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…
The 17th-century witchfinder general, Mary Hopkin, roamed Essex on top of a horse, burning witches and stuffing her bearded face with purloined olden-days tavern fayre – crusty bread rolls, steak and ale pies and banana splits. And yet, crawling from Colchester in a crackling cloud of dark energie, it appears the spawn of at least…
The German E coli bean sprout scandal offers damning evidence that all fruits and vegetables are dirty beyond reason, toxic timebombs that have secreted themselves at the very heart of global cuisine in the form of trusted dietary staples. Yet government food eggheads continue to bray from their state-sterilised laboratories, demanding that we eat at…
The National Trust has concealed recordings of eight celebrities inside benches. Undoubtedly, listening to Claudia Winkleman while contemplating Quarry Bank Mill might help to sensualise the horrors of Industrial Revolution working conditions. And we will one day wonder how we managed to enjoy the 520 acres of Felbrigg Hall without a bench upon which visitors…
This month, the former Perrier Awards for Comedy on the Edinburgh Fringe have been taken over by Foster’s, the beer company. The main award, which usually goes to an unknown turn, remains. But Foster’s has also invited the public to vote for a “Comedy God” from all the nominees of the last 30 years. This…
On Sunday, on Fox News, an American terrorism expert named Steven Emerson revealed that the entire English city of Birmingham was a no-go area to non-Muslims. I was worried, as I have a standup gig there as part of my Room With A Stew tour on 2 May, and last time I played my old home town, in 2014, the crowd, though reasonably diverse, was pleasingly weighted towards the educated middle-class white liberal Guardian-reading audience, which I pen occasional columns like this in order to cultivate.
Brief hijab counts in the merchandising desk queues after live shows proved that, on the last tour, The Lowry, Salford, was my most Islamic audience, and Totnes my least, though Devon folk retain the same suspicion of 21st-century life that characterises the vid-blogs of many Islamist commentators.
The “Muslims in the Merch-line” test is not an entirely accurate punter survey method, skewed as it is by the disposable post-show income of different demographics. I have tried to get provincial venue staff to seat my audience in specific sections of the theatres, split along racial and religious divisions, in order to make my consumer analysis easier, but there seem to be all sorts of objections to this from our “gay” friends in the “Politically Correct Brigade” ™.
The trick now, it would appear, will be to try to write standup material that can be consumed by both the Islamic and the anti-Islamic customer bases, both of which are growing fast in modern Britain. Working these two comedy retail opportunities simultaneously presents an exciting challenge for the modern humour vendor. Perhaps this can be done by deploying a wafer-thin tissue of irony, to be folded and unfolded around the act’s content, depending on the specific demands of the immediate marketplace.
I am currently in talks, with both Roy “Chubby” Brown and Citizen Khan’s Adil Ray, aimed at creating a central databank of Islamic-related standup content, which can be loaned out to different comedians and finessed in any direction, by way of facial expressions, tonal vocal shifts and amusing headgear, then targeted towards the racial and religious breakdown of the specific audience.
But Birmingham, apparently, is now totally Islamic. Will there be time before 2 May to spin my new two hours of comedy to address the concerns of Birmingham’s suddenly exclusively Islamic audience? Perhaps they will assume that my new Anti-Islamic Observational Comedy section is in fact a celebration of difference, like Ricky Gervais’s microtonally nuanced Derek, and I will be given the Freedom of the City of Birmingham, such as it is?
But I wouldn’t want the freedom of this new Islamo-Birmingham now, as there will be no pubs. I still remember the bad old days of the 1970s, when Birmingham was controlled by Quakers. Oats were all there was to eat, and the only drink was lukewarm drinking chocolate in a chipped mug with a picture of the pig from Pipkins on it.
Like most of you, I absorb news coverage passively like a meat sponge, factoring in a degree of market-led bias, depending on whether I am reading a neo-Nazi tabloid or a Marxist-Leninist broadsheet, such as this one. Although, on the three or four occasions when I have been involved in news stories, what’s written has rarely tallied exactly with my own experience.
I never attended the 2011 showbiz event where the Metro newspaper claimed I made Michael McIntyre’s wife cry; I could not get the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts to agree that a contentious item of underwear he insisted appeared in a banned opera I directed had never been in it, despite me having seen every performance. And when I returned home from the poll tax march in 1990, expecting to see news coverage of me and my friends, including a nurse, being crushed by disproportionately numerous police horses, I saw only a punk rocker in Trafalgar Square set fire to a bin and flick Vs at a statue of First Sea Lord Admiral Cunningham, whom he blamed for the hated levy.
I should have expected this. In 1982, as a 14-year-old scout, a patient Akela coaxed me up a Peak District cliff face. On the slab next to us was a group of disadvantaged youngsters, given a rare taste of self-esteem by donning climbing gear. A documentary crew, for the as-yet to appear new broadcaster Channel 4, filmed them. Sadly, the girl chosen to be the centre of the story wasn’t making much progress. With the subject at the edge of her comfort zone, only a foot or so off the ground, a cameraman slid underneath her on his back, shooting dramatically up past her, as if she was some distance into a significant ascent. Then she was hauled bodily up the face and interviewed again at the top, the landscape rolling out behind her, the undeniable evidence of her achievement completing the fabricated narrative arc.
I watched the documentary when it was broadcast some six months later. The Matrix dissolved around me, still a virgin, and barely sentient. News was a branch of entertainment. Facts were mutable, and didn’t need to displace a good yarn. It will be fun to go to Birmingham and stand on stage and pretend the city is entirely Islamic. This will make for a funny story. But I am a comedian. What was Fox News’s excuse?
Stewart Lee
2015-01-12T09:14:59+00:00
On Sunday, on Fox News, an American terrorism expert named Steven Emerson revealed that the entire English city of Birmingham was a no-go area to non-Muslims. I was worried, as I have a standup gig there as part of my Room With A Stew tour on 2 May, and last time I played my old home town, in 2014, the crowd, though reasonably diverse, was pleasingly weighted towards the educated middle-class white liberal Guardian-reading audience, which I pen occasional columns like this in order to cultivate. Brief hijab counts in the merchandising desk queues after live shows proved that, on the last tour, The Lowry, Salford, was my most Islamic audience, and Totnes my least, though Devon folk retain the same suspicion of 21st-century life that characterises the vid-blogs of many Islamist commentators. The “Muslims in the Merch-line” test is not an entirely accurate punter survey method, skewed as it is by the disposable post-show income of different demographics. I have tried to get provincial venue staff to seat my audience in specific sections of the theatres, split along racial and religious divisions, in order to make my consumer analysis easier, but there seem to be all sorts of objections to this from our “gay” friends in the “Politically Correct Brigade” ™. The trick now, it would appear, will be to try to write standup material that can be consumed by both the Islamic and the anti-Islamic customer bases, both of which are growing fast in modern Britain. Working these two comedy retail opportunities simultaneously presents an exciting challenge for the modern humour vendor. Perhaps this can be done by deploying a wafer-thin tissue of irony, to be folded and unfolded around the act’s content, depending on the specific demands of the immediate marketplace. I am currently in talks, with...
Stewart Lee is to the world of comedy what pans are to a chef; pretty vital unless you want cold beans, and nobody wants cold beans.
This man possesses razor sharp comic timing; somehow he can make any innocuous word comical. One small inflection or miniscule tweak of his expression conveys more than any amount of high pitched puerile drivel from the crosseyed one from Mock the Week or pretty much anyone from BBC Three.
Lee has worked on or been the star of some of the best subversive and irreverent comedy programmes to appear on our screens. Originally the slimmer half of Lee & Herring he produced Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. The latter shamelessly provided more material and wit in its short run than the equivalent of 16 million series of Two Pints of Lager. We’re being conservative in our estimate, too. After the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera, Stewart has only briefly kept us afloat by appearing as a panellist or contributor. But now he is back to save television with his Comedy Vehicle.
The opening titles depict Lee looking blissfully moronic in his car, a look he has had years to perfect and uses to great effect. Each week he presents a different topic which is performed via the medium of stand up and sketches. The latter are performed by some of his old stable mates, Kevin Eldon, Simon Munnery, and Paul Putner who are themselves comedians and writers of great esteem.
This week’s edition pits Stewart against the intellectual might of celebrity writers such as Chris Moyles and Russell Brand. He speaks polemically about said writers and the sad state of literature where one of our most well published authors (Dan Brown) can also be terrible. He also provides a useful time saving device by suggesting that we dismiss Brand’s Booky Wook as rubbish without reading it. This also applies to Chris Moyle’s second autobiography, Asher D’s literary vomit, and the entire Harry Potter series. He has (excluding Potter) read these piles of bound paper so that you don’t have to, much in the same way that we watch After You’ve Gone and The Green Green Grass so you don’t have to.
Watch this brilliantly pedantic, mesmerizingly-voiced comedian as often as you can, he offers the rare gift of being both very funny and occasionally incredibly incisive in a similar vein to the late Bill Hicks.
Stewart Lee
2009-03-17T11:00:31+00:00
Stewart Lee is to the world of comedy what pans are to a chef; pretty vital unless you want cold beans, and nobody wants cold beans. This man possesses razor sharp comic timing; somehow he can make any innocuous word comical. One small inflection or miniscule tweak of his expression conveys more than any amount of high pitched puerile drivel from the crosseyed one from Mock the Week or pretty much anyone from BBC Three. Lee has worked on or been the star of some of the best subversive and irreverent comedy programmes to appear on our screens. Originally the slimmer half of Lee & Herring he produced Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. The latter shamelessly provided more material and wit in its short run than the equivalent of 16 million series of Two Pints of Lager. We’re being conservative in our estimate, too. After the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera, Stewart has only briefly kept us afloat by appearing as a panellist or contributor. But now he is back to save television with his Comedy Vehicle. The opening titles depict Lee looking blissfully moronic in his car, a look he has had years to perfect and uses to great effect. Each week he presents a different topic which is performed via the medium of stand up and sketches. The latter are performed by some of his old stable mates, Kevin Eldon, Simon Munnery, and Paul Putner who are themselves comedians and writers of great esteem. This week’s edition pits Stewart against the intellectual might of celebrity writers such as Chris Moyles and Russell Brand. He speaks polemically about said writers and the sad state of literature where one of our most well published authors (Dan Brown) can also be terrible. He also provides a...
'Whatever you decide, dock one off,' he says teasingly to the critics in the room, 'this is only going to get worse.'
Of course, you can ignore that: Lee remains one of the best stand-ups in the country and he knows it, which is why, even though he is technically branding this a 'work in progress' - you get three out of a potential six half-hour routines in preparation for his next stand-up series on BBC2 – he remains in polished, energising form.
Part of the thrill of seeing Lee – beyond his usual biting lines, fourth wall-breaking deconstruction of his own sets and shrewd micromanagement of his audience – is seeing how he switches between genuine sincerity and absurd parody in a heartbeat.
In that regard, there's much to relish in his unforgettable routine about Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall, as he applies Nuttall's logic on the subject of the possible influx of Bulgarians into Britain (to précis: ‘The most qualified ones would be better off staying and helping Bulgaria, rather than serving tea and coffee here') to the history of evolution.
Elsewhere, he describes the 1980s in two sentences, offers up a hilariously vivid gag involving Ben Fogle's attic as part of an explanation of satire, and has a boozy, emasculating, existential crisis, the only chunk that veers us away from politics.
So there we have it. Get tickets now if you want to get in before Christmas – then add on your own star accordingly.
Stewart Lee
2013-11-08T18:40:06+00:00
How many stars to give Stewart Lee? 'Whatever you decide, dock one off,' he says teasingly to the critics in the room, 'this is only going to get worse.' Of course, you can ignore that: Lee remains one of the best stand-ups in the country and he knows it, which is why, even though he is technically branding this a 'work in progress' - you get three out of a potential six half-hour routines in preparation for his next stand-up series on BBC2 – he remains in polished, energising form. Part of the thrill of seeing Lee – beyond his usual biting lines, fourth wall-breaking deconstruction of his own sets and shrewd micromanagement of his audience – is seeing how he switches between genuine sincerity and absurd parody in a heartbeat. In that regard, there's much to relish in his unforgettable routine about Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall, as he applies Nuttall's logic on the subject of the possible influx of Bulgarians into Britain (to précis: ‘The most qualified ones would be better off staying and helping Bulgaria, rather than serving tea and coffee here') to the history of evolution. Elsewhere, he describes the 1980s in two sentences, offers up a hilariously vivid gag involving Ben Fogle's attic as part of an explanation of satire, and has a boozy, emasculating, existential crisis, the only chunk that veers us away from politics. So there we have it. Get tickets now if you want to get in before Christmas – then add on your own star accordingly.
“The skinhead smashed the still steaming grill plate of the state-of-the-art Breville sandwich toaster into his red face, to stem the violent impulses rising within him. His skin fizzed, like cold piss on a hot Guy Fawkes bonfire. Ancient burnt pieces of cheese and tomato, remnants of his well-heeled host’s cocaine-fuelled midnight snacks, buried themselves in the tight fuzz of his No 1 crop. Through the open window of the politician’s luxury million-pound west London flat Robbie could smell the stench of the Notting Hill night wafting into the exclusive mews of former stable buildings, where some famous film actors and racing car drivers also lived. Goat curry. Chicken jerky. And sweet sweet waccy waccy tobaccy. ‘Those spades got one thing right,’ conceded the skinhead, closing the lid of the sandwich toaster and putting it back on the Formica surface of the expensive designer kitchen.” – The Right Honourable Skinhead by Richard Allen (1981).
It’s well known that the racist news website wizard and former Trump confidante Steve Bannon, currently planning a pan-global far-right resurgence called The Motion, was inspired by Jean Raspail’s controversial 1973 French science-fiction novel The Camp of the Saints, which uses an invasion of western Europe by disenchanted brown people from below the equator as a satire of white European privilege and colonial guilt.
But is it possible that Bannon’s current championing of the sunbed magnate and mortgage fraudster Tommy Robinson as “the backbone” of the UK has been inspired by his acquaintance with a less well-known piece of fascist-flavoured fiction?
The Canadian alcoholic Richard Allen is thought to have written 290 novels in his lifetime, and between 1970 and 1980 he penned 18 violent books set in the milieu of Britain’s fractious youth culture, such as Skinhead, Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Returns, and the martial arts-themed Taekwondo Skinhead.
Principally chronicling the adventures of a racist skinhead thug called Robbie Tomlinson, the books were top sellers for the cheap and nasty New English Library imprint, also home to Alex R Stuart’s disreputable Hell’s Angels series: Angel, Angel Escapes, Angel Returns and the martial arts-themed Taekwondo Angel.
Allen was rediscovered in his twilight years by the experimental author Stewart Home, who was inspired by the novels’ repetitive formulae, and it is possible to view Allen’s Skinhead as a Nietzschean antihero akin to Henry Williamson’s instinct-driven eponymous animal protagonists Tarka the Otter, Salar the Salmon, Valkyrie the Vole, Mitford the Moth, Hitler the Hamster and the martial arts-themed Taekwondo Hitler Hamster.
But Allen’s last Skinhead outing, which was due to be published in 1981, proved too controversial even for the ambulance-chasing New English Library outlet, and saw the character retired. Allen’s final job for the publisher, under the pen-name James Moffat, was an ignominious novelisation of a suppressed erotic film entitled Queen Kong.
Queen Kong was the first in a doomed series of giant monster sex comedies, in which the genders of famous horror movie creatures were reversed, all due to feature the dream team of Robin Asquith, Rula Lenska and Carol Drinkwater from All Creatures Great and Small. However, legal action ended the project before filming on the follow-up, Queen Kong Versus God-Sheila, had been completed, let alone the series’ third, martial arts-themed, instalment Taekwondo Queen Kong Versus Gwonbeop God-Sheila.
Allen’s sad monkey book appeared in a cover very different to the iconic street-style imagery of the Skinhead series, depicting as it did a man, dressed as a giant female ape with permed hair and exposed furry genitalia, looming over the London skyline in a frenzy of animal lust for Robin Asquith. And yet it is from the author of this ape-sex work that Breitbart’s Steve Bannon appears to be drawing his current political thinking.
The unpublished manuscript of Allen’s 19th New English Library youth violence novel, from 1981, is somehow available for download on the dark web, and is entitled The Right Honourable Skinhead. The overlap between the plot points of Allen’s final skinhead outing and Bannon’s apparent plans for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson is too great to be coincidental.
Having failed to capture the heart of the nation’s disenchanted voters via the scripted racist gaffes of a posh clown-puppet politician called Horace Thompson, a secret cabal of fascists sets about trying to position the street-brawling racist football thug Robbie Tomlinson as a serious political player, and the character gives voice to the same voter discontent Bannon clearly hopes to weaponise through the conduit of Tommy Robinson.
“Bloody MPs, he thought. They got elected to do what their constituents wanted done and the bastards thought they were little tin-gods better than the voters! If he had his way every politician would be slung in prison and given a taste of what they deserved.” – The Right Honourable Skinhead, Richard Allen (1981).
And on page 103 of The Right Honourable Skinhead, the news magnate Steve Mannon, Robbie Tomlinson’s chief cheerleader, who differs only from Steve Bannon in that he is a Welsh born-again Christian, addresses radio presenter Leo Isherwood thus, “Flip you, boyo! Don’t you flipping say you’re calling me out. You flipping liberal elite. Robbie Tomlinson is the backbone of this country, by which I mean the whole UK not just Wales.”
Worryingly for Britain’s embattled liberals, while the unscrupulous New English Library considered Allen’s dystopian fascist fantasy The Right Honourable Skinhead too hideous to publish, Steve Bannon seems intent on belatedly making its bleak fiction a chilling reality.
Stewart Lee
2018-08-12T22:51:48+01:00
“The skinhead smashed the still steaming grill plate of the state-of-the-art Breville sandwich toaster into his red face, to stem the violent impulses rising within him. His skin fizzed, like cold piss on a hot Guy Fawkes bonfire. Ancient burnt pieces of cheese and tomato, remnants of his well-heeled host’s cocaine-fuelled midnight snacks, buried themselves in the tight fuzz of his No 1 crop. Through the open window of the politician’s luxury million-pound west London flat Robbie could smell the stench of the Notting Hill night wafting into the exclusive mews of former stable buildings, where some famous film actors and racing car drivers also lived. Goat curry. Chicken jerky. And sweet sweet waccy waccy tobaccy. ‘Those spades got one thing right,’ conceded the skinhead, closing the lid of the sandwich toaster and putting it back on the Formica surface of the expensive designer kitchen.” – The Right Honourable Skinhead by Richard Allen (1981). It’s well known that the racist news website wizard and former Trump confidante Steve Bannon, currently planning a pan-global far-right resurgence called The Motion, was inspired by Jean Raspail’s controversial 1973 French science-fiction novel The Camp of the Saints, which uses an invasion of western Europe by disenchanted brown people from below the equator as a satire of white European privilege and colonial guilt. But is it possible that Bannon’s current championing of the sunbed magnate and mortgage fraudster Tommy Robinson as “the backbone” of the UK has been inspired by his acquaintance with a less well-known piece of fascist-flavoured fiction? The Canadian alcoholic Richard Allen is thought to have written 290 novels in his lifetime, and between 1970 and 1980 he penned 18 violent books set in the milieu of Britain’s fractious youth culture, such as Skinhead, Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Returns, and the martial arts-themed...
Across the city, under the auspices of newly formed estate agents Pennington Lee, Michael Pennington (aka stand-up Johnny Vegas) and Stewart Lee have devised an hour-long perambulation through a semi near Old Trafford with the title Interiors.
It's a skit on the obsession with design and property which swerves into something more disconcerting: Pennington, as vendor Jeffrey Parkin, whose 'design initiatives' on the house aren't quite finished, and who really wants to go into property in Montenegro, unravels - room by room, joke by joke - only inches away from his audience.
A wobble-spirited, wobble-bellied, Parkin, a more tentative persona than the abrasive Vegas, greets his spectators/prospective buyers at the door of the house (equipped with 'liquid flush-toilet' and 'water-dispensing body-wash shower'). He's all boasts in the kitchen, which has a fridge stuck with snaps of Montenegro, a weird gap where a load-bearing wall has been taken down (if it had been allowed to stay, half the audience 'would be ignored'), and a massively eulogised (totally standard) pan rack, 'modelled on sketches I did of the Humber Bridge'.
Things get a bit edgier in the sitting-room (unsafe gas fire, sofa with a grey blanket, standard lamp 'for atmos'), as he works out which would be the best still from Farinelli: Il Castrato to project as a subtly teasing cultural reference on his wall.
They get desperate in the bedroom, where an unseen partner has unstylishly intervened: the bed provokes a raging riff on Ikea, 'flat-pack paedophiles picking on the weak and vulnerable' and a stretch of wallpaper gets attacked with a scraper - 'It's not even wallpaper: it's a dirty protest. You just smear it on.' They get explained in the final and only finished room: a perfect, empty nursery. It's not greatly startling, this attack on consumerism, but it's finely done, and it's well worth doing. How did we get to the point where the word 'interior' always had a colour chart attached to it?
Stewart Lee
2015-06-14T00:45:32+01:00
Across the city, under the auspices of newly formed estate agents Pennington Lee, Michael Pennington (aka stand-up Johnny Vegas) and Stewart Lee have devised an hour-long perambulation through a semi near Old Trafford with the title Interiors. It's a skit on the obsession with design and property which swerves into something more disconcerting: Pennington, as vendor Jeffrey Parkin, whose 'design initiatives' on the house aren't quite finished, and who really wants to go into property in Montenegro, unravels - room by room, joke by joke - only inches away from his audience. A wobble-spirited, wobble-bellied, Parkin, a more tentative persona than the abrasive Vegas, greets his spectators/prospective buyers at the door of the house (equipped with 'liquid flush-toilet' and 'water-dispensing body-wash shower'). He's all boasts in the kitchen, which has a fridge stuck with snaps of Montenegro, a weird gap where a load-bearing wall has been taken down (if it had been allowed to stay, half the audience 'would be ignored'), and a massively eulogised (totally standard) pan rack, 'modelled on sketches I did of the Humber Bridge'. Things get a bit edgier in the sitting-room (unsafe gas fire, sofa with a grey blanket, standard lamp 'for atmos'), as he works out which would be the best still from Farinelli: Il Castrato to project as a subtly teasing cultural reference on his wall. They get desperate in the bedroom, where an unseen partner has unstylishly intervened: the bed provokes a raging riff on Ikea, 'flat-pack paedophiles picking on the weak and vulnerable' and a stretch of wallpaper gets attacked with a scraper - 'It's not even wallpaper: it's a dirty protest. You just smear it on.' They get explained in the final and only finished room: a perfect, empty nursery. It's not greatly startling, this attack on consumerism, but it's...
A Rock Snobbery Special plus 50 years of the Old Grey Whistle Test
...where we consider the brave new world in which Rick Astley plays the Smiths, a documentary explores the reasons people detest Kenny G and Rolling Stone rather self-consciously revise their list of the Best 500 Songs Of All Time (should they declare 2001 the new Year Zero and just reset the clock?). And featuring ... worst supergroups, acts who've never put out any cover versions, bands who arrived at the venue but never played and Morrissey answering the phones on Rock Around the Clock.
Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
Stewart Lee
2021-09-21T19:17:39+01:00
A Rock Snobbery Special plus 50 years of the Old Grey Whistle Test ...where we consider the brave new world in which Rick Astley plays the Smiths, a documentary explores the reasons people detest Kenny G and Rolling Stone rather self-consciously revise their list of the Best 500 Songs Of All Time (should they declare 2001 the new Year Zero and just reset the clock?). And featuring ... worst supergroups, acts who've never put out any cover versions, bands who arrived at the venue but never played and Morrissey answering the phones on Rock Around the Clock. Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear
Weirdlore encompasses a mystic strain of mushroom-flecked contemporary English folk, newly nesting in hedgerows between outright traditional music and the rootless folk-pop of The Mumford And Sons massive. Rapunzel & Sedayne's Innocent Hare is a shimmering psychedelic drone. Starless And Bible Black arrive by way of West Coast California. The Scottish interloper Alasdair Roberts channels ancient troubadours. Calling Weirdlore a broad church would overstate its range. Instead, the genre is a spacious ante-chapel. But alongside the new, star guest strewn, Folk Songs II album, by the notably absent Big Eyes Family Players, a movement gathers momentum.
Stewart Lee
2012-07-29T00:56:49+01:00
Weirdlore encompasses a mystic strain of mushroom-flecked contemporary English folk, newly nesting in hedgerows between outright traditional music and the rootless folk-pop of The Mumford And Sons massive. Rapunzel & Sedayne's Innocent Hare is a shimmering psychedelic drone. Starless And Bible Black arrive by way of West Coast California. The Scottish interloper Alasdair Roberts channels ancient troubadours. Calling Weirdlore a broad church would overstate its range. Instead, the genre is a spacious ante-chapel. But alongside the new, star guest strewn, Folk Songs II album, by the notably absent Big Eyes Family Players, a movement gathers momentum.
Stewart Lee's comedy vehicle looks like a clown car.
His show appears to be a stand-up gig in a nightclub, with added sketches, and Stewart Lee himself looks like a middle-aged man in a suit that's straining at the buttons. It's not a comedy suit though, like Harry Hill's trademark collars.
It's more like the suit of a man who was surprised to find his old jacket didn't fit any more but decided there was no point in buying a new one because he's been the same size all of his life.
I mention the suit because Stewart Lee, who went from Fist Of Fun to penning Jerry Springer The Opera, is 40 now. A difficult age when, if he's not careful, stand-up patter starts to sound like a one-man edition of Grumpy Old Men - or just plain envy.
Each week on his show Lee will be bitching about something. Tonight, it's books - specifically celebrity hardbacks, the tragic lives genre, Dan Brown - whatever sells by the shed-load.
Reading between the lines, Lee might just be really peeved that his own debut novel didn't match the dizzying sales figures enjoyed by the likes of Chris Moyles or Jeremy Clarkson. No wonder he can't stick Harry Potter.
"I've read the complete works of the romantic poet and visionary William Blake!" he blurts out at one point. You half-expect him to grab the cameraman by the lapels and scream: "I went to Oxford!!"
Fortunately, most of the time, Lee is very funny. As funny as Moyles though?
Watch and decide for yourself.
Stewart Lee
2009-03-16T11:03:48+00:00
Stewart Lee's comedy vehicle looks like a clown car. His show appears to be a stand-up gig in a nightclub, with added sketches, and Stewart Lee himself looks like a middle-aged man in a suit that's straining at the buttons. It's not a comedy suit though, like Harry Hill's trademark collars. It's more like the suit of a man who was surprised to find his old jacket didn't fit any more but decided there was no point in buying a new one because he's been the same size all of his life. I mention the suit because Stewart Lee, who went from Fist Of Fun to penning Jerry Springer The Opera, is 40 now. A difficult age when, if he's not careful, stand-up patter starts to sound like a one-man edition of Grumpy Old Men - or just plain envy. Each week on his show Lee will be bitching about something. Tonight, it's books - specifically celebrity hardbacks, the tragic lives genre, Dan Brown - whatever sells by the shed-load. Reading between the lines, Lee might just be really peeved that his own debut novel didn't match the dizzying sales figures enjoyed by the likes of Chris Moyles or Jeremy Clarkson. No wonder he can't stick Harry Potter. "I've read the complete works of the romantic poet and visionary William Blake!" he blurts out at one point. You half-expect him to grab the cameraman by the lapels and scream: "I went to Oxford!!" Fortunately, most of the time, Lee is very funny. As funny as Moyles though? Watch and decide for yourself.
We went up 75 mins late in Hull last night.
I apologise. The venue's software wasn't talking to itself. A man came in from holiday to try to get it all online. Thanks for your patience.
It was a great, if long, night, in the end.
CONTENT PROVIDER FINAL 2018 TOUR DATES - NO MORE TO FOLLOW - FINITO - LAST 5 DATES OF A TOTAL OF 214
19th - 23rd April 2018.
Content Provider has been touring to sold out theatres throughout divided Brexit Britain for nearly two years and is Stewart Lee's most successful full-length show ever.
Join him on these special evenings as he finally abandons two hours of monetisable material and performs the show for the very last time. When it's gone it's gone.
Stewart is 50 years old in 2018 and, after performing these shows, he intends to take the longest break from stand-up he's had since his four year disappearance at the start of the century.
April 2018
Thursday 19th - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Friday 20th - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Monday 23rd - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS
BENEFIT SHOWS
18th May - Action on Hearing Loss, London, details TBC
13th June - Hilarity for Charity, Leicester Sq Theatre, London. Stewart Lee returns to the Leicester Square Theatre for a third year running to head up a comedy night in aid of community charities North London Cares and South London Cares.
He'll be joined by Carl Donnelly, Athena Kugblenu, Arnold Brown and Bridget Christie, with further acts to be announced, including a really famous bloke who has been in films.
8th July - The Secret Spy Cops' Ball - Rob Newman, Evelyn Mok, Mark Steel, Stewart Lee, Jackson's Lane, London.
For women tricked into relationships w undercover police.
Most of the performers on the bill are adopted orphans, oddly.
I am interviewing the folk singer, author and song collector Shirley Collins again at the Hay festival on Friday June 1st at 5.30.
I wonder what I will ask her this time?
She has a brilliant new book out, All In The Downs.
Monday 10th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS
Tuesday 11th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS
Wednesday 12th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - 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
Tuesday 2nd - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS
Wednesday 3rd - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS
Thursday 4th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - 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
Tuesday 30th - WHAT NOW? - Leicester Square Theatre, LONDON - 7pm - 020 7734 2222 - TICKETS
Wednesday 31st - 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
Stewart Lee
2018-03-22T10:30:01+00:00
HULLAPLOG We went up 75 mins late in Hull last night. I apologise. The venue's software wasn't talking to itself. A man came in from holiday to try to get it all online. Thanks for your patience. It was a great, if long, night, in the end. CONTENT PROVIDER FINAL 2018 TOUR DATES - NO MORE TO FOLLOW - FINITO - LAST 5 DATES OF A TOTAL OF 214 April 2018 Thursday 12th - Content Provider, Palace Theatre, Southend - 01702 351135 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Friday 13th - Content Provider, Palace Theatre, Southend - 01702 351135 - 7.30pm - TICKETS THESE ARE FILMING DATES FOR A DVD/DL/BBC B'CAST CONTENT PROVIDER RFH LONDON 19th - 23rd April 2018. Content Provider has been touring to sold out theatres throughout divided Brexit Britain for nearly two years and is Stewart Lee's most successful full-length show ever. Join him on these special evenings as he finally abandons two hours of monetisable material and performs the show for the very last time. When it's gone it's gone. Stewart is 50 years old in 2018 and, after performing these shows, he intends to take the longest break from stand-up he's had since his four year disappearance at the start of the century. April 2018 Thursday 19th - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Friday 20th - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Monday 23rd - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS BENEFIT SHOWS 18th May - Action on Hearing Loss, London, details TBC 13th June - Hilarity for Charity, Leicester Sq Theatre, London. Stewart Lee returns to the Leicester Square Theatre for a third year running to head up a comedy...
Hair, teeth and ears all present and correct: is Iain Duncan Smith too good to be true? Photograph: ITV/REX Shutterstock
Last week, the Department for Work and Pensions tsar, Iain Duncan Smith, was revealed to have fabricated a pamphlet featuring two entirely fictitious former benefit claimants, using Conservative party stationery cupboard scissors and an adhesive he emits from a weeping gland in his own perineum.
The level of happiness in the workshy duo’s photos, in which they beamed about the just withdrawal of their benefits, was utterly convincing. I wondered if the models featured had been told to imagine seeing Iain Duncan Smith fall into a wood chipper while wearing Michael Gove as a novelty meat hat.
And I realised that in so doing, I had fulfilled a Daily Telegraph reader’s stereotyping of a modern comedian as someone who thinks images of unacceptable physical violence against public hate figures constitute a substitute for genuine wit.
But much as I would love to see the Conservatives make some catastrophic public relations error that would permanently damage their so far untarnished reputation, I was not sure that Sarah and Zacgate was it.
There is, of course, a long history of public campaigns featuring ludicrous and fictitious characters designed to convey messages to the proletariat. Indeed, the last Labour election effort featured an unlikely puppet character called Ed, who wrote his thoughts in big letters on a semi-portable gravestone.
Historically, our masters have always imagined we lowly peasants will digest information more easily if it is written, for example, in a speech bubble coming out of the mouth of an imaginary squirrel pedestrian in yellow loon pants.
Yes, baby-boomers, there was no Tufty. The road safety rodent was as unreal as Iain Duncan Smith’s Sarah and Zac, if less cuddly. And perhaps the Green Cross Man’s catchphrase – “Remember, I won’t be there when you cross the road because I am a fictional character designed as a vehicle for public safety information” – should have alerted the children of the 70s to the nonexistence of their favourite traffic-awareness superhero.
As an adopted child, my acceptance of my situation was greatly eased by early exposure to a book called Mr Fairweather and His Family. It was the beautifully illustrated story of a man, Mr Fairweather, who, having failed to find the emotional satisfaction he craved from getting either a cat, a dog or a wife, finally achieved it by getting an abandoned child off an old woman in a room full of cots in a grey government building.
Alcohol or drugs would doubtless have provided Mr Fairweather with similar consolations to fatherhood and would have been cheaper than a child in the long run. Nonetheless, the utilitarian fiction of Mr Fairweather and His Family was a superb piece of socially useful work I treasure to this day and I remain eternally grateful to its titular and nonexistent, ennui-ridden antihero Mr Fairweather, the Josef K of prescriptive childcare literature, for normalising my early years.
But not all fictionalised information-carrying characters are as popular as Tufty, the Green Cross Man and our jaded Mr Fairweather, with his disappointing cat, his unfulfilling dog and his unstimulating wife. People with long memories, who perhaps visited western Canada in the 80s, may nonetheless struggle to recall the once widely reviled public infotainer, Chilliwack the Aids Ptarmigan.
A plump cartoon gamebird in a Vancouver Canucks ice hockey shirt, voiced by the legendary Canadian comedian Richard Lett, it was Chilliwack the Aids Ptarmigan’s duty to instruct the gay communities of Alberta and British Columbia about safe-sex practices during the first Aids panic.
Over music provided by Ontario progressive rockers Christmas, a series of crudely drawn information films pictured stereotyped Tom of Finland-type lumberjacks about to get down to business in Rocky Mountain log cabins, only to find the Aids Ptarmigan fluttering around their heads advising them to act responsibly, squawking his catchphrase: “We see thee rise!”
Needless to say, Chilliwack the Aids Ptarmigan swiftly became the butt of a thousand Canadian standup comedy routines and his short-lived, sex-fearing reign of gay terror has been largely erased from cyberspace by censorious and retrospectively ashamed Canadian public health bodies.
Given the long history of unconvincing public information avatars, initially I wondered why it was that Iain Duncan Smith’s Zac and Sarah had annoyed everyone so. Andy Burnham went as far as to say the DWP had been caught “red handed”, even as he and his Labour moderate co-candidates themselves assume the blurred penumbrae of implausible forgotten fictions.
Zac and Sarah may not be real, but perhaps they are not entirely unreal. I looked closely at their pictures in Iain Duncan Smith’s false pamphlet. The pair looked as convincing as anyone. A woman I might have met at a library once. A man I might have kicked a ball around with in a south London park. And yet they were products of a propaganda machine.
I looked at Iain Duncan Smith on a YouTube interview clip. His skin covered his body accurately. Hair grew convincingly out of parts of his head and from patches on his arms. Teeth protruded from his gums. His ears were on the side of his face and his mouth opened and closed when he spoke. Was it, perhaps, all too good to be true?
The right has a colourful recent history of fictitious personalities. Former Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps was briefly thought to have been the unreal alter ego of a pseudonymous internet privateer called Michael Green, and some even suggested the actual Shapps had been substituted by an alien clone after a UFO abduction in Kansas in 1989.
The left has interrogated itself about its election failure, but maybe the battle was lost some time ago? This Zac and Sarah, the unreal people, selling a political fiction, maybe they are just the tip of the ice cube? Maybe it’s all unreal, all the way down, the speeches, the photo opportunities? Actors move across a canvas. Paint splashes on a stage. Non-negotiable promises come and go.
I am in Edinburgh at the fringe festival. I walk to my venue, across town, at around midday. And every day, at the same time, I find myself moving east down the cobbles of the Royal Mile, against the upward flow of human traffic, in a vast throng of people. Actors press towards me, in animal masks and historical costumes, offering me leaflets and imploring me. How much easier it would be to turn away from my intended destination and move in their direction, flowing with them, like driftwood carried by a flood.
Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until Sunday and in London from 21 September
Stewart Lee
2015-08-23T00:43:45+01:00
Hair, teeth and ears all present and correct: is Iain Duncan Smith too good to be true? Photograph: ITV/REX Shutterstock Last week, the Department for Work and Pensions tsar, Iain Duncan Smith, was revealed to have fabricated a pamphlet featuring two entirely fictitious former benefit claimants, using Conservative party stationery cupboard scissors and an adhesive he emits from a weeping gland in his own perineum. The level of happiness in the workshy duo’s photos, in which they beamed about the just withdrawal of their benefits, was utterly convincing. I wondered if the models featured had been told to imagine seeing Iain Duncan Smith fall into a wood chipper while wearing Michael Gove as a novelty meat hat. And I realised that in so doing, I had fulfilled a Daily Telegraph reader’s stereotyping of a modern comedian as someone who thinks images of unacceptable physical violence against public hate figures constitute a substitute for genuine wit. But much as I would love to see the Conservatives make some catastrophic public relations error that would permanently damage their so far untarnished reputation, I was not sure that Sarah and Zacgate was it. There is, of course, a long history of public campaigns featuring ludicrous and fictitious characters designed to convey messages to the proletariat. Indeed, the last Labour election effort featured an unlikely puppet character called Ed, who wrote his thoughts in big letters on a semi-portable gravestone. Historically, our masters have always imagined we lowly peasants will digest information more easily if it is written, for example, in a speech bubble coming out of the mouth of an imaginary squirrel pedestrian in yellow loon pants. Yes, baby-boomers, there was no Tufty. The road safety rodent was as unreal as Iain Duncan Smith’s Sarah and Zac, if less cuddly. And perhaps the...
"I’d forgotten this was a radical town,” says Stewart Lee during one of this evening’s many semi-improvised asides.
Touching on everything from losing out on a Bafta to Graham Norton, to hating yoghurt-drinking under-40s and orienteering with Napalm Death, Lee’s self-styled passive-aggressive approach may be very familiar, but it certainly hasn’t worn thin.
His esoteric trails of thought, introspective dissections of comedy and faux jibes at the crowd may still occasionally rile some critical opinion; in particular, Lee references a recent zero-star Telegraph review. But the laughs certainly come thick and fast tonight, typically often at our expense in the audience.
When one poor chap in the front row dares to scurry out at the inopportune moment of a routine’s conclusion, the resulting rant segues into an impromptu extended first half. In fact, Lee performs for almost three hours this evening in a set that proves he’s lost none of his idiosyncratic charm with age or his notable successes of recent years.
So although Lee laments that “it’s taken three decades to half-fill a room in Bournemouth” while scoping out how long it’ll take him to pay off his mortgage, from where we’re sitting his Comedy Vehicle seems to be pootling along nicely.
Even if he does suggest its appeal is limited to vegetarian Guardian readers.
Stewart Lee
2016-02-05T21:34:30+00:00
"I’d forgotten this was a radical town,” says Stewart Lee during one of this evening’s many semi-improvised asides. Touching on everything from losing out on a Bafta to Graham Norton, to hating yoghurt-drinking under-40s and orienteering with Napalm Death, Lee’s self-styled passive-aggressive approach may be very familiar, but it certainly hasn’t worn thin. His esoteric trails of thought, introspective dissections of comedy and faux jibes at the crowd may still occasionally rile some critical opinion; in particular, Lee references a recent zero-star Telegraph review. But the laughs certainly come thick and fast tonight, typically often at our expense in the audience. When one poor chap in the front row dares to scurry out at the inopportune moment of a routine’s conclusion, the resulting rant segues into an impromptu extended first half. In fact, Lee performs for almost three hours this evening in a set that proves he’s lost none of his idiosyncratic charm with age or his notable successes of recent years. So although Lee laments that “it’s taken three decades to half-fill a room in Bournemouth” while scoping out how long it’ll take him to pay off his mortgage, from where we’re sitting his Comedy Vehicle seems to be pootling along nicely. Even if he does suggest its appeal is limited to vegetarian Guardian readers.
It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, finally, to see the Fall. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly superb when I was in my culturally vulnerable teenage state, otherwise you could be sitting here reading an article about Toto.
I saw an advert saying the Fall were playing at a rock festival in Cornwall and persuaded my mum, against her better judgment, to let me go, alone, with a sleeping bag and a tent. The rolling grassland sloped down to a stage, shadowed by the ancestral home of Lord Eliot, unlikely benefactor of one of the last gasps of the real 60s counterculture. The Elephant Fayre.
Wafty pre-Raphaelite women wandered bare-breasted. Terrifying crusties, friendly if approached, roamed the site. In ignorant bliss I saw the then‑unknown to me John Martyn, fortuitously abandoning his gloopy 80s jazz funk to return spectacularly to his 70s echoplex experiments, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, of whom I was similarly unaware, deliver a set of entrancing faux-naivety.
The Fall, Mark E Smith centre, on the main stage at the Elephant Fayre, July 1984. Photograph: Gentleman_Dude/Flickr
Darkness fell. A woman gave me free homemade tea and I sat in a little tent and watched a band I never caught the name of play a three-hour-long version of the Beatles’ The Fool on the Hill. It was only many years later, remembering the experience, that I realise it was unlikely anyone played The Fool On the Hill for three hours, and that the tea was probably slightly stronger than I realised at the time.
In another tent, a lone Rastafarian and I sat together and watched John Carpenter’s The Thing, when film still felt special, in those pre-DVD days. A screaming scientist turned into a weird mutant dog. “Lord Jesus Christ,” said my companion, his hand on my shoulder, blowing sinsemilla into my face.
A hippy antiques dealer lectured me by moonlight about the ninth-century Welsh monk chronicler Nennius, on whom I had written my O-level history project, and gave me a copy of a solo single by Dave Oberlé, of 70s medievalists Gryphon, which I have never since seen listed in any official discography. Did it even exist?
The Fall took the stage by the light of burning torches, the classic two-drum-kit line-up, now augmented by American guitarist Brix. Without a word of greeting, the group dropped into the spindly descend of Smile. I’m listening to a bootleg tape now and touching the entry ticket, still tucked into the cassette box, and I relive the exhilaration of experiencing the stolen riff of Elves for the first time, and a vast 10-minute version of the soon-retired Garden, still my favorite Fall song, with Brix singing the “Jew on a motorbike” refrain through some strange dub-effects pedal. I can taste the wet air in my lungs, see the black-clad couple in front of me, and I realise that the rest of my life, which can have such profound and disorientating pleasures in it, is going to be both wonderful and frightening.
The next day, my dad and his new wife, holidaying somewhere in Devon, intercepted me in Exeter. On the way home we stopped at Gordano services and I shat blood into a toilet bowl, the first signs of a stomach disorder that has since been my constant companion. As have the Fall. Next month I will see them for the 48th time.
Stewart Lee
2015-11-15T13:10:33+00:00
It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, finally, to see the Fall. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly superb when I was in my culturally vulnerable teenage state, otherwise you could be sitting here reading an article about Toto. I saw an advert saying the Fall were playing at a rock festival in Cornwall and persuaded my mum, against her better judgment, to let me go, alone, with a sleeping bag and a tent. The rolling grassland sloped down to a stage, shadowed by the ancestral home of Lord Eliot, unlikely benefactor of one of the last gasps of the real 60s counterculture. The Elephant Fayre. Wafty pre-Raphaelite women wandered bare-breasted. Terrifying crusties, friendly if approached, roamed the site. In ignorant bliss I saw the then‑unknown to me John Martyn, fortuitously abandoning his gloopy 80s jazz funk to return spectacularly to his 70s echoplex experiments, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, of whom I was similarly unaware, deliver a set of entrancing faux-naivety. The Fall, Mark E Smith centre, on the main stage at the Elephant Fayre, July 1984. Photograph: Gentleman_Dude/Flickr Darkness fell. A woman gave me free homemade tea and I sat in a little tent and watched a band I never caught the name of play a three-hour-long version of the Beatles’ The Fool on the Hill. It was only many years later, remembering the experience, that I realise it was unlikely anyone played The Fool On the Hill for three hours, and that the tea was probably slightly stronger than I realised at the time. In another tent, a...
If you have been watching this weekly half hour of droll polemic (now in its third glorious series), you're either a dedicated fan of the standup comedian Stewart Lee or you hate his smug, sing-song delivery and smirking repetition and you just enjoy being angry. There seldom seems to be a middle ground where Lee's concerned.
Like the first two series of Comedy Vehicle, this one takes segments of low-lit standup in front of a club audience and punctuates them with often avant garde VTs exploring an idea that comes from his monologue. In the first series, and to a lesser extent the second, this used to take the form of elaborate sketches featuring usual collaborators such as Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery.
And while this still happens in smaller doses, this series Chris Morris replaces Armando Iannucci as his ireful psychotherapist, acting as a sort of eloquent below-the-line commenter, pre-empting the Lee haters and giving an audibly sneering voice to their loathing in improvised "therapy" sequences. These are often some of the most illuminating bits of the show.
I've enjoyed Lee's TV work since the mid-90s, when I first saw the childish, brilliant nonsense he made with Richard Herring for BBC2, from Fist of Fun to This Morning With Richard Not Judy. And I like how that laddish 90s foolishness has given way to a world-weary, baggy philosopher, gargling thoughts around and around his mouth and refusing to spit them out because he likes the way they taste.
Others find it infuriating and self-indulgent. Or perhaps it's something to do with his apparent tone of contempt. Or the way he makes a point by relentlessly hitting the same beats again and again to build up traction for his big finish.
He visibly takes great pleasure – I love his genuine delight this series, lots of giggling – in picking out one microscopic aspect of a thing, and repeatedly picking it apart with all the incomprehension of a boy brought up by wolves.
In last week's episode it was "Paul Nuttall from the Ukips" and his assertion that the best and brightest Bulgarians should stay in Bulgaria rather than coming here to work. He regressed the argument further and further back in time to the origins of the universe, where Nuttall insisted that matter should go back where it came from, preventing the forming of existence itself.
In the late 90s, I saw him do half an hour of standup purely about the lyrics of All Things Bright and Beautiful, which he represented on a flip chart using subsets. Just when you think the repetition is going to kill you, he zooms out to deliver his punchline as if he's suddenly looking at the Earth from space and wagging a wise finger at mankind. Which is probably where the intense hatred comes in for many. Who does he think he is?
In last week's episode he quoted from comedian Lee Mack's autobiography, which accuses him of being "a cultural bully from the Oxbridge mafia who wants to appear morally superior, but couldn't cut the mustard on a panel game".
To which (Stewart) Lee replies, grinning: "Cultural bully, honestly. And anyway, you don't cut mustard, you spread it." He's been called meta for all this playing with the form and exposing the workings. But he says himself that he's playing "the clown of Stewart Lee".
He gets away with all the haughty, judgmental stuff – for me, anyway – because he sets himself up as a loser. Those sequences where Morris belittles him reduce him to a low-status, tongue-tied fool. The pomposity and high-horse riding he engages in on stage are just basically Oliver Hardy fiddling with his tie and talking in an affected voice.
Like Barry Humphries done up as Dame Edna, he can do and say far more while hiding behind this exaggerated persona. The opening titles of Comedy Vehicle's first series featured Lee driving through a field in a clown car followed by a brightly dressed circus parade. He often allows you to guess what he's going to say next, just like a clown wielding a bucket of confetti. It's inclusive if you look at it like that.
And Lee does get away with a lot. In the last episode of series two, he devoted most of the show (about 20 minutes) to an anecdote about David Cameron snubbing him at Oxford University. He admits right at the end of the story that it isn't true. He made it up. But he says that what it teaches us about David Cameron is true and, therefore, it's valid.
Adore him or abhor him, the BBC has already commissioned series four, so he'll be here for a while yet. Do you rejoice in his unique approach to standup or does his keen cerebral jousting really annoy you? It's got to be one or the other.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-20T20:31:59+00:00
If you have been watching this weekly half hour of droll polemic (now in its third glorious series), you're either a dedicated fan of the standup comedian Stewart Lee or you hate his smug, sing-song delivery and smirking repetition and you just enjoy being angry. There seldom seems to be a middle ground where Lee's concerned. Like the first two series of Comedy Vehicle, this one takes segments of low-lit standup in front of a club audience and punctuates them with often avant garde VTs exploring an idea that comes from his monologue. In the first series, and to a lesser extent the second, this used to take the form of elaborate sketches featuring usual collaborators such as Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery. And while this still happens in smaller doses, this series Chris Morris replaces Armando Iannucci as his ireful psychotherapist, acting as a sort of eloquent below-the-line commenter, pre-empting the Lee haters and giving an audibly sneering voice to their loathing in improvised "therapy" sequences. These are often some of the most illuminating bits of the show. I've enjoyed Lee's TV work since the mid-90s, when I first saw the childish, brilliant nonsense he made with Richard Herring for BBC2, from Fist of Fun to This Morning With Richard Not Judy. And I like how that laddish 90s foolishness has given way to a world-weary, baggy philosopher, gargling thoughts around and around his mouth and refusing to spit them out because he likes the way they taste. Others find it infuriating and self-indulgent. Or perhaps it's something to do with his apparent tone of contempt. Or the way he makes a point by relentlessly hitting the same beats again and again to build up traction for his big finish. He visibly takes great pleasure – I love his...
You can recognise a Rowland S Howard guitar lick in seconds. A quavering, tremulous thing, half anaemic Duane Eddy, half spaghetti-western soundtrack, permanently hovering on the brink of collapse. But for the past decade, Howard has been missing in action, while his one time bandmate Nick Cave is recognised as one of the world's finest songwriters.
Back in mid-1970s Melbourne it was Howard who co-piloted Cave's early journeys from thrash punk into more epic territory. But more than 20 years after he first helped Cave discover his, Howard too has finally found his own voice.
"I went into the studio on the understanding that it was my record and I had power of veto," he says of his first solo album, Teenage Snuff Film (out now on Cooking Vinyl records). "There was none of the acrimony you get with a band, of people refusing to surrender what they had deemed to be their 'magnificent contributions', of different personalities that inevitably run afoul of each other. This time it was no problem."
Nowadays, Howard is eloquent and witty, grown old on just the wrong side of (ex-) junkie chic, impossibly long of finger and looking like the St Kilda sun might melt him. But Howard was an elfin-faced 17-year-old when, in 1977, he joined Cave in the Boys Next Door, bringing with him a cache of more sophisticated songs that clearly raised the singer's game. In 1981, reincarnated as the Birthday Party, they settled in London, where their incendiary live shows became as talked about as their feral, drug-wracked lifestyle. But Howard's most unpleasant memory of London is of Kilburn High Road. "I remember for months every traffic light was sitting in a hole in the road with wires trailing out. It was like the Third World." Nevertheless, after the band collapsed, Howard stayed, collaborating with obscure cult figures on albums only distinguished by glimpses of his distinctive guitar sound.
He eventually joined the hardy Australian perennials Crime and the City Solution, but disagreements with the gravel-voiced vocalist Simon Bonney forced his departure. "I had these absurd arguments with Simon. He said my guitar and his voice both occupied the same 'sonic frequency' and therefore I had to be turned down," recalls Howard with an almost comic disbelief. When he finally got to front his own band, These Immortal Souls, things fell apart as usual. "There was a string of extremely unfortunate incidents," he says, darkly. "We went into a studio for weeks and came out with nothing. The record company was reluctant to let us back in. It kind of killed the momentum."
In 1994 Howard took a holiday back home: "Something clicked and I thought, 'What am I doing in London?' I was utterly miserable there, and there was nothing to write about because nothing had happened to me for so long. Also, the musical scene in Melbourne appeared to be very healthy, where previously there had just been an enormous proliferation of drugs." In a series of acoustic sets in local clubs, Teenage Snuff Film began to take shape.
Unlike Cave's more recent songs, which extend the usual alternative-rock concerns into metaphors about man's relationship with God or the creative imagination, Howard is starting from scratch once more at the simple sex, drugs and death level, but gloriously so on tracks such as the chillingly sparse Breakdown, or the shimmering, meditative Autoluminescent. When we start discussing the album's take on the 1960s standard She Cried, something is revealed of the songwriter Howard hopes he is.
"I heard it on a Shangri-Las compilation," he recalls. "They had some amazing writers. Shadow Morton wrote Leader of the Pack while smoking a cigarette in the shower, on a piece of clear plastic using three coloured pens to mark out the vocal lines. I like those old songs that are corny but have an emotional core. I admire people like Shadow Morton or Lee Hazelwood , who subvert the genre from within. I fondly like to imagine that Lee Hazelwood can't tell the difference between a work of genius like Some Velvet Morning and something appalling."
The Howard as would-be Shadow Morton/Lee Hazelwood theory would go some way to explaining the air of class that surrounds Teenage Snuff Film. And it shows Howard has grown up. Eighteen years ago, he and the American performance artist Lydia Lunch released the second worst recording of Some Velvet Morning ever, but in his approach to a cover version on his current album, the new, reformed Howard shows an astonishing maturity. His reading of Billy Idol's White Wedding reveals a hidden dignity beneath the song's trashy veneer.
If Howard is ready to take a Billy Idol song seriously, then he must be ready to respect his own talent. "It's interesting to find something great in a song that everyone despises," he says. "I mean, do we really need another version of Knockin' on Heaven's Door apart from Bob Dylan's? But to do a song by Billy Idol, a man regarded as being without any redeeming features, a kind of cartoon character, but not a cartoon character that anyone likes... Excuse me, can you ring me back later? My bathroom has just flooded."
A faulty washing machine denies us a glib conclusion. Still, here goes. The Birthday Party's first posthumous live album is called It's Still Living, a phrase that could equally be applied to the tenacious Howard himself. Even if he's having trouble with his domestic appliances.
Stewart Lee
2000-07-09T17:40:47+01:00
You can recognise a Rowland S Howard guitar lick in seconds. A quavering, tremulous thing, half anaemic Duane Eddy, half spaghetti-western soundtrack, permanently hovering on the brink of collapse. But for the past decade, Howard has been missing in action, while his one time bandmate Nick Cave is recognised as one of the world's finest songwriters. Back in mid-1970s Melbourne it was Howard who co-piloted Cave's early journeys from thrash punk into more epic territory. But more than 20 years after he first helped Cave discover his, Howard too has finally found his own voice. "I went into the studio on the understanding that it was my record and I had power of veto," he says of his first solo album, Teenage Snuff Film (out now on Cooking Vinyl records). "There was none of the acrimony you get with a band, of people refusing to surrender what they had deemed to be their 'magnificent contributions', of different personalities that inevitably run afoul of each other. This time it was no problem." Nowadays, Howard is eloquent and witty, grown old on just the wrong side of (ex-) junkie chic, impossibly long of finger and looking like the St Kilda sun might melt him. But Howard was an elfin-faced 17-year-old when, in 1977, he joined Cave in the Boys Next Door, bringing with him a cache of more sophisticated songs that clearly raised the singer's game. In 1981, reincarnated as the Birthday Party, they settled in London, where their incendiary live shows became as talked about as their feral, drug-wracked lifestyle. But Howard's most unpleasant memory of London is of Kilburn High Road. "I remember for months every traffic light was sitting in a hole in the road with wires trailing out. It was like the Third World." Nevertheless, after the band...
Until recently, I was only aware of Stewart Lee as a comedian who is liked by other people, the kind who sneer at just about everything anyone's ever heard of, condemning it as being too mainstream. I would secretly like to be one of these people, because I have a sneaking feeling that they actually are cooler, cleverer and more original than me. I also hate myself for thinking this, and want to protest that comedy should be about what makes you laugh loudest, be it a Death Star canteen or that thing that everyone does while they're hoovering. It was gratifying to find that this kind of deconstructive self-loathing was in fact pretty much the theme of Lee's show at the Corn Exchange on Sunday night.
Watching the show uncomfortably reminded me of reading annotated literary texts, with the commentary being forced upon you as you go. Opening with a crude joke about teenage pregnancy, Lee immediately cut off the laughter by classing it as a Frankie Boyle-type gag, since it "shows the requisite contempt for the vulnerable". But Lee magnificently headed off any critics who, like me, were planning to class him as a bitter elitist. The centrepiece of the evening was a protracted riff on Mock the Week (or, as Lee prefers to put it, Mock the Weak) star Russell Howard's charity cycle ride, and the vast sums of money which he raised. The joke doubled back on itself, progressing from lambasting Howard for not doing more charity cycling, to a despair that by choosing to be an alternative comedian, Lee himself can never equal his mainstream counterpart's philanthropy. The latter segment was performed with no microphone, instead bellowed from the aisles, thus making the audience more uncomfortable about their previous easy laughter.
Lee seemed to mock the current trend for musical stand up by doing the last third of the show sitting with an unused guitar across his lap, on the basis that this makes an audience "more tolerant of poor material." But again, he wrongfooted us—he actually sang two decent comedy songs at the end. One of them was derived from a routine about the Bullingdon Club circa 1986—the lefty Lee was there, and he recounted his meeting with David Cameron at length. As a lefty myself, I was again jerked out of my complacent laughter with Lee's admission that the stories were all lies—"but the important thing is, they sound like they could be true". By the end I was a little bit exhausted with examining my own lazy attitudes.
Stewart Lee is not for everyone-his low-register monotone and endless miserable metacomedy will grate on some. But he has ditched the excesses of self-indulgent absurdism and repetition which characterised his recent work, and despite protestations to the contrary, churned out a rapid succession of actual jokes. I laughed heartily, furtively hoping that this now made me cool enough to get Stewart Lee.
Stewart Lee
2011-03-11T15:24:00+00:00
Until recently, I was only aware of Stewart Lee as a comedian who is liked by other people, the kind who sneer at just about everything anyone's ever heard of, condemning it as being too mainstream. I would secretly like to be one of these people, because I have a sneaking feeling that they actually are cooler, cleverer and more original than me. I also hate myself for thinking this, and want to protest that comedy should be about what makes you laugh loudest, be it a Death Star canteen or that thing that everyone does while they're hoovering. It was gratifying to find that this kind of deconstructive self-loathing was in fact pretty much the theme of Lee's show at the Corn Exchange on Sunday night. Watching the show uncomfortably reminded me of reading annotated literary texts, with the commentary being forced upon you as you go. Opening with a crude joke about teenage pregnancy, Lee immediately cut off the laughter by classing it as a Frankie Boyle-type gag, since it "shows the requisite contempt for the vulnerable". But Lee magnificently headed off any critics who, like me, were planning to class him as a bitter elitist. The centrepiece of the evening was a protracted riff on Mock the Week (or, as Lee prefers to put it, Mock the Weak) star Russell Howard's charity cycle ride, and the vast sums of money which he raised. The joke doubled back on itself, progressing from lambasting Howard for not doing more charity cycling, to a despair that by choosing to be an alternative comedian, Lee himself can never equal his mainstream counterpart's philanthropy. The latter segment was performed with no microphone, instead bellowed from the aisles, thus making the audience more uncomfortable about their previous easy laughter. Lee seemed to mock...
Comedians don’t make it easy for us, the maggoty masses, to love them. Turn on the TV and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the British laughter racket is entirely ruled by bright eyed bouncy young pups eager to sell their souls to pithy panel shows and advertising campaigns for that fast-track route to the lucrative arena stages, chat show sofas and Christmas book tie-ins. Exhibit A: Rob Brydon, who was once a character actor of renown, capable of crafting a keenly observed and compassionate show such as Human Remains, now sells cereal flakes that come in a cardboard box, and holidays on oceanic cruise liners that resemble floating prisons for UKIP people.
We unavoidably find ourselves observing a world of entertainment that rewards Michael McIntyre and shuns Jerry Sadowitz; that martyrs Bill Hicks yet would never harbour an equivalent on primetime TV. Frankie Boyle manages to dash the streak of humanity that lurks within him with such flashes of withering cruelty that he can never truly be loved. Peter Kay remembers stuff while sweating in Blackpool. Jimmy Carr mocks the disabled then looks startled. Jack Whitehall honks in tight trousers. Many Russells say many things, each with one eyebrow archly raised. Some Northerners notice that London is different to Bolton. It’s just good enough really.
In this world of chaos, confusion, political failings and economic instability, humour is an increasingly valuable currency that’s key to stopping the majority of citizens grabbing an AK and spraying their local Arndale. Below-par comedians and political hypocrisy are two topics that Stewart Lee writes especially well about, not to mention all those little things in modern life that piece together to create a mental mosaic of a country of people that is, at least collectively, borderline insane.
A satirist in the vein of the other satirists who usually get mentioned when the word is lazily deployed to illustrate people who tell jokes without bouncing across the stage in bright blouses (Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift, Vladimir Putin), Lee has long occupied a unique hard-won position, being simultaneously palatable, aesthetically-pleasing and BBC-friendly, yet subversive in his content and delivery. His niche has been carved by being droll, informed and Oxford-clever, but without ever using long words or a squeaky voice, or trashing Indian restaurants as an undergraduate.
Instead he is prone to repeating a single word, phrase or image to such an extent that it becomes, by turns, silly, then funny, then boring, then annoying, then anxiety-inducing, then funny, then awkward, then boring, then funny again. This only works in his stand-up routines though; in print it would just be a piss-take.
I wouldn’t be so pretentious and unoriginal as to note the jazz-styled construction of both Stewart Lee’s latter-day TV shows and the recent newspaper columns that are collated here: meandering but thematically cohesive, surprising but rarely improvised, repetitive to the point of hypnotic. Wild but controlled. Only a lazy hack on a diminishing word rate at Q magazine would do that. However, I will observe that unlike many of the jazz greats, he does all of this while not on heroin. Lee has, he says, survived in the jazz hands business by exploiting the goodwill of once-teenage fans who have grown up “and now work as journalists and regional cultural tsars.” He attributes Britpop’s Damon Albarn’s success to this too. And not doing heroin (Lee, not Albarn who, as the odds, one ex-girlfriend and a round of interviews in 2014 suggest, has – as with hats, musicals and cartoon monkeys – certainly dabbled).
Lee’s political observations are particularly prescient right now, as the rats jump their respective ships and a shower of excrement reigns down upon us all (this may be a mixed and lazily scatological metaphor, but I think it is self-sustaining). Sitting ducks like Margaret Thatcher (dead) and Grant Shapps (not dead) are given short shrift, as is David William Donald Cameron who “will leave no legacy, [while] Rebekah Brooks will be a stain upon the saddle of time’s swift stallion”. Lee is highly poetic in his put-downs: Michael Portillo is a “Cuprinol wood goblin”, Jimmy Savile “a secret glam rock Dracula”. Alex Salmond is the subject of an entire column based largely around his name being misheard as “I like salmon” at an imaginary buffet. And as someone rumoured to be distantly related to Her Royal Twiglet via the old pit villages of rural Durham myself, I was pleased to see Kate Middleton described as “a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon–shadowed swamplands.”
Having worked with Michael Gove on a short-lived early 90s TV show called A Stab In The Dark (Google it and marvel at Gove the satirist, looking exactly as he does a quarter century later, only a little less like a red salamander and/or a burnt penis), Lee is particularly fascinated by the erstwhile, metaphorically stab-happy Tory contender. As far back as 2012 he observed: “I have seen Gove’s political career as, firstly, a bid to get accepted by those post sporty cunts – Cameron, Boris, George ‘Pencils’ Osborne etc – and then, secondly, as an attempt to get revenge on them somehow.” I read this piece on the very day that Gove did exactly that and, verily, I nearly declared Lee a post-punk prophet, a sage of the stage, but then remembered we all suspected this anyway. But still. It’s like he is a tiny man with a tiny laptop, writing live from inside the reader’s head.
With much journalism now finding a home online, the contemporary critic and commentator finds his or herself faced with a new era of kneejerk reaction and below the line comments, each designed to peck away at one’s soul like a trapped budgie at the final frayed splinter of cuttlefish. Refusing to become disheartened by the keyboard-rattling idiocy of human worms with all the intellectual flexibility of a Tunnock’s Teacake but with easy access to a fast broadband connection, this is something that Lee plays with, peppering his prose with deliberate errors (Dennis Roussos, Dizzy Rascal, ‘Witchfinder General Mary Hopkin’), then sitting back to watch the “Typical Grauniad” comments come in. He prints some of the best responses here without comment. Clearly there’s no need, as each offers some Whitehouse-esque righteous indignation. The woman, not the provocative proto-industrial band, obviously.
Beneath the slightly jaded tone of one who has watched his beloved Hackney become a Petri dish for twats who piss in his garden, and a Dan Ashcroft-esque suspicion that the idiots are indeed winning (and, broadly speaking, they are), Lee writes best about those things he is genuinely passionate about: music, literature, comedy, mythology, humanity and actual social mobility, rather than the phrase “social mobility”, which is just two words that sometimes fall out of politicians’ mouths like gold molars or errant cords of semi-digestible pulled pork. Recalling a childhood reading of The Owl Service by Alan Garner he describes being “sucked into a sphagnum bog of sexy druidical Celtoid mytho-poetics”. He confides in joining the National Trust “in the spirit of class hatred” and files his membership cards alongside the first four Crass albums. Haven’t we all?
I’m glad that Stewart Lee exists and is given televisual air-time and newspaper space in which to deftly weave webs of thought that bridge the gap between wonderment and weary cynicism. Content Provider is a fun read for disheartened liberals and an unfunny heap of words whose combination is punishable with death by either firing squad or Top Gear repeats for others. It is full of truths and lies and it made me laugh twenty times, after which point I stopped counting, and resumed digging my bunker at the bottom of the garden.
Stewart Lee
2016-08-06T23:14:07+01:00
Comedians don’t make it easy for us, the maggoty masses, to love them. Turn on the TV and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the British laughter racket is entirely ruled by bright eyed bouncy young pups eager to sell their souls to pithy panel shows and advertising campaigns for that fast-track route to the lucrative arena stages, chat show sofas and Christmas book tie-ins. Exhibit A: Rob Brydon, who was once a character actor of renown, capable of crafting a keenly observed and compassionate show such as Human Remains, now sells cereal flakes that come in a cardboard box, and holidays on oceanic cruise liners that resemble floating prisons for UKIP people. We unavoidably find ourselves observing a world of entertainment that rewards Michael McIntyre and shuns Jerry Sadowitz; that martyrs Bill Hicks yet would never harbour an equivalent on primetime TV. Frankie Boyle manages to dash the streak of humanity that lurks within him with such flashes of withering cruelty that he can never truly be loved. Peter Kay remembers stuff while sweating in Blackpool. Jimmy Carr mocks the disabled then looks startled. Jack Whitehall honks in tight trousers. Many Russells say many things, each with one eyebrow archly raised. Some Northerners notice that London is different to Bolton. It’s just good enough really. In this world of chaos, confusion, political failings and economic instability, humour is an increasingly valuable currency that’s key to stopping the majority of citizens grabbing an AK and spraying their local Arndale. Below-par comedians and political hypocrisy are two topics that Stewart Lee writes especially well about, not to mention all those little things in modern life that piece together to create a mental mosaic of a country of people that is, at least collectively, borderline insane. A satirist in the vein of...
Thai dishes are intoned in breathless conjunction with rural Irish place names; lists of pancakes clash with pulpy lit clichés over low end striations; daytime television injury claim adverts are recited with inappropriate sincerity.
Sound art veterans The Bohman Brothers invest random words with unearned meanings via the eloquent juxtapositions of their elegantly neutral voices. After three decades of experimentation, these alchemists of banality, these banalchemists, turn everyday leaden language into poetic gold.
As the heroic sci-fi sleeve shows, the Bohmans have a sense of the absurd, but they can seriously re-order your whole reality.
(9/9/12)
Stewart Lee
2012-09-09T01:40:44+01:00
Thai dishes are intoned in breathless conjunction with rural Irish place names; lists of pancakes clash with pulpy lit clichés over low end striations; daytime television injury claim adverts are recited with inappropriate sincerity. Sound art veterans The Bohman Brothers invest random words with unearned meanings via the eloquent juxtapositions of their elegantly neutral voices. After three decades of experimentation, these alchemists of banality, these banalchemists, turn everyday leaden language into poetic gold. As the heroic sci-fi sleeve shows, the Bohmans have a sense of the absurd, but they can seriously re-order your whole reality. (9/9/12)
"Visiting athletes enjoying their first taste of an East End curry have just discovered a new purpose for their Olympic Rings!" That was the tweet that started it all. Fans of me and my comedy work will know I am an inescapable presence on the Twitter social networking site and have more than 900,000 followers. It's not an ego thing. Drip-feeding a few gags every 20 minutes helps me to maintain my customer base and the discipline of being humorous in 140 characters or fewer forces me to develop different kinds of comedy from the multi-award-winning, long-form, idea-driven monologues I am best known for. When you've won two British Comedy awards, a Bafta and a Chortle award all in the same year, it's easy to rest on your laurels and I find that grappling with Twitter's stylistic limitations helps me keep my wits sharp and my comedy muscle match-fit.
The throwaway Olympic Ring gag isn't among my best work, admittedly, drawing as it does a simple and direct comedic comparison between the Olympic Rings themselves and the perhaps inflamed anuses of visiting Olympians who might perhaps have gone out for a curry in the East End of London, maybe around Brick Lane, and who might then perhaps have ordered a dish that was somewhat hotter than advisable, perhaps leading to soreness later when defecating. I'm not saying this did happen or ever will happen. It probably didn't and probably never will. What I am saying is that if it did happen, and the information that it had happened were somehow to leak out into the public domain, then there would be more than ample opportunity for we satirists to use the word "ring" in both its Olympic and its rectal sense.
Anyway, the gag, which I made on the Twitter network three days ago, wasn't intended to be analysed to death. It was just supposed to be a bit of spur-of-the-moment fun, something to keep my fans in the loop and my follower numbers up until the next pithy bon mot, although I noticed David Baddiel had re-tweeted it to Jonathan Ross, who in turn had re-tweeted it to United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who in turn had re-tweeted it to Ricky Gervais, who had then sent it to all his followers, without clear attribution, sadly. But what I could not have anticipated was the Olympic ring of fire that the gag would cause to surround me over the next 48 hours.
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I wasn't aware of the extent to which unauthorised use of key Olympic phrases is being policed during the Games this year. Nearly 300 "Advertisement Enforcement Officers" are on hand to ensure that only the Olympics' official sponsors get sole commercial use of a list of Olympics-associated phrases so extensive it even includes "summer", "bronze" and "London".
Astonishingly, an independent butcher, Dennis Spurr of Weymouth, has already been told to remove a sign showing his bespoke sausages in the shape of Olympic rings. Had I known this, I perhaps wouldn't have been so surprised when, on Friday at 5am, a team of a dozen Olympic Advertisement Enforcement Officers dressed in matching McDonald's- and Coca-Cola-branded NBC suits battered down my door and pinned me up against a bookcase while my wife and children looked on in horror.
Once the hoo-hah had died down and I had tweeted my near-million followers to tell them I was OK, we all sat around the conservatory table with a pot of tea. While the Olympic Advertisement Enforcement Officers regretted their heavy- handed entrance, it transpired that the problem was that there was already a precedent for action against an Olympic Rings/anus comparison.
Last week, a cheeky chemist in Truro, Paul Deakley, put up a humorous handmade sign, written in marker pen, saying: "This summer, why not soothe your Olympic Rings with Anusol." Even though the haemorrhoid ointment manufacturers had not asked Deakley to advertise their product in any manner at all, let alone such a controversial one, it was decided that Deakley's business, which is not an official Olympic sponsor, was profiting by association with the Olympics. (Obviously I hadn't known this Deakley guy had already done an Olympic Rings/anus gag, and if I had I wouldn't have done mine, but it is difficult for professional comics to stay ahead of the pack now that any amateur clown has access to Twitter, online blogs, cardboard and marker pens.) But either way, Deakley's Olympic Ring joke counts as "ambush marketing" and it's just the sort of thing the Olympic Advertisement Enforcement Officers are cracking down on.
"But hang on," I said. "My Olympic Rings tweet was just a joke. It had no commercial application." "Well, we would argue that it did," offered the lead Olympic Advertisement Enforcement Officer, Leslie Macintosh, and asked me what I thought the point of my Twitter feed was.
Without thinking it through, I answered: "Well, to flex my comedy muscle and to maintain links with the people who come and see me live and buy all my DVDs."
"Exactly," she said. "So in other words your appropriation of the Olympic symbol served the purpose of furthering your own business interests. We're not monsters. We can't, and wouldn't, stop an ordinary member of the public using the phrase 'Olympic rings' to another member of the public, even if they were using it as a euphemism for anuses, but the fact that you can generate increased income by using the phrase means you are in contravention of our sponsors' agreements."
I packed a bag and said goodbye to my children. Leslie had explained the official questioning process might take some days. "I don't understand," said my son through his tears. "Am I allowed to say 'Olympics' or not?"
"Yes," I told him. "I think you are allowed to say 'Olympics'. But I'm not sure that I'm allowed to quote you saying the word 'Olympics' in a piece I might write for money. It's all very confusing."
I spent the next 48 hours waiting to be processed, sitting on a stone bench in a damp cell in Newham. By the end of the ordeal I had Olympic Ring problems of my own but realised it wouldn't be appropriate to tell my million-plus Twitter followers anything about that!
Stewart Lee
2012-07-22T14:51:41+01:00
"Visiting athletes enjoying their first taste of an East End curry have just discovered a new purpose for their Olympic Rings!" That was the tweet that started it all. Fans of me and my comedy work will know I am an inescapable presence on the Twitter social networking site and have more than 900,000 followers. It's not an ego thing. Drip-feeding a few gags every 20 minutes helps me to maintain my customer base and the discipline of being humorous in 140 characters or fewer forces me to develop different kinds of comedy from the multi-award-winning, long-form, idea-driven monologues I am best known for. When you've won two British Comedy awards, a Bafta and a Chortle award all in the same year, it's easy to rest on your laurels and I find that grappling with Twitter's stylistic limitations helps me keep my wits sharp and my comedy muscle match-fit. The throwaway Olympic Ring gag isn't among my best work, admittedly, drawing as it does a simple and direct comedic comparison between the Olympic Rings themselves and the perhaps inflamed anuses of visiting Olympians who might perhaps have gone out for a curry in the East End of London, maybe around Brick Lane, and who might then perhaps have ordered a dish that was somewhat hotter than advisable, perhaps leading to soreness later when defecating. I'm not saying this did happen or ever will happen. It probably didn't and probably never will. What I am saying is that if it did happen, and the information that it had happened were somehow to leak out into the public domain, then there would be more than ample opportunity for we satirists to use the word "ring" in both its Olympic and its rectal sense. Anyway, the gag, which I made on the Twitter...
While bands elsewhere moaned melodramatically about the fascist state, in 1981 Spaniards fumbled out of an actual dictatorship in the wake of a failed coup.
The forty two bands presented in this landmark survey of Spanish post-punk, dubbed the 'siniestro' sound, took shelter in big hair and a spiky solipsism, heavily indebted to the jagged neo-psychedelia and doomed glamour of early Cure, Banshees, U2, and Bunnymen.
Sombras sounds like a typically top notch mid-80s edition of the Juan Peel show.
Stewart Lee
2014-05-25T22:02:35+01:00
While bands elsewhere moaned melodramatically about the fascist state, in 1981 Spaniards fumbled out of an actual dictatorship in the wake of a failed coup. The forty two bands presented in this landmark survey of Spanish post-punk, dubbed the 'siniestro' sound, took shelter in big hair and a spiky solipsism, heavily indebted to the jagged neo-psychedelia and doomed glamour of early Cure, Banshees, U2, and Bunnymen. Sombras sounds like a typically top notch mid-80s edition of the Juan Peel show.
Last night I had dinner with the molecular microbiologist Professor Keith Gull. He discussed the information overload that has taken shape in academia his lifetime, and how it has affected the working methods of his students. Over spinach and egg, Professor Gull identified the need to be able to extract the relevant points from the unprecedentedly vast mass of material now available as a key skill in the contemporary data-dense environment. Tangentially, it seems to me that all 21st century musicians are likewise potentially swamped in a vast range of influences largely unavailable to their recent predecessors.
This World Wide Web that you all have now has made pretty much everything that ever was available, by legal or illegal means. But Wolf People are one of the few groups to funnel this oceanic torrent of endless sonic information into a fine and purposeful point. And that fine and purposeful point is their second album proper, Fain.
The peripheral early seventies British underground influences that Wolf People acknowledge on their website playlists - Linda Hoyle and Affinity, Arzachel, Tractor, Beau, Thundermother, High Tide, May Blitz, Arcadium and The Way We Live - were all familiar to me as a post-punk fundamentalist teenager in the early 80s, but in name only. Theirs were the already culturally obsolete gatefold albums with gloomily meaningful sleeves spilling out of the racks in the second hand shop in the underpass by Moor Street Station at low low prices, that our generation thrust aside in search of 12" singles by angry ironists on the Rough Trade and Vindaloo labels. This dopey beardo wizard shit was kulturally verboten. It was never coming back, granddad, and without the open-access information experiment of the newfangled Internet, could a band like Wolf People ever have sounded quite the way it does?
"I don't think it could have, or at least not in the form it's taken now", concedes Wolf People's founder, vocalist, and co-guitarist (with Joe Hollick) Jack Sharp. "We were very much involved in collecting records and sampling, and interested in '60's and '70's subculture (as well as hip hop) in the "pre internet age", but things were a lot harder to come by when you didn't have the almost brain numbing instant access to pretty-much-everything-ever that you have now. Getting involved in online record collecting communities around 2002/2003, when we were in our early twenties, had a massive impact on Tom and myself, and it still provides a lot of inspiration and ways of finding music that is still off the radar even now."
Having burrowed out of Bedford in the mid-noughties, Wolf People are a formidable hybrid. Yes, they're crate-digging record collector completists with time on their hands and the sort of international file-trader connections that mean they can legitimately say "There has always been a 1970s Finnish progressive rock influence on our music." But, crucially, they're also dedicated musicians demonstrating, with their zen-mastery of Tom Verlaine type twin guitar starbursts and Pythagorean progressive rock timekeeping, the lost art of what long dead rock scribes used to call 'chops'.
"We'll probably look back and realise what idiots we were being!" volunteers Sharp. "I suppose it's strange that we're using the internet as a tool to reference a craft of music making that would otherwise be extinct or buried." If only Wolf People been able to enjoy the housing benefit scams, generous student grants, aristocratic major label patronage, and communal squat culture that bought their spiritual Seventies forebears endless practice time. Had they been relieved of the obligation to sustain themselves, we'd have seen Wolf People's debut mini-masterpiece, 2010's Steeple, some years ahead of schedule.
I'm worried I've made Wolf People sound like mere historical revivalists, the prog-blues-folk-rock equivalent of those people who dress up as cavaliers at weekends and lose once more battles already lost long ago. Crucially, there's something else entirely going on in their rehearsal room. We know the technology now exists to clone and revive an extinct woolly mammoth from DNA found in frozen specimens perfectly preserved in arctic ice-fields, which is arguably partly what Wolf People have done, referencing artists on the missing presumed extinct Holyground label, for example. But what if we were to take that mammoth and cross-breed it with a similarly re-vivified sabre tooth tiger?
It was on the closing pair of tracks on Wolf People's last album Steeple, namely Banks of Sweet Dundee Parts 1 and 2, that their unique selling point became clear. Wolf People are positing an alternate early Seventies musical reality that nearly, but never quite actually, happened. Yes, Fairport Convention's A Sailor's Life, the extended epics of Trees' unbeatable 1970 album On The Shore, and bits of Carolanne Pegg's '73 solo album, posit a British folk music informed by then contemporary rock practice, with extended modal soloing and driving rhythm sections.
And yes, the title track alone of Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die album, and The Battle Of Evermore from Led Zeppellin IV, and bits of the and the inexplicably English sounding German band Carol of Harvest's eponymous 1978 release, suggest a more densely entwined, more fertile, future for this unlikely crossbreed. But it was a future that was never quite fulfilled, Traffic wandering off into a flutey jazz fog, and Led Zeppellin climbing the Giant's Causeway to an immortality not tainted by folksy flavors.
"I think subconsciously, we're trying to make the type of records we would like to find," says Jack. "I love Trees and Fairport and Mr Fox, but I find myself thinking that there aren't enough groups like that, and sometimes I want it to be heavier. So we've tried to stretch both the folk and the heavy element as far as it will go in either direction and see what happens." I think the modest Wolf Person is selling the band short. Fain doesn't sound stretched. Its eight substantial songs sound, given the incompatible diversity of its sources, implausibly integrated.
Empty Vessels skewers California '60s folk rock rhythm guitar with Hollick's insurgent soloing; All Returns' truncated hairy funk licks, from bassist Dan Davis and drummer Tom Watt, suddenly bristle into the red, finally unable to contain themselves, bursting free of a psalmodic structure, like The Stooges' We Will Fall re-tooled by jazz monks; When The Fire Is Dead In The Grate is the album's first stone classic, a funky folk-metal workout that trails off into a compellingly extended coda, both guitarists circling and dovetailing and spiraling; Athol is a downbeat minor key boogie, like an uncommonly reflective Canned Heat gone native somewhere in the Suffolk fens.
Massed witches' sabbat backing vocals swell and rise under the arching leads of the painfully disciplined Hesperus, the song dissolving into a peat bog superfuzz sphagnum moss sludge; Answer drapes hop-harvest harmonies over pointillist pin pricks of lead guitar; Thief's Can-style atomic bomb blast opening spills over analogue synth noise into an all-but unaccompanied plaintive folk ballad vocal, that breaks down into collapsing arpeggios of twin guitars; and NRR sounds like it was written to make Hell's Angels, and their molls, attending an outdoor blues-rock/rock-blues festival in a disused WWII airfield in 1973, do that dance where they bend sideways and bump their butts together, the rather self-conscious set closer that would once have provoked mass applause and the ritualized discarding of bras.
Music fans like to speculate on what-if's. What if The Fall had followed Hex Enduction Hour with more of the same, instead of switching track to escape expectation? What if The Buzzcocks had held on to and harnessed the high art aspirations of Howard Devoto alongside the pop art punch of Pete Shelley? What if Jimi Hendrix had made that album with Miles Davis? What if Television had run in the songs for their belated 3rd album live, and found all the jumping-off points they discovered in the years spent woodshedding Marquee Moon? What if all the great songs the final line-up of The Byrds squandered in half-realised solo projects had made one last brilliant band album? And so on.
If you've ever listened to those furtive early '70s fusions of folk and rock and wondered if there was another way those superficially incompatible genres might have intertwined, then Wolf People offer an answer, with Fain's patchouli-scented stews of perfurmed garden pre-punk, each shadowed by a creeping deep country darkness of backwater occult imagery, utilitarian King James Bible lyricism, and knowing nods to primordial melodies, that already lurk deep in the collective subconscious. Re-organising the re-available past, Wolf People cast a cup of bones against the back wall, and play the runes in the patterns they fall in.
Stewart Lee
2013-03-20T18:49:40+00:00
Last night I had dinner with the molecular microbiologist Professor Keith Gull. He discussed the information overload that has taken shape in academia his lifetime, and how it has affected the working methods of his students. Over spinach and egg, Professor Gull identified the need to be able to extract the relevant points from the unprecedentedly vast mass of material now available as a key skill in the contemporary data-dense environment. Tangentially, it seems to me that all 21st century musicians are likewise potentially swamped in a vast range of influences largely unavailable to their recent predecessors. This World Wide Web that you all have now has made pretty much everything that ever was available, by legal or illegal means. But Wolf People are one of the few groups to funnel this oceanic torrent of endless sonic information into a fine and purposeful point. And that fine and purposeful point is their second album proper, Fain. The peripheral early seventies British underground influences that Wolf People acknowledge on their website playlists - Linda Hoyle and Affinity, Arzachel, Tractor, Beau, Thundermother, High Tide, May Blitz, Arcadium and The Way We Live - were all familiar to me as a post-punk fundamentalist teenager in the early 80s, but in name only. Theirs were the already culturally obsolete gatefold albums with gloomily meaningful sleeves spilling out of the racks in the second hand shop in the underpass by Moor Street Station at low low prices, that our generation thrust aside in search of 12" singles by angry ironists on the Rough Trade and Vindaloo labels. This dopey beardo wizard shit was kulturally verboten. It was never coming back, granddad, and without the open-access information experiment of the newfangled Internet, could a band like Wolf People ever have sounded quite the way it does?...
YOU’D have to be as drunk as Phil Mitchell to find Celebrity Juice funny. It’s like a tenth rate Shooting Stars.
People titter because Keith Lemon leers at breasts and says “milk, milk”. What are we, six? Ooh, he said fanny, he said poo...
On his live show, Lemon got his first laughs with “Oh f***, we’re live”, followed by “I whacked her in the face with me c**k”.
Oscar Wilde eat yer heart out. This is lobotomised comedy aimed at the Club 18-30 crowd after a night on Jägerbombs – the comic equivalent of a tanked-up footballer at Cheltenham.
It’s lazy toilet humour bereft of wit or insight but it’s still arguably preferable to Stewart Lee’s smart-arse ramblings. Lee caters for the smug, right-on, middle class Guardian-reading crowd – the people who share his elitist prejudices.
He despises Only Fools & Horses, arguably the greatest British sitcom ever made, and only last week said Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album made him “physically sick”.
On Thursday he turned his fire on the English flag, linking it falsely to the 1970s National Front (who actually marched behind the Union Jack).
He then spent two thirds of a dull, self-indulgent show talking about his cat, allegedly called Jeremy Corbyn, and its diarrhoea – blowing a raspberry for three minutes while it defecated on the cross of St George.
Looking for laughs in this garbage is like searching for the meaning of life in a Joey Essex documentary. Ah, but clever people tell me I’m missing the joke.
Stewart Lee is just as much a character as Keith Lemon, they say, but brighter. His rambling, repetitive shtick is an act.
He’s actually subverting comedy. Maybe so, but 1) it’s very hard to tell where the fake Lee stops and the real Lee starts, and 2) this is the fourth series ploughing the same shallow furrow.
Like a herpes sore, there is no getting rid of him. Comedy is a matter of taste, of course, but it’s a matter of fact that Oxbridge comedians – which Lee is – get most TV bookings because Oxbridge educated commissioners control the process. The same kind of cretins who sacked Les Dawson...
Stewart Lee
2016-03-20T21:52:17+00:00
YOU’D have to be as drunk as Phil Mitchell to find Celebrity Juice funny. It’s like a tenth rate Shooting Stars. People titter because Keith Lemon leers at breasts and says “milk, milk”. What are we, six? Ooh, he said fanny, he said poo... On his live show, Lemon got his first laughs with “Oh f***, we’re live”, followed by “I whacked her in the face with me c**k”. Oscar Wilde eat yer heart out. This is lobotomised comedy aimed at the Club 18-30 crowd after a night on Jägerbombs – the comic equivalent of a tanked-up footballer at Cheltenham. It’s lazy toilet humour bereft of wit or insight but it’s still arguably preferable to Stewart Lee’s smart-arse ramblings. Lee caters for the smug, right-on, middle class Guardian-reading crowd – the people who share his elitist prejudices. He despises Only Fools & Horses, arguably the greatest British sitcom ever made, and only last week said Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album made him “physically sick”. On Thursday he turned his fire on the English flag, linking it falsely to the 1970s National Front (who actually marched behind the Union Jack). He then spent two thirds of a dull, self-indulgent show talking about his cat, allegedly called Jeremy Corbyn, and its diarrhoea – blowing a raspberry for three minutes while it defecated on the cross of St George. Looking for laughs in this garbage is like searching for the meaning of life in a Joey Essex documentary. Ah, but clever people tell me I’m missing the joke. Stewart Lee is just as much a character as Keith Lemon, they say, but brighter. His rambling, repetitive shtick is an act. He’s actually subverting comedy. Maybe so, but 1) it’s very hard to tell where the fake Lee stops and the real Lee starts, and...
Not only is this next along the shelf from yesterday's King Creosote 10", there's another good reason for posting this. Right now, and I think until next Thursday, you can download this for a donation to the Trussell Trust from the website https://www.gofasterstripe.com/cgi-bin/website.cgi?page=videofull&id=39289 , then it will change to something else from the GFS back catalogue. Minimum £1.00, so get on that.
This 20ish minute piece takes as its starting point the Edward Lear nonsense poem The Owl & The Pussycat. Lee then writes a story, in the form of diary entries from the owl, and taking the poem at face value he narrates the gradual breakdown of the owl. It begins an amusing tale, the owl attempts to communicate with it's natural predator, tries to eat the honey, despite "having the flat face of an owl", nearly learns Mull of Kintyre on the small guitar. But what begins in honey, ends in tragedy, and the tale is finished by the turkey's diary.
There's a lot to like. I particularly like the running joke about how, "At noon, on the far horizon, we saw another pea green boat, identical to ours in every way, except crewed by", and then each time a different improbably pairing of animals.
This was part of a larger show where it was interwoven with a story of Lee being commissioned to do a biopic of Lear, and having a broken toilet. I never saw that show, but have heard a bootleg. More here.
And finally, if you haven't seen it, here he is in a famous routine dismantling the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful:
Stewart Lee
2020-04-10T19:36:29+01:00
Not only is this next along the shelf from yesterday's King Creosote 10", there's another good reason for posting this. Right now, and I think until next Thursday, you can download this for a donation to the Trussell Trust from the website https://www.gofasterstripe.com/cgi-bin/website.cgi?page=videofull&id=39289 , then it will change to something else from the GFS back catalogue. Minimum £1.00, so get on that. This 20ish minute piece takes as its starting point the Edward Lear nonsense poem The Owl & The Pussycat. Lee then writes a story, in the form of diary entries from the owl, and taking the poem at face value he narrates the gradual breakdown of the owl. It begins an amusing tale, the owl attempts to communicate with it's natural predator, tries to eat the honey, despite "having the flat face of an owl", nearly learns Mull of Kintyre on the small guitar. But what begins in honey, ends in tragedy, and the tale is finished by the turkey's diary. There's a lot to like. I particularly like the running joke about how, "At noon, on the far horizon, we saw another pea green boat, identical to ours in every way, except crewed by", and then each time a different improbably pairing of animals. This was part of a larger show where it was interwoven with a story of Lee being commissioned to do a biopic of Lear, and having a broken toilet. I never saw that show, but have heard a bootleg. More here. And finally, if you haven't seen it, here he is in a famous routine dismantling the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful:
Let's show we don't all subscribe to the worst racist rhetoric of Brexit
(This article first appeared on Chortle on the 28th December.)
Stewart Lee on his campaign to get to No 1 with Asian Dub Foundation
Move over Miley Cyrus and tell Ed Sheeran the news. A bunch of protest-music electro-punks and a 52-year-old man who has let himself go are within snatching distance of your shiny pop crowns! And it’s all for charity!! Do the decent thing and step aside!!!
As I write this on December 27, Comin’ Over Here, by Asian Dub Foundation featuring Stewart Lee, is Number 1 in the Amazon charts, and number 2 in the iTunes charts. I don’t even know how the other charts work, or how you calculate a hit single in these digital days. We used to buy music as reels of paper full of holes that you had to feed into a mangle with a ram’s horn attached to it back in my day. And it were all just filthy noise back then, not auto-tuned dance-friendly melodies like today’s rubbish. Eeee! I remember when this was all Fields of the Nephilim.
But I do know that with your help we could realise Asian Dub Foundation’s dream of making Comin’ Over Here the top of the charts on New Year’s Day, as Brexit finally festers into reality. And we can generate a hefty wedge for the record’s beneficiaries, Kent Refugee Action Network, whether it is Number 1 or not.
Without an Instacam or a Tweeter to my name I am hardly a media manipulator, and as people at Netflix will tell you, I am of limited parochial interest. And you are unlikely to see Seann Walsh cavorting to an Asian Dub Foundation track on Strictly Come Dancing any time soon. So how did this strange chart-bound convergence happen?
After their initial impact in a nostalgic Britpop era that was a poor fit for them, the ethno-futurists Asian Dub Foundation have enjoyed a cycle of touring successive acclaimed albums to a devoted following, and developing high-concept side-projects (soundtracking La Haine at Broadwater Farm and performing an opera about Colonel Gaddafi at the London Coliseum) almost beneath the radar.
It’s the sort of musical career model I recognise, and one I have done my best to try and apply to the unwieldy world of stand-up. But as the former Teardrop Explodes frontman and Dinky mystic Julian Cope once told me, while standing in a Wiltshire stone circle: ‘You have to get through being a has-been and then you can become a legend.’
I told this story to former Confessions Of A Window Cleaner star and Pier Paolo Pasolini protégé Robin Askwith when I worked with him in 2019, and he quoted me telling him it in a recent LBC radio obituary for Barbara Windsor. If something Julian Cope said can end up in Barbara Windsor’s obituary via super-spreader Askwith in just three moves, let that be a warning about how easily Covid-19 can be transmitted, and wear your masks in Sainsbury’s.
Anyway, Asian Dub Foundation contacted me early in 2020 to ask if they could sample an old routine of mine from eight years ago, about the historic waves of settlement in the British Isles, on their new album, and I was delighted to have it taken out of my hands. I lost control of the bit to Twitter years ago anyway, where it is posted many times a day back and forth in political debates, free of its moorings.
I had the idea for the routine in 2012 when I heard a mad interview on the radio with Paul Nuttalls, the Ukip leader soon to lose his job due to confusion as to whether or not he had been present at the Hillsborough disaster.
I went home, transcribed Nuttalls’ words, and wrote a succession of increasingly exaggerated loops of his suspicion of various foreign objects, via modern Eastern European immigrants, through prehistoric settlers, and back as far as all matter and the abstract concept of reality itself. It was one of those rare extended riffs that took about as long to write as it does to say, as opposed to the routines that can take years to chisel out.
I don’t even really feel responsible for it, as everything in it was implied by Nuttalls anyway, who seemed to stand at my shoulder in spectral form, guiding my hand. The bit just sort of fell out of my head like a weird egg, broke on the laptop in front of me, and fried itself.
Though I normally police the context of my work as rigorously as possible, I was fascinated to see what would happen to the bit in the hands of Asian Dub Foundation, who saw in the finished routine a comic response to the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric some players in the Brexit referendum chose to amplify and weaponise, which spoke to their experiences.
I handed over the tapes and waited. And it was a great privilege for me, at 52, to find myself on a record like ADF’s, which I think is both powerful and funny, largely for reasons that are little to do with me and everything to do with the group themselves. And I love that fact that they chose to pull out the section where I am quoting the 1,100 year old anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of The Wanderer, his presence and mine on the record showing that you are never too old to have a hit.
If I had known I was going to be in a pop video I would have got in shape under lockdown and maybe worn a catsuit, like when Lulu performed with Take That. But the band were brilliant on the day of the shoot, between the two lockdowns, and jammed on John Coltrane’s version of My Favourite Things between takes, which meant I got a private musical performance of one of my own favourite things in a year where I have rarely seen anything live.
On the EP’s extra tracks, ADF’s Steve Savale has fitted the spoken word samples of other bits of the routine to the group’s rhythms and melodies so brilliantly, it makes me think of Messiaen transcribing birdsong, or the way Richard Thomas nailed American talk show guests’ trash talk to classical forms in Jerry Springer The Opera. And when Savale said he wanted to give all the profits to Kent Refugee Action Network and was taking advice from the DJ, activist and chart placings guru Jon Morter on how to have a Brexit Day Number 1, I was delighted.
At the risk of sounding hysterical, I think Asian Dub Foundation are, on this record, true patriots, and great global ambassadors for Britain, who can show the world that we didn’t all subscribe to the racist rhetorical excesses of the worst aspects of the Brexit campaign.
Writing in The Daily Mail on fucking Christmas Day, the lead Brexiteer Michael Gove’s partner Sarah Vine said the fallings-out she had with Remainer friends means that ‘few have paid such a heavy cost’ as her for Brexit. This is, of course, to overlook the fact that an MP was murdered by a white supremacist during the campaign for defending immigration, a cost perhaps heavier than having an uncomfortable moment at a 50th birthday party.
You have until New Year’s Eve, pop-pickers, to register your pop vote in the pop music pop Referendum of the pop year!
Let's show we don't all subscribe to the worst racist rhetoric of Brexit (This article first appeared on Chortle on the 28th December.) Stewart Lee on his campaign to get to No 1 with Asian Dub Foundation Move over Miley Cyrus and tell Ed Sheeran the news. A bunch of protest-music electro-punks and a 52-year-old man who has let himself go are within snatching distance of your shiny pop crowns! And it’s all for charity!! Do the decent thing and step aside!!! As I write this on December 27, Comin’ Over Here, by Asian Dub Foundation featuring Stewart Lee, is Number 1 in the Amazon charts, and number 2 in the iTunes charts. I don’t even know how the other charts work, or how you calculate a hit single in these digital days. We used to buy music as reels of paper full of holes that you had to feed into a mangle with a ram’s horn attached to it back in my day. And it were all just filthy noise back then, not auto-tuned dance-friendly melodies like today’s rubbish. Eeee! I remember when this was all Fields of the Nephilim. But I do know that with your help we could realise Asian Dub Foundation’s dream of making Comin’ Over Here the top of the charts on New Year’s Day, as Brexit finally festers into reality. And we can generate a hefty wedge for the record’s beneficiaries, Kent Refugee Action Network, whether it is Number 1 or not. Without an Instacam or a Tweeter to my name I am hardly a media manipulator, and as people at Netflix will tell you, I am of limited parochial interest. And you are unlikely to see Seann Walsh cavorting to an Asian Dub Foundation track on Strictly Come Dancing any time soon. So...
Stewart Lee was described by The Times in 2009 as 'the comedians comedian, and with good reason.' He is the man responsible for television delights such as Fist of Fun, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle and the controversial but brilliant Jerry Springer: The Opera.
As well as that he is also noticeable for being part of the teams who created great comedy characters such as Alan Partridge and The Mighty Boosh.
His reach within the world of British comedy is unquestionable, I have always been a fan from afar but this is my first experience of the 9th 'Most Influential Person in UK Comedy' live.
I'm suddenly all too aware of the famous E B White's quote 'Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies' but we plod on.
Lee is incredibly articulate; he starts the show with a typical lowdown of what's going to happen over the course of the evening then effortlessly begins deconstructing the jokes, narrative and entire set to great effect. The first half (and first joke we're assured) focuses mainly on satire and is not, in my opinion, his greatest work.
The first half jokes are laboured and other than a great piece about his last date at the Lowry four years ago (giving back a fortune in refunds as a Maltese heckler thought the set was a personal conversation and kept answering back) the act is largely forgettable and I found myself forcing out a laugh or two. The second half is a different story entirely and two sections stand out, the UKIP/Immigration joke is beautifully crafted and delivered taking the current 'don't come to our country' attitude of a particular politician right back through the Neolithic ages to the big bang and beyond. The Latvia stereotype story another wonder of imagination and surrealism. Lee ends with the 45 year old impotent vasectomised married father of two story which has both myself and the rest of the audience in stitches.
Generally the show is very funny but a little hit and miss. I count three genuine belly laughs, several smaller laughs (usually directed at his expert use of language and semantics) and a fairly constant smile, some audience members are in hysteric convulsions others sit bemused.
Lee's reputation as an anti-populist comedian is well founded, but based on tonight's show I'd encourage fans to find tickets in smaller venues with more like minded audience members to fully enjoy the Stewart Lee experience.
Now, where's the needle and thread for this frog?
Stewart Lee
2013-10-05T18:19:26+01:00
Stewart Lee was described by The Times in 2009 as 'the comedians comedian, and with good reason.' He is the man responsible for television delights such as Fist of Fun, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle and the controversial but brilliant Jerry Springer: The Opera. As well as that he is also noticeable for being part of the teams who created great comedy characters such as Alan Partridge and The Mighty Boosh. His reach within the world of British comedy is unquestionable, I have always been a fan from afar but this is my first experience of the 9th 'Most Influential Person in UK Comedy' live. I'm suddenly all too aware of the famous E B White's quote 'Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies' but we plod on. Lee is incredibly articulate; he starts the show with a typical lowdown of what's going to happen over the course of the evening then effortlessly begins deconstructing the jokes, narrative and entire set to great effect. The first half (and first joke we're assured) focuses mainly on satire and is not, in my opinion, his greatest work. The first half jokes are laboured and other than a great piece about his last date at the Lowry four years ago (giving back a fortune in refunds as a Maltese heckler thought the set was a personal conversation and kept answering back) the act is largely forgettable and I found myself forcing out a laugh or two. The second half is a different story entirely and two sections stand out, the UKIP/Immigration joke is beautifully crafted and delivered taking the current 'don't come to our country' attitude of a particular politician right back through the Neolithic ages to the big bang and beyond. The Latvia stereotype story...
Stewart Lee was at the Curve to present Vegetable Stew; material intended for his forthcoming Comedy Vehicle TV show.
In his book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Lee admitted he enjoys losing an audience and attempting to win it back, which made it difficult to tell if Sunday's performance was deliberately evasive.
Lee's understanding of the art of stand-up was evident all through, with numerous asides for meta-observations about the nature of the routine.
On occasion, he would stop the flow to comment on some seemingly unplanned thing he'd said or done.
It then became apparent how carefully planned Lee's comedy was.
He relied on the audience being sufficiently familiar with stand-up to understand when its conventions were being subverted, and for the most part, they were with him.
The middle of the show elicited less audience approval, concerning satirical observations about Adrian Chiles and Gary Lineker.
By the time he was making accusations that comedian Russell Howard was responsible for deaths in the developing world, the crowd weren't so sure the targets deserved it.
He pulled everyone back for a confessional tale about his involvement with the elitist Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, before defiantly derailing it at the close.
Lee deserved his plaudits for daring to challenge his audience and they in turn recognised a masterclass when they got it.
Stewart Lee
2010-10-19T14:32:58+01:00
Stewart Lee was at the Curve to present Vegetable Stew; material intended for his forthcoming Comedy Vehicle TV show. In his book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Lee admitted he enjoys losing an audience and attempting to win it back, which made it difficult to tell if Sunday's performance was deliberately evasive. Lee's understanding of the art of stand-up was evident all through, with numerous asides for meta-observations about the nature of the routine. On occasion, he would stop the flow to comment on some seemingly unplanned thing he'd said or done. It then became apparent how carefully planned Lee's comedy was. He relied on the audience being sufficiently familiar with stand-up to understand when its conventions were being subverted, and for the most part, they were with him. The middle of the show elicited less audience approval, concerning satirical observations about Adrian Chiles and Gary Lineker. By the time he was making accusations that comedian Russell Howard was responsible for deaths in the developing world, the crowd weren't so sure the targets deserved it. He pulled everyone back for a confessional tale about his involvement with the elitist Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, before defiantly derailing it at the close. Lee deserved his plaudits for daring to challenge his audience and they in turn recognised a masterclass when they got it.
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!
Stewart Lee
2016-04-24T19:55:24+01:00
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...
What makes Stewart Lee so unashamedly funny is how he gets under the skin of his audience. So he began his show, Content Provider, by telling us how much he hated King’s Lynn.
He pointed to the fact that the Corn Exchange was almost half empty, a problem he said he’s always had in this town in his 27 years of stand up comedy.
“I’m not coming here again, my brother was stationed at RAF Marham and even he hates it,” he said. “There’s not enough people to get the big laughs.”
But there were plenty of big laughs permeating the theatre, and plenty of thought-provoking silences too.
Current polarised politics and humanity’s obsession with the digital world acted as the overarching theme of Lee’s show, with Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog serving as an appropriate backdrop.
In the first act, he took us back to the Brexit vote, which is treading on dangerous waters in a leave-majority town. He double bluffs his insults at leave-voters but not before making sound arguments of why we shouldn’t make massive generalisations of them.
Lee worked the audience to fit with his show and it’s something he does so well because he’s aware of who they are. They are the under 40’s he berated as Pokemon Go players and courgette eaters belonging to the “metropolitan liberal elite”.
He even questioned his own stance within this elite, turning down a stint with “evil” Sky because he didn’t want to appear in an industry owned by Rupert Murdoch.
He explained his jokes to the audience in his typical, superior manner, with bitter irony that garnered the most rapturous laughter. And he made an inbred joke about Norfolk which, as an unwritten rule, must be done.
In the second half, he returned to the same gag used to explain Brexit to introduce Trump, and drew a comparison between Game of Thrones - without having ever watched it - and the Scottish independence referendum, which for an avid fan almost made sense.
In a more concentrated routine, the “exaggerated story” of his grandfather improvising bondage and S&M bizarrely reflected a meaningful era without selfies and assembly-line consumerism. The show ended with a touching, poetic monologue of how modern society has “turned away from the wider world and is looking inward.”
After his BAFTA-winning show Comedy Vehicle was axed by BBC Two, Lee returned to the stage with a 90-minute cultured show with no limits or censorship. It is pure stand-up comedy, where Lee looked to be loving every minute of his political and personal performance.
He took on a new style of punchy, vulgar witticism and mixed it up with his trademark of deconstructing jokes and dry soliloquies with outstanding pay-off.
As much as he kept drawing back to the empty seats, it is by no means a reflection of Stewart Lee’s comedic genius which lingers in the mind long after the final act.
Stewart Lee
2017-03-23T20:58:30+00:00
What makes Stewart Lee so unashamedly funny is how he gets under the skin of his audience. So he began his show, Content Provider, by telling us how much he hated King’s Lynn. He pointed to the fact that the Corn Exchange was almost half empty, a problem he said he’s always had in this town in his 27 years of stand up comedy. “I’m not coming here again, my brother was stationed at RAF Marham and even he hates it,” he said. “There’s not enough people to get the big laughs.” But there were plenty of big laughs permeating the theatre, and plenty of thought-provoking silences too. Current polarised politics and humanity’s obsession with the digital world acted as the overarching theme of Lee’s show, with Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog serving as an appropriate backdrop. In the first act, he took us back to the Brexit vote, which is treading on dangerous waters in a leave-majority town. He double bluffs his insults at leave-voters but not before making sound arguments of why we shouldn’t make massive generalisations of them. Lee worked the audience to fit with his show and it’s something he does so well because he’s aware of who they are. They are the under 40’s he berated as Pokemon Go players and courgette eaters belonging to the “metropolitan liberal elite”. He even questioned his own stance within this elite, turning down a stint with “evil” Sky because he didn’t want to appear in an industry owned by Rupert Murdoch. He explained his jokes to the audience in his typical, superior manner, with bitter irony that garnered the most rapturous laughter. And he made an inbred joke about Norfolk which, as an unwritten rule, must be done. In the second half, he...
It starts with a cheerily vivid threat of violent retribution to users of camera phones. It ends with a visual punchline: a riposte to generation selfie delivered from on top of piles of rival comedians’ remaindered DVDs. And in the two hours of jokes about Brexit, Trump and “the individual in a digitised free-market society” in between, Lee delivers what may just be the most consistently funny show of his brilliant career.
As you’ll know if you’ve seen Lee in his now-cancelled BBC Two stand-up show, his thirst to address our messed-up world is matched only by his hunger to discuss his style, technique and simultaneously marginal and pre-eminent position in the marketplace. He sets up a hall of comedic mirrors in which any joke about stuff that matters — his Brexit routine is good, as is a Trump routine hastily but artfully conceived to mirror it in every detail — fast ricochets into live footnotes about how the show is going, about whether this is all just “massaging the prejudices” of the metropolitan liberal elite.
Yet secretly there is a plan to Content Provider, a return to the sort of long-form live show that Lee sidelined in the years when his tours became tryouts for television material. And we, the Lee consumers, are getting a much better deal: his mixture of the overstatedly satirical and the wilfully absurd needs time to attain equilibrium.
As he roams between mocking the faddish mimsiness of anyone under 40 — his beaming, Neanderthal mime of people on their phones is my funniest moment of the year so far — to mocking politicians, Russell Howard, Game of Thrones (“Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings”) and the strictures of his own persona, he is also trying to find a way to be authentically amusing in a divided society with atomised tastes.
If that sounds highfalutin, what renders it hilarious is Lee’s sheer devotion to jokes. His writing is both dense and loose. He mocks the narcissism of our age, while forever keeping a jaundiced eye out for his reflection. Phew. I laughed till it hurt.
Stewart Lee
2016-11-17T18:22:12+00:00
It starts with a cheerily vivid threat of violent retribution to users of camera phones. It ends with a visual punchline: a riposte to generation selfie delivered from on top of piles of rival comedians’ remaindered DVDs. And in the two hours of jokes about Brexit, Trump and “the individual in a digitised free-market society” in between, Lee delivers what may just be the most consistently funny show of his brilliant career. As you’ll know if you’ve seen Lee in his now-cancelled BBC Two stand-up show, his thirst to address our messed-up world is matched only by his hunger to discuss his style, technique and simultaneously marginal and pre-eminent position in the marketplace. He sets up a hall of comedic mirrors in which any joke about stuff that matters — his Brexit routine is good, as is a Trump routine hastily but artfully conceived to mirror it in every detail — fast ricochets into live footnotes about how the show is going, about whether this is all just “massaging the prejudices” of the metropolitan liberal elite. Yet secretly there is a plan to Content Provider, a return to the sort of long-form live show that Lee sidelined in the years when his tours became tryouts for television material. And we, the Lee consumers, are getting a much better deal: his mixture of the overstatedly satirical and the wilfully absurd needs time to attain equilibrium. As he roams between mocking the faddish mimsiness of anyone under 40 — his beaming, Neanderthal mime of people on their phones is my funniest moment of the year so far — to mocking politicians, Russell Howard, Game of Thrones (“Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings”) and the strictures of his own persona, he is also trying to find a way to be authentically amusing in...
I opened my new standup show, Basic Lee, 14 days after Liz Truss took office. Do you remember her? The cheese one? I joked to the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati in attendance at the Leicester Square theatre that there was little point in pursuing my usual practice of tying a personal story into the contemporary political one, as the new Liz Truss government would certainly not last until the tour ended in April 2024. Perhaps it wouldn’t even last to the end of that night’s two-hour show. Accordingly, I read my opening 15 minutes of material on Truss and her cabinet off flimsy cards, explaining there was no point in learning it. How we laughed! And how the world laughs at us.
On a Thursday less than two weeks later, in between my leaving home and arriving at the Leicester Square theatre, the thuggish chancellor of the exchequer became the first dim domino to fall and my tight five on Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget bit the dust. As I rolled it out for one last time to an audience of Anti-Growth Coalition members cackling at the impossibility of my job, I felt like the neolithic fisherman of standup, trying to spear the salmon of slippery political targets in the fast-moving, and inevitably sewage-filled, chalk stream of the Conservatives’ collapse. Pity the refugee! Pity the pensioner!! But above all, in these dark times, pity the professional satirist!!!
My half-term break with the kids was three days away, so I spaffed Kwarteng up the wall, just as Truss had done herself, and hoped any further prolapses of the collective Conservative anus would at least happen during my time off, leaving me ready with rewrites on returning to the stage on 2 November. Inevitably, the Truss government was removed within days, because it was totally shit, and with it went most of my opening 15 minutes, which were totally great. It was almost as if the men in grey suits of the 1922 Committee were trying to make life as difficult as possible for the jobbing liberal comedian trying to hold a tightly structured two hours together.
My now useless routine about the newly defenestrated Ranil Jayawardena, the 50-day environment secretary, by then performed to nearly 10,000 virtue-signalling wokeys, was now as irrelevant and forgotten as Jayawardena himself, the Paul Squire of environmental politics. The pro-fracking policies he was about to have to suck up are now overturned too, as revolving Rishi Sunak rotates back to the anti-fracking commitments of the original 2019 Tory manifesto, like a frighteningly banal Victorian spinning toy made of elastic bands and wood. History conspired to drain the very notion of Jayawardena of all meaning. He is gone. And there is no evidence of his ever having been there. We will not see his like again. If indeed we ever did.
Ranil Jayawardena’s replacement is Thérèse Coffey, who is perhaps better positioned than her predecessor to understand the hedgerows and moorlands, as it looks as if that is where she sleeps and forages for food. Sadly, there is little mileage for my post-Truss standup set in portraying Coffey as a badger, as a born-again feminist at the Daily Mail will accuse me of misogyny, before penning another article about the unfair allure of Angela Rayner’s reproductive organs. (“But will they bewitch dishy Rishi?”) In her 50-day tenure as health secretary, Coffey alarmed medical professionals by recommending that henceforth antibiotics were thrown like sweets by clowns in the streets to anyone who wanted them, even if they weren’t ill, dangerously weakening their efficacy. In her environment secretary capacity Coffey is expected to announce subsidies for Japanese knotweed cultivation, while establishing a protected reserve for Asian hornets and Colorado beetles in her bloomers.
I had a tight 10 on Nadhim Zahawi, who had suddenly become equalities minister, and there was something innately funny about the equalities minister’s horses having been previously warmed at the taxpayers’ expense while your gran froze at the energy company shareholders’ behest. But now Zahawi is the minister without portfolio. And so is Gavin Williamson. In short, Zahawi and Williamson haven’t got a portfolio between them. They do, however, have some previously warmed horses and a tarantula spider called Cronus. If Williamson is able to do as much damage to the idea of portfolios as he did to the education system there will be no portfolios left. Children will ask us: “What was a portfolio, Grandad?” And we won’t quite remember, but will know their disappearance was something to do with the minister without portfolio.
Former culture secretary Oliver Dowden takes on the arcane role of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but will it be worth thinking of anything funny to say about him? It’s not quite clear what the job of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is. But because Dowden is bringing to it the same level of understanding he brought to the culture secretary post he is expected to announce on Monday that his favourite Lancasters are Burt Lancaster, “because of when he was on the beach and all sea went on him”, and the Lancaster bomber “because it had machine guns as well as bombs”. And Matt Handcock has pointed out that a “duchy” is actually “a kind of Jamaican iron cooking pot and so having a chancellor of a duchy in the Conservative cabinet proves that we live in a diverse and tolerant country”.
Round and round it goes. God, I wish it would stop! Police officers who are exposed to obscene material online receive counselling, but those of us required to contemplate wave after wave of incompetent and corrupt Tories in the course of our satirical duties are left to fend for ourselves. Is it any wonder we turn to drink?
Stewart Lee
2022-10-30T19:22:51+00:00
I opened my new standup show, Basic Lee, 14 days after Liz Truss took office. Do you remember her? The cheese one? I joked to the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati in attendance at the Leicester Square theatre that there was little point in pursuing my usual practice of tying a personal story into the contemporary political one, as the new Liz Truss government would certainly not last until the tour ended in April 2024. Perhaps it wouldn’t even last to the end of that night’s two-hour show. Accordingly, I read my opening 15 minutes of material on Truss and her cabinet off flimsy cards, explaining there was no point in learning it. How we laughed! And how the world laughs at us. On a Thursday less than two weeks later, in between my leaving home and arriving at the Leicester Square theatre, the thuggish chancellor of the exchequer became the first dim domino to fall and my tight five on Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget bit the dust. As I rolled it out for one last time to an audience of Anti-Growth Coalition members cackling at the impossibility of my job, I felt like the neolithic fisherman of standup, trying to spear the salmon of slippery political targets in the fast-moving, and inevitably sewage-filled, chalk stream of the Conservatives’ collapse. Pity the refugee! Pity the pensioner!! But above all, in these dark times, pity the professional satirist!!! My half-term break with the kids was three days away, so I spaffed Kwarteng up the wall, just as Truss had done herself, and hoped any further prolapses of the collective Conservative anus would at least happen during my time off, leaving me ready with rewrites on returning to the stage on 2 November. Inevitably, the Truss government was removed within days, because it was totally...
You probably wouldn't guess it from his mastery of the material and the fluency and control of his delivery, but Stewart Lee is also road-testing a new show for Edinburgh.
In 2004, after a few years away, he turned up to the festival with 'Stand-Up Comedian' - and, as the choice of title might suggest, it was a bold declaration that the comedian-cum-novelist-cum-critic had returned to his true vocation. Zeroing in on Americans, Ben Elton and Gary Lineker's "velvet owl face" and wrapping up with an extended version of the much-loved routine about the tributes to Princess Diana left outside Kensington Palace, the show (available here) is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
The following year Lee was back in the Scottish capital with the self-deprecatingly named '90s Comedian' (DVD here, courtesy of the lovely people at Go Faster Stripe), part personal mission to make jokes that Joe Pasquale couldn't steal and part cathartic crusade to respond to his experiences in the wake of the controversy surrounding 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'. With that out of his system, and fatherhood having crept up on him in the last few months, would we see a more mellow figure before us?
In short, no.
This new show was originally called 'March Of The Mallards', as Lee explains, in direct response to the American Right who appropriated 'March Of The Penguins' for their own ends, claiming that the penguins' monogamous relationships and close-knit family units are nature showing us how to live morally. Mallards, you see, reproduce by gang rape and have also been known to indulge in (he relishes the phrase) "homosexual necrophilia"...
Realising he didn't have enough mallard-related material to spin out over a full hour, though, Lee plumped instead for a more familiar-sounding title, '41st Best Stand-Up Ever!'. Taken from his position on recent Channel 4 list programme '100 Greatest Stand-Ups', stalled just outside the Top 40, "it's both humble and arrogant" and allows him free rein to ruminate on his favourite subject, comedy itself - and indeed the show kicks off with a long segment on Tom O'Connor. If you think all that sounds a bit tediously and self-regarding, then you'd be very wrong - Lee is very often at his funniest when trying to pinpoint with that characteristically relentless attention to detail exactly what it is that makes something funny.
Lee is as prepared to mock himself, detailing the embarrassment of going to WeightWatchers, as he is others (Russell Brand, Stuart Maconie, his mother). Most of his vitriol is saved up for "the 20 or 30 people who run TV" and Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn. The latter is attacked as part of a segment about the Suffolk serial killings and that most unsacred of cows, political correctness, which, for its sheer genius, is most probably the bit destined to live longest in the memory. It isn't spoiling the show in any way to mention that other subjects include the potato peach aphid and the possibility that Carphone Warehouse and online lingerie site BeCheeky.com might be "the fronts for racialist organisations".
And, as befits a comedy theorist, it's not just about the material itself; it's also about the way it's packaged, about the deliberate pace and structure (there's a big difference between deliberate and laboured, whichever Independent critic labelled him the latter), about the language in which it's framed and about the intellect that stands behind it all. No wonder Time Out suggested it's worthy of winning the Booker Prize.
No pen and paper for Lee - either the show's very nearly complete and he's only reminding himself how to stay on stage (it's tiny, and he accidentally steps off mid-flow on at least two occasions) or he's sufficiently confident in himself and his material not to crave or even need the audience's explicit approval.
Obviously, that could be a bad thing in someone who is ultimately paid to entertain people, but with Stewart Lee you know you can feel confident that wherever he takes you it'll be inspired. Hence the show's conclusion: a man, stood on stage with a soft toy balanced on his head, in complete silence.
Stewart Lee
2007-08-01T19:48:05+01:00
You probably wouldn't guess it from his mastery of the material and the fluency and control of his delivery, but Stewart Lee is also road-testing a new show for Edinburgh. In 2004, after a few years away, he turned up to the festival with 'Stand-Up Comedian' - and, as the choice of title might suggest, it was a bold declaration that the comedian-cum-novelist-cum-critic had returned to his true vocation. Zeroing in on Americans, Ben Elton and Gary Lineker's "velvet owl face" and wrapping up with an extended version of the much-loved routine about the tributes to Princess Diana left outside Kensington Palace, the show (available here) is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. The following year Lee was back in the Scottish capital with the self-deprecatingly named '90s Comedian' (DVD here, courtesy of the lovely people at Go Faster Stripe), part personal mission to make jokes that Joe Pasquale couldn't steal and part cathartic crusade to respond to his experiences in the wake of the controversy surrounding 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'. With that out of his system, and fatherhood having crept up on him in the last few months, would we see a more mellow figure before us? In short, no. This new show was originally called 'March Of The Mallards', as Lee explains, in direct response to the American Right who appropriated 'March Of The Penguins' for their own ends, claiming that the penguins' monogamous relationships and close-knit family units are nature showing us how to live morally. Mallards, you see, reproduce by gang rape and have also been known to indulge in (he relishes the phrase) "homosexual necrophilia"... Realising he didn't have enough mallard-related material to spin out over a full hour, though, Lee plumped instead for a more familiar-sounding title, '41st Best Stand-Up Ever!'. Taken...
Brent Cross is a security guard at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. He is 37 years old and was born in Wellington, New Zealand.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up working at Brent Cross. I was born to Mr and Mrs Peter Cross, in New Zealand in 1970, two British hippies who washed up on the South Island in the 60’s. They named me Brent, but it wasn’t until I came to Wembley to live in a cereal box with three other kiwis that I even knew there was a place called Brent Cross. I called up my Dad and I said “Dad, did you know there was a big shopping centre in London called Brent Cross?” and he just cracked up. I suppose they were having a joke at my expense right from the start. You have to admire their patience. My Mum and Dad, they were playing a looooong game.
And then one day, I saw an advert – “Brent Cross. Security Guard Wanted.” Now, I never wanted to be a security guard, but I like reading and figured I could probably take a book to work, and it was like that little card was calling me, by name. When I arrived for my first day at Brent Cross I had a uniform and a name badge saying “Brent Cross. Brent Cross.” One day, one of the old guys said, “I’ve been coming into Brent Cross every day for thirty years and I’m sick of it” and everyone pointed at me and laughed. The other guys in the flat – Daveo, Keitho and Steveo - kept pinning up headlines from London papers on the fridge door – “Brent Cross to be refurbished”, “£50 000 spent on Brent Cross’ toilets”, “Brent Cross to be extended into inverted T shape” – and such like, and they’d laugh, too. Who cares? You need something to distract you. Brent Cross is Hell.
There isn’t a bookshop in the Brent Cross shopping centre? Does that strike you as weird? Sure there’s a WH Smiths, selling drawing pins and chic lit, but there isn’t an actual bookshop, selling actual books. One time this girl in specs and an alice band said to me, “My boyfriend’s browsing in an electrical shop. I want to kill time. Where’s the bookshop?” And I said ‘There isn’t one, dude. Isn’t that amazing?” And we ended up getting it on in a service elevator while he looked at I-pods.
No bookshop. And on Boxing Day 5000 people rioted over clothes at Next. Can you imagine there being a riot over books at Foyles or Blackwells? No. Who are these people that shop here? Brent Cross’ marketing slogan is ‘Feed Your Addiction”. Brent Cross got what it deserved. Consumer-junkies fighting each other for .... stuff. It’s just stuff, dude.
Last week a guy tripped over a marble stone border surrounding a coffee outlet on Level 1, and I was called because he’d started shouting at it, calling it names, and threatening it. He didn’t want his girlfriend to see him beaten by a step. People that shop here are the kind of people that pick fights with stone. “No inanimate object is going to make me look like an idiot.” That’s why there’s no need for a bookshop here. It’s like hell.
Once, when I was a kid, I walking along the beach, I saw three dolphins just offshore, so I stripped off and ran into the sea, and they raced alongside me for what seemed like hours, even though it was only a few minutes. I think I have to leave London, and go home. There isn’t even a bookshop in the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Come on! What’s that all about?
Brent Cross was talking to Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2007-03-27T16:57:41+01:00
Brent Cross is a security guard at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. He is 37 years old and was born in Wellington, New Zealand. I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up working at Brent Cross. I was born to Mr and Mrs Peter Cross, in New Zealand in 1970, two British hippies who washed up on the South Island in the 60’s. They named me Brent, but it wasn’t until I came to Wembley to live in a cereal box with three other kiwis that I even knew there was a place called Brent Cross. I called up my Dad and I said “Dad, did you know there was a big shopping centre in London called Brent Cross?” and he just cracked up. I suppose they were having a joke at my expense right from the start. You have to admire their patience. My Mum and Dad, they were playing a looooong game. And then one day, I saw an advert – “Brent Cross. Security Guard Wanted.” Now, I never wanted to be a security guard, but I like reading and figured I could probably take a book to work, and it was like that little card was calling me, by name. When I arrived for my first day at Brent Cross I had a uniform and a name badge saying “Brent Cross. Brent Cross.” One day, one of the old guys said, “I’ve been coming into Brent Cross every day for thirty years and I’m sick of it” and everyone pointed at me and laughed. The other guys in the flat – Daveo, Keitho and Steveo - kept pinning up headlines from London papers on the fridge door – “Brent Cross to be refurbished”, “£50 000 spent on Brent Cross’ toilets”, “Brent Cross to be extended...
The Imaginary Comedy Cabal? Frankie Boyle, Mock the Week’s Russell Howard, Dara O’Briain, Hugh Dennis and Andy Parsons, and Stewart Lee. Photograph: guardian
Last Saturday, I took my children on a tour of the Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden. I explained to them that they were going to visit the magical headquarters of an ancient secret society, to blow their childish minds. Be honest. Don’t you wish I was your dad? Where’s your dad taken you this weekend? The Cumberland Pencil Museum? Barometer World? The Morpeth Bagpipe Centre?
Sadly, the temple and museum were closed that day, as the freemasons were assembled within, deciding the future of the world. But, luckily for my disappointed children, suddenly hundreds of freemasons streamed from the temple into Covent Garden, each dressed in trademark black suit, and carrying a little bag just big enough to hold his apron, his dagger and some Shippam’s fish paste sandwiches from his freemason mum, in case he got hungry while manipulating global events.
One friendly freemason engaged my three-year-old, who was dressed as Dracula, in banter about her outfit, rich coming from a man who moments before was blindfolded in a pair of one-legged trousers, like the singer from Imagination. Nonetheless, I wished I could be a member of a secret society that controlled the destiny of nations. Then I remembered. I already am!
Accused last week by the disappointed standup Andrew Lawrence, star of Radio 4 and all TV standup shows, of being biased in favour of talentless women and “ethnics”, and by Nigel Farage of the Ukips of representing a liberal media elite of Ukips-hating luvvies, British comedy is having its Pastor Niemöller moment. “First they came for the immigrants, but I did not speak out because I was not an immigrant. Then they came for Lenny Henry, but I did not speak out because I was not Lenny Henry. And then they came for the TV panel-show comedians – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As long ago as the 19 July 2011, Jan Moir of the Daily Mail posited the existence of a shadowy and “deeply unpleasant cabal of foul-mouthed leftwing comics”, so secretive that her stupid article was only able to name two members of it – me, and Frankie Boyle, a man I have met only once – and disappeared from the paper’s website within days due to its actionable idiocy. Besides, I wouldn’t want to belong to any deeply unpleasant cabal that would have me as a member.
Andrew Lawrence. Photograph: Idil Sukan
Last Thursday, in the regular column he has in the Independent as part of the biased liberal media’s attempt to silence him, Nigel Farage similarly asserted that the Ukips were targeted by a liberal elite of relentless bores and opined: “While I’m used to the ire of the PC-brigade, it must be disconcerting for [Andrew Lawrence] to be embroiled in all of this for speaking his mind.”
The truth is that, in our comedy community, everyone I met, including all the black and Asian comics I worked with last week, expressed genuine and sympathetic concern for their colleague Andrew Lawrence’s mental wellbeing. (Could I just point out here that I met three black and Asian people I am friendly with on the live circuit last week just by chance. I wasn’t going around with a quota to firm up my liberal credentials, even though it was, admittedly, next on my “to do” list.)
Jokes about the Ukips are, according to Farage, “low-hanging fruit” for people who misunderstand the Ukips. “Aren’t comedians supposed to be witty and subversive?” he asked, before citing four comedians – Carlin, Pryor, Mayall and Rivers – our generation should learn from. All four are conveniently recently dead, otherwise they would be involved in the same kind of panicked damage-limitation exercises currently performed by any musician David Cameron confesses fondness for.
You don’t need to be part of a liberal media elite controlling the flow of information to find the Ukips funny. They are funny because David Silvester said gay marriage had caused flooding in the Thames basin; because Godfrey Bloom assaulted a reporter with a conference brochure and condemned aid to “bongo bongo land”; because their celebrity Mike Read sang a pro-Ukips calypso in a West Indian accent; because William Henwood said Lenny Henry should emigrate to a “black country”; because Winston McKenzie has the fame-crazed air of a man who would join a Skrewdriver tribute band if he thought it would get him on Channel 5 news; and because the Ukips’ deputy leader, Paul Nuttalls, is so pleased to be the centre of attention he sports the perpetual expression of a baby that has just used a potty for the first time, holding up his arse muck delightedly for his parents to coo over.
(Note: Any deceased liberal 18th-century newspaper cartoonists interested in elaborating upon this idea should take care to label the potty “BRITISH POLITICS”, while the poo itself should have a tiny flag marked “UKIPS” planted in it. The baby himself, of course, should be wearing a Union Jack top hat, holding a pint and smoking a cigar.)
Oddly, despite Farage’s and Lawrence’s criticism of positive discrimination in favour of liberals, talentless women and unfunny “ethnics”, the current trend, made explicit by the departing head of BBC radio comedy, is towards positive discrimination in favour of rightwing comedians, the dearth of talent in the field making it hard to maintain balance. This is an exercise in politically correct social engineering I myself am guilty of when I programme standup bills, tours and cable television showcases. I am as delighted to find a funny rightwinger as I am to find a funny person with a terrible disability or a bewildering sexual orientation, and when I find one I treasure and nurture them.
Even a member of the imaginary liberal comedy cabal would rather watch a funny rightwing standup on a panel than have to listen to the honking of Katie Hopkin again. Sadly Henning Wehn, Simon Evans and Liam Mullone, the only three right-of-centre standups funny enough to fulfil the brief, can’t do all the jobs, so the spaces are filled with non-comedian columnists such as Rod Liddle and Daniel Finkelstein, who reap the benefits of this blatant pro-rightwing tokenism in an act of political correctness gone mad.
The Ukips’ position on comedy is, like so many things, ill-thought out. In March, Paul Nuttalls called for Johnny and the Baptists to be banned from any venue receiving public subsidy – basically everywhere – for doing a funny song about the Ukips, even though the same places host Jim Davidson, Roy Chubby Brown, John Gaunt and Top Gear; the same week Farage defended the booking of an old-school non-PC comic at the Ukips’ conference saying: “Let people tell their jokes! If what they say is inappropriate they won’t earn a living.” But the position that there is no moral dimension to comedy and that the free market should be its only arbiter, while consistent with Nuttalls’ plan to scrap the “uncompetitive” NHS, is at least preferable to the one Farage now occupies, namely that satire should be silenced by his exaggerated victimhood.
Deputy Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, aka Paul Nuttalls. Photograph: Fabio De Paola
There is no liberal comedy cabal. At least there wasn’t a week ago. But maybe Farage has created one. I don’t speak for comedians. They all hate me. And Lawrence and Farage do have unlikely supporters in standup. But last Thursday, on the day Farage’s Independent rant ran, I was doing a homeless benefit with five other acts – an Asian man, a black woman, an Australian woman, a man who was Irish, and a poor bald man with a terrible speech impediment who only gets gigs out of sympathy. I, a white middle-class man, was the only normal person on the bill, and the only one who had got into the show by his own merits. Nonetheless, by sheer coincidence, three of the acts ended up talking about race, prejudice and the Ukips (I myself talked only about urine). That night, threatened as we are now by the rise of a party that wants to see satire silenced, their routines seemed powerful, bold, relevant, vital, alive, dangerous and electrifying.
So. Let this Imaginary Liberal Comedy Cabal will itself into existence. And when our liberal grandchildren ask us: “What did you do in the war, grandperson of indeterminate gender?” we can say: “I said Paul Nuttalls was like a baby doing a poo.” Come at us. For we are slayers, of gigantic melancholy and gigantic mirth, coming hither, killing the rooms, night after night, microphones in hand. And we will crush your constituencies under our sandalled feet. We will see you driven before us like the dust, and scattered to the four winds. And we will hear the mewling of your followers, and we will rejoice in the lamentations of your German women.
Stewart Lee
2014-11-05T13:05:32+00:00
The Imaginary Comedy Cabal? Frankie Boyle, Mock the Week’s Russell Howard, Dara O’Briain, Hugh Dennis and Andy Parsons, and Stewart Lee. Photograph: guardian Last Saturday, I took my children on a tour of the Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden. I explained to them that they were going to visit the magical headquarters of an ancient secret society, to blow their childish minds. Be honest. Don’t you wish I was your dad? Where’s your dad taken you this weekend? The Cumberland Pencil Museum? Barometer World? The Morpeth Bagpipe Centre? Sadly, the temple and museum were closed that day, as the freemasons were assembled within, deciding the future of the world. But, luckily for my disappointed children, suddenly hundreds of freemasons streamed from the temple into Covent Garden, each dressed in trademark black suit, and carrying a little bag just big enough to hold his apron, his dagger and some Shippam’s fish paste sandwiches from his freemason mum, in case he got hungry while manipulating global events. One friendly freemason engaged my three-year-old, who was dressed as Dracula, in banter about her outfit, rich coming from a man who moments before was blindfolded in a pair of one-legged trousers, like the singer from Imagination. Nonetheless, I wished I could be a member of a secret society that controlled the destiny of nations. Then I remembered. I already am! Accused last week by the disappointed standup Andrew Lawrence, star of Radio 4 and all TV standup shows, of being biased in favour of talentless women and “ethnics”, and by Nigel Farage of the Ukips of representing a liberal media elite of Ukips-hating luvvies, British comedy is having its Pastor Niemöller moment. “First they came for the immigrants, but I did not speak out because I was not an immigrant. Then they came for...
Alan Moore is best known for his comics classics such as V for Vendetta and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but his latest work takes him into different territory: Jerusalem is a prose novel that, at 600,000 words, is longer than the Bible - and is a vast celebration of his relatively small home town of Northampton.
In a Guardian Live event recorded in London, Moore explains his project to comedian Stewart Lee.
Stewart Lee
2016-11-07T21:42:18+00:00
Alan Moore is best known for his comics classics such as V for Vendetta and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but his latest work takes him into different territory: Jerusalem is a prose novel that, at 600,000 words, is longer than the Bible - and is a vast celebration of his relatively small home town of Northampton. In a Guardian Live event recorded in London, Moore explains his project to comedian Stewart Lee.
This mini-newsletter is intended to cover weekly extras in the current slew of stuff related to me. The absence of anything should not be seen as an indication of its cancellation.
Everything will be covered in the next big monthly or weekly newsletter, including final line-ups for ATP at Prestatyn 15-17 April, which isn’t cancelled, and Edinburgh and Autumn dates. In the meantime...
Tonight 9th of March 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.]
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.
My wife Bridget Christie takes her A Book For Her tour to your town.
March 2016
17th - Warwick Arts Centre, COVENTRY - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 02476 524524 TICKETS
21st - Everyman Theatre, LIVERPOOL - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0151 709 4776 TICKETS
22nd - The MAC, BIRMINGHAM - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0121 4463232 TICKETS
April 2016
13th - Memorial Hall, SHEFFIELD - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0114 2789 789 TICKETS
14th - WYP Courtyard, LEEDS - 7.45pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0113 213 7700 TICKETS
18th - Gulbenkian Theatre, CANTERBURY - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01227 769075 TICKETS
19th - Corn Exchange, EXETER - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01392 665938 TICKETS
20th - Ropetackle Arts Centre, SHOREHAM BY SEA - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01273 464440 TICKETS
21st - The Dukes, LANCASTER - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01524 598500 TICKETS
25th - The Junction, CAMBRIDGE - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01223 511511 TICKETS
26th - The Stables, WAVENDON, MILTON KEYNES - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01908 280800 TICKETS
27th - North Wall Arts, OXFORD - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01865 319450 TICKETS
28th - Theatre Severn, SHREWSBURY - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01743 281281 TICKETS
May 2016
3rd - The Mercury, COLCHESTER - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01206 573948 TICKETS
4th - Playhouse, NORWICH - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01603 598598 TICKETS
5th - Tobacco Factory, BRISTOL - 8pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0117 9020344 TICKETS
9th - Sugar Club, DUBLIN - 8.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0818 903001 TICKETS
10th - Sugar Club, DUBLIN - 8.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0818 903001 TICKETS
11th - Glee Club, CARDIFF - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0871 472 0400 TICKETS
12th - Corn Exchange, BRIGHTON - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 01273 709 709 TICKETS
Stewart Lee
2016-03-17T12:59:49+00:00
This mini-newsletter is intended to cover weekly extras in the current slew of stuff related to me. The absence of anything should not be seen as an indication of its cancellation. Everything will be covered in the next big monthly or weekly newsletter, including final line-ups for ATP at Prestatyn 15-17 April, which isn’t cancelled, and Edinburgh and Autumn dates. In the meantime... Edinburgh Dates On Sale https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/stewart-lee-content-provider I am at the stand with a work-in-prog called Content Provider, 5th – 28th August, 12.45pm. Tickets went on sale today. SLCV Series 4 This continues on BBC2 tonight March 17th at 10pm. BBC2. BBC page for the series with clips & links to iPlayer episodes (after broadcast) is here. Global Globules with Baconface Tonight 9th of March 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.] Next week’s show covers the music of Japan. The last three weeks’ shows can be heard here.. http://www.baconfacecanada.com/listen/ 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. http://www.baconfacecanada.com | https://www.resonancefm.com BRIDGET CHRISTIE TOUR My wife Bridget Christie takes her A Book For Her tour to your town. March 2016 17th - Warwick Arts Centre, COVENTRY - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 02476 524524 TICKETS 21st - Everyman Theatre, LIVERPOOL - 7.30pm - A BOOK FOR HER - 0151 709 4776 TICKETS 22nd - The MAC,...
In this episode, Louis speaks to comedian, writer and 41st best stand-up ever, Stewart Lee.
Stewart tells Louis about taking aim at “Netflix comedians” in his new show, Stewart Lee vs. The Man-Wulf, what went wrong at a disastrous gig at the Royal Albert Hall, and what Elon Musk doesn't understand about comedy.
Stewart Lee
2026-03-24T13:04:12+00:00
In this episode, Louis speaks to comedian, writer and 41st best stand-up ever, Stewart Lee. Stewart tells Louis about taking aim at “Netflix comedians” in his new show, Stewart Lee vs. The Man-Wulf, what went wrong at a disastrous gig at the Royal Albert Hall, and what Elon Musk doesn't understand about comedy.
Comedian Stewart Lee, 42, was one half of a successful 1990s double act with Richard Herring. He co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera before returning to stand-up in 2007 with a series of critically acclaimed shows. He has just written a new book.
What’s your book about?
It’s the transcripts of three stand-up shows I did between 2004 and 2007 with notes explaining what was behind it. It was interesting to see what things even from five years ago I wouldn’t do again.
Such as?
Certain jokes. There was a lot of stuff in the 2004 show about American complicity in Iraq but because there’s allegations of us doing torture I couldn’t write that now without thinking about what our own country has done.
The book starts with you contemplating giving up stand-up. Why was that?
I was getting bad reviews, touring around to do shows no one came to and I couldn’t write anything. I went down really badly one night in Liverpool and thought: ‘I can’t do this any more.’ I stopped for four years. Richard Herring and I had done our fourth tour and we hadn’t turned a profit after four months on the road. I had a sense of pointlessness about it all. It was the end of a difficult period.
So why did you give it another go?
A lot of what I thought of as limitations of stand-up suddenly seemed like advantages after working on Jerry Springer: The Opera. You can write something in the morning and perform it that night. I thought I could mess with the format more and decided instead of being really popular I should aim for the people who liked me and I’d be alright. It suddenly seemed really simple whereas Jerry Springer: The Opera didn’t add up financially. I thought if I could just get 4,000 people to see me once a year I’d be all right.
Was it hard to get motivated?
Some comics make films or write books about going back to stand-up – like Frank Skinner going back after doing chat shows for ten years – but they didn’t need to, it was a sentimental journey for them. That wasn’t the case for me. I was 36, everything I’d done hadn’t worked out. It mattered a bit more. It wasn’t for fun. I got to the point where it was too late to do anything else and nothing I’d done had worked out so this time it had to. It had also become easier to get through to the people who liked me via the internet rather than having to spend money on publicity.
Was trying to be popular a mistake?
Comedy was supposed to be the new rock ’n’ roll in the 1990s. After Newman and Baddiel played Wembley there was this thought that the sky was the limit for everyone but there is a top limit to what I do, 90 per cent of people won’t like me. I had to realise that. Instead of someone promoting me as the next big thing I had to realise I was never going to be that and make a living out of what I did. My TV show might have got 1million viewers but that means 59million didn’t watch it. People find me boring. I had to find the minority of people who didn’t and get them to help.
Have you got a typical fan?
When I was touring with Tony Law he’d laugh his head off at the audiences. We’d get to frightening towns in the middle of nowhere and every Guardian reader in that town would be in the audience. When I go to a town I go to the comic shop, the independent record shop and the independent book shop and the people behind the counters usually have tickets to my show. It’s usually pretentious self-satisfied outsiders with funny hair. That’s what I like.
Do you ever get mistaken for anyone?
So many – Terry Christian, Roland Gift from the Fine Young Cannibals, Ali Campbell from UB40, Todd Carty from EastEnders, Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl, Mark Lamarr – I have genuinely been mistaken for all those people at some point. Anyone with a chubby face and a quiff.
How I Escaped My Certain Fate is out now published by Faber, £12.99
Stewart Lee
2010-08-17T12:33:35+01:00
Comedian Stewart Lee, 42, was one half of a successful 1990s double act with Richard Herring. He co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera before returning to stand-up in 2007 with a series of critically acclaimed shows. He has just written a new book. What’s your book about? It’s the transcripts of three stand-up shows I did between 2004 and 2007 with notes explaining what was behind it. It was interesting to see what things even from five years ago I wouldn’t do again. Such as? Certain jokes. There was a lot of stuff in the 2004 show about American complicity in Iraq but because there’s allegations of us doing torture I couldn’t write that now without thinking about what our own country has done. The book starts with you contemplating giving up stand-up. Why was that? I was getting bad reviews, touring around to do shows no one came to and I couldn’t write anything. I went down really badly one night in Liverpool and thought: ‘I can’t do this any more.’ I stopped for four years. Richard Herring and I had done our fourth tour and we hadn’t turned a profit after four months on the road. I had a sense of pointlessness about it all. It was the end of a difficult period. So why did you give it another go? A lot of what I thought of as limitations of stand-up suddenly seemed like advantages after working on Jerry Springer: The Opera. You can write something in the morning and perform it that night. I thought I could mess with the format more and decided instead of being really popular I should aim for the people who liked me and I’d be alright. It suddenly seemed really simple whereas Jerry Springer: The Opera didn’t add up financially. I...
When the Frenchman Yann Tambour released his previous records as Thee Stranded Horse he was attempting mystery in a second language. Forgive Tambour. He plucks cascades of twinkling notes from a twenty-one string Kora, and his studiously subdued vocals, in French and English, now suggest the timeless tunes of some travelling Medieval troubadour, rather than the pre-natal blues of West Africa, a move North newly supported by suitably sparse string accompaniment.
The Malian Kora player Ballake Sissoko throws a fluttering coda over Shields, raising a bar that Tambour almost reaches himself in the extended closer, Halos, all visionary declamations and potent silences.
Stewart Lee
2011-04-09T21:53:09+01:00
When the Frenchman Yann Tambour released his previous records as Thee Stranded Horse he was attempting mystery in a second language. Forgive Tambour. He plucks cascades of twinkling notes from a twenty-one string Kora, and his studiously subdued vocals, in French and English, now suggest the timeless tunes of some travelling Medieval troubadour, rather than the pre-natal blues of West Africa, a move North newly supported by suitably sparse string accompaniment. The Malian Kora player Ballake Sissoko throws a fluttering coda over Shields, raising a bar that Tambour almost reaches himself in the extended closer, Halos, all visionary declamations and potent silences.
Like many disappointed parents throughout the UK, on Wednesday morning I received the following letter from Father Christmas’s official address, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ.
“Ho! Ho! Ho! It is I, Father Christmas. I am writing to you to update you on the steps we are taking to maintain The Magic of Christmas ™ ® during the pandemic. I believe it was I who said, ‘I see you when you’re sleeping and I know when you’re awake. I know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.’ But this year I shall not be seeing you when you are sleeping and I will not know if you are awake. Because this year, I will not be coming.
“On Monday, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, Zoomed me to say that my annual distribution of free toys represented an unacceptable socialist intervention in the marketplace. According to Sunak, my magic elves who slave for pies and my reindeer delivery team that circumvents all border trade tariffs were not operating on a level playing field, undercutting genuine businesses.
“I suggested this approach was the very essence of his party’s vision for the post-Brexit trading environment, making me simply a buccaneering Santa, banishing workers’ rights and red tape in a race to the bottom, in pursuit of economic competitiveness. But Sunak resorted to emotional manipulation, requesting that, in a year when hard-working retailers need all the business they can get, due to the twin wrecking balls of Covid-19 and the possible no-deal Brexit, I desist immediately from my financially disruptive activities in the name of maintaining the economy.
“I was weighing up his request when I suddenly received a telephone call from the shambling culture-war golem Ben Bradley, Conservative MP for Mansfield, saying he knew for a fact children sold their Christmas gifts to get money for crack dens and brothels and that I was a snowflake. ‘Mr Bradley,’ I said, astounded, ‘what in the name of Christmas is wrong with snowflakes? They are simply beautiful. If you cannot see the magic of snowflakes, then how can you be expected to understand The Magic of Christmas ™ ®? You Tory cunt! Ho fucking ho!’
“But though I should love to defy the Conservative government and deliver your children gifts as usual this Christmas, the sad fact remains that my supply chains have been broken by the virus and it has not been safe for my elves to slave in my workshop in anywhere near enough numbers to meet demand. On top of that, I am a 1,750-year-old Turkish saint with high blood pressure and a heart condition and it is not advisable for me to enter the bedrooms of millions of children undetected and make my deposits on their bedspreads. If indeed it ever was.
“Nonetheless, I am determined that between us, we can preserve The Magic of Christmas ™ ®. We must allow the sleeping youngsters to believe that I have visited them, even though I have not. This is why I am giving you, mums and dads, these simple instructions. You must delve deep into your depleted savings and buy for your own children the very gift you would usually have expected me to bring. You must conceal it somewhere safe around your home. Before your children go to bed, you must make a great show of leaving out a selection of treats, a carrot for Rudolph and a nice single malt whisky and a mince pie for me. You must avoid having to answer questions about how many mince pies I eat in a single night. But if you have particularly precocious children, you must tell them that, like that of Christ, my body is subject to the laws of the early Christian doctrine of Docetism; namely that my physicality is illusory and so, even if I eat pies and drink spirits in copious amounts all Christmas Eve long, I am not required to perform the expected biological processes of either digestion or defecation.
“And if your child should counter you, pointing out that this doctrine was unequivocally rejected at the First Council of Nicaea in 325AD and is regarded as heretical by the Catholic church, Eastern Orthodox church and Coptic Orthodox church of Alexandria, you must explain that many Protestant denominations accept and hold to the statements of these early church councils and that, indeed, there is a desire within the mystical fringes of the Catholic community to reset the church to the values and beliefs of its earliest incarnations. And then you must remind them that they must go to sleep or else Santa will not come.
“When your children are asleep you must creep in and conceal their gift, now housed in a pillowcase or sack, on or near their bed. Then you must dispose of the supposed Santa food, perhaps leaving a few convincing pie crumbs, carrot shards and whisky dregs, to make it look as if I consumed the complimentary snack in something of a hurry, having so many homes to visit.
“Your trusting child will wake up in the morning, delighted with my gift, thinking I have visited, when in fact, this year, it was actually you, the parents, all along, carrying out perhaps the greatest subterfuge ever. And if this deception works, then maybe we can do it every year. I am getting old. The world warms and the snow melts and soon there will be no snowbound workshop for me to work in and no reindeer for me to ride. Take back control! I am handing you the reins. You are the sovereigns of your own Christmases. But, I urge you, please, to stay at home, protect The Magic of Christmas ™ ® and save lives. And remember, never trust a Tory! Father Christmas.”
Stewart Lee
2020-12-20T18:23:05+00:00
Like many disappointed parents throughout the UK, on Wednesday morning I received the following letter from Father Christmas’s official address, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ. “Ho! Ho! Ho! It is I, Father Christmas. I am writing to you to update you on the steps we are taking to maintain The Magic of Christmas ™ ® during the pandemic. I believe it was I who said, ‘I see you when you’re sleeping and I know when you’re awake. I know if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.’ But this year I shall not be seeing you when you are sleeping and I will not know if you are awake. Because this year, I will not be coming. “On Monday, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, Zoomed me to say that my annual distribution of free toys represented an unacceptable socialist intervention in the marketplace. According to Sunak, my magic elves who slave for pies and my reindeer delivery team that circumvents all border trade tariffs were not operating on a level playing field, undercutting genuine businesses. “I suggested this approach was the very essence of his party’s vision for the post-Brexit trading environment, making me simply a buccaneering Santa, banishing workers’ rights and red tape in a race to the bottom, in pursuit of economic competitiveness. But Sunak resorted to emotional manipulation, requesting that, in a year when hard-working retailers need all the business they can get, due to the twin wrecking balls of Covid-19 and the possible no-deal Brexit, I desist immediately from my financially disruptive activities in the name of maintaining the economy. “I was weighing up his request when I suddenly received a telephone call from the shambling culture-war golem Ben Bradley, Conservative MP for Mansfield, saying he knew for a fact...
The main link between these two short monologues, which can be seen separately, is the relative fame of their writers, Mark Ravenhill and Stewart Lee, and the novelty in seeing them ‘act’ – I use inverted commas because, in the event, only one them even gives that a proper go.
In ‘Product: World Remix’, Ravenhill plays a film executive pitching a story to a star actress. He’s a vile, lubricious sort of creature, given to aggrandisement and bullshit, and he’s very funny. The movie he is pitching, ‘Mohammed and Me’, is seven hacks’ attempt at representing the ideological conflict between the West and radical Islam while packing in a lot of sex and explosions. There’s a lot of fun satire on Western veniality, in the midst of which even the stunted diatribes of terrorist and lover Mohammed acquire a haunting persuasiveness. All good – even if it goes on a bit.
Stewart Lee’s ‘What Would Judas Do?’ on the other hand goes as quick as you like. The story of Judas as told by Judas, as a stand-up piece, it could be more joke-packed, and as a piece of theatre, it could have something more about it. Those expecting sacrilege will have little to rage at. Lee presents Judas as an everyday bloke, with Lee’s own bathetic approach and a nice line in audience participation. Like Tim Rice before him, he sees Judas as a revolutionary pragmatist who thought Jesus was going astray, and he gets good fun from analysing some of Christ’s sillier utterances.
Get into what Lee is actually trying to say and you find yourself a little lost. Lee doesn’t seem that interested in Judas himself: there’s no real idea, for example, of the fervour that leads him to suicide. Nor is there any hint of why it matters what Judas’s motivations were. In the end, I suppose, it works as a reminder that the things we’re liable to be told ’bout the Bible aren’t necessarily right. But I think we knew that.
Stewart Lee
2007-01-15T20:16:08+00:00
The main link between these two short monologues, which can be seen separately, is the relative fame of their writers, Mark Ravenhill and Stewart Lee, and the novelty in seeing them ‘act’ – I use inverted commas because, in the event, only one them even gives that a proper go. In ‘Product: World Remix’, Ravenhill plays a film executive pitching a story to a star actress. He’s a vile, lubricious sort of creature, given to aggrandisement and bullshit, and he’s very funny. The movie he is pitching, ‘Mohammed and Me’, is seven hacks’ attempt at representing the ideological conflict between the West and radical Islam while packing in a lot of sex and explosions. There’s a lot of fun satire on Western veniality, in the midst of which even the stunted diatribes of terrorist and lover Mohammed acquire a haunting persuasiveness. All good – even if it goes on a bit. Stewart Lee’s ‘What Would Judas Do?’ on the other hand goes as quick as you like. The story of Judas as told by Judas, as a stand-up piece, it could be more joke-packed, and as a piece of theatre, it could have something more about it. Those expecting sacrilege will have little to rage at. Lee presents Judas as an everyday bloke, with Lee’s own bathetic approach and a nice line in audience participation. Like Tim Rice before him, he sees Judas as a revolutionary pragmatist who thought Jesus was going astray, and he gets good fun from analysing some of Christ’s sillier utterances. Get into what Lee is actually trying to say and you find yourself a little lost. Lee doesn’t seem that interested in Judas himself: there’s no real idea, for example, of the fervour that leads him to suicide. Nor is there any hint of why...
When I am stationed abroad as a stand-up, in New York, Montreal or Melbourne, I spend hours searching for venues showcasing the kind of sounds that are right here on my doorstep all along. London, and specifically North London, is the best place for free-improvised music in the world, and the saxophonist Evan Parker is now the scene’s elder statesman. Even if you don’t think you know him, you may yet have heard him, floating glacially through Scott Walker’s Climate Of The Hunter album, collaborating with left-field rock types like Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, or Spring Heel Jack, or staffing the absurdly overqualified house band on Vic Reeves’ early 90’s I Will Cure You collection, which is where I first failed to notice him. His London Jazz Festival appearance next week is with the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble he formed in the mid-90’s, still looking for new challenges. I’ve probably seen Parker perform thirty or so times, in various permutations, over the last ten years, and the fact that he’s usually playing somewhere around N16 once a month is one of the reasons that makes life in London worth living.
I don’t really know anything about Evan Parker as a person. It was only whilst writing this piece I found out that he was born the same day as me, the 5th of April, 24 years previously, in 1944, in Bristol, eventually pitching up in London in the late 60’s. I’m an avid reader of musicians’ biographies, and I write music reviews and the odd feature for a newspaper, but I’ve never felt the urge to swot up on Evan Parker. Press releases for musicians detail their disastrous lives, as if providing supporting notes to justify their work, but when I sit and watch Evan Parker, instead of struggling to work out how the music fits together, or what it might have to say about the artist, or to the listener, I find I’m simply transported. In the best possible way, Evan Parker’s music doesn’t make me think of anything. I don’t find I’m editing filmic images to it in my head. It doesn’t sound angry, even when at its most clattering or abrasive. And it doesn’t move me to introspective reflection, even in moments of apparent lyricism. And yet often it provokes joyful laughter, or stifled sobs. I remember a solo performance on New Year’s Day at Stoke Newington’s old Vortex club once that will simply stay with me for ever. The American jazz avant-garde of the 60’s, like the European cathedral builders of the middle ages, mistook their own innate abilities for the voice of God speaking through them. At the same time, Parker and his British contemporaries, Derek Bailey, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, co-authored a similar sound that came without subtext. What’s going on? I don’t know. Part of me hopes I never find out.
Much free-improvised music requires, initially, a certain suspension of disbelief from the newcomer, a degree of trust that all this heads-bowed scraping is really working towards something, a faith in the credentials of the players. But when you watch Evan Parker blow, even during a lengthy improvisation that initially seems unformed, his prowess is so immediately obvious that you feel instantly in safe hands. Lead on. We’ll follow. Evan Parker gigs are the ones I take sceptics to when I want to convince them free-jazz is worth the investment. I’ve never known anyone leave anything less than stunned. I know there are anxieties within the free-jazz community that Parker’s concessions to tonality betray some of the movement’s first principles, but this is a chink that lets in the uninitiated. The saxophone is second only to the guitar as being an instrument that has nothing left to say, the shiny life-preserver that rock musicians reach for when they need a meaningful solo to add n impression of emotional content, but Parker redeems it nightly.
In the flesh, Parker has a monastic quality. He’d look good in a Franciscan robe feeding bread to small birds, with twigs stuck in his beard. And when you wonder what the point of life is, sometimes his sets seem to answer the question. Over a timescale of elephantine proportions, the monoscerous gets better at the special thing that he does. When The Vortex Jazz club was threatened with closure four years ago, I helped out with fundraising largely because I didn’t want to lose the luxury of having Evan Parker perform regularly on my doorstep, when if I lived anywhere else I’d be shelling out to see him state-subsidised auditoriums. This is one of the things you tend to take for granted about London. There are great artists, here with us, right now, and they’re probably performing for peanuts in your post code.
THE BARE FACTS
EVAN PARKER
1944 Born 5th of April, in Bristol
1966 Leaves Birmingham university for London and joins the Spontaneous Music Ensemble with John Stevens and Derek Bailey.
1970 Founds Incus records with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley.
1971 Forms the Alexander von Schlippenbach trio was Schlippenback on piano and Paul Lovens on percussion.
1980 First recordings by The Evan Parker Trio with Barry Guy on bass and
Paul Lytton on percussion.
1998 First recordings with The Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
Stewart Lee
2006-11-01T19:32:15+00:00
When I am stationed abroad as a stand-up, in New York, Montreal or Melbourne, I spend hours searching for venues showcasing the kind of sounds that are right here on my doorstep all along. London, and specifically North London, is the best place for free-improvised music in the world, and the saxophonist Evan Parker is now the scene’s elder statesman. Even if you don’t think you know him, you may yet have heard him, floating glacially through Scott Walker’s Climate Of The Hunter album, collaborating with left-field rock types like Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, or Spring Heel Jack, or staffing the absurdly overqualified house band on Vic Reeves’ early 90’s I Will Cure You collection, which is where I first failed to notice him. His London Jazz Festival appearance next week is with the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble he formed in the mid-90’s, still looking for new challenges. I’ve probably seen Parker perform thirty or so times, in various permutations, over the last ten years, and the fact that he’s usually playing somewhere around N16 once a month is one of the reasons that makes life in London worth living. I don’t really know anything about Evan Parker as a person. It was only whilst writing this piece I found out that he was born the same day as me, the 5th of April, 24 years previously, in 1944, in Bristol, eventually pitching up in London in the late 60’s. I’m an avid reader of musicians’ biographies, and I write music reviews and the odd feature for a newspaper, but I’ve never felt the urge to swot up on Evan Parker. Press releases for musicians detail their disastrous lives, as if providing supporting notes to justify their work, but when I sit and watch Evan Parker, instead of struggling...
How exciting for me! I have written an introduction to Paul Hanley’s brilliant informative and funny new book about my favorite album ever, The Fall’s HEX ENDUCTION HOUR.
HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS: THE STORY OF HEX ENDUCTION HOUR
Even if it’s a fool’s errand trying to decide which is the greatest LP out of The Fall’s huge back catalogue of albums, many fanatics of the group will tell you that the worst thing you can say about Hex is that it’s their equal best at the very least. ’ – John Doran, The Quietus
Of all The Fall’s myriad long-players, Hex Enduction Hour remains one of their most highly regarded. Even the circumstances of its recording, purportedly in an abandoned cinema and a cave formed from Icelandic lava, have achieved legendary status among their ever-loyal fanbase. HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS tells the full story of the album, including how each song was written, performed and recorded. It also includes new interviews with key players.
Author Paul Hanley, who was one of The Fall’s two drummers when Hex was created, is uniquely placed to discuss the album’s impact, both when it was released and in the ensuing years. Needless to say, we’re delighted to welcome Paul back to Louder Than Words Fest for what will undoubtedly be a fascinating in conversation focused on his terrific new book
Hanley writes in his introduction to the book: ‘Because of the way The Fall worked in those days, Hex and its contents can’t be discussed in a vacuum […] While what went on during the Iceland and Hitchin sessions will inform much of what follows, documenting the making of Hex Enduction Hour isn’t like discussing Rumours, or even Blood on the Tracks: its recording was part of a process. What’s more, the Fall process often subverted the rehearse-record-tour cycle by skipping the rehearsal bit – it wasn’t unheard of for a song roughed out in a soundcheck to be part of that night’s set. The oldest song on Hex Enduction Hour was first played live as early as August 1980. The group released an LP, a six-track ‘mini-album’ and two singles before it made its way onto vinyl, but it fits Hex Enduction Hour’s atmosphere perfectly. Someone in The Fall knew what they were doing. Hopefully by the end of this you’ll have some idea too.’
It is this continuous working process – from the formation of the band that made the record, through the trip to Iceland, the key switching of record labels from Rough Trade to Kamera and the subsequent recording at The Regal in Hitchin – that is at the heart of HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS. Along the way, Hanley’s insider’s perspective busts a few myths that have surrounded the album over the years, as well as bringing fresh insights, not least of which is who is the King Shag Corpse.
The book features new contributions from key players on the album, including Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley, Marc Riley and Kay Carroll, plus producers Grant Showbiz and Richard Mazda, and Kamera’s Saul Galpern and Chris Youle and from Paul himself, we'll undoubtedly get insights and anecdotes that no-one else can match!
Stewart Lee
2019-10-05T21:15:00+01:00
How exciting for me! I have written an introduction to Paul Hanley’s brilliant informative and funny new book about my favorite album ever, The Fall’s HEX ENDUCTION HOUR. HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS: THE STORY OF HEX ENDUCTION HOUR Even if it’s a fool’s errand trying to decide which is the greatest LP out of The Fall’s huge back catalogue of albums, many fanatics of the group will tell you that the worst thing you can say about Hex is that it’s their equal best at the very least. ’ – John Doran, The Quietus Of all The Fall’s myriad long-players, Hex Enduction Hour remains one of their most highly regarded. Even the circumstances of its recording, purportedly in an abandoned cinema and a cave formed from Icelandic lava, have achieved legendary status among their ever-loyal fanbase. HAVE A BLEEDIN GUESS tells the full story of the album, including how each song was written, performed and recorded. It also includes new interviews with key players. Author Paul Hanley, who was one of The Fall’s two drummers when Hex was created, is uniquely placed to discuss the album’s impact, both when it was released and in the ensuing years. Needless to say, we’re delighted to welcome Paul back to Louder Than Words Fest for what will undoubtedly be a fascinating in conversation focused on his terrific new book Hanley writes in his introduction to the book: ‘Because of the way The Fall worked in those days, Hex and its contents can’t be discussed in a vacuum […] While what went on during the Iceland and Hitchin sessions will inform much of what follows, documenting the making of Hex Enduction Hour isn’t like discussing Rumours, or even Blood on the Tracks: its recording was part of a process. What’s more, the Fall process...
“Each shit series is like a suicide note,” Stewart Lee tells Chris Morris in the first episode of Comedy Vehicle series four; “or like someone that’s carried out a crime and written in blood on the wall, ‘Stop me before I do this again.’” The BBC clearly isn’t getting the message – notwithstanding Lee’s frequent claims to be falling out of their favour. Ah, but maybe those claims are made by the “character” Stewart Lee and not the “real” Stewart Lee. Don’t expect onstage and offstage to mark a clear distinction between the two. There are no clear distinctions in Lee’s public world. Everything’s a wind-up. Everything’s a hall of mirrors.
That was never more the case than in last night’s trailblazer for the new series of Comedy Vehicle. Billed as addressing wealth, it was more specific than that: it was about Lee’s wealth, or lack of it. Of course we expect from Lee a nitpicking analysis of the jokes he’s telling and the reaction they’re getting. But here he’s absorbed not only in the dynamics of his own standup, but in those of his career more widely. The centrepiece is a long routine about Lee’s peevish reaction to being pipped to a Bafta award by Graham Norton’s chat show. A Bafta, he says, would have helped with his money problems – the very problems that compel him to crack jokes that are beneath him, to flatter an audience he despises.
Or so he says. It’s up to us to puzzle out how much of this is heartfelt, and how much an act. (Is he pretending to care about Norton beating him to a Bafta? Or pretending to just be pretending to care? Or is that what he wants us to think?) On the one hand, that’s a fun game to play: Lee’s genius is in having plunged deeper than any other comic into the grey area between truth and fiction, the endless recursiveness of self-revelation and self-deception. That’s enjoyable for performance geeks, but it also illuminates something about human nature; our negative capability to be both miffed (in this instance) and not miffed at the same time.
I enjoy the ambiguity in these routines, without remotely understanding why anyone (the Telegraph critic who walked out; the Dublin journalist who thought he was having a breakdown) would take them seriously. If Lee came onstage dressed as a winky face emoji, he couldn’t signal more clearly that his tongue is in his cheek. The playfulness is much in evidence here – and in the best of his comedy, it’s a precipitous pleasure to be toyed with, to try and track the joke, the target and the significance between the layers of irony.
This first episode is not the best of his comedy. It made me wonder, is “the character Stewart Lee” (as Lee calls his onstage persona) in danger of elbowing the actual Stewart Lee off the stage? I’ve most enjoyed Lee when, alongside the mind-bending performative sleights of hand (all that “Brechtian alienation”, as he calls it here) there are opinions about the world too, and things he cares about – even if they’re implied, and you have to hunt them down. Here: not so much. I know the self-absorption is part of the joke, but it’s still self-absorption, and I can’t bring myself to care about (or indeed believe in) Lee’s struggle to keep hack material out of his shows. That self-pitying shtick works as a counterpoint to weightier, more outward-looking stuff. It feels just a bit thin when obliged to sustain a whole show.
I wouldn’t want to stop him before he does this again, mind you. I’m judging this first episode only by the high standards Lee has set. And even by those standards, there’s great stuff here. The viral progress of his anti-Norton rant – from blaming Bafta, to blaming Norton, to blaming James Corden – is beautifully traced. His high-handed abuse of Corden is joltingly funny – both in its shoring up of Lee’s lofty self-esteem, and as a reminder of how seldom you hear those in the gilded back-slappy celebrity club being bluntly nasty about one another. Yes, I’ve sometimes regretted that Lee’s live work these days is always cast as a rehearsal for his TV show. But we’re lucky to have the TV show, which is seldom less than brilliant, tricksy, brain-nourishing, mickey-taking good fun. Roll on the next five episodes.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-04T12:46:00+00:00
“Each shit series is like a suicide note,” Stewart Lee tells Chris Morris in the first episode of Comedy Vehicle series four; “or like someone that’s carried out a crime and written in blood on the wall, ‘Stop me before I do this again.’” The BBC clearly isn’t getting the message – notwithstanding Lee’s frequent claims to be falling out of their favour. Ah, but maybe those claims are made by the “character” Stewart Lee and not the “real” Stewart Lee. Don’t expect onstage and offstage to mark a clear distinction between the two. There are no clear distinctions in Lee’s public world. Everything’s a wind-up. Everything’s a hall of mirrors. That was never more the case than in last night’s trailblazer for the new series of Comedy Vehicle. Billed as addressing wealth, it was more specific than that: it was about Lee’s wealth, or lack of it. Of course we expect from Lee a nitpicking analysis of the jokes he’s telling and the reaction they’re getting. But here he’s absorbed not only in the dynamics of his own standup, but in those of his career more widely. The centrepiece is a long routine about Lee’s peevish reaction to being pipped to a Bafta award by Graham Norton’s chat show. A Bafta, he says, would have helped with his money problems – the very problems that compel him to crack jokes that are beneath him, to flatter an audience he despises. Or so he says. It’s up to us to puzzle out how much of this is heartfelt, and how much an act. (Is he pretending to care about Norton beating him to a Bafta? Or pretending to just be pretending to care? Or is that what he wants us to think?) On the one hand, that’s a fun game...
Comedian Stewart Lee favoured the Watford Colosseum with the debut of his new tour Stewart Lee: Digital Content Provider last Tuesday night but after railing at the audience for not laughing in all the right places he told us not to come to his show if we 'didn't know anything'.
But what does the acclaimed stand up know about our town?
His opening gambit was to say Watford lay outside the M25 and later in a blisteringly funny sequence about people under the age of 37, he went off on one about Game of Thrones but failed to reference the fact that Watford's own Kings Langley once changed its name to King’s Landing in honour of the cult fantasy series?
Don't you know anything about Watford Stewart Lee? Well actually he did refer to Pavarotti having once used the auditorium toilets but I suspect that was pre-refurb so they might not even be the same cubicles where the renowned opera singer relieved himself.
Don't come to Watford Stew if you don't know anything about Watford...
What Stewart Lee does know, however is how to perfectly hone a night of satire, political discourse, insightful social comment and downright silliness in two 45-minute segments packed full of information.
You will find out how people enjoyed bondage back in the 1930s, you'll discover the folly of the selfie-obsessed and reel with belly laughs at the retail value of DVDs made by household name comics.
Stewart is on to this though and has a scheme where he buys back his DVDs to sell for profit, hence when I made it into the queue at the end I asked him to sign my copy to Stewart Lee from Stewart Lee in the hope of boosting his profits.
Still as he continues to hone material of this original and prophetic quality I don't think he's in any danger of being out of work.
Five stars
Stewart Lee
2016-11-03T04:24:15+00:00
Comedian Stewart Lee favoured the Watford Colosseum with the debut of his new tour Stewart Lee: Digital Content Provider last Tuesday night but after railing at the audience for not laughing in all the right places he told us not to come to his show if we 'didn't know anything'. But what does the acclaimed stand up know about our town? His opening gambit was to say Watford lay outside the M25 and later in a blisteringly funny sequence about people under the age of 37, he went off on one about Game of Thrones but failed to reference the fact that Watford's own Kings Langley once changed its name to King’s Landing in honour of the cult fantasy series? Don't you know anything about Watford Stewart Lee? Well actually he did refer to Pavarotti having once used the auditorium toilets but I suspect that was pre-refurb so they might not even be the same cubicles where the renowned opera singer relieved himself. Don't come to Watford Stew if you don't know anything about Watford... What Stewart Lee does know, however is how to perfectly hone a night of satire, political discourse, insightful social comment and downright silliness in two 45-minute segments packed full of information. You will find out how people enjoyed bondage back in the 1930s, you'll discover the folly of the selfie-obsessed and reel with belly laughs at the retail value of DVDs made by household name comics. Stewart is on to this though and has a scheme where he buys back his DVDs to sell for profit, hence when I made it into the queue at the end I asked him to sign my copy to Stewart Lee from Stewart Lee in the hope of boosting his profits. Still as he continues to hone material of...
I am a stand-up comedian, and I am in the process of previewing a new live show, which I hope to tour until early 2018. It was supposed to be about how the digital, free-market society is reshaping the idea of the individual, but we are in the pre-Brexit events whirlpool, and there has never been a worse time to try to assemble a show that will still mean anything in 18 months’ time.
Saturday
A joke written six weeks ago about deporting eastern Europeans, intended to be an exaggeration for comic effect, suddenly just reads like an Amber Rudd speech – or, as James O’Brien pointed out on LBC, an extract from Mein Kampf.
A rude riff on Sarah Vine and 2 Girls 1 Cup runs aground because there are fewer people now who remember Vine than recall the briefly notorious Brazilian video clip. I realise that something that gets a cheer on a Tuesday in Harrogate, or Glasgow, or Oxford, could get me lynched the next night in Lincoln. Perhaps I’ll go into the fruit-picking business. I hear there’s about to be some vacancies.
Sunday
I sit and stare at blocks of text, wondering how to knit them into a homogeneous whole. But it’s Sunday afternoon, a time for supervising homework and finding sports kit. My 11-year-old daughter has a school project on the Victorians and she has decided to do it on dead 19th-century comedians, as we had recently been on a Music Hall Guild tour of their graves at the local cemetery. I wonder if, secretly, she wished I would join them.
I have found living with the background noise of this project depressing. The headstones that she photographed show that most of the performers – even the well-known Champagne Charlie – barely made it past 40, while the owners of the halls outlived them. Herbert Campbell’s obelisk is vast and has the word “comedian” written on it in gold leaf, but it’s in the bushes and he is no longer remembered. Neither are many of the acts I loved in the 1980s – Johnny Immaterial, Paul Ramone, the Iceman.
Monday
I would have liked to do some more work on the live show but, one Monday a month, I go to the studios of the largely volunteer-run arts radio station Resonance FM in Borough, south London. Each Wednesday night at 11pm, the masked Canadian stand-up comedian Baconface presents selections from his late brother’s collection of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s jazz, psychedelia, folk, blues and experimental music. I go in to help him pre-record the programmes.
Baconface is a fascinating character, whom I first met at the Cantaloupes Comedy Club in Kamloops in British Columbia in 1994. He sees the radio show as an attempt to atone for his part in his brother’s death, which was the result of a prank gone wrong involving nudity and bacon, though he is often unable to conceal his contempt for the music that he is compelled to play.
The show is recorded in a small, hot room and Baconface doesn’t change the bacon that his mask is made of very often, so the experience can be quite claustrophobic. Whenever we lose tapes or the old vinyl is too warped to play, he just sits back and utters his resigned, philosophical catchphrase, “It’s all bacon!” – which I now find myself using, as I watch the news, with depressing regularity.
Tuesday
After the kids go to sleep, I sit up alone and finally watch The Lady in the Van. Last year, I walked along the street in Camden where it was being filmed, and Alan Bennett talked to me, which was amazing.
About a month later, on the same street, we saw Jonathan Miller skirting some dog’s mess and he told me and the kids how annoyed it made him. I tried to explain to them afterwards who Jonathan Miller was, but to the five-year-old the satire pioneer will always be the Shouting Dog’s Mess Man.
Wednesday
I have the second of the final three preview shows at the intimate Leicester Square Theatre in London before the new show, Content Provider, does a week in big rooms around the country. Today, I was supposed to do a BBC Radio 3 show about improvised music but both of the kids were off school with a bug and I had to stay home mopping up. In between the vomiting, in the psychic shadow of the improvisers, I had something of a breakthrough. The guitarist Derek Bailey, for example, would embrace his problems and make them part of the performance.
Thursday
I drank half a bottle of wine before going on stage, to give me the guts to take some risks. It’s not a long-term strategy for creative problem-solving, and that way lies wandering around Southend with a pet chicken. But by binning the words that I’d written and trying to repoint them, in the moment, to be about how the Brexit confusion is blocking my route to the show I wanted to write, I can suddenly see a way forward. The designer is in, with samples of a nice coat that she is making for me, intended to replicate the clothing of the central figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 German masterpiece Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.
Friday
Richard Branson is on the internet and, just as I’d problem-solved my way around writing about it, he’s suggesting that Brexit might not happen. I drop the kids off and sit in a café reading Alan Moore’s new novel, Jerusalem. I am interviewing him about it for the Guardian in two weeks’ time. It’s 1,174 pages long, but what with the show falling apart I have read only 293 pages. Next week is half-term. I’ll nail it. It’s great, by the way, and seems to be about the small lives of undocumented individuals, buffeted by the random events of their times.
Stewart Lee
2016-10-28T20:36:13+01:00
I am a stand-up comedian, and I am in the process of previewing a new live show, which I hope to tour until early 2018. It was supposed to be about how the digital, free-market society is reshaping the idea of the individual, but we are in the pre-Brexit events whirlpool, and there has never been a worse time to try to assemble a show that will still mean anything in 18 months’ time. Saturday A joke written six weeks ago about deporting eastern Europeans, intended to be an exaggeration for comic effect, suddenly just reads like an Amber Rudd speech – or, as James O’Brien pointed out on LBC, an extract from Mein Kampf. A rude riff on Sarah Vine and 2 Girls 1 Cup runs aground because there are fewer people now who remember Vine than recall the briefly notorious Brazilian video clip. I realise that something that gets a cheer on a Tuesday in Harrogate, or Glasgow, or Oxford, could get me lynched the next night in Lincoln. Perhaps I’ll go into the fruit-picking business. I hear there’s about to be some vacancies. Sunday I sit and stare at blocks of text, wondering how to knit them into a homogeneous whole. But it’s Sunday afternoon, a time for supervising homework and finding sports kit. My 11-year-old daughter has a school project on the Victorians and she has decided to do it on dead 19th-century comedians, as we had recently been on a Music Hall Guild tour of their graves at the local cemetery. I wonder if, secretly, she wished I would join them. I have found living with the background noise of this project depressing. The headstones that she photographed show that most of the performers – even the well-known Champagne Charlie – barely made it past 40, while the owners of...
Stewart Lee – beloved writer, columnist and stand-up - was on the podcast in 2022 talking about the first records he bought, immensely funny and fascinating, and we’ve been praying for an excuse to get him back since. And it’s here! - he’s on tour again and his ‘Basic Lee’ show is on Sky/Now TV on July 20. This covers his first memories of live entertainment - in the audience and as a performer – and the people who influenced him and stops off at the following stations …
… why the Wombles were just like Crass.
… how he writes and tests new material.
… why Ted Chippington inspired his stand-up career.
… television comedy is now “two-screen TV” as the viewer’s always watching something else at the same time.
… how Lockdown made audiences forget how to behave.
… “Comedian In Bum Phone Fury”: how he stopped people filming his gigs.
… deliberately using negative reaction shots in his TV edits.
… improvisation in music and comedy and why every night should be unique.
… the tense protocol of comedians at other comedians’ gigs
...Mark E Smith doing things “out of necessity irrespective of how they were received” and his reaction to seeing Stewart in his audience.
… why festival crowds are a challenge.
… the Drifters, the Applejacks and Napalm Death and how they are related.
… the music playing when his son was born.
… arriving in full early Dexys rig - donkey jacket, woolly hat - to find they were now the “raggle-taggle gypsies”.
… the sole performance of Peter Richardson’s Mexican bandit act.
… Daniel Kitson, “the world’s greatest living stand-up”.
… plus the Nightingales, Chris Spedding, Clem Cattini, Kirk Brandon, the Bevis Frond, Geddy Lee, Throbbing Gristle and Brighton Psych Fest’s Secluded Bronte – “is it music or are they just moving furniture around?”
Stewart Lee
2024-06-15T15:53:56+01:00
Stewart Lee – beloved writer, columnist and stand-up - was on the podcast in 2022 talking about the first records he bought, immensely funny and fascinating, and we’ve been praying for an excuse to get him back since. And it’s here! - he’s on tour again and his ‘Basic Lee’ show is on Sky/Now TV on July 20. This covers his first memories of live entertainment - in the audience and as a performer – and the people who influenced him and stops off at the following stations … … why the Wombles were just like Crass. … how he writes and tests new material. … why Ted Chippington inspired his stand-up career. … television comedy is now “two-screen TV” as the viewer’s always watching something else at the same time. … how Lockdown made audiences forget how to behave. … “Comedian In Bum Phone Fury”: how he stopped people filming his gigs. … deliberately using negative reaction shots in his TV edits. … improvisation in music and comedy and why every night should be unique. … the tense protocol of comedians at other comedians’ gigs ...Mark E Smith doing things “out of necessity irrespective of how they were received” and his reaction to seeing Stewart in his audience. … why festival crowds are a challenge. … the Drifters, the Applejacks and Napalm Death and how they are related. … the music playing when his son was born. … arriving in full early Dexys rig - donkey jacket, woolly hat - to find they were now the “raggle-taggle gypsies”. … the sole performance of Peter Richardson’s Mexican bandit act. … Daniel Kitson, “the world’s greatest living stand-up”. … plus the Nightingales, Chris Spedding, Clem Cattini, Kirk Brandon, the Bevis Frond, Geddy Lee, Throbbing Gristle and Brighton Psych Fest’s Secluded Bronte...
Twice voted 'Funniest Comedian' on Sigma XI Stewart is torn on whether he wants Donald Trump to win the US Election (for a very selfish reason!), and has some excellent advice for anyone (say, a bin-headed count from off-world) who might be heading on their debut comedy tour.
This really is a great episode - it's so good that if you haven't yet, this is probably the one that would make you hit 'follow' so you get a new episode every week.
Enjoy!
Stewart Lee
2024-07-27T18:19:02+01:00
This week Stewart Lee is on the pod. Twice voted 'Funniest Comedian' on Sigma XI Stewart is torn on whether he wants Donald Trump to win the US Election (for a very selfish reason!), and has some excellent advice for anyone (say, a bin-headed count from off-world) who might be heading on their debut comedy tour. This really is a great episode - it's so good that if you haven't yet, this is probably the one that would make you hit 'follow' so you get a new episode every week. Enjoy!
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.
Stewart Lee
2024-04-07T14:08:58+01:00
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...
I am a travelling entertainer. I spent decades in secondhand bookshops in shabby sidestreets, filling the sick-stomach void between station and show with palliative possibility, panning for gold. Somewhere at the end of the last millennium, a few measly pounds bought me a signed first edition of the Irish travelogue The Crying of the Wind (1954), simply because I liked the accompanying archaeological etchings of its author, one Ithell Colquhoun. More than 20 years later, it’s £300 unendorsed on eBay, I got to write the introductions to the 2016 reprint, and a lifelong fascination with this most mysterious of pan-disciplinary artist-writer-mystic saw me asked to be an unworthy speaker at the launch of an exhibition pairing her paintings with work for sale by comparable contemporary artists at Unit London, Song of Songs. Colquhoun and I, it seems, are trapped in the same cramped Ford Fiesta on Google’s algorithmic roundabout, and I very much doubt she is at all happy about it. But who was Ithell Colquhoun, what inspired the fecund fleshy forms and prehistoric undulations of her work, and how is she creeping back into the collective consciousness?
Amy Hale, author of the most recent Colquhoun study, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, explains: “Historically, surrealism has been utterly dominated by big male personalities. Women were thought of as either muses or monsters who may have been artists on the side, but they can no longer be relegated to those roles. Self-promotion takes swagger and bravado. Colquhoun was quite terrible at it.”
She’s right. Your heart goes out to her. The Crying of the Wind depicts a woman in retreat from life – at one point it alludes elliptically to Colquhoun’s split from the Italian surrealist Toni del Renzio via a lone remark that her wedding ring has outlasted her marriage – and yet her story is told as if automatically, landscapes and apparently random observations doing all the heavy lifting. And Colquhoun’s artwork is rarely figuratively explicit, illustrating instead the complexities of our inner mental turbulence. For Song of Songs’ curator, Rachael Thomas, it is telling that Colquhoun’s will copyrighted her works to the Samaritans, and mental health charities are the partial beneficiaries of any Unit London sales.
Born in India to a British military family in 1906, Colquhoun splices aspects of an adopted Celtic identity with surrealist techniques. The Indo-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai, who shows five collages in Song of Songs, agrees that such cross-cultural pollination provokes an almost accidental surrealism. “I use imagery from Indian folktales, memory and oral tales passed down to me from my Guyanese Indian family. I study the patterns and palettes of Indian miniatures and textiles but am steeped in contemporary themes of gender and postcolonialism. For me the ‘accidental surrealism’ emerges through a juxtaposition of disparate materials. I reconcile my layered past through seemingly harmonic compositions. My Indian, Guyanese, Canadian and American identities create a mashup of oddities emerging from memory, myth and history and parallel Ithell’s transnational experiences.”
Clare Ormerod’s textiles shadow the occult abstractions of Colquhoun’s paintings. Years after she had become aware of Colquhoun she discovered the artist had visited her husband’s ancestral home, Huntington Castle in Ireland’s County Carlow, the cellar of which houses an ancient sacred well dedicated to St Brigid, the Catholic church’s cannibalisation of the Celtic goddess of the same name. “In the 70s my husband’s great-aunt, Oliva Robertson, initiated Ithell Colquhoun as a priestess of the Fellowship of Isis, the divine feminine religion that is based in the castle dungeons.”
This kind of information can cloud Colquhoun for me. I am not a spiritual person – I’m not even convinced that I exist, let alone any gods or goddesses – but sometimes it feels as if the once forgotten trickster surrealist is organising my existence from the great beyond. It appears the schoolboy me, for example, delivered newspapers to the Birmingham surrealist Emmy Bridgwater, the third party in Colquhoun’s failed marriage; I’ve walked the west London suburbs and west Cornwall moors where Colquhoun lived, arriving at guarded conversations with suspicious personalities connected to her; and only last Sunday, as I sat in a crowd of less than 50 in a chapel in west Wales watching the last ever live performance by the folk veteran Meic Stephens, a woman leaned forward to introduce herself as Katell Keineg, the singer due to perform with me at Song of Songs’ opening, 218 miles and five days away.
The polymath Linder Sterling’s sacred not-safe-for-work collages profanely recast Colquhoun’s collisionary assemblages, and channel a punk aesthetic Mojo readers will recognise from her work on seminal 70s sleeves like the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict. Sterling playfully calls the familiar Colquhoun coincidences I’ve experienced “the Hand of Ithell”.
She notes: “I found a large stash of Health and Efficiency magazines in a bookshop in Penzance. The naturist magazines all dated from the last years of Colquhoun’s life. Coincidence? Or the Hand of Ithell at work?” To me these odd intersections show that, despite having been with us all these years, we are suddenly noticing Ithell Colquhoun everywhere. Her time is now.
Stewart Lee
2021-10-11T15:32:54+01:00
I am a travelling entertainer. I spent decades in secondhand bookshops in shabby sidestreets, filling the sick-stomach void between station and show with palliative possibility, panning for gold. Somewhere at the end of the last millennium, a few measly pounds bought me a signed first edition of the Irish travelogue The Crying of the Wind (1954), simply because I liked the accompanying archaeological etchings of its author, one Ithell Colquhoun. More than 20 years later, it’s £300 unendorsed on eBay, I got to write the introductions to the 2016 reprint, and a lifelong fascination with this most mysterious of pan-disciplinary artist-writer-mystic saw me asked to be an unworthy speaker at the launch of an exhibition pairing her paintings with work for sale by comparable contemporary artists at Unit London, Song of Songs. Colquhoun and I, it seems, are trapped in the same cramped Ford Fiesta on Google’s algorithmic roundabout, and I very much doubt she is at all happy about it. But who was Ithell Colquhoun, what inspired the fecund fleshy forms and prehistoric undulations of her work, and how is she creeping back into the collective consciousness? Amy Hale, author of the most recent Colquhoun study, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, explains: “Historically, surrealism has been utterly dominated by big male personalities. Women were thought of as either muses or monsters who may have been artists on the side, but they can no longer be relegated to those roles. Self-promotion takes swagger and bravado. Colquhoun was quite terrible at it.” She’s right. Your heart goes out to her. The Crying of the Wind depicts a woman in retreat from life – at one point it alludes elliptically to Colquhoun’s split from the Italian surrealist Toni del Renzio via a lone remark that her wedding ring has outlasted her...
Here inside, I am losing it. I watched Carry on Screaming and enjoyed it unreservedly. My right arm seems to have stopped working, making it difficult to do Nazi salutes at the television whenever a government minister comes on. And I found myself asking a pigeon, sitting on the fence outside the kitchen window, how it was getting on in the current situation. And then answering my own question about the pigeon’s welfare myself, in a stupid Eric Idle accent, presumably the supposed voice of the pigeon, as if it were talking to me. “I’m very well thank you Stewart and as a full-time denizen of the sky I am enjoying the improvement in London’s air quality enormously. Funny how you never see baby pigeons, isn’t it?” I shut the back door and went inside to seek solace in teabags and memories.
I am glad I started out as the multiple-award-winning standup I am today on what was then the “alternative” comedy circuit, at the tail-end of the 80s, back before the bills became homogenised into our modern, TV-friendly fare. And when you were still allowed to go outside. “Remember white dog shit? Remember any dog shit at all? Remember colours? Things? Remember when each day was different to the last? The unexpected smell of farts that weren’t your own? What was that all about?”
There is much that modern comedians have noticed, it seems, and a large amount of it is common to all our experience. Or at least it was, before your experience became either being inside or struggling selflessly in underequipped hospitals for a government that appears to have abandoned you. “Is it really necessary to dissolve stock cubes or can you just chew them up as a snack? Have you ever noticed, right, that if you close your eyes and grit your teeth you can actually hear time passing in slow, throbbing waves? And have you ever noticed, right, that when you’ve been forced to work a Covid ward without any protection, if you threaten to tell anyone they say they’ll sack you? Thank you and goodnight! I’m here indefinitely!! Try the stock cubes!!!”
In the old comedy circuit days of the late 80s, I remember performing at the now demolished Red Rose, which ran out of the function room of a Labour club in Finsbury Park, on a bill with an act that didn’t even make the concession of actually appearing on the stage, its slightly raised platform being too restrictive a space, with its neocolonial lights and patriarchal microphone. Instead, the usual, heady mix of social workers and squatters had to view her in an alcove by the door as they left the venue between sets, subverting the whole idea of where a performance began and ended, questioning the relative status of audience and performer, and causing a problematic blockage in the corridor by the gents.
A naked, middle-aged woman was curled up inside a box, which was mounted on stilts and lined with vaudevillian velvet, and she had invited us to look into it through a little hole. This aperture had a powerful magnifying glass lens on it, meaning that while you saw what was obviously flesh, you could have no idea which part of the anatomy you were actually looking at. It was a great gag, the sort of thing that might have won a Turner prize if it had been presented in a more respectable venue by someone with a degree, the process presumably intending to parody our voyeuristic instincts generally, and the male gaze specifically. Technically, the desire to see the subject was fulfilled, but in such closeup as to render it completely indistinct.
It also strikes me, more than three decades later, as an unexpectedly apposite metaphor for the current situation. For who can claim, viewing the world through the smeared lens of Sky News or the thin slit of their bedroom window, to really know what the fuck is going on out there? Is that Matt Handcock’s face, or a part of a naked person’s armpit seen through a high-powered magnifying glass? Is that Donald Trump, or one of those tiny swollen bugs that lives in eyebrows, feeding on dandruff, and descends to the facemeat only to die? Is this the end of world as we know it, or just harmless dirt that has formed a hardened crust behind a human ear?
I knew the situation on the wards was worse than reported because a relative told me in emails. And I knew about the care home death tolls because another online correspondent has gone back to working in them. And a man whose record I once reviewed has reported to me from a sealed cellar in New York City. I store these particles of information for posterity, to piece into a full picture posthumously.
We squint through our apertures. Along the HS2 route, unobserved contractors baffle birds and fell trees, enabling quicker journeys between currently silent cities for business meetings that will surely be conducted remotely in the post-viral world anyway. In Whitehall, even junior ministers try to dodge the bullet of the daily briefing, a Russian roulette of inevitable humiliation, where the bloke from the LADBible website asks better questions than the castrati-courtesans of the BBC. And 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Johnson emerges from intensive care, thanks Po Ling, and leaves a hollow-socketed skull that hopes to dismantle the monolithic NHS in command instead.
Upstairs, I look out of the skylight periodically. Bin bags disappear on Tuesdays. The cranes by the reservoir rarely revolve. Last week, an Orthodox Jew walked past carrying a mini fire extinguisher. And I thought I saw Miriam Margolyes on the top deck of a bus, eating a Cornetto. But I am not sure.
Stewart Lee
2020-04-19T13:55:56+01:00
Here inside, I am losing it. I watched Carry on Screaming and enjoyed it unreservedly. My right arm seems to have stopped working, making it difficult to do Nazi salutes at the television whenever a government minister comes on. And I found myself asking a pigeon, sitting on the fence outside the kitchen window, how it was getting on in the current situation. And then answering my own question about the pigeon’s welfare myself, in a stupid Eric Idle accent, presumably the supposed voice of the pigeon, as if it were talking to me. “I’m very well thank you Stewart and as a full-time denizen of the sky I am enjoying the improvement in London’s air quality enormously. Funny how you never see baby pigeons, isn’t it?” I shut the back door and went inside to seek solace in teabags and memories. I am glad I started out as the multiple-award-winning standup I am today on what was then the “alternative” comedy circuit, at the tail-end of the 80s, back before the bills became homogenised into our modern, TV-friendly fare. And when you were still allowed to go outside. “Remember white dog shit? Remember any dog shit at all? Remember colours? Things? Remember when each day was different to the last? The unexpected smell of farts that weren’t your own? What was that all about?” There is much that modern comedians have noticed, it seems, and a large amount of it is common to all our experience. Or at least it was, before your experience became either being inside or struggling selflessly in underequipped hospitals for a government that appears to have abandoned you. “Is it really necessary to dissolve stock cubes or can you just chew them up as a snack? Have you ever noticed, right, that if you...
The usually punishing Japanese experimental doom metal trio's New Album is an unexpected set of sugary melodic dream pop, wrapped in Athena faerie artwork you might see on a twelve year old girl's pencil case.
Party Boy's electronic beats and listless female vocal approach dance floor anthem territory; Luna plunges 1990s Thames Valley shoe-gazing guitars into an Atari landscape; and the surging Spoon is licked by dubstep drum patterns.
It's an admirable effort, but will fans, hoping for another forty-five minute feedback fest, give it a thumbs down? “Hope you like our new direction! This is Takeshi. He wrote this."
Stewart Lee
2012-02-12T01:51:35+00:00
The usually punishing Japanese experimental doom metal trio's New Album is an unexpected set of sugary melodic dream pop, wrapped in Athena faerie artwork you might see on a twelve year old girl's pencil case. Party Boy's electronic beats and listless female vocal approach dance floor anthem territory; Luna plunges 1990s Thames Valley shoe-gazing guitars into an Atari landscape; and the surging Spoon is licked by dubstep drum patterns. It's an admirable effort, but will fans, hoping for another forty-five minute feedback fest, give it a thumbs down? “Hope you like our new direction! This is Takeshi. He wrote this."
‘You know those amazing occasions where a significant band’s finally unearthed first demo tape is revealed as better than anything else they ever recorded?’ go the sleeve notes to Stewart Lee’s newly-released Jazz Cellar Tape from 1989. ‘Well, this CD is not like that.’
True, but this small bit of comedy history is a fascinating curio and, despite Lee’s assertion that the set is ‘undeniably poor’, it is occasionally funny, and - more significantly – very revealing about the origins of his penchant for subverting comedy conventions.
This 27-minute set was recorded when Lee was a student of 20 in the Oxford Union’s jazz cellar. As a contemporary, I remember those Sunday-night gigs fondly if patchily. With the naitivity of youth, seeing the Oxford Revue Workshops in this intimate, smoky, low-ceiling venue seemed like belonging to an exciting, secret clique, riding the spirit of alternative comedy which, to us, still seemed fresh.
This recording – made on an old reel-to-reel tape and of the quality you might therefore expect – shows what an easily pleased audience we were. But although the jokes may be patchy there is still an unmistakably impudent, precocious attitude to Lee’s writing.
Twisting the expected formula, he gets some cheap anti-Tory cheers from what looks like a series of ‘knock, knock’ jokes, which he undermines immediately, while the riddle of why a chicken would cross the road is warped into a routine about the persecution of Iraq’s Kurds and a philosophical treatise on the meaning of life. It’s possibly more ambitious than funny, although this is clearly a young man with ideas for comedy. ‘Where have all the proper comedians gone?’ he asks, putting clear water between him and the Jimmy Tarbucks of the world; a disconnect from the mainstream he exploits to this day.
Largely his approach is similar to his contemporary persona so loved by comedy aficionados, if less sophisticated, and without the grumpy weariness of middle age that fits him so well. Talk of pulling women and being a great shag is strange, the supposed irony barely disguising the self-aggrandisement, but his comments on Christianity remain sharp.
Familiar sayings and old wives’ tales are a staple of this act, with Lee applying a superiority and logic to subjects that don’t require much in the way of life experience. Sometimes he tries to have his cake and eat it, for example by doing a deliberately poor piece of observational stand-up about the weather, but with a cheesy wink.
The content has largely weathered the intervening 22-and-a-half years well, although there is the occasional dated references to the likes of acid house (which Lee admits is already not ‘trendy’) and the Queen Mum looking well at 80. And a jibe at the undergraduates of Wadham College also shows that Lee couldn’t entirely raise his comedy scope above parochial student in-jokes.
The CD also includes a reproduction of the original poster advertising the gig (which cost 50p to Union members) and a student newspaper review of ‘Stuart’ Lee, which concludes he ‘might be bound for the host’s job in a comedy club’. And yet he’s still not a regular at Jongleurs...
Stewart Lee
2011-09-05T18:45:08+01:00
‘You know those amazing occasions where a significant band’s finally unearthed first demo tape is revealed as better than anything else they ever recorded?’ go the sleeve notes to Stewart Lee’s newly-released Jazz Cellar Tape from 1989. ‘Well, this CD is not like that.’ True, but this small bit of comedy history is a fascinating curio and, despite Lee’s assertion that the set is ‘undeniably poor’, it is occasionally funny, and - more significantly – very revealing about the origins of his penchant for subverting comedy conventions. This 27-minute set was recorded when Lee was a student of 20 in the Oxford Union’s jazz cellar. As a contemporary, I remember those Sunday-night gigs fondly if patchily. With the naitivity of youth, seeing the Oxford Revue Workshops in this intimate, smoky, low-ceiling venue seemed like belonging to an exciting, secret clique, riding the spirit of alternative comedy which, to us, still seemed fresh. This recording – made on an old reel-to-reel tape and of the quality you might therefore expect – shows what an easily pleased audience we were. But although the jokes may be patchy there is still an unmistakably impudent, precocious attitude to Lee’s writing. Twisting the expected formula, he gets some cheap anti-Tory cheers from what looks like a series of ‘knock, knock’ jokes, which he undermines immediately, while the riddle of why a chicken would cross the road is warped into a routine about the persecution of Iraq’s Kurds and a philosophical treatise on the meaning of life. It’s possibly more ambitious than funny, although this is clearly a young man with ideas for comedy. ‘Where have all the proper comedians gone?’ he asks, putting clear water between him and the Jimmy Tarbucks of the world; a disconnect from the mainstream he exploits to this day. Largely...
