other two films, the good films? Compare the meerkat. You changed Wookiees for the new small creatures to sell more toys to morons?’ Lucas said nothing. All is business. What song is the group playing now?”

“State of My Union,” I reply, fizzing, “I suppose, both musically and lyrically, it has an ironic relationship with rock’n’roll songs that eulogise a particular place, like the Beach Boys’ California Girls, the humour here deriving from the fact that it concerns the unglamorous state of Kentucky.” “Enough, Shoe-shine!” honked Abramovich, “they’re leaving the stage. Clap for an encore.”

“Ivory Tower! Ivory Tower!” commanded Abramovich, a man not used to having his wishes disobeyed, but the spritely roots veterans sprang instead into a spirited reading of their near hit, the British invasion hued American history lesson Looking for Lewis and Clark. “This song is good. The harmonica break excites me,” concluded Abramovich as the Long Ryders left that stage, and we headed to the exits. “But it’s no Ivory Tower. Hey! Shoe-shine,” and Abramovich threw his arm around me as we walked through the Chelsea grounds in the cool summer night, “Ivory Tower. Sing that song for me, now.” “Really,” I asked, “just here now, unaccompanied? I don’t know if … ” “Sing the fucking song, Shoe-shine, and earn your champagne!” growled Abramovich, so I summoned some inner strength, stood up straight and sang: “My friend lives in an ivory tower. She don’t listen when you try to tell her: ‘it’s too late, your ivory tower’s falling down.’”

The notes faded and Abramovich sat down near a seagull on top of a dirty bin, gazing at the stars. He seemed momentarily moved, as if about to admit something, but then snapped back into certainty. “Hmm,” concluded Abramovich, “This Ivory Tower needs a checkpoint entry, crash barriers, iron gates, like Kensington Palace Gardens. Or expensive litigation lawyers. Some donations to a charitable fund. Etc. Then the Ivory Tower will not fall. Go home Shoe-shine. Home to your stinking book-lined cave.”

Today, if I worked as a cartoonist for a tabloid newspaper, I could simply hand in a hurried scrawl of heaven, where Victoria Wood now plays the piano alongside Prince on guitar and John Whittingdale’s political credibility on slap bass. But instead, I must write.

Does it matter that the torture-porn fan, free-market fundamentalist and wilful BBC wrecker John Whittingdale dated a woman who turned out to be a dominatrix and then threw her under the bus when the story threatened to go public? Not unless you entertain some outdated idea of chivalry, I suppose. Whittingdale should remember that dominatrixes are ladies too. There is nothing of the knight about him.

And does it matter that the knowing withholding of the knowledge that Whittingdale, hog-tied by events, unknowingly dated a known dominatrix may have been knowingly left unknown in order to influence Whittingdale’s attitude to press regulations? Yes.

And in the week that Whittingdale, the cheeks of his reputation blistering, has said he is “not minded” to implement the Leveson recommendations on press regulation in full, it matters doubly so. And anyone who chooses not to see that has been wilfully latex blindfolded and tied to a bedstead of betrayal by the Anne Summers Beginners’ Bondage Kit of political expediency.

But can any of us honestly say we never unknowingly dated someone we didn’t know was knowingly working as a known dominatrix, without our knowing? I know I can’t.

In a related development, on Saturday, I was supposed to host a discussion with Roger Drew, a writer on the political satire The Thick of It, about the 2012 Leveson-inspired Goolding inquiry episode. The session was one of many at a music festival in a Pontins in north Wales for which, this year, I was the e-list celebrity curator who got to chose the acts, though not the catering.

Pontins insists on providing all the dining options for in-house events themselves, even though the staff remain visibly overwhelmed by the unexpected arrival of 3,000 people not content to eat only chips for three days.

There were more kitchen utensils in operation on stage in the drone-percussion performance by Japan’s Boredoms than there were in either of the venue’s hot food outlets. It was Jesus Christ in reverse, as if a blue-coated anti-miracle worker had taken one tiny nourishing new potato and turned it into mountains of fried food that thousands of people didn’t want to eat.

