John Cage meets Stewart Lee - September 2012 Devil's Trill - By Andrew - September 23rd, 2012

Stewart Lee, Tania Chen, Steve Beresford, Alan Tomlinson Battersea Arts Centre, September 23 2012 Even now, a century after his birth, John Cage’s art feels brilliantly fresh. I say art, because although you’ll see him described as a composer, his exploration of sound was genuinely genre busting, exploding the idea of what music could be.…

Approaching The Unfamiliar: Stewart Lee On John Cage’s Indeterminacy - September 2012 TheQuietUs - By David Stubbs - September 14th, 2012

Ahead of a clutch of performances, Stewart Lee talks about the overlaps between comedy and avant garde music In 1959, John Cage released an album on the Folkways label called Indeterminacy. As ever with Cage, the idea was deceptively self-explanatory and simple. He read out a series of stories about a whole bunch of stuff,…

Review: Stewart Lee – works by John Cage - May 2011 London Jazz Blog - May 31st, 2011

Stewart Lee, Steve Beresford, Tania Chen, Harry Hill and Alan Tomlinson perform John Cage (Purcell Room on Saturday 29 May, 2011; review and drawings* by Geoff Winston Stewart Lee, best known as a comedian, has championed radical guitarist Derek Bailey on Radio 4’s ‘The Music Group’ (“that music … it stops time”). Last year he…

Austerity Binge – John Cage – Indeterminacy - May 2011 O B S E R V A T I O N A L I S M - By J Francis Bowyer - May 29th, 2011

Last night I remembered how much I love sound in all its guises. A friend was down in London and had tickets for a performance of John Cage’s Indeterminacy, a series of short stories Cage wrote that were to be accompanied by improvisations from other musicians. Neither party is meant to pay attention to the…

From The Desk Of Stewart Lee – May 2011 - May 2011 May 1st, 2011

This year I have chosen to adopt the following quotes as my mantras. “Comedy can be a transient art that can assist leisure businesses in widening their appeal, something that is vital in these current trading conditions.” Maria Kempinska, Jongleurs “James just said “fuck it”. It was a lot of money and why not? Loads…