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…

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 Dlms. Radio 4 should use him more, pronto. “Chroniclers have been lying to us since the Drst troglodyte daubed an exaggerated bison on a French cave wall,” he…

Stewart Lee: Unreliable Narrator - June 2021 The Times - By Patricia Nicol - June 13th, 2021

Reardon, as his much-interrupted work on his memoirs attests, is an unreliable narrator, which was the topic of yesterday’s entertaining, inventive Archive on 4, presented by the stand-up and writer Stewart Lee. Lee begins his journey “walking along Cecil Court”, off the Charing Cross Road, which when Lee first arrived in London was lined with…

Stewart Lee: Unreliable Narrator. - June 2021 Chortle - By Steve Bennett - June 13th, 2021

To research this Radio 4 essay about the role of the unreliable narrator, Stewart Lee spent almost three weeks with the Inrravat people of northern Canada, who believe in a trickster god whose stories cannot be trusted. What did he learn about this ancient culture? Well, almost nothing in a literal sense as all their…

FROM THE METRO-LIB-ELITE DESK OF Stewart Lee – JUNE EXTRA - June 2021 June 7th, 2021

In addition to the usual stuff below, some extra things i. Stewart Lee – Unreliable Narrator. This is an Archive on 4 slot I was recruited into by Michael Umney, who made radio art at Resonance 104.4 FM, and we have tried to have some fun with the brief whilst also fulfilling its demands. See…