Stewart Lee is back on the road after three years, and he comes back wonderfully refreshed and on marvellous form with this double header, Tornado/Snowflake.
Tornado, the first hour, starts with Lee reading out the wrong blurb that his show Comedy Vehicle was given on Netflix. It actually describes the B-movie Sharknado, in which sharks rain from the sky. The joke is teased out and weaves through the hour, as he chisels away at a favourite subject in his work, his perceived standing in comedy. Would anybody notice if they tuned in to his show after reading that description?
The mention of Netflix allows Lee to ruminate on the relationship between comedic talent and commercial worth, so he names names. Of course Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr are targets, but others too. There's a set piece about US comic Dave Chappelle, which, in typical Lee style, moves from description of fact to sublimely surreal invention as he describes an evening that starts backstage at Leicester Square Theatre and results a scary chase around Soho. This being Lee, he manages to get a fine Brexit joke in the telling of the tale as well.
In Snowflake, it's Tony Parsons, Ricky Gervais (again) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge who get it in the neck. The first is demolished in a gloriously pedantic essay on grammar, while Gervais is parodied for “saying the unsayable” in a lengthy riff that has no actual words, and Waller-Bridge is ridiculed for her “discovery” of addressing the audience directly. To be fair, she doesn't claim this, but Lee nicely deconstructs the iconic status bestowed on her as he acts out how everything from Shakespeare to weather forecasters may have looked if they had not had the same lightbulb moment.
There's so much comedy packed in that one could almost miss the deeper layers of Lee's material. But it's there, in the seemingly throwaway lines, or a detail in a lengthy tale, as he makes a deep dive into the post-PC age, and what those of a liberal bent are to make of it. But he likes to wrongfoot and tease the audience: as he slyly jokes at the top of the show, his fans have been "starved of the opportunity to participate in mass agreement" since he was last on tour.
While the trademarks of Stewart Lee shows – the sarcasm, the surreal invention, the faux self-regard and obsession with his place in the comedy firmament – are very much present here, he also introduces new elements to his performance: a playful physicality and literary spoofs. Despite the Alan Bennett section, complete with a passable imitation, slightly outstaying its welcome, he's on top form and it's great to have him back
Stewart Lee
2019-11-19T12:17:19+00:00
Stewart Lee is back on the road after three years, and he comes back wonderfully refreshed and on marvellous form with this double header, Tornado/Snowflake. Tornado, the first hour, starts with Lee reading out the wrong blurb that his show Comedy Vehicle was given on Netflix. It actually describes the B-movie Sharknado, in which sharks rain from the sky. The joke is teased out and weaves through the hour, as he chisels away at a favourite subject in his work, his perceived standing in comedy. Would anybody notice if they tuned in to his show after reading that description? The mention of Netflix allows Lee to ruminate on the relationship between comedic talent and commercial worth, so he names names. Of course Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr are targets, but others too. There's a set piece about US comic Dave Chappelle, which, in typical Lee style, moves from description of fact to sublimely surreal invention as he describes an evening that starts backstage at Leicester Square Theatre and results a scary chase around Soho. This being Lee, he manages to get a fine Brexit joke in the telling of the tale as well. In Snowflake, it's Tony Parsons, Ricky Gervais (again) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge who get it in the neck. The first is demolished in a gloriously pedantic essay on grammar, while Gervais is parodied for “saying the unsayable” in a lengthy riff that has no actual words, and Waller-Bridge is ridiculed for her “discovery” of addressing the audience directly. To be fair, she doesn't claim this, but Lee nicely deconstructs the iconic status bestowed on her as he acts out how everything from Shakespeare to weather forecasters may have looked if they had not had the same lightbulb moment. There's so much comedy packed in that one could almost...
What can a sexless middle aged married man, whose life now consists mainly of watching Scooby Doo cartoons with a four year old boy, possibly find to write comedy about?
Formerly stand-up's youthful iconoclast, Lee now gawps blankly at News 24 as Britain burns down around him, and blinks weirdly at the vast wayside retail outlets during endless journeys to and from increasingly indistinct provincial theatres.
Once he lived on the pleasure planet.
Now he is trapped in Carpet Remnant World.
And so are you.
Lee's new DVD will feature a live recording (from Sheffield, Lyceum Theatre) of the 2012 show 'Carpet Remnant World' and some really good extras.
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T19:56:54+00:00
What can a sexless middle aged married man, whose life now consists mainly of watching Scooby Doo cartoons with a four year old boy, possibly find to write comedy about? Formerly stand-up's youthful iconoclast, Lee now gawps blankly at News 24 as Britain burns down around him, and blinks weirdly at the vast wayside retail outlets during endless journeys to and from increasingly indistinct provincial theatres. Once he lived on the pleasure planet. Now he is trapped in Carpet Remnant World. And so are you. Lee's new DVD will feature a live recording (from Sheffield, Lyceum Theatre) of the 2012 show 'Carpet Remnant World' and some really good extras.
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?
Stewart Lee
2015-04-12T09:31:01+01:00
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...
Miranda Sawyer - The Observer, Sunday 19 August 2012
For those who prefer their music clever and obscure, Stewart Lee took us through the higgledy-piggledy homemade beginnings of UK electronic music in A Sound British Adventure.
I've heard a version of this story several times on Radio 4; Lee managed to make it seem fresh.
There was something charmingly anorak-like about BBC Radio 4's A Sound British Adventure, comedian Stewart Lee's homage to early British electronic music makers. Hunkered away in sheds and studios around the country, and mostly using surplus military electrical equipment, these boffins developed highly individual new sound genres, each with their own distinct style and sense of creative purpose.
They included Desmond Leslie, who achieved notoriety not only for co-writing the book Flying Saucers Have Landed, but also for punching Bernard Levin on That Was The Week That Was, after the writer criticised a play featuring Leslie's wife.
Funding was never available for the research of their electronic output, but, with the advent of new technology in the home, companies needed a fitting, futuristic sound as a backing track for commercials to create the aura of a brave new world.
The eerie, metallic sounds fitted perfectly. Programme producers were initially suspicious of the radical new 'music', and it wasn't until early 1963 that an electronic-based signature tune was used, for the children's puppet-based show Space Patrol. Later that year, the very first series of Doctor Who aired, complete with its now iconic opening theme.
To quote one contributor, "jaws dropped". It sounded like it came from another world, and it did - the eccentric, talented and weird world of the early electronic sound 'scientists'.
Now, when most music has an electronic element, it might seem strange to refer to 'electronic music'. However, it is a very distinct genre, referring to music created largely from tape loops, tone generators and other synthesised sounds.
For many, the term will be synonymous with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which produced a great deal of famous radio and TV music, including Delia Derbyshire's original version of the Doctor Who theme, but Britain had a thriving electronic music scene away from the BBC studios at Maida Vale too.
Introduced by stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, who billed himself as 'the only radio-friendly E-list celebrity the producers could find who had been to a Stockhausen concert', A Sound British Adventure paid homage to pioneers inside and outside the BBC. Many of the pioneers were demobbed servicemen and women, taking advantage of military surplus equipment to create noises that could be turned into music. The arrival of magnetic tape in the late 1940s made it possible to edit, reverse, speed up and slow down sounds.
Many of the most futuristic and ethereal sounds were created simply. The popping of a cork or snapping of a wooden ruler on a desk could be recorded, pitchshifted and, with painstaking editing, formed into a melody line.
Unsurprisingly, such dedicated activity attracted eccentrics. One of them, Desmond Leslie, is best remembered for a non-musical achievement, as he was the man who stepped forward from the audience of That Was The Week That Was in 1962 and punched Bernard Levin live on air. He was avenging a stinking review given by Levin to his wife, actress and singer Agnes Bernelle. So, it was nice to be reminded of the hinterland behind his ongoing notoriety.
So many television documentaries now are full of irrelevant interviewees and the same old clips, as well as being blighted by smirking narration. The people interviewed in this programme were either the composers themselves or acknowledged experts, and the clips were rare and interesting, while Lee's narration was unobtrusive and affectionate.
My only complaint is that half an hour for this documentary was too short.
As with so much in life, the British and the French had startlingly different approaches to the early days of electronic music. Over in Paris 60 years ago, the national broadcaster embraced the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and his peers with premises, money and an immensely grand department name. Here in the UK, as A Sound British Adventure made clear, the only places to hear comparable bleeps and glurps were the sheds of demobbed chaps who had grown fond of the weird noises from their radio sets during the war.
Chaps such as Desmond Leslie, a former Spitfire pilot and early UFO expert. (He also punched Bernard Levin on live television, but that's another story.) And Tristram Carey, a former Navy man, whose years of monkeying about with military surplus kit finally paid off when he became, in 1955, the first man commissioned by the BBC to produce a piece of original electronic music, to accompany a radio play (about the atomic bombing of Japan).
And, as we heard, what an eerie soundtrack it still is. Yet as narrator Stewart Lee reminded us in this diverting dip into the archives, the BBC - and its orchestras - were wary of these pioneers. Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe established the BBC Radiophonic Workshop rather in spite of their employers. Doctor Who and its famous theme tune notwithstanding, some of the most memorable snatches of electronic music were used by advertisers on ITV to sell washing machines (wonder music for a wonder device!).
But an avant-garde is nothing without a bitch-fest, and some of the spiciest put-downs came from a prime mover of the movement. Peter Zinovieff was the British inventor who devised the VCS3 synthesizer that Pink Floyd used to swirly effect on Dark Side of the Moon. Oram, he told us impishly in a 40-year-old recording, he found "rather dull". He was "much more interested in Stockhausen coming round than Paul McCartney - [who] came for lunch a couple of times". It's safe to say, I think, that Zinovieff hasn't got Crazy Frog for his mobile ring tone.
The Mail On Sunday & The Daily Mail
The Radio Times
Stewart Lee
2012-08-01T20:03:55+01:00
Miranda Sawyer - The Observer, Sunday 19 August 2012 For those who prefer their music clever and obscure, Stewart Lee took us through the higgledy-piggledy homemade beginnings of UK electronic music in A Sound British Adventure. I've heard a version of this story several times on Radio 4; Lee managed to make it seem fresh. Derek Smith - The Stage, 23rd August 2012 There was something charmingly anorak-like about BBC Radio 4's A Sound British Adventure, comedian Stewart Lee's homage to early British electronic music makers. Hunkered away in sheds and studios around the country, and mostly using surplus military electrical equipment, these boffins developed highly individual new sound genres, each with their own distinct style and sense of creative purpose. They included Desmond Leslie, who achieved notoriety not only for co-writing the book Flying Saucers Have Landed, but also for punching Bernard Levin on That Was The Week That Was, after the writer criticised a play featuring Leslie's wife. Funding was never available for the research of their electronic output, but, with the advent of new technology in the home, companies needed a fitting, futuristic sound as a backing track for commercials to create the aura of a brave new world. The eerie, metallic sounds fitted perfectly. Programme producers were initially suspicious of the radical new 'music', and it wasn't until early 1963 that an electronic-based signature tune was used, for the children's puppet-based show Space Patrol. Later that year, the very first series of Doctor Who aired, complete with its now iconic opening theme. To quote one contributor, "jaws dropped". It sounded like it came from another world, and it did - the eccentric, talented and weird world of the early electronic sound 'scientists'. Louis Barfe - Lady.co.uk - 24th August 2012 Now, when most music has an...
Philosophers delight in the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, a cat that is both inside a box and outside a box at the same time. (Ironically, the somewhat scatty Erwin Schrödinger himself had forgotten that he owned two identical cats, one of which liked boxes while the other hated them, explaining his confusion.) One day, philosophers will also discuss the idea of Schrödinger’s Rwanda: a place at once so awful that the very thought of being deported there will deter asylum seekers from crossing the Channel and yet simultaneously so brilliant that asylum seekers should be delighted to be sent there with no possibility of ever coming back to the UK. The human traffickers who send people across the Channel are despicable. And so their victims, many of them already having enjoyed torture and abuse at home, must be further punished by being deported to Rwanda. It’s an illogicality that Alice in Wonderland would have seen through in an instant. And so did the European court of human rights. Off with their heads!
It’s very early on a Thursday morning and I am still tapping away, alone with black coffee and toast. Reality is kaleidoscoping. I could have filed this week’s so-called “funny column” ™ ® at midday yesterday, 18 hours ago, as I have every right so to do. But I fell asleep listening to Priti Patel dissembling on Rwanda, following prime minister’s questions at lunchtime, after she was trapped in a net made of hard facts and human decency by her opposite number, Yvette Cooper. Nyaaagh! It burns! It burns!! I’m melting!!!
The home secretary was as boring and repetitive, and yet oddly relaxing, as the short cycle of diaphanous library music they pipe in to soundtrack the jellyfish display at the Sea Life Aquarium. But Priti’s Theme was written entirely in Black Sabbath Tony Iommi tritones and played by ghouls on xylophones made from the ribcages of the Kabul embassy dead. I woke up halfway through and thought I had died and gone to hell. No brimstone. No fire. Just listening to tape recordings of Patel while standing waist deep in a lake of coffee. For ever. Could be worse. And then a bell rings and the devil shouts: “All right lads, coffee break’s over. Back on your heads!” I’m here all week! Try the chicken igisafuria!! Don’t forget to tip your Private Security Contractor!!! Their focus is on treating the people in their care with dignity and respect and they are confident that their officers have acted professionally!!!!
It was lucky I didn’t submit today’s “comedy” early, as a lot has happened since lunchtime: the EU has begun legal action against the UK over our criminal abandonment of the Northern Ireland protocol; our prime minister has confirmed that he is considering withdrawing Britain, like our economic and kleptocratic soulmate Russia, from the European court of human rights; and the prime minister’s ethics adviser, the pork belly windsock known as Lord Geidt, realised his time was up and quit his post, having at last grown a vestigial tail (to call it a spine would be generous).
Geidt finally agreed that Johnson’s, and his cronies’, wine and Abba antics may have broken the ministerial code or at the very least a child’s garden swing. Suddenly, an afternoon is a long time in politics. Hopefully, Johnson will manage to soldier on bravely without someone to advise him on ethics. It would be awful if, without a moral mentor, Johnson were to suddenly find himself lying, cheating and repeatedly breaking international law.
Under normal circumstances, any one of these bombshells would have blown up the news cycle and made my columnist job easy. Roll out the barrel and hand me the blunderbuss! These fish are toast!! But this kind of chaos seems calculated. Numerous event-shits are tossed by hand into the news-fans from different angles and critical onlookers are too busy dodging the foul splatterings to remember Partygate and the missing billions the Brexit government has funnelled through the pandemic into the pockets of friends and donors. Look! Over there!! Our old enemy Europe!!! With its snails and its sauerkraut and its “human rights”.
On Monday, future city square statue subject and stained-glass windowed national saint-in-waiting Carole Cadwalladr survived legal persecution by Leave.EU’s Arron Banks. More links between Russia and the desirously destabilising goal of Brexit were highlighted. But even this didn’t really register in the wider news-scape. What’s a soupçon of Russian influence between friends? It’s not like Banks was flying back drunk from private parties at the villa of the subsequently Johnson-ennobled son of a KGB agent. Is distracting from this sort of thing just what the Rwandan deportation programme is for? Fly, my pretties, fly!
The deportation flight to Rwanda was always a win-win situation for the Brexit government, whether it left the tarmac or not. Schrödinger’s cat gives us Schrödinger’s Rwanda, which in turn gives us Schrödinger’s Dead Cat, a policy that succeeds even if it fails. If the asylum seekers were shipped out illegally, that plays well to the worst aspects of the Brexit government’s base. And if they weren’t, that gives the Brexit government, the comforts of the EU suddenly looking dangerously desirable, another range of Orwellian enemies – do-gooding lawyers, lefty charity activists, European “late-night” judges and the very idea of “human rights” itself.
The pockets of protesters currently engaged in street battles against police officers forced to carry out snatch raids on immigrants are a last line of defence against a Home Office that cannot be trusted to act ethically. Your children study the rise of Hitler in history and are asked how the people of 30s Germany allowed their country to slide into fascism. Well, now we can tell them. Kids, look out of the classroom window. It was like this...
Stewart Lee
2022-06-19T19:54:45+01:00
Philosophers delight in the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, a cat that is both inside a box and outside a box at the same time. (Ironically, the somewhat scatty Erwin Schrödinger himself had forgotten that he owned two identical cats, one of which liked boxes while the other hated them, explaining his confusion.) One day, philosophers will also discuss the idea of Schrödinger’s Rwanda: a place at once so awful that the very thought of being deported there will deter asylum seekers from crossing the Channel and yet simultaneously so brilliant that asylum seekers should be delighted to be sent there with no possibility of ever coming back to the UK. The human traffickers who send people across the Channel are despicable. And so their victims, many of them already having enjoyed torture and abuse at home, must be further punished by being deported to Rwanda. It’s an illogicality that Alice in Wonderland would have seen through in an instant. And so did the European court of human rights. Off with their heads! It’s very early on a Thursday morning and I am still tapping away, alone with black coffee and toast. Reality is kaleidoscoping. I could have filed this week’s so-called “funny column” ™ ® at midday yesterday, 18 hours ago, as I have every right so to do. But I fell asleep listening to Priti Patel dissembling on Rwanda, following prime minister’s questions at lunchtime, after she was trapped in a net made of hard facts and human decency by her opposite number, Yvette Cooper. Nyaaagh! It burns! It burns!! I’m melting!!! The home secretary was as boring and repetitive, and yet oddly relaxing, as the short cycle of diaphanous library music they pipe in to soundtrack the jellyfish display at the Sea Life Aquarium. But Priti’s Theme was...
The great thing about Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, now in its deadpan fourth season, is that there are no extreme physical challenges involved in it; just extreme intellectual ones. You'd have thought that there wasn't much usefully innovative you could do with stand-up (and I don't mean take it on a hike across the north of England), but Lee and his script editor Chris Morris, whose reputation goes before him, proved that, well, there is: a masterful reinvention of the witty aside.
The mordant joyfully mated with the whimsical; and post-post-post modern interviews of Lee by Morris. Every frame of the Comedy Vehicle is freeze-dried to ironic perfection, containing more layers than a mille-feuille pastry, a textural delight. This is something to watch and something for your brain to work out on, while your bum is planted firmly on the sofa, a lager in your hand, let us say.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-17T22:04:56+00:00
The great thing about Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, now in its deadpan fourth season, is that there are no extreme physical challenges involved in it; just extreme intellectual ones. You'd have thought that there wasn't much usefully innovative you could do with stand-up (and I don't mean take it on a hike across the north of England), but Lee and his script editor Chris Morris, whose reputation goes before him, proved that, well, there is: a masterful reinvention of the witty aside. The mordant joyfully mated with the whimsical; and post-post-post modern interviews of Lee by Morris. Every frame of the Comedy Vehicle is freeze-dried to ironic perfection, containing more layers than a mille-feuille pastry, a textural delight. This is something to watch and something for your brain to work out on, while your bum is planted firmly on the sofa, a lager in your hand, let us say.
My best New Year’s Eve was 15 years ago. A mis-calibrated dose of prescription painkillers in a bed and breakfast near Wootton Courtenay meant I slept through the whole thing. I slept through the fear. I slept through the dread. I slept through the recriminations and regrets. And I slept through Jools Holland insisting on playing inappropriate boogie-woogie piano with – who will it be this year? – Peter Brötzmann, Napalm Death, Youssou N’Dour, Mark and Roxanne from LadBaby, or the future festive ghost of his own grinning self.
This New Year’s Eve I lay on my back in the garden, long after midnight, belly full of Butty Bach™ ® beer and mini Quorn™ ® sausages, and looked at the stars. Do they have elections on those distant worlds, I wondered? Is there an alien Dominic Cummings, and if so, how would you know? Does the alien Sir Iain Duncan Smith eat his own mucus in public like our Earth Sir Iain, or does he just eat crisps? On Alien Sir Iain’s world is crisp-eating considered disgusting, while finger-picked mucus is the cuisine of the Princesses of Mars? And is that the space Jennifer Arcuri dancing round the Pole Star? Remember her? Thought not.
Sniffing the air, I suddenly realised I had accidentally laid my head in fox excrement. I did not know what I should do. Beat the fox responsible to death with a Remain-voting baseball bat, while cross-dressed in a kimono, like a sick metropolitan elitist? Or wear red and white finery and harry it with hounds, before tearing its body to shreds and smearing its blood upon a nearby child’s crying face, like a rural Tory voter merely upholding an ancient tradition threatened by political correctness gone mad? (Delete as applicable to suit your social and political prejudices.)
Then I regained my composure, and simply lay there in the wet dark, the year yet young around me, grinding my head into the fox faeces, mashing it luxuriously into my precious remaining hairs. 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ Get-Brexit-Done Johnson is prime minister. And I may be lying in the garden with fox excrement in my hair, but I’m looking up at the stars.
Apparently, the communications satellites that now clog the skies mean astronomers and astrophysicists will soon have their view of outer space fatally obscured. But we need those communication satellites. Otherwise how would we know, for example, quite how many people were disgusted by the presence of two black children in the new Worzel Gummidge, and by association the size of the Venn diagram overlap between fans of magic talking scarecrows and White Supremacists?
“It’s unrealistic to say black people live in the countryside, even if they are orphans who have been sent there. The countryside is where magic talking scarecrows live. Not fantasy black people,” they crow. The online debate about the Great Replacement Theory in action at Scatterbrook Farm echoes out into the spaceways for ever, a cosmic memorial to mankind’s noblest sentiments.
I squint upwards. Something shoots across the sky. Is it Turds, spaffing up the wall of the heavens, just because he can? Is there anyone out there at all? Presumably those far-distant alien minds, immeasurably superior to ours, are about to have their observation of us permanently suspended too, unless they can see through the satellite screen. Among their final views of our world will have been Turds hiding in a fridge, public nosepicker Sir Iain Duncan Smith celebrating his knighthood with a fingerful of fresh green, and all life on Earth drowning and choking and burning to death in real time all around us, flapping like an expiring fish, stranded on a beach.
Sadly, the curious aliens will never know how our story ends, though they could have a reasonable guess that it won’t end well. I close my eyes in the new year night and inhale the heady musk, a fox faeces visionary. In the crystal ball of my mind, Australian boat people flounder in the channel in cork-decorated hats, and sunburnt cockneys scrabble at the recently fortified Scottish border for the last of the Highland Spring. Turds is in a dream home in New Zealand, making jokes in Latin as he heads to the shelter with a young researcher on one arm and a nervous rescue dog on the other. “Veni, vidi, vici!”
But who is to blame for the aliens’ view of Earth being blocked? It is, in part, a man called Elon Musk, who is a billionaire genius philanthropist and not a brand of aftershave with both aphrodisiac and organ-elongation properties. Elon Musk is always included on Dad’s Christmas list, alongside novelty socks, a Liam Neeson DVD and a Liam Gallagher album. Mother was exhausted on Boxing Day. Father had been at the Elon Musk again.
The billionaire genius philanthropist Elon Musk, of SpaceX, is like a rubbish DC Comics copy of the billionaire genius philanthropist Tony Stark, of Stark Industries, from Marvel Comics’ Iron Man. “What is this Musk character’s company called?” asks the editor, to a desk-chained cartoonist, who has already signed away all his rights. “SpaceX,” he replies. “Will that do?”
Musk’s SpaceX company is about to shoot 40,000 satellites skyward, enhancing broadband, but blocking astronomers’ view of the universe, and dotting the same heavens our ancestors marvelled at with tens of thousands of artificial points. It’s New Year’s Day. The sky is lightening. As I struggle to stand I realise I am now the weight of a middle-aged man who suddenly dies at the wheel of a Ford Focus in a local newspaper report. So I make a resolution. And one by one the stars all go out.
Stewart Lee
2020-01-05T16:57:50+00:00
My best New Year’s Eve was 15 years ago. A mis-calibrated dose of prescription painkillers in a bed and breakfast near Wootton Courtenay meant I slept through the whole thing. I slept through the fear. I slept through the dread. I slept through the recriminations and regrets. And I slept through Jools Holland insisting on playing inappropriate boogie-woogie piano with – who will it be this year? – Peter Brötzmann, Napalm Death, Youssou N’Dour, Mark and Roxanne from LadBaby, or the future festive ghost of his own grinning self. This New Year’s Eve I lay on my back in the garden, long after midnight, belly full of Butty Bach™ ® beer and mini Quorn™ ® sausages, and looked at the stars. Do they have elections on those distant worlds, I wondered? Is there an alien Dominic Cummings, and if so, how would you know? Does the alien Sir Iain Duncan Smith eat his own mucus in public like our Earth Sir Iain, or does he just eat crisps? On Alien Sir Iain’s world is crisp-eating considered disgusting, while finger-picked mucus is the cuisine of the Princesses of Mars? And is that the space Jennifer Arcuri dancing round the Pole Star? Remember her? Thought not. Sniffing the air, I suddenly realised I had accidentally laid my head in fox excrement. I did not know what I should do. Beat the fox responsible to death with a Remain-voting baseball bat, while cross-dressed in a kimono, like a sick metropolitan elitist? Or wear red and white finery and harry it with hounds, before tearing its body to shreds and smearing its blood upon a nearby child’s crying face, like a rural Tory voter merely upholding an ancient tradition threatened by political correctness gone mad? (Delete as applicable to suit your social and political...
Stewart Lee was on fire tonight, the best I’ve seen him in years (and I’ve seen him a lot). Freed of the need to road-test material for his now cancelled Comedy Vehicle TV show, he’s gone back to the longform set structure that made him comfortably the best comedian in the country. He was at pains to point out that whilst he started writing a show last year that dealt with the individual in a digital world, first Brexit and then Trump derailed his plans and caused him to rework it. He was also astute on the difficulties of finding comedy in a subject like Brexit, which even among his ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ audience, is divisive. He didn’t waste much time fretting about that, though, explaining that not everybody who voted to Leave was a racist. “Some of them were just cunts”.
The first half of the set roamed across the pre-Brexit wasteland, hitting upon everything from Michael Gove and Sarah Vine (“the Neil and Christine Hamilton for the ‘Two-Girls-One-Cup generation”) to Eamonn Holmes, memorably portrayed as “Murdoch’s dustbin condom truffle pig”. The second-hand cost of live stand-up DVDs on Amazon (1p for most comedians, considerably more for Lee’s because he buys them all up to sell at his shows, thus inflating prices) explained the tottering piles of DVD cases arranged behind him (the sole other prop, a print of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, became relevant much later). There was a point where it looked like he was leaning a little too heavily on his long-established device of playing different segments on the audience against each other – still funny but far from fresh – but this was kept to a minimum; thankfully there was still plenty of his self-proclaimed “pretentious, self-aware meta-textual shit”.
The second half of the set started beautifully, mirroring his Brexit opening with reference to Trump (“not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist…”) but stayed closer to the original intention for the material, looking at our increasingly atomised lives via glorious attacks on Game Of Thrones (“Peter Stringfellow’s Lord Of The Rings… Bilbo Baggins At Spearmint Rhino”), ‘the Russells’ (Russell Howard in particular), and young people in general, “with their Japanese cat face satchels drinking yoghurt from a pouch”, leading to an excruciatingly protracted sight of Lee clawing at an imaginary mobile phone, face contorted (the previous night’s show had seen him confiscate an audience member’s phone and shove it into his underpants for half the set). The final segment of the show – which critiqued lazy consumerism by comparing the ease of buying a Taiwanese sex fist from Amazon with the S&M efforts of his grandparents in the thirties, forced to hand craft sex harnesses from twine and straw and use potato sacks as gimp masks – was impossibly funny. Finally – and with a twisted logic - we were left with the image of Lee, clad in a cloak atop the hillock of DVDs, shrouded in dry ice, recreating the Friedrich painting whilst wielding a selfie stick at the audience.
Untouchable.
Stewart Lee
2017-05-25T13:09:51+01:00
Stewart Lee was on fire tonight, the best I’ve seen him in years (and I’ve seen him a lot). Freed of the need to road-test material for his now cancelled Comedy Vehicle TV show, he’s gone back to the longform set structure that made him comfortably the best comedian in the country. He was at pains to point out that whilst he started writing a show last year that dealt with the individual in a digital world, first Brexit and then Trump derailed his plans and caused him to rework it. He was also astute on the difficulties of finding comedy in a subject like Brexit, which even among his ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ audience, is divisive. He didn’t waste much time fretting about that, though, explaining that not everybody who voted to Leave was a racist. “Some of them were just cunts”. The first half of the set roamed across the pre-Brexit wasteland, hitting upon everything from Michael Gove and Sarah Vine (“the Neil and Christine Hamilton for the ‘Two-Girls-One-Cup generation”) to Eamonn Holmes, memorably portrayed as “Murdoch’s dustbin condom truffle pig”. The second-hand cost of live stand-up DVDs on Amazon (1p for most comedians, considerably more for Lee’s because he buys them all up to sell at his shows, thus inflating prices) explained the tottering piles of DVD cases arranged behind him (the sole other prop, a print of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, became relevant much later). There was a point where it looked like he was leaning a little too heavily on his long-established device of playing different segments on the audience against each other – still funny but far from fresh – but this was kept to a minimum; thankfully there was still plenty of his self-proclaimed “pretentious, self-aware meta-textual shit”. The...
With their britches bursting with gags, Sir Walter Raleigh (Miles Jupp) and Queen Elizabeth (Simon Munnery) pull off this glorious display of costumed silliness, following the story of the Queen's relationship with her favourite courtier.
Jupp's dashing Raleigh and Munnery's pernickety queen do credit to that quintessentially British obsession with dressing up as our ancestors and ridiculing them, and both actors were on top form.
Seeing the pair break character as their own laughter on stage got too much for them was hilarious, especially as Elizabeth force fed Raleigh his beloved mashed potatoes while they sang 'You Don't Bring Me Flowers' to each other, and he knelt at the block in England boxer shorts.
Pure showmanship and brilliant entertainment.
With their britches bursting with gags, Sir Walter Raleigh (Miles Jupp) and Queen Elizabeth (Simon Munnery) pull off this glorious display of costumed silliness, following the story of the Queen's relationship with her favourite courtier. Jupp's dashing Raleigh and Munnery's pernickety queen do credit to that quintessentially British obsession with dressing up as our ancestors and ridiculing them, and both actors were on top form. Seeing the pair break character as their own laughter on stage got too much for them was hilarious, especially as Elizabeth force fed Raleigh his beloved mashed potatoes while they sang 'You Don't Bring Me Flowers' to each other, and he knelt at the block in England boxer shorts. Pure showmanship and brilliant entertainment. Udderbelly's Pasture, 31 Jul - 25 Aug, 10.35pm (11.35pm), prices vary tw rating 4/5’
I have tried to avoid knowing anything about the revelations in Prince Harry’s book, so that I could use the privilege of these column-inch opportunities to ridicule something more significant. But the Harry headlines snigger from the newsagent shelves, elegant sirens shouting about sex and drugs but in the gruff tones of high-street newspaper vendors. Readallabahtit!
“Prince Harry admits he had frostbitten penis when he was best man at William and Kate’s wedding,” exclaims the Daily Record. The topical radio comedy hack writer I was 33 years ago kicks in. “Frostbitten penis. Wow! That was an extravagant wedding menu! Were the gangrenous testicles off? Was there no sunburned anus?” But of course, a quick search of social media reveals that the infinite number of monkeys of the general public have already made an infinite number of monkey variations on this joke, and with far greater speed than we professional satirists, still tilling the arid soil of legacy media, winding up the letterpress to hand-crank out our already irrelevant opinion guano.
The Sun’s headline “Harry: I did coke and weed” invites the more infantile among us to imagine the word “weed” is a verb, suggesting the luxury cocaine Harry enjoyed made him lose control of his royal bladder, and it conjures other headline possibilities. “Harry: I did speed and puked.” “ Harry: I did ketamine and shat.” And my own favourite: “Harry: I did LSD and realised we are all essentially just molecules of energy drifting in a meaningless cosmos and should love one another. And then weed and puked and shat.”
“She treated me like a young stallion,” wails the Daily Mail, on the subject of Harry losing his virginity to an older “woman who loved horses” in a field behind a pub. I envy the exploited prince. I lost my virginity to an older horse who loved women in a pub behind a field. But then I am not a prince.
“Harry declares: ‘I killed 25 Taliban fighters,’” the same paper announced later. Except he didn’t “declare” it. He said the figure gave him no satisfaction and he’d prefer to live in “a world without war”. But the Taliban interior minister’s aide, Anas Haqqani, has tweeted: “Mr Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans.” Thanks to press misrepresentation it now looks like Prince Harry is on the Taliban kill list. He should take some consolation from the fact that they think he is called “Mr Harry”. If assassins put that into Google they will be directed to a hair and beauty salon in Droitwich. Mr Harry’s offers “something for everyone, including barbering, ladies’ hairdressing, restyles and tints”, all treatments that are sure to anger already inconvenienced Islamist fundamentalists even further.
The Daily Express announces: “Kirstie Allsopp says Harry and Meghan are ‘in bed with the devil’.” The devil here appears to be whey-faced ITV News at Ten host Tom Bradby, but Lucifer is cunning and takes unexpected forms. In June last year, Allsop swallowed an Apple AirPod that she thought was a vitamin pill, but was able to regurgitate it unaided, exactly the sort of skill that, not so very long ago, would have seen her accused of being a handmaiden of Satan.
A cynic would say the Harry headlines are a useful tool for the rightwing press, or “the press” as it is more accurately known, to distract attention from the unfolding twin disasters of the Tory Brexit and the Tory governments they urged their readers to support. I know Gran just died in a puddle of her own urine in a hospital corridor but look! Over there!! A frostbitten penis!!!
Because while the papers poke the prince, Boris Johnson’s 2020 Covid fantasy – “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” – has become a reality many times over, not in the plague pits of the pandemic, but in the A&E departments of a National Health Service that his party have run into the ground. How sad Johnson must be that it is backstabbing Sunak that gets to take the credit for his fever dream made flesh. Those dead bodies had Johnson’s name on them!
The NHS staff must now be demonised and blamed. Where once we clapped for them, now we must clap for the hardworking thinkers at the thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, who have been thinking hard for years about how best to outsource determinedly defunded NHS operations to profit-making companies. They are the real heroes here.
As the health service collapses, and public support for striking workers across many different fields grows, the Conservatives must be delighted that Prince Harry’s revelations are filling the spaces. There’s a lot of bad news that needs burying right now and where better to bury it that beneath a rancid pile of royal revelations?
It seems most likely for example, despite Defra’s alternative truths, that the mass die-off of all marine life in the Brexit-voting heartlands between Hartlepool and Whitby was caused by chemicals disturbed during preliminary work on the proposed Teesside Brexit Benefit Bullshit Freeport. The livelihoods of Brexit-voting fishers are destroyed. Johnson, whose lies pushed Brexit through, has the blood of thousands of crustaceans on his hands, and not for the first time, as suppressed photos of the 1987 Bullingdon Club’s Seafood Sextacular event show. But that Times headline telling us all about the Brexit crab catastrophe will never cut through a cloud of frostbitten penises and horse-loving Mrs Robinsons. Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!
Maybe some good will come of all this. In destroying the royal family for ever, Harry may yet succeed where Oliver Cromwell failed.
Stewart Lee
2023-01-15T21:58:42+00:00
I have tried to avoid knowing anything about the revelations in Prince Harry’s book, so that I could use the privilege of these column-inch opportunities to ridicule something more significant. But the Harry headlines snigger from the newsagent shelves, elegant sirens shouting about sex and drugs but in the gruff tones of high-street newspaper vendors. Readallabahtit! “Prince Harry admits he had frostbitten penis when he was best man at William and Kate’s wedding,” exclaims the Daily Record. The topical radio comedy hack writer I was 33 years ago kicks in. “Frostbitten penis. Wow! That was an extravagant wedding menu! Were the gangrenous testicles off? Was there no sunburned anus?” But of course, a quick search of social media reveals that the infinite number of monkeys of the general public have already made an infinite number of monkey variations on this joke, and with far greater speed than we professional satirists, still tilling the arid soil of legacy media, winding up the letterpress to hand-crank out our already irrelevant opinion guano. The Sun’s headline “Harry: I did coke and weed” invites the more infantile among us to imagine the word “weed” is a verb, suggesting the luxury cocaine Harry enjoyed made him lose control of his royal bladder, and it conjures other headline possibilities. “Harry: I did speed and puked.” “ Harry: I did ketamine and shat.” And my own favourite: “Harry: I did LSD and realised we are all essentially just molecules of energy drifting in a meaningless cosmos and should love one another. And then weed and puked and shat.” “She treated me like a young stallion,” wails the Daily Mail, on the subject of Harry losing his virginity to an older “woman who loved horses” in a field behind a pub. I envy the exploited prince. I lost...
Working from a barn in Kent, Postgate and Firmin produced some of the best-loved children's television of the 1960s and 1970s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor The Engine and Noggin The Nog.
This book presents the Smallfilms archive - the puppets and cut-outs from these series, along with insights into how they were made.
It's a book full of pipe cleaners, cotton wool, wire and ping-pong balls, and celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped the childhoods of a generation.
Introduction by Jonny Trunk, Foreword by Stewart Lee:
'Jonny Trunk has taken the astonishingly thorough archive of Smallfilms... and presented it as one would a collection of artefacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired 20th century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada.
The Smallfilms' partnership's sacred relics repay his trust, and our repeated viewings.'
Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T21:37:46+00:00
Working from a barn in Kent, Postgate and Firmin produced some of the best-loved children's television of the 1960s and 1970s, including Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor The Engine and Noggin The Nog. This book presents the Smallfilms archive - the puppets and cut-outs from these series, along with insights into how they were made. It's a book full of pipe cleaners, cotton wool, wire and ping-pong balls, and celebrates the imagination and ingenuity of two artists who shaped the childhoods of a generation. Introduction by Jonny Trunk, Foreword by Stewart Lee: 'Jonny Trunk has taken the astonishingly thorough archive of Smallfilms... and presented it as one would a collection of artefacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired 20th century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada. The Smallfilms' partnership's sacred relics repay his trust, and our repeated viewings.' Stewart Lee
“I don’t really have any friends who are comedians,” Stewart Lee sighs, mock-pitifully, in his superb new show Snowflake/Tornado. It’s easy to see why. One of the few taboos in stand-up comedy is stand-up itself. Most comics shy away from discussing their peers onstage, but not Lee.
Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Josh Widdicombe are just three of the household names skewered over the course of this evening, while the world’s reverential treatment of Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge inspires a gloriously surreal rant. (Remember how different TV was before she invented looking at the camera? Lee does.) What makes the cattiness work is Lee’s artfully constructed character; the petty, status-obsessed version of himself he plays onstage is almost always the butt of the joke.
A little pretentiously, Snowflake/Tornado is presented as two back-to-back shows, rather than one with an interval. It’s typical of Lee’s attention to detail that the two press quotes on his poster (one per show) are part of the joke, inspiring some of the funniest lines in each hour.
Tornado, an extended riff on his reception and his place in the comedy world, is advertised with a quote from an erudite review in the LRB, while Snowflake - a defence of “political correctness” and attack on hypocrisy - boasts a line from Tony Parsons calling Lee “the rancid tip of a cesspit”. It’s a phrase he delights in wittily unpicking. “I’m not an expert in cess, or the collection thereof...” he begins, before speculating about how a pit can have a tip.
This isn’t the first time Lee has had fun with negative feedback. For several years, he plugged his shows with a quote that called him unfunny and complained that he had nothing to say, attributed to the Daily Telegraph. It’s not a line the Telegraph ever published, but why let the truth get in the way of a good gag? From now on, though, Lee may need to drop it from circulation. The silly and self-deprecating Tornado is often uproariously funny, while Snowflake proves that, at 51, he still has something vital to say.
Tornado is inspired by the realisation that his TV series, Comedy Vehicle, had been accidentally uploaded to Netflix with the programme description for B-movie Sharknado 3 (“Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again…”). It’s only a tad less helpful than that LRB review, from Lee fan Alan Bennett, which compares him to a string of obscure philosophers. These two strands - Bennett and Sharknado - collide in the hour’s closing set-piece, a cosy literary spoof that is some of Lee’s most well-observed writing, though more wryly amusing than belly-laugh funny.
Any fears that he’s going soft disappear in Snowflake, where Lee rails against comedians who make a killing by claiming to be “silenced” in lucrative TV specials. (Ricky Gervais “doesn’t say the unsayable - he says the sayable, by definition.”) Typically for Lee, it’s a sharp point that veers off into sui generis surrealism. What would a comedian saying the unsayable actually look like? Cue five long minutes of pop-eyed gurning, wordless gasps and biting the air. Lee’s extended riffs often become endurance-tests for the crowd, but this one looks almost as painful for him as it is for us. It’s a virtuoso piece of physical comedy, and new ground for this wordiest of comics. Spiky, cool and one-of-a-kind, Stewart Lee is undeniably a snowflake.
Stewart Lee
2019-11-08T13:12:30+00:00
“I don’t really have any friends who are comedians,” Stewart Lee sighs, mock-pitifully, in his superb new show Snowflake/Tornado. It’s easy to see why. One of the few taboos in stand-up comedy is stand-up itself. Most comics shy away from discussing their peers onstage, but not Lee. Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Josh Widdicombe are just three of the household names skewered over the course of this evening, while the world’s reverential treatment of Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge inspires a gloriously surreal rant. (Remember how different TV was before she invented looking at the camera? Lee does.) What makes the cattiness work is Lee’s artfully constructed character; the petty, status-obsessed version of himself he plays onstage is almost always the butt of the joke. A little pretentiously, Snowflake/Tornado is presented as two back-to-back shows, rather than one with an interval. It’s typical of Lee’s attention to detail that the two press quotes on his poster (one per show) are part of the joke, inspiring some of the funniest lines in each hour. Tornado, an extended riff on his reception and his place in the comedy world, is advertised with a quote from an erudite review in the LRB, while Snowflake - a defence of “political correctness” and attack on hypocrisy - boasts a line from Tony Parsons calling Lee “the rancid tip of a cesspit”. It’s a phrase he delights in wittily unpicking. “I’m not an expert in cess, or the collection thereof...” he begins, before speculating about how a pit can have a tip. This isn’t the first time Lee has had fun with negative feedback. For several years, he plugged his shows with a quote that called him unfunny and complained that he had nothing to say, attributed to the Daily Telegraph. It’s not a line the Telegraph...
“No one is equipped to review me,” Stewart Lee declares near the beginning of this work-in-progress show, referring to the multiple layers of irony and self-awareness that exist between him and his audience. Feigning contempt for the audience and the recognition his television work has brought him is, he explains, something he does “for a laugh – which is within the remit of this job”.
Relentless scrutiny of what is within the remit of comedy underpins all Lee’s standup; he will test a set piece to destruction, stretching it almost past the limit of the audience’s patience, until the repetition itself becomes the source of the laughter. In the first half, this begins with the offhand remark that Graham Norton’s chatshow beat him to the Bafta for comedy this year, and spirals into a beautifully controlled piece of demagoguery about the state of television entertainment. His targets are deliberately obvious – Russell Brand, Live at the Apollo – but he wrongfoots us by turning his scorn on our responses to the material. After a heavily flagged-up piece of reincorporation, he rounds furiously on the audience: “Don’t clap. You’re applauding your own ability to remember things.”
In the second half he has a lot of sport with the Edinburgh audience, blaming them for the lukewarm reception of a joke and, by extension, the suicides of great comics whose material was never fully appreciated. At one point, he tells any young comics in to watch and learn from him. As with most of what he says, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s good advice: even in a work in progress that includes some familiar material, Lee remains one of the most technically skilled and thought-provoking comics you’ll see at the fringe.
Stewart Lee
2015-08-23T00:11:11+01:00
“No one is equipped to review me,” Stewart Lee declares near the beginning of this work-in-progress show, referring to the multiple layers of irony and self-awareness that exist between him and his audience. Feigning contempt for the audience and the recognition his television work has brought him is, he explains, something he does “for a laugh – which is within the remit of this job”. Relentless scrutiny of what is within the remit of comedy underpins all Lee’s standup; he will test a set piece to destruction, stretching it almost past the limit of the audience’s patience, until the repetition itself becomes the source of the laughter. In the first half, this begins with the offhand remark that Graham Norton’s chatshow beat him to the Bafta for comedy this year, and spirals into a beautifully controlled piece of demagoguery about the state of television entertainment. His targets are deliberately obvious – Russell Brand, Live at the Apollo – but he wrongfoots us by turning his scorn on our responses to the material. After a heavily flagged-up piece of reincorporation, he rounds furiously on the audience: “Don’t clap. You’re applauding your own ability to remember things.” In the second half he has a lot of sport with the Edinburgh audience, blaming them for the lukewarm reception of a joke and, by extension, the suicides of great comics whose material was never fully appreciated. At one point, he tells any young comics in to watch and learn from him. As with most of what he says, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s good advice: even in a work in progress that includes some familiar material, Lee remains one of the most technically skilled and thought-provoking comics you’ll see at the fringe.
Alison Blunt, Ivor Kallin, and Hannah Marshall spontaneously score three lengthy pieces, and a short spasm, for violin, viola and cello. Barrel's music, they admit, involves a lot of scraping.
Initially, the trio's genetic make up means it's difficult to for the listener to peer through the shadow of the classical tradition or the minimalist avant-garde, and hear the sound that's actually there. But by the final piece, Moths and Feathers, Barrell sound unlike anything else.
Flurries of notes and clunky bridge nudge noise flutter around gracefully drunken descends, three dowager duchesses sliding down the banister in a rain of ripped confetti.
Stewart Lee
2011-11-20T01:15:36+00:00
Alison Blunt, Ivor Kallin, and Hannah Marshall spontaneously score three lengthy pieces, and a short spasm, for violin, viola and cello. Barrel's music, they admit, involves a lot of scraping. Initially, the trio's genetic make up means it's difficult to for the listener to peer through the shadow of the classical tradition or the minimalist avant-garde, and hear the sound that's actually there. But by the final piece, Moths and Feathers, Barrell sound unlike anything else. Flurries of notes and clunky bridge nudge noise flutter around gracefully drunken descends, three dowager duchesses sliding down the banister in a rain of ripped confetti.
This week, on a break between standup tour dates, I am on holiday with the children in Nether Stowey, Somerset, from where I file the next of my election columns. As a north London Old Speckled Hen socialist I assumed there would be little political for my satirical pen to set about in Somerset, where the inhabitants live like lotus eaters in a bucolic haze of smoked eels and whortleberry jam.
Would Old Mother Leakey of Minehead curdle the local Liberal Democrats’ drinking chocolate again, I wondered? Or perhaps a Gilbert’s potoroo, escaped from the Tropiquaria attraction, would be mistaken for an immigrant, and chased around Watchet by the retailer with the commemorative Battle of Waterloo display in his shop window? But, deep in an ancient Exmoor woodland, I stumbled upon a scandal as explosive as Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP’s 2005 expenses claim for an actual entire lake.
Readers of the antiquary and wartime spy Hazel Eardley-Wilmot will already be aware of the Culbone Stone, an inscribed menhir hidden deep in woodland, west along the coastal path from Porlock Weir. I set out to find it last Wednesday afternoon, thrashing through dense brambles, the unhappy children, three and six, in tow, having been convinced they were upon a Narnian quest, but one which soon turned sour as it took on a very modern political dimension.
Once lepers were left to wander these woods, kindly allowed to view the consecration of the host in St Bueno’s church through a bespoke “leper window”, or hagioscope, and nourished only by donations of food abandoned by the villagers. It was the “big society” in miniature. And for those who don’t remember David Cameron’s big “big society” idea of five years ago, it was essentially the hope that simple human empathy would compensate for an ideologically driven programme of cuts, but named as if it were some kind of grand political theory. In the middle ages things were more prosaic. They called the same idea simply leaving bread out for lepers in the woods, who otherwise would just die.
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The birds were singing in the thickets as we pushed through the wild rhododendron bushes towards the ruined Barnardo’s orphanage, formerly Ashley Combe house, and I put my new free NHS hearing aids in to appreciate their calls. It was then, in the overgrown former garden of the estate, that I zeroed in, Steve Austin-style, on unmistakable voices in confidential conversation, and beckoned the children to hide with me behind some twigs, silencing their prattling with two jelly babies.
Three of the most rapidly downwardly mobile players of the current election, politicians so gaffe-prone that watching them explain themselves, even to sympathetic BBC Tory sleeper agents like Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil, seems cruel beyond reason, were in animated conversation around an Ordnance Survey map; culture secretary Sajid Javid, Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps, and education, women and equalities minister Nicky Morgan.
“… and Culbone woods will be a pilot scheme for the initiative that will save us the £8bn we have promised to find, and then Andrew Neil can stick his ‘magic money tree’ up his BBC socialist sporran,” concluded Shapps, spreading out the map on a tree stump and pounding it with his face, his essence having manifested itself for the day in its contemporary “Grant Shapps” identity.
“Would there be some way of monetising the lepers, Grant?” asked Javid. “Perhaps we could sell people tickets to ridicule the lepers in the wood, howsoever they thought finest, and then those tickets could be sold on at an even greater profit by entrepreneurial secondary ticketing agencies? Or maybe the leper pimps could pimp out any sexy lepers to leper fetishists, and we could take a cut?”
Nicky Morgan was infuriated by the culture secretary’s ideas. “Grant’s not saying we should fill British woodlands with actual lepers, Sajid,” she interrupted. “He’s just using how it used to work with the lepers as an example of something we could do to find that eight-billion figure some idiot let slip.” Javid, crestfallen, retreated, repeating “let the market decide” beneath his breath, over and over again, like an article of faith, like a Hail Mary.
“Nicky is right, Sajid,” continued Shapps, absentmindedly eating the cover of the map. “Imagine, acres of British woodland, all over these isles, filled with society’s most costly free spirits, cut loose from the ties of the nanny state, and left to fend for themselves, like symbolic figures in a medieval illuminated manuscript.”
I wish I could remember more, but as I sit here writing, two days later, my chain of thought has been irreparably broken. A person from Porlock has arrived, asking me who I am, and what I was doing in the woods on Wednesday.
Stewart Lee
2015-04-19T09:46:25+01:00
This week, on a break between standup tour dates, I am on holiday with the children in Nether Stowey, Somerset, from where I file the next of my election columns. As a north London Old Speckled Hen socialist I assumed there would be little political for my satirical pen to set about in Somerset, where the inhabitants live like lotus eaters in a bucolic haze of smoked eels and whortleberry jam. Would Old Mother Leakey of Minehead curdle the local Liberal Democrats’ drinking chocolate again, I wondered? Or perhaps a Gilbert’s potoroo, escaped from the Tropiquaria attraction, would be mistaken for an immigrant, and chased around Watchet by the retailer with the commemorative Battle of Waterloo display in his shop window? But, deep in an ancient Exmoor woodland, I stumbled upon a scandal as explosive as Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP’s 2005 expenses claim for an actual entire lake. Readers of the antiquary and wartime spy Hazel Eardley-Wilmot will already be aware of the Culbone Stone, an inscribed menhir hidden deep in woodland, west along the coastal path from Porlock Weir. I set out to find it last Wednesday afternoon, thrashing through dense brambles, the unhappy children, three and six, in tow, having been convinced they were upon a Narnian quest, but one which soon turned sour as it took on a very modern political dimension. Once lepers were left to wander these woods, kindly allowed to view the consecration of the host in St Bueno’s church through a bespoke “leper window”, or hagioscope, and nourished only by donations of food abandoned by the villagers. It was the “big society” in miniature. And for those who don’t remember David Cameron’s big “big society” idea of five years ago, it was essentially the hope that simple human empathy would compensate for an ideologically...
Julian Cope, the former lead singer of the chart-topping 80’s pin-ups The Teardrop Explodes, is playing a secret solo show in the back room of a community arts centre in the Berkshire frontier town of Aldershot. Union Jacks flutter in all the pubs. Cope’s hair is, by some margin, the longest in the surrounding area. Onstage alone in a floppy hat and sunglasses, Cope surveys the small but swollen space and modestly takes stock of the situation; “"I know I'm not current,” he laughs, “And I don't believe I'm timeless. But I am in my forties, and I’m in sight of fifty. And once you're over fifty, sixty's not far away. And then you are allowed to be legendary. So I just have to keep my head down and keep working. And then I can be legendary."
To many, the antics that characterise Cope’s career are already the stuff of legend. Cope famously appeared on the cover of his second solo album wearing only a turtle shell, protested against the Poll Tax dressed as a giant baby from space, and is currently winning new fans in America with his super-dense, ‘ambient-metal’ project LAMF. To most people, Cope admits, he is “that World Shut Your Mouth guy”, best known for the anthemic smash hit to which even Terry Wogan succumbed in 1986. But perhaps his strangest achievement is the completion of two heavyweight books on Prehistoric Archaeology, the second of which, The Megalithic European, is published this month.
1998’s The Modern Antiquarian, a colour coded gazetteer of British prehistoric sites was the answer to a prayer for those of us who’d spent years trekking across moors to stone circles on advice pieced together from quasi-mystical pamphlets or dry academic tomes. Stand at the centre of the Orkney mainland with The Modern Antiquarian in your hand and lost civilisations rise up around you in three dimensions. Now Cope has applied the same utilitarian ethic to the monuments of the continent in The Megalithic European. At his home in the Wiltshire countryside, within striding distance of the stone circle of Avebury, Julian Cope holds forth.
“My job is to make un-cool things seem cool,” he says, his foot up on a kitchen chair like a rock star bestriding a monitor. “If you can find a way of presenting these things correctly, people will get into them. And if you can get people out of believing that stone circles are about Wellington boots and anoraks, that they can be elegant, why not do it? When I put together my Scott Walker compilation album for example, he was so in the boneyard, he was just though of as a git, but I am a total field worker. I get into things and go to places, and see if they do it for me, and if they are going to do it for other people. Is there enough remaining above ground? Or if the thing is underground, is it superbly underground? Is it the mother of all underground temples? Is it a hypogeum from hell? Can you go in and lose yourself?” Initially, I’m uncertain whether Cope is using subterranean prehistoric temples as a metaphor for the 60’s balladeer Scott Walker, or whether he is actually talking about subterranean prehistoric temples. Then I realise, it’s both, at the same time. Cope in conversation doesn’t so much free-associate as make entirely unrelated ideas occupy exactly the same space. And he’s barged into the world of archaeology with the open-minded enthusiasm of the very gentlemen amateurs whose work the science was historically built on. Has he been welcomed?
“There’s two types of Archaeologists,” Cope explains, putting down a toy wooden guitar which he is making for his ten year old daughter, who wants to attend the local Halloween event as Angus Young from AC/DC. “The older guys are pleased to be able to debrief to someone. They’re like spies with all this information so they can afford to be generous. Aubrey Burl, who writes books with flat names like “The Stone Circles Of The British Isles.”, and I get on really well. I can call him up and go, “Aubrey I think I’ve found a new stone circle.” And he goes, “I suppose it’s quite possible but don’t tell my wife because I am too old to start visiting there now.” If I’ve ever had a problem it was with Archaeology’s middle management, who felt we should have taken more official routes to publish that sort of book.” Invited to lecture at the British Museum in 2001, Cope chose the subject of The Norse God Odin in Christian symbolism. “I went from Odin to Christ via the various pagan pre-cursors of Christ. The very nice old guys at The British Museum in dicky-bows had been saying, “You’re not the normal kind of person we have here, but you do it the way you want.” So I did the lecture in full face-paint and five inch platform shoes, two nights, sold out. It was amazing!”
In The Modern Antiquarian, Cope’s analysis reflected his own performance background. Stones with quartz in them would look great glittering in the moonlight if you were a prehistoric audience on mild natural hallucinogens watching the prehistoric equivalent of Julian Cope. At the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, earlier this year, Cope’s own persona seemed influenced by his archaeological imaginings. In psychedelic combat clothes, giant shoes and face-paint, Cope became an absurd and impregnable priest-clown figure, and spent most of his two hour set in the audience, declaiming over a wilfully-primitive punk-metal backdrop. “Being on stage, dealing with an audience, with hysteria, with a really barbarian art-form, is the closest you get to a religious experience,” he concludes. “The shaman and the showman are inextricably linked. Little Richard recognised that. Jerry Lewis was damned from the moment he opened his mouth. Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, however, were never in any danger.”
The Aldershot show was supposed to be a low-key date, re-acquainting Cope with live performance after months of writing. But with Cope, nothing is ever low key. The fanatical fan-base are out in force, undiluted by the less evangelistic onlookers present in bigger venues. Cope is derailed by enthusiastic interjections from proprietary fans and the show lurches from one interruption to another. There’s a section of every Cope crowd that think he is their own private cult figure, a rock legend they can still reach out and touch, insult or fondle at will. Tonight, guitar in hand, Cope appears happy to indulge this clammy notion at close range. But there’s a mighty Four Wheel Drive in the car park waiting to whisk him back to Wiltshire, where, one suspects, he is already planning his next great adventure. “I’m in a unique position,” he had said, earlier, “but through luck, not judgement. There are people from my time, like Billy Bragg or Nick Cave, still doing everything with real dignity. But they have their feet in the officially straight world. There might be a South Bank Show on them. But me? I’m doing an Ambient Metal installation in a Greek Art Gallery. And writing about Ziggurats.”
Stewart Lee
2004-10-10T18:15:14+01:00
Julian Cope, the former lead singer of the chart-topping 80’s pin-ups The Teardrop Explodes, is playing a secret solo show in the back room of a community arts centre in the Berkshire frontier town of Aldershot. Union Jacks flutter in all the pubs. Cope’s hair is, by some margin, the longest in the surrounding area. Onstage alone in a floppy hat and sunglasses, Cope surveys the small but swollen space and modestly takes stock of the situation; “"I know I'm not current,” he laughs, “And I don't believe I'm timeless. But I am in my forties, and I’m in sight of fifty. And once you're over fifty, sixty's not far away. And then you are allowed to be legendary. So I just have to keep my head down and keep working. And then I can be legendary." To many, the antics that characterise Cope’s career are already the stuff of legend. Cope famously appeared on the cover of his second solo album wearing only a turtle shell, protested against the Poll Tax dressed as a giant baby from space, and is currently winning new fans in America with his super-dense, ‘ambient-metal’ project LAMF. To most people, Cope admits, he is “that World Shut Your Mouth guy”, best known for the anthemic smash hit to which even Terry Wogan succumbed in 1986. But perhaps his strangest achievement is the completion of two heavyweight books on Prehistoric Archaeology, the second of which, The Megalithic European, is published this month. 1998’s The Modern Antiquarian, a colour coded gazetteer of British prehistoric sites was the answer to a prayer for those of us who’d spent years trekking across moors to stone circles on advice pieced together from quasi-mystical pamphlets or dry academic tomes. Stand at the centre of the Orkney mainland with The Modern...
A final heads up that the 2 hr film of the Content Provider Tour due to show on BBC2 has moved again from Saturday 4th August, back to 28th July at 10.45pm.
It will be available on the iPlayer after broadcast, here.
This is to give us the best possible chance of not being able to get the Sunday newspapers to cover it.
All 24 ep's of COMEDY VEHICLE are now on BBC i-player too (LINK).
In a related item we had to commission a theme tune to the show, and it's STEW'S BLUES by Edinburgh blues band THE BLUESWATER, currently all over the fringe, and now it is ours so you can download and own it for ever here.
And we had to license a 1970s Turkish psych-funk track, YASAR ADAM by TOZ HASAT, for the Turkish funk joke to work, so help yourself to that too here.
CONTENT PROVIDER BBC2 A final heads up that the 2 hr film of the Content Provider Tour due to show on BBC2 has moved again from Saturday 4th August, back to 28th July at 10.45pm. It will be available on the iPlayer after broadcast, here. This is to give us the best possible chance of not being able to get the Sunday newspapers to cover it. All 24 ep's of COMEDY VEHICLE are now on BBC i-player too (LINK). In a related item we had to commission a theme tune to the show, and it's STEW'S BLUES by Edinburgh blues band THE BLUESWATER, currently all over the fringe, and now it is ours so you can download and own it for ever here. And we had to license a 1970s Turkish psych-funk track, YASAR ADAM by TOZ HASAT, for the Turkish funk joke to work, so help yourself to that too here. Your pal, Stewart Lee DOWNLOAD THE MUSIC HERE And here's a clip from the show
Casual consumers convinced by PJ Harvey's Mercury nod might try a cautious lick of Evangelista's In Animal Tongue. Carla Bozulich graduated from the Eighties LA punk scene via the noisy improvisations of Scarnella and the gothic country music of The Geraldine Fibbers and her solo work, to the distinctly dark sound of Evangelista.
Montreal experimental musicians lay down claustrophobically dense thickets of cello, violin, viola and contrabass while Bozulich whispers and retches fecund and unsentimental visions of consuming flames, trembling birds and fearful lambs. Bozulich remains a true artist - unique, uncompromising, brilliant, and, frankly, almost too much to bear.
Stewart Lee
2011-10-02T12:33:24+01:00
Casual consumers convinced by PJ Harvey's Mercury nod might try a cautious lick of Evangelista's In Animal Tongue. Carla Bozulich graduated from the Eighties LA punk scene via the noisy improvisations of Scarnella and the gothic country music of The Geraldine Fibbers and her solo work, to the distinctly dark sound of Evangelista. Montreal experimental musicians lay down claustrophobically dense thickets of cello, violin, viola and contrabass while Bozulich whispers and retches fecund and unsentimental visions of consuming flames, trembling birds and fearful lambs. Bozulich remains a true artist - unique, uncompromising, brilliant, and, frankly, almost too much to bear.
He was set to play two nights here as part of his Snowflake/Tornado tour in March 2020, but things were cut short after the first.
In fact, things were cut short across the world as lockdown turned everything on its head.
At the time I'd phoned ahead to check the show was still on but even the woman who assured me it was didn't seem convinced.
We arrived to a sell-out auditorium spattered with deserted seats. Looking back it was all very budget disaster movie.
It also felt like we were taking a risk – a band of rebel snowflakes thrown together by a shared interest in the comic works of The Times' "world's greatest living stand-up”, sneaking out to enjoy a pre-apocalyptic gig.
If the end of the world had happened in March 2020 and we were trapped in the Marlowe how would we have beaten back the baying mobs who would have inevitably taken to the streets? With rolled up copies of The Observer and snobbery, of course.
If Putin does go full tonto over the course of the next 140 minutes this imagined scenario will no doubt play out.
I've been in the lobby for five minutes and standing in the queue at the bar the woman in front is ordering breakfast tea with oat milk, the woman behind is scrolling through the Guardian's Instagram feed and everyone is wearing Doc Martens. The proportion of mask wearers is exceptionally high. It's the kind of place to make a GB News presenter explode with resentment. Bliss.
Lee arrives on stage to rapturous applause and launches into a set that immediately gives me déjà vu. Of course it does, I've already seen it.
This is the same material with some tweaks along the way but I'll give you two reasons why that's a good thing and a third if you need it.
Firstly, it showcases his higher-level skill. At points it feels like a seminar on comic writing and at points he makes it exactly that by explaining in intricate detail to members of the audience who have made the short hop from the University of Kent's comedy course exactly what he is doing.
These little lectures may not sound like good material but they very much are.
Watching it for a second time I'm appreciating the level of craftsmanship that goes in to a set like this.
Of course, much of this didn't happen before, he's improvising masterfully. And that's the second thing.
Within minutes the microphone cable has broken, a large group has arrived late and someone near me gets their phone out.
All these things are worthy of their own bits and as with everything with Lee nothing is brushed over quickly; as he points out later he doesn't do "quips", regardless of what anyway says.
He weaves all these interruptions into his set, runs to time and doesn't appear to leave anything out. It's impressive stuff.
Thirdly, and on perhaps the most basic level, I'm still laughing.
I'm laughing at everything. Some of it I've heard multiple times and while I'm not howling like some people and don't sound like I'm about to collapse like the guy behind (hope he's OK) it doesn't really matter that I remember a few punch lines.
I'm not sure this would happen if you watched the same Jimmy Carr joke twice.
Carr, by the way, gets a pasting, with material written in 2019 that is, if anything, more relevant now.
As does US comedy giant Dave Chappelle, whose penchant for rotisserie chicken and near-impossible work rates makes him the "Vladimir Putin of poultry".
Ricky Gervais gets a lengthy section in which he (acted by Lee) repeatedly attempts to say the unsayable.
All this forms part of a first half (Tornado) inspired by a Netflix mishap.
The second half (Snowflake) is a searing take down of the 'anti-woke brigade' centred around a GQ article penned by punk era polemicist Tony Parsons.
It's got a long bit about the structure of cesspits and concludes with fake snow and an acoustic song but as with everything during Lee's barnstorming return to the city it works because and not in spite of those things.
As Lee thanks the audience for taking advantage of the small window of opportunity between a pandemic and a war to come out and see him he remarks that not much has changed in two years.
One thing that has are Canterbury's parking charges (£6.90!!!), something that only dawns on me as my partner reveals she's spent two years developing a crush on Stewart Lee. We drive off silently into the night.
Stewart Lee
2022-03-01T19:40:15+00:00
What a difference two years makes. When I was last sat in Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre awaiting the arrival of Stewart Lee it was against a backdrop of impending doom. He was set to play two nights here as part of his Snowflake/Tornado tour in March 2020, but things were cut short after the first. In fact, things were cut short across the world as lockdown turned everything on its head. At the time I'd phoned ahead to check the show was still on but even the woman who assured me it was didn't seem convinced. We arrived to a sell-out auditorium spattered with deserted seats. Looking back it was all very budget disaster movie. It also felt like we were taking a risk – a band of rebel snowflakes thrown together by a shared interest in the comic works of The Times' "world's greatest living stand-up”, sneaking out to enjoy a pre-apocalyptic gig. If the end of the world had happened in March 2020 and we were trapped in the Marlowe how would we have beaten back the baying mobs who would have inevitably taken to the streets? With rolled up copies of The Observer and snobbery, of course. If Putin does go full tonto over the course of the next 140 minutes this imagined scenario will no doubt play out. I've been in the lobby for five minutes and standing in the queue at the bar the woman in front is ordering breakfast tea with oat milk, the woman behind is scrolling through the Guardian's Instagram feed and everyone is wearing Doc Martens. The proportion of mask wearers is exceptionally high. It's the kind of place to make a GB News presenter explode with resentment. Bliss. Lee arrives on stage to rapturous applause and launches into a set that...
Much of the history of protest in my lifetime has concerned the enforced occupation of physical space, from the perimeter fence of Greenham Common Air Base to tunnels beneath the A30 extension in Devon, to the Occupy Movement's own encampments in Wall Street and The City, to a grocer's in Hastings I refused to leave for twenty minutes in 2008 because they wouldn't accept a Scottish fiver despite it being legal tender.
Yet the reason public opposition to global capitalism hasn't yet reached tipping point is precisely because its real crimes don't conclude in physical space itself, but in a virtual world of virtual money and virtual profit.
It's hard to feel especially strongly about the effects of something you can't really see, though this didn't stop the Church of England tying itself in knots about what God would think of there being a load of tents outside St Paul's Cathedral. (One assumes He'd have been delighted. There are exactly 48 mentions of tents in the King James Bible, and if He doesn't like them, why did He keep putting them in the Bible so much, seeing as how He wrote it.)
The Occupy Movement is occupying space and time. Well done. In doing so, so far, it has changed the news agenda, shown how random groups of people can co-operate to noble ends, and made the plastic-headed Tory MP Louise Mensch look like an out-of-touch dilettante.
Again. But Global Capitalism has moved beyond space and time into a theoretical abstract region unfettered by the laws of either physics or common decency, and where there isn't so much as a paving slab to pitch your tent on, let alone a Starbucks where you can recharge your mobiles and irritate Louise Mensch.
I admire Occupy's commitment no end, and were I not busy satirising capitalism for hard cash in the world of light entertainment, I'd be camped out too. But, in the words of David Essex in Geoff Wayne's 1976 prog rock concept album War Of The Worlds, given that the Occupy Movement's foot soldiers are real physical beings made of meat and water, and Global Capitalism is an invisible Lovecraftian entity from another dimension, maybe it's a case of "bows and arrows against the lighting."
I'm not trying to piss in anyone's chips. But look at the facts. In 1649 at St Georges Hill a ragged band they called The Diggers tore down the enclosures to reclaim ancient Common Land. In 1811 the Luddites attempted to protect the work force by smashing wide-framed automated looms. They had physical targets to attack. And while it certainly was fun to put supa-glue in a bank door lock in the 1990s, Global Capitalism is now too slippery an entity to be inconvenienced by commercially available solvents.
Let's pin this to a recent news meme. We all know that the comedian Jimmy Carr, for example, and the pop star Gary Barlow have concealed millions of pounds of tax, within tentatively legal loopholes. But where is the cash? Did it ever exist? At no point did a boat containing their joint millions in tightly tied bundles with pound signs on them cross the sea by night to Jersey, with Carr at the prow, squinting towards land, and Barlow tugging lugubriously at the oars, whilst singing Take That b-sides to keep time. Where might a protestor have intercepted this transfer?
The money never existed. The abstract idea of it was simply suddenly double clicked from one non-existent space to another.
And asking anyone to understand the exact procedures behind Barclays fixing of interest rates is unreasonable. Pictured in its simplest terms we know Bob Diamond has essentially run off with a big wheelbarrow containing the bare essentials of the poor, and the aspirational hopes and dreams of the squeezed middle, but in reality we know some guys that called each other 'dude' and go surfing in Cornwall together for bonding weekends somehow manipulated some figures relating to notional ideas of value in a virtual conceptual marketplace, and now no-one in East London can afford breakfast cereal and teachers are sneaking the kids apples.
How can non-theoretical visible protestors strike blows against the manipulation of theoretical invisible money? Whilst Occupying the squares and streets of finance districts has no doubt been hugely effective, to deliver the killer blow Occupy's agitators need to move beyond the physical realm and do battle with the concept of unfairly distributed wealth on the astral plane of non-corporeal fiscal matter. These rebel forces need a Yoda to train them to meet the evil Empire on a whole other level.
Step forward Dr Giles Fraser, the former Canon Chancellor of St Paul's, who stepped down after a moral dilemma during the Occupy protests. The philosopher priest, able to interrogate language and meaning using Wittgensteinian techniques, whilst simultaneously having the ear of the liberal media, is found in the liminal zone between Heaven and Earth beloved by Anglican mystics, for whom even God Himself is more conceptual notion than actual entity. Could Fraser, on some level a friend of Occupy, teach the troops how to pray themselves into a virtual state, whereby disconnected versions of their physical selves could somehow take invisible wings and stop the transparent flow of Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow's tax cash, and of Barclay's falsely manufactured profits, between equally non-existent spatial safe havens.
Once they had become Fraser-formed avatars of their own ideals, could Occupy protestors coagulate into gas clouds of rage, smothering the non-corporeal growth of Global Capitalism? Could we all join hands and levitate Jersey into outer space, where lack of gravity would render it as weightless as the virtual money stored in its virtual vaults? Its money market men threaten independence from the UK.
Cut them adrift, literally, and see how they like it. Bob Diamond himself may not even exist. I suspect he is some kind of skin-bag, full of virtual pound coins, manipulated by the formless energy of notional wealth, a collection of transactions that have somehow coalesced into a malign energy swarm, almost, but not quite, physically real.
Sadly, Giles Fraser, like some part time Gandalf, remains at his new post in Elephant and Castle, selfishly refusing to use his spiritual powers to shape the Occupy Movement into a trans-dimensional ethical police force, unencumbered by mass or shape, psychedelic warlords, ready to disappear in smoke.
Instead, Occupy protestors remain on duty, solidly and nobly embodying a literal notion of political presence. Meanwhile, the air around us hums with unknowable communiqués as vast sums disappear in clouds of transparent data, assets transfer and liquidize in the reverse land grab of the system's gradual collapse, and you reach for them, like children swiping at wasps, who have licked up the sugar, and scarpered in the face of the rolled up newspaper of public condemnation. Buzz. Thwack! Bzz...ugh.
Stewart Lee
2012-01-01T18:31:06+00:00
Much of the history of protest in my lifetime has concerned the enforced occupation of physical space, from the perimeter fence of Greenham Common Air Base to tunnels beneath the A30 extension in Devon, to the Occupy Movement's own encampments in Wall Street and The City, to a grocer's in Hastings I refused to leave for twenty minutes in 2008 because they wouldn't accept a Scottish fiver despite it being legal tender. Yet the reason public opposition to global capitalism hasn't yet reached tipping point is precisely because its real crimes don't conclude in physical space itself, but in a virtual world of virtual money and virtual profit. It's hard to feel especially strongly about the effects of something you can't really see, though this didn't stop the Church of England tying itself in knots about what God would think of there being a load of tents outside St Paul's Cathedral. (One assumes He'd have been delighted. There are exactly 48 mentions of tents in the King James Bible, and if He doesn't like them, why did He keep putting them in the Bible so much, seeing as how He wrote it.) The Occupy Movement is occupying space and time. Well done. In doing so, so far, it has changed the news agenda, shown how random groups of people can co-operate to noble ends, and made the plastic-headed Tory MP Louise Mensch look like an out-of-touch dilettante. Again. But Global Capitalism has moved beyond space and time into a theoretical abstract region unfettered by the laws of either physics or common decency, and where there isn't so much as a paving slab to pitch your tent on, let alone a Starbucks where you can recharge your mobiles and irritate Louise Mensch. I admire Occupy's commitment no end, and were I...
‘The only time I wanna see ‘big break’ and ‘Stewart Lee’ in the same sentence, will also involve his spinal column’ - Centerist Thug, Twitter
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.
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 11th)
7pm (4pm performance Saturday 12th 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
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
Saturday 1st April 2023 - The Lowry, Salford Quays - TICKETS
3. EDINBLUR 2022
Two shows, on sale March 3rd. 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) - 3rd – 27th August (days off 15th & 16th 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.
The Stand’s New Town Theatre (Grand Hall), 1.50pm (13.50hrs) - 3rd – 28 August (days off 15th & 16th 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!!!!
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.
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
Friday 10th June 2022 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - TICKETS
Saturday 11th June 2022 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - 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
5. KING ROCKER DVD/SCREENINGS
Our critically acclaimed doc KING ROCKER is available on DVD, and the s/track is out on various formats too.
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 (21st-24th 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
Deer Shed (29th - 31st July https://www.deershedfestival.com) w Dry Cleaners, Billy NoMates, Treeboy & Archie, Yard Actors, Snapped Angles, The Love Eggs, and David O’Doherty
6. SAVE THE WYE
Please save the Wye from pollution as it is my favourite river.
There is a Ukraine benefit (which I am not in) at Leicester Sq Theatre on THURSDAY MARCH 24th, but I have given some tickets to the raffle.
You can buy tickets HERE or watch a live stream HERE.
James Acaster, Adam Buxton, Bridget Christie, Amy Gledhill, Nick Helm, Darren Harriott, Rhys James, Milton Jones, Rachel Parris & Sara Pascoe. Join us for an evening of stand up to raise money for the people of Ukraine.
The line up is outstanding - here it is again - James Acaster, Adam Buxton, Bridget Christie, Nick Helm, Darren Harriott, Rhys James, Milton Jones, Rachel Parris & Sara Pascoe with Amy Gledhill as MC.
Also, there will be a raffle drawn live during during the show. I think the star prize is a personalised jingle by Adam Buxton, and there are stacks of other amazing prizes too.
All proceeds from the ticket sales and the raffle go to the Red Cross.
Line Up is subject to change. Age guidance: 15 - some swearing probably
8. I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME 2022 HAPPENINGS/THINGS
Echo & The Bunnymen Scally psych-survivors APRIL 6TH Bexhill De La Warr (I saw them in Feb. It was amazing.)
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 4th Nottingham Rammel Club, 5th M’cr Anthony Burgess Foundation, April 29th Reading Rising Sun Arts. SECLUDED BRONTE March 20th Rotterdam ?, 26th Amsterdam OCCII, 27th Rotterdam Worm, April 19th Zurich Institut, 20th Geneva Café 12, 21st Paris Les Instants Chavires, 22nd Brussels Les Ateliers Claus, 23rd tba, 25th Café Oto London. MORPHOGENESIS - ORIGINAL LINE-UP OF ART NOISE LEGENDS June 12th Café Oto London
Stiff Little Fingers Still impossibly inspiring NI punk survivors MARCH 10th Bristol Academy, 11th Cardiff SU, 12th B’ham Academy, 14th Nottingham Rock City, 16th Troon Hall, 17th Glasgow Barrowlands, 18th Newcastle City Hall, 19th Leeds Academy, 21st Northampton Roadmender, 24th Bournemouth Academy, 25th M’cr Academy, 26th Camden Roundhouse AUGUST 4th Blackpool Rebellion, OCTOBER 1st- 2nd Sheffield Academy
Melt Banana Endlessly inspiring Japanese pop-art-noiseniks MARCH 31st Margate Elsewhere, APRIL 1st Reading South Street, 6th Cambridge Portland Arms, 9th Huddersfield Parish, 12th Edinburgh Caves, 13th Glasgow Stereo, 14th York Crescent, 17th Bristol Exchange, 18th Cardiff Ifor Bach, 22nd Brighton Patterns
Nish Kumar Bread roll obsessed, woke so-called ‘comedian’ hits the road.
APRIL 2ND Brighton Dome, 3rd St Albans Arena, 9th Colchester Charter, 16th Brecon Brycheiniog, 22nd/23rd Hackney Empire, 28th Monmouth Savoy, MAY 17TH Oxford New Theatre More here.
Alex Winter London Prince Charles Cinema 31st March - April 3rd. 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.
Wet Leg Sure to be briefly massive, these waspish Amish-styled Boston-indie-circa-1989-sounding barnstormers hit the road APRIL 17th Edinburgh Mash, 19th Leeds Brudenell, 20th M’cr Gorilla, 21st Bristol Trinity, 23rd B’ham Institute 3, 24th Norwich Arts, 26th London Scala, 27th Southsea Wedgewood, MAY 28th 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 19th Glasgow Cathouse, 20th Liverpool Cavern, 23rd M’cr Deaf Institute, 24th Leeds Key, 26th Norwich Epic, 27th Oxford Academy, 29th Brighton Patterns, 30th Birmingham Academy, MAY 2nd Bristol Thekla, 3rd London Garage, 5th Leek Foxlowe Arts, 7th Nottingham Bodega
Red Guitars Reunited 80’s politicised Hull post-punks w afropop inflections in original line-up configuration. APRIL 19th Leeds Old Woollen, 21st M’cr Night & Day, 22nd Glasgow Attic, 22nd Hull Adelphi, 23rd Brighton Green Door, 29th London 100 Club, 30th 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 21st Dublin Liberty Hall, 25th Glasgow Glee, 27th Birmingham Glee, 28th M'cr Academy, 30th London Hackney Earth
Low Mormon minimalists APRIL 25th Edinburgh Queen’s Hall, 26th Dublin Vicar St, 27th M’cr Cathedral, 28th Brighton St George’s, 29th London St John At Hackney, 30th Bristol Trinity
Bridget Christie - Who Am I? Woke comedienne. APRIL 26th - 30th, Leicester Sq Theatre London.
Flamin’ Groovies - You must see these superb ‘70s American Stones/Byrds/Beatles styled survivors. MAY 3rd York Cowgirl, 4th Newcastle Cluny, 6th Glasgow Room 2, 7th London 100 Club
Chuck Prophet Chiselled guitar gunslinger from another, better time. MAY 26th Bury Met, 27th Nottingham Metronome, 28th Newcastle Gosforth Civic, 31st Bristol Fleece, JUNE 1st B’ham Hare & Hounds, 2nd Thetford Red Rooster, 3rd London Garage
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 27th London Water Rats, 29th High Wycombe Kingsmead House, 30th Hambrook Village Hall, JUNE 1ST Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen’s Club, 2nd Birmingham Kitchen Garden cafe.
RECC’D INTERNETS, YOUTUBES AND PODCASTS
Rosie Holt’s Youtube characters *****
Ogmios School of Zen Motoring *****
Limmy’s review of After Life *****
The Exploding Heads Alasdair Beckett-King’s various things *****
Stinkfood (Twitter) *****
VonViddy (TikTok) Eleanor Morton - Jack The Ripper (but shot in portrait!?)
Paddy Young - Posh actor in Northern Film
Dan March - British Tourism films
Tom Little
9. 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)
Stewart Lee
2022-03-21T15:22:07+00:00
‘The only time I wanna see ‘big break’ and ‘Stewart Lee’ in the same sentence, will also involve his spinal column’ - Centerist Thug, Twitter 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 BUY THEM HERE 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. FACTS - Pink / Blue FACTS - Green / Blue...
On 23 March 2020, 74 days after China declared coronavirus to the WHO, Britain went into lockdown. In the interim Boris “I Shook Hands With Everyone” Johnson had ignored emails about a Europe-wide PPE purchasing scheme; ignored experts’ recommendations to close pubs and restaurants; taken a holiday in Kent, back before it became clogged with lorry drivers’ faeces; got divorced from his second wife whom he had repeatedly cheated on, including, according to her testimony at least, with a handsomely publicly remunerated tech adviser; ignored further expert advice to close schools; endorsed the idea of herd immunity; announced his engagement to an environmentally concerned refurbishing enthusiast; skipped five successive Cobra meetings; shaken hands with everybody in a hospital; advised hand-washing; joined 82,000 rugby fans in Twickenham; ignored further lockdown calls in early March; made international sports fans mingle in Cheltenham and Liverpool; abandoned contact tracing; allowed people into the country unchecked from virus hotspots; told NHS staff to wear less of the PPE he declined to order earlier; hosted a shower for his latest baby two days before telling people to reduce social contact; herded 5,000 Stereophonics fans into the killing ground of Cardiff Arena; finally told people not to go to pubs and venues but didn’t say that pubs and venues should close, a period now known as Schrödinger’s British Hospitality Industry; and then sent coronavirus-ridden patients back to the petri dishes of their care homes.
But last Tuesday, when Dominic Yateswinelodge from the Metro asked Shake Hands live on TV: “When the time comes to describe this period to future generations, how will we explain how Britain suffered the highest death toll in Europe and the deepest recession?”, Boris Herd Immunity Johnson replied: “About aaah about aah you know your sort of league table question I I I you know I think I mean I er respectfully er go back to the answer you would have heard from the podium many times which is that the er the er the the pandemic is er alas tragically is not over yet er across the world and we will continue to er protect everyone is er to the to the er to the best of to the best of our abilities. This this this is not over and I think the international comparisons are are are premature at this stage.”
Premature international comparisons have, however, been useful to the Brexit-Covid government in extolling the superiority of our own vaccine rollout. And our dubiously awarded and criminally useless £37bn track-and-trace system was famously and falsely designated “world-beating”. It appears international comparisons must only be applied where they favour our nation. Nonetheless, Shake Hands’s answer seized the punch-drunk public’s imagination. By seven that evening, his answer, now known as the “About Aaah About Aah You Know Your Sort of League Table Question I I I You Know I Think I Mean I Er Respectfully Er” speech, had already dislodged Earl Spencer’s Princess Diana Funeral Oration from the No 1 spot of an online League Table of the Greatest Speechifying of All Time. This was ironic, given that the clear thrust of the speech was to discredit the idea of league tables and of the notion that anything should be compared with anything else generally. But memes swiftly developed, including re-edited footage of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream address, appearing to show him declaring: “About aaah about aah you know your sort of league table question I I I you know I think I mean I er respectfully er.”
But those who had already voted for “About Aaah About Aah You Know… ” were, like international comparisons, premature. Dominic from the Metro then asked Shake Hands: “People who own holiday homes overseas, such as your father for instance, will be exempted from the travel ban affecting everyone else. Would you advise people to buy a second home abroad if they want to have a holiday this year?” In two simple, sarcastic sentences, the humble Metro scribe had Zoomed Shake Hands to the floor. But he had reckoned without our leader’s mastery of deliberately incoherent speechifying.
“And on your point really about global ah ah travel and ah and ah holidays ah,” Shake Hands speechified, “a lot of people do want to know about um er er what’s going to happen on the on the on the holiday front and um er I er I I I know there’s a a a great deal of er curiosity and interest… Er er ab ab we’ve heard already that there are er er other European countries where the disease is now rising so things certainly look difficult for the for the er time being er but we we’ll be we’ll be able to say more er we hope in a few days time. I certainly I certainly hope to be er saying some more by 5 April and and er er I think that’s the best you can hope for there.”
The main thrust of the question had been totally ignored. The Zoom format saw poor Dominic’s window swiftly shut before he could point this out and cunning Shake Hands’s calculated ineloquence had successfully created the illusion that something, of some sort, had been said. Time had passed. And the speech now known as “Er Er Ab Ab We’ve Heard Already That There Are Er Er” swiftly replaced “About Aaah About Aah You Know Your Sort of League Table Question I I I You Know I Think I Mean I Er Respectfully Er” at the top of the speechifying league tables. The vaccine rollout continues. As does the whitewash rollout, all but unchallenged. Which will be the Brexit-Covid government’s greatest triumph?
Stewart Lee
2021-03-28T19:22:13+01:00
On 23 March 2020, 74 days after China declared coronavirus to the WHO, Britain went into lockdown. In the interim Boris “I Shook Hands With Everyone” Johnson had ignored emails about a Europe-wide PPE purchasing scheme; ignored experts’ recommendations to close pubs and restaurants; taken a holiday in Kent, back before it became clogged with lorry drivers’ faeces; got divorced from his second wife whom he had repeatedly cheated on, including, according to her testimony at least, with a handsomely publicly remunerated tech adviser; ignored further expert advice to close schools; endorsed the idea of herd immunity; announced his engagement to an environmentally concerned refurbishing enthusiast; skipped five successive Cobra meetings; shaken hands with everybody in a hospital; advised hand-washing; joined 82,000 rugby fans in Twickenham; ignored further lockdown calls in early March; made international sports fans mingle in Cheltenham and Liverpool; abandoned contact tracing; allowed people into the country unchecked from virus hotspots; told NHS staff to wear less of the PPE he declined to order earlier; hosted a shower for his latest baby two days before telling people to reduce social contact; herded 5,000 Stereophonics fans into the killing ground of Cardiff Arena; finally told people not to go to pubs and venues but didn’t say that pubs and venues should close, a period now known as Schrödinger’s British Hospitality Industry; and then sent coronavirus-ridden patients back to the petri dishes of their care homes. But last Tuesday, when Dominic Yateswinelodge from the Metro asked Shake Hands live on TV: “When the time comes to describe this period to future generations, how will we explain how Britain suffered the highest death toll in Europe and the deepest recession?”, Boris Herd Immunity Johnson replied: “About aaah about aah you know your sort of league table question I I I...
Comedian and columnist Stewart Lee joins Nish and Coco to discuss the week’s big stories.
They talk about Donald Trump’s deadly and yet utterly confusing war with Iran, as the US President continues to contradict his own statements about the Strait of Hormuz and peace talks, almost in the same breath.
It certainly means a new, live, UK sketch show has plenty of material - but how should comedy respond to the challenging times we are all living through?
Plus - why having a weekly opinion column is good for your mental health and why news organisations need to do more to tackle the lies and extreme rhetoric coming from politicians.
Don’t forget to leave a review - it gives the show a boost and we love to see your comments.
Stewart Lee
2026-03-26T11:53:46+00:00
Comedian and columnist Stewart Lee joins Nish and Coco to discuss the week’s big stories. They talk about Donald Trump’s deadly and yet utterly confusing war with Iran, as the US President continues to contradict his own statements about the Strait of Hormuz and peace talks, almost in the same breath. It certainly means a new, live, UK sketch show has plenty of material - but how should comedy respond to the challenging times we are all living through? Plus - why having a weekly opinion column is good for your mental health and why news organisations need to do more to tackle the lies and extreme rhetoric coming from politicians. Don’t forget to leave a review - it gives the show a boost and we love to see your comments.
On Wednesday, Dominic Raab, the Minister for Paddleboarding While Kabul Burns, mocked the Labour deputy leader for attending Glyndebourne while railway workers picketed. Who did Angela Rayner think she was? Pick up your stepladder, get back in your slum and eat your fried offal, peasant. “No opera for you!” Raab even winked at Rayner before he delivered the standard “champagne socialist” slapdown, the James Bond assassin-playboy of his own wet dreams, the corridors of power still spaffed with wine-time spatterings. Wasn’t there a dogfight somewhere that Rayner should be betting on? Or a cockroach race in a Victorian pub backroom? Shouldn’t her sort be roaming the streets gathering excrement with her bare hands to tan leather? At least this time the Tories weren’t speculating about the colour of her pubic hair. Progress.
Tories don’t get the arts. In 2015, when Sajid Javid was culture secretary, he resisted attempts to prevent touts from reselling publicly subsidised tickets, designed to ease access to productions, privately at higher rates. Javid said the only people bothered by criminally inflated ticket costs were “the chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”.
Again, the arts weren’t for ordinary folk. Didn’t Javid understand that his job as culture secretary was not just to transform public subsidies into private profits, but to make the arts part of people’s lives, because culture has a value beyond its financial worth? No, he didn’t understand that. Javid should have a notice plastered to his bald head saying: “No tools are kept in this vehicle overnight.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson had realised Raab’s snobbery had backfired; the Conservatives suddenly believed: “Everybody should be able to enjoy arts and culture and other such things across the UK.” This is a lie. The Conservatives’ contempt for culture, and ordinary folk’s access to culture, is well documented and continuing, though reports of Johnson’s office hours oral examinations prove they do believe people should at least be free to enjoy “other such things”.
Sheffield Hallam University is suspending its English literature degree, probably the first of many outside the members’ club of the Russell Group to do so. The universities minister, Michelle Donelan, wants to chop courses where “fewer than 60% of graduates are in professional employment or further study within 15 months of graduating”. She misunderstands the point of studying the arts. Any arts course where as many as 60% of students are in “professional” employment only 15 months after graduating has failed. Spectacularly.
The point of an English degree is to inspire those who take it with such a love of literature that they spend the next decade serving in bars while trying to complete their Great Work. And if that doesn’t fly, they must become English teachers, handing on the same curse of loving literature to future generations, their collective misery deepening like a coastal shelf, just as our collective understanding of the works grows because of their efforts.
I do lots of talks about writing comedy, at various educational institutions, usually for free as I am a virtue-signalling do-gooder. If there’s a fee, I donate it to Arts Emergency, a charity that mentors young people from less advantaged backgrounds who want to work in arts, culture and activism. Eton school’s Literary Society asked me to speak, so I thought I’d give the fee to Arts Emergency. They said: “Student-run societies don’t have budgets for fees.” I didn’t go. But I doubt the post-talk Q&A session at Eton would have gone the way they usually do.
Because what the cool kids usually ask is how to get by financially in the perineum between starting out and either making it, or deciding to quit, without having to waste all their writing time in the world of “professional” employment. Donelan has just told young creatives there won’t even be an English course for them if they so much as think about trying to achieve their dreams. Slapped down by the Tories! Just like Rayner, dipping her dirty toe in the Glyndebourne lake.
Maybe one of these students will become a success whose tax repays their debt to the state many times over. (Hello?) Maybe they will just become that friend of yours who knows intuitively which books to recommend, God bless them. Or maybe, by studying English literature, they just help to keep the understanding of real writing alive in a world where Dumbo Dorries’s beloved Netflix generates paint-by-numbers content by market-driven algorithm. All of these outcomes represent value for money, but they’re resistant to rigorous calculation.
Great Britain falls apart under the Brexit government. We break international law and lie and cheat and trash our overseas reputation; the rivers, whose post-EU protections Michael Gove promised would be strengthened, are suddenly more polluted than ever, pulsating with polio; workers’ rights, which Mick Lynch’s RMT said would be stronger after Brexit, are diluted; musicians can’t tour; small businesses can’t export; a man with a megaphone is broken on a wheel; and our cultural capital, the world of film and music and television and literature, that gave us global soft power, is strangled by a government that seems to want to destroy the arts in an act of… what? Vandalism? Spite? Protection from the kind of questions that people who understand how words work ask?
A museum curator I met on the east coast of Scotland last week said we face a second dark age. But it isn’t Vikings and puritans that are coming to burn our books and tapestries. It is our own government. Donelan crests the horizon in a dragon ship; false beard; historically inaccurate horned helmet; and all. Light the beacons across the land and bury the books in bogs. Maybe, when this criminal gang is finally routed, we will have been able to save something, at least.
Stewart Lee
2022-07-03T11:39:16+01:00
On Wednesday, Dominic Raab, the Minister for Paddleboarding While Kabul Burns, mocked the Labour deputy leader for attending Glyndebourne while railway workers picketed. Who did Angela Rayner think she was? Pick up your stepladder, get back in your slum and eat your fried offal, peasant. “No opera for you!” Raab even winked at Rayner before he delivered the standard “champagne socialist” slapdown, the James Bond assassin-playboy of his own wet dreams, the corridors of power still spaffed with wine-time spatterings. Wasn’t there a dogfight somewhere that Rayner should be betting on? Or a cockroach race in a Victorian pub backroom? Shouldn’t her sort be roaming the streets gathering excrement with her bare hands to tan leather? At least this time the Tories weren’t speculating about the colour of her pubic hair. Progress. Tories don’t get the arts. In 2015, when Sajid Javid was culture secretary, he resisted attempts to prevent touts from reselling publicly subsidised tickets, designed to ease access to productions, privately at higher rates. Javid said the only people bothered by criminally inflated ticket costs were “the chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”. Again, the arts weren’t for ordinary folk. Didn’t Javid understand that his job as culture secretary was not just to transform public subsidies into private profits, but to make the arts part of people’s lives, because culture has a value beyond its financial worth? No, he didn’t understand that. Javid should have a notice plastered to his bald head saying: “No tools are kept in this vehicle overnight.” By Wednesday afternoon, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson had realised Raab’s snobbery had backfired; the Conservatives suddenly believed: “Everybody should be able to enjoy arts and culture and other such...
Walter Raleigh, in a high state of excitement, believes his many achievements and discovery of the potato and tobacco, will win the hand of Queen Elizabeth. In this endeavour, he is sadly mistaken.
Walter Jupp (sic) does the best with the material given, but his patter falls short. The play only picks up with the grand entrance of QE1, Simon Munnery, dressed to the nines in a black and white gown, pearls everywhere, red ragged wig, painted white face and wearing the ocassional men's underwear.
The Queen's entrance is followed by her un-PC attacks on most European countries and everyone not fortunate enough to be English. Munnery manages the right level of disdain and arrogance, lacking in Sir Walter who prances around the stage like a lost teenager in love.
There are a few good scenes, such as the ships passing in the fog and the Queen giving Sir Walt his own medicine, that is, feeding him mashed potatoes. The whole project, however, needs to be tighter and is desparate for more jokes. These two historical characters should have been a wonderful opportunity for amusing banter, but Blackadder did it much better years ago.
The set is attractive albeit minimal. Having a mute servant girl play various musical instruments was a nice touch. Even though Stewart Lee has written several two handers, the script let everyone down.
There is a story that Queen Elixabeth was very conscious of hygiene. She took a bath once a year even when she didn't need it. Simon Munnery certainly looked the part.
Stewart Lee
2008-08-04T20:08:03+01:00
Walter Raleigh, in a high state of excitement, believes his many achievements and discovery of the potato and tobacco, will win the hand of Queen Elizabeth. In this endeavour, he is sadly mistaken. Walter Jupp (sic) does the best with the material given, but his patter falls short. The play only picks up with the grand entrance of QE1, Simon Munnery, dressed to the nines in a black and white gown, pearls everywhere, red ragged wig, painted white face and wearing the ocassional men's underwear. The Queen's entrance is followed by her un-PC attacks on most European countries and everyone not fortunate enough to be English. Munnery manages the right level of disdain and arrogance, lacking in Sir Walter who prances around the stage like a lost teenager in love. There are a few good scenes, such as the ships passing in the fog and the Queen giving Sir Walt his own medicine, that is, feeding him mashed potatoes. The whole project, however, needs to be tighter and is desparate for more jokes. These two historical characters should have been a wonderful opportunity for amusing banter, but Blackadder did it much better years ago. The set is attractive albeit minimal. Having a mute servant girl play various musical instruments was a nice touch. Even though Stewart Lee has written several two handers, the script let everyone down. There is a story that Queen Elixabeth was very conscious of hygiene. She took a bath once a year even when she didn't need it. Simon Munnery certainly looked the part.
Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home.
In these pages on Birmingham, you'll find two unique tales. 'Silver in the Quarter' is a vivid coming-of-age fiction about a boy who finds himself caught up in the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 by Maria Whatton. 'In the Ape's Shadow' is a fascinating exploration of the music scene that inspired him growing up in Birmingham, by BAFTA Award-winning comedian and author Stewart Lee.
Stewart Lee
2018-06-28T16:55:27+01:00
Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home. In these pages on Birmingham, you'll find two unique tales. 'Silver in the Quarter' is a vivid coming-of-age fiction about a boy who finds himself caught up in the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 by Maria Whatton. 'In the Ape's Shadow' is a fascinating exploration of the music scene that inspired him growing up in Birmingham, by BAFTA Award-winning comedian and author Stewart Lee.
With his rapier wit, caustic put-downs and prodigious appetite for drink, Samuel Johnson is right at home on the Edinburgh Fringe but for one thing: his jokes are 230 years old.
In 18th-century London, Dr Johnson was a superstar — the author of the first English dictionary, a critic and a novelist who dominated the capital’s literary salons. In 21st-century Edinburgh, he is half of the Fringe’s most eagerly awaited double act in Johnson and Boswell — Late but Live, which has its premiere at the Traverse theatre tonight.
The show, devised by the team that turned Jerry Springer: The Opera into one of the most explosive successes in Fringe history, is an attempt to prove that Dr Johnson can cut it as a modern comic. The Jerry Springer cocktail of biblical characters, filthy arias and tap dancing Ku Klux Klansmen appalled some and delighted many more. Five years later Stewart Lee, who co-wrote and directed it, has returned to the festival with Iain Gillie and Nigel Godfrey, the show’s managers, to put on the equally ambitious Johnson and Boswell.
“Great wit is timeless,” Lee said yesterday. “I wanted to find a way to take the dust off Dr Johnson’s lines and show that Johnson was as funny as any stand-up working today.”
Like many Fringe favourites, Dr Johnson’s humour was punchy, rude and often fuelled by alcohol. The Scots were frequently the victims of his barbs, although he did concede that “much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young”. In 1773 Dr Johnson toured the Hebrides with his dissolute friend and biographer James Boswell, who recorded much of their conversation verbatim. Extracts from their contrasting accounts of the trip form the basis of Lee’s script.
The show is set in the present day. Boswell has persuaded Dr Johnson to visit Edinburgh to cash in on the fad for celebrity memoirs by relaunching their travel books.
“We quote a lot of their text directly but we’ve also written things about Scotland today in a Johnsonian way. I don’t think the average person will be able to tell which bits are Johnson and which bits are us. That’s the joy of it,” said Lee.
Stewart Lee
2007-08-07T19:34:55+01:00
With his rapier wit, caustic put-downs and prodigious appetite for drink, Samuel Johnson is right at home on the Edinburgh Fringe but for one thing: his jokes are 230 years old. In 18th-century London, Dr Johnson was a superstar — the author of the first English dictionary, a critic and a novelist who dominated the capital’s literary salons. In 21st-century Edinburgh, he is half of the Fringe’s most eagerly awaited double act in Johnson and Boswell — Late but Live, which has its premiere at the Traverse theatre tonight. The show, devised by the team that turned Jerry Springer: The Opera into one of the most explosive successes in Fringe history, is an attempt to prove that Dr Johnson can cut it as a modern comic. The Jerry Springer cocktail of biblical characters, filthy arias and tap dancing Ku Klux Klansmen appalled some and delighted many more. Five years later Stewart Lee, who co-wrote and directed it, has returned to the festival with Iain Gillie and Nigel Godfrey, the show’s managers, to put on the equally ambitious Johnson and Boswell. “Great wit is timeless,” Lee said yesterday. “I wanted to find a way to take the dust off Dr Johnson’s lines and show that Johnson was as funny as any stand-up working today.” Like many Fringe favourites, Dr Johnson’s humour was punchy, rude and often fuelled by alcohol. The Scots were frequently the victims of his barbs, although he did concede that “much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young”. In 1773 Dr Johnson toured the Hebrides with his dissolute friend and biographer James Boswell, who recorded much of their conversation verbatim. Extracts from their contrasting accounts of the trip form the basis of Lee’s script. The show is set in the present day. Boswell has...
The rumbling juggernaut of expressive grumpiness that is Stewart Lee rolls slowly, yet relentlessly, into town; stopping off, briefly, at The Brighton Dome to delight a packed out audience.
Garnering laughs from the off, Lee describes how he has got bald, fat, blind and deaf since he last went on tour, before launching into the first set of the evening, Tornado.
This first half, explores the fabulously silly premise that his hit BBC television series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, was falsely described for two years in its Netflix listing as a programme about killer sharks falling from the sky, and leads him to explain in minute detail, how this is an injustice, as well as the damage this has done to his career.
Lee continues by talking about other comedians who haven’t suffered the same fate and have correctly attributed shows on the platform. Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle and Josh Widdicombe all get lambasted by his acerbic rants and musing as hearty laughter rings throughout the Dome.
As an aside he berates the dads in the audience for bringing their reluctant offspring to see him. “They won’t like me and they’ll hate you for it” he declares. Brightonians don’t escape his gaze either; “You know the rest of the country isn’t like this don’t you?” He chides. There is an awkward murmur of guilty liberal laughter at our hypocrisy, at this observation.
Lee is interrupted in his majestic flow by the flash of a camera phone. He is thoroughly prepared for the intrusion, it sadly must happen at every gig. Woe betides anyone who uses their device to try and capture a sneaky picture or a snippet of video. Lee lies in wait like a 1960s chemistry teacher throwing a bunch of keys at an inattentive pupil. He will crush you! It’s a zero-tolerance approach rightly administered to those who cannot help feed their need to document the night out, rather than staying in the moment and enjoying the mastery of a performer at the top of his profession.
As the performance goes on, we find all people, whether they love him or loathe him, are treated with the same irreverence. Alan Bennett, who has written a glowing review of Lee, comes in for some fine goading. The comedian rounds the half with a glorious impersonation of him and his writing style.
Revelling in repetition, callbacks and opening surreal pathways, to the joy of the crowd, Tornado is an intricate and interwoven piece plotted towards one large visual gag.
Back from the interval – part two, Snowflake, begins.
Here Lee tackles political correctness, the magazine GQ and comments made by the journalist Tony Parson, all with great fervour.
Unabated laughter can be heard, as he explores the concept of people being able to say the unsayable in a section that proves Lee is just as much a first-rate clown as he is an excellent wordsmith.
Other highlights include a fabulously funny critique of the hit sitcom Fleabag and a hilarious condemnation of James Bond, the rapist.
The night closes with a pastiche of Enid Blyton in a very humorous reading and an uplifting song (whether meant or not) in the finale.
Lee has created one of the best grotesque comedy characters performing on the circuit today. He cannot, however hard he tries (and he does really try hard), hide the kind, compassionate and sweet-natured soul that lies beneath, it’s what makes his material so wonderful to consume, whether it be written or performed.
If you are to see only one stand up performance in your life go and see Stewart Lee (or Daniel Kitson). He is the best the art form gets.
Stewart Lee
2020-02-21T19:33:22+00:00
The rumbling juggernaut of expressive grumpiness that is Stewart Lee rolls slowly, yet relentlessly, into town; stopping off, briefly, at The Brighton Dome to delight a packed out audience. Garnering laughs from the off, Lee describes how he has got bald, fat, blind and deaf since he last went on tour, before launching into the first set of the evening, Tornado. This first half, explores the fabulously silly premise that his hit BBC television series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, was falsely described for two years in its Netflix listing as a programme about killer sharks falling from the sky, and leads him to explain in minute detail, how this is an injustice, as well as the damage this has done to his career. Lee continues by talking about other comedians who haven’t suffered the same fate and have correctly attributed shows on the platform. Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle and Josh Widdicombe all get lambasted by his acerbic rants and musing as hearty laughter rings throughout the Dome. As an aside he berates the dads in the audience for bringing their reluctant offspring to see him. “They won’t like me and they’ll hate you for it” he declares. Brightonians don’t escape his gaze either; “You know the rest of the country isn’t like this don’t you?” He chides. There is an awkward murmur of guilty liberal laughter at our hypocrisy, at this observation. Lee is interrupted in his majestic flow by the flash of a camera phone. He is thoroughly prepared for the intrusion, it sadly must happen at every gig. Woe betides anyone who uses their device to try and capture a sneaky picture or a snippet of video. Lee lies in wait like a 1960s chemistry teacher throwing a bunch of keys at an inattentive pupil. He will crush...
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 deadpanned. As a documentarian, Lee shares much with Jonathan Meades: a truculent contrarianism, a deep hinterland of high and pop culture, and an eye for the oddest bits of the British psyche.
His tour of untrustworthy voices began with the book that made King Arthur famous: The History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey was “a bit of a leg-puller,” admitted a British Library academic. Lee quoted the words of William of Newburgh, who in 1190 put it less politely: “Everything this man said was made up [...] either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.” Cue embarrassed laughter in the hushed and “lie-packed” British Library vaults.
There followed a web of false endings, red herrings and uncanny impressions (was that really Iggy Pop reading Edgar Allan Poe?). Keen-eared listeners may have noticed that the song used to introduce a segment on Bob Dylan’s untruths was actually by forgotten Sixties psych rock band Mouse and the Traps, who found brief success by copying his style. Even the picture of Lee advertising this show on the BBC Sounds app wasn’t of Lee, but of lookalike Terry Christian.
Yes, it was all too clever by three-quarters. But what gave it depth was a palpable love of the sometimes recondite material chewed over by Lee and his interviewees. Poet Rob Auton offered a sweet tribute to Ivor Cutler’s writing, explaining why he felt close to the Scottish eccentric: “My imagination is one of my best friends, and it’s like he’s friends with it as well.”
Lee spoke to the reclusive satirist Chris Morris about how algorithms are skewing our sense of reality. It prompted a final dramatic reveal: by doctoring Wikipedia pages that he knew Lee would visit, Morris had essentially been this programme’s shadowy puppet-master, spoon-feeding the hapless presenter his own alternative facts. (Or had he?)
Stewart Lee
2021-06-16T22:16:17+01:00
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 deadpanned. As a documentarian, Lee shares much with Jonathan Meades: a truculent contrarianism, a deep hinterland of high and pop culture, and an eye for the oddest bits of the British psyche. His tour of untrustworthy voices began with the book that made King Arthur famous: The History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey was “a bit of a leg-puller,” admitted a British Library academic. Lee quoted the words of William of Newburgh, who in 1190 put it less politely: “Everything this man said was made up [...] either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.” Cue embarrassed laughter in the hushed and “lie-packed” British Library vaults. There followed a web of false endings, red herrings and uncanny impressions (was that really Iggy Pop reading Edgar Allan Poe?). Keen-eared listeners may have noticed that the song used to introduce a segment on Bob Dylan’s untruths was actually by forgotten Sixties psych rock band Mouse and the Traps, who found brief success by copying his style. Even the picture of Lee advertising this show on the BBC Sounds app wasn’t of Lee, but of lookalike Terry Christian. Yes, it was all too clever by three-quarters. But what gave it depth was a palpable love of the sometimes recondite material chewed over by Lee and his interviewees. Poet Rob Auton offered a sweet tribute to Ivor Cutler’s writing, explaining why he felt close to the Scottish...
This massively expanded version of Skullflower’s 1988 debut e.p. is the addictive noise fix your nan warned you about.
Dumb ugly titles christen filthy dirges of militaristic pounding, unmanly retching, and tidal swathes of space rock guitar sewage.
Often recorded in rehearsal rooms on audibly overburdened dictaphones, Skullflower’s youthful stirrings suggest an obsessively single-minded British Sonic Youth, unencumbered by redemptive hippy dream hopefulness.
Skullflower still exists, though guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn soon split to ply more utilitarian scuzz jazz with the obscurely influential Ascension.
Stewart Lee
2013-08-04T21:39:37+01:00
This massively expanded version of Skullflower’s 1988 debut e.p. is the addictive noise fix your nan warned you about. Dumb ugly titles christen filthy dirges of militaristic pounding, unmanly retching, and tidal swathes of space rock guitar sewage. Often recorded in rehearsal rooms on audibly overburdened dictaphones, Skullflower’s youthful stirrings suggest an obsessively single-minded British Sonic Youth, unencumbered by redemptive hippy dream hopefulness. Skullflower still exists, though guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn soon split to ply more utilitarian scuzz jazz with the obscurely influential Ascension.
Kawabata Makoto's bands - Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Acid Mothers Temple - have a cannibalistic relationship with the underground's first flowering, regurgitating exaggerated forms of psychedelia, hard rock and proto-punk.
Here he teams with a genuine first generation innovator, the percussionist Mani Neumeier of the Seventies krautrockers Guru Guru, a kind of free jazz Stooges.
On five spontaneous compositions, ranging between three and twenty minutes, Neumeier plugs all available space with clattering splashback, forcing Makoto out of his curatorial comfort zone, his guitar playing here more reminiscent of the spiky improviser Derek Bailey than any of the long-haired legends he usually channels.
Stewart Lee
2011-04-03T21:07:32+01:00
Kawabata Makoto's bands - Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Acid Mothers Temple - have a cannibalistic relationship with the underground's first flowering, regurgitating exaggerated forms of psychedelia, hard rock and proto-punk. Here he teams with a genuine first generation innovator, the percussionist Mani Neumeier of the Seventies krautrockers Guru Guru, a kind of free jazz Stooges. On five spontaneous compositions, ranging between three and twenty minutes, Neumeier plugs all available space with clattering splashback, forcing Makoto out of his curatorial comfort zone, his guitar playing here more reminiscent of the spiky improviser Derek Bailey than any of the long-haired legends he usually channels.
In April this year, I rammed my forty-six year old self into the 150 capacity 12 Bar club in Denmark Street, Soho. On stage, a tall haunted man bobbed to the beats of his laptop like an aging rave survivor lurking in a municipal park, and another twitched and ranted like the cash-cadging last orders cokehead he might once have been. A conflagration of showbiz tastemakers and dedicated fans agreed that something superb was happening. Despite thirty-three years of weekly gig going, I've rarely been in the right place at the right time. I may have missed The Sex Pistols at The Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976, but I was there for Sleaford Mods at the 12 Bar in 2014. And now Sleaford Mods have descended upon me, like an enormous yes.
Jason Williamson, a brick-built office worker long marinated in quietly suppressed fury, started recording as Sleaford Mods in 2007, dropping dirty realist observations in a distinct East Midlands argot over home-grown sample-heavy slabs. Things stepped up a gear in 2011 when Andrew Fearn, a lanky laptop jockey with laughing eyes who lives in a perpetual state of secret amusement, arrived with his hydroponically nurtured musical hybrids, floppy dance rhythms cross-pollinated with Peely post-punk noise.
"When we first got together," recalls Williamson, "I just told him to make it faster and sound like the Wu Tang Clan." "Jason was a bit suspicious of me," Fearns remembers, "I'd make a mix-tape with The Butthole Surfers and Abba on it. He didn't know what would work. I'd put a synth pad or something in and he'd say, 'No. Change that for a car alarm.'"
When I first heard Sleaford Mods' genre-collapsing speed-poetry I imagined I'd finally stumbled across young people making obviously contemporary records that nonetheless matched the incendiary energy of similarly smouldering sounds that had scorched me decades ago– The Specials, The Fall, Husker Du, Conflict and Public Enemy. But the duo, it turns out, were in their early forties, having served long apprenticeships in the Nottinghamshire music scene; Fearns nurturing a larder of supposedly incompatible sources to draw upon; Williamson accruing a lifetime's supply of archly observed turns of phrase and awkward situations to concertina, cut-up style, into car-crash images of quiet desperation.
"I suck on a roll-up. Pull your jeans up. Fuck off! I'm going home."(Jobseeker, Chubbed Up, 2014)
Jaded middle class opinion formers like me trip over themselves to declare Sleaford Mods the authentic voice of the English provincial working class, a bona-fide Prole Art Threat, to quote The Fall. In the 1930s, the American folk song collector John Lomax employed the jailbird bluesman Lead Belly as a driver come butler, whilst also recording his music, and there's something crass and telling about the way metropolitan media treats Sleaford Mods' distinctive voice, the sort rarely heard today outside of poverty porn TV, as somehow exotic. But standing in the smokers' courtyard of a sensitively refitted olde London pub in newly gentrified Finsbury Park, the sort of disputed cultural territory Sleaford Mods regularly mock, it becomes clear these marginalised outsiders are within snatching difference of the keys to pop music's executive toilets. But will they smash up the cistern or just redecorate?
"Who gives a fuck about yesterday's heroes, who seem to think that they are still today's heroes? It's not a pyramid, you're not a fucking pharaoh." (Pubic Hair Ltd, Austerity Dogs 2013)
"Johnny Borrell fucks off to an island for four months at the height of his fame. Was the country bothered? Was it fuck. He made a massively bad calculation, the thick cunt."(6 Horsemen (The Brixtons), Tiswas 2014)
I put it to Sleaford Mods that, given the naked hostility they appear to display to identifiable individuals, they're lucky there is some separation between them and the characters that narrate the songs. The ungrateful houseguest in You're Brave, (on the last album Divide And Exit), who ridicules Chumbawumba, secretly masturbates in his "fucking tit-rifle" host's toilet, and then nicks his biscuits, as some obscure act of social justice, is not the same person as the suddenly conscience stricken drug consumer in 2011's Double Diamond, who takes issue with a dealer supplying to crack-addicted prostitutes.
So who is firing off these zeitgeist-derailing zingers and insulting all these pop stars? Is it Sleaford Mods themselves or a succession of different semi-fictionalised characters? Fearn gives an answer that I suspect is slightly off-message; "They're being insulted by us really I think. But it's just a wind up as well, pub humour, where you take the piss out of your mates." But how will their Holy Fool outsider act play if Sleaford Mods become massive? "It remains to be seen. But I've been thinking about that a lot lately," says Williamson, typically more pensive. "It's inevitable that you are sucked in."
Fearn is acutely aware of how success might change the duo, but is enjoying the ride. "Manchester last week was amazing. There was this whirlwind of young people, all crowd surfing. Whatever is happening, it's here now. We just carry on doing what we do on stage but you can't control how it's going to be perceived. We've been trying to do things the traditional way, and you get a reputation for being real and hanging out in the bar but then there's kids everywhere wanting to talk to you and doing selfies…" He tails off. Williamson continues for him.. "And you can't carry on. Sleaford Mods has been wrapped in an energy dictated by being in full time work and having to dedicate 80% of your life to something you don't like. But when that changes you have to see how it goes from there."
Williamson's quitting his job this month to be a full time Sleaford Mod, but his stories are acutely informed by his workplace experiences, a strange mix of cynicism and empathy, contempt and pity. What will Sleaford Mods write about now? Will they get angry with journalists and air travel like Kelly Jones on the third Stereophonics album? Fearn isn't worried, and has touching faith in Williamson's abilities to find friction in things "as simple as the coining of British phrases, like 'You couldn't make it up'. It's such a British thing to say. Everything people say could be musical."
"I always found it hard to write love songs," confides Williamson, "with a bridge and a chorus, then I stopped trying and it came easily. What's interesting to me is the horribleness of everyday things, that ashtray on that table, the concrete on the floor, and I've been trying to hone in on that, thinking about what naturally comes out." Williamson sees magical strangeness in the banal, and his apprehension of the ashtray echoes Jean Paul Sartre's horrified encounter with a doorknob in the existentialist classic Nausea.
Jean Paul Sartre? Really? In the '80s the music press creaked with such heavyweight cultural names, dropped into Bananarama 7" reviews through ducts of newly minted critical theory. Today Sleaford Mods are making pop music sturdy and significant enough to take the pounding of music writers' art-crit ambitions. The car alarms and flushing toilets that Fearn chops into the tracks echo the unadorned urinal Marcel Ducamp dumped in an art gallery; and writing in The Wire, the academic Mark Fisher offered analysis of Sleaford Mods informed by concerns about global capitalism. There are things here to wrap your brain around, to take to your heart. But Williamson is worried about how reading such criticisms might influence the duo's work.
"I started to read Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism after he reviewed our album because I thought the way he explained it was really interesting. He'd seen stuff we hadn't. But that kind of criticism makes you self-conscious. I don't want to do what we do to order. Now I could probably reel off something that sounded like A Level Government Politics or whatever if I wanted to but you are wary of doing that because a) it's really fucking patronising and b) it sounds shit as well. It's better to talk about the sociological things you've experienced in a 'feet on the ground' sense rather than an academic sense."
While Sleaford Mods' feet are definitely on the ground, Williamson's words and Fearn's occasional psychedelic touches conjure a visionary mood. Liveable Shit, from Divide And Exit, is a key track. It begins with the scatological satirical bent of a Viz comic strip, describing Williamson's daily workplace encounter with the same shitty smell and the co-worker responsible for it, then expands into a critique of the shitness of life, with David Cameron's face "hanging in the clouds like Gary Oldman's Dracula", lyrical allusions to acid-godfathers The Doors, and sudden watery sunspots of tonal backwash. William Blake saw heaven in a wild flower and eternity in a grain of sand. Williamson sees the world in an office toilet.
"Liveable Shit was based on seeing the same bloke in the same shirt going in the same toilet, where you spend most of the day, going backwards and forwards, drinking your coffee, in the same workplace at the same time every morning," Williamson remembers, "And we didn't get on anyway. I forget what his name was. He went for a job I was going for it and he fucking got it. And he turned up the next day in these fucking trousers, rocker's trousers – he was a rocker – and I went "You got the fucking job!"
Sleaford Mods' age and cultural and geographical positioning fingerprint their work, making it quintessentially English, and magically timeless, regurgitating decades' worth of reference points whilst remaining utterly contemporary. The new single Tiswas cites Chris Tarrant's forgotten early '80s comedy project OTT. And who talks about 'rockers' anymore anyway? Mark Fisher pointed out that even the duo's name seems like 'vintage graffiti', and I imagine it scrawled on an M6 motorway bridge sometime in the late '70s. Why 'Sleaford Mods'?
"It was just random one night," Williamson recalls. "The old engineer said, 'You've got five or six tunes here that are all really good. You're going to need a name sharpish.' I was sat in the pub and it just popped out. I like the Mod thing. It's not trying to be subtle. It's just like someone shouting 'MODS!'" Why 'Sleaford' though, a small Lincolnshire market town? And then someone from the NME uses the Gents behind the window in the pub courtyard and triggers the flush cycle. When I transcribe the tape the rest of The Sleaford Mods' conversation is masked by the sound of the gushing urinal. Beneath the flow I can just make out Williamson's still small voice, reaching back across the years. "I used to go to Sleaford, from Grantham, as a kid, with my parents, to go to the cinema and that. I saw Superman there, with Christopher Reeve. Sleaford was a real treat."
Sleaford Mods' Tiswas ep is available on Invada from Nov 24th. The Chubbed Up album is reissued on October 26th. They tour Britain this month and support The Specials in November. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Series 2 is available on DVD and download from Nov 10th.
SWEARING SIDE-BAR
Sleaford Mods' are our current kings of swearing. But here's five of their forebears.
Philip Larkin – Sunny Prestatyn (1964), This Be The Verse (1971) and High Windows (1974). The Hull poet punched through poetic convention with well chosen expletives. "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do."
George Carlin – Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television (1972). The brilliant American stand-up explores the cultural context of swearing. The seven words are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.
Crass – Reality Asylum 7" (1979) Anarcho-punk pioneer Eve Libertine's cut-glass voice intones, with impossible precision, a studiously blasphemous collage of holy imagery, feminist protest and fantastic swearing. "Fucklove prophet of death. You sigh alone in your cockfear. You lie alone in your cuntfear."
John Cooper Clarke – Evidently Chickentown (1980) The punk poet's howl against urban living is the ultimate versified fuckathon. "The fucking clocks are fucking wrong, The fucking days are fucking long, It fucking gets you fucking down, evidently chicken town."
The Opera Device – Stockhausen soprano soloist Lore Lixenberg circled the fringe of the '90s comedy circuit in a titanium bra crushing hecklers with operatically arranged put-downs like "Fuck off you cunt", composed by future Jerry Springer The Opera creator Richard Thomas.
Stewart Lee
2014-10-01T21:16:19+01:00
In April this year, I rammed my forty-six year old self into the 150 capacity 12 Bar club in Denmark Street, Soho. On stage, a tall haunted man bobbed to the beats of his laptop like an aging rave survivor lurking in a municipal park, and another twitched and ranted like the cash-cadging last orders cokehead he might once have been. A conflagration of showbiz tastemakers and dedicated fans agreed that something superb was happening. Despite thirty-three years of weekly gig going, I've rarely been in the right place at the right time. I may have missed The Sex Pistols at The Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976, but I was there for Sleaford Mods at the 12 Bar in 2014. And now Sleaford Mods have descended upon me, like an enormous yes. Jason Williamson, a brick-built office worker long marinated in quietly suppressed fury, started recording as Sleaford Mods in 2007, dropping dirty realist observations in a distinct East Midlands argot over home-grown sample-heavy slabs. Things stepped up a gear in 2011 when Andrew Fearn, a lanky laptop jockey with laughing eyes who lives in a perpetual state of secret amusement, arrived with his hydroponically nurtured musical hybrids, floppy dance rhythms cross-pollinated with Peely post-punk noise. "When we first got together," recalls Williamson, "I just told him to make it faster and sound like the Wu Tang Clan." "Jason was a bit suspicious of me," Fearns remembers, "I'd make a mix-tape with The Butthole Surfers and Abba on it. He didn't know what would work. I'd put a synth pad or something in and he'd say, 'No. Change that for a car alarm.'" When I first heard Sleaford Mods' genre-collapsing speed-poetry I imagined I'd finally stumbled across young people making obviously contemporary records that nonetheless matched the incendiary energy...
Last week, there was really only one story. And it wasn’t that a children’s television science-fiction character, who never reproduces or has sexual relations with anyone, is now played by a human of a different gender than at any point previously. Despite this, like all the other crying centrists, I wept hot snowflakes to witness it happen in my lifetime.
And I couldn’t be happier that the Time Lady’s new companions include a black teenager with mild learning difficulties and a female Asian police officer. Predictably, The Chase’s Bradley Walsh let the side down by being a straight white man. Though I understand that in tonight’s episode Bradley Walsh reveals that, as a result of unpredictable side-effects from his character’s chemotherapy treatment, he now has both male and female genitalia, while a cloaca on his left thigh also enables him to reproduce parthenogenetically, although not without some discomfort.
Like the Zuni berdache, Bradley Walsh will become an intergender priest-princess, an ambassador between different dimensional realities, his engagements unencumbered by a traditional sexual identity. Typical BBC! It’s political correctness gone mad!! Nonetheless, the genitalia of fictional time travellers wasn’t the week’s big story.
On Monday, scientists revealed that we have only 12 years to put in place real strategies to combat climate change before the future of all life on Earth is doomed. It has taken our government more than two years to fail to agree that Brexit is more difficult than David Davis’s proposed easiest thing in the world. In the light of the progress of these negotiations, I don’t hold out much hope for the survival of the Melton Mowbray pork pie, let alone the continued existence of all the life on Earth.
But while climate change experts were once derided as cranks, a kind of environmental Flat Earth Society, finally their message is believed. And now the cranks are oil industry cheerleaders such as Nigel Lawson, ranting outside the window like a Hogarth etching of some bawling fictional aristocrat; Lord Entitlement Demands His Buttermilk Ramekin.
The definitive mass extinction bombshell held its position in the news chart for a few days and on Wednesday all four of the Guardian’s page four stories covered the end of all life as we know it and related fossil fuel consumption and rainforest obliteration news, shunting Adrian Searle’s review of the artist Anni Albers’s new abstract textiles exhibition all the way back to a humiliating page nine.
A further story, that the Dutch are developing robot bees to pollinate the crops we need to survive after the now inevitable insect apocalypse, ran on page 14, being five pages less important that the textile display. I immediately began to worry that intelligent robot bees would realise the best way to ensure the survival of the crops they were programmed to nurture was to destroy the human race who were poisoning the Earth. I wondered how me and my family would best survive attack by millions of Dutch nano-bees. I began learning the phrase “Robot bee, I am your friend” in as many Dutch dialects as I could master: West Frisian, Papiamento, Low Saxon and Limburgish.
If the Doctor really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us? Photograph: Sophie Mutevilian/BBC
In other newspapers, we were back to business as usual. On the front page of Wednesday’s Sun, the end of all life on Earth forgotten, it was revealed that a comedy man had kissed a dancing lady behind an acting lady’s back. Really? As a species, we don’t deserve to live. It’s just a shame we’re going to take all the insects, animals and plants down with us. Unless we are exterminated by robot bees.
The imminent extinction of all life on Earth exposes a logical hole in the Doctor Who mythos. The Doctor loves to help humanity but as a time traveller she must know that within a decade or so our whole race will be doomed. If she really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us all from ourselves? But by doing what exactly? Preventing Trump from weakening the Paris accord last June? Exposing the 1970s oil companies that sat on climate change data they knew would make their brands toxic in the short term? Or going back to the dawn of time and preventing the clever troglodyte, Keith Flintsparker, the first fire-starter, from dipping a dry twig into a puddle of tar and flint-sparking it into fuel.
The 1975 Tom Baker Doctor Who story Genesis of the Hateweed explores this conundrum. In it, the Doctor finds himself in the laboratory where his future nemesis, the Hateweed, is being genetically engineered into existence. He holds the spores over a nearby toilet and eventually decides that flushing them down the bowl and destroying them would constitute too great an intervention in the timeline. Nicholas Parsons, in a rare serious role as the Hateweed’s creator, Anglias the Weedseeder, watches him while eating a blue space pie, in an act of defiant indifference.
In 1992, I worked with Baker on the BBC radio comedy series The Inexplicable Worlds of Patrick Nimmo and I loved pumping Baker for behind-the-scenes Who stash. Baker told me he had been professionally jealous of the popularity of the Hateweed with female Doctor Who fans and had intended to change the scene while filming by “throwing the fucking seeds into the toilet and doing a massive, fast wee on them and shouting, ‘That’s pissed in their chips!’ But Nicholas Parsons said, ‘You, Thomas Stewart Baker, are drunk,’ and he said he would throw the space pie at me if I did a wee. I said, ‘I may be drunk, but you are Nicholas Parsons and in the morning I will be sober.’ We had a jolly good laugh and it was all forgotten over a few jars.”
I share a personal trainer with Bradley Walsh and so I went to meet him in Doctor Who’s Cardiff studios on Thursday and asked him if he thought the new Doctor should intervene in the climate change catastrophe. Bradley Walsh, who was patiently being fitted for multiple prosthetic genitals, both male and female, and those of a bird, said he didn’t know.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-14T19:07:56+01:00
Last week, there was really only one story. And it wasn’t that a children’s television science-fiction character, who never reproduces or has sexual relations with anyone, is now played by a human of a different gender than at any point previously. Despite this, like all the other crying centrists, I wept hot snowflakes to witness it happen in my lifetime. And I couldn’t be happier that the Time Lady’s new companions include a black teenager with mild learning difficulties and a female Asian police officer. Predictably, The Chase’s Bradley Walsh let the side down by being a straight white man. Though I understand that in tonight’s episode Bradley Walsh reveals that, as a result of unpredictable side-effects from his character’s chemotherapy treatment, he now has both male and female genitalia, while a cloaca on his left thigh also enables him to reproduce parthenogenetically, although not without some discomfort. Like the Zuni berdache, Bradley Walsh will become an intergender priest-princess, an ambassador between different dimensional realities, his engagements unencumbered by a traditional sexual identity. Typical BBC! It’s political correctness gone mad!! Nonetheless, the genitalia of fictional time travellers wasn’t the week’s big story. On Monday, scientists revealed that we have only 12 years to put in place real strategies to combat climate change before the future of all life on Earth is doomed. It has taken our government more than two years to fail to agree that Brexit is more difficult than David Davis’s proposed easiest thing in the world. In the light of the progress of these negotiations, I don’t hold out much hope for the survival of the Melton Mowbray pork pie, let alone the continued existence of all the life on Earth. But while climate change experts were once derided as cranks, a kind of environmental Flat Earth...
Caffe Nero, Richard Hammond and Magners ad campaigns are really getting Stewart Lee's goat in his latest show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One. Can it be that the same man who loves to discuss topics like political correctness, racism and religion, is going down the Michael McIntyre route of observational comedy? Er, no - this is Stewart Lee we're talking about and he doesn't pander to the mainstream. It is his desire to challenge, satirise and deconstruct the form of comedy itself that has garnered him a cult following of discerning fans who regard him as the best working stand-up in Britain. It is sadly also why he will probably lose out to McIntyre at the British Comedy Awards next week.
At the age of 41, he is officially past it according to Frankie Boyle who recently stated that comedians over 40 lack anger and few are any good. Lee begs to differ as he livid with Caffe Nero for failing to acknowledge his loyalty card entitling him to a free coffee. He launches into an animated parody of a furious observational stand-up (he's even made props), attempting to contradict Boyle's words while simultaneously highlighting the hackneyed style of his genre.
He soon runs out of steam: “I'm too old to be angry about the Queen's vagina" - a reference to Boyle's crass joke about the monarch, Beeb-approved for Mock The Week. It seems Lee is pretty content as it goes and his show certainly hasn't suffered for it. There isn't an expletive in sight and instead of rape jokes and rage we get satire, intelligent writing and a performance that doesn't feel like it's been injected with steroids.
Top Gear is another subject for his chagrin, particularly Richard Hammond's presence on the show, whom Lee compares to a school bully sycophant, giggling along to all of Clarkson's politically incorrect jokes. “I wish Richard 'The Hamster' Hammond (not a real hamster), had been decapitated in that car crash and that his head had rolled on a few more yards into some boiling oil." The Top Gear section has attracted a lot of media attention for its 'bad taste', notably The Daily Facist, er Mail rather, which amusingly branded Lee's tirade an 'extraordinary attack'. Had some of these journalists actually attended or understood the show they might have picked up on a bit of irony here. Just like Clarkson's defence for his un-pc humour, Lee tells us: “It's just a joke!
Although co-incidentally....that is what I wish had happened." If Clarkson can call Gordon Brown a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot' in the heat of the moment then Lee can declare he hopes Jez's kiddies go blind. Get the gist?!
All his favourite techniques are in use here: the repetition, call-backs, nonchalant delivery and deconstruction. The routine is rigorously well-timed and the audience knows what to expect as with every deliberate pause comes a wave of laughter in anticipation of the punchline. I'm betting this crowd might have seen him before.
His final 20-minute routine demonstrates some superb comedy-building skills as what starts off as a sarcastic pop at Magners advertising slogans turns into a hysterical pedant's rant. It appears Magners have also ruined Lee's favourite song 'Galway Girl' and used it in their adverts.
To overwrite the now-spoiled memory of the song, he finishes the show with his own rendition of Steve Earle's track. There's a further climactic twist to the song but before that, in this unexpected and heartfelt performance, Lee proves that comedy doesn't have to break taboos. It just needs to be done “sincerely and well".
Stewart Lee
2009-12-10T17:05:03+00:00
Caffe Nero, Richard Hammond and Magners ad campaigns are really getting Stewart Lee's goat in his latest show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One. Can it be that the same man who loves to discuss topics like political correctness, racism and religion, is going down the Michael McIntyre route of observational comedy? Er, no - this is Stewart Lee we're talking about and he doesn't pander to the mainstream. It is his desire to challenge, satirise and deconstruct the form of comedy itself that has garnered him a cult following of discerning fans who regard him as the best working stand-up in Britain. It is sadly also why he will probably lose out to McIntyre at the British Comedy Awards next week. At the age of 41, he is officially past it according to Frankie Boyle who recently stated that comedians over 40 lack anger and few are any good. Lee begs to differ as he livid with Caffe Nero for failing to acknowledge his loyalty card entitling him to a free coffee. He launches into an animated parody of a furious observational stand-up (he's even made props), attempting to contradict Boyle's words while simultaneously highlighting the hackneyed style of his genre. He soon runs out of steam: “I'm too old to be angry about the Queen's vagina" - a reference to Boyle's crass joke about the monarch, Beeb-approved for Mock The Week. It seems Lee is pretty content as it goes and his show certainly hasn't suffered for it. There isn't an expletive in sight and instead of rape jokes and rage we get satire, intelligent writing and a performance that doesn't feel like it's been injected with steroids. Top Gear is another subject for his chagrin, particularly Richard Hammond's presence on the show, whom...
Stewart Lee, star of BBC 2's hit show Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, came to Harrogate last night claiming he had nothing funny to talk about any more. He currently spends his days driving around, looking after his son and watching Scooby Doo cartoons; he says the best inspiration for comedy. However, as the 90 minute show attested to, Lee does still find plenty to talk about.
Lurching from the decline of rope bridges thanks to Margaret Thatcher to left wing Americans via satirising those bland popular comedians who get by with little more than unconnected jokes and manically running around the stage, usually all called Russell.
Lee's comedy or anti-comedy to give it a better title is delightfully dark, bitter and at times petulant. It is all the better for these qualities. Over the years he has moved towards this and it suits him very well.
If anyone is new to his style of comedy they may struggle to understand why he is frustrated with sections of the audience, who are "brought along by friends". This is all part of the act and those who have followed his career appreciate the lengths he goes to, to engage his audience, and to chastise them for not being quick enough to keep up with him, or even get to the punchline before he has finished when the setup is so rigorous to make the point obvious. He pushes the boundaries to the seams sometimes labouring the point but this is all part of the act and part of his comedy genius.
Not many comedians would feel comfortable enough and self aware enough to structure part of their routine around derogatory comments that have been made about them on the internet. Lee delves into this section with aplomb, and suitable backing music, clearly revelling in the hateful comments that some people make about him on the internet throwing in suggestion that he may even have made some of them up himself.
In the second half, Lee recounts his struggle to find material for the new show he is getting ready to tour. The pace builds steadily until he reaches a crescendo at a local Butcher's, before the denouement with a revelation of the true location of said Butcher
The jokes are insightful, relevant and thought provoking as well as providing great laughs in what is a well crafted show. If you have not seen him before he is well worth a viewing, but do a little research before you go, as he hates "lazy audiences"
Stewart Lee
2012-03-01T13:59:44+00:00
Stewart Lee, star of BBC 2's hit show Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, came to Harrogate last night claiming he had nothing funny to talk about any more. He currently spends his days driving around, looking after his son and watching Scooby Doo cartoons; he says the best inspiration for comedy. However, as the 90 minute show attested to, Lee does still find plenty to talk about. Lurching from the decline of rope bridges thanks to Margaret Thatcher to left wing Americans via satirising those bland popular comedians who get by with little more than unconnected jokes and manically running around the stage, usually all called Russell. Lee's comedy or anti-comedy to give it a better title is delightfully dark, bitter and at times petulant. It is all the better for these qualities. Over the years he has moved towards this and it suits him very well. If anyone is new to his style of comedy they may struggle to understand why he is frustrated with sections of the audience, who are "brought along by friends". This is all part of the act and those who have followed his career appreciate the lengths he goes to, to engage his audience, and to chastise them for not being quick enough to keep up with him, or even get to the punchline before he has finished when the setup is so rigorous to make the point obvious. He pushes the boundaries to the seams sometimes labouring the point but this is all part of the act and part of his comedy genius. Not many comedians would feel comfortable enough and self aware enough to structure part of their routine around derogatory comments that have been made about them on the internet. Lee delves into this section with aplomb, and suitable backing music, clearly...
Jarett Kobek in conversation with Stewart Lee
Monday 23 October 2017, 7pm-8.30pm
Islington Assembly Hall, London, N1 2UD
Jarett Kobek may not be a household name, but his novel I Hate the Internet, a satire of the Internet age and Silicon Valley, earned him cult status in the US and praise from the likes of Bret Easton Ellis. Join Kobek for an evening with another fan - standup comedian Stewart Lee - as he discusses his new novel, The Future Won't Be Long.
This gritty, epic story follows the trials and tribulations of the friendship between starry-eyed gay country bumpkin Baby and rich art school kid Adeline against the backdrop of the highs and lows of the 1980s and 1990s' New York. A California-based Turkish-American writer, Kobek is also the author of several other books, including ATTA, a psychedelic biography of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, and Soft & Cuddly, a monograph on an obscure computer game for the ZX Spectrum.
SHIRLEY COLLINS + STEW 16TH OCT, CURZON CINEMA, LONDON (NOT 18th! I got it wrong)
& RIO CINEMA LONDON 29TH OCT 4.30pm
Widely regarded as the 20th century's most important singer of English traditional song, Shirley Collins stood at the epicenter of the folk music revival during the 1960s and 70s.
But in 1980 she developed a disorder of the vocal chords known as dysphonia, which robbed her of her unique singing voice and forced her into early retirement.
Rob Curry and Tim Plester's documentary sets out to explore the story behind the icon, and chronicles Shirley's battle, at the grand old age of 80, to rediscover that voice she lost so many years previously and suggests that, during these turbulent and increasingly untethered times, we might just need Shirley Collins now more than ever. Stewart Lee hosts an interview w Shirley. CURZON:https://www.curzoncinemas.com/film-info/the-ballad-of-shirley-collins RIO:http://riocinema.org.uk/RioCinema.dll/WhatsOn?Film=9759698
IAIN SINCLAIR + STEW 30TH OCT, LRB BOOKSHOP, LONDON
Iain Sinclair has been writing about London for most of his adult life. The Last London (Oneworld) is the culmination of Iain's London project, although 'project' is far too determined a word to describe a body of work so many-layered, so prodigiously polyvalent.
He'll be talking about the book and the city with comedian, writer and film director Stewart Lee, another Londoner from elsewhere.
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)
More national dates to follow for Feb-April 2018, and then this must end.
TOP TIPS - I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND
DREAM SYNDICATE uk TOUR
The 1980s California band sounded, and now sound again, like The Fall playing Credence Clearwater Revival, fronted by Dashiell Hammett... on acid!!!
Their new incarnation mixes noir-ish lyricism with stretched out punk-psyche jams.
Monday 30 October, Tues 31st 2017 - The Lexington, London, UK Wednesday 01 November 2017 - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, UK Thursday 02 November 2017 - The 1865, Southampton, UK
Stewart Lee
2017-10-13T20:57:50+01:00
23rd OCT JARRET KOBEK + STEW EVENT Jarett Kobek in conversation with Stewart Lee Monday 23 October 2017, 7pm-8.30pm Islington Assembly Hall, London, N1 2UD Jarett Kobek may not be a household name, but his novel I Hate the Internet, a satire of the Internet age and Silicon Valley, earned him cult status in the US and praise from the likes of Bret Easton Ellis. Join Kobek for an evening with another fan - standup comedian Stewart Lee - as he discusses his new novel, The Future Won't Be Long. This gritty, epic story follows the trials and tribulations of the friendship between starry-eyed gay country bumpkin Baby and rich art school kid Adeline against the backdrop of the highs and lows of the 1980s and 1990s' New York. A California-based Turkish-American writer, Kobek is also the author of several other books, including ATTA, a psychedelic biography of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, and Soft & Cuddly, a monograph on an obscure computer game for the ZX Spectrum. Standard tickets are £20, or £30 including a copy of The Future Won't Be Long. Running time: 90 minutes, no interval. To book tickets go to https://membership. theguardian.com/event/jarett- kobek-in-conversation-with- stewart-lee-38107696145 SHIRLEY COLLINS + STEW 16TH OCT, CURZON CINEMA, LONDON (NOT 18th! I got it wrong) & RIO CINEMA LONDON 29TH OCT 4.30pm Widely regarded as the 20th century's most important singer of English traditional song, Shirley Collins stood at the epicenter of the folk music revival during the 1960s and 70s. But in 1980 she developed a disorder of the vocal chords known as dysphonia, which robbed her of her unique singing voice and forced her into early retirement. Rob Curry and Tim Plester's documentary sets out to explore the story behind the icon, and chronicles Shirley's battle, at the grand old age of...
Stewart Lee is, ironically, one of the biggest comedians working in the UK today. Despite years of stand-up based around the fact he felt he wasn’t as popular as he should be, his wry persona, deadbeat delivery and general disdain for the audience has seen him offer a refreshing kind of stand up; one that progresses the medium, rather than striving for imitation.
Lee brings his new show Content Provider to De Montfort Hall this February as part of the comedy festival, headlining for two nights at one of the city’s largest venues. It seems that the audience he berates for not understanding his comedy may be finally getting the joke. “I am very lucky that an open-minded, clever, tolerant, inquisitive and loyal audience have stayed with me, and self-seeded themselves, for decades now,” Lee explains. “But, on the other hand, I always come back with new shows that develop on what they have come to expect, and I never short change them.”
Content Provider is also a book by the same name, a collection of the best of Lee’s newspaper columns over the past five years. In much the same way as his stand-up, Lee pushed the barriers of what a column is supposed to be. “Having accepted the jobs, I tried to discharge them to the best of my abilities, whilst at the same time trying to bend the rules and push the fringes of the ‘funny column’ genre where possible.”
For those who have read his Observer pieces, his articles have covered wildly varying topics, from advising Corbyn to take advice from Putin, to a piece purporting to be about the Olympic legacy, only to be mainly about a decomposing cat. The absurdity of his comedy has become increasingly popular, as is much of what was previously deemed ‘alternative comedy’, meaning it has begun to move into the mainstream. Yet much of his work has been met with intense hatred, with big Lee-bashers including the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, something he revels in by posting their reviews on his website and even using them to advertise his books.
Lee’s strength lies here; his seeming disregard for anything that might offend him. When the audience doesn’t laugh, he explains why they should. When there is a bad review, he uses it as marketing material. “I may pretend to hate doing stand-up,” he says, “But I really do my best.” His persona’s cynicism and superiority is the result of meticulous craft, and those who don’t respond to his work are often missing the point entirely.
Content Provider is in very much the same vein as most of Lee’s work to date, examining what we know about being a column writer and dismantling it. “A decade or so ago I got a bewildering text asking me if, in the light of attending the Kilkenny Comedy Festival, I had any ‘content’ which I would be willing to ‘provide’ to local ‘content providers’. This was my first encounter with the phrase, and I came to understand that they were asking me if I had any text or film or audio, which I could give to mobile phones or websites,” Lee explains. “We like to imagine we are artists, us writers, but it is funny to see what you do described as if it is just filler to put onto gizmos, which I suppose, increasingly, it is.”
Described as an attempt to “understand modern Britain”, Content Provider in its live form will inevitably have to incorporate Brexit. Little more than a month after the vote that divided the country, the Edinburgh Festival began and comedians had to adapt to the new, untrodden landscape of a post-Brexit Britain.
“People that I had routines about had been instantly forgotten,” Lee explains. “As it is, it’s evolved into something that sort of addresses that issue – what kind of content do I provide to an unstable divided society?”
The society comedians were reflecting before had changed drastically, and so in turn did their shows. Lee was clearly in the Remain camp, something reflected in his columns leading up to the vote, but how does he – rather than his persona – feel about the reality of Brexit now it’s happening?
“Anecdotally, racism is on the rise. Austerity is, it’s official, going to be prolonged and worsened. There will be no cross-continental plan, that includes us, for the Syrian refugee crisis or climate change and environmental pollution. It may be that people will get what they wanted out of Brexit in the end, and feel like the sacrifices have been worth it. But for now there are a tense few years ahead. That said, my comedy is like a horrible vulture feeding off the carcass of human misery, so I’m laughing.”
Fortunately, so is everyone else. Lee sold out both his stand-up show and book festival talk this year in Edinburgh, and has become an increasingly iconic figure in comedy. And so naturally, his return to Leicester’s Comedy Festival is hotly anticipated. “My first ever paid out-of-London gig was Leicester Poly with Jerry Sadowitz in 1990. I remember the hotel room had little soaps and shampoos that you could take away with you. I had never seen anything like it.” Who said Leicester wasn’t a luxury destination, eh? We also have the pleasure of being credited as the place in which he met his wife, fellow comedian Bridget Christie, in 2005. Yet, there’s one thing missing this year.
“Leicester has changed in 26 years. I miss the German progressive rock shop, Ultima Thule, by the station, which is online now, and was run by two identical twin brothers who really knew their stuff.”
Europe’s longest comedy festival this year will see Lee share the stage with other big names including Jimmy Carr, Susan Calman, Dane Baptiste and his former comedy partner Richard Herring. Sadly, it doesn’t look like a Lee and Herring reunion is on the cards.
“We would need to rehearse properly for ages, and there is no time or financial incentive to do that, and also the basic relationship of the double act doesn’t make sense for two men of nearly 50, predicated as it is on an essentially adolescent relationship. That said, I think it might be funny to do it in our 80s.”
Well, at least we can keep it in our diaries for the 2040s. And, if he is right, Stewart Lee will no doubt prove to be as popular then as he is now. “I’m lucky that my stage persona makes more sense, rather than less, as I get older.” If this is a hint at a move towards grumpy old man territory, then it is a humble remark. Lee is in a league of his own, brilliantly breaking down audience expectations of comedy and outwitting us at every turn. But of course, what we think isn’t the point anyway. “People can come if they want but it is what it is and it’s not my fault if they don’t like it.”
Stewart Lee: Content Provider will be on 8th & 9th February at De Montfort Hall.
Stewart Lee
2016-12-08T17:35:21+00:00
Stewart Lee is, ironically, one of the biggest comedians working in the UK today. Despite years of stand-up based around the fact he felt he wasn’t as popular as he should be, his wry persona, deadbeat delivery and general disdain for the audience has seen him offer a refreshing kind of stand up; one that progresses the medium, rather than striving for imitation. Lee brings his new show Content Provider to De Montfort Hall this February as part of the comedy festival, headlining for two nights at one of the city’s largest venues. It seems that the audience he berates for not understanding his comedy may be finally getting the joke. “I am very lucky that an open-minded, clever, tolerant, inquisitive and loyal audience have stayed with me, and self-seeded themselves, for decades now,” Lee explains. “But, on the other hand, I always come back with new shows that develop on what they have come to expect, and I never short change them.” Content Provider is also a book by the same name, a collection of the best of Lee’s newspaper columns over the past five years. In much the same way as his stand-up, Lee pushed the barriers of what a column is supposed to be. “Having accepted the jobs, I tried to discharge them to the best of my abilities, whilst at the same time trying to bend the rules and push the fringes of the ‘funny column’ genre where possible.” For those who have read his Observer pieces, his articles have covered wildly varying topics, from advising Corbyn to take advice from Putin, to a piece purporting to be about the Olympic legacy, only to be mainly about a decomposing cat. The absurdity of his comedy has become increasingly popular, as is much of what was previously...
The reluctantly rabble-rousing Gene were a more thoughtful band than the unambiguous Britpop era allowed, but after eight years away, front-man Martin Rossiter seems uncharacteristically comfortable alone at the piano.
His unadorned debut's starkly sparse opener, a ten minute minimalist meditation on failed fatherhood entitled Three Points On A Compass, is an unequalled highpoint, but tunes pitched somewhere between Wesleyan psalms and torch songs prove perfect vessels for Rossiter's articulate, blackly comic lyrics.
You lost a 20th century indie band to gain a 21st century solo artist.
Stewart Lee
2012-11-25T21:31:07+00:00
The reluctantly rabble-rousing Gene were a more thoughtful band than the unambiguous Britpop era allowed, but after eight years away, front-man Martin Rossiter seems uncharacteristically comfortable alone at the piano. His unadorned debut's starkly sparse opener, a ten minute minimalist meditation on failed fatherhood entitled Three Points On A Compass, is an unequalled highpoint, but tunes pitched somewhere between Wesleyan psalms and torch songs prove perfect vessels for Rossiter's articulate, blackly comic lyrics. You lost a 20th century indie band to gain a 21st century solo artist.
So then: who’s funniest? In compiling this list of the 30 best English-speaking comedians at work today, I gave myself some parameters. This would be an overview of who is at the top of their game now, on stage or screen or even podcast. It is not a guide to the most influential living comedians. It is not a handing out of long-service medals. So: no Pythons, no Mighty Booshes, no French and Saunders, nor even – though he came close – any Gervaises. It’s a snapshot of now.
Am I objective, or am I just listing what has made me laugh most in the past year or so? As The Times’s comedy critic, I get to see loads of live comedy by comedians old and new, have the luxury of thinking about it and talking about it and writing about it. I am, I hope, an expert. I also know that in comedy more than any other art form, expertise means zilch if something doesn’t get you in the gut. Ever tried convincing someone that they have made a mistake in not finding something funny? It’s not a good conversation.
So, yes, this is my list of the men and women who have cheered me, thrilled me, moved me, inspired me and, yes, of course, surprised me into laughter. The list is still more male than female, still largely white, but things are changing fast.
It is a good time for comedy. And a show like Hannah Gadsby’s, though not the funniest in the world right now, may prove to be the most important in the world right now. It argues for a new language for the form, goes beyond comedy to do so, while expanding and excelling at the language we already have. Or, more succinctly: I loved it! It’s great! See it!
1 - Stewart Lee, 50
I marvelled at the skill, I thrilled to the boldness, most importantly I laughed till it hurt when I saw Lee’s latest show, Content Provider, at the start of its tour 18 months ago. Do his teasing stand-up routines about everything from Trump and Brexit (correct, he’s a fan of neither) to Game of Thrones and mobile phones (ditto) hold up today on the performance recorded for television in May? Amazingly, they do: pretty much every moment has some sort of delicious surprise. And if a show addressing “the individual in a digitised free-market society” sounds highfalutin, Lee unspools these two hours with a sense of fun underlying every gear he goes through: abrasive, ironic, confessional, interactive, absurd, clownish, arrogant, but above all playful.
Stewart Lee
2018-07-21T12:32:00+01:00
So then: who’s funniest? In compiling this list of the 30 best English-speaking comedians at work today, I gave myself some parameters. This would be an overview of who is at the top of their game now, on stage or screen or even podcast. It is not a guide to the most influential living comedians. It is not a handing out of long-service medals. So: no Pythons, no Mighty Booshes, no French and Saunders, nor even – though he came close – any Gervaises. It’s a snapshot of now. Am I objective, or am I just listing what has made me laugh most in the past year or so? As The Times’s comedy critic, I get to see loads of live comedy by comedians old and new, have the luxury of thinking about it and talking about it and writing about it. I am, I hope, an expert. I also know that in comedy more than any other art form, expertise means zilch if something doesn’t get you in the gut. Ever tried convincing someone that they have made a mistake in not finding something funny? It’s not a good conversation. So, yes, this is my list of the men and women who have cheered me, thrilled me, moved me, inspired me and, yes, of course, surprised me into laughter. The list is still more male than female, still largely white, but things are changing fast. It is a good time for comedy. And a show like Hannah Gadsby’s, though not the funniest in the world right now, may prove to be the most important in the world right now. It argues for a new language for the form, goes beyond comedy to do so, while expanding and excelling at the language we already have. Or, more succinctly: I loved...
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.
Stewart Lee
2025-01-03T14:50:44+00:00
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.
My wife Bridget Christie is performing her hit 2011 Edinburgh Fringe show Surrealist Housewife at Curve in the Leicester Comedy Fest at 8pm on Friday Feb 10th. http://www.curveonline.co.uk/curve.php?view=showinfo.php&showid=327
Press about the show is here, and join Bridget's mailing list here for more news.
CARPET REMNANT WORLD
Carpet Remnant World is the title of the new full length show from the acclaimed star of the BAFTA nominated BBC2 series: Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (“The funniest thing on television" The Guardian). The London run sold out three 02’s worth of people. Now it tours. More dates tba.
February 2012
Thursday 23rd - The Playhouse, Nottingham - 8.00pm. Box Office: 0115 9419419 Book Online.
Friday 24th - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - 7.30pm. Box Office: 01227 787787 Book Online.
Saturday 25th - Town Hall, Cheltenham - 8.00pm Box Office: 0844 576 2210 Book Online.
Wednesday 29th - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - 8.00pm Box Office: 01423 502116 Book Online.
March 2012
Thursday 1st - St. George's Hall, Bradford - 8.00pm. Box Office: 01274 432000 Book Online.
Friday 2nd - Waterfront Hall, Belfast - Box Office: 028 9033 4455 Book Online.
Saturday 3rd - Philarmonic Hall, Liverpool - 8.00pm. Box Office: 0151 709 3789 Book Online.
Tuesday 6th - Opera House, Buxton - 7.30pm. Box Office: 0845 1272190 Book Online.
Wednesday 7th - Corn Exchange, Cambridge - 8.00pm. Box Office: 01223 357851 Book Online.
Friday 9th - The Anvil, Basingstoke - Box Office: 01256 844244 Book Online.
Saturday 10th - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - Box Office: 01604 624811 Book Online.
Sunday 11th - Theatre Royal, Norwich - 7.30pm. Box Office: 01603 630000 Book Online.
Thursday 15th - DeMontfort Hall, Leicester - 7.30pm. Box Office: 0116 233 3111 Book Online.
Friday 16th - Derby Theatre, Derby - Box Office: 01332 255800 Book Online.
Saturday 17th - Performing Arts Centre, Lincoln - Box Office: 0844 888 4414 Book Online.
Wednesday 21st - The Dukes Theatre, Lancaster - 8.00pm. Box Office: 01524 598500 Book Online
Thursday 22nd - Journal Tyne Theatre, Newcastle - 8.00pm. Box Office:0844 493 9999 Book Online.
Friday 23rd - King's Theatre, Glasgow (Glasgow Comedy Festival) - 8.00pm. Box Office: 0844 3954005 Book Online.
Saturday 24th - Theatre Royal, York - 7.30pm. Box Office: 01904 623568 Book Online.
Monday 26th - Playhouse, Oxford - 8.00pm Box Office: 01865 305305 Book Online.
Wednesday 28th - St David’s Hall, Cardiff - 8.00pm Box Office: 029 2087 8444 Book Online.
Thursday 29th - The Hexagon, Reading - 8.00pm Box Office: 0118 960 6060 Book Online.
Friday 30th - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - 8.00pm Box Office: 0121 7803333 Book Online.
April 2012
Tuesday 17th - Theatre Royal, Winchester - 8.00pm Box Office: 01962 840440 Book Online.
Wednesday 18th - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - 8.00pm Box Office: 01872 262466 Book Online.
Friday 20th - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - 7.45pm Box Office: 0114 249 6000 Book Online.
Saturday 21st - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - 7.45pm Box Office: 0114 249 6000 Book Online.
Thursday 26th - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - 8.00pm Box Office: 01743 281281 Book Online.
Sunday 29th - The Lowry, Salford - MATINEE - 3.00pm Box Office: 0843 208 6010 Book Online.
Sunday 29th - The Lowry, Salford - EVENING - 7.30pm Box Office: 0843 208 6010 Book Online.
May 2012
Wednesday 2nd - The Dome, Brighton - Box Office: 01273 709709 Book Online
Saturday 5th - Machynlleth Comedy Festival, Wales - Book Online.
Sunday 6th - Hippodrome, Bristol - 7.30pm Box Office: 0844 871 3012 Book Online.
Monday 7th - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - Box Office: 01752 230440 Book Online.
Tuesday 8th - Octagon Theatre, Yeovil - Box Office: 01935 422884 VENUE WEBSITE.
Saturday 12th - Music Hall, Aberdeen - Box Office: 01224 641122 Book Online.
Sunday 13th - Eden Court, Inverness - Box Office: 01463 234234 Book Online.
Thursday 17th - Vicar Street, Dublin - Box Office: 00353 (0)1 77 55 800 Book Online.
Friday 18th - Vicar Street, Dublin - Box Office: 00353 (0)1 77 55 800 Book Online.
Saturday 19th - Seapoint Ballroom, Salthill, Galway - 8.00pm - 0818 719300 Book Online.
Sunday 20th - Savoy Theatre, Cork - 8.00pm - 0818 719300 Book Online.
Thursday 24th - Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry - 8.00pm Box Office: 024 7652 4524 Book Online.
Saturday 26th - Festival Theatre, Malvern - Box Office: 01684 892277 Book Online.
June 2012
Friday 8th - West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds - Box Office: 0113 213 7700 Book Online.
Saturday 9th - The Alban Arena, St Albans - 01727 844488 - ON SALE SOON.
Thursday 14th - Grand Theatre, Swansea - Box Office: 01792 475715 VENUE WEBSITE.
Friday 15th - Lighthouse, Poole - Box Office: 0844 406 8666 Book Online
Friday 22nd - Civic Theatre, Chelmsford - Box Office: 01245 606 505 VENUE WEBSITE.
Saturday 23rd - City Hall, Salisbury - 8.00pm - Box Office: 01722 434434 Book Online.
Sunday 24th - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - Box Office: 01392 493493 Book Online.
Tuesday 26th - City Hall, Hull - 8.00pm - Box Office: 01482 300 300 Book Online.
Wednesday 27th - Huntingdon Hall, Worcester - Box Office: 01905 611427 Book Online.
Thursday 28th - Huntingdon Hall, Worcester - Box Office: 01905 611427 Book Online.
A DISCUSSION ABOUT THE ARTS
With me, Josie Long & Alan Moore, March 26th in Oxford, 2pm
http://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/events/detail/whats-the-point-of-the-arts-and-humanities
NEW BOOK - IF YOU PREFER A MILDER COMEDIAN ETC
Out from Jan 5th through Faber. - click here to buy... link
FIST OF FUN SERIES 1 DVD
You probably know the saga of this. The 1995 series by Richard Herring and me was in the room where the BBC throw things away. An insider asked them why they hadn’t released it.
They said “neither Sales nor Marketing believed that Lee & Herring had much sales potential in the current market”, which probably explains why all my own BBC series are conspicuously absent amongst all the TV comedy tat piled high for Xmas in HMV. Rich and Chris Evans of the Welsh comedy indie label GoFasterStripe brokered a deal to buy Fist of Fun series 1, and now it’s available with three discs of extras, following a superb half page review in The Guardian, Dec 3rd.
If you could buy this rather than steal it it would be good, as all the profits of GFS so far have gone into making it.
Cheers. Buy it here.
Stewart Lee
2012-02-09T14:38:35+00:00
BRIDGET CHRISTIE LEICESTER My wife Bridget Christie is performing her hit 2011 Edinburgh Fringe show Surrealist Housewife at Curve in the Leicester Comedy Fest at 8pm on Friday Feb 10th. http://www.curveonline.co.uk/curve.php?view=showinfo.php&showid=327 Press about the show is here, and join Bridget's mailing list here for more news. CARPET REMNANT WORLD Carpet Remnant World is the title of the new full length show from the acclaimed star of the BAFTA nominated BBC2 series: Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (“The funniest thing on television" The Guardian). The London run sold out three 02’s worth of people. Now it tours. More dates tba. February 2012 Thursday 23rd - The Playhouse, Nottingham - 8.00pm. Box Office: 0115 9419419 Book Online. Friday 24th - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - 7.30pm. Box Office: 01227 787787 Book Online. Saturday 25th - Town Hall, Cheltenham - 8.00pm Box Office: 0844 576 2210 Book Online. Wednesday 29th - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - 8.00pm Box Office: 01423 502116 Book Online. March 2012 Thursday 1st - St. George's Hall, Bradford - 8.00pm. Box Office: 01274 432000 Book Online. Friday 2nd - Waterfront Hall, Belfast - Box Office: 028 9033 4455 Book Online. Saturday 3rd - Philarmonic Hall, Liverpool - 8.00pm. Box Office: 0151 709 3789 Book Online. Tuesday 6th - Opera House, Buxton - 7.30pm. Box Office: 0845 1272190 Book Online. Wednesday 7th - Corn Exchange, Cambridge - 8.00pm. Box Office: 01223 357851 Book Online. Friday 9th - The Anvil, Basingstoke - Box Office: 01256 844244 Book Online. Saturday 10th - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - Box Office: 01604 624811 Book Online. Sunday 11th - Theatre Royal, Norwich - 7.30pm. Box Office: 01603 630000 Book Online. Thursday 15th - DeMontfort Hall, Leicester - 7.30pm. Box Office: 0116 233 3111 Book Online. Friday 16th - Derby Theatre, Derby - Box Office: 01332 255800 Book...
The comedian Stewart Lee arrives at Pizza Express on Upper Street in north London looking more like a wary gnome than the confident figure he cuts in his stand-up shows.
The restaurant holds fond memories for Lee. He used to eat here with other comedians in the early 1990s after performing at the nearby Market Tavern, "a grotty pub, now a swanky bar" called the Winchester. "There used to be marble tables here," he recalls. "I knocked one of them when I was trying to straighten it, and a big slab of marble fell on the floor and smashed in half." Luckily, one of the comedians in his party was Jo Brand, "who might have done a bit of telly by then", and she managed to smooth things over.
These days, Lee has a television series of his own. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, the second series of which was shown late at night on BBC2 earlier this year, combines politically freighted, often cerebral stand-up routines of the kind you almost never see on TV in these days of comedy roadshows and panel games. He also has a new full-length touring show, Carpet Remnant World, which has just begun a three-month run at the Leicester Square Theatre. It is, he says, "all about the idea of utopias".
"I grew up in Solihull," he says, "on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn't feel allegiance to anything. I didn't have working-class pride or upper-class superiority." He used to have a mild Birmingham accent but he shook it off "fairly deliberately". Solihull was also a good place to grow up, he says, because it's "the kind of place that you want to leave. If you want to do something, it's good to come from the kind of place you would want to be driven out of." Here he chuckles, as he does often, in what seems like a mixture of exasperation, disbelief and joy.
"Otherwise, you just stay - you don't do anything. If I had grown up in London, I wouldn't have been as keen to become a comedian or a writer. I'd have been able to see a lot of good films and music and comedy. I'd have been distracted. As it was, I had to make it." Another chuckle.
Despite increasing popularity and visibility, Lee has somehow remained, or persuasively presented himself as, a cult figure, an outsider, an upstart even. This is due in part to his willingness to make jokes about other comedians, most of them younger and better-known than him - among them Russell Brand, Russell Howard, Mark Watson, Michael McIntyre, Frankie Boyle. He is also both wary and critical of such prevailing modes of stand-up as routines based on everyday observations and jokes that are in aggressive bad taste.
Instead, he offers an ironic approach, in which he dissects what he is saying while in the middle of saying it, and speculates how his comments are coming across to, or going down with, the audience. As things stand, he is the British comedian most widely admired both by broadsheet newspapers and by fellow comedians - some of whom, such as Ricky Gervais, owe a great deal to Lee in terms of tone, subject matter, and delivery, and have confessed as much.
A waiter appears and Lee orders a Diet Coke, a green salad, and, without a wink of irony, the "Christmas pizza", which features a mix of spiced bolognese sauce, beef meatballs and fiery peppers. His green salad arrives first and has to be guarded from the hands of passing waiters - he is saving it for when his main course arrives. I go for the meatballs and Contadina pizza, with chicken, spinach and peppers.
"Protecting the Stewart Lee stand-up brand" is, he explains, his main concern. When it was announced that he had a TV series on its way, he was approached by people from "terrible publishers that have meetings with Tesco's about what the covers of books should be". Instead, the distinctively subtle and intelligent book he ended up writing, and publishing with Faber last year, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian, and the forthcoming follow-up, based on his recent show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, are mostly comprised of verbatim transcripts of stand-up performances with footnotes either elaborating on what he's saying, explaining the provenance of the material, or illuminating some aspect of technique. They are a world away from books by comedians "about what they did at school or university, or something their wife did, or their alcoholism and how they recovered, or their sex-aholism."
It is especially important that the book enhances the "stand-up brand", he says. By way of explanation, he adds, "Things that I do tend not to work out, commercially." For example, Lee's most famous endeavour, Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he co-wrote with composer Richard Thomas in 2001, and also directed, looks to the outside world like a success story - a piece of intellectual fringe comedy that played at the National Theatre and in the West End. "But over the five-year period, the producer's chauffeur - who was being paid out of the production budget - made more money than I did." This is partly because Lee didn't receive a salary until the production started at the National, and partly because he waived it soon after to cover legal fees in a libel battle against the Daily Mail over the newspaper's allegation that the show, which was accused of "blasphemy" by organisations such as Christian Voice and which provoked 55,000 complaints after it was aired on the BBC in January 2005, was losing money. "The only thing that has started to pay for itself is the stand-up," he says - which is why he doesn't want to jeopardise it by appearing in adverts or panel shows or doing things that will earn him quick money or fame while alienating a long-term audience. (Though he thinks appearing in an advert isn't really held against you the way it used to be - "because no one has any values any more", he says more than half-seriously - he still wouldn't do it. No amount of money could justify becoming "the guy off that advert".)
It took Lee, now 43, a long time to achieve the odd, enviable reputation he now has - as a famous stand-up comedian rarely invoked as a famous stand-up comedian. In the early 1990s, he emerged as a startlingly handsome young comedian, appearing on radio and TV alongside Richard Herring, whom he met at Oxford University, in the double act Lee and Herring. But, as the decade wore on, he became increasingly irritated with his career, and with TV executives. In 2001, fed-up of losing money on tour and feeling out of touch with comedy audiences, Lee gave up stand-up and wrote a novel, The Perfect Fool, and Jerry Springer.
Three years later, he decided to return to comedy. Part of the reason was the success of Ricky Gervais. "Ricky had the calmness, and the way of offering up contentious ideas as if they meant nothing and were merely idle thoughts, that I felt was a hallmark of my work, and [which had] made it such a difficult fit for mainstream audiences at populist clubs," he wrote in How I Escaped My Certain Fate. The experience of watching Gervais at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 2004 reminded Lee of how much he cared about his stand-up career. And it also suggested that comedy audiences, having taken to a diluted version of his formula, might be ready for the real thing.
On his return to stand-up, Lee decided that in order to avoid the rise-and-fall arc of his 1990s path, he would nurture a small but loyal audience. In order to do something valuable, he tells me, you've got to be "something that nine out of 10 people will hate". And he doesn't mind being hated - indeed, it has its uses when it comes to attracting the one out of 10. His promotional material carries a quotation from the journalist Toby Young - "I've always thought of Stewart Lee's comedy as doing the opposite of what really good comedy should do." Lee explains: "I thought, 'That's a good quote actually.' Because wrongly or rightly, a lot of people hate Toby Young, and they're the kind of people you want to come to see you. In Edinburgh, a lot of people would say to me, 'I didn't know who you were but I hate Toby Young.' I don't think I've ever met him. I saw him at a motorway service station once. Bad quotes from disliked people are quite a good way of trying to galvanise an audience."
This year, Lee picked up another useful enemy, Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, who identified him as one of a "cabal" of leftwing comedians - another being foul-mouthed Scottish stand-up Frankie Boyle - who were unkind to the popular comedian Michael McIntyre at an awards ceremony. "I wasn't even at this thing where his wife was crying," Lee says. (When I suggest that Moir was wrong to characterise Boyle as leftwing, he corrects me: "He comes from that branch of the left who hate the disabled - a radical splinter group.")
Part of the difficulty with levelling charges at Lee, even when they have a basis in reality, is that his routines contain a great deal of artifice. As he puts it in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, "The me you see on stage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty and my most patronising." But "when there are taste issues or ethical things involved," he tells me, "I try not to be too ironic."
When I say, in a spirit of sympathy, that he tends to pick on people for picking on people, he agrees. "Luckily, there are loads of them." One of his core beliefs is that you shouldn't demean or humiliate people on the grounds of race, class, or physical or mental handicap. He seems worried about developments in the work of Ricky Gervais, whose recent use of the word "mong" provoked a row over whether the term was offensive to those with Down's syndrome. Gervais initially insisted it no longer had that meaning before apologising. Lee says he hopes that Gervais "doesn't do something so awful that it undoes The Office". He says comedians who complain that political correctness has gone mad are either using this argument as a quasi-intellectual licence to make offensive jokes, or else deploying it as part of their act - in the teeth of contrary evidence. "Roy 'Chubby' Brown is so oppressed by the politically correct brigade that he's able to tour massive theatres all year and sell millions of DVDs," he says alluding to one particularly successful blue British comedian.
After two hours, Lee is on his second Diet Coke, having declined both dessert and coffee. The restaurant is filling up. There seem to be large groups of talkative women, operating the lunchtime equivalent of a hen-night. Fortunately, seated on the table next to ours, a mother and daughter sit in silence, as Lee talks fluently, only breaking stride to let out another apparently irrepressible, often inexplicable, chuckle.
Towards the end of lunch, though, he becomes quite angry about present conditions. There's no way he would have made it to Oxford today, he says. "For a start, I was adopted. In the 1960s, the process took three months, now it can take three years. That's going to affect people differently. I might have been damaged by longer in care. And I wouldn't have gone anyway because of the debts. There's no way I would take that on. Thirdly, a whole generation of people are being made to feel that they shouldn't be studying the arts. They're being told that their degree has got to be cost-effective."
He especially regrets the disappearance of the old "support networks", such as the unemployment and housing benefits, that enabled artists to live cheaply and find their way. "It's all over. There'll come a point when somebody will suddenly realise - there's loads and loads of Coldplay but there isn't a Radiohead, there's loads and loads of ITV1 sitcoms, and things with Robert Lindsay in a house, but there isn't a League of Gentlemen. Someone will be reading an embossed novel about a missing artefact, and they will suddenly think, 'Didn't there use to be books that were not just a list of events?' " (Lee's well-known parody of a typical Dan Brown sentence goes: "The famous man looked at the red cup.") In 40 years, he reckons, people will be saying, "Where's all that stuff gone that was ... good?"
Lee's conversation, never less than engaging and precise, frequently verges on rant. More than an hour after polishing off his pizza, he has finally indulged in a good one. Then he stands up. It's time, he says, for "school pick-ups and things". "Is that OK?" I say it's OK. And off he shuffles.
Stewart Lee is at the Leicester Square Theatre until February 10
.......................................................................
Pizza Express
335 Upper Street, London N1
Mixed Side Salad £3.50
Meatballs £5.40
Contadina pizza £9.75
Christmas pizza on a romana base £11.95
Sparkling water £3.95
Diet Coke x2 £4.50
Total (including service) £45.00
.......................................................................
Laugh track: Ben Thompson's brief history of modern British comedy
1960s Beyond the Fringe's Oxbridge quartet of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller set about dismantling British ideas of deference from the top down (a project previously begun by the Goons, who pursued the same goal with more subtlety and from the bottom up, so never got quite as much credit for it). Cook's wryly-named club, the Establishment, operational in Greek Street, Soho, from 1961-1964, was the epicentre of the ensuing satire earthquake.
1970s Perhaps overly identified with the unreconstructed attitudes to race and gender paraded by the hard-bitten working-men's club acts of ITV's The Comedians, the 1970s was also the decade when the gentle "one nation" TV comedy of Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies united its largest ever audiences. While the opening of the Comedy Store above a Soho strip club in 1979 was rightly seen as the dawn of a new era, it's also true that few of the anti-Tory iconoclasts who passed through its doors could match the earlier taboo-busting exploits of daring Irish anecdotalist Dave Allen, the deceptively soft-edged whimsy of Victoria Wood, or the free-wheeling Rabelaisian wit of Billy Connolly (whose endless runs at the Hammersmith Apollo were the closest UK equivalents to the arena comedy being pioneered by the likes of Steve Martin in America).
1980s If Margaret Thatcher was the mother-in-law of alternative comedy, punk was the cooler cousin it always looked up to. A generation of performers brought to a mass TV audience by ITV's Saturday Live and Channel 4's The Comic Strip - Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and French and Saunders among them - coalesced into a new showbiz aristocracy with alarming speed. At the same time an ad hoc network of small stand-up comedy clubs, independent music venues and student comedy nights provided a home to less easily co-optable talents, Nietzschean wildcard Simon Munnery and deadpan provocateur Ted Chippington being two of Stewart Lee's favourites.
1990s The youthful audiences and unfettered adulation attracted by wilfully apolitical "post-alternative" mainstays Reeves and Mortimer and Newman and Baddiel inspired the ubiquitous coinage, "Comedy is the new rock and roll." While an increasingly weighty infrastructure of management companies, tour promoters, comedy club franchises and stand-up courses turned live comedy into a career option, a golden generation of TV shows (among them Father Ted, The Day Today, The Royle Family, The League of Gentleman and The Fast Show) flew the flag for creative daring.
2000s Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand made it in Hollywood on a scale no British performers have managed since Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore and the Pythons. At home, developments in digital sound overcame the technical problems that had dogged large-scale comedy shows to usher in a new era of stadium laughter-making. Peter Kay, Michael McIntyre, and Lee Evans vied to break attendance and DVD sale records, while the tyranny of the TV panel game was Orwell's dystopian vision made flesh - Stephen Fry's boot stamping on a human face for ever
Ben Thompson is the author of 'Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy'
Stewart Lee
2011-11-25T13:06:05+00:00
The comedian Stewart Lee arrives at Pizza Express on Upper Street in north London looking more like a wary gnome than the confident figure he cuts in his stand-up shows. The restaurant holds fond memories for Lee. He used to eat here with other comedians in the early 1990s after performing at the nearby Market Tavern, "a grotty pub, now a swanky bar" called the Winchester. "There used to be marble tables here," he recalls. "I knocked one of them when I was trying to straighten it, and a big slab of marble fell on the floor and smashed in half." Luckily, one of the comedians in his party was Jo Brand, "who might have done a bit of telly by then", and she managed to smooth things over. These days, Lee has a television series of his own. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, the second series of which was shown late at night on BBC2 earlier this year, combines politically freighted, often cerebral stand-up routines of the kind you almost never see on TV in these days of comedy roadshows and panel games. He also has a new full-length touring show, Carpet Remnant World, which has just begun a three-month run at the Leicester Square Theatre. It is, he says, "all about the idea of utopias". "I grew up in Solihull," he says, "on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn't feel allegiance to anything. I didn't have working-class pride or upper-class superiority." He used to have a mild Birmingham accent but he shook it off "fairly deliberately". Solihull was also a good place to grow up, he says, because it's "the kind of place that you want to leave. If you want to do something, it's...
Howe Gelb, leader of the Tucson, Arizona group Giant Sand, started mixing country music, then still unacceptable in polite society, with punk, jazz, and noise thirty years ago. Today, Howe tours the world without troubling the charts, and is feted by collaborators and fans from PJ Harvey to the Spanish flamenco musicians with whom he recently snuck out the CD Alegrias. “Giant Sand were at least 12 minutes ahead of our time, I guess.” reflects the so-called ‘Godfather of Alternative Country’, a mantle he says “feels different on different days, from comfortably invisible to ridiculously notable. When they ask me at passport control what kind of music I play, I retort “I’m a cult figure”. But I don’t mind. It probably means I’ll never have to suffer a backlash from being too popular. That would suck. ”
To Howe, genre specifics are irrelevant. His career includes three solo piano instrumental collections, bucketfuls of grunge sludge, and two collaborations with a Gospel choir. 1994’s Glum, for example, included lead vocals by Howe’s four year old daughter Indiosa, and also by then septuagenarian crooner Pappy Allen. “I used to think if I just got the record done and out there, more informed powers then me would know what to label it,” he explains, “I mean, was Johnny Cash ever really country music? Never a lick of pedal steel there, but they had to sell him somehow. Neil Young is just Neil Young rock.? Is Thelonious Monk a jazz piano player? Why does he sound like he’s discovered his own planet then? If I have to make up my own category, I’d prefer the term ‘erosion rock’. I think it’s encoded in the band name anyway; Giant Sand.”
Howe’s compelling musical process sees chance strategies and slapdash instant composition collide with a thorough working knowledge of classic rock, an approach sometimes as likely to thrill as to spill. But it’s an addictive ride, its evolutionary arc encoded in Howe’s first three albums as Giant Sand, reissued last month by Fire records with a further twenty-four culled from his back catalogue to follow by next Summer. The garage rock of 1985’s Valley of Rain bleeds into the country-punk fusion that was 1987’s Storm. The one-take blowouts of 1989’s Long Stem Rant introduced improvisational freedom, and the key elements were all in place. Those early records make much more sense today, in the wake of White Stripes, Alt Country, and Western Society’s third or fourth Garage Rock Revival. “I am just happy it stands up at all,” Gelb confesses, now older and greyer than the youngster on the inner sleeve of Valley of Rain, “But those first two albums are regurgitations. I hear ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ in there. I hear all the stuff I loved when I was 14 and had my first stereo.”
So is Howe a product of a specific era, a Seventies rock childhood, followed by punk teens, and then the get-in-the-van American indie era? Could Giant Sand happen in today’s climate? “I existed in between things, like the space between molecule clusters. ‘72 to ‘77 was bleak for rock.” Howe opines, but makes notable exceptions for Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Neil Young’s Zuma, the parentage of his own apparently orphaned mix of literary lyrics and guitar noise suddenly clear. And if Howe’s omnivorous music sounds like it was influenced by almost random browsing, then his teenage listening habits explain it. “I’d poke into the blues bins at the record store and gather what I could from Memphis Slim and Otis Span, and the cheap jazz bins , full of McCoy Tyner and, thankfully, Theloniuous Sphere Monk.” Like many musicians, after the punk party was over Howe felt stifled by the Eighties. “We just had to make up our own music cause we couldn’t find what we wanted to buy. We made the music we needed to hear.”
After grunge, the lo-fi movement of the mid-90s, placing ideas and energy over production values, should have been a perfect fit for Howe, now making Giant Sand and solo records in ad-hoc combinations of musicians on the fly. “Sure, folks finally had ears for immediacy and began to embrace the realm of sonic happenstance. But, I was hit with a series of troubling circumstances and was hampered from further momentum until the end of the decade.”
In 1997, Howe lost his long-term inspiration and sometime collaborator, the steel guitarist Rainer Ptacek, to a brain tumor; in 1999, he was dropped by Virgin, the first major label to invest in him; and gradually a fairly stable Giant Sand band left him to become Calexico, pushing a tasteful version of Howe’s core sound to larger audiences in a way Howe had never been willing or able to do. But eventually the freedom seemed to energise him. Howe started self-releasing records, and hit the road in the clothes he stood up in, with a contract asking for underwear and socks and the loan of a guitar, carrying just a utility belt of effects pedals. And thus he became the low-intensity cult figure of legend, sustainably farming a loyal audience worldwide.
Giant Sand’s latest album proper, Blurry Blue Mountain (Fire), has received the kind of career best reviews that come when critics finally realise there’s little they can say or do that will deter a determined artist from proceeding, so they may as well concede defeat. There’s the Monk-ish piano balladry of Time Flies and Love A Loser, the luminescent country chug of Monk’s Mountain and Better Man Than Me, and scorching re-writes of the back catalogue classics Thin Line Man and Swamp Thing, revisited and reinterpreted as if they were alternate universe standards. What, then, is the key to a successful performance? “I don’t know,” Howe says,”it’s like, what makes a line funny or fail. It’s the beat. Sometimes you are inside the beat and sometimes you are outside the beat. They both work, but not to someone who is listening to only one. And unlike jazz, our improvisation is not in the solo, it’s in everything. Just like erosion changes the landscape on a daily basis, I tend to allow the same for my work. It is what nature is. And if the desert is anything, it is magnificent erosion.”
Does Howe hope, at 54, that Fire’s reissues program will consolidate, belatedly, the Giant Sand brand? Howe is philosophical; “At this point if someone has never discovered Giant Sand, they most likely will be insulted that we didn’t reach them before. Die hard fans should be remiss we never validated their allure with their friends who chided them from choosing the likes of us. And our more successful peers should hate us for seeming so fiercely independent and unattached to the very things they have had so much success with. I guess we probably suck.”
Howe is surprisingly amenable when I suggest he might like to consider dying, as it often provides a sales boost to cult artists. “Last month, at a place called Gig harbor on the Puget Sound below Seattle, I found myself drowning in a capsized canoe,” he recalls, “cold weather, clothing saturated, and losing the struggle against the outgoing tidal surge. But the epitaph would have been tempting: Howe Gelb - drowned in sound at gig.”
Blurry Blue Mountian, Valley Of Rain, Thin Line Man and Storm are all out now on Fire Records.
Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2010-11-19T20:40:05+00:00
Howe Gelb, leader of the Tucson, Arizona group Giant Sand, started mixing country music, then still unacceptable in polite society, with punk, jazz, and noise thirty years ago. Today, Howe tours the world without troubling the charts, and is feted by collaborators and fans from PJ Harvey to the Spanish flamenco musicians with whom he recently snuck out the CD Alegrias. “Giant Sand were at least 12 minutes ahead of our time, I guess.” reflects the so-called ‘Godfather of Alternative Country’, a mantle he says “feels different on different days, from comfortably invisible to ridiculously notable. When they ask me at passport control what kind of music I play, I retort “I’m a cult figure”. But I don’t mind. It probably means I’ll never have to suffer a backlash from being too popular. That would suck. ” To Howe, genre specifics are irrelevant. His career includes three solo piano instrumental collections, bucketfuls of grunge sludge, and two collaborations with a Gospel choir. 1994’s Glum, for example, included lead vocals by Howe’s four year old daughter Indiosa, and also by then septuagenarian crooner Pappy Allen. “I used to think if I just got the record done and out there, more informed powers then me would know what to label it,” he explains, “I mean, was Johnny Cash ever really country music? Never a lick of pedal steel there, but they had to sell him somehow. Neil Young is just Neil Young rock.? Is Thelonious Monk a jazz piano player? Why does he sound like he’s discovered his own planet then? If I have to make up my own category, I’d prefer the term ‘erosion rock’. I think it’s encoded in the band name anyway; Giant Sand.” Howe’s compelling musical process sees chance strategies and slapdash instant composition collide with a thorough...
Comedian Stewart Lee has launched an extraordinary attack on Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, saying he wishes he had been ‘decapitated’ in the high-speed crash that nearly cost him his life.
The 41-year-old comedian, star of BBC2’s critically acclaimed Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, accuses Hammond and his Top Gear colleagues of being ‘bullies’ and jokes about the car crash that left Hammond suffering brain damage.
Lee was at the same school as Hammond – he was two years ahead of the presenter – though the source of the animosity remains unclear.
Yesterday, neither of the BBC men were prepared to discuss their days at Solihull School, a £9,400-a-year public school in Birmingham, amid speculation that their shared school experience may have prompted Lee’s diatribe.
Hammond, 39, nicknamed ‘The Hamster’ by fans, suffered brain injuries three years ago while driving a jet-propelled Vampire dragster that flipped and crashed at about 280mph
He made a remarkable recovery after the crash, and has gone on to present other TV programmes, including BBC1’s Total Wipeout gameshow, and Brainiac on Sky1.
Lee spends 20 minutes telling audiences about his dislike of Hammond in his show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and he incorporates their schooldays into his routine.
During one show last week, Lee said: ‘I wish he had died in that crash and that he had been decapitated and that his head had rolled off in front of his wife and that a jagged piece of metal debris from the car had got stuck in his eye and blinded him.
‘And then his head had rolled on a few more yards into a pool of boiling oil and that his head had retained just enough neural capacity for him to be able to think “ooh, this is bit hot" before the whole thing exploded into tiny pieces.’
Later in the routine, he said: ‘I wish Richard Hammond HAD died and I wish he had been decapitated. Of course, it’s a joke. But coincidentally it’s also what I believe.’
Lee has made no secret of his dislike for Top Gear in episodes of his BBC2 show, which is watched by one million viewers.
He has characterised Hammond and his colleagues, Jeremy Clarkson and James May, as ‘bullies’.
An audience member in Edinburgh said: ‘It was very funny and it is his stock-in-trade, complaining about his bete noires.
'But I don’t imagine that Hammond would be happy to hear it. He told a joke which he said was made-up, about how he had saved Hammond from some school bullies, but you couldn’t help wondering if there was something more to it.’
Neither Lee nor Hammond was prepared to speak about their time at Solihull School.
Fellow students recalled how Lee was a star pupil, with a particular aptitude for English.
His headmaster, Philip Griffiths, said: ‘He was a very able English scholar and had a remarkable way with words. He was involved in drama, arts and literature and he was chairman of the sixth-form group which we had at that time.’
Hammond’s progress at the school was less remarkable, although he left the school early after his family moved to Ripon, North Yorkshire, where he attended Ripon Grammar.
Last night, Hammond did not want to comment on Lee’s comedy routine, although he is believed to view Lee’s jokes as being ‘in bad taste’.
Lee was embroiled in controversy four years ago, as co-writer of the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, which led to protests by religious pressure group Christian Voice.
Lee said before his Edinburgh show on Friday night: ‘I don’t want to talk about it. They do jokes on Top Gear don’t they? Treat it as a joke.’
His spokeswoman said: ‘I don’t think they knew each other at school.’
Stewart Lee
2009-08-30T15:18:36+01:00
Comedian Stewart Lee has launched an extraordinary attack on Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, saying he wishes he had been ‘decapitated’ in the high-speed crash that nearly cost him his life. The 41-year-old comedian, star of BBC2’s critically acclaimed Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, accuses Hammond and his Top Gear colleagues of being ‘bullies’ and jokes about the car crash that left Hammond suffering brain damage. Lee was at the same school as Hammond – he was two years ahead of the presenter – though the source of the animosity remains unclear. Yesterday, neither of the BBC men were prepared to discuss their days at Solihull School, a £9,400-a-year public school in Birmingham, amid speculation that their shared school experience may have prompted Lee’s diatribe. Hammond, 39, nicknamed ‘The Hamster’ by fans, suffered brain injuries three years ago while driving a jet-propelled Vampire dragster that flipped and crashed at about 280mph He made a remarkable recovery after the crash, and has gone on to present other TV programmes, including BBC1’s Total Wipeout gameshow, and Brainiac on Sky1. Lee spends 20 minutes telling audiences about his dislike of Hammond in his show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and he incorporates their schooldays into his routine. During one show last week, Lee said: ‘I wish he had died in that crash and that he had been decapitated and that his head had rolled off in front of his wife and that a jagged piece of metal debris from the car had got stuck in his eye and blinded him. ‘And then his head had rolled on a few more yards into a pool of boiling oil and that his head had retained just enough neural capacity for him to be able to think...
Mick Collins, The Dirtbombs' front-man, is one of American garage punk's lone black voices.
In 2001, the Detroit band's Ultraglide In Black album hot-wired Seventies soul standards with scratchy guitars. Ten years later, Party Store offers chunky analogue facsimiles of famous Detroit techno tunes of the Eighties, attempting another cross-cultural hybridisation.
It's a fantastic conceit, digital music deprogrammed, Kraftwerk in reverse. Men are driven to drum like machines. Snatches of sampled song are imprecisely vocalised.
Pulverised guitars ape inexactly electronic noise. And a twenty minute slash at Carl Craig's Bug In The Bassbin sheds and shreds The Dirtbombs' punk straightjacket.
Stewart Lee
2011-01-23T12:25:58+00:00
Mick Collins, The Dirtbombs' front-man, is one of American garage punk's lone black voices. In 2001, the Detroit band's Ultraglide In Black album hot-wired Seventies soul standards with scratchy guitars. Ten years later, Party Store offers chunky analogue facsimiles of famous Detroit techno tunes of the Eighties, attempting another cross-cultural hybridisation. It's a fantastic conceit, digital music deprogrammed, Kraftwerk in reverse. Men are driven to drum like machines. Snatches of sampled song are imprecisely vocalised. Pulverised guitars ape inexactly electronic noise. And a twenty minute slash at Carl Craig's Bug In The Bassbin sheds and shreds The Dirtbombs' punk straightjacket.
Sometime around 1973 or 74, when I was five or six years old, I was spinning the lower rungs of a rack of soft porn and True Detective magazines in a newsagents on the Stratford Road just outside Birmingham and an issue of Captain Marvel jumped out, the first real comic book I ever read. My Mum bought it for me. The story was obviously part of some continuing epic.
The words were complicated and hard to understand, and raised my reading age incrementally. The hero seemed strangely tortured and complex, at least compared to the firemen and the windmill owner in Trumpton. The aliens, Skrulls as I remember, were psychedelically terrifying in a way that Scooby-Doo monsters just weren't. I was hooked, but comics was to prove, initially, a hard addiction to feed.
American comic books were junk back then, imported as ballast for ships or discounted detritus to seaside souvenir stores, Saturday morning market stands and motorway service station newspaper shops. There were no regular distribution networks, no dedicated comic stands, and H&M wasn't carrying Iron Man underpants. In the late sixties, a strange hybrid British comic, Pow!, ran Bash Street Style humor strips alongside bought-in Spider-Man stories, cut up randomly to fit the page size.
In the early Seventies, designated British Marvel comics were filled with filleted reprints in fragmented black and white form, curiously unsatisfying to any reader who had tasted the forbidden fruit of the original four-colour formats.
Soon, dedicated mail order companies would provide monthly packages of original American comics for a price, if a big city with an actual comic shop was too far away, and your pocket money would stretch to it. God bless my Mother for tolerating my dependence.
The lure of Marvel comics, specifically Marvel comics, was the Marvel Universe, a fully functioning alternate reality populated with thousands of characters whose adventures all appeared to overlap.
The borderline autistic tendencies of the genius child were snagged by this tantalizing world, surely impossible to know in its totality, however diligently one might plug the numbered gaps in hard to find runs. Spotting a cross-reference flattered the fans, and Marvel's editor-in-chief Stan Lee encouraged our sense of belonging.
In his monthly soapbox columns, we were his 'true believers', his 'merry Marvel marching society', scornful of DC comics, the 'Distinguished Competition'.
And in the Seventies, Marvel's stories had the edge on the distinguished competition. There was just enough adult content, character development, and contemporary political and social relevance to make the pubescent reader feel like he was reading something he perhaps shouldn't be. Steve Gerber's scabrous Howard The Duck appeared to be some kind of satire of something.
Roy Thomas' visceral Conan was adapted from actual books which I then read, their lurid covers incurring my grandparents' disapproval. Rich Buckler's brutal and nihilistic Deathlok appeared to have something to say about totalitarianism and war.
And the galactic sweep of Jim Starlin's Warlock was prepping me secretly for Milton's Paradise Lost and the cosmic works of William Blake all along.
I made mine Marvel. DC was just guys dressed as bats and birds fighting. Marvel was guys dressed as spiders and tin men fighting.
But the spider guy had acne and the iron guy was a functioning alcoholic.
To paraphrase Alan Moore's unsparing analysis of Stan Lee era, where previously comics had been populated by one dimensional characters, Marvel offered fully fledged two dimensional characters.
And despite their failings, to the bewildered boy in search of guidance and something to believe in, what maxim could be more applicable, universally, than Spider-man's mantra, "With great power comes great responsibility."? What more do you need to know? Well, lots apparently.
I shrugged off comics around the age of twelve or thirteen, for punk rock, girls, the French existentialists, and Alternative Comedy, which seemed to meet my emotional needs more immediately.
But by the age of nineteen or so, in the shadow of culturally significant comics like Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Moore's Watchmen, I was back, like a dog to its own vomit, and happy.
While I'd been away, lots had changed.
British writers had taken American source material and re-fried it through the prismatic lens of their own nostalgic relationship with the characters they grew up with. Alan Moore messed ecologically and mystically with Swamp Thing specifically, and all comics generally with Watchmen. Neil Gaiman made The Sandman into a conduit for an epic fantasy.
Grant Morrison took the DC back-catalogue obscurity Animal Man and made a post-modern statement. The trickle down effect saw American writers too raise their game.
Doubtless, comics had been revitalized creatively and I felt like they were addressing me, directly.
Both I, as an adult, and these revisionist writers, seemed to be maintaining a similarly conflicted, and sometimes sentimental, relationship with the characters, trailing their now decades long tailwinds of continuity, and the comic book genre itself. Was this a good thing?
I felt flattered again, just like I did as a kid, by comic book in-jokes that touched the fan boy completist in me, or lushly painted works, like Marvels of Astro City, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, which viewed iconIC characters and superhero archetypes with a sense of awe you'd probably only have if you'd been reading about them for decades.
Alan Moore, typically, had it both ways, with the likes of Supreme and Tom Strong absorbing the tradition so completely as to be both completely accessible and utterly arcane.
And if pesky kids were being frozen out of the readership, what did I care? I had a good twenty years out of this new affair with comics, with too many highlights to mention; Garth Ennis' religious western, Preacher, and his anarchically ludicrous Punisher run; Brian Bendis' dirty-realist Daredevil and high-school sassy Ultimate Spider-man; Peter David's multi-faceted Hulk run; Mike Mignola's gothic love-letter Hellboy; and the seemingly indestructible Hellblazer, a mighty work of many hands.
I was in my late thirties and still up to speed on the Marvel Universe, but the titles published by my favorite House Of Ideas were now even more torturously interlinked than ever before, with annual cross-title events tying dozens of comic books together into vast storylines that unraveled established premises I'd now invested in, emotionally, over decades.
I survived 2005's multi-title mutant cross-over House of M with my grasp of the Marvel Universe intact. I even enjoyed your editor Mark Millar's audacious 2006 Civil War 'event', which over-turned many of the certainties of the Marvel universe. But then suddenly, there was 2007's Secret Invasion, another whole inter-title thing where it turned out loads of characters I'd liked for forty years were Skrulls all along.
Had I wasted my life? I had a kid, and no free time, and I couldn't keep up any more. Who had I been reading about all these years exactly? Even I was lost. Skrulls was where I came in to the Marvel Universe. And Skrulls was where I went out, as I finally caved in under the weight of the demands of the complex continuity that had first suckered me in.
Millar says his aim for Clint is to fill the magazine with comics which, while acknowledging the stylistic advances in the genre of the last fifty years, don't require the reader to have a vast knowledge of historical comics tropes. A part of me, the fan part, is uncertain about this scorched earth policy.
My stand-up, for example, is almost self-consciously created for people who know their way around the art form. I'm narcissistically drawn to knowing art. But I concede, comics need new blood.
I've been failing to write for comics for a few years now, getting as far as having a pitch pushed back by Marvel in 2006. Mark Millar stripped the Marvel fan-boy in-jokes from my original script for the piece I submitted to this month's issue, The Property, and, I admit, improved it.
The Property is in some ways a love letter to comics, the sort of self-aware thing you have to work out of your system when you first engage with any art form.
Now that I am purged, at your expense, I wonder if I could ever write anything that would grab a precocious kid browsing a newsagent's rack, just like Captain Marvel grabbed me, nearly forty years ago.
Stewart Lee
2010-12-01T20:43:56+00:00
Sometime around 1973 or 74, when I was five or six years old, I was spinning the lower rungs of a rack of soft porn and True Detective magazines in a newsagents on the Stratford Road just outside Birmingham and an issue of Captain Marvel jumped out, the first real comic book I ever read. My Mum bought it for me. The story was obviously part of some continuing epic. The words were complicated and hard to understand, and raised my reading age incrementally. The hero seemed strangely tortured and complex, at least compared to the firemen and the windmill owner in Trumpton. The aliens, Skrulls as I remember, were psychedelically terrifying in a way that Scooby-Doo monsters just weren't. I was hooked, but comics was to prove, initially, a hard addiction to feed. American comic books were junk back then, imported as ballast for ships or discounted detritus to seaside souvenir stores, Saturday morning market stands and motorway service station newspaper shops. There were no regular distribution networks, no dedicated comic stands, and H&M wasn't carrying Iron Man underpants. In the late sixties, a strange hybrid British comic, Pow!, ran Bash Street Style humor strips alongside bought-in Spider-Man stories, cut up randomly to fit the page size. In the early Seventies, designated British Marvel comics were filled with filleted reprints in fragmented black and white form, curiously unsatisfying to any reader who had tasted the forbidden fruit of the original four-colour formats. Soon, dedicated mail order companies would provide monthly packages of original American comics for a price, if a big city with an actual comic shop was too far away, and your pocket money would stretch to it. God bless my Mother for tolerating my dependence. The lure of Marvel comics, specifically Marvel comics, was the Marvel Universe,...
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear what would be said at our own funeral? When Michael Gove attends next month’s An Evening With Michael Gove, at Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre, the backpedalling Brexiteer will emerge with some idea of the tone of his forthcoming political obituary.
An enterprising promoter should reboot the night as Michael Gove – This Is Your Life, the vengeful foundling wearing a little girl’s party dress, and crying hot tears of shame as he witnesses a series of grimy slides of his professional half-truths and failures.