That said, I think today’s entitled young festivalgoers should be grateful for what they are given. At Glastonbury, throughout the pre-designer wellies decades of the 80s and 90s, I slept in puddles, not chalets, and ate only mung gruel given away free by Hare Krishnas.

And gruel is all I will offer next time my name is attached to a residential arts festival, in order to differentiate it from those tasteful home counties boutique events, patronised by Tories and Top Gear presenters, where the cheeses are advertised in the same-sized font as the bands and the postmodern wanking. “Cypriot halloumi + Shed Seven + burlesque.”

In the days approaching The Thick of It screening I smugly congratulated myself on my precognitive programming genius. Leveson was suddenly back in the news thanks to the speculation that sex revelations about John Whittingdale had been suppressed in order to influence his decision to implement its recommendations.

The press denied this while, simultaneously and without an iota of shame, making a fuss about not being able to name a threesome celebrity who, coincidentally, held no sway over legislation concerning newspapers’ futures. The session with Roger Drew was to be charged with sudden meaning.

But, at 6pm on Saturday afternoon, 300 political satire fans in the cinema room began a slow handclap, when it became clear that, like the evening’s supposed main stage star John Cale, the episode of The Thick of It would not be appearing.

Doubtless fans of experimental music, hysteria and exaggeration have read of the weekend event’s other problems, the final turd blockage in the U-bend of its cash flow being the caught-on-CCTV vandalism of an arcade machine by a person who had gained access to the site by pretending to be a member of the Fall’s entourage.

Orange juice (the drink not the band, though they would have beatified my 80s Peel show-heavy line-up) had been wilfully and cruelly siphoned into the toy dispensing orifice of a Minions claw grabber machine, short-circuiting an entire electrical system. Pontins’ initial estimate of the damage, for which we were financially accountable, was £24,000, a figure equal to the appearance fees of over half the acts on the bill combined.

In the micro-economics of obscure music promotion the vandalism of a cloth cyclops dispenser could be the point at which your break-even point disappears over the event horizon. I had just learned of this when I was suddenly called away to fill in during the delay caused by the missing Thick of It film.

The patient writer Roger Drew, less familiar than I with hostile, bored audiences, looked at me for answers. I decided to begin the event while technicians struggled to download a workable version of the episode, making comic play of the fact that we might be about to discuss, at length, something that would not actually be seen by its intended audience. Ionesco would applaud.

Since being press-ganged five years ago into an on/off trio, to interpret John Cage’s chance composition Indeterminacy, I have cultivated an ambivalent attitude to the very notion of what constitutes a “performance”. I realised that Roger and I looking at an impotently rotating Samsung logo on a 20ft-high screen in front of 300 people was now “the show”. We improvised around it and Roger charitably transmogrified his potential and justified indignation into comedy gold. Some people said it was their event of the weekend.

Later, I asked the lady in charge what had happened. She said that an unknown whip-wielding woman in tiny black hot pants had been seen to place the Leveson-satirising disc on a desk in the production office, and wriggle around on it until it was arse-sweated into unusability.

The nipple clamp of Murdoch bites hard on the nipple of John Whittingdale’s ministerial responsibilities. Could it be that Whittingdale, like some sick torture-porn Blofeld, maintains an army of taxpayer-funded lap-dancing dominatrix sleeper agents in basements all around Berwick Street, to ball-gag dissent and dog muzzle debate about any issues that affect him, by simply bum-juicing the evidence into oblivion? Has he no shame? What must be done with him? Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart!

Ricky Gervais is an actor, writer, and director. He is brave. I am a standup. I am not brave. I only ever did one brave thing. In 2005, I agreed, while drunk, to jump off the tallest structure in New Zealand. New Zealanders' high living standards mean they are driven to create artificial jeopardy, usually involving jumping off things, stamping their bare feet on hard mud, or eating deceptively hot pies from roadside vendors.

