Richly illuminating new podcast asks What Happened to Counter-Culture? - August 2025 The Financial TImes - By Fiona Sturgess - August 25th, 2025

It was “the most glorious, bravest, the most splendid music”, says British folk singer Shirley Collins of her time collecting folk songs at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the 1950s. “It was all recorded out in the open, so there was a wonderful echo there.” Collins, the one-time leading light of the postwar British folk…

Is counterculture dead – or mainstream? - August 2025 The Observer - By Katherine Cowles - August 10th, 2025

Shirley Collins didn’t think much of Bob Dylan when she first saw him play at the Troubadour in London. He was an American, singing American songs, badly. Worse, he wasn’t wearing a Stetson, which might have helped to set pulses racing. “We didn’t know what to make of him,” she tells Stewart Lee in his…

Radio review #4: What Happened to Counter-Culture? - August 2025 Simon Warner's Substack - By Simon Warner - August 7th, 2025

IT IS HARDLY unhelpful, for the readers of this website, to report that a new BBC radio series on the history of the transatlantic counterculture begins with Allen Ginsberg reading in a 1950s performance of ‘Howl’ in the US and ends with the same poet speaking with a similar and distinctive tone at 1965’s International…

Strong Message Here with Armando Iannucci - June 2025 June 5th, 2025

Comedy writer Armando Iannucci decodes the utterly baffling world of political language. This week, Helen Lewis is away, so comedian and writer Stewart Lee joins Armando to look at Robert Jenrick’s flashy video in which he takes aim at ‘weird Turkish barber shops’, among other things. They discuss how the way politicians, entertainers and journalists…

Headliners with Nihal Arthanayake - September 2024 September 15th, 2024

Nihal Arthanayake speaks to Stewart Lee, his first guest in a new series of Headliners, featuring exclusive in-depth interviews. Over the course of the conversation, Stewart touches on fatherhood and the joy of a profession that allows him to remain immature. He talks about the importance of an economy that supports creativity, finding a new…

Here’s some canny proof that you can’t always trust what you hear - June 2021 The Telegraph - By TRISTRAM FANE SAUNDERS - June 16th, 2021

That presenter was the comedian Stewart Lee, whose recent tribute to punk singer Robert Lloyd, King Rocker, has, so far, been one of this year’s most entertaining films. Radio 4 should use him more, pronto. “Chroniclers have been lying to us since the first troglodyte daubed an exaggerated bison on a French cave wall,” he…