The climax is a massive image of the chortling face of his nemesis, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Weightloss Haircut Bullshit Wall-Spaffer Johnson. Gove realises it has all been for nothing. He could not even save the hedgehogs, let alone himself.
The landscape has changed, rapidly, since Gove agreed to be “in conversation with Spectator editor Fraser Nelson”, which is essentially the same as him being in conversation with himself, like the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie, babbling his demented plans into a sympathetic mirror.
Sensible dialogue has ceased. The alt-right vomit out high-speed soundbites, before lumbering old-school wildebeest journalists can interrupt them with facts, and their followers swiftly repurpose these into potent online propaganda. Traditional resistance is futile. We have entered the Age of the Weaponised Milkshake. But is milkshake a legitimate form of protest?
During his appearances on the campaign trail, Ukip’s star candidate, the internet’s Carl Benjamin, has been assailed with a total of four milkshakes and a single fish. This is a paltry selection of foods on paper, but one which Our Lord Jesus could have used to feed 5,000 people. Or pelt roughly 3,570 Brexiteers.
To clarify, the fish that was flung at Carl Benjamin in Truro was dead, but no one from Ukip could confirm whether there was “enough beer” for Benjamin to consider raping it.
In Newcastle, on Monday, a Five Guys banana and salted caramel milkshake was thrown at Nigel Farage, and the alleged milkshaker, Paul Crowther, is being charged with assault with a Deadly Amount of Calories.
Last year, online fans of freedom defended the Ukip candidate Mark Meechan. He had taught his girlfriend’s pug to do Nazi salutes at the command “Gas the Jews!”, in much the same way as Farage has taught his Pavlovian followers to shout “fake news” every time a criminal investigation is mentioned.
Self-loathing liberals agreed Meechan’s actions were defensible because they were “a joke”. I don’t really know what I think about any of this any more, having found myself, over 35 years, on so many different sides of so many different arguments. But will the same voices rush to the defence of more physical, milkshake-based, comedy?
The Newcastle milkshake man, it could be argued, is acting in a tradition of slapstick clowning far more ancient and primal, and arguably more honest, than the supposed satire of our glib liberal values purportedly essayed by Meechan and Benjamin. The milkshake is flung from a realm of misrule recognisable to all cultures.
Indeed, the day before Farage was milkshaked, Leave EU issued an unauthorised, and now withdrawn, re-edit of a Beastie Boys video, showing him and Ann Widdecombe pouring beer over their political opponents.
Meechan doesn’t agree with milkshaking, and the satirist makes clear on Twitter that “anyone that comes at me with a milkshake will need the straw to eat their meals for the next few months. I don’t care how many cameras are rolling, you’ll be getting booted up and down the street.”
It is said that Meechan’s fellow satirist, Juvenal, issued a similar warning to ancient Greek critics, infuriated by his cavalier use of the dactylic hexameter, in the second century AD.
“Anyone that comes at me with honeyed barley gruel had better save the goblet for their teeth,” Juvenal said, “I don’t care how many chroniclers are inking their papyrus, you’ll be getting sandaled up and down the Acropolis.” But is our modern day lactose political protest legitimate?
I am regularly threatened with physical violence online, though I stopped noting it all down every day about a decade ago. Joycey, of readytogonet, I remember, wanted to beat me “with a shit-covered cricket bat”, while Hiewy, a YouTube viewer, told me he would “shove my thick cock down your throat you gay lord”.
To this day, I flinch whenever a stranger calls my name. To be fair, it’s usually a teenager who admits they don’t like my stuff themselves, but wants a selfie for their dad, who is a big fan, rather than a man readying his shit-covered cricket bat or thick cock.
But who knows what genuine fears flashed through Farage’s Brexit mind as milkshake loomed towards him in Newcastle. And yet...
Nigel Farage hit by milkshake while campaigning in Newcastle – video
On 14 May 2017, less than 11 months after the Remain MP Jo Cox was shot dead in the street by a Brexiter, Farage announced that “if they don’t deliver this Brexit, then I will be forced to don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines”.
Who still “dons” anything, apart from Nigel Farage, outside the late medieval period? The last time anyone “donned” anything it was Prince Valiant, with a tabard, in a 1940s Hal Foster newspaper comic strip. Anyone still donning anything is living in a mock-heroic fantasy.
Nonetheless, Farage’s desire to don himself and tool up represents his perceived frustration with the political process. And, likewise, the flinging of milkshakes represents a frustration with traditional media’s failure to hold the far right to account, with Farage now banning the dogged Channel 4 news from attending his public rallies.
Having no manifesto will not stick to Farage; not declaring his Aaron Banks funding to the EU will not stick to Farage; collaborating with Steve Bannon and Alternative Für Deutschland will not stick to Farage; describing the climate crisis as “a scam” will not stick to Farage; that “Breaking point” poster will not stick to Farage; lying about the EU army will not stick to Farage; nothing sticks to Farage, it seems. Except milkshake.
Stewart Lee
2019-05-26T16:11:16+01:00
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear what would be said at our own funeral? When Michael Gove attends next month’s An Evening With Michael Gove, at Westminster’s Emmanuel Centre, the backpedalling Brexiteer will emerge with some idea of the tone of his forthcoming political obituary. An enterprising promoter should reboot the night as Michael Gove – This Is Your Life, the vengeful foundling wearing a little girl’s party dress, and crying hot tears of shame as he witnesses a series of grimy slides of his professional half-truths and failures. The climax is a massive image of the chortling face of his nemesis, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Weightloss Haircut Bullshit Wall-Spaffer Johnson. Gove realises it has all been for nothing. He could not even save the hedgehogs, let alone himself. The landscape has changed, rapidly, since Gove agreed to be “in conversation with Spectator editor Fraser Nelson”, which is essentially the same as him being in conversation with himself, like the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie, babbling his demented plans into a sympathetic mirror. Sensible dialogue has ceased. The alt-right vomit out high-speed soundbites, before lumbering old-school wildebeest journalists can interrupt them with facts, and their followers swiftly repurpose these into potent online propaganda. Traditional resistance is futile. We have entered the Age of the Weaponised Milkshake. But is milkshake a legitimate form of protest? During his appearances on the campaign trail, Ukip’s star candidate, the internet’s Carl Benjamin, has been assailed with a total of four milkshakes and a single fish. This is a paltry selection of foods on paper, but one which Our Lord Jesus could have used to feed 5,000 people. Or pelt roughly 3,570 Brexiteers. To clarify, the fish that was flung at Carl Benjamin in Truro was dead, but no one from...
The television food personality and chef Angela Hartnett, formerly best remembered as the Rod Hull to Gordon Ramsay’s Emu, is curating something called Kitchen Tales at the Chipping Norton Set’s cheese and music festival, Wilderness. But I can’t work out from the blurb if it is an exhibition, an event, a shop, or just some ingredients lying on the floor that you can look at. Nonetheless, it is reassuring to know that it has been curated, whatever it is.My grandad was a sales rep for Colman’s Mustard. I expect today he would have to say he was a mustard plant compound retail opportunity curator! And he wouldn’t be able to say what colour the mustard was, in case it offended people with jaundice!! It’s political correctness gone mad!!! It’s worse than that!!!! It’s political correctness gone sanity challenged!!!!! And they’ve banned Christmas!!!!!! The cattery wouldn’t take Robin’s cat because they said it looked like Hitler!!!!!!!
This morning I heard a radio interview with the British Dental Association’s curator of dental history, Dr Margaret Wilson, her suspicious job title alone suggesting a whitewash is in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that teeth never occur naturally in humans, and are inserted at birth to generate dentistry revenue.
And yet I recognise Curator Wilson as part of the International Curatorship of Curators, of which I am the acting curator. For, in my capacity as an E-list celebrity comedian, writer, and broadcaster, I have curated over six things, from a weekend at the Southbank Centre to the order of all the pens on my desk, and if I get it wrong, all the women in the world will die. Most imminently, I am the curator of the boutique music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, at Prestatyn Pontins, on the weekend of 15 April.
Ian Hislop’s satirical news magazine Private Eye ran a sympathetic piece on the problems of staging such ambitious events without sponsorship or funding, but in describing me, the word curator was placed in inverted commas, ie “curator”, as if there were some doubt that I had “curated” the festival at all; or as if the very idea of a “curator” was so ridiculous it was suspect in some way. Let me assure you, I am a “curator”, and I have personally “curated” the living fuck out of this event until I am blue in the face.
But what is a “curator”? Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “curator” of the Serpentine gallery, wrote the book on “curating”, literally. It is called Ways of Curating and is, in my professional “curatorial” opinion, naive at best. Indeed, Angela Hartnett, Dr Margaret Wilson and I were all laughing on www.curator.net the other day about what a tool Obrist is when it comes to “curating”. Margaret Wilson said Obrist “couldn’t curate his way out of an elephant’s ballsack”, which seemed unnecessary.
All Tomorrow’s Parties weekend events inevitably exploit the dramatic contrast of the familiar British holiday camp and the unpredictable artists they showcase. Should my “curatorship” embody the radical history of the British holiday camp as an abstract ideal? J Fletcher Dodd’s Socialist Holiday Camp in Great Yarmouth was the interwar pioneer of the holiday-as-political-statement model. The booking of bands like Dutch anarcho-punks the Ex, and Nottingham ranters Sleaford Mods, might reflect this self-improving strain, just as the inclusion of a Saturday small hours set by Charlotte Church echoes Fred Pontin’s and Billy Butlin’s subsequent re-pointing of the instructive blueprint towards utilitarian notions of entertainment.
Obrist’s book told me nothing, as usual. I rang Hartnett, but she was busy stuffing a platypus’s egg with marinated quail’s feet. Dr Wilson was lying about teeth, through her teeth, as usual. And so, in preparing the Prestatyn Pontins ATP “curation”, I undressed, lay on the floor, went into a kind of trance and attempted to visualise the whole history of human sound, while twisting my hips to a rhythm only I could hear, which was embarrassing, as I was waiting to pick up my daughter in her school playground at the time. Luckily, she is 28 years old. And so are all her classmates. And everyone who exists.
“Curating” myself into a visionary state, I saw the Prestatyn event as a pyramid-shaped sonic universe with new acts like Shopping, Trash Kit and Ex-Easter Island Head orbiting its tip, unfamiliar free jazz and folk artists floating in random gyratories, and the whole thing balanced on the back of a huge four-legged turtle, the legs representing musicians whose works are supporting pillars of postwar contemporary music; John Cale; the 13 Floor Elevators; Sun Ra Arkestra; and Giant Sand, wellspring of alt-country. A mysterious fifth vestigial leg is in the form of the proto-alternative comedian Ted Chippington, though its exact function is uncertain. This, my friends, is what “curating” means.
Illustration by David Foldvari
On a related note, I am currently “curating” a radio show called Global Globules on Resonance 104.4FM in the character of the disfigured 80s Canadian comedian and “curator” Baconface, who wears a mask of bacon, and plays lengthy selections from his late brother’s collection of obscure 60s and 70s experimental music, in an attempt to deal with his sibling’s death in a bacon-aggravated bear mauling for which Baconface feels responsible. I record the shows alone in a very small room near London Bridge, wearing Baconface’s stinking bacon-covered clothes and wrestling mask. I receive no payment for this work.
The next logical step of course is to “curate” a festival as Baconface, and indeed the simplicity of his backstory makes it obvious to me who he would book, while my own “curatorial” parameters remain blurred. Has Hans-Ulrich Obrist thought of “curating” something while pretending to be someone else and wearing a mask of cured meat, even while alone? No. Who is the best “curator”? It is me.
Baconface’s Festival of Forgotten Sound would ideally include the Irish minimalist Sr Anselme O’Ceallaigh, two Sardinian 70s acts in the shape of Urthona and Vesuvio, Italian horror soundtrack maestros Hymenoptera, Swindon psychedelic 60s band the Dukes of the Stratosphear, and Martin Zeichnete, who was forced by the Stasi in the early 80s to compose inspiring electronica for the East German Olympic team. All these artists are fictional historical constructs that allow the real musicians behind them creative freedom.
Fictional bands “curated” by a fictional “curator” who doesn’t exist! It’s time to take “curating” to the next level, where the act of “curating” becomes a comment on the very idea of “curating”. We haven’t even begun to explore what “curating” could mean. “Curating” will eat itself! Then, and only then, you may use your inverted commas.
The television food personality and chef Angela Hartnett, formerly best remembered as the Rod Hull to Gordon Ramsay’s Emu, is curating something called Kitchen Tales at the Chipping Norton Set’s cheese and music festival, Wilderness. But I can’t work out from the blurb if it is an exhibition, an event, a shop, or just some ingredients lying on the floor that you can look at. Nonetheless, it is reassuring to know that it has been curated, whatever it is.My grandad was a sales rep for Colman’s Mustard. I expect today he would have to say he was a mustard plant compound retail opportunity curator! And he wouldn’t be able to say what colour the mustard was, in case it offended people with jaundice!! It’s political correctness gone mad!!! It’s worse than that!!!! It’s political correctness gone sanity challenged!!!!! And they’ve banned Christmas!!!!!! The cattery wouldn’t take Robin’s cat because they said it looked like Hitler!!!!!!! This morning I heard a radio interview with the British Dental Association’s curator of dental history, Dr Margaret Wilson, her suspicious job title alone suggesting a whitewash is in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that teeth never occur naturally in humans, and are inserted at birth to generate dentistry revenue. And yet I recognise Curator Wilson as part of the International Curatorship of Curators, of which I am the acting curator. For, in my capacity as an E-list celebrity comedian, writer, and broadcaster, I have curated over six things, from a weekend at the Southbank Centre to the order of all the pens on my desk, and if I get it wrong, all the women in the world will die. Most imminently, I am the curator of the boutique music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, at Prestatyn Pontins, on the weekend of 15 April. Ian...
After a messy on-stage altercation at New York’s Brownies club on April 7th 1998, Smith parted company with his then band, including bass-player Steve Hanley, a cornerstone of The Fall’s initial two decade run who, between 1987 to 1993, had helped wrestle The Fall into the Top Fifty.
Obituary wisdom has it that the twenty years following the severing of his last links with the punk era Fall represent a protracted decline for Mark E Smith, and the second half of The Fall’s career displayed little of the twisted pop sensibility that had entertained fans from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. But, by considering the actual recordings the group made in the period, rather than the soap operas that barnacle its underbelly, it’s easy to make that case that, in his last decade, Smith finally captured the Fall Sound that had always been buzzing in his head. And he did this for better or worse, by accident or by design, and whether it was what you wanted The Fall Sound to be or not.
The Marshall Suite
19/4/99, Artful Records CD: ARTFULCD17; cassette: ARTFULMC17; LP: ARTFULLP17 (2 LPs). Reissued 25/4/11, Cherry Red Records CD: CDTRED491 (3 CDs).
With keyboard player Julia Nagle the only link to earlier incarnations, but with human torch guitarist Neville Wilding newly attached, The Fall produced an album far better than fearful fans had expected, cherry-picking styles from its whole history; the smart weird pop of near hit Touch Sensitive; feral rock and roll covers like Tommy Blake’s F’-oldin’ Money and The Saints’ This Perfect Day; the electronic maelstrom of Shake-Off; and the Zeppelin-channeling power-dirge of (Jung Nev’s) Antidotes. The triple CD reissue features superior Peel sessions, Wilding driving This Perfect Day at 100mph without a map, and a coruscating XFM live set.
Old comrade Grant Showbiz produced an uncharacteristically clean set under disinfected laboratory conditions, dusted with sometimes incompatible electro-frosting. The sterile setting didn’t suit Wilding’s impulsive ethos, though he combusts during Two Librans and Hands Up Billy. Dr Buck’s Letter, assembled by bassist Adam Helal on pro tools, is nonetheless a Fall classic, Smith reciting a facile Pete Tong questionnaire over menacing swamp funk. Lou Reed’s Kill Your Sons is reshaped into the sinisterly shimmering Ketamine Sun, one of The Fall’s best blue sunshine visions. The 2008 reissue includes uninteresting demos
Even to fans used to Smith’s handbrake turns, the dirty garage minimalism of Are You Are Missing Winner, recorded with little finesse by an anonymous line-up of unknown urchins, was a shock. But it was the first step toward the style that sustained The Fall’s final, imperious and imperial, phase. There’s no keyboards here and precious little structure, just vast monumental riffs that Smith can wander about in at will; sturdy and flexible forms built for impulsive vocal improvisations and on-a-whim expansions. The mysterious Ed Blaney co-writes, Bourgeois Blues is reappropriated from Leadbelly via The Panther Burns, and The Troggs’ I Just Sing Inspires the psychedelic stomp of Crop-Dust.
Live At The Knitting Factory LA 14th November 2001
19/2/07, Hip Priest/Voiceprint CD: HIPP017CD
Live In San Francisco 19th November 2001
17/6/13, Ozit - Morpheus Records LP: OZITDANCD 9014 (2 LPs)
Touch Sensitive Box Set
Patronaat, Haarlem, The Netherlands on 6 April 2001
Melkweg, Amsterdam, The Netherlands on 7 April 2001
Concorde 2, Brighton on 17 April 2001
Crocodile Cafe, Seattle on 20 November 2001
The Knitting Factory, New York on 23 November 2001
14/7/03, Castle, 5 CD box: CMYBX752
2G+2
(Studio recordings mid 2001 and American tour of November 20th 2001 – November 25th 2001) 10 June 2002, Action Records CD: TAKE18CD
Live At The Garage London 20th April 2002
29 January 2007, Hip Priest/Voiceprint CD: HIPP016CD
Live At The ATP Festival 28th April 2002
19 February 2007,Hip Priest/Voiceprint CD: HIPP018CD
In bewildering Fall fashion here are no less than nine full live shows, boasting often challenging degrees of fidelity, drawn from a mere five months from November 2001 to April 2002. Over-documenting a slimmed-down line-up based around newcomers Jim Watts on bass and Ben Pritchard on guitar, these fluidly brutal versions of songs from 2001’s then unloved Are Your Are Missing Winner?, and 2000’s difficult to replicate live The Unutterable, reveal a ragbag of recruits learning the ropes en route, and discovering shat-pants courage and red-eyed resourcefulness they never knew they had in them.
Creative Distortion (22nd September 2002)
22/9/14,Secret Records CD + DVD: SECDP088 (2 CDs + DVD)
Yarbles (22nd September 2002)
29/9/14, Secret Records LP: SECLP104
Creative Distortion, misleadingly released in shorter vinyl form as Yarbles, sees an uncharacteristically nostalgic Smith play popular tracks from the back catalogue live, for one night only, presumably in exchange for a plastic bag of cash. The new line-up deliver a radical but powerful reinterpretation of 1992’s Free Range, enhanced by Eleni Poulou on keyboards, another loyal musician wife of Smith’s, who was to define the group for fourteen years.
Mark E Smith - Pander! Panda! Panzer!
23/9/02 Action Records CD: TAKE19CD
The Fall vs 2003 single
2/12/02, Action Records CD: TAKE20CD;7": TAKE20
2002 offered Smith’s second spoken-word album, following 1998’s more digestible Post Nearly Man, and a lone single. Its lead track, Susan Vs Youthclub, featuring drummer Dave Miller’s Faustian pulsations, bridges the provocative reductionism of Are You Are Missing Winner? and the cyberpunk fusions of the forthcoming album.
The Real New Fall LP, formerly Country On The Click
27/10/03, Action Records CD: TAKE021CD; and LP: TAKE021. Released in different form in the USA, Narnack records, 15/6/04 CD: NCK7018; and LP: NCK7018.
We Wish You A Protein Christmas
8/12/03 Action Records CD: TAKE22CD: and Double 7": TAKE22
Live At The Knitting Factory New York 9th April 2004
29/1/07 Hip Priest/Voiceprint CD: HIPP015CD
Interim (Live and Rehearsal Studio August and September 2004)1/11/04 Hip Priest/Voiceprint CD: HIPP004CD
2003’s The Real New Fall LP, Formerly Country On The Click, is one of the great Fall albums, an embarrassment of riches so plentiful no-one knew how best to present it, the Pritchard/Poulou/Watts axis at its zenith. An early pirated mix was suppressed, and the UK release was swiftly followed by a US version with different mixes. Grant Showbiz got the meeting of studio trickery and as-live excitement exactly right this time, The Fall now a space rock steamroller, a post-punk Hawkwind, with Smith’s lyrics clear and focused in a way they would rarely be again.
Theme From Sparta FC became a BBC football staple, Green Eyed Loco Man mixes ayahuasca with bin juice, Mountain Energei and Janet, Johnny & James lope like lupine late ‘70s Iggy Pop. With extra tracks on the Protein Christmas single, essential outtakes on the Interim album, contemporary live material, and a superb Peel session in the vaults, surely someone can find it in themselves to knock together a four CD edition?
Fall Heads Roll
3/11/05, Slogan Records, CD: SLOCD003; and LP: SLOLP003.
Fall Heads Roll is the one that got away. Ben Pritchard and Eleni Poulou were now paired with bassist Steve Trafford and the Are You Are Missing Winner? era’s drummer Spencer Birtwistle. By design or necessity, Smith assembled the vast pulverising krautobilly riff blocks of Pacifying Joint, What About Us, Assume, Bo Demmick, Youwanner and Clasp Hands in such sturdy dimensions that the exact location of his presence in a song was irrelevant. The album gave us both the mighty throb of Blindness, one of the great doom-funk Fall workouts, and the surprisingly plangent tones of Pritchard’s The Early Days Of Channel Fuhrer and Trafford’s Midnight In Aspen. But somehow, many of Fall Heads Roll’s key tracks rocked inexplicably harder in non-album incarnations, Blindness’ Peel session take remaining the definitive reading.
Typically, the reliable and pliant line up that produced Fall Heads Roll folded somewhere in Phoenix Arizona on the 7th of May the following year, six months after the album’s release. Less than 48 hours later Smith and Poulou were on-stage in San Diego with a new American Fall, culled from the LA psychedelic band Darker My Love. A revealing bootleg shows them almost pulling off a set of songs they’d presumably learned from the records in a day while Mr and Mrs Smith drove West towards them, and an uncertain future.
Reformation Post TLC
12/2/07 on Slogan Records, a label of Sanctuary Records Group, CD: SLOCD007; and LP: SLODV007 (2 LPs)
Last Night At The Palais (1st April 2007)
24/8/ 09, Sanctuary CD & DVD: 2713432
Sometimes billed as “Mark E Smith and his American Fall”, Smith and Poulou and their swiftly hired hands pulled off another great album in the shape of Reformation Post TLC, repurposing some songs the line-up Smith abandoned in Arizona had already made studio stabs at, any writing credits erased. Smith chooses to credit himself with the composition of the opening track Over! Over!, which must be a surprise to the members of The United States Of America, who wrote and recorded exactly the same track in 1968 under the title Coming Down. But this quibble aside Fall Sound, Systematic Abuse and Reformation (essentially Can’s Mother Sky retooled) find the fluid and road-worn Americans concocting more of the flexible repetitive drone-grooves now best suited to Smith’s wayward wordplay.
As usual, these tracks flourished live in a way the studio never captured, but the playful Insult Song shows how happy Smith was with his American indie apprentices. The US release featured longer versions of two tracks, and the subsequent live album, from the final night of the Hammersmith Palais, saw a hybrid British-American Fall deliver superb selections mainly from the last two albums. And then the Americans were gone. With their beards.
Imperial Wax Solvent
28/4/08 Sanctuary CD: 1765729; and LP: 1766796
Here, Smith stabilized a core quintet of new boys Peter Greenway on guitar, Keiron Melling on drums, and Dave Spurr on bass, with Poulou still on keyboards, which was to remain more or less constant until his death. It’s also on Imperial Wax Solvent that Smith chose most obviously to escape from the prison of perceptions of himself as post-punk’s premiere poet, and instead pursue a kind of studied incoherence. Smith’s new vocal range of visceral animal growling could descend into any section of a song at will, and defied the analysis of the English Literature graduates and beard-kneading academics running Fall lyric websites. The eleven minute 5O Year Old Man is a manifesto for the next decade, a rockabilly rumble with minimalist trance-like repetition, spiked by a country and western breakdown midsection, that snarls satirical assertions of impotent power in a barely understood gurgle.
Your Future Our Clutter
26/04/10 Domino CD: WIGCD245; and LP: WIGLP245 (2 LPs)
Domino cracked the whip and The Fall danced, delivering a career high point, 32 years in, and one which makes a compelling case for the Greenway/Spurr/Poulou/Melling incarnation as being as adept at channeling the indefinable spirit of The Fall as the Hanley/Scanlon/Brix combos always held in nostalgic fondness. Smith’s daring and suicidal vocal leap up the octave on OFYC Showcase is one of the great Fall moments, and there’s not a duff track here on an album characterized by bulldozer brutal repeated riffs, spindly surf lead lines, Poulou’s perfectly pitched keyboard embellishments, and twangy fifties boogie. It closes with the whispered threat, “You don’t deserve rock and roll.”
Ersatz GB
14/11/11 Cherry Red CD: CDBRED500; and LP: BRED500
Smith often followed a successful and coherent album with a deliberate attempt to sabotage any developing identity, but Ersatz GB continues YFOC’s quest to combine everything he appeared to love about post-war popular music in one epochal package. Cosmos 7 is cosmic greaser rock and roll; Taking Off is bass heavy space rock; Nate Will Not Return’s stuttering post punk pogos on the spot for six minutes; Greenway provides a dense thicket of hard rock within which Smith growls his guitarist’s name; Happi Song is a sublime moment of psychedelic trance-pop voiced by Poulou; Monocard showcases eight minutes of Smith’s evolving ruined throat vocal range. It’s another great album that’s easy to love.
Re-Mit
13/5/13 Cherry Red CD: CDBRED580; and LP: BRED580
The Remainderer
9/12/13 Cherry Red CD: CDMRED600; and 10": BREDEP600
Live Uurop VIII-X11 Places In Sun & Winter Son
27/10/14 , Cherry Red CD: CDBRED599; and double LP: BRED599
Live In Clitheroe (25th April 2013)
22/4/17 Ozit - Morpheus Records LP: OZITDANLP 8029
Re-Mit was studio album number thirty and The Fall showed no sign of slowing. Check Smith’s explosive gutteral land grab for the listener’s attention on the highly combustible wig-out of Sir William Wray, his mastery of rock’s essential inarticulacy undimmed. We kept writing about Smith as a wordsmith. But I think he knew that rock and roll was also about the sheer power of precision-bombed consonants and vowels. Smith’s “ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba”s could say as much as his finest Philip Dick-induced poetry.
Swapping in a few songs from the subs’ bench of the subsequent Remainderer EP, such as the barked swagger of the title track, the skeletal I Wanna Be Your Dog steal of Rememberance R, or Smith and Puolou’s Lee And Nancy in Hell duet-duel Touchy Pad, would have elevated Re-Mit, the least convincing release of the group’s majestic last decade, into the premier league of final Fall albums.
Live Uurop, actually recorded between 2008 and 2013, finds the consolidated final Fall power through its current repertoire with both finesse and fury, a combination that had eluded many earlier incarnations, as Smith continues to mutate into a compelling and deliberate hybrid of street preacher and Oliver Reed’s wolfman. Live In Clitheroe is an uncharacteristically sensible reading of the current set, prefaced by a fascinatingly listless introduction from the promoter.
Sub-Lingual Tablet
11/5/15 Cherry Red CD: CDBRED660; double LP: BRED580
Wise Ol’ Man
19/2/16 Cherry Red CD: CDMRED666; and 12": BREDEP666
Fans should be pathetically grateful that Smith survived to complete this particular phase of The Fall, Sub-Lingual tablet being another superb release. Thirty eight years in, and two years from close of business, Auto-Chip 2014-2016 is one of the great Fall songs of all time, and a 20 minute reading from The Highbury Garage that’s surfaced on Youtube could be the group’s finest live moment. Greenway’s inter-tangled licks chime and slither over ten minutes of high-speed motorik kraut rhythm, making for an immersive experience which is simultaneously both mind-bendingly psychedelic and yet vein-poppingly invigorating. It breaks down. It builds again. And it never lets go. Thrusting relentlessly forward in the same furrow, Fibre Book Troll comes a close second. The accompanying Wise Ol’ Man ep features another lengthy disruption, All Leave Cancelled, alongside stray remixes and live tracks.
New Facts Emerge
28/7/17 Cherry Red CD: CDBRED706; 2x10" LP: BRED706
On The Fall’s final lp, sadly without Poulou on side, Smith took the persona of the incoherent animal-shaman he’d been perfecting for the last decade to a whole new level of total theatre. On Fol de Rol, Greenway’s perfectly considered keening guitars swoop over clattering rhythms around Smith’s ravaged roars. Who is he on Couples Vs Jobless Mid 30s? Some haunted seer, possessed by all-knowing goblin spirits, that torment and taunt you from an indeterminate point way back in the mix. The opening of the Shakin’ Stevens like Second House Now, where Smith’s ‘ba ba ba’s initially defy the song’s rhythm and then meet it head on, is a masterpiece of comic timing. The joyful and perfunctory loudhailer gobbledygook of O! Zzztrrk Man is, like so much of The Fall at their best, joyously, absurdly, laugh-out loud funny. Gibbus Gibson, interpreted by some as a comment on the moon-faced appearance Smith’s medical problems gave him, is a spritely rock and roll number that could have appeared on a Seventies Fall b-side, while Groundsboy too has something of that ‘country and northern’ swing of the same era.
And how fitting that the last song The Fall released in Smith’s lifetime, Nine Out Of Ten, a final respite to critics he felt had underrated his group, is an extended unaccompanied ghost guitar vamp from which Smith is absent for the last six minutes, having finally walked, head held high, out of his own movie.
The run of nine studio albums from 2003’s The Real New Fall LP, Formerly Country On The Click to 2017’s New Facts Emerge is a sequence of great recordings any band, at any time in their career, would have been proud of. And the fact that it came at a point where most would just cash in credit earned on former glories makes it even more remarkable. Listeners still longing for the anti-pop hits of the Late Eighties-Early Nineties, or the integrated electronic sheen of the Phonogram era were to be perpetually disappointed. Instead, from 2005’s Fall Heads Roll onwards The Fall were, brilliantly and permanently, in the same realm of cosmic garage rock minimalism that spawned the stand out epics of the early eighties glory years; I’m Into CB, Deer Park, And This Day, Garden, Smile and Cruisers’ Creek.
But Smith had shed the burden of being the clipped and articulate wordsmith in chief to become instead a kind of abstract presence, haunting his own work and with growls and slurs and yammerings and hammerings that reaffirm rock and roll’s primal power to bypass sense. It was still music your dad would hate, even if you were now your dad.
The Fall toured relentlessly until the end and the albums rolled out with rigorous regularity. The last decade saw a permanent unit grow in confidence and audacity. Far from being a decline, the last ten years in particular of the group’s 21st century career could be argued to represent the final fulfillment of whatever the fuck it was The Fall was supposed to be all along. We were privileged to have been around to witness it. What really went on there? Well, as of now, we’ll only ever have these extracts.
Stewart Lee, writer/clown
Stewart Lee
2018-03-01T17:49:10+00:00
After a messy on-stage altercation at New York’s Brownies club on April 7th 1998, Smith parted company with his then band, including bass-player Steve Hanley, a cornerstone of The Fall’s initial two decade run who, between 1987 to 1993, had helped wrestle The Fall into the Top Fifty. Obituary wisdom has it that the twenty years following the severing of his last links with the punk era Fall represent a protracted decline for Mark E Smith, and the second half of The Fall’s career displayed little of the twisted pop sensibility that had entertained fans from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. But, by considering the actual recordings the group made in the period, rather than the soap operas that barnacle its underbelly, it’s easy to make that case that, in his last decade, Smith finally captured the Fall Sound that had always been buzzing in his head. And he did this for better or worse, by accident or by design, and whether it was what you wanted The Fall Sound to be or not. The Marshall Suite 19/4/99, Artful Records CD: ARTFULCD17; cassette: ARTFULMC17; LP: ARTFULLP17 (2 LPs). Reissued 25/4/11, Cherry Red Records CD: CDTRED491 (3 CDs). With keyboard player Julia Nagle the only link to earlier incarnations, but with human torch guitarist Neville Wilding newly attached, The Fall produced an album far better than fearful fans had expected, cherry-picking styles from its whole history; the smart weird pop of near hit Touch Sensitive; feral rock and roll covers like Tommy Blake’s F’-oldin’ Money and The Saints’ This Perfect Day; the electronic maelstrom of Shake-Off; and the Zeppelin-channeling power-dirge of (Jung Nev’s) Antidotes. The triple CD reissue features superior Peel sessions, Wilding driving This Perfect Day at 100mph without a map, and a coruscating XFM live set. The Unutterable 6/11/00,...
A woman I went on a blind date with in 1988 told me that witches she knew would consort with the devil at midnight, on the meadow by the river outside the town where I was a student. Soon after I decided to become a standup comedian, I sought them out, in the shadow of a ruined abbey, where the cursed remains of Henry II’s mistress Rosamund were destroyed in the dissolution. A bearded middle-aged man in a black polo neck and a pentangle pendant, a cliched look he nonetheless owned convincingly, stated terms on which I could be guaranteed to succeed beyond my wildest dreams. And, like a bloody fool, I accepted them. As promised, in 2018 the Times newspaper declared me the “world’s greatest living standup”. But I know the cost of that accolade. Deals with the devil have a habit of turning sour.
In 1930, at the age of 19, the travelling troubadour Robert Johnson stood at midnight, lit by the moon, at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and sold his soul to Papa Legba in exchange for unprecedented blues power. On 13 June 2021, at the age of 94 and a half, the respected veteran newsman Andrew Neil stood in a studio in Paddington Basin, lit by some battery-operated torches bought from an all-night garage in the Harrow Road, and sold his soul, and his reputation, to GB News chief executive Roberto Rastapopoulos™®. What did Andrew Neil want in exchange for his precious essence? Money? Power? Some hair? And what did Andrew Neil get? Public humiliation, the loss of his hard-won reputation, the chance to play second fiddle to Nigel Farage and a tasty feast of hard cheddar, humble pie and human excrement. And no hair.
In happier times, hosting cult news-comedies like the BBC’s dog-infested Portillo fest, This Week, the fustian-tonsured anti-woke warrior recognised and roundly repudiated the alt right face-flatus of the American speed-blabbermouth Ben Shapiro, a reminder that within him once beat the heart of a real newsman. Shapiro was beyond reason even for a man who regarded the BBC’s thoroughly Reithian Horrible Histories as too leftwing. But the Sticklebrick Rapunzel, as I heard Neil called by a mischievous Ken Clarke behind his back when I guested on the show, would still shut down comedy contributors who mocked Nigel Farage on air, as he smelled the farmyard stench of Brexit on the wind and tried to remain upwind of history.
Angry with the BBC’s imaginary woke bias and feeling undervalued in his small hours niche, the Steel Wool Sinéad O’Connor flounced off to be the figurehead of the avowedly anti-woke new channel GB News. Neil’s theatrical exit has turned out to be the equivalent of a man storming indignantly out of a dinner party through a door into a broom cupboard. Right now, having been absent for two months, while his station is remoulded around the eminently less qualified but infinitely more commercial Nigel Farage and a gaggle of clickbait-harvesting lockdown sceptics and Fox News-style fantasists, Neil is waiting in the broom cupboard amid the mops and Domestos bottles. The Accordion Potato hopes that when the dinner party ends and the other guests go home, he can creep out unnoticed to minimise his humiliation, dusting himself down nonchalantly with the air of a man who had intended to spend two months in a broom cupboard all along, actually, so there.
But what if the GB News dinner party doesn’t end? What if the Farage factor’s unspectacular but acceptable viewing figures mean the guests are endlessly supplied with ever more crisps and Spitfire, like the temporally trapped diners in Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, and Neil must listen to their revels for ever, cursing his Faustian pact and bursting for the toilet, eyeing the mop bucket opportunistically and wondering if it will bear the burden of his buttocks?
It’s hard to have any sympathy for Neil. In sync with the fabricated culture war, driven by Boris Johnson’s propagandist sex-businessman Douglas Smith and the arts dimbo culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, Neil has driven a race towards the bottom of the news cesspit. Now he finds himself outperformed by Nigel Farage, who has no qualms about diving deeper into the cess than British broadcasters have previously thought advisable or possible. How can Grandad Neil compete with the young and thrusting Farage in the ratings-driven offence stakes? Farage hangs around Kent beaches calling the RNLI a taxi service and camera-phoning distressed migrants. How’s the comparatively refined Andrew Neil going to beat that? Sit in his bathchair with a howitzer and shoot aircraft flying in Afghan interpreters out of the sky, filming himself laughing at the exploding planes and falling clumps of human flesh? There is no dignified exit for Neil from the public stocks he has carved for himself. Here come the cabbages, smashing into Andrew Neil’s human face – for ever.
GB News hangs in there, like a monkey surfing on an ironing board in a torrent of raw sewage, reports of its demise proving exaggerated, to gagging liberals’ dismay. Farage provides inflammatory content that draws satisfactory crowds of onlookers four times weekly, gawping like superstitious peasants at the ecclesiastical trial of a donkey. And quietly it poisons the discourse a little more each day. Meanwhile, under lockdowns, and in the 1970s Sunday afternoon quiet of Covid, I’ve been getting papers in order and discarding unnecessaries, in readiness for the someday soon when my cheque is cashed. Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me. For me. For meeeee. But it looks from my vantage point as if old Nick is enjoying letting Andrew Neil wiggle, like a little worm, on the barbed hook of his vanity.
Stewart Lee
2021-08-29T11:15:47+01:00
A woman I went on a blind date with in 1988 told me that witches she knew would consort with the devil at midnight, on the meadow by the river outside the town where I was a student. Soon after I decided to become a standup comedian, I sought them out, in the shadow of a ruined abbey, where the cursed remains of Henry II’s mistress Rosamund were destroyed in the dissolution. A bearded middle-aged man in a black polo neck and a pentangle pendant, a cliched look he nonetheless owned convincingly, stated terms on which I could be guaranteed to succeed beyond my wildest dreams. And, like a bloody fool, I accepted them. As promised, in 2018 the Times newspaper declared me the “world’s greatest living standup”. But I know the cost of that accolade. Deals with the devil have a habit of turning sour. In 1930, at the age of 19, the travelling troubadour Robert Johnson stood at midnight, lit by the moon, at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and sold his soul to Papa Legba in exchange for unprecedented blues power. On 13 June 2021, at the age of 94 and a half, the respected veteran newsman Andrew Neil stood in a studio in Paddington Basin, lit by some battery-operated torches bought from an all-night garage in the Harrow Road, and sold his soul, and his reputation, to GB News chief executive Roberto Rastapopoulos™®. What did Andrew Neil want in exchange for his precious essence? Money? Power? Some hair? And what did Andrew Neil get? Public humiliation, the loss of his hard-won reputation, the chance to play second fiddle to Nigel Farage and a tasty feast of hard cheddar, humble pie and human excrement. And no hair. In happier times, hosting cult...
In 2011, Nigel Farage co-chaired the Europe of Freedom and Democracy grouping with Italy’s Francesco Speroni, who described the Norwegian white supremacist mass murderer and unlikely celebrity Top Gear fan Anders Behring Breivik as someone whose “ideas are in defence of western civilisation”. Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Do Ant and Dec believe Breivik’s July 2011 shooting of 69 people, most of them teenagers, on the island of Utøya represented a defence of western civilisation? Do Ant and Dec, like Breivik, think Top Gear is “one of the funniest shows on TV… and one of the very few programmes at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation still worth seeing”, or do they prefer Bill Burr’s new anti-woke movie, Old Dads?
In 2017, Farage was invited to address the Alternative für Deutschland party by Beatrix von Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister and a woman who said German border guards should be allowed to shoot migrants (an attitude she shares with Rwanda, treaty or no treaty). Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Do Ant and Dec have a joint view on whether it is right to shoot migrants, or do their opinions differ? Would they like to meet Hitler’s friend’s granddaughter?
Farage has been happy, repeatedly, to guest on Infowars with the far-right American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who said that the climate crisis is a hoax initiated by the World Bank, that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Connecticut was faked and that the US government is drugging the water supply to make men gay. Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Does Dec believe that the American government is drugging water to gay men up? Does Ant have any opinion about gay water?
In 2016, Brexiters such as Farage claimed Brexit would reduce NHS waiting lists, increase education funding, reduce food costs, boost housing stock, control borders, and strengthen fishing and farming. None of those things happened. And the rivers are full of unregulated post-Brexit shit too. And Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Dec looks very clean, but perhaps Ant likes to swim in human excrement. I expect so.
As a teenaged army cadet and Enoch Powell fan, Farage reportedly marched through a Sussex village chanting Hitler youth songs and was recalled by an old schoolfriend singing an unattributed verse beginning: “Gas them all, gas ’em all, gas them all!” While denying the specifics, Farage argues, not entirely unreasonably, that the mid-80s were a volatile time, when people “were attracted to extreme groups on both sides of the debate”. But what specific debate was that, exactly, one wonders? The debate over whether people should be gassed? And what was the “other side” in that debate? The side that believed people shouldn’t be gassed? To be fair, teenagers often don’t understand the seriousness of what they are saying. Nonetheless, Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Does the show’s sponsor, Tombola, believe it’s acceptable to gas people? Do Ant and Dec have different views on the matter, democratically echoing both sides of the debate?
In 2016, Farage’s Ukip released a poster of Syrian refugees, captioned “breaking point”, widely viewed, by Unison and the archbishop of Canterbury, for example, as inadvertently echoing Nazi propaganda and likely to incite racial hatred. Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Does Tombola feel Nazi undertones in political advertising are acceptable? Does Ant? Is Dec ambivalent?
In How They Broke Britain, James O’Brien points out, perhaps tendentiously, as is his right, that within hours of the “breaking point” poster being unveiled, the remain-supporting MP Jo Cox had been fatally stabbed and shot in the street by a white supremacist terrorist; and that a week later, Farage boasted, his short-term memory perhaps damaged by the terrible 2010 crash he suffered while flying a Ukip banner through some clouds, that Brexit had been achieved “without a single shot being fired”. Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Does Ant share Farage’s view that Brexit was achieved without a single shot being fired? Perhaps Dec believes that Jo Cox was, on some level, a casualty of the charged atmosphere the leave campaign fostered? Who knows?
The problem with having Farage on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! is that most of the jungle twats, and the two perma-grinning apologist pricks who present it, do not have the ability, or the inclination, to offer even the gentlest of informed criticism of Farage’s untenable political positions and unsavoury historical associations. Farage may as well be on BBC News with a bunch of acquiescent BBC News journalists. Thus, ITV provides an uncritical platform for a dangerous demagogue to present himself as a man of the people without being held to account in any meaningful way, paving his way to power. Sound familiar? The Apprentice gave America Donald Trump and Have I Got News for Yougave Britain Boris Johnson. If another political assassination follows Farage’s further ascent, Dec will have blood on his hands and Ant will have blood on his face. Yes. I meant to say that. As the blood spatters, see, I imagine both Ant and Dec instinctively trying to shield their faces, but that Ant’s reaction time would be a little slower.
Stewart Lee
2023-11-26T20:31:18+00:00
In 2011, Nigel Farage co-chaired the Europe of Freedom and Democracy grouping with Italy’s Francesco Speroni, who described the Norwegian white supremacist mass murderer and unlikely celebrity Top Gear fan Anders Behring Breivik as someone whose “ideas are in defence of western civilisation”. Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Do Ant and Dec believe Breivik’s July 2011 shooting of 69 people, most of them teenagers, on the island of Utøya represented a defence of western civilisation? Do Ant and Dec, like Breivik, think Top Gear is “one of the funniest shows on TV… and one of the very few programmes at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation still worth seeing”, or do they prefer Bill Burr’s new anti-woke movie, Old Dads? In 2017, Farage was invited to address the Alternative für Deutschland party by Beatrix von Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister and a woman who said German border guards should be allowed to shoot migrants (an attitude she shares with Rwanda, treaty or no treaty). Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! with Ant and Dec. Do Ant and Dec have a joint view on whether it is right to shoot migrants, or do their opinions differ? Would they like to meet Hitler’s friend’s granddaughter? Farage has been happy, repeatedly, to guest on Infowars with the far-right American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who said that the climate crisis is a hoax initiated by the World Bank, that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Connecticut was faked and that the US government is drugging the water supply to make men gay. Farage has received £1.5m to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me...
It’s 2am on Thursday. Wildfires are burning in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, Portugal, Croatia and Algeria. British tourist climate refugees are, ironically, being rescued by friendly locals in small boats. Stop the boats! No! Not those boats! The other ones! The ones with brown people in them!
But the main environmental news in the past few weeks has not been about the Giveaway Package Holiday Dante’s Inferno Supa-Deals. Instead, we learn that British political parties are rethinking their commitment to green policies. And all because Labour somehow lost Uxbridge, by a narrow margin, to a Conservative party so corrupt that it is considering setting up an amnesty bucket at the entrance to parliament, where those on the right of the house can vomit out their consciences before taking their seats.
Apparently, it was the ultra low-emission zone (Ulez) expansion proposals wot lost it for Labour. But the Ulez was initially proposed by a proud Boris Johnson in 2015. This didn’t stop the lying opportunist from criticising Labour London mayor Sadiq Khan, in his £1m Daily Mail columnist capacity, for expanding a scheme the disgraced former prime minister himself had previously described as “an essential measure”. But those expecting consistency from Johnson on anything may as well expect a glob of Hippo High Performance Expanding Glue ™ ® to maintain a considered moral position on adhesives.
Considering his party’s defeat, a spooked Keir Starmer said: “We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet. We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.” No. He isn’t. And he doesn’t have to face up to anything except the fact that the Tories will lie about him whatever he does. There’s no reasoning with a party so desperate and disgusting it has made Lee Anderson deputy chairman, a decision akin to putting a bear in charge of a golf club.
And anyway, within days, the now spiritually bankrupt Rishi Sunak conflated the Labour party with criminal gangs in another desperate “stop the boats” missive. See, Keir? You cannot appease a ravenous tapeworm by just snivelling at it. You have, according to my late grandad, “to get the doctor from Worcester to come out and tempt it out of your throat with a bit of rotten meat and then, when it jumps out, stamp on its fucking head”.
Starmer, a man given to rolling up his sleeves to show he means business, was shocked by Uxbridge. Things are so serious it is understood a Labour party focus group is suggesting that now, whenever he appears in public, Starmer rolls up his trousers as well as his sleeves, to show he means business twice as much as he meant business before. And if that still doesn’t convince the Uxbridge electorate, Sir Keir must strip to his pants, and roll them up tightly around his genitals, so he looks like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
Meanwhile, the Tories took the opportunity to prepare the ground for ditching their 2050 net zero commitment, obviously. Remember when David Cameron, the blancmange-faced bringer of Brexit, went from hugging a husky in the Arctic while “investigating climate change” in 2006 to wanting to “Get rid of all that green crap” in 2013? It’s that, again. If only Dave had been so flexible in regard to his nation-destroying EU referendum, the shepherd hut-coveting Peasemore fistula.
Sunak now says ordinary people must not bear the cost of compulsory green initiatives, and that the path to net zero must be “proportional and pragmatic”. But the problem with climate change is it is neither. Some scientists are now saying the Gulf Stream could collapse within two years. I’m already booking live dates for 2025! Will the fenlands go under? Ah, well. I’ve always been looking for an excuse not to play Ipswich.
What Sunak needs to understand – and what he probably does understand but is pretending not to in order to get angry and confused people to vote Tory – is that anything spent on green initiatives now will cost less than having to terraform Mars and fly all his billionaire hedge fund manager mates there in captured alien spacecraft while the rest of humanity dies in 10 years’ time, so he may as well swipe the card he doesn’t really know how to use on the green initiative card reader.
In the meantime, we continue to convict the future heroes of Just Stop Oil with draconian laws Sunak himself admitted were inspired by suggestions put forward by “non-partisan educational charity” Policy Exchange, a thinktank belonging to the “Tufton Street” gang of organisations, a grouping awash with cash from American funders of climate change denial such as the John Templeton Foundation, the National Philanthropic Trust and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.
It’s easy for rightwing talk radio hosts to sneer at the well-meaning middle-class youths of Just Stop Oil, all named after herbs and Farrow & Ball paints, crying on camera as they consider what is in store for us. But Sunak actually used oil-funded strategies to silence them, and if you knew what these kids know, you would be crying too. I just saw a photo of Europe from space, looking like a burning Breville toaster with inappropriate pikelets catching fire inside it, as all the smoke alarms go off, and I wet myself a bit.
And that’s what you should be doing, weeping and pissing and shitting yourself, not getting out of your car to slap around a nice little girl in sustainable trousers, slow-walking in the high street on a Monday morning, because, let’s face it, your wife won’t have sex with you due to the fact that you’re obviously an arsehole.
Stewart Lee
2023-07-30T17:40:42+01:00
It’s 2am on Thursday. Wildfires are burning in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, Portugal, Croatia and Algeria. British tourist climate refugees are, ironically, being rescued by friendly locals in small boats. Stop the boats! No! Not those boats! The other ones! The ones with brown people in them! But the main environmental news in the past few weeks has not been about the Giveaway Package Holiday Dante’s Inferno Supa-Deals. Instead, we learn that British political parties are rethinking their commitment to green policies. And all because Labour somehow lost Uxbridge, by a narrow margin, to a Conservative party so corrupt that it is considering setting up an amnesty bucket at the entrance to parliament, where those on the right of the house can vomit out their consciences before taking their seats. Apparently, it was the ultra low-emission zone (Ulez) expansion proposals wot lost it for Labour. But the Ulez was initially proposed by a proud Boris Johnson in 2015. This didn’t stop the lying opportunist from criticising Labour London mayor Sadiq Khan, in his £1m Daily Mail columnist capacity, for expanding a scheme the disgraced former prime minister himself had previously described as “an essential measure”. But those expecting consistency from Johnson on anything may as well expect a glob of Hippo High Performance Expanding Glue ™ ® to maintain a considered moral position on adhesives. Considering his party’s defeat, a spooked Keir Starmer said: “We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet. We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.” No. He isn’t. And he doesn’t have to face up to anything except the fact that the Tories will lie about him whatever he does. There’s no reasoning with a party so desperate and...
Adam talks with British comedian Stewart Lee about comedy, music and the film King Rocker, a documentary he's made with director Michael Cumming about Robert Lloyd of legendary cult Birmingham band The Nightingales.
Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for conversation editing.
Adam talks with British comedian Stewart Lee about comedy, music and the film King Rocker, a documentary he's made with director Michael Cumming about Robert Lloyd of legendary cult Birmingham band The Nightingales. Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for conversation editing. Podcast artwork by Helen Green RELATED LINKS SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER (ADAM BUXTON WEBSITE) NATIVE INSTRUMENTS RAMBLE CHAT REMIX COMPETITION (METAPOP WEBSITE) ANGEL COMEDY SUPPORT PAGE (AND SITCOM EPISODE STARRING ADAM BUXTON!) BILL MURRAY PUB LOCKDOWN SITCOM TRAILER - 2021 ROCK DAD CAR QUIZ SKETCH FROM 'RUSH HOUR' - 2007 (YOUTUBE) LAURIE ANDERSON - O SUPERMAN (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (1982, YOUTUBE) ROBERT LLOYD AND THE NIGHTINGALES RELATED KING ROCKER TRAILER - 2020 (YOUTUBE) FUZZBOX (feat. ROBERT LLOYD, TED CHIPPINGTON) - ROCKIN' WITH RITA (HEAD TO TOE) (OFFICIAL VIDEO) - 1986 (YOUTUBE) ROBERT LLOYD ON SOLITARY DRINKING - 2009 (THE QUIETUS) STEWART LEE'S ROBERT LLOYD AND NIGHTINGALES PLAYLIST (SPOTIFY) STEWART LEE RELATED ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION feat. STEWART LEE - COMIN' OVER HERE - 2020 (FACEBOOK) STEWART LEE'S 'MAAAATE!' BIT FROM CONTENT PROVIDER - 2018 (YOUTUBE) TED CHIPPINGTON, WESTGARTH SOCIAL CLUB, MIDDLESBOROUGH - 2015 (YOUTUBE) STEWART LEE ON STAGE LEFT PODCAST - 2018 STEWART LEE ON THE BREAKDOWN PODCAST WITH JAMALI MADDIX - 2018 (YOUTUBE) GUILT FREE PLEASURES - 2007 (ARTICLE BY STEWART IN GUARDIAN ABOUT COMEDY AND PC CULTURE) STEWART LEE RADIO 4 DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE PUEBLO CLOWNS - 2006 (YOUTUBE)
'I don't want to tell you how to do your jobs,' says Stewart Lee, addressing the reviewers in tonight's press night audience. 'But whatever you think of this, you should probably take a star off.'
This isn't a finished show, explains the influential comic, with a flowing narrative and neat conclusion. 'Much-a-Stew About Nothing' is a work in progress, featuring six routines (three each night, on rotation) which will eventually become episodes of the next series of Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle'. And he's deliberately chosen the three strongest sets on press night. But even when workshopping fresh routines (which, in fact, he's been road-testing for six months), the iconoclastic comedian is on spectacularly funny form.
Tonight, Lee's three half-hours focus (broadly) on politics, immigration and being an 'impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old, functioning alcoholic father of two'. Each 30-minute section has a distinctively different style and feel and, of course, Lee displays his trademark techniques – confident cynicism, patience-stretching repetition, deconstructing his own material and the audiences' reactions – to immaculate effect.
But Lee's aware that his loyal fanbase are smart and familiar with his tactics, so deliberately puts out red herrings, or swerves off in unexpected directions and, at one point, mockingly berates the crowd's lack of creativity. He often comments on what joke's coming up next, expertly demolishing the insincerity of stand-up appearing as off-the-cuff, while adding an extra sense of anticipation when the gag finally arrives.
Lee claims that, unlike other long-running shows, 'Much-a-Stew About Nothing' will actually get worse throughout the run, as he puts the stronger routines to bed to allow for extra work on the weaker sets. Indeed, the middle set in tonight's show is weaker than the other two, and not many stand-ups could get away with charging £20 a head for the privilege of witnessing unfinished material in a 400-seat theatre.
Perhaps later in the run Lee could be right, and this review needs a star knocking off. For now, though, he's certainly worthy of our four, as even in work-in-progress mode, Stewart Lee's still better than most comedians could ever manage.
Stewart Lee
2013-11-08T23:09:17+00:00
'I don't want to tell you how to do your jobs,' says Stewart Lee, addressing the reviewers in tonight's press night audience. 'But whatever you think of this, you should probably take a star off.' This isn't a finished show, explains the influential comic, with a flowing narrative and neat conclusion. 'Much-a-Stew About Nothing' is a work in progress, featuring six routines (three each night, on rotation) which will eventually become episodes of the next series of Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle'. And he's deliberately chosen the three strongest sets on press night. But even when workshopping fresh routines (which, in fact, he's been road-testing for six months), the iconoclastic comedian is on spectacularly funny form. Tonight, Lee's three half-hours focus (broadly) on politics, immigration and being an 'impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old, functioning alcoholic father of two'. Each 30-minute section has a distinctively different style and feel and, of course, Lee displays his trademark techniques – confident cynicism, patience-stretching repetition, deconstructing his own material and the audiences' reactions – to immaculate effect. But Lee's aware that his loyal fanbase are smart and familiar with his tactics, so deliberately puts out red herrings, or swerves off in unexpected directions and, at one point, mockingly berates the crowd's lack of creativity. He often comments on what joke's coming up next, expertly demolishing the insincerity of stand-up appearing as off-the-cuff, while adding an extra sense of anticipation when the gag finally arrives. Lee claims that, unlike other long-running shows, 'Much-a-Stew About Nothing' will actually get worse throughout the run, as he puts the stronger routines to bed to allow for extra work on the weaker sets. Indeed, the middle set in tonight's show is weaker than the other two, and not many stand-ups could get away with charging £20 a head for the privilege of witnessing...
So when fans of Stewart Lee were told he would be performing a set in a small venue above an Oxford pub, many were left wondering whether it was all a joke.
Last night the comic treated a packed out Jericho Tavern to a short set in support of Birmingham rock band The Nightingales.
Lee is no stranger to the city. A former English student at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he is also patron of the Oxford Playhouse - performing multiple shows at the venue last year.
He told the crowd at the Walton Street pub: "You play the Jericho Tavern twice in your career: once on the way up..."
He said he had visited the venue on his second day in the city as a student, making a friend which he then spent two weeks trying to get rid of. He also mocked Jericho's 'hipster' reputation, joking that people living in the area had never stopped wearing 60's-style Jesus sandals since they were first in fashion.
The show was followed by a raucous set by The Nightingales, who enjoyed some fame in the early 80s, before breaking up in 1986. Frontman Robert Lloyd reformed the band in 2004.
In keeping with the 80s theme, Lee, who helped create the controversial Jerry Springer The Opera, admitted he would only be performing jokes from that decade - warning an audience member filming the performance not to put it on the internet in case viewers thought he had not written any new material.
His set followed a show by Oxford garage-rockers The Other Dramas the duo of Maria Ilett and Richie Wildsmith.
Maria said: "What a night. We had a great time. We love Stewart Lee - and he's actually a really lovely person to meet. I gave him our new CD and he wanted to pay for it."
Nightingales drummer Fliss Kitson tweeted after the show: "First day of tour - my phone fell down the toilet, big ol’ bruise on my arm, zip on my suitcase has broken, drivers glasses have snapped, but it was great! Thank you Oxford... you were tip top."
Stewart Lee
2018-09-21T16:22:17+01:00
So when fans of Stewart Lee were told he would be performing a set in a small venue above an Oxford pub, many were left wondering whether it was all a joke. Last night the comic treated a packed out Jericho Tavern to a short set in support of Birmingham rock band The Nightingales. Lee is no stranger to the city. A former English student at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he is also patron of the Oxford Playhouse - performing multiple shows at the venue last year. He told the crowd at the Walton Street pub: "You play the Jericho Tavern twice in your career: once on the way up..." He said he had visited the venue on his second day in the city as a student, making a friend which he then spent two weeks trying to get rid of. He also mocked Jericho's 'hipster' reputation, joking that people living in the area had never stopped wearing 60's-style Jesus sandals since they were first in fashion. The show was followed by a raucous set by The Nightingales, who enjoyed some fame in the early 80s, before breaking up in 1986. Frontman Robert Lloyd reformed the band in 2004. In keeping with the 80s theme, Lee, who helped create the controversial Jerry Springer The Opera, admitted he would only be performing jokes from that decade - warning an audience member filming the performance not to put it on the internet in case viewers thought he had not written any new material. His set followed a show by Oxford garage-rockers The Other Dramas the duo of Maria Ilett and Richie Wildsmith. Maria said: "What a night. We had a great time. We love Stewart Lee - and he's actually a really lovely person to meet. I gave him our new CD...
"Spotify’s opaque algorithm rewards conformity to rigid metrics, including song length, and the prominence of chorus and hooks, and actively punishes any kind of experimentation ... this method of recommendation is harmful because of the drag it will have on pop." - John Doran of The Quietus
BASIC LEE
The tour of the current stand-up show will be finished next month.
Dates here
March 2024
Friday 1st March 2024 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS
Saturday 2nd March 2024 - The Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Sunday 3rd March 2024 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS
Monday 4th March 2024 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - TICKETS
Wednesday 6th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Thursday 7th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Friday 8th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Saturday 9th March 2024 - Storyhouse, Chester - TICKETS
Tuesday 12th March 2024 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Wednesday 13th March 2024 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Thursday 14th March 2024 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS
Friday 15th March 2024 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS
Saturday 16th March 2024 - Hippodrome, Darlington - TICKETS
Sunday 17th March 2024 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Thursday 21st March 2024 - King's Theatre, Portsmouth - TICKETS
Friday 22nd March 2024 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Saturday 23rd March 2024 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Sunday 24th March 2024 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS
Wednesday 27th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 28th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
April 2024
Monday 15th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Tuesday 16th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Thursday 18th April 2024 - St. George's Hall, Bradford - TICKETS
Monday 22nd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 25th April 2024 - The Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
2) KING ROCKER
King Rocker, the Nightingales rockumentary I made with Michael Cumming, is now available to stream globally.
“One of my all-time favourite rock docs” MARK KERMODE, BBC
“It’s warm, it’s funny, it’s fascinating” Radcliffe and Maconie, BBC6 Music
“The film is ace, the band is ace, Rob is a remarkable man” Marc Riley, BBC6 Music
“A beautiful and fucking hilarious and moving film” Shaun Keavney, BBC6 Music
To celebrate 3 years since the acclaimed film King Rocker premiered on Sky Arts and Robin Ince noticed that "the whole country is watching King Rocker" we will be making the film available internationally on that exact same day. From February 6th everyone, anywhere, will be able to watch. 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 band’s The Prefects and The Nightingales, has survived under the radar 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. Featuring Frank Skinner, Nigel Slater, Robin Askwith, Samira Ahmed, John Peel, Gina Birch, Marc Riley, Danny Fields, John Taylor, Paul Morley, Fuzzbox, Kevin Eldon, Nish Kumar, Bridget Christie, Andrew O’Neill, Sean Walsh, Paul Putner, Steve Beresford, and more. ‘King Rocker’ is now available to pre-order. From February 6th you can stream and download globally.
THERE ARE ALSO LIVE SCREENINGS AND DIRECTOR’S CUT EVENTS WITH DIRECTOR MICHAEL “Toast” CUMMING HERE…
14th Mar 2024 King Rocker - Director’s Cut Screening + Live Q&A Wolverhampton, Arena Theatre TICKETS
27th Apr 2024 King Rocker - Director’s Cut Screening + Live Q&A Kendal, Brewery Cinema TICKETS
3) RIP STEVE BROWN – JUST GIVING
In the last few years we have lost a lot of people that were significant figures on the comedy scene when I started at the back end of the eighties, some known and many unknown, and it seems like I am at a funeral every few months now, where I see the same brave crowd putting on the same brave faces. But the loss of the comedian and musician Steve Brown, who died suddenly in February, has affected me significantly, I think because he was just someone who seemed like he would always be there, and someone who was always great at saying the right thing at the right time in a funny way.
On the Saturday night he texted me to say he wasn’t well and couldn’t come to my Bath show, the next day he was hospitalised, and it was all over in a few days. Steve’s last texts were about a vinyl copy of the second Comus album he had seen on a market stall which he was keen to give me, as he knew I would appreciate it, a strange little detail that will linger as Steve really knew his way around all different areas of music. He was a lovely man and a huge talent and will be massively missed. Your Mum will know him as Alan Partridge’s unflappable Glen Ponder but his fingerprints are all over the funniest music of the last four decades – the musical I Can’t Sing being an especial highlight - and he was also a respected, resourceful and innovative producer in the music industry proper, steering the raw talents of Rumer to stardom, for example.
Steve was also an early pioneer of the Mass Leaving Of Avalon Management Movement, that saw the company lose many of its top talents in the noughties. Steve’s tenacious and often hilarious questioning of apparent irregularities was an inspiration to a whole generation of escapees seeking better lives outside the agency, and lots of us had many great nights out laughing about the madness of the business side of comedy with Steve, who had become something of an expert on it. He could always find the funny in the most frustrating situations, a talent he shares with his gifted son the comedian Alfie Brown, while Lenny Brown, the bass player, got the musical genes.
Steve had a burning sense of right and wrong, and he and his wife Deborah hoped the Ukrainian family below could be secure in their future, and his family have set up the following Just Giving appeal for them in Steve’s memory. Please read and reflect.
“Deborah and Steve met Natalia and Yunna in Bath, a chance meeting after they sought refugee status in the UK. They were living in dire accommodation due to their host family mistreating them. Steve and Deb invited them to live with them in their home after only knowing them for about one hour. They stayed until they decided to go to Germany to be with their other daughter who was studying there. That daughter is now in the UK studying at Bristol University and being sponsored under the Homes for Ukranians scheme with Deborah's sister. Natalia and Yunna now wish to come back to the UK to be together as a family, and once again time is running out with their living accommodation due to sale of their studio flat and they are now on borrowed time. Steve's dearest wish was to enable them to lead a better life than the one they are currently living and to that end we are finding accommodation for them in London, with Deb's brother but ultimately want them to be a able to make independent decisions for themselves and their future, and money helps. With this fund they can pay a deposit on a flat, pay for transportation, get English language lessons, and Natalia (the mother) can update her qualifications of psychology and economics and ultimately, decide where and how to live. Steve's dearest wish was that they could be safe and cared for.”
4) THE GIANT SYNDICATE 27TH APRIL EARTH HACKNEY LONDON
From 1pm – 10pm In the month of my 56th birthday, and Fire records’ 40th, I introduce various combinations of Dream Syndicate, Giant Sand and Kristen Hirsch at my local live music emporium. Teenage me can’t believe it. https://www.ticketweb.uk/event/the-giant-syndicate-earth-tickets/13278203
5) STOP THE TORIES
Carol Vordeman wants us all to work together to stop the Tories, and here’s how https://stopthetories.vote
SIMON MUNNERY – JERUSALEM. The struggle continues for The Peter Cook of his generation. MARCH 1st London Leics Sq Theatre, 7th Bristol Comedy Box, 8th Brighton Old Market, 16th Oxford North Wal1, 17th Cambridge Junction, APRIL 3rd Swindon Arts, 10th Norwich Arts, 11th S’hampton Attic, 16th N’castle Stand, 17th E’burgh Stand, 18th Glasgow Stand, 20th Bath Rondo, 21st Colchester Arts, 25th B’ham Glee, MAY 19th Salford Lowry, 29th Leeds Brudenell, 20th York Theatre 41
JERRY SADOWITZ The struggle continues for the Jerry Sadowitz of his generation.MARCH 1st Troon Concert Hall, 2nd Stirling Albert Halls, 3rd Hamilton Town House, 5th-6th Aberdeen Tivoli, 7th Dundee Whitehall, 8th Dunfermline Alhambra, 9th Greenock Beacon, 14th Sheffield City Hall, 15th M’cr Academy, 16th Cambridge Junction, 18th Nottingham Theatre Royal, 19th-20th Leeds Wardrobe, 21st London Forum, 23rd Liverpool Academy, 26th Brighton Komedia, 27th Portsmouth New Theatre, 28th Dudley Town Hall, APRIL 3rd Exeter Corn Exchange, 4th-5th Bristol Hen & Chicken, 6th Worcester Huntingdon Hall
BOHMAN BROTHERS The struggle continues for The Mike And Bernie Winters of noise. Rare appearance from the surreal sound artists MARCH 1st Brighton Bee’s Mouth
FASCINATING AIDA 40TH ANNIVERSARY The struggle continues for the fantastic foul mouthed female Flanders and Swans of the singalonga-center-left, who are celebrating their 40th anniversary and get funnier the longer they go on. And they do go on! MARCH 1st Scarborough Spa, 2nd Chesterfield Winding Wheel, 5th Halifax Victoria, 6th New Brighton Floral Pavilion, 7th Wrexham William Aston Hall, 11th Aberdeen Music Hall, 12th Perth Concert Hall, 13th – 14th Glasgow Kings, 15th Dunfermline Alhambra, 20th Bournemouth Pavilion, 21st Weston-super-mare Playhouse, 22nd Dunstable Grove, 23rd Portsmouth Kings, 26th-27th Bury St Edmunds Apex, 28th Dorking Halls https://www.fascinatingaida.co.uk/tour-dates/
BO NINGEN Japanoiseniks MARCH 1st Earth Hackney
PATRICE MOOR – THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE Contemporary figurative surrealism St John’s College Oxford FEB 16th – MARCH 8thhttps://patricemoor.co.uk
MARTIN NEWELL/CLEANERS FROM VENUS Unexpected return from ‘80s English psyche-pop legend suddenly beloved by the young FEB 25th Brightlingsea Winterfest, MARCH 3rd Colchester Minories, 23rd Bristol Ritual Union Festival, 30th Leeds Belgrave, APRIL 11th London Stoke Newington St Mattias, 13th Glasgow CCA, 20th Southend Tea & Oranges
CRYPT W PROFESSOR ALICE ROBERTS Live ancient action with the Alice Bag of archaeology. MARCH 3rd London Blackheath Halls, 4th Guildford G Live, 5th C’nam Town Hall, 6th Portsmouth Guildhall, 7th N’hampton Derngate, 9th Oundle Stahl, 10th Wycombe Swan
ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN The psychedelic scallies play the greatest hits of their first incarnation. March 2nd Norwich Nick Rayns LCR UEA, 3rd Brighton Dome, 5th Bournemouth Academy, 6th Bristol Beacon, 8th London Roundhouse, 10th Cardiff University, 13th Nottingham Rock City, 16th/17th M’cr Albert Hall, 19th Sheffield City Hall, 20th Glasgow Barrowlands, 22nd Leeds Academy, 23rd Newcastle City Hall, 25th/26th Liverpool Empire
STIFF LITTLE FINGERS Raucous NI punk survivors, w Sex Pistol Glen Matlock in support. March 11th Nottingham Rock City, 12th B’ham Academy, 13th Bristol Academy, 15th Newcastle City Hall, 16th/17th Glasgot Barrowlands, 21st Leeds Academy, 22nd M’cr Academy, 23rd Camden Roundhouse
ALFIE BROWN Brilliant pure stand-up MARCH 12th Sheffield Leadmill, OCT 13TH Lincoln Engine Shed, NOV 7th Nottingham Canal House
GALILEO SEVEN Light the lava lamps and loon! MARCH 15th London Camden Forge, 18th Hastings Fratcave, 25th Margate Olby’s Mod Weekender.
JOHN ROBB Spoken word tour by the James Boswell of post-punk. MARCH 22 SELBY Town Hall, 23 CHORLEY Theatre, 27 KENDAL Brewery Arts, 28 SALE Waterside, 29 HALIFAX Square Chapel APRIL 10 SHEFFIELD Leadmill, 11 POCKLINGTON Arts Centre, 12 BUXTON Pavilion Arts, 18 WORCESTER Huntingdon Hall, 19 BRISTOL Folk House, 20 SOUTHAMPTON The Attic, 21 CAMBRIDGE Junction, 22 SUDBURY Quay Theatre, 23 COLCHESTER Arts Centre, 24 NORWICH Arts Centre, 26 CHESTER Storyhouse Garret, 27 LIVERPOOL Philharmonic Music Room, 28 LEEDS The Old Woollen, MAY 01 BRIGHTON Komedia, 03 WOOLWICH Works, 04 LONDON 21 Soho, 09 EDINBURGH Voodoo Rooms
ALISON COTTON Acid-folk drone mystic MARCH 23rd Gregynog Hall Newtown, 28th Glad Cafe Glasgow, 29th March The Lubber Fiend Newcastle, 30th Bishop's House Sheffield, 31st RiseYork, APRIL 5th St Pancras Old Church London
FALLEN LEAVES The Gentlemen Adventurers of sharp-dressed mod-punk MARCH 23rd London Hope & Anchor, JUNE 8th London Dublin Castle, JULY 20th Kingston Fighting Cocks, SEPT 14th London Dublin Castle, NOV 2nd London Hope & Anchor
ALASDAIR BECKETT-KING The hilarious multi-media surrealist takes his Nevermore show to your town MARCH 27th B’ham Old Rep, 29th Glasgow Oran Mor, 30th Belfast Limelight, APRIL 2nd Colchester Arts, 5th Cambr Junction, 6th Canterbury Gulbienkin, 10th Nottingham Just The Tonic, 12th S’hampton Attic, 13th Salisbury Arts, 17th Basingstoke Anvil, 19th Leeds City Varieties, 20th L’pool Hot Water, 21st M’cr Home, 24th Bristol Redgrave, 25th Shrewsbury Walker, 27th N’castle Stand, MAY 1st Norwich Playhouse, 2nd Brighton Komedia, 3rd Bury St Edmunds, 7th Swindon Arts, 8th Cardiff Glee, 9th Exeter Phoenix, 10th Taunton Tacchi-Morris, 16th & 24th London Leicester Sq Theatre
THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE More dates for a brilliant adaptation, by Graham Eatough, of David Keenan’s life-affirming fiction. MARCH 28th – 30th Glasgow Tron, APRIL 3rd – 6th E’burgh Traverse, 23RD – May 11TH London Riverside
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY INDIE ROCK FESTIVAL MARCH 29th High Wycombe Venue. https://www.datathistle.com/event/2293582-iwd-fest/ With Popguns, Desperate Journalist, Miki Berenyi of Lush, Debbie Googe of MBV, Charley Stone (of everything) & The Actual Band, Debbie Smith + more.
JOLIE HOLLAND Alt-country chanteuse returns MARCH 30TH Leek Foxlowe, 31st London Bush Hall, APRIL 1st Cambridge Portland Arms, 2nd Birmingham Kitchen Garden, 3rd Belfast Black Box, 4th Edinburgh Summerhall, 6th M’cr St Michael’s, 7th Brighton Komedia
HAWKWIND This current Hawkwind iteration channels their classic ‘70s space rock sound unashamedly, with keyboardist Thighpaulsandra of Coil, Cope and Spiritualised clearly living out a childhood dream. April 4th M’cr Academy, 5th Newcastle City Hall, 6th Edinburgh Academy, 7th Glasgow Academy
HOUSE OF ALL M’cr Fall-related supergroup tour APRIL 2nd Sheffield Leadmill, 3rd Glasgow Stereo, 8th London Dome, 9th Brighton Hope & Ruin, 20th M’cr Gorilla, 25th Portsmouth Wedgewood, 16th Bedford Esquires
KEVIN MCALEER. The most I have ever laughed is at this reclusive Irish comedy genius, making a rare greatest hits return, apparently for the last time. APRIL 11th Dublin Vicar Street, 21st Belfast Mandela Hall.
ROSIE HOLT – THAT’S POLITAINMENT Woke satirist on the road. APRIL 11th Didcot Cornerstone, 12th Newbury Corn X, 13th Winchester Theatre Royal, 18th-19th London Leics Sq Theatre, 20th Swindon Royal, 21st Bristol Redgrave, 24th Poole Lighthouse, 25th Bridgwater McMillan, 26th Cardiff Sherman, 27th Norwich Playhouse, 28th N’hampton Derngate, MAY 1st Bradford Kings, 2nd Maidenhead Norden Farm, 3rd Tunbridge Wells Trinity, 4th Bury St Edmunds Royal, 5th Colchester Arts, 9th Birmingham MAC, 10th Farnham Maltings, 12th Leeds City Varieties, 22nd Lyme Regis Marine, 23rd Brighton Komedia, 24th Milton Keynes Stables, 25th L’pool Playhouse, 26th Salford Lowry, 31st Chipping Norton Theatre.
JASMINE MINKS Victory lap for Glasgow’s C86 era mod-ish janglers APRIL 19th Bristol Thunderbolt, 20th London Waiting Room
ELIZA CARTHY The first lady of folk and reigning Queen of The Faeries in full flight APRIL 20th Oxford North Wall, 26th Bristol Folk House, 27th Sheffield Greystones, MAY 10th Cambridge Stoney’s Field, JUNE 19th Gateshead Glasshouse
GIANT SAND The great improvising Americana Arizona legends unexpected return to active service. APRIL 22nd Newcastle Cluny, 23rs Glasgow Broadcast, 24th M’cr Yes, 27th London Hackney Earth w Dream Syndicate, Kristen Hirsch, Islet, Stewart Lee and more.
PETER CASE/SID GRIFFIN British dates from American power-pop progenitor turned Grammy-awarded grizzled folk-bluesman, with Long Ryders leader Sid Griffin in support. A must. APRIL 23rd Chester St Mary’s, 24th Birmingham Kitchen Garden, 26th Edinburgh Bannermans, 27th Glasgow Glad Café, 28th Leeds Northern Guitars, 29th Bristol Hen & Chicken, MAY 1st London Leytonstone Social, 2nd Dublin Upstairs At Wheelans, 3rd Belfast Cathedral Quarter, 4th Kilkenny Roots Festival
FLAT & THE CURVES – GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT TOUR. The prosecco hen night from hell housed in a surprisingly savage musical comedy form by these witty, obscene, often clownishly grotesque, and also unnecessarily musically gifted, four best girlfriends you never had. I love Flat & The Curves and I don’t know why! The Nolans of Filth! APRIL 26th Scarborough SJT, JUNE 4th Kings Lynn Corn Exchange, 5th Maidstone Hazlitt, 6th Rickmansworth Watersmeet, 7th Wellingborough Castle Theatre, 8th Coventry Albany, 9th Hereford, 10th East Grinstead Chequer Mead, 12th Harpended Eric Morecambe Centre, 13th Mansfield Palace, 14th Stockport Plaza, 15th Rotherham Civic, 16th Leeds City Varieties, 18th Middleton Arena, 20th Redditch Palace, 21st Bishop’s Stortford South Mill Arts, 22nd Bury St Edmunds Theatre Royal, 23rd Newport Riverfront, 26th St Helen’s Theatre Royal, 29th Lowestoft Marina JULY 3rd Aberdeen Tivoli, 4th Dundee Gardyne, 5th Dunfemlin Alhambra, 6th Livingston Howden Park, 10th South Shields Custom House, 11th Lancaster Grand, 14th Camberley Theatre, 16th Taunton Brewhouse, 18th Winchester Theatre RoyaL, 19TH Tewkesbury Roses, 20th Stevenage Gordon Craig, 21st Tamworth Assembly Rooms
NIGHTINGALES Off the beaten track small town dates for Birmingham post-punk heroes of belated King Rocker film fame May 2nd Kendal Glisky, 3rd Telford Firefly, 4th Halifax Square Chapel, 5th Milton Keynes Crawford Arms, 6th Ramsgate Music Hall, 8th W’chester Railway, 9th Newport Le Pub, 10th Warrington Irish, 11th Dunoon Burgh Hall
THE HANDSOME FAMILY Literary Lynchian Alt-Country duo MAY 3rd Dublin Liberty Hall, 7th Glasgow St Luke’s, 10th M’cr Stoller Hall, 12th Leeds Irish, 14th Norwich Arts, 16th Cardiff Gate, 18th Salisbury Winchester Gate, 21st London Union Chapel, 23rd Folkestone Quarterhouse
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE Punishing Japanese acid-jam veterans. MAY 9th Brighton Hope & Ruin, 10th London Dingwalls, 12th Dublin Workman’s, 16th Dundee Church, 17th N’castle Lubber Fiend, 20th Chelmsford Hot Box, 22nd Cambridge Portland Arms
THE BEVIS FROND Psych legends Lexington, London May 18th
THE LOVELY EGGS Art-punk duo MAY 23rd Glasgow St Luke’s, 24th Edinburgh Belle Angele, 25th N’castle Grove, 26th Leeds Brudenell, 27th Birmingham Xoyo, 28th Bristol Thekla, 29th Brighton Chalk, 30th London Earth, 31st Nottingham Rescue Rooms JUNE 1st M’cr New Century
THE PRISONERS Psychedelic Medway mods return MAY 24th London Camden Roundhouse
ROBERT FORSTER Former Go-Between all grown up into silver fox troubadour MAY 24th/25th London Omeara
WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM Black metal with an eco-bent MAY 28th Limerick Dolans, 29th Dublin Opium, 30th Bristol Fleece, 31st London Earth, JUNE 1st Glasgow Garage/Scarborough Fortress
RAIN PARADE LA’s 80s psychedelic revivalists revived JUNE 14th Bristol Strange Brew, 15th Leeds Brudenell, 16th M’;cr Night & Day, 18th Nottingham Metronome, 19th London 229
DETROIT COBRAS Garage punk party time JULY 2nd Bristol Lost Horizon, 3RD M’cr Rebellion, 4th Glasgow Oran Mor, 5th Leeds Brudenell, 6th London Camden Forge
THE SADIES Surf-twanged country-Canadiana JULY 3rd Oxford Bullingdon, 4th Leeds Brudenell, 5th Eaton Farm Park Woodbridge, 6th London 100 Club
LLOYD COLE Solo tour by the godfather of arch introspective indieSEPT 4th Limerick Lime Tree, 6th Ballycotton Sea Church, 8th Bexhill on Sea De La Ware Pavillion, 9th Exeter Corn Exchange, 10th Bath Komedia, 13th Guildford G Live, 14th Bury St Edmonds Apex, 16th B’ham Town Hall, 18th Shrewsbury Severn, 19th Lytham St Anne’s Lowther Pavillion, 21st Hamilton Town House, 22nd Greenock Beacon, 24th Whitley Bay Playhouse, 25th Ilkley King’s Hall, 26th Sheffield City Hall
NATALIE HAYNES’ DIVINE MIGHT The Florence Desmond of Greek and Roman mythology live SEPT 9th
MARK RADCLIFFE AND MARC RILEY LIVE SEPT 26th Shepherd’s Bush Empire London NOV 3rd Shrewsbury Severn, 5th Crewe Lyceum, 10th Warrington Parr Hall.
TIRZAH GARWOOD: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery London, 19 November 2024–26 May 2025. 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.
THE DAMNED Black Album/Strawberries line-up, with hard-wristed Holy Grail headhunter Rat Scabies back on drums. DEC 4th Newcastle NX, 5th Glasgow Barrowlands, 6th M’c Academy, 8th Leeds Academy, 9th Nottingham Rock City, 10th W’hampton Halls, 12th Bristol Beacon, 13th S’hampton Guuildhall, 14th Eastbourne Winter Gardens, 16th Cambs Corn X, 18th London Roundhose
8) 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)
Ewen Macintosh (Office secondary superstar, 1973)
Alan Tomlinson (Jazz trombonist, dry northern wit, beatnik, 1947)
I review Alan Tomlinson in the forthcoming Idler. “The jazz trombonist Alan Tomlinson was born in 1947 and died in February this year. Three live releases, all from the mid-noughties, crept out on the Scatter Archive’s bandcamp in the month before his death. I worked with Tomlinson as the spoken word stooge in Steve Beresford’s and Tania Chen’s intermittent John Cage shows. Alan, a potential conservatoire virtuoso who chose instead to be a contrary subversive, combined an innate feel for the outermost possibilities of his instrument with the dry wit of the old school Northern working class autodidact outsider artist. A poker-faced clown persona made his impressively physical relationship with his trombone at once both balletic and burlesque. The solo set At The Red Rose, recorded in 2006 and 2007 at the irreplaceable and now demolished Finsbury Park jazz and comedy venue, is a great entry point. Normally po-faced Wire readers submit to titters of hilarity and gasps of amazement as Tomlinson simultaneously mocks, mutates, loves and liberates his loyal instrument, breathing life through it and into it, and making it live, like a mischievous goblin god. Baggage and Boating with Steve Beresford and Steve Noble, and At Ryan’s Bar with Rhodri Davies and Roger Turner are also newly available.”
Stewart Lee
2024-02-29T20:11:08+00:00
"Spotify’s opaque algorithm rewards conformity to rigid metrics, including song length, and the prominence of chorus and hooks, and actively punishes any kind of experimentation ... this method of recommendation is harmful because of the drag it will have on pop." - John Doran of The Quietus BASIC LEE The tour of the current stand-up show will be finished next month. Dates here March 2024 Friday 1st March 2024 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS Saturday 2nd March 2024 - The Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS Sunday 3rd March 2024 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS Monday 4th March 2024 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - TICKETS Wednesday 6th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS Thursday 7th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS Friday 8th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS Saturday 9th March 2024 - Storyhouse, Chester - TICKETS Tuesday 12th March 2024 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS Wednesday 13th March 2024 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS Thursday 14th March 2024 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS Friday 15th March 2024 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS Saturday 16th March 2024 - Hippodrome, Darlington - TICKETS Sunday 17th March 2024 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS Thursday 21st March 2024 - King's Theatre, Portsmouth - TICKETS Friday 22nd March 2024 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS Saturday 23rd March 2024 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS Sunday 24th March 2024 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS Wednesday 27th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS Thursday 28th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS April 2024 Monday 15th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS Tuesday 16th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS Thursday 18th April 2024 - St. George's Hall, Bradford - TICKETS Monday 22nd April 2024 -...
LOOKING more like Heath Ledger's Joker than the Virgin Queen, Simon Munnery is, nevertheless, surprisingly, perfectly cast as Elizabeth I in this dementedly enjoyable follow-up to Late But Live with Boswell and Johnson. Once again he's joined by Miles Jupp, as Sir Walter Raleigh, in a show scripted by Stewart Lee.
The result of all these stellar talents coming together is just a joy; a lavish, mad multimedia bash that recalls Munnery and Lee's semi-legendary epic Cluub Z that debuted in Edinburgh way back in 1997.
Although this show doesn't quite approach the scale of Cluub Z, it is quite understandable – that show played to packed houses every night yet still lost thousands. This one, you hope, might make a few quid.
Jupp cuts quite the dash as the resurrected Raleigh, obviously expecting a hero's welcome in Scotland as he popularised both smoking and the potato. Without him, he says, our diet would consist merely of brown sauce and alcohol.
But when Munnery enters he commands the stage; his Elizabeth is a throwback to the Nietzschean übernerd he played in his League Against Tedium persona – overbearing, arrogant, insane and shockingly regal.
This supremely silly show is handsomely mounted and benefits immeasurably from some live authentic 16th-century music performed by a perfectly deadpan Jane Watkins as enslaved American Indian Prince Tinymeat ("mind of a child").
While Elizabeth's closing speech – a vain attempt to give this lunacy a point – doesn't really work, it's hardly worth complaining about. The Spanish Armada battle sequence alone is enough to make up for any minor flaws.
Until 25 August.
Stewart Lee
2008-08-20T20:20:35+01:00
LOOKING more like Heath Ledger's Joker than the Virgin Queen, Simon Munnery is, nevertheless, surprisingly, perfectly cast as Elizabeth I in this dementedly enjoyable follow-up to Late But Live with Boswell and Johnson. Once again he's joined by Miles Jupp, as Sir Walter Raleigh, in a show scripted by Stewart Lee. The result of all these stellar talents coming together is just a joy; a lavish, mad multimedia bash that recalls Munnery and Lee's semi-legendary epic Cluub Z that debuted in Edinburgh way back in 1997. Although this show doesn't quite approach the scale of Cluub Z, it is quite understandable – that show played to packed houses every night yet still lost thousands. This one, you hope, might make a few quid. Jupp cuts quite the dash as the resurrected Raleigh, obviously expecting a hero's welcome in Scotland as he popularised both smoking and the potato. Without him, he says, our diet would consist merely of brown sauce and alcohol. But when Munnery enters he commands the stage; his Elizabeth is a throwback to the Nietzschean übernerd he played in his League Against Tedium persona – overbearing, arrogant, insane and shockingly regal. This supremely silly show is handsomely mounted and benefits immeasurably from some live authentic 16th-century music performed by a perfectly deadpan Jane Watkins as enslaved American Indian Prince Tinymeat ("mind of a child"). While Elizabeth's closing speech – a vain attempt to give this lunacy a point – doesn't really work, it's hardly worth complaining about. The Spanish Armada battle sequence alone is enough to make up for any minor flaws. Until 25 August.
Enter free improvisation's world of no tunes jazz through this gateway recording. Coxhill and Ward play soprano sax and clarinet respectively, both trustworthy blowing instruments, and the four decades age chasm between them reveals free improvisation as a shared language for both initiators and inheritors.
The cd sleeve uses cinematic conceits to expose the process - two men arrive at a Hackney house and hit record - and there's enough obvious technique on display in these seven intricate improvisations to convince doubters that these cats know where they're going, even if their final destination is not always obvious to the listener.
Stewart Lee
2011-07-17T02:01:32+01:00
Enter free improvisation's world of no tunes jazz through this gateway recording. Coxhill and Ward play soprano sax and clarinet respectively, both trustworthy blowing instruments, and the four decades age chasm between them reveals free improvisation as a shared language for both initiators and inheritors. The cd sleeve uses cinematic conceits to expose the process - two men arrive at a Hackney house and hit record - and there's enough obvious technique on display in these seven intricate improvisations to convince doubters that these cats know where they're going, even if their final destination is not always obvious to the listener.
19th - 23rd April 2018.
Content Provider has been touring to sold out theatres throughout divided Brexit Britain for nearly two years and is Stewart Lee's most successful full-length show ever.
Join him on these special evenings as he finally abandons two hours of monetisable material and performs the show for the very last time. When it's gone it's gone.
Stewart is 50 years old in 2018 and, after performing these shows, he intends to take the longest break from stand-up he's had since his four year disappearance at the start of the century.
April 2018
Thursday 19th - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Friday 20th - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS Monday 23rd - Content Provider, Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 020 3879 9555 - 7.30pm - TICKETS
Feb 7th, Hackney Empire, London.
Belter for the Shelter is back! Join us for an evening of top class comedy in aid of Hackney Winter Night Shelter.
Returning for a fourth time, Belter is bringing yet another stellar line-up of comedians to the Hackney Empire to help raise money for the Shelter's vital work with local homeless people.
All money raised on the night goes towards keeping people off the streets of Hackney this winter and providing them with a hot meal and warm bed.
Providing the gags for the good cause will be Bridget Christie,
Dane Baptiste,
Kevin Eldon,
Kevin McAleer,
Lolly Adefope,
Michael Legge,
Stewart Lee
and the evening will be compered by Daniel Kitson.
This event has always sold out and this year promises to be no different so act quickly to make sure you don't miss out!
On her 2003 debut Catalpa, Jolie Holland's simplistic guitar and mellifluous vocal suggested she'd just wandered down from some Appalachian peak. Eight years later her fifth album's opener All Those Girls chugs out in a more standard country rock milieu and her voice has dropped a few octaves.
Holland still sings, delightfully, like she's chewing her vowels through a mouthful of squidgy windfalls, and Pint Of Blood's performances, even though some tunes tend towards safer ground, are characterised by a weird and artful sloppiness, distinguishing her work from the greater mass of back porch troubadours.
Stewart Lee
2011-06-26T20:23:12+01:00
On her 2003 debut Catalpa, Jolie Holland's simplistic guitar and mellifluous vocal suggested she'd just wandered down from some Appalachian peak. Eight years later her fifth album's opener All Those Girls chugs out in a more standard country rock milieu and her voice has dropped a few octaves. Holland still sings, delightfully, like she's chewing her vowels through a mouthful of squidgy windfalls, and Pint Of Blood's performances, even though some tunes tend towards safer ground, are characterised by a weird and artful sloppiness, distinguishing her work from the greater mass of back porch troubadours.
For a few minutes the other night, I became part of comedian Stewart Lee's act.
Though we've never met, he felt obliged to inform the audience of just under 1,000 that there was a 'Daily Mirror reporter' in the audience to review his show.
It also gave him the opportunity to explain that his material would be coming from six half-hour sets he was preparing for a new TV show, which he's going to be recording in December.
And he said, because there was a 'Daily Mirror reporter' in the audience, he had improved his material for this review, so he would appreciate me giving the show one star less than it merited - as the rest of the tour wouldn't be as good. It got the required laugh.
According to Stewart, I should be telling readers that the best part of his show was when he - supposedly in the character of Animal Magic presenter Johnny Morris - acts out smashing a snake's egg on stage....'definitely worth two stars of anyone's money'.
The Johnny Morris piece - part of a longer wildlife one, including mentions for Ben Fogle and Michaela Strachan - worked well and, as Lee rightly pointed out, elicited a round of applause...'micromanaged', as he put it, 'but got still a round of applause'.
But, sorry, Stew, the funniest moment that had me in stitches was when you ripped UKIP to shreds.
Lee, 45, took the conceit of UKIP's deputy leader Paul Nuttall warning about the influx of skilled Bulgarian workers later in the year, then ran and ran with it, imagining Nuttall telling previous immigrants, such as the Poles of the last 10 years and the West Indians and Pakistanis of the 1950s not to bother coming here.
Then, in characteristic form, he took it to surreal lengths, extending Nuttall's remarks to the Huguenots of medieval France, the Anglo-Saxons, the Neolithics, the first fish to ever make it on to land and then nothingness itself. All addressed with the same degree of intolerant UKIP remarks.
By the time Lee reached the end of that piece, many of the audience had tears of laughter running down their cheeks.
His eviscerating comment on Nuttall and co came in a fast-moving second half, with a rapid-fire range of observational comedy.
His latest material is, without doubt, some of the sharpest he's ever produced and an improvement even on his popular Carpet Remnant World tour of a year or so ago.
Fellow stand-ups came into his line of fire - Alan Davies, Michael McIntyre, Jimmy Carr, Roy 'Chubby Brown', Jim Davidson - and were witheringly and amusingly put down.
And there were unsurprising pops at Tories David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher, but Labour leader Ed Miliband didn't escape either - 'For Miliband to make a mess of Labour, after Blair, is like catching a baby that's been dropped out of an aeroplane, then to trip over and drop it in the gutter'.
The wonderful thing about Lee - undoubtedly the best comedian in Britain - is that he doesn't give a damn, yet eschews the kind of scatological humour so many older 'funnymen' employ or to the excessive foul language that many younger ones rely on.
Sure, there are a few swear words in his intelligent act, but they are used for maximum comedic effect, not for shock value nor as an obscene lingua franca.
Sorry again, Stew, but you do get the full five stars... just take one off if it makes you feel better!
Stewart Lee
2013-10-02T18:17:46+01:00
For a few minutes the other night, I became part of comedian Stewart Lee's act. Though we've never met, he felt obliged to inform the audience of just under 1,000 that there was a 'Daily Mirror reporter' in the audience to review his show. It also gave him the opportunity to explain that his material would be coming from six half-hour sets he was preparing for a new TV show, which he's going to be recording in December. And he said, because there was a 'Daily Mirror reporter' in the audience, he had improved his material for this review, so he would appreciate me giving the show one star less than it merited - as the rest of the tour wouldn't be as good. It got the required laugh. According to Stewart, I should be telling readers that the best part of his show was when he - supposedly in the character of Animal Magic presenter Johnny Morris - acts out smashing a snake's egg on stage....'definitely worth two stars of anyone's money'. The Johnny Morris piece - part of a longer wildlife one, including mentions for Ben Fogle and Michaela Strachan - worked well and, as Lee rightly pointed out, elicited a round of applause...'micromanaged', as he put it, 'but got still a round of applause'. But, sorry, Stew, the funniest moment that had me in stitches was when you ripped UKIP to shreds. Lee, 45, took the conceit of UKIP's deputy leader Paul Nuttall warning about the influx of skilled Bulgarian workers later in the year, then ran and ran with it, imagining Nuttall telling previous immigrants, such as the Poles of the last 10 years and the West Indians and Pakistanis of the 1950s not to bother coming here. Then, in characteristic form, he took it to...
At the Royal Festival Hall in 1997, Derek Bailey played a double header with the Japanese duo Ruins. I seem to recall a moment where septuagenarian genius, lost in concentration, actually bumped into the back wall of the stage, his guitar making a resonating clang. Looking down, he appeared to consider what had happened, and then playfully bashed the instrument into the wall a second time. I laughed, and despite the wealth of different responses Bailey’s music had already offered me, I never though it would provoke laughter. But something great music shares with great comedy is the capacity to surprise, to take us out of ourselves and engender a joyous, and not necessarily mean spirited or cynical, laughter. I’ve subsequently learned Bailey once played in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise, when they toured theatres before their 60’s and 70’s TV success. Banging your guitar into a wall by accident, and then doing it again on purpose in a spirit of clownish curiosity, seems to me like a classic Eric Morecambe move.
There’s a great documentary about stand-up comedy currently winning awards all over the international film festival circuit. The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, shows sixty or so stand-ups telling a shaggy dog story enjoyed privately by American comics, but never inflicted on the public. In essence, The Aristocrats, as the gag is known, goes like this, and includes a central section which can be infinitely expanded and altered. A talent scout visits a Broadway booker to sell him a new vaudeville act he has seen. It involves a husband and wife, usually depicted dressed in formal finery, performing acts of escalating obscene sexual violence on each other, and then on their children, and perhaps on any animals, or birds, in the vicinity, to the accompaniment of sophisticated classical music, or cabaret show tunes, or light opera, or whatever. At the end of this description, which Gilbert Godfried is seen spinning out for over an hour, the baffled and sickened booker says, “That sounds appalling. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see that. What is this act called?”, to which the talent scout replies, with a smile, or a wink, or an attitude of profound regret, or a showbiz snap of the fingers and thumbs, “The Aristocrats.” It’s hilarious. But perhaps you have to be there.
I’ve never subscribed to the idea that stand-up is, along with jazz and comic books, one of America’s great 20th century art forms. This seems a blinkered and isolationist observation. But The Aristocrats started to swing me. Halfway through, soon after one of the comics has gone off on a tangent involving the father repeatedly slamming his penis in a draw for the audience’s edification, somebody makes a case for stand-up’s relationship with jazz. The distinct variations different performers can extrapolate from The Aristocrats tells us that stand-up is about ‘the singer not the song’. Just as John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things is different to the Julie Andrews version, so George Carlin’s Aristocrats, told with a world-weariness that suggests he has been compelled against his will to relate this horrible event, differs vastly from Billy Connolly’s, which is delivered with typically infectious relish.
Carlin, a Fifties Catskills hack, turned Sixties radical, turned elder statesman of American stand-up, wisely draws the distinction between ‘shock’, a term that comes with pejorative overtones, and ‘surprise’, which has no obvious moral dimension. Though the endless variations in different versions of The Aristocrats mainly involve stacking up increasing levels of scatological or sexual symbols, what’s really making us laugh is the pleasure of surprise, of things being simply unexpected and wrong, of reversing the usual order of things. Surprise is the reason a one year old child laughs if you put a shoe on your head. Shoes are for feet, not heads. Even a baby has a sense of inappropriate behaviour. Respectable looking families shouldn’t smash their genitals into draws on stage in the name of entertainment. And guitars shouldn’t be banged into walls by elderly musicians, and then banged again. But how exciting it is to not know what’s going to happen next? Sometimes Derek Bailey’s music makes me feel like a kid on a roller-coaster. And Carlin, like some Native American shaman-clown, makes the need to subvert expectation, to continually surprise, sound like an artist’s Holy Obligation.
It seems to me there are two broadly different approaches to stand-up, and by association to all art, each with their own strengths. At commercial British comedy chains like Jongleurs or The Comedy Store, performers tell you about your life, and things that always happen to you, and you may feel comforted by this. Go beyond the usual venues and you may see acts advance ideas that would not normally have occurred to you. In his book, Improvisation, Derek Bailey assumes a position in opposition to the very act of musical composition itself. But there’s a kind of social need both for songs we can all sing, and for jokes about buses always being late, and men being different to women, and dogs being different to cats. Only the most extreme Wire subscriber would deny the potential of all-embracing, utilitarian art. It just that all-embracing, utilitarian art tends to be a bit shit. When millions wept for their own mortality after the death of Princess Diana, all they were offered was an Elton John song with the words changed a bit.
Great art, whether it’s laboriously crafted or spontaneously generated, tends towards the surprise factor that Carlin describes, and Bailey embodies. Derek Bailey is bold enough to refuse to gloss his work with emotional signifiers, just as George Carlin doesn’t tell jokes as if they’re supposed to be funny. Both make us do the work, and we get the reward of appearing to surprise ourselves. But the breakthrough moment, for me, of seeing Bailey bash his guitar into the back wall of the RFH, was realising that I could be made to laugh, against my will, in an atmosphere of high seriousness, in the temple of culture, by the simple childlike joy of surprise. Derek Bailey, it seemed, was giving me permission to laugh.
Stewart Lee
2005-06-01T18:19:30+01:00
At the Royal Festival Hall in 1997, Derek Bailey played a double header with the Japanese duo Ruins. I seem to recall a moment where septuagenarian genius, lost in concentration, actually bumped into the back wall of the stage, his guitar making a resonating clang. Looking down, he appeared to consider what had happened, and then playfully bashed the instrument into the wall a second time. I laughed, and despite the wealth of different responses Bailey’s music had already offered me, I never though it would provoke laughter. But something great music shares with great comedy is the capacity to surprise, to take us out of ourselves and engender a joyous, and not necessarily mean spirited or cynical, laughter. I’ve subsequently learned Bailey once played in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise, when they toured theatres before their 60’s and 70’s TV success. Banging your guitar into a wall by accident, and then doing it again on purpose in a spirit of clownish curiosity, seems to me like a classic Eric Morecambe move. There’s a great documentary about stand-up comedy currently winning awards all over the international film festival circuit. The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, shows sixty or so stand-ups telling a shaggy dog story enjoyed privately by American comics, but never inflicted on the public. In essence, The Aristocrats, as the gag is known, goes like this, and includes a central section which can be infinitely expanded and altered. A talent scout visits a Broadway booker to sell him a new vaudeville act he has seen. It involves a husband and wife, usually depicted dressed in formal finery, performing acts of escalating obscene sexual violence on each other, and then on their children, and perhaps on any animals, or birds, in the vicinity, to...
Stewart Lee: 41st Best Stand-Up Ever | Concert Hall | Reading | Friday 12 October 2007
AF Harrold's review
According to a poll voted for by the public and screened on Channel Four in April 2007 Stewart Lee is indeed, without a shadow of doubt and with no word of a lie or room for dissent the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever.
The support tonight comes from a man who is according to some the 62nd best stand-up in Germany, a title not so eagerly sought after.
Henning Wehn, the German Comedy Abassador, is an example of a peculiar species, the German comedian.
He makes great light of this fact, playing on German stereotypes of strictness and efficiency and memories of the Hitler Youth, but is at his very funniest on his long digressions about the history of, for example, cardigans or zips.
In these gleefully invented cheerfully presented deadpan passages brilliant invention and silliness go hand in hand in a manner reminiscent of Paul Merton at his best.
Stewart Lee's Edinburgh show is really very funny, but more than this it is well told.
This is the most striking thing about Lee his patient delivery: he doesn't hurry, doesn't gabble, doesn't chatter; he speaks at a calm pace, leaving room to think and room to listen, which in an echo chamber like the Concert Hall is refreshing. Without giving away too much of the content of the show it revolves around the Channel Four poll mentioned previously and his mother's preference for Tom O'Connor as a stand-up to her son.
In fact, an alternative title for the show could have been 'Coming To Terms With Tom O'Connor'.
Through passages against television, about Weight Watchers, against religion, about the Celebrity Big Brother racism row, about a cabaret called Pestival at an entomologists' conference, against listening to the public opinion and a coruscating assault on the Daily Mail writer Richard Littlejohn, which within the space of a minute shifts from being daringly, name-callingly, playground funny to being a very dark, hushed moment of heart-chilling sadness.
And this is one of Lee's skills, to be able to turn a joke into a piece of serious observation, without either being afraid of talking without a laugh for five minutes or losing his connection with the audience, trusting them enough to go with him, and then at the most unexpected moment to become a comedian again, telling jokes.
The show ends on another daringly quiet moment, with Lee (explicably, though we shan't say why here, in case you decided to see this highly recommended show) standing still and silent for several minutes, without fear and without shame (silence, of course, being both shaming and terrifying to most comedians) until the final black out.
A bravura piece of writing, which is deceptive in its simplicity, but filled with bravery, compassion, intelligence and comedy.
Matt Dyson's review
Stuart Lee's latest show was originally called 'March Of The Mallards' - based on the lurid, sexual activity of mallards. It was to be a defiant repose to Fundamentalist Christians, who have being using March Of The Penguin as a frost bitten, brain fact that penguins, and therefore nature is inherently monogamous.
Mother Nature, they say, is a puritanical, Victorian prude.
'March of The Mallards' was to use the brutal group mating activity these airborne, aquatic sex pests to prove that nature is , in fact , evil. The problem is, there is nothing else remotely funny about the Mallard.
It is this contempt for ill thought out ideas and stubborn refusal to let go, whether it is funny or not, which is the beating heart of Lee's stand up. It is also what makes him so compellingly funny.
You see, he is, according a recent Channel 4 poll, the '41st Best Stand Up Of All Time'. In this tour, Lee locks in on the dubious accolade like a pair of concrete boots to plunge into the depths of public stupidity and ridicule our national bad taste.
It is a show in which Tom O' Connor is a theme. That's right, him from Crosswits. A show where the 'values' of The Car Phone Warehouse are discussed alongside Marx and Buddha. And where the lumpen ignorance of lazy observational comedians are ridiculed through the analogy of insects.
Dressed as a grass hopper performing stand up to a room of leading etymologists might seem like a doomed pursuit but is it anymore fool hardy than voting Del Boy's fall in Only Fools and Horses as the funniest moment of all time? Trigger might have pulled a face but gravity as a 21st century comic device, shouldn't complete with Chris Morris' Brass Eye.
Battling logic through bewilderment, Lee campaigns for a revote.
Stewart Lee
2007-10-12T21:51:48+01:00
Stewart Lee: 41st Best Stand-Up Ever | Concert Hall | Reading | Friday 12 October 2007 AF Harrold's review According to a poll voted for by the public and screened on Channel Four in April 2007 Stewart Lee is indeed, without a shadow of doubt and with no word of a lie or room for dissent the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever. The support tonight comes from a man who is according to some the 62nd best stand-up in Germany, a title not so eagerly sought after. Henning Wehn, the German Comedy Abassador, is an example of a peculiar species, the German comedian. He makes great light of this fact, playing on German stereotypes of strictness and efficiency and memories of the Hitler Youth, but is at his very funniest on his long digressions about the history of, for example, cardigans or zips. In these gleefully invented cheerfully presented deadpan passages brilliant invention and silliness go hand in hand in a manner reminiscent of Paul Merton at his best. Stewart Lee's Edinburgh show is really very funny, but more than this it is well told. This is the most striking thing about Lee his patient delivery: he doesn't hurry, doesn't gabble, doesn't chatter; he speaks at a calm pace, leaving room to think and room to listen, which in an echo chamber like the Concert Hall is refreshing. Without giving away too much of the content of the show it revolves around the Channel Four poll mentioned previously and his mother's preference for Tom O'Connor as a stand-up to her son. In fact, an alternative title for the show could have been 'Coming To Terms With Tom O'Connor'. Through passages against television, about Weight Watchers, against religion, about the Celebrity Big Brother racism row, about a cabaret called Pestival at an...
With his award-winning BBC TV series being cancelled and the BBC’s funding instead ploughed into a remake of Are you being served (well, according to this showanyway), Stewart Lee has returned to his roots and thrown himself into a punishing tour schedule starting in June 2016 taking him all the way through to April 2018.
While the title Content Provider was chosen to reflect the key theme of the show – an embittered late forty-something liberal pouring scorn and vitriol on an increasingly fragmented and “digital” world – the timing ensured that Brexit and Trump would inevitably get a mention.
Much has been made in the press, and by Lee himself, about people walking out of this show. And, sure enough, within moments of arriving on stage in Cambridge, Lee launched into an expletive-ridden tirade against Brexit supporters which some might find offensive but Lee was clearly among friends here in remain-majority Cambridge. In fact, anyone daring to even leave their seat mid performance prompted such a personal verbal assault from Lee that I’m sure many thought twice about even visiting the bathroom let alone walking out.
While Stewart Lee is described as “the comedian’s comedian” he is quite unlike any other stand-up today. Though his main routine consists of a venomous attack on a whole number of topics: Game of Thrones, politics, trip advisor reviewers, people under 40, other stand-up comedians, he adds a witty additional layer which gives the audience a narrative on the show itself, making the true target Lee himself.
Indeed, it’s the continual moving in and out of the show’s main routine, and the commentary about the show itself and what is happening in the moment (mainly from audience interaction), that requires a greater level of concentration and commitment from the audience.
He divides the audience into those who “get it” and those who don’t, knowing that each member will consider themselves one of the wise. This makes it a far more involving and ultimately entertaining night out than a normal evening of comedy.
Ironically, while he lays into other comedians for their on-stage personae, it was Lee’s physical comedy, such as his demonstration of people under 40’s relationship with their mobile phones, which achieved some of the biggest laughs of the evening.
Lee is clearly the most intelligent stand-up and wittiest wordsmith of his generation, and had the very audience that he had spent most of the evening attacking, eating out the palm of his hand. He is provocative to the max. But had me literally crying with laughter at various points in the 90 minute show, and the fact that I couldn’t tell what was improv and what was routine. Dying to see it again.
Stewart Lee
2017-05-15T12:21:39+01:00
With his award-winning BBC TV series being cancelled and the BBC’s funding instead ploughed into a remake of Are you being served (well, according to this showanyway), Stewart Lee has returned to his roots and thrown himself into a punishing tour schedule starting in June 2016 taking him all the way through to April 2018. While the title Content Provider was chosen to reflect the key theme of the show – an embittered late forty-something liberal pouring scorn and vitriol on an increasingly fragmented and “digital” world – the timing ensured that Brexit and Trump would inevitably get a mention. Much has been made in the press, and by Lee himself, about people walking out of this show. And, sure enough, within moments of arriving on stage in Cambridge, Lee launched into an expletive-ridden tirade against Brexit supporters which some might find offensive but Lee was clearly among friends here in remain-majority Cambridge. In fact, anyone daring to even leave their seat mid performance prompted such a personal verbal assault from Lee that I’m sure many thought twice about even visiting the bathroom let alone walking out. While Stewart Lee is described as “the comedian’s comedian” he is quite unlike any other stand-up today. Though his main routine consists of a venomous attack on a whole number of topics: Game of Thrones, politics, trip advisor reviewers, people under 40, other stand-up comedians, he adds a witty additional layer which gives the audience a narrative on the show itself, making the true target Lee himself. Indeed, it’s the continual moving in and out of the show’s main routine, and the commentary about the show itself and what is happening in the moment (mainly from audience interaction), that requires a greater level of concentration and commitment from the audience. He divides the...
When you listen to Sale Quanto Basta remember that Paolo Angeli is creating this curious concoction of composition, modal improvisation, and familiar folk melody as-live and all alone, triggering various mechanical pedals, hammers, mini-fans, and brushes welded, Heath Robinson-style, to the mutant body of his outsize Sardinian guitar.
His sixth album sees the eleven minute Mascarutu traverse further than Angeli’s dared before into the zone of the unknown drone, while Primavera Araba features a rare vocal performance, co-opting a local traditional tune to express a global concern.
Stewart Lee
2013-06-30T00:56:22+01:00
When you listen to Sale Quanto Basta remember that Paolo Angeli is creating this curious concoction of composition, modal improvisation, and familiar folk melody as-live and all alone, triggering various mechanical pedals, hammers, mini-fans, and brushes welded, Heath Robinson-style, to the mutant body of his outsize Sardinian guitar. His sixth album sees the eleven minute Mascarutu traverse further than Angeli’s dared before into the zone of the unknown drone, while Primavera Araba features a rare vocal performance, co-opting a local traditional tune to express a global concern.
I am a stand-up comedian. I am Eighteen years younger than John Dowie.
I never saw him perform stand-up.
As a teenager, I bought a copy of his book, Hard To Swallow, a collection of his "abandoned comedy routines" illustrated by the underground cartoonist Hunt Emmerson; I had seen him on TV occasionally, doing slots in shows as a guest of people he was clearly better than; I had a strange half memory of him doing punky sneery stuff on one of those late night Seventies rock shows, So It Goes or Revolver. I knew he was a significant figure.
But I never saw him perform stand-up.
I could have seen John Dowie do stand-up, of a sort, at my fourth Edinburgh Fringe, in 1990, when he performed a one man show called 'Why I Gave Up Stand-Up Comedy', but I didn't go. I don't know why. The title was strange. It made me think of Captain Oates, leaving Captain Scott's arctic tent to die with the words "I'm just going outside. I may be some time.", and perhaps hoping someone would stop him. But no-one stopped John Dowie. He had performed Alternative Comedy before it even had a name, was tired of it by the time the tropes he's established became commonplace, and then he just sort of slipped away.
Ten years later, I was drinking late one night in the courtyard of the Pleasance Theatre in the year 1999, my thirteenth Edinburgh Fringe, when the comedian Simon Munnery arrived, looking pleased with himself, like a gun dog bringing back a pheasant, or a family cat that comes in a drops a dead rat on the carpet. He had found John Dowie, the pheasant/dead rat of Alternative Comedy, and he was nearby, right now, drinking, and ready to receive our tributes.
We got to know Dowie that Summer. It was interesting to talk to him about how it all began, and what it was all for. The great sage would have been all of 49 then, five years older than I am now, but he dealt with us graciously. He came to see my show and offered no advice other than that I should wear proper shiny shoes in future, and not trainers.
In the last few years I have come to see that he was right, but it seemed strange advice to receive from the punk era stand-up who has also once opened for Black Sabbath.
Having kids seemed to have shifted Dowie's priorities. He was writing children's shows now, and poems, and plays, and seemed to want to say things that were unambiguously positive. He was sucked into the unpaid charity benefit circuit that all out gang seemed to be on all the time, but would never be drawn to perform his old stuff, offering instead neat, philosophical haikus that made everything else on the bill look rather bitter and bleak. I saw him do a one-off performance, in a Fitzrovian cellar, of his theatre piece about Jospeh, made famous by Tom Conti, Jesus My Boy. It was brilliant, funny, moving, and told you more about the real John Dowie than any amount of drinking sessions. In the guise of the cuckolded carpenter, he really opened up.
We had Dowie round for New Year's Eve once. He seemed angry about something and, I think, absented himself before he turned nasty. I went to his flat a few times, and he greeted me with a wave from a fifth story window. It made me think of the Philip Dick story, "The Man In The High Castle." Each time I went there Dowie had less stuff. In the end he had reduced his possessions to five basic food groups; records by Bob Dylan and Moondog; books by William Blake and the aforementioned Dick; and some Batman comics. It was as if he was preparing to depart. And pretty soon he did. No-one in our gang knew where he'd gone, but we knew he could now carry everything he ever wanted in a backpack, and he'd bought a bike.
Years passed. In 2011 I tracked Dowie down to ask him to appear in At Last! The 1981 Show, a celebration of Alternative Comedy's first wave that I was curating for the Royal Festival Hall. Needless to say, he would have nothing of it, and would not give anything away, either, about his then current whereabouts.
I am glad this document exists. The punk era music tracks are perfect period pieces, sort of Dada Cabaret/pub rock fusion, Tristan Tzara fronting Doctor Feelgood; Mime Sketch, reminds me of similarly atmospheric field recordings by Ted Chippington and Lenny Bruce; it seems even funnier to a comedy-literate listener because you feel the material is way too good for the response it's getting, and it's great to hear such nakedly honest archive. And knowing Dowie, a little, hearing the hilarious but awkwardly confrontational I'm Here To Entertain You, or No More Fucking's visceral fear of the physical world, with hindsight, it seems obvious why Dowie was eventually to chose a brighter path. No more would Dowie spit out the bleak rhyming couplet that began, "If I had any sense I'd nail my penis to the floor."
Instead he wrote Dogman, for children, the story of an alien Dog who ends up running a lighthouse that appears, the more I read it to my own children, to be a kind of autobiography.
There's a political dimension to this collection too.
Dowie came from a time very different to our own; where there was a degree of social mobility that is now greatly reduced; where places like Birmingham's Arts Lab funded and developed art they felt was worthwhile in of itself, rather than as a route to the loot; where punk and the hippy era's DIY ethics propelled singular talents like Dowie's forward; and where a viable Fringe circuit encouraged risk taking.
If someone were thinking of doing something in comedy as radical as Dowie did in the '70s, would they be able to, and if they did, would we even know about it?
Stewart Lee
2012-01-01T18:26:08+00:00
I am a stand-up comedian. I am Eighteen years younger than John Dowie. I never saw him perform stand-up. As a teenager, I bought a copy of his book, Hard To Swallow, a collection of his "abandoned comedy routines" illustrated by the underground cartoonist Hunt Emmerson; I had seen him on TV occasionally, doing slots in shows as a guest of people he was clearly better than; I had a strange half memory of him doing punky sneery stuff on one of those late night Seventies rock shows, So It Goes or Revolver. I knew he was a significant figure. But I never saw him perform stand-up. I could have seen John Dowie do stand-up, of a sort, at my fourth Edinburgh Fringe, in 1990, when he performed a one man show called 'Why I Gave Up Stand-Up Comedy', but I didn't go. I don't know why. The title was strange. It made me think of Captain Oates, leaving Captain Scott's arctic tent to die with the words "I'm just going outside. I may be some time.", and perhaps hoping someone would stop him. But no-one stopped John Dowie. He had performed Alternative Comedy before it even had a name, was tired of it by the time the tropes he's established became commonplace, and then he just sort of slipped away. Ten years later, I was drinking late one night in the courtyard of the Pleasance Theatre in the year 1999, my thirteenth Edinburgh Fringe, when the comedian Simon Munnery arrived, looking pleased with himself, like a gun dog bringing back a pheasant, or a family cat that comes in a drops a dead rat on the carpet. He had found John Dowie, the pheasant/dead rat of Alternative Comedy, and he was nearby, right now, drinking, and ready to receive...
At my secondary school, a friend of mine pretended to be the confidant of the tragic Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, maintaining that time away on family holidays was actually spent visiting the ailing singer at her home in Scotland. He even went as far as appearing to receive and engage in phone calls from Zavaroni, presumably by cutting off the call as soon as he picked up the receiver, and acting out a fake one-way conversation. It wasn’t until years after Zavaroni’s death I learned the relationship had been an elaborate, committed, and entirely pointless hoax. No one was impressed by a friendship with the former Opportunity Knocks singer anyway, just baffled. And yet my friend identified, convincingly, as a personal friend of Lena Zavaroni. For about five years. It was an act of insane genius.
For the past week, the national conversation has been dominated by the idea that a school in Rye had defended a child’s right to identify as a cat, subsequently and cynically extrapolated into the idea that woke schools all over the land were encouraging children to identify as animals. The clandestine classroom recording that sparked this moral panic revealed a put-upon teacher discussing complex gender issues with some combative children, clearly under some pressure and concerned for a distressed class member. But at no point was it clear that anyone was identifying as a cat. Or indeed as a dog. A dinosaur. Or a furry. Because at no point did anyone identify as a cat. It didn’t happen.
But by this point the cat that didn’t exist was out of the bag that didn’t exist either. The falsehood-windsock Nick Ferrari, on LBC, hosted a morning phone-in about it; Kemi Badenoch, the minister for women and equalities, demanded an investigation; the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, condemned schools – as it was now assumed the cat-child phenomenon was spreading beyond the lone Rye cesspit that spawned it – for letting children say they were animals, generally (ocelots perhaps, or shrews); and Sir Keir Starmer condemned the practice of animal-child-identification, even though it didn’t happen, which his advisers must have known. It seems Starmer’s hunger for power is so great that not only will he sell out old-school socialists, he will also throw children who never even identified as cats anyway under the bus. Luckily the cat-children don’t exist, so no one was harmed.
But the imaginary cat-child did what was required of her, tapping into the Tories’ carefully fabricated culture war to fill the internet, the press, and the swamps of barely regulated “news” television with distracting stories about cat-identifiers. Meanwhile, disaster capitalism crashed Thames Water, Boris Johnson’s murky relationship with a Russian intelligence-adjacent playboy became ever more dubious, British beaches ran thick with sewage as the summer getaway season loomed, and Texas threatened to become too hot for human habitation. The news was smouldering. The Tories were putting out fires with cat-people.
The government has made poor progress towards net zero and is now committed to opening a new coalmine in Cumbria. What can be done? On Wednesday, at Lord’s, brave Just Stop Oil protesters invaded the pitch and were arrested. I’m not a fan of cricket, and associate it with standing around bored before having my penis and testicles felt by a breathless old man apparently checking to see if I had showered after games. But the square world’s objection to Just Stop Oil is that they are stopping decent people getting to work. Now they’re not allowed to disrupt a sport game either, even one that moves so slowly no one would notice if it had stopped anyway. So how does one protest exactly, in post-police bill Britain?
The photos from the Ashes, of heroic Just Stop Oil protesters being brought down by uniformed sport primates, in striking clouds of orange dust, are already iconic. And one day soon, as the Earth itself turns to actual ashes, they will take on the same status as all those other unforgettable news images: that lone Tiananmen Square protester in front of a tank; that flag raised at Iwo Jima; that hooded Abu Ghraib detainee; that starving child stalked by an opportunistic vulture; that Saigon street execution; those civil rights Olympics salutes; that napalmed nine-year-old; and that post-party Boris Johnson, clearly still off his tits at an Italian airport, having met a former KGB agent.
Imagine, if instead of carrying that bold dust-chucker off the cricket field to the cheers of the foolish crowd, idly accepting the collective suicide of their species and the death-by-negligence of their planet, the cricketer Jonny Bairstow had made a different choice at this sliding-doors moment of his life. What if the athlete had had the intelligence to take the protester’s hand, present them to the audience, and invite the world to applaud them for their courage? Then he could have made a difference. But instead Bairstow, like so many others, missed his moment, his chance to help. And one day the cricket player’s own children, as they watch the world die in real time around them, will curse his terrible error of judgment, his unwitting role as the unpaid enforcer for big oil and the climate crisis denialists, the worst people on earth.
But never mind. Somewhere, someone didn’t identify as a cat, and the front pages roll forward and the pundits step up to their microphones, with endless comment on something unimportant that didn’t even happen. And as the world of tomorrow burns, when the image of Bairstow carrying a Just Stop Oil protester away from the cricket competition is reflected upon by the dying, only one hero will emerge from the picture. And it absolutely won’t be Jonny Bairstow.
Stewart Lee
2023-07-02T16:46:02+01:00
At my secondary school, a friend of mine pretended to be the confidant of the tragic Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, maintaining that time away on family holidays was actually spent visiting the ailing singer at her home in Scotland. He even went as far as appearing to receive and engage in phone calls from Zavaroni, presumably by cutting off the call as soon as he picked up the receiver, and acting out a fake one-way conversation. It wasn’t until years after Zavaroni’s death I learned the relationship had been an elaborate, committed, and entirely pointless hoax. No one was impressed by a friendship with the former Opportunity Knocks singer anyway, just baffled. And yet my friend identified, convincingly, as a personal friend of Lena Zavaroni. For about five years. It was an act of insane genius. For the past week, the national conversation has been dominated by the idea that a school in Rye had defended a child’s right to identify as a cat, subsequently and cynically extrapolated into the idea that woke schools all over the land were encouraging children to identify as animals. The clandestine classroom recording that sparked this moral panic revealed a put-upon teacher discussing complex gender issues with some combative children, clearly under some pressure and concerned for a distressed class member. But at no point was it clear that anyone was identifying as a cat. Or indeed as a dog. A dinosaur. Or a furry. Because at no point did anyone identify as a cat. It didn’t happen. But by this point the cat that didn’t exist was out of the bag that didn’t exist either. The falsehood-windsock Nick Ferrari, on LBC, hosted a morning phone-in about it; Kemi Badenoch, the minister for women and equalities, demanded an investigation; the prime minister, Rishi...
Peter Hammill spent forty-five years declaiming stentorian English experimental rock. Gary Lucas traded avant-blues tongues with Captain Beefheart and co-wrote the explosive ballads that branded Jeff Buckley.
Their unlikely collaboration ought to fail. Lucas draws ghostly delta guitar shapes in air, while the Van Der Graaf Generator frontman, who usually appears shrouded in incense clouds of cathedral organ or sepulchral piano, stands naked, intoning significant statements. Momentarily their trajectories overlap, incandesce brilliantly, and drift apart again.
Stewart Lee
2014-02-09T20:11:57+00:00
Peter Hammill spent forty-five years declaiming stentorian English experimental rock. Gary Lucas traded avant-blues tongues with Captain Beefheart and co-wrote the explosive ballads that branded Jeff Buckley. Their unlikely collaboration ought to fail. Lucas draws ghostly delta guitar shapes in air, while the Van Der Graaf Generator frontman, who usually appears shrouded in incense clouds of cathedral organ or sepulchral piano, stands naked, intoning significant statements. Momentarily their trajectories overlap, incandesce brilliantly, and drift apart again.
A weekend of events curated by Stewart Lee culminated in a spectacular nostalgiafest which dusted off some lovingly remembered and some long forgotten acts that inspired the young Lee. It was not all terrific but much was. Mostly, though, it was a reminder of how political, surreal and downright dangerous the original alternative comedy scene could be.
Alexei Sayle easily prompted the biggest cheer.
The former fuming iconoclast would now make a serviceable Edward VII lookalike and while he now calls himself a writer he still fired verbal volleys with sardonic panache. Recalling his Liverpool roots, he encapsulated a dodgy Greek restaurant: "We've run out of pitta, do you want Hovis?" If Nigel Planer's hippy Neil felt dated, Arnold Brown's laconic wit was timeless. Red Dwarf's Norman Lovett made a little routine with a shower cap go a long way and Kevin McAleer also raised comic minimalism to absurd heights describing a cute owl picture.
The show-stealer, however, was The Greatest Show on Legs collective. Original prankster Malcolm Hardee is gone but survivor Martin Soan led their traditional naked balloon dance with clownish aplomb. Proceedings climaxed with Chris Lynam reviving his banger-up-the-bum firework finale.
Then they left. Possibly to the funniest old people's home imaginable.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-31T20:52:46+01:00
A weekend of events curated by Stewart Lee culminated in a spectacular nostalgiafest which dusted off some lovingly remembered and some long forgotten acts that inspired the young Lee. It was not all terrific but much was. Mostly, though, it was a reminder of how political, surreal and downright dangerous the original alternative comedy scene could be. Alexei Sayle easily prompted the biggest cheer. The former fuming iconoclast would now make a serviceable Edward VII lookalike and while he now calls himself a writer he still fired verbal volleys with sardonic panache. Recalling his Liverpool roots, he encapsulated a dodgy Greek restaurant: "We've run out of pitta, do you want Hovis?" If Nigel Planer's hippy Neil felt dated, Arnold Brown's laconic wit was timeless. Red Dwarf's Norman Lovett made a little routine with a shower cap go a long way and Kevin McAleer also raised comic minimalism to absurd heights describing a cute owl picture. The show-stealer, however, was The Greatest Show on Legs collective. Original prankster Malcolm Hardee is gone but survivor Martin Soan led their traditional naked balloon dance with clownish aplomb. Proceedings climaxed with Chris Lynam reviving his banger-up-the-bum firework finale. Then they left. Possibly to the funniest old people's home imaginable.
How many small plastic toy egg casings could be hidden in, for example, a Michael Gove? And, if we knew this figure, and had an accurate idea of potential volunteer multiple plastic toy egg couriers, could we extrapolate from it the volume of goods that might be secretly transported, in this fashion, both in and out of our ring-fenced island nation? And why is knowing this number an important part of planning for the no-deal Brexit that our uncooperative friends in George Soros’s Europe, and the traitorous MPs who collaborate with them, are cruelly forcing on us through no fault of our own?
A civil servant I was in Woodcraft Folk with 43 years ago regularly texts me about bizarre developments in the National Centre For No-Deal Planning, despite risking her job to do so. “They’ve got us hard at work finding out how we get components and medicines and essential items into the country, if or when the supply lines break down. Don’t forget to stockpile toilet roll, Stewey! It may end up being the only viable form of currency!! LOL!!!”
On Wednesday morning, Tallulah (not her real name) informed me, she was told to coordinate the clandestine purchase, via thousands of press-ganged schoolchildren and cross-Channel swimmers, of as many Kinder ™ eggs and tubs of Vaseline ®, respectively, as she could acquire without arousing suspicion.
“Suspicion of what?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Tallulah answered, “but we don’t want to set off a Kinder ™ egg and Vaseline ® buying panic. I have to go now. Dominic Cumming has just come in. He’s wearing really tight cycling shorts and glaring at everyone like a horrible owl.”
Kinder ™ eggs and Vaseline ®. What was Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson up to now? I wondered.
Later on, I read that our lying, self-serving prime minister had visited Leeds prison the previous day, in a non-election campaign visibility stunt, last week’s booing Scots folk a distant memory.
Boris Johnson’s colleague Michael Gove, a known former cocaine user, owns a £493 Manchu cabinet and has nothing illegal in his underpants. Johnson himself famously only managed to avoid eating some cocaine by fortuitously sneezing it all away as he tried to ingest it, in an incident he described as an “inconclusive event”.
A 38-year-old father of one, caught with a quarter of a kilogram of cocaine in his underpants last May, is currently detained for four and a half years in Leeds at Her Majesty’s pleasure, while better-connected powder enthusiasts are asked to form a government, at Her Majesty’s invitation. It’s almost as if there is one law for upper-class Conservative drug-dabbling MPs and another for working-class drug mules.
During his prison visit, Watermelon was photogenically amused, for the benefit of the compliant press and the gullible public, by an x-ray showing how anally inserted Kinder ™ egg interiors can be used to smuggle into prison everything from tobacco and drugs to mobile phone parts. Kinder ™ egg suppositories are already responsible for a greater flow of goods annually than the government’s botched Brexit ferry scheme.
If I was prime minister, on seeing the anal Kinder ™ x-ray, I would have said: “It gives a whole new meaning to the words ‘Kinder Surprise ™’!” The electorate would have thought I was hilarious, but Wall-Spaffer appeared to have missed the magic moment and blown it. Later on I would come to realise that his magpie mind had merely moved on to other things.
On Thursday morning at 12.30am, Tallulah texted me again. She had gone back into the National Centre For No-Deal Planning, having forgotten her mobile phone, and swiftly secreted herself under a desk when she heard strange snuffling coming from a frosted-glass side room. She pressed her phone up to the opaque window and I listened in.
“You must do it, Michael,” said a voice, that of Turds Johnson. “You are in charge of no-deal planning. We need to test my plan and I can’t let anyone find out about it. You are my most loyal servant.”
“I am so not, Boris!” It was Michael Gove, squealing as he spoke. “I stabbed you in the back, remember? Why do I have to do this? Can’t Cumming do it? It is undignified. May I remind you that I am the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?” Suddenly there was a loud slurping.
“Cumming,” Letterbox exploded, “you can’t eat Vaseline ®, man. It’s not a food. Put the lid back on.” Dominic Cumming’s musical and mellifluous voice protested: “But Vaseline ® is delicious, Boris. I ate it in Russia every day and it kept me warm, like a Bovril made of grease. It is wrong treacle, old Popeye Cumming’s petroleum spinach. And anyway, it’s all over my hands now. So I can just lick it off, whether you like it or not. Besides which, Boris, we may all have to develop a taste for non-standard foods, like Vaseline ®, or insects, in the darkness before the New Dawn.”
“Stop eating the Vaseline ®, Cumming!” It was Spunk-Burster again. “Eat up all the Kinder ™ chocolate. We need to dispose of the evidence. No one must know my plan.”
Then Gove appeared to be shouting, something about how he now realised from personal experience how important it was to reach a deal. And then Tallulah’s phone went dead.
As the sun rose on Thursday, I watched Breakfast TV and hoped she would call again. Bumboys, Gove and Cumming appeared bleary-eyed at a press conference. Cumming had a brown mouth and sticky hands and he kept sucking his fingers when he thought no one was looking. Gove goved silently into the distance, like a shell-shocked air-man. Boris stepped forward and proudly announced that, in an all-night strategy session, great strides had been made in no-deal planning.
Stewart Lee
2019-08-18T22:47:54+01:00
How many small plastic toy egg casings could be hidden in, for example, a Michael Gove? And, if we knew this figure, and had an accurate idea of potential volunteer multiple plastic toy egg couriers, could we extrapolate from it the volume of goods that might be secretly transported, in this fashion, both in and out of our ring-fenced island nation? And why is knowing this number an important part of planning for the no-deal Brexit that our uncooperative friends in George Soros’s Europe, and the traitorous MPs who collaborate with them, are cruelly forcing on us through no fault of our own? A civil servant I was in Woodcraft Folk with 43 years ago regularly texts me about bizarre developments in the National Centre For No-Deal Planning, despite risking her job to do so. “They’ve got us hard at work finding out how we get components and medicines and essential items into the country, if or when the supply lines break down. Don’t forget to stockpile toilet roll, Stewey! It may end up being the only viable form of currency!! LOL!!!” On Wednesday morning, Tallulah (not her real name) informed me, she was told to coordinate the clandestine purchase, via thousands of press-ganged schoolchildren and cross-Channel swimmers, of as many Kinder ™ eggs and tubs of Vaseline ®, respectively, as she could acquire without arousing suspicion. “Suspicion of what?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Tallulah answered, “but we don’t want to set off a Kinder ™ egg and Vaseline ® buying panic. I have to go now. Dominic Cumming has just come in. He’s wearing really tight cycling shorts and glaring at everyone like a horrible owl.” Kinder ™ eggs and Vaseline ®. What was Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds...
Few comedians would get away with breaking down a joke in the middle of their set to tell the audience that they laughed at the wrong time. Then again, few comedians have a relationship with the audience like Stewart Lee has.
Bringing his latest show Content Provider to a packed-out Winchester Theatre Royal, Lee proclaimed to Winchester’s “metropolitan liberal elite” that his show was critically acclaimed and that if there were any problems with the evening they were not coming from his side of the stage, and he was right.
Lee has a dilemma – he’s critically acclaimed but decidedly niche. People who have heard of him buy tickets for his shows; but don’t know what why are going to get. Fans bring their friends: who then don’t enjoy the show half as much. Ticket touts buy up seats, and then find that no one wants to pay over the odds for them. It turns out his ideal performance would be a sold out show where nobody turned up, as he’s be paid but it would remove the worst part of being a performer – the audience that don’t appreciate his genius.
At one point proclaiming himself “the moral arbiter of stand-up comedy for the past 16 years” his scorn spared no one - from Brexiteers to Trump, other comics - whose live DVDs were strewn across the stage (they were the cheapest building material he could find, which he gleefully stamps on throughout the show), Game of Thrones, (or Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings as he calls it) and even himself.
Turns out Lee hates his stage persona because he would never appear on Sky, so he refused to take a lucrative TV deal with them several years ago to take his BAFTA winning series Comedy Vehicle to ‘Rupert Murdoch’s Evil network’. A deal that shows what a pariah he has become because Sky tried to send him a cease and desist when he started mentioning it in his shows. This was of course before the BBC cancelled it because it was “critically acclaimed and incredibly cheap to make”.
Lee’s vitriol came to a hilarious crescendo when he began to rave about his hatred for the under 40s while his trousers slid down to his ankles, gesticulating wildly with the microphone stand as he raved about the utter pointlessness of the young.
Cynical, bitter, and hysterically funny, Stewart Lee may loathe the audience, but I can’t say the feeling is mutual.
Stewart Lee
2017-10-23T19:45:50+01:00
Few comedians would get away with breaking down a joke in the middle of their set to tell the audience that they laughed at the wrong time. Then again, few comedians have a relationship with the audience like Stewart Lee has. Bringing his latest show Content Provider to a packed-out Winchester Theatre Royal, Lee proclaimed to Winchester’s “metropolitan liberal elite” that his show was critically acclaimed and that if there were any problems with the evening they were not coming from his side of the stage, and he was right. Lee has a dilemma – he’s critically acclaimed but decidedly niche. People who have heard of him buy tickets for his shows; but don’t know what why are going to get. Fans bring their friends: who then don’t enjoy the show half as much. Ticket touts buy up seats, and then find that no one wants to pay over the odds for them. It turns out his ideal performance would be a sold out show where nobody turned up, as he’s be paid but it would remove the worst part of being a performer – the audience that don’t appreciate his genius. At one point proclaiming himself “the moral arbiter of stand-up comedy for the past 16 years” his scorn spared no one - from Brexiteers to Trump, other comics - whose live DVDs were strewn across the stage (they were the cheapest building material he could find, which he gleefully stamps on throughout the show), Game of Thrones, (or Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings as he calls it) and even himself. Turns out Lee hates his stage persona because he would never appear on Sky, so he refused to take a lucrative TV deal with them several years ago to take his BAFTA winning series Comedy Vehicle to...
The former front-man of the Boston psychedelic band Cul-de-Sac, Glen Jones is ageing gracefully, touting his fourth collection of acoustic guitar instrumentals.
Titles shape responses; Twenty-three Years In Happy Valley, Or Love Amongst the Chickenshit, invites us to read its banjo flurries ambiguously; the seventeen minute closer is a dense cycle of blurred finger-picking, with shuffling snare percussion from Chris Corsano, entitled The Orca Grande Cement Factory At Victorville, acknowledging John Fahey's similarly named, and comparably expansive, mid-Sixties tracks; and the eight improvised minutes of A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957 unfurl, appropriately, like a fading photographic memory.
Stewart Lee
2011-09-04T20:30:57+01:00
The former front-man of the Boston psychedelic band Cul-de-Sac, Glen Jones is ageing gracefully, touting his fourth collection of acoustic guitar instrumentals. Titles shape responses; Twenty-three Years In Happy Valley, Or Love Amongst the Chickenshit, invites us to read its banjo flurries ambiguously; the seventeen minute closer is a dense cycle of blurred finger-picking, with shuffling snare percussion from Chris Corsano, entitled The Orca Grande Cement Factory At Victorville, acknowledging John Fahey's similarly named, and comparably expansive, mid-Sixties tracks; and the eight improvised minutes of A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957 unfurl, appropriately, like a fading photographic memory.
Many years ago, while wearing a Navajo jacket, I was accused of cultural appropriation. I told the zealot harassing me the jacket was a gift from a Native American shaman-clown, under whom I had studied. She backed down, humiliated, like Major General Arthur St Clair before the forces of Little Turtle and the Potawatomi, at the Battle of a Thousand Slain, on 4 November 1791.
My accuser and I began a short but tempestuous relationship, based on the thrill of committing ever more offensive ideological thought crimes. One sick night, I imagined a public library with deliberately inadequate disabled access, while she made a scale model of a unisex toilet and then vandalised it. Within weeks, our imaginary atrocities exhausted, our twisted affair ended. But I realised there may have been some truth in my ex-lover’s accusations of cultural insensitivity. Luckily, I still had the receipt for the jacket and so I returned the racist garment to Camden market, where I had bought it while shopping drunk months earlier.
The idea of “cultural appropriation” is a minefield, especially in the “political correctness gone mad” times that we live in now, in today’s “politically correct” world of “so-called” “political correctness” “gone mad”. But I don’t doubt for a moment that Michael Gove’s decision to quote the rap singer Stormzy in a tweet on Tuesday was without malice. If Gove isn’t a Stormzy fan how would the blotchy foundling know that the rapper’s hit Shut Up included the phrase “I set the trends dem man copy”? Daniel Hannanananananananan’s decision to reply to Gove’s tweet with the emphatic urban phrase “Big man ting!” is less easy to justify. As the words do not relate to a specific Stormzy lyric, one can only assume Hannanananananananan thought them appropriate simply because Stormzy is black.
It would be interesting to see if Hannanananananananan felt comfortable saying “Big man ting!” in person to a black person – Sir Trevor McDonald, Lizzo, Anthony Braxton, or Michelle Obama for example – while explaining his views on Brexit. “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our position in the single market. Big man ting!” In short, would a “Big man ting” in the mouth of Daniel Hannanananananananan seem uncomfortable, or would it be a perfect fit, as if it had always belonged there?
In the interests of full disclosure I must confess that I sing some Stormzy in my current show, Snowflake/Tornado. A line from Crown, “heavy is the head that wears the crown”, helps the audience understand the pressures I have faced since the Times declared me the “world’s greatest living standup”. But no one has suggested that I am racist quoting Stormzy, perhaps because I do not work for a man who has called black people “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”.
Minds immeasurably superior to mine have suggested that Gove’s controversy-generating tweet was manufactured on his behalf by culturally savvy Conservative content providers, primed to cause plausible online distractions while dog-whistling to the coveted Arsehole Vote, historically a key part of any Tory victory.
But Dominic Tosser Raab explained last week he thinks “people don’t give a … er … toss about social media”, which is why his party doesn’t spend money on re-editing news footage to smear their opponents online. Except that it does. Never mind. Tosser is probably confused, like when he didn’t know the difference between sea and land. And anyway, if the Conservatives wanted to woo arseholes, they could just let Jacob Rees-Mogg open his mouth, instead of hiding him on a remote Somerset fen, like the flesh-eating recluse played by Don Henderson in The Ghoul (Freddie Francis, 1975), who said his hitchhiker victims deserved to be cooked and eaten because they lacked the common sense to not be cooked and eaten.
It is likely that Gove, however, feels a genuine connection to Stormzy. Both men, for example, have been accused of using class A drugs, a charge Stormzy denies. But a young black man accused of class A usage would face the full force of the law, whereas an elderly white Conservative politician like Gove can admit to having snuffled as much cocaine as he likes and the offence is soon forgotten. Least said soonest mended, I always say. Gove was further traduced for saying Stormzy, who supported the Grenfell fire victims and funds scholarships to Cambridge University, should leave politics alone because he is “a far, far better rapper than he is a political analyst”. Black people, it seems, need to carry on singing and dancing for their masters and leave the thinking to big brains like Michael Gove.
But is this interpretation of Gove’s words unfair? What if Gove is such a Stormzy fan that he is afraid he will lose his idol from music to politics, and then there will be no more of the rap music that he loves? Is Gove trying to put Stormzy back in the black box simply because he loves him too much?
If the online comment sewer is flowing beneath this piece this week, doubtless readers will ask why this column isn’t questioning the Labour party’s ongoing open-goal antisemitism shambles. This is a legitimate criticism, except that we have the entire rest of the media to ask that question repeatedly while, as usual, the Conservatives’ relentless top-down racism remains relatively unexamined.
It’s a startling fact that 25% of the prison population is from a BAME background, whereas none of it is from parliament, perhaps due to the unequal systems of punishment Gove’s non-conviction proves are in play. Had Gove been imprisoned for his drug offences, as he should have been, his fluency in urban slang would have been a great asset inside. “Ah! Stop it!! It hurts!!! My haggis nozzle!!!! Big man ting!!!!!”
Stewart Lee
2019-12-01T22:26:17+00:00
Many years ago, while wearing a Navajo jacket, I was accused of cultural appropriation. I told the zealot harassing me the jacket was a gift from a Native American shaman-clown, under whom I had studied. She backed down, humiliated, like Major General Arthur St Clair before the forces of Little Turtle and the Potawatomi, at the Battle of a Thousand Slain, on 4 November 1791. My accuser and I began a short but tempestuous relationship, based on the thrill of committing ever more offensive ideological thought crimes. One sick night, I imagined a public library with deliberately inadequate disabled access, while she made a scale model of a unisex toilet and then vandalised it. Within weeks, our imaginary atrocities exhausted, our twisted affair ended. But I realised there may have been some truth in my ex-lover’s accusations of cultural insensitivity. Luckily, I still had the receipt for the jacket and so I returned the racist garment to Camden market, where I had bought it while shopping drunk months earlier. The idea of “cultural appropriation” is a minefield, especially in the “political correctness gone mad” times that we live in now, in today’s “politically correct” world of “so-called” “political correctness” “gone mad”. But I don’t doubt for a moment that Michael Gove’s decision to quote the rap singer Stormzy in a tweet on Tuesday was without malice. If Gove isn’t a Stormzy fan how would the blotchy foundling know that the rapper’s hit Shut Up included the phrase “I set the trends dem man copy”? Daniel Hannanananananananan’s decision to reply to Gove’s tweet with the emphatic urban phrase “Big man ting!” is less easy to justify. As the words do not relate to a specific Stormzy lyric, one can only assume Hannanananananananan thought them appropriate simply because Stormzy is black. It...
"This is clearly the weakest of the four series you've done... is that deliberate?" asks Chris Morris' hostile interrogator, but, joking aside, this is a weaker episode than last week. Perhaps it has something to do with the subject: Islamaphobia
Stewart Lee
2016-03-10T15:27:58+00:00
"This is clearly the weakest of the four series you've done... is that deliberate?" asks Chris Morris' hostile interrogator, but, joking aside, this is a weaker episode than last week. Perhaps it has something to do with the subject: Islamaphobia
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/slcv4/tv-pick/
Stewart Lee
2015-08-13T02:43:34+01:00
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/2015/08/4831/
Last weekend, residents of our east London thoroughfare were told to remove their vehicles, clearing the route for an exceptionally wide and potentially hazardous load. Perhaps your mum, who I believe lives locally, had ordered a new pair of pants from Littlewoods?
Rising on Tuesday to a thunderous ding dong, I saw “Free Tibet” protesters fleeing west while nervous Chinese students waved identical banners reading “Welcome” and, in much smaller letters, “Made in China”.
Dispersing demonstrators, police ensured the welcomers were in place as the object of their obligations began its progress past my window. It was, at some 100 feet across, and mounted on tiny casters, nothing less than a massive Chinese arse.
With the silent authority of a vast totalitarian slug, the massive Chinese arse rolled over the buckling tarmac, shiny in the sun, with all farts coming out of it, speeding its gaseous progress towards Westminster.
Having flown in from China, suspended between four Chinooks, the massive Chinese arse sat down discreetly at RAF Scampton, where it became the subject of an enthusiastic Lincolnshire cargo cult, and was then escorted into London by a fleet of police motorcyclists, clothes pegs discreetly over their noses against the arse’s flatulent mechanism.
A human rights protester positioned himself before the massive Chinese arse, raising defiant fists. But two unremitting meat mountains, enormous Chinese buttocks, rolled unsentimentally over him, spitting him out behind, winded and battered.
“Did you see that?” I asked a policewoman, “A massive Chinese arse is crushing legitimate criticism.” “Calm down Mr Lee,” said an undercover officer, recognising me from my multiple Bafta- and British Comedy Award-winning TV shows. “Perhaps a ticket to tonight’s ceremonial massive Chinese arse banquet at Buckingham Palace would buy your silence?”
I told him I could not be bought, having turned down an advert for Sharwood’s Spicy Szechuan Stir Fry Melts on ethical grounds only last week. “There will be braised red cabbage, cocotte potatoes, and timbale of celeriac,” he bartered, waving an embossed menu of tainted possibility.
And so it was that, for truth and timbale of celeriac, I was seated at Buckingham Palace, with the massive Chinese arse and his confidants, a host of delighted business people, and some compromised dignitaries: Mark Carney of the Bank of England, George “Pencils” Osborne, David Cameron and, Christ-like in his accommodations, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, supine among the sinners, the non-tax-gatherers, and the non-dom non-tax payers.
The Queen wore a white banquet dress, embroidered with beads by her dressmaker Angela Kelly, and a pair of old lady’s knickers, the label sewn in by C&A. It was the first time she had worn the dress. The Duchess of Cambridge wore a bespoke red gown by Jenny Packham, and a Chinese Rocks tiara, on loan from George “Pencils” Osborne. It was the first time she had worn the gown.
Instead of wearing a booby-trapped papier-mache head of the Dalai Lama, as was feared, Jeremy Corbyn wore a black jacket, white tie, white shirt, black shoes and black trousers, with black socks and white pants from Marks and Spencers. It was the 75th time he had worn the pants.
I saw the Queen’s eyes, as she licked the massive Chinese arse, meeting Jeremy Corbyn’s eyes
On the subject of clothes, PEN Award-winning writer and academic Ilham Tohti appears to be wearing a blue anorak and a white T-shirt in the picture I found of him, but who knows what he is wearing now, as he is serving life imprisonment in a Chinese jail, as I would be if I wrote this piece there, even though it is only a silly thing about a massive Chinese arse.
Still, no time to worry about that now. The timbale of celeriac smelt delicious when I could catch a whiff of it, wafting in from the kitchen, through the low-hanging cloud of the massive Chinese arse’s effulgent flatulence. And anyway, dinner was served.
Fillet of west coast turbot with lobster mousse, roasted loin of Balmoral venison in a Madeira and truffle sauce, braised red cabbage, cocotte potatoes, and timbale of celeriac. To follow, and in celebration of the prime minister’s heroic rejection of the sugar tax, délice of dark chocolate, mango and lime. And 25 almonds, some Space Dust, and a juicy red apple for George “Pencils” Osborne, who was still on his diet.
After dessert came the part of the evening the diplomats had dreaded most. They knew the assembled worthies were required to venerate the massive Chinese arse, but even the most accomplished translator had been unable to ascertain whether the Chinese government’s instructions meant the massive Chinese arse was to be licked, or to be kissed.
Archbishop Justin Welby officiated, the dignitaries processing toward the massive Chinese arse, in a sick pantomime of the communion. Some – David Cameron, Mark Carney, and the Duchess of Cambridge – chose to kiss the massive Chinese arse. Others – Prince William, Prince Andrew and the Queen – elected to lick it.
From where I was sitting I saw the Queen’s eyes, as she licked the massive Chinese arse, meeting Jeremy Corbyn’s eyes. It seemed to me they shared an intimate moment, as she communicated to him the terrible bondage of duty, perhaps envying the rebellious leader of the opposition, and her own absent firstborn son, their uncompromised freedom, perhaps asking for understanding. And I like to think that it was in solidarity with the quietly dignified Queen that Jeremy Corbyn too then leaned forward to lick the massive Chinese arse himself.
The arse-licking and arse-kissing done, the band struck up the James Bond theme Nobody Does It Better and George Osborne took centre stage. Testing the opening with his usual pencil, he rolled up his shirt sleeve, James Herriot-style, and began his diplomatic negotiations, pushing through the half-digested fillet of west coast turbot with lobster mousse, the semi-dissolved roasted loin of Balmoral venison in a Madeira and truffle sauce, the broken-down braised red cabbage, the condensing cocotte potatoes, the disintegrating timbale of celeriac and the dissipating délice of dark chocolate, mango and lime. And finally the chancellor pulled out a plum! “What a good boy am I!” he cried, holding up the filthy fruit, to the applause of all. “This plum is worth £30 billion.”
The week dragged on. Unfortunately the massive Chinese arse was unable to find time to see Ai Weiwei at the Academy, the capital’s most important cultural event. But David Cameron did manage to take it to his local, The Cock and Pig, in Chipping Norton, where it enjoyed fish and beer, and was then forgotten, as the prime minister drove off, leaving it in a toilet.
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
Stewart Lee
2015-10-25T15:22:28+00:00
Last weekend, residents of our east London thoroughfare were told to remove their vehicles, clearing the route for an exceptionally wide and potentially hazardous load. Perhaps your mum, who I believe lives locally, had ordered a new pair of pants from Littlewoods? Rising on Tuesday to a thunderous ding dong, I saw “Free Tibet” protesters fleeing west while nervous Chinese students waved identical banners reading “Welcome” and, in much smaller letters, “Made in China”. Dispersing demonstrators, police ensured the welcomers were in place as the object of their obligations began its progress past my window. It was, at some 100 feet across, and mounted on tiny casters, nothing less than a massive Chinese arse. With the silent authority of a vast totalitarian slug, the massive Chinese arse rolled over the buckling tarmac, shiny in the sun, with all farts coming out of it, speeding its gaseous progress towards Westminster. Having flown in from China, suspended between four Chinooks, the massive Chinese arse sat down discreetly at RAF Scampton, where it became the subject of an enthusiastic Lincolnshire cargo cult, and was then escorted into London by a fleet of police motorcyclists, clothes pegs discreetly over their noses against the arse’s flatulent mechanism. A human rights protester positioned himself before the massive Chinese arse, raising defiant fists. But two unremitting meat mountains, enormous Chinese buttocks, rolled unsentimentally over him, spitting him out behind, winded and battered. “Did you see that?” I asked a policewoman, “A massive Chinese arse is crushing legitimate criticism.” “Calm down Mr Lee,” said an undercover officer, recognising me from my multiple Bafta- and British Comedy Award-winning TV shows. “Perhaps a ticket to tonight’s ceremonial massive Chinese arse banquet at Buckingham Palace would buy your silence?” I told him I could not be bought, having turned down an...
It’s half term and I am rewriting the opening topical 20 minutes of my touring standup show. Again. Damn Rishi’s rollercoaster ride. The current Conservative cabinet has had more lineup changes than the Fall, but will not leave as significant a cultural legacy, bar a similarly large succession of weighty books trying to make subsequent sense of what happened. If it’s Rishi Sunak and your granny on bongos, then this is the Conservative government.
My tight five on Nadhim Zahawi, I reluctantly admit, will not make it to the show in Coventry on Wednesday, despite the reliable laugh quota generated all around the land by the mere mention of the former minister without portfolio. Once Zahawi didn’t have two portfolios to rub together. But now, he must look back on the days when all he didn’t have was a portfolio with nostalgic regret.
I can already feel Zahawi receding in the collective subconscious, as he joins the other routines, abandoned along the way since September, like Boris Johnson’s discarded children or Jeremy Hunt’s principles, as their subjects slipped from view.
Farewell Liz Truss, who finally dared to put flesh on the bones of the thinktanks’ impossible economic fantasies, old rotten meat stuck to the balsa-wood skeleton of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and began the rout of Tufton Street. Truss will now be remembered, if she is remembered at all, only for a bizarre speech about cheese! We imported two-thirds of our cheese. It was a disgrace, she told us, with blank ire. But within weeks she had cost the country £30bn and the horrible cheese disgrace suddenly seemed less significant. Indeed, how we longed for the cheese disgrace of old.
And goodbye and good riddance also to the morning news radio round golem, Kwasi Kwarteng, always called upon to defend six indefensible things before breakfast! Kwarteng goes back in the economic attic, the secret rune that reanimates him removed from his wet mouth.
And au revoir to the blink-and-you-missed-him environment secretary Ranil Jayawardena, the George Canning of unchecked sewage discharge, the Tory equivalent of those apparently significant characters Jed Mercurio used to write into Line of Duty who’d always die at the end of the first episode, the Spinal Tap drummer of the Truss era. He spontaneously combusted after 49 days. He voted against LGBT-inclusive sex education. He occasionally goes to church. At the going down of the sun, and in the evening, we will not remember him. But this endless churn of osmotic political excrement is making my professional life a lot harder than it needs to be.
There have been so many rotten Conservative politicians making merry since the Brexit campaign shattered standards of decency and honesty in public life that it’s hard to remember them all, which I suspect is a priced-in strategy. Why get worked up about your local MP who lied about Europe, made a mint off a dodgy PPE contract and charged the taxpayer to heat the nests of his fancy mice when there’ll be another equally rotten Tory along in a moment? But did anyone think that the next “another one along in a minute” would be Ashfield MP, Lee Anderson?
Perhaps some patronising creeps behind closed Conservative doors thought Anderson’s “common sense” pronouncements would play well with the fragmenting “red wall” vote, beginning to see beyond the Brexit lies. Indeed, Anderson is a member of the Common Sense Group, which proves he has common sense or why would he be in a group called the Common Sense Group? It’s common sense that people who have been executed will never commit a crime. But it is not common sense to assume they are guilty. By Anderson’s logic it would make sense to execute everyone immediately, in case they turn bad at a later date.
Anderson is an accident waiting to happen to the entire Conservative party. He was recorded bullying a reporter. And he has had an unfortunate photo opportunity with a shy ex-BNP member who apparently has a white supremacist tattoo and is said to sport a “No Remorse White Pride” T-shirt; and also with a fan of the influential white supremacist band Skrewdriver.
It’s easy enough to be photographed with people without it indicating that you support them unequivocally. I was once photographed with the bisc-haired GB News patsy Andrew Neil, for example, yet I never believed Carole Cadwalladr was a “mad cat woman” or that “GB News is the most exciting thing to happen in British television news for more than 20 years”. But had a Labour party member been photographed shaking hands with similar salt of the earth types to Anderson it’s unlikely they’d still be in a position of responsibility.
In November 2019, while canvassing, Anderson was caught by a Mail+ journalist’s microphone arranging for his friend to pose as a supportive constituent and telling him to pretend he didn’t know him personally. “Make out you know who I am… you know I’m the candidate, but not a friend, all right?” The Conservatives are so concerned about electoral fraud they are introducing a raft of punitive ID measures that will disproportionately disenfranchise exactly the kind of voter most likely to vote against them. There were six examples of electoral fraud in the last election. And yet here is Anderson, caught on camera fraudulently trying to influence public opinion, and he is rewarded with the deputy chair of the Conservative party.
Meanwhile, the sewage flows into the rivers, public money continues to flows into the sewers of the Conservative party’s friends and donors and I’ve wasted my breath talking about a strawman who probably isn’t even worth trying to write a standup routine about. Because I could do with a new five minutes that will see me through to the spring at least.
Stewart Lee
2023-02-19T21:23:37+00:00
It’s half term and I am rewriting the opening topical 20 minutes of my touring standup show. Again. Damn Rishi’s rollercoaster ride. The current Conservative cabinet has had more lineup changes than the Fall, but will not leave as significant a cultural legacy, bar a similarly large succession of weighty books trying to make subsequent sense of what happened. If it’s Rishi Sunak and your granny on bongos, then this is the Conservative government. My tight five on Nadhim Zahawi, I reluctantly admit, will not make it to the show in Coventry on Wednesday, despite the reliable laugh quota generated all around the land by the mere mention of the former minister without portfolio. Once Zahawi didn’t have two portfolios to rub together. But now, he must look back on the days when all he didn’t have was a portfolio with nostalgic regret. I can already feel Zahawi receding in the collective subconscious, as he joins the other routines, abandoned along the way since September, like Boris Johnson’s discarded children or Jeremy Hunt’s principles, as their subjects slipped from view. Farewell Liz Truss, who finally dared to put flesh on the bones of the thinktanks’ impossible economic fantasies, old rotten meat stuck to the balsa-wood skeleton of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and began the rout of Tufton Street. Truss will now be remembered, if she is remembered at all, only for a bizarre speech about cheese! We imported two-thirds of our cheese. It was a disgrace, she told us, with blank ire. But within weeks she had cost the country £30bn and the horrible cheese disgrace suddenly seemed less significant. Indeed, how we longed for the cheese disgrace of old. And goodbye and good riddance also to the morning news radio round golem, Kwasi Kwarteng, always called upon to...
'Notebooks out, plagiarists!" ran the sleeve notes of the Fall's 1991 album Shiftwork. The veteran Manchester band's frontman, Mark E Smith, tends towards an inventive paranoia, but in the case of the American indie quintet Pavement, he couldn't have been more right. Their acclaimed 1991 debut, Slanted and Enchanted, was the sound of the Fall's back catalogue invigorated by a youthful American college band's lightness of touch and a stateside slacker's knowing sense of irony. Even so, Pavement's wholesale reappropriation of Smith's consonant-ridden jargon still seemed a little brazen. Wasn't Slanted and Enchanted's Our Singer just an exact rewrite of the Fall's Hip Priest? "Yeah it was," Stephen Malkmus, Pavement's wiry, bookish singer and guitarist admits, "but there were other songs too. Conduit for Sale was New Face in Hell. Jackals, False Grails; The Lonesome Era was The Classical. It didn't worry me at the time. I don't know what I was thinking," he muses idly, as if he'd never considered the subject before. "We don't sound like them any more."
This much is true. Since their scratchy lo-fi four-track singles of the late 1980s, Pavement have blossomed from inspired copyists to fully fledged artists who, on last year's Wowee Zowee, finally found their own voice. With their new album, Brighten the Corners, released on Domino records on February 10, Pavement have managed to retain their alluring, ramshackle charm and ally it to a set of distinctive songs - the wry humour of Stereo, the gorgeous folk rock of Shady Lane and the shuffling jazz inflections of Blue Hawaiian. Brighten the Corners is an album only Pavement could have made. But appropriately, Pavement themselves are about to find out what it feels like to be the subject of comparisons.
The eponymous fifth album from Britpop flag-bearers Blur allegedly indulges their suppressed love of American indie rock stylings, especially Pavement's. Malkmus doesn't hear that much of Pavement in it. "I think the overall tone could be equated to our last album, Wowee Zowee," he offers, "in that it covers loads of different genres, with mellow bits and aggressive bits going back and forth, but as far as individual notes go - no, it's not like us. I think it still has Blur's English Kinks/folky part to it. But what I like about Blur is Damon's singing. He has a voice that doesn't annoy me."
Pavement are probably one of the only American bands Blur could use as a new template, their stock of classic British rock being exhausted. Most American bands have a coast-to-coast road-tested lack of contrivance, but Pavement used to be too clever by half. While Oasis, blissfully untroubled by intellectual anxieties, are ideally equipped to speak to the child in all of us, Blur and Pavement are more likely to engage the head than the heart or the gut. Malkmus concurs, albeit defensively: "I think there's parts of our sound that you could react to emotionally. I try hard to have soul, but maybe there's some irony and necessary self-consciousness that you can't help having if you've got a brain. I want to listen to someone who is clever and smart, like Bob Dylan, not just some raw-emotion person with no brain."
Malkmus has admitted in the past that Pavement have a tendency to play "in inverted commas", but elaborates: "If anyone's guilty of inverted commas then it's British bands in general. The Britpoppers are much more referential to other music in that way than us." One would hope that in giving a song on the new album the appalling title I'm Just a Killer for Your Love, Blur were using a fairly bold set of inverted commas, but Malkmus won't be drawn into criticising his new-found fans. He's now a regular house guest of Albarn and his girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. Frischmann's band Elastica, successfully sued for plagiarism by both Wire and the Stranglers, were once described by Malkmus as "representing the 1990s disease of wholesale nihilism about creativity", but he now tries to put an apologetic gloss on the comment.
"Er...well...I mean it's just a different kind of thing. It's just more controlled, more anal, I guess. I think she has different goals to us." In a single bound Malkmus escapes. "Justine wants her album to be the perfect statement for now, and I'm envious of that in a lot of ways. And I think Damon decided this is what it is for this year and he carries it out to its end, and there's something honourable about that, too." Pavement, Malkmus suggests, don't operate to such a rigid agenda, and Brighten the Corners is the first album they've rehearsed before recording. "What we do in a lot of ways is, like, more of a dartboard," he says bewilderingly. "I don't really know about music being a pop cultural movement or representing middle-class youth culture or working-class consciousness in a song. I think of music as an art thing. I try to keep it sort of loose for that reason."
Malkmus is painting a picture of our champion Britpoppers actually aspiring to make disposable ephemera. But as Blur set about spinning a new web of idiomatic cross-references, so Pavement are consolidating the escape from the bonds of theirs. And in a show at the London Astoria 10 days ago, the Pavement/Fall comparisons ended, too. Where Mark E Smith stands aloof from the Fall, looking like a vicious soldier ant sternly surveying his labouring workers, Malkmus stands only a little to the side of Pavement, glowing with the benign pride of a parent at the school nativity play, as if he finds his band mates' attempts to push out new shapes from guitar, bass and drums inexplicably endearing.
Stewart Lee
1997-02-02T16:55:48+00:00
'Notebooks out, plagiarists!" ran the sleeve notes of the Fall's 1991 album Shiftwork. The veteran Manchester band's frontman, Mark E Smith, tends towards an inventive paranoia, but in the case of the American indie quintet Pavement, he couldn't have been more right. Their acclaimed 1991 debut, Slanted and Enchanted, was the sound of the Fall's back catalogue invigorated by a youthful American college band's lightness of touch and a stateside slacker's knowing sense of irony. Even so, Pavement's wholesale reappropriation of Smith's consonant-ridden jargon still seemed a little brazen. Wasn't Slanted and Enchanted's Our Singer just an exact rewrite of the Fall's Hip Priest? "Yeah it was," Stephen Malkmus, Pavement's wiry, bookish singer and guitarist admits, "but there were other songs too. Conduit for Sale was New Face in Hell. Jackals, False Grails; The Lonesome Era was The Classical. It didn't worry me at the time. I don't know what I was thinking," he muses idly, as if he'd never considered the subject before. "We don't sound like them any more." This much is true. Since their scratchy lo-fi four-track singles of the late 1980s, Pavement have blossomed from inspired copyists to fully fledged artists who, on last year's Wowee Zowee, finally found their own voice. With their new album, Brighten the Corners, released on Domino records on February 10, Pavement have managed to retain their alluring, ramshackle charm and ally it to a set of distinctive songs - the wry humour of Stereo, the gorgeous folk rock of Shady Lane and the shuffling jazz inflections of Blue Hawaiian. Brighten the Corners is an album only Pavement could have made. But appropriately, Pavement themselves are about to find out what it feels like to be the subject of comparisons. The eponymous fifth album from Britpop flag-bearers Blur allegedly indulges their...
Regarded by many as a trailblazer at the top of the UK's comedy ravine, with 'Content Provider' Stewart Lee has surpassed even his own superlative standards and delivers what must be his most crafted and by far funniest and best show to date. With masterful structure and the perfect balance of self-effacement and aggression, conscience-pricking and lunacy this show ticks every conceivable box for any comedy fan,- including value for money with over two hours of material at a very moderately priced ticket.
Blending familiar elements such as educating sections of the audience when they don't laugh and deconstructing a joke or two out of ironic sympathy with the strugglers he manages to add in a new pace to his delivery, perhaps choosing to dispense with the long uncomfortable pauses in which he has previously delighted on previous shows both live and on television. His use of popular, cultural and historical references is so smooth he creates the air of a man with the room, and possibly the world, in the palm of his hand. Yet perhaps unlike Stephen Fry who could make any statement seem believable we are acutely aware that Lee may well have fabricated every single strand of his research simply for comic effect.
This show brings a certain visual structure not really used by him before, not just with his basic set but also with some sections being germane to his narrative, in particular the ending which is a quite stunning piece of art and artistic comment. Also more developed this time round is his fearless name-ckecking of other comedians of whom he disapproves. This apparent arrogance is only surface-deep though, as with the entire construction of his set, his material is very critical of many aspects of his and our lives but this observational element to his work is not in itself the joke, as is the case with so many other comics, several of whom he derides. No, Lee selects his subject and criticizes it both truthfully and satirically at the same time, then just when it seems he is being serious he throws in some childishness or foolery, just when he appears to have finished with one idea he delves back into it from a completely different angle. It is this constant but barely detectable change of direction that keeps the laughter and interest going.
Comedians at the top of their game are able to deliver a real rollercoaster ride of comedy and this certainly qualifies without question. What makes Stewart Lee different (and different in a way that is most definitely better) is that somehow, long ago, he alone figured out how to actually drive the rollercoaster and has been perfecting the skill throughout his entire career while the rest of us assume the usual rails and control switches set all the rules and boundaries. But if there are no rules, who decides what is allowed? Who gets to choose what is funny and what isn't, and by what standards we should judge everything? He has the answer for that, too, and when you hear it you may well disagree, but you will definitely laugh. And that's kind of the point.
Stewart Lee
2017-03-31T20:41:36+01:00
Regarded by many as a trailblazer at the top of the UK's comedy ravine, with 'Content Provider' Stewart Lee has surpassed even his own superlative standards and delivers what must be his most crafted and by far funniest and best show to date. With masterful structure and the perfect balance of self-effacement and aggression, conscience-pricking and lunacy this show ticks every conceivable box for any comedy fan,- including value for money with over two hours of material at a very moderately priced ticket. Blending familiar elements such as educating sections of the audience when they don't laugh and deconstructing a joke or two out of ironic sympathy with the strugglers he manages to add in a new pace to his delivery, perhaps choosing to dispense with the long uncomfortable pauses in which he has previously delighted on previous shows both live and on television. His use of popular, cultural and historical references is so smooth he creates the air of a man with the room, and possibly the world, in the palm of his hand. Yet perhaps unlike Stephen Fry who could make any statement seem believable we are acutely aware that Lee may well have fabricated every single strand of his research simply for comic effect. This show brings a certain visual structure not really used by him before, not just with his basic set but also with some sections being germane to his narrative, in particular the ending which is a quite stunning piece of art and artistic comment. Also more developed this time round is his fearless name-ckecking of other comedians of whom he disapproves. This apparent arrogance is only surface-deep though, as with the entire construction of his set, his material is very critical of many aspects of his and our lives but this observational element...
The four tracks on Angharad Davies' Six Studies are titled as if they were exploratory exercises for the experimental violinist, (Circular Bowing Study, Balancing Springs on Strings Studies 1 - 3), and are sealed in an anonymous tin.
Cat gut, metal and plastic scrape on string, at a succession of angles, sounds sawn from air.
Time slows, scale reverses, and you're up close to the process.
Gulliver traverses the violin neck, watching sound vibrate off overhead cables in great powerful waves.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-24T11:29:09+00:00
The four tracks on Angharad Davies' Six Studies are titled as if they were exploratory exercises for the experimental violinist, (Circular Bowing Study, Balancing Springs on Strings Studies 1 - 3), and are sealed in an anonymous tin. Cat gut, metal and plastic scrape on string, at a succession of angles, sounds sawn from air. Time slows, scale reverses, and you're up close to the process. Gulliver traverses the violin neck, watching sound vibrate off overhead cables in great powerful waves.
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.
Stewart Lee
2022-09-30T12:45:58+01:00
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.
The acclaimed British comedian recalls five personally influential moments from the scene's 1980s heyday
5 DEFINING MOMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE COMEDY, A PERSONAL VIEW
5th May 1981
BBC 2 aired the second and final edition of Boom Boom Out Go The Lights, the first, and extremely short-lived, TV showcase of Alternative Comedy. I didn't see the first one, and I'm not sure how the thirteen year old me came to watch the second one. All I know is after seeing Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson's double act The Dangerous Brothers struggle in a Beckettian vortex with the basic mechanics of telling a joke about a gooseberry in a lift, whilst dressed like disheveled members of the R&B mod band Nine Below Zero, I was never the same again. The joke didn't matter. It was all about the process. It was the opposite of comedy as we knew it.
3rd October 1982
I see Dexy's Midnight Runners at the Birmingham Hippodrome, supported by The Comic Strip's Peter Richardson, performing, for the first and last time, in character as a threatening and mysterious Mexican Bandit. I lived in Birmingham and I was 14. Back then there wasn't a touring comedy circuit for Alternative Comedians, and if there had been I wouldn't have been able to get into the clubs anyway. Seeing this unannounced appearance was amazing and unexpected. But Richardson never performed this act live again, having been largely ignored by a bewildered crowd of Come On Eileen-craving pop-pickers.
28th October 1984
Ted Chippington is supporting The Fall at The Powerhaus, Birmingham. (Don't look for it, it's not there anymore.) He comes on as if he doesn't want to be there, performs variations on the same joke over and over again for half an hour interspersed with poor renditions of club standards, scowls over a bottle of beer while dressed in Teddy boy garb, and divides the audience into the hysterical and the furious. It is the most punk rock thing the sixteen year old me had ever seen. I knew at this point I wanted to be a stand-up, having previously thought you had to be either Ben Elton or Bernard Manning.
Sometime in 1985
Oscar McLennan at Warwick Arts Centre. At this point McLennan was still nominally a stand-up, but was clearly on his way to becoming the hardcore performance artist type he is today. An hour plus monologue about a dysfunctional family ended with him rolling around on the floor, lit by a single low level light, to the strains of Helicopter Man by the forgotten punkabilly band Turkey Bones And The Wild Dogs. There were few laughs from the small audience but I have subliminally subsumed the show my own pretentious art comedy outpourings ever since. On the way home, my then girlfriend slagged me off for singing along to a tape of the new Scottish indie band del Amitri covering Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl, in a fake American accent.
August 1987
Arnold Brown, Norman Lovett, Arthur Smith and Jerry Sadowitz, at The Gilded Ballon, Edinburgh. I went to The Fringe for the first time with a student show and, only nineteen years old, saw this unimaginably brilliant and era--defining stand-up bill. I'm lucky I saw all the weirdo acts of Alternative Comedy when I was young, not the emerging generation of football lad squares, or I wouldn't have thought it was for me. Brown and Lovett's deadpan surrealism solidified the studied indifference I'd seen in Ted, Smith showed you could be literary and louche and love language, and Sadowitz opened up all sorts of arguments about taste and targets. I can't imagine a bill this brilliant ever happening today.
Stewart Lee
2013-01-25T20:59:34+00:00
The acclaimed British comedian recalls five personally influential moments from the scene's 1980s heyday 5 DEFINING MOMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE COMEDY, A PERSONAL VIEW 5th May 1981 BBC 2 aired the second and final edition of Boom Boom Out Go The Lights, the first, and extremely short-lived, TV showcase of Alternative Comedy. I didn't see the first one, and I'm not sure how the thirteen year old me came to watch the second one. All I know is after seeing Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson's double act The Dangerous Brothers struggle in a Beckettian vortex with the basic mechanics of telling a joke about a gooseberry in a lift, whilst dressed like disheveled members of the R&B mod band Nine Below Zero, I was never the same again. The joke didn't matter. It was all about the process. It was the opposite of comedy as we knew it. 3rd October 1982 I see Dexy's Midnight Runners at the Birmingham Hippodrome, supported by The Comic Strip's Peter Richardson, performing, for the first and last time, in character as a threatening and mysterious Mexican Bandit. I lived in Birmingham and I was 14. Back then there wasn't a touring comedy circuit for Alternative Comedians, and if there had been I wouldn't have been able to get into the clubs anyway. Seeing this unannounced appearance was amazing and unexpected. But Richardson never performed this act live again, having been largely ignored by a bewildered crowd of Come On Eileen-craving pop-pickers. 28th October 1984 Ted Chippington is supporting The Fall at The Powerhaus, Birmingham. (Don't look for it, it's not there anymore.) He comes on as if he doesn't want to be there, performs variations on the same joke over and over again for half an hour interspersed with poor renditions of club standards, scowls...
The film is also screening this month in the Sheffield Documentary Festival, Sat 12 June 14:00, in Showroom Cinema 4, with an intro and q&a with me and Brass Eye dir Michael Cumming.
An actual physical 12” EP of Asian Dub Foundation(feat. Stewart Lee)‘s Brexit day number 1 Comin’ Over Here came out on March 26th and can be ordered here...
The remixes are of other bits of the Paul Nuttalls routine and work great.
You can d/l them too I think. I can’t believe how well the ADF’s made this work. I was their mere tool.
3) TEN BOB / USE YOUR LOAF 7”
‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album.
B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album, which didn’t happen after something got spilt on the laptop that had all the tracks on it. Fire Records/King Rocker Records.
It looks like all the SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO tour dates outstanding from 2020 will be shifted into 2022, starting in Jan, and below are the ones we know about so far. Thanks for bearing through all this with patience.
Local venues will contact you if they haven’t already. All the warm-up club dates you may have bought tickets for have been slotted in to Nov and Dec, covid willing, and venues will contact ticket holders. Please do not hassle venues about all this. They will contact you. We will get there!
I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point. It's all bacon!
Currently, the following dates have been re-arranged;
January 2022
Saturday 15th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS
Tuesday 25th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Wednesday 26th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 27th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Friday 28th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 29th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Sunday 30th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
February 2022
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd February 2022 - Rose Theatre, Kingston - TICKETS
Friday 4th February 2022 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Saturday 5th February 2022 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Tuesday 8th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 9th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Thursday 10th February 2022 - De Montfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Friday 11th February 2022 - Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry - TICKETS
Saturday 12th February 2022 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Sunday 13th February 2022 - Hippodrome, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 25th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Saturday 26th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Sunday 27th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Monday 28th February 2022 - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - TICKETS
March 2022
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Friday 4th March 2022 - Lighthouse, Poole - 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
Saturday 12th March 2022 - Grand Theatre, Swansea
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
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
Friday 22nd April 2022 - The Hexagon, Reading - TICKETS
Sunday 24th April 2022 - Mayflower Theatre, Southampton - 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
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
Friday 13th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Saturday 14th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - 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
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
June 2022
Sunday 19th June 2022 - Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
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
Daniel Kitson, the best comedian, warns that his bandcamp has been hacked, so he is advising no-one to use it until further notice as of 26/5/21.
6) TO VAC OR NOT TO VAC
The gvt may not impose vaccine passporting, as their will be questions about who is responsible if you can’t get into your local pub/club/theatre/brothel.
I would be delighted if, if you are coming to see me, you could do your best to get vaccinated, irrespective of what the gvt or the venue insist upon.
I doubt that my snowflake audience will contain many people who deny the existence of Covid or believe the vaccine is George Soros or Bill Gates trying to put tiny Transformer robots into your blood.
But I and my team will be interacting with over 150 000 people on the next leg of the tour, and I would like to minimise our risk, and the risk to my audience, so meet me half way. I will be selling and signing stuff as usual, I hope, but I won’t be shaking hands to thank you all this time around, and will probably be positioned behind some kind of screen like William Shatner in Airplane 2. Sad.
7) MEDIA GARAGE SALE
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits, as have NETFLIX, the utter bastards.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
To try and promote King Rocker I have been pimping myself about like Priss Fotheringham on every Podcast going, alone or with dir M Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast), saying the same things in the same room in the same clothes to all different people, all of whom were very kind.
I don’t know what a podcast is really but I think you go on the internet and click on something.
As my grandfather once said, in 1983, “Do you know, in America, there are shops that only sell Kentucky Fried Chicken?” I enjoyed being on the internet with all these people enormously, but will put some blue water between me and the next wedge.
David Baddiel told me it was good to be on the internet, though. These are available..
OLD TUNES FRESH TAKES
A lovely podcast about folk music that I do a bit on.
A rambling chat in which I fail to promote King Rocker at the expense of a Marxist analysis of culture and history from the inventor of Alternative Comedy ™ ®
Dir Michael Cumming and I discuss King Rocker with Britain’s top film guru and skiffle enthusiast, who has been very supportive of the no-budget project.
Andy Miller and John Michinson’s long running and much loved books podcast. I discuss the waspish poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks with them, Nicky Birch and Jennifer Hodgson.
This is a marvellous ongoing Podcast which is unashamedly civilised in an unenlightened era, and this episode is full of great writing, batshit radiophonic music and clever women.
North London echo chamber fun sure to irk people of all political persuasions with the forensically-minded folk devil for the far right and snowflake do-gooder Owen Jones, and me, talking about King Rocker and more general stuff. His current run of ‘casts has some great guests.
Informed Wolverhampton-based comedy and music enthusiast of uncommon warmth and knowledge talks to me about KING ROCKER and what the Gray Pays ‘n’ Bacon are like at the Great Western pub.
I asked Adam if I could go on this massively popular podcast and he said yes which was very kind of him. It was fun hearing his Mark E Smith story from the horse’s mouth and he asked me hard questions of the type I usually avoid.
In this episode of The Last Line, James talks to comedian Stewart Lee about his new film King Rocker, a documentary about Robert Lloyd, lead singer of 70’s post-punk band The Nightingales. During their conversation they discuss the new film, its central protagonist Robert Lloyd, stand up comedy, Stewart’s propensity to defend stand up comedians against the views of the general public and his reluctance to participate in podcast interviews.
There’s an interview with Michael Cumming on this podcast too, link below.
Sometime in March you will be able to hear me eat a really lovely Sri Lankan mutton curry from the Kolama restaurant, Soho, with bon viveur jazz pianist Jay Rayner. (I see how this works now!)
This is the most showbiz thing I have ever done, and I am glad it was with jazzy Jay Rayner. Listen Here.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
with post-mod post-man, old school Labour face, and former near pop-soul star, Alan Johnson.
Ben Moor/Jo Neary - The Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra of multi-layered serio-comic theatre-art are back! 27th/28th July at the Hen and Chickens, Islington, w national dates to follow TICKETS
Faust 9th June, Union Chapel, London. Surely the last hurrah for the Krautrock pioneers and former Lee and Herring ‘90s chat show guests.
Ruts DC 10th June New Cross Inn, London Punky reggae pioneers back in action.
Gigbuddy Benefit 20th June Bristol Exchange. Ltd edition live event and on-line livestream benefit to provide access and assistance to gigs to punters w difficulties, w me, Sean Walsh, Josh Weller and some indie types. TICKETS
L7 26th June London Electric Ballroom, 27th June M’cr Academy 2. Distaff grunge pioneers still appear to be appearing.
Shirley Collins/Stewart Lee 7th July I am in conversation w the folk singer and writer Shirley Collins at the East Sussex bohemian hangout Charleston. The venue also features the first ever painting retrospective of the brilliantly bonkers Fitzrovian character, writer and micro-genius Nina Hamnett. TICKETS
Blue Orchids 23rd July Hebden Bridge Trades, 6th Aug Bristol Thunderbolt, 7th Aug Dublin Castle London, 8th Aug Brighton Prince Albert. Post-punk dishwater psychedelia.
MDC 14th Aug Edinburgh Sneaky Pete’s. Veteran angry American hardcore innovators
NEW FILMS
Ronnie’s, Ronnie Scott & His World Famous Jazz Club (Oliver Murray)
The Dig (Simon Stone) ★★★★★
Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) ★★★★
The News Of The World (Paul Greengrass) ★★★★
Nomadland (Chloe Zhao) ★★★★
OLD FILMS
Box Of Moonlight (Tom DeCillo, 1996) ★★★★★
Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) ★★★★★
Where Eagles Dare (Brian G Hutton, 1968) ★★★★★
The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967) ★★★★★
The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) ★★★★★
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) ★★★★★
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)★★★★★
Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D’sa/Glen Leyburn, 2013)★★★★★
Caliber 9 (Fernado di Leon, 1972) ★★★★★
‘71 (Yann Demange, 2014) ★★★★★
Big Night (Campbell Scott/Stanley Tucci, 1996) ★★★★★
Jason & The Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) ★★★★★
Goldstone (Ivan Sen, 2016) ★★★★★
Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) ★★★★★
Avengers Infinity War (Russo Brothers, 2018) ★★★★
Avengers Endgame (Russo Brothers, 2019) ★★★★
In Order of Disappearance (Hans Peter Molland, 2014)★★★★★
It’s evident that the corrupt kleptocracy of Boris Johnson isn’t going to dislodged by Kier Starmer’s PMQ’s however forensic, or by the biased media, or by legal investigations in which the gvt essentially investigate themselves.
However, despite the threats to judiciary in the Queen’s speech, at present the gvt are required to obey the law.
Champagne socialist fox-whacking lawyer Jolyon Maugham’s donation funded Good Law Project seems to be better than the opposition currently at holding the gvt to account, and proving where they have broken the law, so if you can spare a pound crowd fund them, as they do seem to be making an impact.
Did you know that the gvt are about to sell all your medical records off to the highest bidder? Thought not. We weren’t consulted.
I don’t care about the privacy aspect, but I do object to my life being monetised to give leverage to some horrible massive info-tech company.
You can withdraw the gvt’s right to farm your medical history as if you were some kind of data-pig at the link above.
STONEHENGE - WHERE THE DEMONS DWELL, WHERE THE BANSHEES LIVE AND THEY DO LIVE WELL!
We are fast approaching our last chance to stop the massive and irreparable damage to the Stonehenge World Heritage Site have sent out a couple of quick updates. Remember - this is the gvt of pride in Britain etc trashing our most emotive national monument.
The first update is a video explaining what the scheme is about and where we currently are with it. WATCH it here (3.5min)
The second update is about a webinar on Thursday 3 June at 7pm to learn more about saving Britain's most iconic World Heritage Site with distinguished opponents of the road scheme: Mike Parker Pearson, Professor of British Later Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, and Phil Goodwin, Emeritus Professor and Senior Fellow of Transport Policy at UCL and the University of the West of England.
The event will be chaired by Tom Holland, Stonehenge Alliance President and award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. So, save the date. Details will follow shortly.
Thank you for helping us raise the profile of our campaign.
Best wishes,
The Stonehenge Alliance
PS Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site Ltd, the group that is bringing the legal challenge, is appealing for funds to go to court on 23rd to 25th June.
Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew)
Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959)
Carl Reiner (director) (1922)
Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928)
Keith Tippett (jazz pianist) (1947)
Jimmy Cobb (jazz drummer) (1929)
Barbara Smoker (Humanist) (1923)
The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
Tony Elliot (Time Out) (1942)
Judy Dyble (folk singer) (1949)
Peter Green (blues guitarist) (1946)
Emitt Rhodes (power pop auteur) (1950)
Annie Ross (jazz bohemian) (1930)
Joe Ruby (Scooby-Doo) (1933)
Craig Weatherhill (folklorist) (1950)
Don Weller (jazz saxophonist) (1940)
Simeon Coxe (Silver Apple) (1938)
Diana Rigg (Avenger) (1938)
Toots Hibbert (reggae got soul) (1942)
Dele Fadele (carry bag man) (1962)
George Jeffrie (man’s-laughter maker) (1964)
Dave Kusworth (Brum punk Stone) (1960)
Gary Peacock (jazz bassist) (1935)
Doorkins (Southwark Cathedral Cat) (2005?)
Spencer Davis (Brumbeat pioneer) (1939)
Bunny Lee (dubmaster) (1940)
The Cubbington Pear Tree (1770)
Fungie The Dingle Dolphin (1979)
Jill Paton Walsh (humanist novelist) (1937)
Val Warner (poet) (1946)
Guy N Smith (Lord of The Crabs) (1939)
Richard Corben (decadent cartoonist) (1940)
David Johnson (Duke of Soho) (1960)
Leslie West (Mountain man) (1945)
- 2021 -
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Celia Drummond Ford (voice of Trees) (1950)
The Happy Man Tree (Stoke Newington Tree) (1870)
John Russell (guitar guru) (1954)
Marcel Uderzo (Asterisk artist) (1933)
Tom Stevens (Long Ryder and Magus) (1956)
Dougie Anderson (Coda’s Edinburgh record dealer (1952)
Captain Tom (Covid Walkman) (1920)
Rynagh O’Grady (Ted’s Mary) (1954)
Mary Wilson (Supreme) (1944)
Chick Corea (Miles’ tinkler) (1941)
Iain Pattinson (You wanted to see me Prime Minister?) (1951)
U-Roy (Toastmaster) (1942)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (bookstore beat) (1921)
Wink O’Bannon (Eleventh Dream Day) (1956)
Bunny Wailer (Wailer) (1947)
Doug Parkinson (Oz vocal celeb) (1946)
Milford Graves (temporal explorer) (1941)
Johnny Rogan (Byrds’ Boswell) (1953)
Jessica Walter (Play Misty For Me) (1941)
Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight) (1941)
Anita Lane (Oz punk chanteuse) (1958)
Barbara Ess (Theoretical Girl) (1944)
Michael Collins (Apollo 11) (1930)
Mohammed Ag Itale (Tinariwen) (1960)
Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) (1929)
Sonny Simmons (jazz hobo) (1933)
Charles Grodin (The American Tim Key) (1935)
Franco Battiato (Italian Fetus) (1945)
Yoshi Wada (bagpipe minimalist) (1943)
Stewart Lee
2021-05-26T16:03:17+01:00
1) KING ROCKER NOW TV, SKY TV 28TH MAY, & SHEFFIELD SCREENING SAT 12th JUNE 2pm If you don’t have NOW TV, Sky Arts, free to air to anyone w a set top box, are suddenly rescreening KING ROCKER this week, on Friday 28th May at 9pm. Please tell your friends. FREE ON TV THIS WEEK. Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times. “I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times ★★★★ Financial Times ★★★★ Chortle “One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus “The new gold standard for rockumentaries” - The Scotsman All Press is collecting here. You can also watch it, ad-free, on NOW TV if you have that; NOW TV LINK The film is also screening this month in the Sheffield Documentary Festival, Sat 12 June 14:00, in Showroom Cinema 4, with an intro and q&a with me and Brass Eye dir Michael Cumming. SHEFFIELD DOC FEST LINK 2) ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION - COMIN’ OVER HERE 12” An actual physical 12” EP of Asian Dub Foundation(feat. Stewart Lee)‘s Brexit day number 1 Comin’ Over Here came out on March 26th and can be ordered here... Bandcamp | X Ray Production The remixes are of other bits of the Paul Nuttalls routine and work great. You can d/l them too I think. I can’t believe how well the ADF’s made this work. I was their mere tool. 3) TEN BOB / USE YOUR LOAF 7” ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album. B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s...
What was the overarching feeling following Stewart Lee's Carpet Remnant World?
It was exhaustion. It is a relentless bombardment of sophisticated, crafted comedy and scrutinising of his audience.
Claiming he has no new material because his life consists of nothing more than watching Scooby Doo with his son and driving to gigs, Lee opts for a studious exploration of the art of comedy itself. The homogeneity of observational anecdotes was pulverised and every joke was deconstructed with masterly precision.
His entrance (rock music, synchronised lighting and a smoke machine) mocked "big entrances" of contemporary comics; he purposely told bad or overly long jokes to test people' sensibilities and his deadpan snobbery and manipulative wrong-footing always kept him one step ahead. He expects everyone to work hard for their laughs; they are permanently under his judging gaze. His well-known techniques and intransigence form a series of in-jokes that help Lee separate the "Jimmy Carr crowd".
It was not just punters and other comics - poor Michael McIntyre, Frankie Boyle, Russell Kane and even Bill Hicks - however who felt the brisance: he read out abusive comments from his fiercest internet detractors to a jazz backing track. He sublimely blended the sardonic and irascible with tongue-in-cheek.
A more professional and consummate craftsman in stand-up cannot be found. Stewart Lee's razor-sharp anti-comedy makes Carpet Remnant World a staggeringly funny and intricate addition to his impressive back catalogue.
More than that, it is an experience; a gruelling one, both emotionally and - bizarrely - physically, but hugely rewarding.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-27T14:07:59+01:00
What was the overarching feeling following Stewart Lee's Carpet Remnant World? It was exhaustion. It is a relentless bombardment of sophisticated, crafted comedy and scrutinising of his audience. Claiming he has no new material because his life consists of nothing more than watching Scooby Doo with his son and driving to gigs, Lee opts for a studious exploration of the art of comedy itself. The homogeneity of observational anecdotes was pulverised and every joke was deconstructed with masterly precision. His entrance (rock music, synchronised lighting and a smoke machine) mocked "big entrances" of contemporary comics; he purposely told bad or overly long jokes to test people' sensibilities and his deadpan snobbery and manipulative wrong-footing always kept him one step ahead. He expects everyone to work hard for their laughs; they are permanently under his judging gaze. His well-known techniques and intransigence form a series of in-jokes that help Lee separate the "Jimmy Carr crowd". It was not just punters and other comics - poor Michael McIntyre, Frankie Boyle, Russell Kane and even Bill Hicks - however who felt the brisance: he read out abusive comments from his fiercest internet detractors to a jazz backing track. He sublimely blended the sardonic and irascible with tongue-in-cheek. A more professional and consummate craftsman in stand-up cannot be found. Stewart Lee's razor-sharp anti-comedy makes Carpet Remnant World a staggeringly funny and intricate addition to his impressive back catalogue. More than that, it is an experience; a gruelling one, both emotionally and - bizarrely - physically, but hugely rewarding.
The last time I went to a big comedy gala type evening was last year at the Edinburgh fringe. There were about twelve of the most popular current stand-ups all on the same bill, doing around eight minutes each, and I remember thinking at the time that many of them could have happily exchanged acts with each other, so similar was much of the material.
This is not an accusation you can throw at any of the veteran performers from Stewart Lee's celebration of the early days of alternative comedy: At Last! The 1981 Show. Norman Lovett is never going to dress up as Lenin and rant about muesli, any more than Stewart Lee would do a naked balloon dance or Alexei Sayle would stick a firework up his arse. Not all of it is especially hilarious, and some of it is nauseatingly grotesque, but what it can boast is an endless stream of variety, audacity, and most uniquely of all, imagination.
The show is split up into three sections, the first hosted by Arthur Smith, a good choice in many respects as he has been performing material he first wrote in 1981 for his entire career. Tonight he even does a pun about Marathon bars, the original name for Snickers prior to 1990! However, what he lacks in topicality he more than compensates for with wit and personality, most obviously on display during his joyous revival of the old chant: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out! Out! Out!"
Also featuring in this first section is a welcome return of Saturday Live favourites, The Oblivion Boys, performing a routine that wouldn't have seemed out of place in the music halls, filled as it is with witty wordplay and unashamedly corny gags. Norman Lovett's ten minutes consist of him playing with bubble wrap, bags and shower caps, as well as delivering his unique and genuinely inventive offbeat material in as deadpan a fashion as possible. The section is rounded off by The Greatest Show on Legs doing a brilliant sketch about mime artists, littered with great visual gags, followed by the truly horrific naked balloon dance.
The act I'm most excited about is Alexei Sayle, and he comperes the second third of the show. The few flashes of stand-up he grants us remind everyone of just how great a performer he was, and he appears to really enjoy the return to the stage. He also gets to introduce his fellow early Comedy Store compere, Arnold Brown, who proves he's still a master of dry one-liners. Other highlights of this section are a surreal sketch about Lenin, Pauline Melville as Edie the Radical Housewife doing some surprisingly incisive and cutting political gags, and Nigel Planer reviving Neil from The Young Ones, looking genuinely intimidated by a whistling audience member.
The final section sees Stewart Lee take to the stage. Even though back in 1981 he was actually only thirteen years old, he still fits seamlessly into the line-up, so influenced is his style by the era's sensibilities. This is most obvious when he introduces Kevin McAleer, a comic who gets big laughs simply by standing silently in front of a picture of some startled owls for about five minutes, the sort of thing only a stand-up like Lee would attempt today. The show then comes to an end with Japanese cabaret act Frank Chickens, and Chris Lynam inserting a firework inside his anus.
I'm not sure I'd want to see all of these acts if they were doing their own full length show, but in the context of this evening, they all work really well. It was a real pleasure to see a comedy show where you honestly didn't know what was going to happen next, and it would be great if more acts would emerge on the current scene that were willing to be as daring and individual as the performers we saw tonight.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-31T20:55:39+01:00
The last time I went to a big comedy gala type evening was last year at the Edinburgh fringe. There were about twelve of the most popular current stand-ups all on the same bill, doing around eight minutes each, and I remember thinking at the time that many of them could have happily exchanged acts with each other, so similar was much of the material. This is not an accusation you can throw at any of the veteran performers from Stewart Lee's celebration of the early days of alternative comedy: At Last! The 1981 Show. Norman Lovett is never going to dress up as Lenin and rant about muesli, any more than Stewart Lee would do a naked balloon dance or Alexei Sayle would stick a firework up his arse. Not all of it is especially hilarious, and some of it is nauseatingly grotesque, but what it can boast is an endless stream of variety, audacity, and most uniquely of all, imagination. The show is split up into three sections, the first hosted by Arthur Smith, a good choice in many respects as he has been performing material he first wrote in 1981 for his entire career. Tonight he even does a pun about Marathon bars, the original name for Snickers prior to 1990! However, what he lacks in topicality he more than compensates for with wit and personality, most obviously on display during his joyous revival of the old chant: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out! Out! Out!" Also featuring in this first section is a welcome return of Saturday Live favourites, The Oblivion Boys, performing a routine that wouldn't have seemed out of place in the music halls, filled as it is with witty wordplay and unashamedly corny gags. Norman Lovett's ten minutes consist of him playing with bubble wrap,...
Deadpan, unfazed, poker-face comic Stewart Lee is exactly the same in interviews as on stage. He talks slowly, rarely changes pitch and delivers long answers, usually with a sardonic payoff.
When he laughs, you take a deep breath: a small part of him, far below the surface, might actually be enjoying himself.
"I think it's funny when a comedian does a miserable joke then steps out of character to let you know it's a joke," he says, speaking to The Guide from Hackney.
"I like it when they hold their nerve."
Often it is the listeners who need to hold their nerve after a Lee workout.
"I don't want to be their friend. I want them to know I am going to do the show whatever. It's not necessarily to please them but if they like it they are welcome to enjoy it."
He breaks into a childish laugh and admits that be it on stage in Sheffield or Glasgow or Brighton, with off-the-cuff prods or more formal and stylistic methods and longer jokes, he likes to see how far he can push the crowd.
"It's good fun getting something to work that you thought wouldn't."
He often gets criticised because his material confirms the prejudices and reaffirms the beliefs that people already have. Two nights of Brighton crowds, much of whom could be called his target market, sounds right up that street.
"Brighton was one of the first places to really pick up with me. But it's funny, you say ‘target market', and you'd think it would be. The stereotype of my audience is Guardian-reading liberals, but actually over the past year it has become a lot more diverse.
"I like to pretend it is all Guardian-reading liberals, and to berate them for their predictability in coming to see me, but I think it's slightly more jumbled up than that now."
That is partly thanks to his hugely successful BBC show Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
"In Edinburgh I noticed there were a lot of shirt-wearing lads coming in, the sort of people you would expect would be at Jimmy Carr, wanting their photo taken with me."
New audiences are the last thing on his mind.
He's never done panel shows or chat shows and avoids social media.
Last year's Carpet Remnant World was two hours of a man at the point of breakdown, looking at the pointlessness of his life. Worrying about getting older, wondering what he had to write about. The show's conceit was that it was about nothing because very little happened to Lee.
"But it was about that exact thing: the idea of who are you if you are a parent, an observer of life, what are you supposed to talk about? It met that problem head on."
Lee artfully weaved a complex narrative over two hours.
"I've done that once – and at the moment I am trying to work out if there is a way of carrying the flavour of that into what I write for the next series of Comedy Vehicle, which is what this tour is.
"This tour will become series three of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, and at the moment I have one half hour which is about that feeling of nullification that being a parent gives you."