Visitors to the Auckland Sky Tower can freefall from 650 feet at 60 miles an hour. A brake kicks in for the last 10 feet, so you realise what it would be like to die, but don't. I panicked, and started telling the men that I didn't want to do it, but I was already on a ledge high over the city so they just snapped the clips and pushed me off. As I fell I realised that one day I would be dead, that the world would continue without me, and that I was nothing. I wish I'd just eaten the pies.

Members of the public are always telling standups that we must be very brave. Some of you who have told me this are a fireman, a community policewoman, and a mercenary who chases Somalian pirates. The fireman is half right, I suppose. Once extinguished, a fire is done. However, an extinguished heckler can later go on an internet forum and say I'm shit and that he hopes various women I know are raped.

You say standups must be brave because anything can happen in a live comedy show, and that's true, but only within certain parameters. The laws of physics will remain constant. Gravity will not reverse. Giant moths will not swoop down and carry the comedian away. And while Eddie Izzard always dresses as a woman before performing, the average comedian is unlikely to change gender mid-gag, like a west African frog.

I have, however, seen some of you physically attack standups onstage. And I even saw one of you wave a gun during the young David Baddiel's act in a Montreal club in 1997. The gunwoman's defence, namely that she had been sent back from the future to avert a catastrophic event called "Baddielageddon", was dismissed as fantasy by the arresting officers, perhaps with indecent haste.

A confusion seems to exist in your minds that a comedian is somehow validated by doing material that you perceive as being "brave". Lenny Bruce was brave to challenge orthodoxies in front of audiences peppered with FBI agents aiming to arrest him. Chubby Roy Brown is not brave to sing a pro-golliwog song in front of loads of people who, from the YouTube clip, seem to be all disproportionately enthusiastic about golliwogs. Perhaps it was a private booking for a golliwog enthusiasts' group?

But as ideas of what's acceptable change, it can be difficult for comedians to know if, at any particular point in time, we are being brave and clever, or offensive and stupid. For example, in 2008, the standup comedian Russell Brand was censured by the Yorkshire Michael Parkinson, having joked to an old Mexican grandad about having sex with a goth. Back in February 1977, the letters page of the Radio Times carried a letter from a viewer criticising Michael Parkinson for laughing along to Bernard Manning's "racist" jokes on his TV chat show.

Was Russell Brand "brave" to have joshed the old man about the goth sex? Was Manning "brave" to be racist in the 70s, even though racism was largely thought of as ace until UB40's first album, Signing Off, discredited it? And would Michael Parkinson have thought it was OK for Russell Brand to do the old Mexican grandad goth sex prank if he had used the Baddielogeddon portal to go back 40 years in time and do it in a comedy Pakistani voice?

Today, furious internet commentators, and cab drivers who vaguely recognise me, think the bravery of a comedian is measured by their willingness to tackle the hot potato of Islam. (Yes, I know it is forbidden in the Koran to warm a potato, even accidentally. This is merely a figure of speech. I meant nothing by it. I was not trying to be brave.) Here is a selection of almost three unsolicited emails the BBC received during my last TV outing, from people desperate to see Muslims mocked, both implying my lack of bravery.

"Dear BBC, I enjoyed Stewart Lee's making fun of Chris Moyles on TV last night. I look forward to him mocking the Prophet Mohammed in the same way next week, or wouldn't that be 'politically correct'?" And, "Dear BBC, I enjoyed watching Stewart Lee making jokes about crisps last night. But I doubt we will be seeing him having a go at any Muslim snacks in the near future. It appears there's one law for crisps and quite another for spicy bombay mix." These two emails, which were both sent by Norris McWhirter, are not real. But there are many like them that are.

Islam is not the comedy taboo the fictional Norris McWhirter imagines it to be. Many standups, and often those of an Islamic background, do make informed jokes about Muslims. So where can the would-be brave comedian go to prove his bravery? Well, just as he did with The Office nearly 30 years ago, once again, the self-styled "little fat bloke" Ricky Gervais has shown us all the way.