He has two children, aged two and six, with the recent Foster's Comedy Award winner, Bridget Christie. A gag in Carpet Remnant World ran as follows: "Winning a British comedy award is like having a sign around your neck saying, ‘Hey d****, come to this!"
Did he pass on the advice?
"I do worry, as anyone worries, that if you have an award you don't necessarily want people coming to see the award winner, because it is inevitably going to be a disappointment for them.
"I remember when Phil Nichol, who is a great comic, got the Perrier Award and a load of people came along and were angry and hated it.
"It was the same when I directed The Mighty Boosh in Edinburgh in 2000. After the award nominations were announced, all these people started coming to see it and there was silence because the wrong people came."
Lee has many signs around his neck. In 1990, barely out of Oxford, he won the Hackney Empire New Act Of The Year competition.
In 2012, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle won a BAFTA for Best Comedy Programme.
And there was little except admiration from other humanists (and abuse from Christians) for his spoof musical, Jerry Springer: The Opera.
Neither Lee not Christie were aware that the latter's show, A Bic For Her, had the buzz around Edinburgh this year though.
"We don't go out at night and talk to anyone. I also imagine the sort of satirical articles I have written about the Foster's and Perrier awards would count against her.
"But it'll make it easier for us to organise our lives, and as I start to visibly fade away and become prematurely senile it would be great if she could do a tour next year."
He might even be able to tour biennially now.
"What I would like to do is do it every other year now and my wife could do the years in between.
"As I get older I find it harder to have ideas, partly because I dismiss things out of hand more quickly, and partly because nothing really happens to me any more.
"I don't have adventures. I don't interact with culture in any way. I just read newspapers and look after children. I don't have any experiences that I can write about so it's harder to come up with things."
So expect more invention from the comic's comic, because children are not a good source, for two reasons.
"Firstly: It is a fairly clichéd, well-worn subject. Secondly: it is someone else's life. The stuff I do ends up on television and YouTube now, so I can't talk about them because it is their lives, and their friends' parents will see it.
"Your children are a brilliant comic resource in your life, but they are other people so I don't think it's fair to go into too much detail. They're not a resource for me to pillage."
And while "the lack of material" means the first few weeks of a new show can be frightening, at least he gets a break from the offspring.
"At the beginning of a new show you feel sick and frightened. But by the time I get to Brighton I will be all right. And I do really enjoy it. Because for three hours no one is asking you any questions or getting you to do things or talking to you. So it's quite relaxing really."
Stewart Lee
2013-09-16T18:09:23+01:00
Deadpan, unfazed, poker-face comic Stewart Lee is exactly the same in interviews as on stage. He talks slowly, rarely changes pitch and delivers long answers, usually with a sardonic payoff. When he laughs, you take a deep breath: a small part of him, far below the surface, might actually be enjoying himself. "I think it's funny when a comedian does a miserable joke then steps out of character to let you know it's a joke," he says, speaking to The Guide from Hackney. "I like it when they hold their nerve." Often it is the listeners who need to hold their nerve after a Lee workout. "I don't want to be their friend. I want them to know I am going to do the show whatever. It's not necessarily to please them but if they like it they are welcome to enjoy it." He breaks into a childish laugh and admits that be it on stage in Sheffield or Glasgow or Brighton, with off-the-cuff prods or more formal and stylistic methods and longer jokes, he likes to see how far he can push the crowd. "It's good fun getting something to work that you thought wouldn't." He often gets criticised because his material confirms the prejudices and reaffirms the beliefs that people already have. Two nights of Brighton crowds, much of whom could be called his target market, sounds right up that street. "Brighton was one of the first places to really pick up with me. But it's funny, you say ‘target market', and you'd think it would be. The stereotype of my audience is Guardian-reading liberals, but actually over the past year it has become a lot more diverse. "I like to pretend it is all Guardian-reading liberals, and to berate them for their predictability in coming to see...
Mine is a generation of men that was defined by its underpants. We prized them for their garish styles and loud colours; and because they annoyed our baffled parents, still shell-shocked from the second world war; and because they told people – teachers, the police, girls – who we were. It is painful for men like us to accept, finally, that for our sons and our grandsons, underpants are unimportant, disposable products, designed to be worn once, ruined by shallow enjoyments, and then flung away filthy in the lane. It's hard for us to let go of our underpants. But the fact remains, the nonagenarian high-street giant HMP is in receivership as of last Monday and going down with it is everything we held dear.
The great and the good of a certain age let out their lamentations. The personality David Hepworth edited a succession of populist underpant magazines in the 80s, 90s and 00s, aimed at everyone from young, confused boys to elderly uncertain men. In Tuesday's Independent newspaper, Hepworth was hurriedly promised a gift voucher in exchange for remembering working at a branch of HMP in the 70s: "The queues for the tills stretched to the end of the queues," offered David, nostalgically. "In the 80s and 90s, when an underpant could be sold for more than £8, they were even longer. The only thing that men under 30 wanted was an underpant." Fine words, David. But, as Sir Kenneth Clark said in the opening of TV's Civilisation, fine words butter no parsnips. So what happened?
My showbiz friend the Hollywood film writer Peter Baynham, whose latest film features Adam Sandler as a Dracula, spoke morbidly of being a teenager in Cardiff in the 70s. He claimed he would visit Cardiff's famous independent underpant store, Spillers, each Saturday and spend his paper-round money on a colourful and up-to-the-minute underpant.
Then he would walk defiantly through Splott with the elasticated tummy band pulled dangerously high up out of his trousers to the mid-point of his torso, his underpant serving as a siren shriek to lure likeminded Splott (and Canton) youths into his orbit. But today's young people have Facespace and The Twitters to enable them to seek out soulmates. The day of the underpant as an essential badge of self-identification and an oiled funnel of adolescent social lubrication is long gone, a change HMP were sadly and fatally slow in anticipating.
For more than nine decades, the HMP logo, of a little dog burying a stolen pair of underpants in a dark wood, has been one of the world's most recognisable brands. But no more. I personally have taken quite a heavy financial hit from the collapse of HMP. I am a standup comedian and in 2004 I pioneered the now commonplace idea that comedians should sell bespoke souvenir underpants. My management company at the time pooh-poohed my pants and it fell to a Cardiff-based independent Go Faster Stripe to make a sideways move from making and selling novelty babygrows to marketing my Stewart Lee underpants online.
I have since shamed all other standups worldwide, including your new god Louis CK, by designing and producing an entirely new line of quality underpants every year, to the delight of broadsheet underpant critics and my loyal fanbase of underpant-wearing pseudo-intellectuals. Eight years since my old management dissed my pants, I had, for the first time, convinced HMP to provide me with a high street point of sale, and more than 30% of sales of the new carpet-textured underpant I launched last November had been over the counter of the ailing underpant giant. But now I will never see the money from those sales, my profits and my Chinese labour costs swallowed up by HMP's debts, my break-even point receding into the distance.
Without HMP, there is now no competition for tax-evading online underpant outlets, or for supermarket underpant retailers, who buy cheap underpants and sell them at a loss to entice shoppers in. This won't affect makers of pointless underpants adorned with the face of Michael McIntyre, a joke about cockerels, or a picture of The Stig, but makers of inherently worthwhile and clever underpants like mine will find it increasingly hard to operate cost-effectively. Big retailers will drive down the prices they'll pay suppliers per underpant, as surely as they have done with pints of milk. Pantufacturers have artificially propped up HMP for the past few years to avoid this Ballardian dystopia. And what did you do? Nothing.
The Twitters internet website was alive, on Tuesday, with opinion on HMP's demise. The Covent Garden musical theatre shop Dress Circle loomed up, like a terrible all-singing, all-dancing Aztec God of Death with the face of Sheridan Smith, to remind the music theatre community that it was "still open for all your disco pant needs". Sir Alan Sugar, anxious to maintain the illusion that he has some kind of insight, said he saw HMP's collapse coming two years ago (and yet he had been unable to foresee the immediate obsolescence of his own Amstrad GX4000 games console). And the rap-singer Professor Green, who is a professor of nothing, identified the abstract dimension to HMP's woes thus, writing: "We may as well give up on any medium that involves physical matter." Despite his lack of any real scientific qualifications, Green is on to something.
Like the visionary mystic Sir Alan Sugar, I too saw this coming. A decade ago, while in British Columbia researching an idea for a comedy character, I attended an internet industry conference in Chilliwack, the ground zero of Canada's own mushrooming silicon valley. A young internet entrepreneur did a presentation recommending the then unheard-of idea of virtual underpants. The virtual underpant was of course much cheaper to produce than its real-world counterpart, because it did not exist and remained legally the possession of the supplier after purchase.
To me, it appeared that the speaker was naked and yet my nerdy neighbour reassured me that the man was wearing a pair of the virtual pants, for promotional purposes, and that perhaps I wasn't "techno-savvy" enough to see them. "Besides," he said, without an ounce of sentimentality, "isn't it a drag how much goddam space jockeys take up in your apartment, eh?"
I pulled my underpants up above my trousers by the elasticated bellyband and invited him to stroke the cotton weave. The disdainful look on his face showed me that we were already doomed.
Stewart Lee is curating The Alternative Comedy Experience for Comedy Central, from 5 February. His latest DVD, Carpet Remnant World, is now 35% less easily available than it was a week ago.
Stewart Lee
2013-01-20T14:11:11+00:00
Mine is a generation of men that was defined by its underpants. We prized them for their garish styles and loud colours; and because they annoyed our baffled parents, still shell-shocked from the second world war; and because they told people – teachers, the police, girls – who we were. It is painful for men like us to accept, finally, that for our sons and our grandsons, underpants are unimportant, disposable products, designed to be worn once, ruined by shallow enjoyments, and then flung away filthy in the lane. It's hard for us to let go of our underpants. But the fact remains, the nonagenarian high-street giant HMP is in receivership as of last Monday and going down with it is everything we held dear. The great and the good of a certain age let out their lamentations. The personality David Hepworth edited a succession of populist underpant magazines in the 80s, 90s and 00s, aimed at everyone from young, confused boys to elderly uncertain men. In Tuesday's Independent newspaper, Hepworth was hurriedly promised a gift voucher in exchange for remembering working at a branch of HMP in the 70s: "The queues for the tills stretched to the end of the queues," offered David, nostalgically. "In the 80s and 90s, when an underpant could be sold for more than £8, they were even longer. The only thing that men under 30 wanted was an underpant." Fine words, David. But, as Sir Kenneth Clark said in the opening of TV's Civilisation, fine words butter no parsnips. So what happened? My showbiz friend the Hollywood film writer Peter Baynham, whose latest film features Adam Sandler as a Dracula, spoke morbidly of being a teenager in Cardiff in the 70s. He claimed he would visit Cardiff's famous independent underpant store, Spillers, each Saturday...
Martin Carthy, English folk pioneer and national treasure, celebrates his 70th birthday at the Royal Festival Hall next weekend, and here's a two disc career overview.
The hypnotic, chunky, acoustic guitar style arrives fully-formed on the earliest tracks, from '65 and '66, pulsating round the purloined ur-folk licks on which Paul Simon and Bob Dylan built their breakthroughs.
Psychically sympathetic modal duets with the fiddler Dave Swarbrick remain timelessly intense. By a 2004 reading of Famous Flower Of Serving Men, ten minutes of head-drone render contemporary acid folk obsolete, and Carthy's once reedy vocal has a Methuselaic authority, his playing flowing like blood.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-08T11:23:07+01:00
Martin Carthy, English folk pioneer and national treasure, celebrates his 70th birthday at the Royal Festival Hall next weekend, and here's a two disc career overview. The hypnotic, chunky, acoustic guitar style arrives fully-formed on the earliest tracks, from '65 and '66, pulsating round the purloined ur-folk licks on which Paul Simon and Bob Dylan built their breakthroughs. Psychically sympathetic modal duets with the fiddler Dave Swarbrick remain timelessly intense. By a 2004 reading of Famous Flower Of Serving Men, ten minutes of head-drone render contemporary acid folk obsolete, and Carthy's once reedy vocal has a Methuselaic authority, his playing flowing like blood.
In the last decade, Stewart Lee has been at the peak of his powers. Increasingly over this time he has channelled his comedy through a carefully constructed onstage persona, a parody of himself. The embittered, envious comic going through mid-life crisis, brimming with self-regard, obsessed with his own status and resentful and contemptuous of his audience. This version of himself was particularly (and very amusingly) antipathetic and antagonistic in his previous show Content Provider which was a beautifully crafted comedy set that, to my mind, further cemented his status as Britain’s finest comedian.
In his new show, Snowflake/Tornado he sardonically explores many themes which will be familiar to his audience from his status and place in the comedy world to political correctness. Despite the familiar thematic ground, it didn’t feel stale and his act contained several pleasing new twists. It was a delight to see him live in action again. So much so that I will be seeing him again in Leeds in March.
By way of introduction, Lee laments his physical decline and acknowledges the immediately noticeable fact that he has got fatter and greyer since his last tour (“I know what you’re thinking, Julian Assange has let himself go”). His exploration of the indignities of his decay kicked off the set as he told us of his recent visit to the doctor where a nurse expressed sympathy and advised him to try “chair based” exercise.
There were fewer overtly political references in his set this time, but an early comment provided Lee with the opportunity to mock himself and his (liberal love-in) audience who have been “starved of the opportunity to participate in mass agreement” over the last two years. This began a consistent theme of defending liberal sensibilities and “snowflake” PC culture while also mocking them and being far more savage and confrontational than a self-professed snowflake is supposed to be.
The show is essentially two sets separated by an interval which explore similar themes but shift the focus. In Tornado he riffs on his place in the world of comedy and how others perceive him, which is explored through his petty, bitter caricature of himself, obsessed with his status and always the butt of his own joke. There are plenty of laughs squeezed out of his faux self-regard with frequent references to The Times naming him the world’s best living comedian, “heavy is the head that wears the crown”.
The foundation of Tornado is Netflix erroneously using the blurb from absurd American horror film Sharknado to describe his award winning tv series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle – an error that remained in place for two years. This provides the framework through which Lee explores his status and compares himself to more famous mainstream comedians, such as Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr (who get both barrels).
The first half climaxes gloriously in a self-mocking parody of Alan Bennett’s prose complete with an impression (“yes, I’m doing impressions now”). This was inspired by Bennett’s pretentiously high brow review of Lee’s stand up in which he bizarrely compared him to obscure philosophers. “Stewart Lee is the JL Austin of stand up… that’s a great quote for the poster”.
The second part of the show, Snowflake, kicks off with an attack on Tony Parsons’ criticism of Lee in GQ magazine in which he referred to him as “the rancid tip of a cesspit” and develops into a defence of political correctness via poking fun at his gran’s generation lamenting the things they can’t say and confusing PC culture with health and safety regulation.
He takes aim at Gervais again by ridiculing the idea that he says “the unsayable”, pointing out that “he’s not saying the unsayable, he’s saying the sayable. By definition. To millions of people for millions of dollars”. This characteristically veers off into a surreal and purposely overlong endurance test for the audience as he attempts to “say the unsayable” by gasping and groaning into the microphone as he becomes increasingly sweaty and red-faced. The laughs crescendo then dip into awkwardness before looping back round into laughs.
A highlight of the second half of the show is his sharp ridicule of the overblown, over reverential reaction to Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her show “Fleabag”. It was a a show I thought amusing and enjoyable myself, but I was also baffled by the extent of the praise and sudden explosion of Waller-Bridge mania.
Lee deconstructs the excessive praise lavished on Waller-Bridge and her award-winning show (“remember how different everything was before she invented looking at the camera and addressing the audience?”). This leads to a surreal riff on how different everything from stand up to weather forecast might have been if only they’d thought to directly address the audience and onto an exploration of what a “woke”, PC version of Bond might look like (which descends into Bond raping a range of small animals).
Tornado/Snowflake is a satisfying mix of the familiar and new. With Lee’s familiar criticism of his audience for not upping their game (he frequently lamented us being a typical “new years crowd” not reacting to certain bits as planned. There was plenty of his classic “callbacks”, digressions and self-mocking deconstruction of his own craft.
However, new elements such as the two literary spoofs were fresh and contained some of his best writing. In the first half he read “Sharknado” as written by Alan Bennett and in the second he read – in one of the wittiest parts of the routine – Enid Blyton’s “Noddy and the gollywog”.
Of course, there were several moments unique to the night as Lee reacted to the audience. With one bit of material being completely abandoned as a young member of the audience suddenly had to rush out, leading Lee to go off on an unscripted tangent.
Lee is touring Tornado/Snowflake across the country through to July and he will likely continue to develop the material in the run up to recording. While it didn’t quite hit the heights of Content Provider, this was still a masterful performance from Britain’s finest comedian and I laughed out loud throughout.
Stewart Lee
2020-01-11T16:42:58+00:00
In the last decade, Stewart Lee has been at the peak of his powers. Increasingly over this time he has channelled his comedy through a carefully constructed onstage persona, a parody of himself. The embittered, envious comic going through mid-life crisis, brimming with self-regard, obsessed with his own status and resentful and contemptuous of his audience. This version of himself was particularly (and very amusingly) antipathetic and antagonistic in his previous show Content Provider which was a beautifully crafted comedy set that, to my mind, further cemented his status as Britain’s finest comedian. In his new show, Snowflake/Tornado he sardonically explores many themes which will be familiar to his audience from his status and place in the comedy world to political correctness. Despite the familiar thematic ground, it didn’t feel stale and his act contained several pleasing new twists. It was a delight to see him live in action again. So much so that I will be seeing him again in Leeds in March. By way of introduction, Lee laments his physical decline and acknowledges the immediately noticeable fact that he has got fatter and greyer since his last tour (“I know what you’re thinking, Julian Assange has let himself go”). His exploration of the indignities of his decay kicked off the set as he told us of his recent visit to the doctor where a nurse expressed sympathy and advised him to try “chair based” exercise. There were fewer overtly political references in his set this time, but an early comment provided Lee with the opportunity to mock himself and his (liberal love-in) audience who have been “starved of the opportunity to participate in mass agreement” over the last two years. This began a consistent theme of defending liberal sensibilities and “snowflake” PC culture while also mocking them and...
Advantages: Master of the craft performs finely honed routines about significant stuff.
Disadvantages: Repeats much material from previous years.
Stewart Lee's new Edinburgh show is a literal egg box of laughs. Having spent much of the year in his hard-pressed job as a stand-up comedian (the hardest job in the world apparently) writing new routines and plagiarising his own substantial back catalogue for next year's BBC series 'Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle,' the squashed Albert Finney conjured up the conceit of using a box of numbered eggs to randomly determine each night's set-list. Unless you're attending the half-price preview before the Fringe has really begun, in which the comedian confesses he hasn't learned all of the routines yet, and an audience member is offered the more limited selection of choosing any three eggs from the front row of three. It spoils the sense of adventure somewhat, but the tickets were only £5 so there's no reason to complain. You want the moon on a stick.
Despite being advertised as 'a mix of new material, and material that's so old it seems new' (unless you approached the show on the malfunctioning EdFringe website where it was bizarrely billed as a tragic comedy about a frustrated obituary writer befriending a very old woman), much of the material is taken directly from the comedian's previous three stand-up tours, that fans might like to imagine qualify as a trilogy insofar as there were three of them in relatively close proximity. As of yet, there's none of the cocky absurdity of Lee's nineties work, which is a shame, but the material is still some of the strongest on the Fringe, and works as something of a greatest hits collection of 21st century Stewart Lee. It's just a shame that long-time fans will have heard much of this before, as will anyone who purchased his DVDs.
Consciously avoiding the story and crescendo elements of his usual hour-long shows, the three routines (whatever they may be) are self-contained entities bridged by Lee checking a piece of scrap paper and announcing 'now I'll talk about political correctness,' but his twenty years of experience in professional stand-up still allow him to refer back to previous material when it becomes relevant again, creating some sense of progression and structure. Lee's on-stage persona is self-assured without being arrogant, self-deprecating without seeking pity and, most of all, intimidatingly smart, and the issues he explores in detail in these twenty-minute routines are mature and thought-provoking.
From personal issues with the low standards of the general public to his justified fears of being misinterpreted, Lee paints a detailed picture of the life of a stand-up comedian and the responsibilities that come with the job, all inspired by a second-hand LP of Franklyn Ajaye that he admits he's never felt the need to actually listen to. Religion is inevitably discussed again, Lee being no stranger to reprisals after co-writing and directing 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' and suffering from the partially successful protests of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, and political correctness is discussed in a more reasoned manner than you'd expect from the Stand, illustrated with experiences from Lee's own life now he's reached the ancient milestone of forty.
For fans, 'Scrambled Egg' promises to be an exciting show that invites a return visit, but is disappointing for being based largely in material that's not yet so old that it seems new. While the material is essentially as scattered and arbitrary as Lee's previous shows, the self-contained pieces don't permit the grand finales that proved so rewarding in the comedian's 2004 and 2005 shows, but depending on the material selected, there's still a chance to see the performer's trademark mental breakdown set-piece. For non-fans, this is a great opportunity to see one of the best comedians in the country ploughing through finely honed routines without any weak links, a show that informs as much as it amuses. At the very least, you might leave knowing more about jazz than you did before.
'Stewart Lee: Scrambled Egg' is on at the Stand One, Sundays to Thursdays from 3rd to 24th August 2008 (not 8th, 9th, 15th, 16th, 22nd or 23rd) at 7:45pm, lasting one hour. Tickets cost £10.
Summary: 'In a town where no-one dies, a frustrated obituary writer befriends a very old woman.'
Stewart Lee
2008-07-31T13:46:24+01:00
Advantages: Master of the craft performs finely honed routines about significant stuff. Disadvantages: Repeats much material from previous years. Stewart Lee's new Edinburgh show is a literal egg box of laughs. Having spent much of the year in his hard-pressed job as a stand-up comedian (the hardest job in the world apparently) writing new routines and plagiarising his own substantial back catalogue for next year's BBC series 'Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle,' the squashed Albert Finney conjured up the conceit of using a box of numbered eggs to randomly determine each night's set-list. Unless you're attending the half-price preview before the Fringe has really begun, in which the comedian confesses he hasn't learned all of the routines yet, and an audience member is offered the more limited selection of choosing any three eggs from the front row of three. It spoils the sense of adventure somewhat, but the tickets were only £5 so there's no reason to complain. You want the moon on a stick. Despite being advertised as 'a mix of new material, and material that's so old it seems new' (unless you approached the show on the malfunctioning EdFringe website where it was bizarrely billed as a tragic comedy about a frustrated obituary writer befriending a very old woman), much of the material is taken directly from the comedian's previous three stand-up tours, that fans might like to imagine qualify as a trilogy insofar as there were three of them in relatively close proximity. As of yet, there's none of the cocky absurdity of Lee's nineties work, which is a shame, but the material is still some of the strongest on the Fringe, and works as something of a greatest hits collection of 21st century Stewart Lee. It's just a shame that long-time fans will have heard much of...
Fun might be stretching it, but Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (Thursday, BBC Two) continues its fourth season of his scorched earth approach to stand-up and real-life hypocrisy. This week the focus was on Islamophobia, but he also dealt with Quakers and porridge, Mormons* (their Watchtower magazine, to be precise), as well as the average angry Islamophobe watching telly. He even managed plenty of digs at comedians who have a preference for observational comedy.
I spent the opening few minutes laughing my head off, but most of the time I just marvelled at a comedian who, with razor-sharp wit and great timing, cut through more crap than any comedian I've heard or seen since Bill Hicks. Thursday nights on BBC Two, though. It's a wonder it's not in Danish, using subtitles and desperately grim.
*Note - this bit did not reference Mormons, as stated in this article, it referenced Jehovah's Witnesses.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-15T22:16:02+00:00
Fun might be stretching it, but Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (Thursday, BBC Two) continues its fourth season of his scorched earth approach to stand-up and real-life hypocrisy. This week the focus was on Islamophobia, but he also dealt with Quakers and porridge, Mormons* (their Watchtower magazine, to be precise), as well as the average angry Islamophobe watching telly. He even managed plenty of digs at comedians who have a preference for observational comedy. I spent the opening few minutes laughing my head off, but most of the time I just marvelled at a comedian who, with razor-sharp wit and great timing, cut through more crap than any comedian I've heard or seen since Bill Hicks. Thursday nights on BBC Two, though. It's a wonder it's not in Danish, using subtitles and desperately grim. *Note - this bit did not reference Mormons, as stated in this article, it referenced Jehovah's Witnesses.
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 £80,000 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.
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.
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 £12.50 here.
0844 871 7615
Charity Website: HelpRefugees.org
Twitter: @ChooseLaughs
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
Stewart Lee
2018-11-23T13:44:33+00:00
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 £80,000 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 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...
What better way to understand ourselves than through the eyes of comedians - those who professionally examine our quirks on stage daily? In this touching and witty book, award-winning presenter and comic Robin Ince uses the life of the stand-up as a way of exploring some of the biggest questions we all face. Where does anxiety come from? How do we overcome imposter syndrome? What is the key to creativity? How can we deal with grief?
Informed by personal insights from Robin as well as interviews with some of the world's top comedians, neuroscientists and psychologists, this is a hilarious and often moving primer to the mind. But it is also a powerful call to embrace the full breadth of our inner experience - no matter how strange we worry it may be!
Stewart Lee
2018-10-15T17:38:30+01:00
I wrote the foreword for Robin Ince's new book. What better way to understand ourselves than through the eyes of comedians - those who professionally examine our quirks on stage daily? In this touching and witty book, award-winning presenter and comic Robin Ince uses the life of the stand-up as a way of exploring some of the biggest questions we all face. Where does anxiety come from? How do we overcome imposter syndrome? What is the key to creativity? How can we deal with grief? Informed by personal insights from Robin as well as interviews with some of the world's top comedians, neuroscientists and psychologists, this is a hilarious and often moving primer to the mind. But it is also a powerful call to embrace the full breadth of our inner experience - no matter how strange we worry it may be!
For the lazy journalist, the Cincinnati rock band the Afghan Whigs are "the Motown Nirvana'', a combination of soul melodies and post-grunge guitar squall. For the casual observer, their sharp suits, unashamed showmanship and, at times, downright funky sound represent a clean break from the alternative-rock peer group they themselves have described as "slovenly''.
Their fourth album, Gentlemen, from 1993, was a stifling mesh of Jacobean jealousy and infidelity; in it their musical influences finally gelled and their charismatic frontman, Greg Dulli, an uncommonly articulate square-jawed young Robert De Niro, first found his personal voice. It describes the ugly collapse of a once-treasured relationship and is an uncomfortable, even embarrassing, listen. But was Gentlemen really the naked confessional it seemed, or just the posturing of an admittedly skilful character actor?
"Well, I have been an actor in the past," admits Dulli, a former film student, "but there are songs from Gentlemen I won't sing any more. To go on stage and plumb those depths, without feeling it, would seem maudlin and arrogant and disrespectful to a precious memory.''
There is a verse in When We Two Parted that begins: "I should have seen this s coming down the hall, every night I spent in that bed with you facing the wall.'' As Dulli growls out the words, there are couples in every Whigs live audience shifting uneasily on their feet in half-recognition of a shame they've clocked but never discussed. "Yeah, I accidentally stumbled on a truism and didn't realise it until I heard it back. That was the one that really got my ex.''
Going to Town, on the new LP, Black Love (out now on Mute Records), was a breakthrough song for Dulli. It describes two lovers driving away from the small town they have just torched, and was his first lyric that wasn't based on personal experience. "I never burnt down a town,'' he protests.
The new album attempts to put a respectful distance between his writing and his life. ``People were maybe hurt by some of what I've written before. A lot of Gentlemen was spiteful and childish. This time, I'm holding my cards a little closer. I'm finding I can inhabit songs rather than live them.''
Maybe the territory mapped by America's best young songwriters reflects that of its greatest modern novelists, the ``dirty realists''. But while Dulli was once, like the late Charles Bukowski, nobly bearing the burden of drunken misanthropy on our behalf, he isn't yet the late Raymond Carver, giving voice to the hopes and fears of others. Black Love suffers lyrically because of this, it is never as focused or consistent as Gentlemen.
Musically, though, the band continues to develop. Blame Etc adds a funky wah-wah Isaac Hayes-style sound to the band's canon. The Afghan Whigs are among a minority of groups that can plunder the sounds of the past and transcend pastiche, somehow retaining an emotional, irony-free core. The Britpop band Blur, for example, are so musically knowing and so lyrically self-conscious that if they were ever to have a genuine feeling, they'd find themselves stylistically denied the tools to articulate it.
Recently, Dulli turned up at a photo session black-eyed and bruised. The night before, he had got into a fight in a London hotel bar, and the press cuttings say he beat a guy with a chair "until he stopped moving''. "I have a temper,'' he admits. "It's been a problem. I regret the incident now and I've been advised not to speak about it.'' Someone, somewhere must have imagined the subsequent photos would add a level of integrity to Dulli's wounded-lover persona. Instead, they are caricatured and crass. And a black eye isn't such an impressive badge of honour in rock'n'roll terms anyway. After all, the bluesman Robert Johnson was killed by a jealous cuckold.
"I just showed up at the photo session to honour a commitment and I could see them thinking, "Hey, we got a live one here!''' recalls Dulli. "But I played a willing part in it. That photo... it's a photo of an immature person... I coulda been killed and it would have been my fault.''
The Scottish space-rock band the Telstar Ponies have an obscure early B-side called Thanks But No Thanks Mr Dulli, an elliptical, but apparently vindictive, attack on the hapless American. Their gleeful press release said it described a failed chat-up attempt by Dulli. "They say I tried to hit on one of their girlfriends, but I don't remember anything about it,'' he says. "Maybe I'll learn the song and perform it on tour,'' he adds. "Sometimes, one has to laugh in the face of the aggressor rather than throw a fist at him.'' Dulli is growing up.
Stewart Lee
1996-03-01T16:34:13+00:00
For the lazy journalist, the Cincinnati rock band the Afghan Whigs are "the Motown Nirvana'', a combination of soul melodies and post-grunge guitar squall. For the casual observer, their sharp suits, unashamed showmanship and, at times, downright funky sound represent a clean break from the alternative-rock peer group they themselves have described as "slovenly''. Their fourth album, Gentlemen, from 1993, was a stifling mesh of Jacobean jealousy and infidelity; in it their musical influences finally gelled and their charismatic frontman, Greg Dulli, an uncommonly articulate square-jawed young Robert De Niro, first found his personal voice. It describes the ugly collapse of a once-treasured relationship and is an uncomfortable, even embarrassing, listen. But was Gentlemen really the naked confessional it seemed, or just the posturing of an admittedly skilful character actor? "Well, I have been an actor in the past," admits Dulli, a former film student, "but there are songs from Gentlemen I won't sing any more. To go on stage and plumb those depths, without feeling it, would seem maudlin and arrogant and disrespectful to a precious memory.'' There is a verse in When We Two Parted that begins: "I should have seen this s coming down the hall, every night I spent in that bed with you facing the wall.'' As Dulli growls out the words, there are couples in every Whigs live audience shifting uneasily on their feet in half-recognition of a shame they've clocked but never discussed. "Yeah, I accidentally stumbled on a truism and didn't realise it until I heard it back. That was the one that really got my ex.'' Going to Town, on the new LP, Black Love (out now on Mute Records), was a breakthrough song for Dulli. It describes two lovers driving away from the small town they have just torched, and...
The older the listener gets the more sense the gnomic beatnik platitudes of Dave Graney, the Lee Hazelwood of suburban Melbourne, make; functional philosophy, crooned over coiled leads and funk-footed rhythms.
Transcending his punk past, and his subsequent immersions in the various genre fictions of country, lounge and songwriter styles, Graney sculpts the slick Seventies rock of his youth, unsentimentally anatomized in the pin-sharp recitation Mt Gambier Nights, into a series of sparkling as-live sides.
Ventriloquising various delusional deadbeats, or hidden in deep cover self-mythologising, Graney quietly releases another late career classic into the wild.
Stewart Lee
2012-07-22T19:52:56+01:00
The older the listener gets the more sense the gnomic beatnik platitudes of Dave Graney, the Lee Hazelwood of suburban Melbourne, make; functional philosophy, crooned over coiled leads and funk-footed rhythms. Transcending his punk past, and his subsequent immersions in the various genre fictions of country, lounge and songwriter styles, Graney sculpts the slick Seventies rock of his youth, unsentimentally anatomized in the pin-sharp recitation Mt Gambier Nights, into a series of sparkling as-live sides. Ventriloquising various delusional deadbeats, or hidden in deep cover self-mythologising, Graney quietly releases another late career classic into the wild.
For a man who professes to dislike the internet so much, Stewart Lee is an ardent fan on one of its trendiest aspects: the meme.
His act is almost entirely based around the recurrence of motifs: building them up in the audience's mind and returning back to them again and again, hoping that the growing conspiracy of insider knowledge that he creates in the auditorium will repay with bigger laughs with every reoccurence.
The most wicked part of this conceit is that Lee is so naked in its pursuit - actively bragging about the emptiness of his show while taking close to £20 a seat from a near-sell out Theatre Royal crowd - and that the audience loved it.
So he gets away with a show that has Scooby Doo, self-aggrandising shop names, and the acts of other comics as its main themes, and does so with enviable panache, deceitful confidence and a still-growing fan base after more than two decades as a professional comedian.
He can do this because as well as pursuing an almost Platonic study of comedy he is very funny. Alongside the metaphysical dispositions there are very good gags, both of the bold, crude kind, and slow burning jokes that take hold after a few cogs have turned in the listener's head.
Lee made much of his previous visits to Norwich at the Art Centre and the Playhouse, and was perhaps too close with an observation that his style of comedy works better in smaller venues.
It deserves Theatre Royal-sized audiences and their big belly laughs though.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-11T14:00:55+00:00
For a man who professes to dislike the internet so much, Stewart Lee is an ardent fan on one of its trendiest aspects: the meme. His act is almost entirely based around the recurrence of motifs: building them up in the audience's mind and returning back to them again and again, hoping that the growing conspiracy of insider knowledge that he creates in the auditorium will repay with bigger laughs with every reoccurence. The most wicked part of this conceit is that Lee is so naked in its pursuit - actively bragging about the emptiness of his show while taking close to £20 a seat from a near-sell out Theatre Royal crowd - and that the audience loved it. So he gets away with a show that has Scooby Doo, self-aggrandising shop names, and the acts of other comics as its main themes, and does so with enviable panache, deceitful confidence and a still-growing fan base after more than two decades as a professional comedian. He can do this because as well as pursuing an almost Platonic study of comedy he is very funny. Alongside the metaphysical dispositions there are very good gags, both of the bold, crude kind, and slow burning jokes that take hold after a few cogs have turned in the listener's head. Lee made much of his previous visits to Norwich at the Art Centre and the Playhouse, and was perhaps too close with an observation that his style of comedy works better in smaller venues. It deserves Theatre Royal-sized audiences and their big belly laughs though.
Can it be only last year that I was making the out-of-touch liberal elite laugh, in publicly subsidised theatres throughout pre-Brexit Britain, by saying that “Donald Trump” sounded like the kind of name Walt Disney would come up with if he was asked to invent a fart that could speak?
Happy times.
It seemed then that Donald Trump was destined to become little more than the answer to a pub trivia question, fondly and foolishly remembered, and filed alongside Faith Brown’s Rusty Lee impression, Spike Milligan’s sitcom Curry & Chips, and an almost heroically offensive sentence my dad shouted at a woman on a gangplank near Greenwich in 1997 as an example of the dying light of a distant dark age.
And can it be only last year that Brexit’s bogus cheerleader Boris Johnson, who remains incomprehensibly at large like a clever piglet, was reassuring us that we could leave the EU and stay in the single market, as his policy was “having cake and eating it”? Where is your cake now, fatty? Or, as Pliny the Younger might have said, “Ubi nunc est subcinericius panis, sterculus?”
And can it be only two days ago that a cakeless Theresa May, desperate to proffer illusory options before forcing through article 50 with the compliance of an immolated opposition, went lamb-like into the Playboy-encrusted office of Donald Trump? Friendless in Europe, she began trade negotiations with the kind of rogue state we might once have proudly imposed sanctions on. We didn’t buy Apartheid oranges. Henceforth let us boycott Dunkin’ Donuts, hardcore pornography and Adam Sandler movies, America’s most choice exports.
Article 50 was not designed to be triggered; nuclear weapons were not built to be used (which is lucky for us, because ours don’t work); and postwar western democracies weren’t supposed to vomit up people like Donald Trump, who appears to have reignited a war against the Native Americans, a conflict historians might reasonably have assumed was now settled. Things have learned to walk that ought to crawl.
Events defy analysis. Sometimes it simply isn’t enough to just keep on drawing Nazi moustaches on Donald Trump’s face – by which I mean on pictures of Donald Trump’s face. Not his actual face. If you so much as approached Trump’s face with a marker pen you would soon be wrestled to the ground by the rubber-hands of his bodyguard, and then waterboarded until you agreed to disputed inauguration audience figures. To analyse Donald Trump we need better tools than felt tips. It seems to me that prophecies of Donald Trump have been built into the culture, perhaps by the very alien scientists that seeded us on Earth in the first place.
Before I seek Donald Trump in cinema, I am aware that my film buff credentials are in doubt. In last week’s column, I ignorantly mixed up two Dirty Harry movies. To be fair, it has been a hard month for fans of Clint Eastwood, whose endorsement of Donald Trump has finally meant we must face the fact that the violent reactionary characters our hero portrayed in the 1970s were not intended as satires of violent reactionary attitudes, but as blueprints for a dystopian future.
Indeed, I am now wondering if Eastwood’s touching portrayal of a weird loner’s dysfunctional relationship with a servile orangutan in the haunting visual poem Every Which Way But Loose (1978) was actually intended as a misogynist endorsement of traditional marriage.
Fans of fake news will be pleased to know that my Dirty Harry error has been erased from history on the Observer’s website. As regular readers will know, the only films I have really watched these past few years are Italian “spaghetti” westerns of the 60s and 70s. I have now seen 112, and sheer weight of numbers makes it seem like spaghetti westerns make sense of every human problem. Like Donald Trump’s tweets, they are often tasteless, incoherent and badly written, and yet somehow seem to offer exactly the answers people need.
Last weekend I sat up late alone, eating some nuts, and watched Joe D’Amato’s micro-budget 1972 shambles Pokerface, a spaghetti that’s hard to recommend, even to genre stalwarts. Variously also known as Run Men Run, Trinity in Eldorado, Stay Away from Trinity When He Comes to Eldorado, Run Men Eldorado Is Coming to Trinity, and, rather brilliantly, Go Away! Trinity Has Arrived in Eldorado, the movie’s very titles, like spellings of Theresa May’s name, are post-factual, alternative names telling alternative truths. The same shot of a laughing Mexican eating something outdoors is repeated over and over again, at different points in the film, to fill empty space. The movie itself lies. The images cannot be trusted.
Pokerface stars Stelvio Rosi, last heard of as the line producer of the 1997 Ice Cube/giant snake vehicle Anaconda, as a magician-cum-conman involved in a series of unfunny scrapes in a blandly anonymous borderland. But just as I was getting ready to hit the hay, the last third of the film changed gear, and loomed like a warning from history.
Rosi arrives in a deserted, whitewashed town, ruled over by an eccentric gold-hoarding demagogue named Eldorado (Craig Hill), who rides around on an ostentatiously decorated nag, in a general’s uniform one suspects he is not entitled to wear. Frightened Mexican peasants bow to Eldorado as he rides past, and then he spits theatrically upon them from above. His garish throne is flanked by semi-naked women, instructed to laugh at his jokes and applaud his thoughts. He cries out, “My gold, my beautiful gold!” and is easily distracted by nudity and card tricks. It’s 2am, I am full of nuts, future sexploitation director D’Amato’s broad-brushed caricature of crazed power is Donald Trump, made flesh in a cheap 70s western, and I claim my £5.
But were D’Amato’s sticky fingers guided by a godlike power, warning us of our future? There are more antecedents for Trump, as if some unseen hand had threaded cautionary archetypes into our collective consciousness, perhaps the finest being the Golem of Jewish folklore. The rabbi of medieval Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, conjures a compliant monster to defend the ghetto. But he forgets to remove from its mouth the rune that brought it to life, and the Golem begins an indiscriminate rampage.
Some critics believe the story to be a 19th-century German literary invention. Fake news, folks! Fake news!! But little America has unleashed a monster of its own making, which it thought would do its bidding, and now no one knows how to bring it to a halt. Somehow I don’t think Theresa May is about to put it back in its box.
Stewart Lee
2017-01-29T16:44:58+00:00
Can it be only last year that I was making the out-of-touch liberal elite laugh, in publicly subsidised theatres throughout pre-Brexit Britain, by saying that “Donald Trump” sounded like the kind of name Walt Disney would come up with if he was asked to invent a fart that could speak? Happy times. It seemed then that Donald Trump was destined to become little more than the answer to a pub trivia question, fondly and foolishly remembered, and filed alongside Faith Brown’s Rusty Lee impression, Spike Milligan’s sitcom Curry & Chips, and an almost heroically offensive sentence my dad shouted at a woman on a gangplank near Greenwich in 1997 as an example of the dying light of a distant dark age. And can it be only last year that Brexit’s bogus cheerleader Boris Johnson, who remains incomprehensibly at large like a clever piglet, was reassuring us that we could leave the EU and stay in the single market, as his policy was “having cake and eating it”? Where is your cake now, fatty? Or, as Pliny the Younger might have said, “Ubi nunc est subcinericius panis, sterculus?” And can it be only two days ago that a cakeless Theresa May, desperate to proffer illusory options before forcing through article 50 with the compliance of an immolated opposition, went lamb-like into the Playboy-encrusted office of Donald Trump? Friendless in Europe, she began trade negotiations with the kind of rogue state we might once have proudly imposed sanctions on. We didn’t buy Apartheid oranges. Henceforth let us boycott Dunkin’ Donuts, hardcore pornography and Adam Sandler movies, America’s most choice exports. Article 50 was not designed to be triggered; nuclear weapons were not built to be used (which is lucky for us, because ours don’t work); and postwar western democracies weren’t supposed to...
Hardy perennials of the boutique arty indie festival circuit, Bardo Pond have spent two decades dowsing Terrastock and All Tomorrow’s Parties punters with reliably transportative swathes of feedback drenched psychedelia.
But, quietly and incrementally, they grow ever more majestic.
Isobel Sollenberger’s whale mother vocals and delicate flute parts float through a stew now equal parts fire music free jazz and sulphurous bad acid blues.
Like bikers meditating in a zen garden, Bardo Pond’s genius is in the collision of contrasts.
(17/11/13)
Stewart Lee
2013-11-17T01:13:34+00:00
Hardy perennials of the boutique arty indie festival circuit, Bardo Pond have spent two decades dowsing Terrastock and All Tomorrow’s Parties punters with reliably transportative swathes of feedback drenched psychedelia. But, quietly and incrementally, they grow ever more majestic. Isobel Sollenberger’s whale mother vocals and delicate flute parts float through a stew now equal parts fire music free jazz and sulphurous bad acid blues. Like bikers meditating in a zen garden, Bardo Pond’s genius is in the collision of contrasts. (17/11/13)
1. Stewart Lee: on Brexit, his new film, "woke" and being arrested just for being English
The comedy genius that is Stewart Lee discusses his must-see new film King Rocker - which premiers on Sky Arts on 6th February at 9pm; the state of comedy; the anti-"woke" backlash; culture wars; Brexit; how the pandemic is hitting the arts; and how these days, if you say you're English, you get arrested and thrown in jail.
Please like, subscribe and help us build this channel: https://patreon.com/owenjones84
1. Stewart Lee: on Brexit, his new film, "woke" and being arrested just for being English The comedy genius that is Stewart Lee discusses his must-see new film King Rocker - which premiers on Sky Arts on 6th February at 9pm; the state of comedy; the anti-"woke" backlash; culture wars; Brexit; how the pandemic is hitting the arts; and how these days, if you say you're English, you get arrested and thrown in jail. Please like, subscribe and help us build this channel: https://patreon.com/owenjones84 Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-owen-jones-podcast.
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 left to be discovered. But On The Shore, the second and final album from the English folk rock band Trees, may yet be approached and appreciated in innocence, free from unwanted associations. Trees formed in London in 1969, and spluttered to a halt in 1972, barely a footnote in musical history. Since then, On The Shore’s legend has grown slowly underground these last thirty-five years. In the Spring of 2006, the track ‘Geordie’ was sampled by a chart-topping pop group called Gnarls Barkley after a recommendation from the proprietor of Ladbroke Grove’s Minus Zero record store, and the album was given a final push back into the sunlight. On The Shore’s re-emergence is timely. “Folk is the new rare groove”, declared the London listings magazine Time Out in June 2006. But the raggle-taggle troubadours of the Nu-Folk movement are retro indie-rockers in disguise, whilst On The Shore’s psychedelic-folk fusion was all but unprecedented, and its tone of strange, otherworldly, almost sinister ambivalence has remained impossible to counterfeit.
Trees formed through a network of friends and acquaintances. The first time the folk guitarist David Costa met the lead guitarist Barry Clarke they immediately got out their instruments, played together, and, it being 1969, decided to form a band. Bassist and songwriter Bias Boshell lived in the same house as Barry, and he’d been at the famous Hampshire non-conformist school Bedales with drummer Unwin Brown. Celia Humphris, the singer, was the sister of a workmate of David’s. “David asked her if she knew any female singers for a new band,” Celia recalls, “She suggested me and made me go to the audition. I was totally involved in my studies at drama school and really had no interest in leaving but I went anyway, had never heard of any of the songs they wanted me to sing, like The Incredible String Band’s October Song, so I sang Summertime and left saying “thanks, but...” and then changed my mind overnight!”
Given the arbitrary nature of its genesis, how did Trees settle on such a distinct sound? “I was a nice north London Jewish boy who grew up inexplicably fascinated with the folk scene in and around the Hampstead folk clubs,” David remembers in the design studio he now heads, “The Chalk Farm Enterprise, The Hole In The Wall, one in Flask Walk in Hampstead that I can’t remember the name of, one in Harrow, and Les Cousins in Soho. We were all down there, hanging out, in our black polar necks being terribly beatnik, terribly cool, assumed it was French and always called it Lay Coozan. It was only a couple of years ago I found out that the guy who owned it was actually called Les Cousins.” The 15 year old folk fan befriended Martin Carthy, today viewed as the godfather of modern English traditional music. “I was hugely influenced by Martin but my real love was for the Americanisation of the basic British folk ballads, like a Xerox of a Xerox. When the received tradition becomes that convoluted, it folds over itself so many times you get very surreal, distorted lyrics and wonderful aural accidents simply as a result of mis-hearing.”
“David introduced us to the wonderfully rich, exciting and vibrant world of traditional music,” Bias admits, “to songs that were, and are, so extraordinarily brilliant and moving that anyone would kill to put their name to them.” Celia is characteristically direct. “I certainly wasn't a folk fan! But it suited my vocal limitations. I had trained as an opera singer and I totally pissed off my singing teacher when I joined Trees. ‘Two years wasted,’ she said. I’d have loved to have sung blues or jazz but I had too light a voice. That said, I came to enjoy what I was involved in, just as the others did.” David almost seems to suggest that Trees became a folk rock band by default. “I don’t think there’s any mystery to it. If you think of what was available in the fifties and sixties to the listening population of students, beatniks, and jazzers, there was jazz, there was skiffle, there was rock and roll, and blues, and there was folk. These were the building blocks. Basically we did what we could do and we all brought different things to the table. I brought the folk thing. Barry was a phenomenal lead guitarist. Bias was writing his own material. Celia had particular purity to her voice. It was all we could do, we couldn’t be anything other than what we were, we couldn’t do anything other than what we did. We were never engaged in a dialogue about the authenticity of the tradition, and what’s interesting about Gnarls Barkley is they’ve done pretty well the same thing today (albeit a lot better!). They’ve looked at a body of music that’s available to them, and there’s forty years more music available as a resource now than there was when we were young, and in a sense they’re doing what we did. We were only sampling, too. I’m not a great folk musician. What I loved was those aberrations and those weird things that could happen when the tradition was working really hard and when it was subject to all these other influences.”
Trees’ first album, The Garden of Jane Delawney, from the Spring of 1970, snuggles nicely into contemporary nu-folkies’ idea of the genre, and shares some of the pastoral-whimsy that characterised The Incredible String Band or Donovan, offset by some stunning interpretations of traditional material and Bias’ own songs, which somehow seemed to be a part of the tradition Trees had adopted. “David was the driving force behind the folk influences,” Celia confirms, “but Bias was writing songs anyway and was able to bend his stuff around the folk thing.” David again emphasises the group’s hybridised nature; “It was when I first listened to Bluebird by Buffalo Springfield that I realised you could have an acoustic and electric lead together, and that we could marry that with the writing skills of Bias, who understood the threads of what folk music could offer and could weave them very conveniently into Trees.” The album’s title track actually pre-dated Bias’ joining the group. “I wrote Jane Delawney at Bedales in about1965. I cannot explain anything about it,” he confesses, “I don’t know who Jane Delawney is, what it means, or what influenced me in writing it. It just appeared as if from nowhere.”
Once you’ve succumbed to Trees, you’ll need to seek out The Garden Of Jane Delawney, but it is overshadowed by On The Shore, which followed later the same year. There’s a definite shift between the two records, the second being darker and more ambivalent. Here Trees don’t tell you what to think. You’re left to formulate your own response to this odd, opaque music. Bias explains the difference with a metaphor drawn from William Blake. “First come songs of innocence, or naivety, and secondly, songs of experience, or, possibly, cynicism.” “Generally,” agrees David, “interest seems divided between the naivety of the first album and the dark, arcane Englishness of the second.” Apart from the occurrence, in the closing sections of Fool and the middle of While The Iron Is Hot, of the kind of rock soloing that Trees kept up their sleeves for tough crowds, On The Shore is performed largely without unnecessary accents. Even Bias’ original compositions find Trees sounding like a conduit for material that is somehow passing through them. At times, Celia approaches a tradition of English female folk singers exemplified by Shirley Collins, who avoid overwrought interpretations and allow the songs to speak. Was this something she was consciously aiming for? “No, not really. I was simply being the fifth lead instrument. The words were less important than their sound. I rarely actually listen to the words of a song, rather instead to the vocal as a part of the whole, the sound, the rhythm, the style.” Was the actress turned front-woman taking on the character of a folk singer? “Well, I did used to stick my finger in my ear,” she jokes, “but that was more out of necessity than affectation. I simply couldn't hear the pitch because the band always played so loudly. I was unable to step up the volume for certain songs. That's why I started to sing in my chest range which is much stronger but totally different to the head voice. I couldn't move from one to the other without a yodel.”
Three and a half decades later, On The Shore remains a captivating item partly because it cannot be understood. The product of an era characterised by clunky polemic, Arcadian sentimentality or English fuzzy-felt surrealism, the album is fascinatingly unknowable, and like all classic records, it’s somehow so much greater than the sum of its parts. On The Shore even survives the negative gravitational pull of the occasional deeply flawed track. “We put our emotions and lives into that record,” says Bias, “with the possible exception of Little Sadie.” “The second album was so much more elegant than the first,” Celia agrees, “apart from Little Sadie, of course; God that was awful…”
The album opens with a strident traditional tune, Soldiers Three, learned from Dave Swarbrick before he joined Fairport Convention. Bias describes Murdoch, written at his mother’s house, in Arthog, North Wales, in the shadow of Cader Idris, as “the only song that I've ever remembered that I heard in a dream. I still find it somewhat disturbing. However, anyone who has gazed up at Cader Idris in a bleak Welsh twilight will know the feeling.” Murdoch’s lyrical complexity marks it out as contemporary, but with its black beaked crows and mountain shrouds, it also exemplifies the ‘pagan’ element that David Costa felt defined Martin Carthy’s take on English folk. Bias explains; “I had, at that time, an almost religious conviction that with lyrics, it didn't so much matter what you said as that it should sound good, it should ‘sing right.’ I've written a few songs in my time, most only known to me, where the lyrics make perfect sense but they do not ‘sing’ well!” Celia and her future husband, the Radio 1 DJ Pete Drummond, ended up buying the house where Murdoch was composed, the same house where many of the tracks were learned or rehearsed for stage or studio.
Polly On The Shore, another traditional tune, was assimilated from the repertoire of Martin Carthy. It’s one of the definitive moments of English folk rock, with Barry’s exquisite, needlepoint lead picking out perfectly chosen notes that blossom and fade over the opening bars. Celia’s restrained performance gives the song a dispassionate, deeply affecting, matter-of-fact quality, but it’s not a performance she personally looks back on fondly. “My voice was not strong enough to give any more emphasis, especially in the refrain when it comes around. I feel I just couldn’t give it what it needed, and no-one else would sing on stage.” A contemporaneous radio session version of the song added massed male backing vocals to the main theme, but at the expense of the album version’s sense of muted resignation. “The guitar work was superb,” Celia concedes, “but the 'plodding' nature of some of our work is obvious.” Maybe this ‘plodding’ feeling is the song’s strength? It feels like Trees, described affectionately at the time by the journalist Karl Dallas as being a collection of people all playing lead, are pushing the song towards exploding, finally overwhelming the stately rhythm during the 4th minute. Hitchcock said a couple could be filmed kissing on a bed as long as you liked, so long as there was a bomb underneath it. Polly On The Shore is suffused with a delicious tension.
Adam’s Toon, written in the 13th century by the troubadour Adam Dela Halle was learned from an album of medieval music. Fool, a co-write between Bias and David, is the most contemporary sounding track on the album, despite its arcane lyrics. “All the Trees tracks that I wrote were just written with nothing else in mind apart from getting whatever song it was out of my system,” remembers Bias, “apart from Fool which David and I wrote together. I believe that we had enormous fun doing this, but neither of us has any idea who ‘Oswald the smith’ is or was, or shall be.” While The Iron Is Hot was another attempt by Bias to write in a traditional idiom. “I knew something about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and then read about a strike in the 19th century where ‘they broke the shears at Foster's Mill.’ The phrase had a rhythm to it that became a tune in my head. And we used to go down to Cecil Sharpe House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and trawl through stuff and listen to so much modal music that it became the norm. The one thing I would dearly like to change in the lyric is the line ‘I think it was in 1890...’. It should have been ‘1819.’ There weren’t a lot of Luddites left near the end of Victoria's reign!”
Geordie and Streets Of Derry are two more superb interpretations of traditional tunes, both characterised by the same controlled passion that defines Polly On The Shore. Geordie was learned from the folk circuit and everybody’s repertoire, and it’s strange to think of the song’s convoluted progress into the Gnarls Barkley sample arsenal. Barry’s lead guitar work is again characteristically brilliant, and seems to anticipate Tom Verlaine, Robert Quinne and the guitar heroes of the mid-seventies New York scene. Streets Of Derry would have been familiar to folk fans at the time from Shirley Collins’ version, and offers the band an extended coda to improvise over, which again sounds more like an anglicised version of Crazy Horse or Television than the fag-end of flower power. Celia admits to falling asleep on stage during one especially lengthy reading of the song; finding things to do through the band’s extended instrumental sections seems to have been a recurring problem for her. “I used to ‘wiggle,’ or dance on the spot, during the long breaks. I'd turn my back on the audience so that it should have been obvious that I was not the important bit. But when we played at Wellington College Boys’ School, one of the masters asked me to stop wiggling as it was ‘upsetting’ the boys. That was when I started to lie down onstage instead.”
Trees’ reading of the Bristol folksinger Cyril Tawney’s Sally Free And Easy is the centrepiece of the album, and its finest moment. Fairport Convention had delivered English folk rock’s first extended psychedelic workout in the shape of A Sailor’s Life, in July 1969, but next to the Trees track’s quicksilver fluidity it sounds as rigorous and earthbound as a piece of on-beat German techno. Arranged basically as-live in the studio, complete with tempo surges and moments of telepathically sympathetic collective mood shifts, Sally Free And Easy remains as fresh today as the moment it was first performed, and is one of the greatest recordings by any British band ever. The problem of the folk rock rhythm had been addressed by Danny Cox, of Pentangle, with jazzy inflections, and by Dave Mattacks, of Fairport, with mighty thwacks. Here Unwin Brown drives Sally softly forward, picking choice moments to increase the thrust with propulsive martial fills, David holds down a modal drone, and Barry, Bias and Celia a free to shine.
David has fond memories of the session: “Sally Free And Easy was the closest we ever got to delivering what we wanted to deliver, because it went down live. We had never played it before and we toyed with it in rehearsal, decided we were going to do it and I said “ok let’s give it a go”. Bias was on keyboards, which opened out the band tremendously, and Tony Cox our producer went on bass. We began to run it and it became completely apparent that it was going to work - so we went for it, did it in one take and it became our defining moment. We had time on our hands so Celia put on another vocal and we couldn’t decide which one we liked best, so we double-tracked them both.” “Sally Free And Easy was brilliant,” remembers Celia, “It happened after an all night recording session. The guys were fiddling around with a tune they'd always liked, and Bias moved to the piano. It was around five in the morning and we felt great afterwards. It’s my personal favourite. That was indeed a turning point, I feel, but one that we seemed unable to build upon at that time.”
Sally Free And Easy exemplifies David’s earlier theories, of the power of existing material folded in on itself and transformed by accidents and unforeseen circumstance; “I’d seen Cyril Tawney play the song in a folk club in Hampstead – from memory - with a nylon strung guitar and I was always lead to believe that that tremolo was representative of the hum of a submarine. He’d served in submarines and the throb of the diesel engine came through into this lovely tremolo. I was playing a chord configuration that was all tuned to D with a capo which is partly why my fingers gave up, which you can hear in the second verse. We had to double the tempo because I couldn’t keep on doing it. I went into a different style, everybody kicked in, the build just picked up so well. None of us expected Sally Free And Easy to happen the way it did and it took the wind out of our sails. We couldn’t quite believe what we’d done and we knew it was a defining moment. Sadly it was one which we were never able to re-find because it just worked by accident.”
But On The Shore wasn’t the breakthrough it should have been. Eighteen months later Trees limped to a close with a depleted line-up, having made no further commercially available recordings. Celia returned to acting and subsequently became a sought-after voice over artist, subliminally familiar to London Underground commuters as the disembodied ghost-woman announcing upcoming stations on the Northern Line. She now lives in France. David went on to become Elton John’s art director and now runs his design studio Wherefore Art?, working with some of the world’s major artists. After coming in first place with Capricorn at the 1972 Tokyo Yamaha song contest, ahead of Abba’s Bjorn and Benny, Unwin went on to become a teacher, now in a pre-prep school in Kensington. Barry can be found selling pearls and jewellery at a well-known West End antique market. Bias wrote Kiki Dee’s hit ‘I Got The Music In Me’ and remains a professional musician. Over the years of exile, Trees were momentarily sighted in effusive fanzine profiles and in out-there versions of Sally Free And Easy by underground acts such as Magic Hour and Flying Saucer Attack, that acknowledged their debt to the group’s own version. But, from where he’s sitting, David doesn’t see Trees’ rediscovery as the end-point of a gradual process. “It hasn’t been a thirty-five year build up, it’s been more like a ten year build up, because God knows we were in utter obscurity for twenty-five of those years. It’s the archaeological nature of the internet and the effect of Amazon, where the reviews of us have always been pretty extraordinary, that finally enabled people to beat a path to our door.”
There’s talk of some dates, and of the re-recording of forgotten tracks. But David understands that Trees’ mystery survives partly because their book was closed, and unlike say, Fairport Convention, the sheer power of Trees’ legacy hasn’t been compromised by subsequent, deteriorated versions of the original.
“When the impact of the Gnarls Barkley sample began to sink in my sons said to me, ‘Dad, don’t forget if there’s anything of value about what you did, it’s in part because it stopped and it didn’t continue.’ They both went very pale when I said we might do it again. ‘Be careful,’ they said. ‘Part of what people love about Trees is that as a band you were in, and out, and then gone.’ ”
Stewart Lee
2007-02-01T19:50:32+00:00
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 left to be discovered. But On The Shore, the second and final album from the English folk rock band Trees, may yet be approached and appreciated in innocence, free from unwanted associations. Trees formed in London in 1969, and spluttered to a halt in 1972, barely a footnote in musical history. Since then, On The Shore’s legend has grown slowly underground these last thirty-five years. In the Spring of 2006, the track ‘Geordie’ was sampled by a chart-topping pop group called Gnarls Barkley after a recommendation from the proprietor of Ladbroke Grove’s Minus Zero record store, and the album was given a final push back into the sunlight. On The Shore’s re-emergence is timely. “Folk is the new rare groove”, declared the London listings magazine Time Out in June 2006. But the raggle-taggle troubadours of the Nu-Folk movement are retro indie-rockers in disguise, whilst On The Shore’s psychedelic-folk fusion was all but unprecedented, and its tone of strange, otherworldly, almost sinister ambivalence has remained impossible to counterfeit. Trees formed through a network of friends and acquaintances. The first time the folk guitarist David Costa met the lead guitarist Barry Clarke they immediately got out their instruments, played together, and, it being 1969, decided to form a band. Bassist and songwriter Bias Boshell lived in the same house as Barry, and he’d been at the famous Hampshire non-conformist school Bedales with drummer Unwin Brown. Celia Humphris, the singer, was the sister of a workmate of David’s. “David asked her if she knew any female singers for a new band,” Celia recalls, “She suggested me and made...
It has taken a long time, from its origins at Battersea Arts Centre via the Edinburgh Fringe, but composer/lyricist Richard Thomas and his collaborator Stewart Lee finally witness the official world premiere of their much touted show at the National Theatre.
Lee himself directs a zingy staging that uses operatic devices to parody, satirise and celebrate the genre of confessional trash television and its high priest, whom Michael Brandon impersonates with a blend of semi-fake charm and good natured non-judgementalism.
The high-octane production never lets up in the first half, in which Springer's studio audience howls and bays at a succession of lowlifes whose sexual and emotional obsessions are splurged out for all to revel in and despise. As one schlocky narrative succeeds another, a climax of brilliance is reached with the arrival of a troupe of all-singing, all-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen, who bring the first half to a riotous close.
It is clearly predestined for cult status but if one is being picky it is hard not to feel that the score is thin, although the parodies of Bach and Handel are cleverly positioned.
Or that the plot, in which Springer's fired warm-up man (David Bedella) shoots him in revenge and then turns out to be the Devil, precipitating an Act II confrontation involving Satan, Jesus, God plus Adam and Eve, is laboured.
The show has grown beyond its natural limits. But it is great fun along the way and presented with relentless chutzpah
Stewart Lee
2003-05-08T18:57:07+01:00
It has taken a long time, from its origins at Battersea Arts Centre via the Edinburgh Fringe, but composer/lyricist Richard Thomas and his collaborator Stewart Lee finally witness the official world premiere of their much touted show at the National Theatre. Lee himself directs a zingy staging that uses operatic devices to parody, satirise and celebrate the genre of confessional trash television and its high priest, whom Michael Brandon impersonates with a blend of semi-fake charm and good natured non-judgementalism. The high-octane production never lets up in the first half, in which Springer's studio audience howls and bays at a succession of lowlifes whose sexual and emotional obsessions are splurged out for all to revel in and despise. As one schlocky narrative succeeds another, a climax of brilliance is reached with the arrival of a troupe of all-singing, all-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen, who bring the first half to a riotous close. It is clearly predestined for cult status but if one is being picky it is hard not to feel that the score is thin, although the parodies of Bach and Handel are cleverly positioned. Or that the plot, in which Springer's fired warm-up man (David Bedella) shoots him in revenge and then turns out to be the Devil, precipitating an Act II confrontation involving Satan, Jesus, God plus Adam and Eve, is laboured. The show has grown beyond its natural limits. But it is great fun along the way and presented with relentless chutzpah
"No one is equipped to review me," said Stewart Lee towards the end of a comedy masterclass that pushed the audience at a packed Royal Concert Hall to the limit.
He was joking, obviously. Well, I think he was. And that sums up the tightrope he walked throughout his lengthy show (he came on just after 8 and there was a 20-minute interval but it was still after 10.35pm when he leapt off the stage and ran up the aisle to sign autographs). Even to describe the material betrays it. What sounds snide written down was often joyous in the room.
He was at his most devastating in the first half, brilliantly taking on the frequent "anti-PC" question: "Why don't any of you lefty comedians make fun of Muslims?" This was thrillingly intelligent stuff, with Lee forensically lampooning "observational" stand-up, telling wannabe "Islamophobic" jokes in the voice of Roy "Chubby" Brown and launching into an inspired, hysterically ill-informed, rant against Quakers.
He jokily divided the audience into the brighter "hardcore fans" who had bought stalls tickets and the rest of us - "chaff", only there because he'd been on telly. This led to a spiralling riff on the pressures facing comedians and the fact that so many comics have taken their own lives. This was frequently uncomfortable but never less than hilarious. "It's audiences like you that essentially murdered Robin Williams," he said, justifiably bringing down the house. You had to be there.
The second half, about the lunacies of nationalism and home life, was more relaxed and rambling - exactly right after the peaks of part one. Lee, one of the best live comedians I've ever seen, is using this tour to develop material for a new series of his BBC Comedy Vehicle shows. On this evidence, it's going to be unmissable.
Stewart Lee
2015-03-27T20:30:31+00:00
"No one is equipped to review me," said Stewart Lee towards the end of a comedy masterclass that pushed the audience at a packed Royal Concert Hall to the limit. He was joking, obviously. Well, I think he was. And that sums up the tightrope he walked throughout his lengthy show (he came on just after 8 and there was a 20-minute interval but it was still after 10.35pm when he leapt off the stage and ran up the aisle to sign autographs). Even to describe the material betrays it. What sounds snide written down was often joyous in the room. He was at his most devastating in the first half, brilliantly taking on the frequent "anti-PC" question: "Why don't any of you lefty comedians make fun of Muslims?" This was thrillingly intelligent stuff, with Lee forensically lampooning "observational" stand-up, telling wannabe "Islamophobic" jokes in the voice of Roy "Chubby" Brown and launching into an inspired, hysterically ill-informed, rant against Quakers. He jokily divided the audience into the brighter "hardcore fans" who had bought stalls tickets and the rest of us - "chaff", only there because he'd been on telly. This led to a spiralling riff on the pressures facing comedians and the fact that so many comics have taken their own lives. This was frequently uncomfortable but never less than hilarious. "It's audiences like you that essentially murdered Robin Williams," he said, justifiably bringing down the house. You had to be there. The second half, about the lunacies of nationalism and home life, was more relaxed and rambling - exactly right after the peaks of part one. Lee, one of the best live comedians I've ever seen, is using this tour to develop material for a new series of his BBC Comedy Vehicle shows. On this evidence, it's going...
It's assumed the '80s New Zealand lo-fi noise of bands like The Dead C reflected geographical and technological isolation.
But contemporaneously, in bedrooms from Bristol to London, and within earshot of pop cultural civilization, a young Stefan Jaworzyn plugged whatever sounds he could source into cassette recorders and carved his own archipelago of clattering loops, psychedelic guitar squalls, and brain-fizzing organ drones.
Now your laptop conceals more kit than Abbey Road, these analogue aural hallucinations seem positively Arts and Crafts.
Stewart Lee
2014-05-11T20:33:30+01:00
It's assumed the '80s New Zealand lo-fi noise of bands like The Dead C reflected geographical and technological isolation. But contemporaneously, in bedrooms from Bristol to London, and within earshot of pop cultural civilization, a young Stefan Jaworzyn plugged whatever sounds he could source into cassette recorders and carved his own archipelago of clattering loops, psychedelic guitar squalls, and brain-fizzing organ drones. Now your laptop conceals more kit than Abbey Road, these analogue aural hallucinations seem positively Arts and Crafts.
Brexit and Trump now loom over culturally engaged comedy, where behind-the-curve jokes can be easily exposed. Stewart Lee – just as his wife, Bridget Christie, did in Edinburgh this year – begins by complaining that his new show, Content Provider, has been derailed by the EU vote. The original idea was to explore, with reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, atomised man in the era of digital consumerism. Which Lee duly does, but the concept feels diluted now – rendered peripheral, indeed – by his material on 2016’s two great political cataclysms, which kickstarts each act.
The concept is muddied then, but there remains a great deal in Content Provider to enjoy. After the axing of BBC2’s Comedy Vehicle, Lee is no longer compelled to frame his live work as a dummy run for the TV show, and he can focus on delivering excellent live standup. Tonight’s offering fits the bill, as the almost 50-year-old “ex-TV comic” purports to reassess his place in the world. “I’m coming to despise the character of Stewart Lee,” he tells us at one point, and there are intriguing hints that, for once, that utterance might contain a shred of the truth. Not to begin with, though. Lee’s opening Brexit routine pitches us into trademark Stewart Lee territory, as he double bluffs his scorn for Leave voters and questions his own role within “the metropolitan liberal elite”. (On which pertinent subject, it would be fascinating to hear more.) A new UK landscape comes into being, he tells us: one great Tolkien wasteland studded with walled citadels where “wizards, poets and people who understand data” live. As ever, Lee oozes superiority, whether quoting his own newspaper columns (“I believe it was I who once said ...”) or mocking the BBC’s remake of out-of-time sitcom Are You Being Served? By this stage, he’s back on track with the original show, bemoaning his fall from TV grace, reduced, in one pleasingly beady routine, to buying his own DVDs online and selling them on at a paltry profit. The second half unfolds Lee’s most concentrated setpiece, a characteristically twisty routine about bondage practices in years gone by. On one level, it’s a rude joke about our grandparents’ generation improvising DIY S&M. On multiple others, it’s mocking Lee’s hated under-40s, to whom everything – even kinky sex – comes easily packaged as just another meaningless artefact in the consumerist marketplace. This argument climaxes in a broadside against generational narcissism that, by Lee’s standards, seems unusually straightforward. At such moments – and assuming no irony is intended in the famously navel-gazing Lee critiquing self-absorption – the dense archness of “the character of Stewart Lee” dilutes. At others, it persists, but more cosily than in the past, as a game we all – Lee and his audience – enjoy playing together. It’s certainly enjoyable tonight. Lee is at ease, having fun, totally in control of his complex, supercilious/resentful register. But, as a satisfying visual gag brings his lament for the selfie generation to its conclusion, the sense lingers that Brexit and Trump (and his material on them) have devalued the currency of Lee’s original concept. We’re left with a show that pulls in different directions. But if its parts are ill-fitting, they’re also frequently brilliant.
Stewart Lee
2016-11-17T14:35:05+00:00
Brexit and Trump now loom over culturally engaged comedy, where behind-the-curve jokes can be easily exposed. Stewart Lee – just as his wife, Bridget Christie, did in Edinburgh this year – begins by complaining that his new show, Content Provider, has been derailed by the EU vote. The original idea was to explore, with reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, atomised man in the era of digital consumerism. Which Lee duly does, but the concept feels diluted now – rendered peripheral, indeed – by his material on 2016’s two great political cataclysms, which kickstarts each act. 'I’m coming to despise the character of Stewart Lee' he tells us at one point The concept is muddied then, but there remains a great deal in Content Provider to enjoy. After the axing of BBC2’s Comedy Vehicle, Lee is no longer compelled to frame his live work as a dummy run for the TV show, and he can focus on delivering excellent live standup. Tonight’s offering fits the bill, as the almost 50-year-old “ex-TV comic” purports to reassess his place in the world. “I’m coming to despise the character of Stewart Lee,” he tells us at one point, and there are intriguing hints that, for once, that utterance might contain a shred of the truth. Not to begin with, though. Lee’s opening Brexit routine pitches us into trademark Stewart Lee territory, as he double bluffs his scorn for Leave voters and questions his own role within “the metropolitan liberal elite”. (On which pertinent subject, it would be fascinating to hear more.) A new UK landscape comes into being, he tells us: one great Tolkien wasteland studded with walled citadels where “wizards, poets and people who understand data” live. As ever, Lee oozes superiority, whether quoting his own...
The Seventies New York punk survivor Patti Smith reminds us of what we have lost. Smith still believes music and poetry can change the world, and, in a time where Bono Vox poses for photo-op’s with George Bush, asking us to visualise the bigger, if severely blurred picture, her stark, uncompromising sloganeering seems increasingly of another, simpler era. At The Queen Elizabeth Hall to deliver a set of stripped down songs old and new, followed by a reading of an elegy for her friend the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith looks elegantly dishevelled on a set suggesting the corner of a homely recording studio, with sofas, threadbare rugs and a standard lamp. She reamins a strange and eternally beguiling hybrid of stentorian Old Testament prophet, raining down fire and brimstone, and a shy little girl, whose slinky-hipped stage moves and fluttering fingers still bear the stigmata of a teenage Mick Jagger fixation. For most of the first half Smith is backed by her regular bassist Tony Shanahan and the Italian cellist Giovanni Solima, whose thoughtful, sparse accompaniament suggests a musical template over which Smith, should she ever abandon her usual ferocious performance mode, could chose to grow old gracefully. The lament Qana is hot off the press, a passionately declaimed memorial to the thirty-seven children killed in last month’s Israeli shelling of the eponymous village, while the closing number of the first half, a version of Beneath The Southern Cross, from 1996’s Gone Again album, sees Smith’s trio augmented by two influential guitarists of the 1980’s British underground. Jason Pierce of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, who takes up a slumped position on the sofa with admirable nonchalance, were both ideally suited to sustaining a two-chord.
After the interval, Shields is due to accompany Smith reading her Mapplethorpe tribute, The Coral Sea. As the audience re-enter, the number 49 can just be seen blinking red in the liquid crystal display window of his Alesis Midiverb #2 reverb box. This particulr factory pre-set of the now discontinued effects unit was discovered by Shileds in 1988, and is the key to hs former group My Bloody Valentine’s hugely influential smear of liquid noise and subliminal harmonics. Nearly two decades later, one has to admire his single-mindedness, but a more adaptable approach may have suited The Coral Sea better. Given that Smith’s first musical forays,in 1974, were as a performance poet improvising in a little trio, there was little actual interplay between her and Shields in The Coral Sea. Smith is an engaging, unselfconscious and disarmingly open performer, but Shields works, head down, in hermetically sealed, introspective space. It seemed his furry blankets of feedback and fuzz would have unfurled in exactly the same order wether Smith had been present or not. Their collaboration, recorded both nights for subsequent release, was an experiment that didn’t completely succeed, but it felt like a rare priviledge to be allowed to sit in on it.
Stewart Lee
2006-09-10T19:26:06+01:00
The Seventies New York punk survivor Patti Smith reminds us of what we have lost. Smith still believes music and poetry can change the world, and, in a time where Bono Vox poses for photo-op’s with George Bush, asking us to visualise the bigger, if severely blurred picture, her stark, uncompromising sloganeering seems increasingly of another, simpler era. At The Queen Elizabeth Hall to deliver a set of stripped down songs old and new, followed by a reading of an elegy for her friend the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith looks elegantly dishevelled on a set suggesting the corner of a homely recording studio, with sofas, threadbare rugs and a standard lamp. She reamins a strange and eternally beguiling hybrid of stentorian Old Testament prophet, raining down fire and brimstone, and a shy little girl, whose slinky-hipped stage moves and fluttering fingers still bear the stigmata of a teenage Mick Jagger fixation. For most of the first half Smith is backed by her regular bassist Tony Shanahan and the Italian cellist Giovanni Solima, whose thoughtful, sparse accompaniament suggests a musical template over which Smith, should she ever abandon her usual ferocious performance mode, could chose to grow old gracefully. The lament Qana is hot off the press, a passionately declaimed memorial to the thirty-seven children killed in last month’s Israeli shelling of the eponymous village, while the closing number of the first half, a version of Beneath The Southern Cross, from 1996’s Gone Again album, sees Smith’s trio augmented by two influential guitarists of the 1980’s British underground. Jason Pierce of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, who takes up a slumped position on the sofa with admirable nonchalance, were both ideally suited to sustaining a two-chord. After the interval, Shields is due to accompany Smith...
Box Sets were once the preserve of canonical Mojo magazine cover stars. Now everyone's liquidizing their assets before all recorded music becomes worthless. Here's four CDs of Australia's finest Eighties pre-grunge unknowns, feedtime.
With two founder members that liked Seventies cock rock and pre-war blues respectively, feedtime flayed Duracel bunny roots rhythms with hardcore noise, slung over Wire's minimalist post-punk clothes horse, and anchored with high-gravity bass suction power. The sticker on the box calls feedtime 'avant-garde pub rock', which wil do fine.
The last disc's occasional concessions aside, feedtime's time-travelling conceptual blues-noise suddenly and belatedly makes piquant sense.
Stewart Lee
2012-09-16T19:33:05+01:00
Box Sets were once the preserve of canonical Mojo magazine cover stars. Now everyone's liquidizing their assets before all recorded music becomes worthless. Here's four CDs of Australia's finest Eighties pre-grunge unknowns, feedtime. With two founder members that liked Seventies cock rock and pre-war blues respectively, feedtime flayed Duracel bunny roots rhythms with hardcore noise, slung over Wire's minimalist post-punk clothes horse, and anchored with high-gravity bass suction power. The sticker on the box calls feedtime 'avant-garde pub rock', which wil do fine. The last disc's occasional concessions aside, feedtime's time-travelling conceptual blues-noise suddenly and belatedly makes piquant sense.
At the invitation of the Exeter based free jazz trio capri-batterie, Stewart Lee spent an hour in a Bristol studio last October improvising words to their spontaneous sounds.
These are the unfiltered results, collected as the ‘Bristol Fashion’ album – available here.
"Capri-Batterie is 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. If you think you have heard improvised music, think again.Stewart Lee should need no introduction, as undoubtedly the most original stand-up comedian in more than 30 or so years. He is also a highly regarded writer, and director. Stewart has been involved in numerous interesting musical projects and maintains a strong association with the avant-garde and improvised scene. It’s not often that something can genuinely be described as “unique”. This can be though, there is nothing like it. Anywhere.
LP - Limited to 500 Copies."
Stewart Lee
2021-01-18T22:25:11+00:00
At the invitation of the Exeter based free jazz trio capri-batterie, Stewart Lee spent an hour in a Bristol studio last October improvising words to their spontaneous sounds. These are the unfiltered results, collected as the ‘Bristol Fashion’ album – available here. There is a review of the project within the misc. press section of this site, here. "Capri-Batterie is 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. If you think you have heard improvised music, think again.Stewart Lee should need no introduction, as undoubtedly the most original stand-up comedian in more than 30 or so years. He is also a highly regarded writer, and director. Stewart has been involved in numerous interesting musical projects and maintains a strong association with the avant-garde and improvised scene. It’s not often that something can genuinely be described as “unique”. This can be though, there is nothing like it. Anywhere. LP - Limited to 500 Copies."
Fresh from a hugely successful residency at the Leicester Square Theatre and on the back of the BBC commissioning a third and fourth series of his Comedy Vehicle show, Stewart Lee continues to ride this problematic wave of popularity. Finding himself evicted from his usual Edinburgh Fringe base at the Stand Comedy Club, for the more luxurious and much larger Assembly Rooms, Lee delivers a sublime seventy-five minutes of stand-up comedy.
Lee deconstructs his chosen art form, flawlessly parodying topical comedy, observational comedy, 'dead comic' comedy and the apparently endless emergence of 'Russell Comedians'.
For those unfamiliar with his stage persona, it's important to note that Lee doesn't spoon-feed his audience 'jokes' but rather makes us think - encouraging the more astute to get to the punch line before he does.
He divides the room, rewarding his devoted fans while encouraging the newbies to keep up. 'It's not aimed at you,' repeats the comedian as he berates his audience for missing an impossible call back, all the more funny because it was clear that by this point just about everybody knew exactly what he was doing.
Rather than hampering the show, playing to a much larger initially mixed-ability room works well for Lee. Indeed, by the end of what must be his best set to date, we're all with him.
Over the last decade or so I have reviewed hundreds of comedy shows. This is the best stand up routine I have ever seen.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-06T14:46:57+01:00
Fresh from a hugely successful residency at the Leicester Square Theatre and on the back of the BBC commissioning a third and fourth series of his Comedy Vehicle show, Stewart Lee continues to ride this problematic wave of popularity. Finding himself evicted from his usual Edinburgh Fringe base at the Stand Comedy Club, for the more luxurious and much larger Assembly Rooms, Lee delivers a sublime seventy-five minutes of stand-up comedy. Lee deconstructs his chosen art form, flawlessly parodying topical comedy, observational comedy, 'dead comic' comedy and the apparently endless emergence of 'Russell Comedians'. For those unfamiliar with his stage persona, it's important to note that Lee doesn't spoon-feed his audience 'jokes' but rather makes us think - encouraging the more astute to get to the punch line before he does. He divides the room, rewarding his devoted fans while encouraging the newbies to keep up. 'It's not aimed at you,' repeats the comedian as he berates his audience for missing an impossible call back, all the more funny because it was clear that by this point just about everybody knew exactly what he was doing. Rather than hampering the show, playing to a much larger initially mixed-ability room works well for Lee. Indeed, by the end of what must be his best set to date, we're all with him. Over the last decade or so I have reviewed hundreds of comedy shows. This is the best stand up routine I have ever seen.
Chris Eckman formed Walkabouts in Seattle thirty years ago, a pioneer of the Alternative Country movement. Walkabouts’ low-profile melancholia mirrors their sometime collaborators, Nottingham’s Tindersticks, but Eckman’s solo debut offers an even starker sound, inspired by empty Oregon landscapes, and recorded clean and cold in a vast orchestra studio in Prague. The eleven minute Rock Springs leans lyrically on a Richard Ford story of the same name, and is a low, slow-burning thrum through Americana’s darkest corners.
Stewart Lee
2014-01-18T12:30:33+00:00
Chris Eckman formed Walkabouts in Seattle thirty years ago, a pioneer of the Alternative Country movement. Walkabouts’ low-profile melancholia mirrors their sometime collaborators, Nottingham’s Tindersticks, but Eckman’s solo debut offers an even starker sound, inspired by empty Oregon landscapes, and recorded clean and cold in a vast orchestra studio in Prague. The eleven minute Rock Springs leans lyrically on a Richard Ford story of the same name, and is a low, slow-burning thrum through Americana’s darkest corners.
Stewart Lee gave up stand-up comedy in 2001 after deciding that his material was "arch, cynical, tired, fake, conceited, formulaic and flat". He threw his energies into co-writing and directing Jerry Springer: the Opera, which earned him an Olivier Award, opprobrium and no money. In 2004, he began his comeback as an "alternative" comedian, and this book is the story of that comeback.
It takes the form of transcripts of his three shows, Stand-up Comedian (2005), '90s Comedian (2006) and 41st Best Stand-up Ever (2008), each copiously footnoted, explaining and critiquing his material and techniques, and with excursions into his life, his health, his friends, his comedy heroes and his mum.
I was in the audience for all three of these shows. They were hilarious then and are still hilarious on the page. But would I laugh so much if I hadn't been there, if I couldn't remember Lee's slow, bitter, weary, irony-saturated delivery? Take no chances: buy this book and get the DVDs of the shows as well (helpfully listed in a discography, along with appendices including a long narrative poem about stand-up and a truly hilarious discussion with Johnny Vegas about Russell Brand). And if you get the chance, go and see Stewart Lee perform. Because the material is non-arch, uncynical, energetic, genuine, modest, original and as spiky as a range of mountains. Oh, and did I say hilarious?
Stewart Lee
2011-08-07T13:23:14+01:00
Stewart Lee gave up stand-up comedy in 2001 after deciding that his material was "arch, cynical, tired, fake, conceited, formulaic and flat". He threw his energies into co-writing and directing Jerry Springer: the Opera, which earned him an Olivier Award, opprobrium and no money. In 2004, he began his comeback as an "alternative" comedian, and this book is the story of that comeback. It takes the form of transcripts of his three shows, Stand-up Comedian (2005), '90s Comedian (2006) and 41st Best Stand-up Ever (2008), each copiously footnoted, explaining and critiquing his material and techniques, and with excursions into his life, his health, his friends, his comedy heroes and his mum. I was in the audience for all three of these shows. They were hilarious then and are still hilarious on the page. But would I laugh so much if I hadn't been there, if I couldn't remember Lee's slow, bitter, weary, irony-saturated delivery? Take no chances: buy this book and get the DVDs of the shows as well (helpfully listed in a discography, along with appendices including a long narrative poem about stand-up and a truly hilarious discussion with Johnny Vegas about Russell Brand). And if you get the chance, go and see Stewart Lee perform. Because the material is non-arch, uncynical, energetic, genuine, modest, original and as spiky as a range of mountains. Oh, and did I say hilarious?
Next week, The Stand Edinburgh will be taken over by the kind of lineup that will make comedy purists tremble at the knees. Josie Long, Robin Ince, David O'Doherty, Tony Law, Bridget Christie, Simon Munnery and Isy Suttie are just a few of the names appearing at the series of ten shows, masterminded by none other than Stewart Lee.
"I was approached by Colin Dench of Comedy Central," Lee explains. "They had seen my style of shooting and were interested in doing something along those lines. All of us were aware that there was a school of standup that is very popular with comedians, but isn't favoured by the mainstream comedy programming on television. It was very interesting that when we tried to programme it, we found ourselves ruling people out because they could appear on other shows. What we were left were these people who all fit the motif of alternative comedy."
'Alternative comedy' is a troublesome term. The alternative revolution of the 80s effectively killed off the competition and now every boy in a t-shirt who notices things is technically the bastard lovechild of Alexei Sayle. Some people still think that Michael McIntyre is alternative.
"Yes," says Lee, calmly, "there are people who think that. But he isn't.
"I think alternative comedy is a good name for this because people think alternative comedy is something annoying, confusing, weird, satirical and clever. And I think... yes. That's fine. I don't really want anyone to come and see the show, to be honest.
"Jim Bowen had that joke about 'Alternative comedy? It's the alternative to comedy'. I think it's good to have an alternative to the kind of standup shows you have on TV now."
The shows at The Stand will be aired on Comedy Central in August in a sort of standup/documentary hybrid, which the performance intercut with Lee interviewing each of the acts about the art of comedy. "It's the kind of programme I'd want to watch," says Lee.
In some ways could this be great. A space on Mock The Week or Live At The Apollo remains the best way to sell tickets. But is this true of all comedians? Or will Lee's guests find their audiences unchanged by this exposure?
"Its' hard to say. We discovered that the number of people coming to my live shows was higher than the viewing figures for [Stewart Lee's] Comedy Vehicle. So you wonder if maybe the kind of people who enjoy alternative comedy are people who do go out and do see live shows, and the ones who watch more mainstream shows are not."
Lee mentions a certain comic (who we won't name) who was advised by their agent (who we also won't name) to avoid doing a themed one-hour show for Edinburgh this year, and instead produce a series of six minute bits which could easily translate onto television. "That's because all agents these days," he says, "see an appearance on McIntyre's show as the only way to be successful. But it doesn't always translate into ticket sales."
Whether or not this show is the catalyst for a massive Tony Law stadium tour (and hopefully it will), it's certainly going to make for a fascinating document on the state of alternative comedy in 2012.
Stewart Lee
2012-06-29T20:53:57+01:00
Next week, The Stand Edinburgh will be taken over by the kind of lineup that will make comedy purists tremble at the knees. Josie Long, Robin Ince, David O'Doherty, Tony Law, Bridget Christie, Simon Munnery and Isy Suttie are just a few of the names appearing at the series of ten shows, masterminded by none other than Stewart Lee. "I was approached by Colin Dench of Comedy Central," Lee explains. "They had seen my style of shooting and were interested in doing something along those lines. All of us were aware that there was a school of standup that is very popular with comedians, but isn't favoured by the mainstream comedy programming on television. It was very interesting that when we tried to programme it, we found ourselves ruling people out because they could appear on other shows. What we were left were these people who all fit the motif of alternative comedy." 'Alternative comedy' is a troublesome term. The alternative revolution of the 80s effectively killed off the competition and now every boy in a t-shirt who notices things is technically the bastard lovechild of Alexei Sayle. Some people still think that Michael McIntyre is alternative. "Yes," says Lee, calmly, "there are people who think that. But he isn't. "I think alternative comedy is a good name for this because people think alternative comedy is something annoying, confusing, weird, satirical and clever. And I think... yes. That's fine. I don't really want anyone to come and see the show, to be honest. "Jim Bowen had that joke about 'Alternative comedy? It's the alternative to comedy'. I think it's good to have an alternative to the kind of standup shows you have on TV now." The shows at The Stand will be aired on Comedy Central in August in a...
An English musician sits on the outskirts of the Spanish desert town of Tabernas, where Italians shot American cowboy movies on now abandoned sets, and concocts a widescreen country rock record influenced by the mariachi hued soundtracks bashed out to accompany them.
Scott Walker only sang themes to two Spaghetti westerns, Joe Hill and The Rope And The Colt, but the Choppers' musical director and vocalist Ben Nicholls swells his lungs and ghosts the tortured troubadour a whole album of horse opera hits.
Be Ready is so ingrained with acutely observed inauthenticity it swallows its own tail and becomes thoroughly convincing.
Stewart Lee
2011-07-10T11:36:01+01:00
An English musician sits on the outskirts of the Spanish desert town of Tabernas, where Italians shot American cowboy movies on now abandoned sets, and concocts a widescreen country rock record influenced by the mariachi hued soundtracks bashed out to accompany them. Scott Walker only sang themes to two Spaghetti westerns, Joe Hill and The Rope And The Colt, but the Choppers' musical director and vocalist Ben Nicholls swells his lungs and ghosts the tortured troubadour a whole album of horse opera hits. Be Ready is so ingrained with acutely observed inauthenticity it swallows its own tail and becomes thoroughly convincing.
The slovenly combo's pictured on this vinyl compilation look like rabid bedsit theorists from the early eighties DIY scene, but only three of the eleven tracks date from the era, including The Passionate Winemakers' snotty strum Disintegrating Jellyfish. New recordings indicate the spirit still spurts.
Electricity In Our Homes' Here I Am is limply upbeat; legendary experimentalist Adam Bohman furthers a career of cryptic rambling; The Pheromoans' punishing monotony angered my wife; and La La Vasquez cross krautrock grooves with feminist post-punk. +
A pleasingly confusing collection that sounds like a tape you'd find in the flat of a dead madman.
Stewart Lee
2012-01-22T22:04:01+00:00
The slovenly combo's pictured on this vinyl compilation look like rabid bedsit theorists from the early eighties DIY scene, but only three of the eleven tracks date from the era, including The Passionate Winemakers' snotty strum Disintegrating Jellyfish. New recordings indicate the spirit still spurts. Electricity In Our Homes' Here I Am is limply upbeat; legendary experimentalist Adam Bohman furthers a career of cryptic rambling; The Pheromoans' punishing monotony angered my wife; and La La Vasquez cross krautrock grooves with feminist post-punk. + A pleasingly confusing collection that sounds like a tape you'd find in the flat of a dead madman.
The Nightingales with support from Stewart Lee premieres Thursday 11th March + New ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ 7” out 15th May
Nostalgic for a time when people gathered in crowded rooms to listen to music and comedy?
You can relive those heady pre-pandemic nights with an 80-minute rare concert from Birmingham’s post-punk legends, The Nightingales at Hackney’s Moth Club in 2018. Directed by Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, King Rocker, Toast Of London), this special concert includes comedian Stewart Lee performing his 20 minute ‘80s club set.
This special live recording premieres on NoonChorus, as part of our ‘Baptism Of Fire’ series, on March 11th 2021 (8pm GMT / 12pm PT /3pm EST).
‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album.
B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album. ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ will be released 15th May on Fire Records/King Rocker Records.
Fire Films and NoonChorus present:
The Nightingales with support from Stewart Lee
Thursday, March 11th, 2021
(8pm GMT / 12pm PT / 3pm EST)
To clarify - I do 20 mins stand-up at the start of the livestream. It is the 1989 Jesus At The Door routine fucked about with, and then the JAZZ FOLK SEX routine from the Content Provider tour that was cut from the finished film of that show. Michael Cumming filmed the bit in a very live fashion in a very live atmosphere at Hackney’s very live Moth Club. It is a nice bit of film, but if you are a comedy fan and you pay for that stay for The Nightingales 60 mins straight through no-breaks-between-the-songs steamroller of a set, and a lively reminder of what live entertainment and cool venues look like.
All my little club dates for Feb will be in the process of being pulled and re-scheduled.
The venues have your money, not me, and although I am sure loads of you could do with it, if you can let these clubs hang on to it for now it could mean the difference between them surviving and going under.
Support The Brixton Windmill. And all independent venues.
We all want a world of live art to go back to.
If major tour dates are moved all the same applies. Thank-you for your patience.
I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point.
4) MEDIA GARAGE SALE
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits, as have NETFLIX, the utter bastards.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
To try and promote King Rocker I have been pimping myself about on every Podcast going, alone or with dir M Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast), saying the same things in the same room in the same clothes to all different people, all of whom were very kind.
I don’t know what a podcast is really but I think you go on the internet and click on something.
As my grandfather once said, in 1983, “Do you know, in America, there are shops that only sell Kentucky Fried Chicken?” I enjoyed being on the internet with all these people enormously, but will put some blue water between me and the next wedge.
David Baddiel told me it was good to be on the internet, though. These are available..
KERMODE ON FILM
Dir Michael Cumming and I discuss King Rocker with Britain’s top film guru and skiffle enthusiast, who has been very supportive of the no-budget project.
Andy Miller and John Michinson’s long running and much loved books podcast. I discuss the waspish poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks with them, Nicky Birch and Jennifer Hodgson.
This is a marvellous ongoing Podcast which is unashamedly civilised in an unenlightened era, and this episode is full of great writing, batshit radiophonic music and clever women.
North London echo chamber fun sure to irk people of all political persuasions with the forensically-minded folk devil for the far right and snowflake do-gooder Owen Jones, and me, talking about King Rocker and more general stuff. His current run of ‘casts has some great guests.
Informed Wolverhampton-based comedy and music enthusiast of uncommon warmth and knowledge talks to me about KING ROCKER and what the Gray Pays ‘n’ Bacon are like at the Great Western pub.
I asked Adam if I could go on this massively popular podcast and he said yes which was very kind of him. It was fun hearing his Mark E Smith story from the horse’s mouth and he asked me hard questions of the type I usually avoid.
In this episode of The Last Line, James talks to comedian Stewart Lee about his new film King Rocker, a documentary about Robert Lloyd, lead singer of 70’s post-punk band The Nightingales. During their conversation they discuss the new film, its central protagonist Robert Lloyd, stand up comedy, Stewart’s propensity to defend stand up comedians against the views of the general public and his reluctance to participate in podcast interviews.
There’s an interview with Michael Cumming on this podcast too, link below.
Sometime in March you will be able to hear me eat a really lovely Sri Lankan mutton curry from the Kolama restaurant, Soho, with bon viveur jazz pianist Jay Rayner. (I see how this works now!)
This is the most showbiz thing I have ever done, and I am glad it was with jazzy Jay Rayner. Not Out Yet. Coming Soon.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
with post-mod post-man, old school Labour face, and former near pop-soul star, Alan Johnson.
An actual physical 12” EP of Asian Dub Foundation(feat. Stewart Lee)‘s Brexit day number 1 Comin’ Over Here will be out on March 26th and can be pre-ordered here...
Brilliantly, higher shipping costs on ADF’s Anti-Brexit anthem are due to...Brexit, but they will try and circumvent this.
The remixes are of other bits of the Paul Nuttalls routine and work great.
I can’t believe how well the ADF’s made this work. I was their mere tool.
7) Big Wow Badges
BIG WOW BADGES
Cool Scottish punk-pin badge makers Big Wow Badges are shutting down at the end of Feb, so this is your last chance to buy the fabulous badges they made, some related to my material over the last decade and a half, and any others of their amazing art and lit designs.
Thanks Big Wow Badges! You made an old man very happy. Good luck in whatever you do next.
This year’s Bristol Festival of Slapstick Comedy has gone on line and I will be doing an Ince-chaired event on 6th March at 8pm choosing my favourite moments of Slapstick comedy.
I am all about the slapstick, as you will know from when my trousers fell down at The Bristol Hall Of Slavers in 2016. £6.
Steve is a major player in the second wave of British Free Improvisation, a lynchpin of the current scene, and a punk era collaborator with The Flying Lizards, Prince Far-I and The Slits.
He, I and Tania Chen toured Britain over the last decade performing John Cage’s Indeterminacy, and Steve appears playing toys and objects with me and Tania in King Rocker.
Comedy fans will know him as ‘man playing organ’ in a The Day Today sketch about executions, and as the director of music on Vic Reeves’ unnecessarily good album.
11) I Arrogantly Recommend
NEW FILMS
Ronnie’s, Ronnie Scott & His World Famous Jazz Club (Oliver Murray)
The Dig (Simon Stone) ★★★★★
NEW TV
Ghosts S2 (BBC, 2020)
Ghosts - Xmas Special 2020 (BBC, 2020)
The Mandalorian S2 (Disney, 2020) ★★★★★
Call My Agent S3 (France 2, 2018)★★★★★
Call My Agent S4 (France 2, 2021) ★★★★★
The Trump Show (BBC, 2020-1)★★★★★
Lupin S1 (Netflix, 2021)★★★★★
NEW RECORDS
Lady Leshurr - Quaranqueen
The Primevals - New Trip
Cult Figures - Deritend
Vapour Trails - Celestial Scuzz ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - Before Computers (demos)
Kevin March - Last Night
NEW OLD RECORDS
V/A - Rough Guide To Avant-Garde Japan
Guided by Voices - Live At Irving Plaza (1996)
Damo Suzuki & Echo Ensemble - Live @ Green Door (2013)
Heavenly - A Bout De Heavenly (1989-1996)
Martin Stone - Down But Not Out In Paris and London (1992-2013)
John Russell & Terry Day - Russell & Day (1979?)
Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts & Terry Day - At LTC (1972?)
Sonny Rollins - Rollins In Holland (1967) ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - I Sell The Circus (demos) (2015)
The Fall - St Helen’s Technical College (1981) ★★★★★
FOOD
Kolamba Sri Lankan restaurant, Soho, London
12) IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS
Adam Schlesinger (Fountain of Wayne) (1967)
John Prine (outlaw country singer) (1946)
Henry Grimes (jazz bassist) (1935)
Dave Mountfield (Ornate Johnson) (1970)
Hal Wilner (arranger) (1957)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Goodie) (1940)
Lee Konitz (jazz saxophonist) (1927)
Matthew Seligman (Soft Boy) (1955)
Millie Small (ska singer) (1946)
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk robot) (1947)
Bill Rieflin (drummer for hire) (1960)
Hugh McKenna (Tear Gas pianist) (1949)
Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounder) (1942)
Astrid Kirchherr (photographer) (1938)
Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra saxophonist) (1947)
Aubrey Burl (archaeologist) (1926)
Phil May (Pretty Thing) (1944)
The Clacton Fin Whale (circa 2000)
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (artist) (1930)
Doll Tor stone circle (3300 BC)
Kay Carroll (The Fall) (1948)
Bob the Cat (73 bus) (2006)
Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew)
Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959)
Carl Reiner (director) (1922)
Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928)
Dougie Anderson (Coda’s Edinburgh record dealer) (1952)
Captain Tom (Covid Walkman) (1920)
Stewart Lee
2021-02-08T14:00:43+00:00
King Rocker Now TV Thanks for watching our documentary KING ROCKER last Saturday on Sky Arts, and spreading the word, and crowd-funding it, if you did. Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times. “I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times ★★★★ Financial Times ★★★★ Chortle “One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus All Press is collecting here. Anyway, it appears you can now watch it, ad-free, on NOW TV if you have that; NOW TV LINK - STREAMING UNTIL 8th MARCH 2021 2) PERISH THE THOUGHT LIVESTREAM The Nightingales with support from Stewart Lee premieres Thursday 11th March + New ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ 7” out 15th May Nostalgic for a time when people gathered in crowded rooms to listen to music and comedy? You can relive those heady pre-pandemic nights with an 80-minute rare concert from Birmingham’s post-punk legends, The Nightingales at Hackney’s Moth Club in 2018. Directed by Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, King Rocker, Toast Of London), this special concert includes comedian Stewart Lee performing his 20 minute ‘80s club set. This special live recording premieres on NoonChorus, as part of our ‘Baptism Of Fire’ series, on March 11th 2021 (8pm GMT / 12pm PT /3pm EST). ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album. B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album. ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ will be released 15th May on Fire Records/King Rocker...
Vinyl re-release of 15 year old comedy-art-drone piece on Green Vinyl.
An owl wakes up at sea in a pea green boat. It is accompanied by a cat, its natural predator. There is some honey. What chain of events led to this dangerous situation?
This is a long awaited luxury vinyl repress of the legendary Pea Green Boat record. On Pea Green Vinyl! (note - it's slightly darker than it looks in the photo)
It's more or less identical to the 2007 release, except this time we have pressed the record on pea green vinyl, and in deference to the times, each disc comes with an mp3 download.
Also we've removed the references to myspace from the back of the sleeve.
I unreservedly recommend the following shows at London's Leicester Square Theatre, some of which can be seen after me some nights, so why not double-dip it!
In recommending them, I do not seek to use my vast influence to damage the careers of other comedians who I am not recommending, or to seek to take business away from other venues, which are not the Leicester Square Theatre.
In the interests of full disclosure I am married to this woman, who is now sold out until the December dates.
I recommend also...
Suns Of The Tundra - The Bedford, Balham, S London, Oct 20th TICKETS
Featuring comic-monologuist-writer Ben Moor as the narrator the ATP-shaking psych-prog band perform their concept album on the arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.
CONTENT PROVIDER BOOK
I had a new book out on August 4th, Content Provider, through Faber. "Over the last five years, often when David Mitchell has been on holiday, the comedian Stewart Lee has been attempting to understand modern Britain, and his own place in it, in a series of irregular newspaper columns.
Will Scotland become the Promised Land of the Left? Is it possible to live a life without crisps? Who was Grant Shapps? What does your Spotify playlist data say about you? Are Jeremy Corbyn and Stewart Lee really the new Christs? And so on. Selected, introduced and, where necessary, explained by the author and corrected by readers, Content Provider is funny, grumpy, provocative, confusing and brilliant."
This clunky title, as well as being the same name as my next book, will be another full-on, finished, Carpet Remnant/41st Best/Milder Comedian type epic show, with an actual set, although the exact material is currently in freefall post-Brexit. Until Nov the shows are work-in-progs and then I will tour it for about 18 months (everywhere in UK and EIRE, except Carlisle) into mid-2018, unless there is no demand for it or I get sick or bored. Here's some dates.
OCT
11th - 15th, 18th - 20th Digital Content Provider w free DVD, Leicester Sq Theatre London
NOV (Digital Content Provider w free DVD)
November 1st - Watford Colosseum - 7.30pm - 01923 571102 - TICKETS November 2nd - Liverpool Philharmonic Hall - 8pm - 0151 709 3789 - TICKETS November 3rd - Cambridge Corn Exchange - 8pm - 01223 357851 - TICKETS November 4th - Cardiff St. David's Hall - 8pm - 029 2087 8444 - TICKETS November 6th - Newcastle Upon Tyne Theatre Royal - 7.30pm - 08448 11 21 21 - TICKETS
NOV (Content Provider)
8th - 12th, 15th - 19th, 22nd 24th, 29th Leicester Sq Theatre, London
JAN 2017
2-7, 9-10, 12-14, 16-21, 23-28 Leics Sq Theatre
The 2017 Content Provider tour will cover much of the UK, Scotland & Ireland and will run - at least - from February to June 2017.
Dates are currently being booked.
As such, the dates below are the ones confirmed so far.
More dates - and the full tour schedule - will be added shortly. For now, though...
As usual, I continue to work tirelessly for charity.
Oct 7th - Stop The War, Shaw Theatre, w Michael Rosen, Jen Brister and more.
I have had to drop out of this due to a funeral. I continue to think war should be stopped.
March 21st - South & North London Care. Leics Sq Th, London. Details TBC
AlDEBURGH COMEDY FEST LAUGH EAST
Me, Danielle Ward, (the late) Ivor Cutler, Alexei Sayle, Bridget Christie, Tina C, Johnny & The Baptists. In Aldeburgh! 30th Sept - 2nd Oct. http://www.laugheast.co.uk
ARNOLD BROWN'S BRITHDAY BASH
The legendary and inspiring comedian Arnold Brown celebrates his birthday with this generation-spanning bill at the Comedy Store, London, on Nov 21st at 7.30.
Joining him for this very special show will be MC Clive Anderson, Paul Merton, Stewart Lee, Sara Pascoe, John Hegley, Bridget Christie, Norman Lovett, Adam Bloom, Nick Revell & more acts to be announced. Also, a rare chance for fans of weird shit to see inside the temple of comedy. http://thecomedystore.co.uk/london/show/arnold-browns-birthday-bash/
Other live s-up Dates
(mainly 30 mins sets w some previews)
OCT
1st Aldeburgh Comedy Festival - TICKETS
3rd Susan Murray's Covent Garden gig
4th and 5th Red Imp, London
6th Sevenoaks somewhere w Maff Brown
7th Bush Hall, London
10th Happy Mondays, London
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.
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.
Dead Funny Encore book
Comedian Robin Ince, the co-editor of the new comedians' horror fiction anthology, in which I have a piece, writes...
"Hello everyone. Dead Funny Encore is out. i am really pleased with it, as is Johnny Mains. Sorry it took longer than thought, but really couldn't be helped.
PEA GREEN BOAT 10" Vinyl re-release of 15 year old comedy-art-drone piece on Green Vinyl. An owl wakes up at sea in a pea green boat. It is accompanied by a cat, its natural predator. There is some honey. What chain of events led to this dangerous situation? This is a long awaited luxury vinyl repress of the legendary Pea Green Boat record. On Pea Green Vinyl! (note - it's slightly darker than it looks in the photo) It's more or less identical to the 2007 release, except this time we have pressed the record on pea green vinyl, and in deference to the times, each disc comes with an mp3 download. Also we've removed the references to myspace from the back of the sleeve. Buy at Go Faster Stripe S LEE RECOMMENDS I unreservedly recommend the following shows at London's Leicester Square Theatre, some of which can be seen after me some nights, so why not double-dip it! In recommending them, I do not seek to use my vast influence to damage the careers of other comedians who I am not recommending, or to seek to take business away from other venues, which are not the Leicester Square Theatre. Tony Law, 21st - 29th Oct, 9.30 TICKETS You know Tony - like a car crash in a paint factory. Hans Teeuwen 3rd - 26th Nov, 9.30 TICKETS Hans is one of the greatest stand-ups ever. Bridget Christie. 29th Sep - 1st Feb, 9.30 TICKETS In the interests of full disclosure I am married to this woman, who is now sold out until the December dates. I recommend also... Suns Of The Tundra - The Bedford, Balham, S London, Oct 20th TICKETS Featuring comic-monologuist-writer Ben Moor as the narrator the ATP-shaking psych-prog band perform their concept album on the arctic...
“Stewart Lee has absolutely no capacity to see the world through anyone's eyes other than his own. He is a stupid person's idea of what a 'clever' comedian is like.”
- Paul Embery, UnHerd columnist, Trade unionist (FBU and NUJ), Blue Labour, Made in Dagenham, Author: ‘Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class’.
Please look after yourselves in the ongoing unknown world and don’t take any unnecessary risks.
Keep fit and keep your brains ticking over with books and films and music and don’t get sad and mad, and look out for each other.
When all this is over, I promise you, live comedy and music will feel better than they ever have, so let’s make sure we are all there to join in again on the other side.
1) LIVE DATES NEWS
What can I say?
You live in the same reality as me. You know as much as I do.
All my little club dates for Jan and Feb will be in the process of being pulled. At the moment The Scottish and Geordie Stand shows in Feb are still on, as the virus is more scared of N Sturgeon than it is of B Johnson. We will see.
I assure you, ALL THESE DATES WILL BE RESCHEDULED. The venues have your money, not me, and although I am sure loads of you could do with it, if you can let these clubs hang on to it for now it could mean the difference between surviving and going under, and we all want a world of live art to go back to.
If major tour dates are moved all the same applies.
Thank-you for your patience.
I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point.
2) PETITION FOR MUSIC, COMEDY TOURING
If you like music then bear in mind that its already covid-fucked practitioners are further fucked by the Brexit agreement, which ends the one size fits all arrangement for touring all EU member states cost-effectively, and renders it financially near impossible for most of the UK’s best acts to tour the continent to the smaller places they have got used to playing over the last near five decades, whatever shit Roger Daltrey comes out with, the stupid UKIP-supporting twat.
This is a petition to ask parliament to try and hammer out some arrangement to stem the further decimation of live art, including all the nice English language stand-up gigs all your favorite acts got to play of late, so please sign it.
Thanks to everyone who bought, and told their friends to buy, the Asian Dub Foundation track, Comin’ Over Here, which featured me shouting.
It reached the top of all the actual charts reflecting actual sales and actual downloads, but in the valueless streaming chart it was beaten by the likes of Wham’s Last Christmas, a worthy victor, which was doubtless streamed endlessly over the season by people weeping into their bread sauce.
As Mark Steel, the thrust of whose brilliant In Town Radio 4 series has recently been culturally appropriated on behalf of Channel 4 in Tom Allen Goes To Town, pointed out, ADF have enabled me to join the pantheon of pop chart topping British comics alongside Ken Dodd and Benny Hill.
Thanks also to my favourite obscene electropop act Kunt & The Gang, who graciously co-ordinated their seasonal chart assault with ours, and to Jon Morter, Sally Homer, James Hingley, Duncan Ballantyne and whoever runs a facebook page about me who knew how to target the social media.
4) KING ROCKER - MOJO
Our documentary KING ROCKER was selected for the Sheffield Documentary Festival but didn’t get screened due to Covid.
It has, however, been named by rock-mag MOJO as the second best rockumentary of 2020, and I am now allowed to announce that it will be on newly free-to-air SKY ARTS, which has also recently covered PUNCHDRUNK THEATRE, COLD WAR STEVE and IVOR CUTLER, on Jan 30th 2021 (as far as I know). Who would have thought that the weird arts brief of BBC4 would one day be fulfilled by SKY ARTS?
Comedian Stewart Lee and director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye) investigate a missing piece of punk history. Robert Lloyd, best known for fronting cult bands The Prefects and The Nightingales, has survived under the radar for over four decades. 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.
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have been involved with this positive and uplifting project, and it has been a mental lifeline this year.
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
The company operates out of an industrial unit in Southend, run by a man called Colin, who for the whole festive season will be alone and dressed as a Santa while he ships your orders of Xmas laffs worldwide, at top speed!
We have already mailed parcels of fun to Japan, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, France, USA, Canada, New Zealand, and even Latvia! Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
and chuck in to save The Goodness, a Wood Green microbrewery run by my old neighbours’ son, which was just coming together from start-up when the Covid struck, and Tier 5 restrictions have just removed even the takeaway option.
We will need music, art, and comedy on the other side of the virus.
But above all we will need beer. And loads of it.
7) I Arrogantly Recommend
NEW TV
Ghosts - Xmas Special 2020 (BBC, 2020)
NEW MUSIC
Lady Leshurr - Quaranqueen
The Primevals - New Trip
8) FINALLY, DAVID JOHNSON
Few real fans of comedy, theatre and music will have been untouched by the work of my old promoter of these last fifteen years, David Johnson, who died in December, and received nothing but massive love from all that encountered.
Here are two lovely obituaries from The Herald Scotland and The Guardian, the latter by his great friend the playwright Mark Ravenhill.
At some stage there will be the tribute show to end all tribute shows. But not yet.
Bunny Lee (dubmaster, 1940)
David Johnson (Duke of Soho, 1960)
Leslie West (Mountain man, 1945)
Stewart Lee
2021-01-06T08:30:15+00:00
“Stewart Lee has absolutely no capacity to see the world through anyone's eyes other than his own. He is a stupid person's idea of what a 'clever' comedian is like.” - Paul Embery, UnHerd columnist, Trade unionist (FBU and NUJ), Blue Labour, Made in Dagenham, Author: ‘Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class’. Please look after yourselves in the ongoing unknown world and don’t take any unnecessary risks. Keep fit and keep your brains ticking over with books and films and music and don’t get sad and mad, and look out for each other. When all this is over, I promise you, live comedy and music will feel better than they ever have, so let’s make sure we are all there to join in again on the other side. 1) LIVE DATES NEWS What can I say? You live in the same reality as me. You know as much as I do. All my little club dates for Jan and Feb will be in the process of being pulled. At the moment The Scottish and Geordie Stand shows in Feb are still on, as the virus is more scared of N Sturgeon than it is of B Johnson. We will see. I assure you, ALL THESE DATES WILL BE RESCHEDULED. The venues have your money, not me, and although I am sure loads of you could do with it, if you can let these clubs hang on to it for now it could mean the difference between surviving and going under, and we all want a world of live art to go back to. If major tour dates are moved all the same applies. Thank-you for your patience. I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as...
Say “Cornwall” to an uncontacted pygmy brave deep in a New Zealand forest and his bamboo flute will swiftly carve the shape of the Cornish pasty into the Shotover riverbank sands. “Oggy, oggy, oggy,” he will cry, as he mimes pushing a too-hot Cornish pasty into his unambiguously delighted face. “Oggy, oggy, oggy!”
But last Monday, the feast day of Cornwall’s proud Saint Piran, American food industry lobbyists revealed plans to exploit the end of our protection by the EU’s regional foods scheme. American “Cornish” pasties could be on their way into Britain. And yet Arthur, who swore to return if his land was imperilled, sleeps soundly still in his Tintagel cave.
American Cornish pasties? Say the horrible words and savour their bitter taste. Was this desecration what Leave-voting Cornwall voted for? Did proud Cornwall want the crusty foodstuff that has made Kernow beloved worldwide replaced by a foul foreign fake? Did Arthur die on adulterous Mordred’s lance to see the sacred pasty cuckolded so? Did Henry Jenner, bard of Boscawen-Un, strive to revive Cornwall’s lost language for his cultural inheritors to ask the man in Pengenna Pasties for a King Size American? Did the noble Cornish folk want nothing more than to be Donald Trump’s Brexit pasty whores? Because that is all they are! Especially the people from London who own cottages there!! And Rick Stein!!!
The Leave-voting Cornish comedian Jethro Tull has appeared twice on the Leave-voting comedian Jim Davidson’s Generation Game show, demonstrating how to make Cornish pasties. During one sequence, Tull mocked the interfering EU for insisting pasty preparers wear gloves. Now he and Davidson will be able to fly to America and see Cornish pasties being made by Hispanic slave labour from factory-farmed, hormone-ridden cattle, doused in petroleum, reduced to pulp and squeezed from automatic tubes into pre-molded pasty pastry Hot Cornwall Pockets™®. Doubtless they are delighted.
If he could see the meat and potato atrocities about to be enacted in the name of his beloved Cornish pasties, Cornwall’s holy Saint Piran would turn in his grave, had his remains not been split up and sent all around the country in the 14th century. As it is, one of Saint Piran’s arms revolves in Exeter Cathedral, the other in Waltham Abbey, while his missing head spins somewhere undisclosed in St Piran’s Old Church, Perranzabuloe.
In the Mad Max dystopia of our post-Brexit nation, it is unlikely hungry Britannia will have the luxury of rejecting Donald Trump’s food regulation-relaxing advances, no matter how many times she slaps his tiny hands away from her cool thigh. Scotch whiskies, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Jersey Royal potatoes, Solihull stickleback slices and Cumberland sausages, all sourced from the finest American processing plants, will soon foul our patriotic British palates. First they came for the West Cornwall Pasty Company. And then they came for me.
I will miss the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s cheery wayside retail outlets, a Greggs for road-worn wayfarers who fear not the harsh crust or the hot steak steam. Doubtless they are soon to close when cheap American imports undercut the business, sending hundreds of gainfully employed Cornish pasty-makers back to their old ancestral ways of piracy, smuggling and wrecking. The West Cornwall Pasty Company’s honest fayre is one of the comforts of the road to an endlessly touring comedian and last week I needed my Cornish culinary compensation.
During these last, final weeks of my 18-month standup comedy tour around broken Brexit Britain, I have been reading the 1967 novel Ice by the science-fiction pioneer and heroin enthusiast Anna Kavan, newly rescued from oblivion by Peter Owen Publishers. Ice eerily depicts a man travelling through a Kafkaesque collapsing society, beset by an encroaching ice age, against the backdrop of some imminent but unspecified political catastrophe. What ghostly forces of guidance compelled me to read this prophetic novel at this exact moment in time? Mother? Are you there? Is that you?
On Thursday night, I and my tour manager were trapped in Bristol by the Beast from the East and I was denied two days back with my resentful family in London, as we remained there until Sunday and a date in Plymouth. An audience member’s ice-skidding car had crashed into the loading doors of the Bristol theatre, where it remained for days, blocking our exit, closing the Overton window of our departure and tripling our hotel bill. I missed the kids and sat in reading Ice, worrying about their futures until my heart ached.
On Sunday we set off toward Plymouth. Though the sudden snow was thawing, all along the A386 abandoned cars lay shipwrecked in laybys, ditched during Thursday’s snowstorm and now stripped clean of parts and fabrics, the Devonshire locals reverting to type at the first sign of a social breakdown.
At the Fox Tor cafe in Princetown, high on Dartmoor, above the prehistoric stone rows of Merrivale, I suspended my diet to stand and scoff a Cornish pasty, looking out across the ancient, frost-flecked landscape of the nation that made me. The pasty was good eating, and authentically Cornish too, but there was a bitter aftertaste not of its own making. As I ate into the pasty, I felt the very notion of Britain itself being eaten away, like some kind of enormous metaphor.
On his Cornish deathbed in 1934, the last Cornish words of the Cornish language revivalist Henry Jenner were: “Here in Cornwall, we do not need other meat and pastry products. The whole object of my life has been to inculcate into the Cornish people, and the Cornish pasties, a sense of their Cornishness. Either that chicken and mushroom slice goes or I do. Aaaagh!”
How sad that Brexit befouls Jenner’s legacy and turns his Cornish pasty to cows’ dungs in our mouths. Wake, proud Arthur! Wake and bake!!
Stewart Lee
2018-03-11T18:04:12+00:00
Say “Cornwall” to an uncontacted pygmy brave deep in a New Zealand forest and his bamboo flute will swiftly carve the shape of the Cornish pasty into the Shotover riverbank sands. “Oggy, oggy, oggy,” he will cry, as he mimes pushing a too-hot Cornish pasty into his unambiguously delighted face. “Oggy, oggy, oggy!” But last Monday, the feast day of Cornwall’s proud Saint Piran, American food industry lobbyists revealed plans to exploit the end of our protection by the EU’s regional foods scheme. American “Cornish” pasties could be on their way into Britain. And yet Arthur, who swore to return if his land was imperilled, sleeps soundly still in his Tintagel cave. American Cornish pasties? Say the horrible words and savour their bitter taste. Was this desecration what Leave-voting Cornwall voted for? Did proud Cornwall want the crusty foodstuff that has made Kernow beloved worldwide replaced by a foul foreign fake? Did Arthur die on adulterous Mordred’s lance to see the sacred pasty cuckolded so? Did Henry Jenner, bard of Boscawen-Un, strive to revive Cornwall’s lost language for his cultural inheritors to ask the man in Pengenna Pasties for a King Size American? Did the noble Cornish folk want nothing more than to be Donald Trump’s Brexit pasty whores? Because that is all they are! Especially the people from London who own cottages there!! And Rick Stein!!! The Leave-voting Cornish comedian Jethro Tull has appeared twice on the Leave-voting comedian Jim Davidson’s Generation Game show, demonstrating how to make Cornish pasties. During one sequence, Tull mocked the interfering EU for insisting pasty preparers wear gloves. Now he and Davidson will be able to fly to America and see Cornish pasties being made by Hispanic slave labour from factory-farmed, hormone-ridden cattle, doused in petroleum, reduced to pulp and squeezed from automatic...
IF You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One is the provocative title for Stewart Lee's tour which brings the comedian to Worthing's Pavilion Theatre on Wednesday, October 7, at 8pm.
It's an adults-only show from the co-writer of Jerry Springer the Opera and comes inspired by an altercation in a high street coffee chain.
"In this show, an account of something that happened to me in a coffee shop will be used as a convenient framing device for disparate material possibly concerning English Heritage, Top Gear, The Olympics, emigration, prawns, Bella Pasta, The National Trust, farmers, D.H. Lawrence, piglets, cathedrals, bees, Iggy Pop, cider adverts, riots etc ., etc."
Yes, he will be getting a few things off his chest, refreshed from a quick pre-tour break in north Devon, grabbed in between his Edinburgh dates and hitting the road.
Improvisation
He will be gigging pretty much six nights a week now right through to March.
"It's the longest one that I have ever done," he says.
And to keep it fresh there will be the green lung of improvisation – though the things that work will find permanent homes in the show. As Stewart says, it's Eddie Izzard who is the absolute master in that respect. He gives the impression of delivering it off the top of his head. In reality, it's deliberate. The skill is in putting across that air of constant invention…
Performance
"The last four shows I have done have had beginning, middle and end, but in this one I will be leaving myself a lot more room to manoeuvre."
Just as well, given the vast array of venues he will be playing, everything from the big 800-seaters to theatres and halls considerably smaller.
It's live – and the size of the crowd is bound to shape the performance.
"With fewer people you can actually tone it down and it is like you are talking to friends."
It does work the other way.
Acclaim
His previous tour, entitled the 41st Best Stand-up Ever, was a jokey look at what he terms his relative professional failure compared to his critical acclaim.
When he was bemoaning his fate, it didn't sit quite so well when he was performing in a full-house 800-seater, he laughs.
As for the content this time, he will be looking at the things we can and can't say, for instance the anti-women, anti-homosexual things that the Top Gear presenters for some reason are allowed to get away with.
"I don't feel constrained personally", says Stewart.
But he makes the point that there has to be a point to what you are saying: "It's easier to justify it then."
Stewart Lee
2009-10-06T15:33:02+01:00
IF You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One is the provocative title for Stewart Lee's tour which brings the comedian to Worthing's Pavilion Theatre on Wednesday, October 7, at 8pm. It's an adults-only show from the co-writer of Jerry Springer the Opera and comes inspired by an altercation in a high street coffee chain. "In this show, an account of something that happened to me in a coffee shop will be used as a convenient framing device for disparate material possibly concerning English Heritage, Top Gear, The Olympics, emigration, prawns, Bella Pasta, The National Trust, farmers, D.H. Lawrence, piglets, cathedrals, bees, Iggy Pop, cider adverts, riots etc ., etc." Yes, he will be getting a few things off his chest, refreshed from a quick pre-tour break in north Devon, grabbed in between his Edinburgh dates and hitting the road. Improvisation He will be gigging pretty much six nights a week now right through to March. "It's the longest one that I have ever done," he says. And to keep it fresh there will be the green lung of improvisation – though the things that work will find permanent homes in the show. As Stewart says, it's Eddie Izzard who is the absolute master in that respect. He gives the impression of delivering it off the top of his head. In reality, it's deliberate. The skill is in putting across that air of constant invention… Performance "The last four shows I have done have had beginning, middle and end, but in this one I will be leaving myself a lot more room to manoeuvre." Just as well, given the vast array of venues he will be playing, everything from the big 800-seaters to theatres and halls considerably smaller. It's live – and the size of the crowd is bound...
In 2003, at the mid-point of their career, superstardom winked briefly at New Jersey's Fountains Of Wayne, when their hit single Stacey's Mom achingly anatomised adolescent trans-generational lust.
But their fifth album finds them back in the box marked ‘underappreciated guitar pop classicists', where their understatedly sharp, and wryly witty, portraits of suburban survivors' mid-life muddles pan out in thirteen perfectly structured songs. With old school moves like middle eights, key changes, vocal harmonies, and guitar solos, in all the right places, Sky Full Of Holes won't spook the horses, but engages instead both the heart and the head.
Stewart Lee
2011-08-21T19:42:05+01:00
In 2003, at the mid-point of their career, superstardom winked briefly at New Jersey's Fountains Of Wayne, when their hit single Stacey's Mom achingly anatomised adolescent trans-generational lust. But their fifth album finds them back in the box marked ‘underappreciated guitar pop classicists', where their understatedly sharp, and wryly witty, portraits of suburban survivors' mid-life muddles pan out in thirteen perfectly structured songs. With old school moves like middle eights, key changes, vocal harmonies, and guitar solos, in all the right places, Sky Full Of Holes won't spook the horses, but engages instead both the heart and the head.
I will, without exception, take the opportunity to use an ampersand wherever possible. Except on those points where it seems ugly. I am an aesthetic writer, would be the point. I'm also a big fan of Stewart Lee , to the point where I buy those weird anachronisms that DVDs are fast becoming. But lest (I went there) you think this is going to be a glut of sycophancy I'd like to kick off with the biggest problem that this latest show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, has.
It's the show. Or rather, that it always feels like a show. There's a performative aspect, a Brechtian distancing to the whole thing which, on a retrospective re-watching of his earlier live releases: Stand Up Comedian, 90s Comedian & (see?) 41st Best Stand Up Ever, seems like it's been increasing year on year. If you'll forgive a clumsily reductive synopsis of this collection then the major theme is a deconstruction of the idea, action and execution of stand up comedy. And to look at that description and hold it up to my criticism seems to show me up for a fool. I realise that if the idea is to deconstruct the medium then assuming a position outside the performance proper allows for a more subjective discursive…
But it's not that that bothers me, in fact it's the moments where unexpected difficulties drag Stewart Lee out of his rote role that are some of the show's funniest and most honest. It's the carefully chosen instances of rage and frustration, despair and collapse, the degree to which the set seems to be led by these pre-planned emotional peaks and troughs, rather than them occurring, or seeming to occur, more naturally. It may be that Stewart Lee's just not the actor he used to be, or that the energy and bile which spurred on the invectives of an angry young man have passed with age. But the added artifice tips the scales from real to make-believe.
It may be a problem with the medium, or not the medium as such, more our expectations of it. The limitations that we project onto it. It's telling that at one point, while talking to a woman with the temerity to leave mid-rant, Lee refers to the show as art, a label which you could never think to apply to ninety-nine percent of stand up. To my mind some of finest moments in stand up, the key moments of such luminaries as Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor, are those of the greatest pathos, where someone turns pain or tragedy or merely sadness into something uplifting, even beautiful. The performer gives something of themselves and the shared connection is so much stronger than the commonality of a conversation with a difficult call-centre worker or being vexed by someone of the opposite gender behaving according to stereotype.
I'm not sure that this is a review, really. It's hard to discuss the DVD without either getting into the specifics of jokes or just telling you over and over that I think it's funny. The material's as sharp as ever, a spring-board of formulaic jokes by which to get onto the meat of Lee's work and the deliberately wearying repetition of ideas and lines, it's hard to describe but it is hilarious. Sometimes Lee's work, including an extended run about Richard Hammond's death is easier to admire than enjoy but where that's the case it's also usually the point. No matter what specious articles in the Daily Mail or the flat-out lunatics on Richard Hammond fansites (it's a sad truth that such things exist) say…
But I digress, I am digression. For all its issues the show is expertly constructed, Lee working the audience like some demonic puppet master with fewer actual jokes than Tim Vine uses between the wings and the microphone. And, after all that, when finishing with a song Lee reveals a much better voice than I would have given him credit for, his libretto-writing background clearly in evidence. I may think it's the weakest of his sets, but on his worst day Stewart Lee is a more interesting and importantly, funnier comic than most.
(See, an ampersand in that last sentence would have looked stupid.)
Stewart Lee
2010-11-23T17:34:10+00:00
I will, without exception, take the opportunity to use an ampersand wherever possible. Except on those points where it seems ugly. I am an aesthetic writer, would be the point. I'm also a big fan of Stewart Lee , to the point where I buy those weird anachronisms that DVDs are fast becoming. But lest (I went there) you think this is going to be a glut of sycophancy I'd like to kick off with the biggest problem that this latest show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, has. It's the show. Or rather, that it always feels like a show. There's a performative aspect, a Brechtian distancing to the whole thing which, on a retrospective re-watching of his earlier live releases: Stand Up Comedian, 90s Comedian & (see?) 41st Best Stand Up Ever, seems like it's been increasing year on year. If you'll forgive a clumsily reductive synopsis of this collection then the major theme is a deconstruction of the idea, action and execution of stand up comedy. And to look at that description and hold it up to my criticism seems to show me up for a fool. I realise that if the idea is to deconstruct the medium then assuming a position outside the performance proper allows for a more subjective discursive… But it's not that that bothers me, in fact it's the moments where unexpected difficulties drag Stewart Lee out of his rote role that are some of the show's funniest and most honest. It's the carefully chosen instances of rage and frustration, despair and collapse, the degree to which the set seems to be led by these pre-planned emotional peaks and troughs, rather than them occurring, or seeming to occur, more naturally. It may be that Stewart Lee's just not the...
Next time you read a thoughtful article in a broadsheet newspaper about how 'graphic novels' are now serious literature, take a look at the American comic books of the fifties and sixties and remind yourself how far we, as a civilization, have come.
Pitiful four-colour daubs picture infantile, underwear clad simpletons, barely capable of reasoned thought, in battle with absurd aliens, deranged versions of their future selves, and cackling pantomime villains. It seemed as if these comics were written solely for the amusement of children, and it's impossible to imagine that within a few decades comics would have evolved to offer us the sophisticated geo-political travelogues of Joe Sacco (Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine, Walking With Israelis) the brutal scatological and religious satires of Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, God's Cunts) and the erotic mysticism of Alan Moore (Promethea, Lost Girls, Perfumed Emissions).
But they did. How?
The Super Moby Dick of Space, actually a cumbersome astro-fish and not a cetacean at all, appeared only once in the comics universe, in a May 1965 edition of DC's Adventure Comics Featuring Superboy and The Legion Of Super-heroes (issue 332), and was clearly written in the not insignificant shadow of Herman Melville's definitive American novel, Moby Dick.
In The Super Moby Dick Of Space, a small fish is accidentally enlarged by one Dr Lampier, whereupon it flies into space to feast indiscriminately on metal ores. After The Super Moby Dick of Space gobbles up a space freighter, Lightning Lad battles it unsuccessfully, his injuries resulting in the amputation of his right arm. Dr Lampier gives Lighting Lad a new metal arm, ("This should give me the power to handle the Super Moby Dick", the Lad says.)
Then, like some kind of mad one-armed Captain Ahab in green tights, Lightning Lad vows secretly to destroy the Dick and leads the unwitting Legion Of Superheroes in its pursuit. A psychedelic, venom-induced vision stops the blood-crazed Lightning Lad slaying the Space Dick and eventually the innocent fish is shrunk back to its normal size.
From this précis, The Super Moby Dick of Space seems a typical example of the kind of accidentally surreal comic book landfill of the era (1).
But it is more than that. So much more. For The Super Moby Dick of Space is perhaps a key, if rarely acknowledged, element in the process by which comics have evolved from the pathetic scribbles of the post-war era, once consumed, as explained earlier, only by infants and those with poor reading skills, to the sophisticated graphic literature of today, stocked in best bookshops, and discussed in broadsheet newspapers, usually under the heading 'Comics Have Grown Up!'
And the seismic tremors that The Super Moby Dick of Space's writer Edmond Hamilton set in motion, when he first mixed the highbrow world of literature, in the form of his own fantastic re-imagining of Herman Melville's enormous sea-dwelling metaphor for human hubris, with the clanking world of dimbo comic book idiocy, are still being felt today.
However simplistic its depiction, Lightning Lad's obsessive, one-armed quest for the Dick chimed with the same philosophical truisms that Melville coaxed from Ahab's obsession. How many of Hamilton's previously passive readers must suddenly have felt themselves stirred by thoughts of the Super Dick into a quiet contemplation of what it meant to be human?
Hamilton's The Super Moby Dick Of Space began the process of saving comics from themselves. Hamilton taught the genre ambition. He taught the comics scribes of the future to chase their own white whales. But who was he?
Born in 1904, Hamilton's golden era was the twenties and thirties when he wrote, prolifically, for Farnsworth Wright's seminal Weird Tales magazine, alongside other favorites like HP Lovecraft, Jack Williamson and Robert E Howard.
By the forties, as Science Fiction became more sophisticated, Hamilton's Flash Gordon style space operas seemed dated, and in 1946 he began a twenty year stint penning stories for DC comics, then as now a publisher known for its charitable acceptance of once ambitious writers who had failed in more highbrow areas of literature.
But lest we should dismiss Hamilton as a hack, and the genius of The Super Moby Dick Of Space as a mere fluke, bear in mind these three key points in his defence.
1) After a few years writing the adventures of Lightning Lad, Captain Future and such like, Hamilton's own prose work was, according to sci-fi experts, showing increasing signs of sophistication, culminating in 1960's philosophically inclined novel, The Haunted Stars, still highly regarded today.
2) Like many male comic book writers, Hamilton was romantically entwined with a more talented female partner, whom one must assume had influenced his work. In 1946, Hamilton married the acclaimed, snow obsessed, science fiction author Leigh Brackett, eventually to become the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back, conspicuously the only one of the original Star Wars trilogy in which the dialogue is anything more than just the phrase "I've got bad feeling about this" repeated over and over again.
Stan Lee says it was his wife that urged him to give his crazy Spider-man and Fantastic Four ideas a shot.
It's a reasonable presumption that Brackett's encouragement might have given Hamilton the confidence to act on his ambitious The Super Moby Dick Of Space vision, despite the apparent restrictions of the comics genre.
3) In his essay Herman Melville : Space Opera Virtuoso , the Nebula award winning Science Fiction writer John Kessell describes how the young, would-be pulp magazine contributor Herman Melville corresponded with contemporaries like Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester and Edmond Hamilton. Edmond Hamilton! Stumbling across this essay on the internet, everything suddenly made sense. Perhaps Hamilton and Melville had cooked up Moby Dick together, Melville using the idea as the basis for the great American novel, Hamilton using it as the basis for the comic book that changed everything. Except of course the dates don't work.
Moby Dick was published in 1851, Melville died before Hamilton was born, and on closer inspection Kessell's piece is a delightful alternate history fantasy in which Melville invents modern science fiction in 1920s New York with his novel The Wail.
Kessell posits this Melville's Ahab as the captain of the Independent Research Ship Peascod, and he is able, "through alien symbiosis, to detect the forces that move behind the "pasteboard mask" of matter."
But behind the pasteboard mask of Kessell's temporarily misleading fiction, behind the fact that Melville and Hamilton did not know each other at all, and could not have done, lies a strange coincidence, which suggests Hamilton was the natural inheritor of Melville's visionary innovations, whether he knew it or not. When Melville wrote Moby Dick, the sea was the unknown, the limit of man's understanding of the physical world, the perfect location upon which to float the gigantic symbol that is the unknowable white whale. For Hamilton's generation it was space.
But maybe Melville saw this shift of focus coming, a shift eventually accelerated by Lightning Lad's grapple with a Dick of his own.
Melville's last novel was 1957's The Confidence Man. His prose was largely unappreciated during his lifetime and he lived out the rest of his days as a customs officer, and occasional poet, dying uncelebrated in 1891. But Melville's notebooks show that he was still at work on unfinished ideas, and that he was also a great reader of contemporary writers. An 1866 journal shows Melville clearly spellbound by Jules Verne's recently published From The Earth To The Moon, making notes comparing the sea to space itself, the frustrated and forgotten writer envisioning 'dark waves of black air', 'a white surf of starlight', and 'a voyage to the unknown suns, destined to remain unending'.
And, perhaps aware of Francis Godwin's 1599 proto-sf fantasy, The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage thither, in which basket-harnessed geese carry a passenger into space, Melville had begun to make some very strange sketches; - pencil drawings of a whale, borne to the stars by vast flocks of birds tied to its fins, its jaws snapping at manned, pencil-shaped cylinders.
But why? What was Melville trying to say? Was this space-borne Dick an attempt to extend the metaphor of the white whale in a medium Melville knew would soon be universally appropriate? And was this an attempt that Edmond Hamilton eventually and intuitively completed, one hundred years later?
Melville's Moby Dick gave the Great American Novel vast and unprecedented depths. Hamilton's The Super Moby Dick Of Space began the same process for the Great American Comic Book. Neither writer was given any credit for what he had done in his lifetime.
During his second and final attempt to slay the Super Dick, Lightning Lad is pictured in a wild-eyed visionary state, Dick venom from the wound that severed his arm finally having made its way through his bloodstream to his brain.
He pictures the Dick at the centre of a vast cosmos of interrelated beings, and realises that his intended vengeance is an offence to nature. "Everything that lives is holy," he observes, trembling, "energy is eternal delight." With these words, quoted presumably deliberately by Hamilton from William Blake's The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, Hamilton not only assimilates the lessons of Melville's Moby Dick, but arguably improves upon them, plugging the novel into a wider consciousness of ecstatic moral relativism that Melville only hinted at.
And, on a perhaps less profound note, he showed those who were watching - Alan Moore included, I should imagine - just what comics might one day be capable of.
FOOTNOTE
(1) To be fair, there are other moments of incidental brilliance in the story, such as 'The World Of Dead Robots' that Lightning Lad briefly flies over in his spaceship. "Those huge mechanical giants, created to serve humans, revolted and drove their masters away.
Then, unable to repair themselves, they gradually stopped running and 'died'.", the lad observes of the rotting robots, depicted by the artist John Forte as resembling the denizens of some now abandoned Soviet era sculpture park.
Stewart Lee
2010-11-01T20:38:46+00:00
Next time you read a thoughtful article in a broadsheet newspaper about how 'graphic novels' are now serious literature, take a look at the American comic books of the fifties and sixties and remind yourself how far we, as a civilization, have come. Pitiful four-colour daubs picture infantile, underwear clad simpletons, barely capable of reasoned thought, in battle with absurd aliens, deranged versions of their future selves, and cackling pantomime villains. It seemed as if these comics were written solely for the amusement of children, and it's impossible to imagine that within a few decades comics would have evolved to offer us the sophisticated geo-political travelogues of Joe Sacco (Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine, Walking With Israelis) the brutal scatological and religious satires of Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, God's Cunts) and the erotic mysticism of Alan Moore (Promethea, Lost Girls, Perfumed Emissions). But they did. How? The Super Moby Dick of Space, actually a cumbersome astro-fish and not a cetacean at all, appeared only once in the comics universe, in a May 1965 edition of DC's Adventure Comics Featuring Superboy and The Legion Of Super-heroes (issue 332), and was clearly written in the not insignificant shadow of Herman Melville's definitive American novel, Moby Dick. In The Super Moby Dick Of Space, a small fish is accidentally enlarged by one Dr Lampier, whereupon it flies into space to feast indiscriminately on metal ores. After The Super Moby Dick of Space gobbles up a space freighter, Lightning Lad battles it unsuccessfully, his injuries resulting in the amputation of his right arm. Dr Lampier gives Lighting Lad a new metal arm, ("This should give me the power to handle the Super Moby Dick", the Lad says.) Then, like some kind of mad one-armed Captain Ahab in green tights, Lightning Lad vows secretly to...
Cutting edge comedian Stewart Lee performed at a packed Truro Hall for Cornwall last night.
Seats were in short supply as the Lee brought his unique comedy act to the stage as part of his live tour taking him up and down the country.
As well as stand-up comedy, Lee has broadcast on television and radio and written in national newspapers.
Stewart Lee
2010-02-20T17:19:08+00:00
Cutting edge comedian Stewart Lee performed at a packed Truro Hall for Cornwall last night. Seats were in short supply as the Lee brought his unique comedy act to the stage as part of his live tour taking him up and down the country. As well as stand-up comedy, Lee has broadcast on television and radio and written in national newspapers.
'No one is equipped to review me,' stated Stewart Lee on Thursday evening at the Hall for Cornwall. That isn't going to stop me trying.
He entered the stage (complete with two flags of St. Piran, as the day dictated) in front of a sell-out crowd, and proceeded to explain his set-list. Half an hour of anti-Islamic observational comedy, about forty minutes on urine, quick interval, and then a piece on nationalism. The bad kind, of course, not the good Cornish kind.
Suppose you went to see a magician, but with each moment, they explained how the trick worked. It would be disastrous, the joy is not knowing how it has been done. Yet Lee, in a Brechtian theatrical tradition, deconstructs his comedy throughout, exposes the mechanics of the work, strips it down to its components, and shows the quality of each individual moment in his superb two-hour set. The "how" is every bit as enjoyable as the result.
Lee is unlike many other comedians, whether feigning anger with his audience, helpless looks to a (presumably absent?) stage manager, questioning the crowd's ability to appreciate comedy, yet the experience of watching is no less enjoyable. Whilst simultaneously appearing to issue with the crowd, he absolutely played to us, making fun of our dear 'Fascist Utopia,' Cornwall. Interwoven with these moments, his politics shines through, with his routines working as insightful and topical allegories. The rise of UKIP from entertaining lunatic fringe to altogether more sinister lunatics was particularly astute, as well as being hysterically funny.
He is a remarkable performer, and a master of his craft: particularly apparent on a perfectly stressed 'Rochester and Stroud.' Not every joke landed, some weren't great, but his ability to immediately pass comment on how and why they didn't always resulted in a laugh. It was precise, forensic comedy, which had my head aching with laughter at points, yet always made me think. Perhaps his most "Brechtian" success was that his audience didn't '[hang] its brains up in the cloakroom along with its coat.' No one passively watched; his audience hung on his every word.
His self-awareness, the impeccable commentary throughout, his heated interaction with the audience, and even explaining the content of the show right at the beginning, all served to remind us that we were watching stand-up. That distance, I think, had us considering the content all the more. Particularly pertinently, in one of the most genuine and truthful moments in his performance, Lee reminded us, "But you must vote. You absolutely must vote."
Thanks for coming Stew, and please head back soon. Also, you were absolutely right to call it the 'Furry Dance,' and got the tune bang on. Whoever shouted out 'Floral Dance,' hang your head in shame. On our national day too. The good kind of nationalism, of course.
P.S. – If you have a spare fifty-five minutes, and are a fan of Stewart Lee, this is well worth a watch.
Stewart Lee
2015-03-08T20:17:29+00:00
'No one is equipped to review me,' stated Stewart Lee on Thursday evening at the Hall for Cornwall. That isn't going to stop me trying. He entered the stage (complete with two flags of St. Piran, as the day dictated) in front of a sell-out crowd, and proceeded to explain his set-list. Half an hour of anti-Islamic observational comedy, about forty minutes on urine, quick interval, and then a piece on nationalism. The bad kind, of course, not the good Cornish kind. Suppose you went to see a magician, but with each moment, they explained how the trick worked. It would be disastrous, the joy is not knowing how it has been done. Yet Lee, in a Brechtian theatrical tradition, deconstructs his comedy throughout, exposes the mechanics of the work, strips it down to its components, and shows the quality of each individual moment in his superb two-hour set. The "how" is every bit as enjoyable as the result. Lee is unlike many other comedians, whether feigning anger with his audience, helpless looks to a (presumably absent?) stage manager, questioning the crowd's ability to appreciate comedy, yet the experience of watching is no less enjoyable. Whilst simultaneously appearing to issue with the crowd, he absolutely played to us, making fun of our dear 'Fascist Utopia,' Cornwall. Interwoven with these moments, his politics shines through, with his routines working as insightful and topical allegories. The rise of UKIP from entertaining lunatic fringe to altogether more sinister lunatics was particularly astute, as well as being hysterically funny. He is a remarkable performer, and a master of his craft: particularly apparent on a perfectly stressed 'Rochester and Stroud.' Not every joke landed, some weren't great, but his ability to immediately pass comment on how and why they didn't always resulted in a laugh....
COMEDIAN Stewart Lee angrily smashed an audience member’s phone on the stage floor and put it between his bum cheeks.
Stewart leapt from the stage and ordered the device to be handed over.
He had warned him to put his phone away in a rant over how a filmed joke could be taken out of context online.
Despite the fan insisting it was not recording, Stewart shouted: “I f***ing warned you.”
He returned to the stage, threw the phone down then dropped his trousers and shoved it between his cheeks.
The audience at Oxford Playhouse were horrified.
One man said: “He jiggled around with the phone shoved in his bum.”
Stewart, best known as one half of Lee and Herring, later called the fan an idiot and told him that his phone was in a Jiffy bag with sanitiser.
Stewart Lee
2022-01-19T13:53:05+00:00
COMEDIAN Stewart Lee angrily smashed an audience member’s phone on the stage floor and put it between his bum cheeks. Stewart leapt from the stage and ordered the device to be handed over. He had warned him to put his phone away in a rant over how a filmed joke could be taken out of context online. Despite the fan insisting it was not recording, Stewart shouted: “I f***ing warned you.” He returned to the stage, threw the phone down then dropped his trousers and shoved it between his cheeks. The audience at Oxford Playhouse were horrified. One man said: “He jiggled around with the phone shoved in his bum.” Stewart, best known as one half of Lee and Herring, later called the fan an idiot and told him that his phone was in a Jiffy bag with sanitiser.
Trojan's catalogue of reggae classics re-emerges in another series of compilations, now under the ‘Trojan Presents' banner. This re-packaging process has been ongoing for over a decade, but this latest petit dejeuner de dog is a doozy.
In the Seventies, Jamaican engineers with an instinctive understanding of sonic drama stripped existing recordings of distinguishing features, fore-grounding vocal snippets, booming bass and mystical melodica licks in echoing landscapes born in basically equipped studios and primitive effects.
They called it Dub, and here's forty chronologically sequenced tracks, from King Tubby to relative unknowns, to convince you it's a genre of genius.
Stewart Lee
2011-07-17T00:54:26+01:00
Trojan's catalogue of reggae classics re-emerges in another series of compilations, now under the ‘Trojan Presents' banner. This re-packaging process has been ongoing for over a decade, but this latest petit dejeuner de dog is a doozy. In the Seventies, Jamaican engineers with an instinctive understanding of sonic drama stripped existing recordings of distinguishing features, fore-grounding vocal snippets, booming bass and mystical melodica licks in echoing landscapes born in basically equipped studios and primitive effects. They called it Dub, and here's forty chronologically sequenced tracks, from King Tubby to relative unknowns, to convince you it's a genre of genius.
HE feels like a failure. Having been voted the 41st best stand-up comedian ever in one of those ridiculous Channel 4 countdown shows, he'd be forgiven for assuming his place in the hearts and minds of the British public was assured.
But as he tells us, after 20 years of sciatica inducing touring, and a few extra pounds of middle-age spread, the '41st best' accolade doesn't really get you anywhere. Even when a BBC2 producer offers you your dream six-part series, you can have that shiny new toy taken away and stamped on. So you're left toiling away on the circuit, playing to half-empty theatres such as the Nottingham Playhouse.
Of course, despite the general ranting at his own career misfortunes, his tongue is firmly set in his cheek. Stewart Lee is so incredibly clever that he can make his whole routine a convincing diatribe of his personal career woes, but with the subtleties and nuances of a seasoned professional that leave us no doubt in just why those that did turned up in the first place.
His timing is impeccable. The weight of the punchline reinforced by the pause that precedes it. And it works in all parts of his act, from the surrealist take on a Portuguese sardine, to the ethics of observational comedy.
There may have been one or two troughs in an otherwise skillfully constructed and executed set, but whether 41st or not his task is to make us laugh. And he does his job brilliantly.
Stewart Lee
2008-03-01T22:03:49+00:00
HE feels like a failure. Having been voted the 41st best stand-up comedian ever in one of those ridiculous Channel 4 countdown shows, he'd be forgiven for assuming his place in the hearts and minds of the British public was assured. But as he tells us, after 20 years of sciatica inducing touring, and a few extra pounds of middle-age spread, the '41st best' accolade doesn't really get you anywhere. Even when a BBC2 producer offers you your dream six-part series, you can have that shiny new toy taken away and stamped on. So you're left toiling away on the circuit, playing to half-empty theatres such as the Nottingham Playhouse. Of course, despite the general ranting at his own career misfortunes, his tongue is firmly set in his cheek. Stewart Lee is so incredibly clever that he can make his whole routine a convincing diatribe of his personal career woes, but with the subtleties and nuances of a seasoned professional that leave us no doubt in just why those that did turned up in the first place. His timing is impeccable. The weight of the punchline reinforced by the pause that precedes it. And it works in all parts of his act, from the surrealist take on a Portuguese sardine, to the ethics of observational comedy. There may have been one or two troughs in an otherwise skillfully constructed and executed set, but whether 41st or not his task is to make us laugh. And he does his job brilliantly.
Jason DiEmilio committed suicide in 2006, his death hastened by tinnitus and painful sensitivity to sound. It's assumed his conditions resulted from the atonal, high volume, feedback drones he wrenched from his guitar as The Azusa Plane, but DiEmilio's music always sounded like someone trying to block something out with clouds of vibrating bliss.
Here's two CDs and sixty-seven bonus mp3s suggesting My Bloody Valentine or The Velvet Underground, their pop song shapes erased, and all that abstract sonic dressing dragged center-stage, where it will carry whatever emotional weight you care to place upon it.
Stewart Lee
2012-02-01T00:55:52+00:00
Jason DiEmilio committed suicide in 2006, his death hastened by tinnitus and painful sensitivity to sound. It's assumed his conditions resulted from the atonal, high volume, feedback drones he wrenched from his guitar as The Azusa Plane, but DiEmilio's music always sounded like someone trying to block something out with clouds of vibrating bliss. Here's two CDs and sixty-seven bonus mp3s suggesting My Bloody Valentine or The Velvet Underground, their pop song shapes erased, and all that abstract sonic dressing dragged center-stage, where it will carry whatever emotional weight you care to place upon it.
From Ted Chippington to TS Eliot and Chic Murray to Lenny Bruce, The Observer's most eagerly awaited stand-in columnist lays bare the foundations of his best-selling comedy primer 'How I Escaped My Certain Fate'.
Stewart Lee
2015-04-30T18:01:29+01:00
From Ted Chippington to TS Eliot and Chic Murray to Lenny Bruce, The Observer's most eagerly awaited stand-in columnist lays bare the foundations of his best-selling comedy primer 'How I Escaped My Certain Fate'.
As Lee is the last person you need to have a relaxing evening of gentility with.
You need to be alert. Switched on. Maybe that’s where the term “high-brow” comes from - the wide-eyed concentration that is required to get the most from Lee’s style of comedy.
The forty nine year old always deserves an audience who is willing to work hard for their laughs - and the majority of the first half at the Theatre Royal on Friday was exactly that.
Gripping onto a battered and bent microphone stand, which was nearly used in smashing up a pre-warned punter who used a mobile phone, is well used but still managed to keep upright. It would be too obvious to point of the similarity of its owner.
Working out where the lines of which is ramshackle and which is beautifully constructed layed comedy, is part of the entertainment as Lee attacked everything and anything in his sights, including himself.
Volunteer ushers, other stand ups, Sky, Trump, supporters of Trump, Brexit, Deacon Blue, supporters of Brexit, and randomly the residents of Diss. Although he did admit he had never been to Diss - he just found it an amusing name.
The main target throughout the show though - was the “Friends of the Theatre Royal”. That valiant group of people who go to most performances, and are more comfortable with shows with the songs of Gerry an the Pacemakers, than a stumbling later-years-Elvis lookalike calling them all names under the sun.
Lee spends more time explaining why his routine is funnier and cleverer than any other working stand-up to the casual passer-bys of tonight’s show than doing his routine, which ultimately, IS his routine. And it’s funny and clever. Very funny and clever in some parts, especially the wistful ending.
Despite having three primetime series’ on the BBC, and turned down offers from Sky, Lee is more mainstream than he’d like to admit. With 200+ sold out shows completed, Content Provider is slick, poetic and an captivating night of comedy.
But not for everyone.
If watching a man stomp and smash across thousands of other stand up DVDs that he bought for a 1p each, whilst ranting about the liberal elite and Diss is your idea of a high-brow evening, then you missed out.
Stewart Lee
2018-03-26T22:45:19+01:00
As Lee is the last person you need to have a relaxing evening of gentility with. You need to be alert. Switched on. Maybe that’s where the term “high-brow” comes from - the wide-eyed concentration that is required to get the most from Lee’s style of comedy. The forty nine year old always deserves an audience who is willing to work hard for their laughs - and the majority of the first half at the Theatre Royal on Friday was exactly that. Gripping onto a battered and bent microphone stand, which was nearly used in smashing up a pre-warned punter who used a mobile phone, is well used but still managed to keep upright. It would be too obvious to point of the similarity of its owner. Working out where the lines of which is ramshackle and which is beautifully constructed layed comedy, is part of the entertainment as Lee attacked everything and anything in his sights, including himself. Volunteer ushers, other stand ups, Sky, Trump, supporters of Trump, Brexit, Deacon Blue, supporters of Brexit, and randomly the residents of Diss. Although he did admit he had never been to Diss - he just found it an amusing name. The main target throughout the show though - was the “Friends of the Theatre Royal”. That valiant group of people who go to most performances, and are more comfortable with shows with the songs of Gerry an the Pacemakers, than a stumbling later-years-Elvis lookalike calling them all names under the sun. Lee spends more time explaining why his routine is funnier and cleverer than any other working stand-up to the casual passer-bys of tonight’s show than doing his routine, which ultimately, IS his routine. And it’s funny and clever. Very funny and clever in some parts, especially the wistful ending. Despite...
It's almost impossible to review Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (Saturday, BBC2), the meta-stand-up show which has returned for a third series, because Stewart Lee is his own best critic; he's already done the hard work for us.
So, as he put it, this episode was both "weaving magic out of thin air" and "some sort of elitist prank". It was, most of all, "the sound of the middle class applauding their own guilt". Cheers, Stew. I might nip downstairs for a cup of tea, while you finish up here?
SLCV also requires no introduction, because if you're one of those guilt-applauding Independent-reading liberals that Stewart Lee appeals to, you'll already know and admire the semi-masochistic pleasure of his abrasive style. And if not, then you're unlikely to be made to feel welcome. By the end of this half-hour show, Lee had his back to the studio audience, having become engrossed in a mimed phone conversation with an imaginary patron of a made-up business. It was very clever, very funny and also the height of rudeness.
Last series introduced the "hostile interrogator", helping Lee to get away with such spectacular slights to his devoted fans by bringing him down a peg or two. This series, these short scenes intercut with the stand-up marked the return to TV of British comedy's most enigmatic satirist, Chris Morris. He'd always acted as SLCV's script editor, but in this series he's emerging from the shadows to take over from Armando Iannucci as Lee's Paxman-style foe.
This comedy about comedy would be unforgivably self-indulgent if Lee wasn't just as incisive on every other facet of modern life as he is on his own comedic genius. Last series included episodes titled "Charity", "Identity" and "Democracy"; this episode memorably summed up Twitter as "a state surveillance agency staffed by gullible volunteers" and Vodafone's Digital Parenting guide as "the fox's guide to chicken security".
There's nothing more to add, is there? Especially since any and all criticisms of Lee risk being co-opted into the advertising for his next tour. Or at the very least included in the exhaustive "Online Critiques" list he keeps on his website, detailing every rude thing anyone has ever said about him.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-02T21:15:54+00:00
It's almost impossible to review Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (Saturday, BBC2), the meta-stand-up show which has returned for a third series, because Stewart Lee is his own best critic; he's already done the hard work for us. So, as he put it, this episode was both "weaving magic out of thin air" and "some sort of elitist prank". It was, most of all, "the sound of the middle class applauding their own guilt". Cheers, Stew. I might nip downstairs for a cup of tea, while you finish up here? SLCV also requires no introduction, because if you're one of those guilt-applauding Independent-reading liberals that Stewart Lee appeals to, you'll already know and admire the semi-masochistic pleasure of his abrasive style. And if not, then you're unlikely to be made to feel welcome. By the end of this half-hour show, Lee had his back to the studio audience, having become engrossed in a mimed phone conversation with an imaginary patron of a made-up business. It was very clever, very funny and also the height of rudeness. Last series introduced the "hostile interrogator", helping Lee to get away with such spectacular slights to his devoted fans by bringing him down a peg or two. This series, these short scenes intercut with the stand-up marked the return to TV of British comedy's most enigmatic satirist, Chris Morris. He'd always acted as SLCV's script editor, but in this series he's emerging from the shadows to take over from Armando Iannucci as Lee's Paxman-style foe. This comedy about comedy would be unforgivably self-indulgent if Lee wasn't just as incisive on every other facet of modern life as he is on his own comedic genius. Last series included episodes titled "Charity", "Identity" and "Democracy"; this episode memorably summed up Twitter as "a state surveillance agency staffed...
Every Tuesday at 8.45pm, I stand in the silent lane alone and bang my Le Creusets in support of a group of brave people who must never be forgotten; unsung martyrs who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves working at the very heart of a terrible unfolding disaster of an unprecedented scale – the cast of the second series of Ricky Gervais’s After Life (Netflix).
Denied proper support or protection, in the form of three-dimensional characters or plausible dialogue, these simple actors, almost two of them from an ethnic minority, are forced instead to mouth lines apparently designed merely to cement public perceptions of their author’s own genius, like old beggars under sacks. And yet they solider on, the real heroes of our times, discharging their duties with professionalism and dignity, lions led by a dong. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we shall remember them.
I’m joking of course! But should anything be off-limits for humour, especially during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Snack ™ ® Co Ltd)? It’s a question answered by Ricky Gervais himself in a syndicated Press Association interview provided free to the Aberdeen Evening Express, and newspapers nationwide, in March. The “Wokefinder General” (Sarah Vine, Daily Mail) concluded: “There is no better tool to get you through bad things… than with a sense of humour.” I am sure this was a sentiment shared privately by his cast every day during the filming of After Life (Netflix).
If nothing should be off-limits for humour, especially during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Smoothies and ’Shakes ™ ® Co Ltd), then is it acceptable to joke that After Life (Netflix) is the first successful post-truth TV programme? Manifestly ill-equipped to fulfil its chosen function, mixing callous cruelty with saccharine sentimentality, claiming it was only joking whenever its intentions are questioned, and buoyed artificially by the support of a loyal Twitter following and its attendant algorithmic significance, After Life (Netflix) is the sociopathic Donald Trump (Fox News) of comedy dramas. But at least After Life (Netflix) hasn’t recommended drinking Dettol (Reckitt Benckiser Group plc).
But is it appropriate to laugh at Donald Trump (Fox News) during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Battered Bat and Pangolin Fingers ™ ® Inc)? Did the time for laughing end when Donald Trump (Fox News), who has the codes to a nuclear holocaust in his man bag, recommended the ingestion of cleaning fluids? Was this in fact the time for the world to collectively crap its pants and cry, instead of laughing and carrying on?
I’m joking of course! Nothing should be off-limits for humour, even during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Party Bites ™ ® Ltd)!! People should, and indeed must, be free to enjoy the Wokefinder’s After Life (Netflix) if they wish to do so, irrespective of the opinions of the gatekeepers of the temples of culture. And, in the same way, people should also be free to drink or mainline cleaning fluid if they so desire, whatever the so-called “cleaning fluid manufacturers” of the liberal elite and their gender-fluid friends say.
Vice-president Mike Pence (The Koch Network) explained that he was the only one not wearing a mask when touring a coronavirus clinic because he wanted to be able to look medical workers in the eye. But medical masks cover the mouth, not the eyes and thus would not prevent eye-to-eye contact. All the medical mask would do is prevent Mike Pence (The Koch Network) from thanking medical workers by kissing them full on the mouth, and then gratefully tonguing them to climax.
Perhaps Mike Pence (The Koch Network) is confusing medical masks with the full-head rubber gimp mask he is forced to wear during his private Oval Office meetings with Donald Trump (Fox News). Nothing should be off limits for humour, but is it appropriate to joke that Mike Pence (The Koch Network) is regularly sodomised by Donald Trump (Fox News) while wearing a rubber gimp mask, especially during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Home Masseuses ™ ® Ltd)? Or will it seem like a distasteful joke when this actually turns out to have been the case, and that the Russians have it on film?
It is worth remembering this. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, but that which does kill us actually does kills us. Dead! And Dettol (Reckitt Benckiser Group plc), whether drunk or injected, will kill you, even if you drink or inject it sarcastically, having been recommended to drink or inject it in a “sarcastic” way by the leader of the free world.
But is it appropriate to be sarcastic during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Escort Service ™ ® Intl)? Donald Trump (Fox News) was quick to dismiss accurate transcripts of his exact comments about how you should drink or inject Dettol (Reckitt Benckiser Group plc) as “fake news”, a concept I experienced personally myself last week for the first time when I became the subject of a failed meme attempt.
A clickbait entity circulated a plausible-looking BBC news page online, featuring a photograph of “comedian” Stewart Lee claiming he wanted lockdown to last at least two years. I have never said this, but if anything I think two years isn’t long enough, and that Richard Branson’s unpaid taxes should be used to fund all British citizens’ locked-down leisure, in full, indefinitely, even after the virus is eliminated. And that every household should receive a free copy of the German experimental band Faust’s second album for Virgin, 1973’s Faust IV, so they can dream away the lotus days in a haze of fuzzy krautrock.
I’m joking of course. But After Life is trending and Matt Handcock is dissembling. And a baby, a baby! Is this a civilisation that deserves to be saved?
Stewart Lee
2020-05-03T21:58:00+01:00
Every Tuesday at 8.45pm, I stand in the silent lane alone and bang my Le Creusets in support of a group of brave people who must never be forgotten; unsung martyrs who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves working at the very heart of a terrible unfolding disaster of an unprecedented scale – the cast of the second series of Ricky Gervais’s After Life (Netflix). Denied proper support or protection, in the form of three-dimensional characters or plausible dialogue, these simple actors, almost two of them from an ethnic minority, are forced instead to mouth lines apparently designed merely to cement public perceptions of their author’s own genius, like old beggars under sacks. And yet they solider on, the real heroes of our times, discharging their duties with professionalism and dignity, lions led by a dong. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we shall remember them. I’m joking of course! But should anything be off-limits for humour, especially during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Snack ™ ® Co Ltd)? It’s a question answered by Ricky Gervais himself in a syndicated Press Association interview provided free to the Aberdeen Evening Express, and newspapers nationwide, in March. The “Wokefinder General” (Sarah Vine, Daily Mail) concluded: “There is no better tool to get you through bad things… than with a sense of humour.” I am sure this was a sentiment shared privately by his cast every day during the filming of After Life (Netflix). If nothing should be off-limits for humour, especially during the horror of The Corona Virus (Wuhan Bat and Pangolin Smoothies and ’Shakes ™ ® Co Ltd), then is it acceptable to joke that After Life (Netflix) is the first successful post-truth TV programme? Manifestly ill-equipped to...
The name Fountains of Wayne might sound familiar for two reasons. Perhaps you remember them from the two critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful late 90’s albums, where they mixed irresistible guitar pop hooks with uncommonly witty and surprisingly sympathetic descriptions of the quietly desperate lives of various suburbanites. Or maybe you’ve seen a garden furniture store of the same name used as a cutaway to add local colour between scenes of mob violence in the HBO TV series The Sopranos. Are the management of Fountains Of Wayne, the New Jersey garden furniture store, aware of Fountains of Wayne, the resilient New Jersey rock band who stole their name?
“They know about us,” admits Adam Schlesinger, the more affable part of the classic double act he forms with his less forthcoming song-writing partner Chris Collingwood, “We actually went by there when we first started the band, and let them know what we were doing. The gardening guy was a little wary. He said something like, “Well, let’s just stay in touch throughout all of this.” And we were like – ‘What do you mean? All of what?’” Collingwood laconically continues the story; “He wanted us to come down and say hi, so we did. He said, “I just want to make sure you guys aren’t gangster rappers or something, who will give the store a bad name.” I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re nice boys.’ Sometimes people still say to us, ‘Did you know there’s a garden store called Fountains of Wayne?’ And I say, ‘No. Never heard of it. It’s just a f***ing coincidence you f***ing moron!’”
Inevitably, the Fountains of Wayne garden furniture store has become a place of pilgrimage for Fountains Of Wayne fans, who send photos to the band of themselves posing amid the lawn chairs. But the name the band chose has, belatedly, acquired a strange relevance to the characters that inhabit their songs. Just what kind of place is Wayne? “It’s in the Tri-State area, the most populated place of the United States, full of highways and suburbs and malls.”, Schlesinger answers, and after a brief squabble with Collingwood over what exactly comprises the Tri-State Area, elaborates, “It seems now it was a really calculated idea to name our band after the Fountains of Wayne store because it was going to tie in to the vibe of our songs. But at the time we just thought it was a funny name. We didn’t put much thought into it, but we knew it wasn’t going to make sense to anyone outside that area so we’d have a bond with everyone locally and everyone else in the world would at least be curious.”
An incisive American critic has described Fountains Of Wayne songs as taking place exclusively “between exits 10-14 of the New Jersey Turnpike.” After some discussion it seems the region is most closely analogous to the wilderness of the Thames Valley Corridor, the domain of David Brent and his co-workers in the office, full of IT companies, night clubs with drinks promotions of weekday evenings, new towns and roadside retail developments. For The Fountains of Wayne, and the people they write about, there is a sense that they are one step removed from the thrills of big city existence, and that life is elsewhere. The protagonist of Hackensack dreams of the high school sweetheart who is now a movie star. Little Red Light is the interior monologue of a businessman stuck in traffic. Hey Julie depicts an office worker thinking about his girlfriend between filing and phone calls. “We often set our songs on the outskirts of cities rather than within the cities themselves,” says Schlesinger. “Both of us grew up essentially in the suburbs. I grew up outside of New York in New Jersey, Chris grew up outside of Philadelphia, but a lot of our songs are set just outside of these cities rather than within then, and that’s somewhere that a lot of Americans live, and that’s something that resonates with a lot of people. When we were in our formative musical years the big bands of the day, U2 or The Police, were writing about these grand themes and we knew that wasn’t going to work for two guys from the suburbs. So we took our inspiration from English bands like The Kinks Or The Smiths that wrote about very specific things that they knew. We didn’t know those neighbourhoods that they were describing but the details made the songs more vivid and universal.”
Collingwood uses Bright Future In Sales, a song from the new Welcomes Interstate Managers album, as an example of their constituency. It sounds like it should be about hot-rods or surfing, but in fact describes the daily struggles of a commercial traveller. “When we write about that guy we’re not thinking ‘poor schumuck’. It’s just a funny little story. Some people said, ‘Why are you writing about somebody who has a horrible life and is really unhappy?’ The answer is it that, to us, it wouldn’t make a good album if all the songs were ‘Whooopeee! Life is great!’ There’s nothing interesting about that.” “People don’t sometimes realise that we don’t see ourselves as so far removed from these characters in a lot of cases,” adds Schlesinger, “There title track of our last album, Utopia Parkway, was about this guy that is getting a bit too old to be trying to be in a rock band but he’s still running around town putting his fliers up. Well, that’s us. We’re not making fun of someone else. That’s pretty much our life. And when people say why do you always write about these business travellers and so forth, well that’s our life too. Basically, we are business travellers and we spend most of our time in airports or on buses and commuting.”
After the commercial failure of their second album, time was very nearly called on the duo’s adolescent rock ambitions. The band made a strong start, and Schlesinger supplied the Oscar nominated theme to the Tom Hanks comedy That Thing You Do. Their eponymous 1996 debut had seen the pair create a set of classic power pop songs, offsetting fuzzy punk guitars with subversively tuneful melodies. Interviewed for this paper at the time Collingwood reacted resentfully to the suggestion that the band were academic rock nerds, studiously decoding the Rosetta Stone of classic American guitar pop with pointers from Big Star, The Posies and various early 80’s skinny tie sporting songwriters. “It’s not like I sit at home all day studying obscure Shoes b-sides.”, he sniped, understandably. 1999’s Utopia Parkway created a colder atmosphere, and new recruits Jody Portter on guitar and The Posies drummer Brian Young helped sustain a more melancholy mood. But despite mass critical approval, the band were dropped by Atlantic records three years ago.
Schlesinger is philosophical. “We realised that music was first and foremost a business and despite the fact that we had a lot of fans in positions of power at a lot of labels, and a lot of people really rooted for us, nobody could actually stick their necks out without hearing something that sounded like a hit. Everyone said the same thing. ‘I love Fountains of Wayne but do you have any demos?’ And we felt at this stage in our career it was demeaning to talk of demos. And not only that, but we also hadn’t written any new songs anyway so it was sort of a moot point. So we just kind of retreated and said let’s take our timer and make a record and one way or another we’ll figure out a way to get it put there.’ Virgin released the results, and, just when it was least expected, Fountains of Wayne gave found themselves with a weird Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and a massive American hit single, Stacy’s Mom.
Stacy’s Mom, released here next month, finds a sensitive subtext to a young boy’s crush on his best friend’s mother, and does it over an undeniably radio-friendly tune, once heard, never forgotten. Collingwood is comically dismissive of the reasons behind the song’s success. “It’s because Rachael Hunter is in the video,” he deadpans, “that’s a big factor.” “That’s two big factors.”, adds Schlesinger, and immediately asks to have his impetuous and off colour comment struck from the record. Inevitably, their sudden popularity at home has given them some anxieties. “Fountains Of Wayne fans of years back can put that single in contest of what the band do in general,” Schlesinger frets, “but there’s a whole load of people who just hear Stacy’s Mom on the radio and if they go buy the record thinking there’s going to be ten Stacy’s Mom’s … well, hopefully they’ll play the record and be pleasantly surprised. But we’re proud of the song. I guess the way I look at it is the fact that we’ve been around for eight years means we have some insurance against being perceived as a One Hit Wonder. The Best New Artist Grammy nomination is certainly ironic. But we’ll take it. Better to be best new artist than most washed up artist. It’s a new lease of life.”
Stewart Lee
2004-02-08T18:01:11+00:00
The name Fountains of Wayne might sound familiar for two reasons. Perhaps you remember them from the two critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful late 90’s albums, where they mixed irresistible guitar pop hooks with uncommonly witty and surprisingly sympathetic descriptions of the quietly desperate lives of various suburbanites. Or maybe you’ve seen a garden furniture store of the same name used as a cutaway to add local colour between scenes of mob violence in the HBO TV series The Sopranos. Are the management of Fountains Of Wayne, the New Jersey garden furniture store, aware of Fountains of Wayne, the resilient New Jersey rock band who stole their name? “They know about us,” admits Adam Schlesinger, the more affable part of the classic double act he forms with his less forthcoming song-writing partner Chris Collingwood, “We actually went by there when we first started the band, and let them know what we were doing. The gardening guy was a little wary. He said something like, “Well, let’s just stay in touch throughout all of this.” And we were like – ‘What do you mean? All of what?’” Collingwood laconically continues the story; “He wanted us to come down and say hi, so we did. He said, “I just want to make sure you guys aren’t gangster rappers or something, who will give the store a bad name.” I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re nice boys.’ Sometimes people still say to us, ‘Did you know there’s a garden store called Fountains of Wayne?’ And I say, ‘No. Never heard of it. It’s just a f***ing coincidence you f***ing moron!’” Inevitably, the Fountains of Wayne garden furniture store has become a place of pilgrimage for Fountains Of Wayne fans, who send photos to the band of themselves posing amid the lawn chairs. But the...
The National Trust has concealed recordings of eight celebrities inside benches. Undoubtedly, listening to Claudia Winkleman while contemplating Quarry Bank Mill might help to sensualise the horrors of Industrial Revolution working conditions. And we will one day wonder how we managed to enjoy the 520 acres of Felbrigg Hall without a bench upon which visitors have been invited to "rest their weary bottoms" by Stephen Fry.
To be fair, Winkleman and Fry are among the best television personalities available, turnips in a sea of turds. But, as a National Trust member, the speaking celebrity bench scheme causes me to contemplate the cliche of dumbing down. (As does the Trust's website for Felbrigg Hall, inviting visitors to "look in the library, the 'internet' of the 18th century". Were books only unevolved websites? Why is "internet" in inverted commas? And unless Felbrigg Hall library is full of pornography, hundreds of unattributed Tim Vine one-liners, and thousands of anonymous comedy forum posters saying that I am a "smug ****ing ****", it is not at all like the "internet".)
I joined the National Trust in a spirit of class hatred, and keep my membership card on a shelf next to my CD reissues of the first four Crass albums. I used to be breathless with pleasure at the thought that these massive country piles no longer belonged fully to the bucktoothed scum who inherited them, living in poverty in one wing while Daily Mail readers stamped dog muck and Shippams paste into their carpets. The professional posh man Julian Fellowes last week identified such prejudice as the last acceptable hatred. Hostility he and his oyster-guzzling friends experience would be unacceptable if directed towards the poor. But making jokes at Fellowes's expense is quite different to mocking the disenfranchised.
Fellowes is privileged and well connected. Apparently, he has the ear of the Queen, the hand of Princess Michael's lady-in-waiting, and something unsavoury that once belonged to the Duke of Edinburgh in a pooper-scooper in the glove compartment of his Nissan. Indeed, it is muttered privately in royal circles that Fellowes's obsession with the monarchy has gone too far. I have nothing against Fellowes. I met him when I appeared on his BBC4 grammar quiz show, Never Mind the Full Stops, for money. Like all posh people, he was utterly delightful and entirely incapable of deliberate malice. Why, one could listen to them for hours, going on about what they imagine life is like.
I have mellowed over the years, and now part of what lures me to National Trust properties is not hatred of the posh, but the sadness of these places and their stories, their quiet and dignified tragedy. Fellowes says he believes that the quest for social equality is a pointless folly. Certainly, the cultural and political achievements of the denizens of the Trust's inherited homes, understood through the artefacts they left behind, would seem to reveal them as our natural betters, if only because they had the resources to pursue finer things for their own sake. But who were they really? It seems we can no longer trust the National Trust.
I forget which house I was in when I first saw through the matrix. I was looking at the bookshelves in the lady of the house's recreated 1920s' reading room. Their contents seemed, surprisingly, weighted towards decadent authors, and included a number of first editions of Ronald Firbank, a rather louche figure to find in such surroundings. I asked the guide in the room what sort of person this broadminded reader had been. "Oh," he said, "those books are brought in from a central National Trust depository. It's used to furnish many of the properties. They may not be from this house originally. She may never have read those writers." I felt the whole world wobble. The room had been dressed, like a set. The character of the lady of the house had been implied and constructed by the set-dressers. What was I looking at exactly? What was real? What was imaginary?
I stumbled out to other rooms, to kitchens, into which it was now standard Trust procedure to pump the artificial smell of newly baked bread, to the laundry rooms, where the same is done with artificial odours of fresh washing. Of course, displaying a historic home requires a number of brutal creative decisions to be made – do you maintain the gardens in their 17th-, 18th- or 19th-century state, for example? – but I felt I no longer knew what kind of experience I was supposed to be having. I thought about my own home and wondered if I was real or whether some cosmic National Trust set-dresser had conjured my whole being from a cryptic arrangement of compact discs and comic books.
I was shaken. Although I still visit National Trust properties, I now prefer the country houses where, somehow, the aristocracy have managed to cling on without capitulating, lacking the cynicism to fictionalise their own living spaces. At an ancient abbey on a north Devon peninsula, the perfectly preserved lady of the house passed us in tennis shorts and stopped to chat about the shrubbery, a glorious rare bird, still queen of its own protected woodland. At a great house in Cornwall, ringed by rhododendrons and an ancient hill fort, a volunteer guide showed us the family's collection of golliwog children's books and offered, guilelessly, that they "don't hold with that political correctness down here". The experiences were entirely unmediated. All smells were real, though, admittedly, I remained the source of most of them.
Meanwhile, at the National Trust property, where a woman may or may not have read Ronald Firbank, the smell of soiled undergarments was not recreated in the cupboard below stairs, where the lord had forced himself upon the serving wench. Nor was there blood spattered across the stable wall from where he split fatally the skull of a slovenly groom. I had to imagine that. The National Trust was subliminally directing the way I responded, emotionally, to the raw material of the property, constructing a narrative that it wanted me to follow, to the exclusion of my own interpretation. What was the National Trust? The very name seemed suddenly sinister, the sort of newspeak name you would give an organisation that was neither national nor trustworthy. It seemed like the sort of organisation that would give a bench the voice of Stephen Fry, not trusting its foolish patrons to have their own thoughts while contemplating the hills, the clouds, the future, the past, thinking of things near, and thinking of things far.
The final episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is on BBC2, Wednesday, 11.20pm. A DVD of the series will be available on 20 June. David Mitchell is away
Stewart Lee
2011-06-05T15:14:40+01:00
The National Trust has concealed recordings of eight celebrities inside benches. Undoubtedly, listening to Claudia Winkleman while contemplating Quarry Bank Mill might help to sensualise the horrors of Industrial Revolution working conditions. And we will one day wonder how we managed to enjoy the 520 acres of Felbrigg Hall without a bench upon which visitors have been invited to "rest their weary bottoms" by Stephen Fry. To be fair, Winkleman and Fry are among the best television personalities available, turnips in a sea of turds. But, as a National Trust member, the speaking celebrity bench scheme causes me to contemplate the cliche of dumbing down. (As does the Trust's website for Felbrigg Hall, inviting visitors to "look in the library, the 'internet' of the 18th century". Were books only unevolved websites? Why is "internet" in inverted commas? And unless Felbrigg Hall library is full of pornography, hundreds of unattributed Tim Vine one-liners, and thousands of anonymous comedy forum posters saying that I am a "smug ****ing ****", it is not at all like the "internet".) I joined the National Trust in a spirit of class hatred, and keep my membership card on a shelf next to my CD reissues of the first four Crass albums. I used to be breathless with pleasure at the thought that these massive country piles no longer belonged fully to the bucktoothed scum who inherited them, living in poverty in one wing while Daily Mail readers stamped dog muck and Shippams paste into their carpets. The professional posh man Julian Fellowes last week identified such prejudice as the last acceptable hatred. Hostility he and his oyster-guzzling friends experience would be unacceptable if directed towards the poor. But making jokes at Fellowes's expense is quite different to mocking the disenfranchised. Fellowes is privileged and well connected....
Stewart Lee declared he's 'not the cheeky chappy next door' in response to criticism from the likes of fellow comic Lee Mack who accused him of being part of the 'Oxbridge mafia'.
I'm not the cheeky chappy next door,' declared Stewart Lee helpfully at the top of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2), just in case we were in any doubt. And what a relief that was from the faux mateyness of clichéd panel game banter, the safe zone of popular comedy. Lee's sour chops are the perfect antidote to a world that's pathologically pleased with itself.
Lee's shtick hovers on the grumpy git line but rarely crosses it: he communicates a restless disillusion with the state of things without coming off as a terminal pessimist. His rebuttal of fellow comedian
Lee Mack's claim that he 'couldn't cut the mustard' on a panel show – 'you don't cut mustard, you spread it' – was a priceless piece of tongue-in-cheek, prompted by Mack's reference to Lee as a 'cultural bully from the Oxbridge mafia'.
Lee's riposte was an exercise in neatly judged apathy: ‘What have I ever done to him? Nothing.' It undercut the idea that panel shows are comedy's Holy Grail rather than scripted easy paycheques.
The second episode is even better, Lee building an entire 15-minute rant around a taxi driver's (alleged) off-the-cuff remark to him that ‘these days you get arrested and thrown into jail if you say you're English, don't you?'
Alleged? Not content to undermine the absurdity of that casual racism, Lee gleefully undermined his own reputation, floating the idea that he fictionalises the folk bigotry of taxi drivers to suit his own nefarious punchlines. It's comedy that makes you stop and think, and there's not enough of it about.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-03T21:12:37+00:00
Stewart Lee declared he's 'not the cheeky chappy next door' in response to criticism from the likes of fellow comic Lee Mack who accused him of being part of the 'Oxbridge mafia'. I'm not the cheeky chappy next door,' declared Stewart Lee helpfully at the top of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2), just in case we were in any doubt. And what a relief that was from the faux mateyness of clichéd panel game banter, the safe zone of popular comedy. Lee's sour chops are the perfect antidote to a world that's pathologically pleased with itself. Lee's shtick hovers on the grumpy git line but rarely crosses it: he communicates a restless disillusion with the state of things without coming off as a terminal pessimist. His rebuttal of fellow comedian Lee Mack's claim that he 'couldn't cut the mustard' on a panel show – 'you don't cut mustard, you spread it' – was a priceless piece of tongue-in-cheek, prompted by Mack's reference to Lee as a 'cultural bully from the Oxbridge mafia'. Lee's riposte was an exercise in neatly judged apathy: ‘What have I ever done to him? Nothing.' It undercut the idea that panel shows are comedy's Holy Grail rather than scripted easy paycheques. The second episode is even better, Lee building an entire 15-minute rant around a taxi driver's (alleged) off-the-cuff remark to him that ‘these days you get arrested and thrown into jail if you say you're English, don't you?' Alleged? Not content to undermine the absurdity of that casual racism, Lee gleefully undermined his own reputation, floating the idea that he fictionalises the folk bigotry of taxi drivers to suit his own nefarious punchlines. It's comedy that makes you stop and think, and there's not enough of it about.
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A-hen-d what Trump segged abowl-t Sadegg chiKhen hen Sundegg was dishenest (like a bird's nest) hen-d disreggtive hen tree eggstreggme.
Jereggmy Caw(like a bird's caw)beak(like a bird's beak) hiss hen Tree V n-owl, caw caw-tree pea hen hen tree eggteggnoon oeuf Mondegg 5eggth oeuf June, sayegg tree wood tail(like a bird's tail) Down-owl-d Trump flap beak hegg-ve on-tree wing planegg.
Treereggsoar May hen-d heregg crow(like a crow)nies(like a bird's knees), hen contrarse(like a bird's arse), ouef-fried(like a fried French egg) shit(like a bird's shit)eggc-hiss-wing(like a bird's wing) Trump.
Tree weed (like a bird's wee) coo h-owl-d Trump hen beak, hen conjeggction wing oeuf-er bird(like a bird) poweggs, hen-d Treeeggsoar May instegg heggd hiss t-heny hen-d hen tree rose birdegg hen-d hiss coo compromeggsed coo condegg hen.
The future oeuf owl oeuf hen Egg heggs hen tree baleggs oeuf Eggster, Ealegg, Bereggshire, Breggford, Haliegg, Wingegg, Beggregg hen-d Fried Egg, hen-d Breggegg.
Stewart Lee
2017-06-05T20:30:30+01:00
Down(like a duck's down)-owl-d Tree-ump's eggtteggtude coo tree Pareggs eegreggmeggnt m-eggs hen, with-owl(like an owl)t d-owlt, tree most dangeggrowls hum-hen, and tree beggeggst threggt to tree f-cloaca oeuf owl l-oeuf hen Eggth, bat hiss (like a goose's hiss) eggver eggshisstegged. A-hen-d what Trump segged abowl-t Sadegg chiKhen hen Sundegg was dishenest (like a bird's nest) hen-d disreggtive hen tree eggstreggme. Jereggmy Caw(like a bird's caw)beak(like a bird's beak) hiss hen Tree V n-owl, caw caw-tree pea hen hen tree eggteggnoon oeuf Mondegg 5eggth oeuf June, sayegg tree wood tail(like a bird's tail) Down-owl-d Trump flap beak hegg-ve on-tree wing planegg. Treereggsoar May hen-d heregg crow(like a crow)nies(like a bird's knees), hen contrarse(like a bird's arse), ouef-fried(like a fried French egg) shit(like a bird's shit)eggc-hiss-wing(like a bird's wing) Trump. Tree weed (like a bird's wee) coo h-owl-d Trump hen beak, hen conjeggction wing oeuf-er bird(like a bird) poweggs, hen-d Treeeggsoar May instegg heggd hiss t-heny hen-d hen tree rose birdegg hen-d hiss coo compromeggsed coo condegg hen. The future oeuf owl oeuf hen Egg heggs hen tree baleggs oeuf Eggster, Ealegg, Bereggshire, Breggford, Haliegg, Wingegg, Beggregg hen-d Fried Egg, hen-d Breggegg.
The Walthamstow guitar guru Nick Saloman is sixty this year and his 21st Bevis Frond album is an undimmed double cd set.
Fusing classic sixties rock and plangent pounding post-punk neo-psychedelia in a string of plaintive and psycho-geographically specific guitar-pop nuggets, it’s capped monumentally by an exemplary 45 minute modal jam.
File The Bevis Frond alongside Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope in the English acid-pop survivor nook and wonder how Saloman slipped the mass-acknowledgment net. Buy this, and then 1991’s New River Head, and begin a late-blooming love affair.
Stewart Lee
2013-05-19T01:25:13+01:00
The Walthamstow guitar guru Nick Saloman is sixty this year and his 21st Bevis Frond album is an undimmed double cd set. Fusing classic sixties rock and plangent pounding post-punk neo-psychedelia in a string of plaintive and psycho-geographically specific guitar-pop nuggets, it’s capped monumentally by an exemplary 45 minute modal jam. File The Bevis Frond alongside Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope in the English acid-pop survivor nook and wonder how Saloman slipped the mass-acknowledgment net. Buy this, and then 1991’s New River Head, and begin a late-blooming love affair.
I think I can state with a fair degree of certainty that audiences coming out of the theatre will from now on be identifying the man in Gaspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, with Stewart Lee.
Lee, stand-up comedian and columnist, has won many British Comedy Awards for his television work. He has a cerebral, middle-class approach to comedy. He is a comedian for grown-ups who enjoy irony.
I first saw him at Bush Theatre in 2007 when it was a very small fringe theatre above a pub on Shepherd’s Bush Green. He told the story of Jesus’ betrayal from Judas’s point of view.
Audiences, who had seen and knew he was the author and co-director of Jerry Springer – The Opera, naturally expected him to be blasphemous and vulgar. But he was nothing of the sort. He was funny and theologically interesting. He had done his research.
I next saw Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre in 2011 in his award-winning Carpet Remnant World. His main target then, as it is now, is the audience whose IQ he constantly questions; and the more insulting he is, the louder the audience’s laughter.
“What’s your problem?” he roars when the reaction does not measure up to his expectation as he points out he is a professional five-star stand-up comedian and he knows what’s funny and we don’t.
Lee’s stand-up is very enjoyable.
The high spot is an extended nostalgic sequence in the second half when he relates the bondage his grandparents had practised. The amazing detail will be particularly useful for social historians and, of course, anybody studying bondage in rural England during World War 2.
Lee, following his run in London, will be going on an extensive tour of the UK in 2017 See www.stewartlee.co.uk for details of tour.
His forte is political satire and he has just published a book which is a collection of the witty essays he has written for The Observer: Stewart Lee Content Provider (Faber & Faber £14.99). A nice Christmas present for his fans.
Stewart Lee
2016-11-24T13:45:55+00:00
I think I can state with a fair degree of certainty that audiences coming out of the theatre will from now on be identifying the man in Gaspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, with Stewart Lee.Lee, stand-up comedian and columnist, has won many British Comedy Awards for his television work. He has a cerebral, middle-class approach to comedy. He is a comedian for grown-ups who enjoy irony.I first saw him at Bush Theatre in 2007 when it was a very small fringe theatre above a pub on Shepherd’s Bush Green. He told the story of Jesus’ betrayal from Judas’s point of view.Audiences, who had seen and knew he was the author and co-director of Jerry Springer – The Opera, naturally expected him to be blasphemous and vulgar. But he was nothing of the sort. He was funny and theologically interesting. He had done his research.I next saw Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre in 2011 in his award-winning Carpet Remnant World. His main target then, as it is now, is the audience whose IQ he constantly questions; and the more insulting he is, the louder the audience’s laughter.“What’s your problem?” he roars when the reaction does not measure up to his expectation as he points out he is a professional five-star stand-up comedian and he knows what’s funny and we don’t.Lee’s stand-up is very enjoyable.The high spot is an extended nostalgic sequence in the second half when he relates the bondage his grandparents had practised. The amazing detail will be particularly useful for social historians and, of course, anybody studying bondage in rural England during World War 2.Lee, following his run in London, will be going on an extensive tour of the UK in 2017 See www.stewartlee.co.uk for details of tour.His forte is political...
I first filed this supposedly funny column, about Boris Let the Bodies Pile High in Their Thousands Johnson’s wallpaper, at 8pm on Wednesday, 15 glorious hours before the Thursday 11am deadline. Now I could enjoy a leisurely morning cycle to a Pret a Manger™ ® breakfast bap with my name on it and some passive-aggressive banter with the private security company policeman by Buck Street Market, who tried to move me on because lockdown hair has made me look homeless. Does he know who I am? It seems having a bi-weekly Observer column counts for nothing.
But then I sat up late watching the rolling news tide wash away my prematurely posted Observer sandcastle of satire. Johnson is being investigated, the flat redecoration fumble threatening a general unravelling of greater threads of corruption. It’s strange that Johnson’s fate may be sealed by the furnishings of Lulu Lytle, the kind of costly kitsch interior designer beloved by people who fly to Glastonbury in private helicopters with wraps of coke in their Hunter wellingtons and only emerge from the VIP area to enjoy Lionel Richie ironically.
The Lulu Lytle brand will now have the same problem as Fred Perry, trying to dissociate its classic yellow striped polo shirts from the far-right thugs who now favour them. I’ve had to take all mine to the Oxfam shop, where hopefully they will be snapped up by thrifty racists. But will people really want wallpaper that makes them think of Johnson and bodies piled high in their thousands? Maybe Lulu Lytle should embrace the chaos and swap her ethno-forged colonial wildlife prints for cushion covers depicting Johnson giving Jennifer Arcuri a business development bung on his wife’s sofa. At one stage, the multi-identity trickster Grant Shapps was trying to pass off Lulu Lytle’s stylings as playing an important role in the conservation of a national monument. I look forward to seeing Stonehenge swathed in wallpaper depicting scrolling ferns, Persian mazes or idealised images of the Ottoman court.
In paranoid moments, I imagine Johnson’s erratic career has been deliberately designed to thwart me. A few years back, I had a film deal on the table, to finesse my finished script about a corrupt politician called Horace Thompson, based loosely on Johnson. But after Johnson lost the leadership bid to Theresa May it no longer seemed plausible that such an obviously untrustworthy person could wield political power in checked and balanced Britain. So I let it wither, not knowing Johnson would soon be back, the Terminator of spaff. This is a shame, as the film climaxed with the Johnson character being eaten alive by his own guard dogs, which is essentially what is happening to him now, something I am sure many of my fellow prosecco Stalinists would have paid to see.
Before bed, I rewatch Matt Handcock’s appearance on the futile totalitarian burlesque of the Wednesday Press Conference, where he told journalists asking questions about corruption that he wouldn’t be answering them and then just answered questions that hadn’t been asked instead, a standard Johnson government move that even Laura Kuenssberg must be tiring of now. Handcock’s barefaced evasion is a not entirely surprising move from a man who handed a massive Covid-test manufacturing job, uncontested, to the bloke who ran his local pub. Move on! There’s nothing to see here!!
I finally go to sleep around 2am with the rewrite unfinished but wake to scan the morning’s developments at 6.30 before the school run. Despite the official Tory line that voters aren’t interested in Johnson’s corruption, every Thursday morning newspaper front page thinks it’s significant, except Johnson’s old employer the Daily Telegraph, which has probably run with a picture of a 17-year-old boarding school girl in shorts celebrating the fact that they are allowed to have sports day. And Arlene Foster has quit. Given the unpredictability of the howling news tsunami I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it’s because she paid for Johnson’s Lulu Lytle curtains in exchange for an afternoon of Irish border negotiations on his wife’s sofa. Is it acceptable to make two variations on that joke in one column?
I sit in traffic listening to the radio. Nadhim Zahawi, a man who spent a portion of a £6,000 claim of taxpayers’ money on heating the stables for his horses and saw a company he was a shareholder in benefit from more than £1m-worth of government Covid contracts, has been sent out again to defend Johnson against charges of corruption. This is a great choice as there is nothing Zahawi hates more than corruption, except maybe a chilly horse. Zahawi refused to be drawn into condemning Theresa May’s sickening skip-ready John Lewis furniture that Carrie Symonds needed replaced, but a brief scan of John Lewis’s website show that pure wool blankets, which would warm a cold horse, start from as little as £45.
I won’t get back in time to file this and finish it by the 11am deadline if I queue up for a hot Pret bacon roll and then argue with the fake policeman, so I grab a BLT from the Co-op ™ ® and scoff it in the car with more radio news on. It appears that a strange loophole means the prime minister, Boris Johnson, retains the power to exonerate the subject of any inquiries, in this case the prime minister Boris Johnson himself, if found guilty. The problem with Johnson is he is so shameless he might actually do just that.
Stewart Lee
2021-05-02T19:46:36+01:00
I first filed this supposedly funny column, about Boris Let the Bodies Pile High in Their Thousands Johnson’s wallpaper, at 8pm on Wednesday, 15 glorious hours before the Thursday 11am deadline. Now I could enjoy a leisurely morning cycle to a Pret a Manger™ ® breakfast bap with my name on it and some passive-aggressive banter with the private security company policeman by Buck Street Market, who tried to move me on because lockdown hair has made me look homeless. Does he know who I am? It seems having a bi-weekly Observer column counts for nothing. But then I sat up late watching the rolling news tide wash away my prematurely posted Observer sandcastle of satire. Johnson is being investigated, the flat redecoration fumble threatening a general unravelling of greater threads of corruption. It’s strange that Johnson’s fate may be sealed by the furnishings of Lulu Lytle, the kind of costly kitsch interior designer beloved by people who fly to Glastonbury in private helicopters with wraps of coke in their Hunter wellingtons and only emerge from the VIP area to enjoy Lionel Richie ironically. The Lulu Lytle brand will now have the same problem as Fred Perry, trying to dissociate its classic yellow striped polo shirts from the far-right thugs who now favour them. I’ve had to take all mine to the Oxfam shop, where hopefully they will be snapped up by thrifty racists. But will people really want wallpaper that makes them think of Johnson and bodies piled high in their thousands? Maybe Lulu Lytle should embrace the chaos and swap her ethno-forged colonial wildlife prints for cushion covers depicting Johnson giving Jennifer Arcuri a business development bung on his wife’s sofa. At one stage, the multi-identity trickster Grant Shapps was trying to pass off Lulu Lytle’s stylings as...
Hmm... a woman played by a bloke? Sounds a mite Elizabethan and – hey, look! It is.
Our eponymous heroes in Late but Live: Elizabeth and Raleigh are ably portrayed by funny men Simon Munnery (Queen Elizabeth I) and Miles Jupp (Sir Walter Raleigh) in this gag-fuelled romp at the Tobacco Factory Theatre. And, yes, this show works splendidly if verbal slapstick is your thing.
The usual suspects – outsize codpieces and ruffs, gags of indeterminate gender – all do a decent job of setting the scene for Raleigh’s increasingly desperate seduction attempts on Her Majesty.
He is assisted by a coterie of fabulous bon mots: “My aim is the aim of an owl: to wit; to woo.”
Munnery, too, does a more than decent job of conveying the imperial quirks of royalty. He is by turns a querulous, handsomely flirtatious monarch – doubtless all things yer-actual historical Elizabeth was.
Don’t expect emotional volcanoes, Shakespeare it ain’t. Yet writer Stewart Lee does achieve a deft balance between surreal gags – throne with flashing lights, anyone? – and moments of tenderness between the players, ably assisted by Jane Watkins’ lilting music
And Jupp’s Raleigh, is a dapper, nippy adversary to his harsh-tongued Queen in what is more or less a slick war of stand-uppery designed to expose the anarchic workings of the human heart.
The avalanche of one-liners offer a refreshing cure for any working-day blues and give vital oomph to this tale of potatoes and executions.
Stewart Lee
2008-09-10T20:27:52+01:00
Hmm... a woman played by a bloke? Sounds a mite Elizabethan and – hey, look! It is. Our eponymous heroes in Late but Live: Elizabeth and Raleigh are ably portrayed by funny men Simon Munnery (Queen Elizabeth I) and Miles Jupp (Sir Walter Raleigh) in this gag-fuelled romp at the Tobacco Factory Theatre. And, yes, this show works splendidly if verbal slapstick is your thing. The usual suspects – outsize codpieces and ruffs, gags of indeterminate gender – all do a decent job of setting the scene for Raleigh’s increasingly desperate seduction attempts on Her Majesty. He is assisted by a coterie of fabulous bon mots: “My aim is the aim of an owl: to wit; to woo.” Munnery, too, does a more than decent job of conveying the imperial quirks of royalty. He is by turns a querulous, handsomely flirtatious monarch – doubtless all things yer-actual historical Elizabeth was. Don’t expect emotional volcanoes, Shakespeare it ain’t. Yet writer Stewart Lee does achieve a deft balance between surreal gags – throne with flashing lights, anyone? – and moments of tenderness between the players, ably assisted by Jane Watkins’ lilting music And Jupp’s Raleigh, is a dapper, nippy adversary to his harsh-tongued Queen in what is more or less a slick war of stand-uppery designed to expose the anarchic workings of the human heart. The avalanche of one-liners offer a refreshing cure for any working-day blues and give vital oomph to this tale of potatoes and executions.
Peter Tasseledbat is the head of Endemetriol Productions, the London based production company responsible for a host of hit Channel 4 shows including Teen Street, Street Slag, Shit Street, Teen Shit, Street Teen, Slag Shit, Teen Slag, Slag Teen, Street Shit, Shit Teen, Slag Street, Shit Slag, The Friday Night Project, Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother. He lives in Hertfordshire and works in Soho.
It’s half term at the moment so my driver picks my daughter and I up at home, and on the way to the Endemetriol offices I drop Sophie off at her clarinet lesson in Muswell Hill. She’s up to grade six now and is starting to get to grips with some of the simpler works of the major composers, which is wonderful, and so we’ve started taking her to concerts at The Barbican and The South Bank. I think it’s so important for young people to know about classical music, and luckily we’re secure enough to allow Sophie to pursue her dreams. At the moment her ambition is to play in one of the major European orchestras and I couldn’t be happier that she has set her sights on something genuinely worthwhile.
Next I arrive at the Big Brother offices and immediately begin work on approving edits of drunk female housemates masturbating with wine bottles, or, as is the case at the moment, of a young Indian film star being racially abused behind her back. One of the things I found amusing about the wine bottle incident was that when the idea of introducing alcohol into the house was first mooted, there were discussions as to whether we might get a leading wine manufacturer to sponsor the show and provide us with a few bottles of cheap plonk in to the bargain. Imagine if a wine company had sponsored it, and then one of their bottles had been put to the sort of use! It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘screw-top bottle’! I think sparks would have flown. I enjoy a good wine but try to drink in moderation. We let the children have wine once a week, on Sundays, but we try to set them a good example about alcohol consumption and the kind of adverse effects that result from over-indulgence.
There’s been a load of fuss about the supposed ‘racialist bullying’ in Big Brother, but our brief from Channel 4 is to provide television that pushes back the boundaries, and if those boundaries happen to be only at the bottom, then so be it! I’m not racialist. One of Sophie’s friends is Asian. Her father is a surgeon and he’s on the parents’ assosciation at one of the better schools in the area, so I would hardly do anything racialist would I? The thing about Big Brother is that it holds up a mirror to society, and it shows us what ordinary people, such as chavs, are really like, I should imagine. Sophie wanted to go and see the new English National Ballet show, and when we got there we had to cross a picket line because one of the dancers is in the BNP. Luckily the dancer’s racialism didn’t spoil our enjoyment of the piece.
If it is racialist to deliberately engineer ratings-driven conflict by putting an attractive, talented Indian woman into an enclosed environment with insecure, inarticulate people whom anyone could have realised would inevitably resort to racially-derived insults in order to assert themselves in the face of her perceived social superority then yes, I am a racialist. But I’m not because is isn’t. Is it? Hold on there’s someone on the other line. What? Oh come on, you cannot be serious...
Peter Tasseledbat was talking to Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2007-01-30T16:51:17+00:00
Peter Tasseledbat is the head of Endemetriol Productions, the London based production company responsible for a host of hit Channel 4 shows including Teen Street, Street Slag, Shit Street, Teen Shit, Street Teen, Slag Shit, Teen Slag, Slag Teen, Street Shit, Shit Teen, Slag Street, Shit Slag, The Friday Night Project, Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother. He lives in Hertfordshire and works in Soho. It’s half term at the moment so my driver picks my daughter and I up at home, and on the way to the Endemetriol offices I drop Sophie off at her clarinet lesson in Muswell Hill. She’s up to grade six now and is starting to get to grips with some of the simpler works of the major composers, which is wonderful, and so we’ve started taking her to concerts at The Barbican and The South Bank. I think it’s so important for young people to know about classical music, and luckily we’re secure enough to allow Sophie to pursue her dreams. At the moment her ambition is to play in one of the major European orchestras and I couldn’t be happier that she has set her sights on something genuinely worthwhile. Next I arrive at the Big Brother offices and immediately begin work on approving edits of drunk female housemates masturbating with wine bottles, or, as is the case at the moment, of a young Indian film star being racially abused behind her back. One of the things I found amusing about the wine bottle incident was that when the idea of introducing alcohol into the house was first mooted, there were discussions as to whether we might get a leading wine manufacturer to sponsor the show and provide us with a few bottles of cheap plonk in to the bargain. Imagine if a...
1 What weighs as much as 21bn suns, is 10 times the size of our solar system, breaks down the physical laws of space and time, and can swallow itself and everything around it?
a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch's nose
d) Greece's sovereign debt
e) ITV's Daybreak
2 The third series of BBC1's The Impressions Show, starring Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson, began broadcasting in October this year, but this time around the show was forbidden from making jokes about which significant natural phenomenon?
a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch's nose
d) Greece's sovereign debt
e) ITV's Daybreak
3 What tried to stem the departure of hundreds of thousands of loyal followers by setting the costly toby-jug-faced man Adrian Chiles free this month?
a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch's nose
d) Greece's sovereign debt
e) ITV's Daybreak
4 What has, highly probably, had some of the drugs Nigel Kennedy was contemplating near it, been nuzzled by Metallica's manager, and sniffed out corruption at the News of the World?
a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch's nose
d) Greece's sovereign debt
e) ITV's Daybreak
5 What was downgraded to category CCC, the world's lowest, following an EU/IMF audit in June this year?
a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach
b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy
c) Louise Mensch's nose
d) Greece's sovereign debt
e) ITV's Daybreak
Round 2: Comedians and comedy
1 Which football-loving comedian told the Archbishop of Canterbury he thought atheists were as big a threat to humanity as climate-change deniers?
2 Who wrote on their website that Jeremy Clarkson's Top Gear was "one of the funniest shows on TV … one of the very few programs at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation still worth seeing"?
3 Which wealthy Hollywood-based comedian spent much of the year bravely trying to reclaim the word "mong" from its apparent misuse?
4 Which beloved male American comedian was mistakenly referred to as "she" on live TV in a piece on his untimely death by the abysmal expat journo Piers Morgan?
5 Which insolent comedian spent most of September vomiting and retching, having guzzled a cocktail of E coli, salmonella and hepatitis, while arrogantly defying nature by attempting to swim the length of the Thames out of sheer vanity?
Round 3: The Tories
1 Which of the following has never been a nickname for chancellor George Osborne?
a) Cabin Boy George
b) Oik
c) Pencils
2 All the following politicians were members of the exclusive, room-trashing, window-smashing, student dining society the Bullingdon club. But who dismissed these escapades, while applauding zero tolerance for summer rioters, by saying: "We all do stupid things when we're young"?
a) David Cameron
b) George Osborne
c) Boris Johnson
3 Which of the following current or former Conservative MPs has not been the victim of opportunistic late-night burglars?
a) Oliver Letwin
b) Louise Mensch
c) Liam Fox
4 Which confusing Tory MP reveals their surprising sensitivity to black American jazz and the personal struggles of its economically and socially disenfranchised proponents in a series of thoughtful documentaries on BBC Radio 4?
a) Ann Widdecombe
b) Oliver Letwin
c) Ken Clarke
5 Which Tory MP looks the most like a cross between a blinky lemur and an ambitious eel?
a) Michael Gove
b) Louise Mensch
c) George Osborne
Round 4: Rock - true or false
1 The British Museum currently displays a glazed pot depicting Mark E Smith, of Manchester rock survivors the Fall.
2 Soon after the breakup of REM, Michael Stipe appeared on a US TV chatshow competing in a quiz alongside Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.
3 The actor-comedian Russell Brand secretly blows into an ocarina belonging to the Amorphous Androgynous collective on Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds album.
4 In his autobiography, Rob Brydon claims, amusingly, that he lost his virginity while listening to side two of the 1975 album Maximum Darkness by the Welsh progressive rock band Man, specifically during John Cipollina's guitar solo on the band's version of the folk-blues standard Codeine.
5 Glenn Gregory, of Human League and Heaven 17, has invented a device that enables him to hack into supermarket PA systems and broadcast facetious announcements to confused shoppers.
Round 5: Punk postmen
1 Which punk proto-goths backed postman Frank Bell on the 1979 single I'm a Cult Hero?
2 Name one of the three bands fronted by Birmingham punk legend and sometime postman Robert Lloyd.
3 Which comedian played Manchester punk scenester John the Postman in the film 24 Hour Party People?
4 Which punk postman recorded with Subway Sect?
5 Which British blues guitarist, whose drunken 1976 on-stage anti-immigration rant inspired punk's Rock Against Racism movement, once worked as a postman, delivering letters through a letterbox, rather than, as a drunk man, delivering race hatred through his mouth.
Round 1: The Five Things 1 What weighs as much as 21bn suns, is 10 times the size of our solar system, breaks down the physical laws of space and time, and can swallow itself and everything around it? a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy c) Louise Mensch's nose d) Greece's sovereign debt e) ITV's Daybreak 2 The third series of BBC1's The Impressions Show, starring Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson, began broadcasting in October this year, but this time around the show was forbidden from making jokes about which significant natural phenomenon? a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy c) Louise Mensch's nose d) Greece's sovereign debt e) ITV's Daybreak 3 What tried to stem the departure of hundreds of thousands of loyal followers by setting the costly toby-jug-faced man Adrian Chiles free this month? a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy c) Louise Mensch's nose d) Greece's sovereign debt e) ITV's Daybreak 4 What has, highly probably, had some of the drugs Nigel Kennedy was contemplating near it, been nuzzled by Metallica's manager, and sniffed out corruption at the News of the World? a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy c) Louise Mensch's nose d) Greece's sovereign debt e) ITV's Daybreak 5 What was downgraded to category CCC, the world's lowest, following an EU/IMF audit in June this year? a) Eamonn Holmes's stomach b) The newly discovered largest ever black hole, in the NGC 4889 galaxy c) Louise Mensch's nose d) Greece's sovereign debt e) ITV's Daybreak Round 2: Comedians and comedy 1 Which football-loving comedian told...
Our hero stumbles onto the stage with a pint, bundle of A4 with unkept hair and grey beard (Julian Assange has let himself go…..Father Abraham from The Smurfs has let himself go…..) for this hastily scheduled Work In Progress show for his Work In Progress show at the weekend. He later reveals that a visit to the doctors earlier that day produced an offer of ‘seated activities for the over 50s’ and the enquiry “have you got someone to look after you at home?”
In the autumn thru spring Stew will have his regular several month residency at the Leicester Square Theatre with ‘Snowflake-Tornado’ and some of the material from this first gig might well appear. So I’m not going to spoil it. An obscure reference garners a response which he hopes will also work in audiences of more than the 60 people crammed into this hot room at 6pm on a Friday in May.
His first sketches of a hour long comedy set are better than some stand ups entire career. Will be fascinating to see how it is honed and perfected between now and October but it went down a storm tonight with Stew wondering “what if this is the best this material ever goes in front of an audience?”
He ends with an ancient piece of material although being Stewart Lee he can’t help but bring his surreal edge to revisiting a comic idea. The whole set obviously has a nervous energy and spontaneity (both planned and genuine) with less of the pausing and chiding of the audience that we’re used to but that only adds to the intensity of the gag rate. Its a genuine treat to see an unpolished but still sparkling diamond this close up
BTW I am sufficiently knowledgeable about the art of comedy to review Stewart Lee but I know funny when I see it
The audience:
Hardcore fans who happened to read an email quick enough to get tickets
It made me think..
Haven’t laughed til it hurt like that in ages. Those moments where you have to remember to breathe and just find yourself involuntarily physically convulsing from a comic idea – that’s magic
Stewart Lee
2019-05-24T16:15:14+01:00
Our hero stumbles onto the stage with a pint, bundle of A4 with unkept hair and grey beard (Julian Assange has let himself go…..Father Abraham from The Smurfs has let himself go…..) for this hastily scheduled Work In Progress show for his Work In Progress show at the weekend. He later reveals that a visit to the doctors earlier that day produced an offer of ‘seated activities for the over 50s’ and the enquiry “have you got someone to look after you at home?” In the autumn thru spring Stew will have his regular several month residency at the Leicester Square Theatre with ‘Snowflake-Tornado’ and some of the material from this first gig might well appear. So I’m not going to spoil it. An obscure reference garners a response which he hopes will also work in audiences of more than the 60 people crammed into this hot room at 6pm on a Friday in May. His first sketches of a hour long comedy set are better than some stand ups entire career. Will be fascinating to see how it is honed and perfected between now and October but it went down a storm tonight with Stew wondering “what if this is the best this material ever goes in front of an audience?” He ends with an ancient piece of material although being Stewart Lee he can’t help but bring his surreal edge to revisiting a comic idea. The whole set obviously has a nervous energy and spontaneity (both planned and genuine) with less of the pausing and chiding of the audience that we’re used to but that only adds to the intensity of the gag rate. Its a genuine treat to see an unpolished but still sparkling diamond this close up BTW I am sufficiently knowledgeable about the art of...
Last week I dragged the girlfriend along to go watch Stewart Lee's 'Carpet Remnant World' at Canterbury's new Marlowe Theatre. We didn't have great tickets; we were in the Upper Circle, one row from the very back. However, thanks to great designing, we could still see the stage brilliantly due to the elevated seats.
The one issue is that with comedy shows such as these, you lose the intimacy if you are further away. For example, previous to this performance, I have only ever seen comedians in very intimate venues with only a few hundred. Suddenly, you don't seem to connect as well with someone when in a theatre holding 1,200 people.
For this reason, I do not get the appeal of seeing a comedian, or anything, in a huge venue holding thousands of people such as The London O2 or Wembley Arena; you end up just watching the comedian on the giant screens around the venue.
I believe for a comedian to be their most successful, you have to have a small, intimate venue. It is much easier to work a crowd of 200, than one larger: any comedian would probably tell you that.
Stewart Lee is completely the same. If you watch his stand-up DVD's or television series, you can see that he excels in a small group. I think my enjoyment of the show was lessened because of how far away we were from the stage. Not to sound like I am being negative, but he was talking to the few hundred people in the stalls, and sometimes ignoring everyone higher. However, he is a genius when it comes to stand-up (I mean, you would be after 25 years), and he is fully aware of what he is doing. Of course, he is doing it intentionally, and in large venues like this, it feeds his routine with extra fun.
The question is did I enjoy it?
Of course I bloody well did!
Like all Stewart Lee material, you're never quite sure when he actually starts his routine, because it all just seems natural. It isn't a false conversation like a lot of other comedians do, it is ,in fact, just a well informed rant/lecture. Even though I use the word lecture to describe it, it is a fun lecture. If you wanted to get into stand-up, then it is essential to go see him perform I believe. You can learn a lot about the art of stand-up from him.
His jokes are nicely varied, with some being just simple one-line jokes, a number were 20 minutes rants about something, whether it be him watching Scooby-Doo, Twitter or discussing the process of finding his material, and others were satirical observations about the local area or politics. The rest of the time, he was just shouting at the audience, which is strangely endearing. I mean, I'm not sure Michael McIntyre would get away with yelling and swearing at the audience for two hours, but Stewart can.
When it comes to favourite comedians I have seen live, he is up there with Lee Mack, and it is purely down to audience interaction and the ability to adapt a routine for an audience and local things which they can relate to. Stewart Lee did this through bringing on stage the front cover of the local newspaper to mock its lead story, for the main local news was a Headteacher, wearing a red wig, pretending to kidnap the Janitor. It was very good.
Of course, I cannot convey how funny it was in a not-very-well-written blog without giving you all the jokes and ruining it for prospective audience members, so you will just have to believe me.
However, what makes him different from the other comedians that I have seen is how friendly he is, and willing to spend time with the people who paid to see him. I joined the back of a five minute queue to shake his hand, have him sign a book and have a picture taken with him (as well as making an unfunny joke about how to spell Stuart/Stewart). I thoroughly enjoyed my evening in the company of Mr Stewart Lee. He was humble and lovely when I met him afterwards, and during the show he was everything you expect him to be: Funny, sarcastic, full of hate and 'alternative'. So much so, it felt like he had made my diaphragm enter my throat.
P.S. "...Dog; [In a high-pitched voice] Dooog?" You'll get it when/if you see/saw it...
Stewart Lee
2012-03-01T13:58:30+00:00
Last week I dragged the girlfriend along to go watch Stewart Lee's 'Carpet Remnant World' at Canterbury's new Marlowe Theatre. We didn't have great tickets; we were in the Upper Circle, one row from the very back. However, thanks to great designing, we could still see the stage brilliantly due to the elevated seats. The one issue is that with comedy shows such as these, you lose the intimacy if you are further away. For example, previous to this performance, I have only ever seen comedians in very intimate venues with only a few hundred. Suddenly, you don't seem to connect as well with someone when in a theatre holding 1,200 people. For this reason, I do not get the appeal of seeing a comedian, or anything, in a huge venue holding thousands of people such as The London O2 or Wembley Arena; you end up just watching the comedian on the giant screens around the venue. I believe for a comedian to be their most successful, you have to have a small, intimate venue. It is much easier to work a crowd of 200, than one larger: any comedian would probably tell you that. Stewart Lee is completely the same. If you watch his stand-up DVD's or television series, you can see that he excels in a small group. I think my enjoyment of the show was lessened because of how far away we were from the stage. Not to sound like I am being negative, but he was talking to the few hundred people in the stalls, and sometimes ignoring everyone higher. However, he is a genius when it comes to stand-up (I mean, you would be after 25 years), and he is fully aware of what he is doing. Of course, he is doing it intentionally, and...
A grown man wearing only a nappy is waving a gun. An assortment of white trash and trailer-park lowlifes is weaving around the stage, and at the back, a chorus of Ku Klux Klansmen is merrily tap-dancing. As a bad-taste musical moment the closing number of Kombat Opera's show rivals the brilliant Springtime for Hitler extravaganza in Mel Brooks's The Producers.
There is certainly no accounting for taste, and since it first popped up at BAC last August, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee's comic opera has acquired cult status. Its current run as a work in progress is an attempt to develop the idea further and see if there is the backing for a possible West End run.
It is a neat enough proposition, and only time will tell if it can be stretched to a full-length stage show. Irony is a difficult pose for either a production or an audience to sustain for more than an hour. The references to lesbian dwarves, chicks with dicks and lap-dancing transsexuals press all the right mirth buttons for an audience that has sacrificed its brains at the altar of daytime TV. But the performance really comes into its own in its more serious moments. After all, the real Jerry Springer Show has you gaping open-mouthed at the TV. Kombat can't top its awful, unbelievable reality; all they can do is add music to it. But they can do something that the real show can't: show us how the poor misguided participants actually feel. There is an extraordinarily potent moment when the fat, desperate, angry would-be pole dancer Chantel is forced to dance. Music and libretto fuse in an aria full of grace for the graceless, a hymn for the unloved and unlovely.
Since it doesn't really have to try too hard to be amusing (although it is interesting that the operatic commercial breaks raise the most laughter), it strikes me that it is in its ability to externalise the internal that the real originality and as yet unrealised theatricality of Jerry Springer: the Opera lies.
· Until February 23. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
Stewart Lee
2002-02-09T16:36:20+00:00
A grown man wearing only a nappy is waving a gun. An assortment of white trash and trailer-park lowlifes is weaving around the stage, and at the back, a chorus of Ku Klux Klansmen is merrily tap-dancing. As a bad-taste musical moment the closing number of Kombat Opera's show rivals the brilliant Springtime for Hitler extravaganza in Mel Brooks's The Producers. There is certainly no accounting for taste, and since it first popped up at BAC last August, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee's comic opera has acquired cult status. Its current run as a work in progress is an attempt to develop the idea further and see if there is the backing for a possible West End run. It is a neat enough proposition, and only time will tell if it can be stretched to a full-length stage show. Irony is a difficult pose for either a production or an audience to sustain for more than an hour. The references to lesbian dwarves, chicks with dicks and lap-dancing transsexuals press all the right mirth buttons for an audience that has sacrificed its brains at the altar of daytime TV. But the performance really comes into its own in its more serious moments. After all, the real Jerry Springer Show has you gaping open-mouthed at the TV. Kombat can't top its awful, unbelievable reality; all they can do is add music to it. But they can do something that the real show can't: show us how the poor misguided participants actually feel. There is an extraordinarily potent moment when the fat, desperate, angry would-be pole dancer Chantel is forced to dance. Music and libretto fuse in an aria full of grace for the graceless, a hymn for the unloved and unlovely. Since it doesn't really have to try too hard to...
IT'S Saturday afternoon and The Music Hall in The Assembly Rooms is steadily filling up. The occasion - which is becoming more and more like an 'event' as the room becomes more packed - is the second preview of Jerry Springer - The Opera.
As more and more people file in, the man beside me becomes more and more agitated and begins mumbling as much to himself as to me. "I only earned 80 quid when I came up here with the Comedy Zone in 1991," he mutters as he surveys the large two-tiered stage that will soon hold 21 singers and a five-piece band. The nervous man next to me is Stewart Lee, director and librettist of Jerry Springer. And even if the show sells out every performance of its Edinburgh run - and it just might - he'll still be leaving the Fringe with even less than 80 quid.
Precisely nothing in fact.
For this Lee is grateful. "People kept telling me we should bring this show to Edinburgh and I was utterly terrified," he says, with the air of a man who admits to having had "about 20 hours sleep in the last week".
As befitting such an ambitious scale venture, the opera is costing a smaIl fortune to stage, so that its box office receipts cannot possibly recoup the outlay. Fortunately Lee and composer Richard Thomas, who originated the idea, are covered by a group of financial backers - all of whom are, no doubt, soon to be very happy. Because this is a preview (ie no critics), reviewing the show is strictly verboten, but presumably Lee and Thomas won't mind me passing on the advice that you should definitely book NOW if you want to catch what just might be the most original and entertaining show on the Fringe this year. The West End and probably Broadway beckons. Seriously.
After the performance the two men are visibly buzzing. It's only the second time, they say, that they've heard the full score performed and they're obviously delighted, as well they might be.
The public's response is phenomenal. People are grabbing badges that read Slut Junky and Chick With A Dick, while the plaintive refrain: "Cover me with chocolate and throw me to the lesbians" proves eminently hummable.
"It's good doing it here because the Assembly is quite like the West End in a way;" says Lee afterwards. "You have ABBA tribute shows and Gyles Brandreth so it does give you a feel for how the show works in a mainstream environment. I think a lot of people who come just want to be entertained and don't care what it says about opera or the human condition."
And Jerry Springer -The Opera does say quite a bit about the human condition. Infidelity, jealousy; murder, suicide and a cavalcade of sexual fetishism, all human life is here. Which is why, of course, every hack comedian on the Fringe was doing Jerry Springer jokes TWO years ago. It's odd to find Lee - probably the most iconoclastic comedian of the past decade - reverting to well-ploughed ground.
"True, but it was Richard's idea originally and he asked me to get involved," Lee says with a sly srnile: 'The originality of the material was never a consideration for me. What was is how well it would work as an opera. When I first started writing with [former partner] Richard Herring 15 years ago we had this list of things that we would never write about, but as I get older I think how you approach subjects and manage to treat them originally is more important than what you're dealing with."
Richard Thomas began writing the opera 14 months ago after logging over a hundred hours watching the Springer show on TV.
" I really like Jerry Springer," he cheerfully admits, "and if you watch that many shows you can't watch Oprah Winfrey or whatever because they're just whorish and vile. I like the fact that the show is a cultural phenomenon and the fact that he's a real working class hero," says Thomas of the former mayor of Cincinnati turned king of trash TV.
"He's sort of like St Mephistopheles because he's never judgmental. I mean, Jerry won't have anyone on unless the other person is there to defend themselves - or have a fight," laughs Thomas. "OK, it is deeply exploitative." Lee, admits to being more ambivalent about Springer but came onboard after Thomas started doing workshops at the Battersea Arts Centre where the composer offered helpful punters "beer for an idea". The best ideas got a can of Grolsch while duds were awarded a can of generic supermarket lager.
"The subject matter is a bit of a red herring," Lee smiles. "The good thing is because it's what feels like a familiar idea people come along thinking they know what they're going to get. But there are lots of emotionally touching parts in it and the way it develops in the second half seems to surprise people.
"It's written and sung to an incredibly professional level and that really throws people because they think they're going to get some sketch show burlesque of American talk shows. So in may ways the familiarity of the title is really great because if it was called Chat Show - The Opera With Depressing Bits And A Meditation on Good And Evil then many people who are going to the ABBA singalongs wouldn't be coming.
"But as it is they get exposed to something that is probably more morally complex than they would normally be exposed to."
This isn't mere hyperbole on Lee's part, the second half of the opera sees Jerry Springer in Hell mediating on the age-old argument between God and Satan ("I don't do conflict resolution," he protests).
"The first half is really what people would expect and the second half is a reward for me to go deeper musically into things," explains Thomas who has undergone months of coaxing classically trained opera singers more used to Il Trovatore to trailer-trash.
"The main problem was the diction," recalls Thomas. "A lot of opera singing is far too stylised. In rehearsals a lot of people who had amazing opera voices sounded too straight and I used to say to them use the laziest diction you've ever sung - just imagine that you were speaking. A lot of singers seem to think that their diction has to be perfection and that's just elitist."
The result is a real rarity - an opera that you can actually follow with lyrics that you can actually understand.
"Richard originally wanted the second half to be a lot of people hanging upside down singing a requiem for the American Dream," explains Lee. "I've only seen one opera, Wagner's Ring Cycle, and there's a bit in that where someone goes down into a netherworld, so I suggested that."
Apart from giving Lee the chance to wrongfoot his audience, the switch in scenario gives him the chance to air his ambivalence to his subject when "Springer" is confronted with past guests who have been humiliated on his show and committed suicide as a result. "A person with less broadcasting experience would feel responsible for that," comes the glib reply.
Unsurprisingly, the show has already weathered the threat of legal action from the producers of Springer's American TV show, but Lee and Thomas believe they have managed to smooth the waters.
"We actually met him a month ago because he was over and trying to find out what the show was about," says Lee. "We quite confidently told him that we didn't think that there would be a problem because I think firstly it's not really a parody of him and also I think he, even if he does find the opera slightly critical, would be flattered by inspiring all this beautiful music."
With Springer himself coming to speak at the TV Festival later this month the show's co-creator's are eager to get the man himself along to the Assembly Rooms.
"We'll probably have to sneak him in at the back because I can't imagine anyone in the show not being affected by him sitting in the front row," says Lee.
It's also hard to imagine Springer not being affected by the performance. Fringe Director Paul Gudgin who was also at the preview opined that the chat show host would "probably be sitting there rigid with a huge smile while he thought: 'I want this f*****g thing stopped'."
Still, perhaps he could get a good show out of it - "These Men Made An Opera About Me And I'm Mad As Hell".
Stewart Lee
2002-08-08T17:24:51+01:00
IT'S Saturday afternoon and The Music Hall in The Assembly Rooms is steadily filling up. The occasion - which is becoming more and more like an 'event' as the room becomes more packed - is the second preview of Jerry Springer - The Opera. As more and more people file in, the man beside me becomes more and more agitated and begins mumbling as much to himself as to me. "I only earned 80 quid when I came up here with the Comedy Zone in 1991," he mutters as he surveys the large two-tiered stage that will soon hold 21 singers and a five-piece band. The nervous man next to me is Stewart Lee, director and librettist of Jerry Springer. And even if the show sells out every performance of its Edinburgh run - and it just might - he'll still be leaving the Fringe with even less than 80 quid. Precisely nothing in fact. For this Lee is grateful. "People kept telling me we should bring this show to Edinburgh and I was utterly terrified," he says, with the air of a man who admits to having had "about 20 hours sleep in the last week". As befitting such an ambitious scale venture, the opera is costing a smaIl fortune to stage, so that its box office receipts cannot possibly recoup the outlay. Fortunately Lee and composer Richard Thomas, who originated the idea, are covered by a group of financial backers - all of whom are, no doubt, soon to be very happy. Because this is a preview (ie no critics), reviewing the show is strictly verboten, but presumably Lee and Thomas won't mind me passing on the advice that you should definitely book NOW if you want to catch what just might be the most original and entertaining...
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2) is back, with conditions. The conceit of the new series is that Lee was only allowed another go if he promised to put more jokes in and be more accessible.
The idea that Series 2, which started last week, is Lee at his most accessible is itself part of the joke.
He is, however, at his most masterful. It's always a pleasure to watch someone who is good at his job go to work. Lee is skilled enough to work a club audience and a TV audience simultaneously, even to play one off against the other.
Personally, I think he's the funniest thing on television right now, but success isn't going to spoil him anytime soon.
Not while they're still putting him on the wrong side of Newsnight.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-12T22:13:37+01:00
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2) is back, with conditions. The conceit of the new series is that Lee was only allowed another go if he promised to put more jokes in and be more accessible. The idea that Series 2, which started last week, is Lee at his most accessible is itself part of the joke. He is, however, at his most masterful. It's always a pleasure to watch someone who is good at his job go to work. Lee is skilled enough to work a club audience and a TV audience simultaneously, even to play one off against the other. Personally, I think he's the funniest thing on television right now, but success isn't going to spoil him anytime soon. Not while they're still putting him on the wrong side of Newsnight.
Stewart Lee has been touring the appallingly-titled ‘Room With A Stew’ show so long his agents obviously thought it safe to slip in a second date at Warwick Arts Centre a year after the first, perhaps relying on the punters’ memories being as useless as their ability to grasp his convoluted brand of stand-up – something the comedian regularly chastises them for.
The tour has been a way to hone and road test material for a new run of his Comedy Vehicle TV show, but while that date 12 months ago showed very much a work in progress, the fourth series is now in the can so this latest performance was much closer to the finished product.
Whether Lee really has a finished product is a moot point.
The set certainly never felt like it – and the comic would baulk at the notion of putting on the same sort of polished routine as the panel-show stars he habitually mocks – but the meticulous construction of his layered material offers damning evidence to the contrary.
Simultaneously intelligent and absurd, he takes logical thoughts – on topics ranging from wealth and patriotism to missing out on a BAFTA and urine – to illogical conclusions.
Lee truly comes into his own when he deconstructs (and often destructs) it all again.
Some elements didn’t quite hit the mark, and the passive-aggressive stance and contempt for the audience shtick are definitely starting to wear a bit thin, but Lee remains the UK’s boldest and most original comedian.
Stewart Lee
2016-02-10T23:11:51+00:00
Stewart Lee has been touring the appallingly-titled ‘Room With A Stew’ show so long his agents obviously thought it safe to slip in a second date at Warwick Arts Centre a year after the first, perhaps relying on the punters’ memories being as useless as their ability to grasp his convoluted brand of stand-up – something the comedian regularly chastises them for. The tour has been a way to hone and road test material for a new run of his Comedy Vehicle TV show, but while that date 12 months ago showed very much a work in progress, the fourth series is now in the can so this latest performance was much closer to the finished product. Whether Lee really has a finished product is a moot point. The set certainly never felt like it – and the comic would baulk at the notion of putting on the same sort of polished routine as the panel-show stars he habitually mocks – but the meticulous construction of his layered material offers damning evidence to the contrary. Simultaneously intelligent and absurd, he takes logical thoughts – on topics ranging from wealth and patriotism to missing out on a BAFTA and urine – to illogical conclusions. Lee truly comes into his own when he deconstructs (and often destructs) it all again. Some elements didn’t quite hit the mark, and the passive-aggressive stance and contempt for the audience shtick are definitely starting to wear a bit thin, but Lee remains the UK’s boldest and most original comedian.
Former Telford man Stewart Lee spent four years writing his latest works – a TV show called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle and a new tour called Content Provider.
The tour is the comedian’s first new full-length show since the award-winning Carpet Remnant World. He’ll bring it to Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Monday and Tuesday.
And previous shows have seen critics swoon. The Times offered a five star review and wrote: “The most consistently funny show of his brilliant career . . . I laughed until it hurt.”
The Mail on Sunday offered a similar rating and said: “Two marvellous misanthropic hours . . . there’s no-one else to touch him.”
Others have described the show as ‘characteristically twisty and frequently brilliant’ and ‘venomously funny’.
Content Provider was published as a book and Stewart is delighted that people have enjoyed it.
“My new book, Content Provider, annotates and explains a selection of short and supposedly comic prose pieces, all written over the past five years,” he says.
“During the period covered, various characters came and went from political life. Who can even remember Tory party chairman Grant Shapps now? Others gradually became ever more significant and by February last year, when the book ends, were positioned to be major players in the decisive swing of the fatal one-way cat-flap of Brexit.
“In March 2014, I imagined Sarah Vine proudly raising a status-confirming toilet brush, flecked with excrement. Who could have known that one day her husband, Michael Gove, would almost have been that triumphant bathroom accessory, and she the plastic holder cradling it?
“The landscape Content Provider described is suddenly gone, its key players either discarded in post-Brexit’s Brabantia bin, or grown unimaginably powerful in its wake, and the values the book holds self-evident are threatened as never before. This extract from the introduction describes the circumstances that led to my unlikely late-life newspaper columnist side-career. I’ve no idea, at this point in time, how anything I learned will be useful in this strange new world…”
Stewart, who was born in Wellington but raised in Solihull by adoptive parents, started doing standup in the late 80s and got his first paid gig in September 1989, at the Bedford Pub in Balham, south London. He was 21 when he became a semi-professional stand-up. The first time he got asked to write funny columns was for a short-lived comedy magazine.
“Maybe I was in deep cover. Maybe I still am. I don’t know. Whatever, I wish I was still 12 stone and sickly and could smoke a pack of cigarettes before breakfast without throwing up.
“Deadpan folded after a year and I don’t remember any of the funny columns I got asked to write by any other outlet being much good at all for the next decade or so. That doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t. I can’t remember much about the decade of the 90s.
“I was drunk for a lot of it, and then depressed towards the end, I think, in retrospect. It’s all a haze of London comedy-club cellars viewed from the stage through a jazz photograph pre-smoking-ban fug; motorway service stations in Doppler effect from the transit van windows on loss-making tours with the Stewart Lee & Richard Herring double act, where big theatre gigs with our big promoter made me less than my usual solo slots on pub-cellar mixed bills paid me alone; people arguing in hotel bars and Little Chefs; intrigue in the toilets at the Comedy Cafe in pre-hipster Old Street, its upstairs room the London circuit’s unofficial social club in those fondly remembered long, late Saturday nights of the early 90s, Roger Mann on his hands and knees, pulling faces from behind a sofa; me going deaf at rock’n’roll gigs in Camden and Harlesden and Islington and Manette Street and Charing Cross Road. Polvo! Yo La Tengo!! The Fall!!!”
Stewart Lee
2017-03-25T20:51:38+00:00
Former Telford man Stewart Lee spent four years writing his latest works – a TV show called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle and a new tour called Content Provider. The tour is the comedian’s first new full-length show since the award-winning Carpet Remnant World. He’ll bring it to Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Monday and Tuesday. And previous shows have seen critics swoon. The Times offered a five star review and wrote: “The most consistently funny show of his brilliant career . . . I laughed until it hurt.” The Mail on Sunday offered a similar rating and said: “Two marvellous misanthropic hours . . . there’s no-one else to touch him.” Others have described the show as ‘characteristically twisty and frequently brilliant’ and ‘venomously funny’. Content Provider was published as a book and Stewart is delighted that people have enjoyed it. “My new book, Content Provider, annotates and explains a selection of short and supposedly comic prose pieces, all written over the past five years,” he says. “During the period covered, various characters came and went from political life. Who can even remember Tory party chairman Grant Shapps now? Others gradually became ever more significant and by February last year, when the book ends, were positioned to be major players in the decisive swing of the fatal one-way cat-flap of Brexit. “In March 2014, I imagined Sarah Vine proudly raising a status-confirming toilet brush, flecked with excrement. Who could have known that one day her husband, Michael Gove, would almost have been that triumphant bathroom accessory, and she the plastic holder cradling it? “The landscape Content Provider described is suddenly gone, its key players either discarded in post-Brexit’s Brabantia bin, or grown unimaginably powerful in its wake, and the values the book holds self-evident are threatened as never before. This extract...
Lord Melvyn Bragg has flung open the gate of terrestrial television’s last remaining temple of culture and welcomed in a former heroin addict who sometimes physically attacked his own audiences, and whose only chart hit was accompanied by a video depicting him murdering Kylie Minogue. Tonight’s South Bank Show features the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave. His quarter century career has encompassed the chaotic post-punk of The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, the acclaimed novel And The Ass Saw The Angel, and the epic sounds of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. But the programme makes a case for the former punk icon as an artist at the height of his powers, and, most endearingly, opens with Lord Melvyn himself, standing in a field, describing Cave’s early work as ‘an orgy of violence’. The show has a pleasing absence of both tabloid tale telling and critical analysis. Perhaps Cave has attained a dignity that makes such intrusions irrelevant. In the year that Mick Jagger, an eternal adolescent, turns sixty, Cave has somehow arrived in his mid-forties as his polar opposite – a middle-aged rock star who is not remotely embarrassing.
Cave’s vast press pack documents the changing journalistic angles used to appraise him. Once his struggles with various demons, both chemical and personal, were used to explain the violence of his music. But in the light of the reflective timbre of the records he’s made since 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, Cave is depicted in his Brighton domestic idyll, travelling to his office everyday, sitting at the piano, refining his craft. “I don’t really read pieces about me but I get the feeling they’re all exactly the same,” he explains, “That must be tedious for my fans. But my fans are very forgiving. They’ve forgiven me for my years of drug addiction, and for my dubious Christian leanings. But they probably wouldn’t forgive the fact that today I am wearing Hi-Tops.” A pair of black and white baseball boots peep out beneath Cave’s sensible brown suit. “I’d rather you didn’t report that I’m wearing these,” he requests, “I think they’d draw the line there.”
Cave’s Christianity is perhaps the most shocking thing about his recent history. His lecture The Flesh Made Word enraged a vocal minority of the audience during its 1997 Edinburgh Fringe performance, but rationalist fans could then at least excuse Cave’s God as a metaphor for the creative process. “God is a product of the creative imagination,” he wrote, “and God is that imagination taken flight.” But today the author of the introduction to the Canongate edition of St Mark’s Gospel is unequivocal. “I do accept Christ’s divinity. More and more so actually. But I don’t think a person truly believes unless they doubt as well. My faith kind of swells up and subsides. It’s going through a swelling up at the moment.”
The CD of Cave’s new album, Nocturama, features a DVD of the song Babe I’m On Fire, a vaudeville parade of various characters, all burning with passion. But to illustrate the notion of the ‘Christian apologist’ the dressing up box was closed in favour of a shot of Cave’s own expressionless face. “We tried to think what a Christian apologist would look like and we realised there was one in the room. But if one’s going to mould one’s self on someone it may as well be Christ. Better that than Mick Jagger.” Was coming out as a Christian as a shock tactic, an attention grabbing device as dramatic as calling a live album Drunk On The Pope’s Blood, which The Birthday Party did in 1982? “Well, Christianity doesn’t sell records,” counters Cave, “and it hasn’t done much for Cliff Richard.”
Even though his faith is sincere, Cave acknowledges its role in the artist’s duty to confound his audience. But lately married life is another factor that has given him a new and unexpected energy, and spared him many of the inherent pitfalls that befall other veteran rock stars. “The truth is that I’m middle aged and married and settled and there isn’t this wealth of anguish to write about. That’s definitely a problem, certainly in rock music, for people who are getting older. What do you actually write about? I write love songs I suppose. Certainly the idea of being in a stable relationship is fairly uncharted in rock music. People always write about the beginning and the end but that vast middle period is not really addressed and I find that difficult but exciting.” And how does Cave go about finding a vocabulary to address this uncharted territory? “I read WH Auden.”, he laughs, “especially in regard to his changing from being a radical writer, to writing about community, Christianity, spousal love and marriage. He managed to do it in an exciting way. There’s something very neutral and sensible about the way he writes that is really jarring in modern culture.”
Cave, at last, seems supremely comfortable with himself. And though the look-back bores will always cite The Birthday Party’s “orgies of violence” (c. Melvyn Bragg 2003) as a live highpoint, Cave’s performances can now invoke the hysterical theatrics of Las Vegas period Elvis, and the intimacy of some piano bar balladeer, without compromising any notions of artistic integrity. And Cave still enjoys performing. “I love that moment when it’s all right and you know you’re there. I constantly chase after that feeling. When it’s working there’s a voice in my head telling me ‘You are great. You are God.” I love looking into the crowd and seeing people smiling. It’s a great feeling, the feeling that you are finally where you always wanted to be. I only get that on stage and it is taken away from me as soon as I watch a film of what I’ve done, or see it on TV. Or on The South Bank Show.
Cave’s appears profoundly uninterested in watching his South Bank moment; “I don’t put myself through that sort of thing. There’s some people who do a show and go back to the hotel and listen to the show back and get sent magazine covers, and frame them and send them to their mothers, and read their own press, and make scrapbooks, and put album covers on the wall, but I’m not that sort of person,” he explains defiantly, before adding, “What’s it like anyway? Is it good?”
A DVD by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, God Is In The House, is available tomorrow on Mute records.
Stewart Lee
2003-09-14T17:56:23+01:00
Lord Melvyn Bragg has flung open the gate of terrestrial television’s last remaining temple of culture and welcomed in a former heroin addict who sometimes physically attacked his own audiences, and whose only chart hit was accompanied by a video depicting him murdering Kylie Minogue. Tonight’s South Bank Show features the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave. His quarter century career has encompassed the chaotic post-punk of The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, the acclaimed novel And The Ass Saw The Angel, and the epic sounds of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. But the programme makes a case for the former punk icon as an artist at the height of his powers, and, most endearingly, opens with Lord Melvyn himself, standing in a field, describing Cave’s early work as ‘an orgy of violence’. The show has a pleasing absence of both tabloid tale telling and critical analysis. Perhaps Cave has attained a dignity that makes such intrusions irrelevant. In the year that Mick Jagger, an eternal adolescent, turns sixty, Cave has somehow arrived in his mid-forties as his polar opposite – a middle-aged rock star who is not remotely embarrassing. Cave’s vast press pack documents the changing journalistic angles used to appraise him. Once his struggles with various demons, both chemical and personal, were used to explain the violence of his music. But in the light of the reflective timbre of the records he’s made since 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, Cave is depicted in his Brighton domestic idyll, travelling to his office everyday, sitting at the piano, refining his craft. “I don’t really read pieces about me but I get the feeling they’re all exactly the same,” he explains, “That must be tedious for my fans. But my fans are very forgiving. They’ve forgiven me for my years of...
As Observer-reading ABC1 cultural consumers, our carefully cultivated tastes in film, in literature and in oak-aged cheeses are the exquisite hand-crafted carnival masks that we wear as armour in the awkward middle-class dinner party of life. But the tragic consequences of last week’s Spotify data hack continue to unravel. And we wonder privately what could be more revealing, more socially shaming, than exposure of the aching gulf between the music we claim to like, and the music we actually listen to. I live on borrowed time. I’m not alone.
On Tuesday, a writer for the Wire magazine was sacked after analysis of her leaked playlists revealed that, despite passionate appraisals of post-Coltrane black power ecstatic jazz, her favourite artist was in fact the late funnyman Bernard Manning’s house band, Shepp’s Banjo Boys.
And on Wednesday, a founder of the taste-making hipster website Pitchfork trimmed off his own beard after a number of Nickelback albums appeared on his most-played profile. Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger said, from within a Jacuzzi of foaming Jägermeister, that he felt “vindicated”.
Closer to home, our culture secretary John Whittingdale was forced into damage-limitation mode on Thursday after it emerged that he spent all of last year listening to nothing but an old BBC Sound Effects of Death and Horror album over and over again, though the powerful filth-maven seemed most ashamed by the fact that the record in question was a BBC product.
Pressed on this damning electro-acoustic revelation at the Edinburgh television festival on Friday, the semi-feral human claimed he had been trying to work out if the track Eyeballs Being Gouged (17 seconds) had a leftwing bias. And he concluded that it did, despite the eyes in question having been gouged by Nick Robinson as a Conservative-supporting teenage intern.
The Daily Mail and the Sun picked up on the fact that all the supposed sounds of maiming and amputation on the BBC’s lucrative 1970s sound effects series of long players were actually achieved by cutting up vegetables, rather than actual people, and that this was a betrayal of the promise of trust that lay at the very heart of the BBC.
Whittingdale, his lips honeyed with some kind of phosphorescent linctus, removed a single satin lady’s evening glove and responded that, had he known that the sounds of mutilation he had been enjoying in private every night were in fact just chopped vegetables, then he wouldn’t have derived so much pleasure from them.
“Only a pervert would choose to delight himself alone while listening to shredded fennel,” protested the defensive culture secretary, definitively, over a Scottish supper, to a “feisty” Sue Perkins. Then, during the cheeses, Whittingdale hastily assembled an independent panel of openly corrupt newspaper barons, murderous highwaymen and low-life business vermin to farm out all BBC death and horror sound effects in future to competitive independent service providers and Conservative party donors based in offshore tax havens, forcibly bound by an inflexible “no fennel” pledge.
As the Spotify revelations unspooled, I realised my own cultural currency was in danger. Although my main income stream remains live standup, I now exploit a number of secondary finance rivulets, unsentimentally fracking my assiduously cultivated record collection in the hope of transforming the intangible flatus of taste into the black gold of financial remuneration.
I have hosted live anniversary tributes to the venerable Scottish folkies Old Sawney’s String Beans, the East German anarcho-punk band Kohlrübe, and the cult Ohio power-pop group Voiding My Gussets, for which I received, respectively, some hay, a rancid swede and a plastic bag of tangled blank audio tape.
In 2010, I even fronted a doomed attempt to introduce actual jazz to the Cheltenham jazz festival, alongside the annual three-day boogie-woogie jam from Jools Holland, whose costly absinthe and Doritos rider consumed most of what should have been my fee.
Next April, this self-inflated perception of me as a person of superior musical taste means I will take on the coveted 21st-century role of a curator, curating the hipster weird-beard drone-rock weekender Lady Godiva’s Operation, held on this occasion at Zygotic Mynci Caravan Park near St Asaph, in north-east Wales. I am already in talks with Guillemot Penis Hospital and the pianist Irene Von Scheizentank.
But now my future as a respected art/music facilitator hangs by threads in the light of the Spotify leak. I envy the bored businessman, whose mere marriage is in tatters since his infidelities with nonexistent and inexpensive transsexuals were accidentally spewed from the Ashley Madison dating site.
Because I know that, although I have listened to Trout Mask Replica, Locust Abortion Technician and Public Castration Is a Good Idea once each in the last 12 months, my most played album this year is actually Platinum, by the unapologetically unreconstructed American country singer Miranda Lambert. And now Spotify knows it, too. And then so will you. So it’s game over for me.
What can I say? Someone sent me a YouTube link to Miranda’s nostalgia-lubed power ballad Automatic, and its pre-digital prelapsarian vision of a southern-state Eden of Polaroid photos, handwritten love letters and teenagers taping the top 40 off FM radio melted my stupid heart.
Do Netflix, Spotify and Facebook know me as well as they think?
Like a sentimental old fool, I bought Miranda’s album immediately, and a lifetime of meticulous cultural self-grooming was squandered in a moment of impulsive madness. Realising that drastic action was required to try and salvage what might survive of my reputation, yesterday I sent a message to my mailing list of blindly devoted fans, clarifying my untenable position.
“Dear All. You will know by now, that far from being the person I pretended to be, I am actually someone who enjoys the country singer Miranda Lambert’s Platinum album. But you know what? At least two of the tracks are superb, it’s a mainstream country record on which some of the songs are co-written by a lesbian, and there’s a beautifully judged hanging cadence at the end of the cautiously life-affirming Bathroom Sink that I defy anyone to sit through dry-eyed.”
And then I realised. It’s like Miranda sings to me in Bathroom Sink: “I’m looking forward to the girl I want to be, but regret has got a way of staring me right in the face.” The Spotify leak had liberated me. If we have no secrets then we cannot be compromised. Finally, I was free, free to be who I really had been all along. You go, honey!
And then I remembered, I don’t even have a Spotify account. Ah. Too late.
Stewart Lee’s A Room with a Stew is at Leicester Square Theatre, London from 21 Sep.
Stewart Lee
2015-08-30T00:55:10+01:00
As Observer-reading ABC1 cultural consumers, our carefully cultivated tastes in film, in literature and in oak-aged cheeses are the exquisite hand-crafted carnival masks that we wear as armour in the awkward middle-class dinner party of life. But the tragic consequences of last week’s Spotify data hack continue to unravel. And we wonder privately what could be more revealing, more socially shaming, than exposure of the aching gulf between the music we claim to like, and the music we actually listen to. I live on borrowed time. I’m not alone. On Tuesday, a writer for the Wire magazine was sacked after analysis of her leaked playlists revealed that, despite passionate appraisals of post-Coltrane black power ecstatic jazz, her favourite artist was in fact the late funnyman Bernard Manning’s house band, Shepp’s Banjo Boys. And on Wednesday, a founder of the taste-making hipster website Pitchfork trimmed off his own beard after a number of Nickelback albums appeared on his most-played profile. Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger said, from within a Jacuzzi of foaming Jägermeister, that he felt “vindicated”. Closer to home, our culture secretary John Whittingdale was forced into damage-limitation mode on Thursday after it emerged that he spent all of last year listening to nothing but an old BBC Sound Effects of Death and Horror album over and over again, though the powerful filth-maven seemed most ashamed by the fact that the record in question was a BBC product. Pressed on this damning electro-acoustic revelation at the Edinburgh television festival on Friday, the semi-feral human claimed he had been trying to work out if the track Eyeballs Being Gouged (17 seconds) had a leftwing bias. And he concluded that it did, despite the eyes in question having been gouged by Nick Robinson as a Conservative-supporting teenage intern. The Daily Mail and the Sun...
Before Stewart Lee starts his three hour set he issues a warning to any mobile phone users: if he sees anyone taking photos or texting he will “smash the phone with the microphone stand, then wank on it, and then take it to the backstage toilets and shit on it too”. He needn’t bother, though. He’s playing a home crowd; there’s no danger anyone’s going to miss a word.
In many ways a three-hour Stewart Lee gig at the Royal Festival Hall is a middle class comedy fan’s cummy sleep-wank heaven. This was not lost on Lee. He attacked the venue’s patrons immediately, calling the audience at the Southbank Centre “Guardian reading cunts”. It was the first in a long line of many shrewd, apt and hilarious put downs throughout the night. Looking slimmer of waist and less red of face, he looked healthy, seeming to move with more energy across the tastefully lit, bare stage.
My concerns about the RFH being too large for Stew’s muttered performances were unfounded. As much as he’d like you to think he doesn’t know how to do a huge room he does – the 2,500 seat venue quaked with laughter throughout, the jokes travelling from front to back. He employed a tactic familiar to his fans, dividing the room up based on how skilled, liberal and discerning they were. I was on the slow side of the room (the majority) and he expertly played to those seated behind him, turning them into High Command coven of Stewart Lee elites.
He seemed a man utterly relaxed within his craft. Stew, who I do not know well enough to address with such informality, played throughout the night with the crowd’s expectations.
A joke about your inner-tabloid-voice became an extended schizophrenic running gag; sabotaging his measured and reasonable diagnoses of a world besieged by bigoted rhetoric. That interplay of high-concept satire blended with the straight faced social justice makes the jokes hit harder. I am fully aware how glib that all sounds, but it’s his playfulness and great sense of the mood in the room that make it all hang together, seemingly effortlessly.
Politics was the order of the day in this set, although other comedians were the main victims of his painful liberal mastication. It’s something a number of my friends criticise Stew for, the smugness of his character being a thin mask for his genuine Oxbridge pseudery. That and his unrestrained bashing of other acts he’s deemed unworthy.
Personally it’s always been one of my favourite parts of his style; the faux-outrage at the insouciance of an audience failing to recognise his genius. He swept the laughable and tubby James Corden away in a single pithy line, describing the mere idea of his fandom “like a dog listening to classical music”.
You think this mutt appreciates counterpoint?!These jokes wouldn’t work if you didn’t think that some small part of Stew believed in it. Flawless delivery and a tight performance aid this too, although they are almost to be expected at this point. Putting aside his talent as a performer, it’s the mercurial cross-roads where the real Stewart Lee meets the character that is the most interesting. He must be a bit of a mean genius, surely? Maybe I’m falling into his trap.
Stew seems more comfortable in his fame, too. His acute awareness of the respect and admiration other comics hold for him was underscored with the dismissal of his comedy critics “They’re obsessed with me, the young comics. ‘I hate Stewart Lee, I’ve seen him 800 times.’”
He was never too self-satisfied though, a mistake many good comics have made. In recent years Eddie Izzard has looked like he is high on the stink of his own schtick. Jimmy Carr too, his pretend laugh replete with an erroneous assurance that he is “bloody funny ya know”.
Eddie Izzard recycles; he sniffs his own farts.It felt good to see that Stew has never stopped embracing the struggle – and it’s that crackle that makes comedy exciting and dangerous. That’s why he divides and taunts the audience so much throughout, because he has to have something to kick back against.
Still, I did feel that three hours is too much of one comedian for me. It’s an audacious idea – a performance of the six half-hour sets that will make up the next series of Comedy Vehicle. Even so, they’re always quite meaty topics and I did feel some fatigue towards the end, most likely caused by lack of time for digestion. If this was the length of a full show it would veer into masturbatory self-indulgence.
Having seen A Room With A Stew in January last year, I was half expecting to be bored as he talked his way down a well-travelled road. I was proved wrong on this count, much to my satisfaction.
Almost an hour of what I had seen at that preview show had been removed, and another twenty minutes expanded upon and changed. In a world where Jerry Seinfeld feels comfortable stating that he gets rid of only 10 percent of his old material each year.
Casting aside a full hour of material becomes a medallion of artistic integrity round Stewart Lee’s neck. The show would have been great with those bits in (they were my favourite part of the earlier performances), but obviously Stew is neither short of material or afraid of self-editing. I hope that little known fact is with people when they watch the program later this year – he chucked two episodes worth, for us!
As always though, the most interesting parts of any Stewart Lee show are the deconstructions, and it’s these points where his genius, yes genius really shows.It is oft-said and for that reason loses its impact, but Stewart Lee is a much better class of comedian than the TV viewing public are ever exposed to. Given the BBC’s shamefully passé taste of late (Mrs Brown’s Boys), it is a small miracle something unashamedly cerebral has made it onto the box at all.
His preoccupation with form is comparable only to the innovations of the jazz pioneers and visionaries that play throughout the intervals of the show. He is so adept at pulling apart the fabric of his comedy, breaking and folding, repeating and cultivating seat-twisting tension. It is jazz-comedy in a very pure, experimental way.
“Miles Davis has arrived”, it’s true, and he said it himself.
Before Stewart Lee starts his three hour set he issues a warning to any mobile phone users: if he sees anyone taking photos or texting he will “smash the phone with the microphone stand, then wank on it, and then take it to the backstage toilets and shit on it too”. He needn’t bother, though. He’s playing a home crowd; there’s no danger anyone’s going to miss a word. In many ways a three-hour Stewart Lee gig at the Royal Festival Hall is a middle class comedy fan’s cummy sleep-wank heaven. This was not lost on Lee. He attacked the venue’s patrons immediately, calling the audience at the Southbank Centre “Guardian reading cunts”. It was the first in a long line of many shrewd, apt and hilarious put downs throughout the night. Looking slimmer of waist and less red of face, he looked healthy, seeming to move with more energy across the tastefully lit, bare stage. My concerns about the RFH being too large for Stew’s muttered performances were unfounded. As much as he’d like you to think he doesn’t know how to do a huge room he does – the 2,500 seat venue quaked with laughter throughout, the jokes travelling from front to back. He employed a tactic familiar to his fans, dividing the room up based on how skilled, liberal and discerning they were. I was on the slow side of the room (the majority) and he expertly played to those seated behind him, turning them into High Command coven of Stewart Lee elites. He seemed a man utterly relaxed within his craft. Stew, who I do not know well enough to address with such informality, played throughout the night with the crowd’s expectations. A joke about your inner-tabloid-voice became an extended schizophrenic running gag; sabotaging his measured...
It’s a privilege to write funny columns about the news for the Observer, and every Sunday I wake excitedly to see what flows from the slushy pen of our illustrator, David Foldvari. But writing these means I have to read the news every day, a weather eye on the endemic corruption of untouchable ministers, and trawl the filth of social media and the sewer press to see if they vomit forth anything I could spin into satire. Sometimes I feel done in by it, a 6 Music dad Malcolm McDowell with my Clockwork Orange eyes pinned open, flickering images of Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman burning my retina until my heart is broken. Again. It’s the lying I can’t stand.
Can two different things be true at the same time? Or is nothing actually true? What is truth? What are lies? A sandalled seeker searching a lifetime in a desert could encounter more vital incarnations of these questions by observing the current antics of the Tory party’s most malevolent manifestation to date. Schrödinger merely had one lone reality-defying cat. We have an entire reality-defying government. And unlike Schrödinger’s cat, Rishi Sunak doesn’t know how to use a litter tray, preferring to stink out the front benches every time his mouth miaows.
I was in the car with a 12-year-old on Wednesday morning, listening to the Covid inquiry coverage on news radio, the child provoked into laughter by Boris Johnson’s quarter-arsed explanation of how he had lost his WhatsApp messages, and then again by Rishi Sunak’s repeated use of the phrase “I don’t recall”. To paraphrase the comedian George Carlin, “I don’t recall” is just an uptown way of lying. When he is finally flushed, Sunak should reboot Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. In Total Non-Recall, Sunak plays Dick, a man who has all his memories removed, but instead of being replaced with other memories, they are replaced by an endless loop of the phrase “I don’t recall” and a photo of a man touching a woman’s bum from the front of a Jilly Cooper novel. And it ain’t over ’til the fat lady’s head explodes!
Kids, used to trying to weasel their way out of trouble without a shred of conscience, recognise the smell coming out of the mouths of Johnson and Sunak, and find it joyously hilarious to hear actual adults – let alone two British prime ministers – wheeling out the same fake shit as I did in 1972 when I kicked a ball through next door’s greenhouse window. The difference being, that ball didn’t result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the misappropriation of billions in public funds. When I ruined Mr Archer’s tomato plants I didn’t kill everyone’s grannies, or get an ocean-going yacht and an interview under caution about a missing two hundred million quid. And kids are better at lying than this lot.
Funny how I can just write the word “lying” and know there will be no legal comeback. We all know they are lying. And they know we know they are lying. And the apparently powerless interlocutors of the Covid inquiry must know they’re lying too. Sunak, especially, seems to have given up caring. Why should he worry about consequences when he can dismiss an international convention affecting billions, and the findings of his own supreme court, with a waft of parliament? Facts begone!
Right now Sunak, like Johnson, says he can’t find his WhatsApp messages because they were all lost. But in June he sought a judicial review to say he didn’t need to hand the WhatsApp messages over, declaring them “unambiguously irrelevant”. The judicial review, then, was presumably a big waste of everyone’s time and money if the WhatsApps were actually all lost anyway. Which they obviously weren’t. Perhaps Schrödinger’s cat ate them. I am sure all those teenagers who hack free rides every day on Santander short-term hire cycles all over London could find those WhatsApps in seconds. Rishi – they can remember it for you wholesale! Is anyone going to actually do anything about this?
Because Sunak’s lies matter. Pursuing the transporting of 200 people a year to Rwanda, at a cost of £290m so far, is supposed to deter migrants from seeking our shores. Rwanda was presumably a good deterrent because of its poor human rights record, and because its police force kill refugees if they protest about having no food. But we can only deport 200 people a year, and if you’re already someone who thinks crossing the Channel in a Tupperware box is an acceptable risk, the remote possibility of Rwandan resettlement has such low odds it’s irrelevant.
Seven Bins Sunak has supersized his lies, using a self-invented lie-law to undermine the judgment of our own non-foreign supreme court that deemed Rwanda unsafe, which it is, and insisted in a law that it is safe, which it isn’t, so he can send migrants there. But if Rwanda was safe it wouldn’t be a deterrent, would it? Critics have called it Schrödinger’s Rwanda, after the famous paradoxical cat mentioned earlier, which is simultaneously both alive and dead. But I call it Pursglove’s Rwanda, after the new minister for legal migration and delivery Tom Pursglove, who is both a purse and a glove at the same time. Meanwhile, a man took his own life on the Bibby Stockholm.
The government’s convoluted, costly and impractical immigration policy is built on lies and serves no purpose other than to try to preserve the unity of a collapsing Conservative party, and consolidate the loyalty of its most aggrieved, and easily misled, supporters. Life would be simpler, and I would be happier, if I didn’t have to follow the falsehoods of the Tory turds beached by the backwash of Brexit. But I do this for you. And for the money. Both at the same time. Schrödinger’s columnist.
Stewart Lee
2023-12-17T22:00:37+00:00
It’s a privilege to write funny columns about the news for the Observer, and every Sunday I wake excitedly to see what flows from the slushy pen of our illustrator, David Foldvari. But writing these means I have to read the news every day, a weather eye on the endemic corruption of untouchable ministers, and trawl the filth of social media and the sewer press to see if they vomit forth anything I could spin into satire. Sometimes I feel done in by it, a 6 Music dad Malcolm McDowell with my Clockwork Orange eyes pinned open, flickering images of Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman burning my retina until my heart is broken. Again. It’s the lying I can’t stand. Can two different things be true at the same time? Or is nothing actually true? What is truth? What are lies? A sandalled seeker searching a lifetime in a desert could encounter more vital incarnations of these questions by observing the current antics of the Tory party’s most malevolent manifestation to date. Schrödinger merely had one lone reality-defying cat. We have an entire reality-defying government. And unlike Schrödinger’s cat, Rishi Sunak doesn’t know how to use a litter tray, preferring to stink out the front benches every time his mouth miaows. I was in the car with a 12-year-old on Wednesday morning, listening to the Covid inquiry coverage on news radio, the child provoked into laughter by Boris Johnson’s quarter-arsed explanation of how he had lost his WhatsApp messages, and then again by Rishi Sunak’s repeated use of the phrase “I don’t recall”. To paraphrase the comedian George Carlin, “I don’t recall” is just an uptown way of lying. When he is finally flushed, Sunak should reboot Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. In Total Non-Recall, Sunak plays Dick, a man who...
The 2007/8 show was recorded at The Stand, Glasgow on April 7th '08 and was released on 28th of July through Real Talent.
You can buy online at amazon, play, etc.
Here's all the press from the tour.
It's come out really well and there's some good extras including a 45 minute interview conducted by Johnny Vegas and Stewart's performance at Pestival - 'the international Arts Pestival dedicated to raising awareness of the integral role insects play in the global ecosystem'.
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T20:27:17+00:00
The 2007/8 show was recorded at The Stand, Glasgow on April 7th '08 and was released on 28th of July through Real Talent. You can buy online at amazon, play, etc. Here's all the press from the tour. It's come out really well and there's some good extras including a 45 minute interview conducted by Johnny Vegas and Stewart's performance at Pestival - 'the international Arts Pestival dedicated to raising awareness of the integral role insects play in the global ecosystem'.
It was with some glee (and no little surprise) that we at DS welcomed the news that Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle had been given a second series. He may have been proclaimed the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever in 2007, but we'd struggle to name many comics we'd rather see on stage than him.
Before his show returns tonight, we spoke to Stewart about his new late-night TV slot, why Channel 4 are "moronic cynics" and the long-awaited DVD release of his and Richard Herring's '90s classic Fist of Fun.
How do you feel about doing a second series? "I didn't think it would be recommissioned... and it was recommissioned specifically to try to carve out an exciting new territory for comedy - 11.20pm after Newsnight on a weekday. The feeling being that my show is unlikely to snag casual viewers but that a hardcore of people will follow it."
Are you okay with the new slot? "I'm relieved of the obligation to make any concessions in terms of the style of it. It's much more like the stuff I do live - the routines are longer and there are less jokes! Also there's been an across-the-board 30% budget cut to most comedy programmes... the sketches were what had to give. There isn't as much filmed stuff, but to be honest, being in the later slot and not needing to sugar the pill, they might have gone anyway."
What was Chris Morris's input as script editor? "He really helped fix a particular problem. I noticed reviews saying that I was arrogant and condescending. I thought, 'That's interesting because it doesn't feel like that live'. In the room I'm able to fabricate some kind of struggle whereby the gig isn't quite working. I'm a lower-status character, so when you criticise someone you don't do it from a position of authority or strength - it doesn't seem arrogant."
How did Chris fix that on screen? "I wanted some sort of device that would lower my status or make me appear to be under pressure. I spent days on end talking to Chris about different ideas to get that to work. We ended up with Armando Iannucci interviewing me throughout the series in a hostile way - criticising all the material and my role in the programme. That's cut in with all the stand-up and it works really well."
Did Chris write any material for the show? "There was a bit I was trying to write about observational comedy, and I wanted things that sounded like things you get in an observational, mainstream set that are slightly wrong. Chris came up with this brilliant line about how when you go to the dentist there's always a fish tank, and in the fish tank there's always a tiny statue of Napoleon. It's the sort of thing that sounds like it's nearly true but isn't."
You said some people thought you were arrogant in the first series... "I realised that lots of things people were criticising me for were things that I had actually set out to do. It made me realise that on some level I was on the right track. The tone of the new series is slightly reactive - trying to do more of the things that people hated. Not out of wilful perversity, but because the fact that they'd identified them meant that I probably hadn't done them enough. Sometimes things look a mistake, but if you do it much more then people have to accept that you've done it by choice - like improvised music. This series I've decided to push all the things that are irksome about it to people a bit further, so that they realise it's a choice - and it's their choice then to go with it or not."
What do you think about the impact of forums and the internet on comedy? "I know that when the second series wasn't going to be commissioned there was a website with a petition for it. I don't know how much difference that makes. I don't know if broadcasters should take any notice of that. They're dealing with huge budgets and really those budgets shouldn't be held hostage to the fact that it's quite easy to get 10,000 people to vote for something."
Does online criticism affect you? "I think it takes a lot of self-control to not look at what people are saying when you've got a new thing out. I don't think it influences content so much. Also, it's not something I have a direct contact with - I don't blog and I don't do Twitter."
Why not? "I don't really want anyone to know who I am. If people know things about you then they won't buy into stuff as much. I wrote a thing in The Guardian about the royal wedding and it looks like someone mad has written it. But if you know that I'm not mad and I have a family, you wouldn't buy into it as much... And I don't think it works as well for me as it does for Richard Herring. His work as a comedian is indivisible from his life - to a point where I sometimes wonder if he lives his life in a deliberately mad way to try and generate material!"
Richard told us that you were considering putting out Fist of Fun and TMWRNJ together... "Oh, he's done it, he's sorted it out. Basically the BBC didn't want to put out Fist of Fun commercially, because they didn't think it would sell anything. But then they wouldn't let us have it either, because they said it hadn't recouped its value. He's managed to buy the first series or both series of Fist of Fun off them for 15 grand. So we've gone three ways on it. Me, Rich and Chris Evans who runs [independent DVD firm] Go Faster Stripe. Of course we can sell them after gigs and I don't think it should be too difficult to make the money back."
Are you excited about that? "I think it's quite important for Richard's self-esteem. He's done much better than me financially in his life, he co-wrote Al Murray's sitcom, but I don't think he's had the critical acclaim that I've had. Weirdly I'd be much happier with the money and no critical acclaim! I think he feels he did something really good in Fist of Fun and it's never had the credit it deserved. I think it's really important for him to get it out there. I'm really happy for him that that's happening. I'm slightly ambivalent about it. I really liked the first series. I feel with the second series we were encouraged to make a number of artistically ill-advised compromises."
When will it be coming out? "We'll film a load of extras for it... I think it might be next year - we've got an idea about doing a one-off gig to launch it."
Richard blamed Channel 4 for the recent Frankie Boyle controversy, what are your thoughts on Boyle as a comedian? "He writes good jokes, but they don't seem to have a consistent point of view. When some of the things he said are explained in certain terms, that point of view is then contradicted by another joke. It's hard to justify them, because they don't add up to a coherent world view. I think the other problem Frankie has is that Channel 4 are defending him and we know that Channel 4 is run by opportunistic, moronic cynics."
Go on... "It's on Channel 4, so why would you trust it? It's true, isn't it? When people from Channel 4 say 'It's an example of the absurd, what Frankie's done', it isn't. They don't know anything. He and his writers come up with really great gags. In the mouth of someone else and in a different context, that thing about Katie Price's son might have read entirely differently. The problem is that Frankie's a high-status figure. Whereas if [Jerry] Sadowitz was doing it, it would read totally differently. Sadowitz is like a rat who's disenfranchised by the world. It would also read differently if it wasn't on Channel 4 - because Channel 4's just ugly and stupid on the whole... It's all about context."
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle returns tonight at 11.20pm on BBC Two
Stewart Lee
2011-05-04T22:25:50+01:00
It was with some glee (and no little surprise) that we at DS welcomed the news that Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle had been given a second series. He may have been proclaimed the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever in 2007, but we'd struggle to name many comics we'd rather see on stage than him. Before his show returns tonight, we spoke to Stewart about his new late-night TV slot, why Channel 4 are "moronic cynics" and the long-awaited DVD release of his and Richard Herring's '90s classic Fist of Fun. How do you feel about doing a second series? "I didn't think it would be recommissioned... and it was recommissioned specifically to try to carve out an exciting new territory for comedy - 11.20pm after Newsnight on a weekday. The feeling being that my show is unlikely to snag casual viewers but that a hardcore of people will follow it." Are you okay with the new slot? "I'm relieved of the obligation to make any concessions in terms of the style of it. It's much more like the stuff I do live - the routines are longer and there are less jokes! Also there's been an across-the-board 30% budget cut to most comedy programmes... the sketches were what had to give. There isn't as much filmed stuff, but to be honest, being in the later slot and not needing to sugar the pill, they might have gone anyway." What was Chris Morris's input as script editor? "He really helped fix a particular problem. I noticed reviews saying that I was arrogant and condescending. I thought, 'That's interesting because it doesn't feel like that live'. In the room I'm able to fabricate some kind of struggle whereby the gig isn't quite working. I'm a lower-status character, so when you criticise someone you...
Promoting the uncharacteristically accessible Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! album, Nick Cave’s back with The Bad Seeds. The elegantly dishevelled interncontinental post-punk supergroup assembled a quarter century ago after the collapse of Cave’s breakthrough Melbourne group, The Birthday Party. Tonight the septet’s fifty year old front man valiantly defeats the onset of middle-age by adopting a look that is on the verge of adsurdity. His huckster hairstyle and tight Wild West pants defiantly challenge you to find him ridiculous, like a local eccentric who regualrly arrives at the pub dressed as Doc Holliday and recently had his replica six guns confiscated by a community police officer. Few men could carry this look off. Nick Cave is already ahead on points.
Cave is flanked by two key players. Stage right stands his Horatio, his lieutennant of thirty years, the multi instrumentalist Mick Harvey, who seems grimly professional throughout. Stage left is his fool, the violinist Warren Ellis, looking like a seafaring Alan Yentob who has been abandoned on a desert island by disgruntled fellow pirates. The newly guitar-toting Cave’s emergence from behind the piano he somberly sat at throughout his forties means there’s now a lack of any discernable lead instrument in The Bad Seeds’ sound, save the occassionally plucked strings of Ellis’ violin. When the ensemble do stretch out to fill the spaces, they tend to respond not with genuinley inspired improvisations, but, as in tonight’s storm tossed version of Tupelo, with simple but effective shifs in textural density or rhythmic intensity. The group are at their best during the flailing free-form sections sneaked into the breakdowns of We Call Upon The Author, Ellis riding its krautrocking throb as if electrocuted. But the Velvet Underground groove of More News From Nowhere reveals their limitations. When the mighty lead pendulum of this incarnation of the Seeds fails to swing they have little to fall back on, and things can drag.
When Cave pruned his Seeds into the garage-rock quartet of Grinderman last year, critics said it represented a rebirth. But Grinderman only made explicit the sharp end of a stylistic spread always implicit in the prolific polymath’s canon, giving journalists something new to say in the thirty year narrative of Nick Cave. Tonight, with high kicks, catwalk wheels, greatest hits like the clanging Red Right Hand for the dabblers, and relative obscurities for the faithful, Cave is committed both to entertaining the crowd and expanding their horizons. He is at last the anti-Elvis of his teenage dreams, and his dissolute image conceals a canny survivor’s instinct. Luckilly for us, Nick Cave seems to be figuring out a way of becoming immortal.
Stewart Lee
2008-05-08T20:08:01+01:00
Promoting the uncharacteristically accessible Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! album, Nick Cave’s back with The Bad Seeds. The elegantly dishevelled interncontinental post-punk supergroup assembled a quarter century ago after the collapse of Cave’s breakthrough Melbourne group, The Birthday Party. Tonight the septet’s fifty year old front man valiantly defeats the onset of middle-age by adopting a look that is on the verge of adsurdity. His huckster hairstyle and tight Wild West pants defiantly challenge you to find him ridiculous, like a local eccentric who regualrly arrives at the pub dressed as Doc Holliday and recently had his replica six guns confiscated by a community police officer. Few men could carry this look off. Nick Cave is already ahead on points. Cave is flanked by two key players. Stage right stands his Horatio, his lieutennant of thirty years, the multi instrumentalist Mick Harvey, who seems grimly professional throughout. Stage left is his fool, the violinist Warren Ellis, looking like a seafaring Alan Yentob who has been abandoned on a desert island by disgruntled fellow pirates. The newly guitar-toting Cave’s emergence from behind the piano he somberly sat at throughout his forties means there’s now a lack of any discernable lead instrument in The Bad Seeds’ sound, save the occassionally plucked strings of Ellis’ violin. When the ensemble do stretch out to fill the spaces, they tend to respond not with genuinley inspired improvisations, but, as in tonight’s storm tossed version of Tupelo, with simple but effective shifs in textural density or rhythmic intensity. The group are at their best during the flailing free-form sections sneaked into the breakdowns of We Call Upon The Author, Ellis riding its krautrocking throb as if electrocuted. But the Velvet Underground groove of More News From Nowhere reveals their limitations. When the mighty lead pendulum of this incarnation...
King Crimson's epochal 1974 album Red remains progressive rock's finest recording, collaborative and curiously egoless, its brutality as undeniable as its beauty.
So, who wants a 24 disc set of American live dates leading up to Red? Someone, evidently.
Crimson spew recent wrestles with free improvisation at the emerging edifice of supersized stadium rock, tilting at the impossible alignment of transatlantic paydirt and transcendental extemporization. Familiar favorites explode.
Red emerges piecemeal in unplanned explorations.
It couldn't last.
It didn't.
Stewart Lee
2013-10-27T20:40:13+00:00
King Crimson's epochal 1974 album Red remains progressive rock's finest recording, collaborative and curiously egoless, its brutality as undeniable as its beauty. So, who wants a 24 disc set of American live dates leading up to Red? Someone, evidently. Crimson spew recent wrestles with free improvisation at the emerging edifice of supersized stadium rock, tilting at the impossible alignment of transatlantic paydirt and transcendental extemporization. Familiar favorites explode. Red emerges piecemeal in unplanned explorations. It couldn't last. It didn't.
Like so many of my generation, I came to London in the mid-Seventies in search of sensation; the legendary Hope And Anchor pub rock scene of The Feelgoods and Ducks Deluxe; the then exotic delights of London's take-away food community, Italian Pizza, Indian Curry, Kentucky chicken, and Chinese Chinese; the availability of cheap speed; and, above all, the lure of a London Christmas.
For was it not Brinsley Schwarz himself who said, "'If an epicure could remove by a wish in quest of sensual gratification, wherever he had Eastered, he would then Christmas in London."
But even in the Seventies, so many of the London Christmas traditions that had duffed Dickens' plum were fading. My first London yule, Graham Parker of The Rumour took me to see The Hackney Christmas Rat.
Every December 23rd the Hackney Christmas Rat would poke his head up from an open sewer on Downs Rd and indicate, through a display of interpretive retching, whether the children of Hackney had been naughty or nice. If nice, the rat would have spiced urinal cakes flung at him by Pearly Kings.
If naughty, his head would be blown off with a sawn-off shotgun, Sweeny-style. In '76, it was curtains for the Christmas rat.
Wired to fuck in purple flares and white plimsoles, Parker laughed so hard he dropped his peshwari and blew warm Truman's down his whizzy konk!
Sometime between Christmas and New Year '78 and I'm on Westminster Bridge with The Kursaal Flyers, awaiting the passing of the Danish Arse Barge. 9th century viking connections meant that, each year, the Danish embassy sent a slow moving torch-lit barge along the river, festooned with elderly Danes dressed as Thor and Odin, elegantly and inexpressively baring their bottoms to the accompaniment of sombre bassoon music.
Rugby jumper-ed and thoroughly ripped one Will Birch, soon to leave The Flyers for The Records, was so amused he spewed a Directors into the river and lost a spring roll and a schnozwrap over the railings.
I have guzzled ampheto-nog at The Nashville with Kilburn And The Highroads, and dressed up as Tiny Tim with Eggs Over Easy for the Massed Camden Limp, fuzzed on Fuller's and whites. But those days are gone.
What have you got, kids? The Saturdays singing so-called R'n'B on Oxford Street, you barely buzzed on alco-pops and plant-food, and Hyde Park full of fake German fairgrounds, like pre-punk never happened.
Merry Christmas London 2011.
You're welcome to it.
Stewart Lee
2011-12-01T20:56:46+00:00
Like so many of my generation, I came to London in the mid-Seventies in search of sensation; the legendary Hope And Anchor pub rock scene of The Feelgoods and Ducks Deluxe; the then exotic delights of London's take-away food community, Italian Pizza, Indian Curry, Kentucky chicken, and Chinese Chinese; the availability of cheap speed; and, above all, the lure of a London Christmas. For was it not Brinsley Schwarz himself who said, "'If an epicure could remove by a wish in quest of sensual gratification, wherever he had Eastered, he would then Christmas in London." But even in the Seventies, so many of the London Christmas traditions that had duffed Dickens' plum were fading. My first London yule, Graham Parker of The Rumour took me to see The Hackney Christmas Rat. Every December 23rd the Hackney Christmas Rat would poke his head up from an open sewer on Downs Rd and indicate, through a display of interpretive retching, whether the children of Hackney had been naughty or nice. If nice, the rat would have spiced urinal cakes flung at him by Pearly Kings. If naughty, his head would be blown off with a sawn-off shotgun, Sweeny-style. In '76, it was curtains for the Christmas rat. Wired to fuck in purple flares and white plimsoles, Parker laughed so hard he dropped his peshwari and blew warm Truman's down his whizzy konk! Sometime between Christmas and New Year '78 and I'm on Westminster Bridge with The Kursaal Flyers, awaiting the passing of the Danish Arse Barge. 9th century viking connections meant that, each year, the Danish embassy sent a slow moving torch-lit barge along the river, festooned with elderly Danes dressed as Thor and Odin, elegantly and inexpressively baring their bottoms to the accompaniment of sombre bassoon music. Rugby jumper-ed and thoroughly...
If someone invited you to a two- hour stand-up routine by an ultra post-modern comedian, so sophisticated that he satirises himself, his audience and all the big names on the circuit, you might pass and ask to see a panto instead.
But Stewart Lee's humour is the opposite of pretentious. Sure, his new show, Carpet Remnant World (I'll come to the title later), is clever, and riddled with oblique references - you're expected to know about Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and see the absurdity in the Vatican changing its doctrine on Purgatory. But he isn't showing off - he just assumes you're on his intellectual level. And if you're not, he doesn't want you there anyway. As he keeps saying to any Jimmy Carr fans in the audience: "It's not for you," adding, for his loyal fans, "It'll soon be back to just us."
At the same time he is mock-baffled that the BBC hasn't commissioned him for a third series - it hasn't had time to make a decision. "They're too busy commissioning 200 episodes of Russell Howard and writing Rob Brydon a blank cheque."
In his deadpan, "passive aggressive", middle-aged and bitter way, Lee brilliantly deconstructs and savages other comedians' techniques, so when a joke's not going very well, he says, you slip in a reference to rectal bleeding. Or just add a bit, and then a bit more, and eventually you get a laugh. "In the trade we call it Boyle's law."
If his Michael McIntyre prancing is funny, then his riff on what he calls "observational comedy" is funnier still, as in those comedians who endlessly say, "have you noticed the way ...?". As he puts it: "You can't just go on stage and ask a load of questions without a punchline. Can you?" Of course, the twist is that he is indulging in "observational comedy" about comedy itself.
This sort of meta-comedy, if it can be called that, is the seam running through the show. Take his self-deprecation. He says he's got no material because his life consists of watching Scooby-Doo with his son, and driving round the North Circular. In the hands of another comedian, being told they've got no jokes would be annoying. It's been done before. But Lee pushes it further. Towards the end of the first half, he starts looking at the prompts scrawled on his hand. He does it so subtly, just as you would if you actually had forgotten your script, that for a moment I thought, yeah, actually, you are rubbish. But as the first half fizzles and you realise the fizzling is the joke, the laugh is on you for falling for it.
It's not all so convoluted - there are one-liners too. Such as: "My wife wants me to have a vasectomy." Sigh. "Hardly any point." And there are meta-one-liners, such as: "That was a joke ... They do stick out." Then there are moments of sheer silliness, like the Scooby-Doo riff. Having watched the same cartoon 180 times, it's his only frame of reference. So when he goes into observational comedy mode, the question he keeps asking is: "You know those jungle canyon rope bridges, right, you know, the ones that are always broken ...?"
And what of the show's title? It refers to the carpet remnant store he finds himself going into, on one of his lonely motorway drives. But its true significance comes clear only at the end. Suddenly, a show that you thought was just a meandering two hours of deadpan half-baked material-free nonsense - as he keeps telling you it is - comes together, tight as a ball of string. At the beginning, he tells you what will happen one minute from the end, to "create an illusion of structure". Except it's not an illusion at all - it's just brilliantly post-modern.
Stewart Lee
2011-11-27T13:12:29+00:00
If someone invited you to a two- hour stand-up routine by an ultra post-modern comedian, so sophisticated that he satirises himself, his audience and all the big names on the circuit, you might pass and ask to see a panto instead. But Stewart Lee's humour is the opposite of pretentious. Sure, his new show, Carpet Remnant World (I'll come to the title later), is clever, and riddled with oblique references - you're expected to know about Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and see the absurdity in the Vatican changing its doctrine on Purgatory. But he isn't showing off - he just assumes you're on his intellectual level. And if you're not, he doesn't want you there anyway. As he keeps saying to any Jimmy Carr fans in the audience: "It's not for you," adding, for his loyal fans, "It'll soon be back to just us." At the same time he is mock-baffled that the BBC hasn't commissioned him for a third series - it hasn't had time to make a decision. "They're too busy commissioning 200 episodes of Russell Howard and writing Rob Brydon a blank cheque." In his deadpan, "passive aggressive", middle-aged and bitter way, Lee brilliantly deconstructs and savages other comedians' techniques, so when a joke's not going very well, he says, you slip in a reference to rectal bleeding. Or just add a bit, and then a bit more, and eventually you get a laugh. "In the trade we call it Boyle's law." If his Michael McIntyre prancing is funny, then his riff on what he calls "observational comedy" is funnier still, as in those comedians who endlessly say, "have you noticed the way ...?". As he puts it: "You can't just go on stage and ask a load of questions without a punchline. Can you?" Of course,...
Sunday. I am seven weeks into the biggest stand-up tour I’ve ever done.
Normally when I go back to a town with a new show I perform to about 25 per cent more people than before, building from audiences of about 100-150 to sometimes selling out 700-seater venues. But I did a TV series for BBC2 this year, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and for this tour numbers have doubled. It couldn’t have come at a better time. My wife Bridget and I were getting ready to sell our flat and leave the capital in search of space to get our two-year-old his own room. But the extra money means we now have a mortgage on a family home in London, the city that licked us both into shape, and which we’re reluctant to leave.
Tonight I’m at the Theatre Royal in Richmond. Since I got bigger crowds, I’m often upgraded into booming town halls, the rows of seats receding into the dark distance, my voice bouncing off the walls, the laughter disappearing into the dome. But this is a fantastic old theatre, where no one feels more than 50ft away. I don’t think I could ever be one of those comics who perform on massive screens in stadiums, as what I do is tiny and nuanced, but with the BBC unlikely to recommission the series this won’t ever become an issue. So that’s good then.
Monday. It’s my first day off for a week or so.
My wife Bridget and I booked a babysitter and had planned to go and see some music locally. Stoke Newington, where we live, has a rich history of improvised jazz, which my wife and I love seeing live. Lol Coxhill and John Edwards were at Café Oto in Dalston, and the American jazz bass player Henry Grimes was at the Vortex nearby but we realised we hadn’t really spoken for weeks and so sat at the back of the Auld Shillelagh, a genuinely Irish Irish pub off Church Street, and caught up. Bridget has had to put her own stand-up and writing on hold at the moment and do most of the childcare before the temporary buzz of interest in me dissipates. This was never the idea and, sometimes, when the theatres won’t put the money from my CD sales on the settlement, I bring home a handful of used tenners, which I press on her for shopping and the boy. When did our marriage move back to the 1950s?
Tuesday. I’m in Tunbridge Wells and there are two reviewers in.
I hope to get good write-ups to sell the longest London run I’ve ever done, six weeks starting on Monday. I’m curious about what the critics will say, especially if they’re the sort who actually go and see lots of stand-up. But, since I became a dad, my main worry is that bad press might hit sales and my ability to provide for my family.
Maybe I was nervous. I fluffed the opening to the show, and introduced my superb opening act Tony Law, a surreal Canadian stand-up, in a messy way, throwing him to the lions rather. The show was the most sluggish of the tour and, for the first time so far, a half-hour bit about the ethics of the cruel humour of the TV show Top Gear was compromised by the fact that most of Tunbridge Wells seemed to be big fans of Jeremy Clarkson and co. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the struggle, a kind of numb war of attrition against their bruised sensibilities and apparent boredom.
Wednesday. Birmingham Town Hall. Once again, I feared the echo chamber effect, as it’s hard to play the pauses and silences in reverberating rooms, but the sound engineers did amazing things with adjustable Perspex baffling.
Birmingham was my hometown but I left 23 years ago. Like most escapees I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Brum, but this time I felt unjustly proud by association. The latest architectural overhaul of the city centre showcases both old and new buildings in their best light, everyone we dealt with seemed enthusiastic, and Nostalgia & Comics remains the best laid-out comic shop in the country. Outside the town hall in the square there is a delightful little Christmas market. Still impossible to find anywhere to eat after 10.30, though. Damn those Quakers!
Thursday. I am in Oxford, where a quarter of a century ago I was a student.
Tony and I stayed in a little hotel off the Cowley Road, a slightly scary area back then but now full of bistros and boutiques and swelling with pride. It has changed. In fact, seeing different cities every day, I’ve realised that the whole world has changed. The liminal zones where people limped along on grant money and dole cheques are long gone, as even the poorest live it up on borrowed wealth.
Even as I got more popular I could still never get in the big theatre in Oxford. On the last tour I performed the show four times in a local promoter’s 200-seater pub room. This time around he’s put me in a 1,000-seater bingo hall that’s newly opened as a rock venue. It took 90 minutes to seat everyone and I was worried about the mood turning. But the show went well and even the Telegraph reviewer liked it, though afterwards I had an argument with the tickets guy, which will no doubt lead to me being traduced anonymously on the internet. My old English tutor came and liked the show. I was relieved. I think I was still, subconsciously, expecting to be graded.
Friday. I walked with Tony to the newly refurbished Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and saw two paintings by Edward Calvert, a disciple of William Blake, whose grave lies hidden in dense undergrowth in a cemetery opposite my flat in north London, and admired the craftsmanship of the Alfred Jewel.
Then we drove to Peterborough, where I bought my son a SpongeBob SquarePants ukulele and ate some soup alone in the Travelodge. Is this not the most rock’n’roll tour ever? Do you envy me, Financial Times readers, with your big City jobs? Hell, when I’ve finished this, I might even get that ukulele out of its box and give it a strum. Everything could go wrong tomorrow. I could go deaf, the tide could turn against me, I could forget how to be funny ... but this afternoon I’m strumming a child’s mandolin in a Peterborough Travelodge and I am free.
Stewart Lee
2009-12-05T20:18:32+00:00
Sunday. I am seven weeks into the biggest stand-up tour I’ve ever done. Normally when I go back to a town with a new show I perform to about 25 per cent more people than before, building from audiences of about 100-150 to sometimes selling out 700-seater venues. But I did a TV series for BBC2 this year, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and for this tour numbers have doubled. It couldn’t have come at a better time. My wife Bridget and I were getting ready to sell our flat and leave the capital in search of space to get our two-year-old his own room. But the extra money means we now have a mortgage on a family home in London, the city that licked us both into shape, and which we’re reluctant to leave. Tonight I’m at the Theatre Royal in Richmond. Since I got bigger crowds, I’m often upgraded into booming town halls, the rows of seats receding into the dark distance, my voice bouncing off the walls, the laughter disappearing into the dome. But this is a fantastic old theatre, where no one feels more than 50ft away. I don’t think I could ever be one of those comics who perform on massive screens in stadiums, as what I do is tiny and nuanced, but with the BBC unlikely to recommission the series this won’t ever become an issue. So that’s good then. Monday. It’s my first day off for a week or so. My wife Bridget and I booked a babysitter and had planned to go and see some music locally. Stoke Newington, where we live, has a rich history of improvised jazz, which my wife and I love seeing live. Lol Coxhill and John Edwards were at Café Oto in Dalston, and the American jazz bass...
Last month saw the return of comedian Stewart Lee to the magnificent backdrop of the Lyceum Theatre. Having recorded his previous live show Carpet Remnant World here, the venue is a favourite haunt of Lee. This time, by his own admission, it’s a work in progress. Some material is tried and tested, while other sections are still in development ahead of the forthcoming fourth series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.
The difficulty of reviewing Lee’s work is that he provides his own continuous review during the show, from offering a nonchalant explanation that his “planned” encore is “OK - not amazing, just OK” to the continuous analysis of the audience’s reaction and whether it meets his expectations. He interrupts himself to explain the true merit of his material or to explain why it was funnier than the audience gave credit for.
Those familiar with Lee’s work will immediately recognise his mastery of the stage. This is something very different from more TV-friendly stand-ups who frequent panel shows and Live at the Apollo. His confidence with his methods is something that no doubt comes with 25 years of stand-up experience. Rather than warming up the crowd, Lee derides the audience for bringing friends with them who are unlikely to understand the show. “Come alone or not at all,” he proclaims to the welcoming audience.
His tried and tested material on nationalism in the first half is a tight set and brilliantly done, a riposte to the Daily Mail’s sentiment that no-one is “having a go at the Islams”. He is able to guide the liberal audience through their discomfort while attempting some mainstream, McIntyre-esque observational comedy.
His 30-minute piece on urine is promising, at one stage leaving the audience uneasy as they decide how much of his onstage breakdown is fully scripted. It will be intriguing to see the final form when the new series of Comedy Vehicle arrives on BBC2.
As this is a warm-up, it doesn’t represent Lee’s tour de force, but it still felt very special and unique in contrast to so many big names on the circuit. For aficionados of comedy, he is definitely on the must-see list. Just remember, if you are in the audience, bring your “A game”.
Stewart Lee
2015-06-13T11:49:50+01:00
Last month saw the return of comedian Stewart Lee to the magnificent backdrop of the Lyceum Theatre. Having recorded his previous live show Carpet Remnant World here, the venue is a favourite haunt of Lee. This time, by his own admission, it’s a work in progress. Some material is tried and tested, while other sections are still in development ahead of the forthcoming fourth series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. The difficulty of reviewing Lee’s work is that he provides his own continuous review during the show, from offering a nonchalant explanation that his “planned” encore is “OK - not amazing, just OK” to the continuous analysis of the audience’s reaction and whether it meets his expectations. He interrupts himself to explain the true merit of his material or to explain why it was funnier than the audience gave credit for. Those familiar with Lee’s work will immediately recognise his mastery of the stage. This is something very different from more TV-friendly stand-ups who frequent panel shows and Live at the Apollo. His confidence with his methods is something that no doubt comes with 25 years of stand-up experience. Rather than warming up the crowd, Lee derides the audience for bringing friends with them who are unlikely to understand the show. “Come alone or not at all,” he proclaims to the welcoming audience. His tried and tested material on nationalism in the first half is a tight set and brilliantly done, a riposte to the Daily Mail’s sentiment that no-one is “having a go at the Islams”. He is able to guide the liberal audience through their discomfort while attempting some mainstream, McIntyre-esque observational comedy. His 30-minute piece on urine is promising, at one stage leaving the audience uneasy as they decide how much of his onstage breakdown is fully...
Here's a special edition, pared down version of the our bloated Fist of Fun set.
This two disc set contains just the episodes and commentary tracks.
Finally, people with only a causial interest in early Lee and Herring can see what the fuss is all about.
It's Fist of Fun! And here are your hosts. One is Stewart Lee and the other one is known as Richard Herring.
And you can see all 12 episodes from both series of their crazy adventure on this double disc set.
Here's just some of the nostalgia on offer
- see if Stew gets his Moon on a Stick
- meet the Real Rod Hull (he is him!)
- revisit Simon Quinlank's hobbies
- see inside the Julia Sawalha shrine
- hear Rich say 'ahhh', and then Stew say 'not ahhh'.
The show features young versions of Peter Baynam, Kevin Eldon, Ben Moor, Ronni Ancona, Alistair McGowan and many other famous faces.
But that's not all - as a lovely bonus, modern day Rich and Stew have recorded commentary tracks for every episode and there are commentary tracks from Kevin Eldon, Ben Moor, and one from the Real Rod Hull and Simon Quinlank.
Stewart Lee
2019-03-17T11:04:58+00:00
Here's a special edition, pared down version of the our bloated Fist of Fun set. This two disc set contains just the episodes and commentary tracks. Finally, people with only a causial interest in early Lee and Herring can see what the fuss is all about. It's Fist of Fun! And here are your hosts. One is Stewart Lee and the other one is known as Richard Herring. And you can see all 12 episodes from both series of their crazy adventure on this double disc set. Here's just some of the nostalgia on offer - see if Stew gets his Moon on a Stick - meet the Real Rod Hull (he is him!) - revisit Simon Quinlank's hobbies - see inside the Julia Sawalha shrine - hear Rich say 'ahhh', and then Stew say 'not ahhh'. The show features young versions of Peter Baynam, Kevin Eldon, Ben Moor, Ronni Ancona, Alistair McGowan and many other famous faces. But that's not all - as a lovely bonus, modern day Rich and Stew have recorded commentary tracks for every episode and there are commentary tracks from Kevin Eldon, Ben Moor, and one from the Real Rod Hull and Simon Quinlank.
1. T-SHIRT FRENZY - STEWART LEE 100% PEAR T-SHIRTS on Pre-order Now.
Thrill your friends, and your own body, at Xmas!
Relive the glory days of 2008/9 by wearing a t-shirt with a line from Stew's If You Prefer A Milder Comedian... tour, from back when he was still good, rather than simply complacent and reliable.
100% pear! 100% PEAR CIDER Tee Shirts.
Two versions in Navy Blue or Purple on Anthem Organic Tee Shirts.
A UK based ethical Tee Shirt Manufacturer.
Pre Order NOW and Shipping starts on 30th November They cost £20.00 each plus shipping. https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee
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.
"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
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.
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
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)
Stewart Lee
2022-11-14T09:00:05+00:00
1. T-SHIRT FRENZY - STEWART LEE 100% PEAR T-SHIRTS on Pre-order Now. Thrill your friends, and your own body, at Xmas! Relive the glory days of 2008/9 by wearing a t-shirt with a line from Stew's If You Prefer A Milder Comedian... tour, from back when he was still good, rather than simply complacent and reliable. 100% pear! 100% PEAR CIDER Tee Shirts. Two versions in Navy Blue or Purple on Anthem Organic Tee Shirts. A UK based ethical Tee Shirt Manufacturer. Pre Order NOW and Shipping starts on 30th November They cost £20.00 each plus shipping. https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee Pears Blue Pears Purple 2. RARE 47 MINUTE EDIT OF THE SNOWFLAKE GERVAIS BIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWBodOgWRs 3. TV SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO Snowflake and Tornado are both on the BBC iplayer now. Snowflake is here. & Tornado is here. 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...
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. While his European contemporaries were dryly dictating the terms of a new avant-garde order, Cage charted the outer limits of music with a wide eyed wonder, seeing all that was remarkable in the commonplace and the overlooked. And we're still travelling in his wake, astounded that his big ideas could have been expressed quite so pithily.
While much of the archaeology of high modernism has been brushed aside, people flock to John Cage as to no other twentieth century experimentalist, revelling in the humour at the heart of his output. Cage's works dare us to giggle, either in joy or disbelief. And so it seems natural that a comedian should have taken quite so strongly to Cage's work; that's just what stand-up Stewart Lee has done, locating Cage's natural wit with his own laconic delivery for this touring event, caught by Devil's Trill at Battersea Arts Centre.
Lee takes the role of the reader - originally performed by Cage - in Indeterminacy, a series of autobiographical one minute stories read at random to an accompaniment of improvised noise. Cage's tales are expertly turned - sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and occasionally baffling - but their length determines the delivery, having to last one minute no matter how many words they contain. The composer's friends and colleagues are brilliantly drawn: the almost chronically unimpressed David Tudor; the existential disappointment of Morton Feldman; the gnomic wisdom of Dr. Suzuki.
They all sound great fun. Lee's deadpan, almost bored style only heightens the comedy. The slow retort of mushroom expert Guy Nearing, on having his mistake picked up by the young Cage (“There are so many.....Latin names.....rolling around in my head.....that sometimes.....the wrong one comes out") could have been written for Lee.
And then there are flashes of the philosophy of Cage's world view. He recalls a juke box playing at a swimming pool: “I noticed that the music accompanied the swimmers, though they didn't hear it".
And so the improvisations of Tania Chen and Steve Beresford, played mostly on musical toys, form an apparently random but often eerily synchronous counterpoint to the text. Sometimes they obscure it, rendering Lee's commentary a different brand of noise.
Before all of this, Beresford and Chen take to two pianos to improvise wildly. On this occasion, their first improvisation ranged widely and recalled two other great American mavericks - Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow; their second was a terser, frantic affair. Cage's fascination for extending instrumental techniques is demonstrated by Alan Tomlinson, following the composer's diverse instructions in the Solo for sliding trombone - only some of which involve the mouthpiece. Tomlinson raised hoots of delight from the Battersea audience as he barked through his instrument like an angry dog, and that's what Cage-the-comic would have wanted.
Stewart Lee
2012-09-23T21:30:07+01:00
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. While his European contemporaries were dryly dictating the terms of a new avant-garde order, Cage charted the outer limits of music with a wide eyed wonder, seeing all that was remarkable in the commonplace and the overlooked. And we're still travelling in his wake, astounded that his big ideas could have been expressed quite so pithily. While much of the archaeology of high modernism has been brushed aside, people flock to John Cage as to no other twentieth century experimentalist, revelling in the humour at the heart of his output. Cage's works dare us to giggle, either in joy or disbelief. And so it seems natural that a comedian should have taken quite so strongly to Cage's work; that's just what stand-up Stewart Lee has done, locating Cage's natural wit with his own laconic delivery for this touring event, caught by Devil's Trill at Battersea Arts Centre. Lee takes the role of the reader - originally performed by Cage - in Indeterminacy, a series of autobiographical one minute stories read at random to an accompaniment of improvised noise. Cage's tales are expertly turned - sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and occasionally baffling - but their length determines the delivery, having to last one minute no matter how many words they contain. The composer's friends and colleagues are brilliantly drawn: the almost chronically unimpressed David Tudor; the existential disappointment of Morton Feldman; the gnomic wisdom of Dr. Suzuki. They all sound great fun. Lee's deadpan, almost bored...
Stewart Lee's 2012 Fringe kicked off in typically provocative vein, when his Guardian article (headlined 'The Slow Death of the Edinburgh Fringe') delivered an industry-savvy knee to the groin of corporate comedy promoters. While PRs dealt with the aftermath from his wrath, the 25-time Fringe veteran holds court this year at the chandeliered, revamped Assembly Rooms.
Insider knowledge of the comedy game is only one card up Lee’s sleeve. There’s also his signature self-aware, deconstruction tactic, employed with grade-A mastery here. 'I mean the opposite of what I just said,' he condescends after a sarcastic aside. When laughs don't arrive fast enough, he deadpans, a twinkle in his eye: 'you're gonna have to up your game'.
Pedantry, semantics, current affairs and affectionate disdain feature too in a show about his supposed lack of a show, due to fatherhood and being 'creatively spent'. Although the last 15 minutes genuinely sag, making it seem like the biter has bit himself in the bum, the ploy is clever and the good bits still stomach-hurtingly funny.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-11T14:51:45+01:00
Stewart Lee's 2012 Fringe kicked off in typically provocative vein, when his Guardian article (headlined 'The Slow Death of the Edinburgh Fringe') delivered an industry-savvy knee to the groin of corporate comedy promoters. While PRs dealt with the aftermath from his wrath, the 25-time Fringe veteran holds court this year at the chandeliered, revamped Assembly Rooms. Insider knowledge of the comedy game is only one card up Lee’s sleeve. There’s also his signature self-aware, deconstruction tactic, employed with grade-A mastery here. 'I mean the opposite of what I just said,' he condescends after a sarcastic aside. When laughs don't arrive fast enough, he deadpans, a twinkle in his eye: 'you're gonna have to up your game'. Pedantry, semantics, current affairs and affectionate disdain feature too in a show about his supposed lack of a show, due to fatherhood and being 'creatively spent'. Although the last 15 minutes genuinely sag, making it seem like the biter has bit himself in the bum, the ploy is clever and the good bits still stomach-hurtingly funny.
Stand-up Stewart Lee once said his comedy goes in and out of fashion and, if that is really the case, then the laconic comedian can certainly put 2009 down as one of his best years yet.
In the latter half of the 90s, Lee made a number of successful TV shows as one half of the double act Lee and Herring. Yet when the duo’s series, This Morning With Richard Not Judy, was cancelled in 1999, it marked the start of period during which Lee made only fleeting appearances on our screens.
He may have gained public attention in 2003 when he wrote the book for Jerry Springer: The Opera – a show that was targeted by a band of angry Christians – but in the main Lee was left to concentrate on coming up with a series of critically acclaimed stand-up shows.
The BBC was eventually to come calling again and, earlier in the year, Lee’s series Comedy Vehicle enjoyed a successful run on BBC2.
Keen to capitalise on this exposure, the 41-year-old comic has embarked on his biggest ever solo tour with his new show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, arriving at Richmond Theatre on Sunday.
Was he worried about how his style – controversial, quiet and heavy on repetition – would translate to large venues?
“Initially, I was worried about what I do and how it was going to work because I have been performing to twice as many people as I was before,” he says.
“What I do is quiet and not really about unifying the audience. It is about everyone being confused. It has been absolutely fine, though.”
In his previous live show, 41st Best Stand-Up Ever, Lee included a routine that lambasted stand-up comedians who rely on mundane observational material.
His desire to avoid falling into a similar trap has proved the inspiration for If You Prefer A Milder Comedian..., in which he vents spleen on numerous targets including Top Gear and Scottish comic Frankie Boyle.
“In April, I went into a branch of Café Nero and I had this weird thing when they wouldn’t accept my loyalty card,” he explains.
“So I started writing a routine about being turned down in a coffee shop. It seemed like something a Jack Dee or a Michael McIntyre would do and, at about that time, I read an interview with Frankie Boyle where he said no-one over 40 should do stand-up as you have no anger left.
“I had written this bland thing so I thought about what did really annoy me and I have tried to find something that is true to the things that bother me that isn’t mainstream observational comedy.”
Lee’s slow and, at times, oblique stand-up may not be for everyone but he relishes any bad notices that come his way. As is his custom, the flyer for the current tour is adorned with a negative quote – “His tone is one of complete smug condescension” – pulled from a review in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury.
A strange marketing tactic, perhaps? “I seek out the bad quotes because it helps keep certain people out,” he says.
“The Sun said I was the worst stand-up in Britain and about as funny as bubonic plague and, if that means people who read The Sun don’t come to the show, then that is a good thing.”
He has also managed to alienate Robbie Williams in the past, who left one of his shows after 10 minutes –a fact Lee is proud of.
“Robbie left because he said I had a monotonous voice and should do relaxation tapes instead. I was pleased with that because I thought, if Robbie, who must be a d***, doesn’t like it, I must be doing something right.”
Lee is waiting to hear whether the BBC will commission a second series of Comedy Vehicle but says that, if it doesn’t come off, he has plenty more in the pipeline including another stand-up show and two theatre commissions.
Even if 2009 proves to be his high-point from a commercial point of view, comedy fans will be pleased to know we haven’t heard the last from this awkward and engaging stand-up.
Stewart Lee
2009-11-19T16:09:41+00:00
Stand-up Stewart Lee once said his comedy goes in and out of fashion and, if that is really the case, then the laconic comedian can certainly put 2009 down as one of his best years yet. In the latter half of the 90s, Lee made a number of successful TV shows as one half of the double act Lee and Herring. Yet when the duo’s series, This Morning With Richard Not Judy, was cancelled in 1999, it marked the start of period during which Lee made only fleeting appearances on our screens. He may have gained public attention in 2003 when he wrote the book for Jerry Springer: The Opera – a show that was targeted by a band of angry Christians – but in the main Lee was left to concentrate on coming up with a series of critically acclaimed stand-up shows. The BBC was eventually to come calling again and, earlier in the year, Lee’s series Comedy Vehicle enjoyed a successful run on BBC2. Keen to capitalise on this exposure, the 41-year-old comic has embarked on his biggest ever solo tour with his new show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, arriving at Richmond Theatre on Sunday. Was he worried about how his style – controversial, quiet and heavy on repetition – would translate to large venues? “Initially, I was worried about what I do and how it was going to work because I have been performing to twice as many people as I was before,” he says. “What I do is quiet and not really about unifying the audience. It is about everyone being confused. It has been absolutely fine, though.” In his previous live show, 41st Best Stand-Up Ever, Lee included a routine that lambasted stand-up comedians who rely on mundane observational...
Did the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen cultivate lagoons of urine in his rural Leicestershire constituency? In 2014, the Environment Agency claimed lagoons at the Measham depot of his vegetable packaging and distribution company, AB Produce, emitted a pervasive urine smell. “It smells just like urine all the time – first thing in the morning until last thing at night,” a villager said. By 2016, more than 400 people had complained about Bridgen’s urine lagoons, which he claimed contained liquefied vegetables; they were asked to score Bridgen’s odour from one (“very faint odour”) to six (“the strongest odour you could ever encounter, which could make you physically ill”). Though the issue was resolved, whenever the Conservatives need a stink, the Creature from the Yellow Lagoon can be relied upon to kick one up.
In February, Disney decided to flag, but not censor, dated content in old Muppet Shows. Viewers were warned, for example, that Johnny Cash sang in front of a Confederate battle flag, now blacklisted by American retailers after Confederate battle flag fan Dylann Roof shot dead nine black churchgoers in Charleston. Bridgen, a Tamagotchi Farage, mechanically declared: “I would like to know which bunch of muppets thought this one up… If this continues kids won’t be able to watch any TV programmes which are not newly made. Is nothing safe?” The shows, previously archived, were in fact newly available, with brief statements before contentious but unaltered episodes. It will soon be illegal to be white.
Post-factual Bridgen is the political equivalent of a dog with a firework strapped to it, chasing a ball towards enemy lines, tail wagging happily, with little idea of what it is doing. The Conservatives value the culture war confusion the Yellow Dog causes, while knowing it would be a liability to allow his urine to flow too far south from Leicestershire, especially in poorly ventilated constituencies.
In 2018, Bridgen discussed Brexit on BBC Radio Ulster. Old Yeller didn’t seem to understand the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were different entities, believing being English entitled him to an Irish passport, via some imagined reciprocal citizenship with Cromwell’s former colony. Having baffled host Stephen Nolan, born in Shankhill Road, the Loch Piss Monster quickly hung up mid-call, pretending to have disappeared. But since Boris Johnson avoided questions by scampering into a Yorkshire fridge, Yellowbelly’s Belfast auto-kneecapping seems comparatively dignified.
Though it is easy to dismiss Bridgen’s pronouncements as verbal lagoons of urine, last Sunday’s Express headline-grabber was deceptively granular. On page 16, the Yellow Peril addressed the HGV driver shortage, expediently concurring that Brexit’s withdrawal of EU labour was good because “paying the minimum wage with a queue of migrants ready to jump in is not an option any more”. Hopefully, the Golden Cockerel’s unexpected concern won’t drive up the wages of workers globally or the prized Brexit dividend of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s vaunted “cheaper footwear” will evaporate. How pleasing to see workers’ rights espoused by Bridgen, whose party traditionally believes labour markets shouldn’t be subject to interfering ethics. Yellowman he cum fe mash dem again! Zungguzungguguzungguzeng!
Abandoning Marxist rhetoric, Bridgen then said the driver shortage isn’t due to Covid, the pingdemic or Brexit, but to the disappointing 90s cadaver Tony Blair, who encouraged working-class children to go to university, thus “placing less value on vocations”. Or, as the Yellow Kid really means, Blair didn’t tell the peasants all they were good for was driving lorries for AB Produce’s Measham urine swamp. Blair’s inane “the more you learn the more you earn” mantra encouraged customer-students to view the holistic university experience in degraded time-and-motion terms, but it provided hope, and the possible byproduct of social mobility, to millions. However, YouGov studies show the more educated are less likely to vote Conservative, so discouraging the working class from study is, like the Conservatives’ voter ID scam, a good way of rigging elections.
Fifteen years ago, during a period of mental instability, I appeared on a grammar quizshow hosted by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, who patronisingly explained afterwards that privilege and inequality were natural and that my betters had my best interests at heart. Downton Abbey carpet-bombed the idea of benign aristocratic paternalism into the ITV viewing proletariat, class traitors such as Dame Maggie Smith and Dan Stevens softening the ground for the advance of Boris Johnson’s silver-spoon commandos into the red wall.
I was the first in my single mum’s family to go to university, aided by a posh part-scholarship and a charity fund for “waifs and strays”, your honour. (How I wish I were still a “waif”.) English literature and Anglo-Saxon! Study for its own sake! It blew my Brum-boiled brain. But Bridgen tells the less privileged to lower their horizons. For him, “levelling up” is levelling down. I suspect Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to extend his Bullingdon Club perks to Burnley Miners’ Club members either, however valuable their Brexit vote. I hope the King in Yellow is equally keen to tell upper-class parents their children should consider urine lagoon management instead of studying medicine or the philistine Brexiter James Dyson’s derided “French lesbian poetry”.
Bridgen asks for “an honest conversation on the worth of many degree courses… which add little to the economy or the life chances of students”. Does Brexit require the nation to be less well educated? But just as urine lagoons are inevitable consequences of vegetable processing, so disappointment and debt are inevitable consequences of the poisoned chalice of enlightenment that, if it is the right of the scions of privilege, should remain the right of all doomed romantics. Like others of his ilk, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, and the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, the Yellow Axolotl is dead in the head, dark in the heart and incapable of attaching value to abstract ideas. Bounded in lagoons of urine, they count themselves kings of infinite space. Without conscience or imagination, they sleep untroubled by bad dreams.
Stewart Lee
2021-08-08T11:03:50+01:00
Did the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen cultivate lagoons of urine in his rural Leicestershire constituency? In 2014, the Environment Agency claimed lagoons at the Measham depot of his vegetable packaging and distribution company, AB Produce, emitted a pervasive urine smell. “It smells just like urine all the time – first thing in the morning until last thing at night,” a villager said. By 2016, more than 400 people had complained about Bridgen’s urine lagoons, which he claimed contained liquefied vegetables; they were asked to score Bridgen’s odour from one (“very faint odour”) to six (“the strongest odour you could ever encounter, which could make you physically ill”). Though the issue was resolved, whenever the Conservatives need a stink, the Creature from the Yellow Lagoon can be relied upon to kick one up. In February, Disney decided to flag, but not censor, dated content in old Muppet Shows. Viewers were warned, for example, that Johnny Cash sang in front of a Confederate battle flag, now blacklisted by American retailers after Confederate battle flag fan Dylann Roof shot dead nine black churchgoers in Charleston. Bridgen, a Tamagotchi Farage, mechanically declared: “I would like to know which bunch of muppets thought this one up… If this continues kids won’t be able to watch any TV programmes which are not newly made. Is nothing safe?” The shows, previously archived, were in fact newly available, with brief statements before contentious but unaltered episodes. It will soon be illegal to be white. Post-factual Bridgen is the political equivalent of a dog with a firework strapped to it, chasing a ball towards enemy lines, tail wagging happily, with little idea of what it is doing. The Conservatives value the culture war confusion the Yellow Dog causes, while knowing it would be a liability to allow his urine...
Stewart Lee, it has to be said, will never be a household name. Sure, his recent two series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle on BBC2 met with much critical acclaim and the show was nominated for a Bafta. But Lee obstinately refuses to play the fame game. When he won a brace of Comedy Awards last month, he was notably absent from the boozy proceedings. Despite being 'current', he won't be seen serving up chummy repartee on any of the myriad TV shows in which comics chop up their routines to recycle them in the guise of 'spontaneous wit'. Wilfully perverse, he ensures his act is hard enough to break down into tenminute chunks for benefit gigs, let alone 30-second panel-show soundbites.
The inverse of a crowd-pleasing standup, he elects to stand out from the pack by a) telling precious few jokes; b) advising his audience he indeed has precious few jokes - 'That was a joke,' he explains. 'They do stick out' - and c) ensuring the few he does tell are not especially funny. His new show, Carpet Remnant World, is a splendid case in point. The theme of the show is that there is no show. In his characteristic monotone, Lee tell us all he does is drive up and down motorways from gig to gig or sit at home with his four-year-old son watching Scooby Doo And The Pirate Zombie Jungle. 'I've got nothing,' he admits apologetically. He's taken to driving around the North Circular in the vain hope something might happen to him. The idea of a comic in desperate search of a routine, then turning that search into his routine, is classic Lee.
This Marmite of comedians is not to everyone's taste. You only have to look online to witness the love-hate divide on the message boards. It's typical of Lee that he should share some of the bilious outpourings posted on the internet about him, while backed by a jazz soundtrack.
In the past he has made much of a quote by commentator de nos jours Toby Young, even including it in his publicity material. Young said: 'I have always thought that Stewart Lee's comedy is the opposite of what comedy should be.' It is surely the opposite of what comedy is thought to be in the age of Michael McIntyre; Lee's bitter persona is relentless in satirising his peers. 'When only half the room go for something,' he declares with relish, 'the comedians you like would do something else . . . I do it more!' Cue hearty applause.
But when the current comedy boom fizzles out, as it one day must, Lee will still challenge audiences with his uncompromising material, as he walks his fine line between multi-layered, self-referential deconstructionism and disappearing up his fundament. This is a comedy masterclass, and not for the easily pleased. 'I'm aware that this is a peak,' he says of this show. If so, then it's a triumphant one. Let's just hope nothing of any interest happens to him on the North Circular to mar his future shows.
Stewart Lee
2012-01-22T13:44:31+00:00
Stewart Lee, it has to be said, will never be a household name. Sure, his recent two series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle on BBC2 met with much critical acclaim and the show was nominated for a Bafta. But Lee obstinately refuses to play the fame game. When he won a brace of Comedy Awards last month, he was notably absent from the boozy proceedings. Despite being 'current', he won't be seen serving up chummy repartee on any of the myriad TV shows in which comics chop up their routines to recycle them in the guise of 'spontaneous wit'. Wilfully perverse, he ensures his act is hard enough to break down into tenminute chunks for benefit gigs, let alone 30-second panel-show soundbites. The inverse of a crowd-pleasing standup, he elects to stand out from the pack by a) telling precious few jokes; b) advising his audience he indeed has precious few jokes - 'That was a joke,' he explains. 'They do stick out' - and c) ensuring the few he does tell are not especially funny. His new show, Carpet Remnant World, is a splendid case in point. The theme of the show is that there is no show. In his characteristic monotone, Lee tell us all he does is drive up and down motorways from gig to gig or sit at home with his four-year-old son watching Scooby Doo And The Pirate Zombie Jungle. 'I've got nothing,' he admits apologetically. He's taken to driving around the North Circular in the vain hope something might happen to him. The idea of a comic in desperate search of a routine, then turning that search into his routine, is classic Lee. This Marmite of comedians is not to everyone's taste. You only have to look online to witness the love-hate divide on...
Experience how it feels to be the subject of a blasphemy prosecution! Find out why 'wool' is a funny word! See how jokes work, their inner mechanisms revealed, before your astonished face!
In 2001, after over a decade in the business, Stewart Lee quit stand-up, disillusioned and drained, and went off to direct a loss-making opera about Jerry Springer. How I Escaped My Certain Fate details his return to live performance, and the journey that took him from an early retirement to his position as the most critically acclaimed stand-up in Britain.
Here is Stewart Lee's own account of his remarkable comeback, told through transcripts of the three legendary full-length shows that sealed his reputation.
Astonishingly frank and detailed in-depth notes reveal the inspiration and inner workings of his act. With unprecedented access to a leading comedian's creative process, this book tell us just what it was like to write these shows, develop the performance and take them on tour. How I Escaped My Certain Fate is everything we have come to expect from Stewart Lee: fiercely intelligent, unsparingly honest and very funny.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T23:36:25+00:00
Experience how it feels to be the subject of a blasphemy prosecution! Find out why 'wool' is a funny word! See how jokes work, their inner mechanisms revealed, before your astonished face! In 2001, after over a decade in the business, Stewart Lee quit stand-up, disillusioned and drained, and went off to direct a loss-making opera about Jerry Springer. How I Escaped My Certain Fate details his return to live performance, and the journey that took him from an early retirement to his position as the most critically acclaimed stand-up in Britain. Here is Stewart Lee's own account of his remarkable comeback, told through transcripts of the three legendary full-length shows that sealed his reputation. Astonishingly frank and detailed in-depth notes reveal the inspiration and inner workings of his act. With unprecedented access to a leading comedian's creative process, this book tell us just what it was like to write these shows, develop the performance and take them on tour. How I Escaped My Certain Fate is everything we have come to expect from Stewart Lee: fiercely intelligent, unsparingly honest and very funny.
This sell-out show was performed on a stage littered with piles of DVDs released by lesser comedians that Lee bought for 1p off Amazon.
He took great pleasure in grinding them into the stage under his boot. However, Lee has been stomping over comedians for more than two decades.
Few comedians can deconstruct their jokes to expose the mechanics and bones – but still be funny. Lee can.
Lee admitted his ideal gig would be a sell-out where no one turned out so he didn’t have to look at people struggling to understand his genius.
Tongue in cheek – but not without merit.
Each generation has a comedic genius asking questions and pushing boundaries. There was Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks. We have Lee.
Stewart Lee
2018-03-13T22:33:49+00:00
This sell-out show was performed on a stage littered with piles of DVDs released by lesser comedians that Lee bought for 1p off Amazon. He took great pleasure in grinding them into the stage under his boot. However, Lee has been stomping over comedians for more than two decades. Few comedians can deconstruct their jokes to expose the mechanics and bones – but still be funny. Lee can. Lee admitted his ideal gig would be a sell-out where no one turned out so he didn’t have to look at people struggling to understand his genius. Tongue in cheek – but not without merit. Each generation has a comedic genius asking questions and pushing boundaries. There was Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks. We have Lee.
AXA Wealth International head of proposition Simon Willoughby on his love of stand-up comic Stewart Lee and how he wishes financial services could be more like him.
Some of you may recall my chance meeting with the comedian Jimmy Carr last year, and due to my inability to retain sufficient composure when trying to engage him in conversation, how I became the unfortunate victim of his cutting wit.
Well, you'll be pleased to know that I recently managed to strike-up a brief and vaguely coherent discussion with my all time favourite comedian after a show in Leicester Square. He even signed my DVD.
Stewart Lee, whose third Comedy Vehicle series has just finished on BBC2, tends to polarise opinions.
If you've come across him, you're likely to be either an addicted fan of his comic style or hate him with a vengeance.
As an example of the latter, the Daily Mail described him as a "Slime pit of bitterness".
To prove this point, when I asked my wife if she wanted to come to the show, she said "Oh, no. I can't stand him. I'm going to the ballet instead".
Apparently diverse interests are the key to a successful marriage, so I went on my own.
It was one of the best stand-up shows I've ever seen, and while I waited in a wine bar off Leicester Square for the ballet-follower to return from her rather more highbrow entertainment, I reflected on why I like Stewart Lee and his particular brand of humour.
I concluded that, as he would say, "The comedian Stewart Lee" is everything I wish the financial services sector would be, but only infrequently is.
Stewart Lee has been around since the late 80s and although his recent TV series' have brought his talent to a wider audience, something you suspect he secretly hates, he's never altered his style to court wider popularity.
He's avoided TV panel shows as well as observational comedy. In my view he's never sold out.
He's not afraid to challenge conventional thinking and tackle social injustice by using his own brand of subtle satire and verbal dexterity to put across an alternative view on a topic.
This has the effect of shaming his audience into considering a different way of thinking without beating them over the head.
Finally he's also not afraid to deconstruct the art of stand-up and lay bare the techniques and processes around which his act is supposed to be built.
He's able to do this because he has the confidence and skill to do so and still make people laugh even though he's already told them why they really shouldn't.
I'd like to work in a financial services sector that was a little braver, that never submits to vested interest groups and always chooses to do what's best for the end client.
While I think that is the direction of travel, wouldn't it be great if we were there already?
I'd like to work in a sector that was self confident enough to deal with social consequences of advice exclusion and the real life impact this could have.
I'd also like to work in a sector that was more willing to accept that large parts of what it does right now will need to change in the future and to openly seek to meet these challenges rather than trying to defend the past.
In a nutshell, I'd like the financial services sector to be more like Stewart Lee.
Of course the irony is "The comedian Stewart Lee" would be horrified by such a thought, although I think the Stewart Lee I met would probably allow himself a quiet chuckle.
Stewart Lee
2014-05-14T19:44:38+01:00
AXA Wealth International head of proposition Simon Willoughby on his love of stand-up comic Stewart Lee and how he wishes financial services could be more like him. Some of you may recall my chance meeting with the comedian Jimmy Carr last year, and due to my inability to retain sufficient composure when trying to engage him in conversation, how I became the unfortunate victim of his cutting wit. Well, you'll be pleased to know that I recently managed to strike-up a brief and vaguely coherent discussion with my all time favourite comedian after a show in Leicester Square. He even signed my DVD. Stewart Lee, whose third Comedy Vehicle series has just finished on BBC2, tends to polarise opinions. If you've come across him, you're likely to be either an addicted fan of his comic style or hate him with a vengeance. As an example of the latter, the Daily Mail described him as a "Slime pit of bitterness". To prove this point, when I asked my wife if she wanted to come to the show, she said "Oh, no. I can't stand him. I'm going to the ballet instead". Apparently diverse interests are the key to a successful marriage, so I went on my own. It was one of the best stand-up shows I've ever seen, and while I waited in a wine bar off Leicester Square for the ballet-follower to return from her rather more highbrow entertainment, I reflected on why I like Stewart Lee and his particular brand of humour. I concluded that, as he would say, "The comedian Stewart Lee" is everything I wish the financial services sector would be, but only infrequently is. Stewart Lee has been around since the late 80s and although his recent TV series' have brought his talent to a wider...
I will always remember where I was when I heard Boris Johnson had resigned. It was 9.05am on Thursday 7 July, I was driving through Stamford Hill. This column had a final deadline of 10am and now I had 55 minutes to rewrite it. The bendy BBC Tory-trumpet Chris Mason broke the news via the government-amplifier of Nick Robinson’s mouth and, winding down my window, I was desperate to share my joy with someone. But the only human beings in the area were a group of Orthodox Jewish schoolboys by the library, who seemed bewildered by an old fat goy shouting something about a bastard having gone at them out of a passing Ford Fiesta.
But, even as a Metropolitan Liberal Elitist Remoaner, I am grateful to Johnson on many levels. When the country voted for Brexit, and then for Johnson, I knew years of chaos and a far right lurch lay ahead. I also realised Brexit and Johnson would be exactly the kind of wedge issues to guarantee me a lucrative stand-up career playing to grateful audiences of crying Remainers for the foreseeable future. Like the hedge fund manager Crispin Odey and the international businessman Arron Banks, I too benefited financially from Johnson’s Brexit.
My last tour, Piglet’s Inferno, which ended an interrupted three-year run with a sold-out week at the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday, contained nothing but me swearing, red-faced, about Johnson for two-and-a-half hours and culminated in a beef effigy of the prime minister being shredded into slices and dropped from the rigging into the mouth of a giant puppet shark. And I achieved my dream of abandoning the traditional demands of so-called “comedy”, finally writing an entirely laugh-free show, each attack on the prime minister greeted simply by approving applause and angry jeers from the grim-faced Remoaners who exclusively comprise my audience. But for the tour’s closing weeks I worried daily that Johnson was about to be forced to resign and the show would fall apart before I had finished. I will be eternally grateful to Johnson for hanging on for four days after the show’s final date.
Johnson’s premiership, a mindless rotting meat zombie held together with the Sellotape™® of lies and the sticky excretions of his own spaff-faucet, began a sudden and dramatic slide into the ocean on Wednesday, like an arctic ice shelf made entirely of frozen shit. The Tories gasped for air in the filthy brine. Michael Fabricant got all brown stuff in his stupid hair and Carrie Johnson went down. Again. Hemingway’s line about a disaster happening “gradually, then suddenly” grew flesh. Gardy-loo! Gardy-loo! Gardy-loo!
I started to write this at 8.30am on Wednesday in a Pret A Manger, the day before Johnson finally folded. Two MPs resigned in less time than it took me to eat a Bacon & Egg Breakfast Mini Baguette™®. Whatever I filed on Thursday morning would surely be irrelevant by the time it was published on Sunday. I considered emailing the illustrator David Foldvari, suggesting he drew a blank space in a frame, inviting readers to scribble in their own etching of whatever has happened in the previous five minutes. Who would be in charge by the weekend? Mike “Concrete” Graham? A jar of Bovril with some mould in it? Morbius the Living Vampire? Or would Johnson cling on, like a mad king in an ancient British folk tale, roaming the mushroomed woods with his langer a-dangle, knighting stoats and beatifying otters.
Nadhim Zahawi, whose horses were never knowingly under-warmed, with £5,822.27 of public money heating their stables, became chancellor, surely a safe pair of hands for public finances. Michelle Donelan was education secretary for 36 hours before resigning and still managed to be rubbish at it. Even Ashfield MP Lee 30p Anderson quit, a man of such integrity he used supportive stooges on filmed walkabouts, and who until recently believed the PM was a victim of “a witch hunt by the BBC”, a news outlet so enfeebled it would run scared if someone showed it a child’s drawing of a Frankingstein. All these sudden discoveries of standards speak only of self-preservation.
I tried to follow the resignations on my laptop in Pret. A woman sitting at the next table, who has been throwing boiled eggs into her mouth and shouting about how magnetism is gay, got up and left. Perhaps she was the new parliamentary private secretary in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. I turned off my phone, worried that if I could be contacted I might be offered a cabinet position.
By the time I turned in on Wednesday night, 42 MPs had resigned from the government and Johnson had sacked Michael Gove. Portents of doom abounded; a lioness hath whelped in the street; Sky News had a drone camera flying over parliament, beaming back the kind of shots you’d see in a disaster movie where London is attacked by dragons from space; graves yawned, and yielded up their Kremlin connections. You couldn’t write this. How could I write about it? And then the morning news brought a sort of conclusion, but the corruption that allowed Johnson is still with us.
Because despite the drama, we are still where we always have been. Rightwing media and the Conservative party enabled the promotion of a man they knew was a dangerous lying corrupt cheat, in order to further their own interests. And so far they have wasted six years of our country’s life now, briefly wavering only when the figurehead’s corruption could no longer be concealed and threatened to blow the political reactor core sky high, a Chernobyl explosion of backhanders, bullying, Brexit bullshit and ridiculously expensive wallpaper. You fucking idiots. Your self-serving resignations ring hollow. Your backpedalling editorials stink. You should all be in prison.
Stewart Lee
2022-07-10T21:16:12+01:00
I will always remember where I was when I heard Boris Johnson had resigned. It was 9.05am on Thursday 7 July, I was driving through Stamford Hill. This column had a final deadline of 10am and now I had 55 minutes to rewrite it. The bendy BBC Tory-trumpet Chris Mason broke the news via the government-amplifier of Nick Robinson’s mouth and, winding down my window, I was desperate to share my joy with someone. But the only human beings in the area were a group of Orthodox Jewish schoolboys by the library, who seemed bewildered by an old fat goy shouting something about a bastard having gone at them out of a passing Ford Fiesta. But, even as a Metropolitan Liberal Elitist Remoaner, I am grateful to Johnson on many levels. When the country voted for Brexit, and then for Johnson, I knew years of chaos and a far right lurch lay ahead. I also realised Brexit and Johnson would be exactly the kind of wedge issues to guarantee me a lucrative stand-up career playing to grateful audiences of crying Remainers for the foreseeable future. Like the hedge fund manager Crispin Odey and the international businessman Arron Banks, I too benefited financially from Johnson’s Brexit. My last tour, Piglet’s Inferno, which ended an interrupted three-year run with a sold-out week at the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday, contained nothing but me swearing, red-faced, about Johnson for two-and-a-half hours and culminated in a beef effigy of the prime minister being shredded into slices and dropped from the rigging into the mouth of a giant puppet shark. And I achieved my dream of abandoning the traditional demands of so-called “comedy”, finally writing an entirely laugh-free show, each attack on the prime minister greeted simply by approving applause and angry jeers from the...
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, from high to low subject matter, while his longtime collaborator David Tudor played improvised passages on piano in another room. The “indeterminacy" arose from the fact that Tudor could not hear Cage, nor he Tudor - the music was not designed to accompany the text, or vice versa and if they did chime in together, it was, necessarily, on an unconscious, unpremeditated basis.
Half a century later, and longtime improvisor, pianist and Cage expert Tania Chen struck on the idea of reviving Cage's project. Beresford asked Stewart Lee, both a comedian and a fan of ultra-left field music including the improv scene, to do the readings. “I was always a massive fan, I loved Fist Of Fun, and, of course, his stand-up," says Beresford. “I knew he'd have an angle on it, he wouldn't ham it up or anything."
This September, the trio continue their tour of the piece, with Alan Tomlinson on slide trombone. Lee himself is perhaps overly modest about his role in the proceedings. “I've been brought in rather in the way that Gavin Bryars brought in that tramp on Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. I'm a resource. The only Cage piece I really knew was 4'33". I wasn't an expert and I'm still not. I tried not to find out about John Cage, so as to come to it clean. A lot of his strategies seem to be quite conceptualised, academic ways of approaching the unfamiliar. So actually being unfamiliar with his stuff I thought would be very helpful.
“I thought it would be a lot more serious - then Steve Beresford told me to look at Cage performing Water Walk on an American TV show back in 1950.
“Harry Hill actually performed it at the South Bank Centre, which he did, absolutely dead-on. Just like John Cage. So in some ways it did seem like Vic Reeves or Monty Python - Cage invites the audience to accept there's some point in doing what he's doing and then does it totally straight - which is what all the best comics do. It's hilarious and beautiful."
Cage's performances, both of Water Walk and Indeterminacy invite two sorts of laughter - the sort of uncomprehending, Philistine scorn with which avant garde activity has so often been greeted on its interfaces with mass audiences, but also a genuine and intended joy at a performance which is intended to be as non-serious as it is serious.
“One of the liberating things about watching Cage on Water Walk is that he accepts the derisory laughter as a valid response to his work. I think that's great," says Lee. “I don't believe he wasn't aware at some level that the stories in Indeterminacy, when juxtaposed at random, wouldn't produce comic effects. They're a mixture of the pretentiously philosophical and the banally mundane. A disproportionate number of them have a lot to do with mushrooms - not the magic ones, just mushrooms.
“I think my involvement will bring in a lot of people with very little knowledge of John Cage who will go there and realise they have permission to laugh - not that I'll be playing it for laughs. Cage's instructions are 'performance without expression'."
The links and overlaps between comedy and avant garde/improv, supposedly a bastion of high seriousness are both manifold and strangely logical. Steve Beresford put together Vic Reeves' house band; the late improv guitarist Derek Bailey, meanwhile, was a member of the Morecambe and Wise house band. “He was one of those musicians who used to hang around Soho, like labourers, looking for session work," says Lee.
“Derek Bailey got me into Chic Murray, a great Scottish music hall act from the 50s - Bailey said all the pit band musicians used to try to bunk off early to see him. You can see what they would have liked about him - it really swings. It's like jazz, it's all in the timing. Some of Bailey's spoken word reminiscences sound a lot like John Shuttleworth - there's this wonderful banal surrealism he gets."
“Most great comedians are concerned with form," says Beresford. “The Marx Brothers. Hellzapopin, remember that? Enormously formally innovative. And Jacques Tati - clearly, a huge influence on Vic & Bob, the farting Frenchmen.
Also, the use of silence and reticence - so many things you could connect with Cage. The very obsessive, analytic nature of Stewart Lee's comedy - his dissection of a postcard of two cats and dogs playing the piano. Or his take on Del Boy falling through the pub bar. Cage worked through things in the same obsessive way."
Stewart Lee
2012-09-14T21:13:28+01:00
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, from high to low subject matter, while his longtime collaborator David Tudor played improvised passages on piano in another room. The “indeterminacy" arose from the fact that Tudor could not hear Cage, nor he Tudor - the music was not designed to accompany the text, or vice versa and if they did chime in together, it was, necessarily, on an unconscious, unpremeditated basis. Half a century later, and longtime improvisor, pianist and Cage expert Tania Chen struck on the idea of reviving Cage's project. Beresford asked Stewart Lee, both a comedian and a fan of ultra-left field music including the improv scene, to do the readings. “I was always a massive fan, I loved Fist Of Fun, and, of course, his stand-up," says Beresford. “I knew he'd have an angle on it, he wouldn't ham it up or anything." This September, the trio continue their tour of the piece, with Alan Tomlinson on slide trombone. Lee himself is perhaps overly modest about his role in the proceedings. “I've been brought in rather in the way that Gavin Bryars brought in that tramp on Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. I'm a resource. The only Cage piece I really knew was 4'33". I wasn't an expert and I'm still not. I tried not to find out about John Cage, so as to come to it clean. A lot of his strategies seem to be quite conceptualised, academic ways of approaching the unfamiliar. So actually being unfamiliar...
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is able to translate the grunting of Mark Ruffalo’s incoherent Hulk into meaningful dialogue. Last Monday the Times newspaper invited us to believe that the resentful foundling Michael Gove could do the same with the contradictory snarling of Donald Trump.
As a fellow adoptee I recognise Gove’s irreparably damaged personality. Indeed, both of us were once published in the same vanity-pressed anthology of neurotic, self-justifying teenage poetry. And as a member of the Gove-loathing metropolitan liberal elite, I thought we had seen the last of the self-serving nest-cuckoo and his hand-wringing wife. Six months ago, it looked as if a stateless Gove and Sarah Vine were reinventing themselves as the amusing celebrity political couple for young millennials so jaded they no longer found Neil and Christine Hamilton quite sickening enough. Michael Gove and Sarah Vine – a Neil and Christine Hamilton for the Two Girls, One Cup generation.
It had been Gove who, with David Cameron and Boris Johnson, sabotaged our children’s futures in a doomed peeing war of competitive posh men. As a student, David Cameron is rumoured to have put his penis into a dead pig. To outdo him as an adult, in an act even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist. And to render both his rivals irrelevant, to do something even more disgusting and demented, Boris Johnson allowed himself to be put into the role of foreign secretary, a punishment-beating for the world.
But, in a plot twist worthy of an HBO box set, it is actually Johnson’s old ally and enemy Gove who has made the first plausible contact with the new president of America. This journalistic coup goes some way to restoring the wounded pride of Gove, an adopted misfit masking his low self-esteem, afraid that his standing is an accident of administrative paperwork in infancy, desperate to assert his role in a world of entitlement to which he suspects he is not really entitled.
Encounters with Trump that appear calm usually suggest the school bus driver in the film Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), interacting as politely as possible with Andy Robinson’s vividly unhinged psychopath, in the hope that he won’t massacre the kidnapped preteens on board. When Robinson forces the weeping children to sing Old MacDonald, the scene conveys the same air of forced jollity evident among Democrats at Trump’s inauguration. But Gove’s dealings with Trump were reported as relaxed, admittedly by Gove, in an interview he wrote, in a paper he works for owned by an arse.
Everything you need to know about Gove’s feelings for Trump, and for his previous paramour Boris Johnson, is contained in Nietzsche’s 1887 book of essays On the Genealogy of Morality. If you haven’t read it, download Apple’s Ask a Nietzsche app, and question a tiny avatar of the dead philosopher, voiced by the German comedian and TalkSport regular Henning Wehn. I first heard about the book on a radio show hosted by someone called Melvyn Bragg, who I was surprised to find was real, rather than a Siri-like app with a broken pitch control.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
Now, I personally know nothing about psychiatry, philosophy, moral philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychological profiling, cultural history, politics, linguistics, or the science of personality, but to me Gove would appear to exhibit all the characteristic traits of what Nietzsche calls “slave mentality”, the resentful jealousy of the “ill-born, meek” man, imagining that one day the world will see that he was right all along.
Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, however, fulfil the criteria of what Nietzsche names, in the same essay, “blond beasts”. Not only are they both blond and beastly, but they are “beyond good and evil”, observing no law other than their own power. The Gove-slave needs to believe in deferred justice as he is physically incapable of defeating the blond beasts on their own terms. Nietzsche sees this as the root of Christian morality.
Or alternatively, it would appear, the slave can canoodle with the beast, and if one blond beast doesn’t take the bait, there’s always another one over the Atlantic to cuddle up with instead. But one doesn’t need Nietzsche to understand Gove’s relationship with Trump. Presumably you remember it from the playground, where Gove-like figures peeped over bullies’ shoulders, urging them to violence from a position of cowardly safety, the Richard Hammond/Jeremy Clarkson dynamic, an eternal archetype, replayed in Trump’s golden office, framed Playboy covers reflected in the smeared lenses of Gove’s steamed-up spectacles. Is it just me or is it hot in here?
Gove may be a slave but he is not an idiot. He knows there is no point setting any store by anything Trump says. Trump’s comments do not add up to any coherent worldview. Each emerges in the moment, suitable for that second and that second alone. In his Gove interview Trump said he hoped to scale down his nuclear arsenal. But as recently as the 22 December, in his famous Let It Be an Arms Race series of 140-character treatises, Trump declared “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.”
After the interview’s publication, Gove was deferred to uncritically on Radio 4’s Today programme, a show currently so spineless in its questioning of government that it resembles not so much a news source, as a stack of jellyfish piled up on top of one another and wrapped in an unbuttoned shirt and a Robert Redford wig, in the hope that someone will mistake it for Bob Woodward.
Gove is a desperate, disappointed man, staring into the murky dew pond of Trump’s inarticulate pronouncements, looking for something that validates him. Hearing that Trump will do a trade deal with the UK “absolutely, very quickly”, Gove the emasculated Brexiteer makes this the focus of a Times interview so uncritical as to be as dangerous and dishonest as anything emerging from a Macedonian fake news factory. This is not a game. Lives are at stake. You all need to do better. See me.
Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring; see stewartlee.co.uk for details
Stewart Lee
2017-01-22T11:46:08+00:00
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is able to translate the grunting of Mark Ruffalo’s incoherent Hulk into meaningful dialogue. Last Monday the Times newspaper invited us to believe that the resentful foundling Michael Gove could do the same with the contradictory snarling of Donald Trump. As a fellow adoptee I recognise Gove’s irreparably damaged personality. Indeed, both of us were once published in the same vanity-pressed anthology of neurotic, self-justifying teenage poetry. And as a member of the Gove-loathing metropolitan liberal elite, I thought we had seen the last of the self-serving nest-cuckoo and his hand-wringing wife. Six months ago, it looked as if a stateless Gove and Sarah Vine were reinventing themselves as the amusing celebrity political couple for young millennials so jaded they no longer found Neil and Christine Hamilton quite sickening enough. Michael Gove and Sarah Vine – a Neil and Christine Hamilton for the Two Girls, One Cup generation. It had been Gove who, with David Cameron and Boris Johnson, sabotaged our children’s futures in a doomed peeing war of competitive posh men. As a student, David Cameron is rumoured to have put his penis into a dead pig. To outdo him as an adult, in an act even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist. And to render both his rivals irrelevant, to do something even more disgusting and demented, Boris Johnson allowed himself to be put into the role of foreign secretary, a punishment-beating for the world. But, in a plot twist worthy of an HBO box set, it is actually Johnson’s old ally and enemy Gove who has made the first plausible contact with the new president of America. This journalistic coup goes some way to restoring the wounded pride of Gove,...
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.
Stewart Lee
2020-09-09T12:20:41+01:00
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...
During the Thatcher era, wealthy British people leaving the National Theatre skirted British homeless people in the cardboard cities of the South Bank subway. Today, wealthy Arabs, Russians and Europeans, leaving the Princess Diana memorial playground, skirt Romanian homeless people in the Marble Arch underpass. Can there be any better proof of the astonishing progress London has made in three decades to become the truly global city it is in 2014?
Even as a professional comedian of 25 years' standing, I nevertheless find it difficult to know what angle to take on this week's much anticipated mass influx of Romanians. I am filing this column, in English, on the morning of Thursday 2 January, but by the time you read it, on Sunday the 5th, it may already be appearing only in Romanian, in an attempt to court some of the 29 million potential new Observer readers the soft right predict will arrive this week. From a business point of view, should I be pro-Romanian or anti-Romanian? While I won't be down at Luton airport handing out Costa coffees any time soon, I do nonetheless wonder which market should I work.
At the end of November, Boris Johnson, Britain's first self-satirising politician, became an early advocate of the anti-Romanian business model, observing sadly: "We can do nothing to stop the entire population of Transylvania – charming though most of them may be – from trying to pitch camp at Marble Arch." Johnson's trademark tuck-shop wit makes him a formidable political orator. Johnson is like an iron fist encased in an iron glove, but on the knuckles of the iron glove are tiny childlike drawings of ejaculating penises at which even the son of a Marxist intellectual cannot help but smirk.
I am not a political speech writer, and I hate to appear cynical, but when Johnson said most of the Romanians "may" be "charming", I don't think he meant this. I think Johnson was being sarcastic. Johnson chose to make Romania synonymous with Transylvania, a region of Romania comprising, at more than 7 million souls, roughly a third of the country's 20 million-plus population. In doing so, was he deliberately evoking fears of the blood-eating Transylvanian vampires of legend, deeply buried in the European collective subconscious? I believe so. For nothing Johnson does is accidental, even things that look like accidents. His wizard zip-wire prang of 2012 was choreographed by CBeebies' Mr Tumble, to exact specifications laid down by a team of spin doctors, in order to court the slapstick vote.
FW Murnau's silent 1922 vampire classic, Nosferatu, is frequently read as antisemitic, the hook-nosed, rat-fancying Count Orlok obviously a 20s Jewish stereotype, as surely as Johnson's flesh-drinking "Transylvanians" represent the Romanians today. Johnson is mired in the folkloric, I should imagine. His evocation of the unholy dining habits of the Romanians is as deliberate as Enoch Powell's allusions to Virgil, and Powell's "rivers of blood" marks the same attitudinal watershed as Johnson's own dinners of blood.
Dracula must be destroyed. Not even Keith Vaz would argue against this, though he may offer him a gingerbread latte. But it's harder to know what to do with dozens of old people on crutches sleeping on the floor between bin bags full of rags, or crammed by unscrupulous landlords into unregulated low-rent ex-council properties in market towns forgotten by party politics. You can't just creep up and drive stakes through their hearts, even though Johnson's calculatedly casual allusion to the vampire myths seems to be inviting Londoners to do so.
As a commercial traveller, delivering my humour content to customers nationwide, I don't think the service industries of Britain could cope without east European workers, even if they do feast on human blood, take gas form, attract vermin, and poison our wells. From the lowliest Travelodge to the highest Hotel du Vin, every front desk I approach is manned by an eastern European, their literacy and numeracy skills putting them ahead of one third of the British workforce.
The "Off-Liscenese" near my home and the "Babelon Cafe", Nicholson Street, Edinburgh, are just two examples, off the top of my head, of British businesses that have managed to spell their own names two different ways on the front of their own premises. And, while the extract from the lyrics of the Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues, hand-painted on the wall of my room in the Morrison hotel, Dublin, sports a glaring misused possessive apostrophe, it is unlikely that the Bulgarian woman on reception was responsible, as her English was perfect.
We fear what we do not know. And what do I, I wonder, know about the Romanians? Well, like many people, Johnson included, I should imagine, say the word Romania to me, and I think instantly of Stefan Niculescu, Octavian Nemescu and Corneliu Cezar. We all accept that the Romanian electro-acoustic composers of the postwar era were decent, hard-working pioneers in their field. But it is not decent, hard-working Romanian electro-acoustic composers who will be coming here and undercutting decent, hard-working Polish immigrants who have spent 10 years undercutting the decent, hard-working British workers at the hand car wash by the cemetery on the bypass, now closed. And I should be very surprised if British artists applying for grants to drop ring modulators down wells suddenly find there is a bald Romanian with a communist beard trying to gazump their funding bid. The last place in Europe a Romanian would come to pursue a career as a state-funded experimental artist would be Britain.
Of course, it is very easy for me, a middle-class man, economically shielded from any immediate negative impact of surges in immigration, to adopt a moderate attitude to the imminent arrival of 29 million Romanian vampire Gypsies coming to eat our children, but pointing this out won't stop the comments section under this article from going on and on about it. And I need an electrician. No one returns my calls.
Stewart Lee's Much A-Stew About Nothing is currently at the Leicester Square theatre, London, and then touring. See stewartlee.co.uk
Stewart Lee
2014-01-05T13:39:12+00:00
During the Thatcher era, wealthy British people leaving the National Theatre skirted British homeless people in the cardboard cities of the South Bank subway. Today, wealthy Arabs, Russians and Europeans, leaving the Princess Diana memorial playground, skirt Romanian homeless people in the Marble Arch underpass. Can there be any better proof of the astonishing progress London has made in three decades to become the truly global city it is in 2014? Even as a professional comedian of 25 years' standing, I nevertheless find it difficult to know what angle to take on this week's much anticipated mass influx of Romanians. I am filing this column, in English, on the morning of Thursday 2 January, but by the time you read it, on Sunday the 5th, it may already be appearing only in Romanian, in an attempt to court some of the 29 million potential new Observer readers the soft right predict will arrive this week. From a business point of view, should I be pro-Romanian or anti-Romanian? While I won't be down at Luton airport handing out Costa coffees any time soon, I do nonetheless wonder which market should I work. At the end of November, Boris Johnson, Britain's first self-satirising politician, became an early advocate of the anti-Romanian business model, observing sadly: "We can do nothing to stop the entire population of Transylvania – charming though most of them may be – from trying to pitch camp at Marble Arch." Johnson's trademark tuck-shop wit makes him a formidable political orator. Johnson is like an iron fist encased in an iron glove, but on the knuckles of the iron glove are tiny childlike drawings of ejaculating penises at which even the son of a Marxist intellectual cannot help but smirk. I am not a political speech writer, and I hate...
A crowd who may, as Stewart surmised, be largely new to him and his different brand of material.
Stewart is a clever man. An angrier Charlie Brooker he deals less in tricky riddles and more in brutal honesty. So yes, while there is a lot of thinking to be done when listening, he isn’t afraid to drop it all and pull off a crass laugh with a profanity or sexual reference.
So the crowd at first seemed slow to warm to him - perhaps the stretched and less-than-comfy arena hampered our ability to unite as one and enjoy the collective humorous experience.
But as he went on his honest approach to what he saw around him, his keen eye for a decent visual punchline after decades in the business and his sheer warmer-than-you-would-think personality slowly won everyone around.
By the time the second half of his set drew to a close there was more laughter and more shaking of seats on their secure rails as shoulders involuntarily rocked to the vibrations of humour.
Stewart was looking at how technology has changed the way we get our enjoyment. How the internet has taken our wider view of existence and clipped it down to 20-second clips of cats falling over on endless loops.
He derided the under-40s, the computer generation. And perhaps what made me laugh so hard was, as a 29-year-old, I completely agreed with the majority of what he was saying. The downfalls of my own generation were hard to deny, and there was plenty I fell foul of myself.
The routine on fads and how stupid they make us was excellent, especially when delving into how our grandparents may have sought to spice up their sex life in the 1930s countryside.
He bemoaned Brexit, lambasted the decision for America to vote Trump in. And there was also time to take a swipe at the all-encompassing TV phenomenon that is Game of Thrones.
His stage was a collection of his rivals’ live DVDs all ‘picked up for 1p online’. As he stamped across their faces with mock venom and anger, the message of his set was really hammered home. Comedians come and go in fads, as has technology such as the DVD itself.
Yet the one thing that has endured is laughter. And we all left with it ringing in our ears (and a reminder to learn about the triangles of jokes).
Stewart Lee
2017-09-23T20:48:52+01:00
A crowd who may, as Stewart surmised, be largely new to him and his different brand of material. Stewart is a clever man. An angrier Charlie Brooker he deals less in tricky riddles and more in brutal honesty. So yes, while there is a lot of thinking to be done when listening, he isn’t afraid to drop it all and pull off a crass laugh with a profanity or sexual reference. So the crowd at first seemed slow to warm to him - perhaps the stretched and less-than-comfy arena hampered our ability to unite as one and enjoy the collective humorous experience. But as he went on his honest approach to what he saw around him, his keen eye for a decent visual punchline after decades in the business and his sheer warmer-than-you-would-think personality slowly won everyone around. By the time the second half of his set drew to a close there was more laughter and more shaking of seats on their secure rails as shoulders involuntarily rocked to the vibrations of humour. Stewart was looking at how technology has changed the way we get our enjoyment. How the internet has taken our wider view of existence and clipped it down to 20-second clips of cats falling over on endless loops. He derided the under-40s, the computer generation. And perhaps what made me laugh so hard was, as a 29-year-old, I completely agreed with the majority of what he was saying. The downfalls of my own generation were hard to deny, and there was plenty I fell foul of myself. The routine on fads and how stupid they make us was excellent, especially when delving into how our grandparents may have sought to spice up their sex life in the 1930s countryside. He bemoaned Brexit, lambasted the decision for America...
I was interested to read that Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph failed to make it past the interval at Stewart Lee's show on Friday. I also had misgivings about the show on Thursday night, although I had no difficulty staying to the end.
I reviewed the show for The Evening Standard here and gave it four stars. I'm not suggesting that it deserved less. Judged in terms of laughter it was probably Lee's funniest show ever. The Leicester Square Theatre was full and, as I said in my review, there was a constant ripple of giggles. There was none of the awkwardness that Cavendish seemed to sense on Friday.
Lee once quipped that he would like to do Michael McIntyre's set as a kind of stand-up experiment. In some ways Much A-Stew About Nothing is the nearest Lee has ever come to a conventional Live at the Apollo/Roadshow performance. This may not be observational humour in the Peter Kay sense, but a lot of it was accessible and much easier to laugh at than some of Lee's more recherché routines, such as his vomiting-into-the-anus-of-Jesus skit.
The show was, as he reminded us, a work-in-progress for his next TV series and maybe puking-in-Christ's-bumhole riffs aren't the sort of thing that would play well on BBC2. But at times at the Leicester Square Theatre he seemed to be bending over backwards to play the populist card. There were gags about Ed Miliband and the Labour Party that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an Arena set by, say, if not Jim Davidson, then maybe Bill Bailey.
There were also various in-jokes and digs about fellow comedians that raised the biggest issue for me. Early on in the set Lee had a poke at Ricky Gervais, joking about the fact that he was only able to say things that Lee feels are politically incorrect because he was being "ironic".
Yet in his current show Lee plays what seems to me to be a similar game. At one point there's a gag about anal sex which he acknowledges that he knows is cheap but has his reasons for retaining it. The gag is funny and the later callback even funnier. But a cheap gag is a cheap gag, however you cloak it in postmodern terms and put it in imaginary quote marks like a comedic cordon sanitaire.
Then later on in the show he also did a routine which involves him using the term "bitches". Now, I presume Lee doesn't use the word away from the stage, possibly not even when talking about lady dogs. In fact he has said plenty to confirm that he is a card-carrying male feminist. But, and maybe it is just me here, why is he permitted to adopt this stage persona which it is surely what he objects to Ricky Gervais doing?
The trouble with Lee is that these days his comedy is so "meta" it is hard to know on what level to take his material. Dominic Cavendish's article suggests that he is going through that stage that Daniel Kitson went through when he felt he was getting too popular and felt that he wanted to drive away the fans that "didn't get it". Although some comments on the Telegraph website suggest that Cavendish misread the room or that Lee turned things round after the interval, there is also the possibility that because Cavendish went on a Friday the crowd might have been more of a fun-loving, boozy, weekend "out out" audience rather than an out-and-out Lee audience.
Anyway, as I said, it's a great show and it does deserve its quartet of stars. It is just an unusually mainstream show for Lee. I never thought I'd see him doing seventies nostalgia/Jimmy Savile gags but there was even one of those. Bold as brass, no discernible irony. Maybe not quite Michael McIntyre, but maybe closer, when watched from the stalls, than Lee realises.
Stewart Lee
2013-11-10T23:14:06+00:00
I was interested to read that Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph failed to make it past the interval at Stewart Lee's show on Friday. I also had misgivings about the show on Thursday night, although I had no difficulty staying to the end. I reviewed the show for The Evening Standard here and gave it four stars. I'm not suggesting that it deserved less. Judged in terms of laughter it was probably Lee's funniest show ever. The Leicester Square Theatre was full and, as I said in my review, there was a constant ripple of giggles. There was none of the awkwardness that Cavendish seemed to sense on Friday. Lee once quipped that he would like to do Michael McIntyre's set as a kind of stand-up experiment. In some ways Much A-Stew About Nothing is the nearest Lee has ever come to a conventional Live at the Apollo/Roadshow performance. This may not be observational humour in the Peter Kay sense, but a lot of it was accessible and much easier to laugh at than some of Lee's more recherché routines, such as his vomiting-into-the-anus-of-Jesus skit. The show was, as he reminded us, a work-in-progress for his next TV series and maybe puking-in-Christ's-bumhole riffs aren't the sort of thing that would play well on BBC2. But at times at the Leicester Square Theatre he seemed to be bending over backwards to play the populist card. There were gags about Ed Miliband and the Labour Party that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an Arena set by, say, if not Jim Davidson, then maybe Bill Bailey. There were also various in-jokes and digs about fellow comedians that raised the biggest issue for me. Early on in the set Lee had a poke at Ricky Gervais, joking about the fact that...
WHAT is it, I wondered, as I scrolled through the pages of some of the most excoriating and vicious reviews I’ve seen, that makes any comedian want to post stuff like that on their website?
A milder selection includes:
“A cultural bully from the Oxbridge Mafia who wants to appear morally superior but couldn’t cut the mustard on a panel game.”
“A sneering tosser.” “Stewart Lee is not funny and has nothing to say”
At first, I was beginning to agree with a lot of them as I watched Stewart Lee strut (well, waddle) and sneer across the stage in his Snowflake Tornado show.
Twenty-five minutes into the first of his two hours-plus on stage, I hadn’t laughed and the line about the first rule of comedy – say something funny – was floating to the surface of my thoughts.
Twenty-five minutes into the first of his two hours-plus on stage, I hadn’t laughed and the line about the first rule of comedy – say something funny – was floating to the surface of my thoughts.
Then it clicked – he doesn’t give a fig what people think about him as he looks down from his lofty cerebral crow’s nest on the intellectually inferior plebs beneath him.
I tried to warm to him as he liberally peppered his audience with verbal barbs when they sometimes failed to laud his genius with applause and laughter.
“I thought I’d get more laughs in a university town,” he chided.
Dubbed “the Leonard Cohen of stand up,” he revels in his intellectual superiority, regardless of who among his audience he offends.
But, judging by the roars of laughter in the sell-out show, and reviews regularly scoring 4 or 5 out of 5, what do I know?
At times, as he took the audience to new and unexplored places, the laughter and applause was more sporadic, resembling the sound of seals being fed fish.
He does exercise your brain with gags like: “A man was bitten by a false widow spider on his false leg. He was sent to a doctor of philosophy who gave him anti-irony drugs.”
He does exercise your brain with gags like: “A man was bitten by a false widow spider on his false leg. He was sent to a doctor of philosophy who gave him anti-irony drugs.”
Bitter barbs were aimed at (in my view comedy superiors) including Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr – but maybe I was missing the point.
“I haven’t got many friends in comedy. I can’t go out on the town afterwards in case I meet any other comedians”. Enough said.
Stewart Lee
2020-02-14T13:20:42+00:00
WHAT is it, I wondered, as I scrolled through the pages of some of the most excoriating and vicious reviews I’ve seen, that makes any comedian want to post stuff like that on their website? A milder selection includes: “A cultural bully from the Oxbridge Mafia who wants to appear morally superior but couldn’t cut the mustard on a panel game.” “A sneering tosser.” “Stewart Lee is not funny and has nothing to say” At first, I was beginning to agree with a lot of them as I watched Stewart Lee strut (well, waddle) and sneer across the stage in his Snowflake Tornado show. Twenty-five minutes into the first of his two hours-plus on stage, I hadn’t laughed and the line about the first rule of comedy – say something funny – was floating to the surface of my thoughts. Twenty-five minutes into the first of his two hours-plus on stage, I hadn’t laughed and the line about the first rule of comedy – say something funny – was floating to the surface of my thoughts. Then it clicked – he doesn’t give a fig what people think about him as he looks down from his lofty cerebral crow’s nest on the intellectually inferior plebs beneath him. I tried to warm to him as he liberally peppered his audience with verbal barbs when they sometimes failed to laud his genius with applause and laughter. “I thought I’d get more laughs in a university town,” he chided. Dubbed “the Leonard Cohen of stand up,” he revels in his intellectual superiority, regardless of who among his audience he offends. But, judging by the roars of laughter in the sell-out show, and reviews regularly scoring 4 or 5 out of 5, what do I know? At times, as he took the audience to...
I WISH I could be as brazen as Stewart Lee — not his humour, which is richly funny, but the chutzpah which saw him stride into the Oxford audience less than two minutes into his set and wrench a phone from an audience member.
“No phones, mate,” he said as he marched back to the stage and stashed the device inside the back of his jeans.
In your face, at your throat, uncompromising, truly remarkable timing, self-referential, laden with irony and straight-up funny.
I realised my own phone was still turned on but didn’t dare get it out to neuter it for fear of similar treatment.
Genuinely funny people don’t need gags written for them, they can exploit a situation, improvise on it and wring it dry. So it is with Lee who’s been a stand-up for more than 30 years.
He delivers two routines, the first an extended riff on a reference to a Netflix video of his, the second his take on being a snowflake — both are hilarious. What makes him work is his dual performance: one is the direct source material, the other is a kind of notated commentary on what he’s doing, a sideways look at himself.
He announces with simultaneous pride and irony his position in The Times hierarchy of comedians — at the top, of course. It’s that apparent contradiction, but not quite doublethink, which makes him tick.
It’s unquestionably original and often challenging. But he’s not unlike Shakespeare in that the high intellect is often countered by low humour which had the audience reduced to helplessness.
He’s political, identifies immediately and proudly as a liberal centre-leftie, and sends out poison-tipped jokes to pick off his targets — Boris Johnson is a favourite.
And watch out for a piece on cesspits which shouldn’t be funny at all, but in the hands of a comic master it is.
Stewart Lee
2020-03-02T18:56:01+00:00
I WISH I could be as brazen as Stewart Lee — not his humour, which is richly funny, but the chutzpah which saw him stride into the Oxford audience less than two minutes into his set and wrench a phone from an audience member. “No phones, mate,” he said as he marched back to the stage and stashed the device inside the back of his jeans. In your face, at your throat, uncompromising, truly remarkable timing, self-referential, laden with irony and straight-up funny. I realised my own phone was still turned on but didn’t dare get it out to neuter it for fear of similar treatment. Genuinely funny people don’t need gags written for them, they can exploit a situation, improvise on it and wring it dry. So it is with Lee who’s been a stand-up for more than 30 years. He delivers two routines, the first an extended riff on a reference to a Netflix video of his, the second his take on being a snowflake — both are hilarious. What makes him work is his dual performance: one is the direct source material, the other is a kind of notated commentary on what he’s doing, a sideways look at himself. He announces with simultaneous pride and irony his position in The Times hierarchy of comedians — at the top, of course. It’s that apparent contradiction, but not quite doublethink, which makes him tick. It’s unquestionably original and often challenging. But he’s not unlike Shakespeare in that the high intellect is often countered by low humour which had the audience reduced to helplessness. He’s political, identifies immediately and proudly as a liberal centre-leftie, and sends out poison-tipped jokes to pick off his targets — Boris Johnson is a favourite. And watch out for a piece on cesspits which shouldn’t...
Last week, on ITV’s This Morning, the cheerily rodentine Phillip Schofield and his margarine-moulded familiar, Holly Willoughby, offered a desperate member of the public the chance to have their energy bills paid at the whim of a gaudy spinning wheel of chance. Schofield is a cruel god, for whom we are mere flies, our sufferings simply sport. The former gopher handler fired up his roulette wheel of misery, taunting his victim with possibilities, as the viewer’s financial security in the punishing winter ahead hung in the balance. This tasteless fiasco was in fact the perfect prologue to the Liz Truss era. Pray, poor peasants, and spin the wheel! Life is a lottery! And you lost it the moment you were born! But why don’t we meet some of life’s winners?
Despite the fact that the new government is comprised largely of people who were born to win, the fates conspired to usher Truss into power in the most ridiculous way possible, the loser. On Tuesday, a coiled serpent cavalcade of Conservative Range Rovers slowly ushered Truss towards Downing Street as the heavens suddenly decided to open, like an old incontinent seer soaking his leggings as he scried what lay ahead for the nation. Outside No 10, trying to second-guess the weather, a pair of technicians ran backwards and forwards with the Ricky Gervais-style lectern from which Truss was to make her opening speech, as if the Chuckle Brothers had been booked as her warm-up act. “To me! To you! That’s it. A little more to the right. No. More to the right. To the right. Further. Further to the right. To the right! The right!”
Truss’s soggy rostrum was finally positioned in front of the door of No 10, with a bin bag placed on top of it to shield its upper surface from the rain. I sat with the kids and laughed at the bizarre sequence on the BBC that followed, doubtless shot deliberately by Marxists, where the caption “Liz Truss appointed prime minister” appeared for some time beneath an image of a crumpled black rubbish bag on top of a lectern. Damn the BBC! Whatever next? Jokes about politicians on comedy shows? A wet Nadhim Zahawi made a face. He once had a nice taxpayer-warmed stable out in the countryside. Truss could have made her speech there, all warm and dry, like his publicly heated horses.
Truss’s speech was the usual potpourri of lies, distraction, fantasy and disinformation we had come to expect from Tory politicians in the Brexit era, making her the perfect Boris Johnson continuity candidate. According to Truss’s nonsensical speech, Johnson delivered Brexit – except not in any form anyone would have wanted or recognised, and in doing so has crippled the economy and our reputation abroad; the energy crisis that predated the Urkaine conflict is “caused by Putin’s war” apparently, the 4% of energy we take from Russia providing the same useful fig leaf cover that Covid did for the Brexit damage; somehow, Truss will both cut taxes and increase public spending, to reward the hard work of the British workers she has previously described as “among the worst idlers in the world”. There was only one statement that rang true: “History will see [Boris Johnson] as a hugely consequential prime minister.” Yes, in the same way as my Premier Inn toilet bore witness to a “hugely consequential” lamb phaal I had last month in Birmingham.
Because no Tories with any integrity could back the disgusting Johnson or the unworkable Brexit, the party is purged of talent and Truss’s cabinet is composed of the indistinct particles of grey-green matter that get caught in the plughole when you wash up after an especially stodgy Sunday roast. Michelle Donelan, who wants to stop the study of the arts at university, is culture secretary; Brandon Lewis, formerly the Minister for Having His Sorry Ass Handed to Him on a Plate by Old Women Shouting at Him in the Street, is justice secretary; and a little bit of boiled potato with some gravy on it and a sprig of rosemary sticking out of the top is the minister without portfolio. Oh no, sorry, that’s Jake Berry.
The top table seems stuffed with ministers whom I think history will come to judge as genuinely evil; Suella Braverman, who said there would be no Brexit bill to pay for exiting the EU and no increased Brexit delays or Brexit disadvantages to business; Kwasi Kwarteng, formerly Johnson’s Golem-enforcer, who tried to bully the independent regulator Kathryn Stone into retiring last November for investigating Owen Paterson, unaware that CCHQ had already decided to throw the bent lobbyist under the bus; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who decries “climate alarmism” as a third of Pakistan drowns, with 1.4m hectares (3.5m acres) of crops and 800,000 livestock lost; and James Cleverly, who recently tweeted that he “liked Stewart Lee a lot better when he was funny”. To be honest, I am glad he has gone off me, as the 25 years where he would hang around all my shows asking me to sign his cock with a Sharpie were becoming tedious in the extreme.
Thérèse Coffey is the new deputy prime minister and health secretary. Anyone shocked by America’s sudden rolling back of abortion rights must be worried. We assume “It couldn’t happen here”, but Coffey has voted against the availability of abortion pills and against extending abortion rights to the women of Northern Ireland. However, Coffey has declared that she would “prefer that people didn’t have abortions but I am not going to condemn people that do”. And critics’ fears should be allayed by the announcement of the NHS Christmas abortion lottery. With reduced funds affecting basic services, Coffey has declared that on Christmas Eve Phillip Schofield will take to a makeshift stage in Trafalgar Square to spin another wheel of chance, making one woman’s dream of instantly available expert care a reality.
Stewart Lee
2022-09-11T14:21:14+01:00
Last week, on ITV’s This Morning, the cheerily rodentine Phillip Schofield and his margarine-moulded familiar, Holly Willoughby, offered a desperate member of the public the chance to have their energy bills paid at the whim of a gaudy spinning wheel of chance. Schofield is a cruel god, for whom we are mere flies, our sufferings simply sport. The former gopher handler fired up his roulette wheel of misery, taunting his victim with possibilities, as the viewer’s financial security in the punishing winter ahead hung in the balance. This tasteless fiasco was in fact the perfect prologue to the Liz Truss era. Pray, poor peasants, and spin the wheel! Life is a lottery! And you lost it the moment you were born! But why don’t we meet some of life’s winners? Despite the fact that the new government is comprised largely of people who were born to win, the fates conspired to usher Truss into power in the most ridiculous way possible, the loser. On Tuesday, a coiled serpent cavalcade of Conservative Range Rovers slowly ushered Truss towards Downing Street as the heavens suddenly decided to open, like an old incontinent seer soaking his leggings as he scried what lay ahead for the nation. Outside No 10, trying to second-guess the weather, a pair of technicians ran backwards and forwards with the Ricky Gervais-style lectern from which Truss was to make her opening speech, as if the Chuckle Brothers had been booked as her warm-up act. “To me! To you! That’s it. A little more to the right. No. More to the right. To the right. Further. Further to the right. To the right! The right!” Truss’s soggy rostrum was finally positioned in front of the door of No 10, with a bin bag placed on top of it to shield...
Historical themes are not always the easiest for a theatre group to capture, what with actual facts always getting in the way. The best and worst of these attempts are here.
Warming himself to the audience like a cuddly chat show host, Sir Walter Raleigh, discoverer of worlds, champion of potatoes, begins with his particular brand of obsequious fawning for the greatness of others. Then behold, ladies and gentlemen, the bizarre, wonderful, crazed and incongruous introduction to what is Elizabeth and Raleigh: Late but Live.
Playing Raleigh with panache, wit and throwaway fun is Miles Jupp, whose perfect foil, Queen Elizabeth I, is played imperiously by Simon Munnery. The pairing of these two great comedians is like nothing else at the Fringe, and for those lucky enough to have seen Johnson and Boswell: Late but Live last year, expect more of the same weirdly madcap humour. Penned by Stewart Lee, the jokes in the show are the kind that produce great bubbles of joyous, unexpected laughter. A strong sense of the historical is mixed in with the best kind of modern silliness, and the heightened language only adds to the excellence of the base humour. This is the Fringe at its best, and those who witness Raleigh's culinary humiliation are likely to agree.
Stewart Lee
2008-08-22T20:23:10+01:00
Historical themes are not always the easiest for a theatre group to capture, what with actual facts always getting in the way. The best and worst of these attempts are here. Warming himself to the audience like a cuddly chat show host, Sir Walter Raleigh, discoverer of worlds, champion of potatoes, begins with his particular brand of obsequious fawning for the greatness of others. Then behold, ladies and gentlemen, the bizarre, wonderful, crazed and incongruous introduction to what is Elizabeth and Raleigh: Late but Live. Playing Raleigh with panache, wit and throwaway fun is Miles Jupp, whose perfect foil, Queen Elizabeth I, is played imperiously by Simon Munnery. The pairing of these two great comedians is like nothing else at the Fringe, and for those lucky enough to have seen Johnson and Boswell: Late but Live last year, expect more of the same weirdly madcap humour. Penned by Stewart Lee, the jokes in the show are the kind that produce great bubbles of joyous, unexpected laughter. A strong sense of the historical is mixed in with the best kind of modern silliness, and the heightened language only adds to the excellence of the base humour. This is the Fringe at its best, and those who witness Raleigh's culinary humiliation are likely to agree.
The standup's two-part set is, as ever, a rarefied viewing experience. You can take nothing at face value as he plays cat and mouse with the audience
Stewart Lee recently defended comedy against the Nigel Farage charge that it's in hock to left-liberal values. Now he's out to disprove (not for the first time) the Daily Mail's barb that comics fight shy of attacking Islam. "Having a go at the Islams" supposedly forms the first half hour of Lee's current two-part set - again billed as a try-out for his TV show rather than a theatre event in its own right. There's still plenty to delight those who prefer watching him live: Lee's on tricksy, antagonistic form here. "Islams" are largely spared, but the rest of us - critics, the audience, squeamish liberals like Lee himself - spend most of these 75 minutes in the line of fire.
There's an enjoyable frisson to the first half, as Lee sets out to create a mass-appeal, Islamophobic observational routine, "to get the Daily Mail off my back". To some degree, that situates Lee in his comfort zone, in that it licenses more cheap (but still funny) shots at mainstream standup.
But it also floats an interesting possibility, given that Lee's most celebrated show, 90s Comedian, featured a famously no-holds-barred attack on evangelist Christianity. His main aim here is to mock the rightwing impulse to simplify and demonise Islam. But there are moments too when Lee allows us to think he might rise to, as well as ridicule, the Mail's challenge.
He chooses not to, of course, but has devious fun along the way. There's a choice send-up of the various ways the UK press react to clash-of-civilisation flashpoints, and a lovely, throwaway aside - skewering the inanities of racist discourse - about a Sikh man on a bus who refuses to gift Lee a punchline.
The second half is ostensibly about urine - it being a noble experiment, Lee says, to fashion 30 minutes of comedy out of piss alone. It begins with five-year-old Lee being bullied in the school toilets, and later finds him accidentally peeing on his granddad's face. From that incident, Lee derives a droll variant on the phrase "water off a duck's back", which he then deploys - with trademark dolorous repetition - throughout the rest of the show.
It is, as ever, a rarefied viewing experience. You can take nothing at face value, and inverted commas swarm like bees around everything Lee says. Some may crave a moment's relaxation of the rules of his cat-and-mouse game with the audience. But it remains the case that working out what he's up to, and why, is part of the fun of Lee's comedy.
Tonight's most choice example - a deadpan piss-take of tears-of-a-clown cliches - comes when Lee feigns bitter disappointment at the reception of one joke. What starts as pique at the audience's ignorance accumulates, increment by increment, into a baroque vision in which under-appreciated Lee is flanked onstage by the ghosts of suicidal comedians through the ages, chanting "join us! Join us!"
This isn't peak Lee: it's two short, rough-cut sets in which nothing has much time to develop. But it's still a rich evening of comedy. The material's always surprising, there are no longueurs, and Lee's performance in the role of the arrogant, thin-skinned and manipulative host is more skilful and playful than ever.
Stewart Lee
2014-11-14T21:42:40+00:00
The standup's two-part set is, as ever, a rarefied viewing experience. You can take nothing at face value as he plays cat and mouse with the audience Stewart Lee recently defended comedy against the Nigel Farage charge that it's in hock to left-liberal values. Now he's out to disprove (not for the first time) the Daily Mail's barb that comics fight shy of attacking Islam. "Having a go at the Islams" supposedly forms the first half hour of Lee's current two-part set - again billed as a try-out for his TV show rather than a theatre event in its own right. There's still plenty to delight those who prefer watching him live: Lee's on tricksy, antagonistic form here. "Islams" are largely spared, but the rest of us - critics, the audience, squeamish liberals like Lee himself - spend most of these 75 minutes in the line of fire. There's an enjoyable frisson to the first half, as Lee sets out to create a mass-appeal, Islamophobic observational routine, "to get the Daily Mail off my back". To some degree, that situates Lee in his comfort zone, in that it licenses more cheap (but still funny) shots at mainstream standup. But it also floats an interesting possibility, given that Lee's most celebrated show, 90s Comedian, featured a famously no-holds-barred attack on evangelist Christianity. His main aim here is to mock the rightwing impulse to simplify and demonise Islam. But there are moments too when Lee allows us to think he might rise to, as well as ridicule, the Mail's challenge. He chooses not to, of course, but has devious fun along the way. There's a choice send-up of the various ways the UK press react to clash-of-civilisation flashpoints, and a lovely, throwaway aside - skewering the inanities of racist discourse - about...
While appearing in a production at the National Theatre in 1977, the English folk singer Shirley Collins lost her voice to nerves, and her musician husband to an actress. She rarely performed in public again, eschewing the peripatetic life of the entertainer to raise her children alone. But, in the previous quarter-century, she had travelled the American South, gathering archive material with the song collector Alan Lomax, and had been a key player in both the British folk revival in the 1960s and the nascent folk-rock movement of the 1970s.
Critical acclaim for new young folk singers such as Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby has recently reawakened interest in traditional music. But unlike Martin Carthy and Nonna Waterson, who have been honoured for their contributions to sustaining England's indigenous folk music, Collins has remained a relatively obscure figure.
Now, though, Collins is being celebrated by a four-CD career retrospective, Within Sound, on Fledg'ling Records (released tomorrow), and, during the course of our conversation at her little house by the sea in Hove, she reports that cheques arrive from the Performing Rights Society more regularly than they used to. The well-preserved 67-year-old, who, rather disarmingly, describes her old acquaintance Muddy Waters as "sex on legs", appears to be enjoying a renaissance.
Within Sound begins with a recording made in 1955, when Collins was 19. She confesses that the grammar-school inflections in her accent on the first of the four CDs make her sound like "a little Rank starlet", but the defining characteristics of her approach to English folk song are already in place. Her singing is egoless.
It resists stylistic flourishes, removes the obstacle of the performer's personality, and directly channels the listener to the words and music, reconnecting traditional tunes with the strange worlds they emerged from. Collins doesn't inhabit a song so much as surrender to it. "All I did was perform the songs in a straightforward way," she explains. "It's the only way I can sing them, because when people start dramatising or enacting a song, I just become embarrassed. I think the best way is to draw people in, not to stand there and declaim it. I think because I was born into a semi-rural, working-class Sussex family before the folk revival had started, and because there were then still songs for me to hear from original sources, the instincts for this music were there in me from an early age. The older I got, the more I felt it was a direct link, with little strings tying me to however far you wanted to go back. I believed in English music. I believed in its source and I believed in the way I was doing it, even though it didn't appeal to a lot of people.
One critic described me as having 'a potato voice'." Having left home to sing in the emerging London folk scene, Collins met the American folklorist Lomax at a party held by Ewan MacColl. They became romantically involved and, in 1959, she boarded the SS America to become his assistant, making field recordings of traditional music. "The deep rural South was a fascinating, wonderful and dangerous place. People were keeping an eye on ns and it wasn't necessarily friendly. I was 23 years old, which was the equivalent of being about nine today. I was young and naive. In the Mississippi delta, you felt like a tiny little speck in thousands of acres of low country and space. You knew how far from home you were."
At the Parchman Farm penitentiary, Lomax recorded a work song by a chain gang led by one James Carter, who, 40 years later, found himself receiving a Grammy award after it was included on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Collins coaxed songs and stories out of the women. "On our last night at Parchman Farm, the woman who was my domestic came in to turn my bed down or something ludicrous and started telling me how she had been arrested for walking down a railroad track that had a 'No trespassing' sign on it.
She was illiterate, of course, but had still been locked up."
Collins's current return to live performance has been in the form of lectures based on her travels with Lomax, and a book of her story is with publishers, but she still misses singing. "I long to be able to sing again, but I physically can't do it. I tried taking lessons three years ago, for a whole year. But there's either this huge block or something's wrong. I think it was psychological when it started, but now it's physical. Sixty-seven is quite old to still be able to sing. I know what I can do is still understand a song.
But not to be able to sing them, well, it really kills me sometimes."
Earlier on in our conversation, Collins had described herself as a "conduit" to a storehouse of old English song. Had she been hinting at an almost mystical dimension to her work? "I don't think so. I don't think along spiritual lines," she answers, with admirable practicality, and then adds, laughing: "I haven't got a spirit guide. Why are they always Red Indians? They're either Red Indians or Egyptian princesses, aren't they? I'd like a guardian angel, though, and, in fact, I sometimes think I've had one all my life. I've been so lucky. But have you read Philip Pullman's books? Everybody has a daemon as a companion, not a guardian angel. And I like the thought of that. I wouldn't mind having my own daemon."
Stewart Lee
2003-01-05T17:51:23+00:00
While appearing in a production at the National Theatre in 1977, the English folk singer Shirley Collins lost her voice to nerves, and her musician husband to an actress. She rarely performed in public again, eschewing the peripatetic life of the entertainer to raise her children alone. But, in the previous quarter-century, she had travelled the American South, gathering archive material with the song collector Alan Lomax, and had been a key player in both the British folk revival in the 1960s and the nascent folk-rock movement of the 1970s. Critical acclaim for new young folk singers such as Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby has recently reawakened interest in traditional music. But unlike Martin Carthy and Nonna Waterson, who have been honoured for their contributions to sustaining England's indigenous folk music, Collins has remained a relatively obscure figure. Now, though, Collins is being celebrated by a four-CD career retrospective, Within Sound, on Fledg'ling Records (released tomorrow), and, during the course of our conversation at her little house by the sea in Hove, she reports that cheques arrive from the Performing Rights Society more regularly than they used to. The well-preserved 67-year-old, who, rather disarmingly, describes her old acquaintance Muddy Waters as "sex on legs", appears to be enjoying a renaissance. Within Sound begins with a recording made in 1955, when Collins was 19. She confesses that the grammar-school inflections in her accent on the first of the four CDs make her sound like "a little Rank starlet", but the defining characteristics of her approach to English folk song are already in place. Her singing is egoless. It resists stylistic flourishes, removes the obstacle of the performer's personality, and directly channels the listener to the words and music, reconnecting traditional tunes with the strange worlds they emerged from. Collins doesn't inhabit...
A MAN consistently lauded as one of the country's sharpest stand-up comedians is going back on the road.
Stewart Lee is returning to venues across the UK with his new stand-up show, after receiving rave reviews on tour last year.
Earlier this year, Lee filmed his first TV series for almost a decade, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, for BBC2.
In 2002, he hit the headlines after writing and directing the hit, but also controversial show Jerry Springer The Opera.
The show won four Olivier awards after its run in the West End.
During the course of his comedy career, Lee has also worked with the likes of Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, and The Mighty Boosh. He also co-created four series of comedy shows for BBC2 along with partner in crime Richard Herring.
Ricky Gervais once described Lee as "the funniest, most cliche-free comedian on the circuit."
Stewart Lee is coming to The Capitol, in Horsham, on Friday October 30, from 8pm.
Tickets cost £16 (concessions £14). To book yours call the box office on 01403 750220 or visit www.thecapitolhorsham.com
Stewart Lee
2009-10-11T15:39:45+01:00
A MAN consistently lauded as one of the country's sharpest stand-up comedians is going back on the road. Stewart Lee is returning to venues across the UK with his new stand-up show, after receiving rave reviews on tour last year. Earlier this year, Lee filmed his first TV series for almost a decade, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, for BBC2. In 2002, he hit the headlines after writing and directing the hit, but also controversial show Jerry Springer The Opera. The show won four Olivier awards after its run in the West End. During the course of his comedy career, Lee has also worked with the likes of Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, and The Mighty Boosh. He also co-created four series of comedy shows for BBC2 along with partner in crime Richard Herring. Ricky Gervais once described Lee as "the funniest, most cliche-free comedian on the circuit." Stewart Lee is coming to The Capitol, in Horsham, on Friday October 30, from 8pm. Tickets cost £16 (concessions £14). To book yours call the box office on 01403 750220 or visit www.thecapitolhorsham.com
Last call for the documentary, or ‘rockumentary’ if you will, that Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and I (BSB’s Up Yer News!) have made ourselves about Birmingham punk and Birmingham public art, King Rocker.
It’s on tomorrow night. You will have to watch this go out in real time, or record it somehow, as we don’t know where it will pop up next, and its cinema tour is deferred.
So instead of going to the pub on Saturday night... Oh.
There has been amazing advanced word. I haven’t experienced anything like it since the early stages of Jerry Springer The Opera twenty years ago.
And to think, it’s only on TV because of Covid anyway!
Thanks to everyone who has supported us and if you were one of the crowdfunders your actual human name will be there at the end for all to see.
If it helps, here’s a bostin’ Spotify ™ ® playlist I did for Giglist, which serves as a primer to the film, but if you like any of the music please buy a hard copy so the bands see some £s. - https://giglist.com/buzz/article/stewart-lees-guide-nightingales
And here’s one put together as a guide for Adam Buxton before he interviewed me about the film.
Son Of God’s Mate is superb but for some reason the version on Spotify is 25% slower than the original vinyl, so that’s why it sounds weird. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1g1BOKAxemcl63gV4stneI
Last call for the documentary, or ‘rockumentary’ if you will, that Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and I (BSB’s Up Yer News!) have made ourselves about Birmingham punk and Birmingham public art, King Rocker. It’s on tomorrow night. You will have to watch this go out in real time, or record it somehow, as we don’t know where it will pop up next, and its cinema tour is deferred. So instead of going to the pub on Saturday night... Oh. There has been amazing advanced word. I haven’t experienced anything like it since the early stages of Jerry Springer The Opera twenty years ago. And to think, it’s only on TV because of Covid anyway! Thanks to everyone who has supported us and if you were one of the crowdfunders your actual human name will be there at the end for all to see. https://www.firerecords.com/films/king-rocker/ If it helps, here’s a bostin’ Spotify ™ ® playlist I did for Giglist, which serves as a primer to the film, but if you like any of the music please buy a hard copy so the bands see some £s. - https://giglist.com/buzz/article/stewart-lees-guide-nightingales And here’s one put together by the film producers Fire https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3gvwhk47NSFDredoP1tnas?si=Wv6wthm5SVCsIXaWMbosKw And here’s one put together as a guide for Adam Buxton before he interviewed me about the film. Son Of God’s Mate is superb but for some reason the version on Spotify is 25% slower than the original vinyl, so that’s why it sounds weird. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1g1BOKAxemcl63gV4stneI Here’s some written interviews DAZED AND CONFUSED The Guardian I Choose Birmingham We Are Cult Dummy Magazine The Telegraph Here are some audios and podcasts SOHO RADIO BRUM RADIO C86 PODCAST KERMODE ON FILM OWEN JONES Or, on Youtube GINGERBEARDMARK ADAM BUXTON PODCAST MRS BARBARA NICE AND FRIENDS KingRockerFilm.com OFFICIAL TRAILER - youtu.be/UEUuvN9S9I4 AUDIO TRAILER...
As far as song lyrics go, “Boris Johnson is a f****** c***” is not exactly what you’d call chart-friendly. But that didn’t stop comedy punk group The Kunts getting their politically charged track (called, naturally, “Boris Johnson is a F****** C***”) to No 5 in the official Top 20 at Christmas. Just a few weeks later, as the UK officially left the EU, comedian Stewart Lee and Asian Dub Foundation were pushing a comical anti-Brexit ode featuring lyrics from a 1,000-year-old Anglo Saxon poem into the download charts.
In recent years, campaigners and rabble-rousers have increasingly taken aim at the upper ranks of the pop charts in a bid to adopt them as a form of political billboard. In the same spirit of the Sex Pistols’ releasing “God Save the Queen” in the week of the 1977 Silver Jubilee, contemporary efforts have taken on everything from Boris to Brexit to the Hillsborough tragedy and war in foreign lands. The tradition of protest music long outdates chart history, if not the history of recorded music itself – but there’s something about the symbolism of the charts that still attracts campaigners wanting to cause a stir.
“I suppose it’s sort of subversive and fun,” says Lee. “I forget who it was that said the purpose of comedy was to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted, but I think a lot of people have got some comfort from seeing these things get through. Often, the more stupid they are, the more delightful it is that they’ve managed to do it.”
These singles vary from the downright deranged to the seriously serious. The Great Chart Reclamation began around February 2007, when activist group Stop the War Coalition released a version of Edwin Starr’s “War” credited to a group called Ugly Rumours – the name of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s university rock band. The campaign coincided with the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War and kicked off at a march in London, with attendees encouraged to purchase the song on their mobile phones.
“War” hit No 6 in the midweeks and eventually charted at No 21. The song’s producer, Ben Grey, summed up the thinking behind the song at the time: “We wanted to try and reach the people who might be more into watching The X Factor than listening to politics. Marches and rallies can be dismissed and ignored but a hit record will mean everyone is talking about this issue.” The stunt didn’t stop the war (admittedly quite a big ask), but it proved at least that this tactic could work on some basic level.
Stop the War’s stunt had planted a seed. A year later, in 2008, Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert led a campaign protesting unlawful bank charges with a version of The Clash’s “I Fought the Law” retitled as “I Fought the Lloyds”. While it didn’t break any new ground in the charts (reaching No 25), it was clear that these campaigns were becoming more savvy: the song was released at the beginning of January, typically a quiet time for new music, and an email campaign had notched up tens of thousands of pre-sale downloads in advance of the release date. Lewis has since claimed that it was only a change in how the charts are calculated (counting the number of downloads rather than the number of payments received) that prevented the song from hitting the top spot. Such technical arguments have become a familiar refrain among chart raiders.
One man who knows more than most about launching political songs to the top of the charts is Jon Morter. A DJ from Essex, Morter first made headlines in 2009 with his successful effort to deliver US rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine their first Christmas No 1 – and keep that year’s X Factor winner, Joe McElderry, from swiping the slot. He’d tried the same feat a year before with Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” (a popular internet meme at the time), but ultimately it was the defiant message of RATM’s “Killing In The Name” and Morter’s ability to mobilise a Facebook community of thousands that broke Simon Cowell’s iron grip on consecutive Christmas blockbusters.
Since then, Morter says his inbox has been stuffed with requests not only from major labels and promotion agencies intrigued by his methods, but by other social and political campaigners too. He’s assisted on digital campaigns for everyone from The Rolling Stones to The Justice Collective (raising funds for Hillsborough charities). In fact, if there’s a campaign to get a protest song into the charts, there’s a good chance Jon Morter has been involved at some point.
That includes the rather macabre effort to take “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” to No 1 when Margaret Thatcher died in 2013. Six years after it was first created, a Facebook group called “Make ding dong the witch is dead No 1 the week Thatcher dies” suddenly sprung to life. The anonymous woman, who had first set it up in 2007, was floundering at the requests and eventually got in touch with Morter to help out. “The woman that was running [the page] found me and said, ‘What the hell do I do? I don’t know what to do, we've got literally thousands that have joined and want to do it. What do you suggest?” remembers Morter. He offered his assistance, acting under a pseudonym due to the divisive nature of the campaign. The song reached No 2 in the charts, but Morter remains convinced that, based on the iTunes sales data, it had shifted enough units to go to No 1. Having held out at the top of the download chart all week, the song slipped to second place at the last moment. Says Morter: “I think there was a little bit of shenanigans going on there.”
The confluence of social media and digital music services have made it easier than ever to turn the charts into a political placard, and the success of efforts like the Thatcher campaign and Morter’s Rage Against the Machine bid have proven the tactic’s viability. These targeted campaigns have cropped up with increasing frequency in recent years. In the run-up to the 2017 general election, ska outfit Captain SKA released a new version of their song “Liar Liar”, functionally retitled “Liar Liar GE2017”. The original had been penned in 2010 about the David Cameron-led coalition but this new take trained its aim on Theresa May. Accompanied by a comic music video, it charted at No 4, made headlines in The New York Times, and even ruffled the usually austere then-prime minister herself, with May telling BBC Radio’s Newsbeat that she was “not very happy about it”.
A couple of years later, in December 2019, a bid to crown Jarvis Cocker’s 2006 song “Running The World” (with its refrain of “c**** are still running the world”) followed the Conservatives’ general election victory. A month after that, in January 2020, “Come Out Ye Black And Tans” by Irish rebel group The Wolfe Tones spiked in the download charts. The campaign was a response to plans by the Irish government to commemorate the centenary of the controversial Royal Irish Constabulary, the force notorious for police brutality and extrajudicial killings. Inspired by this Irish effort, the Welsh independence campaigners at YesCymru pushed a rendition of the folk song “Yma O Hyd” (meaning “still here”) by former Plaid Cymru president Dafydd Iwan into the UK iTunes charts too.
Most of these campaigns donate their proceeds to charity, but the aim for many of these chart hijacks is simply about showing solidarity. Morter most recently contributed to two new chart bids: The Kunts’ aforementioned Boris Johnson single, spurred on by the prime minister’s U-turn over Christmas restrictions, and the anti-Brexit collaboration between Asian Dub Foundation and Stewart Lee, which was called “Comin’ Over Here”. The Kunts’ chart success surprised even Morter, while the Asian Dub Foundation track topped the UK single sales chart in the first week of the year (it peaked at 65 in the official charts, which includes streams).
For Steve Chandra Savale of Asian Dub Foundation, his band’s spontaneous, slightly ramshackle campaign was as much about “uniting people around a vibe” as anything else. The song was written as an album track in March last year, with Lee’s routine about former Ukip leader Paul Nuttall dubbed over the top. A delayed release as a result of the pandemic offered an opportunity for a run on the singles charts. “For people with a more internationalist, unprejudiced and non-xenophobic outlook, [it’s been a] grim few years,” says Savale, “and we wanted to be able to show through song that there’s a big amount of people that don’t like the general zeitgeist being shoved down their throats.”
These days, the charts are less visible than when music mags would publish the results or Top of the Pops aired primetime performances each week. Despite their apparently waning influence, however, they offer a symbolic means of registering protest. Stewart Lee admits that there’s an element of nostalgia to entering the charts – particularly among those who grew up with shows like TOTP – but says that they still retain some emblematic significance. Others debate the impact that puncturing the singles list actually makes. “People have created their own imaginary rules about the significance of it,” says charts analyst James Masterton. “The idea is, ‘if we get to No 1, Radio 1 will have to play our song’. They won't, they're under no obligation to. Or ‘they'll have to announce it on Top of the Pops on Christmas Day’. No, that’s going to happen either.”
But if you can make the race to No 1 a close-run thing, then you can at least count on a few news headlines to draw attention (or outrage) to your campaign. “I don't think anybody's going to necessarily switch their political allegiance based on somebody singing a song about some kind of political issue,” says Masterton, “I think what it's all about is an opportunity to raise awareness of a cause. And if nothing else, to allow people to express support for something – it does facilitate that.”
Most of these chart campaigns would be described as a form of reactive protest, as opposed to driving at any tangible future change: Jarvis Cocker calling the Conservatives “c****”; Ugly Rumours painting Tony Blair as a warmonger; Asian Dub Foundation and Stewart Lee sending up Brexiteers as bigoted xenophobes. It’s as much about cathartic release and feeling heard as anything else.
“A lot of this is less about focusing on the long term and more about reflecting what they feel the nation feels at a specific moment in time,” says Radhika Patel, a political campaigner and organiser based in London. “I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, I just think it’s not particularly impactful if they want to make change, because unfortunately you can’t make change by just having one single out. In some ways it’s just something funny for people to hang on to, or feel like someone understands.”
This feeling of collective catharsis is something that Morter, Savale, and Masterton all mention too – while acknowledging that the real change-making work happens elsewhere. Morter describes it as a form of “armchair activism” but notes that many of the Facebook groups he’s created over the years live on as active communities to this day. Masterton wonders whether clicking a mouse button can ever have the same effect as taking to the streets over a particular cause.
Ultimately, these campaigns are stunts: their impact lasting not much longer than the songs themselves. There are countless pop songs that include political or social messages, and their timelessness as works of art means a cause can live on in people’s imaginations. But sometimes a simple middle finger raised at the establishment can be the right message at the right time. And with each new entrant, this peculiarly British chart tradition grows more entrenched. “It’s pretty much people sticking their proverbial finger up at whoever it’s aimed at,” says Morter. “It's a way people can get behind it and go, ‘Yeah, we're doing it too: up yours!’”
Stewart Lee
2021-01-19T16:50:02+00:00
As far as song lyrics go, “Boris Johnson is a f****** c***” is not exactly what you’d call chart-friendly. But that didn’t stop comedy punk group The Kunts getting their politically charged track (called, naturally, “Boris Johnson is a F****** C***”) to No 5 in the official Top 20 at Christmas. Just a few weeks later, as the UK officially left the EU, comedian Stewart Lee and Asian Dub Foundation were pushing a comical anti-Brexit ode featuring lyrics from a 1,000-year-old Anglo Saxon poem into the download charts. In recent years, campaigners and rabble-rousers have increasingly taken aim at the upper ranks of the pop charts in a bid to adopt them as a form of political billboard. In the same spirit of the Sex Pistols’ releasing “God Save the Queen” in the week of the 1977 Silver Jubilee, contemporary efforts have taken on everything from Boris to Brexit to the Hillsborough tragedy and war in foreign lands. The tradition of protest music long outdates chart history, if not the history of recorded music itself – but there’s something about the symbolism of the charts that still attracts campaigners wanting to cause a stir. “I suppose it’s sort of subversive and fun,” says Lee. “I forget who it was that said the purpose of comedy was to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted, but I think a lot of people have got some comfort from seeing these things get through. Often, the more stupid they are, the more delightful it is that they’ve managed to do it.” These singles vary from the downright deranged to the seriously serious. The Great Chart Reclamation began around February 2007, when activist group Stop the War Coalition released a version of Edwin Starr’s “War” credited to a group called Ugly Rumours – the...
And just when you thought the modern wise guy had evolved from revelling in scatological humour, Stewart Lee proved otherwise. Lee began with September 11 and five minutes later there was a sustained flatulence joke.
Trying to yoke the momentous with the ridiculous was not a promising start and it got worse. Lee's obsession with over-analysing his own (dated) material, his fondness for repetition and stretching out a simple gag to 10 minutes was a constant irritant.
Stewart Lee
2005-04-05T22:34:01+01:00
And just when you thought the modern wise guy had evolved from revelling in scatological humour, Stewart Lee proved otherwise. Lee began with September 11 and five minutes later there was a sustained flatulence joke. Trying to yoke the momentous with the ridiculous was not a promising start and it got worse. Lee's obsession with over-analysing his own (dated) material, his fondness for repetition and stretching out a simple gag to 10 minutes was a constant irritant.
"I am delighted to be returning to BBC2, TV's historic home of smart-ass comedy, for two more series, with the same multi-gong-grabbing team as before. I can't really believe this opportunity has been presented to me, and I certainly wasn't expecting it. I hope to repay this unprecedented act of blind faith by donning my too tight jacket to hone another six hours of densely irritating stand-up over the next four years, spliced with aggressive Armando grillings and obtuse filmic codas. It will be amazing to be able to move forward and experiment in this unprecedentedly secure position. Thanks to everyone out there who watched the series, wrote about them, or lobbied for their return. I will make you proud. Peace! I'm outta here! You shoulda killed me last year!"