On his blog last month, Gervais claimed to be working on a sitcom about a "lovely little feller" called Derek, and linked to a YouTube clip of himself as Derek Noakes, a 38-year-old man whose non-specific mental condition, with some superficial similarities to Down's syndrome, and vulnerability to sexual abuse, are the source of some typically opaque Gervaisian irony. Morgana Robinson's eponymous C4 series featured Gilbert, a foolish "special needs" boy and his disabled friends, but it looks as if the glamorous comedienne's bravery is about to be eclipsed by Gervais'.

Gervais's fans have already praised his brave reclamation of the word "mong" last month, but his decision to make comedy about the mentally handicapped more explicitly may be the heroic multimillionaire actor-writer-director's bravest yet. To return to our opening metaphor, if "mong" is a hot pie, Derek Noakes is the full Sky Tower.

It would, doubtless, be brave for Gervais to pursue his Derek Noakes sitcom. It would be braver for him to staple his penis to a wolf. And braver still for him to run into a threshing machine, pushing children in wheelchairs in before him. But watching Gervais's Derek Noakes on YouTube, I imagined feral children trailing real Dereks around supermarkets, chanting "Derek Derek", as they doubtless would were the series to be made, and wondered if, sometimes, discretion is not the better part of valour.

Carpet Remnant World is at Leicester Square Theatre from 15 Nov and tours throughout the UK in Spring 2012. See stewartlee.co.uk

"In contrast with (my) generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think that they meant it. Except that after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were white supremacists. Was this always how it happened?"
Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books, Feb 2019

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1) NEW SHOW 2019/20 - SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO

I'm doing a new stand-up show for the back end of 2019 and the first half of 2020. National dates from Feb 2020 will be announced later in the year, but I am going to do less than last time, but with longer runs in bigger rooms to hit the same demand, sadly, as the length of the last run nearly killed me, as you can see from the BBC film of the show.
he initial London dates will be work in progress, with a free DVD of CONTENT PROVIDER for all ticket holders and fans of obsolete physical media. Tons of fun!
I will film this show/these shows in the Summer of 2020 for offloading to whatever content platforms are still viable at that stage in late capitalism's technologically-driven cultural decline.

David Johnson & John Mackay in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present
STEWART LEE - SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO.

Double-bill of two new 60-ish minute sets, back to back nightly from "the world's greatest living stand-up" (Times).

Tornado questions a shipwrecked Stew’s position in the comedy marketplace after Netflix mistakenly lists his show as "reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe." What is anything? Is it this?
And Snowflake questions our worth in a collapsing society which no longer shares the liberal values we have for so long been keen to be seen to espouse, in a fairy-tale landscape of winter wonder.  Tons of fun!

SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO Work-in-Progress and DVD LAUNCH
Leicester Square Theatre, London.
A run of work-in-progress gigs to celebrate the DVD launch of his celebrated last live show CONTENT PROVIDER.
Each ticket will include a very special limited edition copy of the new DVD, exclusively available to bookers of this live show.
Stewart will be signing copies after the show.

Sept 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th - 7pm start
Oct 1st , 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Oct - - 8.45pm start
2 hrs including interval
£26.50 including DVD of Content Provider (RRP £19.95)

Stewart Lee - Snowflake/Tornado.
Leicester Square Theatre, London.

October - December 2019
Tues 29th October 8.45pm - Sat Dec 14th
No Mondays, No Sundays, & not Sat Nov 30th

January 2020
Thurs 2nd Jan 8.45pm - Sat 25th Jan
No Mondays, No Sundays, & not Jan 9th
8.45 pm Stewart on stage
2 hrs + interval

Tues, Weds, Thurs £27.50
Friday & Saturday£29.50

All shows are 14+ apparently. If you are under 14 you are too immature to enjoy my swearing and farts.