These two series will be delivered Jan 2014 and some time 2016. There will be live try-outs of new material at Edinburgh Fringe 2013, 2014, 2015. There will be many Soho Theatre and Leicester Square Theatre runs of new stuff in the period.
There will be two or three small-ish 30 date tours in that period, also busting in new shit.
Then there will be a big tour 2017 with cannons and dancers and fireworks. Then I will do something else for a bit.
Carpet Remnant World is the title of the new full length show, Aug 2010-Aug 2011.
Thanks to all who came so far. It has been really very good.
April 2012
Tuesday 17th - Theatre Royal, Winchester - 8.00pm Box Office: 01962 840440 Book Online.
Wednesday 18th - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - 8.00pm Box Office: 01872 262466 Book Online.
Friday 20th - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - 7.45pm Box Office: 0114 249 6000 Book Online.
Saturday 21st - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - 7.45pm Box Office: 0114 249 6000 Book Online.
Thursday 26th - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - 8.00pm Box Office: 01743 281281 Book Online.
Sunday 29th - The Lowry, Salford - MATINEE - 3.00pm Box Office: 0843 208 6010 Book Online.
Sunday 29th - The Lowry, Salford - EVENING - 7.30pm Box Office: 0843 208 6010 Book Online.
May 2012
Thursday 1st - Corn Exchange, King's Lynn - Box Office: 01553 764864 Book Online.
Wednesday 2nd - The Dome, Brighton - Box Office: 01273 709709 Book Online
Saturday 5th - Machynlleth Comedy Festival, Wales - Book Online.
Sunday 6th - Hippodrome, Bristol - 7.30pm - Box Office: 0844 871 3012 Book Online.
Monday 7th - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - Box Office: 01752 230440 Book Online.
Tuesday 8th - Octagon Theatre, Yeovil - Box Office: 01935 422884 Book Online.
Friday 11th - Gala Theatre, Durham - 8.00pm - Box Office 0191 332 4041 Book Online.
Saturday 12th - Music Hall, Aberdeen - Box Office: 01224 641122 Book Online.
Sunday 13th - Eden Court, Inverness - Box Office: 01463 234234 Book Online.
Thursday 17th - Vicar Street, Dublin - Box Office: 00353 (0)1 77 55 800 Book Online.
Friday 18th - Vicar Street, Dublin - Box Office: 00353 (0)1 77 55 800 Book Online.
Saturday 19th - Seapoint Ballroom, Salthill, Galway - 8.00pm - 0818 719300 Book Online.
Monday 21st - Cork Opera House, Cork - 8.00pm - + 353 (0) 21 - 427 0022 Book Online.
NOTE: RESCHEDULED FROM SUN 20th at Savoy Theatre. Tickets for 20th still valid. Please contact
the venue with any queries.
Thursday 24th - Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry - 8.00pm Box Office: 024 7652 4524 Book Online.
Friday 25th - Civic Theatre, Wolverhampton - 7.30pm Box Office 0870 320 7000 Book Online.
Saturday 26th - Festival Theatre, Malvern - Box Office: 01684 892277 Book Online.
June 2012
Friday 1st - Assembly Hall, Tunbridge Wells - 8.00pm Box Office 01892 530613 / 532072 Book Online
Friday 8th - West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds - Box Office: 0113 213 7700 Book Online.
Saturday 9th - The Alban Arena, St Albans - 01727 844488 - Book Online.
Wednesday 13th - Corn Exchange, Bedford - Box Office: 01234 269519 ON SALE SOON.
Thursday 14th - Grand Theatre, Swansea - Box Office: 01792 475715 VENUE WEBSITE.
Friday 15th - Lighthouse, Poole - Box Office: 0844 406 8666 Book Online
Friday 22nd - Civic Theatre, Chelmsford - Box Office: 01245 606 505 Book Online.
Saturday 23rd - City Hall, Salisbury - 8.00pm - Box Office: 01722 434434 Book Online.
Sunday 24th - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - Box Office: 01392 493493 Book Online.
Tuesday 26th - City Hall, Hull - 8.00pm - Box Office: 01482 300 300 Book Online.
Wednesday 27th - Huntingdon Hall, Worcester - Box Office: 01905 611427 Book Online.
Thursday 28th - Huntingdon Hall, Worcester - Box Office: 01905 611427 Book Online.
July 2012
The show will then be slimmed down from its current 2hrs running time to 75 minutes for the final dates, including a reprise of the show for the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe, as part of The Stand’s Assembly Rooms program, having been originally run it at The Stand in the Summer of 2011. If you want to interpret this as “he couldn’t be arsed to write a new show this year”, despite the fact that I have obviously been touring this most nights of the year to meet the demand and to stop other people complaining that I never play in their town when in fact I have probably already been there dozens of times, that is up to you. If you feel I am not working hard
enough don’t feel obliged to come. There are other comedians available, remember.
Wednesday 4th - Picture House, Hebden Bridge - 8.00pm Box Office 01422 842684 Book Online (Still full-length)
Friday 13th - The Shed, North Yorkshire - 8.00pm Box Office 01653 668494 Book Online
Saturday 14th - The Shed, North Yorkshire - 8.00pm - Box Office 01653 668494 Book Online
Sunday 15th - Richmond Theatre, Richmond - 8.00pm - Box Office 0844 871 7651 Book Online
Wednesday 18th - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - 8.00pm Box Office: 0844 847 9910 Book Online.
Monday 30th - The Stand, Newcastle
Tuesday 31st - Falkirk Comedy Festival, Falkirk
August 2012
Thursday 2nd - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Friday 3rd - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Saturday 4th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Sunday 5th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Monday 6th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Tuesday 7th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Wednesday 8th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Thursday 9th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Friday 10th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Saturday 11th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Sunday 12th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Tuesday 14th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Wednesday 15th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Thursday 16th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Friday 17th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Saturday 18th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Sunday 19th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Tuesday 21st - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Wednesday 22nd - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Thursday 23rd - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Friday 24th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Saturday 25th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Sunday 26th - The Stand @ The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh - 6.05pm - Book Online.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-30T18:18:38+01:00
STATEMENT FROM DESK OF S LEE "I am delighted to be returning to BBC2, TV's historic home of smart-ass comedy, for two more series, with the same multi-gong-grabbing team as before. I can't really believe this opportunity has been presented to me, and I certainly wasn't expecting it. I hope to repay this unprecedented act of blind faith by donning my too tight jacket to hone another six hours of densely irritating stand-up over the next four years, spliced with aggressive Armando grillings and obtuse filmic codas. It will be amazing to be able to move forward and experiment in this unprecedentedly secure position. Thanks to everyone out there who watched the series, wrote about them, or lobbied for their return. I will make you proud. Peace! I'm outta here! You shoulda killed me last year!" These two series will be delivered Jan 2014 and some time 2016. There will be live try-outs of new material at Edinburgh Fringe 2013, 2014, 2015. There will be many Soho Theatre and Leicester Square Theatre runs of new stuff in the period. There will be two or three small-ish 30 date tours in that period, also busting in new shit. Then there will be a big tour 2017 with cannons and dancers and fireworks. Then I will do something else for a bit. DOWNLOADS There are now audio and video downloads of lots of stuff I've done available at http://www.gofasterstripe.com/cgi-bin/website.cgi?page=downloads BRIDGET CHRISTIE My wife Bridget Christie, whose main area of interest is being continually referred to as Stewart Lee’s wife everywhere and often by female journalists, is doing her multi-*****d 2011 show at Soho Theatre, LONDON, this month. 24th April - Housewife Surrealist. Soho Theatre - Tickets 25th April - Housewife Surrealist. Soho Theatre - Tickets 26th April - Housewife Surrealist. Soho Theatre...
“No one is equipped to review me,” says Lee, beginning the fourth round of his standup series. He’s joking. Kind of. By now, he’s basically Oscar Wilde: it’s practically impossible to divine any meaning from his increasingly complex pose. Lee says he adopts a snobbish persona to make people “laugh in spite of me, not because of me”.
Hopefully, that’s not a rare moment of earnestness: this is a show dominated by a commentary on audience reaction, real and imagined, that’s unlikely to have anyone in stitches.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-03T15:16:18+00:00
“No one is equipped to review me,” says Lee, beginning the fourth round of his standup series. He’s joking. Kind of. By now, he’s basically Oscar Wilde: it’s practically impossible to divine any meaning from his increasingly complex pose. Lee says he adopts a snobbish persona to make people “laugh in spite of me, not because of me”. Hopefully, that’s not a rare moment of earnestness: this is a show dominated by a commentary on audience reaction, real and imagined, that’s unlikely to have anyone in stitches.
Citing their influences as Bauhaus, Satanism and Herzog, Klaus Kinski explode out of Llanfairfechan playing moronically furious music that's also deceptively intelligent. “Ecce Homo", a screaming, serrated song about indecent exposure that ends unpleasantly, takes its Latin title all too literally. Yes, Klaus Kinski might suggest any number of British imitators of the Birthday Party's bone-shattering punk-blues from three decades back, but The Inca Babies and Turkey Bones And The Wild Dogs are long gone, whereas these North Welsh woodsmen have their hands upon the plough right now, and they're not looking back. Let the dead bury their own dead!
Stewart Lee
2011-03-06T20:41:33+00:00
Citing their influences as Bauhaus, Satanism and Herzog, Klaus Kinski explode out of Llanfairfechan playing moronically furious music that's also deceptively intelligent. “Ecce Homo", a screaming, serrated song about indecent exposure that ends unpleasantly, takes its Latin title all too literally. Yes, Klaus Kinski might suggest any number of British imitators of the Birthday Party's bone-shattering punk-blues from three decades back, but The Inca Babies and Turkey Bones And The Wild Dogs are long gone, whereas these North Welsh woodsmen have their hands upon the plough right now, and they're not looking back. Let the dead bury their own dead!
STEWART Lee can wrong-foot an audience faster than most people can say "white supremacist theme park".
Which was the description of Cheltenham he decided to goad us with in his intro.
Given that he was promising a three-parter divided into the subject matters of Islamaphobia, urine and UKIP, it went down well. As did his berating of the latecomers shuffling in midway through his jibes at reviewers, namely Rod Liddle and his smeared on suet and Angel Delight.
But all's well that ends well, eh? Stewart got to revive a longer list of smeary foodstuff for Rod, and the audience. Well, it's always nice to see a collective approach to self-flagellation at a comedy gig. And the town hall was packed to capacity.
The Room with a Stew tour is a work in progress in preparation for his TV show, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
Stewart's stage act is a conflictive mass of deconstructed and convoluted back-handed comedy. He spares no one as he launches his tirades against the ills of society, then he peppers it with audience-baiting and spoiler ploys, playing the long game and leading you astray, before pouncing back with a killer punch.
But all of this rapid-fire eloquence and irony is still surprising and clever, and there's no denying his intelligentsia appeal. This is the razor-sharp onion unpeeling type of wit that makes you feel a tad intellectually superior, albeit for just a couple of hours. Lee Mack or Michael McIntyre it ain't.
Stewart is a comedic craftsman; taking us one way then haranguing us for going there. It's all finely honed, even though it's a work in progress, and you have to involve yourself and invest in it. But then, let's face it, Stewart has got form, and his precision planning is second to none
And it is an act: the misanthrope who is continually challenged by society and commercialism, to the point where he uses his negative reviews as advertising on his tour posters. It is this ability to subvert the very notion of his own popularity that is his own grist to the mill.
Stewart is an acquired taste, but for all of his diatribes and reprimands, he is evidently amusing himself too. And he eschews any pretentious showy palaver.
He just gets on stage, gives you a run-through, performs and exits stage left. A bit like wash and go shampoo but without the froth and more of a sting in the eye.
I'm not ashamed to admit I cried with laughter. Fairy hats in the fuchsia and a peckish fox can do that to a girl.
Stewart Lee
2015-03-09T20:19:27+00:00
STEWART Lee can wrong-foot an audience faster than most people can say "white supremacist theme park". Which was the description of Cheltenham he decided to goad us with in his intro. Given that he was promising a three-parter divided into the subject matters of Islamaphobia, urine and UKIP, it went down well. As did his berating of the latecomers shuffling in midway through his jibes at reviewers, namely Rod Liddle and his smeared on suet and Angel Delight. But all's well that ends well, eh? Stewart got to revive a longer list of smeary foodstuff for Rod, and the audience. Well, it's always nice to see a collective approach to self-flagellation at a comedy gig. And the town hall was packed to capacity. The Room with a Stew tour is a work in progress in preparation for his TV show, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. Stewart's stage act is a conflictive mass of deconstructed and convoluted back-handed comedy. He spares no one as he launches his tirades against the ills of society, then he peppers it with audience-baiting and spoiler ploys, playing the long game and leading you astray, before pouncing back with a killer punch. But all of this rapid-fire eloquence and irony is still surprising and clever, and there's no denying his intelligentsia appeal. This is the razor-sharp onion unpeeling type of wit that makes you feel a tad intellectually superior, albeit for just a couple of hours. Lee Mack or Michael McIntyre it ain't. Stewart is a comedic craftsman; taking us one way then haranguing us for going there. It's all finely honed, even though it's a work in progress, and you have to involve yourself and invest in it. But then, let's face it, Stewart has got form, and his precision planning is second to none And...
This Tuesday, Battersea Arts Centre's annual contemporary opera fest, "The Works", will open with the first opera to take television as its subject. No, it's not a Network, or a Broadcast News. It's not by Turnage either. Or Butler, or Sawer, or Adès. It's Jerry Springer the Opera, the latest creation from Kombat Opera's Richard Thomas (below, right), who will himself be taking the (non-singing) starring role and displaying his other talent: a fiendish ability to impersonate chat show hosts. But Jerry Springer? The Mephistopheles of Cincinatti? The man who hosts such programmes as "My mom stole my lesbian lover", "Sex Escorts tell all", "Guess what, I'm pregnant and you aren't the father", and "My date with a neo-Nazi"? As an opera? The very same. Opera, as Thomas points out, has always been the medium for vulgarity, mayhem, manipulation, sexual confusion, infidelity, pathos, tragedy and violence. Think Iago, Scarpia, Poppea. Think Jerry. Yes, it's a comedy. But is it really opera?
Thomas – blue-eyed boy-next-door composer of the foul-mouthed cult hit Tourette's Diva, head-honcho of Kombat, admirer of Arvo Pärt, the Sex Pistols, Messiaen, and Miles Davis, prime target for naked-man throwing (of which, more later), and MD for Skinner, Baddiel, Lee and Herring, and the League against Tedium – has no doubt. "The parallels are amazing!" he says, counting them off on his fingers. "It's got tragedy, it's got violence. There are all these people screaming at each other. You can't understand what they're saying. You have inbuilt duets, trios, quartets, choruses: 'Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!' This is a medium that can take total extremes. Why not push it as far as you can?"
For Thomas, opera, with all of its traditional pomposities, is an unexpected career. Though he studied piano from the age of five, and is a voracious and extremely eclectic listener, he has had no formal compositional training. So why compose? He squirms while admitting it, but says he "just adores the human voice." And this is nearly all human voices (he includes divas and punks in his list of favourites) except, of course, his own. Thomas – who is perpetually self-deprecating in a genial floppy-haired fashion – sings "like a horse". After leaving Cambridge with a "hodge-podge" degree, he went into comedy, touring the club circuit for 10 years and writing music for TV – including an arrangement of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the style of Chas and Dave, and a duet version of "Da Doo Ron Ron" for Mr Methane and Frank Skinner (sadly never broadcast). During his first professional gig, a group of bored prostitutes stripped a member of a stag-party and threw him at Thomas – who was standing in a boxing ring – inadvertently starting an anti-heckling campaign that led to the composition of 500 ariettes (including "I hugged a tree. It didn't hug me.") and 10 operatic heckles (mostly unprintable), to be sung by soprano Lore Lixenberg. These heckles formed the basis for Tourette's Diva: an exercise in applying the speed and style of stand-up to opera. Much to Thomas's surprise, Tourette's was a hit with both the comedy audience and the opera critics.
Spurred on by the success of Tourette's, Thomas held a series of BAC studio workshops called How to write an Opera about Jerry Springer. (The flyer read, "Have idea. Think it's a shit idea. Despair. Do it anyway.") Using Kombat's patented "beer for an idea" scheme, he bribed his audience for constructive feedback with a can of John Smith's, and punished them for stupid suggestions with a can of Asda bitter. Ah well, there's nothing quite like an inebriated focus group. And so the characters of Diaper Man, Duane, the Chick-with-a-Dick, and the Bitches Fighting were born: unusual subjects for an opera but perfect protagonists for a gloves-off (and sometimes clothes-off) TV confessional.
Thomas's guest characters may be "very Jerry," but they're not simply there to be laughed at. Echoing Springer's own somewhat dubious defence of a TV show that slides easily into exploitation, Thomas says he is "definitely on the side of the guests". How conscious he is of bending the bars of what often seems to be a human zoo, is hard to tell. He says there have been occasions where he's felt "almost guilty to be watching", but in Jerry Springer the Opera, the dispossessed of America's trailer parks are finally given a chance to sing. With influences ranging from Herbert Howells (the theme-tune trio), to Sondheim (a swaggering paean to infantilisation), to Stevie Wonder (the glorious melismatic transvestite aria, "I'm a man"), the latest incarnation of Jerry Springer the Opera is a whirlwind of musical styles. It's also very rude, and very funny. Mindful of the episodic nature of chat shows, the sections that worked in the workshops – that were "ur-Jerry", as Thomas puts it – have been expanded and re-worked, the flops have been cut, and comedian Stuart Lee (of Lee and Herring) has been brought in as co-librettist to temper Thomas's somewhat uncritical devotion to Springer. "In a way, writing a comic opera is almost masochistic," says Thomas. "I mean, how often is opera really funny? [Rossini's] 'Cat Duet'? Oh, please. Urrgh. Aaaargh," he groans, "The laughter in opera is totally conditioned. I don't understand it." Neither Thomas nor Lee see anything wrong with a three-minute attention span. But then the speed of TV is something that fascinates Thomas; "If you were really honest, what percentage of operas do you go to that you aren't bored by for the majority of the time? If you're watching [TV], it's completely normal to be subjected to four or five different styles in a few minutes. So you can use that pacing, use short cuts, if you like, in order to build up a classic piece where you have space to expand," he says.
As the old boundaries between "high" and "low" art become ever more vague, it's the perfect time for Thomas's latest onslaught on the most elite of art forms. Since microphones and spoken dialogue started to appear in opera, and Sondheim upped the musical sophistication of music theatre, even the toughest critics have been hard pushed to agree on what makes one work an opera and another a musical. Television has been making its presence felt in the opera houses: whether through use of video (Peter Sellars's Salzburg staging of Saint François d'Assise, Richard Jones's From Morning to Midnight, Deborah Warner's St John Passion), or design (the I Love Lucy-fication of every comic opera from Cosi fan Tutte to Cenerentola). And though Jones and Sellars have given some contemptuous quotes on the medium's all-powerful influence, few directors are immune to the need to keep things moving for a generation raised on TV. But with the exception of John Adams's politico-historical operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer (currently in production for Channel 4), television has barely registered in the narrative of modern opera, let alone a comic opera. However you class it, Jerry Springer the Opera is unique.
What the doyens of the opera world will ultimately make of Thomas's creation is anyone's guess, though I doubt that anyone who regularly laughs out loud at the "Cat Duet" would have the stomach for this operatic anarchy. So will he be going too far for the purists this time? Thomas says he has no aspirations to the Royal Opera House, yet he continues to write these technically demanding, viciously funny and rather glamourous arias with coloratura that straddles bel canto and jazz funk and conveys pathos as well as comedy – which explains why singers like Lixenberg are prepared to work for him for fringe rates. "I just try to give people their money's worth," he says. "I try to pack in a lot of music and I quite like the idea of exposition without development. That's how a composer described Tourette's Diva – 'So much exposition – so little development.' I thought it was a compliment! The bastard!" he laughs. "If people come to see Jerry Springer then hopefully they won't be bored. Coming from a comedy background, boredom is death. I think that's a great discipline to come from. Boredom is bottles, and prostitutes throwing naked men at you." It would never happen at Covent Garden. Or would it? Watch this space.
'Jerry Springer the Opera': Battersea Arts Centre, London SW11 (020 7223 2223), Tuesday to 2 September
Stewart Lee
2001-08-20T16:00:35+01:00
This Tuesday, Battersea Arts Centre's annual contemporary opera fest, "The Works", will open with the first opera to take television as its subject. No, it's not a Network, or a Broadcast News. It's not by Turnage either. Or Butler, or Sawer, or Adès. It's Jerry Springer the Opera, the latest creation from Kombat Opera's Richard Thomas (below, right), who will himself be taking the (non-singing) starring role and displaying his other talent: a fiendish ability to impersonate chat show hosts. But Jerry Springer? The Mephistopheles of Cincinatti? The man who hosts such programmes as "My mom stole my lesbian lover", "Sex Escorts tell all", "Guess what, I'm pregnant and you aren't the father", and "My date with a neo-Nazi"? As an opera? The very same. Opera, as Thomas points out, has always been the medium for vulgarity, mayhem, manipulation, sexual confusion, infidelity, pathos, tragedy and violence. Think Iago, Scarpia, Poppea. Think Jerry. Yes, it's a comedy. But is it really opera? Thomas – blue-eyed boy-next-door composer of the foul-mouthed cult hit Tourette's Diva, head-honcho of Kombat, admirer of Arvo Pärt, the Sex Pistols, Messiaen, and Miles Davis, prime target for naked-man throwing (of which, more later), and MD for Skinner, Baddiel, Lee and Herring, and the League against Tedium – has no doubt. "The parallels are amazing!" he says, counting them off on his fingers. "It's got tragedy, it's got violence. There are all these people screaming at each other. You can't understand what they're saying. You have inbuilt duets, trios, quartets, choruses: 'Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!' This is a medium that can take total extremes. Why not push it as far as you can?" For Thomas, opera, with all of its traditional pomposities, is an unexpected career. Though he studied piano from the age of five, and is a...
CONTENT PROVIDER is on BBC again on Saturday 29th Dec at 11.55pm, and then on the i-player for 3 months afterwards.
2) Late Junction/s ON RADIO 3
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 a mixtape from recorder player and violinist Laura Cannell. The shows go out at 11pm nightly.
How does a working class autodidact, with no visible means of support, maintain his role as the leader of a cult British underground band into its fifth decade? Comedian and writer Stewart Lee (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle) , director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and James Nicholls (Fire Records, Fire Films) investigate the mysterious existence of Robert Lloyd (The Prefects, The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons), Britain's ultimate post-punk survivor.
Robert Lloyd's Prefects played with The Clash on the White Riot tour in 1977, and their ongoing incarnation, as Birmingham's Captain Beefheart suffused post-punk poets The Nightingales, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other band. Ever.
Buoyed by endless critical acclaim, but hampered by ongoing commercial indifference, Lloyd has nonetheless continued to tour and record, The Nightingales' affairs managed by drummer Fliss Kitson, from a Wolverhampton shipping container, and Lloyd himself, from the isolated borderland mountain fastness of Wellington, Shropshire, surrounded by prehistoric remains and industrial archaeology.
Lloyd, a post-punk flaneur, sometime postman, and master snug room raconteur, appears to have maintained a lifestyle outside the system via a succession of hustles, often involving an encyclopaedic knowledge of horse racing and pre-punk musical weirdness.
But what were the social, cultural and economic circumstances that enabled and sustained such outsider artists in the punk and post-punk eras, and how has the world changed to the point where such figures are unlikely to flourish in the same way today? Lloyd's own odyssey echoes how abstract notions of social mobility, of the value of culture and music, have changed in the last five decades.
In an odd coincidence, Lloyd's current home, the Shropshire market town of Wellington, in the shadow of the Wrekin, is also where the comedian Stewart Lee was born, though he only spent nine days there before being dispatched to an orphanage, and has not been back since.
Further chance collisions abound. For a brief period the skyline of '70s concrete Birmingham was defined by Nicholas Monroe's unloved, and soon sold off pop art sculpture, of the giant ape, King Kong. Missing and presumed lost for years, this icon of Birmingham was eventually discovered prostrate in a Lake District garden, before being critically rehabilitated in an exhibition of great British public sculpture at the Henry Moore Gallery in Leeds in 2017.
As a child, Stewart was fascinated by the sculpture, and in a strange piece of synchronicity Lloyd compared his onstage persona to Monroe's Kong in a triumphant post-gig rant in King's Cross this year. The parallels make the point of comparison too good to ignore. King Rocker will shadow Lloyd's story with that of Birmingham's forgotten, and rediscovered, giant art ape, King Kong.
**UPDATE** We are now 1/3rd of the way through filming and editing and are looking for donations to complete the film. Everyone who donates, no matter how big or how small, will be featured in the end credits.
Stewart Lee
2018-12-21T09:00:14+00:00
1) CONTENT PROVIDER BBC 2 29th DEC CONTENT PROVIDER is on BBC again on Saturday 29th Dec at 11.55pm, and then on the i-player for 3 months afterwards. 2) Late Junction/s ON RADIO 3 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 a mixtape from recorder player and violinist Laura Cannell. The shows go out at 11pm nightly. King Rocker https://www.kingrockerfilm.com/ How does a working class autodidact, with no visible means of support, maintain his role as the leader of a cult British underground band into its fifth decade? Comedian and writer Stewart Lee (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle) , director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and James Nicholls (Fire Records, Fire Films) investigate the mysterious existence of Robert Lloyd (The Prefects, The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons), Britain's ultimate post-punk survivor. Robert Lloyd's Prefects played with The Clash on the White Riot tour in 1977, and their ongoing incarnation, as Birmingham's Captain Beefheart suffused post-punk poets The Nightingales, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other band. Ever. Buoyed by endless critical acclaim, but...
Stumbled upon unwares upstairs in an Oxford pub, in the Winter of 1986, Razorcuts were the coolest looking band I'd seen to date. Magnificently stylish beatniks, but clad in threads you could snag from charity shops, beamed in from bohemia. For the next three years it seemed impossible to avoid them.
And the sound was like nothing around. Summer of '66 psychedelia slashed with a summer of '76 sneer. Today there's fifty years of rock and roll source material instantly downloadable to young hipsters the world over, but in 1986, the flavours of 1976 and 1966 were distanced from us by un-navigable dimensions, apparently lost for ever. Achieveing this apparently effortless fusion would have taken Razorcuts real dedication.
Razorcuts were The Byrds playing The Buzzcocks, lyrically emboldened by Morrissey's winsome wordplay and the bookish Postcard records crowd, not embarssed to write a song with the word 'embarass' in its title. But they were here and now, four feet away, at The Jericho Tavern and The Ice rink, and slinking through the streets in pointy shoes carrying skinny guitar cases.
I was eighteen. I never saw The Byrds, or spat at The Sex Pistols, but stepping out into the frosty north Oxford night, the 12-string guitar parts of that song about the snowbirds still ringing in my ears, I couldn't imagine that the after-buzz of either could have been much better.
A quarter of a century later, revisiting the things that spun you out as an impressionable teenager, it's clear we often mistake objective excellence with the hormonal rush that made everything we experienced seem special. How graitifying to realise that Razorcuts, however briefly, really were that good.
Stewart Lee
2010-09-01T18:11:52+01:00
Stumbled upon unwares upstairs in an Oxford pub, in the Winter of 1986, Razorcuts were the coolest looking band I'd seen to date. Magnificently stylish beatniks, but clad in threads you could snag from charity shops, beamed in from bohemia. For the next three years it seemed impossible to avoid them. And the sound was like nothing around. Summer of '66 psychedelia slashed with a summer of '76 sneer. Today there's fifty years of rock and roll source material instantly downloadable to young hipsters the world over, but in 1986, the flavours of 1976 and 1966 were distanced from us by un-navigable dimensions, apparently lost for ever. Achieveing this apparently effortless fusion would have taken Razorcuts real dedication. Razorcuts were The Byrds playing The Buzzcocks, lyrically emboldened by Morrissey's winsome wordplay and the bookish Postcard records crowd, not embarssed to write a song with the word 'embarass' in its title. But they were here and now, four feet away, at The Jericho Tavern and The Ice rink, and slinking through the streets in pointy shoes carrying skinny guitar cases. I was eighteen. I never saw The Byrds, or spat at The Sex Pistols, but stepping out into the frosty north Oxford night, the 12-string guitar parts of that song about the snowbirds still ringing in my ears, I couldn't imagine that the after-buzz of either could have been much better. A quarter of a century later, revisiting the things that spun you out as an impressionable teenager, it's clear we often mistake objective excellence with the hormonal rush that made everything we experienced seem special. How graitifying to realise that Razorcuts, however briefly, really were that good.
My husband hasn’t bought me a book as a present for YEARS. He says he has no idea what I like any more. But he bought me Content Provider by Stewart Lee for Christmas.
We’ve been fans of Stewart Lee since the late 90s, when we loved him so much that we used to watch live recordings in London of his show This Morning with Richard not Judy with Richard Herring. More recently, we have found Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on TV absolutely hilarious.
Content Provider is not my usual sort of book. Because it’s a collection of short pieces of prose – mainly newspaper columns. I mistakenly bought a book of short stories a while back and I haven’t got round to reading it yet, because I don’t like to read in that way. I like a proper nice long story that I can get my teeth into. But at first I actually enjoyed reading a couple of complete pieces of Content Provider at a time.
The articles are very funny, but also very intellectual. I can see they wouldn’t be many people’s cup of tea. He’s also included some of his negative online comments after the articles – mainly from people saying he’s sh*t or who completely miss the irony.
This made me properly laugh out loud
There were plenty of times when I laughed out loud, but I must admit, by about halfway through, I was starting to get a bit bored. You can have too much of a good thing and some of the articles were starting to get repetitive. Reading a column every week in a newspaper would probably feel like a treat, but reading several a day for two weeks started to feel like a chore.
I’m never going to go off Stewart Lee’s stand-up, but his writing is definitely for die-hard fans only (who most definitely, like myself, wouldn’t be David Cameron supporters!).
Stewart Lee
2017-02-10T17:40:31+00:00
My husband hasn’t bought me a book as a present for YEARS. He says he has no idea what I like any more. But he bought me Content Provider by Stewart Lee for Christmas. We’ve been fans of Stewart Lee since the late 90s, when we loved him so much that we used to watch live recordings in London of his show This Morning with Richard not Judy with Richard Herring. More recently, we have found Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on TV absolutely hilarious. Content Provider is not my usual sort of book. Because it’s a collection of short pieces of prose – mainly newspaper columns. I mistakenly bought a book of short stories a while back and I haven’t got round to reading it yet, because I don’t like to read in that way. I like a proper nice long story that I can get my teeth into. But at first I actually enjoyed reading a couple of complete pieces of Content Provider at a time. The articles are very funny, but also very intellectual. I can see they wouldn’t be many people’s cup of tea. He’s also included some of his negative online comments after the articles – mainly from people saying he’s sh*t or who completely miss the irony. This made me properly laugh out loud There were plenty of times when I laughed out loud, but I must admit, by about halfway through, I was starting to get a bit bored. You can have too much of a good thing and some of the articles were starting to get repetitive. Reading a column every week in a newspaper would probably feel like a treat, but reading several a day for two weeks started to feel like a chore. I’m never going to go off Stewart Lee’s...
I love British traditions. Whose heart soars not upon seeing some drunk men chasing a cheese down a fatally steep Gloucestershire hill, or some drunk men burning their faces off carrying flaming tar barrels on their heads in a Devonshire village, or some drunk men dropping an enormous effigy of David Jason into a giant burning boozer made of straw in a Hertfordshire hamlet at midnight? In Spanish fire bull festivals, cruel peasants set fire to animals. Here, outside the EU, we merely set fire to ourselves.
But the nights are drawing in and soon it will be time for one of the oldest, and most enjoyable, British traditions of all. Because it’s that time of year when, in the run-up to the National Trust’s AGM on 11 November, the opaquely funded “anti-woke” pressure group Restore Trust, backed by Neil Record of the Tufton Street climate crisis denial bodies Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch, tries to have its own pod people planted on the board. Sing ye wassail! It’s that time again!!
The National Trust, which has more than 250,000 hectares (almost 620,000 acres) of farmland in its stewardship, is a thorn in the side to the government and its masters in the oil-money funded Tufton Street thinktanks. National Trust members actually vote for board members themselves, while cultural and environmental organisations that take public funding, such as the British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens, use a supposedly unbiased public appointments process to nobble their nabobs. This unbiased public appointments process has recently seen GB News social affairs editor Inaya Folarin Iman and Boris Johnson’s Mustique holiday facilitator David Ross parachuted on to the board of the National Portrait Gallery, whose trustees have included the spectral courgette Jacob Rees-Mogg, and where doubtless they spend a lot of time wondering how the invention of photography impacted on representational art.
But does this apparent covert gerrymandering actually jeopardise the future of all life on Earth? The answer is, sadly, yes. For example, much as we all love birds, it’s simply not possible for our feathered friends to survive without an environment to fly around in, so it makes perfect sense for a charity that likes birds to be concerned about preserving the places they live. A bird in the hand isn’t worth any in the bush at all if all the bushes have burned down in a massive brush fire due to the climate crisis and there were no birds in them anyway because they were all dead. So it’s obvious that the RSPB should be interested in environmental issues, because to ignore them would be the equivalent of spending 10 hours making a luxurious soup, having previously smashed every bowl in your house into smithereens and melted all the spoons down into tiny effigies of Wycombe MP Steve Baker.
In the hallowed hall behind Warner, Judge Silas Reid had ruled that, during the trial of three environmentalists, environmental issues were not to be mentioned, presumably fearful that if the jury understood why the defendants had blocked the road, they’d let them off, and then we’d be in a nightmare dystopia that pitched morality against law and saw a load of old men who enjoy a few swift ones before the afternoon session out of a job for life.
The point being that the oil-smeared ghouls of Tufton Street and the Tory party have already gelded street protest with the police bill, and prevented public bodies from speaking out by stuffing them with their cronies, but the National Trust can only be infiltrated by Tufton Street should the members vote for the infiltrators. It’s a harder 18th-century walnut dresser to crack. So, every year, the ghostly astroturfed group Restore Trust emerges from the Netherlands on social media and, in a campaign that appears coordinated with opinion piece writers at papers like the Times and the Daily Telegraph, attempts to get National Trust members to vote for its own plants, the usual mix of libertarians, cranks and arseholes.
This year’s star Restore Trust stooge is the historian and judge Lord Sumption, who, despite sounding like a character in a William Makepeace Thackeray novel who liked to either assume things or consume things or both, is a step up from Restore Trust’s star 2021 candidate, Stephen Green of Christian Voice, who, it would seem, once supported overseas laws proposing the execution of some gay people, though not necessarily on National Trust property, at least unless the events are properly stewarded.
On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak ripped up another raft of environmental commitments in a move so sudden that even the chair of Ford UK found herself suffering a moral whiplash injury as she veered suddenly away from the ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles she’d been steering towards. Street protest is now under threat to the point where the punk rock naturalist Chris Packham is wondering whether it’s morally just to ignore the law and protest anyway. And the government’s gagging of even the relatively innocuous RSPB means birdwatchers no longer have a voice. That’s why it’s important to join the National Trust, of all things, now and vote in its AGM before 11 November, for the candidates the council recommends. Save the National Trust. And the environment! Here today! Scone tomorrow!
Stewart Lee
2023-09-24T21:18:38+01:00
I love British traditions. Whose heart soars not upon seeing some drunk men chasing a cheese down a fatally steep Gloucestershire hill, or some drunk men burning their faces off carrying flaming tar barrels on their heads in a Devonshire village, or some drunk men dropping an enormous effigy of David Jason into a giant burning boozer made of straw in a Hertfordshire hamlet at midnight? In Spanish fire bull festivals, cruel peasants set fire to animals. Here, outside the EU, we merely set fire to ourselves. But the nights are drawing in and soon it will be time for one of the oldest, and most enjoyable, British traditions of all. Because it’s that time of year when, in the run-up to the National Trust’s AGM on 11 November, the opaquely funded “anti-woke” pressure group Restore Trust, backed by Neil Record of the Tufton Street climate crisis denial bodies Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch, tries to have its own pod people planted on the board. Sing ye wassail! It’s that time again!! The National Trust, which has more than 250,000 hectares (almost 620,000 acres) of farmland in its stewardship, is a thorn in the side to the government and its masters in the oil-money funded Tufton Street thinktanks. National Trust members actually vote for board members themselves, while cultural and environmental organisations that take public funding, such as the British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens, use a supposedly unbiased public appointments process to nobble their nabobs. This unbiased public appointments process has recently seen GB News social affairs editor Inaya Folarin Iman and Boris Johnson’s Mustique holiday facilitator David Ross parachuted on to the board of the National Portrait Gallery, whose trustees have included the spectral courgette Jacob Rees-Mogg, and where doubtless...
Comedian Stewart Lee joins Rob to discuss his new stand-up shows Snowflake and Tornado, currently on BBC iPlayer. And Stewart explains why he particularly embraces the audience members who have been dragged to his shows against their will...
Brydon & is a Spotify Exclusive Podcast. Rob Brydon is the Executive Producer in partnership with The Talent Bank and Folding Pocket. The show is produced by Sam Roberts and Rebecca Taylor-Sims. For Spotify, the Executive Producer is Rachel Simpson. NOTE: THIS PODCAST IS ON SPOTIFY WHICH MEANS YOU NEED A SPOTIFY ACCOUNT TO LISTEN TO IT IN ITS ENTIRETY
Stewart Lee
2022-09-08T19:33:15+01:00
Comedian Stewart Lee joins Rob to discuss his new stand-up shows Snowflake and Tornado, currently on BBC iPlayer. And Stewart explains why he particularly embraces the audience members who have been dragged to his shows against their will... Brydon & is a Spotify Exclusive Podcast. Rob Brydon is the Executive Producer in partnership with The Talent Bank and Folding Pocket. The show is produced by Sam Roberts and Rebecca Taylor-Sims. For Spotify, the Executive Producer is Rachel Simpson. NOTE: THIS PODCAST IS ON SPOTIFY WHICH MEANS YOU NEED A SPOTIFY ACCOUNT TO LISTEN TO IT IN ITS ENTIRETY
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/mp3/brydon-and/
Kevin Eldon is described as British comedy's most prolific supporting star – and for the first time, he’s got his own show, It’s Kevin, starting on BBC Two. Kevin’s friend and long time collaborator Stewart Lee introduces who exactly this Kevin Eldon bloke is.
The teenage Kevin Eldon occupied half a page in a book called Volume, Oliver Gray's history of punk-era Southampton, where, in 1980, Kevin fronted a band called The Time.
"His between song patter was laden with mimicry and improvisational flair and he obviously had a bright quick mind," writes Gray, "If stand-up comedy had been around then, Kevin would probably never have been in a band at all."
I met Kevin a decade or so later, at a stand-up gig at the De Hems pub in Soho, London, where we were both on the bill.
He had a manic amphetamine energy, delivering a rolling cascade of obscure impressions at impossible velocity, a trait I later learned was the result of nothing other than terrible nerves.
Watching him I realised there didn’t appear to be any voice he couldn’t do, and resolved to ask him to be the funny accent guy on a radio show I was working on with Richard Herring.
Kevin has kindly credited us with 'discovering' him, but he already knew exactly where he was, and someone would have stumbled over him sooner or later.
That night, I remember being confused by what this ancient figure - he must have been all of 31 - had been doing for 10 years, between his 1979 John Peel session and his 1990 stand-up debut, but Kevin has never been one to rush things.
Kevin's grateful collaborators, whose TV and radio shows have always been massively improved over the last 20 years by his supporting contributions, have all noted his meticulous, almost insane, attention to detail in voice and characterisation, and I have rarely seen the comedian Simon Munnery laugh more than when describing sitting backstage during one of Kevin’s multi-character live shows, and watching him trying to get methodically into character, whilst also trying to get into a succession of hats and wigs, all within the space of a 20 second turnaround.
Kevin's become a Zelig-like figure in British comedy, instantly recognisable to fans of quality shows, but rarely featured above the title.
Despite the massive wellspring of goodwill towards Kevin within the comedy community, his progression towards fronting his own show has been steady and measured, rather like the growth of his signature character the poet Paul Hamilton, whose act grew by about a line a year over that last two decades until it was all of 15 minutes long, but oh what perfection those 15 minutes are.
I expect It’s Kevin will display that same attention to detail, as well as the wild-eyed intensity that’s as evident on those old John Peel punk sessions as it is in the comedy characters that have made his name.
Stewart Lee is a comedian who appears in episode three of It's Kevin.
It’s Kevin starts on BBC Two at 10.30pm on Sunday, 17 March. For further programme times, please see the episode guide.
Stewart Lee
2013-03-13T18:43:54+00:00
Kevin Eldon is described as British comedy's most prolific supporting star – and for the first time, he’s got his own show, It’s Kevin, starting on BBC Two. Kevin’s friend and long time collaborator Stewart Lee introduces who exactly this Kevin Eldon bloke is. The teenage Kevin Eldon occupied half a page in a book called Volume, Oliver Gray's history of punk-era Southampton, where, in 1980, Kevin fronted a band called The Time. "His between song patter was laden with mimicry and improvisational flair and he obviously had a bright quick mind," writes Gray, "If stand-up comedy had been around then, Kevin would probably never have been in a band at all." I met Kevin a decade or so later, at a stand-up gig at the De Hems pub in Soho, London, where we were both on the bill. He had a manic amphetamine energy, delivering a rolling cascade of obscure impressions at impossible velocity, a trait I later learned was the result of nothing other than terrible nerves. Watching him I realised there didn’t appear to be any voice he couldn’t do, and resolved to ask him to be the funny accent guy on a radio show I was working on with Richard Herring. Kevin has kindly credited us with 'discovering' him, but he already knew exactly where he was, and someone would have stumbled over him sooner or later. That night, I remember being confused by what this ancient figure - he must have been all of 31 - had been doing for 10 years, between his 1979 John Peel session and his 1990 stand-up debut, but Kevin has never been one to rush things. Kevin's grateful collaborators, whose TV and radio shows have always been massively improved over the last 20 years by his supporting contributions, have...
Public services are being laid to waste and benefits shorn, but popular culture's voice of dissent remains strangely silent
For those of us who still spend far too much time thinking about what used to be called popular culture, these are fretful times. For more than two years, politics has been in a state of post-crash tumult. Now the government sets about what remains of the social fabric, with order papers waved aloft. And pop culture's response? Noncommittal, heavy on irony, essentially apolitical. By early 2011, we will have reached a litmus-test moment: if even the full arrival of austerity sparks nothing, we'll know we live in truly deadened times.
The signs aren't good. Aside from soap, the idea of mainstream TV and cinema concertedly portraying life at the blunt end now seems as old-fashioned as double-digit inflation. Comedy is no better. The woefully underrated Stewart Lee aside, most halfway successful comedians seem to cleave to a pretty depressing maxim: why meaningfully critique anything when you could be earning good money for boorish silliness on Mock the Week, selling out the O2 arena, and ensuring an autobiography with profanity in the title is doing brisk Christmas business at WH Smith?
The same sense of washout prevails in popular fiction – can you imagine a latter-day Alan Sillitoe, Nell Dunn or Shelagh Delaney?
And so it goes: in the midst of public services laid waste, social cleansing via the benefits system, the tripling of the cost of higher education and even worse, the only thing that has so far united any significant number of "creatives" is the cutting of their own subsidies: a sad enough business, but one that creates a response that plays perfectly to the populist stereotype of a cloistered, decadent elite.
And what of pop music? These days, it too often feels like the spirit of dissent is the preserve of past generations, there to be reverentially saluted rather than reinvented. In the United States, one of the most talked-about albums of the season is Wake Up, by singer John Legend and the veteran hip-hop band the Roots – a misplaced attempt to crystallise the condition of modern America via reworkings of consciousness-stirring songs by such icons as Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, which comes off looking like an exercise in sepia-tinted radical chic.
We see a similar thing in the UK. When David Cameron began reminiscing about his love of the Jam, Paul Weller revived his 1979 class-war anthem Eton Rifles on tour ("All that rugby puts hairs on your chest / What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?"), but no one of any note has tried a modern equivalent. If rock history is kept in a glass case, it follows that a once-vibrant tradition of musical protest might be in there with it – so look, don't touch.
That said, four or five years ago musical social comment temporarily came back, and there was a run of stuff about crap jobs, smalltown tedium, and the thin rattle of small change. Thanks chiefly to the Arctic Monkeys, it momentarily defined the fashionable rock aesthetic circa 2006 – and even though the songs that resulted were free of any hardened politics, they were a start. But now, the modern scene looks to be divided between two schools of thought: art-for-art's sake (witness the comically abstract Manchester-based group Everything Everything – "So how will they remember us whole, when we turn into salt?" pleads a frantic song titled Qwerty Finger), and the quest for rustic authenticity that drives the ubiquitous Mumford & Sons – privately educated fans of John Steinbeck, though for his windswept romance rather than his sociopolitical bite. Neither approach holds out the promise of much anger or agitation: one would imagine that either of these artists could soundtrack a Saturday night soiree at Chequers.
So it is that one's thoughts once again turn bleak: when the Berlin wall fell and the gospel of no alternative took hold, maybe the culture was inevitably changed for keeps. And perhaps a good deal of the story lies in pop's own passage into middle-age and the fact that its various incarnations now span not just most of the planet but almost the entire generational range. Ubiquity may have robbed it of its old counter-cultural charge; as it turned out, perhaps what some romantics call the People's Music is better suited to selling mobile phones than soundtracking revolt. The upshot: if you have seditious thoughts, why would you express them via free-market capitalism's favourite art form?
Forty is far too old to be driven mad by any of pop music's supposed failings. But there are truths about our times that most politicians have no wish to tell, and songwriters should be feasting on: 18 millionaires in the cabinet; a war on the poor; the return of a born-to-rule elite, now clad in weekend casualwear and affecting glottal stops, but still reeking of grouse moors and arrogance. This is surreal, mind-boggling stuff. The last time anything comparable happened, my generation's response was couched in the vocabulary of the old left; now, I'd love to hear genuine 21st-century dissent.
To end, then, an appeal to some unknown neurotic outsider, stranded in God-knows-where, and minded to pick up a guitar and howl their outrage: please, prove me wrong.
Selected Comments...
Parvulesco, 4 November 2010 9:50PM
Where are they gonna howl?
Since the demise of the charts, the fantastically egalitarian TotP and the endearingly unpredictable Radio 1 there's nowhere for them to howl into/out of.
Also, Stewart Lee is one unfunny, smug, public school Tarquin.
cocainemidget, 5 November 2010 4:20AM
also..
"The woefully underrated Stewart Lee aside"
why do the guardian staff persist with this guy?? his overwrought language, overthought logic and complete lack of comedic timing just leaves me scratching my head as to what those in the audience at his shows are laughing at. he reaches for the offhand insights bill hicks' schtick used to stumble through but falls woefully short..
Public services are being laid to waste and benefits shorn, but popular culture's voice of dissent remains strangely silent For those of us who still spend far too much time thinking about what used to be called popular culture, these are fretful times. For more than two years, politics has been in a state of post-crash tumult. Now the government sets about what remains of the social fabric, with order papers waved aloft. And pop culture's response? Noncommittal, heavy on irony, essentially apolitical. By early 2011, we will have reached a litmus-test moment: if even the full arrival of austerity sparks nothing, we'll know we live in truly deadened times. The signs aren't good. Aside from soap, the idea of mainstream TV and cinema concertedly portraying life at the blunt end now seems as old-fashioned as double-digit inflation. Comedy is no better. The woefully underrated Stewart Lee aside, most halfway successful comedians seem to cleave to a pretty depressing maxim: why meaningfully critique anything when you could be earning good money for boorish silliness on Mock the Week, selling out the O2 arena, and ensuring an autobiography with profanity in the title is doing brisk Christmas business at WH Smith? The same sense of washout prevails in popular fiction – can you imagine a latter-day Alan Sillitoe, Nell Dunn or Shelagh Delaney? And so it goes: in the midst of public services laid waste, social cleansing via the benefits system, the tripling of the cost of higher education and even worse, the only thing that has so far united any significant number of "creatives" is the cutting of their own subsidies: a sad enough business, but one that creates a response that plays perfectly to the populist stereotype of a cloistered, decadent elite. And what of pop music? These days,...
“Sphincter-poppingly angry, totally unamusing and uninsightful, and painfully, excruciatingly right-on. A bitter, politically correct member of the Remain-voting liberal elite. The type of comedy which is not designed to provoke laughter so much as solemn head-nodding and applause at the politically correct sentiment.” James Delingpole, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News
1) SNOWFLAKE/TORNAD0 - LIVE
David Johnson & John Mackay in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present
STEWART LEE - SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO.
EXTRA DATE ADDED ROYAL FEST HALL, LONDON, JULY 17TH
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!
The Leicester Square, London run has now finished, and the show is touring the UK. There are extra London dates in June / July at the Royal Festival Hall - here.
JUNE
27TH 28TH South Bank Centre, London BOOK HERE.
JULY
1ST, 2ND, 3RD South Bank Centre, London BOOK HERE.
Currently confirmed / onsale national dates are as follows.
NOTE: This is not the complete list. More national dates are currently being added & confirmed & will be announced soon.
Not all dates are currently on sale.
As further dates are announced / go on sale, they will be listed on the Live Dates page of the website & via this newsletter as they come in.
Wednesday 1st 2020 - 8pm - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Thursday 2nd 2020 - 8pm - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Friday 3rd 2020 - 8pm - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 7th 2020 - 7.30pm - The Forum, Bath - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th 2020 - 7.30pm - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - EXTRA DATE - TICKETS
Thursday 9th 2020 - Garrick Theatre, Lichfield - ON SALE SOON
Friday 10th July 2020 - 7.30pm - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - EXTRA DATE - TICKETS
Monday 13th July 2020 - 7.30pm - Theatre Royal, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne - EXTRA DATE - TICKETS
Tuesday 14th 2020 - Hippodrome, Darlington - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 15th July 2020 - 7.30pm - Playhouse, Nottingham - EXTRA DATE - TICKETS
Friday 17th 2020 - 8pm - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
2) King Rocker Doc
Michael Cumming (Brass Eye/Toast) and I have now finished this film about Birmingham post-punk band THE NIGHTINGALES, so thanks all crowd-funders for your help. News about screenings to follow. - https://www.kingrockerfilm.com/
I am contributing some words to a new performance by mediaeval minimalist the mighty Laura Cannell, at London’s King’s Place on July 11th - https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/
4) MUSIC FROM SHOWS
PEOPLE KEEP ASKING ME AFTER GIGS; "WHAT IS THAT BIT OF MUSIC FROM ‘CONTENT PROVIDER’ OR ‘SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO’?". So, here goes...
PRE-SHOW - Oh Yeah - Can (Tago Mago, 1971), Halleluhwah - Can (Tago Mago, 1971), Pinch - Can (Ege Bamyasi, 1972), If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up - Betty Davis (Betty Davis, 1973) TORNADO WALK ON - Blueswater - Stew’s Blues. - DOWNLOAD CONTENT PROVIDER MUSIC HERE. INTERVAL - Auto Chip 2014 - 2016 - The Fall (Sub Lingual Tablet, 2014), Auto (2024) Chip Replace Live - The Fall (Live Uurop VIII- XII, 2014), Fibre Book Troll - The Fall (Sub Lingual Tablet, 2014) SNOWFLAKE WALK ON - Home - Fixed Horizon (Nothing Beyond, 2019) WALK-OUT - Stiff Little Fingers - My Dark Places (No Going Back, 2014), Dave Graney - Ultrakeef (Zippa DeeDoo, 2019)
5) BENEFITS HACKNEY HOMELESS
HACKNEY EMPIRE HOMELESS 20TH MAY I have programmed another benefit for Hackney Homeless Shelter at the Hackney Empire for May 20th, featuring, so far, me, Daniel Kitson, Rosie Jones, Paul Hamilton and Bridget Christie, with more to follow.
- TICKETS HERE.
6) I arrogantly recommend
THE DAYDREAM LIBRARY SERIES & ECSTATIC PEACE LIBRARY (Thurston Moore, Edwin Pouncey, and the bloke who used to run ZIPPO records) are pleased to announce the opening of a record store & bookshop on the charming retail lane of Stoke Newington Church Street, London. Opening February 5, 2020, 96 CHURCH. “We are giving it a month or so,” says musician Thurston Moore. “If it works, we’ll keep on keepin’ on.” UNTIL MARCH 13TH AT LEAST
JOHN SHUTTLEWORTH. The hilarious legend of mundane musical comedy is on tour and must be seen by all people.
MARCH
APRIL
1st Wimbourne Tivoli,
2nd Exeter Phoenix,
3rd Winchester Theatre Royal,
4th Swansea Pontardawe,
Tuesday 14th NORWICH PLAYHOUSE,
Wednesday 15th STAMFORD ARTS CENTRE
16th Sheffield City Hall,
17th Barnsley Civic,
18th Worcester Huntingdon Hall,
19th Bristol Old Vic,
22nd Hastings St Mary,
23rd Chelmsford Civic,
24th Stratford Playhouse,
25th Newcastle Under Lyme New Vic.
MAY
4th Belfast Black Box.
OTOBOKE BEAVER. Japa-noise-niks,. FEB 19th Leicester Musician, 23rd London Scala.
THE GOON SAX. Young Australian indie clacissists. FEB 20th Bristol Old England, 23rd London Dalston Victoria.
RICHARD DAWSON. Art-folk wunderkind. MARCH 25th Gateshead Sage, 28th London RFH
STIFF LITTLE FINGERS - Ever relevant punk veterans roll onwards in March - 12th Bristol Academy, 13th Cardiff Great Hall, 14th Birmingham Academy, 16th UEA, 17th Glasgow Barrowlands, 19th Troon Concert Hall, 20th Newcastle Academy, 21st Leeds Academy, 23rd Northampton Roadmenders, 24th Nottingham Rock city, 26th Portsmouth Pyramids, 27th M’cr Academy, 28th Roundhouse London
SPRING EQUINOX FRIDAY 20TH MARCH 3.50 PM Your local druids will be about, in London on Parliament Hill and Tower Hill.
THE FALLEN LEAVES - HOPE AND ANCHOR, LONDON, 21ST MARCH. Veteran mod-punk legends. Always superb. Top entertainment.
PETER CASE (PLIMSOULS, NERVES) w support from SID GRIFFIN (LONG RYDERS) Two punky alt-country legends on the road18th March Menai Bridge The Victoria Hotel, 19th March Liverpool, Heaven’s Gate Presents @ 81 Renshaw, 20th March Newcastle upon Tyne, The Prohibition Cabaret Bar, 21st March Edinburgh, The Wee Red Bar, 22nd March Glasgow, Sound In The Suburbs @ Nice & Sleazy, 23rd March Birmingham Kitchen Garden Café, 24th March London, Green Note presents…@The Water Rats
Stewart Lee
2020-03-13T15:57:04+00:00
“Ghastly, puritanical, po-faced, sanctimonious, finger-wagging, Woke-Witchfinder-in-Chief” Toby Young, Twitter “Sphincter-poppingly angry, totally unamusing and uninsightful, and painfully, excruciatingly right-on. A bitter, politically correct member of the Remain-voting liberal elite. The type of comedy which is not designed to provoke laughter so much as solemn head-nodding and applause at the politically correct sentiment.” James Delingpole, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News 1) SNOWFLAKE/TORNAD0 - LIVE David Johnson & John Mackay in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present STEWART LEE - SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO. EXTRA DATE ADDED ROYAL FEST HALL, LONDON, JULY 17TH 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! The Leicester Square, London run has now finished, and the show is touring the UK. There are extra London dates in June / July at the Royal Festival Hall - here. JUNE 27TH 28TH South Bank Centre, London BOOK HERE. JULY 1ST, 2ND, 3RD South Bank Centre, London BOOK HERE. EXTRA DATE JULY 17TH - BOOK HERE. SNOWFLAKE/TORNAD0 - UK TOUR Currently confirmed / onsale national dates are as follows. NOTE: This is not the complete list. More national dates are currently being added & confirmed & will be announced soon. Not all dates are currently on sale. As further dates are announced / go on sale, they will be listed on the Live Dates page of the website...
For nearly 18 months now, the increasingly frustrated European liberal fat-cat elite has been asking for some clues as to what we brave British Brexiters imagine Brexit will be, the pastry edifice of Theresa May’s monumental “Brexit means Brexit” statement having already crumbled last year, when a moth’s tear fell near it.
Unable to say what Brexit is, a strategically and heroically vague David Davis last week chose instead to tell Brussels what Brexit isn’t, promising, definitively, that Brexit will not be “a Mad Max-style world”, despite evidence to the contrary commissioned by his own department.
Andrea Leadsom, meanwhile, has clarified that Brexit will also not be “some ham”, Jacob Rees-Mogg has stated categorically that Brexit will not be “a drawing of Alain Delon”, while Dan Hananananan has further elucidated that Brexit will also not be “a kind of thing with all stuff on it, and brown stripes, going up and down, like humbug mints on an escalator or some hot bees”.
In the light of Davis’s assurances that we will not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”, I wonder how much worse the post-Brexit dystopia could be anyway? Would the air of the capital remain technically toxic? Would there be nuclear power stations abandoned in dangerous disrepair? Would the oceans choke on plastic? Would secure housing be a pipe dream for millions? Would Boris Johnson still be free to scatter his lies at midnight into sleeping children’s eyes?
For many of the disenfranchised and disenchanted Britons who voted for Brexit, being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia would represent an improvement in their living conditions! Perhaps being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia is one of the few tangible benefits of Brexit!! Especially if it was sunny and featured Tina Turner as an Amazon cyberpunk!!! And anyway, better to live one day free in a Mad Max-style dystopia than a thousand years as a slave in the world’s largest single market area.
I worry that the idea that we will be “plunged” into a Mad Max-style dystopia is a little optimistic. The word “plunged” suggests events would unfold with a speed and decisiveness so far absent from the Brexit process. After a few years of sliding slowly and painfully into a Mad Max-style dystopia, with no clear end to the plunging in sight, Leave voters will look back at the suggestion that we were to be plunged into anything at all as just another example of the lying betrayals of their feckless and apparently unaccountable Brexit cheerleaders. Where was the plunge into a Mad Max-style dystopia we were promised?
But what do I know? I have not even seen any of the Mad Max movies, though last year Brendan McCarthy, co-writer of the recent reboot Mad Max: Fury Road, described me as “an archaic leftwing relic”, adding: “Milo Yiannopoulos is more on the zeitgeist.” But where is the discredited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos now? Nowhere. And where am I? I am in a three-star hotel room in Stratford-upon-Avon, eating a bag of humbug mints, which are what gave me the idea for the closing sentence of the third paragraph. I win.
And anyway, the best dystopian sci-fi film is not Mad Max, but the straight-to-video Mad Max rip-off World Gone Wild (Lee H Katzin, 1987), which I bought on VHS from a shop called Rimpy’s Fags, Foods and Non-Foods on Horn Lane in Acton for 50p in 1989. (World Gone Wild was, of course, filed in the non-foods section of the store, along with the wood, a fossilised coelacanth and Terence Trent D’Arby.)
The reason World Gone Wild is a better dystopian sci-fi movie than Brendan McCarthy’s stupid Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, is because it doesn’t have a colon in the middle of its title like what a idiot would do; and because it stars Adam Ant as a man called Derek Abernathy who, in a plot copied off Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, harries a plucky village of survivors in a Mad Max-style dystopia; and because it co-stars the bewildering actor Alan Autry, who played a gay footballer in the controversial gay Cheers episode The Boys in the Bar, but went on to become the anti-gay mayor of Fresno California; and because I’ve seen it and you never will. I win. Again.
David Davis rightly became the immediate target of the high-speed satire sausage machines of social media’s infinite monkey treadmill for his foolish Mad Max metaphor, but imagine if he had been just a little more pop-culturally literate in the way that Tories just never are.
Imagine if, instead of saying Britain would not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”, David Davis had said Britain would not be “plunged into a Derek Abernathy-style world. You know? Derek Abernathy? The Adam Ant character in World Gone Wild? Haven’t you seen it? Steve Jones from the Sex Pistol’s forgotten 80s hair metal band Chequered Past do the theme tune.”
The confused corrupt Eurocrat fat-cats of Brussels would immediately have sent their researchers off to score copies of World Gone Wild to decode Davis’s latest opaque clue as to what Britain imagined Brexit was, thus buying Davis more time to invoke ever more obscure dystopian sci-fi movies in his quest to hide the dispiriting truth.
“I tell you what Brexit won’t be. It won’t be like that one set two years from now where Christian Bale and a group of bedraggled survivors hide in a desolate English wasteland attacked by giant dragons. Rain of Fire, wasn’t it? No, Reign of Fire.
“Well, whatever, it won’t be like that. Or Enzo Castellari’s The New Barbarians, where the American footballer Fred Williamson is a kind of Jedi-ninja in a desert ruled by lawless bikers. Brexit won’t be like that. Or a drawing of Alain Delon.”
Content Provider continues to tour until April, when it resolves with three dates at the Royal Festival Hall. stewartlee.co.uk
Stewart Lee
2018-02-25T16:53:42+00:00
For nearly 18 months now, the increasingly frustrated European liberal fat-cat elite has been asking for some clues as to what we brave British Brexiters imagine Brexit will be, the pastry edifice of Theresa May’s monumental “Brexit means Brexit” statement having already crumbled last year, when a moth’s tear fell near it. Unable to say what Brexit is, a strategically and heroically vague David Davis last week chose instead to tell Brussels what Brexit isn’t, promising, definitively, that Brexit will not be “a Mad Max-style world”, despite evidence to the contrary commissioned by his own department. Andrea Leadsom, meanwhile, has clarified that Brexit will also not be “some ham”, Jacob Rees-Mogg has stated categorically that Brexit will not be “a drawing of Alain Delon”, while Dan Hananananan has further elucidated that Brexit will also not be “a kind of thing with all stuff on it, and brown stripes, going up and down, like humbug mints on an escalator or some hot bees”. In the light of Davis’s assurances that we will not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”, I wonder how much worse the post-Brexit dystopia could be anyway? Would the air of the capital remain technically toxic? Would there be nuclear power stations abandoned in dangerous disrepair? Would the oceans choke on plastic? Would secure housing be a pipe dream for millions? Would Boris Johnson still be free to scatter his lies at midnight into sleeping children’s eyes? For many of the disenfranchised and disenchanted Britons who voted for Brexit, being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia would represent an improvement in their living conditions! Perhaps being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia is one of the few tangible benefits of Brexit!! Especially if it was sunny and featured Tina Turner as an Amazon...
Some comedians choose reggae or punk as their intro music, some declare their grandiosity with a blast of opera, but Stewart Lee brings us into the room with some cerebral, complicated jazz.
He deliberately screws up his announcement from behind the curtain – which is another clue as to how complex and multi-layered this show is going to be.
A few years ago Lee wrote a show around a comedy routine written so it was impossible to steal. In this show, with its deliberately naff title, he breaks all the unwritten rules about how a comedian is supposed to behave. He cultivates a sneery obnoxious persona, he consults his notes, he shares his inner monologue about how long each particular segment is supposed to take.
For the comedy nerds he digresses to provide overblown academic descriptions of the anatomy of a joke.
Ostensibly Lee is trying out material for his new television series – but he has already performed these routines more than a hundred times on his national tour.
Despite the “work in progress” label, this is a highly controlled, highly deliberate and highly theatrical performance about the nature of laughter and the art of stand-up. Lee pulls his audience into his game to act as his collaborators – while leaving them wondering which of his attitudes and opinions are real.
He claims that all he is doing is “reading the room” – quoting a possibly fictitious old jazz player.
But this is a very big room. And despite all the intellectual posturing, the greatest laughs are found in the most accessible and most idiotic moments.
Whether he is talking about fairies at the bottom of the garden, listening to foreign radio under the covers or being haunted by dead comedians, Lee has the ability to reduce his audience to helpless spleen-splitting laughter.
The Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 30 August
Stewart Lee
2015-08-21T00:08:58+01:00
Some comedians choose reggae or punk as their intro music, some declare their grandiosity with a blast of opera, but Stewart Lee brings us into the room with some cerebral, complicated jazz. He deliberately screws up his announcement from behind the curtain – which is another clue as to how complex and multi-layered this show is going to be. A few years ago Lee wrote a show around a comedy routine written so it was impossible to steal. In this show, with its deliberately naff title, he breaks all the unwritten rules about how a comedian is supposed to behave. He cultivates a sneery obnoxious persona, he consults his notes, he shares his inner monologue about how long each particular segment is supposed to take. For the comedy nerds he digresses to provide overblown academic descriptions of the anatomy of a joke. Ostensibly Lee is trying out material for his new television series – but he has already performed these routines more than a hundred times on his national tour. Despite the “work in progress” label, this is a highly controlled, highly deliberate and highly theatrical performance about the nature of laughter and the art of stand-up. Lee pulls his audience into his game to act as his collaborators – while leaving them wondering which of his attitudes and opinions are real. He claims that all he is doing is “reading the room” – quoting a possibly fictitious old jazz player. But this is a very big room. And despite all the intellectual posturing, the greatest laughs are found in the most accessible and most idiotic moments. Whether he is talking about fairies at the bottom of the garden, listening to foreign radio under the covers or being haunted by dead comedians, Lee has the ability to reduce his audience...
You don't need this record. No-one needs this record.
These sixteen low-fidelity self-released tracks by '70s American teens in thrall to Sabbath, Zeppelin, Tolkein, and weed are a desperate attempt to tickle the palettes of jaded hipster know-alls, and Numero Uno records knows it.
And yet, and yet... the school doodle satanic imagery, basement boogie band chops, febrile as-live production, and utterly sincere foolhardiness of these barely existent bands - Arrogance, Stoned Mace, Wrath - is nakedly compelling.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-17T00:56:13+00:00
You don't need this record. No-one needs this record. These sixteen low-fidelity self-released tracks by '70s American teens in thrall to Sabbath, Zeppelin, Tolkein, and weed are a desperate attempt to tickle the palettes of jaded hipster know-alls, and Numero Uno records knows it. And yet, and yet... the school doodle satanic imagery, basement boogie band chops, febrile as-live production, and utterly sincere foolhardiness of these barely existent bands - Arrogance, Stoned Mace, Wrath - is nakedly compelling.
Stewart is the uncredited and unpaid guitarist, bassist and co-writer on most of these messy, lo-fi, hardcore anarcho-punk pastiches from the comedian Simon Munnery in his alter ego, or real self, of Alan Parker.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T22:20:43+00:00
Stewart is the uncredited and unpaid guitarist, bassist and co-writer on most of these messy, lo-fi, hardcore anarcho-punk pastiches from the comedian Simon Munnery in his alter ego, or real self, of Alan Parker.
John and Tony kick off the new season of Three Little Words with comedian Stewart Lee, a man The Times called in 2018 "the best standup working today."
On Three Little Words, John Bishop and Tony Pitts invite guests to chat about three words that mean something to them and the one they would gladly never hear again.
NOTE: THIS PODCAST IS ON AMAZON MUSIC WHICH MEANS YOU NEED AN AMAZON MUSIC ACCOUNT TO LISTEN TO IT
Stewart Lee
2022-02-18T19:34:12+00:00
John and Tony kick off the new season of Three Little Words with comedian Stewart Lee, a man The Times called in 2018 "the best standup working today." On Three Little Words, John Bishop and Tony Pitts invite guests to chat about three words that mean something to them and the one they would gladly never hear again. NOTE: THIS PODCAST IS ON AMAZON MUSIC WHICH MEANS YOU NEED AN AMAZON MUSIC ACCOUNT TO LISTEN TO IT
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?
Stewart Lee
2018-04-29T18:27:45+01:00
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...
Happy new year! But is it too late to save British democracy as we once knew it? In 2024, details of your awkward rectal prolapse could soon be earning a pretty penny for shareholders of an American surveillance business. What a time to be alive!
The American spy technology company Palantir has been given a £330m contract by NHS England to manage its “federated data platform”, which integrates our patient records. Palantir is, genuinely, named after magical orbs in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which the actual Dark Lord, Sauron, uses to spy on the hobbits when he is sending the Nazgûl to murder them. This should perhaps have rang alarm bells.
Tolkien scholars maintain Gandalf would not use the palantír because it would bring him under the Dark Lord’s control, but I am sure the health secretary, Victoria Atkins, has risk-assessed the danger of control of the NHS by evil orbs as thoroughly as she researched the role of junior doctors, whom she thinks are toddlers dressed in white aprons prescribing Smarties.
The British Medical Association, the Doctors’ Association UK, patient groups and privacy campaigners all oppose Palantir’s acquisition of our data. And wasn’t there an evil British spyware company that could have monetised it, anyway? I didn’t spend a month in the 00s defecating blood into a bucket so a billionaire early Donald Trump backer could fly around in a private jet eating chicken out of a bucket.
Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel is a former Trump-funding libertarian who told the Oxford Union: “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick,” and compared the British public’s love of the NHS to “Stockholm syndrome”. You wouldn’t put a man who hated pencils in charge of Cumbria’s Derwent Pencil Museum, or have asked Freddie Starr to look after your hamster. So why is Palantir anywhere near our NHS data?
Good Law Project is a nonprofit run by the barrister Jolyon Maugham, who sounds like a racing driver from Monte Carlo Or Bust, but in fact protects the interests of the public from the government with the tenacity of a man in a woman’s silk kimono killing a fox with a baseball bat. Good Law Project recently announced it is launching legal action regarding NHS England’s use of patient data. But on 22 December, Good Law Project claimed it received leaked emails showing that a PR company called Topham Guerin was planning to discredit them, on behalf of Palantir, which wants that NHS data.
Good Law Project believes social media influencers have been asked by Topham Guerin what their “fee expectation” would be for sending two tweets criticising Good Law Project, while taking care not to mention Topham Guerin or link to Palantir. But if I was Topham Geurin, and I wanted to make Jolyon Maugham mad, I would try to get him to believe Palantir was paying for social media influencers to attack him. Is this deep-vein psyops stuff, or me overthinking everything?
Topham Guerin’s speciality is “shitty memes”. “Sometimes shitty memes are effective,” declared co-founder Sean Topham of content so deliberately unsophisticated it appears, in contrast to the slick memes of “the elite”, trustworthy. Those experts! With their lighting!! And their fonts!!!
In 2019, Topham Guerin created the famously shitty “We bumped into Boris on his tea break” meme showing shitty Boris Johnson making a shitty cup of tea, announcing his since utterly discredited shitty Brexit deal and declaring his love of the Clash, Joe Strummer’s corpse spinning like a spin doctor. The content is shitty but, in retrospect, for reasons that shitty Topham Guerin didn’t predict.
It was also shitty Topham Guerin that unethically and shittily rebranded a shitty Conservative party Twitter account as a factchecking page, “factcheckUK”, during a television election debate.
For who can fight the current Conservatives, unbound by ethics and honesty? Don’t look to the 90% of the press that are Tory loyalists, or to toytown outlets GB News or TalkTV, sustained by self-interested billionaires to amplify their talking points, evil giants breaking wind into the infosphere through sewage pipes, the massive hunting horns of malign hell gods. And don’t look to the BBC for balance, touting oil-funded Tufton Street spoke-holes on Question Time again and again, like The Lord of the Rings’s comatose King Théoden, dozing as the worm-tongued BBC board member, former Downing Street spin doctor, Tory crony and ex-GB News adviser Robbie Gibb ejaculates into his ear.
But in Tolkien’s fable, Middle-earth is saved by an unlikely band of ill-matched heroes. And it seems we have our own in waiting, many belatedly radicalised by having had enough, not accountable to Conservative-cowed media. Our Fellowship of the Ring! Jolyon Maugham is Gandalf, with his trusty enchanted baseball bat; the four hapless hobbits are Led By Donkeys, fly-projecting truth-sigils by night; Gimli the dwarf is the lawyer Peter Stefanovic, tirelessly digging the arbitrary dishonesty of the Tory lie mine; Aragorn is Marina Purkiss, devastatingly articulate daytime TV Wag, obviously; Legolas the elf is Carol Vorderman, apparently immortal, ageless, and with pointed ears and a shiny face full of facts; and our Boromir, the well-meaning but brutal human, may yet be Danny Dyer. “Tories! You toilets!! Stitch that!!!”
In 2024, we ourselves have to get behind these people, social-media the shit out of them and crowdfund our way out of the crisis of democracy. They are our best hope, because the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats and, God bless them, the Greens have no idea of the tonnage of weaponised lies that are about to descend on them. Happy new year.
Stewart Lee
2023-12-31T23:38:29+00:00
Happy new year! But is it too late to save British democracy as we once knew it? In 2024, details of your awkward rectal prolapse could soon be earning a pretty penny for shareholders of an American surveillance business. What a time to be alive! The American spy technology company Palantir has been given a £330m contract by NHS England to manage its “federated data platform”, which integrates our patient records. Palantir is, genuinely, named after magical orbs in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which the actual Dark Lord, Sauron, uses to spy on the hobbits when he is sending the Nazgûl to murder them. This should perhaps have rang alarm bells. Tolkien scholars maintain Gandalf would not use the palantír because it would bring him under the Dark Lord’s control, but I am sure the health secretary, Victoria Atkins, has risk-assessed the danger of control of the NHS by evil orbs as thoroughly as she researched the role of junior doctors, whom she thinks are toddlers dressed in white aprons prescribing Smarties. The British Medical Association, the Doctors’ Association UK, patient groups and privacy campaigners all oppose Palantir’s acquisition of our data. And wasn’t there an evil British spyware company that could have monetised it, anyway? I didn’t spend a month in the 00s defecating blood into a bucket so a billionaire early Donald Trump backer could fly around in a private jet eating chicken out of a bucket. Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel is a former Trump-funding libertarian who told the Oxford Union: “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick,” and compared the British public’s love of the NHS to “Stockholm syndrome”. You wouldn’t put a man who hated pencils in charge of Cumbria’s Derwent Pencil Museum,...
Just when it seemed there were no more ways to repackage Trojan's vast back-catalogue of Jamaican sounds, Freedom Sounds' five themed CD, 108 song celebration of fifty years of Jamaican independence radically recombines typical Trojan material. Disc 2, “Jamiacan Hits", surveys the usual suspects, Desmond Dekker's syncopated 007, Junior Murvin's Clash-inspiring Police & Theives, and The Maytals' 54 46. But Disc 4, “Innovators", diversifies, with many of the set's fifty rarities, never before on CD. A King Tubby dub of Johnny Clarke's None Shall Escape The Judgement, and an extended version of Barrington Levy's declamatory Skylarking, both clang righteously.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-06T00:55:29+01:00
Just when it seemed there were no more ways to repackage Trojan's vast back-catalogue of Jamaican sounds, Freedom Sounds' five themed CD, 108 song celebration of fifty years of Jamaican independence radically recombines typical Trojan material. Disc 2, “Jamiacan Hits", surveys the usual suspects, Desmond Dekker's syncopated 007, Junior Murvin's Clash-inspiring Police & Theives, and The Maytals' 54 46. But Disc 4, “Innovators", diversifies, with many of the set's fifty rarities, never before on CD. A King Tubby dub of Johnny Clarke's None Shall Escape The Judgement, and an extended version of Barrington Levy's declamatory Skylarking, both clang righteously.
Like a bald man masturbating alone into an open pedal bin, Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain disgusts itself. And yet, despite being observed on the gents’ toilet’s security camera that is the modern world stage, it continues its abasement unabashed. After the second world war, the German volk were described as experiencing kollektivschuld, a national shame. But the capacity for shame has been surgically removed from our leaders. And it pulses only weakly, like some underactive perineal muscle, in the electorate that endorses them. Could it be possible instead for the physical mass of a nation, rather than the citizens it comprises, to display the attributes of shame?
Brexiter culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, who didn’t know what the customs union was, has called publicly for the removal of public funding for a TV channel that isn’t publicly funded; Brexiter Dominic Raab, who had not appreciated the importance of Calais, went paddleboarding in Crete while Kabul rescue cats fought to get on British planes; and Brexiter Rishi Sunak, who has all his different breads in all his different houses, took lucrative advantage of tax loopholes that the EU he sought to exit had hoped to close.
(A judge told a couple fined £2,000 for having a baby shower, days before lockdown ended, they could pay in instalments if they didn’t spend the deferred money on “Sky Sports or anything”. Sunak, who is worth £200m or more, has been issued with a £50 fine for the lockdown breach he seemed to mislead parliament about. He, too, presumably, can pay in instalments as long as he doesn’t spend the deferred money on any $7.2m Santa Monica beachfront homes. Or anything.)
(Johnson has assigned Lord Geidt, the wallpaper investigator, to chair an inquiry into Sunak. This is the same as doing nothing. If I worked in a government office, I would have a bin with a picture of Geidt on it and I would use the phrase “Ask Lord Geidt to chair an inquiry into that” as a euphemism for “Just put that in the bin.” After a few weeks, a new member of staff would say: “You’re quite funny. Have you ever thought of trying to do comedy?” I would try to ask them out and it would go wrong.)
But consider Boris in-All-Frankness Pays-Fixed-Penalty Unreserved-Apology Anger-and-Frustration Birthday-Exemption Poledancing-Cyberlover Wallpaper-Freeloader Lebedev’s-Party Watermelon-Picaninny Tank-Topped-Bum-Boys Deprogramme-a-Transperson Fifty-Pound-Offender Dead-in-the-Water Vaccine-Rollout All-Purpose-Get-Out Johnson. Having bent human language to associate Kier Starmer with Jimmy Savile, it appears an actual living child molester, in the shape of the Brexiter Imran Ahmad Khan MP, was still a member of his own party. Meanwhile, Johnson has been belatedly fined for the first of the lockdown breaches he lied to parliament and the British public about. He should, of course, resign, but clings on, like a sheet of shatted toilet roll stuck to the sole of the national shoe.
Some say now is not the time for Johnson to go, because of the situation in Ukraine. But on Tuesday, parliament couldn’t meet to discuss chemical weapons in case someone asked the prime minister an awkward question about “gatherings”. People shouldn’t die in cellars as human shields for Johnson’s birthday cake. Disposing of Johnson as soon as possible might at least show Putin that the self-serving engine driving the Brexit that Russia so obviously hoped to secure is now no longer a key component of our corrupt political system. And having allowed so many oligarchs and their families to settle in west London and launder their stolen wealth with impunity means there’s still loads more to get rid of! Then Jacob Rees-Mogg can boast to the EU that we are leading the world in dealing with them!!
To summarise, at the start of last week the Conservative party included a child molester, a serial adulterer and compulsive liar, a handsome but morally bankrupt financial whiz-kid and a bully who sends immigrants to Rwanda. That’s less like a government and more like a special team of convicted criminals given their freedom in exchange for accepting an impossible mission behind enemy lines in a 1970s Italian-funded war film. Telly Savalas! Klaus Kinski!! Lewis Collins!!! Helga Liné!!!! Operation Dynamite Bastards!!!!!
Perhaps it is still too soon after the Brexit referendum for Brexit Britain to shudder fully at its folly. Brexit’s social, economic and political consequences are still conveniently blamed on Covid, Ukraine, Eddie Izzard and the wrong kind of langoustines. But last week I climbed the 832-metre (2,730ft) Cadair Berwyn, south of LLangollen, and as I looked east, it seemed that vast patches of rural England had somehow turned purple. Either that or some jam from a scone I ate in Bala had somehow got mashed into my blepharitis flakes.
The staining phenomenon was first observed, I learned from a civil servant friend, in Staffordshire, where a putrefying mountain of 500 tonnes of British beetroot lay rotting, the betanin leaching into the soil to turn the entire landscape the same shade as a Tory MP’s frothing racist face. Brexit has backlogged our beetroot. Publicly, delays are blamed on P&O, bad weather and Covid. You’ll have to scour lorry drivers’ blogs online to learn about the burden of new Brexit customs checks and the fact that the government’s Brexit IT system has been down for more than two weeks. Last week, the BBC literally edited the word “Brexit” out of the Scottish farmers’ union’s president’s explanation of the industry’s current woes.
No one wants to mention the B-word. But my contact warned that if the Brexit beetroot backlog isn’t dealt with soon, it appears the topsoil of the entire country may turn an embarrassing shade of beetroot puce, visible from space. It would be as if the whole of Brexit Britain had changed colour with shame.
Stewart Lee
2022-04-17T20:00:14+01:00
Like a bald man masturbating alone into an open pedal bin, Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain disgusts itself. And yet, despite being observed on the gents’ toilet’s security camera that is the modern world stage, it continues its abasement unabashed. After the second world war, the German volk were described as experiencing kollektivschuld, a national shame. But the capacity for shame has been surgically removed from our leaders. And it pulses only weakly, like some underactive perineal muscle, in the electorate that endorses them. Could it be possible instead for the physical mass of a nation, rather than the citizens it comprises, to display the attributes of shame? Brexiter culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, who didn’t know what the customs union was, has called publicly for the removal of public funding for a TV channel that isn’t publicly funded; Brexiter Dominic Raab, who had not appreciated the importance of Calais, went paddleboarding in Crete while Kabul rescue cats fought to get on British planes; and Brexiter Rishi Sunak, who has all his different breads in all his different houses, took lucrative advantage of tax loopholes that the EU he sought to exit had hoped to close. (A judge told a couple fined £2,000 for having a baby shower, days before lockdown ended, they could pay in instalments if they didn’t spend the deferred money on “Sky Sports or anything”. Sunak, who is worth £200m or more, has been issued with a £50 fine for the lockdown breach he seemed to mislead parliament about. He, too, presumably, can pay in instalments as long as he doesn’t spend the deferred money on any $7.2m Santa Monica beachfront homes. Or anything.) (Johnson has assigned Lord Geidt, the wallpaper investigator, to chair an inquiry into Sunak. This is the same as doing nothing. If I worked...
All 37 episodes of the pub-based sitcom starring award-winning comedian, Al Murray.
Written by Al & Richard Herring, with some contributions from Stew.
Stewart Lee
2019-02-05T23:29:18+00:00
All 37 episodes of the pub-based sitcom starring award-winning comedian, Al Murray. Written by Al & Richard Herring, with some contributions from Stew.
If the dead could vote, who would they vote for? And what would the deceased community make of the Britain they have left behind? For example, in ye olden times Britain, before there were privatised water companies to keep us clean and hydrated, a famous warning cry went out when people threw their urine and faeces into the uplifted faces of those below. Gardyloo! The word, it transpires, is derived from the French for: “Look out! I am throwing my excrement into your eyes because Anglian Water doesn’t exist. Sorry.”
People who think everything was better in the past must be thrilled that we are returning to similarly simple times. Our assiduously asset-stripped privately owned water companies cut out the middleman of actual waste treatment and dumped raw sewage directly into our rivers and seas 300,000 times in 2022 alone, often in the spawning grounds of endangered salmon during breeding season. How would the typical Conservative MP like it if someone came and tipped a load of human excrement over him while he was having sex? We could always ask Conservative Friends of Russia founding member Matthew Elliott, as the KGB is bound to have some compromising photos.
As raw sewage saturates the ground of post-Brexit Britain, free from Brussels’s tedious environmental red tape, our nation is turning into a giant sponge of excrement. Should the group Madness perform any outdoor greatest hits concerts this summer, it’s suggested the downward pressure of 10,000 hefty ex-skinheads jumping up and down at the same time could cause massive geysers of human excrement to shoot up from the filth-sodden earth and overwhelm the emergency services. A Cobra committee has met to decide which of the group’s eminently danceable, yet simultaneously erudite, hits are literally too dangerous to perform, the instrumental moon-stomp of One Step Beyond singled out as being of special concern.
Everything is, literally, turning to shit. The Brexit checks on imports from the EU, which we have incompetently delayed for three years, finally landed last week, predictably threatening to ruin thousands of small businesses and further drive up the costs of both staple “red wall” remain voter foods such as raw liver and crispy pig fat, and things like serrano ham and olives that rich leave-voting Tories love to eat.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tippi Hedren of this particular ideological bird strike, must recall with terrible woe how he himself described enacting the import checks as a colossal “act of self-harm”. Presumably, it’s a risk Mogg was prepared to take to get cheaper footwear for his inadequately shod North East Somerset constituents. Many of them had been reduced to crimping their loyal feet into stale pasty casings, in which to caper a celebratory West Country morris for their lord’s multimillion-pound Somerset Capital dividend payouts.
In 2020, the now disgraced then PM Boris Johnson told us there would be no non-tariff barriers to trade. And four years earlier, the European Research Group MP Dananiel “Bendy” Hannana, who still gets lucrative writing gigs at national newspapers, declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” And a year before that the lobbying-loving, windmill-hating MP Owen Paterson said: “Only a madman would actually leave the market.” And a quick Google will find a 2016 clip of the wicked sorceress Andrea Leadsom telling GB News’s foolish former chairman Andrew Shredded Wheat Hair Neil that we will not incur any costs by leaving the single market.
But on Wednesday, Leadsom was wandering around in the wilderness between morning news studios bleating, like Vote Leave’s sacrificial Leviticus goat, that we all knew what we were voting for, that businesses should have prepared and that florists need to start getting all their flowers from Britain. It’s Valentine’s Day soon. When it’s spring again, I’ll bring again, cowslips from Rotherham. And some Bovril! Drink it!! And shut up!!!
On Wednesday, Johnson triumphantly announced six benefits of Brexit, five of which even a lowly comedian like me was able to immediately identify as lies, the sixth being a “don’t know”. The Brexit lies finally bite, Rwanda runs aground and simmering scandals such as the Post Office, and the Teesside freeport funding funnel Michael Gove doesn’t want us to talk about, show how we are regarded essentially as barely sentient meat parcels to be farmed for liquifiable tax cash, serf labour and marketable data. Those future Tory votes are drifting away. But how to halt the haemorrhaging?
The Conservatives’ immediate plan is, of course, to cheat. But alarm bells ring at their attempts to loosen electoral spending limits, allow rich expats to vote and suppress unsympathetic voters with voter ID rules. But more worrying are plans that have come to light, floated on a leaked document, by the defence secretary, Grant Shapps; plans to extend voters’ right to vote even beyond the actual point of their death.
Surveys show that the Conservatives appeal to older voters and that the leave voters who secured victory by a narrow margin are now all dead. “And yet,” Shapps argues, “it is their will that has shaped the country we now live in, and their lifetime of taxes that paid for it. Would it be so very wrong to use AI technology to extrapolate the voting preferences of the dead and enact them? Rather than ‘wrong’, I would argue,” he concludes, “that it is in fact the moral thing to do.”
His shilly-shallying about a Gaza ceasefire may cost Keir Starmer the Muslim and traditional Labour peacenik vote. The numbers may yet stack up. But independent polling shows the majority of the decomposed would vote Conservative and if Shapps is able to mobilise the electoral power of the no longer living, then his zombie government may yet stumble on through one more term.
Stewart Lee
2024-02-04T20:38:33+00:00
If the dead could vote, who would they vote for? And what would the deceased community make of the Britain they have left behind? For example, in ye olden times Britain, before there were privatised water companies to keep us clean and hydrated, a famous warning cry went out when people threw their urine and faeces into the uplifted faces of those below. Gardyloo! The word, it transpires, is derived from the French for: “Look out! I am throwing my excrement into your eyes because Anglian Water doesn’t exist. Sorry.” People who think everything was better in the past must be thrilled that we are returning to similarly simple times. Our assiduously asset-stripped privately owned water companies cut out the middleman of actual waste treatment and dumped raw sewage directly into our rivers and seas 300,000 times in 2022 alone, often in the spawning grounds of endangered salmon during breeding season. How would the typical Conservative MP like it if someone came and tipped a load of human excrement over him while he was having sex? We could always ask Conservative Friends of Russia founding member Matthew Elliott, as the KGB is bound to have some compromising photos. As raw sewage saturates the ground of post-Brexit Britain, free from Brussels’s tedious environmental red tape, our nation is turning into a giant sponge of excrement. Should the group Madness perform any outdoor greatest hits concerts this summer, it’s suggested the downward pressure of 10,000 hefty ex-skinheads jumping up and down at the same time could cause massive geysers of human excrement to shoot up from the filth-sodden earth and overwhelm the emergency services. A Cobra committee has met to decide which of the group’s eminently danceable, yet simultaneously erudite, hits are literally too dangerous to perform, the instrumental moon-stomp of One...
Stewart Lee, or was it Mark Kermode, has famously said that there is no such thing as the culture war, that it is a fiction, no more real than biological so-called sex. It is, according to Lee, or possibly Terry Christian, something created in a lab – no, not a lab, a right-wing bat market – and then sprayed about like feral cat urine by reactionary newspapers like the Guardian, to distract you from pizza-shop paedophile rings (or was it onion rings?), spirit cooking and postal ballots. No wait, that’s the other lot. To distract you from enforced food banks, the break-up of the NHS (which is simultaneously the envy of the world and on its knees) and Priti Patel’s shoot-to-kill policy on those tiresomely buoyant Calais boat people. A charade, in short.
So, it was a bit of a surprise when fans of Stewart Lee – or is it Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin? – began to share his end-of-year round robin for 2021. Because it seemed almost embarrassingly designed, albeit rather late to the party, to raise the colours of his side in this non-existent war.
Along with his rescheduled tour dates and a gratifyingly detailed account of everything he’d watched, listened to or read that year (‘26 April, 3.36pm, downstairs loo – Warning on the back of a bottle of Domestos: **** Admirably multi-lingual but lacking narrative arc’) Lee had also included a list of those living beings he deems worthy of being put on a pedestal, and those destined for the pedal bin of history. And it was pretty obvious what the criteria had been.
NB: I have to be careful here. The last time I mentioned Stewart Lee in print was for the Daily Telegraph in 2017, in an article called ‘Confessions of a Brexit Comedian’, about the dangers of taking a comedy audience’s Remain sympathies for granted. I was rewarded with a stern admonition from Grand Poobah HQ about allowing myself to become a tool for the dark forces of media manipulation, with which Lee was doing battle on a pretty much permanent footing.
I pointed out that nothing I had said in the copy deviated from Lee’s own stated experiences, or those one or two other EU-friendly comics had shared with me. If anything, I wailed – hot tears of injustice already welling in my eyes – I’d sympathised with this problem as a comic who had himself experienced that record-scratch moment when you realise you have just blithely shared a big fat stinking Babycham of an opinion, assuming it to be axiomatic among the sane, and the room has fallen irretrievably silent.
And, I pointed out, I hadn’t written the headline.
Well, said Lee, I was now (on the standard Hitchens / Larkin fool-ranking system) not only a fool, I was a fucking fool – the most concentrated form. And a patsy and a rube to boot, oblivious to the pawn I had become and the game being played over my head.
So, in short, I’m on a warning and had better be careful if I don’t want to have my badge demanded of me this time. But really, even if only on a technicality, there is something that needs calling out here.
It’s not that I resent the Papal Bull as a mode. Lee is not on Twitter, which is probably wise, and without live gigs, we all need to get this stuff off our chest from time to time. True, many of the barbs are turned inward on the entertainment industry and many of us are somewhat weary of Lee’s assumption of the role of Witchfynder General to the stand-up trade – a position none of us can remember seeing advertised. But as I am sure Napoleon himself must have shrugged, at some point, someone would have had to do it.
No, what rankles is not that Lee should publish such a list, but that his targets should be so banal. Perhaps having excused himself from the argy bargy, the moshpit of Twitter, he is not quite match fit. Perhaps this is what has enabled him to remain so oblivious to the lines having been drawn up all this time. But really, is there anyone who reads Lee’s end-of-year list and feels even the mildest frisson of affirmation seeing Donald Trump dumped, and Greta Thunberg elevated to the full height of a grown man? My own mother would shrink from such basic bitch, normie shit. This is a list to make the committee for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth look like the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
I honestly have no quarrel with Lee’s desire to connect with his base. And in a year when mass hysteria has made touring tricky, this sort of thing is no doubt intended to suppress rumours of his demise. Kim Jong-un-ish pronouncements of this kind are especially apt.
But this is a man who defines himself by the ‘what level of cultural obscurity are you on?’ system of self-worth. Who would scarcely dream of listening to anything that the Fall had released as an actual A-side. A man whose great heroes have been the likes of Ted Chippington and the Nightingales – heroic failures perhaps, but failures certainly, and in an era when YouTube de-shrouds the reasons for their failure with forensic detachment.
It just makes no sense, that a man of such impeccably contrarian and obscurantist credentials, should put out a hit list and shit list, that invites us to scorn names as shop-worn as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, and warmly applaud the likes of Owen Jones, Ken Loach and Sadiq Khan.
Ah well. I want to be fair, and not only so that I avoid getting a name check next year (this year, I have had to do with inclusion under the loosest of banners, those associated with GB News, another all too predictable target). So, let me say that there is something not only generous but also quite profound about Lee’s accumulated souvenirs of every record, book and gig, every meal and art exhibition and place of historical interest that crossed his path in 2021. It is, in its way, what a more twee influencer might think of as a gratitude journal, as much as anything more discriminating, let alone arbitrary and despotic. It is Lee being present.
Thanks to the list I also now know there are one or two gigs coming up in 2022 – Robyn Hitchcock, for one – where I might even find myself rubbing masks with… is that Tucker Jenkins out of Grange Hill?
And as for the Heroes and Villains list, the banality of good and evil? I will, as I have had occasion to in the past where Stewart was concerned, just have to conclude, albeit without complete confidence, that that was the joke.
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. He is currently on tour with his show, Work of the Devil. You can buy tickets here.
Stewart Lee
2022-01-04T13:13:43+00:00
Stewart Lee, or was it Mark Kermode, has famously said that there is no such thing as the culture war, that it is a fiction, no more real than biological so-called sex. It is, according to Lee, or possibly Terry Christian, something created in a lab – no, not a lab, a right-wing bat market – and then sprayed about like feral cat urine by reactionary newspapers like the Guardian, to distract you from pizza-shop paedophile rings (or was it onion rings?), spirit cooking and postal ballots. No wait, that’s the other lot. To distract you from enforced food banks, the break-up of the NHS (which is simultaneously the envy of the world and on its knees) and Priti Patel’s shoot-to-kill policy on those tiresomely buoyant Calais boat people. A charade, in short. So, it was a bit of a surprise when fans of Stewart Lee – or is it Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin? – began to share his end-of-year round robin for 2021. Because it seemed almost embarrassingly designed, albeit rather late to the party, to raise the colours of his side in this non-existent war. Along with his rescheduled tour dates and a gratifyingly detailed account of everything he’d watched, listened to or read that year (‘26 April, 3.36pm, downstairs loo – Warning on the back of a bottle of Domestos: **** Admirably multi-lingual but lacking narrative arc’) Lee had also included a list of those living beings he deems worthy of being put on a pedestal, and those destined for the pedal bin of history. And it was pretty obvious what the criteria had been. NB: I have to be careful here. The last time I mentioned Stewart Lee in print was for the Daily Telegraph in 2017, in an article called ‘Confessions of a Brexit Comedian’, about...
Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are currently promoting the benefits of the deregulated “special economic zones” known as freeports, despite evidence that they encourage organised crime, money-laundering, drug-trafficking and terrorist finance, though admittedly the first three of these supposed problems appear to be common leisure activities for most Tory MPs. I’m here all week! Try the Colombian!!
Joined-up thinking, or paranoia depending on your point of view, suggests the next logical step from freeports is “charter cities”, allowing whole regions to be run as “corporate fiefs” by big business, stripped of tiresome regulations in the pursuit of profit. As long ago as 2010, the rightwing Tufton Street-based Taxpayers’ Alliance thinktank proposed that Hull “became our own version of a charter city [with] minimum wage, working-hours regulations, social benefits for working-age citizens, and central government planning regulations abolished”. Businesses that have made themselves useful to the Tories will doubtless be the beneficiaries here, just as they were when the PPE billions were doled out with due diligence.
Could Boris Johnson’s wedding venue donors at Daylesford Organic be given a south Devon section incorporating the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region? Could Ultimo, the lingerie company formerly owned by the Tory peer Michelle Mone, be handed the entire east Midlands from Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton? Will the Tory-adjacent businesswoman Jacqueline Gold’s Ann Summers organisation be left to run the Humber sector from Spurn Head to Howden, including Hull? Can Matt Handcock’s local pub landlord be allowed to do whatever he wants with both Needham Market and Clacton-on-Sea? And if this is the case, can these companies be trusted to respect the rights of the citizens of whom they will have dominion, when there are no regulations to protect them?
Should the people of Chagford and Yelverton be made to eat deregulated Daylesford Organic pork pies, which could possibly fuse with their genes at a subatomic level and turn them into half-human pig creatures? Should the people of Corby and Kettering be forced to wear untested Ultimo corsets, which could explode on contact with back sweat? Should people from Hull, and their orifices, be used as guinea pigs for untried, and potentially unsafe, Ann Summers sex toys, such as a turbo-charged, post-Brexit version of the Ann Summers bestseller the Anal Training Kit? As if Brexit wasn’t enough of a disaster as it is, are these some of the new “Brexit benefits” currently rolling down the sewage outlet of post-Brexit Tory deregulation?
It’s fun, isn’t it, to joke about the Brexit Tories’ attempts to turn Britain into a horrible dystopia designed to make money for their friends at the expense of the environment, the arts, education, human rights and so forth. Ha! Ha! Ha! But, here at the Edinburgh fringe, I popped out between my own shows to see two Ukrainian standups in From Ukraine With Laughs. Pavlo Voytovych presented a slick club set with cosmopolitan, pan-European reference points that would chime in his adopted Berlin; Dima Watermelon’s deadpan absurdity was darkened by attempts to deal with the systematic stealing of his homeland, the militarised erasure of the culture he grew up in. It made me think about what it would be like to lose the country you loved. And I realised I was.
It’s hysterical, of course, to compare the Brexit Tories’ stealthy but determined dismantling of the Britain we cherish with Putin’s physical assault on Ukraine. But if you’ve ever shown an interest in architecture, gardening or nature, doubtless the infiltrated algorithms of your social media feeds are steering you towards the respectable-looking Restore Trust organisation, which is reminding National Trust members to renew their memberships before 26 August, so they can vote in the charity’s autumn AGM. All well and good, surely?
Nominally a “forum where members and friends of the National Trust can discuss their concerns about the charity’s future”, the innocuous-sounding Restore Trust is in fact designed to stem the National Trust’s drift towards “wokeness” (by addressing links between its sites and slavery, for example). Restore Trust backer Neil Record, for one, is a financier and sometime Tory donor who has funded the climate-denial lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, also based on Tufton Street, and chairs Net Zero Watch, a thinktank spin-off on the same street lobbying to scrap net zero commitments. This is a worrying development given the vast tracts of land the National Trust manages and the millions of non-politically affiliated invertebrates in its keep. Butterflies don’t care about unisex toilets. They just want the plants they lay their eggs on to flower when they are supposed to.
In last year’s National Trust board member elections, one of the six preferred candidates that Restore Trust’s supporters hoped to vote into a position of influence was the self-styled “reverend” Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for gay sex in Uganda, believes all Muslims are going to hell and, when he was campaigning against a theatre piece I worked on decades ago, refused to shake the hand of a gay journalist because he knew “where it had been”. It is not known if Green believes garden design in National Trust properties should reflect one specific period in the house’s history or attempt to illustrate many simultaneously. We do know, however, that he thinks it is impossible for a husband to rape his wife.
It seems bizarre that it is suddenly necessary for reasonable people, who probably only joined the National Trust because they like carrot cake and a firm hanging buttress, to make sure they vote in the organisation’s 5 November AGM to prevent fun days out in historic locations becoming weaponised as yet another front in the far right’s culture war against everything nice. But we are where we are.
Stewart Lee
2022-08-21T14:29:25+01:00
Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are currently promoting the benefits of the deregulated “special economic zones” known as freeports, despite evidence that they encourage organised crime, money-laundering, drug-trafficking and terrorist finance, though admittedly the first three of these supposed problems appear to be common leisure activities for most Tory MPs. I’m here all week! Try the Colombian!! Joined-up thinking, or paranoia depending on your point of view, suggests the next logical step from freeports is “charter cities”, allowing whole regions to be run as “corporate fiefs” by big business, stripped of tiresome regulations in the pursuit of profit. As long ago as 2010, the rightwing Tufton Street-based Taxpayers’ Alliance thinktank proposed that Hull “became our own version of a charter city [with] minimum wage, working-hours regulations, social benefits for working-age citizens, and central government planning regulations abolished”. Businesses that have made themselves useful to the Tories will doubtless be the beneficiaries here, just as they were when the PPE billions were doled out with due diligence. Could Boris Johnson’s wedding venue donors at Daylesford Organic be given a south Devon section incorporating the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region? Could Ultimo, the lingerie company formerly owned by the Tory peer Michelle Mone, be handed the entire east Midlands from Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton? Will the Tory-adjacent businesswoman Jacqueline Gold’s Ann Summers organisation be left to run the Humber sector from Spurn Head to Howden, including Hull? Can Matt Handcock’s local pub landlord be allowed to do whatever he wants with both Needham Market and Clacton-on-Sea? And if this is the case, can these companies be trusted to respect the rights of the citizens of whom they will have dominion, when there are no regulations to protect them? Should the people of Chagford and Yelverton...
Well, finally, here were are. Almost two years after this gig should have originally happened, in a mostly filled Theatre Royal, we sit down the watch the show we should have seen on 27 March 2020. It was in fact one of the first to fall victim to the inital lockdown announcement of 23 March 2020, which I commented on at the time over at The Guardian.
The show is divided into two distinct parts, as you might be able to guess from the title. But tonight, the first part is in fact, Tornado, the reasons why it’s named that way become clear as the section continues.
“Hasn’t that Stewart Lee let himself go?”
The opening shots are about his own appearance, his health, and just about getting older generally; his rising blood pressure that constantly needs checking (always a great thing for a stand-up), and being described by The Times as “Britain’s Greatest Living Standup”, though he doesn’t like to talk about it, honest.
But it does serve as a bridge into talking about Netflix mis-listing his show, Comedy Vehicle, on the channel, for over two years¹, which gets him to compare his show to a few other stand-up listings on there. There’s a nice little little riff on Jimmy Carr, and how his show doesn’t contain any mention of sharks, but how it would be nice if they got the text to match what was actually in the show, and whether the comedian actually delivered what the synopsis said. There’s also the first mention of Ricky Gervais. I think it’s safe to say he’s not much a fan, given that he describes After Life as a nine and a half hour crying wank, and providing an altogether too convincing mime to go with it. But there’s more — much more — about Gervais later.
The biggest two sections in the rest of the first half concern Alan Bennett, and Dave Chappelle. He begins by telling us that someone drew his attention to Bennett’s discussion of him in the London Review of Books², which he looked up with a bit of excitement, given AB’s status, only to discover he’d been described as the JL Austin of stand up, and that “Erving Goffman would like him”, which generates the familiar kind of Stew mock outrage. But he ties this to watching other comics, including riffs aabout US stand-ups & audiences, which brings us into a routine about Chappelle playing a warm-up gig at the Leicester Square Theatre, following the last show in Stew’s longish warm-up run there. If you want to see Stewart Lee basically doing an impersonation of Barry White in an extended monologue about chicken juices³, then you are bang in luck here.
But the centrepiece of the first part is the brushing down and putting on of his Alan Bennett voice to read a viscera-spattered Bennett version of Sharknado, which is properly hilarious and finishes with a beautiful little stage set piece to end the first half.
Snowflake
After the interval Lee arrives back to ask how, as a man in middle age, he should cope with being an 70s & 80s-bred centre-left liberal in today’s comedy climate, and whether all the attacks on “Wokeness” aren’t just reheated versions of the cries of “it’s poliitcal correctness gone mad” that came in previous years.
The first focus of enquiry is Tony Parsons who, like Gervais, we can safely gather Stew is not hugely enamoured with. This partially stems from an emetic pearl-clutching GQ article Parsons wrote in 2019 which refrences Lee, whom he described as:
…the Guardian columnist, the BBC-approved comedian who can be guaranteed to dress to the left
One thing is for sure, Stewart Lee dresses very definitely to the right, and proves it to us tonight. He thinks his penis started in the middle, but like Parsons, has probably drifted to the right as they both got older. In some versions of the article, the words, “tip of a cesspit” figure too, and Stew takes delight in deconstructing that phrase for a while. While he’s doing this he ruminates about who the “metropolitan elite” that columinsts like Parsons talks about actually are, and he gets a big laugh from the audience when he starts to wonder if Newcastle is a bit pretentious and try-hard, and whether this audience here are just “the metropolitan elite but with sauce spilled all down your front.”
But the big moment of Snowflake comes when he starts to ask where the “woke” boundaries in comedy are, and who trangresses. So, he talks about the oft-heard opinion that “Ricky Gervais says the unsayable”. Except he doesn’t. He actually says things, making him someone who says the sayable by definition. What we then get is several minutes of what Gervais actually trying to say the unsayable might actually sound like. If you’re thinking cat coughing up furball, you’re also in the right place. It’s probably the highlight of the evening for me, and gets huge laughs, very deservedly.
And then we’re kind of into a wind-down. Given the great Barry Cryer’s death this week, like pretty much every comic Stew has a Baz anecdoate to share, and it’s a good one, told with real affection. That mood continues when he breaks persona for a moment to thank the audience for coming out after everything that’s gone on, and continues to. He’s generous in his praise for the backstage staff, and everyone who’s helped to make sure this evening can go ahead. It really is “just good to be out again.”
The last little bit of the night is a song, on an acoustic guitar, together with some effects (which you’ll be able to guess at if you scan the photos)
After-show
Of course, the ironic thing about the Bennett stuff in the first half, and the mock outrage at having the Austin and Goffman references thrown his way, only serve to demonstrate that Bennett is pretty much bang on. Lots of Goffman’s work is centred on the performance of self, and much of Lee’s act is shielded behind multiple layers of irony, and misdirection about who the “Stewart Lee” performing actually is. The Austin allusions make sense too. Quite a lot of Lee’s act is built up by copious use of repetition, call-back, and a relationship with the audience that is full of codified in-jokes, very knowing tongue-in-cheek sneers, and carefully confected beligerence, which those who know the format can peel back and enjoy at whichever levels they wish to. He jokes copiously about his reception in the left wing press, and undercuts it all with the sly back-of-the-hand admission that it’s all utterly absurd really. Of the shows I’ve seen him do (and this is the third), this feels like the least inflected, and the most open in many ways. He really is an experience to savour when he’s in full flow.
¹ it turns out they mistakenly provided the synopisis of Sharknado for his series, which was probably a bit of a disappointment for anyone wanting airborne apex sea predator larks.
² The entry in question is for 28 July
³which also crops up in the interval music. It’s not all just thrown together …
Stewart Lee
2022-01-31T19:49:43+00:00
Pre-show Well, finally, here were are. Almost two years after this gig should have originally happened, in a mostly filled Theatre Royal, we sit down the watch the show we should have seen on 27 March 2020. It was in fact one of the first to fall victim to the inital lockdown announcement of 23 March 2020, which I commented on at the time over at The Guardian. The show is divided into two distinct parts, as you might be able to guess from the title. But tonight, the first part is in fact, Tornado, the reasons why it’s named that way become clear as the section continues. “Hasn’t that Stewart Lee let himself go?” The opening shots are about his own appearance, his health, and just about getting older generally; his rising blood pressure that constantly needs checking (always a great thing for a stand-up), and being described by The Times as “Britain’s Greatest Living Standup”, though he doesn’t like to talk about it, honest. But it does serve as a bridge into talking about Netflix mis-listing his show, Comedy Vehicle, on the channel, for over two years¹, which gets him to compare his show to a few other stand-up listings on there. There’s a nice little little riff on Jimmy Carr, and how his show doesn’t contain any mention of sharks, but how it would be nice if they got the text to match what was actually in the show, and whether the comedian actually delivered what the synopsis said. There’s also the first mention of Ricky Gervais. I think it’s safe to say he’s not much a fan, given that he describes After Life as a nine and a half hour crying wank, and providing an altogether too convincing mime to go with it. But there’s more...
The RaM Music Club is a blog where each week they pick a guest who chooses a critically acclaimed album they've never listened to. The guest explains why they've never listened to it, laying out any potential prejudice in advance. i.e. "I've never liked the cut of Pink Floyd's jib" or "Mark E Smith frightens me". The guest has to listen to the album at least three times, this acclaimed album that they've never bothered listening to, and then tell us whether it was worth it or not.
Who’s Stewart when he’s at home?
I am 48 in April.
I was adopted into a nice family as a small child, and benefitted from a charity bung and part scholarship to a private school, which was followed by reading English at Oxford University. All these factors contributed, I think, to a confused sense of self, an uneasy notion of being out of place, an outsider even, and yet despite these feelings, I never felt it necessary to seek comfort in the music of David Bowie.
Today, I am a stand-up comedian by trade, but I reviewed records for a national newspaper from 1995-2015, and have written for Q, Mojo, Uncut, Bucketful of Brains and The Wire, and yet I have never knowingly listened to a David Bowie album.
Stewart’s Top 3 albums ever?
Today it’s The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour (which is always number 1) and Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, and Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand.
What great album has he never heard before?
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars by David Bowie
Released in 1972
Before we get to David, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Ziggy Stardust
Another Lesson in Persistence.
One day in 1955, Haywood Jones walked into his house in Bromley with a bunch of Rock and Roll singles that some fella had just given him. As far as I know, there’s no record of who that fella was, or why he was going around giving singles away in post war Britain. The important thing, and frankly all that matters, is that he did.
Haywood Jones, who didn’t really like Rock and Roll, decided to give the singles to his 9 year old son - David.
The kid commandeered the family turntable and began to familiarise himself with the music. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers - one by one he went through the 45s with varying degrees of excitement and interest.
Then he played Tutti Frutti by Little Richard and his head fell off.
He would later say that the room filled with energy, colour, and outrageous defiance and, from that point on, Little Richard became his idol. With historical perspective, it’s easy to see why. The sex, the glamour, the outrageous costumes - all fitting motifs that you’d expect to light a fire under Jones. But the truth is probably less aware than that - Tutti Frutti is, of course, a total banger. I stopped writing this to listen to it and had the best 2 mins and 27 seconds of my life since I was 15.
If it’s having that effect on me now, imagine hearing it in 1955 when your favourite song up to that point was probably The Chattanooga Choo Choo.
My head would have fallen off too.
But back to the story.
Jones quickly learnt the ukulele and washboard and formed a little Rock ‘n’ Roll “gang” at school that used to practice under the stairs in between lessons. At evenings and weekends he would spend his time shopping for records in Bromley High Street and hanging out at either of the two Wimpy Bars that had just opened in town. I know, first Little Richard had come into his life, and now Wimpy. Its little wonder that his school report described him, generously, as a “pleasant idler” - he was probably still trying to get his head around the fact you got your burger on a plate with a knife and fork.
Oh, the only other incident worth mentioning from his schooldays is that he had his left eyeball scratched after being punched in a fight over a girl. As a result, he had a permanently dilated pupil which made his left eye appear much darker than his right.
So here he is as a teenager. The '60s are starting to take shape around him and he’s itching to get involved. His instrument of choice is now the saxophone and he’s got different colour eyes.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for a while, everything.
He joins a band called The Konrads and the first thing you need to know about them is the amount of chances they were given to succeed. They auditioned for legendary producer Joe Meek, appeared on the TV talent show Ready Steady Win (best name for a talent show ever), and even tried out for Decca, during that phase where they signed everyone after turning down The Beatles. They also met Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles and Eric Easton, co-manager of The Rolling Stones.
As I said, they had a series of open goals and, if they were any good, they definitely would have made it. But they didn’t, because the second thing you need to know about The Konrads is they were bloody awful. And Jones knew it too, eventually leaving them after he wanted to do a cover of Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness and the rest of the band didn’t.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Next up, he joins a group called The King Bees as their singer. The next part of the story is literally the maddest thing I’ve ever heard.
David Jones, with his dad, wrote a letter to a fella called John Bloom - a successful entrepreneur who had made his fortune selling white goods. The letter ended with the following sentence -
“If you can sell my group the way you sell washing machines, you’ll be on to a winner!”
I did warn you. It’s basically the equivalent of sending your demo to Comet.
Remarkably, though, it worked. Bloom was charmed and passed the letter on to his friend Les Conn, who actually did have a track record in managing artists and had nothing to do with fridge freezers at all. Conn went to see The King Bees live and, whilst he thought they were mostly terrible, he was impressed with Jones. So much so that he gets them a record deal and they release a single called Lisa Jane.
But again, they weren’t very good.
The single fails to chart and Jones, impatient, decides to leave his second band and join his third - The Mannish Boys. As you may have come to expect by now, they didn’t get anywhere either - they were basically a '60s version of The Ordinary Boys which was the last thing anyone needed back then. They did however have a fella in the band who went on to create the weird '80s TV show Metal Mickey and so, for that reason alone, I thought they deserved a paragraph.
His next band though, David Jones and The Lower Third, only warrant a sentence - i.e. they were slightly better than The Mannish Boys but without the Metal Mickey angle.
Around this time Jones also has a brief spell in The Small Faces until they decide to get rid of him because he liked Bob Dylan too much - obviously the worst reason to ever sack anyone from a band ever.
So, finally, after jettisoning virtually every band in the '60s, Jones decides to try his luck as a solo artist. In the process, he also changes his name to David Bowie.
“Ah now we’re getting somewhere!” I hear you say.
Well, sort of.
David Bowie’s debut album, brilliantly called David Bowie, was a typical piece of late '60s English whimsy and psychedelia - songs about Laughing Gnomes disastrously mixed with music hall numbers about the Moors Murders. Unsurprisingly, such material also failed to trouble the charts and the whole thing wasn’t helped by an album cover showcasing one of THOSE haircuts.
It would be his last release for two years.
For the first time, his natural positivity now deserts him and he immerses himself in other pursuits for a while - namely dancing, listening to Jacques Brel and, in what must have been his lowest ebb, a bit of miming. But mostly he’s in a world of his own, one of his friends at the time brilliantly describing him as "the sort of bloke who wouldn’t talk about the weather or the latest Who single”.
By all accounts he then spends most of 1968 sitting with his legs crossed waiting for something to happen. And finally it does - he smokes a load of pot and goes to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The song he wrote afterwards, Space Oddity, represented a temporary breakthrough. Not only was it the first time a song came naturally to him, it was also the first time he wasn’t trying to catch a trend. It was different, it had its own sound, and it was REALLY good. Rick Wakeman, who played Mellotron on the song, said it was one of the few times in his career that the hairs on the back of his neck stood up - an anecdote made all the more believable when you actually consider the rest of Rick Wakeman’s career.
Once the BBC realised the Apollo 11 astronauts were home safely, and wouldn’t stuck be in space forever, they added it to the playlist.
It reached number 5 in the charts.
At last - it’s starting to happen.
Bowie then makes alliances with two people who are crucial to what happens next - a wife (Angie) who he meets in a Chinese Restaurant and a hotshot guitarist (Mick Ronson) who was living in Hull and creosoting a fence at the time. Bowie turned up, asked him if he wanted to be in his band, and he obviously said yes.
Both would have a massive influence - Ronson becoming Bowie’s left hand man for the next four years and Angie working wonders with Bowie’s wardrobe, not to mention his hair. There’s a lovely picture of them at the time - strolling around Beckenham, hatching plans and looking like nothing on earth.
You can only wonder what the baby was wearing.
The next album, The Man Who Sold The World, is again an improvement on what’s come before but it still lacks something. Now, you can see where it was going. Then, I’m not sure that you could. Bowie was in danger of being classed as a “one hit wonder” - that guy who wrote that good song about Space a couple of years ago but hasn’t done much since.
And then, massive drum roll, huge deep breath, he finally does it - he moves his piano into a different room in his house and writes some of the best songs ever. Sometimes that’s all you need to do. For all the talk of the muse and the complexities of the creative process, sometimes all you need to do is try a different room.
The result, of course, was Hunky Dory - the best morning album of all time.
What he does next, though, is brilliant.
Hunky Dory hasn’t even been released, he hasn’t yet wallowed in acclaim and adoration, but he’s off already with a new collection of songs that travel in a different direction. For his next album he takes Hunky Dory on a night out - eyebrows arched and dressed to kill. The past is forgotten and, like a new man, he struts around town like no one has ever strutted around town before or since.
He glows in the dark, drawing ALL the attention.
We’re nearly there, it’s almost happened.
Before recording the album, he debuts it live in a small club in Aylesbury. He takes to the stage nervous - dressed in baggy black culottes, red platform boots, and a woman’s beige jacket. With his new band behind him, they begin tentatively before finally taking off, spectacularly. The place goes mad, Bowie surges with confidence, and says to a journalist afterwards - “That was great. And when I come back, I’m going to be completely different”
I know. I know.
It’s because you know you’re about to fall for him. Because, you know, and HE knows, that’s he’s about to become BOWIE.
He records the album, in a basement below an escort agency, and nails Suffragette City, Starman, and Rock and Roll Suicide in one day. He isn’t messing about anymore, he tells everyone he’s going to be huge and that he’s going to be EVERYWHERE.
He still hasn’t even released Hunky Dory yet but, he knows. He absolutely fucking knows.
His wife suggests a new haircut and the band go shopping for boiler suits and wrestling boots. As I said, he wasn’t messing about anymore. He was all in.
Now he goes back to Aylesbury to fulfill his promise.
The queues are around the block because of what he did last time but, now, he goes further. He takes to the stage, without any nerves at all, and he launches Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars at the eager crowd. Now there’s no doubt. Now the audience know as well.
He walks off stage and says, to the same journalist as before, “I told you it would be different.”
The headline in the local paper the next day, a headline that had been such a long time coming, finally gives us the perfect ending -
“A Star is Born”
He’d done it.
The excited child, the “pleasant idler”, the bit part, and the one hit wonder. He’d been through it all, with a smile on his face, and had finally arrived.
And now he was here to stay. Forever.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Ziggy Stardust.
In a retrospective review, Pitchfork gave it 10/10
Rolling Stone Magazine rated it the 35th best album of all time.
So, over to you Stewart. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
I have listened to thousands of albums.
This year alone so far I have listened, all the way through, to 44. I didn’t like a lot of them. But for the record, some of them were the new one from The Owl Service, Crumbling Ghost’s Five Songs, The Golden Void’s Berkana, The Fall’s Wise Old Man and loads of old stuff like six Stiff Little Fingers albums, a compilation of Australian glam rock, Sam Gopal’s Escalator, every Byrds album, a dj clash of Dillinger And Trinity, Van Morrison’s 1967 New York Bang session, eight Warren Zevon albums, Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, Yamasuki ‘s Le Monde Fabuleux de Yamasuki, every REM album in order as a kind of endurance test, and, for the first time, The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust.
I don’t know why I have never listened to it, or indeed any David Bowie album. I’m not necessarily an inverted snob who avoids the popular or the canonical – I like Dylan, Miles Davis, Neil Young. But I don’t think I ever really got Bowie and I’m not sure I ever will.
I was already listening to post-punk noise on Peel when I first encountered David Bowie on Top Of The Pops in the early ‘80s. In my mind I remember, because I didn’t know anything about him, and because he was in a Pierrot hat dancing around on a beach to some synth music, thinking he was one of the New Romantics like Duran Duran and Visage, who I disliked on principle. But this must be some kind of false memory syndrome, because Ashes To Ashes predates all that stuff by a year or so. So I don’t know what I remember really.
Either way, as a teenager I’d already bypassed Bowie and had found, via The Fall and the songs covered on early REM b-sides, all those counter-culture legends (The Velvet Underground, Krautrock, Stooges) that Bowie is praised for providing a pop-friendly gateway into. I simply didn’t know he had form, and nothing I saw in his 80s pop-soul incarnations – Let’s Dance, Dancing In The Street, Peace On Earth, Modern Love - encouraged me to think he would be for me. I thought he was like Howard Jones or someone. I didn’t understand.
People tell me if I’d encountered the Berlin trilogy as an impressionable younger man I’d have been sold on Bowie, but I just didn’t know he was this ‘figure’ and by the time I did it was too late to take him on board really, too late to get past the legend.
I remember going to the Phoenix festival in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1996 and not even being tempted to watch him, seeing instead an amazing punk-psyche set by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, a dramatic meltdown from The Fall, The Cocteau Twins in full “sonic cathedral” ™ mode, The Sex Pistols’ unexpected second coming, The Dirty Three, the now venerated Earl Brutus with their art school chip shop aesthetic, The Chemical Brothers, Goldie and the late great Terry Callier, and I still wouldn’t trade having seen any of those sets for Bowie in his drum and bass period in a Union Jack frock coat.
People a generation older than me, best friends, who I trust and respect, spoke upon Bowie’s demise with heartfelt sincerity of how he got them through terrible times, his alien rock star persona speaking to all these confused seventies kids, but I think maybe I was an era too late to buy into it.
Indeed, in 2011, in a supposedly funny article for the Observer about what it means to be ‘an artist’, I believe it was I who wrote…
“For example, if viewed as an “artist”, David Bowie makes no sense at all. He seems to be little more than a perpetually spooked moth in slip-ons, sputtering, in a series of self-shaming leaps towards imagined relevance, from one swiftly guttering fad to another – grunge metal, drum and bass and having a skellington face. But imagine Bowie instead as a cunning lichen, an adaptive tuber or a semi-sentient mould, endlessly reshaping himself in search of the moisture of acclaim, and it is easy to understand him.”
That was what I thought then, in my ignorance, albeit exaggerated for comic effect.
But now I have listened to Ziggy Stardust, at least three times.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
All I knew of the album, honestly, was Starman, Ziggy Stardust and Sufragette City, so the thing as a whole piece in of itself was mainly new to me. But you can’t come to it clean, especially now, after all the obituaries.
I don’t like it to be honest. I’m told it’s supposed to be about an alien who becomes a pop star but I can’t make head or tail of the story.
I hate his voice on the second one, Soul Love, like a weird old lady. It’s so reedy and bloodless and thin. I don’t like the honking sax sound and the showbizzy horn solo.
I hate the opening lines of the next one, Moonage Daydream. “I’m an alligator, I’m a momapoppa coming for you. I’m a space invader. I be a rock and rolling bitch for you. Keep your mouth shut. You’re spooking like a big monkey bird.” This kind of thing is ok if it sounds like spontaneous madness – like say Iggy Pop’s Africa Man – but it sounds really prepared and calculated, like he actually thought it was worth saying that he was an alligator, a momopoppa, and a space invader. Time’s been unkind to words like that. Generations of pop-surrealists (Noel Fielding for example), have made them absurd. I can’t get back into it after that opening. It annoys me so much.
I know this Starman one, of course, and quite like it, but my kids got fed up with me having it on in the car and the five year old was singing her own words over it today, “I’m a poopoo sitting in the loo” and stuff like that, which I can’t get out of my mind. I like the one note morse code guitar lick before the chorus – like the lead in Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman – but I hate the handclaps and the bendy lead guitar sound.
I can’t even think of anything to say about It Ain’t Easy, or Lady Stardust or Star. It’s just not my sort of music. It’s not anything I want. I know lots of people really love this sort of thing. I think it’s a taste issue. It’s not necessarily bad…. I just can’t get it. To be honest, I envy people getting such a lot out of it. I wish I could be transported as powerfully by it all as others have. It’s annoying me now that I’m not seeing it, like when you can’t focus on a magic eye picture.
I really hate Hang On To Yourself. I think that kind of glam-pop thing with an old rock and roll type riff under it is probably my least favorite kind of music. It just sounds like Mud or The Rubettes to me, but not as good. It’s been a real chore having to get through this middle bit of the album over and over again. I never want to have to hear these songs again.
I really like Ziggy Stardust. The lead guitar is brilliant. On my friend James’ cd of the album, which we had on in the car, there was a demo of it as an extra track, and you can see that all the memorable musical parts were there in Bowie’s vision of it, just waiting to be fleshed out. The lyrics get on my nerves – Weird and Gilly, some cat from Japan, a fly that tries to break people’s balls and the leper messiah. For fuck’s sake. The singing annoys me but I like the music so much that it survives it.
Weirdly, the first time I ever heard this song was Bauhaus doing it on TOTP in 1982. I loved it. I didn’t know it was a Bowie song, I thought it was one of theirs. It’s still the definitive version for me, which I appreciate is ridiculous, but that’s how I first encountered it. Bauhaus say more to me, because of who I was at the age I heard them, than Bowie, even though it’s clear that Bowie is ‘better’, objectively. Likewise if I had a choice between Bad Manners’ first album and any Bowie record for a desert island disc, I’d take Ska’n’B because it would make me really happy to remember loving it as a pre-teen rude boy where as Bowie has no emotional ties for me.
Lip up fatty!!!
Actually, I think Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead is genuinely better than this whole Bowie album. I’ve just put it on. I feel purified. It’s cleared all this glam out of my tubes. It’s a proper pop art cultural collision that Bauhaus single, and it’s loose enough to feel spontaneous, whilst still being conceptual. It makes the whole of this album seem stilted and stiff.
Suffragette City is pretty good. I like the insistent piano. But it’s International Women’s Day as I write this and I can’t see that it has anything to say about the Suffragettes.
I don’t like the last one either. I don’t really like this whole album much. I have a quite visceral response to it. It makes me feel physically sick throughout and I’ve not enjoyed living with it. It’s not Bowie’s fault, but because of all that Jimmy Saville Top of the Pops footage that whole early 70s glam rock guitar sound now just makes me think of children being harmed. That’s what it reminds me of, and I can’t get past it, which is awful, but people get a similar thing with Wagner. Something becomes associated in your mind with something and you’re stuck with it, sadly. There’s not much you can do about it. It’s pavlovian.
Although a nice thing happened to me recently – and to believe this you have to bear in mind that I don’t really know what’s going on in popular culture. A few days after Bowie’s death I was in an HMV somewhere on tour and there was this music on – a strange sepulchral space jazz, a kind of weird cold ambient music with harsh atonal free saxophone playing and clusters of beats, like pebbles or the milky way. It was like the sort of experimental music I might buy but, inexplicably, it had the production values of expensive popular music. I loved it. I asked the assistant what it was. “David Bowie,” he said, incredulous that anyone could not know, Blackstar.
I found it genuinely amazing that this was Bowie. I went home and watched it on Youtube, but the video was prescriptive nonsense, full of advertising type overstated imagery, which diminished and permanently disfigured my memory of that incredible moment of coming across – and being astounded by – Bowie in ignorant innocence.
Would you listen to it again?
I will never listen to this album again in my life. I will give the copy I bought away. There are 100s of records I’ve never listened to properly on my shelves in front of me. I would rather listen to something I have never heard before and didn’t know what it was than any Bowie album.
A mark out of 10?
This isn’t fair. It’s a significant, groundbreaking and well made record. It’s just not to my taste. Thousands of other things are. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been asked to think about it. It’s made me think that disliking something doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t any good, and vice versa.
RAM Rating – 9/10
Guest Rating - This isn’t fair
Overall Rating – 9/10 plus “This isn’t fair”, divided by two.
So that was Week 60 and that was Stewart Lee. Turns out he’d never heard Ziggy Stardust before because all the previous incarnations of Bowie has never appealed to him – particularly the one at The Phoenix Festival. So we made him to listen to it and he didn’t like this incarnation either and would rather be on a desert island listening to Bauhaus and Bad Manners. I can only hope that, somewhere now, Pete Murphy and Buster Bloodvessel are high-fiving each other in delight.
Here’s some other bits and bobs that Stewart is involved in -
Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is currently on BBC2
His co-writer Baconface currently hosts Global Globules on Resonance 104.4 fm
Finally, he has curated at All Tomorrow’s Parties at Pontins Prestatyn 15-17 April, to which tickets are on sale
Next week, we’re having a week off if that’s ok with everyone but we’ll return on March 25th where Lavinia Greenlaw will listen to something from 1977 for the first time.
Lots of love
Ruth and Martin
xx
Stewart Lee
2016-03-11T23:02:21+00:00
The RaM Music Club is a blog where each week they pick a guest who chooses a critically acclaimed album they've never listened to. The guest explains why they've never listened to it, laying out any potential prejudice in advance. i.e. "I've never liked the cut of Pink Floyd's jib" or "Mark E Smith frightens me". The guest has to listen to the album at least three times, this acclaimed album that they've never bothered listening to, and then tell us whether it was worth it or not. Who’s Stewart when he’s at home? I am 48 in April. I was adopted into a nice family as a small child, and benefitted from a charity bung and part scholarship to a private school, which was followed by reading English at Oxford University. All these factors contributed, I think, to a confused sense of self, an uneasy notion of being out of place, an outsider even, and yet despite these feelings, I never felt it necessary to seek comfort in the music of David Bowie. Today, I am a stand-up comedian by trade, but I reviewed records for a national newspaper from 1995-2015, and have written for Q, Mojo, Uncut, Bucketful of Brains and The Wire, and yet I have never knowingly listened to a David Bowie album. Stewart’s Top 3 albums ever? Today it’s The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour (which is always number 1) and Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, and Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand. What great album has he never heard before? The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars by David Bowie Released in 1972 Before we get to David, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Ziggy Stardust Another Lesson in Persistence. One day in 1955, Haywood...
The Tom Waits of 2008 has ventured far from the conventional balladry his career began with in the early Seventies, and deep into the forest of weird, faux-experimental fairground music. Tonight he appears as a dishevelled hobo, complete with Tourettes spasms and ticks, standing in a circus ring. Birds have eaten his breadcrumb trail. There’s no way back out of the woods.
The Glitter and Doom Tour, its UK dates limited to two nights in Edinburgh Playhouse, costs £102.50 a ticket, and punters are required to show photo i.d on arrival. We were offered unsolicited advice on the unsuitability of ours after we had been let in, which I suppose is all part of the service for such a high ticket price. Waits takes the stage, the set resembling a carnival in a junkyard, forty minutes late, just as the slow handclap started, and then orchestrates the ebb and flow of applause. He stamps his feet. Pre-positioned dust rises in a cloud. He sings, all the lyrics rendered incomprehensible by the growl that grows more guttural with the years. The band clump their clownish reels, a square’s idea of weird. Every shift in mood, every gesture Waits makes, is shadowed by superbly slick and subtle lighting changes. But everything is calculated and pre-ordained. This isn’t a gig. It’s a theatre piece. And Waits and his band are actors, playing the role of a band in an American Gothic fantasy. During Eyeball Kid Waits puts on a shiny hat which reflects the light. There’s a standing ovation. The Edinburgh Fringe starts next week. At The Standing Order pub there’s a guy called Mr Methane who can fart the national anthem. These people need to get out more.
The band leave. Waits sits at the piano. He tells a funny story about something that supposedly happened last time he was in Edinburgh, but like a visiting hack American comic who hasn’t done his local research, maintains it involved swallowing a ‘bullfrog’ in someone’s ‘yard’. Everyone laughs. He dismisses requests, - “Those are all requests, but they’re your requests” – and even though we appreciate he’s in character as a grouchy genius, a little humility wouldn’t go amiss at these prices. Waits plays Innocent When You Dream and hands the chorus over to the crowd, the one moment in the evening when something genuine seemed to happen, before the band, now augmented by his son Sullivan on bongos, return for a closing set of more rootsy, less contrived material. His son? Tom Waits could have a son, sure, but would the shaking hobo-clown-huckster, and could the hobo-clown-huckster’s son afford sneakers? What is it we are watching exactly? The artifice of Waits’ latter-day act makes it difficult to respond to emotionally, as you never feel you’re reaching anything real, but now it’s being compromised by inappropriate footwear. At least make the boy pretend to have a club foot or something.
Nonetheless, the crowd are ecstatic. Was it an example of the West End musical effect, where high prices mean the audience have already invested so heavily, both financially and emotionally, in the event that it can’t fail? Or, like the medicine show shysters of old, whose schtick Waits’ has appropriated, is the old devil just a master salesman?
Stewart Lee
2008-07-27T20:11:21+01:00
The Tom Waits of 2008 has ventured far from the conventional balladry his career began with in the early Seventies, and deep into the forest of weird, faux-experimental fairground music. Tonight he appears as a dishevelled hobo, complete with Tourettes spasms and ticks, standing in a circus ring. Birds have eaten his breadcrumb trail. There’s no way back out of the woods. The Glitter and Doom Tour, its UK dates limited to two nights in Edinburgh Playhouse, costs £102.50 a ticket, and punters are required to show photo i.d on arrival. We were offered unsolicited advice on the unsuitability of ours after we had been let in, which I suppose is all part of the service for such a high ticket price. Waits takes the stage, the set resembling a carnival in a junkyard, forty minutes late, just as the slow handclap started, and then orchestrates the ebb and flow of applause. He stamps his feet. Pre-positioned dust rises in a cloud. He sings, all the lyrics rendered incomprehensible by the growl that grows more guttural with the years. The band clump their clownish reels, a square’s idea of weird. Every shift in mood, every gesture Waits makes, is shadowed by superbly slick and subtle lighting changes. But everything is calculated and pre-ordained. This isn’t a gig. It’s a theatre piece. And Waits and his band are actors, playing the role of a band in an American Gothic fantasy. During Eyeball Kid Waits puts on a shiny hat which reflects the light. There’s a standing ovation. The Edinburgh Fringe starts next week. At The Standing Order pub there’s a guy called Mr Methane who can fart the national anthem. These people need to get out more. The band leave. Waits sits at the piano. He tells a funny story about...
There may be little point to Channel 4's endless (and endlessly repeated) The 100 Best... shows but they have at least provided Stewart Lee - the man behind Jerry Springer: The Opera - with a title for his latest stand-up tour.
Lee is, he's happy to tell you, the 41st best stand-up comedian of all time. He's hardly the 41st most high profile comic in the world but this show - sold out last year when it debuted in Edinburgh - does give you some idea as to why he's so respected.
It's no surprise that Lee, who withstood howls of protest over the "blasphemous" Jerry Springer, borders on the political, but - and this is where so many "serious" comedians go wrong - he is hilarious too.
He may be highly rated by Channel 4 but his own mother thinks Tom O'Connor is funnier. And he may be one of the top 50 best comics of all time but (he says with some bitterness) the BBC tore up its contract for a six-show Lee series and he can't even sell out his Guild Hall gig.
He's no observational comic (thankfully) and the laughs here come from the sincerity and the humour he injects into stories.
In fact, Lee is best on satirical ground and one of the biggest - if most unexpected - laughs of the night comes from his take on the Ipswich deaths, currently the subject of a crown court trial. A Daily Mail columnist was appalled by some newspapers' tendencies to refer to the victims as "women who worked as prostitutes" and not simply "prostitutes". But to what lengths would he go, asks Lee, before suggesting the columnist might head to the victims' graves in the dead of night to change their tombstones.
If it all sounds distasteful, then Lee is not for you. But he didn't become the 41st best comic of all time by playing it safe.
Stewart Lee
2008-02-20T21:59:21+00:00
There may be little point to Channel 4's endless (and endlessly repeated) The 100 Best... shows but they have at least provided Stewart Lee - the man behind Jerry Springer: The Opera - with a title for his latest stand-up tour. Lee is, he's happy to tell you, the 41st best stand-up comedian of all time. He's hardly the 41st most high profile comic in the world but this show - sold out last year when it debuted in Edinburgh - does give you some idea as to why he's so respected. It's no surprise that Lee, who withstood howls of protest over the "blasphemous" Jerry Springer, borders on the political, but - and this is where so many "serious" comedians go wrong - he is hilarious too. He may be highly rated by Channel 4 but his own mother thinks Tom O'Connor is funnier. And he may be one of the top 50 best comics of all time but (he says with some bitterness) the BBC tore up its contract for a six-show Lee series and he can't even sell out his Guild Hall gig. He's no observational comic (thankfully) and the laughs here come from the sincerity and the humour he injects into stories. In fact, Lee is best on satirical ground and one of the biggest - if most unexpected - laughs of the night comes from his take on the Ipswich deaths, currently the subject of a crown court trial. A Daily Mail columnist was appalled by some newspapers' tendencies to refer to the victims as "women who worked as prostitutes" and not simply "prostitutes". But to what lengths would he go, asks Lee, before suggesting the columnist might head to the victims' graves in the dead of night to change their tombstones. If it all...
During Margaret Thatcher's funeral on Wednesday, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, the bishop of London, boasted to all and sundry of how the late prime minister had once physically restrained him when he lunged at some pulverised ducks' breasts. He had intended to cram into his mouth. Fatty duck pâté, it transpired, was a forbidden fruit of Thatcherism.
Like thousands of Thatcher refuseniks across the land, rendered impotent with irritation by biased media coverage and the insensitive splendour of her highly politicised funeral, I immediately rang up my local Waitrose and ordered a delivery of every punnet of duck pâté they had in stock. They could censor our views; they could rewrite the history books; but they could not prevent us pushing the very fatty pâté that Thatcher so despised up to the top of the weekly pâté charts. Or could they?
The Daily Mail saw the skyward sales of duck pâté as evidence of a "campaign organised by left-wing activists", but the truth is the anti-Thatcher pâté protest took off largely of its own accord. Nobody needed to be nudged. Even Morrissey, a staunch vegetarian, suspended his squeamishness and was pictured in the press the day following the bishop's indiscreet poultry paste revelation licking his 11th punnet of duck pâté clean, a beaming smile on his famously miserable face.
By Thursday evening, duck pâté looked likely to be the week's top selling pâté, and the BBC, cowed by the Conservatives as usual, moved into damage-limitation mode. Questions were asked. If, on Saturday, duck pâté was the nation's favourite pâté, would the hostess of BBC Radio 4's Weekly Pâté Round-up, Nigella Lawson, be gobbling it up as normal alongside the other 49 pâtés in the chart, or would a censorious exception be made? The controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams, was grilled on air about pâté by the BBC's own Samira Ahmed.
"It is normal procedure, as you know," Williams explained, "for Nigella to eat a standard Waitrose punnet of each of the 50 chart pâtés live on air during the programme, while describing its taste to the listeners in a breathless eroticised voice. On Saturday, if the duck pâté is the people's most popular exotic paste as expected, she will instead sample only a teaspoonful of the protest pâté, after a brief chat with Nick Robinson and Heston Blumenthal, aimed at contextualising the now politicised foodstuff for confused or vegan listeners."
Meanwhile, untroubled by the possible reduction in the licence fee should Cameron's Conservatives retain power indefinitely, Sky News was brazenly showing a loop of the channel's trophy comedy stars, Ruth Jones and Robert Lindsay, lapping up endless punnets of duck pâté at a sunlit seaside cafe. "A lot of my actor friends said they wouldn't appear on Sky TV eating loads of punnets of duck pâté," Lindsay said to Jones, over and over again, "but now they are saying they wish they had and that they have seen that they themselves are weak and that I am right and much better than them."
On Friday, when the duck pâté finally hit the No 1 slot, social media-savvy Conservatives, led by the would-be personality Louise Mensch, staged a belated fight back. Mensch tweeted a picture of her husband, the Metallica manager Peter Mensch, allowing her his golden credit card to buy herself a pallet piled high with punnets of pâté de foie gras at an all-night New York deli. She encouraged her followers to do the same, hoping to "knock the miserable lefties' duck muck off the top spot".
Mensch's subversive idea spurted through the Twitterverse like a frozen spear of urine falling from an aircraft toilet, and soon pâté de foie gras was itself shooting up Nigella's pâté chart. Even David Cameron himself admitted to having bought some, which he planned to smear joyfully over other foodstuffs later that evening in the company of Helena Bonham Carter and her husband, Morbius the Living Vampire, both of whom he was sure would enjoy the chance to eat pâté de foie gras and celebrate the life of a woman who, whatever you thought of her politics, was simply remarkable and had saved us from the unions.
Overnight, duck pâté partisans noticed essential flaws in Mensch's campaign. Wasn't pâté de foie gras made from the livers of geese? And weren't geese, like ducks, both members of the Anatidae family? Was the goose sufficiently different from the duck for the purchase of its bloated liver to count as a protest against the purchase of the duck pâté? It was even rumoured that "foie gras" was the French for "fat liver". Wasn't it the fat content of the pulverised ducks' breasts that had led Thatcher to prevent the bishop from eating them? And yet here was Mensch urging her supporters to buy, as a tribute to the late fat-loathing prime minister, a pâté specifically named after its high fat content, and which contained even more fat than the pâté that had sickened the baroness when the bishop of London tried to touch it? It was as if Louise Mensch was some kind of stupid, embarrassing, feckless idiot.
Sky news interviewed three diffident French pâté de foie gras farmers early on Saturday morning, who refused to be drawn on the fat content of the pâté de foie gras, the meaning of the phrase pâté de foie gras, or even the exact species of the bird from which pâté de foie gras was made. Giving nothing away, they were able to watch pâté de foie gras sales continue to grow, the pâté's naive Tory purchasers unaware of the irony of their actions.
Despite the best efforts of those aiming to register their displeasure, on Saturday afternoon, Nigella Lawson revealed the duck pâté to have been displaced at the top of her pâté chart by a plantain pâté with Reggae Reggae sauce, made by the celebrity chef Levi Roots. She duly licked up little more than a sliver of the duck pâté and handed over to Nick Robinson, whose choice of language nonetheless toed the official BBC Tory establishment line.
The protesters, apparently, had "failed" to get the duck pâté to No 1. Perhaps Nick, or maybe we had succeeded in getting it to No 2 against all odds, without the benefit of a marketing campaign, and with the might of Louise Mensch against us. Like so many aspects of the Thatcher legacy, it's a matter of perspective.
Stewart Lee has curated The Alternative Comedy Experience for Comedy Central, Tuesdays at 11pm. And hundreds of new live dates are on sale now – visit stewartlee.co.uk
Stewart Lee
2013-04-20T13:49:37+01:00
During Margaret Thatcher's funeral on Wednesday, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, the bishop of London, boasted to all and sundry of how the late prime minister had once physically restrained him when he lunged at some pulverised ducks' breasts. He had intended to cram into his mouth. Fatty duck pâté, it transpired, was a forbidden fruit of Thatcherism. Like thousands of Thatcher refuseniks across the land, rendered impotent with irritation by biased media coverage and the insensitive splendour of her highly politicised funeral, I immediately rang up my local Waitrose and ordered a delivery of every punnet of duck pâté they had in stock. They could censor our views; they could rewrite the history books; but they could not prevent us pushing the very fatty pâté that Thatcher so despised up to the top of the weekly pâté charts. Or could they? The Daily Mail saw the skyward sales of duck pâté as evidence of a "campaign organised by left-wing activists", but the truth is the anti-Thatcher pâté protest took off largely of its own accord. Nobody needed to be nudged. Even Morrissey, a staunch vegetarian, suspended his squeamishness and was pictured in the press the day following the bishop's indiscreet poultry paste revelation licking his 11th punnet of duck pâté clean, a beaming smile on his famously miserable face. By Thursday evening, duck pâté looked likely to be the week's top selling pâté, and the BBC, cowed by the Conservatives as usual, moved into damage-limitation mode. Questions were asked. If, on Saturday, duck pâté was the nation's favourite pâté, would the hostess of BBC Radio 4's Weekly Pâté Round-up, Nigella Lawson, be gobbling it up as normal alongside the other 49 pâtés in the chart, or would a censorious exception be made? The controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams,...
8th July - The Secret Spy Cops' Ball - Rob Newman, Evelyn Mok, Mark Steel, Stewart Lee, Jackson's Lane, London. For women tricked into relationships w undercover police. Most of the performers on the bill are adopted orphans, oddly. https://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/whats-on/the-secret-spycops-ball
Science, music, comedy, poor time-keeping and wonder collide in Space Shambles, presented in association with The Cosmic Shambles Network™ ®.
Part of the Festival of Science: Space.
Legendary astronaut Chris Hadfield™ and Robin Ince ® (host of Radio 4's Infinite Monkey Cage) are your hosts for the evening, plus an eclectic mess of surprise special guests for comedy lovers, music fans and science enthusiasts alike.
We are excited to announce that the first headliners joining us in June include Apollo™ ® astronaut Rusty Schweickart, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili and science-comedy phenomenon Festival of the Spoken Nerd!
In the tradition of Nine Lessons and The Christmas Compendium of Reason, these huge shows have included guest appearances from Professor Brian Cox, Professor Alice Roberts, Charlotte Church, Skeletal Family, Hugh Grant, Dr Spunkfield Leominster, Pristeen Vagamutt, King Tinkale Omoono, Apollo™ ® astronaut Randy Vanwarmer, Sproutmaster Sprat, Dripknob The Weeping Physicist, The Drunken Astronomers, Laika and Uranus, The Gay Space Mice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, The Mad Aryabhatas, The Metaphysical Circus, Schooly D, Principal Ince's Magic Theatre, Mike Peters & The Alarm, Albert's Wanking Rocket Monkees, The Astronomers Royale, and Dara O'Briain.
Neal Jackson of Post Nearly Press conducted a lengthy interview with me, available as a stand-alone book here www.postnearlypress.com
I Arrogantly Recommend
1) Ben Moor - Pronoun Trouble. New show from the performance art genius.
13th June 2018
7.30pm Crystal Palace Festival
Bookseller Crow on the Hill
50 Westow Street
London SE19 3AF A wonderful bookshop, and you'll be able to buy some of the books mentioned in the talk here.
Just £5 tickets, and that will get you a drink and nibbles too! TICKETS ON SALE SOON
29th June - 1st July 2018 Also Festival
Compton Verney
Warwickshire
A compact weekend of terrific speakers, musicians, performers and makers - I'm thrilled to be invited. TICKETS
15th July 2018 Idler Festival
Fenton House
Hampstead Grove,
London NW3 6SP
This will be a wonderful weekend of talks by fascinating folk like Michael Palin, Sally Phillips and Carole Cadwalladr.
And I'll be performing a gentle Sunday morning version as part of the celebration of intelligent distraction. TICKETS
16th - 19th August 2018 Green Man Festival
Crickhowell
Brecon Beacons
The lecture can be located in the brainy enclave of Einstein's Garden.
I'm so glad to be returning to Green Man; this is always an amazing weekend of music, inspiration, fresh air and laughter. TICKETS
2) Drenched - Third Man Theatre Company.
I liked Third Man's work so much I became a patron of the company, essentially a vehicle for the visions of Dan Frost. They have a new show with dates so far in London this month and Edinburgh in August.
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.
Old Red Lion Theatre, Islington
2nd & 3rd July @ 7pm
4th July @ 9.30pm
Edinburgh Festival 2018
1-27 August - Pleasance Courtyard @ 3pm
3) Giant Sand. Howe Gelb's unexpectedly reactivated desert rock outfit.
5th June - Under The Bridge, London.
9th - Whelans, Dublin.
10th Oran Moor, Glasgow.
11th - Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
4) Bardo Pond.
Mind blowing space trance rockers.
June 6th - 100 Club, London.
8th - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds.
5) Andy Moor.
Improv set from Ex guitarist. Café Oto, London.
7) The Rebel.
Weekly June Wednesday residency at The Windmill, Brixton, London, by the provocateur/troubadour/auteur and ex-Country Teaser.
8) Alan Wilkinson/Steve Noble/John Edwards.
Peerless sax/drums/bass free jazz trio.
Cafe Oto, London. June 26th.
9) Wolves In The Throne Room.
The environmentally concerned doom metal band play the following UK dates
JUN 23 The Garage London
JUN 25 La Belle Angele Edinburgh
JUN 26 Corporation Sheffield
JUN 27 The Invisible Wind Factory Liverpool,
JUN 28 The Globe Cardiff
10) PIGSPURT'S DAUGHTER
Daisy Campbell's memories of her father the performance art/comedy innvator Ken Campbell, is at Hampstead Theatre 11th-14th July TICKETS
11) 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
12) WILSON DIXON
Jesse Griffin's dead-on parody of an American outlaw country singer, WILSON DIXON, has an intimate UK tour
June 2018
Monday June 25th - Soho Theatre, London - 020 7478 0100 - 9.30pm
Tuesday June 26th - Soho Theatre, London - 020 7478 0100 - 9.30pm
Wednesday June 27th - Soho Theatre, London - 020 7478 0100 - 9.30pm
Thursday June 28th - Soho Theatre, London - 020 7478 0100 - 9.30pm
Friday June 29th - Soho Theatre, London - 020 7478 0100 - 9.30pm
Saturday June 30th - Soho Theatre, London - 020 7478 0100 - 9.30pm Booking link
July 2018
Sunday July 1st - The Stand Comedy Club, Glasgow - 0141 212 3389 - 4.30pm Tickets
Sunday July 1st - The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh - 0131 558 7272 - 7.30pm Tickets
Tuesday July 3rd - The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh - 0131 558 7272 - 7.30pm Tickets
Wednesday July 4th - Chapter Arts, Cardiff - 029 2030 4400 - 7.30pm Tickets
Stewart Lee
2018-06-06T00:24:58+01:00
BENEFIT SHOWS 8th July - The Secret Spy Cops' Ball - Rob Newman, Evelyn Mok, Mark Steel, Stewart Lee, Jackson's Lane, London. For women tricked into relationships w undercover police. Most of the performers on the bill are adopted orphans, oddly. https://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/whats-on/the-secret-spycops-ball 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 Space Shambles - Royal Albert Hall, June 15th. Science, music, comedy, poor time-keeping and wonder collide in Space Shambles, presented in association with The Cosmic Shambles Network™ ®. Part of the Festival of Science: Space. Legendary astronaut Chris Hadfield™ and Robin Ince ® (host of Radio 4's Infinite Monkey Cage) are your hosts for the evening, plus an eclectic mess of surprise special guests for comedy lovers, music fans and science enthusiasts alike. We are excited to announce that the first headliners joining us in June include Apollo™ ® astronaut Rusty Schweickart, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili and science-comedy phenomenon Festival of the Spoken Nerd! In the tradition of Nine Lessons and The Christmas Compendium of Reason, these huge shows have included guest appearances from Professor Brian Cox, Professor Alice Roberts, Charlotte Church, Skeletal Family, Hugh Grant, Dr Spunkfield Leominster, Pristeen Vagamutt, King Tinkale Omoono, Apollo™ ® astronaut Randy Vanwarmer, Sproutmaster Sprat, Dripknob The Weeping Physicist, The Drunken Astronomers, Laika and Uranus, The Gay Space Mice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, The Mad Aryabhatas, The Metaphysical Circus, Schooly D, Principal Ince's Magic Theatre, Mike Peters & The Alarm, Albert's Wanking Rocket Monkees, The Astronomers Royale, and Dara O'Briain. As the show comes to the Royal Albert Hall for the very first time, expect an impressive collection of familiar faces - there's no telling who else might show up in this secret stew of stars. https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/events/2018/robin-ince-and-chris-hadfields-space-shambles/ Home Town Tales...
When you see a lot of comedy gigs like I do something that is a bit different usually has a head start. And Soiree in a Cemetery was very different.
Ticket-holders only discovered the location of this one-off in the afternoon, which meant that excitement was building up even before arriving. There was a bit of anxiety about the weather as autumn had decided to chip in, but the rain stopped, the sky cleared and, as long as you were well-insulated by overcoats and alcohol a good time was had by all.
Tower Hamlets Cemetery was a pretty spectacular setting. We were told that there were around 40 bodies under each gravestone due to popular demand.
There were more people buried here than are currently alive in the borough. Having arrived, sat down and enjoyed a welcoming song from the British Humanist Choir (pictured below) and a peanut butter and banana muffin from the non-ironic Women's Institute stall we were all taken on a tour, along paths lit by candles in paper bags.
This was a little like Arthur Smith's old tours of Edinburgh crossed with a ghost train ride. Little pocket performances popped up along the way. Jessica Pearce dancing with fire here, an undertaker there. Henry Maynard with a grisly skull puppet sitting on a tomb, screaming brides running past. It was all very evocative and atmospheric if a little crowded - the event sold out and around 400 people were squeezed in.
After this it was back to our al fresco benches where spooky folksome duo Gentle Folk delivered eeerily catchy songs about prostitutes and lost graveyards in Southwark. Poetess/host/laughter therapist Vivienne Soan, of Nunhead variety club Pull The Other One (who put the night together with Adam Taffler of special event organisers @adamotionsuk) compered, getting everyone to release endorphins by giggling hysterically.
Elsewhere her husband Martin Soan went around shaking everyone's hands - he's usually in naked balloon dance troupe The Greatest Show On Legs but this wasn't the climate for stripping off or a location for gratuitous nudity.
And then it was time for the headline act who didn't want to be called the headline act. Stewart Lee is currently doing gigs testing
out his material for the next series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. This time round he did his challenging routine subverting the stand-up trope of churning out gags about childhood memories with a recollection of being bullied in the school urinals.
It's a very funny routine pulling together Lee's own tropes of repetition, exaggeration and mock irritation.
It was a potentially tricky gig for Lee. This was probably the most comedy-literate easy-to-amuse audience he was ever going to get (he opened with an ironic remark of "tough gig") and there is a section in the set which depends on not getting a lot of laughs.
But with a bit of improvisation around his scripted material be pulled it off. He also got a fair number of chuckles out of a random insect flying across the makeshift stage just as he was building to his finale.
The eminence gris of stand-up said to me a few years ago that he tends to have phases where he goes in and out of fashion every seven years so he should be due for a fall any time now, but there was no sign of it last night. Yes, alright, I'll say it he was dead funny.
Lee had not wanted to be called the headline act and in fact he wasn't. He was followed by shadow puppeteer Matthew Robins who sang warped Tiger Lillies-style song-stories while images of flies and other animals danced around on the screen. A lovely end to a very special night.
I think the organisers will probably do more. Now, if they can only install radiators in the cemetery for their next event...
Stewart Lee
2014-10-05T21:25:37+01:00
When you see a lot of comedy gigs like I do something that is a bit different usually has a head start. And Soiree in a Cemetery was very different. Ticket-holders only discovered the location of this one-off in the afternoon, which meant that excitement was building up even before arriving. There was a bit of anxiety about the weather as autumn had decided to chip in, but the rain stopped, the sky cleared and, as long as you were well-insulated by overcoats and alcohol a good time was had by all. Tower Hamlets Cemetery was a pretty spectacular setting. We were told that there were around 40 bodies under each gravestone due to popular demand. There were more people buried here than are currently alive in the borough. Having arrived, sat down and enjoyed a welcoming song from the British Humanist Choir (pictured below) and a peanut butter and banana muffin from the non-ironic Women's Institute stall we were all taken on a tour, along paths lit by candles in paper bags. This was a little like Arthur Smith's old tours of Edinburgh crossed with a ghost train ride. Little pocket performances popped up along the way. Jessica Pearce dancing with fire here, an undertaker there. Henry Maynard with a grisly skull puppet sitting on a tomb, screaming brides running past. It was all very evocative and atmospheric if a little crowded - the event sold out and around 400 people were squeezed in. After this it was back to our al fresco benches where spooky folksome duo Gentle Folk delivered eeerily catchy songs about prostitutes and lost graveyards in Southwark. Poetess/host/laughter therapist Vivienne Soan, of Nunhead variety club Pull The Other One (who put the night together with Adam Taffler of special event organisers @adamotionsuk) compered, getting everyone...
What is wrong with the following gag? "John Whittingdale: a man who, if he saw the aurora borealis twinkling over a Scandinavian snowfield would only see a missed opportunity for a public-private finance initiative."
According to Stewart Lee's account of his critics' ("young comics") reaction to it, quite a lot of his peers think there is quite a lot wrong with it – because it doesn't really make any sense. You can't conceive of any sort of PFI that could be attached to the Northern Lights, and such a thing would be beyond the ingenuity of the supposed philistine Whittingdale. So, no, it doesn't "work", and so in that sense it cannot be a joke, but the audience found it funny and, as Lee asserts during his stand-up shtick, it is a joke because it has the structure and rhythm of a joke.
But then, in an acrid interview with his script editor, Chris Morris, Lee admits that the joke doesn't work, and grovels for forgiveness for its abject nature – "don't think I'm not ashamed of it", and admits that he wrote another bit on the end of the joke about it not being a joke just to try to cover up his initial comic incompetence. That, too, is very funny.
Lee, then, with Morris, is the only comedian – and that does seem an inadequate term for this intelligent, thoughtful, almost philosophical figure – who thoroughly critiques his act as he is doing it, and then critiques the critique, in his interviews with Morris, sometimes contradicting the first analysis, mostly ironically, sometimes not. It makes for a complex sort of texture and, with Lee's characteristic mordancy, a sometimes difficult one.
His account of the death of a pet mouse when he was aged about eight was too real to be truly repulsive, but it contained some distasteful detail, always rendered to devastating comedic effectiveness. Thus, when his mum tried to persuade the boy Stewart that the mouse could be somehow revived by pouring brandy into its bloodied and clearly dead mouth, and trying to warm it up using a hairdryer, which left its fur at the back ruffed up like a glam rocker's collar, the mouse suddenly resembled Dave Hill out of Slade. There then follows a disturbing sequence reconstructing the childhood tragedy, with the members of Slade in giant mouse costumes in an airing cupboard magically knocking out "Merry Xmas Everybody".
Lee also follows Ricky Gervais's example in making a joke out of eczema. Strange to say, Lee actually reminds me of Tommy Cooper, albeit in a morbid key, because Cooper just used to make the silliness flow and go where it wanted, and Lee does the same. Nothing to be ashamed of there.
All of which just leaves me time to take my leave of The Cruise, which I have been following for some weeks now. Yet again, there is very little happening on board, and I did wonder what it might be like if Stewart Lee got a few bookings on the Regal Princess. But I was very pleased to see that Timothy is continuing to make his incremental journey from help-desk person to low-to-mid-range celebrity by getting his gig as a tour guide. Looking resplendent in his "whites", it can only be a matter of time before he brings his showbiz quality onshore and turns full time. I wish him, and all abroad The Cruise, the very best on the next stage of their journey.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-25T09:38:36+00:00
What is wrong with the following gag? "John Whittingdale: a man who, if he saw the aurora borealis twinkling over a Scandinavian snowfield would only see a missed opportunity for a public-private finance initiative." According to Stewart Lee's account of his critics' ("young comics") reaction to it, quite a lot of his peers think there is quite a lot wrong with it – because it doesn't really make any sense. You can't conceive of any sort of PFI that could be attached to the Northern Lights, and such a thing would be beyond the ingenuity of the supposed philistine Whittingdale. So, no, it doesn't "work", and so in that sense it cannot be a joke, but the audience found it funny and, as Lee asserts during his stand-up shtick, it is a joke because it has the structure and rhythm of a joke. But then, in an acrid interview with his script editor, Chris Morris, Lee admits that the joke doesn't work, and grovels for forgiveness for its abject nature – "don't think I'm not ashamed of it", and admits that he wrote another bit on the end of the joke about it not being a joke just to try to cover up his initial comic incompetence. That, too, is very funny. Lee, then, with Morris, is the only comedian – and that does seem an inadequate term for this intelligent, thoughtful, almost philosophical figure – who thoroughly critiques his act as he is doing it, and then critiques the critique, in his interviews with Morris, sometimes contradicting the first analysis, mostly ironically, sometimes not. It makes for a complex sort of texture and, with Lee's characteristic mordancy, a sometimes difficult one. His account of the death of a pet mouse when he was aged about eight was too real...
LUNCHTIME at the Jerwood Space in South London: three comics and a director, eating risotto. The team behind Stewart Lee's new play, Johnson and Boswell - Late But Live, consisting of Lee, Simon Munnery (Johnson), Miles Jupp (Boswell) and director Owen Lewis, are taking a well-earned rest.
"My main worry is that Boswell is supposed to be smaller than Johnson," says Munnery. In reality, Jupp (Archie the Inventor in Balamory) towers above him. "So part of my preparation for the role is to have risotto every lunchtime. I'm also trying to eat as much of Miles's risotto as I can."
The talk around the table is of Galway, where Lee was doing a gig the previous night. All three comics are also doing solo shows on the Fringe and Lewis is directing a second play. Galway went well, Lee says, though he's concerned that he's starting to sound like Samuel Johnson.
Lee was approached by producer Iain Gillie to write a two-hander about the two disgruntled gents on their 1773 road trip to the Highlands and Islands. Or at least, he says, that's what it was before he went to Galway. "I don't know what they've been doing with it while I've been away. It could be a puppet show by now."
"There's a Greek chorus," says Munnery, helpfully. The great thing about talking to comedians is that you never know when they're joking.
In the play, the pair rock up in the Traverse in 2007, "late but live", to re-launch their travel books, cashing in on the fad for celebrity memoirs.
Post-risotto, Jupp rehearses his introduction. Lee, who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera and directed last year's Talk Radio, has written a sharp script which takes no prisoners.
Enter Munnery, who slips into a prim RP accent to deliver Johnson's acerbic lines, meeting Jupp's eagerness with a waspish cynicism: "As a dog returns to its vomit, so I have returned to the land of the deep-fried pizza..."
Lee says that, deep-fried pizza additions aside, many of Johnson's original lines sound remarkably modern. "I like the idea of comedy fans coming along and really laughing at good jokes from 230 years ago, and not knowing that's what they are."
He started writing expecting to exploit the comic potential in the differences between Scotland then and now, but in the rehearsal room the piece started to change. "The more interesting thing is the relationship between these two people," he says now. "We all thought it was going to be a bit of fun, but the second half has become quite a different thing, quite an ambitious thing to do.
"Johnson is like Peter Cook in decline, he's fed up with being the perfect wit. He lets Boswell down."
It helps that Jupp and Munnery fit their roles so well. Munnery is himself something a master of the acerbic one-liner, and when Lee ran into Jupp in a pub in Shepherd's Bush, he looked into his young, plaintive face and knew he'd found his Boswell.
"My relationship with Miles is similar to Johnson and Boswell's relationship," says Munnery, deadpan. "He writes down things I say."
"That's because I'm trying to make sense of them," counters Jupp sharply.
Twenty yellow buckets are stacked up tantalisingly at the edges of the rehearsal space. They belong, Lee says, to the physical theatre bit in the second half. Iain Gillie arrived with them one day on his motorbike.
I'm still trying to visualise producer, motorbike and buckets when Lee strides into his next analogy: "I wrote this really complicated bit of physical theatre involving lots of stuff and left them to it. It's a bit like doing a big shit and leaving them to clean it up!"
"And all we've done is spread it about," says Jupp, as if on cue.
As I leave the rehearsal, I'm cursing the power of a visual imagination. And Lee is still cackling.
• Johnson and Boswell - Late But Live is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, 7-26 August (not 13 or 20)
Stewart Lee
2007-07-27T19:22:10+01:00
LUNCHTIME at the Jerwood Space in South London: three comics and a director, eating risotto. The team behind Stewart Lee's new play, Johnson and Boswell - Late But Live, consisting of Lee, Simon Munnery (Johnson), Miles Jupp (Boswell) and director Owen Lewis, are taking a well-earned rest. "My main worry is that Boswell is supposed to be smaller than Johnson," says Munnery. In reality, Jupp (Archie the Inventor in Balamory) towers above him. "So part of my preparation for the role is to have risotto every lunchtime. I'm also trying to eat as much of Miles's risotto as I can." The talk around the table is of Galway, where Lee was doing a gig the previous night. All three comics are also doing solo shows on the Fringe and Lewis is directing a second play. Galway went well, Lee says, though he's concerned that he's starting to sound like Samuel Johnson. Lee was approached by producer Iain Gillie to write a two-hander about the two disgruntled gents on their 1773 road trip to the Highlands and Islands. Or at least, he says, that's what it was before he went to Galway. "I don't know what they've been doing with it while I've been away. It could be a puppet show by now." "There's a Greek chorus," says Munnery, helpfully. The great thing about talking to comedians is that you never know when they're joking. In the play, the pair rock up in the Traverse in 2007, "late but live", to re-launch their travel books, cashing in on the fad for celebrity memoirs. Post-risotto, Jupp rehearses his introduction. Lee, who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera and directed last year's Talk Radio, has written a sharp script which takes no prisoners. Enter Munnery, who slips into a prim RP accent to deliver...
Howe Gelb is enjoying an encounter with the mainstream.
Transplanting the Scottish songwriter KT Tunstall to his native Tucson, he produced her acclaimed new album with a smorgasbord of avant-country collaborators. But here’s Gelb all but alone again, on piano, banjo, guitar and palm slap percussion, crooning fourteen fresh fragments as-live at home.
Thirty years back his Giant Sand band offered rock product.
But decades of diligence mean Gelb’s verbally vivid country-blues vignettes now sound like momentary musical dust motes drifting unselfconsciously past the microphone.
Stewart Lee
2013-06-23T20:09:09+01:00
Howe Gelb is enjoying an encounter with the mainstream. Transplanting the Scottish songwriter KT Tunstall to his native Tucson, he produced her acclaimed new album with a smorgasbord of avant-country collaborators. But here’s Gelb all but alone again, on piano, banjo, guitar and palm slap percussion, crooning fourteen fresh fragments as-live at home. Thirty years back his Giant Sand band offered rock product. But decades of diligence mean Gelb’s verbally vivid country-blues vignettes now sound like momentary musical dust motes drifting unselfconsciously past the microphone.
How far can you take a joke? That's the premise of Stewart Lee's latest DVD, in which he tests not only how far he can go with bad taste, but also how long he can drag out a single gag. And the answer to both is: much further than you think.
The keynote routine revolves around the Top Gear trio, taking their reactionary stance against 'political correctness' and turning it back on themselves to see if they can take a cruel joke as well as deliver one. Lee gets a laugh when he explains this single obsession will take around 40 minutes - but it turns out not far short. And despite the trademark repetitions, there's very little fat on this daring routine.
The forewarning is typical of Lee's deconstruction, throwing open the curtain to reveal the tricks and mechanics of stand-up. He expects his audience to have at least a casual grasp of the language of comedy - better yet if they're fluent - and if he feels they are slipping behind, he patiently but patronisingly tells them off, like a teacher chiding a slow pupil.
Not that the Glasgow crowd are passive in all this, especially the stubborn punter Lee engages with in his early routine about his coffee-shop loyalty card. But while the awkward, terse encounter threatens to derail the routine, its inclusion captures the unpredictability of a live gig in a way most DVDs don't.
It also feeds perfectly into Lee's persona of a comedian frustrated with the expectations of his artform. Sparked by Frankie Boyle's assertion that no one over 40 should do stand-up, Lee is trying to do an accessible Roadshow-style observational routine from the perspective of a grumpy middle-aged man, but somehow it all turns out much more bitter and bleak. The audacious - even epic - show ends with him shouting from the balconies in frustration at a cider ad. Here his repeated stressing of the same point could test your patience, but the affected psychosis is mesmerising.
Again, his clambering through the audience gives this DVD - the first to be released on the Comedy Central label - a distinctive feel; and while many stand-up titles will gather dust after their Christmastime viewing, the richness and depth of Lee's magnum opus will have you coming back.
Stewart Lee: If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One
Recorded at: Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Running time: 105 mins
Extras: Interview with Kevin Eldon (a revealing and insightful 51 mins); Nick Pynn short (2mins introducing Lee's accompanist); Trailer (1min); Press and tour photos
Released by: Comedy Central, out now
Price: £19.99. Click
here to buy from Amazon at £11.99
Stewart Lee
2010-11-04T17:32:09+00:00
How far can you take a joke? That's the premise of Stewart Lee's latest DVD, in which he tests not only how far he can go with bad taste, but also how long he can drag out a single gag. And the answer to both is: much further than you think. The keynote routine revolves around the Top Gear trio, taking their reactionary stance against 'political correctness' and turning it back on themselves to see if they can take a cruel joke as well as deliver one. Lee gets a laugh when he explains this single obsession will take around 40 minutes - but it turns out not far short. And despite the trademark repetitions, there's very little fat on this daring routine. The forewarning is typical of Lee's deconstruction, throwing open the curtain to reveal the tricks and mechanics of stand-up. He expects his audience to have at least a casual grasp of the language of comedy - better yet if they're fluent - and if he feels they are slipping behind, he patiently but patronisingly tells them off, like a teacher chiding a slow pupil. Not that the Glasgow crowd are passive in all this, especially the stubborn punter Lee engages with in his early routine about his coffee-shop loyalty card. But while the awkward, terse encounter threatens to derail the routine, its inclusion captures the unpredictability of a live gig in a way most DVDs don't. It also feeds perfectly into Lee's persona of a comedian frustrated with the expectations of his artform. Sparked by Frankie Boyle's assertion that no one over 40 should do stand-up, Lee is trying to do an accessible Roadshow-style observational routine from the perspective of a grumpy middle-aged man, but somehow it all turns out much more bitter and bleak. The audacious...
CONTENT PROVIDER is on BBC I-player until end of March.
And all the COMEDY VEHICLES seem to have gone back up too. See how the world has changed in a decade.
How does a working class autodidact, with no visible means of support, maintain his role as the leader of a cult British underground band into its fifth decade? Comedian and writer Stewart Lee (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle) , director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and James Nicholls (Fire Records, Fire Films) investigate the mysterious existence of Robert Lloyd (The Prefects, The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons), Britain's ultimate post-punk survivor.
Robert Lloyd's Prefects played with The Clash on the White Riot tour in 1977, and their ongoing incarnation, as Birmingham's Captain Beefheart suffused post-punk poets The Nightingales, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other band. Ever.
Buoyed by endless critical acclaim, but hampered by ongoing commercial indifference, Lloyd has nonetheless continued to tour and record, The Nightingales' affairs managed by drummer Fliss Kitson, from a Wolverhampton shipping container, and Lloyd himself, from the isolated borderland mountain fastness of Wellington, Shropshire, surrounded by prehistoric remains and industrial archaeology.
Lloyd, a post-punk flaneur, sometime postman, and master snug room raconteur, appears to have maintained a lifestyle outside the system via a succession of hustles, often involving an encyclopaedic knowledge of horse racing and pre-punk musical weirdness.
But what were the social, cultural and economic circumstances that enabled and sustained such outsider artists in the punk and post-punk eras, and how has the world changed to the point where such figures are unlikely to flourish in the same way today? Lloyd's own odyssey echoes how abstract notions of social mobility, of the value of culture and music, have changed in the last five decades.
In an odd coincidence, Lloyd's current home, the Shropshire market town of Wellington, in the shadow of the Wrekin, is also where the comedian Stewart Lee was born, though he only spent nine days there before being dispatched to an orphanage, and has not been back since.
Further chance collisions abound. For a brief period the skyline of '70s concrete Birmingham was defined by Nicholas Monroe's unloved, and soon sold off pop art sculpture, of the giant ape, King Kong. Missing and presumed lost for years, this icon of Birmingham was eventually discovered prostrate in a Lake District garden, before being critically rehabilitated in an exhibition of great British public sculpture at the Henry Moore Gallery in Leeds in 2017.
As a child, Stewart was fascinated by the sculpture, and in a strange piece of synchronicity Lloyd compared his onstage persona to Monroe's Kong in a triumphant post-gig rant in King's Cross this year. The parallels make the point of comparison too good to ignore. King Rocker will shadow Lloyd's story with that of Birmingham's forgotten, and rediscovered, giant art ape, King Kong.
3) BENEFIT GIGS
i) UP THE CREEK, GREENWICH
I am doing a benefit for something with Phil Kay at Up The Creek, Greenwich on Tues 5th of Feb.
The Goodfather: PHIL KAY, STEWART LEE, TONY LAW
+ Roisin & Chiara, Lucy Hopkins, Russell Hicks, Tom Ward
and Phil Kay (MC aka The Goodfather)
Tue 5 Feb 2019 7:00 pm for 7:45 start. Up The Creek, SE10 9SW - EVENT LINK / TICKETS
ii) BELTER FOR THE SHELTER - 19th Feb 2019
- I AM NOT IN THIS ANYMORE
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.
I have had to drop out of this due to a dates mix-up that was my fault due to not understanding i-phones, ROB DELANEY (Catastrophe) and DANIEL KITSON (Crystal Palace) have been added to the bill. Also providing gags for the evening will be 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)
iii) RESOFIT benefit for RESONANCE 104.4FM ARTS RADIO - 25th March
Bloomsbury Theatre, details TBA
iv) BENFIT FOR CANCER, KINGS CROSS - 28th MARCH
This will be at the Francis Crick research centre, details TBA
v) HILARITY FOR CHARTITY - LEICS SQ THEATRE - LONDON - 2OTH MAY
Details TBA
4) WOLVERHAMPTON LIT FEST FEB 2ND
On Saturday 2nd February Stewart Lee (comedian/writer) will read from his contribution to the book 'Home Town Tales' about his youthful fascination for midlands post-punk band The Nightingales and an outsized piece of public sculpture located in Birmingham's Bullring.
METRONOMY, THE COMET IS COMING, STEWART LEE AND BAGPUSS CONFIRMED FOR 2019
The Quietus presents Gazelle Twin - with full line-up to follow
You Tell Me, Hannah Peel & Will Burns, Pip Blom, TVAM join line-up
4AD and Moshi Moshi joins festival's group of curatorial partners
Sea Change to start the 2019 festival summer
Devon's Sea Change Festival, the much-loved event founded by Totnes's Drift Record Shop, is excited to announce the first artists confirmed for its 2019 line-up; the combination of artists and creative partners - a roll call of the country's greatest music labels - is a clear indication of the event's continued boldness and increased size and scope in its 4th year.
Friday night's headliner will be one of the UK's most critically and commercially successful acts, METRONOMY, returning to Devon for a huge homecoming show in the stunning Dartington Hall Gardens. The Mercury-nominated band is currently celebrating the 10th anniversary of breakthrough LP, Nights Out (a new expanded edition of which is available via Because) and founder Joe Mount has most recently been busy at work producing Robyn's Honey album. A long-time supporter of both Drift and Sea Change, Joe snuck into town to play a surprise DJ set at the inaugural Sea Change weekend. It has long been one of the festival's biggest ambitions to invite Metronomy to headline and we are pinching ourselves that he is going to grace the 2019 Sea Change stage.
Saturday night sees the cosmic psychedelic jazz of THE COMET IS COMING taking to the Sea Change stage. Following a 2018 Mercury nomination with the extraordinary Sons of Kemet, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings - alongside bandmates Betamax Killer and Danalogue The Conqueror - turns his attentions back to soundtracking the imagined apocalypse with a fusion of jazz, Afrobeat and electronica. Exactly what the band has in store for 2019 we don't know (cryptic messages have been appearing), but all roads lead to Saturday night at Sea Change.
Sea Change is thrilled to join with Fire Records/Fire Films to offer the first look at KING ROCKER, a film investigating the mysterious existence of the front man and lyricist of The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd. Comedian and writer STEWART LEE and director MICHAEL CUMMING (Brass Eye, Toast) bring an exclusive first preview of the documentary to Sea Change, with a full panel talk and pounding live show from THE NIGHTINGALES, Britain's ultimate post-punk survivors. Robert Lloyd's The Prefects played with The Clash on the White Riot tour in 1977 and The Nightingales recorded more John Peel sessions than any other band.
Essential music and culture website, THE QUIETUS, returns as a key creative partner to proudly present a late-night set from GAZELLE TWIN. Latest LP, Pastoral, was The Quietus's 2018 album of the year (with the hypnotic and terrifying ‘Hobby Horse' also ranking high in the 50 tracks of the year) and it noted, “On her latest extraordinary album, Elizabeth Bernholz serves the full English with extra discomfort, grotesquery and barely contained horror.” The is just the start of The Quietus's plans, which will, of course, include DJ'ing another set of full-on bangers.
Another 2018 project born from obsession and joyous admiration was Earth Recording's BAGPUSS soundtrack reissue, declared by Drift as soundtrack release of the year. At last year's festival, the soundtrack specialists handed Drift a mysterious test pressing and now, less than a year on, Bagpuss will be holding court at Sea Change 2019. Series creators, aficionados and fans will explore the adored '70s animated classic and, as part of an exclusive, fully-immersive experience, musicians SANDRA KERR and JOHN FAULKNER - whose beautiful pastoral folk music helped to make the series so special - will perform the beautiful songs live.
Elsewhere, artist, producer and award-winning composer HANNAH PEEL collaborates with poet WILL BURNS to perform in the beautiful 15th-century St Mary's Church venue. And another celebrated collaboration see's Field Music's PETER BREWIS and Admiral Fallow's SARAH HAYES becoming YOU TELL ME, whose debut album was released this month to much critical praise.
The deft curation of Drift will see two of its favourite bands joining the line-up. Dutch 4-piece PIP BLOM made many new fans on a triumphant supporting slot for The Breeders last year, while big and beaty TVAM released debut LP Psychic Data to great acclaim towards the end of last year.
Creative partners HEAVENLY RECORDINGS, BELLA UNION, ERASED TAPES, ROUGH TRADE BOOKS and MUTE return for 2019, with new friends MOSHI MOSHI and 4AD also coming to Devon.
Sea Change takes place on Friday 24th, Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th May, moving to the late May Bank Holiday for the first time having staged three sell-out events on the August Bank Holiday. The 2019 edition sees the second partnership between the young festival and a revered old institution
with a new story, the Dartington Hall estate, a combination which continues to add new names to Dartington's quite-immaculate list of guest creators in music, art and culture.
As Sea Change moves to May, it also stretches into a third day, with music sets, talks and events, culminating in a special afternoon matinee headline performance at Dartington to close the festival. And while Dartington is the festival's Offshore stage, hosting music until late on Friday and Saturday, the buildings of Totnes remain central to Sea Change, presenting extremely special music guests, panel talks, films and events beneath the beautiful gold leaf ceiling of the Barrel House Ballroom, 15th century St Mary's Church, 1950s Civic Hall and restored Victorian Totnes Cinema.
Earlybird tickets sold out in record time in December, but day (£49), weekend (£89) and Young Person (£39) tickets are on sale now online or via THE DRIFT RECORD SHOP. https://www.seetickets.com/event/sea-change-2019/venues-in-totnes-dartington/1281511
Sea Change founder, Rupert Morrison, said, “For our fourth edition, we drew up a list of our most favourite friends and artists and went for broke... we just asked them and we're still pinching ourselves that we convinced Metronomy to come and play a massive homecoming show on the Sea Change stage. I guess we're doing something right, maybe we're just doing something different? Shabaka Hutchings' saxophone has been a huge part of our last 18 months, as have numerous of Stewart Lee's incendiary pearls of wisdom... and as for the saggy old cloth cat... Sea Change IV is already shaping up to be our dream line up. As ever, there is plenty more to come!”
The Sound Of Music, Walthamstow Jazz Festival, Yo La Tengo, The Wave Pictures, Sleaford Mods, Ruts DC.
THE WAVE PICTURES - Feb 1st Soup Kitchen M'cr, Feb 2nd Clwb Ifor Bach Cardiff, Feb 21st Koko London. A few dates from superb Go-Betweens/Creedence Clearwater Revival literate indie-pop synthesists.
RUTS DC. FEB 12TH Concorde 2 Brighton, Feb 17th Cambridge Junction, Feb 18th Oxford Academy, Feb 28th Shepherds Bush Empire. Punky reggae innovators.
WALTHAMSTOW JAZZ FESTIVAL - WALTHAMSTOW ASSEMBLY HALL - 16TH FEB.
Cream drummer Ginger Baker (Rolling Stone Magazine's top 3 drummers of all time) will headline with his Jazz Confusion outfit.
The line-up also includes a DJ set from the effortlessly cool Django Django, free jazz pioneer Evan Parker, Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, and rising stars such as Emma-Jean Thackray, Binker Golding, Project Karnak and others.
YO LA TENGO - EARTH, HACKNEY, LONDON - 17TH/18TH Feb. New Jersey indie rock pioneers.
SLEAFORD MODS, 100 CLUB LONDON, 21ST FEB. Pre-massive tour warm-up from lo-fi shouting geniuses.
Stewart Lee
2019-01-29T15:10:05+00:00
1) CONTENT PROVIDER BBC CONTENT PROVIDER is on BBC I-player until end of March. And all the COMEDY VEHICLES seem to have gone back up too. See how the world has changed in a decade. 2) King Rocker https://www.kingrockerfilm.com/ How does a working class autodidact, with no visible means of support, maintain his role as the leader of a cult British underground band into its fifth decade? Comedian and writer Stewart Lee (Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle) , director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and James Nicholls (Fire Records, Fire Films) investigate the mysterious existence of Robert Lloyd (The Prefects, The Nightingales, Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons), Britain's ultimate post-punk survivor. Robert Lloyd's Prefects played with The Clash on the White Riot tour in 1977, and their ongoing incarnation, as Birmingham's Captain Beefheart suffused post-punk poets The Nightingales, recorded more John Peel sessions than any other band. Ever. Buoyed by endless critical acclaim, but hampered by ongoing commercial indifference, Lloyd has nonetheless continued to tour and record, The Nightingales' affairs managed by drummer Fliss Kitson, from a Wolverhampton shipping container, and Lloyd himself, from the isolated borderland mountain fastness of Wellington, Shropshire, surrounded by prehistoric remains and industrial archaeology. Lloyd, a post-punk flaneur, sometime postman, and master snug room raconteur, appears to have maintained a lifestyle outside the system via a succession of hustles, often involving an encyclopaedic knowledge of horse racing and pre-punk musical weirdness. But what were the social, cultural and economic circumstances that enabled and sustained such outsider artists in the punk and post-punk eras, and how has the world changed to the point where such figures are unlikely to flourish in the same way today? Lloyd's own odyssey echoes how abstract notions of social mobility, of the value of culture and music,...
Last years Brits declared a pop-friendly facsimile of folk newly fashionable. But our venerable Waterson-Carthy clan continue plying the family business, unheralded by host James Corden. Siblings Marry Waterson and the guitarist Oliver Knight weave a hybrid of traditional textures and contemporary colours, cousin Eliza Carthy's occasional fiddle their stark debut's only adornment.
Mary can do winsome, on the Kathryn Williams co-write Father Us, and strident, - the stoically menstrual Curse The Day is haunted by the blunt Yorkshire harmonies of her mother Lal. This duo reach beyond folk's core constituency, dignity intact.
Stewart Lee
2011-03-27T12:38:36+01:00
Last years Brits declared a pop-friendly facsimile of folk newly fashionable. But our venerable Waterson-Carthy clan continue plying the family business, unheralded by host James Corden. Siblings Marry Waterson and the guitarist Oliver Knight weave a hybrid of traditional textures and contemporary colours, cousin Eliza Carthy's occasional fiddle their stark debut's only adornment. Mary can do winsome, on the Kathryn Williams co-write Father Us, and strident, - the stoically menstrual Curse The Day is haunted by the blunt Yorkshire harmonies of her mother Lal. This duo reach beyond folk's core constituency, dignity intact.
Having successfully turned Johnson and Boswell into stand-up comics at the Fringe last year, the writer Stewart Lee has now tried the same trick for Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh. Simon Munnery goes from Johnson to a queen in whiteface and wig. Miles Jupp becomes the breech-wearing explorer-cum- spy-cum-poet from Budleigh Salterton. The result, sad to say, is an undernourished hour that might muscle its way into your affections in a smaller, scuzzier room, but which looks stiff as an iron ruff in the Cow Barn.
Some, mostly solo, moments shine. Jupp, a revelation as Boswell, again gives plenty of fizz as his historical figure-turned-compere: “Without the potato, your Scottish national diet would consistent solely of alcohol and cigarettes.” Elizabeth's withering addresses are the highlight, even if Munnery might as well be delivering them in his League Against Tedium persona: “To the Italians I say this: Rome wasn't built in a day. Perhaps it could have been if you hadn't been so busy speaking with your arms.” But Elizabeth and Raleigh plays like a polished first draft waiting for its big idea to reveal itself. They stick galleons on their heads to depict a naval battle, but this cute, Thunderbirds FAB-style staging is undermined by their awkwardness with the props. Raleigh's thwarted designs on his queen is conveyed in fairly generic master-and-servant badinage. Without more connection between the players the show trails off badly. Even Jane Watkins's period music sometimes only adds to the stiltedness.
There are some great ideas buried in here. “When I was 3, my father had my mother killed,” Munnery announces. “Is it any wonder that I have commitment issues?” But a few great lines, a nice slide-screen cameo by Jimmy Carr and a bit of tomfoolery amid the crowd add up to neither a proper play nor a jamboree. Owen Lewis's production will surely loosen up as the month progresses.
Stewart Lee
2008-08-05T20:11:11+01:00
Having successfully turned Johnson and Boswell into stand-up comics at the Fringe last year, the writer Stewart Lee has now tried the same trick for Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh. Simon Munnery goes from Johnson to a queen in whiteface and wig. Miles Jupp becomes the breech-wearing explorer-cum- spy-cum-poet from Budleigh Salterton. The result, sad to say, is an undernourished hour that might muscle its way into your affections in a smaller, scuzzier room, but which looks stiff as an iron ruff in the Cow Barn. Some, mostly solo, moments shine. Jupp, a revelation as Boswell, again gives plenty of fizz as his historical figure-turned-compere: “Without the potato, your Scottish national diet would consistent solely of alcohol and cigarettes.” Elizabeth's withering addresses are the highlight, even if Munnery might as well be delivering them in his League Against Tedium persona: “To the Italians I say this: Rome wasn't built in a day. Perhaps it could have been if you hadn't been so busy speaking with your arms.” But Elizabeth and Raleigh plays like a polished first draft waiting for its big idea to reveal itself. They stick galleons on their heads to depict a naval battle, but this cute, Thunderbirds FAB-style staging is undermined by their awkwardness with the props. Raleigh's thwarted designs on his queen is conveyed in fairly generic master-and-servant badinage. Without more connection between the players the show trails off badly. Even Jane Watkins's period music sometimes only adds to the stiltedness. There are some great ideas buried in here. “When I was 3, my father had my mother killed,” Munnery announces. “Is it any wonder that I have commitment issues?” But a few great lines, a nice slide-screen cameo by Jimmy Carr and a bit of tomfoolery amid the crowd add up to neither a proper...
Stand-up "veteran" Stewart Lee has been doing comedy for over 20 years and during that time has found both general popularity, as one half of the Lee/Herring duo who fronted Fist of Fun on Radio and TV in the early 1990s, and more specialised rejection after the broadcast of the Jerry Springer - The Opera stage show he co-produced with Richard Thomas on national television in 2005. The rejection came, almost exclusively, from religious protest groups lead by Christian Voice UK. I think Jerry Springer - The Opera is about the only thing Stewart has been involved in making that I haven't seen. This is not because of any deeply held religious beliefs I might hold and, after the heated "discussions" that resulted from enquiring into the subject of seemingly (to me anyway) unreasoned and yet unyielding belief with people I know and like, I'm not going to be commenting any further on the subject here in a public space.
A group of ten of us, all locals, descended on The Stand in Edinburgh as part of an evening of Festival cheer. I had never seen Stewart perform live before, outside of television or DVD, and I felt my high expectations for the hour long set could not possibly be met. This set starts without making any reference to a distressing world event in an unfamiliar and confrontational manner in the way some of his earlier shows have done. Never more hilariously than at the very start of 2004s Stand Up Comedian where Lee opened with his take on American "over-reaction" to the events of 9-11 (the 9th of November). This evening's opening material centres instead on an incident which happened to Stewart in a London branch of Café Nero with his young son.
One of the great things about Stewart Lee's stand-up is that you just don't know how serious (or not) he is about some of his pronouncements. Does he really wish full blindness upon Jeremey Clarkson's three children? Does he wish equally, that Richard Hammond had been decapitated during the dragster crash he had in 2006, his still sentient head bouncing across the tarmac into a pool of urine? These are just "jokes" he says. In the Top Gear sense of the word that is. Still, "they are also co-incidentally" what he actually believes. This ambiguity creates a real emotional awkwardness in his audience which rarely fails to induce laughter.
Did Lee really attend the same school as Richard Hammond? I suspect he did, but the stories of their time there together probably hold only the very slightest grain of truth, if any. Does it matter? Of course not. Lee finishes a tale of his heroic, but ultimately thankless, rescue of Hammond from bullies through the use of his privileged status as a library monitor with the proviso "now, that story about Richard "The Hamster" Hammond (he isn't a real hamster) isn't true, but I think it tells us a lot about him". Such is Lee's relaxed manner with the audience, and the rapid rapport he builds up with us, that we all nod along in agreement. Hammond is indeed an ungrateful rat of a man who selfishly sold us out. Us, the rightful heirs to any profit to be made from book or TV deals resulting from the near-fatal crash which we, the licence fee payer, funded. Relax, it's a "joke".
Like Hammond, the cider manufacturer Magners was also the recipient of Lee's ire. Not only had they appropriated their TV ad strapline "Give it to me straight, like a pear cider made from 100% pear(s)" from the common and varied usage the phrase had enjoyed within the Lee family for generations but, more painfully, they had ruined Steve Earle's The Galway Girl for Lee by using it in a previous TV ad. The song had been Lee's favourite of the past decade or so and had held warm associations with his wife, the comedian Bridget Christie.
Stewart Lee is always keen to push the boundaries of his chosen artform and closed his set by confronting what he described as "the final comics' taboo". This, in his words, "is to do something sincerely, and to do it well" and involved him performing The Galway Girl (albeit with a couple of comic additions) with an acoustic guitar, accompanied by an on-loan fiddle player. Whilst this form of finale is almost the stylistic polar opposite of the surreally dark "vomiting into the anus of Christ" skit which closed his 90s comedian show of 2005/06, it still surprised his audience. It was heartfelt and the audience saw that. Highly recommended.
Stewart Lee
2009-08-21T15:16:54+01:00
Stand-up "veteran" Stewart Lee has been doing comedy for over 20 years and during that time has found both general popularity, as one half of the Lee/Herring duo who fronted Fist of Fun on Radio and TV in the early 1990s, and more specialised rejection after the broadcast of the Jerry Springer - The Opera stage show he co-produced with Richard Thomas on national television in 2005. The rejection came, almost exclusively, from religious protest groups lead by Christian Voice UK. I think Jerry Springer - The Opera is about the only thing Stewart has been involved in making that I haven't seen. This is not because of any deeply held religious beliefs I might hold and, after the heated "discussions" that resulted from enquiring into the subject of seemingly (to me anyway) unreasoned and yet unyielding belief with people I know and like, I'm not going to be commenting any further on the subject here in a public space. A group of ten of us, all locals, descended on The Stand in Edinburgh as part of an evening of Festival cheer. I had never seen Stewart perform live before, outside of television or DVD, and I felt my high expectations for the hour long set could not possibly be met. This set starts without making any reference to a distressing world event in an unfamiliar and confrontational manner in the way some of his earlier shows have done. Never more hilariously than at the very start of 2004s Stand Up Comedian where Lee opened with his take on American "over-reaction" to the events of 9-11 (the 9th of November). This evening's opening material centres instead on an incident which happened to Stewart in a London branch of Café Nero with his young son. One of the great things about...
THE comedian dubbed the “master of the callback” and the “world’s greatest living stand-up” proved he was just that during a two-night run in Sheffield City Hall.
Stewart Lee’s latest tour, Snowflake/Tornado, is two 60-minute shows of the highest calibre sliced together.
The first-half, Tornado, is inspired by the inaccurate description Lee's show was accidentally uploaded to Netflix with: “Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe”.
This turned out to be the description for B-movie Sharknado 3 — but for two years, millions of Netflix subscribers around the world clicked on the comic’s show hoping for an ocean adventure.
In trademark style, Lee (pictured) continually references back to the description while also taking aim at the careers of some of his peers.
Jimmy Carr, Josh Widdicombe, Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are carefully unpicked — Gervais doesn’t actually say the “unsayable”, but what would it look like if he did?
Cue five long minutes — sometimes uncomfortable for both audience and comic — of Lee gagging, gasping, gurning and blabbering.
It is an endurance test and one he says a Mumsnet reader said “went on a bit”.
Even Fleabag writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge — currently enjoying national treasure status — isn’t safe as Lee ridicules astonishment at her breaking of the “fourth wall”, sniping: “What did we do before she invented looking at the camera?”
Lee cleverly pokes fun at addressing the audience directly, which is a staple for stand-up comics, referring back to earlier in his set when he had broken off to talk directly to someone on their way to the toilet.
Even his own brand isn’t safe as he knowingly mocks the demographic the likes of the Daily Mail will associate him with — “the metropolitan liberal elite”.
In Snowflake, Lee examines people, like his nan, who decry “political correctness gone mad” at every opportunity.
And if being labelled a snowflake means you’re empathetic, then so be it. Hear, hear!
Lee is a total Marmite comedian — I could see audience members both completely stony-faced or bent over in stitches.
My friend and I were the latter, although even my superfan pal had to admit some of the material was rehashed.
Thank God Lee’s recent ill-health hasn’t put the brakes on his career as this was one, if not the best, comedy shows I’ve seen and is definitely worth checking out, or watching on Netflix...if you can find it.
Stewart Lee
2020-02-11T15:01:56+00:00
THE comedian dubbed the “master of the callback” and the “world’s greatest living stand-up” proved he was just that during a two-night run in Sheffield City Hall. Stewart Lee’s latest tour, Snowflake/Tornado, is two 60-minute shows of the highest calibre sliced together. The first-half, Tornado, is inspired by the inaccurate description Lee's show was accidentally uploaded to Netflix with: “Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe”. This turned out to be the description for B-movie Sharknado 3 — but for two years, millions of Netflix subscribers around the world clicked on the comic’s show hoping for an ocean adventure. In trademark style, Lee (pictured) continually references back to the description while also taking aim at the careers of some of his peers. Jimmy Carr, Josh Widdicombe, Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are carefully unpicked — Gervais doesn’t actually say the “unsayable”, but what would it look like if he did? Cue five long minutes — sometimes uncomfortable for both audience and comic — of Lee gagging, gasping, gurning and blabbering. It is an endurance test and one he says a Mumsnet reader said “went on a bit”. Even Fleabag writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge — currently enjoying national treasure status — isn’t safe as Lee ridicules astonishment at her breaking of the “fourth wall”, sniping: “What did we do before she invented looking at the camera?” Lee cleverly pokes fun at addressing the audience directly, which is a staple for stand-up comics, referring back to earlier in his set when he had broken off to talk directly to someone on their way to the toilet. Even his own brand isn’t safe as he knowingly mocks the demographic the likes of the Daily Mail will associate him with — “the metropolitan...
So, Stewart Lee is to be the guest editor of Radio 4's Today programme on New Year's Eve. This announcement will doubtless put an angry spring in the step of those who enjoy running around declaring that the BBC is in the deathly grip of the liberal left.
Lee, reviled for his part in bringing Jerry Springer The Opera to the stage, and leading exponent of a rigorously deadpan and self-aware form of stand-up, continues to attract high levels of cultish devotion and splenetic hatred. For some he's no better than the anti-Christ - even though all he's really doing is pursuing a narrow track of sharply intelligent, acerbically amusing "anti-comedy", a groove into which he is now almost happily - and possibly too comfortably - settled.
Presented against a backdrop of rolled-up carpets - with Lee stylishly sporting his time-warp post-punk look - Carpet Remnant World has much double-edged fun at his own expense by rehearsing his online detractors' cruellest cuts. Handing them ammo, the bigger running joke here is that Lee hasn't got a set to speak of. He tells us he has been too busy parenting his four-year-old son to have come up with decent material. "I don't know anything anymore" he mock-laments, riffling through the news for topical relevance and explaining that his specialist subject nowadays is Scooby-Doo.
On one level, we're immediately in the realm of his now-familiar contempt for comedy as commodity: in proffering some ostentatiously lame riffs on Islam and Travellers, he's simultaneously advancing a knowingly inadequate show, and flaunting a superiority towards an audience that might find him wanting. But the way he does this - with enough gags to show you he's funny, and enough charm to stave off bumptiousness - is masterful. And over the course of 90 minutes, he weaves a theme of sorts from thin air - proceeding from deliberately childish swipes at the Tories, past potshots at Red Ed too ("You have to have imagination on the Left - you have to look at Ed Miliband and imagine a future for democracy") towards an artful summation of where we're at right now: emptied out, spent, seeking something we can't find.
Bleak but tongue-in-cheek, an oddly cheering antidote to our nameless malaise, it's unlikely to appeal to those in search of easy festive laughs, but it should amply satisfy the converts and the wavering doubters too. That Today programme should be all right, actually.
Stewart Lee
2011-11-28T13:16:31+00:00
So, Stewart Lee is to be the guest editor of Radio 4's Today programme on New Year's Eve. This announcement will doubtless put an angry spring in the step of those who enjoy running around declaring that the BBC is in the deathly grip of the liberal left. Lee, reviled for his part in bringing Jerry Springer The Opera to the stage, and leading exponent of a rigorously deadpan and self-aware form of stand-up, continues to attract high levels of cultish devotion and splenetic hatred. For some he's no better than the anti-Christ - even though all he's really doing is pursuing a narrow track of sharply intelligent, acerbically amusing "anti-comedy", a groove into which he is now almost happily - and possibly too comfortably - settled. Presented against a backdrop of rolled-up carpets - with Lee stylishly sporting his time-warp post-punk look - Carpet Remnant World has much double-edged fun at his own expense by rehearsing his online detractors' cruellest cuts. Handing them ammo, the bigger running joke here is that Lee hasn't got a set to speak of. He tells us he has been too busy parenting his four-year-old son to have come up with decent material. "I don't know anything anymore" he mock-laments, riffling through the news for topical relevance and explaining that his specialist subject nowadays is Scooby-Doo. On one level, we're immediately in the realm of his now-familiar contempt for comedy as commodity: in proffering some ostentatiously lame riffs on Islam and Travellers, he's simultaneously advancing a knowingly inadequate show, and flaunting a superiority towards an audience that might find him wanting. But the way he does this - with enough gags to show you he's funny, and enough charm to stave off bumptiousness - is masterful. And over the course of 90 minutes, he...
In this week's episode, we invite cult meta-comedian and out-there-music connoisseur Stewart Lee to discuss the new documentary he's made about Prefects/Nightingales legend Robert Lloyd. Stewart also pitches in on RBP's new audio interview, a 1991 conversation 'twixt the late Andy Gill and everyone's favourite choirboy-voiced Commie Robert Wyatt. In addition we consider the week's featured RBP writer Caitlin Moran, with especial attention to her hair-raising 1994 encounter with Courtney Love. Plus we bid a fond farewell to Kool & the Gang co-founder Ronald "Khalis" Bell and to Simeon Coxe of pioneering '60s oscillators Silver Apples...
Finally, with intermittent interjections from Mr. Lee, Mark picks highlights from the week's trove of new additions to the RBP library, including top pieces on Jimi Hendrix, Rodney "Mayor of Sunset Strip" Bingenheimer, Spandau Ballet and inimitable drag superstar RuPaul. With Stewart's tastes in mind, Jasper M-B spotlights Wire classics on Laurie Anderson and Japanese free-music extremist Keiji Haino.
Many thanks to special guest Stewart Lee. Find out more about King Rocker at kingrockerfilm.com.
Stewart Lee
2020-09-14T23:27:05+01:00
In this week's episode, we invite cult meta-comedian and out-there-music connoisseur Stewart Lee to discuss the new documentary he's made about Prefects/Nightingales legend Robert Lloyd. Stewart also pitches in on RBP's new audio interview, a 1991 conversation 'twixt the late Andy Gill and everyone's favourite choirboy-voiced Commie Robert Wyatt. In addition we consider the week's featured RBP writer Caitlin Moran, with especial attention to her hair-raising 1994 encounter with Courtney Love. Plus we bid a fond farewell to Kool & the Gang co-founder Ronald "Khalis" Bell and to Simeon Coxe of pioneering '60s oscillators Silver Apples... Finally, with intermittent interjections from Mr. Lee, Mark picks highlights from the week's trove of new additions to the RBP library, including top pieces on Jimi Hendrix, Rodney "Mayor of Sunset Strip" Bingenheimer, Spandau Ballet and inimitable drag superstar RuPaul. With Stewart's tastes in mind, Jasper M-B spotlights Wire classics on Laurie Anderson and Japanese free-music extremist Keiji Haino. Many thanks to special guest Stewart Lee. Find out more about King Rocker at kingrockerfilm.com.
Last summer I wrote a comedy drama script, currently “in development with a major broadcaster”, concerning a charming, confident, clever and machiavellian politician. Named Horace Thompson, he manipulates popular culture to consolidate support for a controversial referendum he narrowly won, intending to further his own self-interest. And he was in the Bullingdon Club. And he lives in Islington.
(I don’t know where I got the brilliant idea for this character from. Sometimes I think I am a genius, or some kind of unwitting God, forcibly exiled to Earth, his memory of his own divinity erased by jealous members of his former pantheon.)
But, like Liam Fox and David Davis and all the bullying Brexiter shitbags, the charming, confident, clever and machiavellian politician the character of Horace Thompson is inspired by no longer seems quite so charming, confident, clever and machiavellian.
The problem for me is that the average high-profile Brexiter now looks like a once powerful man who thought he was playing a rigged party game of pass the parcel, aiming to win a prize he had previously wrapped himself, but has suddenly realised he is sitting with an unexploded nail bomb in his lap, right next to his shrivelled nut-sack.
Still, as long as there is some way to hold on to the closing scene, in which Horace Thompson’s head is sliced off by the rotating blades of a ceiling fan, and then eaten by his own guard dogs, I will feel it has all been worthwhile. My final rewrite will consciously uncouple the character from specific details.
It may have been folly to hitch my story wagon to a character so clearly inspired by Boris Johnson, even though his future once seemed secure. Boris Johnson will be a forgotten casualty of the crisis his own lying Daily Telegraph columns created; the mad scientist, raging at his own now murderous monster, at the end of some black and white B-movie, “But no Brexeeto, I am your master! I created you to serve me. Noooo. Brexeeto, aaaaaggggghhhh! My nut-sack!”
Pity the professional humorist. It has become a cliche of opinion pieces that the news of the past 12 months has been so absurd, unpredictable and fast-moving that it is beyond satire.
Only the infinite keyboard monkeys of Twitter, trapped on the inhospitable concrete island of their moated social media platform, and lobbing the wet simian excrement of their viral memes and gifs into the hair of curious onlookers, can respond to news stories with the speed required to land a blow.
Then the roulette wheel of events spins again and makes the carefully conceived conceits of slow-moving professional humorists immediately irrelevant, leaving us spluttering through our long-winded set-ups as the gas cloud of poorly thought-out policy our punch lines aimed to ridicule evaporates in a fog of central office plausible denial.
The trick to being a champion clay pigeon shooter, my violent and weaponry-obsessed wife tells me, is to aim for the space you anticipate the clay fool moving into, not the space where it appears to be.
(My advice for any clay pigeons reading is to avoid being shot by moving forwards into a space you didn’t anticipate being in. Then perhaps your decimated numbers will recover in the wild, flying idiots.)
Lawyers and nervous TV producers pore over contributors’ jokes, while the politician they concern is already in the process of being sacked, resigning, performing a blatant policy U-turn, or saying something so stupid and racist that their valuable contribution to the mildly amusing Teignbridge Business Buddies scheme is swiftly eclipsed.
The successful modern satirist must enter a Zen-like state, where all possible outcomes take shape in his third eye, each in turn satirised in advance of its existence, in the event of it becoming a reality.
(When I wrote for the BBC radio satire Week Ending in the early 90s, the writers’ room smelt of excrement and BO, and was full of filthy ashtrays, empty crisp bags and overflowing spittoons. Nobody there was in a Zen-like state, although some functioning alcoholic visionaries were asleep under the desks, which is the next best thing.)
Satirists are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Standup comedians, all of their professional metaphors involving violence and death, call this “punching up”. But which way is up?
Is it “punching up” to poo your comedy pellets on to a severely weakened prime minister with a randomly flapping lower jaw, whose desperate over-reliance on a small repertoire of endlessly repeated and ultimately meaningless statements indicate she is clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and who has sacrificed her future career and hard-won credibility on the altar of her ungrateful party’s best interests?
I don’t know. But when a woman was filmed putting a cat into a wheelie bin everyone thought it was awful. Theresa May is that little cat. History is that wheelie bin. Am I that horrible woman, putting that miserable cat into that horrible bin? I need a clear clay pigeon villain to aim at. All I see, everywhere, are victims and losers.
I’m halfway through my current two-year tour, but I’m taking the summer off because my towering stage set, made entirely from the smashed DVD cases of other standups, is too high, and my show is too long to fit any Edinburgh fringe venue. And I hate all comedians under 40, so I don’t want to spend a month trying to act presidentially around them.
About a quarter of my current near-three-hour run time uses topical material as feeder routes into the main narrative thrust. For simplicity’s sake I could do with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump still being around in September, as the similarities between them dovetail the two acts together neatly, but every night in the interval I have to go online to check Trump hasn’t been assassinated or impeached.
Just over 12 months ago I declined a role in a promising new topical satire TV show which, though green-lit now, still hasn’t made it to our screens. By the time it airs the government under which it was conceived will have been replaced at least twice.
If the news rollercoaster ride of the past 12 months were a real rollercoaster ride it would long since have been closed down. People like excitement, but no one wants to emerge from every brief perusal of a daily newspaper covered in spilt Diet Coke and the vomit of other people’s children, while a showman makes off with all the change that fell out of their pockets.
Stewart Lee
2017-07-16T19:05:17+01:00
Last summer I wrote a comedy drama script, currently “in development with a major broadcaster”, concerning a charming, confident, clever and machiavellian politician. Named Horace Thompson, he manipulates popular culture to consolidate support for a controversial referendum he narrowly won, intending to further his own self-interest. And he was in the Bullingdon Club. And he lives in Islington. (I don’t know where I got the brilliant idea for this character from. Sometimes I think I am a genius, or some kind of unwitting God, forcibly exiled to Earth, his memory of his own divinity erased by jealous members of his former pantheon.) But, like Liam Fox and David Davis and all the bullying Brexiter shitbags, the charming, confident, clever and machiavellian politician the character of Horace Thompson is inspired by no longer seems quite so charming, confident, clever and machiavellian. The problem for me is that the average high-profile Brexiter now looks like a once powerful man who thought he was playing a rigged party game of pass the parcel, aiming to win a prize he had previously wrapped himself, but has suddenly realised he is sitting with an unexploded nail bomb in his lap, right next to his shrivelled nut-sack. Still, as long as there is some way to hold on to the closing scene, in which Horace Thompson’s head is sliced off by the rotating blades of a ceiling fan, and then eaten by his own guard dogs, I will feel it has all been worthwhile. My final rewrite will consciously uncouple the character from specific details. It may have been folly to hitch my story wagon to a character so clearly inspired by Boris Johnson, even though his future once seemed secure. Boris Johnson will be a forgotten casualty of the crisis his own lying Daily Telegraph...
Simon Emmerson's Imagined Village seek a rapprochement between the English folk tradition and post-colonial world music. Their third album finds sitars and tablas alongside the pedigree vocals of Jackie Oates and an especially majestic Eliza Carthy, and Get Kalsi and The Guvna mix devotional sincerity with an arch meditational lounge muzak.
Perhaps Bending The Dark's a sometimes too immaculate conception, without the arresting rough edges its star contributors leave on their own work, and Martin Carthy's stately guitar part scythes tellingly through the perfumed garden of the epic title track, but this daring cross-cultural fusion rarely sounds forced.
Stewart Lee
2012-05-14T20:27:54+01:00
Simon Emmerson's Imagined Village seek a rapprochement between the English folk tradition and post-colonial world music. Their third album finds sitars and tablas alongside the pedigree vocals of Jackie Oates and an especially majestic Eliza Carthy, and Get Kalsi and The Guvna mix devotional sincerity with an arch meditational lounge muzak. Perhaps Bending The Dark's a sometimes too immaculate conception, without the arresting rough edges its star contributors leave on their own work, and Martin Carthy's stately guitar part scythes tellingly through the perfumed garden of the epic title track, but this daring cross-cultural fusion rarely sounds forced.
Until recently, Stewart Lee was still flogging his own DVDs in the foyer after
his shows, but a couple of BBC2 series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle and a pair of 2011 British Comedy Awards have taken him on to the next level, a state of affairs that doesn't sit entirely comfortably with this most contrary of standups.
On Carpet Remnant World ★★★★★, Lee brilliantly plays off this awkward dichotomy, dividing his audience into those who 'get' his multi-layered deconstructionism and those who are only there because they've seen him on the telly, explaining to them: 'I'm so good at stand-up, I make it look as if I can't do it.'
The show's thrust is that Lee is devoid of material, since he spends his days either driving up and down motorways to gigs or watching Scooby Doo with his young son. So he's taken to cruising London's North Circular in the vain hope that something funny will happen, thereby neatly mocking the observational style of comedy favoured by so many successful stand-ups.
Only Lee could get away with writing a show about not having a show, but he pulls all the threads together with such understated aplomb that you can't help but marvel at his utterly distinct approach. Really, it's ridiculously good.
Stewart Lee
2013-01-06T15:00:07+00:00
Until recently, Stewart Lee was still flogging his own DVDs in the foyer after his shows, but a couple of BBC2 series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle and a pair of 2011 British Comedy Awards have taken him on to the next level, a state of affairs that doesn't sit entirely comfortably with this most contrary of standups. On Carpet Remnant World ★★★★★, Lee brilliantly plays off this awkward dichotomy, dividing his audience into those who 'get' his multi-layered deconstructionism and those who are only there because they've seen him on the telly, explaining to them: 'I'm so good at stand-up, I make it look as if I can't do it.' The show's thrust is that Lee is devoid of material, since he spends his days either driving up and down motorways to gigs or watching Scooby Doo with his young son. So he's taken to cruising London's North Circular in the vain hope that something funny will happen, thereby neatly mocking the observational style of comedy favoured by so many successful stand-ups. Only Lee could get away with writing a show about not having a show, but he pulls all the threads together with such understated aplomb that you can't help but marvel at his utterly distinct approach. Really, it's ridiculously good.
It’s a brave comic who declares on stage every night that he would like to see a cute television presenter die in a horrific accident (as nearly happened to Top Gear’s Richard Hammond in 2006). But declares it Stewart Lee does and, for good measure, he also disses a fellow comedian while he’s at it.
Lee’s style is almost professorial; he lays out his material slowly, deliberately in a low, even voice and fashions a joke that may not get its payoff until several minutes later. He even deconstructs his material at times or condescendingly berates the audience for not getting the point quickly enough. He builds jokes layer by layer, often using repetition of words and phrases seemingly to the point of banality, but actually to great dramatic effect.
The comic made his name in the 1990s as one half of Lee and Herring, whose intelligent, surreal comedy in Fist of Fun and Lee and Herring (Radio 1 and BBC2) defined a generation of student humour. In 2003 Lee co-wrote the quite brilliant Jerry Springer: The Opera, which came under sustained attack from the religious right, and in 2004 he returned to stand-up with a solo show. If Lee’s on-screen persona with Herring had been Mr Grumpy, he now had cause to be Mr Angry too, and the fallout from the JSTO brouhaha fuelled sensationally good, often highly controversial satire.
Lee's stand-up career has been an unmitigated triumph and each new show pushes the boundaries of both taste and comic invention a little bit further. His latest, entitled If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, is no exception in both departments, and it also contains a real surprise in its delivery. But more of that later.
The inspiration for the show is a remark recently made by Scottish comic Frankie Boyle (the shouty one just departed from BBC2’s Mock the Week); there are no funny comedians over the age of 40, he said. Lee, 41, begs to differ and subverts the ridiculous ageism in that remark by railing about that most middle-aged obsession, his loyalty card at a high-street coffee chain, which was refused by an officious barista. In a inspired segment that lasts fully 15 minutes, Lee manages to skewer petty rules, corporate greed, middle-class smugness and the futile anger of a man trying to flounce out of said coffee shop but who has to negotiate a narrow doorway with his toddler in a pushchair.
Like much of this show, the riff is expertly crafted and delivered. But while Lee is preaching to the converted about The Man, it's when he spins an elaborate story about Richard Hammond - sidekick of Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear (who also gets a kicking) - that he flirts with danger. Many of the more outrageous comments- “I want to see Hammond decapitated and his head on a stick” - are followed with “It’s just a joke!" a la Clarkson when he is making one of his trademark hilarious comments about gays or greens. It’s a neat trick but one so layered in ironies that the risk is that not all the audience appreciate just where the joke lies.
And then the surprise, when Lee tells us he wants to break the last taboo of comedy. I won’t spoil the joke, but suffice to say it has another elaborate set-up, tugs at the heartstrings and then delivers a very funny sucker punch. He is on sensationally good form.
Stewart Lee is at the Palace Theatre in Southend tonight and then touring until 27 February 2010.
Stewart Lee
2009-11-01T15:56:24+00:00
It’s a brave comic who declares on stage every night that he would like to see a cute television presenter die in a horrific accident (as nearly happened to Top Gear’s Richard Hammond in 2006). But declares it Stewart Lee does and, for good measure, he also disses a fellow comedian while he’s at it. Lee’s style is almost professorial; he lays out his material slowly, deliberately in a low, even voice and fashions a joke that may not get its payoff until several minutes later. He even deconstructs his material at times or condescendingly berates the audience for not getting the point quickly enough. He builds jokes layer by layer, often using repetition of words and phrases seemingly to the point of banality, but actually to great dramatic effect. The comic made his name in the 1990s as one half of Lee and Herring, whose intelligent, surreal comedy in Fist of Fun and Lee and Herring (Radio 1 and BBC2) defined a generation of student humour. In 2003 Lee co-wrote the quite brilliant Jerry Springer: The Opera, which came under sustained attack from the religious right, and in 2004 he returned to stand-up with a solo show. If Lee’s on-screen persona with Herring had been Mr Grumpy, he now had cause to be Mr Angry too, and the fallout from the JSTO brouhaha fuelled sensationally good, often highly controversial satire. Lee's stand-up career has been an unmitigated triumph and each new show pushes the boundaries of both taste and comic invention a little bit further. His latest, entitled If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, is no exception in both departments, and it also contains a real surprise in its delivery. But more of that later. The inspiration for the show is a remark recently made...
Three consistently contrary decades in, The Nightingales ought to enjoy the sustainably farmed cult status of The Fall; both bands' last orders philosopher front-men work from similar Karutrock-abilly blueprints, The Nightingales' more carefully drafted.
With his pint pot spyglass, Robert Lloyd leads a crew of grizzled original ‘gales and talented young people into some typically thrilling skirmishes.
Dick The Do-Gooder is an unapologetically expansive splurge of sustained bile; Real Gone Daddy hijacks a lick from CBBC's In The Night Garden; and the sassy mod-pop of Someone For Everyone suggests the cuddly Jarvis Cocker national treasure Lloyd almost was.
Stewart Lee
2012-04-22T21:08:45+01:00
Three consistently contrary decades in, The Nightingales ought to enjoy the sustainably farmed cult status of The Fall; both bands' last orders philosopher front-men work from similar Karutrock-abilly blueprints, The Nightingales' more carefully drafted. With his pint pot spyglass, Robert Lloyd leads a crew of grizzled original ‘gales and talented young people into some typically thrilling skirmishes. Dick The Do-Gooder is an unapologetically expansive splurge of sustained bile; Real Gone Daddy hijacks a lick from CBBC's In The Night Garden; and the sassy mod-pop of Someone For Everyone suggests the cuddly Jarvis Cocker national treasure Lloyd almost was.
A song cycle about 17th century Witch Trials suggests some ‘80s East Anglian Community Theatre piece, or a ‘70s National Theatre promenade, staffed by ‘60s folkies.
But behind this bold and unique record lurks the thinking person's indie pop legend, and unaccredited national treasure, Darren Hayman, late of Hefner, occasional woodwind clusters his only concession to concept album orchestration.
The plaintive plea for tolerance in Outsiders still resonates, and Hayman finds a universal truth in the eponymous Elizabeth Clake's request that someone tug her feet to hasten her hanging.
Stewart Lee
2012-11-11T20:14:51+00:00
A song cycle about 17th century Witch Trials suggests some ‘80s East Anglian Community Theatre piece, or a ‘70s National Theatre promenade, staffed by ‘60s folkies. But behind this bold and unique record lurks the thinking person's indie pop legend, and unaccredited national treasure, Darren Hayman, late of Hefner, occasional woodwind clusters his only concession to concept album orchestration. The plaintive plea for tolerance in Outsiders still resonates, and Hayman finds a universal truth in the eponymous Elizabeth Clake's request that someone tug her feet to hasten her hanging.
It may have been something of a homecoming for Stewart Lee but that didn't save a sold out Birmingham crowd from his wrath.
Throughout the course of latest show, titled A Room With a Stew, the Wellington-born stand up didn't hold back from giving the crowd a piece of his mind.
He is happy for his 'real' fans to come along, those who saw him playing in the clubs around Birmingham in the 90s, however he doesn't appreciate the stragglers who have surfaced in the wake of his succesful BBC series, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
At least that is what he wants you to think.
It is hard to begrudge Lee his new found, semi mainstream success, even if he seems to be fighting against it.
After years and years of perfecting his craft as an alternative comedian, it seems the wider world is now ready to indulge themselves in his unique stylings, described once upon a time as 'doing everything but actually telling a joke'.Room With a Stew as a show is a unique concept in the days of social media, where Lee has specifically dedicated over a year to road-testing material for the fourth series of Comedy Vehicle.
As such, the content is a little disjointed, a series of half hour 'bits' rather than a 90-minute narrative, such as his fantastic 'Carpet Remnant World' or the now legendary '90s Comedian' shows.
Even in a slightly scattered show like this, Lee's in depth knowledge of his own material is staggering, enabling him to harangue the audience for not laughing in the right places, which is ultimately the source of his annoyance.>He also rallies against the younger generation of stand ups, such as Russell Howard, with acidic put downs scattered throughout.
The important thing to remember is that the person on stage isn't the same Stewart Lee who would make his children breakfast in the morning or go out for a meal with friends, rather a character designed to tackle his new found success while keeping hold of his alternative roots.
Whether there is genuinely a part of him that doesn't want this 'new' audience to come along to his shows is doubtful, his sincere rendition of an old folk song to close the night proving that there is plenty of trust in the room.
It may be the case that next time around, there will be even more stragglers coming along, because Room With A Stew contains enough gems and classic Stewart Lee style comedy that all the signs point towards series four of Comedy Vehicle taking him higher up the stand up rankings.
Stewart Lee
2015-05-04T16:03:15+01:00
It may have been something of a homecoming for Stewart Lee but that didn't save a sold out Birmingham crowd from his wrath. Throughout the course of latest show, titled A Room With a Stew, the Wellington-born stand up didn't hold back from giving the crowd a piece of his mind. He is happy for his 'real' fans to come along, those who saw him playing in the clubs around Birmingham in the 90s, however he doesn't appreciate the stragglers who have surfaced in the wake of his succesful BBC series, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. At least that is what he wants you to think. It is hard to begrudge Lee his new found, semi mainstream success, even if he seems to be fighting against it. After years and years of perfecting his craft as an alternative comedian, it seems the wider world is now ready to indulge themselves in his unique stylings, described once upon a time as 'doing everything but actually telling a joke'.Room With a Stew as a show is a unique concept in the days of social media, where Lee has specifically dedicated over a year to road-testing material for the fourth series of Comedy Vehicle. As such, the content is a little disjointed, a series of half hour 'bits' rather than a 90-minute narrative, such as his fantastic 'Carpet Remnant World' or the now legendary '90s Comedian' shows. Even in a slightly scattered show like this, Lee's in depth knowledge of his own material is staggering, enabling him to harangue the audience for not laughing in the right places, which is ultimately the source of his annoyance.>He also rallies against the younger generation of stand ups, such as Russell Howard, with acidic put downs scattered throughout. The important thing to remember is that the person...
Having wet-nursed the experimental ambitions of upwardly mobile rock bands, such as Wilco and Sonic Youth, Chicago's irrepressible musical explorer Jim O'Rourke split to Japan in 2006 to rediscover the personal voice he'd subsumed somewhat into star names' signature sounds. The Swedish free jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafson's Fire! trio came to Tokyo and invited him to plug in his guitar. Low bellyache blowing, Goth rock electric bass throb, and unexpectedly martial Zeppelin style drum thwacks menace throughout, while O'Rourke terraforms plateaus of feedback into the inhospitable terrain of four improvisations. A closing seventeen minute blow-out is equal parts ecstatic jazz and nihilist noise.
Stewart Lee
2011-08-07T19:39:51+01:00
Having wet-nursed the experimental ambitions of upwardly mobile rock bands, such as Wilco and Sonic Youth, Chicago's irrepressible musical explorer Jim O'Rourke split to Japan in 2006 to rediscover the personal voice he'd subsumed somewhat into star names' signature sounds. The Swedish free jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafson's Fire! trio came to Tokyo and invited him to plug in his guitar. Low bellyache blowing, Goth rock electric bass throb, and unexpectedly martial Zeppelin style drum thwacks menace throughout, while O'Rourke terraforms plateaus of feedback into the inhospitable terrain of four improvisations. A closing seventeen minute blow-out is equal parts ecstatic jazz and nihilist noise.
'Should The Bloater be republished? Oh God, absolutely, it's fantastic' Stewart Lee
Min works at the BBC as an audio engineer, where she is struggling to replicate the sound of a heartbeat. At home, other matters of the heart are making a mockery of life as Min knows it.
Min has found herself the object of her lodger's affection. An internationally renowned opera singer she's nicknamed 'The Bloater', Min is disgusted and attracted to him in equal measure. But with a husband so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off on him even when he's still in the room, Min can't quite bring herself to silence The Bloater's overtures.
Vain, materialistic, yet surprisingly tender, The Bloater is a sparklingly ironic comedy of manners for all flirtatious gossips who love to hate and hate to love.
PRAISE FOR THE BLOATER 'A wonderfully unromantic romantic comedy' Daily Telegraph
'Uncommonly good' Guardian 'It is the perfect aperitif, makes you feel warm and careless and much, much happier' The Times
Stewart Lee
2022-05-14T17:59:50+01:00
'Should The Bloater be republished? Oh God, absolutely, it's fantastic' Stewart Lee Min works at the BBC as an audio engineer, where she is struggling to replicate the sound of a heartbeat. At home, other matters of the heart are making a mockery of life as Min knows it. Min has found herself the object of her lodger's affection. An internationally renowned opera singer she's nicknamed 'The Bloater', Min is disgusted and attracted to him in equal measure. But with a husband so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off on him even when he's still in the room, Min can't quite bring herself to silence The Bloater's overtures. Vain, materialistic, yet surprisingly tender, The Bloater is a sparklingly ironic comedy of manners for all flirtatious gossips who love to hate and hate to love. PRAISE FOR THE BLOATER 'A wonderfully unromantic romantic comedy' Daily Telegraph 'Uncommonly good' Guardian 'It is the perfect aperitif, makes you feel warm and careless and much, much happier' The Times
Rarely does the Wedge witness a line-up as curious as this. Openers Grief Daddy are, as they tell us, the winners of ‘the best band ever’ (they won the venue’s 2017 Unsigned Showcase).
What started as a side project for local noiseniks Battery Hens has acquired a life of its own. The trio operate as a satire on the modern world, consumerism and capitalism – through the medium of an old Yamaha keyboard, a synth drum and a series of splenetic rants and herky-jerky dance moves from frontman, ‘Fax Machine’. ‘#BuyGriefDaddy’ indeed. You won’t be disappointed. Next up is stand-up comic Stewart Lee. Lee fills theatres across the land on his own tours, but as the promoters were at pains to point out this was not a Stewart Lee show, he was doing his 1980s comedy club routine.
But of course being Lee, it wasn’t as straight-forward as that – Lee deconstructs the routine as he goes via the filter of life in 2018. So we get to hear about his run in with doorstepping Christian evangelists asking: ‘If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?’, pre-internet dating, the ‘jazz/folk’ conundrum and the ‘sex pigeon’. It’s hilarious stuff, but almost as soon as you feel it’s getting going, he’s gone. Cult post-punk act The Nightingales are the headliners, but sadly the crowd noticeably thins as their hour-long set progresses - many had clearly come for the novelty of Lee’s skewed return to his roots.
And the four-piece don’t make it easy. Frontman Robert Lloyd prowls the stage barking his confrontational lyrics while Fliss Kitson is an impressive presence, holding it all together at the back on drums and back-up vocals. But the audience are never acknowledged and songs run from one to another, often without pause. For newcomers to the band, it’s difficult to find a way in.
However, it’s easy to see why they were a John Peel favourite back in their ’80s heyday – the pummelling riffs and driving rhythms build a hypnotic effect as they pile past.
Those who stay to the end can truly say they've witnessed a show the likes of which are unlikely to be repeated.
Stewart Lee
2018-09-24T16:29:27+01:00
Rarely does the Wedge witness a line-up as curious as this. Openers Grief Daddy are, as they tell us, the winners of ‘the best band ever’ (they won the venue’s 2017 Unsigned Showcase). What started as a side project for local noiseniks Battery Hens has acquired a life of its own. The trio operate as a satire on the modern world, consumerism and capitalism – through the medium of an old Yamaha keyboard, a synth drum and a series of splenetic rants and herky-jerky dance moves from frontman, ‘Fax Machine’. ‘#BuyGriefDaddy’ indeed. You won’t be disappointed. Next up is stand-up comic Stewart Lee. Lee fills theatres across the land on his own tours, but as the promoters were at pains to point out this was not a Stewart Lee show, he was doing his 1980s comedy club routine. But of course being Lee, it wasn’t as straight-forward as that – Lee deconstructs the routine as he goes via the filter of life in 2018. So we get to hear about his run in with doorstepping Christian evangelists asking: ‘If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?’, pre-internet dating, the ‘jazz/folk’ conundrum and the ‘sex pigeon’. It’s hilarious stuff, but almost as soon as you feel it’s getting going, he’s gone. Cult post-punk act The Nightingales are the headliners, but sadly the crowd noticeably thins as their hour-long set progresses - many had clearly come for the novelty of Lee’s skewed return to his roots. And the four-piece don’t make it easy. Frontman Robert Lloyd prowls the stage barking his confrontational lyrics while Fliss Kitson is an impressive presence, holding it all together at the back on drums and back-up vocals. But the audience are never acknowledged and songs run from one to another, often without pause. For newcomers to...
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 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.
Stewart Lee
2016-07-05T17:55:39+01:00
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...
We welcome you to the Ace podcast, lovingly presided over for us by journalist, record collector and broadcaster Pete Paphides. This occasional series will feature interviews with guests from many branches of the extended Ace family, detailing their own careers, the artists that have influenced their lives and the records that they love, all enjoyably explored over two microphones and plenty of cups of tea.
The celebrated comedian, journalist and documentary maker brings to the Ace podcast his unique take on the world, covering what Jimmy Tarbuck might have seen when given acid by the Beatles, how he met then-stranger Ian McShane for dinner when allowed out after a Covid lockdown and comparing a Dream Syndicate improvisation session to what he hopes to achieve with his stand-up. This is all via talks on record shopping in the Birmingham area, bogs and being a volunteer corpse.
It is the only Ace podcast that includes a live toilet break.
We welcome you to the Ace podcast, lovingly presided over for us by journalist, record collector and broadcaster Pete Paphides. This occasional series will feature interviews with guests from many branches of the extended Ace family, detailing their own careers, the artists that have influenced their lives and the records that they love, all enjoyably explored over two microphones and plenty of cups of tea. soundcloud.com itunes.apple.com Episode 27 - Stewart Lee The celebrated comedian, journalist and documentary maker brings to the Ace podcast his unique take on the world, covering what Jimmy Tarbuck might have seen when given acid by the Beatles, how he met then-stranger Ian McShane for dinner when allowed out after a Covid lockdown and comparing a Dream Syndicate improvisation session to what he hopes to achieve with his stand-up. This is all via talks on record shopping in the Birmingham area, bogs and being a volunteer corpse. It is the only Ace podcast that includes a live toilet break. Further listening: Country Joe & The Fish John Fahey Julian Cope Before The Fall
When the Suharto regime opened Indonesia to Western Influence, its previously repressed rock scene went overground, and here collectors who prize the region's vibrant native hybrids of acid rock, hairy funk and indigenous melodies reluctantly share highlights of their hard to snag stash. It's difficult to tell, from these twenty cherry-picked tracks, whether ‘70s Indonesia is, for collector scum, really the new ‘70s Turkey, but you'll be glad you heard The Brims' heavy-footed freak-out Anti-Gandja, and AKA's Shake Me is a puritanical slice of bellbottom boogie.
Stewart Lee
2012-07-29T00:51:40+01:00
When the Suharto regime opened Indonesia to Western Influence, its previously repressed rock scene went overground, and here collectors who prize the region's vibrant native hybrids of acid rock, hairy funk and indigenous melodies reluctantly share highlights of their hard to snag stash. It's difficult to tell, from these twenty cherry-picked tracks, whether ‘70s Indonesia is, for collector scum, really the new ‘70s Turkey, but you'll be glad you heard The Brims' heavy-footed freak-out Anti-Gandja, and AKA's Shake Me is a puritanical slice of bellbottom boogie.
I’VE BEEN doing stand-up for 17 years,” says Stewart Lee, “and I can tell when there is tension in the room.” There is indeed. Lee has long been one of the most skilful, stimulating comics in Britain — never more so than in last year’s exquisite comeback, a demolition job on the false imperatives of our sentimentalised society. This year, though, he has raised the stakes. Some people will clearly find it unacceptable. Others will delight in the free rein he has given himself. I found it a strikingly provocative, often extremely funny, slightly overambitious blend of the personal and the political.
The political first: Lee puts his personal woes in the context of the climate of extremism that led to the July 7 bombings. He compares the unachievable aims of al-Qaeda — the destruction of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation — with the quainter, more gentlemanly bombers of yesteryear, the IRA: “Proper British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British, but they were.”
And those personal woes? A stomach that is eating itself. A career that is ostensibly fading. And, oh yes, the threats made against him by militant Christians after the BBC Two broadcast of Jerry Springer The Opera, the show he co-wrote and directed that depicted a gay Jesus in a nappy.
Hence the extended anecdote that dominates the latter half of the show. Lee, hiding out at his mum’s house, encounters Jesus — or is it merely his delusion of Jesus? — who then debases himself in order to alleviate the drunken suffering of Stewart Lee, former star of TV’s Fist of Fun.
The opening half is funnier. It nails the nonsense purveyed by gentler targets such as the comic Joe Pasquale or Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code. But Dan Brown leads to the Vatican — “I love Catholicism. It’s my favourite form of clandestine global evil” — and to the bloody-minded testing of limits that makes up the second half.
This may all sound earnest. Far from it: Lee’s dour, steady delivery belies one of the most playful spirits in comedy. His precision of language both highlights the muddle-headedness of his targets and creates gloriously vivid pictures.
The second half is in some ways a wrong turn, though. Lee could do more to bring out the personal sense of hurt that came with his hounding as a blasphemer. Without it, the bad-taste Jesus anecdote is too long to sustain the ideas — of freedom of expression, of the mutability of religious icons — that it supports. So sometimes, yes, it does seem a bit much. But, once again, Lee is out there pushing the form like nobody else. This is awkward but thrilling stuff.
Stewart Lee
2005-08-12T22:59:42+01:00
I’VE BEEN doing stand-up for 17 years,” says Stewart Lee, “and I can tell when there is tension in the room.” There is indeed. Lee has long been one of the most skilful, stimulating comics in Britain — never more so than in last year’s exquisite comeback, a demolition job on the false imperatives of our sentimentalised society. This year, though, he has raised the stakes. Some people will clearly find it unacceptable. Others will delight in the free rein he has given himself. I found it a strikingly provocative, often extremely funny, slightly overambitious blend of the personal and the political. The political first: Lee puts his personal woes in the context of the climate of extremism that led to the July 7 bombings. He compares the unachievable aims of al-Qaeda — the destruction of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation — with the quainter, more gentlemanly bombers of yesteryear, the IRA: “Proper British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British, but they were.” And those personal woes? A stomach that is eating itself. A career that is ostensibly fading. And, oh yes, the threats made against him by militant Christians after the BBC Two broadcast of Jerry Springer The Opera, the show he co-wrote and directed that depicted a gay Jesus in a nappy. Hence the extended anecdote that dominates the latter half of the show. Lee, hiding out at his mum’s house, encounters Jesus — or is it merely his delusion of Jesus? — who then debases himself in order to alleviate the drunken suffering of Stewart Lee, former star of TV’s Fist of Fun. The opening half is funnier. It nails the nonsense purveyed by gentler targets such as the comic Joe Pasquale or Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code. But Dan Brown leads to the...
A quarter of a century ago, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang sold the world that pervasive slowcore guitar sound with Galaxie 500, then split to work as a duo with subtler methods.
Determinedly pedalling a diaphanous acid-folk-pop for two decades now, bowing their heads patiently as it billows in and out of fashion, the pair's ninth album is amongst their best.
The quicksilver guitar of Michio Kurihara, of the Japanese psychedelic collective Ghost, drips magic dust over lightly jazzy drums, arrestingly inexact harmonies, and cautious, languid melodies, that uncoil like cats in the sun.
Stewart Lee
2011-01-05T11:30:08+00:00
A quarter of a century ago, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang sold the world that pervasive slowcore guitar sound with Galaxie 500, then split to work as a duo with subtler methods. Determinedly pedalling a diaphanous acid-folk-pop for two decades now, bowing their heads patiently as it billows in and out of fashion, the pair's ninth album is amongst their best. The quicksilver guitar of Michio Kurihara, of the Japanese psychedelic collective Ghost, drips magic dust over lightly jazzy drums, arrestingly inexact harmonies, and cautious, languid melodies, that uncoil like cats in the sun.
“Sphincter-poppingly angry, totally unamusing and uninsightful, and painfully, excruciatingly right-on. A bitter, politically correct member of the Remain-voting liberal elite. The type of comedy which is not designed to provoke laughter so much as solemn head-nodding and applause at the politically correct sentiment.” James Delingpole, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News
"“I seem to have been radicalised into a one man crusade against Stewart Lee and his fans. This will probably occupy the rest of my life but mark my words the man will die and I will try to be the one that ends his life." Corbyngrad Mayor @SyedforLondon, Twitter
"“Stewart Lee is an archaic left wing relic. The old 'alternative comedian' crowd is now the Establishment - Milo Yiannopoulos is more on the zeitgeist. The 'alt' comics are that comfortable establishment, with their 'edgy' Apollo nights out on the BBC. Don't agree with all of his views, but at least people like Paul Joseph Watson can be funny about subjects that Lefties like Stewart Lee are shit-scared to go anywhere near." Brendan McCarthy, writer/artist of Judge Dredd and Mad Max : Fury Road, Twitter
Dear Covidians of Infectoland
Merry Winterval to ye alle!
Thanks for your patience with rescheduling of dates.
I hope you are all well and have not suffered any loss.
Here I wait patiently to reassume my privileged duties, which I promise to perform henceforth with a greater sense of responsibility, having learned & listened under lockdown.
One day we will all be laughing again in some rooms.
I cannot embrace you all.
Your pal
Stew Art Lee
And to all my American fans I say...
‘I work real hard for my living
But I don't celebrate bullshit Thanksgiving
Sit up like some fool and eat turkey
That's the day your forefathers jerked me’
Agit-pop stars Asian Dub Foundation sampled an old routine of mine on their new album, Access Denied. https://smarturl.it/ADFAcessDenied.
In the period between the two lockdowns, that historians are already calling Johnson’s Perineum, they got me in to record a video with them, and it is out yesterday, 1st December, our Winterval gift to pre-Brexit Britain.
Let’s make it the Christmas No 1! https://youtu.be/_kkOHtniTts
2) MEDIA GARAGE SALE
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
The company operates out of an industrial unit in Southend, run by a man called Colin, who for the whole festive season will be alone and dressed as a Santa while he ships your orders of Xmas laffs worldwide, at top speed!
We have already mailed parcels of fun to Japan, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, France, USA, Canada, New Zealand, and even Latvia! Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
Please send the link below to your grans when they ask what you want for Xmas.
Our documentary KING ROCKER has been selected for the Sheffield Documentary Festival but didn’t get screened due to Covid.
It has, however, been named by rock-mag MOJO as the second best rockumentary of 2020, and I am now allowed to announce that it will be on newly free-to-air SKY ARTS, which has also recently covered PUNCHDRUNK THEATRE, COLD WAR STEVE and IVOR CUTLER, in the 1st ¼ of next year.
Who would have thought that the weird arts brief of BBC4 would one day be fulfilled by SKY ARTS?
Comedian Stewart Lee and director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye) investigate a missing piece of punk history. Robert Lloyd, best known for fronting cult bands The Prefects and The Nightingales, has survived under the radar for over four decades. 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.
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have been involved with this positive and uplifting project, and it has been a mental lifeline this year.
I’m not even bothering with trying to list dates here this month, as so many are in flux. I will send a big list out on Jan 1st. BUT...
1) All outstanding shows of the Snowflake/Tornado tour will be rescheduled/are being rescheduled for whenever they are allowed to happen.
The venues have your ticket money and this is helping them not collapse and keep an arts exoskeleton in place for whatever future cultural lives we are able to have.
I will do these shows. Don’t worry.
2) All little socially-distanced club gigs (that I had down for working out new stuff in November, in London, N’castle, E’bro & Glasgow), have been pulled, and will be rescheduled. Again, the venues have your ticket money which is good for them, so take a chill pill daddi-o. As for any December 3rd onwards club shows, these are currently still on.
For the record, unlike clay’s Grayson Perry, I do not believe that venues or artists that are struggling under covid are ‘dead wood’ which will be cut out by the covid.
Some of the best artists currently working in the world in comedy and music are stacking shelves and driving vans right now, and always will be, having not been lucky enough to enjoy the patronage of various massive publicly funded arts institutions, or the randomised breaks that befall their lessers.
In my experience, the best people have often found commercial viability elusive, and the pestilence only exacerbates this. SHIT FLOATS. As a rule, most profitable art is rubbish, and my own success only makes me doubt my worth.
The Nov club dates were also an effort to make money for small venues to ensure that the infrastructure that supports our artform survives.
All changes as they occur will be listed on the LIVE PAGE OF THE WEBSITE
5) LTD EDTN PRINTS
All supposed merch you see of me on-line, like the YOU SAY YOU’RE ENGLISH football scarf or 100% PEARS t-shirts, is unofficial and I see nothing for it.
But these legit artists have made prints of my ANTI-TORY quips as lovely art to tie in with an exhibition by NEW NORTH PRESS that opens on Nov 20th - somehow.
There will – hopefully – also be a dedicated website with all the posters on it (www.revertingtotype.com), that will showcase the 150 prints from presses around the world, plus our 25 collaborative prints.
This is classier merch than a LITTLE BRITAIN action figure of a bloke pretending to be disabled.
6) THESE FERAL LANDS
Mediaeval minimalist Laura Cannell, whom my wife and I have been huge fans of since the Welsh free-jazz harpist Rhodri Davis recommended her work to me in the bar of the ex-Hungarian embassy in East Berlin over a decade ago, is “beyond excited” to announce her new release THESE FERAL LANDS, for which she asked me to write and mumble words for 4 of the 10 tracks.
Laura says...
“I am beyond excited to announce: THESE FERAL LANDS Volume I - Out Friday 13th November 2020. Feat. LAURA CANNELL + STEWART LEE + KATE ELLIS + POLLY WRIGHT + JENNIFER LUCY ALLAN. This is our Personal and Collective Folklore. PRE-ORDER Ltd Ed CD/DL NOW
Stewart Lee completists, and art fans, can order this fabulous print, by agit-artist Cold War Steve, of Birmingham, called Benny’s Babbies from Birmingham Art Gallery.
The montage includes me, and many other far more significant Midlands figures i.e Steel Pulse, Kevin Rowlands, Mr Egg, Black Sabbath, and Robert LLoyd, and obviously any sales will help Birmingham’s superb art gallery, with its astonishing pre-Raphaelite selection and cool stuff by Laura Knight and Emmy Bridgwater, through the plague times.
A bostin Winterval gift for the Brummie, or ex-Brummie, in your life. £15.
We are all Benny’s Babbies. Ich bin ein Benny’s Babby.
Clapham Grand, 21st Jan, £17.50. For one night only, to celebrate the release of their new album Spare Ribs, Stewart Lee will be in conversation with Sleaford Mods. Expect ridiculous questions and lengthy monologues.
TICKETS
9) TREES BOX SET
Anyone that knows me will be sick of me banging on about this brilliant forgotten turn of the ‘70s folk rock band, Trees, for the last 30+ years.
Their lone two albums, and subsidiary materials, are all collected by FIRE in this fantastic package and I got to write the massive insert booklet.
Tim Wells’ first skinhead werewolf novel, MOONSTOMP, perfectly fused disparate strands of 70s New English Library pulp fiction, into story that was both viscerally entertaining and subversively thought-provoking.
He needs our help to publish its sequel and you would be doing me and him a favour of you bunged in as I want to read it ASAP.
ELECTRIC MUSIC by WOLFHOUNDS with sleeve notes by me -
BEN MOOR’S NEW BOOK. Performance Artist and writer Ben Moor says,
“In lieu of the theatrical performances of Who Here's Lost? I have printed the text of the piece for to be read at leisure.
This would have been on sale after the show to people who missed half the jokes (I tend to go fast) and so they can try and work out just what it was they'd been watching. The book version also includes a selection of pieces I wrote in each of the last four decades"CLICK THIS LINK
PODCASTS DADDI-0!
(Podcasts are like radio shows but are on the internet and you can hear them at any time.
I have just found out about them.)
Erwin Saunders - This is one of those internet finds that one worries about sharing, and hesitates to recommend, a precious bloom that might wither on exposure to light.
There are 17 episodes which, oddly, have been numbered 1 - 17 in reverse order, so you need to start with 17 and work backwards.
Watch the 1st two without distraction, looking for the tiny points if light, ideally on a TV screen where you can see the backgrounds properly, and you will be hooked.
There is only one mis-step in the whole 2 hrs +, where “Erwin” obviously couldn’t resist using some footage he had shot some years ago, which is tonally slightly out of kilter with the rest of this brilliant labour of love.
I know that subscribers to this newsletter will treat Erwin Saunders’ work with the care and respect it deserves. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIptHpq0tre-Mnu2V1VOoww
Honeyland (Tamara Kotevska, Ljubo Stefanov) Days of The Bagnold Summer (Simon Bird)
The Laundromat (Stephen Soderbergh)
The Day Shall Come (Chris Morris)
Southern Journey Revisited (Tim Plester, Rob Curry)
The Social Dilemma (Jeff Orlowski)
The Peanut Butter Falcon (Tyler Nilson)
NEW MUSIC
The Nightingales - Four Against Fate Rich Hopkins & Luminarios - Live At El Lokal The Dream Syndicate - Universe Inside Wild Billy Childish - Kings Of The Medway Delta Garcia Peoples - Nublu NYC 2019 Windy & Carl - Allegiance & Conviction The Frees - Live From The End Of The Earth Alan Wilkinson & Douglas Benford - Appointed Views The Heartwood Institute - Tomorrow’s People John Edwards - Just Another Day At Home Adam Bohman & Douglas Benford - Ad Hoc & Words Laura Cannell - The Earth With Her Crowns Jack Sharp - Good Times Older The Frees - Live To Air The Frees - Lips That Bite Fixed Horizon - Jungle Jon Free - Spiralling Richard Skelton - Border Ballads Howe Gelb - Cocoon The Primevals - Second Nature Richard Youngs - Vistas Darren Hayman - Home Time Richard Youngs - Four Verses V/A - Seito In The Beginning Woman Was The Sun Lucinda Williams - Good Souls & Better Angels Bob Dylan - Rough & Rowdy Ways Billy Sedlmayr - Mean What You Say Shirley Collins - Heart’s Ease Alasdair Roberts - The Songs of My Boyhood Boris - No Slum of Legs - Slum Of Legs Tobin Sprout - Empty Horses Thurston Moore - By The Fire Rhodri Davies - Telyn Rawn Idles - Ultra Mono Guided by Voices - Mirrored Aztec The Cravats - Hoorahland Alison Cotton - Only Darkness Now Rachel Aggs - Visitations 0202 Richard Dawson - Republic of Geordieland Shopping - All Or Nothing Tamikrest - Tamotait Hen Ogled - Free Humans Asian Dub Foundation - Access Denied Chuck Prophet - The Land That Time Forgot Cash Rivers & Sinners - Frankenstein’s New Nut Huggers Guided by Voices - Styles We Paid For Dope - Semi Legal On The Edge Of Culture Carlton Melton - Where This Leads David Grubbs - October 19 2017 Napalm Death - Throes of Joy In The Jaws of Defeatism The William Loveday Intention - People Think They Know Me The William Loveday Intention - 1-8
REISSUED OLD MUSIC
Tim Buckley - Live At The Electric (1968) John Lee Hooker - Black Night Is Falling (1977) The Heads - Reverberations Vol 1 (2005) Barnabus - Beginning To Unwind (1971) Miracle Legion - 4.20 Live At The Boot (2017) V/A - Brown Acid The Tenth Trip (1969-74) Creedence Clearwater Revival - Live At Woodstock (1969) John Lee Hooker - Documenting The Sensation (1948-52) Albert Ayler - New Grass (1969) Guided by Voices - Doses of Nonchalance (1995) The Fall - Tech College, St Helens Merseyside (1981) Linda Hoyle - Pieces of Me (1971) Day Of Phoenix - Mind Funeral (1971) L7 - Smell The Magic - SubPop (1991) The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent special edition (2008) Guided By Voices - Rara Avis (recent live) Gorgeous Space Virus - Shall We Go Skinny Dipping? (1992) Sume - The Sound of a Revolution (1973-6) Gorgeous Space Virus - Shall We Go Skinny Dipping? (1992) Sume - The Sound of a Revolution (1973-6) V/A - Living On A Hill, Danish Underground (1967-74) Culpeper’s Orchard - Mountain Music (1971-3) Guided By Voices - Freak Anthems (2006) Guided By Voices - Freak Anthems Revisited (2006) Trees - Trees Box Set (1970)*****
IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS...
Adam Schlesinger (Fountain of Wayne) (1967)
John Prine (outlaw country singer) (1946)
Henry Grimes (jazz bassist) (1935)
Hal Wilner (arranger) (1957)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Goodie) (1940)
Lee Konitz (jazz saxophonist) (1927)
Matthew Seligman (Soft Boy) (1955) Millie Small (ska singer) (1946) Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk robot) (1947)
Bill Rieflin (drummer for hire) (1960)
Hugh McKenna (Tear Gas pianist) (1949)
Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounder) (1942) Astrid Kirchherr (photographer) (1938) Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra saxophonist) (1947)
Aubrey Burl (archaeologist) (1926)
Phil May (Pretty Thing) (1944) The Clacton Fin Whale (circa 2000) Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (artist) (1930) Doll Tor stone circle (3300 BC) Kay Carroll (The Fall) (1948) Bob the Cat (73 bus) (2006) Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew) Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959) Carl Reiner (director) (1922) Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928) Keith Tippett (jazz pianist) (1947) Jimmy Cobb (jazz drummer) (1929) Barbara Smoker (Humanist) (1923) The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton Tony Elliot (Time Out) (1942) Judy Dyble (folk singer) (1949) Peter Green (blues guitarist) (1946) Emitt Rhodes (power pop auteur) (1950) Annie Ross (jazz bohemian) (1930) Joe Ruby (Scooby-Doo) (1933) Craig Weatherhill (folklorist) (1950) Don Weller (jazz saxophonist) (1940) Simeon Coxe (Silver Apple) (1938) Diana Rigg (Avenger) (1938) Toots Hibbert (reggae got soul) (1942) Dele Fadele (carry bag man) (1962) George Jeffrie (man’s-laughter maker) (1964) Dave Kusworth (Brum punk Stone) (1960) Gary Peacock (jazz bassist) (1935) Doorkins (Southwark Cathedral Cat) (2005?) Spencer Davis (Brumbeat pioneer) (1939) The Cubbington Pear Tree (1770) Fungie The Dingle Dolphin (1979) Jill Paton Walsh (novelist) (1937) Val Warner (poet) (1946)
Stewart Lee
2020-12-02T14:22:15+00:00
“Ghastly, puritanical, po-faced, sanctimonious, finger-wagging, Woke-Witchfinder-in-Chief” Toby Young, Twitter “Sphincter-poppingly angry, totally unamusing and uninsightful, and painfully, excruciatingly right-on. A bitter, politically correct member of the Remain-voting liberal elite. The type of comedy which is not designed to provoke laughter so much as solemn head-nodding and applause at the politically correct sentiment.” James Delingpole, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News "“I seem to have been radicalised into a one man crusade against Stewart Lee and his fans. This will probably occupy the rest of my life but mark my words the man will die and I will try to be the one that ends his life." Corbyngrad Mayor @SyedforLondon, Twitter "“Stewart Lee is an archaic left wing relic. The old 'alternative comedian' crowd is now the Establishment - Milo Yiannopoulos is more on the zeitgeist. The 'alt' comics are that comfortable establishment, with their 'edgy' Apollo nights out on the BBC. Don't agree with all of his views, but at least people like Paul Joseph Watson can be funny about subjects that Lefties like Stewart Lee are shit-scared to go anywhere near." Brendan McCarthy, writer/artist of Judge Dredd and Mad Max : Fury Road, Twitter Dear Covidians of Infectoland Merry Winterval to ye alle! Thanks for your patience with rescheduling of dates. I hope you are all well and have not suffered any loss. Here I wait patiently to reassume my privileged duties, which I promise to perform henceforth with a greater sense of responsibility, having learned & listened under lockdown. One day we will all be laughing again in some rooms. I cannot embrace you all. Your pal Stew Art Lee And to all my American fans I say... ‘I work real hard for my living But I don't celebrate bullshit Thanksgiving Sit up like some fool and eat turkey That's...
On Monday, as part of their ongoing fabricated culture war, a desperate Conservative government declared an incoherent assault on “rip-off” degrees. But there is no one left in the duffer-stuffed Conservative government clever enough to defend the idiotic soundbite that is “Crackdown on Mickey Mouse degrees!” And hasn’t Mickey Mouse suffered enough, being painted over by Robert Jenrick, without having his educational opportunities taken away from him too?
The task of eating a half-baked policy pie full of untested opinion goulash live on TV on a Monday morning fell to the hapless MP for Harlow, education minister Robert Halfon, a man who occupies so many contradictory positions as to appear almost without corporeal form, like a Happy Shopper bag swirling round and round in a gust of wind in a bin store behind one of those adult shops on the A1.
In 2013 Halfon voted against same-sex marriage, but in 2019 he voted in favour of same-sex marriage, but only in Northern Ireland, which didn’t seem any more gay than the rest of the UK last time I visited. Presumably, Halfon doesn’t mind what people get up to as long as it’s behind an informal trade border, and in the privacy of their own island, or quarter of an island in this case.
Halfon also voted remain in 2016, so well done to him, but then said he would vote leave in a second referendum, the twat, making him perhaps the only person, faced with the evidence of Brexit’s catastrophic failure and disastrous impact on Britain’s future prospects, to decide to support it having previously opposed it.
To be fair, Halfon’s been good on school meals and utility company profiteering, in the same way as a stopped clock is right twice daily, but is clearly cannon fodder in the Conservatives’ War Against Intelligence ™ ®. Indeed Halfon folded like wet toilet paper in the face of an uncharacteristically tenacious grilling from Susanna Reid on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. (And this toilet paper that is the same as Robert Halfon also has some diarrhoea on it, in case you are wondering. And it is a cat’s diarrhoea too.)
So forensic was Reid, that Richard Madeley just sat back, the foolish mouth that has been the source of so much unintended joy tightly shut, as he enjoyed the spectacle, like a ruddy-faced farmer who’s just set his jack russell terrier on an enfeebled rat.
The Conservatives’ assault on Mickey Mouse degrees hinged on the idea that people should do “good” degrees. But those charged with explaining the policy had been sent into the field without any clear idea of what the word “good” actually meant here, a simple error that anyone who had done a good degree should have picked up on.
“What we’re trying to do is make sure that those who do degrees have good outcomes when they finish their university degree,” Halfon opined. “Would working in a shop be a good outcome for someone who had a history degree?” asked Reid, stalking her prey like a bearded pard in a medieval bestiary. “It might be,” Halfon answered. “It depends what the progression in the shop is. Is there a progression to higher wages in that shop, depending on what job it is that you are doing? We want good progression, we want good earnings and we want good skills.”
Reid smells victory. The word “good” has been bandied about meaninglessly and carelessly by the fool Halfon. Is a “good” job only a job that pays well, or is it possible to dream of a better world where value is not innately tied to money? Not so long ago, the idea was you were privileged to attend a university because you were now one of Thee Ancient Custodians of Knowledge Charged With Enlightening Thee Worlde Beyonde, saving humanity from sliding back into the dark ages. But then Blair said “The more you learn, the more you earn”, made education a business transaction and ruined it. Reid’s furrowed face, clever like one of those tiny velvet monkeys that figure out how to open a Kinder Egg that has fallen out of an Italian aircraft, suggested she appeared to consider making this case. But her eyes were on a bigger prize.
“So people getting higher and higher wages would be the definition of a good outcome,” Reid began, as Halfon surely sensed doom bearing down on him like Catherine the Great’s horse, “and yet you as a government are saying don’t go and ask for higher wages because that’s going to wreck the economy … because it fuels inflation.” Halfon tried to Sunak his way out of it, answering a different question to the one asked – “Well I am aware that we have a very difficult economic challenge. That’s why we have put £97bn on helping people with the cost of living, giving every family over around over [sic] £3,000 a year” – but stopped short of saying his main priority was to stop the boats.
This current crop of Conservatives will never understand the idea that education, and indeed culture, can have an abstract value beyond the financial. The 12 Conservative culture secretaries who have bulldozed their way through the last decade include such oafs as Michelle Donelan, Nadine Dorries, Oliver Dowden, Matt Handcock and Sajid Javid, the last of whom actually acted to protect ticket touts reselling publicly subsidised seats at a profit for personal gain because they were “legitimate entrepreneurs”.
Meanwhile, in April, the Financial Times reported evidence suggesting “A growing number of voters are graduates and they are becoming less likely to back the Conservatives, threatening to redraw the country’s electoral map”. Is it any wonder they don’t want anyone to know anything, to understand anything, to think?
Stewart Lee
2023-07-23T13:06:01+01:00
On Monday, as part of their ongoing fabricated culture war, a desperate Conservative government declared an incoherent assault on “rip-off” degrees. But there is no one left in the duffer-stuffed Conservative government clever enough to defend the idiotic soundbite that is “Crackdown on Mickey Mouse degrees!” And hasn’t Mickey Mouse suffered enough, being painted over by Robert Jenrick, without having his educational opportunities taken away from him too? The task of eating a half-baked policy pie full of untested opinion goulash live on TV on a Monday morning fell to the hapless MP for Harlow, education minister Robert Halfon, a man who occupies so many contradictory positions as to appear almost without corporeal form, like a Happy Shopper bag swirling round and round in a gust of wind in a bin store behind one of those adult shops on the A1. In 2013 Halfon voted against same-sex marriage, but in 2019 he voted in favour of same-sex marriage, but only in Northern Ireland, which didn’t seem any more gay than the rest of the UK last time I visited. Presumably, Halfon doesn’t mind what people get up to as long as it’s behind an informal trade border, and in the privacy of their own island, or quarter of an island in this case. Halfon also voted remain in 2016, so well done to him, but then said he would vote leave in a second referendum, the twat, making him perhaps the only person, faced with the evidence of Brexit’s catastrophic failure and disastrous impact on Britain’s future prospects, to decide to support it having previously opposed it. To be fair, Halfon’s been good on school meals and utility company profiteering, in the same way as a stopped clock is right twice daily, but is clearly cannon fodder in the Conservatives’...
WHAT WOULD JUDAS DO? Was first performed in the autumn of 2006 at Battersea Arts Centre as one of their enormously important, work-in-progress Scratch Nights.
The idea was to know the story of the last week of Judas' life as well as possible and then kind of throw it away, and tell it anecdotally, like someone remembering a series of events.
These three, not terribly hi-fi, recordings are all that remains of What Would Judas Do? They are about 20% different from each other.
You can download a work-in-progress version of the script here.
WHAT WOULD JUDAS DO? Was first performed in the autumn of 2006 at Battersea Arts Centre as one of their enormously important, work-in-progress Scratch Nights. The idea was to know the story of the last week of Judas' life as well as possible and then kind of throw it away, and tell it anecdotally, like someone remembering a series of events. These three, not terribly hi-fi, recordings are all that remains of What Would Judas Do? They are about 20% different from each other. You can download a work-in-progress version of the script here. You can buy the CD set here
The comedy of Stewart Lee, who I went to see last night, works for me on several levels. One is that the comedy comes with a running commentary from the comedian. Each joke is assessed, explained, and dissected, which appeals to the little Derrida in all of us. Another level is that Lee is the same age as me, and much of his act reflects the concerns and collective memory of men in their early 40s: death, children's television, failure, Thatcher and getting fat. Most of all I like Lee because he revels in the delicious irony of attempting political 'alternative' comedy with a contemporary post-modern audience. Like me, he remembers the 1980s like it was yesterday, and looks bemused when his 20-something audience fails to split their sides at the jokes about Tory cuts, privatisation, and Lord McAlpine.
In his act, he bemoans the fact that in the 1980s you could slag off the Tories, and get a round of applause. An alternative comedy audience in 1989 at the Comedy Store, upstairs at De Hems, or the Balham Banana, when Lee arrived in London, comprised almost exclusively of Labour voters. People like me, in fact. Last night, most of the audience would have voted Tory, Green or Lib Dem, or nothing. One of the biggest laughs was a joke about Ed Miliband, which I won't repeat. Back in the 1980s, it was simple. If you liked alternative comedy, you hated Thatcher and liked the Labour Party.
The lesson my generation of Labour supporters learned was that sitting in a room with 80 like-minded comedy fans, laughing at jokes about Norman Tebbit or Cecil Parkinson, wasn't the same as winning elections. Red Wedge, which I loved of course, made the same tactical error. It appealed to lefties who were going to support Labour anyway, but did nothing to reach the people listening to Dire Straits and Madonna. This latter point was made by a young Tony Blair to a young Billy Bragg, a conversation I wish I'd heard.
Politics, we learned from bitter defeats, wasn't simple at all. Thatcher closed down factories, stigmatised single parents, alienated young people and put their parents on the dole, and still got elected. More trade unionists voted Tory than Labour. Then they got rid of her, and put in a grey, unassuming man whose idea of reform was a phone-line to report rogue traffic cones, and they still won.
Instead of trying to understand why people were voting Tory despite three million people unemployed, record house repossessions, urban riots and collapsing public services, many on the left started to blame the electorate. Working class Tories, buying their own homes, were denounced as racists or idiots or suffering from 'false consciousness'. Middle class Tories, profiting from utility shares and building society demutualisations, were called selfish, or acquisitive or greedy. For some in the Labour Party the reason for four defeats over 13 years was purely the ignorance and stupidity of the voters. Bastards.
My fear is that I'm starting to hear the same nonsense come round again. The communist playwright Bertold Brecht is said to have written something along the lines of 'if we can't get a new government, we must get a new electorate'. This has echoes in what some people on the left are starting to say today about Labour's strategy. Of course, a progressive political party has a duty to lead public opinion on social issues. New Labour's championing of gay rights is a good example. But a party which sets a course distinct from public sentiment, sets out a policy programme which jars with majority opinion, and which fails to reflect public values, is doomed. That's what happened to the Liberal Party. It's what Labour tried in 1983, and was slaughtered at the polls. No party has an automatic right to exist, never mind govern. It has to be earned.
Labour in opposition cannot hope to shape a new electorate from whose eyes the scales will fall, on the way to forming an orderly queue at the polling stations. Our task is not to change the voters, but to change ourselves.
That starts by understanding why people who had voted Labour stopped voting Labour, and what might make them vote Labour again. The problem is that so many different groups and chunks of social classes ceased voting Labour, that anyone can project on to them their own desires. Some point to working class voters who deserted Labour, and so demand a traditional collectivist message, like Labour in the 1940s. No, says others, it was the aspirational C2s who broke away, so we need reheated New Labour as in the 1990s. On Radio 4 last weekend I debated Lord Hennessy who longed for Labour to come up with a 1945-style manifesto, promising a new welfare state. Ultimately, politics is a question of numbers. To win a majority, Labour needs to win seats currently held with small majorities by Conservative MPs. Those seats are not working class industrial areas or inner cities. They are towns and suburbs, with ABC1 and C2 voters, mainly in the south and Midlands. They live in places such as Norwich, Swindon, Reading, Thurrock, Brighton and Hastings. So we need a platform which chimes with these people. It's a question of maths as much as politics.
Anyone who thought a flat-lining economy, growing unemployment, public sector strikes and isolation in Europe would benefit the Labour Party has failed to learn anything at all from our history. This week's polls suggest a narrow Tory lead. In times of such uncertainty, people tend to cling to nurse for fear of something worse. With dwindling public resources and a harsh economic climate, people become harder, more self-interested, and less inclined to altruism. They become, in short, less inclined to vote for a Labour Party offering to put their taxes up and expand state services.
The real threat to Labour is not just not winning the next election; it is doing worse than in 2010. The Lib Dem collapse will benefit the Tories. Tory MPs with small majorities may use their incumbency to boost their majority next time. On this scenario, similar to the period 1951-64, or 1979-97, Labour may not return to office until the mid 2020s. This is the reality that should wake us up like a bucket of cold water. Some, such as those around the In the Black pamphlet, or Alex Smith et al and their policies for business, sound like they realise this. Others, with talk of a return to red-blooded socialism, plainly don't.
I paid my £20 to Stewart Lee to make me laugh last night. Instead, he reminded me of the 1980s, and I don't want to go back.
Stewart Lee
2011-12-15T13:37:40+00:00
The comedy of Stewart Lee, who I went to see last night, works for me on several levels. One is that the comedy comes with a running commentary from the comedian. Each joke is assessed, explained, and dissected, which appeals to the little Derrida in all of us. Another level is that Lee is the same age as me, and much of his act reflects the concerns and collective memory of men in their early 40s: death, children's television, failure, Thatcher and getting fat. Most of all I like Lee because he revels in the delicious irony of attempting political 'alternative' comedy with a contemporary post-modern audience. Like me, he remembers the 1980s like it was yesterday, and looks bemused when his 20-something audience fails to split their sides at the jokes about Tory cuts, privatisation, and Lord McAlpine. In his act, he bemoans the fact that in the 1980s you could slag off the Tories, and get a round of applause. An alternative comedy audience in 1989 at the Comedy Store, upstairs at De Hems, or the Balham Banana, when Lee arrived in London, comprised almost exclusively of Labour voters. People like me, in fact. Last night, most of the audience would have voted Tory, Green or Lib Dem, or nothing. One of the biggest laughs was a joke about Ed Miliband, which I won't repeat. Back in the 1980s, it was simple. If you liked alternative comedy, you hated Thatcher and liked the Labour Party. The lesson my generation of Labour supporters learned was that sitting in a room with 80 like-minded comedy fans, laughing at jokes about Norman Tebbit or Cecil Parkinson, wasn't the same as winning elections. Red Wedge, which I loved of course, made the same tactical error. It appealed to lefties who were going...
Robert Pollard's vast discography, with ninety-three albums in thirty years including twenty five helming Guided By Voices, ought to be intolerable. But Pollard's long surpassed his Oedipal impulse to outdo The Who on his Ohio basement four track and is now officially an auteur, endlessly and obsessively recombining spontaneously regenerated psychedelic mod-punk-powerpop tropes until sometimes, as on this happy occasion, they fall randomly in predominantly perfect patterns.
GBV's immortally idiotic savants satiate rock and rollers' punchy primal impulses and aging thinkers' cerebral thirsts.
Here's seventeen smart songs with big dumb riffs and art-damaged interruptions from the ultimate American rock band.
(unpublished)
Stewart Lee
2013-04-28T19:55:24+01:00
Robert Pollard's vast discography, with ninety-three albums in thirty years including twenty five helming Guided By Voices, ought to be intolerable. But Pollard's long surpassed his Oedipal impulse to outdo The Who on his Ohio basement four track and is now officially an auteur, endlessly and obsessively recombining spontaneously regenerated psychedelic mod-punk-powerpop tropes until sometimes, as on this happy occasion, they fall randomly in predominantly perfect patterns. GBV's immortally idiotic savants satiate rock and rollers' punchy primal impulses and aging thinkers' cerebral thirsts. Here's seventeen smart songs with big dumb riffs and art-damaged interruptions from the ultimate American rock band. (unpublished)
Stay alert! On Twitter, Tom Tugendhat, The Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling, is talking. There! He is thanking the prime minister for his “very clear message”. Tom Tugendhat! On Twitter! Now! He is enjoying the sheer coral sea clarity of the prime minister’s Sunday statement, like sunlight shining through spring water in Waterford crystal! Tom Tugendhat! He says: “Thank you prime minister. That’s leadership!”
Stay alert! This former intelligence officer is the nephew of a real man called Baron Tugendhat. Baron Tugendhat is not a character from a 19th-century German children’s book about a baron with a weird hat, the end of which gets tugged. But what did Tom Tugendhat want? Why was he bothering us?
Stay alert! Peasants! Get back to work! Over the top, boys! Gas! Gas! For God’s sake, gas! Writing in the 2012 book Britannia Unchained, The secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Dominic Skeletor Raab, said of British workers, they “prefer a lie-in to hard work”, “are among the worst idlers in the world”, and expect to see laziness rewarded. If British workers were also serial liars, then our workforce would have been made in the image of our prime minister. Ha! I’m here all week! Maybe all year! Try the fish! Don’t forget to tip your healthcare worker!
Stay alert! Here at home, my family nag me to mend the gate, fix the dimmer switch, hoe the avocado trench. But I am a lazy British worker for whom the pandemic is an excuse to skive off and home-school the year four syllabus. Precipitation, Shinto and Cnut. My family won’t relent, so I have presented them with a simple graph. It shows that at some point I would do the things they wanted me to do, but it was impossible for me to say when that would be, or whether the things would be done well enough to remain done, or whether they would then have to be done again later at an unspecified date. And that seemed to satisfy them. The twats!
Stay alert! On Sunday night the prime minister appeared on television and presented his own graph, explaining his immediately discredited and internationally ridiculed New Vision of Lockdown Britain ™ ®. My 12-year-old, whose strongest subject is not maths, laughed openly at the graph, and said she would not have handed it in at school as neither the X or the Y axis contained any actual information, so it had no meaning. We are being guided by a graph that a schoolgirl would be ashamed to submit. All the prime minister’s shoddy homework suggested was that if some time passed, eventually some things would happen. Some of them might involve stick men jumping about or riding bikes. And although a blue line is going downwards, there was at least twice as much shading-in in the area showing The Future as there was in the area showing The Past. This suggests Covid-19 deaths will triple to around 90,000. Beat that Belgium! But the tear-jerking stupidity of the prime minister’s death-inducing graph did not deter the usual suspects from coming out in its defence, not least of all Tom Tugendhat, his fellow Tory MP Alan Abortionmaqaquesymptom being unavailable due to self-isolation. Because for loyal Tom Tugendhat, the prime minister’s offensively stupid night soil bucket of obfuscation was “a very clear message from @Borisjohnson and a welcome explanation of the situation. By explaining the uncertainty and complexity @10Downingstreet is allowing us all to think through the situation.” Nonsense, Tugendhat, and youknowsit, clart!
Stay alert! Something about the strange collision of unrelated words that form Tom Tugendhat’s surname means that whenever Tom Tugendhat appears in my visionary satire-dreams it is as a territorial army lieutenant colonel forcibly pulling at an end, presumably his own, that has become trapped in a hat, or in an intelligence officer’s wig of disguise. It’s past midnight, and now Baron Tugendhat is in my drunken nightmares, working undercover for James Bond’s great-grandfather, attending a lavish ceremonial dinner at Neuschwanstein castle. The future of Anglo-Bavarian trade relations depends on Baron Tugendhat also tugging his end free of a hat, on this occasion a Tyrolean Alpine bonnet, common to the region, a vagina dentata of felt and chamois leather.
Stay alert! (Readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own slogan.) You may meet one parent at a distance of two metres while the other parent waits in the car. Or you could employ them both at your small business and see them as much as you want. Stay alert! Don’t see your children. But if you are a teacher, see dozens of other people’s children in narrow corridors. Stay alert! Don’t drive. Unless you are driving to take exercise, in which case drive hundreds of miles. But don’t drive into Wales, for there be dragons. Like Schrödinger’s paradoxical cat, the prime minister’s New Vision of Lockdown Britain ™ ® is both stupid and stinks of cats’ piss, and now it has been shooed back out into the lane by Nicola Sturgeon.
Stay alert! Former environment secretary and Brexiter Owen Paterson will be rushing back to work, as his consultancy client Randox Laboratories has just been awarded the government’s £133m virus testing contract, unopposed. But Matt Handcock is unable to say whether other workers can refuse employers’ demands to return. Over the top! Gas, boys, gas! It’s the bonfire of rights Brexiters always dreamed of, delivered ahead of schedule by this coronavirus, a microscopic sleeper agent for the European Research Group.
Stay alert! Lazy British working-class workers. Die at your posts for Dominic Raab. Die in your warehouses for Jacob Rees-Mogg. Die in your care homes for Dominic Cumming. Middle-class workers. Work safely from home at your laptops. Text each other photographs of your Ocado deliveries, and dream of Center Parcs and Forest Holidays. Once I found it funny that the prime minister’s perfect storm of public desperation, manufactured xenophobia and ruthless dishonesty had seen this self-serving turd float to the toilet top. But now it’s just frightening. I worry for my children, my country, my avocado trench. Sort yourself out, wazzock. People are dying.
Stewart Lee
2020-05-17T23:09:02+01:00
Stay alert! On Twitter, Tom Tugendhat, The Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling, is talking. There! He is thanking the prime minister for his “very clear message”. Tom Tugendhat! On Twitter! Now! He is enjoying the sheer coral sea clarity of the prime minister’s Sunday statement, like sunlight shining through spring water in Waterford crystal! Tom Tugendhat! He says: “Thank you prime minister. That’s leadership!” Stay alert! This former intelligence officer is the nephew of a real man called Baron Tugendhat. Baron Tugendhat is not a character from a 19th-century German children’s book about a baron with a weird hat, the end of which gets tugged. But what did Tom Tugendhat want? Why was he bothering us? Stay alert! Peasants! Get back to work! Over the top, boys! Gas! Gas! For God’s sake, gas! Writing in the 2012 book Britannia Unchained, The secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, Dominic Skeletor Raab, said of British workers, they “prefer a lie-in to hard work”, “are among the worst idlers in the world”, and expect to see laziness rewarded. If British workers were also serial liars, then our workforce would have been made in the image of our prime minister. Ha! I’m here all week! Maybe all year! Try the fish! Don’t forget to tip your healthcare worker! Stay alert! Here at home, my family nag me to mend the gate, fix the dimmer switch, hoe the avocado trench. But I am a lazy British worker for whom the pandemic is an excuse to skive off and home-school the year four syllabus. Precipitation, Shinto and Cnut. My family won’t relent, so I have presented them with a simple graph. It shows that at some point I would do the things they wanted me to do, but it was impossible for me...
AN OPERA based on the life of the talk show host Jerry Springer will be among the first productions at the Royal National Theatre in London under its new boss.
The full production of Jerry Springer - The Opera will get its world première in April.
The creators of the show were inundated with offers to present it in the West End and around the world after it was shown at the Edinburgh Festival this summer when still a work in progress. But they were keen to allow the production to develop artistically and snapped up the chance to perform at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre.
Nicholas Hytner, the National’s director designate, saw an early version of the show and was keen to put it on. "It’s exactly the kind of work the National should be doing - bold, scabrous, funny and beautiful," he said.
Springer, known for chat subjects such as "Pregnant By A Transsexual" and "Here Come the Hookers", gave the show his seal of approval by going to see it in Edinburgh.
It was co-written by Stewart Lee, known for his comedy partnership Lee and Herring, who is making his directorial debut with it . Mr Hytner said: "I’ve followed the development of Jerry Springer - The Opera since I saw it in a workshop production 18 months ago at Battersea Arts Centre.
"I’m delighted to be working with Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee on their ground-breaking new opera," he added.
Stewart Lee
2002-12-05T18:30:44+00:00
AN OPERA based on the life of the talk show host Jerry Springer will be among the first productions at the Royal National Theatre in London under its new boss. The full production of Jerry Springer - The Opera will get its world première in April. The creators of the show were inundated with offers to present it in the West End and around the world after it was shown at the Edinburgh Festival this summer when still a work in progress. But they were keen to allow the production to develop artistically and snapped up the chance to perform at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre. Nicholas Hytner, the National’s director designate, saw an early version of the show and was keen to put it on. "It’s exactly the kind of work the National should be doing - bold, scabrous, funny and beautiful," he said. Springer, known for chat subjects such as "Pregnant By A Transsexual" and "Here Come the Hookers", gave the show his seal of approval by going to see it in Edinburgh. It was co-written by Stewart Lee, known for his comedy partnership Lee and Herring, who is making his directorial debut with it . Mr Hytner said: "I’ve followed the development of Jerry Springer - The Opera since I saw it in a workshop production 18 months ago at Battersea Arts Centre. "I’m delighted to be working with Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee on their ground-breaking new opera," he added.
Well I’m enjoying this, I think. “That’s cause you’re a cunt”, was Stewart Lee’s response, as if reading my mind. The insults come thick and fast, but this only means we fall for him even more. His brand of satire, around culture, politics, popular TV shows, his life, your life, weaves in and out of his well-formulated stories. He keeps beating us over the heads and we love it.
Through his anecdotes, rants and hilarious repetition, it’s clear that he’s not like most stand-up comics, he is intellectually superior: “I am up here like a God, you’re down there like pigs in a Norfolk ditch”.
The theme of the show, which is touring, was originally meant to be based around the Caspar David Friedrich painting, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, symbolising an individual looking for a deeper meaning to life. But this becomes peripheral to Brexit and Trump, subjects he tackles from a liberal North London (where he lives) perspective. This suits most of the audience who seem to dress like they live in North London. I’m from there, so I should know.
His premise throughout a lot of the act is that it’s hard to write content when the goal posts keep shifting, how the hell did Trump get in? What the hell is he doing? And who the hell knows what the plan is with Brexit? In one of his astute ramblings, which goes on for a good few minutes, he proclaims: “I’m not sure whether to keep Eastern Europeans being kept out of the country in my act (one minute they’re allowed to stay, the next they’re not). It’s really affecting my work… I can’t help thinking it’s affecting people in other types of work too.”
By the end of the one hour and 45 minute show, which has provided few breaks in the laughter, he skilfully weaves us back to the painting… He condemns the under 40s for being vacuous: “I’m under 40, I’ve got no future, but I’ve got this phone,“ he roars as he bashes an invisible phone with his finger and his trousers fall down around his ankles. He keeps roaring: “Don’t eat toast like normal people…just keep drinking yoghurt from a pouch and wearing your Japanese cat-face satchel bags…“
Ultimately, Lee condemns the digital world for making us more inward looking and therefore making life less meaningful: whether that’s easy access to 1p comedy DVDS (though not his, which you have to buy for at least £3.67), or finding it easy to join a fetish club, which as he proclaims in his grandparents day would have required some real research and a lot of walking. And, how, ultimately, we have become self- and selfie-obsessed and the opposite of what the painting stands for: “What about the wider world?” an important question that he raises in this five star show, Content Provider.
Stewart Lee
2018-03-26T22:42:41+01:00
Well I’m enjoying this, I think. “That’s cause you’re a cunt”, was Stewart Lee’s response, as if reading my mind. The insults come thick and fast, but this only means we fall for him even more. His brand of satire, around culture, politics, popular TV shows, his life, your life, weaves in and out of his well-formulated stories. He keeps beating us over the heads and we love it. Through his anecdotes, rants and hilarious repetition, it’s clear that he’s not like most stand-up comics, he is intellectually superior: “I am up here like a God, you’re down there like pigs in a Norfolk ditch”. The theme of the show, which is touring, was originally meant to be based around the Caspar David Friedrich painting, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, symbolising an individual looking for a deeper meaning to life. But this becomes peripheral to Brexit and Trump, subjects he tackles from a liberal North London (where he lives) perspective. This suits most of the audience who seem to dress like they live in North London. I’m from there, so I should know. His premise throughout a lot of the act is that it’s hard to write content when the goal posts keep shifting, how the hell did Trump get in? What the hell is he doing? And who the hell knows what the plan is with Brexit? In one of his astute ramblings, which goes on for a good few minutes, he proclaims: “I’m not sure whether to keep Eastern Europeans being kept out of the country in my act (one minute they’re allowed to stay, the next they’re not). It’s really affecting my work… I can’t help thinking it’s affecting people in other types of work too.” By the end of the one hour and 45 minute...
Stewart Lee gets deep about how being adopted had a profound effect on his outlook and career choice, his early comedy influences and how why considers luck to be such a key factor in his success as a stand up comedian.
He also talks growing up in Solihull, his grandparents view that reading was "nancy boys" and the effect seeing The Two Ronnies at 8 years old later fed into one of his routines.
Stewart Lee gets deep about how being adopted had a profound effect on his outlook and career choice, his early comedy influences and how why considers luck to be such a key factor in his success as a stand up comedian. He also talks growing up in Solihull, his grandparents view that reading was "nancy boys" and the effect seeing The Two Ronnies at 8 years old later fed into one of his routines. Part 1 is here.
Last week, in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Sun’s politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all.
The inevitable complaints will have already been offset by Sun accountants against the traffic Clarkson drives through the paper’s website. In the short term, mass extinction can be monetised, in a carbon trading of manufactured offence versus advertising revenue. Those short-beaked echidnas did not die in vain and Rod Liddle will still receive his Sun Christmas hamper of suet and saveloy sausage.
Clarkson’s suggestion that Australians needed to “come home”, while unconsciously prefiguring the mass migrations the climate crisis will cause in this decade, could read as a slap in the face to indigenous Australians, for whom the continent has always been “home”, even before it was officially discovered for them by a helpful Dutch bloke in 1606.
Indeed, indigenous Australians had been mapping the stars, creating complex mythological cycles and learning to view massive grubs as treats quite happily for 120,000 years at least, before our ancestors brought them alcohol, forced abduction and a manmade climate crisis. But clangers like Clarkson’s are no longer a bar to popularity, acclaim or office.
Does Clarkson gaze at 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Johnson and wonder why he isn’t prime minister?
Instead, Clarkson, a car man in idiot’s trousers, doggedly pursues relevance, as the harder alt-right opinion-hits available in the unregulated online shitosphere consistently outperform his quaint grandad-motorist fist-waving.
A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, covered in actual swastikas and driven by an armed incel blogger who has a deal with Steve Bannon, has run Clarkson’s Lexus LFA, the one with a “Honk if you hate snowflakes” sticker in the back window, off the rightwing road. Clarkson struggles out of the crumpled passenger door, stamps his brogues in the ditch water and throws his driving cap down in a rage. Bah!
Both Clarkson’s and Turd’s careers have flourished by exploiting the notion that they are lone voices of sanity against a politically correct snowflake cabal intent on silencing normal blokes like them. Their comedy counterpart Ricky Gervais has managed to monetise this notion spectacularly, saying the things that he is apparently not allowed to say, on a variety of global media platforms, for millions of dollars, with the full co-operation and approval of the legal representatives of the institutions on which, and about which, he says the things he is not allowed to say, his functionally adequate standup act having been overpromoted worldwide off the back of his pitch-perfect contribution to the ground-breaking Office sitcom two decades ago.
Last week, a slew of right-leaning sources cited Gervais’s “just jokes” liberal-bating Golden Globes set as vindication of a populist backlash against political correctness, investing its harmless waspish jibes with a political dimension they didn’t really have. Meanwhile an obviously hoaxed article by the clearly fabricated “Jo Murch” in the perpetually gullible Independent created a humourless liberal straw man to vindicate the right’s adoption of Gervais, probably placed by one of Gervais’ libertarian collaborators.
In the Daily Mail, Sarah Vine ripped the lid off the rotting kitchen food waste bin of her mind to retch forth some choice owl pellets of praise for Gervais’s performative outrage. For Vine, Gervais was “a knight in shining armour, saviour of humanity, saviour of comedy, restorer of sanity and… undisputed Wokefinder General”, the latter comment surely the title of his next tour if he wants to attract only furious moronic c**ts. The Wokefinder General could be photographed in a puritan hat smoking a cigar and winking. I can see this working. Let’s do this!
Vine then went on to commend the “sharp edge of viciousness” the Wokefinder General directed to “limousine liberals and sulky schoolgirls”, the latter presumably the climate-crisis activist and eco-mystic Greta Thunberg, who I don’t remember being specifically targeted, but whom veteran opinion-column vultures of Vine’s vintage seem to have a special problem with, like the mean girls in American high-school movies who shit in the clever one’s shampoo bottle.
Of course, when I did a joke about Vine, in my critically acclaimed Content Provider show, she condemned its “vicious prejudice”. They don’t like it up ’em. It appears whether viciousness is justified or not depends on its direction of travel, ideally away from you and towards people you personally dislike. In the Wokefinder General’s case, it’s often downwards, towards transgender people, for example, and the disabled, or “mongs” as the Wokefinder General once said.
In the Wokefinder General’s mawkish sitcom After Life, the Wokefinder General’s character considers suicide because his wife dies of a terminal illness. But in real life, the Wokefinder General has been praised by Sarah Vine, which is worse than losing a loved one prematurely, and so the Wokefinder General should do the decent thing, not prevaricate like his cowardly sitcom character, and kill himself immediately.
The fact that someone like Vine praises his work should at least make the Wokefinder General wonder if he has any responsibility for the cultural ripples caused by those who appropriate his “just jokes”. Clarkson, Turds and the Wokefinder General are narcissistic populists, all clever enough to know better, who continue to court the attention of angry impotent people and take no personal responsibilty for the consequences of their words, other mortals merely collateral damage, rabbits churned up in the combine harvester blades of their ongoing ambitions.
I am aware that I am supposed to be a “so-called comedian” and that this column reads like a blunt polemic. So here is its central thrust represented in the form of a traditional working men’s club joke which, remember, is just a joke.
A Ricky Gervais Netflix standup special walks into a pub with a massive pile of stinking dogshit on its shoulder. The barman says: “Where did you get that massive pile of dogshit?” And the dogshit says: “Netflix. They’ve got bloody loads of them!”
Stewart Lee
2020-01-12T17:52:35+00:00
Last week, in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Sun’s politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all. The inevitable complaints will have already been offset by Sun accountants against the traffic Clarkson drives through the paper’s website. In the short term, mass extinction can be monetised, in a carbon trading of manufactured offence versus advertising revenue. Those short-beaked echidnas did not die in vain and Rod Liddle will still receive his Sun Christmas hamper of suet and saveloy sausage. Clarkson’s suggestion that Australians needed to “come home”, while unconsciously prefiguring the mass migrations the climate crisis will cause in this decade, could read as a slap in the face to indigenous Australians, for whom the continent has always been “home”, even before it was officially discovered for them by a helpful Dutch bloke in 1606. Indeed, indigenous Australians had been mapping the stars, creating complex mythological cycles and learning to view massive grubs as treats quite happily for 120,000 years at least, before our ancestors brought them alcohol, forced abduction and a manmade climate crisis. But clangers like Clarkson’s are no longer a bar to popularity, acclaim or office. Does Clarkson gaze at 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Johnson and wonder why he isn’t prime minister? Instead, Clarkson, a car man in idiot’s trousers, doggedly pursues relevance, as the harder alt-right opinion-hits available in the unregulated online shitosphere consistently outperform his quaint grandad-motorist fist-waving. A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, covered in actual swastikas and driven by an armed incel blogger who has a...
Stew writes the foreword for Through The Crack In The Wall: The Secret History Of Josef K.
Everything was just so intense. There was an alienation and awkwardness about Josef K, but that was actually very true to life for me. Listening today I find really difficult because it brings back so many memories, so many ghosts and characters from the past. -- Paul Haig.
A lot of what Josef K were about was as much to do with what not to play as what to play. Josef K could never have anything rootsy, no blues scale. We were always looking for the modern. -- Malcolm Ross.
Josef K are the great lost post-punk band. Taking their name from the haunted protagonist of Franz Kafka s existentialist novel The Trial, they posed for photographs before brutalist and gothic architecture and produced visionary, often incendiary music that felt like the product of perpetual anxiety. And it really was.
Through The Crack In The Wall is the first ever biography of the band, tracing their story from their origins in the leafy suburbs of Edinburgh through to their untimely implosion four years later. It s a tale of fun and frenzy, filled with highs and lows. From their thrilling live shows, which left onlookers spellbound, to more anxious occasions confronting a baying audience of rioting anarcho-punks in Brussels; from a brief spell as press darlings of the inkies to the fateful decision to pull their debut album just as pop stardom beckoned -- one that continues to haunt them today.
Drawing extensively on new interviews with the band members and those around them as well as contemporary press articles, the book explores the band s inner workings and analyses their relationships with Postcard Records supremo Alan Horne, labelmates Orange Juice, and manager Allan Campbell. It re-evaluates their position in the pantheon of post-punk greats and considers how their music helped shape the UK independent scene of the eighties. More than anything else, though, the book s primary purpose is to celebrate the incredible music Josef K made and consider what makes it more vital today than ever.
Stewart Lee
2024-06-11T17:01:04+01:00
Stew writes the foreword for Through The Crack In The Wall: The Secret History Of Josef K. Everything was just so intense. There was an alienation and awkwardness about Josef K, but that was actually very true to life for me. Listening today I find really difficult because it brings back so many memories, so many ghosts and characters from the past. -- Paul Haig. A lot of what Josef K were about was as much to do with what not to play as what to play. Josef K could never have anything rootsy, no blues scale. We were always looking for the modern. -- Malcolm Ross. Josef K are the great lost post-punk band. Taking their name from the haunted protagonist of Franz Kafka s existentialist novel The Trial, they posed for photographs before brutalist and gothic architecture and produced visionary, often incendiary music that felt like the product of perpetual anxiety. And it really was. Through The Crack In The Wall is the first ever biography of the band, tracing their story from their origins in the leafy suburbs of Edinburgh through to their untimely implosion four years later. It s a tale of fun and frenzy, filled with highs and lows. From their thrilling live shows, which left onlookers spellbound, to more anxious occasions confronting a baying audience of rioting anarcho-punks in Brussels; from a brief spell as press darlings of the inkies to the fateful decision to pull their debut album just as pop stardom beckoned -- one that continues to haunt them today. Drawing extensively on new interviews with the band members and those around them as well as contemporary press articles, the book explores the band s inner workings and analyses their relationships with Postcard Records supremo Alan Horne, labelmates Orange Juice, and manager...
In the old days, vandals and hooligans simply knocked things over, be they flowerpots, bus stops, old ladies or standards of common English decency. But these days anything that is knocked over, as long as it is knocked over with a sense of clear moral purpose, isn’t merely knocked over, it seems, but “toppled”. Indeed, a court judgment in Bristol last week opened the floodgates for a summer of 2022 epidemic of righteous toppling. Let the games begin!
On Wednesday, the four committed young people, opportunistically identified as part of a much larger group that toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol docks in 2020, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They clearly broke the letter of the law of the land and Colston’s sculpted, slavery-funded cane and fancy frock-coat coat-tails specifically were definitely criminally damaged during the toppling, but the jury acquitted the four by referring to a higher moral standard – the new religion of wokery, as Dominic Paddleboard Raab would have it! Or admirable sensitivity to local public feeling in a city once riven by racial tension that is now proudly multicultural, as it is also known. Tribal war! Signs and wonders!! Move on!!!
Last February, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick, whose 2020 luxury housing development approval is now officially more illegal than toppling a Bristol slave trader, said: “Our view will be set out in law, that such monuments are almost always best explained and contextualised.” “We cannot now try to censor or edit our past,” said the prime minister, Boris Johnson, whose 2013 extramarital affair was concealed by an injunction and who lied in an investigation into the recent past of his own interior decorating irregularity. It’s as if there’s one law for statues of slave traders and one for proved liar prime minister adulterers.
Only last summer, the then culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, declared: “The government believes that it is always legitimate to examine and debate Britain’s history, but that removing statues, artwork and other historical objects is not right”, arguing for a “retain and explain” approach to “defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”, before adding: “The first time I saw Phantom of the Opera I thought a real chandelier was actually falling down from the roof and I cried out like a monkey. But then I went to see it loads more times and realised it was a theatre trick because it happened the same every night, which would be too much of a coincidence. It was still exciting though, like when you hold your wee in for ages and then finally go to the toilet and your winky goes off like a firework.”
Where are Dowden’s and Johnson’s and Jenrick’s dogmatic proclamations left by the Independent People’s Republic of Bristol’s decision to give free rein to this woke, righteous effigy-toppling and to support its disrespectful sons and daughters?
The historian David Olusoga told the court about the “rape rooms” of the slaver fortresses on the African coast and explained how Colston’s company branded slaves as young as nine. Sticking a plaque on the bottom of a statue to acknowledge this would seem insane, an Elastoplast on a brain haemorrhage, a sick joke. Anyone with a heart reading it would surely wonder why the statue was still standing. At the site of Hitler’s bunker, next to a car park somewhere south of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, there is no official commemoration, for obvious reasons. Presumably Johnson would favour a blue plaque that retained and explained.
New measures in the government’s forthcoming police, crime sentencing and courts bill would see the Colston Four face up to 10 years in prison because “there has been widespread upset about the damage and desecration of memorials with a recent spate over the summer of 2020”. But even though the justice secretary, Dominic Calais Raab, doesn’t think the police investigate crimes more than a year old, the enforcement of the new bill’s rules must surely see all statue vandalisers from the recent past prosecuted.
In 2012, cowardly, woke council officials removed from the Scotstoun leisure centre in Glasgow a wooden effigy of Jimmy Savile, the predatory paedophile sex offender. New government policy surely means the Savile statue must be subject to the same “retain and explain” policy that Johnson has endorsed. The Savile sculpture must be retained and returned to its original position in the foyer of the leisure centre, with a small plaque appended to its foot, detailing Savile’s horrendous sex crimes. And if, as is thought, it transpires that the council destroyed the Savile effigy, then those responsible must be tried for criminal damage. And if they aren’t, then it appears there is one law for those who destroy effigies of predatory paedophiles and quite another for those who topple slavers into a dock.
On a lighter note, the Colston Hall in Bristol has now been renamed the Bristol Beacon. It is a superb venue, run for the benefit of the people of Bristol and not for faceless shareholders, with a genuinely diverse programme and staffed by the most accommodating and professional and friendly people. I am delighted to see it reopen and glad it has weathered with sensitivity the storms its historical name meant it was caught up in, to continue to serve the people of the mighty musical city. That said, there is also a tiny part of me that is sad that, next time I do standup there, I won’t be able to violently condemn my woke, Guardian-reader audience for patronising a venue that celebrates slavery. Nonetheless, it’s a small price to pay for a city’s efforts to do the right thing. God speed the (former) Colston Hall and the current Colston Four.
Stewart Lee
2022-01-09T01:31:13+00:00
In the old days, vandals and hooligans simply knocked things over, be they flowerpots, bus stops, old ladies or standards of common English decency. But these days anything that is knocked over, as long as it is knocked over with a sense of clear moral purpose, isn’t merely knocked over, it seems, but “toppled”. Indeed, a court judgment in Bristol last week opened the floodgates for a summer of 2022 epidemic of righteous toppling. Let the games begin! On Wednesday, the four committed young people, opportunistically identified as part of a much larger group that toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol docks in 2020, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They clearly broke the letter of the law of the land and Colston’s sculpted, slavery-funded cane and fancy frock-coat coat-tails specifically were definitely criminally damaged during the toppling, but the jury acquitted the four by referring to a higher moral standard – the new religion of wokery, as Dominic Paddleboard Raab would have it! Or admirable sensitivity to local public feeling in a city once riven by racial tension that is now proudly multicultural, as it is also known. Tribal war! Signs and wonders!! Move on!!! Last February, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick, whose 2020 luxury housing development approval is now officially more illegal than toppling a Bristol slave trader, said: “Our view will be set out in law, that such monuments are almost always best explained and contextualised.” “We cannot now try to censor or edit our past,” said the prime minister, Boris Johnson, whose 2013 extramarital affair was concealed by an injunction and who lied in an investigation into the recent past of his own interior decorating irregularity. It’s as if there’s one law for statues of slave traders and one for...
Cardiff Comedy mavericks Go Faster Stripe shot the 90s Comedian show in 2006, and it's now available on DVD.
I'm delighted to have the show available and the team worked wonders with limited equipment.
You can download a no-frills & DRM-free video of this from Go Faster Stripe, or download an audio version of the show from iTunes.
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T20:25:58+00:00
Cardiff Comedy mavericks Go Faster Stripe shot the 90s Comedian show in 2006, and it's now available on DVD. I'm delighted to have the show available and the team worked wonders with limited equipment. You can download a no-frills & DRM-free video of this from Go Faster Stripe, or download an audio version of the show from iTunes.
I Know It's Over is The Queen Is Dead's first pause for breath. As usual, Morrissey's mordant wit is mistaken, historically, for unmitigated misery. “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head." What an opening line!
Remember all those classic blues and folk songs that billow forth from the point of view of a dead and buried body? “The clay it is my bed, my dearest dear," says The Lover's Ghost in the traditional tune of the same name. And “see that my grave is kept clean", commands Blind Lemon Jefferson of those that should outlive him. But Morrissey eschews both the grey phantom and the sightless yellow fruit to channel instead the spirit of the music hall comic Sandy “Can you hear me, Mother?" Powell, even as dusty death claws at his throat.
Time has been unkind to Andy Rourke's bass parts, which on The Smiths' eponymous debut especially seem inappropriately funky, but here he's a model of gentlemanly restraint, pulsing slowly under one of Morrissey's most telling portrayals of sexual and social isolation.
I Know It's Over sounds superficially like a romantic ballad, but the first two minutes see the protagonist envisioning his own suicide, and wishing various ill-suited couples the happiness he's denied. A Byrds-y Johnny Marr arpeggio breezes briefly for ten seconds at one minute and fifty, the classic guitar pop associations of the sound subtly at odds with the self-loathing sentiment.
It's a brilliantly judged contribution, both musically, and in terms of its cultural resonances.
The lyrics for the second half of the song, crucially, are set for the most part in inverted commas. Thus the chain of crushingly comic put-downs that begins “If you're so funny why are you on your own tonight?", escalates brutally through “If you're so terribly good looking why do you sleep alone tonight?" and ends with the deflating “because tonight is like any other night, that's why your on your own tonight, with your triumphs and your charms, while they are in each other's arms" is addressed to the protagonist.
On paper, and in Morrissey's performance, the words are ambivalent, and could even be the caustic teasing of a sympathetic and encouraging friend, sick of the singer's introspection.
Unfortunately, Marr's inane keyboard part attempts to make the sentiment unambiguously sad, diminishing the emotional scope of the song. Six tracks later the same approach wrecks There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. How come Marr knew how to write countless timeless guitar parts but sounds so ephemeral on the synths?
We're told Arabic carpet weavers introduced deliberate errors into their patterns as only Allah was allowed to be perfect. It's lucky then, that Morrissey had Marr at his side here to shield him from God's jealousy.
It's tempting to see the protestations that 'love is natural and real' in the face of the assumption that it cannot be so 'for such as you and I' as the genesis of the more explicit struggles between religious prohibition and gay or bisexual impulses, that reach their apogee in the 2004 song I Have Forgiven You Jesus.
But Morrissey's always been one of those artists whose peculiarly specific way of looking at the world results in an unexpectedly universal relevance.
In closing he succeeds, against all sense, in making a return to that opening line - “Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head" - a euphoric exultation, and there are, strangely, few experiences more uplifting and life-affirming than standing in a crowd of shapeless middle aged men bellowing it back at him.
Stewart Lee
2011-04-01T20:48:40+01:00
I Know It's Over is The Queen Is Dead's first pause for breath. As usual, Morrissey's mordant wit is mistaken, historically, for unmitigated misery. “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head." What an opening line! Remember all those classic blues and folk songs that billow forth from the point of view of a dead and buried body? “The clay it is my bed, my dearest dear," says The Lover's Ghost in the traditional tune of the same name. And “see that my grave is kept clean", commands Blind Lemon Jefferson of those that should outlive him. But Morrissey eschews both the grey phantom and the sightless yellow fruit to channel instead the spirit of the music hall comic Sandy “Can you hear me, Mother?" Powell, even as dusty death claws at his throat. Time has been unkind to Andy Rourke's bass parts, which on The Smiths' eponymous debut especially seem inappropriately funky, but here he's a model of gentlemanly restraint, pulsing slowly under one of Morrissey's most telling portrayals of sexual and social isolation. I Know It's Over sounds superficially like a romantic ballad, but the first two minutes see the protagonist envisioning his own suicide, and wishing various ill-suited couples the happiness he's denied. A Byrds-y Johnny Marr arpeggio breezes briefly for ten seconds at one minute and fifty, the classic guitar pop associations of the sound subtly at odds with the self-loathing sentiment. It's a brilliantly judged contribution, both musically, and in terms of its cultural resonances. The lyrics for the second half of the song, crucially, are set for the most part in inverted commas. Thus the chain of crushingly comic put-downs that begins “If you're so funny why are you on your own tonight?", escalates brutally through “If you're so terribly good looking...
Cardiff Comedy mavericks Go Faster Stripe shot the 90s Comedian show in 2006, and it's now available on DVD.
I'm delighted to have the show available and the team worked wonders with limited equipment.
I'll flog these at gigs, or check their website to get them, and please don't bootleg them all over the place.
I NEED THIS.
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T19:50:53+00:00
Cardiff Comedy mavericks Go Faster Stripe shot the 90s Comedian show in 2006, and it's now available on DVD. I'm delighted to have the show available and the team worked wonders with limited equipment. I'll flog these at gigs, or check their website to get them, and please don't bootleg them all over the place. I NEED THIS.
It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon in which Andrew Kötting (the filmmaker) and Iain Sinclair (the writer) pedal a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in London, via the English inland waterways.
With a nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and a pinch of Dada, Swandown documents their epic journey, on which they are joined by invited guests including comedian Stewart Lee, writer Alan Moore and actor Dudley Sutton.
The package is a double disc set containing both a DVD & a Blu Ray of the film
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T19:26:21+00:00
It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon in which Andrew Kötting (the filmmaker) and Iain Sinclair (the writer) pedal a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in London, via the English inland waterways. With a nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and a pinch of Dada, Swandown documents their epic journey, on which they are joined by invited guests including comedian Stewart Lee, writer Alan Moore and actor Dudley Sutton. The package is a double disc set containing both a DVD & a Blu Ray of the film
It seems tenuous, but appropriate, to give the book a recommended listening list too.
When I imagine Luther's music it's a cross between the following.
Alexander Spence - Oar - Sundazed - SC11075 is the album the wayward Moby Grape member recorded in 1968 having busted out of Bellevue Hospital.
13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere - Decal - CDLIKM002 is for me the best of the 60's Austin Texas band's albums.
Roky Erickson - Gremlins Have Pictures - Demon - Fiend CD66 is a compilation of their leader's later, solo stuff.
Black Sun Ensemble - s/t - Camera Obscura - CAM040 is a re-issue of debut of the mid-80's Tucson instrumental band, led by Jesus Acedo.
Various Artists - The Tucson Sound 1960-1968 - Bacchus - BA002LP is what it says it is, and probably isn't on CD.
Being a fan of the Tucson band Giant Sand first led me to the South West in 1995, and whether they like it or not, they seem inextricably bound up with their environment. Giant Sand - Chore Of Enchantment - Loose - VJCD113 is probably their best album. OP8 - OP8 Featuring Lisa Germano - Thirsty Ear - THL57030.2 is a Giant Sand collaboration with Lisa Germano. I bought it in Adelaide in 1997 and it was always on when I was writing there. Giant Sand - Selections Circa 1990-2000 - Loose VJCD121, a compilation of later recordings is a good introduction.
The night I, the actor Kevin Eldon and the man Ben Moor arrived in Tucson in September 1995 was the launch of the first album by local supergroup The Friends Of Dean Martinez, in the cellar of Hotel Congress. The Friends Of Dean Martinez - The Shadow Of Your Smile - Sub Pop - SP306b is the desert rock/cocktail lounge hybrid soundtrack to the imaginary screenplay of this book
Opening the show in the lobby of Hotel Congress was the late Rainer Ptáçek, who played the version of George Harrison's Within You Without You included on.. Rainer - Nocturnes - Glitterhouse- GRCD363. The previous year I'd seen him play The Weavers in Stoke Newington. It was packed. Robert Plant was there. At Hotel Congress a few people milled around, not paying attention, a prophet without honour …
Probably the most famous Tucson band these days is Calexico, a Giant Sand spin off more self consciously attuned to a regional sound. Their second album, Calexico - The Black Light - City Slang - 08707-2, was out about the time I really set to on the text and was good for atmosphere.
The opening of the book fell into place one night in March 97 in the Arkaba motel, Adelaide, Austalia, while under the influence of repeated playings of … The Beasts Of Bourbon - Gone - Red Eye - REDCD58
Finally, the following three spoken word albums, which include little instrumental snatches of Calexico, were bought at The Singing Wind Bookshop in Arizona, which is, as far as I know, the sole outlet for them. Lawrence Clark Powell is a local historian and all 3 of these cd's are brilliant and changed the way I thought about the region
Lawrence Clark Powell's Southwest:
Volume I: Southwest, an Essay On The Land
Volume II: Where Water Flows
Volume III: Revista Nueva Mexicana
If you're interested try writing to Singing Wind Audio, Box 2197, Benson, AZ 86502, USA
Stewart Lee
2001-06-01T15:04:23+01:00
It seems tenuous, but appropriate, to give the book a recommended listening list too. When I imagine Luther's music it's a cross between the following. Alexander Spence - Oar - Sundazed - SC11075 is the album the wayward Moby Grape member recorded in 1968 having busted out of Bellevue Hospital. 13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere - Decal - CDLIKM002 is for me the best of the 60's Austin Texas band's albums. Roky Erickson - Gremlins Have Pictures - Demon - Fiend CD66 is a compilation of their leader's later, solo stuff. Black Sun Ensemble - s/t - Camera Obscura - CAM040 is a re-issue of debut of the mid-80's Tucson instrumental band, led by Jesus Acedo. Various Artists - The Tucson Sound 1960-1968 - Bacchus - BA002LP is what it says it is, and probably isn't on CD. Being a fan of the Tucson band Giant Sand first led me to the South West in 1995, and whether they like it or not, they seem inextricably bound up with their environment. Giant Sand - Chore Of Enchantment - Loose - VJCD113 is probably their best album. OP8 - OP8 Featuring Lisa Germano - Thirsty Ear - THL57030.2 is a Giant Sand collaboration with Lisa Germano. I bought it in Adelaide in 1997 and it was always on when I was writing there. Giant Sand - Selections Circa 1990-2000 - Loose VJCD121, a compilation of later recordings is a good introduction. The night I, the actor Kevin Eldon and the man Ben Moor arrived in Tucson in September 1995 was the launch of the first album by local supergroup The Friends Of Dean Martinez, in the cellar of Hotel Congress. The Friends Of Dean Martinez - The Shadow Of Your Smile - Sub Pop - SP306b is the desert rock/cocktail...
Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, apparently has restless thoughts and only finds ease in destroying. Doubtless, Dorries is aware on some level of the epic poem, in her capacity as guardian of the nation’s cultural treasures, and as an author herself, and yet she learns nothing from it. So how can it be true that the latest innocent public benefit to fall in her sights is a harmless wild bird that has delighted dog walkers and local schoolchildren for generations?
For nearly 20 years now, a mysterious, enormous and colourful parrot, nearly 3ft in height, has dwelt on the sylvan slopes of Robinswood Hill, a country park south of Gloucester, in a strip of land between the A38 and the M5. I glimpsed it once, as a younger man, flashing blue and red between the green woodland canopy and the orange evening sky and briefly I felt I saw the face of God. In Gloucester. The bird is even rumoured to have inspired local ski-jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards to pursue his dreams of unassisted human flight, but his trainer, Bronson Peary, forbade him from using his preferred nickname of Eddie “That Enormous Colourful Parrot From Robinswood Hill” Edwards, saying it was “dumb-ass”.
No one knows where the enormous colourful parrot came from and its miraculous ongoing survival is said to be assisted by a discreet local support network of undercover amateur ornithologists, who derive enormous pleasure from spotting it in the wild and only want it to be free to view, asking nothing in return. Why then, has Dorries announced her intention to annihilate it? What has an enormous and colourful parrot ever done to her? Does she even need a motive, beyond a kind of jealous hatred of anything beautiful, which shames her spiritual ugliness by its mere existence?
Dorries’s hostility to magic and beauty in all its forms, and to the abstract notion of joy itself, became apparent when she spoke, in November last year, to the Select Committee Panel on Mysterious Wild Birds. Using a collection of words, some of which formed complete sentences, Dorries explained: “I think it’s right that an enormous colourful parrot, in the rapidly changing environment that we’re in at the moment. I think the future and the longevity of that enormous colourful parrot should be brought into question and should be. Particularly when it is in receipt of taxpayers’ money. It is our responsibility to evaluate whether taxpayers are receiving value for money and whether taxpayers. And whether that model is sustainable in the future. I think it’s absolutely right and proper that we should do so. And that is the process we are going through. So I would argue that to say that just because the enormous colourful parrot has been established, as a public service, and just because it’s in receipt of public money, we should never kind of audit the future of the enormous colourful parrot, and we should never evaluate how the enormous colourful parrot looks in the future, and whether or not it is a sustainable and viable enormous colourful parrot. It’s right that the government should do that.”
But do what? What was Dorries saying? The silence of a baffled and stunned Mysterious Wild Bird committee room, in the face of a statement both incoherent and nonsensical, was broken only by the plaintive factual knowledge of Damian Green. “But the enormous colourful parrot isn’t in receipt of public money. It is sustained by nuts, vegetables and fruits left out by local folk, and by foods it forages itself from the 62-mile radius of its territory stretching out, presumably, right over the Cotswolds and the Forest of Dean, providing huge value, at no cost, to a wide community.” Dorries replied, literally: “OK. And so… ay … although it’s… and yes but… that”, having learned nothing from her former use of random words as a smokescreen to hide a deeper incoherence.
Dorries has gone on to say that the enormous colourful parrot must be caught and sold to the highest bidder and that the profits will be “invested”, although the recent Conservative track record suggests the parrot will end up belonging to a party donor, or a friendly pub landlord, who will exploit it and bleed it dry, until it is no longer of any use to anyone and then dies. The enormous colourful parrot costs the taxpayer nothing. It is self-sufficient, and even profitable, drawing curious ornithologists to an economically depressed town, and providing daily meaning to the lives of those who seek it and sustain it, as well as inspiring generations of children to pursue lifelong careers in the study and support of wild birds. Why does Dorries want it destroyed?
Local park ranger Dursley Tyndale gave me his opinion, when I walked the hill with my children last week. “I didn’t know who she was. She parked here once and I said, ‘Don’t park there love. That’s round where that parrot nests and he will shat on your bonnet.’ She just flicked her Vs at me and went into the woods with some bottles of prosecco and a toilet roll. When she came back she had loo paper stuck on her shoe and there was all parrot’s shat all on the car and she started effing and blinding and saying she would get that f***ing parrot. I think it’s pride. She was made to look foolish and now she’s taking it out on that poor parrot. It’s evil, like something old Fred would have done back in the day. I’ll still probably vote for the Tories though. Well, I mean, that Jeremiah Crosby, he’s incompetent isn’t he, doolally?”
Stewart Lee
2022-04-10T15:02:14+01:00
Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, apparently has restless thoughts and only finds ease in destroying. Doubtless, Dorries is aware on some level of the epic poem, in her capacity as guardian of the nation’s cultural treasures, and as an author herself, and yet she learns nothing from it. So how can it be true that the latest innocent public benefit to fall in her sights is a harmless wild bird that has delighted dog walkers and local schoolchildren for generations? For nearly 20 years now, a mysterious, enormous and colourful parrot, nearly 3ft in height, has dwelt on the sylvan slopes of Robinswood Hill, a country park south of Gloucester, in a strip of land between the A38 and the M5. I glimpsed it once, as a younger man, flashing blue and red between the green woodland canopy and the orange evening sky and briefly I felt I saw the face of God. In Gloucester. The bird is even rumoured to have inspired local ski-jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards to pursue his dreams of unassisted human flight, but his trainer, Bronson Peary, forbade him from using his preferred nickname of Eddie “That Enormous Colourful Parrot From Robinswood Hill” Edwards, saying it was “dumb-ass”. No one knows where the enormous colourful parrot came from and its miraculous ongoing survival is said to be assisted by a discreet local support network of undercover amateur ornithologists, who derive enormous pleasure from spotting it in the wild and only want it to be free to view, asking nothing in return. Why then, has Dorries announced her intention to annihilate it? What has an enormous and colourful parrot ever done to her? Does she even need a motive, beyond a kind of jealous hatred of anything beautiful, which shames...
A very special evening to raise money for a memorial for the poet and artist William Blake.
Monday 25th September 2017 at 7.30pm.
Leicester Square Theatre, London.
Featuring;
KEVIN ELDON
SHIRLEY COLLINS, DAVE ARTHUR AND PETE COOPER
THE GREAT BRITISH BLAKE OFF
ROBIN INCE
STEWART LEE
ALAN MOORE
SIMON MUNNERY
TESTAMENT
More To Be Announced
William Blake - a visionary poet, artist and prophet - lies in an unmarked grave in the City of London.
Overlooked, ridiculed and ignored in his lifetime, Blake has since become on of the greatest figures in British culture.
The exact location of Blake's resting place was only re-discovered in recent years after detailed research by two trustees of the Blake Society.
This event featuring some of the UK's most thrilling maverick performers is to raise funds towards a fitting marker to identify Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields Burial ground.
Exclusive 48 hours PRIROTY BOOKING PERIOD from 10am 31ST MAY with PRIORITY BOOKING CODE: BLAKE17
This event is likely to sell out you are most likely to be assured of tickets if you book within this exclusive booking period from 10am Wednesday 31st May until 10am Friday June 2nd.
Book online at https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873574779
or by calling 0207 734 2222 or in person at the box office by entering or quoting the PRIORITY BOOKING CODE: BLAKE17
LISTINGS
WAKE FOR BLAKE - general booking opens 10am Friday 2nd June 2017
Venue: Leicester Square Theatre, London
Date: Monday 25th September 2017
Time: 7.30pm
Tickets: £25 plus booking fee
Booking: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873574779 Tel: 0207 734 222
JIMMY TAVO-FIT
June 12th, Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London.
Benefit for the 80s comedian Jim Tavare, who had a road smash in no-NHS USA.
BOOK NOW - TICKETS FROM £36.00. https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/lyric-theatre/all-star_comedy_benefit_for_jim_tavare
A Gala stand up comedy show for the comedian Jim Tavare featuring twelve top comedians Harry Hill, Stewart Lee, Milton Jones, Paul Zerdin, Alan Davies, Paul Chowdhry, Dave Johns, Arthur Smith, Zoe Lyons, Hal Cruttenden, Dara O Briain, Gina Yashere & Jo Brand (Acts subject to change)
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 Saturday 3rd Feb 2018
Monday to Saturday
Not Fri 24, Sat 25, Thur 30 Nov 2017 (DAYS OFF) Not Tue 9, Sat 13 Jan 2018 (DAYS OFF)
A WAKE FOR BLAKE A very special evening to raise money for a memorial for the poet and artist William Blake. Monday 25th September 2017 at 7.30pm. Leicester Square Theatre, London. Featuring; KEVIN ELDON SHIRLEY COLLINS, DAVE ARTHUR AND PETE COOPER THE GREAT BRITISH BLAKE OFF ROBIN INCE STEWART LEE ALAN MOORE SIMON MUNNERY TESTAMENT More To Be Announced William Blake - a visionary poet, artist and prophet - lies in an unmarked grave in the City of London. Overlooked, ridiculed and ignored in his lifetime, Blake has since become on of the greatest figures in British culture. The exact location of Blake's resting place was only re-discovered in recent years after detailed research by two trustees of the Blake Society. This event featuring some of the UK's most thrilling maverick performers is to raise funds towards a fitting marker to identify Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields Burial ground. Exclusive 48 hours PRIROTY BOOKING PERIOD from 10am 31ST MAY with PRIORITY BOOKING CODE: BLAKE17 This event is likely to sell out you are most likely to be assured of tickets if you book within this exclusive booking period from 10am Wednesday 31st May until 10am Friday June 2nd. Book online at https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873574779 or by calling 0207 734 2222 or in person at the box office by entering or quoting the PRIORITY BOOKING CODE: BLAKE17 LISTINGS WAKE FOR BLAKE - general booking opens 10am Friday 2nd June 2017 Venue: Leicester Square Theatre, London Date: Monday 25th September 2017 Time: 7.30pm Tickets: £25 plus booking fee Booking: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873574779 Tel: 0207 734 222 JIMMY TAVO-FIT June 12th, Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London. Benefit for the 80s comedian Jim Tavare, who had a road smash in no-NHS USA. BOOK NOW - TICKETS FROM £36.00. https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/lyric-theatre/all-star_comedy_benefit_for_jim_tavare A Gala stand up comedy show for the comedian...
1) King Rocker Merch Dear List Here is some limited soon to be valuable merchandise regarding the KING ROCKER documentary that I and Michael Cumming (Toast, Brass Eye) are making. The merch pays for camera crews and travel. Everyone else is working for free. BUY KING ROCKER T-SHIRTS / TOTE BAGS / MUGS HERE 3) SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO WOK IN PROGRESSES I am 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 tickets by clicking here when they are released or by signing up to Angel Comedy's mailing list.
When I had the temerity to explain - in a Telegraph blog post - why I gave up on Stewart Lee’s latest live show at the first interval, I was met with a ferocious torrent of online indignation.
On Twitter, for instance, Stuart Baxter got in touch to go "haha what a bell end!", John Dyer called me a "whimp" (sic) and Deep Roy denounced me as a "T--T". On the Telegraph site, assisted by equivalent instances of bilious contempt, the article shot up the most-viewed rankings to eclipse - do we laugh or cry? - reports on the Philippines typhoon.
I don’t think I can be alone in finding this reaction disproportionate to the complaint I levelled at Lee, which was essentially that - aside from slagging off the Telegraph, its readers and its sketchwriter Michael Deacon - he was being unusually aggressive towards his audience in that opening half, even by his combative standards. Perhaps there are punters who delight in being called "Friday night c---s" and for whom no insult from a comedian who trades in irony can be regarded as unpalatable. I didn’t feel massively affronted but I felt sufficiently disappointed to make the decision to skip the rest of Much A-Stew About Nothing, which trials new material ahead of TV recordings, with a view to visiting it again another time.
Which I duly did at the start of the week, slinking in at the back of the Leicester Square Theatre, bag at the ready just in case the assembled aficionados turned into a real-life mob. Thanks to that article - which Lee dismisses as "click-bait", written only in order to provoke a reaction - there are some fresh laughs to be had. "I’ve read in the paper that I have contempt for the public but I don’t," he suggested, deadpan-plaintive. "I do hundreds of gigs and I try really hard."
It would, of course, be delusional to conclude he’d taken on board what I said but I found it interesting that he had moved the most audience-testing section to the end of the evening and didn’t refer to the crowd using four-letter words. The mood was more relaxed. Organised thus, with a succession of finely nuanced sets - dealing with UKIP, his being "an impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old, functioning alcoholic father of two", racism and satire - he delivered an accomplished, intelligent, manifestly likeable and tonally exact show, of the sort he usually gives and I wish I'd seen in the first place.
Stewart Lee
2013-11-20T23:24:53+00:00
When I had the temerity to explain - in a Telegraph blog post - why I gave up on Stewart Lee’s latest live show at the first interval, I was met with a ferocious torrent of online indignation. On Twitter, for instance, Stuart Baxter got in touch to go "haha what a bell end!", John Dyer called me a "whimp" (sic) and Deep Roy denounced me as a "T--T". On the Telegraph site, assisted by equivalent instances of bilious contempt, the article shot up the most-viewed rankings to eclipse - do we laugh or cry? - reports on the Philippines typhoon. I don’t think I can be alone in finding this reaction disproportionate to the complaint I levelled at Lee, which was essentially that - aside from slagging off the Telegraph, its readers and its sketchwriter Michael Deacon - he was being unusually aggressive towards his audience in that opening half, even by his combative standards. Perhaps there are punters who delight in being called "Friday night c---s" and for whom no insult from a comedian who trades in irony can be regarded as unpalatable. I didn’t feel massively affronted but I felt sufficiently disappointed to make the decision to skip the rest of Much A-Stew About Nothing, which trials new material ahead of TV recordings, with a view to visiting it again another time. Which I duly did at the start of the week, slinking in at the back of the Leicester Square Theatre, bag at the ready just in case the assembled aficionados turned into a real-life mob. Thanks to that article - which Lee dismisses as "click-bait", written only in order to provoke a reaction - there are some fresh laughs to be had. "I’ve read in the paper that I have contempt for the public but...
IF YOU’VE not heard anything from Stewart Lee since his 90’s television work, you might be surprised to learn his recent comedy is blasphemous.
That’s according to fundamentalist Christians at least, who did not enjoy his ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’.
The show depicted American chatshow host Springer descending into hell and Jesus, Satan, the Virgin Mary and God appearing as his guests.
The group Christian Voice, which advocates “national repentance” through prayer, tried to get him, the BBC and the show’s producers prosecuted for blasphemy.
“The court threw out the charge on the grounds it’s not 1508,” is one of Lee’s jokes about it.
When the show toured the UK, Christian Voice members followed it to sing hymns in protest outside venues and distributed leaflets saying it was blasphemous.
The show is no longer being performed and Lee joked: “No one will touch it. It (the protests) is the reason I’m not a millionaire.”
He does not regret making the show or the anger caused but says he has started to take what he says more seriously, twenty years after first doing stand-up.
He started doing comedy while he was an undergraduate at Oxford University.
He is married with a son and now wants what he says to be more serious about what he jokes about.
His new show, which is coming to the Camberley Theatre on October 21, is called If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One.
The show’s title comes from coffee chains promise written on its cups: “If you would like a milder coffee, please ask for one”.
Lee told the News & Mail he started writing the show after Costa Coffee refused him a free drink because the ticks on his loyalty card were in the wrong place.
He said: “I was watching an interview with Frankie Boyle (a comedian best known for his Mock the Week appearances), who said people shouldn’t be comedians when they’re over 40 because they’re not angry about anything anymore.
“I just found it funny, here I was writing about how angry I was at Costa Coffee for not giving me a free coffee.”
But his new outlook will not mean a change to his deadpan style.
Every comedian sticks quotes from favourable reviews and Lee has no shortage of them from, among others, Ricky Gervais. But one he preferred to use is from the Birmingham Sunday Mercury, the paper of his hometown.
The quote is: “His whole tone is one of complete, smug condescension.”
Lee said this was help “curate the audience” and warn people that his humour may not be for everyone.
For all the controversy of the Jerry Springer show, Lee’s career is on the rise again.
He returned to television earlier this year with his own six-part series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, where he told jokes on themes from political correctness to celebrities’ books.
He wrote a novel in 2001, the Perfect Fool, and is now writing a book about his last three shows and how the ideas came to him.
“It should be out by spring. I’m hoping it’ll be quite academic,” he said. “But still funny.”
‘If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One’ is at the Camberley Theatre on October 21 at 8pm.
IF YOU’VE not heard anything from Stewart Lee since his 90’s television work, you might be surprised to learn his recent comedy is blasphemous. That’s according to fundamentalist Christians at least, who did not enjoy his ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’. The show depicted American chatshow host Springer descending into hell and Jesus, Satan, the Virgin Mary and God appearing as his guests. The group Christian Voice, which advocates “national repentance” through prayer, tried to get him, the BBC and the show’s producers prosecuted for blasphemy. “The court threw out the charge on the grounds it’s not 1508,” is one of Lee’s jokes about it. When the show toured the UK, Christian Voice members followed it to sing hymns in protest outside venues and distributed leaflets saying it was blasphemous. The show is no longer being performed and Lee joked: “No one will touch it. It (the protests) is the reason I’m not a millionaire.” He does not regret making the show or the anger caused but says he has started to take what he says more seriously, twenty years after first doing stand-up. He started doing comedy while he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. He is married with a son and now wants what he says to be more serious about what he jokes about. His new show, which is coming to the Camberley Theatre on October 21, is called If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One. The show’s title comes from coffee chains promise written on its cups: “If you would like a milder coffee, please ask for one”. Lee told the News & Mail he started writing the show after Costa Coffee refused him a free drink because the ticks on his loyalty card were in the wrong place. He said: “I was watching...
Two books bestrode my childhood, and made me the man I am: The Magic Bridle, a collection of British and Irish myths retold by the folklorist Forbes Stuart, which ignited my six-year-old imagination in 1974, and Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord, published two years earlier, and part of a then burgeoning bookseller phenomenon of often unreliable Earth mysteries compendiums. Nonetheless, they set this particular boy off, seeking out ancient sites whenever possible. Now everything has wilted but I still have calves of iron, and I can identify the outline of a hilltop earthwork from a moving car on a motorway as surely as a falcon seeing a field mouse 500 feet below.
Through childhood and adolescence I worked towards my targets, assembling my own apostolic archive of similar but unrelated 70s texts, light on detail and heavy on conjecture. Where were these places of power? I would see them! “You and your old ruins!” my gran would cluck dismissively, as I politely requested we broke our Morris Marina journey southwest to the caravan site, at Stanton Drew or Glastonbury.
And when I stumbled in my cub-scout shorts to find the Longstone Barrow, which I had only seen in a blurred pamphlet picture, my divorcee dad waited patiently in a car at the bottom of Challacombe Common, counting down the functional alcoholic hours to opening time. God bless him! Today I feel his pain. But we were all weird walking blind back then, confused men with their hands on the shoulders of the equally confused man in front, seeking silhouettes of standing stones in the mists of imaginary moors.
And then, in the closing hours of the 20th century, came Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian, a landmark practical tome for the would-be site-seeker, served up in its own mud-proof slipcase, synthesising archaeology, folklore, grid references, helpful full-colour maps, parking advice and a small smidgeon of Cope’s own eccentric interpretations, often later validated by reluctantly admiring academics. The stones were stages! Rock and roll! It was a game-changer, and Cope opened up the crack in the Devil’s Grave of our folkloric landscape to all, like the wizard of Alderley Edge.
But Weird Walk is not The Modern Antiquarian. If anything, the three Weird Walkers, whoever they may be, have returned the love of folk tales, ancient sites and the perambulations that lead one to their locations even more defiantly to the realm of the gentleman and gentlewoman amateurs who first documented them. The sensibly shod 17th-century parson, mapping the megaliths between funerals and marriages, and the aristocratic antiquary, pleading with some Cornish farmer to spare the collapsed burial chamber whose capstone he had earmarked for a pigsty, would recognise the Weird Walkers as kindred spirits. No one knows who they are, or what they are doing.
And yet, in their costly boots and cagoules, they seem to have stumbled into something. They walk the landscape in the shadows of the seasons as we used to experience them before they blurred, reminding us of how we once measured out the increments of our humanity, and etched it into rock and earth, in the annual cycles of rotting and rebirth. When we lose this knowledge, we are lost. We’re probably lost anyway to be honest, but fuck it, let’s go down drunk and walking weird.
Dartmoor is a weird place; temporal dislocation comes with the territory. Wayfinding is not easy among this gorse, these rambling tors and secluded brooks. And when an autumn mist descends, you can be transported: a bronze age farmer to your left, a medieval tin miner to your right, and up ahead the lord of the manor has antiquarian ambitions. He’s just repositioned those stones. The earth gnomes don’t approve.
The stretch of moor between the storied Warren House Inn and the foreboding interwar plantation of Fernworthy Forest is classic Dartmoor; the grasses are thick underfoot and marshy ground emerges without warning, saturated by the capricious weather. Long ago, the moorland here would have rolled uninterrupted and Fernworthy’s ancient monuments would have been as exposed as their neighbours at Merrivale or the Grey Wethers. Now, the break with the moor is absolute, and dark evergreens offer up an entrance out of a Grimm’s tale. Once inside, the silent monoculture can provide even the warmest October day with an eerie chill.
Near the edge of the forest sits Assycombe double stone row, Fernworthy’s planters helpfully leaving a gap between the saplings for the stones to breathe. Although little known, it is a remarkable monument that seems to tumble down its grassy hill, the irregular miniliths descending like a dragon’s spine from an initial menhir to a large blocking stone at the foot of the slope.
Assycombe is one of the many stone rows on Dartmoor thought by early antiquarians, such as Richard Polwhele, to be “Druid ways”. They are scattered across the landscape, sometimes barely discernible, but always potent in their imaginative value. Walking these ancient lines creates an access point, a connection to those who walked them long ago.
Following the track from Assycombe, deeper into the plantation, will eventually bring you to the reservoir that dominates the area. Built during the second world war, its construction was not without incident. Fernworthy Farm, which could trace its ancestry back to the Middle Ages, was among the buildings demolished to make way for the dam and reservoir. When it was standing, locals told of a curse laid upon the farm by the earth gnomes who dwell beneath the moor.
So infuriated were the gnomes by the quarrying of their finest granite to rebuild the farmhouse at Fernworthy that they stole the firstborn child of the farmer who had committed the sin. On Dartmoor, “don’t upset the gnomes” seems to come pretty high on the list of folk rules.
Working around the body of water as it lies today, it’s an easy stroll to the mysterious stone circle of Froggymead, its name nodding to its marshy location. A bronze age circle of some 29 stones, it is a wonderfully meditative place. Stone rows, albeit damaged by all that tree planting, can be seen to the north and south of the site. Froggymead (also known as Fernworthy stone circle) makes a vibe-laden picnic spot and, from here, there’s the option to continue out of the forest to the Grey Wethers.
Consisting of two stunning stone circles, the Grey Wethers are one of the megalithic highlights of this part of the world. Their position makes them even more appealing – you’re likely to be sharing the circles with relatively few visitors or perhaps only the skylarks that dance overhead.
From the Grey Wethers, you can head back through the forest for a pint at the Warren House Inn: a fine place to wind up after a day’s yomping. Its fire has been burning solidly since the current building was put up in 1845 and, as one of the highest and most isolated pubs in England, visitors have often welcomed the warmth, especially when autumn arrives.
The inn has its share of tales told around the fire, a favourite being “The Salted Corpse”. This yarn tells of a traveller staying overnight who opens up an intriguing chest in his room. To his horror, he finds himself gazing upon the face of a dead man. Suspecting murder, he rushes to the landlord, who casually informs him that “tis only father”, the old man having been salted down and stored until the trip can be made from the remote inn to Lydford for burial.
Dartmoor is not as out of the way as it once was, and we would hope that there is less need to reach for the salt cellar these days. However, this land has somehow managed to retain a peculiar flavour of isolation well into the 21st century, and, especially away from its most-frequented spots, it still holds almost limitless possibilities for exploration.
Walk notes
Covered on map OS Explorer OL28. There are several parking spots near the Warren House Inn (SX 67423 80944) and from here we made our way across the moor to Fernworthy Forest. As with any moorland walking, this is a map and compass job, best done with pals and all the requisite gear. We entered the forest at SX 66068 81902. Assycombe stone row can be found at SX 66096 82641. From here, you can walk through the forest, skirting the reservoir, to Froggymead at SX 65486 84127. The walk can be extended out of the trees to the Grey Wethers at SX 63869 83134. The nearby Bronze Age settlement of Grimspound (SX 70051 80904) is a two miles walk across the moor from the Warren House Inn and is highly recommended. Absolutely rife with vibes.
Tigh nam Bodach, Perth and Kinross
Tigh nam Bodach is one of Britain’s most enigmatic and isolated ritual sites. This simple pagan shrine sits below snow-capped peaks in a side valley of the mighty Glen Lyon, the longest enclosed glen in Scotland and, according to Sir Walter Scott, the “loneliest and loveliest” too. Outside a modest yet beautifully constructed shelter sits a family of Gaelic myth, headed by a mysterious goddess, the Cailleach. The goddess, her husband (the Bodach of the shrine’s name) and their children are all represented by strangely humanoid stones, which have been shaped over millennia by the fast-flowing Allt na Cailliche stream. At Beltane, on 1 May, locals take the stone family from their house to watch over the land and ensure its fertility, ritually returning them inside on Samhain, 1 November.
The journey to Tigh nam Bodach often begins by driving some 10 miles down a single-track road through stunning scenery to Lubreoch dam at the western end of Glen Lyon. The road runs out at the enormous dam, which holds Loch Lyon at bay in the name of hydroelectricity. From here, a rough track climbs around the loch through a towering landscape of mountains and waterfalls for around six miles to the shrine.
In its eastern section, near the dam itself, the loch has an unusually industrial aspect; the many waterfalls that tumble down from on high are occasionally directed by steel outflow pipes beneath the track. Thankfully, no structures other than a handy wooden bridge interfere with the magnificent Eos Eoghannan waterfall that soon crosses your path, its ravine populated with rowan and birch.
Running through modern Scottish and Irish mythology, the legend of the Cailleach may well have begun life in literature before tumbling into the world of folklore. The goddess is a shaper of mountains and wild places, a bringer of storms and winter. Although it is unclear how old the animistic practices associated with Tigh nam Bodach actually are (some say they were developed in the 18th or 19th centuries by shepherds), the place names in this landscape certainly suggest a venerable association with the goddess.
Turning away from the loch, the track leads you up towards even more impressive mountains, speckled with snow. Here there are streams to cross that can feel more like rivers following a downpour. After the stepping stone crossing of Allt Meurain stream, you climb into Glen Cailliche. This is very much the goddess’s territory, with the powerful Allt na Cailliche running alongside the track. When the shrine is finally spied, it is hard not to run over the marshy ground in excitement, greeting (but not handling, of course) the sacred stones like old friends. The family’s modest home is modelled on a shieling, the simple house once used by farmers in the summer months up in the glens.
Sitting in front of Tigh nam Bodach is a moving experience. The stones themselves seem genuinely imbued with life, appearing at once vulnerable and impervious to the whims of time. Pilgrims have left items around the shrine – a wooden star, a ram’s horn, a piece of shining quartz. Few sites tell of our connection to the seasons and the land like this. In its simple, localised ritual practice, Tigh nam Bodach encapsulates an ancient relationship. The Celtic scholar Anne Ross noted that when the land was flooded, extending the loch for the new dam, there were fewer folk to carry out the ritual. Happily, it has been maintained by Glen Lyon’s shepherds, and, if anything, attachment to the custom has grown even stronger in these parts. When further hydroelectric work threatened to encroach upon the Cailleach’s hidden glen, the plans were soon nixed by concerned locals and academics. Here, the stones still matter.
Walk notes
This walk is covered on OS Explorer OL48. The simplest way to access the site is to find a spot to park at Lubreoch Dam (grid reference NN 45932 41892). You can then walk around Loch Lyon and up to Tigh nam Bodach (NN 38053 42711) which is around six miles away. There are streams to cross, so waterproof footwear is a must. This is a remote one – there’s no phone signal and, being subject to the vicissitudes of the Scottish weather, the right gear is essential. Make sure you have a route mapped and take a pal. Situated at the opposite end of Glen Lyon to Tigh nam Bodach is the village of Fortingall (a fifty-minute drive from Lubreoch Dam), a small place with a hefty mythic pedigree. Fortingall is home to a famous ancient yew tree (some parking at NN 74156 47011), which is thought to be between 2,000 and 3,000 years old. The remnants of three stone circles lie at the eastern edge of the village, close to the River Lyon. Another monument, Càrn na Marbh or “the cairn of the dead”, began life as a Bronze Age burial mound before it was opened in the 14th century to hold the bodies of Fortingall’s plague victims. Further antiquities can be seen in the church, including a Celtic handbell and fragments of Pictish stones.
Trellech, Monmouthshire
Trellech is, in some respects, an uncertain place. The village’s very name is contested – you’ll encounter signs for Tryleg, Trelleck, Trellech and Trelech, depending on the angle of your approach.
There is, however, one thing that Trellech is very definite about: a deep affection for its ancient sites and layers of lore. Trellech’s Rosetta Stone lies inside the church of St Nicholas. Here, the sculpted side panels of a 17th-century sundial bear witness to the village’s mysteries: its mound, its stones and its Virtuous Well. Once standing proud in the village centre, the sundial was moved indoors to protect it from the elements. Observing the venerable, chiselled image of three pagan standing stones within this medieval church is a remarkable thing, and it is certainly worth pretending you can read Latin and donning the attitude of a Jamesian academic as you decipher the inscription, mumbling, “MAIOR SAXIS – greater in its stones; MAXIMA FONTE – greatest in its well”, as though unravelling some ancient riddle.
The mound commemorated on the sundial is known as Tump Terret. Its associated inscription laments “Oh! How many are buried here!” – a reference to the legend that the mound is the resting place of those slain in a conflict between the last crowned Anglo-Saxon English king, Harold Godwinson, and the Welsh. The site has now been identified as the remnants of a small Norman castle which belonged to the De Clare family.
Tump Terret itself emerges ziggurat-like, past swanky barn conversions and their attendant SUVs. This is the remaining motte of the motte and bailey castle, and today its sides ripple with possible paths to the summit, an undulating inverted bowl of green. A summer house was once built on the top of the mound, with flagrant disregard for the supposed curse that befalls those who disturb it. The view over the surrounding landscape perhaps warranted tempting fate. Not far from Tump Terret, and accessed by tracking the route of a stream across a sheep field, lie the three megaliths of Harold’s Stones, a monument that definitely deserves to be more widely known.
The stones have a similar feel to Avebury’s menhirs, whose ancient sacred alignments are juxtaposed with layers of subsequent history within the bounds of an idyllic village. Unlike Avebury’s stones, however, these three are composed of a conglomerate rock called pudding stone, which holds vivid quartz pebbles and lends the megaliths an almost brutalist concrete quality.
Sunrise is the perfect time to visit Harold’s Stones. The early bird is rewarded with a slow reveal of colour, as the stones morph from deep blacks to a complex collection of hues drawn from lichen, shadowed grooves and the unusual conglomerate rock itself.
The folklore, as ever, has had its say on the stones. In one tale, they are said to have arrived in the village when flung from the Black Mountains by the wizard Jack o’ Kent during one of his regular chucking competitions with the devil, although their current name derives from the idea that they mark the site of the defeat of three Welsh elders by King Harold. Their true origins lie much earlier, in the bronze age, but perhaps talk of Harold preserves a folk memory of the stones’ use as an assembly point for those fighting the English king, or even as a site of conflict with the invaders from beyond Offa’s Dyke. However, Trellech’s most important venue may be the well that is found a short walk from Harold’s Stones.
The village is powerfully linked to natural springs and deep wells, and the current Virtuous Well is the last of many ancient springs to be in use here. It is sited next to a stream which flows energetically beneath its footbridge, while nearby trees offer up the colourful tied rags that accompany so many holy springs. Also known as St Anne’s Well, it was once a big draw for pilgrims, the water said to ease ailments of the eyes in particular.
On stepping down into the sunken stone horseshoe of the well, the great age of the place is apparent. Water seeps across ancient flagstones that lead to an arched recess within the far wall. Here, a basin collects the water that bubbles from the underworld, while further recesses provide space for offerings or perhaps cups for those who would have drunk the iron-rich water, the mineral evident in a reddish build-up of sediment between the paving and the wall.
The Virtuous Well remains a meditative place, a reminder of the network of sacred springs in these parts, not least in nearby Ninewells Wood. The well is captured beautifully on a striking modern interpretation of Trellech’s sundial at the village crossroads. Cut from the trunk of a single tree, it incorporates all of the nearby sites of interest. The sculpture is the latest entry in a long tradition of Trellech acknowledging its sites and stories. This is cherished land. And if history is a wondrous palimpsest on these islands, perhaps it is nowhere more so than in this small Monmouthshire village.
Walk notes
There is a small car park at SO 50087 05282. From here you can take in the key sites. The Church of St Nicholas (and its famous sundial) is at SO 50042 05483, and Tump Terret is located at SO 49978 05354. From the Tump, you can follow a signposted path across a sheep field and over the road to Harold’s Stones (SO 49929 05144). On your way to the stones, make a stop at the modern interpretation of the sundial described above (SO 50053 05238). The Virtuous Well can be found at SO 50298 05101. You can soak up the area’s connections to sacred waters with a visit to nearby Ninewells Wood, a beautiful Wye Valley woodland (parking 1.6 miles from Trellech at SO 51501 03827) once renowned for its healing springs. Spotter’s badge if you can find the haunting carving of a fox’s face on the stone stile at SO 51403 03482. It is said to have been the creation of a French prisoner held here during the Napoleonic Wars.
This is an edited extract from Weird Walk (Watkins, £19.99).To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Stewart Lee
2023-10-28T13:15:27+01:00
Two books bestrode my childhood, and made me the man I am: The Magic Bridle, a collection of British and Irish myths retold by the folklorist Forbes Stuart, which ignited my six-year-old imagination in 1974, and Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord, published two years earlier, and part of a then burgeoning bookseller phenomenon of often unreliable Earth mysteries compendiums. Nonetheless, they set this particular boy off, seeking out ancient sites whenever possible. Now everything has wilted but I still have calves of iron, and I can identify the outline of a hilltop earthwork from a moving car on a motorway as surely as a falcon seeing a field mouse 500 feet below. Through childhood and adolescence I worked towards my targets, assembling my own apostolic archive of similar but unrelated 70s texts, light on detail and heavy on conjecture. Where were these places of power? I would see them! “You and your old ruins!” my gran would cluck dismissively, as I politely requested we broke our Morris Marina journey southwest to the caravan site, at Stanton Drew or Glastonbury. And when I stumbled in my cub-scout shorts to find the Longstone Barrow, which I had only seen in a blurred pamphlet picture, my divorcee dad waited patiently in a car at the bottom of Challacombe Common, counting down the functional alcoholic hours to opening time. God bless him! Today I feel his pain. But we were all weird walking blind back then, confused men with their hands on the shoulders of the equally confused man in front, seeking silhouettes of standing stones in the mists of imaginary moors. And then, in the closing hours of the 20th century, came Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian, a landmark practical tome for the would-be site-seeker, served up in its own mud-proof...
Stewart Lee has written another show, additional hours of content for his consumers. He arrives on stage bearded, barrel chested, announcing ‘Julian Assange has let himself go.’ The joke is self-referential, alluding to an earlier routine in If You Prefer A Milder Comedian. Lee has such a loyal following he can now callback to jokes he made years ago. Intertextuality is not something that concerns Roy Chubby Brown, but it’s something Lee gets a kick out of.
Lee’s last show Content Provider toured for two years, culminating in a BBC2 release. Centred around Caspar David Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above A Sea, it was a masterpiece of language, structure and form. From the parallel set up of its first and second act to the subversion of Freidrich’s painting at the end, the work demonstrated a craft and stagecraft rarely seen in comedy. It’s little surprise that Alan Bennett describes him as ‘the J.L. Austin of what is now a sloppy profession.’ (J.L. Austin was a British philosopher of language. I learnt that last night.)
So how do you improve on what is peerless? Lee is a regular contributor to The Guardian; his articles a vitriolic lament on Brexit and its architects. All of which have been collected into a book, March of the Lemmings. With the title of this show Snowflake/Tornado there's a strong suggestion the political maelstrom will be addressed here.
The first half of the show though is less about Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and more about mainstream programmers decision to leave Lee well alone. Netflix, the biggest buyer of stand-up comedy, has his show Comedy Vehicle available to stream. Comedy Vehicle was critically acclaimed; BAFTA, Chortle and the British Comedy Awards garlanded it. Inspired by Dave Allen, each episode took a different subject, distilling it into smart laughs. However, Netflix, the biggest producer of stand-up comedy, listed the show as ‘Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. And nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.' This type of thing wouldn’t happen to Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais. Soon Lee is dissecting the semantics of Netflix descriptions, pouring scorn on how Carr is described as ‘serving’ up comedy – like jailhouse slop – and Gervais ‘slings’ trademark snark – like he’s throwing testicles at trans people. Insulting comedians is Lee’s stock-in-trade and a big reason why we love him. His targets are white privileged males, the counter-culture bad boys who ‘say the unsayable’ for millions of pounds, or mainstream stars who don’t say anything at all.
Soon we’re onto Dave Chapelle, Rolling Stone’s 9th best comedian of all time. Of course, Lee references how his Times position surpasses Chapelle’s. The pair are from two very different schools of comedy, yet their paths are similar. Both enjoyed critical success for their sketch shows: Lee in Fist of Fun and Chapelle in Chapelle’s Show. Both too had long hiatuses from stand-up. Yet the quality of their returns aren’t comparable. Ever since Lee reclaimed the microphone, his output has been prodigious. In the comedy arms race he is packing more than his rivals. Repetition, parallelism, shaggy dog stories, pull back and reveal, anti-comedy, deconstruction, clowning, analogy - he has it all. Chapelle, on the other hand, seems to be living off past glories, barely getting out of second gear. For all that, his tickets sell for hundreds of pounds; Lee’s £27 - with a complimentary £20 DVD.
So the idea of these two men crossing paths is funny. And it’s this tale that forms the bulk of the first half. Despite the cheeky pronouncement that his critical placing is higher, Lee positions himself as the underdog. For someone packing out theatres across the country, he is a master of a deception. A magician. A specialiser in sleight of mouth. We grow so accustomed to hearing him talk about his failures and slights that we forget how schadenfreude is occuring in a sold-out room. Our sold-out underdog tells us about how he was so keen to see Chapelle’s intimate gig he spent £150 on tickets for him and his wife. Our sold-out underdog tells us how with his show finishing before Chapelle’s he looked forward to meeting him. Of course, with the megastar arriving late, entourage in tow, Mariah Carey rider on ice, the G2 conference doesn’t materialise - at least how it should. The pay-off is a contrivance, but a funny one.
By the end of the hour we’re back to Alan Bennett, with a surreal impersonation that you wouldn’t even see Rob Brydon or Steve Coogan attempt. Yes, Lee doesn’t live up to his billing of ‘sharks falling from the sky,’ but he achieves a tornado of comedy, in which nobody – whether it be on the Eastern Seaboard- or the auditorium- are safe.
The second half seeks to address former Leftie, Tony Parsons, assertion that Lee is a ‘BBC approved comedian who can be guaranteed to dress to the left.’ In other words, a woke snowflake or as Parsons defines, ‘professionally sensitive.’ Much of the material invokes the ‘Political Correctness’ routine from 41st Best Stand-Up Ever! In fact, I heard a punter complain after the show that the second half was all old routines. It isn’t. Correct: the scaffolding is the same, but the content is different. His Gran’s punch-line of ‘It’s political correctness gone mad, Stew’ echoes his earlier output, however the set-up of nuclear disaster is different. If anything it’s the sign of the times that old routines can be updated in today’s world. The battles we thought we'd won, we're having to fight all over again. History repeats itself. Therefore, it stands to reason that the master of repetition repeats himself too. By Lee’s own admission this second hour requires more work. The pacing is a little off and the coda tagged on. With weeks more of previews, this second section will soon match the first.
To get two shows and a DVD for under thirty quid, in the centre of London, is great value for money. And although Parsons means ‘BBC approved comedian’ as an insult, it’s in fact a true compliment. Lord Reith, whom established independent broadcasting in the UK, declared the purpose of the BBC was to ‘inform, educate and entertain.’ These triumvirate qualities are embodied in the comedian’s work. Snowflake/Tornado made me think. It taught me things. Itmade me laugh. With this being a work in progress, the painter is still painting. Have a look at his tour dates and see the unveiling of another masterpiece.
Stewart Lee
2019-10-05T16:33:12+01:00
Stewart Lee has written another show, additional hours of content for his consumers. He arrives on stage bearded, barrel chested, announcing ‘Julian Assange has let himself go.’ The joke is self-referential, alluding to an earlier routine in If You Prefer A Milder Comedian. Lee has such a loyal following he can now callback to jokes he made years ago. Intertextuality is not something that concerns Roy Chubby Brown, but it’s something Lee gets a kick out of. Lee’s last show Content Provider toured for two years, culminating in a BBC2 release. Centred around Caspar David Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above A Sea, it was a masterpiece of language, structure and form. From the parallel set up of its first and second act to the subversion of Freidrich’s painting at the end, the work demonstrated a craft and stagecraft rarely seen in comedy. It’s little surprise that Alan Bennett describes him as ‘the J.L. Austin of what is now a sloppy profession.’ (J.L. Austin was a British philosopher of language. I learnt that last night.) So how do you improve on what is peerless? Lee is a regular contributor to The Guardian; his articles a vitriolic lament on Brexit and its architects. All of which have been collected into a book, March of the Lemmings. With the title of this show Snowflake/Tornado there's a strong suggestion the political maelstrom will be addressed here. The first half of the show though is less about Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and more about mainstream programmers decision to leave Lee well alone. Netflix, the biggest buyer of stand-up comedy, has his show Comedy Vehicle available to stream. Comedy Vehicle was critically acclaimed; BAFTA, Chortle and the British Comedy Awards garlanded it. Inspired by Dave Allen, each episode took a different subject, distilling it...
My metropolitan liberal elitist friends here in 78.5% Remain-voting Hackney do not hold BBC news in high regard, its election coverage considered biased in favour of the government and Laura Kuenssberg merely a horrid flesh trombone through which Dominic Cumming honks his reverberating falsehoods.
The news seemed skewed. During the election, the prime minister declined the grilling Andrew “Weetabix” Neil gave his opponents, had a selfie with an impartial Phillip Schofield on ITV and hid in a variety of white goods whenever regional reporters tried to ask basic questions, such as how many children he had or what he actually meant by any of the things he had said.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn was hung upside down in a pedal bin full of hornets by Andrew “Sphagnum” Neil and had cheese graters rubbed on his genital by an impartial Phillip Schofield on ITV. Nonetheless, despite the defeated left’s perception that a cowed BBC kowtows to government, the Tories’ policy continues to be to avoid scrutiny on news outlets favoured by “Westminster obsessives”, which is post-truth newspeak for “people who understand and care about politics”. Maybe the BBC is doing something right?
Even so, it was something of a shock to see 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-Lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Johnson’s first post-election BBC interview on Tuesday morning.
I didn’t even know that Gus Honeybun, the mute puppet rabbit whose leaps announced children’s birthdays on Westward Television from 1961 to 1992, was still alive, let alone conducting political interviews for BBC Breakfast. Honeybun’s inability to speak or communicate in any meaningful way made the cloth rabbit the ideal inquisitor for Turds. Turds was able to wibble his platitudes, avoiding concrete detail on care for the elderly, and saying race wasn’t an issue regarding the treatment of the smiling piccaninny Meghan Markle, the latter a subject on which Turds is uniquely equipped to pronounce.
After Honeybun’s initial attempts to attract Turds’s attention, by leaping successive sequences of leaps, each equivalent in number to the respective ages of the prime minister’s putative children, the puppet reached deep into his repertoire of silent gestures. Turds’s admission that the Americans would be unlikely to extradite the suspected hit-and-run killer Anne Sacoolas, for example, was met with three of Honeybun’s ear waggles, once beloved by West Country viewers.
Turds’s announcement of the Bung a Bob for Big Ben’s Brexit Bongs policy, which the prime minister improvised live on air like a jazzy Sonny Rollins of shit, saw Honeybun perform four of his impressive headstands, a skill his 1970s co-host Fern Britton, in her 1999 kiss-and-tell Honeybun memoir Winter Treats and Summer Delights, described as the move that melted her heart. Honeybun had hoped to respond to Turds’s comments on the racial abuse of Meghan Markle by turning on his magic colour-distorting button, which was introduced to his gestural arsenal in the 1980s, but it was purloined by a lurking Dominic Cumming, who imagined its reality-altering properties might have practical applications for perception manipulation.
While the Honeybun-Turds head to head was bad news for future political accountability in a functioning democracy, it was good news for the cloth rabbit, whose scandal-wrecked career was resurrected, with multiple offers for him to revive his birthday-announcing vehicle on a variety of digital platforms.
All Honeybun needs is a new sidekick to replace his old co-hosts Fern Britton, Judi Spiers and Ruth Langsford, all of whom are now too respected in the serious fields of broadcasting and journalism to interpret the waggles of a fabric rodent. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg would of course be the perfect Honeybun sidekick and would bring to the partnership her own experience of being an accommodating puppet operated by unseen hands.
In an unrelated issue, last week’s column jumped the tracks beyond its intended liberal bubble, out into the field latrine of social media, where it was eventually re-edited in a misrepresentative form by a twat. A number of Twitter users, who disliked the work, asked: “Who is Stewart Lee?”, wondered if I was “supposed to be a comedian” and, most hurtfully of all, spitefully put the word “comedian” in inverted commas, cleverly suggesting that I wasn’t a “comedian” at all. Despite many of these commentators being resourceful enough to have proudly traced their pure Viking ancestors, they seemed unable to Google my name to discover that I am indeed a comedian, irrespective of their own necessarily subjective responses to my comedy.
The Duchamp’s urinal of laughter, I have in fact been a comedian for 31 years. My last tour sold a quarter of a million tickets with no advertising to people who attended venues where I was billed as a comedian, on the shared assumption that that was indeed what I was.
In my comedian capacity I have won a Bafta, two British comedy awards and seven Chortle comedy industry awards, and was the co-recipient of an Olivier award, though I do not set any store by these accolades, do not feel that there is any genuine relationship between popularity and quality and mention sales figures and acclaim only to refute the warped aspirational value systems of those who respect them. My current show has received uniform five- and four-star reviews in every British broadsheet newspaper, from the neo-Nazi Telegraph to the Marxist Guardian, but not in the Times, though that paper did last year declare me “the world’s greatest living standup comedian”.
Indeed, the “Wokefinder General” himself, Ricky Gervais, called me “the cleverest, funniest, most cliche-free comedian on the circuit”, though this was perhaps an attempt to absolve himself of an imagined crime, a heart beating beneath the floorboards. I hope this information clarifies any ongoing confusion as unfortunately I do not have time to deal with all your queries individually.
Stewart Lee
2020-01-19T17:47:24+00:00
My metropolitan liberal elitist friends here in 78.5% Remain-voting Hackney do not hold BBC news in high regard, its election coverage considered biased in favour of the government and Laura Kuenssberg merely a horrid flesh trombone through which Dominic Cumming honks his reverberating falsehoods. The news seemed skewed. During the election, the prime minister declined the grilling Andrew “Weetabix” Neil gave his opponents, had a selfie with an impartial Phillip Schofield on ITV and hid in a variety of white goods whenever regional reporters tried to ask basic questions, such as how many children he had or what he actually meant by any of the things he had said. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn was hung upside down in a pedal bin full of hornets by Andrew “Sphagnum” Neil and had cheese graters rubbed on his genital by an impartial Phillip Schofield on ITV. Nonetheless, despite the defeated left’s perception that a cowed BBC kowtows to government, the Tories’ policy continues to be to avoid scrutiny on news outlets favoured by “Westminster obsessives”, which is post-truth newspeak for “people who understand and care about politics”. Maybe the BBC is doing something right? Even so, it was something of a shock to see 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-Lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Johnson’s first post-election BBC interview on Tuesday morning. I didn’t even know that Gus Honeybun, the mute puppet rabbit whose leaps announced children’s birthdays on Westward Television from 1961 to 1992, was still alive, let alone conducting political interviews for BBC Breakfast. Honeybun’s inability to speak or communicate in any meaningful way made the cloth rabbit the ideal inquisitor for Turds. Turds was able to wibble his platitudes, avoiding concrete detail on...
If The Heads, who've spent two decades hammering at the coalface of Stooges-derived spacerock, hailed from Japan or Finland they'd be living legends. Instead, they're from Bristol, and remain prophets without honour.
Their vocalist and guitarist Paul Allen's new project, Anthroprophh, moves his influences forward eighteen months from late 1969 to mid 1971, adding kosmische krautrock ambience to the riff-heavy template.
Where once Allen would have pummeled you into submission, now the sixteen minute Entropy hypnotizes with tickly tabla and DNA helices of phased guitar.
By 2032 he'll have gone disco.
Stewart Lee
2013-01-27T00:54:18+00:00
If The Heads, who've spent two decades hammering at the coalface of Stooges-derived spacerock, hailed from Japan or Finland they'd be living legends. Instead, they're from Bristol, and remain prophets without honour. Their vocalist and guitarist Paul Allen's new project, Anthroprophh, moves his influences forward eighteen months from late 1969 to mid 1971, adding kosmische krautrock ambience to the riff-heavy template. Where once Allen would have pummeled you into submission, now the sixteen minute Entropy hypnotizes with tickly tabla and DNA helices of phased guitar. By 2032 he'll have gone disco.
New York experimentalists Sonic Youth's three decades of atonal art grunge are over.
Thurston Moore now channels their signature sounds with Chelsea Light Moving.
A liberated Lee Ranaldo weaves once verboten psychedelia with The Dust.
And Kim Gordon, now 60, essays uncompromising guitar drones with Bill Nace as Body/Head, her keening bellow swaying amidst the swell.
Leavening art loft procedures with visceral anguish, and flying the free female freak flag Patty Waters folded forty-five years ago, Gordon is the Sonic survivor to watch.
Stewart Lee
2013-10-13T01:40:34+01:00
New York experimentalists Sonic Youth's three decades of atonal art grunge are over. Thurston Moore now channels their signature sounds with Chelsea Light Moving. A liberated Lee Ranaldo weaves once verboten psychedelia with The Dust. And Kim Gordon, now 60, essays uncompromising guitar drones with Bill Nace as Body/Head, her keening bellow swaying amidst the swell. Leavening art loft procedures with visceral anguish, and flying the free female freak flag Patty Waters folded forty-five years ago, Gordon is the Sonic survivor to watch.
Today, The Bats enjoy sudden profile spikes via a global circuit of scholarly rock festivals curated by bigger names, who fashioned themselves partly in the New Zealand veterans' image.
The quartet's eight album in thirty years and the band still sounds like a downbeat Byrds running on rusted Velvet Underground rhythms, but In The Subway is as driven and dense as the best of their back catalogue.
Front-man Robert Scott was wistful at twenty-one but balding, bearded, and beautifully bloomed, these older and wiser Bats wield their melancholy melodies as warmly as their more frantic former selves.
Stewart Lee
2012-01-08T01:16:17+00:00
Today, The Bats enjoy sudden profile spikes via a global circuit of scholarly rock festivals curated by bigger names, who fashioned themselves partly in the New Zealand veterans' image. The quartet's eight album in thirty years and the band still sounds like a downbeat Byrds running on rusted Velvet Underground rhythms, but In The Subway is as driven and dense as the best of their back catalogue. Front-man Robert Scott was wistful at twenty-one but balding, bearded, and beautifully bloomed, these older and wiser Bats wield their melancholy melodies as warmly as their more frantic former selves.
Stewart Lee has won a BAFTA. Not just one for his show, but he himself has also won a BAFTA. He is, according to BAFTA, the Best Male Television Comic. He won that, and unless they can revoke BAFTAs, like they revoked knighthoods to Fred Goodwin, he will always have it.
He's the Best Male Television Comic. He's not the funniest, or the smartest, or any single measurement of a man, he's the best.
If I turn on my TV and Stewart Lee isn't on it then it'll be rubbish, according to BAFTA. He's the best at it, no point in arguing with that, the best. Objectively.
So to make sure it keeps up with its promise of educating, entertaining and informing, the BBC commissioned another series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. It's the third time they've given him a series, and each time the format has changed. The first series was about 20 minutes of stand up with 10 minutes of cut away sketches peppered throughout, whereas the second removed the litany of sketches and instead had the brilliantly funny Armando Iannucci OBE ask Lee questions as to why he bothers with his show.
This third series has Chris Morris instead. He doesn't have an OBE, but he does also have a BAFTA. If you're counting the show now has 3 BAFTAs.
Stewart Lee does stand up comedy slowly. Everything he says is designed to ramp up tension. He'll repeat himself a lot, a technique dubbed his “rule of 10”, something he openly makes fun of in the first episode of his show; his BAFTA winning show. It's very effective, and even though there's constant reference to how the show is formulaic Lee pulls back the curtain on that formula to laugh at it with us. It's undeniable that if you like Lee's style this will still be of the BAFTA quality you've come to expect.
There's nothing especially dynamic or unique to the format, it's just Lee talking at lots of people and then later with just one. At the end there's a sort of sketch that references previous jokes. They can be a bit arty and surreal but they're only 2 minutes. Not much happens besides that really. I think Lee likes it that way though; it won him a BAFTA after all.
The main reason people enjoy Stewart Lee is, I think, because he isn't there to get a laugh no matter what. He wants a certain type of laugh, for you to engage with his jokes not just because they're funny, but also because they inspire laughter more to do with despair and disbelief than because of shock or surprise.
In about half an hour Lee will make his audience laugh around 20 or 30 times. That might not be as many times as Milton Jones can make people laugh in that time, but it's a more thoughtful series of jokes.
They're about existential crisis, racism, tedium and greed. The punch lines are often a dismissal of some dreadful revelation, and the overriding feeling with the series is one of inescapable despair. Hilarious, BAFTA winning despair.
They're going to need to give him another BAFTA for this one.
Stewart Lee
2014-04-06T20:08:32+01:00
Stewart Lee has won a BAFTA. Not just one for his show, but he himself has also won a BAFTA. He is, according to BAFTA, the Best Male Television Comic. He won that, and unless they can revoke BAFTAs, like they revoked knighthoods to Fred Goodwin, he will always have it. He's the Best Male Television Comic. He's not the funniest, or the smartest, or any single measurement of a man, he's the best. If I turn on my TV and Stewart Lee isn't on it then it'll be rubbish, according to BAFTA. He's the best at it, no point in arguing with that, the best. Objectively. So to make sure it keeps up with its promise of educating, entertaining and informing, the BBC commissioned another series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. It's the third time they've given him a series, and each time the format has changed. The first series was about 20 minutes of stand up with 10 minutes of cut away sketches peppered throughout, whereas the second removed the litany of sketches and instead had the brilliantly funny Armando Iannucci OBE ask Lee questions as to why he bothers with his show. This third series has Chris Morris instead. He doesn't have an OBE, but he does also have a BAFTA. If you're counting the show now has 3 BAFTAs. Stewart Lee does stand up comedy slowly. Everything he says is designed to ramp up tension. He'll repeat himself a lot, a technique dubbed his “rule of 10”, something he openly makes fun of in the first episode of his show; his BAFTA winning show. It's very effective, and even though there's constant reference to how the show is formulaic Lee pulls back the curtain on that formula to laugh at it with us. It's undeniable that...
What could possibly link Mark Ravenhill, the Damien Hirst of the theatre world, and Stewart Lee, the creator of the puzzlingly controversial Jerry Springer - the Opera?
Presumably what appears to be a bloody-minded ability to inspire controversy and then thumb their nose at it? So stick two monologues together which treat Islam and Christianity with irreverence and hey presto - instant holy war, right?
Possibly, but not tonight. Perhaps the - for once - ambiguous titling by Ravenhill of Product has, for now, disarmed those who might seethe about its story within a story of a Muslim Jihadist who has sex with a widow of the Twin Towers attacks. And perhaps the Christians have got tired of harassing Lee for his obsession with telling the truth, as he sees it, about the gospels. More fun for the rest of us, then, in this thoroughly entertaining, only slightly disappointing, juxtaposition of dramatic voices.
To start with Ravenhill, Product is a remix of his Edinburgh show of 2005 where the writer himself plays a film producer, James, pitching a film to Olivia, an A-list film star - a "Sienna Miller type" as he has put it. James strolls camply about his office, telling her the film's story - a tasteless Hollywood take on the 9/11 bombings which is surely, in reality, only just around the corner.
Ravenhill is a revelation as a performer. He looks somewhat like a fat Dr. Evil in an Armani suit, but it is more than his physical size that gives him his stage presence. For 60 longish minutes he holds my attention in what is a fairly sharp, if perhaps a little obvious, satire on the world-renowned ability of Hollywood to take any important event and cheapen it.
As a storyteller he is more successful here, in my view, than in the vacuous Shopping and Fucking. His beautifully timed, almost self-referential, comic defusing of some of the shocking images and language he uses with lines such as "we had a theatre writer work on this bit" or "it's a private note - we won't shoot it" are immaculate. His foil, the mute Jo Lobban, does a superbly understated line in eyebrow raising, and the whole thing is mesmerising, if maybe fifteen minutes too long.
I have forgiven Lee, no longer the lithe young man of his Fist of Fun days, for not allowing me to review Talk Radio at last year's Edinburgh Fringe - admittedly he might not have known anything about it – but, reading between the lines, it does seem he has not forgiven those who trespassed against him in 2006. His brush with Christian fundamentalism is surely the impetus behind this engaging 'stand-up theatre' routine where, in the style of himself, he relates Judas's version of the events that led to Christ's crucifixion.
Lee has the natural story-telling knack that all the best stand-ups possess. In this semi-theatrical monologue (which he is hoping to turn, by the end of run, more into a discussion group based around nuts) he subverts the usual comedian's trick of asking "who are you, sir, and where are you from?" in order to find a hook for his wit, by asking the audience questions in the manner of a Sunday School teacher, testing our knowledge and engagement with his act. Going slightly further than Brecht might have, he not only talks to his audience, he gets them on stage to re-enact the Last Supper and hands the rest of us wine and bread. However, superb a storyteller as Lee is, like the free victuals he plies us with, they fail quite to satisfy as Ravenhill's piece manages without the audience-pleasing demagoguery.
What is interesting about both these two shows is how far in both the storyteller and the story become entwined. Ravenhill's piece could be done justice to by any good actor, yet the writer chooses to put himself centre-stage. Lee's story is told in such a personal way and in such an idiosyncratic style, it could not be performed by anyone other than him. Ultimately, much as I have disliked Ravenhill's work in the past, it is the daring and complexity of his piece which allows it to live with you long after the blackout. Lee's piece is a brilliant bit of nouveau stand-up, but, sadly for him, ideas cannot live on Tesco-bought bread alone.
Stewart Lee
2007-01-15T20:11:46+00:00
What could possibly link Mark Ravenhill, the Damien Hirst of the theatre world, and Stewart Lee, the creator of the puzzlingly controversial Jerry Springer - the Opera? Presumably what appears to be a bloody-minded ability to inspire controversy and then thumb their nose at it? So stick two monologues together which treat Islam and Christianity with irreverence and hey presto - instant holy war, right? Possibly, but not tonight. Perhaps the - for once - ambiguous titling by Ravenhill of Product has, for now, disarmed those who might seethe about its story within a story of a Muslim Jihadist who has sex with a widow of the Twin Towers attacks. And perhaps the Christians have got tired of harassing Lee for his obsession with telling the truth, as he sees it, about the gospels. More fun for the rest of us, then, in this thoroughly entertaining, only slightly disappointing, juxtaposition of dramatic voices. To start with Ravenhill, Product is a remix of his Edinburgh show of 2005 where the writer himself plays a film producer, James, pitching a film to Olivia, an A-list film star - a "Sienna Miller type" as he has put it. James strolls camply about his office, telling her the film's story - a tasteless Hollywood take on the 9/11 bombings which is surely, in reality, only just around the corner. Ravenhill is a revelation as a performer. He looks somewhat like a fat Dr. Evil in an Armani suit, but it is more than his physical size that gives him his stage presence. For 60 longish minutes he holds my attention in what is a fairly sharp, if perhaps a little obvious, satire on the world-renowned ability of Hollywood to take any important event and cheapen it. As a storyteller he is more successful here,...
I have a short story in this collection of comedians' prose.
The poem version is better, but was changed to prose by the publishers.
It is called "I'll Only Go If You Throw Glass", and can be found for free on this site.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T22:02:22+00:00
I have a short story in this collection of comedians' prose. The poem version is better, but was changed to prose by the publishers. It is called "I'll Only Go If You Throw Glass", and can be found for free on this site.
Back in 2005 Stewart Lee was the first person I ever saw perform at the Soho Theatre, performing his 90’s Comedian show. While I’d be very fond of stand up beforehand it was the show which gave me my passion for the art form, and one which redefined what I thought was possible from it as Lee’s story of vomiting in to the gaping anus of Jesus Christ made me laugh an incredibly painful extent, but also left an enormous impression upon me as to what comedy could be and do.
Since then I’ve caught every show he’s put on and always loved them an immense amount, until 2016’s Content Provider that is. Not that it didn’t still have moments of genius, and parts which had me laughing hysterically, but there was the odd moment which frustrated, the way he divided the audience in to two sections especially as it’s something he’d been doing since I saw him in 2005 and for the first time he added nothing new to the idea, with it feeling rather lazy and tired.
So for once I wasn’t overtly optimistic as to how I’d find a night of comedy by Lee, previously it had all been but guaranteed to amaze but now I wasn’t so sure. But I need not have worried in the slightest as this was a fantastic couple of hours of comedy, with Lee on his best form since 2007’s 41st Best Stand Up Ever. Though it’s billed as two separate shows thematically both have a lot in common with as they deal with Lee’s feelings about his place in the world, and how others react to his work, in Tornado it’s sometimes in daft ways such as the fact that on Netflix his show Comedy Vehicle was accidentally given Sharknado’s write up, and also Alan Bennett’s overtly highbrow review of his comedy, while in Snowflake it revolves around a piece about him by Tony Parsons in GQ which patronisingly called him a snowflake.
As well as much mockery of himself (with Lee addressing his change in appearance since Content Provider the moment he walked on to the stage) he uses the set up to attack a number of other piss poor comedians, with Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, Dave Chappelle and Josh Widdicombe being the main subjects of his scorn, but he also has some superb (and much needed) material relating to Brexit, Political Correctness and Boris Johnson. Too many comedians have shied away from tackling these subjects, claiming that politics in the 21st century is beyond satire, but Lee proves them to be utterly wrong in both parts of the night. And instead of claiming that some of the audience don’t get it, and splitting the crowd in to two sections like he has way too many times, pleasingly he just attacks everyone, developing the idea in very funny ways as he suggests we’re not his normal crowd but “Christmas wankers”, and part of office parties who don’t really know his work. It’s all nonsense, of course, but that doesn’t stop it being beautifully funny and instantly allayed my fears that he was getting a little lazy at this stage of his career.
If you were to be annoyingly picky you could point out how he reuses one joke from an older show (where he mentions people mixing up political correctness and health and safety) one bit of him playing around with repetition where he does an impression of Ricky Gervais trying to say the unsayable goes on for a bit too long, and Tornado is a slightly better show than Snowflake, but these are ridiculously minor complaints about a show which is outstandingly funny, and the work of a master of comedy who is truly back on his very best form.
Stewart Lee
2019-12-05T16:05:02+00:00
Back in 2005 Stewart Lee was the first person I ever saw perform at the Soho Theatre, performing his 90’s Comedian show. While I’d be very fond of stand up beforehand it was the show which gave me my passion for the art form, and one which redefined what I thought was possible from it as Lee’s story of vomiting in to the gaping anus of Jesus Christ made me laugh an incredibly painful extent, but also left an enormous impression upon me as to what comedy could be and do. Since then I’ve caught every show he’s put on and always loved them an immense amount, until 2016’s Content Provider that is. Not that it didn’t still have moments of genius, and parts which had me laughing hysterically, but there was the odd moment which frustrated, the way he divided the audience in to two sections especially as it’s something he’d been doing since I saw him in 2005 and for the first time he added nothing new to the idea, with it feeling rather lazy and tired. So for once I wasn’t overtly optimistic as to how I’d find a night of comedy by Lee, previously it had all been but guaranteed to amaze but now I wasn’t so sure. But I need not have worried in the slightest as this was a fantastic couple of hours of comedy, with Lee on his best form since 2007’s 41st Best Stand Up Ever. Though it’s billed as two separate shows thematically both have a lot in common with as they deal with Lee’s feelings about his place in the world, and how others react to his work, in Tornado it’s sometimes in daft ways such as the fact that on Netflix his show Comedy Vehicle was accidentally given Sharknado’s...
The German E coli bean sprout scandal offers damning evidence that all fruits and vegetables are dirty beyond reason, toxic timebombs that have secreted themselves at the very heart of global cuisine in the form of trusted dietary staples. Yet government food eggheads continue to bray from their state-sterilised laboratories, demanding that we eat at least five portions of the crusty filth a day.
In the UK, the gustation boffins have even created a persuasive website showing a photograph of a bald man smiling at a pile of yams. But why? What evidence is there for the supposedly health-giving properties of these soil-encrusted tubers and these repulsive, squashy sacks of sticky juice and seed? Isn't it time we rejected fruits and vegetables?
I never eat fruits or vegetables at all, ever, and neither did my father before me, and while I am constipated, fat, breathless and weak, I am not yet dead. I can still manage to slither across the floor to my laptop every day to dribble out my interesting thoughts for money. Open your eyes! What actual evidence is there for the benefits of vegetables, the worms of the food world, scrabbling in the dirt, or of fruits, hanging limply from branches, like plastic bags full of dog excrement hurled into the trees of an East Anglian layby?
Indeed, humanity's relentless forward march of progress has been a journey away from the soil, away from the dirt, away from dependence on mere fruits and mere vegetables. When the futurists sang hymns of praise to velocity and volume, when the vorticists sought to stir up civil war among the peaceful apes, it is doubtful they did so with mouths full of leek and onion.
When the mighty, clanging factories of Matlow, Maynards and Trebor first rose out of the north to spew forth processed sweets – individually wrapped Black Jacks, Refreshers and, ironically, Fruit Salads – containing no natural matter at all, we were at last free of the tyranny of the dirt. And as our children's teeth gnashed into these angular and unnatural solids, they were tasting the future. But our masters would not have it so. They fear our freedom.
Google the words "David Cameron", "fruit" and "vegetables" and you will find literally thousands of fruit-and-vegetable-laden images of the barely elected nest-cuckoo. Taxpayer-funded public relations consultants guide their photographers to snap at the laughing leader as, like some cycle-helmeted Marie Lloyd, he sits amongst the cabbages and peas, encouraging his followers to guzzle these putrid foods themselves.
Secretly, Cameron exists solely on a diet of nothing but Eton mess, a dessert concocted from strawberries, cream, meringue, mess and pieces of digestives left over from the historic "biscuit game", still played in Eton dormitories on the day of the costly school's annual cricket contest against Winchester College. But, typically, while Cameron guzzles the mess of the elite, he expects you and I to suck our nourishment from the dirt.
Why this sudden national mania for fruits, this state-sponsored enthusiasm for vegetables, despite the warning emanating, as it has done so many times before, from Germany, historically the land of long shadows, where even the bean sprouts carry the curse of Cain? As usual, the blame lies with a predictable unholy trinity of big business, our old friends on the right in global politics and an immortal race of psychic space-squid committed to the destruction of humanity which, even now, slowly but surely, are drawing their plans against us.
Let me explain. Google again, but this time add to "fruits" and "vegetables" the names Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe and Vince Cable and you will see a similar visual smorgasbord as before. Where once they would have cuddled babies or posed in front of war planes, now they nestle up to nectarines and pat parsnips.
The power brokers of the world are all friends of fruits and they are all in bed with vegetables, literally in the case of Berlusconi. (Though it must be stressed that the vegetables received no payment for the time they spent with the Italian president and were at his villa only to appear in a lasagne.) Our leaders promote fruit and vegetables and use state-subsidised health bodies to exaggerate the vile organisms' nutritional values, because they are in league with the real global superpowers – the supermarkets.
Tesco, Lidl and the Co-op are hellbent on flogging their valueless vegetables and their foul fruits to saps such as you and me for enormous profits. When Ahmadinejad gave planning permission to knock down Sheikh Lotf Allah mosque and build the world's largest Tesco, full to the brim of fruits and vegetables and slap bang in the middle of Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square, alarm bells should have rung at the emergence of the ultimate evil alliance. Instead, we sleep-munched our way to oblivion. Are you enjoying your celery? Yes. Idiot.
Understand this. It is obvious that those who most enjoy fruit and vegetables seem to have little to show for their sordid enthusiasms. Perhaps our ancestor the monkey's failure to evolve is directly linked to his fondness for fruits? The very name of the fruit fly speaks of a distinct lack of dietary ambition. The peach potato aphid likewise. Our enemy the slug is happy to live on purloined lettuce, dying cloaked in shame with little to show for its life. And a dedication to the cause of the carrot seems to have done little for rabbit civilisation, doomed to a network of stinking underground burrows or to degrading hutches in infant-school play areas.
Eating fruit and vegetables keeps you simple and stupid. It is no coincidence that they are the favoured foodstuff of athletes and sports people, simpletons who can be tricked into leaping and running upon the sound of a pistol, for no obvious practical purpose. And this is the way the Masters of the World want us dancing to their tune.
Ever wonder why our leaders seem so blase about global warming and the imminent collapse of the planet's ecosystem? It is because their seats on the shuttle out of here are already booked. The deal is done. The psychic space-squid orbit the Earth in vast clouds, protected from military attack on the understanding that they will preserve our leaders on some faraway world, while we obediently eat the vegetables and fruits our governments recommend to us, deadening our spirits, priming us for the first horrible probings of the tentacles from the stars. Eat your five a day. Eat them all up. There's a good slave.
Stewart Lee
2011-06-12T15:12:42+01:00
The German E coli bean sprout scandal offers damning evidence that all fruits and vegetables are dirty beyond reason, toxic timebombs that have secreted themselves at the very heart of global cuisine in the form of trusted dietary staples. Yet government food eggheads continue to bray from their state-sterilised laboratories, demanding that we eat at least five portions of the crusty filth a day. In the UK, the gustation boffins have even created a persuasive website showing a photograph of a bald man smiling at a pile of yams. But why? What evidence is there for the supposedly health-giving properties of these soil-encrusted tubers and these repulsive, squashy sacks of sticky juice and seed? Isn't it time we rejected fruits and vegetables? I never eat fruits or vegetables at all, ever, and neither did my father before me, and while I am constipated, fat, breathless and weak, I am not yet dead. I can still manage to slither across the floor to my laptop every day to dribble out my interesting thoughts for money. Open your eyes! What actual evidence is there for the benefits of vegetables, the worms of the food world, scrabbling in the dirt, or of fruits, hanging limply from branches, like plastic bags full of dog excrement hurled into the trees of an East Anglian layby? Indeed, humanity's relentless forward march of progress has been a journey away from the soil, away from the dirt, away from dependence on mere fruits and mere vegetables. When the futurists sang hymns of praise to velocity and volume, when the vorticists sought to stir up civil war among the peaceful apes, it is doubtful they did so with mouths full of leek and onion. When the mighty, clanging factories of Matlow, Maynards and Trebor first rose out of the...
“The poor are always with us. So speaks the man who has not learned to use a whip correctly!” And also thus spake the unsung genius comedian Simon Munnery, in character in his 90s parody of impotent bedsit fascism, The League Against Tedium. The act seems arguably less satirical today as its best lines have become actual government thinking. What is Priti Patel’s proposed Channel migrant policy if not, however it is dressed up in the sterile language of info-deterrence and reasonable force and common sense and re-seized sovereignty and taking back control, merely cudgelling children back into the cold sea to die, the Kindertransport in satanic reverse? But what are we to do with the poor, who have the temerity to seem especially visible over the festive season, the smelly bastards?
A week before Christmas, I waited in the small hours at a bus stop outside Dalston’s Rio cinema, having spoken at the Covid-decimated London premiere of a film I wrote, King Rocker (“the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the Scotsman). A babbling woman in a bobble hat approached me for money and, it being Christmas, I fished in my pocket. After all, it was highly likely the exuberant lich was in fact a manifestation of Christ himself, come to test my generosity, something that I am convinced has happened to me on several previous occasions. I would not banish this Dalston Christ to the lowly stable. I would welcome her at my Christmas Inn of Spare Change. For I am a good man.
Sadly, the only cash I had on me was a sizable Scottish £10 note, having just got back from Glasgow, which I was reluctant to part with. Even the disguised Christ would probably consider such ostentatious generosity over the top, the work of a whited sepulchre. I’m not made of money, especially after two years of no live gigs and the cost of the resultant need to drink heavily in order to compensate for the withdrawal of the massed nightly adoration of strangers. Nonetheless, I didn’t see any way out of the increasingly awkward situation except to hand the money over, as I was wary of being judged as ungenerous by the other two people at the bus stop, who might also have been further manifestations of the Christ. Perhaps they were appearing together as the holy trinity: the father, the son and the babbling woman in the bobble hat?
“What the fuck is this?” said my beggar Christ, angrily, on receiving the money, divine but nonetheless a Cockney, and thus culturally baffled by unfamiliar sterling, and also excellent at swearing. “It’s a Scottish £10 note,” I said, before adding: “If you can’t use it I’ll have it back,” sensing a way of getting my money returned while nonetheless having made the kind of generous offer that would secure me a decent placing in St Peter’s judgmental ledger. “No, no, you’re all right,” said Christ, scuttling off into the Dalston dark with my Scotch dosh. But the dilemmas didn’t end there.
“I’ll have a tenner if you’re giving them away,” shouted a tall man at the other end of the bus stop, angrily. “I didn’t mean to give her £10, it was all I had,” I said, defensively, realising it was possible to interpret my unintended generosity as offensively profligate. But then, realising the man may also be yet another Christ, attempting to provoke me into revoking the moral worth of my charity, I quickly added: “But it is Christmas, so if you can’t give a beggar £10 at Christmas when can you?” But the angry Christ continued. “They just spend it on crack. That’s where she’s gone now, to a crack den. You’re a fucking idiot.” Then an old woman Christ, who until now had been sitting quietly on the artfully angled bus sheltered seat, “defensively designed” to be just too thin and too slippery to enable a homeless person to sleep on it, piped up: “It’s fucking Christmas, let him give his fucking money to whoever he wants.” This, of course, would be exactly what Christ would say, albeit in less-colourful language.
Could both my Dalston bus-stop debaters be Christ? Yes, if you subscribe to the Manichaean doctrine of dualism, made manifest here tonight, an inexplicable theological survival, in this east London street. The angry man and the kind woman continued to argue with each other as my bus arrived and I slipped away unnoticed, leaving behind me a scatological street-level reimagining of Radio 4’s bloodless Moral Maze, passionate debate replacing masturbatory self-congratulation, educated arrogance and Baroness Fox.
But what is to be done? Will it be the be-jumpered LadBaby, loyally singing about inoffensive sausage rolls at No 1 for the Trussell Trust food banks every Christmas for all eternity now, without addressing the roots of the poverty their offal-inclusive songs seek temporarily to alleviate? Or will the novelty-single-loving British public join the dots and condemn the policies that create the need for both food banks, and the meat and pastry music of LadBaby, and vote out those responsible, who explicitly see wealth as a reward for virtue and poverty as punishment for laziness? On its website, the Trussell Trust’s own “strategic plan” is cautious to avoid direct political comment, anxious, I expect, to avoid being made into a culture war pawn by the usual unscrupulous bad faith operators on the right. Shadows take my hand and mist is on the land. Do we just wait until Christ comes back, with his baked-bean hampers and his top-down plan to end poverty? Until then, we live in a crumbling city built not on rock, but on sausage rolls.
Stewart Lee
2022-01-02T14:50:37+00:00
“The poor are always with us. So speaks the man who has not learned to use a whip correctly!” And also thus spake the unsung genius comedian Simon Munnery, in character in his 90s parody of impotent bedsit fascism, The League Against Tedium. The act seems arguably less satirical today as its best lines have become actual government thinking. What is Priti Patel’s proposed Channel migrant policy if not, however it is dressed up in the sterile language of info-deterrence and reasonable force and common sense and re-seized sovereignty and taking back control, merely cudgelling children back into the cold sea to die, the Kindertransport in satanic reverse? But what are we to do with the poor, who have the temerity to seem especially visible over the festive season, the smelly bastards? A week before Christmas, I waited in the small hours at a bus stop outside Dalston’s Rio cinema, having spoken at the Covid-decimated London premiere of a film I wrote, King Rocker (“the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the Scotsman). A babbling woman in a bobble hat approached me for money and, it being Christmas, I fished in my pocket. After all, it was highly likely the exuberant lich was in fact a manifestation of Christ himself, come to test my generosity, something that I am convinced has happened to me on several previous occasions. I would not banish this Dalston Christ to the lowly stable. I would welcome her at my Christmas Inn of Spare Change. For I am a good man. Sadly, the only cash I had on me was a sizable Scottish £10 note, having just got back from Glasgow, which I was reluctant to part with. Even the disguised Christ would probably consider such ostentatious generosity over the top, the work of a...
During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds.
I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone:
“One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”
But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets.
But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street’s climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since the election. Perhaps because the US government are now doing Tufton Street’s job of normalising rightwing talking points more effectively than just getting the former IEA staffer Kate Andrews on to the BBC’s Question Time for the 14th time. That’s what I call a special relationship!
But, as I enter my 15th year of satirising the news for money here at the Observer, the quality of complaint has changed again. These past few weeks it has been helpful readers that have been writing in to correct my factual errors and my “jokes”, although admittedly last week’s column on the Trump government’s attitude to its Navajo citizens was a hot mess for which I, like Trump’s national securty adviser Mike Waltz, take full responsibility.
I accept the point that Trump did acknowledge the Navajo veterans by inviting them to the White House in 2017, but at the same event he did then make a joke about Pocahontas while standing in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act, which relocated Indigenous peoples and saw their lands seized, which probably soured the celebration for the Indigenous wartime heroes.
As usual with Trump, it’s difficult to know if the crass behaviour was calculated to play to his base, or whether it was just evidence of the ongoing tone deaf stupidity and systemic incompetence of his team. As a rule, one should hesitate before ascribing motive to a landslide, for example, or to a prolapse. Like Trump perhaps, they just happen.
Which is where the worst western military security failure of the century so far comes in. On 15 March the Trump team used the Signal messaging service to discuss their forthcoming attack on the Houthi pirates, and accidentally invited a Democrat-supporting magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join their discussion. If it was a sitcom plot you’d reject it as being too on-the-nose.
Goldberg could have revealed the bombing plans and a CIA operative’s identity. And now everyone knows the depth of the current American administration’s ideologically-driven contempt for European democracy, and the fact that Mike Waltz, a 51-year-old man in a position of some responsibility, uses emojis to celebrate airstrikes. Like a baby with its own bombs.
Does Keir Starmer still think he can salvage the special relationship, an abused husband watching his furious wife throw all of his jazz vinyl out of the bedroom window? The whole world saw America’s Uncle Sam mask slip. But when Trump was questioned about the incident by a journalist on Tuesday, he claimed to know nothing about it, as if he had just been roused from a 24-hour KFC coma and thrust before the cameras without being briefed on a story that was global front page news. Maybe, like in the classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry don’t want to know the football result, Trump was trying to savour the moment of discovery.
Clearly, we can no longer share intelligence with Trump’s US, and no future defence or foreign policy plans can rely on the cooperation of a country that wishes Europe material harm. But more importantly, is it worth me writing jokes about Trump’s US? A paranoid reading of recent events makes it look as if they are targeting even their mildest visa-carrying critics, recently denying entry to a French scientist and three-quarters of punk veterans UK Subs. Although to be fair, five years ago the drummer from the offensively apolitical stoner metal band Orange Goblin was also denied entry, like some kind of innocent shrimp-like bycatch.
First they came for a French scientist. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a French scientist.
Then they came for UK Subs. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a member of UK Subs.
And then they came for the drummer from Orange Goblin. And I did not speak out. Because I prefer Electric Wizard.
And then they came for me.
Stewart Lee
2025-03-30T16:42:43+01:00
During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds. I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone: “One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.” But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets. But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street’s climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since...
No other stand-up comedian could start a show with the base declaration that he'd masturbate over our family pictures if he was forced to confiscate any mobile phones and then end it with the noble re-enactment of 19th century German artist Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog.
That's Stewart Lee in a nutshell – the carefully constructed liberal elitist who's not afraid to go for the Frankie Boyle line here and there. But, of course, he debases the debasement in his "post-laughs" way.
There were times when he told the sell-out crowd – sell-out even with the empty seats – that he was tiring of "the character of Stewart Lee" and even though this was one of his usual contrivances the 48-year-old "ex-TV comic" was definitely more playful than usual.
On previous tours, Lee's serpentine delivery has often been hampered by presenting his show in half-hour blocks as a testing ground for his BBC2 series. He's been axed, gained weight but also got a lot funnier; now his stand-up is able to twist and turn over two glorious hours, like it did when he was "better" and used to play The Acorn in Penzance.
He told us that with a tour running from November last year to this April, he refused to dwell on Brexit and Trump in case he had to constantly rewrite his material, affecting the shows' monetisation.
Of course, that allowed him two set pieces, which opened both halves, brilliantly mirroring each other. It also allowed him to have an affectionate pop at the Cornish – he'd researched that we're educationally superior to much of the nation yet we voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union. Were we racist or, simply, c***s?
Many of Lee's tropes were repeated in Content Provider – for example, the splitting of the audience into the intellectuals who get it and those at the back ("there's something on", "what is it?", "don't know", "let's go") who are holding up proceedings by being behind the beat.
There's also his superiority – aimed at us ("who knows more about stand-up, you or me?" and "I believe it was I who once said…") and other, lesser comedians.
His feud with Russell Howard is reignited. He couldn't understand it as he only ever told one joke about Howard … but it was 55 minutes long. His hilarious, relentless impression of cool, young comedians asking him why he picked on Howard was a masterclass in physical, absurdist humour.
His way with a mocking diatribe is untouchable, particularly when aimed at anyone under 40 – an impression of a 32-year-old playing with his phone was comedy heaven.
It derailed slightly in the second half with a long, rambling section about how our grandparents' generation had to make do while today's young folk are absorbed in artifice and consumerism. Lee hammered the point home via bondage sex, but we got what he was saying and it just wasn't that funny.
He ended back on track with that powerful artistic reinvention, which via one simple but effective visual joke held up a mirror to the narcissistic, selfie generation.
Content Provider is the most enjoyable Stewart Lee show for years, especially after his last TV series which aimed, and failed, to take comedy way out into some darkly acerbic hinterland.
Long may he keep on returning to Cornwall, even if there's a possibility some of us are racist c***s.
Stewart Lee
2017-02-23T21:53:12+00:00
No other stand-up comedian could start a show with the base declaration that he'd masturbate over our family pictures if he was forced to confiscate any mobile phones and then end it with the noble re-enactment of 19th century German artist Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog. That's Stewart Lee in a nutshell – the carefully constructed liberal elitist who's not afraid to go for the Frankie Boyle line here and there. But, of course, he debases the debasement in his "post-laughs" way. There were times when he told the sell-out crowd – sell-out even with the empty seats – that he was tiring of "the character of Stewart Lee" and even though this was one of his usual contrivances the 48-year-old "ex-TV comic" was definitely more playful than usual. On previous tours, Lee's serpentine delivery has often been hampered by presenting his show in half-hour blocks as a testing ground for his BBC2 series. He's been axed, gained weight but also got a lot funnier; now his stand-up is able to twist and turn over two glorious hours, like it did when he was "better" and used to play The Acorn in Penzance. He told us that with a tour running from November last year to this April, he refused to dwell on Brexit and Trump in case he had to constantly rewrite his material, affecting the shows' monetisation. Of course, that allowed him two set pieces, which opened both halves, brilliantly mirroring each other. It also allowed him to have an affectionate pop at the Cornish – he'd researched that we're educationally superior to much of the nation yet we voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union. Were we racist or, simply, c***s? Many of Lee's tropes were repeated in Content Provider – for example,...
ITHELL COLQUHOUN (1906–1988) was a painter and writer who, along with Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington, one of the best-known English women surrealists.
A friend of André Breton, she was also associated with Aleister Crowley.
Her writing has been compared to that of William Blake and Walter de la Mare – the latter being a fan of her work.
Re-publication of Ithell Colquhoun’s two travelogues, for which I have written a new introduction.
ITHELL COLQUHOUN (1906–1988) was a painter and writer who, along with Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington, one of the best-known English women surrealists. A friend of André Breton, she was also associated with Aleister Crowley. Her writing has been compared to that of William Blake and Walter de la Mare – the latter being a fan of her work. Re-publication of Ithell Colquhoun’s two travelogues, for which I have written a new introduction. BUY HERE
Stewart Lee isn't exactly fishing for a new audience with his latest show, Carpet Remnant World. He still spends much time berating those sections of the room who don't laugh at every single nuance of his comedy, accusing them of having been dragged along by friends.
Which is hard to believe. Most people will have seen his BAFTA award-winning television show, read his contributions to The Guardian, or listened to him speak on Radio 4. He is no longer the archetypal 'comedian's comedian' he once was. Which is why there is something strange about his recent injunction to would-be comedy-seekers (to be found in his latest Guardian column) to avoid the area around Bristo Square and instead increase their "off-piste grazing", without admitting that a show by one of the most lauded comics of our day in an opulent George Street venue is still firmly on-piste.
This doesn't mean that Lee has somehow been rendered bourgeois or passé by association. He just seems unwilling to acknowledge and address his own commercial success, although it would be interesting to hear his take on it.
Instead he has chosen as the central theme for his new show a mid-life crisis of sorts. But it's difficult to believe, as he claims, that he has spent the past year or so driving from gig to gig and watching Scooby Doo with his children. One of the things that Lee does well as a performer is conceit and Carpet Remnant World is his most conceited show yet.
Although the aforementioned session of audience-berating seemed to add relatively little to the proceedings, in retrospect those moments take their place amongst other more varied routines, through which the portrait of the artist as an ageing man is realised. The show itself seems bitty, but all of its seemingly disparate parts—from his opening material about the news, to his long account of a literal drive in search of lost comedic inspiration—eventually unite to make something far more cohesive than any of his previous shows.
On the basic criterion of humour, he remains very reliable. He is often attacked for being verbose or overly-intellectual, which isn't exactly true. His most puerile jokes are often his funniest, and there is no dearth of them here.
It is true that he often labours the point.
Those who have stuck with Lee for the past four or five years will certainly find this aspect of his performance a little tiresome by now; there certainly have been times where I have found him wearying.
Thankfully, the difference between this show and previous ones became clear by the end. The entire thing is tied together by one big, rambling routine - a trademark of Lee's - but here it serves a more unifying role than it has previously. Deceptively, Lee still manages to utilise the full contents of his comedy toolbox, while creating something which still feels fresh, even to someone well versed in his material.
Even though Lee seems determined not to fully acknowledge his reputation and position within the world of comedy—which still remains equal to, if not greater than, some of the young, fresh-faced 'T-shirt wearing' comics that he pillories with his usual gusto — this is forgiveable, because his focus is exactly where it should be: on his comedy.
This show should cement his reputation as the foremost purveyor of comedy-as-art. Hats off to him for that.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-06T14:38:14+01:00
Stewart Lee isn't exactly fishing for a new audience with his latest show, Carpet Remnant World. He still spends much time berating those sections of the room who don't laugh at every single nuance of his comedy, accusing them of having been dragged along by friends. Which is hard to believe. Most people will have seen his BAFTA award-winning television show, read his contributions to The Guardian, or listened to him speak on Radio 4. He is no longer the archetypal 'comedian's comedian' he once was. Which is why there is something strange about his recent injunction to would-be comedy-seekers (to be found in his latest Guardian column) to avoid the area around Bristo Square and instead increase their "off-piste grazing", without admitting that a show by one of the most lauded comics of our day in an opulent George Street venue is still firmly on-piste. This doesn't mean that Lee has somehow been rendered bourgeois or passé by association. He just seems unwilling to acknowledge and address his own commercial success, although it would be interesting to hear his take on it. Instead he has chosen as the central theme for his new show a mid-life crisis of sorts. But it's difficult to believe, as he claims, that he has spent the past year or so driving from gig to gig and watching Scooby Doo with his children. One of the things that Lee does well as a performer is conceit and Carpet Remnant World is his most conceited show yet. Although the aforementioned session of audience-berating seemed to add relatively little to the proceedings, in retrospect those moments take their place amongst other more varied routines, through which the portrait of the artist as an ageing man is realised. The show itself seems bitty, but all of its...
Forming four years after their fellow New Yorkers The Fleshtones, The Fuzztones' take on Sixties punk is fundamental to the point of religious fanaticism, with bad trip condensed vocals, paranoid analogue organ sounds, and loping slide guitar.
If The Fleshtones sound like they'd buy you a beer, The Fuzztones would spike your drink with something nasty.
Fifty-nine year old frontman Rudi Protrudi makes a virtue of his increasingly inappropriate obsessions on the psych-blues of Old, confessing “I'm old, old and dirty. If I can't cut the mustard, baby, I can always lick the lid!", which somehow absolves the entire album, and focuses you on its considerable, if lurid, charms.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-08T19:46:01+01:00
Forming four years after their fellow New Yorkers The Fleshtones, The Fuzztones' take on Sixties punk is fundamental to the point of religious fanaticism, with bad trip condensed vocals, paranoid analogue organ sounds, and loping slide guitar. If The Fleshtones sound like they'd buy you a beer, The Fuzztones would spike your drink with something nasty. Fifty-nine year old frontman Rudi Protrudi makes a virtue of his increasingly inappropriate obsessions on the psych-blues of Old, confessing “I'm old, old and dirty. If I can't cut the mustard, baby, I can always lick the lid!", which somehow absolves the entire album, and focuses you on its considerable, if lurid, charms.