SEPTEMBER 2019

Tuesday 24th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 25th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm - TICKETS
Thursday 26th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm - TICKETS
Friday 27th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm - TICKETS
Saturday 28th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 7pm - TICKETS

OCTOBER 2019

Tuesday 1st - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 2nd - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 4th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 5th - WORK-IN-PROGRESS with Free 'Content Provider' DVD - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

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OCTOBER 2019

Tuesday 29th - SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 30th - SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 31st - SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

NOVEMBER 2019

Friday 1st SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 2nd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Tuesday 5th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 6th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 7th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 8th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 9th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Tuesday 12th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 13th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 14th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 15th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 16th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Tuesday 19th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 20th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 21st SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 22nd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 23rd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Tuesday 26th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 27th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 28th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 29th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

DECEMBER 2019

Tuesday 3rd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 4th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 5th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 6th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 7th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

Tuesday 10th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 11th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 12th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 13th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 14th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

JANUARY 2020

Thursday 2nd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 3rd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 4th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

Tuesday 7th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 10th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 11th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

Tuesday 14th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 15th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 16th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 17th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 18th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

Tuesday 21st SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Wednesday 22nd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Thursday 23rd SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Friday 24th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS
Saturday 25th SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 8.45pm - TICKETS

"There's no-one else to touch him" Mark Wareham, Mail On Sunday *****

"Lee remains one of the best stand-ups in the country" ***** Metro

"The world's best living stand-up comedian" Dominic Maxwell, The Times

"He makes stand-up almost a moral pursuit, ... that makes the usual (and more popular) stand-ups seem crude and obvious." Alan Bennet, London Review Of Books.

"Proper, vicious prejudice - a self-proclaimed inhabitant of the moral high ground" Sarah Vine, Daily Mail

"A pot-bellied Bernard Manning for snowflakes" Tony Parsons, The Sun

"Woke, enlightened, professionally sensitive, BBC-approved comedian who can be guaranteed to dress to the left. The rancid tip of a cesspit." - Tony Parsons, GQ

"If I could bring one extinct thing back to life it would be Stewart Lee's sense of humour." Frankie Boyle, The Guardian

"The opposite of what really good comedy should be" Toby Young, Radio 4

"Truly, he is the Oscar Wilde of our times" - Gary Bushell, The Daily Star

NB - I DID 5 MONTHS IN TOTAL AT LST OF CONTENT PROVIDER BETWEEN 2016-2018, AND THEN 4 ROYAL FEST HALLS AND THEY ALL SOLD OUT.
ONCE THESE DATES ARE DONE I AM NOT COMING BACK FOR MORE THIS TIME SO GET TICKETS IF YOU WANT THEM.

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2) SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO 2020 TOUR

Currently confirmed / onsale:

Jan / Feb 2020

Wednesday 29th January 2020 - Saturday 1st February 2020 - Snowflake / Tornado, Nottingham Playhouse. TICKETS HERE

Tuesday 18th - Friday 21st February 2020 - Snowflake / Tornado, Brighton Dome. ON SALE SOON.

Monday 24th - Saturday 29th February 2020 - Snowflake / Tornado, Oxford Playhouse. ON SALE SOON.

March 2020

Tuesday 17th March 2020 - Snowflake / Tornado, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. ON SALE SOON.

Friday 27th / Saturday 28th March 2020 - Snowflake / Tornado, Theatre Royal, Newcastle. ON SALE SOON.

April / May 2020

Wednesday 29th April 2020 - Saturday 2nd May 2020 - Snowflake / Tornado, Salford Lowry. TICKETS HERE

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More national dates are currently being added & confirmed & will be announced soon. They will be listed on the Live Dates page of the website & via this newsletter as they come in.

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3) SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO WORK IN PROGRESSES

I am doing a headline half-hour on bill with John Kearns and Rosie Jones and more at Bristol Comedy Garden, July 7th. https://www.bristolcomedygarden.co.uk/line-up/sunday-late/

Soho Theatre, various dates from 10th June to 4th July
https://sohotheatre.com/shows/stewart-lee-double-work-in-progress/ -

This is now sold out.

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4) EDINBURGH FRINGE

This is now all sold out.

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5) CONTENT PROVIDER DVD

CONTENT PROVIDER has dropped off the BBC I-player.
I know they are allowed to put it on there three more times, but they do tend to need a nudge. Perhaps they will show it again. Who knows?
All four series of COMEDY VEHICLE are still up on there anyway. See how the world has changed for the worse in a decade. How quaint the liberal's manageable dilemmas of 2013 seem now.
The third, and perhaps best, series of COMEDY VEHICLE seems to be on Netflix in the UK and, I think, the US.
It seems you can also stream CARPET REMNANT WORLD and the first 3 series of COMEDY VEHICLE on Amazon, here and I think in the US. Beats me! And, as I said above, CONTENT PROVIDER will be available as an Old Skool physical media DVD in the Autumn.
Tons of fun!

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6) oxide ghosts/wok in progress

Fire Records, Films and Comedy present: ONE NIGHT ON EARTH.
Stewart Lee Upfront Work-In-Progress Show/ Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes Film Screening presented by Michael Cumming.

https://earthackney.seetickets.com/event/stewart-lee-oxide-ghosts-the-brass-eye-tapes/earth-theatre/1367088

A special night for comedy connoisseurs. Earth, Hackney, Friday 14th June. Doors 7pm. Show 8-11pm. Bar until 2am.

This is now sold out.

Extra show Monday Sept 16th

https://earthackney.seetickets.com/event/stewart-lee-oxide-ghosts-the-brass-eye-tapes/earth-theatre-stoke-newington/1382942

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7) King Rocker Doc

Michael Cumming (Brass Eye), James Nicholls (Fire films) and I are now 1/3rd of the way through filming and editing and are looking for donations to complete the film below, which is about Birmingham post-punk survivors The Nightingales. Everyone who donates, no matter how big or how small*, will be featured in the end credits

*(I think this sentence, written by James from Fire, relates to the size of the donation, not the donor.)

https://www.kingrockerfilm.com/

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8) Sleaford Mods

Sleaford Mods are playing the Hammersmith Apollo, London on Friday 15th November 2019.

I am bottom of the bill supporting them on a line-up that also includes Viagra Boys and Horse Meat Disco (DJ Set).

You can get tickets here.

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9) Meanwhile, I Arrogantly Recommend Guided by Voices, Russ Tolman, Flamin’ Groovies, Topic Records, Stereolab, Catenary Wires, Meat Puppets, Acid Mothers Temple, Damo Suzuki, Fred Frith, Ben Moor & Jo Neary

The greatest American rock band of all time GUIDED BY VOICES play the UK for the first tome in nearly 2 decades, with two now sold out dates at London’s Village Underground 5th and 6th June.

Returning Paisley Underground pioneer and former True West guitaruist and songwriter RUSS TOLMAN has 4 UK dates. June 4th – Sheffield Greystones, 5th – Manchester Night People, 6th – Whitney Fat Lil’s, 7th – London Seabright Arms.

‘70s Byrds/Stones inheritors The Flamin’ Groovies, reunited with original vocalist Ray Looney, tour the UK. June 4th – Manchester Club Academy, 5th – Glasgow Oran Mor, 6th – Newcastle Cluny, 7th – London Under The Bridge, 8th – Southend Chinnerys.

There’s a celebration of 80 years of folk indie Topic Records at The Barbican on June 7th. Eliza Carthy, Martin Carthy, Lisa Knapp, Sam Lee, Alasdair Roberts, Olivia Chaney, Spiro, Chris Wood, Marry Waterson, Bernard Butler. TICKETS

Live shows from Godfathers of Indie, The Catenary Wires, fronted by Amelia Fletcher, OBE. June 7th - Welwyn Garden City Green Room, 14th – London St Pancras Old Church; July 12th - Oxford Wheatsheaf, 17th - Cambridge Portland Arms, 19th - Mcr Gullivers, 20th - Newcastle Cumberland Arms, 26th - 28th Indietracks Ripley.

Lysergic desert rock legends The Meat Puppets return. 7 June – Empire / Belfast, N. Ireland [TICKETS] 8 June – Dolan’s Warehouse / Limerick, Ireland [TICKETS] 9 June – Whelan’s / Dublin, Ireland [TICKETS] 10 June – Brudenell Social Club / Leeds, England [TICKETS] 11 June – Rebellion / Manchester, England [TICKETS]

Japanese Freak Folks Acid Mothers Temple tour the UK again. – 26th Jun. (wed) @ Bethnal Green Working Mens Club – London, 27th Jun. (thu) @ Exeter Phoenix – Auditorium, 28th Jun. (fri) @ “Glastonbury Festival 2019”, 28th Jun. (fri) @ Rough Trade Bristol – Bristol, 29th Jun. (sat) @ The Portland Arms – Cambridge, 30th Jun. (sun) @ Cafe Oto – London (matinee)

More endless tour dates from Can frontman Damo Suzuki June 26: London, Jazz Cafe, June 27: Brighton, The Hope and Ruin, June 28: Hastings, The Printworks

70th birthday 3 day residency for Fred Frith of Henry Cow at London’s Café Oto, June 28th - 30th. Frith’s solo guitar sets were, oddly, a big influence on my stand-up when I started out. TICKETS

Polymath writer and performance artist Ben Moor has a bunch of stuff happening. He has written a new show BOOKTALKBOOKTALKBOOK, co-starring Fringe comedy regular Jo Neary. There are a number of upcoming chances to catch this weird, funny, wise, mind-twisty, silly show about two authors at a bookreading. It concerns A.I., washing-up techniques, card tricks, bad novels, the love of books, and how long we should give people who we think might be running late.

Saturday 8th June 2019, 7.00pm Stoke Newington Literary Festival Ben is super-excited to be part of an amazing line-up here - there's a ton of great people talking about their for real books over the weekend in London's N16. Just get on a 73 bus! TICKETS

Sunday 8th July 2019 - Also Festival Jo is also performing her wonderful show Wife on Earth at this boutique festival in the Warwickshire countryside. There's also an array of brilliant speakers, music and activities.

Saturday 13th July 2019, 4.00pm - The Idler Festival Ben premiered BTBTB at the Idler Academy at last year's Port Eliot Festival. There's another chance to catch Wife on Earth at The Idler magazine's 2nd annual weekend of delights and surprises. At Fenton House in Hampstead.

Friday 26th July 2019 WOMAD Festival And finally (for now) the show is part of the World of Words stage at this awesome celebration of our planet's excellent human-produced sounds and ideas. Ben had the best time here last year, and says it's great to be returning.

Ben’s last show, PRONOUN TROUBLE, is also on again. It concerns The Hunting Trilogy, a series of cartoons directed by Chuck Jones, and the philosophical questions about time, friendship and uncertainty it raises. It also looks at a few cool things from the real world, and involves an ever-expanding reading list of book recommendations. Plus there are badges.

Thursday 13th & Friday 14th June 2019, 7.30pm - Etcetera Theatre As part of a Double Bill with the excellent Izzy Mant, and what Ben says is “her deeply funny and wonderfully frank examination of courtesy in a rude world”, Polite Club. Izzy's show begins at 9.00pm. TICKETS

Pronoun Trouble is also available as a DOWNLOAD from GoFasterStripe.

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10) NON-EVENT OF THE MONTH

An Evening With Michael Gove

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-spectator-presents-michael-gove-in-conversation-with-fraser-nelson-tickets-60405937786

Michael Gove in conversation with Fraser Nelson

Will Brexit be delivered?
Can the government survive – or is a Corbyn victory inevitable?
Does Michael Gove, tipped by some as a future Conservative leader, have a plan to turn things around?
Book now to avoid disappointment.

Wed, 5 June 2019, 19:00 – 20:30 BST, Emmanuel Centre, 9-23 Marsham Street London  SW1P 3DW