It is hard to believe but there have been mutterings of a Daniel Kitson backlash.
His latest theatre piece, Analog.Ue was not greeted by the usual ecstatic reviews. Maybe - though I fully expect he would deny it - that is why he has been getting back to his first love of stand-up recently, compering a number of benefits with a few more in the pipeline. This really is what he does best. As he jokily boasted onstage at the Palace Theatre last night, he is, after all, the finest comedian of his generation.
The show was in aid of homelessness charity Centrepoint and the bill was a particularly good one. It was hard, though, for the acts to compete with the brilliance of Kitson, whose effortless riffing outshone the guests' best well-honed material. Opening act Aisling Bea (replacing Sara Pascoe) had a very good routine about the way that some American comedians say nothing but say it so confidently they still get laughs.
Bea admitted that she is a "Secret Talker" and has a habit of going on too long. She did outstay her welcome very slightly, but it was probably a good idea to start with someone pretty mainstream. This looked like a pretty straight audience and they appeared suitably shellshocked at the start of Tony Law's short excerpt from his Tone Zone show. Late-career success seems to have strangely liberated Law and made him nuttier than ever. Sporting a D-I-Y tassled onesie and playing the trombone he gradually won even the squarest audience members round. He should have finished with his idiosyncratic dance to Don't Stop Believing and left the crowd on a high, but a little bit of business with a bunny hat and a bat slightly over-egged the pudding. Conclusive proof that you can have too much surrealism.
By contrast Joe Lycett was an instantly safe pair of hands, telling the kind of funny-but-true consumer-based stories that might have got him a job as one of Esther's boys on That's Life years ago. Lycett first made his name with his tale of a protest over a Birmingham parking ticket and he now has a new version, having been ticketed again when using a parking app. Lycett is surely the Larry Grayson de nos jours, adding bitchy descriptions as he spins his yarn - the woman in the ticket office, for instance, is dubbed "Sweaty Sharon". A brilliant closing story about having to buy an unwanted cookie to get a meal deal was the icing on the comedy cake.
The second half started with Katherine Ryan, who, for once didn't need to resort to her Beyonce routine to have a storming set. Ryan's brand of feminism is interesting - falling somewhere between the angry whimsy of Bridget Christie and the populist crowdpleasing of Luisa Omielan. Gags about lusting after Prince Harry and some mildly edgy material about Kate Middleton as the new Diana kept the momentum going during what was threatening to be a long evening.
Josh Widdicombe kept things on track with a sure-fire stand-up set that had something for everyone - alternative but never too alternative. Widdicombe is a classic observational comic and getting better all the time. It is no surprise that he has become pretty ubiquitous on TV. The Devonian found someone also from the West Country in the audience - or at least someone who had been to Uni there - and excelled with some material about Exeter, a city so out-of-touch he said it still had a branch of Athena.
The final act was Stewart Lee, back indoors after his Cemetery gig on Saturday night. Lee was road-testing the same bit of material at this gig so for a fuller review have a read of this. Needless to say it went down very well indeed.
But not as well as Kitson who managed to walk a glorious tightrope between charm, abuse, cocky arrogance and self-deprecation. He's lost quite a bit of weight this year - two stone he said - and was looking trim. There was no fat on his compering either. Even when he lost his temper at someone taking photos of him it prompted some insightful thoughts on the creepiness of photographic art.
Kitson was analysing his gags even as the audience was still laughing at the punchlines. Discussing his soccer abilities he compared his sporting brain to a professional footballer's mind: "Bit racist, condones rape". Then worried that the joke was the wrong kind of joke to get laughs with, while also admitting that it was exquisitely constructed.
I won't go into too much detail about Kitson's "rich in melancholy" routines as he might do the same ones at these forthcoming benefits he is hosting here and here. There was a very resonant line about Monster Munch though. Needless to say just go and see him. Even if none of the other acts appeal to you Kitson MCing is a joy to behold. I'm looking forward to his next theatre piece of course, but these compering shows make me wish there were two Daniel Kitsons. One to do theatre all the time, one to do stand-up all the time. Of course in every sense there is only one Daniel Kitson.
It is hard to believe but there have been mutterings of a Daniel Kitson backlash. His latest theatre piece, Analog.Ue was not greeted by the usual ecstatic reviews. Maybe - though I fully expect he would deny it - that is why he has been getting back to his first love of stand-up recently, compering a number of benefits with a few more in the pipeline. This really is what he does best. As he jokily boasted onstage at the Palace Theatre last night, he is, after all, the finest comedian of his generation. The show was in aid of homelessness charity Centrepoint and the bill was a particularly good one. It was hard, though, for the acts to compete with the brilliance of Kitson, whose effortless riffing outshone the guests' best well-honed material. Opening act Aisling Bea (replacing Sara Pascoe) had a very good routine about the way that some American comedians say nothing but say it so confidently they still get laughs. Bea admitted that she is a "Secret Talker" and has a habit of going on too long. She did outstay her welcome very slightly, but it was probably a good idea to start with someone pretty mainstream. This looked like a pretty straight audience and they appeared suitably shellshocked at the start of Tony Law's short excerpt from his Tone Zone show. Late-career success seems to have strangely liberated Law and made him nuttier than ever. Sporting a D-I-Y tassled onesie and playing the trombone he gradually won even the squarest audience members round. He should have finished with his idiosyncratic dance to Don't Stop Believing and left the crowd on a high, but a little bit of business with a bunny hat and a bat slightly over-egged the pudding. Conclusive proof that you can have...
Way-out, laddish humour' - Richard Herring and Stewart Lee brought their This Morning with Richard Not Judy show to the Woodville Halls, Gravesend Award-winning duo Lee and Herring have the confidence of market traders, the gift of the gab, an outstanding ability to exchange lines and ideas and are clearly the most natural and well-matched of partners.
On their current tour, which carries the title of their television series, This Morning with Richard Not Judy, their throwaway show bills warned: "Will sell out."
But there were plenty of empty seats at the Woodville Halls, a fact they were quick to inject into their opening routine. The constant, if jokey, put-downs of Gravesend and the locals became yawningly repetitive.
It seems fair game for a touch of the topicals but harping on about Gravesend being Kent's outdoor toilet, a former swamp, and the black heart of Britain suggests limited material.
Stewart Lee and Richard Herring are dressed with shirt tails hanging out and perform throughout wearing head mikes. Behind the smiling personalities and stage presence, theirs is a way-out, laddish humour and they are intending to shock. George Michael gets the full treatment, a man from the stalls claiming to be Hew G Erection is crowned king for the night, another is asked how often he has sex and when national average sex figures are the topic, laughing girls are dismissed as "cackling witches".
There is also a long and taste-less routine about the grief which followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (which they could not do on TV) which is presented with mock respect. Also involved is keyboard player Richard Thomas who, with his song lyrics, pushes the boundaries even further out.
Stewart Lee
1998-05-14T21:57:21+01:00
Way-out, laddish humour' - Richard Herring and Stewart Lee brought their This Morning with Richard Not Judy show to the Woodville Halls, Gravesend Award-winning duo Lee and Herring have the confidence of market traders, the gift of the gab, an outstanding ability to exchange lines and ideas and are clearly the most natural and well-matched of partners. On their current tour, which carries the title of their television series, This Morning with Richard Not Judy, their throwaway show bills warned: "Will sell out." But there were plenty of empty seats at the Woodville Halls, a fact they were quick to inject into their opening routine. The constant, if jokey, put-downs of Gravesend and the locals became yawningly repetitive. It seems fair game for a touch of the topicals but harping on about Gravesend being Kent's outdoor toilet, a former swamp, and the black heart of Britain suggests limited material. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring are dressed with shirt tails hanging out and perform throughout wearing head mikes. Behind the smiling personalities and stage presence, theirs is a way-out, laddish humour and they are intending to shock. George Michael gets the full treatment, a man from the stalls claiming to be Hew G Erection is crowned king for the night, another is asked how often he has sex and when national average sex figures are the topic, laughing girls are dismissed as "cackling witches". There is also a long and taste-less routine about the grief which followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (which they could not do on TV) which is presented with mock respect. Also involved is keyboard player Richard Thomas who, with his song lyrics, pushes the boundaries even further out.
After a decade of obscurity, Stewart Lee's profile was boosted thanks to Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he co-wrote. And his 2004 Edinburgh show was one of the best in memory. The topics - 9/11, flatulence,celebrity culture - might be familiar but Lee's restrained performance is masterful.
Stewart Lee
2005-10-01T22:39:25+01:00
Stewart Lee: Stand-Up Comedian (BBC/Avalon, £19.99, cert 15) After a decade of obscurity, Stewart Lee's profile was boosted thanks to Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he co-wrote. And his 2004 Edinburgh show was one of the best in memory. The topics - 9/11, flatulence,celebrity culture - might be familiar but Lee's restrained performance is masterful.
Another day. Another body under Boris Johnson’s battlebus. Another Tory adviser on the white steps of another Canonbury villa. Another pantomime of regret fabricated from whatever tortured sounds and sad shapes the face can muster. Another bright satellite burning up in Johnson’s doomed orbit. Intended to absorb difficult questions, Allegra Stratton was a five-and-a-half foot human loofah made of chlorinated chicken, 30% full of liquefied facts.
Her press secretary role was created in 2020, a firewall between Boris Johnson and the troublesome world of events. This week, for example, she might have shielded him from the unproven suggestion that he had helped to fly 170 asylum-seeking pets out from collapsing Kabul, like the animal-loving politician played by Steve Coogan in the forthcoming Disney+ film Taliban Dolittle.
Stratton was even given her own Downing Street press conference hub in which to answer hacks’ pesky queries, at a cost to the taxpayer of £2.6m, a strategy assumed to be more effective than merely hiding the prime minister in a nearby fridge at the first sign of a microphone, a notebook and some semblance of journalistic ability.
Bizarrely, the only time the £2.6m speak-space made any impression was this week, a year after its completion, when footage emerged of Stratton on its podium, rehearsing plausible denials of a Covid rule-breaking party in Downing Street last December, and finding the whole thing a wizard wheeze. “Is cheese and wine all right? This is recorded,” she laughs. “This fictional party was a business meeting and it wasn’t socially distanced.” Watching Stratton flail, it’s obvious why her press secretary role was so swiftly canned. Had she been given the job she would have made things even worse. As it happens, she didn’t get the job, and made things even worse anyway, a special kind of genius.
Under lockdown, I admit, I went to a party. Or did I? Suddenly I am not so sure. Was it a party after all, or just some people in a place? There was cheese and wine, I think. Does that make it a party? There is cheese in a cheese sandwich and wine in a wine bottle, but that doesn’t mean either is a party. Or does it? Maybe I attended a cheese sandwich? Or climbed into a wine bottle, like a tiny Spanish galleon? Or maybe I went to a business meeting? I met people, certainly, but did I do any business? If there are no people in a room, but there is cheese, does that mean it is a party? Whether it was a party, not a party, a business meeting, a cheese sandwich, or a wine bottle, one thing I am certain of is that the correct procedures were observed. And a man who may have been at the party, or wasn’t if it wasn’t a party after all, will soon be contracted to confirm that. By me.
Last month, vaccination checks were at the discretion of venues, and it seemed unlikely that the government would insist on face coverings in theatres. After all, Boris Johnson likes to watch Macbeth mask-free while masked people all around him wonder what he takes away from the tale of an ambitious traitor and his manipulative wife. But by Wednesday night, a massive dead cat was required to distract from a day of denied parties and prioritised pets, so Johnson banged plan B on the kitchen table, alienating backbench Covid sceptics.
Given the irrefutable evidence of Boris Johnson’s government’s corruption and callousness, how can those few Tory MPs that appear to have a conscience, such as the new intake that voted against their leader’s attempt to spare Owen Paterson, remain in the disgusting party? They should retire from politics, or join the Liberal Democrats, which is essentially the same thing.
Even given everything that has happened this week, there are many diehard Tories, clinging to an inflatable bendy banana marked “Get Brexit Done”, who will still want to vote for the party despite its utter rottenness. After all what’s the alternative? A blandly competent Labour party notably not hell-bent on asset-stripping the country’s infrastructure to line their own pockets? That simply won’t do!
But the Tory faithful will require a blood sacrifice to convince them their concerns are being addressed. And maybe this time some doorstep weeping and a symbolic sacking of soon-to-be-forgotten Foreign Office Sirs will not be enough. Fate has handed us the perfect votive offering to assuage Tory anger: Pen Farthing’s Afghan animals.
Farthing’s innocent 170 refugee dogs and evacu-cats are now permanently branded by association with Tory negligence and Boris Johnson’s lies, even though the intervention by Johnson’s own personal parliamentary private secretary on the poor beasts’ behalf isn’t definitive evidence of his guilt. But on the corner of Hyde Park, where once stood the bloody tree of Tyburn, let us pile a pyre of faggots. Let banks of seating be laid upon the lush slopes of the magnificent Marble Arch Mound. Newly relieved of her latest government role, Allegra Stratton serves party cheese and party wine as Boris Johnson, and other chief actors in the cavalcade of contempt for the lonely Covid dead of lockdown, take their seats, to watch through their onion tears. Then the lie-stained animals are burned en masse, all 170 of them, on a bonfire lit with flamboyant regret by a vindicated Ant and Dec.
And let the smoke from the smouldering bodies be visible, yea, even from the hills of Gog Magog, and serve as a ritual purification of Conservative-soiled Albion, in this valley of dying stars, in this hollow valley, this broken jaw of our lost kingdom.
Stewart Lee
2021-12-12T19:33:19+00:00
Another day. Another body under Boris Johnson’s battlebus. Another Tory adviser on the white steps of another Canonbury villa. Another pantomime of regret fabricated from whatever tortured sounds and sad shapes the face can muster. Another bright satellite burning up in Johnson’s doomed orbit. Intended to absorb difficult questions, Allegra Stratton was a five-and-a-half foot human loofah made of chlorinated chicken, 30% full of liquefied facts. Her press secretary role was created in 2020, a firewall between Boris Johnson and the troublesome world of events. This week, for example, she might have shielded him from the unproven suggestion that he had helped to fly 170 asylum-seeking pets out from collapsing Kabul, like the animal-loving politician played by Steve Coogan in the forthcoming Disney+ film Taliban Dolittle. Stratton was even given her own Downing Street press conference hub in which to answer hacks’ pesky queries, at a cost to the taxpayer of £2.6m, a strategy assumed to be more effective than merely hiding the prime minister in a nearby fridge at the first sign of a microphone, a notebook and some semblance of journalistic ability. Bizarrely, the only time the £2.6m speak-space made any impression was this week, a year after its completion, when footage emerged of Stratton on its podium, rehearsing plausible denials of a Covid rule-breaking party in Downing Street last December, and finding the whole thing a wizard wheeze. “Is cheese and wine all right? This is recorded,” she laughs. “This fictional party was a business meeting and it wasn’t socially distanced.” Watching Stratton flail, it’s obvious why her press secretary role was so swiftly canned. Had she been given the job she would have made things even worse. As it happens, she didn’t get the job, and made things even worse anyway, a special kind of genius....
Farina's early nineties post-rock scene contemporaries Codeine and Bitch Magnet are hauling gloriously their brontosaurus bodies over the comeback coals, but Farina's band Karate always stood out from the tranquilised hardcore crowd, with their diminished sevenths and jazzy licks. Today he's a born again acoustic troubadour, laying rewarding mid-west poetry professor verbiage over finger-picked traditional sounding tunes, not unlike that other bookish math rock graduate, David Grubbs.
Prick Up Your Ears describes small town soldiers departing for Iraq with commendable sobriety, in a folksy idiom that emphasises the their timeless circumstance.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-04T19:30:43+00:00
Farina's early nineties post-rock scene contemporaries Codeine and Bitch Magnet are hauling gloriously their brontosaurus bodies over the comeback coals, but Farina's band Karate always stood out from the tranquilised hardcore crowd, with their diminished sevenths and jazzy licks. Today he's a born again acoustic troubadour, laying rewarding mid-west poetry professor verbiage over finger-picked traditional sounding tunes, not unlike that other bookish math rock graduate, David Grubbs. Prick Up Your Ears describes small town soldiers departing for Iraq with commendable sobriety, in a folksy idiom that emphasises the their timeless circumstance.
Comedian Stewart Lee isn't just brilliant at telling jokes - he also deconstructs them as part of his act. But with younger comics stealing his routines, and his kids stealing his time, his new show is about 'nothing'
'IS THERE SOME way of keeping a lid on the degree to which you're exposed so that people don't tire of you, while at the same time maintaining enough of a profile to make sure they know that you're on somewhere?" Stewart Lee is flopped on a couch in a dressing room, arms above his head, legs outstretched, pondering a question that haunts him.
For some years, Lee has tried to find an answer to this, with his conclusion, "I've kind of fudged it, gone in the middle ground." The "middle ground" is not really a phrase evoked when dissecting Lee. For more than 20 years, he has been allergic to the middle, averse to easy options, and consistently gravitating towards the edge. "It's a delicate thing. It's an old-fashioned thing as well," he says thinking of that leading question again, "I think a lot of people think of fame as a smash-and-grab ram raid: get in, drive through the front of the shop, get everything, and get out before you're found out."
Lee craves low-key consistency, so maybe he has fudged "it" a little. Instead of cruising just under the radar, as he seems to desire, he veers in and out of detection, sometimes wildly, generally brilliantly, occasionally with some controversy trailing behind him. The career paths of comics such as Daniel Kitson, who can sell out seven nights in the National Theatre in London in 45 minutes without even doing any interviews, as Lee points out enviably, evade him. But perhaps it's for the better.
Maybe Lee has too much to say.
He's more than halfway through a mammoth 80-show run at the Leicester Square Theatre, where by the time it's over, more than 40,000 people will have seen him perform Carpet Remnant World . "The conceit of this show is that because I've just been getting more popular and driving around doing gigs all the time, because I look after children, I haven't had time to write any material, so it hasn't got any structure and it isn't about anything," Lee explains. "But actually, it is about something. It's about idealised notions of society and the idea of how do you get ideas for a show when you don't have any experiences?"
"Conceit" is a word Lee uses a lot throughout the show, as he faux-patronisingly explains the mechanics of his jokes to what he perceives to be a new type of audience arriving since he won two British Comedy Awards for the BBC2 series Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle . His concerns about this new section of his audience, with whom he has a rather Cobain-like discomfort, could be excruciating, but it's hilarious theatre, subverting the idea of the comic trying to win an audience over. Instead, the audience wants Lee to like them. It's this eye-poking approach that Lee has worked to perfect since his early days with Richard Herring on Radio 4's On The Hour, Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy .
His biggest adventure came in 2005 with Jerry Springer - The Opera , a project that would eventually teach him his biggest professional lesson and lead to that irksome question of balance, which still bothers him.
"If we'd kept that to six singers and a piano player and we'd toured it around 150-seater art centres, we'd have made more money on it than we did upscaling it and putting it in the West End and touring," he says. "The kind of people who [attacked it and] went for it would never even have found out it existed." (He later refers to them less kindly as "these kind of psychos on the Christian right".) "We'd have been able to move on and do another thing without being caught up in a chaotic legal situation [the Christian Institute tried to prosecute the BBC for broadcasting it]. And we'd have been able to control it a bit more. Ultimately there was nothing to be gained from trying to run it as a commercial proposition. It wasn't better because it was bigger."
Later, Lee learned another major lesson on his show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask (his book with the same title has recently been published by Faber and Faber). "I got all the sorts of things the Top Gear people say about other minorities and turned them back on them." Lee made an infamous joke saying he wished Richard Hammond had been killed in his car crash. "I said 'don't decontextualise this if you're from a newspaper, it's obvious how it works in context, it's a knowing satire of their rhetoric'. I would say that on stage. Of course, the papers still did it and my immediate worry about that was a practical one: does this mean the show's going to be closed down, because I've put four months' work into it, and I had it all planned out for next year, and I want to turn over money for my life, for my family? A really dull practical consideration." It's these "practicalities of just trying to be 'allowed', not be stopped from working" that Lee is trying to balance with not censuring himself.
This mindset leads him on to discuss the notion of selling out, and how it has changed. "As you get older you're more aware that there used to be loads of ways to be an artist," he reflects. "You could go on Enterprise Allowance here [in the UK], you could sign on the dole, you could live in a squat. There were ways of subsidising it. Here, there have been very political efforts to close all those things down and to get everyone in the system." Lee thinks there has been a deliberate effort "on some level to make it harder for free-thinkers to operate. I don't know if there's been a think-tank where that was issued as a directive, but, you know. . ."
Now he believes it's hard to get by being an artist. "I was talking to Mark E Smith of The Fall about this. He had a song on a car advert in 1997 and funnily enough with that one I thought 'oh great, I hope they get some money'. But he was so bankrupt at the time it all went to the record company and he didn't see any of it." He cracks up laughing. "He had all the shame of being the ex-punk bloke doing an advert and none of the benefits."
An occasional curmudgeonly attitude is something Lee has in common with Mark E Smith, but his politeness, and willingness to engage in a remarkably honest discussion aren't traits he shares with The Fall guy. "Most acclaimed things aren't very good, and they're normally a compromise," he says at one point, claiming that his critical success must therefore be some sort of blip. "It's a bit weird to get a British Comedy Award, because you sense you must have failed in some way."
There's an intrinsic conflict with the alternative being a success, with the anti-telly comedian being on television, with the outsider being, to some degree, part of the mainstream. And it's something he's well aware of. It leads him to believe that many of his fellow comedians "increasingly dislike" him. He's not exactly kind to them either.
"For a long time, I was a sort of totemic figure for them. Popular and successful comedians like to be able to appear magnanimous, and so it was very nice for them to be able to go 'but of course, my favourite comedian is. . .' and then they would say me. But I was not in their orbit, so it's a patrician pat on the head."
But his increasing success changes that. "When I used to do stand-up making fun of how comedy works or complaining about commissioning procedures, or whatever, I did that from a position of being in an 80-seater attic in the Fringe, or in an arts centre somewhere. If the perception of you is a success, things that seem heroic when you're perceived as an outsider very quickly look arrogant."
Then there's the question of being ripped off. "As soon as that happens, people will be irritated with me by association because it [Lee's stand up] will start to feel not an alternative thing, but actually a trope."
While being influential might be flattering for some, Lee has instead dumped some of his trademarks for Carpet Remnant World . "I think it's pretty obvious why I haven't done them - because there are 19-year-olds doing them. Things like long silences, lots of repetition that slightly changes over a 20-minute bit, stating very cruel things, very bluntly as if they were facts, getting off the stage and performing from unlit, unamplified areas of darkness, all those things I've done a lot of - I haven't gone near them in this show because I've seen little kids doing them in open-spot nights."
Seeing younger comics perform like him doesn't exactly give Lee a warm fuzzy feeling. "It's kind of like a Lego version of you. Reduced. Oh dear. It's a bit annoying. I sort of think, that's what I do, and I've got two kids and I'm 43 years old and I'd quite like to be able to eek this out until I die, and yet you're making what I do a cliche and you haven't even got any dependants, you horrible, selfish child." He pauses post-rant. "But, on the other hand, it forces you on."
After a long conversation about how the internet has created a "disproportionate paranoia" about how many people hate him, because as a medium it "amplifies the most brutal voices in society", Lee wanders off through the venue, ready for the first performance of the day, an afternoon matinee followed by an evening show.
On stage, the sharpness of the material makes for a strange and effective balancing act of the abstract and the intricate, and Lee becomes perhaps the only comedian who can make meandering succinct.
He keeps saying the show is about "nothing", and then qualifies it, saying again that it is a "conceit". It is indeed a conceit, because Lee's "nothing" is meatier than most of his contemporaries' "everything".
Stewart Lee
2012-01-25T13:46:06+00:00
Comedian Stewart Lee isn't just brilliant at telling jokes - he also deconstructs them as part of his act. But with younger comics stealing his routines, and his kids stealing his time, his new show is about 'nothing' 'IS THERE SOME way of keeping a lid on the degree to which you're exposed so that people don't tire of you, while at the same time maintaining enough of a profile to make sure they know that you're on somewhere?" Stewart Lee is flopped on a couch in a dressing room, arms above his head, legs outstretched, pondering a question that haunts him. For some years, Lee has tried to find an answer to this, with his conclusion, "I've kind of fudged it, gone in the middle ground." The "middle ground" is not really a phrase evoked when dissecting Lee. For more than 20 years, he has been allergic to the middle, averse to easy options, and consistently gravitating towards the edge. "It's a delicate thing. It's an old-fashioned thing as well," he says thinking of that leading question again, "I think a lot of people think of fame as a smash-and-grab ram raid: get in, drive through the front of the shop, get everything, and get out before you're found out." Lee craves low-key consistency, so maybe he has fudged "it" a little. Instead of cruising just under the radar, as he seems to desire, he veers in and out of detection, sometimes wildly, generally brilliantly, occasionally with some controversy trailing behind him. The career paths of comics such as Daniel Kitson, who can sell out seven nights in the National Theatre in London in 45 minutes without even doing any interviews, as Lee points out enviably, evade him. But perhaps it's for the better. Maybe Lee has too much...
Earlier this week a pile of mud was dumped at the west end of Oxford Street. Then some squares of grass were stuck on the mud. Then people were charged £8 to go up it. Visitor Emma Wright tweeted that going up the mud was “the worst thing I have ever done in London”. But I believe it was Dr Johnson who wrote: “A woman who thinks going up some mud is the worst thing she has ever done in London has not visited the ladies’ toilets in Crystal Palace park. And neither have I.”
The mud’s purpose is to promote Oxford Street, where 17% of shops have closed since March 2020. But in the long term, the best way to save shops is to force Amazon to pay proper tax, so it cannot undercut them. Making people pay £8 to go up mud will not do this. Though British Amazon goods are delivered from British Amazon warehouses to British Amazon customers on British roads by British drivers, the sales of those goods are processed in lightly regulated Luxembourg. Can it be a coincidence that as the net tightens on Amazon, its founder, Jeff Bezos, is lobbying Nasa to put Amazon in charge of outer space?
What tax would Bezos pay on a transaction that was processed on the moon, for example, or on a planet so far away that by the time the light from it reached us the financial exchange could legitimately be viewed as having taken place in a previous tax year? Would Bezos be able to avoid international shipping charges on goods provided from a “lunar fulfilment center”? Would the same employment regulations that give human warehouse staff minimal but profit-damaging rights be applicable to staff enslaved from some as yet unknown alien race? Would an alien with no bladder require costly toilet breaks? Would an alien with no concept of time as we understand it need to be paid by the hour, if at all? Would Bezos eventually be able to rule all of space, like Thanos, Marvel Comics’ cosmic nihilist? To Jeff Thanos, some mud on Oxford Street is but mere dust. He can wish worlds away with a click of his fingers.
But the Oxford Street pile of mud did its job. It got people talking. In that respect, Boris Johnson’s Tuesday crime strategy announcement was also a pile of mud. Expect to see “fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs” of offenders, the prime minister declared, the words immediately ringing my woke alarm bells. I consulted humanity’s hive mind. As I thought. About 65% of the Google image search results for the words “chain gang” were shackled black men, while 4% were of a convict Mickey Mouse, and of some chained babies, doing time for cheese theft and milk concealment offences respectively.
Boris Johnson may of course have invoked the hot potato of race here deliberately, under instructions from his culture war guru, the former sex party fixer Dougie Smith (though it’s understood Smith may have been reined in now the government are being blamed for the football racism they actively encouraged). Was the chain gang idea announced to appeal to horrible Tory voters knowing that it would have to be quietly withdrawn later, a classic strategy of the Boris Johnson government?
In the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, an unnamed spokesperson swiftly clarified that “chain gang” was just “a turn of phrase”, like “piccaninnies”, “watermelon smiles”, and “bum boys”. But one could be forgiven for thinking there were plans to shackle litter-pickers, given that the home secretary floated stashing child migrants on Ascension Island and is in the process of criminalising lifeboat volunteers if they assist drowning foreigners. If Priti Patel announced she was personally going to tar and feather shoplifters it would seem plausible.
The shoe repair millionaire James Timpson took to Twitter to say he employs lots of ex-offenders and makes them wear not shackles and luminous waistcoats but a shirt and tie – “same people, different approach, a much better outcome”. Come the revolution Timpson will be home secretary while Priti Patel will be in a booth at Oxford Circus tube station reheeling a pair of Topshop sling heels and burping.
Next we learned that a Boris Johnson crackdown on drugs will focus on London, Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle and Wakefield. But surely this must include Westminster itself where, in 2019, Vice magazine found cocaine in four out of nine parliamentary nooks – toilets mainly – that could only be accessed by passholders, or their guests. That can’t all have been Michael Gove in the 1990s, or the young Boris Johnson, sneezing his way through his single ineffectual snort.
Black Lives Matter want to defund the police and invest instead in community resources to keep people out of crime. Doing the Marxists’ work for them, the Conservatives have been defunding the police generally since 2010 (officer numbers still have not recovered), and personally in 2021 by refusing them the pay rise given to other public service workers. But dumping the mud of these unworkable new law and order pronouncements has worked. A prime minister who as London mayor allowed £126,000 of public money (£11,500 of which came from a City Hall-funded agency) to go to a pole-dancing businesswoman he was having sex with, and whose ministers routinely appear to have awarded without due process contracts worth millions to cronies, continually escapes imprisonment, while petty offenders will be paraded in fluorescent jackets, like Chinese thought criminals in the Cultural Revolution.
But it’s always edifying to hear a lecture on criminal behaviour from a prime minister who, after a simple YouTube search, can be heard agreeing to conspire with a convicted fraudster to have a journalist beaten up on the understanding that he remains anonymous. Done. Now, maybe I will go up that mud after all.
Stewart Lee
2021-08-01T10:59:49+01:00
Earlier this week a pile of mud was dumped at the west end of Oxford Street. Then some squares of grass were stuck on the mud. Then people were charged £8 to go up it. Visitor Emma Wright tweeted that going up the mud was “the worst thing I have ever done in London”. But I believe it was Dr Johnson who wrote: “A woman who thinks going up some mud is the worst thing she has ever done in London has not visited the ladies’ toilets in Crystal Palace park. And neither have I.” The mud’s purpose is to promote Oxford Street, where 17% of shops have closed since March 2020. But in the long term, the best way to save shops is to force Amazon to pay proper tax, so it cannot undercut them. Making people pay £8 to go up mud will not do this. Though British Amazon goods are delivered from British Amazon warehouses to British Amazon customers on British roads by British drivers, the sales of those goods are processed in lightly regulated Luxembourg. Can it be a coincidence that as the net tightens on Amazon, its founder, Jeff Bezos, is lobbying Nasa to put Amazon in charge of outer space? What tax would Bezos pay on a transaction that was processed on the moon, for example, or on a planet so far away that by the time the light from it reached us the financial exchange could legitimately be viewed as having taken place in a previous tax year? Would Bezos be able to avoid international shipping charges on goods provided from a “lunar fulfilment center”? Would the same employment regulations that give human warehouse staff minimal but profit-damaging rights be applicable to staff enslaved from some as yet unknown alien race? Would an...
An album of Shirley Collins covers featuring contributions from Graham Coxon, Lee Ranaldo, Bitchin Bonnie Billy Bajas (Bonnie Prince Billy), Stewart Lee, Eric Chenaux, Josephine Foster, Johnny Flynn, Stuart Estell, Trembling Bells and many more...
Limited Edition 3xLP available on Record Store Day
Earth Recordings are extremely proud to announce the release of 'Shirley Inspired'.
July 2015 will see Shirley Collins celebrate her 80th year - an age that would seem frankly ridiculous for a woman as spritely as her, had it not been for all she's achieved.
From her seminal field-recording trip to America to her lauded musical career; from her role as historian and protector of the folk tradition, to the very fact that this record can exist - more than half a century after her career began - all of these things are testament to the breadth of her influence.
'Even though I am a folk fan, I like lots of different music and Shirley's in the top ten of all artists for me, irrespective of what they're supposed to be classified as.' - Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T22:15:33+00:00
An album of Shirley Collins covers featuring contributions from Graham Coxon, Lee Ranaldo, Bitchin Bonnie Billy Bajas (Bonnie Prince Billy), Stewart Lee, Eric Chenaux, Josephine Foster, Johnny Flynn, Stuart Estell, Trembling Bells and many more... Limited Edition 3xLP available on Record Store Day Earth Recordings are extremely proud to announce the release of 'Shirley Inspired'. July 2015 will see Shirley Collins celebrate her 80th year - an age that would seem frankly ridiculous for a woman as spritely as her, had it not been for all she's achieved. From her seminal field-recording trip to America to her lauded musical career; from her role as historian and protector of the folk tradition, to the very fact that this record can exist - more than half a century after her career began - all of these things are testament to the breadth of her influence. 'Even though I am a folk fan, I like lots of different music and Shirley's in the top ten of all artists for me, irrespective of what they're supposed to be classified as.' - Stewart Lee
For comics, he is perceived as the ultimate – if inflated – authority on artistic integrity, ‘The Grand Poobah of Comedy’, as Al Murray has dubbed him.
Stewart Lee, for his part, thinks the title both unfair but understandable... not to mention 'really funny because it has the word “poo” in it'.
Understandable because this, after all, is a stand-up who in the new series of his Comedy Vehicle on BBC Two, feigns irritation that the only audience member to semi-comprehend his reference to Ben Fogle's Animal Park leaves the recording to go to the toilet. The incident captures 'a flavour of the chance element of what can happen in a live show', Lee says. 'I'll seize upon anything that humiliates me, makes it look like a struggle or lowers my status.
'It's quite important for the suggestion to be that I'm low-status or a loser or mad. Or embittered in some way. Or should be doing better than I am. All those things are part of what's funny about the clown of Stewart Lee.'
Never mind that Saturday's episode of Comedy Vehicle attracted a million viewers, more than double the average for the second series, with a significant boost expected when iPlayer figures are factored in.
Measured against Mock The Week, that's still modest he points out. And even taking into account media and comedy fans' interest in his opinions, he maintains that 'I don't have any credit in the straight world. I'm not known or rated. In fact, the people that have vaguely heard of me, assume that I must be terrible… To be honest, I'd rather keep it that way.
'Let's remember, I've never been able to definitely get the series recommissioned, they always seem to happen a few years late in a rather slipshod way. There's never any obvious enthusiasm about [the] recommissioning. Certainly, the third wasn't going to happen until Sky wanted to do it and that forced the BBC's hand, as did [winning] the Bafta and the British Comedy Awards. So that's not really fair.'
Comedy Vehicle's return was hastened in part because of a routine about UKIP in tomorrow's episode, which had to air before April 11 to comply with BBC rules on not broadcasting political satire too close to the European elections.
'The good thing is that a lot of the things I've talked about in the series … to do with politics or social issues, still seem to be on the agenda,’ he said. ‘The wealth of London and the relative poverty of the rest of the country, there's a half hour on that. UKIP's anxiety about immigration, it's sort of shifted from December [when the show was recorded], when it was mainly about Eastern Europe, but that's still an ongoing story …
'If you'd left it to July, it would have changed. And also, starting a series from scratch now, I would want to do half an hour on the environment or half an hour on the ethics of the 70s Left. So I'm glad it's going out now. I talk to camera about how it's being recorded in December, so people will probably will give it a bit of leeway.'
An intimidatingly articulate, perceptive and forthright commentator; an aloof victim of misconceptions; a mad, embittered clown, Lee may be the 'cultural bully' of the 'Oxbridge mafia' Lee Mack alludes to in the footnotes of his autobiography. What is certain however, is that he opened the new series by inferring the slight referred to him and damning himself by comparison to Mack's compliment of Daniel Kitson as a comic who could 'cut the mustard' on panel shows.
He is perhaps his own harshest critic because he absorbs criticism so voraciously, going as far as making it a defining part of Comedy Vehicle. When Armando Iannucci's commitments on Veep prevented him returning as the 'hostile interrogator', the caustic Chris Morris was handed the role, alongside his existing one of script editor.
The effects of the interrogations are 'interesting' he muses. 'Armando's are really playful and really funny, Chris's have an air of menace and seriousness about them that I think forced me to respond differently. He humiliates me a lot more, which is probably good in some way. He allows me to be much weaker.
'I wish he could have gone further really. At the end of week six, I got to the point where I kind of got into hysterics and I wasn't really sure whether it was hysterics of laughter or just stress… we did this for about four hours. You have to really keep tuned in, you've got no script or anything. The last minute-and-a-half of the series is me having a kind of breakdown really,' he cackles.
Lee has forged something of a schizophrenic persona. On stage, he snipes devastatingly at other comics, while in person admitting that he either doesn't know them or their work – or likes them. He elegantly denounces Twitter as 'the Stasi for the Angry Birds generation' while restlessly monitoring his reputation online.
Forget Baconface though, the Canadian 80s comic alter-ego he originally conceived as a programme-associate for Comedy Vehicle. Because he doesn't feature in the series.
'He just went off to be honest. I was hoping he would stay and script edit it. But the producer didn't like him. Hopefully I will get him back at some point.'
Baconface was also filmed doing stand-up for the imminent second series of Comedy Central’s Alternative Comedy Experience, which Lee curates, but deemed 'unbroadcastable'.
Remaining committed to his mad, embittered clown side has a personal cost for Lee. He has 'to be true to him, because he's not as reasonable as me. I wouldn't have as much material if I only did the things that I thought were funny. I have to sometimes respond to things in the way that he would.
‘I might see something and think, “well, it's not that bad that”. But it would really annoy him… He's sort of like a throwback to me, 10, 15 years ago, 25 years ago sometimes. So sometimes, I have to go with what he wants to do. Even when it ends up making my life difficult.
'Although there's a lot of stuff about politics and real life and society in my act, I'm not like Mark Steel or Mark Thomas where we're invited to see it as a rational, intelligent, informed commentary.
‘It tries to be the work of an arrogant, delusional man who has an inexplicable grudge against people and feels that he's not given the credit he deserves for things. There's a logical problem with that, in that, in the last few years, I have been given a lot of credit for things, so it's harder for him to find things to feel hard done by about. That's partly why I have to think of him as a different person now.'
When he returned to live performing in 2004 after a break, Lee says he 'felt I had to stop caring about the perceived stand-up audience, which at the time after Newman and Baddiel and Fantasy Football and all those sort of things, was sort of mainstreamy lads. I felt it was really useful to not worry about that and to be able to say “look, this stuff's for the other people”. I still think it is.
However, having moved beyond his ideal audience of 'someone who lives in Stoke Newington and is about 45' – as he does and is – he marvels at his fans’ increasing diversity, from Muslim girls in headscarves in Salford 'slightly calling my bluff on how comfortable I was doing stuff about religion in front of a religiously diverse audience', to 'young, sort of twenty-something sports blokes on cocaine'.
Despite his playful excoriation of the self-loathing middle-classes, the idea that he only preaches 'to a load of Guardian readers' is false he argues, demonstrated by an emerging problem he's facing.
'I'll do 20 minutes on UKIP and everyone's laughing' he explains. 'Then at the end, a guy with a Thai wife will come up to me and say that he's a UKIP voter and will always vote UKIP. But he thought the bit was really funny. [Which is] interesting.
‘I've done jokes in the past about the disconnect between the supposed values of an act on stage and the supposed values of the audience … and what would that feel like. Yet now I'm starting to experience it myself, where an audience might enjoy the comedy of it, without necessarily agreeing with you.'
Lee says he monitored the 'naked hostility' towards him on the internet every day for about two years – which he credits with providing some good gags and helping him craft Comedy Vehicle into the sort of show his detractors ('a Top Gear viewer or a clearly nasty person') would hate. He puts stock in the Twitter reaction after an episode goes out because of the importance he sees attached to it by television executives. 'Forewarned is forearmed' he reasons. 'It's nice to have a look at it. I'll probably stop now.'
Journalists, including myself, have misinterpreted him in the past, failing to convey precisely what Stewart Lee the mad, embittered clown intends, and where it converges or departs from the real him.
He dedicates an episode of the current Comedy Vehicle run to context and, for the record, has never said that he doesn't like slapstick. His memorable Del Boy bit was ‘just about the idea of a thing being taken for granted by popular taste,’ he explains. ‘I actually think the Del Boy falling through the bar bit is really fantastic.'
He also observes that a recent, highly critical newspaper review actually led to a spike in sales for a live show because 'it was so mad that it reminded people I was on and they wanted to go and see it'.
Still, he was concerned that 'to be described as a psychopath … not reflect[ing] the experience of any of the other people there that evening' might affect the way people treat his children.
After the backlash against Jerry Springer: The Opera, he expects that 'it's probably worse for someone like Frankie Boyle who's routinely the subject of folk-devil panics in tabloid newspaper. I've no desire to be that again because I've got a family that suffered by association'.
At one point, he voices concern about failing to anticipate the attention Morris' new role might bring the fiercely private satirist, held in semi-mythical esteem by so many comedy fans. And he was 'slightly irked' by the swathe of recent hagiographic tributes to Bill Hicks on the 20th anniversary of his death, penning his own satirical analysis of the press coverage in the Observer.
He stresses 'let's not underestimate how brilliant [Hicks] was, and he was absolutely fantastic'. But he criticises those journalists who would set the late American on a pedestal as 'not close enough to the ground' of the current UK and Irish comedy circuit, 'which is absolutely amazing… the quality of the stuff is fantastic’.
He is, he maintains, lucky that of all the accomplished acts that 'write full-length shows, go back to the Fringe every year and does that kind of stand-up' he is the only one given the platform to bring his routines to television, without having 'to try and squeeze it into six minutes or chop it out into something that would fit on a panel show'.
'Probably because I'm part of the “Oxbridge mafia”,’ he deadpans.
Lee is frustrated to see shows like Live at the Electric appropriating Comedy Vehicle's moves, such as him talking down the camera, or the camera now lurking at the back of the stage on Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow and Live at the Apollo.
'I'm not saying we invented that' he says. 'But when I mentally choose the shot, to use the camera at the back of the stage, it's often about me turning my back on the studio audience, like ignoring them because I don't think they're good enough. So there's some kind of dramatic impetus to it, which there often isn't when it's just used as a stylistic device.
‘And also, when I talk down the camera, I'm normally trying to say something specific to the viewer at home. Or it's supposed to have a particularly personal note. Or it plays off the audience in the room and their strengths and weaknesses against the assumed strengths and weaknesses of the audience at home.
'When it's in Russell Kane's show, it adds variety to where a punchline is delivered. It's weird to see these things bleed into the vocabulary of the way stand-up's filmed... I was slightly disappointed when I saw the down the camera thing happening a lot because I thought, “Aw, you know, there's an impetus behind that when we do it and it's going to start to look like a cliché.”’
He momentarily imagines stealing a few stylistic devices from the big, shiny floor stand-up showcases, envisioning a Live at the Apollo-style shot of the 'not really celebrities' who attend his gigs, namely Will Self, Grayson Perry, Geddy Lee from Rush and Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine.
Comedy Vehicle's fourth series is set to record in December 2015, to air sometime before April 2016. And he's committed to making it for as long as the BBC wants it, subject to it remaining cost-effective and lucrative enough. Or not becoming too popular.
'If too many people watch the series I imagine the impact on my life and that of my family would not be compensated for by the size of the fee, which doesn't give us enough money to live a sheltered, protected and removed Jonathan Ross lifestyle' he reasons.
'People who live across the street go on the internet saying what I am wearing when I put the bins out. This series looks like getting the best figures yet and it will be interesting to see how irritating it is to be recognised by more people than usual.’
'If too many people start watching I will stop doing TV and just work live and hope people forget me, but at the moment I don't know how many too many is. I suppose it partly depends how many of the people that know who you are hate you and want to harm you, and how weird the ones that like you are in large numbers.
‘One of the nice things about the BBC is they don't really promote the series, which helps to keep you unrecognisable.'
He says he gets 'asked about doing docs for BBC Four and Sky Arts but the things I want to do always get knocked back, or they try to change them into something else which they imagine will be more popular.
‘The doc I did for Channel 5 in 2004, New Puritans, was retitled without my knowledge or permission as the idiotic Stewart Lee Says What's So Bad About Blasphemy?, which I never did say, and wouldn't have said, and which didn't reflect the measured tone of the piece.
‘I found out about this change when I saw it in the paper. I don't know how people can stand working for anyone that would do that to their writing and feel sorry for anyone who relies on TV for their living.'
So with all the 'ambition to write fiction or scripts or do theatre … knocked out' of him, he plans to focus wholly on stand-up, writing a new show every two years until he's 65.
'The government will probably make it impossible for the BBC to make shows eventually. And also, as television budgets shrink, it actually won't make sense to give that amount of material away to television when you could tour it.
‘I expect the internet will get us to a position where we're all expected to be free content providers. But I think that what you can't take away from is the experience of going into a room, to see a person say some stuff, which you know will be a bit different every night and your experience will be unique. I reckon there's 20 years in that before we're replaced by robots, so I'll do that.'
'What would it be like to do it for another 20 years?' he wonders. 'What would it be like to have an audience start to understand you more and be able to develop. Not many people have done that.'
Stewart Lee
2014-03-08T21:06:19+00:00
For comics, he is perceived as the ultimate – if inflated – authority on artistic integrity, ‘The Grand Poobah of Comedy’, as Al Murray has dubbed him. Stewart Lee, for his part, thinks the title both unfair but understandable... not to mention 'really funny because it has the word “poo” in it'. Understandable because this, after all, is a stand-up who in the new series of his Comedy Vehicle on BBC Two, feigns irritation that the only audience member to semi-comprehend his reference to Ben Fogle's Animal Park leaves the recording to go to the toilet. The incident captures 'a flavour of the chance element of what can happen in a live show', Lee says. 'I'll seize upon anything that humiliates me, makes it look like a struggle or lowers my status. 'It's quite important for the suggestion to be that I'm low-status or a loser or mad. Or embittered in some way. Or should be doing better than I am. All those things are part of what's funny about the clown of Stewart Lee.' Never mind that Saturday's episode of Comedy Vehicle attracted a million viewers, more than double the average for the second series, with a significant boost expected when iPlayer figures are factored in. Measured against Mock The Week, that's still modest he points out. And even taking into account media and comedy fans' interest in his opinions, he maintains that 'I don't have any credit in the straight world. I'm not known or rated. In fact, the people that have vaguely heard of me, assume that I must be terrible… To be honest, I'd rather keep it that way. 'Let's remember, I've never been able to definitely get the series recommissioned, they always seem to happen a few years late in a rather slipshod way. There's...
The inspirational Leicester comedy festival awards ceremony, which I attended on Monday in the ballroom of the refurbished Grade II-listed Mercure Leicester Grand, could only have been improved by a multimillionaire performatively punching another multimillionaire in the face. Nonetheless, my once-in-a-lifetime Legend of Comedy statuette win was overshadowed by the violent brawling of the Oscar attendeees, meaning my achievement remained unmentioned in all the major American entertainment trade papers. Bah!
It was almost a very different story. While I and the other Leicester winners were posing for our photos, I nearly stepped backwards off the 18-inch podium, briefly losing one of my hearing aids as it fell from my ear. This should have been one of the Leicester Mercury’s biggest stories of the year, doubtless going viral and helping me to sell as many tour tickets as being punched in the face has shifted for Chris Rock. But in the wake of mouthgate, no one was interested.
I can honestly say that, of the many I have been professionally obliged to attend, the Leicester comedy festival awards ceremony was the only one I have ever enjoyed. It was certainly better than the 2011 Baftas, where Michael McIntyre’s famously excited late manager got me in a headlock in a dark corner and said he would personally see to it that my career was destroyed, while his own minder struggled to free me from his employer’s chokehold. To this day, I have a psychosomatic reaction to the very mention of McIntyre’s name that leaves me gasping for air. Or is that a nut allergy?
I think the awards night felt exceptional to me because the Leicester comedy festival itself is uncharacteristically and inherently worthwhile and isn’t just built around selling booze and bribing executives. The accolades handed out reflected its commitment to encouraging new talent and to building a cultural profile for unfairly overlooked Leicester, previously only famous for being the home of the world’s fattest man, Daniel Lambert. The enormous cock-fighter managed to achieve the weight of 53st in 1805. Seeing his portrait in Leicester as a child, and realising the sacrifices he had made to become a legend, inspired me to follow my dreams. I wore my Daniel Lambert pin badge as I received my Legend award and considered my debt to him paid. The middle “has-been” phase of my career is now officially over and I am into the third and final “legend” act, a clear downhill bobsleigh run to an early grave and subsequent critical reappraisal.
Today, it has become necessary for most mainstream awards ceremonies, from the Oscars down to whatever the British comedy awards are called this year, to be archly hosted with the sassy contempt of a cocaine-addled Friars Club roast by a dutifully disrespectful, high-profile comedian for hire. Is this because even the people putting the events together suspect, deep down, that both the artists and the works they are supposed to be recognising probably aren’t really all that outstanding after all? An Oscar tradition that, in recent years, has not found space for Paddy Considine, Mark Jenkin’s Baitor my own King Rocker, yet rewards violent hooliganism and The Nutty Professor, is demonstrably worthless.
Rock is one of the world’s greatest standups, and his 1996 routine about the black community’s perception of itself is in the all-time top 10. Hosting the Oscars is quite frankly beneath him and they should have just let Ricky Gervais do it again, as he has no dignity to lose. Rock wouldn’t host a corporate Christmas gig for a logistics company and agree to mention the CEO’s wig and the time Sally from accounts was sick in a plant pot, so why is he whoring himself out in the same way to the Academy? Rock brings shame on the nobility of the standup’s profession.
Most of the put-downs Rock trotted out would have been prepared anyway, generated by hired hands in a packed Hollywood writers’ room, and which the Academy, desperate for publicity, had already approved and signed off on. Employing the controversial comedian is a risk cynically calculated to drive traffic. Don’t shoot the messenger. If Will Smith had run off and punched the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president, David Rubin, hard in his stupid Hollywood face, I’d have had more respect for him. Rock was just the patsy. Smith’s punches, justified or not, fell wide of the target.
Jada Pinkett Smith’s position on her husband’s chivalrous battering of Rock’s tiny face went unreported. In 1987, an observant builder extravagantly complimented my feminist girlfriend’s figure in no uncertain terms and my 11st, 19-year-old frame immediately plunged into battle, as fellow builders theatrically held their colleague back. My girlfriend immediately reprimanded me for a sexism, as it wasn’t for me to fight another man over her. Today, my feminist wife tells me that, although my girlfriend’s criticisms were correct, I would also have looked like a loser if I hadn’t reacted. It was a lose-lose situation. The builder, unlike Rock, was at least doing his own material and perhaps comes out as the winner here.
Smith’s awards night ended with violence, disciplinary proceedings and the threat of expulsion. Mine ended with Guinness, Highland Park and the kind of curious, regionally specific crisp selection I can’t resist, in a stained-glass-windowed backstreet bar full of vibrant local artists and standups, duty bound to indulge my reminiscences of the pre-podcasting cultural landscape. For once in my life, in this filthy business, I felt as if I came out ahead. Back in my hotel room, I realised I had spilled mango chutney dip from some poppadom snacks down my awards ceremony shirt, but my hosts had been respectful enough to ignore it. I was now officially a legend, even with all chutney all on me. And I wouldn’t have traded places with Will Smith for the world.
Stewart Lee
2022-04-03T22:12:38+01:00
The inspirational Leicester comedy festival awards ceremony, which I attended on Monday in the ballroom of the refurbished Grade II-listed Mercure Leicester Grand, could only have been improved by a multimillionaire performatively punching another multimillionaire in the face. Nonetheless, my once-in-a-lifetime Legend of Comedy statuette win was overshadowed by the violent brawling of the Oscar attendeees, meaning my achievement remained unmentioned in all the major American entertainment trade papers. Bah! It was almost a very different story. While I and the other Leicester winners were posing for our photos, I nearly stepped backwards off the 18-inch podium, briefly losing one of my hearing aids as it fell from my ear. This should have been one of the Leicester Mercury’s biggest stories of the year, doubtless going viral and helping me to sell as many tour tickets as being punched in the face has shifted for Chris Rock. But in the wake of mouthgate, no one was interested. I can honestly say that, of the many I have been professionally obliged to attend, the Leicester comedy festival awards ceremony was the only one I have ever enjoyed. It was certainly better than the 2011 Baftas, where Michael McIntyre’s famously excited late manager got me in a headlock in a dark corner and said he would personally see to it that my career was destroyed, while his own minder struggled to free me from his employer’s chokehold. To this day, I have a psychosomatic reaction to the very mention of McIntyre’s name that leaves me gasping for air. Or is that a nut allergy? I think the awards night felt exceptional to me because the Leicester comedy festival itself is uncharacteristically and inherently worthwhile and isn’t just built around selling booze and bribing executives. The accolades handed out reflected its commitment to...
In among all the post-match analysis of MES’s genius way with words and his theatrical gift for apparently effortless vocal dramatics, amid all these sociological meditations upon what the Fall told us about the world, let it not be forgotten what fun it was to be a Fall fan! Our great big brilliant secret. And my phone is filled with shared condolences, many from friends I made because of the Fall.
The places Mark would make us go in his pursuit of minimal venue overheads – vast forgotten Irish clubs in Cricklewood, derelict discotheques in Croydon, five-night runs in rooms above pubs, packed beyond capacity. And the nerveracking thrill of not knowing which side of the thin line between transcendental and terrible tonight’s show might fall. Two nights in a row, in the same room, with the same set list, utterly unrecognisable from one another. And who was still going to be in the band? And what hilarious half-heard fragment would you snatch from the muffled lyrical mix tonight? My favourite from the last album? “All salute at the altar of filo pastry.”
Tributes to artists often end up being more about the person writing them, but MES provided me with an alternative education, looping me into Camus, and Arthur Machen, and William Blake, and Can, and dub and old garage punk and rock’n’roll. I saw the Fall 52 times and without MES my life would have been utterly different and nowhere near as much fun. What on earth are we all going to do with ourselves now?
Stewart Lee
2018-01-28T16:10:16+00:00
In among all the post-match analysis of MES’s genius way with words and his theatrical gift for apparently effortless vocal dramatics, amid all these sociological meditations upon what the Fall told us about the world, let it not be forgotten what fun it was to be a Fall fan! Our great big brilliant secret. And my phone is filled with shared condolences, many from friends I made because of the Fall. The places Mark would make us go in his pursuit of minimal venue overheads – vast forgotten Irish clubs in Cricklewood, derelict discotheques in Croydon, five-night runs in rooms above pubs, packed beyond capacity. And the nerveracking thrill of not knowing which side of the thin line between transcendental and terrible tonight’s show might fall. Two nights in a row, in the same room, with the same set list, utterly unrecognisable from one another. And who was still going to be in the band? And what hilarious half-heard fragment would you snatch from the muffled lyrical mix tonight? My favourite from the last album? “All salute at the altar of filo pastry.” Tributes to artists often end up being more about the person writing them, but MES provided me with an alternative education, looping me into Camus, and Arthur Machen, and William Blake, and Can, and dub and old garage punk and rock’n’roll. I saw the Fall 52 times and without MES my life would have been utterly different and nowhere near as much fun. What on earth are we all going to do with ourselves now?
Demob happy, perhaps, after the cancellation of his TV show, Comedy Vehicle, Lee’s new set found the éminence grise of contemporary comedy in unusually loose and playful form – visibly enjoying himself, of all things. Yes, you could see the joins between the Brexit material and the critique of 21st-century digi-narcissism that Lee had originally intended to deliver. But Content Provider remained a blissfully funny and skilful show.
Stewart Lee
2016-12-13T21:59:54+00:00
5. Stewart Lee Leicester Square theatre, London Demob happy, perhaps, after the cancellation of his TV show, Comedy Vehicle, Lee’s new set found the éminence grise of contemporary comedy in unusually loose and playful form – visibly enjoying himself, of all things. Yes, you could see the joins between the Brexit material and the critique of 21st-century digi-narcissism that Lee had originally intended to deliver. But Content Provider remained a blissfully funny and skilful show.
A quarter of a century ago, Nick Saloman's home recordings as The Bevis Frond revivified then forgotten forms, three minute acid-pop nuggets bleeding into twenty minute guitar freak-outs.
A Walthamstow Hendrix, wet with drizzle, Saloman brokered a nostalgic negotiation with the psychedelic sounds of his Sixties childhood. The Leaving Of London, his first album since quitting the city seven years ago, retains Saloman's plaintively naturalistic sentiment and trademark, melodically dissonant, solos.
Stupid Circle and Heavy Hand both embody his quietly genre-defying methods, with propulsive riffs, recalling the Cobain-canonised Portland punks The Wipers, sweetened by wide-eyed hippy harmonies.
Stewart Lee
2011-10-30T01:20:07+00:00
A quarter of a century ago, Nick Saloman's home recordings as The Bevis Frond revivified then forgotten forms, three minute acid-pop nuggets bleeding into twenty minute guitar freak-outs. A Walthamstow Hendrix, wet with drizzle, Saloman brokered a nostalgic negotiation with the psychedelic sounds of his Sixties childhood. The Leaving Of London, his first album since quitting the city seven years ago, retains Saloman's plaintively naturalistic sentiment and trademark, melodically dissonant, solos. Stupid Circle and Heavy Hand both embody his quietly genre-defying methods, with propulsive riffs, recalling the Cobain-canonised Portland punks The Wipers, sweetened by wide-eyed hippy harmonies.
In January, a sulphurous cloud of French pollution drifted across from France to further stink out vast areas of Surrey, its stench so powerful that it overwhelmed the natural foul odours of Eric Clapton, who dwells silently in the hideous region, a subterranean blues truffle.
It was as if the smelly Gallic gas glob did not respect international borders, and had imagined it could just blow around on the wind wherever it liked, a giant goose feather fashioned only from farts, irrespective of our exemption from the Schengen area agreement. Clearly, a continent-wide environmental strategy is required.
In other apocalyptic news, last month all 10 million Swedes were sent leaflets warning them to prepare for Russian invasion by stockpiling their cellars with Swedish staples like meatballs, delicious cakes and pornography.
Our own response to the perceived Russian threat has been to delay the visa of the Putin-backing billionaire Roman Abramovich, who I once stood next to while watching 80s Los Angeles band the Long Ryders in a venue he owned. This was perhaps the only point of overlap in the simplistic Venn diagram of Russian oligarchs and alternative country pioneers, apart from the brief period when Oleg Deripaska played pedal steel for Jason & the Scorchers.
But the threat of Russian invasion is especially problematic in the peacenik nude bathing utopia of Sweden which, in 1980, took official measures to discourage retailers from selling war toys to children. Not knowing one end of a gun from another, Swedes will be fighting the oncoming Russian hordes in the streets with Buckaroos ™, Fuzzy Felts ™ and Slimes ™.
Ironically, street combat with apparently harmless toys is exactly the kind of unpredictable surrealist strategy favoured by Putin’s art-school propaganda adviser Vladislav Surkov, and will either result in an unexpected Swedish victory, or a Russian counter attack involving Stretch Armstrongs ™, Mutons ™, and Kerplunks ™.
I envy the Swedes the simplistic certainty of the threat of Russian invasion. Here Brexit means that, like the ladies in the flashbacks in The Handmaid’s Tale, we are sleepwalking into a rightwing coup without noticing. What supplies should we stockpile in our British cellars to survive subjugation by the Brexiteers? French horns? Kraftwerk bootlegs? Experts?
Those hated experts were in conspicuously short supply last week as the environment secretary M Gove responded to demands from the corrupt fat cats of the unelected EU that we take more serious steps to stop choking ourselves, our European neighbours, and our whole planet to death.
Have they learned nothing in their Brussels ivory tower? This is exactly the kind of interfering attitude that brought about Brexit. If British people want to choke themselves and their children to death in a foul smog of car fumes that is up to us, and it’s not for beret-wearing traitors like Monsieur Jacques Delors, Madame Michèle Yvette Marie-Thérèse Jeanne Honorine Alliot-Marie and Monsieur Eddie Izzard to tell us we can’t.
British air pollution levels are above those recommended by the World Health Organisation for 90% of our population, and fall far short of the meddling EU’s less stringent recommendations. But when we leave the deplorable EU the untrustworthy adopted nest-cuckoo M Gove has promised we will actually aim to better the shit EU’s environmental standards, even as he flounders towards deregulated food supply life rafts made of his friend Donald Trump’s maggoty meats.
The literary stereotype of an orphan is of a meek and hopeful lamb child. But take it from me, all orphans lie, and M Gove is no exception. Last week, in the heat of the Windrush backdraft, the vengeful adoptee also claimed, counterintuitively, that Brexit “has made the UK more welcome to migration and more open to more people entering”. The shamans of the Lakota nation, searching for someone to fulfil the ritual role of the heyoka, the crazy backwards clown, for whom all truths are inverted, need look no further than M Gove for their future holy fool.
You don’t have to be Doubting Thomas ®, from God®’s The Bible ™, to doubt the airy assurances M Gove bubbles through his lying goldfish lips. Pirate Liam Fox sees a buccaneering Britain, bustling with freebooting Tom of Finland businessmen in unbuttoned shirts, thigh length sea-chaps and skull medallions, and is unlikely to allow its forthcoming post-Brexit economic miracle to be hampered by costly self-imposed environmental legislation, me hearties.
Clearly, the pollution crisis needs a top-to-bottom strategy, with the immediate elimination of the internal combustion engine as its ultimate goal. M Gove has promised to phase out diesel- and petrol-driven cars by 2040, a tiny flatus puff in a vast tornado, 22 years of slow death away.
As usual M Gove and his west London friends, essentially the human equivalent of the all-controlling Orangutan priests in the dystopia of Planet of the Apes, will find a way of remaining untouched in their airtight Notting Hill survival biospheres, their constituents choking to death beneath the Westway outside.
The £19,000-a-year Notting Hill Preparatory school has begun fitting £5,000 air filters to each of its classrooms, and who can blame it. But one looks forward to an M Gove government implementing the same safety measures in every state school across the country, perhaps employing cost-cutting subcontractors with the same bottom-line attention to detail as the Grenfell Tower cladders.
Breathable air for school children, it appears, is to become an economic privilege, like private education, not a basic human right. When I blagged into a private school on an orphan’s charity bung in 1979, I was taken aback by the playing fields, the chapel, and the Welsh mountain geography-trip cottage. Back in those halcyon days, I took the idea that I’d be able to breathe the air as read.
Stewart Lee
2018-06-03T17:56:34+01:00
In January, a sulphurous cloud of French pollution drifted across from France to further stink out vast areas of Surrey, its stench so powerful that it overwhelmed the natural foul odours of Eric Clapton, who dwells silently in the hideous region, a subterranean blues truffle. It was as if the smelly Gallic gas glob did not respect international borders, and had imagined it could just blow around on the wind wherever it liked, a giant goose feather fashioned only from farts, irrespective of our exemption from the Schengen area agreement. Clearly, a continent-wide environmental strategy is required. In other apocalyptic news, last month all 10 million Swedes were sent leaflets warning them to prepare for Russian invasion by stockpiling their cellars with Swedish staples like meatballs, delicious cakes and pornography. Our own response to the perceived Russian threat has been to delay the visa of the Putin-backing billionaire Roman Abramovich, who I once stood next to while watching 80s Los Angeles band the Long Ryders in a venue he owned. This was perhaps the only point of overlap in the simplistic Venn diagram of Russian oligarchs and alternative country pioneers, apart from the brief period when Oleg Deripaska played pedal steel for Jason & the Scorchers. But the threat of Russian invasion is especially problematic in the peacenik nude bathing utopia of Sweden which, in 1980, took official measures to discourage retailers from selling war toys to children. Not knowing one end of a gun from another, Swedes will be fighting the oncoming Russian hordes in the streets with Buckaroos ™, Fuzzy Felts ™ and Slimes ™. Ironically, street combat with apparently harmless toys is exactly the kind of unpredictable surrealist strategy favoured by Putin’s art-school propaganda adviser Vladislav Surkov, and will either result in an unexpected Swedish victory, or...
Scandinavia embraced Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman while America still shunned them.
Alan Wilkinson, punchy prize-fighting saxophonist of the London free improvisation scene, follows his spiritual forebears North to record, at last, with three long-time Norwegian collaborators.
The guitarist Kim Johannesen's dextrous velocity rings exhibitionistic alarms, but it's allied to a heroic push to the extremities, sympathetically ensnared by Dag Eric Knedal Andersen's wild off-beats and Ola Høyer's volcanically boiling bass.
Wilkinson huffs and puffs and blows their house down, finally spitting out the read to break into his trademark ecstatic babbling.
Stewart Lee
2013-03-17T00:53:13+00:00
Scandinavia embraced Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman while America still shunned them. Alan Wilkinson, punchy prize-fighting saxophonist of the London free improvisation scene, follows his spiritual forebears North to record, at last, with three long-time Norwegian collaborators. The guitarist Kim Johannesen's dextrous velocity rings exhibitionistic alarms, but it's allied to a heroic push to the extremities, sympathetically ensnared by Dag Eric Knedal Andersen's wild off-beats and Ola Høyer's volcanically boiling bass. Wilkinson huffs and puffs and blows their house down, finally spitting out the read to break into his trademark ecstatic babbling.
Will Self has written a puff piece in the New Statesman on Stewart Lee and various instruments across the globe measuring the degree of wank in the world have exploded it has been revealed.
Professor Charles Langtree of The Felchfield Institute said 'My Twat barometer melted last night.'
'Then the Wankometer blew up followed by the Arse-i-flex erupting. I have never seen such behaviour on our instruments.'
'I knew from these actions some horrific trio of turd had occurred and upon investigation found the article.'
'Despite being politically in the same place, both myself and world instruments can't cope with the sheer volume of shite. There was a worrying wobble in Neptune's gravitational field at the same time.'
'If this causes the universe to implode, I'm going to be really, really annoyed.'
Stewart Lee
2015-10-20T09:45:20+01:00
Will Self has written a puff piece in the New Statesman on Stewart Lee and various instruments across the globe measuring the degree of wank in the world have exploded it has been revealed. Professor Charles Langtree of The Felchfield Institute said 'My Twat barometer melted last night.' 'Then the Wankometer blew up followed by the Arse-i-flex erupting. I have never seen such behaviour on our instruments.' 'I knew from these actions some horrific trio of turd had occurred and upon investigation found the article.' 'Despite being politically in the same place, both myself and world instruments can't cope with the sheer volume of shite. There was a worrying wobble in Neptune's gravitational field at the same time.' 'If this causes the universe to implode, I'm going to be really, really annoyed.'
To search for contemporary queens of comedy you need look no further than performers like Victoria Wood, French and Saunders and, of course, the 'slimline' Jo Brand. But they follow in the footsteps of some quite special comic ladies, a number of them still raising a laugh today.
The Comediennes (R2, from Thursday, January 19) is a series celebrating the lives of such performers, with archive material which includes interviews and memories of classic sketches.
The first programme focused on Irene Handl, and dealt with her memorable portrayals of cockney characters, as well her work with artists like Peter Sellers.
It was an interesting half hour, though I felt the formula was a little haphazard and unsatisfying. However, there was a vast improvement in the second instalment when the spotlight was turned on Hattie Jacques. Male, funny and considerably more modern, Lee and Herring are currently causing hilarious havoc on Radio 1 (from Monday, January 9).
This is no ordinary hour of music and chat - in fact Stewart and Richard appear to select records either for their bizarre content or so that they can deliberately label them worthless.
My favourite bits were the outrageous tribute band competition, hapless Peter Baynham's lifestyle tips and the alternative parable.
It had me laughing out loud.
Stewart Lee
1995-02-02T21:35:03+00:00
To search for contemporary queens of comedy you need look no further than performers like Victoria Wood, French and Saunders and, of course, the 'slimline' Jo Brand. But they follow in the footsteps of some quite special comic ladies, a number of them still raising a laugh today. The Comediennes (R2, from Thursday, January 19) is a series celebrating the lives of such performers, with archive material which includes interviews and memories of classic sketches. The first programme focused on Irene Handl, and dealt with her memorable portrayals of cockney characters, as well her work with artists like Peter Sellers. It was an interesting half hour, though I felt the formula was a little haphazard and unsatisfying. However, there was a vast improvement in the second instalment when the spotlight was turned on Hattie Jacques. Male, funny and considerably more modern, Lee and Herring are currently causing hilarious havoc on Radio 1 (from Monday, January 9). This is no ordinary hour of music and chat - in fact Stewart and Richard appear to select records either for their bizarre content or so that they can deliberately label them worthless. My favourite bits were the outrageous tribute band competition, hapless Peter Baynham's lifestyle tips and the alternative parable. It had me laughing out loud.
“A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
LET’S HOPE IT’S THE FIRST ONE
WITHOUT ANDREW NEIL!”
Some notes on this tour – I’m seeing various things speculating on-line about why I am doing particular venues, with various imagined personal motivations. I have seen this called a stadium tour; that I have ‘sold out’ etc. I am not playing any stadiums. If anything, for the most part, I am doing longer runs in smaller rooms. I may do some stadiums in 2028, with a special stadium-satirising set, but not yet. As usual tour dates choices come down to the same rather mundane things;
1) Will the venue have excess charges to punters and back door secondary ticketing markets? Are their merchandise %s so punitive it is not possible to run the shop without making a loss? If so I aim to avoid them wherever possible.
2) Will it work for my bad deaf hearing aid ears? Sadly some spaces just aren’t working for me anymore, despite how hard the lovely staff tried, so I am now doing longer runs at smaller more acoustically secure spaces in some towns. B’ham Symphony Hall is bouncy and I do struggle there – one of the shows on the last tour was particularly tough to hear - but the second city has pretty much no-where else to play that is ever available and/or large enough. Royal Festival Hall can be hard for me to hear from the stage but works well for the punters themselves and is extremely safe in terms of ticketing in a way most big London spaces aren’t, where rip offs are rife. And it’s a classy joint!
3) What is actually available in the tour timeframe? The Scottish leg of the tour is increasingly difficult in terms of finding available, appropriate and acoustically secure spaces that are well run with no ticket tout infiltration or secondary market shit. This time around there’s a lot of unknowns. We have to land in Glasgow during the comedy festival as the big venues are sublet to the festival at that time, which makes them easier to deal with. Edinburgh in August is not really viable now, especially in Oasis year, so I am doing one big night at the Playhouse in Sept.
4) I’ll be 58 when I finish this tour, and I am deaf with coronary artery disease. I won’t be able to carry on spreading the 250,000 people that want to see me over all these smaller shows in nice little theatres for ever and in my ‘60s may just squat at big but eminently playable spaces, like the lovely Lowry in Salford or the delightful Dome in Brighton, for as long as they will have me, and you will have to travel! It’s been a blast but I am worn out! You spend your life trying to do the right thing in the essentially criminal world of Showbiz. Nobody thanks you for it. Make me a sandwich!
5) I haven’t been to Northern Ireland lately, not because I think it’s ‘too dangerous’, but because in Belfast the Opera House is the only venue that works for me acoustically, and ideally I will tie a trip in with Derry/Londonderry, and the Republic, and the latter has become difficult for various reasons - none of which are to do with being 'afraid' of Ireland. Quite the opposte. I much prefer it to most of England, for example. For Snowflake/Tornado bringing across the shark mechanism would have been a challenge in terms of time and money and manpower. We had a whole Irish secondary set built to tour Carpet Remnant World on the island. Sorry. I miss you and your lovely lands.
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.
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
3rd December 2024 – 17th 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.
Opening at Leicester Square Theatre in December 2024 the new show will tour to UK cities throughout 2025.
Leicester Sq Theatre, London 3rd Dec 2024 – 17th Jan 2025 7pm, except for 6pm and 8.30 pm Sat 4th Jan.
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 - ON SALE SOON
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
3. 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.
5. FESTIVAL SETS 2025
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.
6. Robber Nince
The comedian Robin Ince is so much more than that now. He is becoming a proper poet, not just some comedian who gets their poetry published because they are a micro-celeb, and increasingly good writer of impassioned polemics that never tip over into haranguing the reader. Here’s another one. https://thecosmicshamblesnetwork.substack.com/p/true-british-horror-stories.
7. TWO DANIEL KITSON BENEFITS
Daniel Kitson’s newsletter announces two benefits the world’s greatest living stand-up is hosting, thus.
Monday 9th of December - Union Chapel, London, for the PDA society w Ian Smith, Ania Magliano, Amy Gledhill and Rob Auton - Tickets are available HERE
Wednesday 18th of December - Exeter Phoenix for Tom Parry’s kids Pre School or something like that. Mike Wozniak, Amy Mason, Mike Bubbins, Will Adamsdale, Mel Owen and my sweet, sweet, collaborator and one time neighbour and all time king of midfield ball retention, Gavin Osborn. - You can get tickets HERE.
VICTORIAN RADICALS – BIRMINGHAM MUSEUMS & ART GALLERY, UNTIL DEC 23RD 2024 AT LEAST https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/exhibitions/victorian-radicals
Three generations of British artists, designers and makers revolutionised the visual arts in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and his circle and the men and women of the Arts and Crafts movement transformed art and design.
VANESSA BELL – MILTON KEYNES GALLERY - 23rd 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 – 9th 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.”
ALFIE BROWN
The very good stand-up comedian Alfie Brown tours his OPEN HEARTED HUMAN ENQUIRY show. alfiebrowncomedian.com
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 autobiographyLong Live Great Bardfield, Garwood excelled as a fine artist and printmaker. Her diverse and enchanting works are gems of the mid-20th century.
THE DAMNED Black Album/Strawberries line-up, with hard-wristed Holy Grail headhunter Rat Scabies back on drums.
JACKIE OATES AND JOHN SPIERS Super-folk team up’s festive fun
DECEMBER
6th - Reith Hall, Swaledale, N York
7th - Wychwood Folk Club, Chipping Norton
8th - Folk at the Froze, Woodridge, Suffolk
9th - Colchester Arts, Colchester
10th - Riverhouse Barn, Walton Upon Thames
11th - Chapel Arts, Bath
13th - Ropewalk, Barton Upon Humber
14th - Flowergate Hall, Whitby, N Yorks
20th - Nailsea Folk Club, Bristol
21st - The Globe, Hay-On-Wye
22nd - Halsway Manor, Taunton
DISCHARGE D-beat deadbeats
DECEMBER
7th – Newcastle Byker Grave
13th- Stoke On Trent somewhere
14th – B’ham Castle & Falcom
JAN 4th – London 100 Club
FEB 2nd – Bristol Fleece
THE BLUE AEROPLANES Annual Xmas wig-out from British art-rock institution
DECEMBER 8th Bristol Fleece
THE FALLEN WOMEN – LEXINGTON LONDON DEC 28TH –
The Female Fall Tribute super-group and live karaoke outfit are back in the biffin bridge between Xmas and New year to blast away your festive blues. https://www.thelexington.co.uk/event.php?id=2897
20-odd songs performed by you THE PUBBERLICK and some special celebrity guests.
THE GENTLE SPRING Former Field Mouse Michael Hiscock returns from his French fastness as The Gentle Spring, semi-acoustic indie-pop in hand.
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 BannisterBuy 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
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
22nd - Newcastle - The Cluny
23rd - Glasgow - St Lukes
24th - Sheffield - Greystones
25th - Leicester - The International
26th - Nottingham - Metronome
27th - Cambridge - Portland Arms
28th - 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
4th - Dublin Academy
5th – Glasgow Galvanisers’ Yard
6th – Newcastle Uni Union
7th – London Electric Ballroom
8th – Liverpool Academy
9th – Birmingham Institute
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
13th – M’cr Gullivers
14th – B’ham Castle & Falcom
15th – Nottingham JT Soar
20th – Ramsgate Music Hall
21st – Bristol Thunderbolt
22nd – London Lexington
23rd – Brighton Prince Albert
27th – Leeds Lending Room
28th – N’castle Cluny 2
29th – Glasgow Mono
HAWKWIND 2025. Another implausible trip for the psychedelic survivors, Dave Brock still imperious, even from his stool.
APRIL
17th – Gateshead Glasshouse
18th – Guildford G Live
19th – Bournemouth Pavillion
20th – B’ham Symphony Hall
MAY
9th – Aylesbury Waterside
10th – Liverpool Auditorium
11th – M’cr Bridgewater Hall
23rd – Sheffield City Hall
25th – Cambridge Corn Exchange
26th – London Barbican
THE NIGHTINGALES Birmingham post-punk leg-ends hit the road again. When will it end?
MAY
21ST Leeds Brudenell
22nd Newcastle Think Tank
23rd Glasgow Stereo
24th M’cr Deaf Institute
25th B’ham Castle & Falcon
27th Bristol Exchange
28th Brighton Chalk
29th Cambridge Junction
30th London Oslo
31st Swansea Bunkhouse
10. 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)
11. Janey Godley
I was very sad to learn of the death of the Scottish comedian Janey Godley, and had communicated with her privately in the weeks prior to her passing.
She was a unique voice and, sharing a venue with her at Underbelly throughout much of the ‘00s, I was privileged to watch her learn how to replace standard but effective stand-up material with the bittersweet and brutal stories of her real life that went on to make her such a beloved act. In those days, Janey was one of the acts I took friends and family unfamiliar with the world of stand-up to see, to show them what a vital and varied art form it could be.
She was a compelling figure, by turns exhilarating and exhausting, who I wish I had seen more of in the last few years.
My thoughts are with Sean and Ashley, of whom it was clear Janey was enormously proud.
12.PRIMEVALS MAN-WULF SINGLE
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)
These tracks will be released on Friday 6th Dec, a BC no fees day all proceeds to to the band.
Vinyl sides a&b released on a 45 in January.
“A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR! LET’S HOPE IT’S THE FIRST ONE WITHOUT ANDREW NEIL!” Some notes on this tour – I’m seeing various things speculating on-line about why I am doing particular venues, with various imagined personal motivations. I have seen this called a stadium tour; that I have ‘sold out’ etc. I am not playing any stadiums. If anything, for the most part, I am doing longer runs in smaller rooms. I may do some stadiums in 2028, with a special stadium-satirising set, but not yet. As usual tour dates choices come down to the same rather mundane things; 1) Will the venue have excess charges to punters and back door secondary ticketing markets? Are their merchandise %s so punitive it is not possible to run the shop without making a loss? If so I aim to avoid them wherever possible. 2) Will it work for my bad deaf hearing aid ears? Sadly some spaces just aren’t working for me anymore, despite how hard the lovely staff tried, so I am now doing longer runs at smaller more acoustically secure spaces in some towns. B’ham Symphony Hall is bouncy and I do struggle there – one of the shows on the last tour was particularly tough to hear - but the second city has pretty much no-where else to play that is ever available and/or large enough. Royal Festival Hall can be hard for me to hear from the stage but works well for the punters themselves and is extremely safe in terms of ticketing in a way most big London spaces aren’t, where rip offs are rife. And it’s a classy joint! 3) What is actually available in the tour timeframe? The Scottish leg of the tour is increasingly difficult in terms of finding...
On the opening night of the Leicester Comedy Festival, a smattering of empty seats can be seen as Stewart Lee takes to the stage of De Montfort Hall. The absentees do not go unnoticed.
The faux-embittered comedic juggernaut seems displeased that he failed to sell out the first of two Leicester dates and he is determined thereafter to make the audience, as well as himself, work for their night's entertainment.
'Content Provider' didn't need to be a challenge for anybody. When addressing the treasure trove of accessible material created by recent political happenings, Lee finds a way to simultaneously complain about the short lifespan of Brexit and Trump jokes, whilst also shaping parts of his show around them.
He expertly structures opening segments of each act in order to highlight the absurdity of both events and hold a mirror between them.
As has come to be expected, Lee's relationship with the audience is suitably jagged.
He playfully challenges Leicestershire's political leanings, questions their usage of Gary Lineker as a cultural figurehead and berates audience members attempting a stealth exit to the toilets.
He does however, earnestly provide local comedy fans with a recommendation, in the form of Paul Currie, who will appear at the Firebug this Saturday.
What sets 'Content Provider' apart from most of what you will see at the festival is the unique overarching theme.
With the help Caspar David Friedrich's oil painting 'Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog', the show's main objective is to explore our position within the chaos of digital consumerism.
He tackles social media, dating apps, instant gratification and even 'Game Of Thrones'. It's powerful, it's pointed and it's hilarious.
As he points out, Lee is now viewed as a spokesperson for the metropolitan liberal elite.
Many critics feel as though his main purpose is to massage the pre-existing ideas of his left-leaning audience.
A Stewart Lee show is engrossing, masterfully crafted and occasionally exhausting.
Much to the dismay of Lee's on-stage persona, this left-leaning Leicester audience seem more than happy to receive the aforementioned massage and have their hard work rewarded in a big way.
Stewart Lee
2017-02-10T17:17:35+00:00
On the opening night of the Leicester Comedy Festival, a smattering of empty seats can be seen as Stewart Lee takes to the stage of De Montfort Hall. The absentees do not go unnoticed. The faux-embittered comedic juggernaut seems displeased that he failed to sell out the first of two Leicester dates and he is determined thereafter to make the audience, as well as himself, work for their night's entertainment. 'Content Provider' didn't need to be a challenge for anybody. When addressing the treasure trove of accessible material created by recent political happenings, Lee finds a way to simultaneously complain about the short lifespan of Brexit and Trump jokes, whilst also shaping parts of his show around them. He expertly structures opening segments of each act in order to highlight the absurdity of both events and hold a mirror between them. As has come to be expected, Lee's relationship with the audience is suitably jagged. He playfully challenges Leicestershire's political leanings, questions their usage of Gary Lineker as a cultural figurehead and berates audience members attempting a stealth exit to the toilets. He does however, earnestly provide local comedy fans with a recommendation, in the form of Paul Currie, who will appear at the Firebug this Saturday. What sets 'Content Provider' apart from most of what you will see at the festival is the unique overarching theme. With the help Caspar David Friedrich's oil painting 'Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog', the show's main objective is to explore our position within the chaos of digital consumerism. He tackles social media, dating apps, instant gratification and even 'Game Of Thrones'. It's powerful, it's pointed and it's hilarious. As he points out, Lee is now viewed as a spokesperson for the metropolitan liberal elite. Many critics feel as though his main purpose...
The Assembly Rooms audience don’t know quite what to make of Stewart Lee. The Edinburgh Fringe veteran has spent the best part of the last two decades inspiring both a dedicated following and an equally ardent opposition with his divisive and heavily ironic brand of tongue-in-cheek intellectual comedy.
Luckily, the dramatic difference of opinion towards him is something Lee revels in. In his 2015 show “A Room With A Stew”, a testing-ground for material for his upcoming Comedy Vehicle series, he makes full use of the divide, turning his 70-minute slot into the comedic equivalent of a Mexican stand-off.
He shows his hand early on in the performance, explicitly warning anyone watching him for the first time that his act doesn’t always represent his own beliefs. Instead, he suggests, he prefers to create a fictionalised caricature of himself to run in parallel with the surface humour, creating a narrative arc with greater depth and complexity than you’d expect at a usual top-tier stand-up show.
That’s not the way to impress an audience half-filled with people who already think you’re too intellectual. But, more like a conjuror than a comedian, throughout the show Lee relentlessly pulls off that most impressive feat of telling his audience it’s all smoke and mirrors but making them believe it regardless.
“A Room With A Stew” bears all the hallmarks of a classic Stewart Lee show: there’s heavy irony, excessive repetition and obscure cultural references, meandering off-piste segments that somehow weave their way seamlessly back into the narrative fabric, and off-mic tirades of abuse at an audience he insists is simply too slow to understand quite how clever he and his jokes are.
Lee is unlikely to win any new fans tonight, but it doesn’t look like he wants to either. It’s the show of a comedian who knows exactly who he and his audience are, and he’s not going to change that just because it’s not his usual crowd tonight. Instead, he pushes his method to breaking point, leaving the majority of the crowd wondering whether it’s even supposed to be funny anymore.
As ever, Lee’s good jokes are met with applause rather than laughs, but the response to his finest moments in “A Room With A Stew” is most often a stunned silence. If there’s one thing that unifies the crowd tonight, it’s that both Stewart Lee’s admirers and detractors will go home with their pre-existing opinions reinforced, shaking a clenched fist and shouting: ‘I told you so!’
Stewart Lee
2015-08-26T00:25:29+01:00
The Assembly Rooms audience don’t know quite what to make of Stewart Lee. The Edinburgh Fringe veteran has spent the best part of the last two decades inspiring both a dedicated following and an equally ardent opposition with his divisive and heavily ironic brand of tongue-in-cheek intellectual comedy. Luckily, the dramatic difference of opinion towards him is something Lee revels in. In his 2015 show “A Room With A Stew”, a testing-ground for material for his upcoming Comedy Vehicle series, he makes full use of the divide, turning his 70-minute slot into the comedic equivalent of a Mexican stand-off. He shows his hand early on in the performance, explicitly warning anyone watching him for the first time that his act doesn’t always represent his own beliefs. Instead, he suggests, he prefers to create a fictionalised caricature of himself to run in parallel with the surface humour, creating a narrative arc with greater depth and complexity than you’d expect at a usual top-tier stand-up show. That’s not the way to impress an audience half-filled with people who already think you’re too intellectual. But, more like a conjuror than a comedian, throughout the show Lee relentlessly pulls off that most impressive feat of telling his audience it’s all smoke and mirrors but making them believe it regardless. “A Room With A Stew” bears all the hallmarks of a classic Stewart Lee show: there’s heavy irony, excessive repetition and obscure cultural references, meandering off-piste segments that somehow weave their way seamlessly back into the narrative fabric, and off-mic tirades of abuse at an audience he insists is simply too slow to understand quite how clever he and his jokes are. Lee is unlikely to win any new fans tonight, but it doesn’t look like he wants to either. It’s the show of a...
The ubiquitous multi-instrumentalist Ken Stringfellow staffed Alex Chilton's Big Star for seventeen years, prolonged REM's painful decline, and co-fronts Seattle's resilient power pop professionals The Posies. His solo albums beat his band projects, omnivorously devouring vast swathes of canonical American pop tropes, tailgating bigger beasts like Wilco or The Flaming Lips.
Drop Your Pride is a Broadway Bond theme belter; Pray is horn-laden Seventies soul; the weightlessly weird Odorless, Colorless, Tasteless recalls Chilton's experimental moments; Doesn't It Remind You Of Something? channels Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's broken-hearted country pop duets. Stringfellow is the Leonard Zelig of American Alterno-rock.
Stewart Lee
2012-09-30T21:53:37+01:00
The ubiquitous multi-instrumentalist Ken Stringfellow staffed Alex Chilton's Big Star for seventeen years, prolonged REM's painful decline, and co-fronts Seattle's resilient power pop professionals The Posies.His solo albums beat his band projects, omnivorously devouring vast swathes of canonical American pop tropes, tailgating bigger beasts like Wilco or The Flaming Lips.Drop Your Pride is a Broadway Bond theme belter; Pray is horn-laden Seventies soul; the weightlessly weird Odorless, Colorless, Tasteless recalls Chilton's experimental moments; Doesn't It Remind You Of Something? channels Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's broken-hearted country pop duets.Stringfellow is the Leonard Zelig of American Alterno-rock.
They say you sit in seat D4 of the Lyric Theatre in the Lowry Centre listening to a performance of My Favorite Things at a comedy show twice in your career...
The first time was a month ago, when I and eight friends (yes, I do have eight friends; admittedly one of them was my mum, but she still counts, right?) took up half the row watching the I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue stage-show. As part of the show, in which the funny men spontaneously improvised the exact same answers that they had spontaneously improvised when we saw them at the Palace Theatre last year, Jeremy Hardy and Tim Brooke-Taylor performed the old I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again sketch, The Julie Andrews Dirty Songbook. That MP3 cuts off before the best bit, a performance of My Favorite Things in which every single word is buzzed out except "tied up with" and "these are a few of my favourite things".
The whole audience almost certainly knew the routine off by heart, but that’s hardly the point. I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is made up entirely of catchphrases, jokes so old they would have got a comic booed off stage in the forties, and new jokes cunningly disguised as old jokes. It’s the comedy of comfort, and it gets by entirely on the charm and timing of its regular performers (and it does so extremely well - Graeme Garden, in particular, is simply the finest comic performer I’ve ever seen).
Tonight, I was sat again in seat D4 of the Lyric Theatre. This is not because I have some sort of fetish for seat D4 - if anything it’s at a very slightly awkward angle for me compared with other seats - but because D4 is the kind of seat you’re going to get if you buy tickets for a popular comedy show that will sell out, but won’t sell out straight away, and you buy them the day they go on sale, but not the very hour they go on sale, and you click "best available tickets" on the Lowry’s confusing and ungainly ticketing system.
As those who have read Stewart Lee’s two books of annotated stand-up routines will know, Lee chooses the music before his shows very carefully, in an effort to both prepare and put off his audience. Last time I saw him at the Lowry, the intro music was extended instrumental jams by Canned Heat, several minutes at a stretch of one-chord chugging boogie, presumably chosen so that it would say to audiences who’d come to see "someone off the telly" that this would be monotonous, extended, variations on one or two ideas, and that they would find it slow and boring.
This time, as I entered the room, My Favorite Things by John Coltrane was playing. Initially we had the studio version, and it was spellbinding. I know the track extremely well, of course, but I don’t have a particularly good sound system or anything, so hearing it coming through a huge theatre PA, McCoy Tyner’s piano and Elvin Jones’ drums coming from the giant speaker near me, Coltrane’s soprano sax in the other speaker seeming to come from a whole other world, feeling immersed in the music, feeling like the space I was in *was* the music, was a powerful experience, hearing Coltrane riff on, improvise around, and play with the melody, taking this simple, trite, few bars and turn it into thirteen minutes and forty-four seconds of pure creativity, wringing every possible variation from it.
While sitting there, I look around at the audience. Lee will later do his usual thing of trying to split the audience, attacking the new people who he pretends aren’t as good as the people who used to come and see him in XS Malarkey ten years ago.
(I saw him at XS Malarkey ten years ago. It was the day John Tyndall, the neo-Nazi founder of the BNP, died. I told Toby Hadoke, the compere, this during the interval, and he quickly adapted an old joke to fit the story and put it in his introduction).
There did seem to be a few people who don’t seem to be Lee’s normal audience there, but most of them were familiar faces, even if I didn’t know them. Sat two seats away from me was the comics internet’s own Illogical Volume, but younger, thinner, and less Scottish. Behind me was the comics internet’s own James Baker, but fatter and more female. There were at least three of the comics internet’s own Andrew Hickey, but with more hair and better-looking. There was also a Haroon from my local comic shop, but a month older, but I suspect that was the actual Haroon from my local comic shop, who I haven’t seen in about a month. This isn’t a Peter Kay audience.
Then the music stopped, and the next piece started. My Favorite Things by John Coltrane. Mono this time, presumably a live version. Impossible to immerse myself this time, as the sound’s all coming from one place. Coltrane taking more risks, being more daring still with the melody, as he’s presumably playing to an audience that’s familiar with his work.
Then the music stopped, and the next piece started. My Favorite Things by John Coltrane. Mono again, and this time he doesn’t bother with the piano introduction, or with stating the melody, he’s just straight in with squawking and skronking, implying bits of the melody, trusting the rhythm section to keep the structure, and trusting the listener to follow him.
Then that cuts out, mid-phrase, we get a blast of some atonal vocal music I don’t recognise, and then Stewart Lee comes on stage to a Jack Nitzsche style surf instrumental.
This year’s show, like last year’s, is Lee trying out material for his TV show. This makes for an interesting experience. Lee is a master of structuring a long-form show, and seeing the compromises he makes between doing half-hour long, delineated bits that can stand alone for the TV and creating a through-line for the show is absolutely fascinating. Tonight’s show broke into roughly four sections - Islamophobia, Urine, The UKIPs, and Panel Show Hack Comedians - which will, in some form, become four episodes of the next series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.
The methods Lee uses to create a structure in this material actually seem to owe a lot to Harry Hill. Before the TV funnyman blurred the line between parody of hack light entertainer and actual hack light entertainer to the point where maybe he himself no longer knows the difference, Hill was one of the most astonishingly innovative standups I’ve ever seen, doing sets where he would come up with a beautiful comic idea, riff on it for a while, drop the subject, and then five minutes later make a comment as an aside that worked as a punchline for the earlier section. I’d not made the connection before, but a LOT of what Lee does on stage, the callbacks, the non-jokes and the asides, seems to stem from Hill.
(Or maybe Hill got it from Lee. The two worked together in the late 90s, but it’s not something I’ve seen in Lee’s work before the early 2000s, so I’m attributing it to Hill).
Oddly, there are more "actual jokes" in this set than in anything I’ve seen Lee do before. The set needs them. The first half, in particular, is Lee taking all his stylistic tics to the limit. Pretending to have a nervous breakdown on stage, shouting at the audience off mic, deliberately making jokes fail so he can berate the audience, making obvious jokes, stopping before the punchline, and then berating the audience for laughing at nothing, parodying observational comics, talking about how people ask "why don’t you make fun of the Muslims?", his gran having an unusual family saying, repeating the same phrases over and over... anyone at all familiar with Lee’s work will be, well, familiar with this. But it’s departing further and further from the conventional comedy routines in which those things were originally set.
While the routines are nominally about Islamophobia and urine, in fact the whole first half is actually about the process of writing, and about ageing, and fear of mortality, a multi-layered discussion of the creative process framed with notional subjects but, like all Lee’s best work, really about something other than what it claims to be about. Lee refers in the second half to Brecht’s theatre of alienation (another of his many regular tricks is to explicitly explain, in great academic detail, exactly what he’s just done, in ways that make the show more-or-less immune from criticism.
Lee seems here to be getting closer to what he describes in How I Escaped My Certain Fate as his ambition:
Ideally, routines as told by comedians, as opposed to jokes told by blokes in the pub and cab drivers, will reach a stage where they are impossible to plagiarise. In the year 2525, the futuristic supa-comedian in his silver suit will have developed an act so distinctive and steeped in his own individual specialised world view, that his lines would be incomprehensible in the mouth of anyone else
Lee is getting closer to this all the time, but at the moment he’s had to actually up the quotient of suitable-for-the-pub one-liners, as ways to punctuate sections where he is otherwise performing I Wish I Could Fly, performing the Orville part as Roy "Chubby" Brown and the Keith Harris part as The Comedian Stewart Lee. But these one-liners are mostly marker points, in a first set that’s almost entirely devoted to analysis of itself.
The second set, consisting of a routine about UKIP and a piece which he claims is so new he has to read it from sheets of paper (I say "claims" because another recurring motif in Lee’s work is to pull out a piece of paper to add spurious authority, and while this *looks* to me like Lee genuinely trying out new material, it could be one more layer of performativity) about hack comedians on panel shows. This second set is, on the whole, slightly less successful to my mind.
This is only a relative thing - and actually the single funniest section of the entire show was a multiple-minute routine where Lee merely made noises into a microphone, imitating "the traditional Belgian music of the theremin, the elastic bands stretched over a box full of worms, and an annoyed duck being poked with a stick", a piece which had me actually crying with laughter and unable to breathe - but I thought the UKIP material was possibly a little more obvious than the earlier material.
(Actually, in the extremely unlikely event that Mr Lee ever reads this, two suggestions about structure, micro and macro. On the micro level, I think that cat diahorrea is probably more disgusting than human excrement to most people, so the build in the UKIP section seems slightly off. On the macro level, if you place the UKIP material at the start of the set, then do the Islamophobia stuff to close the first half, then did the hack comedians bit followed by urine in the second half, that would give the show more of a coherent throughline. The political stuff has an undercurrent of anxiety about the process of writing comedy, which is made more explicit in the hack comedians stuff which in turn intensifies the themes of ageing and being made obsolete, which are stronger still in the urine section. I think doing the same material but in that order would make the whole structure stronger, but it’s a minor point).
That said, even Lee at his most obvious is both funny and has something to say, and the conceit of the UKIP section (of various things which are semi-plausibly named after UKIP members, soiling the English flag in ever more disgusting ways, with the story supposedly being told as a way to get round UKIP’s proposal to ban venues that receive government subsidies from having comedians who criticise them on) is multi-layered, clever, and funny. It’s just not *quite* up to the level of the first half.
It’ll be interesting to see how much further Lee can carry this technique. He’s *almost* skirting the edge of self-parody here - but then, I’ve thought that for a while. Every show gets more... well, more "Stewart Lee"... than the one before, and every time his audiences get larger. It’s fascinating to watch.
On the way home, the tram into Piccadilly station was packed, and the station itself even more so, swarming with drunks thanks to the killer combination of Valentine’s Day and Saturday night. Everyone from the tram seemed in a hurry, but I sauntered up the stairs and then saw that my train was going to leave in thirty seconds. I joined a pack of people all sprinting for the same train, and we jumped in just as the doors closed, and looked at each other breathless and grinning. One of the people in this little cluster turned to another and said "I assume you’ve all come from seeing the same thing we have?"
And the other replied "Yes, Peter Kay".
Stewart Lee
2015-02-15T21:56:52+00:00
They say you sit in seat D4 of the Lyric Theatre in the Lowry Centre listening to a performance of My Favorite Things at a comedy show twice in your career... The first time was a month ago, when I and eight friends (yes, I do have eight friends; admittedly one of them was my mum, but she still counts, right?) took up half the row watching the I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue stage-show. As part of the show, in which the funny men spontaneously improvised the exact same answers that they had spontaneously improvised when we saw them at the Palace Theatre last year, Jeremy Hardy and Tim Brooke-Taylor performed the old I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again sketch, The Julie Andrews Dirty Songbook. That MP3 cuts off before the best bit, a performance of My Favorite Things in which every single word is buzzed out except "tied up with" and "these are a few of my favourite things". The whole audience almost certainly knew the routine off by heart, but that’s hardly the point. I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is made up entirely of catchphrases, jokes so old they would have got a comic booed off stage in the forties, and new jokes cunningly disguised as old jokes. It’s the comedy of comfort, and it gets by entirely on the charm and timing of its regular performers (and it does so extremely well - Graeme Garden, in particular, is simply the finest comic performer I’ve ever seen). Tonight, I was sat again in seat D4 of the Lyric Theatre. This is not because I have some sort of fetish for seat D4 - if anything it’s at a very slightly awkward angle for me compared with other seats - but because D4 is the kind of...
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.
Stewart Lee
2015-08-09T01:24:26+01:00
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,...
Club Z returns again for more brainwashing of the highest order. Simon Munnery (alias Alan Parker) is The League Against Tedium, a super-being of 1984 proportions who is better than us.
He uses a large screen with hidden messages and short sketches to command his all-seeing, all-knowing, all- powerful, all-baloney facade over us. A range of stars - including Kevin Eldon, Jason Freeman and Stewart Lee - have their potential talent colossally wasted in sketches that were probably thought of as a passing indulgence.
But Munnery's super-geek host with a trendy mike-staff is not bad. I confess the majority of my nine laughs were as a result of his beady- eyed Kenneth Williams-on-something-strong expressions.
There were multiple cock-ups, pyrotechnics, music and props.
But the bottom line was the huge audience which was laughing at largely poor material, delivered by decent solo stand-ups.
Stewart Lee
1997-08-28T19:17:56+01:00
Club Z returns again for more brainwashing of the highest order. Simon Munnery (alias Alan Parker) is The League Against Tedium, a super-being of 1984 proportions who is better than us. He uses a large screen with hidden messages and short sketches to command his all-seeing, all-knowing, all- powerful, all-baloney facade over us. A range of stars - including Kevin Eldon, Jason Freeman and Stewart Lee - have their potential talent colossally wasted in sketches that were probably thought of as a passing indulgence. But Munnery's super-geek host with a trendy mike-staff is not bad. I confess the majority of my nine laughs were as a result of his beady- eyed Kenneth Williams-on-something-strong expressions. There were multiple cock-ups, pyrotechnics, music and props. But the bottom line was the huge audience which was laughing at largely poor material, delivered by decent solo stand-ups.
Stewart Lee returns for what seems like his 145th Edinburgh show with a ‘work in progress’. Likely to be a different show every night, Lee is showcasing old and new material which he intends to use for an upcoming television project. Because of the format it’s impossible to say what will come up on any given night, but with this old-hand there is always the guarantee of seeing a stand-up who is completely at ease with his material and who promises to have the audience eating out of his hand.
His trademark delivery is slow, considered and uses repetition to dramatic comedic effect – especially, on this night, when he reprises his ‘Del Boy falling through the bar’ routine from last year’s 41st Best Stand Up Ever show. A deconstruction of a record sleeve by a black American comic seems pretty likely to be on the bill throughout the Fringe and builds up beautifully to devastating comedic effect. Ever self-deprecating, Lee takes time to rail against himself as he ventures into well-worn “lazy” observations on Travelodge hotels. Other highlights include a self-penned addition to the modern phenomenon of tragedy literature and definitive material on the much-publicised Fringe box office problems which should make other comics forget about even trying to cover the subject.
The only problem is that going to see any other comedy performer after the mighty Lee feels like switching over to EastEnders after watching a Dennis Potter drama. Simply one of the most mesmerising comedians working today.
Stewart Lee
2008-08-11T13:56:31+01:00
Stewart Lee returns for what seems like his 145th Edinburgh show with a ‘work in progress’. Likely to be a different show every night, Lee is showcasing old and new material which he intends to use for an upcoming television project. Because of the format it’s impossible to say what will come up on any given night, but with this old-hand there is always the guarantee of seeing a stand-up who is completely at ease with his material and who promises to have the audience eating out of his hand. His trademark delivery is slow, considered and uses repetition to dramatic comedic effect – especially, on this night, when he reprises his ‘Del Boy falling through the bar’ routine from last year’s 41st Best Stand Up Ever show. A deconstruction of a record sleeve by a black American comic seems pretty likely to be on the bill throughout the Fringe and builds up beautifully to devastating comedic effect. Ever self-deprecating, Lee takes time to rail against himself as he ventures into well-worn “lazy” observations on Travelodge hotels. Other highlights include a self-penned addition to the modern phenomenon of tragedy literature and definitive material on the much-publicised Fringe box office problems which should make other comics forget about even trying to cover the subject. The only problem is that going to see any other comedy performer after the mighty Lee feels like switching over to EastEnders after watching a Dennis Potter drama. Simply one of the most mesmerising comedians working today.
If ever there was a comedian who divided opinion, it's Stewart Lee.
Older readers may remember him from his other comedy vehicle – the 1990s decidedly-studenty Fist Of Fun, with Richard Herring.
Stewart doesn't do jokes as such … but don't turn away just yet, for the man offers up a deliciously esoteric slant on daily life that you will never, ever get anywhere else. In other words, he's a comedy genius. Think the ferocity of Bill Hicks paired with the eye for the absurdity of Eddie Izzard. And that's still not really it.
The 90s comedian treads a wafer thin line between the often eye-poppingly outrageous reflections of his stand-up persona and the musings and life of the real "Stew".
Stewart also cleverly plays about with the curious and often absurd interchange between his two audiences (the ones at home and in the stalls).
Tonight's jaw-dropping story is all about a cat called Jeremy Corbyn. It is very, very funny.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-17T22:09:25+00:00
If ever there was a comedian who divided opinion, it's Stewart Lee. Older readers may remember him from his other comedy vehicle – the 1990s decidedly-studenty Fist Of Fun, with Richard Herring. Stewart doesn't do jokes as such … but don't turn away just yet, for the man offers up a deliciously esoteric slant on daily life that you will never, ever get anywhere else. In other words, he's a comedy genius. Think the ferocity of Bill Hicks paired with the eye for the absurdity of Eddie Izzard. And that's still not really it. The 90s comedian treads a wafer thin line between the often eye-poppingly outrageous reflections of his stand-up persona and the musings and life of the real "Stew". Stewart also cleverly plays about with the curious and often absurd interchange between his two audiences (the ones at home and in the stalls). Tonight's jaw-dropping story is all about a cat called Jeremy Corbyn. It is very, very funny.
On Tuesday morning I woke in Liverpool with a start, my heart hammering after a night of the most wretched thoughts. The last thing I had seen before I lurched into a fitful sleep had been a foul thing – that Rishi Sunak and Piers Morgan summit – and the day had begun in the Welsh Marches, where I encountered a haunting vision of doom. But wait, old friend. I am getting ahead of myself. Pass me those statins and that Nespresso ™ ® and I’ll begin at the beginning.
Somehow, he said he had been “taken by surprise”, Sunak had accepted a £1,000 bet off Piers Morgan. We need greater self-control from the man who has the full might of the depleted British armed forces at his command, currently six crates of old Lee-Enfields, four 25p boxes of Fun Snaps ™ ® and a camouflaged milk float! God help us if there’s a war! Oh! Hang on! There is.
Notions of plausible denial do a lot of heavy lifting for Sunak. Did Sunak intend to make a joke about trans people at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, only seconds after Keir Starmer had acknowledged the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, whose father has since demanded an apology? Or did he consider Ghey’s memory mere collateral damage as he chased the culture war votes he fears he may be losing to Liz Truss’s shit-stoking Popular Conservatives? Sunak is either a moron or a bastard.
Never mind. Sunak staked £1,000 on finally sending a flight of the frightened to the police state of Rwanda, which, despite his attempt to legislate around the nature of factual reality in parliament, remains a country where a dozen migrants were shot dead protesting over food rationing. We know from their lockdown parties that Conservatives love Abba. A £1,000 bet. The gods may throw the dice. Their minds as cold as ice.
Perhaps the worst thing about Sunak’s bet is how offensively small the sum is. Sunak’s family wealth is valued at about £530m and is likely to grow ever larger as more British public sector contracts find their way to Infosys, the company his wife part-owns.
Last week, it emerged that the former £300,000 Tory donor Dominic Johnson, ridiculously rewarded by becoming the minister of state for regulatory reform, had declared he was “keen to see a bigger Infosys presence in the UK and would be happy to do what he could to facilitate that… at a ministerial level”. There are small-town pound-shop-front-window ram-raids with more dignity than the dying days of Sunak’s rapacious, asset-stripping administration.
But the sum of £1,000, which Sunak bet, is only 0.000188679245% of the £530m that represents his joint personal wealth. The average Brit’s total personal wealth was, in 2020, £125,000; 0.000188679245% of £125,000 is £0.235849056603. So in real terms, Sunak bet just over 20p on getting flights off to Rwanda. A multimillionaire took a 20p bet on the lives of the world’s flotsam, just for fun, on TV, like a spaghetti western bad guy coldly shooting a fleeing peon dead for his own amusement, and tossing a single coin on to the brain-sodden sand beside the still twitching corpse of our international standing.
The only way Sunak’s wager would carry any weight is if he bet an amount that meant to him what £1,000 would mean to the average Brit, as a relative percentage of his total wealth. Sunak should, logically, have bet £4.2m on the realisation of the Rwanda scheme. Anything less than that is a meaningless insult to, for example, everyone who died in the second world war, fighting to make sure that their children’s children could one day deport people to Rwanda, even if the highest court in the land had declared it unsafe.
But it wasn’t just the chilling soulless cruelty of Sunak alone that filled my Monday night with fear. On Monday morning, I found myself in the stunning 16th-century St Giles’ church in Wrexham, looking for some stained glass made at the Edward Burne-Jones workshop, but it was the haunting remnants of a medieval doom painting above the nave that made the most lasting impression. Doom paintings were 12th and 13th-century depictions of the Last Judgment, mainly stripped from British churches by Henry VIII, the Robert Jenrick of the Reformation, but ghostly shadows of some survive. And the roof boss face of a devil hangs high in Wrexham, laughing at the eternally tormented.
The most distressing doom painting I have ever seen is Buonamico Buffalmacco’s c1336 fresco The Triumph of Death in the Camposanto in Pisa, Italy. At its centre, a dead-eyed devil crunches naked bodies into its mouth, and we see them writhing and dissolving in its stomach below, as all around the hideous figures of humans in torment suffer. Because I woke on Monday to doom paintings and went to sleep on Monday to Sunak, I rose on Tuesday with the prime minister’s cruel smirking face superimposed on that of Buffalmacco’s ravenous demon, suffering citizens stuffed in his maw, washed down with sewage, still raw.
Jung said dreams are the “emissary of the unconscious, whose task it is to reveal the secrets that are hidden from the conscious mind”. My subconscious clearly lacks any subtlety and has arguably overplayed its hand. But you don’t need a Jungian to know which way the wind blows. For the sake of the nation’s soul, Sunak must go.
Stewart Lee
2024-02-11T15:45:25+00:00
On Tuesday morning I woke in Liverpool with a start, my heart hammering after a night of the most wretched thoughts. The last thing I had seen before I lurched into a fitful sleep had been a foul thing – that Rishi Sunak and Piers Morgan summit – and the day had begun in the Welsh Marches, where I encountered a haunting vision of doom. But wait, old friend. I am getting ahead of myself. Pass me those statins and that Nespresso ™ ® and I’ll begin at the beginning. Somehow, he said he had been “taken by surprise”, Sunak had accepted a £1,000 bet off Piers Morgan. We need greater self-control from the man who has the full might of the depleted British armed forces at his command, currently six crates of old Lee-Enfields, four 25p boxes of Fun Snaps ™ ® and a camouflaged milk float! God help us if there’s a war! Oh! Hang on! There is. Notions of plausible denial do a lot of heavy lifting for Sunak. Did Sunak intend to make a joke about trans people at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, only seconds after Keir Starmer had acknowledged the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, whose father has since demanded an apology? Or did he consider Ghey’s memory mere collateral damage as he chased the culture war votes he fears he may be losing to Liz Truss’s shit-stoking Popular Conservatives? Sunak is either a moron or a bastard. Never mind. Sunak staked £1,000 on finally sending a flight of the frightened to the police state of Rwanda, which, despite his attempt to legislate around the nature of factual reality in parliament, remains a country where a dozen migrants were shot dead protesting over food rationing. We know from their lockdown parties that...
This live video of the Lee and Herring double act captures us at our worst, recorded in a rush at the beginning of a tour and with inaudible audience response.
A badly advised venture immediately available in garage forecourt discount bins.
Our performance on the inanely titled Comic Relief live video Rude For A Reason is also shit, and now completely unavailable.
Live At The Cochrane is included as an extra feature on the box set of the first series of Fist Of Fun - Now available via Go Faster Stripe
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T19:42:01+00:00
Not strictly a DVD, but an old VHS release. This live video of the Lee and Herring double act captures us at our worst, recorded in a rush at the beginning of a tour and with inaudible audience response. A badly advised venture immediately available in garage forecourt discount bins. Our performance on the inanely titled Comic Relief live video Rude For A Reason is also shit, and now completely unavailable. Live At The Cochrane is included as an extra feature on the box set of the first series of Fist Of Fun - Now available via Go Faster Stripe
The New Zealand lo-fi legends The Puddle's engagingly sloppy indie-pop was epically unadorned.
But what the band's own press release tellingly describes as 'florid saxophone embellishments' on some songs here, suggest that for a quarter century these apparently inspired folk-art amateurs might actually have been frustrated exponents of emotionally explicit mainstream rock.
There's a sub-Velvets classic lurking in In Dreams but someone's honked over it. Nonetheless, fans of Pavement and the nineties American slack school can squint and see the southern hemisphere source of those insouciant grooves, and the decision to retell Norse Mythology chug guitar style on the nine minute Valhalla is inspired.
Stewart Lee
2011-01-21T21:18:57+00:00
The New Zealand lo-fi legends The Puddle's engagingly sloppy indie-pop was epically unadorned. But what the band's own press release tellingly describes as 'florid saxophone embellishments' on some songs here, suggest that for a quarter century these apparently inspired folk-art amateurs might actually have been frustrated exponents of emotionally explicit mainstream rock. There's a sub-Velvets classic lurking in In Dreams but someone's honked over it. Nonetheless, fans of Pavement and the nineties American slack school can squint and see the southern hemisphere source of those insouciant grooves, and the decision to retell Norse Mythology chug guitar style on the nine minute Valhalla is inspired.
Christ was born in a barn. This proves that he came for all humankind, as well as reducing his parents’ options for witty off-the-peg verbal critiques of him should he leave their front door open. Bearing Christ’s universality in mind, on Christmas Day at lunchtime I made my guests stand to listen to a few hours of festive recordings I had sourced via a bent Prison Service contact. A choir of people convicted of offences relating to the summer riots performed a selection of seasonal songs as my guests listened, hands on their hearts. The man who took a brick in the testicles in Southport added a particularly effective descant on the closing verse of Feed the World. Auntie Gladys was in tears and the old man from next door soiled himself in woe.
In the run-up to Christmas, I pondered all those less fortunate than me who would perhaps have to spend the season in prison; or worse still, those who will have to make polite conversation over the turkey with elderly Reform-voting relatives who still think Brexit was a great idea but it just wasn’t done right, and that Nigel Farage is “a character”.
Meanwhile, 19 environmental protesters, soon to be lauded as martyrs in the planet’s last line of defence, celebrated Christmas in British jails this year, doubtless eating artificially fertilised food and opening wasteful cards, like the trust fund-funded middle-class student hypocrites they are.
One 77-year-old Quaker layabout do-gooder, Gaie Delap, initially instructed to serve her sentence at home, was also told she would spend Christmas in prison; the private company contracted to imprison the climate heroine could not find an electronic tag small enough for her, provision for Delap’s wrist circumference presumably lying outside the break-even margins deemed acceptable by its shareholders.
No privatised British incarceration service could reasonably be expected to hold so small a Quaker and still turn a profit. Criminals are usually large anyway, like that Charles Bronson bloke and the Kingpin in Daredevil. I hope the tiny Quaker gave the screws the slip through a ventilation grille and then floated away on a cocktail umbrella. Madam! History will exonerate you!! Be strong!!! We salute you… from our nice homes, admittedly.
The imprisonment of the environmental protesters is a brown stain on our nation’s history. But Elon Musk, whose purchase of the Ricky Gervais fansite and pornbot accelerant Twitter (currently X) has made him the world’s most influential horse tranquilliser consumer, thinks the throb-veined sunbed magnate and mortgage fraudster Tommy Robinson is also a political prisoner; a veritable white Nelson Mandela for the street cocaine and supa-strength cider generation.
Indeed, in November, on Twitter (currently X), Musk asked: “Why is he [currently Tommy Robinson] in prison for 18 months?” It’s telling that Musk had to openly ask this, rather than just running the question through his own social media app, as he has now degraded Twitter (currently X) so much that all that would have come up were links to porn, AI graphics of Donald Trump fighting a transgender Godzilla, and motivational quotes from Musk himself. (“It’s OK to have all your eggs in one basket, as long as you bought the eggs off me and I rented you the basket.”)
Robinson is, of course, in prison for making false claims about a young Syrian refugee in a film, and then repeatedly showing the film when he’d been asked nicely not to. Although to be fair, unlike James Mangold, the director of A Complete Unknown, at least Tommy Robinson didn’t show Bob Dylan composing Girl from the North Country a full year before he learned the Scarborough Fair melody it is based on from Martin Carthy while playing small folk clubs in London. Who is the real criminal here?
Robinson, and Musk, and Farage circulated inflammatory assumptions from the likes of the professional misogynist and self-styled “webcam pimp” Andrew Tate, and rioters were inspired by these comments. But should cruelly misled summer rioters find themselves spending Christmas in jail, for the crime of simply having tried to burn down migrant hostels full of children in good faith? I don’t know. It was for that reason that I commissioned my own Christmas choir of convicted rioters.
That, and because Trump did the same thing a week or so before Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Largo, when recordings of the convicted January 6 rioters singing the national anthem were played for guests. Later the same month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dined there with Trump. This is a man who has all your personal details going back decades, and photos of every fancy dress party you attended, every assignation you engineered, and every political demo you ever walked peacefully along with – and he’s desperate to be in with the new boss.
You are nothing to these people, just low-hanging fruit for whoever has the money to buy the means to mind-map you into being the voter they want you to be. Western democracy is all over bar the shouting.
But there was a strange sliver of hope on Christmas Day when, somehow, the old BBC liberal values leaked through, as if even the Tory place-people that have gerrymandered the board realised Christmas programmes need to be a little bit nice.
Oh look! A feminist ghost story from 1887 (admittedly adapted and directed by a man)! Oh look! A queer black Doctor in Doctor Who creates the star that leads the wise men to the baby Jesus! It’s the wokest Christmas TV ever! For one day, like Robert De Niro in Awakenings, the BBC was back to its old self. And that’s where I’ll be, in the darkest moments of the coming year of despair, flashing myself back into the Baileys haze where an animated dog and an Asian policewoman defeated an army of malevolent AI gnomes controlled by an evil penguin who really should have been in jail.
Stewart Lee
2025-01-05T19:38:03+00:00
Christ was born in a barn. This proves that he came for all humankind, as well as reducing his parents’ options for witty off-the-peg verbal critiques of him should he leave their front door open. Bearing Christ’s universality in mind, on Christmas Day at lunchtime I made my guests stand to listen to a few hours of festive recordings I had sourced via a bent Prison Service contact. A choir of people convicted of offences relating to the summer riots performed a selection of seasonal songs as my guests listened, hands on their hearts. The man who took a brick in the testicles in Southport added a particularly effective descant on the closing verse of Feed the World. Auntie Gladys was in tears and the old man from next door soiled himself in woe. In the run-up to Christmas, I pondered all those less fortunate than me who would perhaps have to spend the season in prison; or worse still, those who will have to make polite conversation over the turkey with elderly Reform-voting relatives who still think Brexit was a great idea but it just wasn’t done right, and that Nigel Farage is “a character”. Meanwhile, 19 environmental protesters, soon to be lauded as martyrs in the planet’s last line of defence, celebrated Christmas in British jails this year, doubtless eating artificially fertilised food and opening wasteful cards, like the trust fund-funded middle-class student hypocrites they are. One 77-year-old Quaker layabout do-gooder, Gaie Delap, initially instructed to serve her sentence at home, was also told she would spend Christmas in prison; the private company contracted to imprison the climate heroine could not find an electronic tag small enough for her, provision for Delap’s wrist circumference presumably lying outside the break-even margins deemed acceptable by its shareholders. No privatised British...
I’m sure most stand-up regulars know that situation where you have to force laughter out, even with a comedian you really like. Their set might be good, but you might be doing it to keep the energy up, or just out of courtesy. However, whenever I watch Lee, live or not, the laughter is honest and never forced.
The reason lies in the fact that most of Lee’s comedy doesn’t come from the set-up and punchline formula, even though it is there; it comes from everything around the joke. Lee’s characteristic deconstructive style emphasises the absurdist nature of all stand-up comedy, it makes you realise the bizarre situation of one person standing in front of hundreds of strangers, trying to make them laugh.
Everything you could expect from a Stewart Lee set is there; meticulously planned moments of audience contempt, frantic repetition, and unrelenting self-deprecation. It’s stand-up pedigree, go see him.
Stewart Lee
2015-08-14T16:39:25+01:00
I’m sure most stand-up regulars know that situation where you have to force laughter out, even with a comedian you really like. Their set might be good, but you might be doing it to keep the energy up, or just out of courtesy. However, whenever I watch Lee, live or not, the laughter is honest and never forced. The reason lies in the fact that most of Lee’s comedy doesn’t come from the set-up and punchline formula, even though it is there; it comes from everything around the joke. Lee’s characteristic deconstructive style emphasises the absurdist nature of all stand-up comedy, it makes you realise the bizarre situation of one person standing in front of hundreds of strangers, trying to make them laugh. Everything you could expect from a Stewart Lee set is there; meticulously planned moments of audience contempt, frantic repetition, and unrelenting self-deprecation. It’s stand-up pedigree, go see him.
We are living in strange times in the country and it really does feel like we are going through a historical moment in history.
As Bristol's first night of the annual Comedy Garden festival got under way a demonstration was taking place in the wind and the rain just a couple of hundred yards away.
We are not quite at the stage of manning the barricades but it really does feel that politics actually means something and has got people talking.
Stewart Lee might not be one of the biggest names on the comedy circuit but he has a devoted following and never has problems selling out major venues whenever he tours.
He has a loyal fan base and everyone who turns up for one of his shows. His rancorous – almost spiteful outlook – is very much of the left and he is not one to hold back the punches when he goes on the attack.
Lee was the last comedian to take to the stage last night on a bill that also included Josie Long, James Acaster and Tony Law. Josie Long was compering and it felt like it was virtually impossible not to bow to the inevitable.
Of course, the comics were always going to be preaching to the converted but there was a real sense of anger and frustration in the room.
Anyone who put their cross in the exit box must have been sitting pretty uncomfortably last night as jokes at the expense of the leave campaign were met with roars of approval.
James Acaster was up second and although just as left wing his style was a lot less confrontational. His lengthy comparison between a cup of mint tea and the vote bought the house down.
Next up was Tony Law who's act is almost impossible to describe. It was the most surreal and the least political. And then came the star of the show who walked on to stage to rapturous applause.
The man who everyone came to see was clearly trying out new material and the first quarter of the set was a referendum rant.
But Stewart Lee can do anything he wants as far as his audience is concerned and they lapped every minute of his set.
Josie long came back on stage to close proceedings and the whole event turned into something of an anti-Brexit rally.
The clearly emotional comedian got the biggest cheer of the night with what amounted to a political rallying cry.
Stewart Lee
2016-06-29T17:47:44+01:00
We are living in strange times in the country and it really does feel like we are going through a historical moment in history. As Bristol's first night of the annual Comedy Garden festival got under way a demonstration was taking place in the wind and the rain just a couple of hundred yards away. We are not quite at the stage of manning the barricades but it really does feel that politics actually means something and has got people talking. Stewart Lee might not be one of the biggest names on the comedy circuit but he has a devoted following and never has problems selling out major venues whenever he tours. He has a loyal fan base and everyone who turns up for one of his shows. His rancorous – almost spiteful outlook – is very much of the left and he is not one to hold back the punches when he goes on the attack. Lee was the last comedian to take to the stage last night on a bill that also included Josie Long, James Acaster and Tony Law. Josie Long was compering and it felt like it was virtually impossible not to bow to the inevitable. Of course, the comics were always going to be preaching to the converted but there was a real sense of anger and frustration in the room. Anyone who put their cross in the exit box must have been sitting pretty uncomfortably last night as jokes at the expense of the leave campaign were met with roars of approval. James Acaster was up second and although just as left wing his style was a lot less confrontational. His lengthy comparison between a cup of mint tea and the vote bought the house down. Next up was Tony Law who's act is...
Series 4 of SLCV is recorded now. I am still touring the material.
January 2016
Tuesday 19th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - PLYMOUTH - Theatre Royal, 01752 267222, - TICKETS
Wednesday 20th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - TRURO - Hall For Cornwall, 01872 262466 - TICKETS
Sunday 24th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - NOTTINGHAM - Playhouse, 0115 941 9419 - SOLD OUT
Monday 25th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - WREXHAM - William Aston Hall, 0844 888 9991 - TICKETS
Wednesday 27th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - BRIGHTON - Brighton Dome, 01273 709709 - TICKETS
Friday 29th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - SOUTHEND ON SEA - Palace Theatre, 01702 351135 - SOLD OUT
Sunday 31st - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - WOLVERHAMPTON - Grand Theatre, 01902 429212 - TICKETS
February 2016
Tuesday 2nd - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - CAMBRIDGE - Corn Exchange, 01223 357851 - TICKETS
Thursday 4th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - BOURNEMOUTH - Pavillion, 0844 576 3000 - TICKETS
Friday 5th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - TUNBRIDGE WELLS - Assembly Hall Theatre, 01892 530613 - TICKETS
Tuesday 9th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - COVENTRY - Warwick Arts Centre, 024 7652 4524 - TICKETS
Wednesday 10th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse, 0113 213 7700 - SOLD OUT
Thursday 11th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse, 0113 213 7700 - SOLD OUT Saturday 20th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW, Festival Theatre, Chichester - 01243 781312 - TICKETS
March 2016
Monday 14th, 7pm – Royal Festival Hall, London, A Room With A Stew - Marathon Night 4 hrs show.
This is positively the last performance of all the SLCV material, all six half hours.
The series may have actually started being shown by then. TICKETS HERE or on 0207 960 4200.
(Please note - tickets are only on sale to South Bank subscribers until WEDNESDAY 20th JANUARY, when they will go on general sale).
Unpaid Charity Benefit Shows
Feb 6th 2016 – Hackney Homeless, Hackney Empire
March 3rd 2016 – South London Cares, Lecis Sq Theatre
May 5th 2016 – Depression, Union Chapel, London
Other live s-up Dates
(mainly 30 mins sets w some previews)
APRIL 2016
April 29th – May 1st Mach Comedy Fest, N Wales
MAY 2016
3rd – 4th Museum of Comedy, London
5th Proud Archivist, London
9th Betsey Trotwood, London
10th LOL Angel, London
11th-12th Museum of Comedy, London
16th Happy Monday, London
17th Lolitics, London
18th Susan Murray in Walthamstow
19th Museum of Comedy, London
23rd Nice n Spiky, Islington
24th Star, Plumstead, London
25th Jane Bom Bayne’s, Brighton
26th Brian Gittins’, Brighton
JUNE 2016
7th – 9th Soho Theatre, London
13th Tattershall Castle, London
14th Lol Angel, London
15th – 16th Museum of Comedy, London
20th Nice n Spiky, Islington
23rd Mostly Comedy, Hitchin
17th – 30th Soho Theatre, London
JULY 2016
1st – 3rd, ATP, Keflavik, Iceland
4th-7th Soho Theatre, London
5th Chippenham Comedy Festival
SEPT 2016
2nd – 4th End Of The Road
9th Martin Soan’s gig, South London
24th Union Chapel, London
OCT 2016
7th Bush Hall, London
10th Happy Mondays, London
ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES 2016
ATP is thrilled to announce that their second ATP 2.0 festival at Pontins camp in Prestatyn, North Wales is to be curated by comedian and writer Stewart Lee, on 15th - 17th April 2016. Buy Tickets HERE All Tomorrow’s Parties 2.0 will be held at Pontins Holiday Camp in Prestatyn, North Wales, 15th-17th Apr 2016. https://www.atpfestival.com/events/atp042016/tickets
Ordinarily overseen by musicians, 2016’s All Tomorrow’s Parties line-up is hand-picked by acclaimed comedian, writer and renowned music enthusiast Stewart Lee,who joins the few alternative cultural figures who’ve curated the festival in the past including the Simpsons’ Matt Groening (2010) and visual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman (2015). Stewart Lee will also be performing stand-up comedy over the festival weekend.
All Tomorrow’s Parties site of Pontins in Prestatyn, North Wales – chosen for its easy reach for both international and UK customers – benefits from all the facilities you’d expect to find in a holiday camp, including an indoor swimming pool, football pitch, basketball and tennis courts, a crazy golf course, go-kart track, air hockey, a large arcade games area, and a beautiful sandy beachfront only a few hundred metres walk away. All attendees are provided with a chalet as part of the ticket price, which includes beds, a bathroom and a kitchen.
JOHN CAGE’S INDETERMINACY 16
The hit experimental music tour is back for more, with Steve Beresford, Tania Chen and me, randomising Cage’s comments as instructed to order. Dates so far, details to be announced, are…
2016
March 20th – TBC
April 26th – London Café Oto
June 21st – Reading TBC
MY CULTURAL YEAR 2015
Here is a list of everything I can remember hearing, reading and seeing last year
NEW FILMS
The best
By Our Selves (Andrew Kotting 2015) *****
The rest
Sean The Sheep (Ardman 2015)
Avengers Age Of Ultron (Joss Wheedon 2015)
Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015)
The American Epic Sessions (Bernard McMahon, 2015)
Star Wars The Force Awakens (JJ Abrahams 2015)
The worst
Spongebob Squarepants : Sponge Out Of Water (Paul Tibbit, 2015) *
James Bond – Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015) *
OLD FILMS
Scrooged (Richard Donner 1988)
Cat People (Jaques Tourneur 1942)
Guns of Navarone (J Lee Thompson 1961) ****
A Barrel Full Of Dollars (Demofilo Fidani 1971) *
Zulu (Cy Endfield 1964) ****
Tam Lin (Roddy McDowell 1970) ****
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton 1983) ****
Brave (Andrews/Chapman 2012) ****
And The Crows Will Dog Your Grave (Juan Bosch 1972)
The Dirty Fifteen (Nunzio Malasomma 1968)
Any Gun Can Play (Enzo Catellari 1967)
Bandidos (Massimo Dallamano 1967)
Arizona Colt/The Man From Nowhere (Michele Lupo 1966) *
Arizona Colt – Hired Gun/Arizona Colt Returns (Sergio Martino 1970) *
Blue (Silvio Narizzano 1967)
Sabata (Gianfranco Parolini 1969)
Adios Sabata/Indio Black (Gianfranco Parolini 1970) *
Black Jack (Gainfranco Baldanelo, 1969)
Awkward Hands/Clumsy Hands (Rafael Marchent, 1970)
Short & Happy Life Of The Brothers Blue (Luigi Bazzoni, 1973) ****
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) *****
A Colt In The Fist Of The Devil (Gianfranco Badanello, 1967)
Taste of Death (Sergio Merolle 1968) ****
You Are A Carrion And I Will Kill You/Fdral Man (M Estaba, 1974) *
Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci 1966)
Five Man Army (Italo Zingarelli 1969)
Silver Saddle (Lucio Fulci 1978)
Death Rides A Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
The Rats (John Laifa, 2002)
Pom Poko (Isao Takahata 1994) ****
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Steven Herek,1989) ****
Big (Penny Marshall 1988)
My Name Is Nobody (Sergio Leone, Tonino Valerii 1973) ****
The Tramplers (Albert Band, 1965)
Tails You Lose (Piero Pierotti, 1969)
Nest of Vipers/Night of The Serpent (Giulio Petroni, 1969) ****
In A Colt’s Shadow (Giovanni Grimaldi, 1965)
Savage Gringo/Gunman Called Nebraska (Antonio Roman, 1966)
The Moment To Kill (Guilano Carnimeo, 1968)
Full House For The Devil (Giovanni Fago, 1968)
Tequila Joe (Enzo Dell’Aquilla, 1968)
Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984)
Requiem For A Gringo/Duel In The Eclipse (Eugenio Martin 1968)
Gentleman Killer (Giorgio Stegani, 1967)
Kill The Wicked (Tanio Bocia, 1967) ***1/2
Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld 1993) ****
Ratatouille (Brad Bird 2007) ****
This Our Still Life (Andrew Kotting, 2011) ****
Adios Hombre (Mario Caiano, 1967) *
High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
King Of Comedy (Martin Scorcese 1983) ****
Shango (Eduardo Mulargia, 1970)
The Hills Run Red (Carlo Lizzani, 1966)
The Fog (John Carpenter 1980) ****
Dr No (Terrence Young 1962)
Cut-throats Nine (Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, 1971)
A Stranger In Town (Luigi Vanzi, 1966)
The Stranger Returns ( Luigi Vanzi, 1967)
Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) ****
A Town Called Bastard (Robert Parrish, 1971)
The Wizard Of Oz (Victor Fleming 1939)
Scrooge (Ronald Neame 1970) ****
The Nightmare Before Christmas (Tim Burton 1993) ****
Yurusarezaru Mono (Sang-il Lee, 2013) *****
The Return Of Martin Guerre (Daniel Vigne 1982) *****
NEW BOOKS
Richard King - Original Rockers – Richard King
Grayson Perry – Playing To The Gallery *****
Alan Warner – Tago Mago
Kim Gordon – Girl In A Band ****
Paul Panic - I Thought Solihull Was For Snobs
Viv Albertine - Clothes Music Boys
Zoe Williams - Get It Together *****
Nina Lyon - Uprooted ****
OLD BOOKS
Dion Fortune - The Demon Lover (1927)
John Majors – My Old Man (2012) ****
George G Gilman - Edge The Loner (1971)
George G Gilman - Edge $10 000 American (1971)
Oliver Double - Getting The Joke (2012)
Ray Bradbury - Farewell Summer (2006)
TV NEW AND OLD
The Clash, New Year’s Day 1977 (BBC4)
Columbo Seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Catastrophe (C4)
Katie Morag (CBBC)
Gogglebox (C4)
First Dates (C4)
Toast Of London (C4)
Dance Rebels (BBC4)
This Week (BBC1)
Question Time (BBC1)
Endeavour (ITV)
Midsommer Murders (ITV)
Lewis (ITV)
MAGAZINES AND PAPERS
Guardian, Independent, Observer, Mojo, Record Collector, Shindig, Wire, Private Eye, Viz, London Review Of Books, New Humanist, Faunus, Machenalia
RADIO
Today Prog (BBCR4)
The Opera Hour (Resonance 104.4FM)
The Fall Live In Gateshead (BBC 6 MUSIC)
Short Cuts (BBCR4)
John Osborne - Don’t Need The Sunshine (BBCR4)
The Honeydripper (Resonance 104.4 FM)
THEATRE 2015
The best
Tree – Daniel Kitson (Old Vic)
Robert LePage – 887 (Edinburgh International Festival)
War Horse (NT, Talk of London)
Clock Strikes Noon – Jethro Compton (C Venue, Edinburgh)
Ahnen – Tanztheatre Wuppertal, Pina Bausch (Saddlers Wells)
The rest
The Boy Who Bit Picasso (United Artists/Oxford Playhouse)
The Passion Of Jesus (Trafalgar Square)
Puddles’ Pity Party (Assembly, Edinburgh)
The Tiger Who Came To Tea (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
Our Teacher’s A Troll (Paines Plough, Summerhall, Edinburgh)
Land Of The Dragon (Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh)
HP Lovecraft’s Statement of Randolph Carter (The Space, Edbro)
Grid Iron – Light Boxes (Summerhall, Edinburgh)
Blood Red Moon – Jethro Compton (C Venue, Edinburgh)
The Piper (Underbelly, Edinburgh)
Rattlesnake’s Kiss – Jethro Compton (C Venue, Edinburgh)
Matilda (RSC, Cambridge Theatre)
COMEDY 2015
The best
Mark Steel – Who Do I Think I Am? (Assembly, Edinburgh)
The rest
Tony Law – Enter The Tone Zone (LST)
Nick Mohammed – Dracula The Musical (Soho)
Harmon Leon (PBH Free Fringe, Edinburgh)
Zoe Coombs Marr – Dave (Underbelly, Edinburgh)
Shazia Mirza – (Stand, Edinburgh)
Paul Sinha – Postcard From The Z List (Stand, Edinburgh)
Andrew Doyle – Minimalism (Stand, Edinburgh)
Sarah Franken – Who Keeps Making All These People? (Stand, Edibrgh)
Alex Horne – Monsieur Butterfly (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
Lewis Shaffer - £5 Until Famous (Just The Tonic, Edinburgh)
Steve Carlin (PBH Free Fringe, Edinburgh)
Eleanor Tiernan (PBH Free Fringe, Edinburgh)
Martin Mor – Funny Stuff For Happy People (Stand, Edinburgh)
Toby Adams – Quivertip (Free Festival, Edinburgh)
John Luke Roberts (PBH Free Fringe, Edinburgh)
Lolly (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
Nick Doody (PBH Free Fringe, Edinburgh)
Ghost Bus Tour (On a bus, Edinburgh)
Jo Neary (Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh)
Sophie Hagen (Soho Theatre)
GIGS 2015
The best
Wolf People (Great Portland Street)
Kaleidoscope/The Misunderstood (Great Portland St)
Richard Dawson (Bloomsbury)
Bevis Frond (Lexington)
Ex-Easter Island Head (BBC Potterow, Edinburgh)
Richard Youngs/Sun Ra Arkestra (Summerhall, Edinburgh)
The Ex (Summerhall, Edinburgh)
Ex-Easter Island Head (Union Chapel)
The rest
Carla Bozulich (Café Oto)
Maggie Nicols & Caroline Kraabel & Charlotte Hug/The Glowering Figs/ Alan Wilkinson & Malcolm Bruce & Jim Lebaigue (Ryan’s Bar)
Chameleons Vox (Islington Academy)
Sheffield Morris Men 40th Anniversary Day (Sheffield City Centre)
Alan Wilkinson & Akode (Ryan’s Bar)
Radio Birdman (Dome)
Evan Parker/Alexander Schlippenbach/Paul Loven (Café Oto)
Terry Edwards and Neil Frazer (Caley Bar, Edinburgh)
Honeyblood (BBC Potterow, Edinburgh)
Waterboys (Princes St Gardens, Edinburgh)
Captain’s Bar Sunday Session (Captain’s Bar, Edinburgh)
Blueswater (Jazz Bar, Edinburgh)
King Crimson (Hackney Empire)
Patti Smith (Roundhouse)
The Fall (Clapham Grand)
ART
Grotte de Niaux
Herman Nitsch (Summerhall)
HISTORICAL SITES
Stonehenge
Danebury Rings
Figsbury Ring
Hestercombe
Fountains Abbey
Mitchells Fold Stone Circle
Temple of Nodens, Lydney Park
Grotte de Niaux
Puliaurens
Perypertuse
Queribus
Montsegur
Carcassonne
Viles des Termes
Arques
Puivert
ALBUMS I LISTENED TO IN THEIR ENTIRITY OLD SCHOOL THIS YEAR IN ONE SITTING AT A DESIGNATED DEVICE
NEW RECORDS – 2015
The best
The Wolfhounds – Middle Aged Freaks
Pat Todd & The Rank Outsiders – 14th & Nowhere
The Wave Pictures – Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon
The Fall – Sub-Lingual Tablet
Trash Kit – Confidence
The Nightingales – Mind Over Matter
Terrakaft – Alone
Robert Pollard – Faulty Superheroes
Eliza Carthy & Tim Eriksen – Bottle
Phil Minton – A Donut’s End
Walter Salas Humara – Curve And Shake (Blue Rose)
Stick In The Wheel – From Here (From Here)
Sleaford Mods – Key Markets
Laura Cannell – Beneath Swooping Talons
Jason Isbell – Something More Than Free
Bardo Pond – Record Store Day Trilogy
Ricked Wicky – King Heavy Metal
Ricked Wicky – Swimmer To Liquid Armchair
Ricked Wicky – I Sell The Circus
The rest
Darren Hayman – Chants For Socialists
The Waterboys - Modern Blues
The Primevals - Tales Of Endless Bliss
Mark Kozelek - Sings Christmas Carols
Cedell Davis – Last Man Standing
Bob Dylan – Shadows In The Night
White Hills – Walks For Motorists
Ricked Wicky – I Sell The Circus
Nick Pynn - Waterproof
Chris Forsyth – Intensity Ghost
Sonny Simmons & Moksha Samnyasin – Nomadic
Songhoy Blues – Music In Exile
Moon Duo – Shadow Of The Sun
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – Chasing Yesterday
Steve Earle – Terraplane
Damon & Naomi – Fortune
Echo & The Bunnymen – Meteorites
Ryley Walker – Primrose Green
Blue Pills – Live Freak Valley Festival
Richard James – All The New Highways
Jennifer Walshe – Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde
The Catenary Wires – Red Red Skies (Elefant)
The Hazey Janes – Language Of Faint Theory (Armellodic)
Wire – Wire (Pink Flag)
Giant Sand – Heartbreak Pass
Tender Prey – Organ Calzone (Bird)
Sun Kil Moon – Universal Themes (Caldo Verde)
Listening Center – Cycles/Other Phenomena (Deep Distance)
Carlton Melton – Out To Sea
Datura 4 – Demon Blues
Miranda Lambert – Automatic
Children of Leir – s/t
White Manna – Pan
Rich Hopkins & Luminarious – Enchanted Rock
Orange Humble Band – Depressing Beauty
Elle Osborne – It’s Not Your Gold Shall Me Entice
Simon Love – It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time
The Chills – Silver Bullets
Dark Horses – Tunnel At The End Of The Light (Dark Horse)
Robert Forster – Songs To Play (Tapete)
Kim & Leanne – True West (Guilt Free)
Shopping – Why Choose? (Fatcat)
REISSUES, NEW OLD LIVE RECORDINGS, AND COMP’S – 2015
Guided by Voices – Suitcase 4 (*****) was exceptional.
I also loved
Alan Jefferson - Galactic Nightmare
Julian Cope – Trip Advizer
Rhodri Davies –Pedwar
Steel Pulse – Handsworth Revolution w radio sessions
Primevals – Sound Hole
The Sunset Strip – Stone Lazy
REM – Dreaming In Paradise, Live 1983
The Sound – Box Set 1984-87
John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
I also heard
021 – All Was Nothing
V/A – Punk 45 Extermination Nights In The Big City, Cleveland 75-82
V/A – Punk 45 Burn Rubber City Burn, Akron Ohio 75-80
D Bailey, Joelle Leander, George Lewis, Evan Parker – 28 Rue Dunois
Simple Minds – Sparkle In The Rain
Michael Chapman – Window
The Stones – Three Blind Mice
Twink – Think Pink (1969)
Burning Spear – Social Living/Living Dub
Elyse Weinberg – Greaspaint Smile
Guardian Angel – Into Lightnin’ (1972)
DM3 – West of Anywhere
Amanaz – Africa (1975)
Nikki Sudden – Tel Aviv Blues (2002)
Son Volt – Trace (2005)
V/A Heavy Soul
OLD OLD RECORDS THAT I LISTENED TO IN 2015
The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour
The Dream Syndicate – The Days Of Wine & Roses
The Dream Syndicate – The Day Before Wine & Roses
Tangerine Dream – Electronic Meditation
Tangerine Dream – Alpha Centauri
Tangerine Dream - Zeit
Sonny Rollins - Freedom Suite
Sonny Rollins – East Broadway Rundown
Paul Kossof - Back Street Crawler
Fleetwood Mac – Men Of The World (68-70 singles, outtakes)
The Flesh Eaters – Dragstrip Riot
John Coltrane – My Favorite Things
John Coltrane – My Favorite Things, Live At Newport
John Coltrane – Last Performance At Newport
Julian Cope – Revolutionary Suicide (2013)
Richard And Thomas Frost
Ash Ra Temple – Ash Ra Temple (1971)
Aphrodite’s Child – End Of The World
Steeleye Span – Below The Salt (1972)
Mountain – Nanucket Sleighride (1971)
The Go-Betweens – Liberty Belle & Black Diamond Express
The Go-Betweens – Tallulah
Kim Salmon – Hey Believer
Dark – Dark Round The Edges
Fleetwood Mac – Boston (1970)
McCoy Tyner – Sahara (1972)
Echo & The Bunnymen - Evergreen
Cream – Disraeli Gears
Can – Tago Mago
The Backbeat Band - Backbeat
Stiff Little Fingers – Inflammable Material
Black Crowes & Jimmy Page – Live At The Greek (2000)
Andrew Hill – Change
Matt Walker & Ashley Davis – S/T (2005)
Dave Graney – You Wanna Be There But... (2004)
Big Star – Best Of Big Star
Black Sabbath – Master Of Reality
Black Sabbath – Paranoid
Amigos de Maria – Rock (1968)
The Saints – Howling (1996)
Canned Heat – Live At Topanga Coral (1970)
Morrissey – You Are The Quarry
Derek Bailey – Guitar, Drums and Bass
Link Wray – Great Guitar Hits (1972)
Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin – 2
Led Zeppelin – 3
Led Zeppelin – 4
Led Zeppelin – Houses Of The Holy
Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti
Led Zeppelin – Presence
Led Zeppelin – In Through The Out Door
Led Zeppelin – Coda
Meat Puppets – Meat Puppets II
Uriah Heep – Salisbury
Buffy Sainte-Marie – Little Wheel Spin And Spin (1966)
The Chameleons – Script of The Bridge
Dirty Blues Band – Dirty Blues Band (1968)
Edgar Broughton Band – Wasa Wasa (1969)
Edgar Broughton Band – Sing Brother Sing (1970)
Edgar Broughton Band – Edgar Broughton Band (1971)
Pearl Jam – Backspacer (2009)
Durutti Column – The Return Of The Durutti Colum (1979)
Broadcast – Work And Non-Work (1997)
The Primevals - Dig
Dennis Wilson – Pacific Ocean Blue
Durutti Column – LC
Steve Wynn – What I Did After My Band Broke Up (2004)
The Pink Fairies – Never Never Land (1971)
The Doors – The Doors (1967)
The Doors – Strange Days (1967)
The Doors – Waiting For The Sun (1968)
The Doors – The Soft Parade (1969)
The Doors – Morrisson Hotel (1970)
The Doors – LA Woman (1971)
The Grateful Dead – Birth Of The Dead
The Grateful Dead – The Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead – Anthem of The Sun
The Streets – Original Pirate Material (2002)
The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come For Free (2004)
The Streets – The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living (2006)
The Streets – Everything Is Borrowed (2008)
The Streets – Computers And Blues (2011)
Lee Morgan – City Lights (1956)
Lee Morgan – The Cooker (1956)
The Chameleons – What Does Anything Mean Basically? (1985)
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Creedence Clearwater Revival (1968)
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bayou Country (1969)
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Green River (1969)
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Willy & The Poor Boys (1969)
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Cosmo’s Factory (1970)
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Pendulum (1970)
Ultravox! – Ultravox! (1976)
Ultravox – Systems of Romance (1978)
Stud – Stud
Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes - s/t
Catherine Ribeiro – Ame Debout
Robin Williamson – Myrrh
Miranda Lambert – Kerosene
Laura Cannell – Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth
Wendy Saddington & Copperwine – Live (1971)
Hula Hula – s/t (2013)
James Griffin – Just Like Yesterday
David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights – Left By Soft
Patti Smith Group – Horses (1975)
Bliss – Return To Bliss (1969)
Scott Morgan’s Hydromatics - Powerglide
Scott Morgan’s Powertrane – Ann Arbor Revival Meeting (2002)
The Solution – Communicate
Scott Morgan – Medium Rare 1970-2000
Jake Holmes – Letter To Katherine December
Sonic’s Rendezvous Band – Detroit
The Fall – ReMit (2013)
The Fall- The Remainderer (2013)
The Fall – Ersatz Gb (2011)
V/A Virgin Front Line Presents Roots (2014)
V/A Trojan Presents Dub (2011)
V/A Trojan Foundation Dub (2010)
V/A Virgin front Line Presents Dub (2014)
V/A Island Presents Dub (2014)
Lee Perry – Disco Devil
Death – Death III (1976-80)
Nervous Norvus – Stone Age Woo
Khmer Rouge – New York/London 1981-86
Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygene (1976)
Downsiders – All My Friends Are Fish
John Coltrane – Crescent
Cowboy Junkies – Trinity Session
Bert Jansch – Bert Jansch
Suzanne Vega – Suzanne Vega
10 00 Maniacs – In My Tribe
Mark Kozelek – Sings Christmas Carols
Miles Davis – Carnegie Hall
Joe Henderson – Page One
Dexter Gordon – Doin’ Alright
Geoff Wayne – War Of The Worlds
Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly –s/t
Stewart Lee
2016-01-19T16:22:48+00:00
LIVE DATES ROOM WITH A STEW Series 4 of SLCV is recorded now. I am still touring the material. January 2016 Tuesday 19th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - PLYMOUTH - Theatre Royal, 01752 267222, - TICKETS Wednesday 20th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - TRURO - Hall For Cornwall, 01872 262466 - TICKETS Sunday 24th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - NOTTINGHAM - Playhouse, 0115 941 9419 - SOLD OUT Monday 25th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - WREXHAM - William Aston Hall, 0844 888 9991 - TICKETS Wednesday 27th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - BRIGHTON - Brighton Dome, 01273 709709 - TICKETS Friday 29th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - SOUTHEND ON SEA - Palace Theatre, 01702 351135 - SOLD OUT Sunday 31st - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - WOLVERHAMPTON - Grand Theatre, 01902 429212 - TICKETS February 2016 Tuesday 2nd - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - CAMBRIDGE - Corn Exchange, 01223 357851 - TICKETS Thursday 4th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - BOURNEMOUTH - Pavillion, 0844 576 3000 - TICKETS Friday 5th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - TUNBRIDGE WELLS - Assembly Hall Theatre, 01892 530613 - TICKETS Tuesday 9th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - COVENTRY - Warwick Arts Centre, 024 7652 4524 - TICKETS Wednesday 10th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse, 0113 213 7700 - SOLD OUT Thursday 11th - 7.30pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW - LEEDS - West Yorkshire Playhouse, 0113 213 7700 - SOLD OUT Saturday 20th - 8pm - A ROOM WITH A STEW, Festival Theatre, Chichester...
A couple of years ago, the Daily Telegraph's longstanding comedy correspondent reviewed Stewart Lee's then touring show, Much A-Stew About Nothing. Or rather, he reviewed the first half because, boasting rather too gleefully, he walked out at the interval due to Lee's perceived bad attitude towards his audience. If they were handing out prizes for The Person Who Should Probably Know Better Yet Totally Missed The Point in 2013, we'd have a very clear winner.
Were he attending A Room With A Stew, chances are he would have bolted after five minutes. Somehow an experienced comedy critic failed to note that his anti-audience running gag is a fairly natural by-product of the detached snooty intellectual persona that creeps in and out of Lee's stage act. Happily for the crowd, his new show (more try-outs for the next series of his BAFTA-winning Comedy Vehicle) is absolutely packed with laughs as that persona rails and jibes and mocks everything from English nationalism to urine and the ‘polo-necked' Dapper Laughs to, yes, the inadequacies inherent in his crowd as we all work towards making the night a success.
One of his central points in the show is that the news agenda has never been so impossible to pin down, so that any actual intention he may have had to display ironic Islamophobia on stage had been shot to pieces by the ever-changing events of the last year. Instead, he pillories those who think that observational humour and perceptive analyses of fundamentalism go easily hand-in-hand.
Those who love Stewart Lee's deconstruction of both his act and the very nature of stand-up will revel in another prime example of this, while his critics (and friends of fans who came along, only to be bored to death) will have left feeling at best perplexed, and at worst, irritated beyond words.
Reviewed at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Sun 15 Mar. A Room With A Stew is on tour until 8 Jan, 2016
Stewart Lee
2015-03-16T20:21:58+00:00
A couple of years ago, the Daily Telegraph's longstanding comedy correspondent reviewed Stewart Lee's then touring show, Much A-Stew About Nothing. Or rather, he reviewed the first half because, boasting rather too gleefully, he walked out at the interval due to Lee's perceived bad attitude towards his audience. If they were handing out prizes for The Person Who Should Probably Know Better Yet Totally Missed The Point in 2013, we'd have a very clear winner. Were he attending A Room With A Stew, chances are he would have bolted after five minutes. Somehow an experienced comedy critic failed to note that his anti-audience running gag is a fairly natural by-product of the detached snooty intellectual persona that creeps in and out of Lee's stage act. Happily for the crowd, his new show (more try-outs for the next series of his BAFTA-winning Comedy Vehicle) is absolutely packed with laughs as that persona rails and jibes and mocks everything from English nationalism to urine and the ‘polo-necked' Dapper Laughs to, yes, the inadequacies inherent in his crowd as we all work towards making the night a success. One of his central points in the show is that the news agenda has never been so impossible to pin down, so that any actual intention he may have had to display ironic Islamophobia on stage had been shot to pieces by the ever-changing events of the last year. Instead, he pillories those who think that observational humour and perceptive analyses of fundamentalism go easily hand-in-hand. Those who love Stewart Lee's deconstruction of both his act and the very nature of stand-up will revel in another prime example of this, while his critics (and friends of fans who came along, only to be bored to death) will have left feeling at best perplexed, and at...
There are much richer dramatic experiences, though, elsewhere in the programme, and particularly in the two site-specific shows commissioned for the Festival. Johnny Vegas's remarkable solo show Interiors - co-scripted with Stewart Lee - is performed in an empty two-bedroomed semi in Old Trafford, with Vegas giving a superbly-judged performance as Jeffrey, the owner desperately trying to sell us what was once his marital home.
The show emerges as a tragic, funny, and often searing one-hour commentary on the bleak and desperate emotional emptiness that lies behind Britain's TV makeover culture.
Stewart Lee
2007-07-05T00:45:46+01:00
There are much richer dramatic experiences, though, elsewhere in the programme, and particularly in the two site-specific shows commissioned for the Festival. Johnny Vegas's remarkable solo show Interiors - co-scripted with Stewart Lee - is performed in an empty two-bedroomed semi in Old Trafford, with Vegas giving a superbly-judged performance as Jeffrey, the owner desperately trying to sell us what was once his marital home. The show emerges as a tragic, funny, and often searing one-hour commentary on the bleak and desperate emotional emptiness that lies behind Britain's TV makeover culture.
The redoubtable independent production company, Farty Television, have offered £100million to take over the digital channel BBC Three, which is facing a radical on-line only future, due to government assaults on the licence fee.
Though public fondness for BBC Three rests largely on the reputations of quality programs like Gavin and Stacey (Baby Cow), Pulling (Silver River), The Mighty Boosh (Baby Cow) Little Britain (BBC), and 15 Storeys High (BBC), Farty Television's cheap and cheerful BBC3 filler (Snuffle Farty's Good Farts, and Live at the Farthouse), has been a vital ingredient of the channel's identity, and a tragic part of its appeal to the elusive 16 to 16-and-a-half years old demographic.
Farty Television's BBC Three shows have usually been heavily weighted towards featuring farts managed by Farty Television's sister company Farty Management, the farts' fees often going towards servicing debts incurred whilst working in Edinburgh with Farty Television's live wing, Farty Promotions. But the ongoing existence of a public marketplace, such as BBC Three, for Farty Management's farts remains vital.
If Farty Management's farts catch the public imagination they can be sent out on lucrative tours, where the farts are released into vast sports auditoriums for delighted audiences to smell. Farty International can't allow the fart elevating platform of BBC Three to disappear, as it is vital fan wafting their farts towards the open mouths of the public.
Beyond BBC Three, Farty Television's program portfolio is vast in width, if not always rich in quality; Farty Fartball (BBC2), Smelly Farter Farts (Paramount), The Fart Zone (Paramount), Unfarted (ITV), Fart Gentlefarts Fart (Sky), The Fart Show (BBC1), I Love My Farts (BBC1), Farty Phil's TV Fart (ITV1), Farty Old Farts (BBC2), Farty Farton's Well Farty Farts (BBC3), That Sunday Night Fart (BBC3), Farter (BBC Radio 4), Fart Hunt (ITV1), Fart, Fart and Fart (BBC2), You Can Chose Your Farts (ITV1), Fart To Fart (BBC3), Farts for Lunch (BBC Radio 2), Touch Me, I'm Farty Farter (BBC3), The Three Day Fart (C4), The Fart Gang (BBC2), The Farts On A Plate (C4), Three Farts In A Fart (BBC2), Farts Now And Then (UKTV), Farts and Farters (BBC1), Animal Farts and Farters (BBC1), The Nightmare Fart Next Door (C5), and The Nightmare Fart Next Door Extreme(C5).
Perhaps Farty Television are aware that being able to slap a BBC logo on their product would, despite the ongoing attempts of freemarket evangelists to discredit and destroy the idea of public broadcasting, give it a credibility abroad and at home that its content alone might not. But would the BBC Three brand be part of the deal anyway?
The Farty company, and its many subsidiaries, are built in the image of its founder, Donald Farty. Farty prides himself on the fact that, even though he is now the director of a successful multinational content provider, he still has a nose for farts. Donald Farty remains involved at grassroots level in the entrapment of new farts, and is still excited by the process. 'If I am out in a bar or a toilet and I smell a smelly fart, or see one coming out of someone's bum, I gulp it up into my mouth and run home with the fart stuck in there. Then, at home, I burp the new fart out into a screw top jar and trap it so I can explain the benefits of Farty Management to it. Sometimes, in the end, the farts escape, or leak out, or loose their smelliness, but the brilliant thing is there are always new farts out there for me to catch. And there always will be. There will always be farts. I think so anyway.'
Farty Television's plans for BBC Three promise that 'all existing contracts would be honored', indicating though any of the channel's current deals with independent content providers would be safe, though crucially it says nothing about renewing or extending them. And when it says 'all original commissions would be made by UK companies', which UK companies would these be? Perhaps some of the many other smaller independents, which have all been assiduously bought up by Farty Television over the last decade or so, such as Farty Smelle, Fartbox, Flaming Farts, and Topical Farts.
Perhaps Farty could appear to fulfil any broadcasting industry obligation to make contracts with a host of other content suppliers, while in fact just channeling more and more farts quietly through up his own backdoor. There is of course no suggestion that this is what the company is intending to do. The ancient BBC forefather Lord Reith, clearly unfamiliar with modern notions of hot-desking and the virtual office, rose spinning from his tomb today to demand that whatever fixtures and fittings remain of BBC3 be destroyed as a precautionary measure, to prevent their appropriation by what he sees as the enemies of Reithian values.
'No blade of grass, not a pane of glass, not a plug socket, or a doorknob or a light fitting must remain,' he bellowed, shaking his gory locks. 'Destroy it all. Raise BBC Three to the ground lest she fall into the hands of these rapacious railroad privateers. And make no mistake, Farty are pirates. Their extension of a helping hand towards BBC3 is merely a rapacious digital land-grab disguised as an act of philanthropy, no more convincing that Vladimir Putin's concerned humanitarian excursions into ailing former Soviet states. To accommodate Farty's empire-building ambition in what was a publicly owned arena would be a betrayal of everything the BBC stood for, worse than the David Attenborough baby polar bear scandal and when those actors all mumbled in that historical drama last year. If I wasn't already dead I would kill myself.'
Can it be right that Conservative cuts to the license fee weaken areas of the BBC so that they can no longer be serviced fully, and yet these areas still remain attractive to private companies? Then, having been made non-viable by the government, these assets, despite having been established by public funding, are suddenly attractive to, and then sold on to, the government's friends in big businesses to exploit, depriving the public of seeing the benefits of their own decades long investment? It's happened in every other area of British life from Postage to Energy to Transport to Education to Health. It appears to be a deliberate strategy. Why shouldn't it happen in the, if anything even more important, area of Youth Orientated Comedy Television too?
Or was Farty's proposal even serious? Perhaps not. In the last few weeks Farty's PR wing appear to have hired some bright spark from the Vladislav Surkov school of propaganda, distributing disorientating headline grabbing stories that land with heavy impact in an increasingly desperate and ephemeral news pond but which, while placing Farty in the public eye, may not serve to distract from the standards of much of its product and the nature of its business practices.
Stewart Lee
2015-01-21T18:56:17+00:00
The redoubtable independent production company, Farty Television, have offered £100million to take over the digital channel BBC Three, which is facing a radical on-line only future, due to government assaults on the licence fee. Though public fondness for BBC Three rests largely on the reputations of quality programs like Gavin and Stacey (Baby Cow), Pulling (Silver River), The Mighty Boosh (Baby Cow) Little Britain (BBC), and 15 Storeys High (BBC), Farty Television's cheap and cheerful BBC3 filler (Snuffle Farty's Good Farts, and Live at the Farthouse), has been a vital ingredient of the channel's identity, and a tragic part of its appeal to the elusive 16 to 16-and-a-half years old demographic. Farty Television's BBC Three shows have usually been heavily weighted towards featuring farts managed by Farty Television's sister company Farty Management, the farts' fees often going towards servicing debts incurred whilst working in Edinburgh with Farty Television's live wing, Farty Promotions. But the ongoing existence of a public marketplace, such as BBC Three, for Farty Management's farts remains vital. If Farty Management's farts catch the public imagination they can be sent out on lucrative tours, where the farts are released into vast sports auditoriums for delighted audiences to smell. Farty International can't allow the fart elevating platform of BBC Three to disappear, as it is vital fan wafting their farts towards the open mouths of the public. Beyond BBC Three, Farty Television's program portfolio is vast in width, if not always rich in quality; Farty Fartball (BBC2), Smelly Farter Farts (Paramount), The Fart Zone (Paramount), Unfarted (ITV), Fart Gentlefarts Fart (Sky), The Fart Show (BBC1), I Love My Farts (BBC1), Farty Phil's TV Fart (ITV1), Farty Old Farts (BBC2), Farty Farton's Well Farty Farts (BBC3), That Sunday Night Fart (BBC3), Farter (BBC Radio 4), Fart Hunt (ITV1), Fart, Fart...
Pea Green Boat has been revived as a book, illustrated by David Waywell, in 2026. Live launch shows in late 2026. More information is here.
A 25 minute audio cd or luxury 10" vinyl single of my pretentious art-comedy piece PEA GREEN BOAT is now available from www.gofasterstripe.com.
There's download version too.
This is a new version, different to the Radio 4 version.
Pea Green Boat Vinyl
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T23:20:20+00:00
Pea Green Boat has been revived as a book, illustrated by David Waywell, in 2026. Live launch shows in late 2026. More information is here. A 25 minute audio cd or luxury 10" vinyl single of my pretentious art-comedy piece PEA GREEN BOAT is now available from www.gofasterstripe.com. There's download version too. This is a new version, different to the Radio 4 version. [caption id="attachment_12517" align="aligncenter" width="450"] Pea Green Boat Vinyl[/caption]
Hemingway maintained there were no second acts in American lives. The career of the Eighties alternative country pioneer Dan Stuart, a benignly pie-eyed anti-star of gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, might have borne him out. But The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings could be amongst the best of Stuart's fourteen albums, his toad bark voice having eroded into a rather touching timbre.
Written beyond the border following marital and mental collapse, and recorded with Italy's Sacri Cuori, a group clearly inspired by the timeless Americana Stuart's Green On Red once pedaled, rough-edged cosmic roots rock cradles eleven hard-bitten monologues.
Stewart Lee
2012-09-02T21:54:05+01:00
Hemingway maintained there were no second acts in American lives. The career of the Eighties alternative country pioneer Dan Stuart, a benignly pie-eyed anti-star of gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, might have borne him out. But The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings could be amongst the best of Stuart's fourteen albums, his toad bark voice having eroded into a rather touching timbre. Written beyond the border following marital and mental collapse, and recorded with Italy's Sacri Cuori, a group clearly inspired by the timeless Americana Stuart's Green On Red once pedaled, rough-edged cosmic roots rock cradles eleven hard-bitten monologues.
I am doing some small shows to work out a rewrite of the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO which hits the road again to complete its interrupted tour next Spring.
The shows will be one hour and will be messy new material.
They will take place under social distance rules and regs and the rooms will be running at 1/3rd capacity.
Sometimes I will do a number of shows a night, all profits are going to the venues to help.
If Covid rules change and we are not allowed to perform they will be refunded or rescheduled.
At the moment, despite the new rule of 6, people are allowed to gather in venues.
Please support your local comedy club if you still want it to be there in the future.
S Lee
Stewart Lee's 2019/2020 show SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO is on hiatus (★★★★★ The Guardian), but 50 final dates are rescheduled for 2021.
See him rewrite and rework the sixty minutes of it that have been rendered irrelevant by events.
Sure to be shoddy as hell, but all proceeds go to the needy venue!
See "the world's greatest living stand-up" (The Times) close up in a socially-distanced, non-match fit state, shuffling towards something.
November / December 2020
The Bill Murray, Angel, Islington, London.
Wednesday 4th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 4th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 11th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 11th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Sunday 15th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Sunday 15th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Monday 16th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Monday 16th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 17th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 17th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 18th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 18th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Thursday 19th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Thursday 19th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Sunday 22nd Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Sunday 22nd Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Monday 23rd Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Monday 23rd Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 24th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 24th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 25th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Wednesday 25th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
Thursday 26th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS
Thursday 26th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS
The Stand, Woodlands Rd, Glasgow.
Sunday 29th Nov 2pm: TICKETS
Sunday 29th Nov 4.30pm: TICKETS
Sunday 29th Nov 7pm: TICKETS
Sunday 29th Nov 9.30pm: TICKETS
The Stand, York Place, Edinburgh.
Monday 30th Nov 2pm: TICKETS
Monday 30th Nov 4.30pm: TICKETS
Monday 30th Nov 7pm: TICKETS
Monday 30th Nov 9.30pm: TICKETS
The Stand, High Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Tuesday 1st December 2pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 1st December 4.30pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 1st December 7pm: TICKETS
Tuesday 1st December 9.30pm: TICKETS
Stewart Lee
2020-09-11T00:00:36+01:00
Dear FANS I am doing some small shows to work out a rewrite of the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO which hits the road again to complete its interrupted tour next Spring. The shows will be one hour and will be messy new material. They will take place under social distance rules and regs and the rooms will be running at 1/3rd capacity. Sometimes I will do a number of shows a night, all profits are going to the venues to help. If Covid rules change and we are not allowed to perform they will be refunded or rescheduled. At the moment, despite the new rule of 6, people are allowed to gather in venues. Please support your local comedy club if you still want it to be there in the future. S Lee Stewart Lee's 2019/2020 show SNOWFLAKE / TORNADO is on hiatus (★★★★★ The Guardian), but 50 final dates are rescheduled for 2021. See him rewrite and rework the sixty minutes of it that have been rendered irrelevant by events. Sure to be shoddy as hell, but all proceeds go to the needy venue! See "the world's greatest living stand-up" (The Times) close up in a socially-distanced, non-match fit state, shuffling towards something. November / December 2020 The Bill Murray, Angel, Islington, London. Wednesday 4th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Wednesday 4th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Wednesday 11th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Wednesday 11th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Sunday 15th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Sunday 15th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Monday 16th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Monday 16th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Tuesday 17th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Tuesday 17th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Wednesday 18th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Wednesday 18th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Thursday 19th Nov 7 pm: TICKETS Thursday 19th Nov 8:45 pm: TICKETS Sunday...
In 1988, the then unfashionably elderly House of Love front-man Guy Chadwick, 32, looked both ways, smearing Seventies glam rock insousiance over the transformative aspirations of the era's widescreen alterno-rock surges, like a decadent Bono, his prayers rolled into Rizlas.
Buoyed by Terry Bickers' guitar, fusing John McGeogh's post-punk Banshee wail with then fashionable treble haze, The House of Love's eponymous debut re-appears with two discs of extras, including the singles Shine On and Destroy The Heart. Bickers' and Chadwick's doomed romance burned tragically briefly.
Stewart Lee
2013-01-13T20:18:32+00:00
In 1988, the then unfashionably elderly House of Love front-man Guy Chadwick, 32, looked both ways, smearing Seventies glam rock insousiance over the transformative aspirations of the era's widescreen alterno-rock surges, like a decadent Bono, his prayers rolled into Rizlas. Buoyed by Terry Bickers' guitar, fusing John McGeogh's post-punk Banshee wail with then fashionable treble haze, The House of Love's eponymous debut re-appears with two discs of extras, including the singles Shine On and Destroy The Heart. Bickers' and Chadwick's doomed romance burned tragically briefly.
Before Brexit, 44% of British musicians, including my showbusiness friend Fish from Marillion, earned up to half their income from now inaccessible European audiences. But, should Fish find some way around the government’s failure to preserve artists’ touring opportunities, his unfortunate choice of stage name could mean he was still subject to time-consuming delays at EU customs. Thousands of pages of Fish’s Fish Health Certification documents would need to be checked by penny-pinching EU officials, and Fish from Marillion would be left rotting on the quayside like some eels, an undignified state for the 62-year-old progressive rock survivor.
“No man may comprehend the heap of consequences that Brexit has piled on musicians, fish, and musicians called Fish better than I,” said Fish, over our weekly Zoom chat on Monday night, “but fate is inexorable. My delayed farewell tour, Weltschmerz, just became an even bigger scrotal irritant.”
“Would it make it easier as regards the new EU paperwork if you stopped being called Fish and went back to being called your real name?” I asked Fish, helpfully. “Stewart my friend!” Fish honked in dismay, “My real name is Dick. Derek William Dick. Do you not remember why I changed it? Derek Dick? It sounds like the name of some rustic mountebank who would make a bear dance for cakes and sausages. Heavens man! I’m losing on the swings. I’m losing on the roundabouts.”
“Maybe you should call yourself Dominic Cumming, Fish!” I quipped, “He seemed to be able to travel wherever he liked without any form of hindrance. Ha!” “Eh, what do you mean, sir?” Fish asked. “Well, last year he drove to Durham, didn’t he Fish, under lockdown?” “Oh, yes, I think I remember that, yes,” Fish mumbled. “Yes Fish,” I continued, undeterred, “and you could say it was necessary for you to perform your new album, and a selection of classics like Kayleigh, all across Europe in order to test your eyesight! Ha! Ha!” “There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight, son,” said Fish defensively, leaving the meeting.
Tragic tales like Old Blind Dick’s are legion. And the government is keen to distract from the obvious disaster of Brexit, even though Keir Starmer has chosen politely not to mention it in parliament. Last week, Dominic Skeletor Raab, having belatedly realised where France is and which of all our stuff comes from it, encouraged failing businesses to “take a 10-year view” of the route to the increasingly distant sunlit uplands of horrible chickens and reduced educational opportunities. But the Brexit-Covid government’s latest dead cat has been smashed down on to the kitchen table with a new level of desperation, weaponising compensation culture in a spurious war against already beleaguered liberal intellectuals.
Cold calls from compensation-claims solicitors are a bane of modern life, but I have at least learned to have fun with them. I told one cold compensation-caller last month that I had had an accident recently, yes, but it involved a collision with the stolen vehicle of a drugs kingpin who said he would kill me and anyone who reported it, so how did the solicitor know about it? He soon made his excuses and hung up. But last week, the Brexit-Covid government announced it will introduce legislation that will enable academics, students or visiting speakers to sue universities for compensation where they feel they have suffered free speech infringements. Or at least it says it will. Often the Brexit-Covid government just floats these provocative ideas to make the left fight among themselves and say ridiculous things, like when the Telegraph pretended the new head of the BBC was going to ban “leftwing” comedy last September, and then he never said anything about it ever.
A government insider says it will be the education secretary Gavin Williamson himself who will make the cold calls to potentially aggrieved truth-tellers, as a reward for the bravery he has shown in continuing in his unsuitable post when others would have taken the coward’s way out and resigned due to their utter incompetence. Initially a recording of Rob Brydon doing an accurate impression of Williamson will ask leading questions such as: “Do you feel your freedom of speech has been infringed, and if so are you owed money?”; “Political correctness has gone mad hasn’t it and do you think you deserve some cash to make up for it?”; “Will you say you think everything is all too woke nowadays in exchange for gift tokens?” The real Williamson will intercept the call if an aggrieved freedom champion takes Brydon’s voice bait.
A government insider gave us a list of the kind of questions the real Williamson will then ask: “Have you ever not been invited to address a university, ever, and if so why?”; “Have you been temporarily prevented, while appropriate questions were first asked by your employers, from hosting a video presenting an anti-feminist narrative of male victimhood to teenage boys at a famous English public school?”; and “Has the counter-extremist unit of the Department of Education stopped you from booking the far-right former editor of Breitbart Tech, who jokingly supported the delivery of pipe bombs to critics of Trump and lost his book deal for condoning underage sex, to address sixth formers at your Kent grammar school?”
There is an important debate to be had about freedom of speech and the part of once noble further educational establishments, now reduced to the role of qualification-manufacturing machines in a grubby customer-service provider transaction, have in maintaining it. But the government that lied on buses about Brexit, that changed the name of its website during election debates to fool surfers into thinking it was an independent fact-checking organisation, and that is headed by Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Bumboys Vampires French-Turds FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Johnson probably aren’t the most trustworthy people to be framing it.
Stewart Lee
2021-02-21T15:21:09+00:00
Before Brexit, 44% of British musicians, including my showbusiness friend Fish from Marillion, earned up to half their income from now inaccessible European audiences. But, should Fish find some way around the government’s failure to preserve artists’ touring opportunities, his unfortunate choice of stage name could mean he was still subject to time-consuming delays at EU customs. Thousands of pages of Fish’s Fish Health Certification documents would need to be checked by penny-pinching EU officials, and Fish from Marillion would be left rotting on the quayside like some eels, an undignified state for the 62-year-old progressive rock survivor. “No man may comprehend the heap of consequences that Brexit has piled on musicians, fish, and musicians called Fish better than I,” said Fish, over our weekly Zoom chat on Monday night, “but fate is inexorable. My delayed farewell tour, Weltschmerz, just became an even bigger scrotal irritant.” “Would it make it easier as regards the new EU paperwork if you stopped being called Fish and went back to being called your real name?” I asked Fish, helpfully. “Stewart my friend!” Fish honked in dismay, “My real name is Dick. Derek William Dick. Do you not remember why I changed it? Derek Dick? It sounds like the name of some rustic mountebank who would make a bear dance for cakes and sausages. Heavens man! I’m losing on the swings. I’m losing on the roundabouts.” “Maybe you should call yourself Dominic Cumming, Fish!” I quipped, “He seemed to be able to travel wherever he liked without any form of hindrance. Ha!” “Eh, what do you mean, sir?” Fish asked. “Well, last year he drove to Durham, didn’t he Fish, under lockdown?” “Oh, yes, I think I remember that, yes,” Fish mumbled. “Yes Fish,” I continued, undeterred, “and you could say it was necessary...
The notriously volatile cult group The Fall played four London dates over the course of five nights. The final show, at a delightful Irish showband venue in Cricklewood, saw two of the line-up that played at Brick Lane’s 93 Feet East on Moday already departed. When jazz soloists seek out new collaborators, it’s seen as evidence of artistic restlessness, but rock journalists, fetishising the gang notion of the classic band, find the erratic line-up changes of the group Mark E Smith formed in Manchester in 1976 endlessly amusing. The Fall frontman, glossing over accusations that he is simply ubearable, compares himself instead to a football manager, reshufflling his squad.
Smith currently operates two basic Fall formations. Monday’s show saw he and his wife, the keyboard player Elena Poulou, backed by a principally American Fall, hastilly assembled in San Diego last May, when the duo were abandoned by their group soon after an incident involving a plantain. The drummer Orpheo McCord maintains the streamroller thrust of What About Us and Pacifying Joint whilst simultaneously making them swing, and the guitarist Tim Presley lends an uncharacteristically psychedelic flavour to The Fall’s pulverising riffs. The bearded bassist Rob Barbato refutes The Fall’s historic baldness, and he and British bass player, Dave Spur, create a heavy, larval bedrock. Smith’s voice has recovered a range presumed lost, and his cryptically compelling lyrics are riddled with dog growl rumbles and flasetto yelps. The new material, - the high-octane drone of Reformation, derived from Can’s Mother Sky, and Fall Sound, a speed-metal declaration of intent, - are amongst his most electrifying compositions to date. Smith may look like a Weatherspoons regular, but his apparent lack of stage craft conceals an understanding of the damatic power of the smallest gestures.
Two nights later, Presley’s gone home, and an ashen-faced Pete Greenway, of the band Pubic Fringe, plays the same guitar riffs with harsher, serrated textures. Barbato nods the group through the changes as Smith, often hiding behind amps, sontaneously extends and contracts songs. A pleasingly unprepared encore sees Poulou reading her husband’s lyrics over improvised backing. “You are the sort of person who keeps a pair of plastic women’s breasts under his desk”, she declaims, to the delight of the crowd. By Friday, Barbato is gone too and the band have peaked, shrinking back to the five piece that played the Summer festival circit. The Fall’s music remains impossible to define, incorporating the visceral, blue-collar thrills of 50’s rock and roll and the visionary experimentalism of Krautrock and dub reggae. The Fall sound exists only in Mark E Smith’s head. Last week he came uncharacteristically close to defining it.
Stewart Lee
2006-09-17T19:27:18+01:00
The notriously volatile cult group The Fall played four London dates over the course of five nights. The final show, at a delightful Irish showband venue in Cricklewood, saw two of the line-up that played at Brick Lane’s 93 Feet East on Moday already departed. When jazz soloists seek out new collaborators, it’s seen as evidence of artistic restlessness, but rock journalists, fetishising the gang notion of the classic band, find the erratic line-up changes of the group Mark E Smith formed in Manchester in 1976 endlessly amusing. The Fall frontman, glossing over accusations that he is simply ubearable, compares himself instead to a football manager, reshufflling his squad. Smith currently operates two basic Fall formations. Monday’s show saw he and his wife, the keyboard player Elena Poulou, backed by a principally American Fall, hastilly assembled in San Diego last May, when the duo were abandoned by their group soon after an incident involving a plantain. The drummer Orpheo McCord maintains the streamroller thrust of What About Us and Pacifying Joint whilst simultaneously making them swing, and the guitarist Tim Presley lends an uncharacteristically psychedelic flavour to The Fall’s pulverising riffs. The bearded bassist Rob Barbato refutes The Fall’s historic baldness, and he and British bass player, Dave Spur, create a heavy, larval bedrock. Smith’s voice has recovered a range presumed lost, and his cryptically compelling lyrics are riddled with dog growl rumbles and flasetto yelps. The new material, - the high-octane drone of Reformation, derived from Can’s Mother Sky, and Fall Sound, a speed-metal declaration of intent, - are amongst his most electrifying compositions to date. Smith may look like a Weatherspoons regular, but his apparent lack of stage craft conceals an understanding of the damatic power of the smallest gestures. Two nights later, Presley’s gone home, and an...
Rebekah Brooks: overcome by the Utopian dream? Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images
There has been much inappropriate, salacious, and opportunistic speculation about the exact nature of the withheld communications between the former News International redhead Rebekah Brooks and the current Conservative party brownhead David Cameron, much of it in extremely dubious taste. I doubt, for example, whether the self-styled grand inquisitor Tom Watson MP would be pleased were someone to make public all his private business messages to the gravy girls at his local branch of The Gourmet Meat Pie Emporium! But unlike Watson, my main interest in the Brooks-Cameron messages is not political, or prurient, but linguistic and literary.
Admittedly, it is possible that, were the full texts of the pair's missives to be brought to light, public confidence in Cameron would be destroyed for ever and the government would collapse, leaving a gaping power vacuum into which Ed Miliband might find himself tumbling, with all the undeniable historical impact of a damp sock falling into a deep trench latrine. But for me, what posterity will choose to preserve from the dialogues is Brooks's response to Cameron's 2009 Conservative party conference pep talk: "Brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love 'working together'." The pellucid message fascinates, dazzling in its mystery, possessed of a bluntly opaque poetry, and will continue to resonate long after the star-cross'd pair themselves have completed their fearful passage, and death lies upon them like an untimely frost. Consider.
Brooks's unusual use of apostrophes, rather than quotation marks, around the words "working together" appears to suggest that Brooks's idea of her and Cameron 'working together' has some entirely different and privately understood meaning from the normal idea of "working together". Would italics have helped? Could Brooks and Cameron have been planning to be 'working together'? Or were they going to be 'working together'? Or, worse still, 'working together'?
Perhaps the much-quoted phrase from the duo's original communique cache, "country supper", as in "I do understand the issue with the Times. Let's discuss over a country supper soon", should also have had apostrophes around it, or have been in italics? Would "Let's discuss over a 'country supper' soon" have done more, or less, to inflame the suspicions of Watson's puritanical leftwing cabal? Its presumably deliberate echoes of Hamlet's lecherous pursuit of "country matters" would certainly not be lost on the Eton-educated Cameron. Rhythmically and dramatically, the substitution is almost too perfect.
Hamlet : Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia : No, my lord.
Hamlet : I mean my head upon your lap.
Ophelia : Aye, my lord.
Hamlet : Or did you think I meant country suppers?
(Hamlet, Act III, Sc ii)
Elsewhere in the message's nine words, Brooks brilliantly and economically evokes the idea of the uncontrolled emotion Cameron's egalitarian political vision inspires in her. "I cried twice."
Twice! Brooks cried twice. The weeping did not begin and then eventually subside, like the snotty bawling of a young foolish girl attending a Russell Brand gig, or officiating the back-garden shoebox funeral of a beloved hamster. No. The weeping began, was contained by sheer force of will, and then the undeniable power of Cameron's crazy utopian dream of Privilege For All overcame Brooks a second time, like an enormous yes.
Make no mistake, Brooks seems to say, this was not some easily won epiphany, like the gut animal reaction to cheap music or cheap perfume, but the unwanted outcome of a struggle for self-control that failed, against Brooks's will, and then failed again. It was a Fifty Shades of Grey-style tussle with unbidden idealistic desires, that nonetheless found their way to the heroine's unwilling and wounded heart. If I might be so bold, the sentiment could only have been more dramatic had Brooks expressed it thus: "I cried. Twice." But journalists are trained to write in sentences.
Cameron knows this. And so does Brooks. And for Brooks to break so boldly a fixed professional and grammatical law would perhaps have betrayed the pair far more convincingly that any amount of clanking innuendo about the riding of disobedient horses.
Time passes. We drive our carts and our plows over the bones of the dead. Leveson recedes into the memory fog. Now Savile looms aloft like Whitby Dracula newly transported in Transylvanian coffin dust, and other figures take shape in the mist, drawing the eye from country suppers. The air changes to soundless damage. Cameron will leave no legacy, and Brooks will be a stain upon the saddle of time's swift stallion, no more. But choice phrases often linger long after the names of those who uttered them are forgotten: "It's black over Bill's mother's"; "Oh! Oh! Mr Peevly! Mr Peevly!"; "That's you that is"; and the immortal "I cried twice." Brooks' words will ring down the ages, divorced from the speaker and her addressee, but emblazoned as the new gold standard of emotional veracity. The News of the World is gone and the coalition will collapse. What will survive of us is love.
Stewart Lee's DVD Carpet Remnant World is released on Monday
Stewart Lee
2012-11-11T14:18:35+00:00
Rebekah Brooks: overcome by the Utopian dream? Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images There has been much inappropriate, salacious, and opportunistic speculation about the exact nature of the withheld communications between the former News International redhead Rebekah Brooks and the current Conservative party brownhead David Cameron, much of it in extremely dubious taste. I doubt, for example, whether the self-styled grand inquisitor Tom Watson MP would be pleased were someone to make public all his private business messages to the gravy girls at his local branch of The Gourmet Meat Pie Emporium! But unlike Watson, my main interest in the Brooks-Cameron messages is not political, or prurient, but linguistic and literary. Admittedly, it is possible that, were the full texts of the pair's missives to be brought to light, public confidence in Cameron would be destroyed for ever and the government would collapse, leaving a gaping power vacuum into which Ed Miliband might find himself tumbling, with all the undeniable historical impact of a damp sock falling into a deep trench latrine. But for me, what posterity will choose to preserve from the dialogues is Brooks's response to Cameron's 2009 Conservative party conference pep talk: "Brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love 'working together'." The pellucid message fascinates, dazzling in its mystery, possessed of a bluntly opaque poetry, and will continue to resonate long after the star-cross'd pair themselves have completed their fearful passage, and death lies upon them like an untimely frost. Consider. Brooks's unusual use of apostrophes, rather than quotation marks, around the words "working together" appears to suggest that Brooks's idea of her and Cameron 'working together' has some entirely different and privately understood meaning from the normal idea of "working together". Would italics have helped? Could Brooks and Cameron have been planning to be 'working together'? Or were they going to...
A WAKE FOR BLAKE - THIS MONDAY 25th.
20 LAST MINUTE EXTRA TICKETS AVAIL
A very special evening to raise money for a memorial for the poet and artist William Blake. Monday 25th September 2017 at 7.30pm. Leicester Square Theatre, London
Featuring
JOHN DOWIE
KEVIN ELDON
SHIRLEY COLLINS, DAVE ARTHUR AND PETE COOPER
TESTAMENT
ROBIN INCE
STEWART LEE
ALAN MOORE
SIMON MUNNERY
William Blake - a visionary poet, artist and prophet - lies in an unmarked grave in the City of London.
Overlooked, ridiculed and ignored in his lifetime, Blake has since become on of the greatest figures in British culture.
The exact location of Blake's resting place was only re-discovered in recent years after detailed research by two trustees of the Blake Society.
This event featuring some of the UK's most thrilling maverick performers is to raise funds towards a fitting marker to identify Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields Burial ground.
Booking: HERE Tel: 0207 734 222
SHIRLEY COLLINS + STEW 18TH OCT, CURZON CINEMA, LONDON
We are honoured to welcome the great Shirley Collins for a post-screening talk, to be hosted by comedian and critic Stewart Lee.
Widely regarded as the 20th century's most important singer of English traditional song, Shirley Collins stood at the epicenter of the folk music revival during the 1960s and 70s. But in 1980 she developed a disorder of the vocal chords known as dysphonia, which robbed her of her unique singing voice and forced her into early retirement.
Rob Curry and Tim Plester's documentary sets out to explore the story behind the icon, and chronicles Shirley's battle, at the grand old age of 80, to rediscover that voice she lost so many years previously.
The film counterpoints this contemporary journey with a more literal one taken from the other end of her life; making fertile use of authentic 1959 audio-archive to recount the tale of Shirley's seminal road-trip around America's Deep South alongside her then-lover (and pre-eminent ethnomusicologist) Alan Lomax.
Featuring contributions from the comedian Stewart Lee and David Tibet of Current 93, the film eschews a straightforward biopic approach and sidesteps any rockumentary talking-heads; the filmmakers instead offering up a meditative and richly textured piece of portraiture.
Here then is a film about loss and redemption.
A film about sacrifice, healing and rebirth.
A film which suggests that, during these turbulent and increasingly untethered times, we might just need Shirley Collins now more than ever. Tickets are available here.
23rd OCT JARRET KOBEK + STEW EVENT
It is likely I will be grilling Jarett Kobek, author of the 2016 novel I Hate The Internet, on this date in London somewhere TBC
SHIRLEY COLLINS + STEW AGAIN, RIO CINEMA LONDON 29TH OCT 4.30pm
Widely regarded as the 20th century's most important singer of English traditional song, Shirley Collins was at the epicentre of the folk music scene during the 1960s and '70's. However, in 1980 she lost her voice in mysterious circumstances, and was forced to retire from musical life.
In 2016, after being rediscovered by a new generation of music fans, Collins made a comeback, releasing her first album in nearly four decades, 'Lodestar,' again with huge critical acclaim. Rob Curry and Tim Plester's documentary sets out to explore the story behind the icon, and chronicles Shirley's battle, at the grand old age of 80, to rediscover that voice she lost.
Alongside the archive video and audio footage there are contributions from such longtime admirers as comedian Stewart Lee. It all adds up to a meditative and richly textured portrait that explores loss and redemption, sacrifice, healing and rebirth.
+ Post screening Q&A with co-director Rob Curry and Stewart Lee, comedian and Shirley Collins fan. Tickets are available here.
IAIN SINCLAIR + STEW 30TH OCT, LRB BOOKSHOP, LONDON
Iain Sinclair has been writing about London for most of his adult life, and if any of us can even begin to understand this peculiar sort of city that we sort of call a sort of home, then it's with Sinclair that we begin.
The Last London (Oneworld) is the culmination of Iain's London project, although 'project' is far too determined a word to describe a body of work so many-layered, so prodigiously polyvalent.
He'll be talking about the book and the city with comedian, writer and film director Stewart Lee, another Londoner from elsewhere. Tickets are available here.
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)
MORE NATIONAL DATES FOR 2018 TO FOLLOW, until April
TOP TIPS - A NEW SECTION WHERE I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND THINGS EACH MONTH
DAVE GRANEY & CLARE MOORE
Short UK tour by the Serge Gainsbourg/Lee Hazelwood/Jim Morrison/Scott Walker/Skip Spence/Ern Malley/Lenny Bruce of Australian music.
A genius songwriter with effortless presence and command, and yet also an invisible chameleon, a reflecting surface, an anonymous conduit.
Anyone who saw his and Clare Moore's ATP sets last year will not want to miss these.
Dave is one of the all time greats. I learned much of what I know from him. Rock and Roll is where he hides.
Friday 6th Oct Fred's Ale House, Mcr
Sunday 8th Oct, O'Riley's, Hull
Weds 11th, Thurs 12th Oct - Betsey Trotwood, London
Sat 14th Oct, Leith Links Cricket Club, Edinburgh
Ben Moor - Pronoun Trouble.
Ben Moor, for my money, is the Ken Campbell/Spalding Gray of my generation, a natural storyteller who blurs the boundaries between comedy, theatre and performance art.
He's not an obvious fit for a world increasingly in search of a quick cultural fix, but those who discover his work become lifelong fans and evangelists, and followers of the live artworks of Daniel Kitson's theatre pieces, Will Adamsdale, James Rowland's Team Viking, Kim Noble, Robert LePage and Bryony Kimmings will find much to admire in Ben's oeuvre.
There is an early stab at his new show Pronoun Trouble, previews of which delighted audiences at that Port Elliot Lit Fest last Summer, at the Hen & Chickens in London on Oct 4th.
4th October 7.30pm £7.50
PRONOUN TROUBLE:
Miscellaneous subjects that crossed my mind while listening to a lecture about Chuck Jones's Hunting Trilogy (1950-52) (which was nevertheless really good)
Ben is sitting in a lecture about a series of Chuck Jones cartoons, but his thoughts drift off in various directions.
There's his friendship with the person he came with, the T-shirts he has at home, his favourite words, his favourite books, and the schism on London's high streets between the conflicting denominations of launderettes and laundrettes.
And all the while, the lecturer is following her own sweet way, exploring new meanings in the films, quoting obscure academics and offering a different way of looking at the world. Are any of us following the script? Aren't we all in some kind of pronoun trouble?
Using Powerpoint and stand-up, Pronoun Trouble combines a fact-adjacent lecture about three extraordinary cartoons and a whole ton of other topics that sometimes come to mind.
Ben Moor has been producing solo comedy pieces since 1993. His most recent show 'Each of Us' has toured the UK and Italy, and was described by The Guardian as "A moving satire on the arbitrariness of the everyday, rivaling the best of Douglas Adams in its witty conjugation of cultural norms and ephemera."
A WAKE FOR BLAKE - THIS MONDAY 25th. 20 LAST MINUTE EXTRA TICKETS AVAIL A very special evening to raise money for a memorial for the poet and artist William Blake. Monday 25th September 2017 at 7.30pm. Leicester Square Theatre, London Featuring JOHN DOWIE KEVIN ELDON SHIRLEY COLLINS, DAVE ARTHUR AND PETE COOPER TESTAMENT ROBIN INCE STEWART LEE ALAN MOORE SIMON MUNNERY William Blake - a visionary poet, artist and prophet - lies in an unmarked grave in the City of London. Overlooked, ridiculed and ignored in his lifetime, Blake has since become on of the greatest figures in British culture. The exact location of Blake's resting place was only re-discovered in recent years after detailed research by two trustees of the Blake Society. This event featuring some of the UK's most thrilling maverick performers is to raise funds towards a fitting marker to identify Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields Burial ground. Booking: HERE Tel: 0207 734 222 SHIRLEY COLLINS + STEW 18TH OCT, CURZON CINEMA, LONDON We are honoured to welcome the great Shirley Collins for a post-screening talk, to be hosted by comedian and critic Stewart Lee. Widely regarded as the 20th century's most important singer of English traditional song, Shirley Collins stood at the epicenter of the folk music revival during the 1960s and 70s. But in 1980 she developed a disorder of the vocal chords known as dysphonia, which robbed her of her unique singing voice and forced her into early retirement. Rob Curry and Tim Plester's documentary sets out to explore the story behind the icon, and chronicles Shirley's battle, at the grand old age of 80, to rediscover that voice she lost so many years previously. The film counterpoints this contemporary journey with a more literal one taken from the other end of her...
The BBC will not be renewing Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.
BBC funding cuts have been blamed for the decision, forcing the comedy department to concentrate on scripted shows.
All the other stand-up on TV is made by the corporation’s entertainment department which, Lee said: ‘I am sure you will agree, isn’t me.’
The comedian broke the news his newsletter tonight, saying he was ‘grateful for a quick answer’ from the broadcaster, just weeks after the fourth series aired.
He said that the run achieved a consolidated million viewers per episode, in line with previous seasons, and ‘personal feedback from viewers was great’.
He added: ‘I am really glad to have produced 12 hours of stand-up with an old school 20th Century BBC logo on it. The team I got to work with were all superb, including [executive producer] Richard Webb, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, [director] Tim Kirkby and regular cast members Kevin Eldon, Paul Putner and Tara Flynn. And the last episode of SLCV4 was my favourite of the 24 we made over the ten years.’
'Looking around The Machynlleth Comedy Festival last weekend I realised how lucky I had been to be the comedian that got to do four series like this.'
And he signed off with: ‘Thanks for watching.’
The DVD of series 4 will be released on Monday October 10, and Lee revealed that there will be a book of the annotated texts of all four series further down the line.
Lee will now tour with Content Provider, ‘a proper big-ideas piece of work’ which will be a work-in-progress until the end of this year, including an Edinburgh Fringe run, followed by a full 18-month tour starting in 2017.
Stewart Lee
2016-05-10T20:12:28+01:00
BBC says 'no more' to acclaimed stand-up show The BBC will not be renewing Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. BBC funding cuts have been blamed for the decision, forcing the comedy department to concentrate on scripted shows. All the other stand-up on TV is made by the corporation’s entertainment department which, Lee said: ‘I am sure you will agree, isn’t me.’ The comedian broke the news his newsletter tonight, saying he was ‘grateful for a quick answer’ from the broadcaster, just weeks after the fourth series aired. He said that the run achieved a consolidated million viewers per episode, in line with previous seasons, and ‘personal feedback from viewers was great’. He added: ‘I am really glad to have produced 12 hours of stand-up with an old school 20th Century BBC logo on it. The team I got to work with were all superb, including [executive producer] Richard Webb, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, [director] Tim Kirkby and regular cast members Kevin Eldon, Paul Putner and Tara Flynn. And the last episode of SLCV4 was my favourite of the 24 we made over the ten years.’ 'Looking around The Machynlleth Comedy Festival last weekend I realised how lucky I had been to be the comedian that got to do four series like this.' And he signed off with: ‘Thanks for watching.’ The DVD of series 4 will be released on Monday October 10, and Lee revealed that there will be a book of the annotated texts of all four series further down the line. Lee will now tour with Content Provider, ‘a proper big-ideas piece of work’ which will be a work-in-progress until the end of this year, including an Edinburgh Fringe run, followed by a full 18-month tour starting in 2017.
Running into the theatre with thirty seconds until the curtain went up, I thought I might have time to settle down, observe the deathly blank stage and pale green antique walls, take a sip of whisky and make some preliminary notes.
Not so. From the very first second Lee stops just short of grabbing audience members and shaking them whilst shouting, 'You better understand these jokes or you're not welcome!' Lee immediately gets involved with putting a member of the audience in a ridicule making situation which quickly twists into a bizarre but overly familiar looking world. He appeared to be miffed at the fact he didn't get a straight answer to the question, 'What's your favourite high-street coffee chain?' In truth, this is exactly what he wanted; and he's off: herding the audience to crowd round a cage to watch a spectacle which is really a mirror.Stewart Lee
If I had to put my finger on where Lee's true master-stroke dwells, I'd say it lies in his fusion of slapstick suggestions and intelligent observations of the unspoken inner workings of the world packed to bursting with snivelling sub-text, full of meanderings and tangents which serve the purpose of making the show tempting for even the inexplicable observer.
This usually inhabits itself in the logical analysis and deconstruction of people attitudes, preconceptions, misconceptions and even his own jokes whilst in the process of telling them.
In this show particularly, he showed his skill and experience by excelling at a technique which is famous for its semblance of ease: references to tension and responses from the audience. He clearly gives the impression of a third-person observer hovering over his own act with a lucid understanding of the situation: at one point a heckler tried to interject from the front row; Lee just carried on with his routine, paying the heckler no attention whatsoever. A trick which is harder than it sounds.
Another characteristic which I have noted from this and other shows is the rhythm which Lee's show takes. He spends long monotonous, but interesting, sections of the show setting jokes up only to be broken by spurious outbursts. I can only liken this to the techniques characteristic of the medieval church: long, terrifying sermons would be given in shouty voices by demi-god-statused priests, petrifying the congregation into a heightened state of suggestibility, which would abruptly fall into utopian descriptions of God's love, power and how he can change everything. In the same way, he lulls the audience into believing they are watching a downtrodden man bear his heart on stage before he sends their pulses racing with insults directed at the audience such as: 'Get back in! You c**t! Sit down! Don't anyone else walk out!' Before moving on to more refined suggestions as it is almost near the end of the show, it's worth holding it in now mate.
I think it is exactly this technique which accounts for his very unique ability to send the audience on huge trundles of suspension of disbelief which he subsequently reveals to be false, much to the audiences delight. One example of this is an anecdote where Richard Hammond being at his school – which is the only fact which turns out to be true from the whole story – gets saved by him propping the door-handle closed with a James Joyce novel. Lee points out the irony in this fact in light of his earlier explanations of why Hammond is the national apologist for ignorance, and somehow makes the exposition of his anecdote as false something funny in itself.
From watching this and his previous two shows, though, it becomes clear that Lee has a structure which he is comfortable with and sees no reason to deviate from that. Why would you? It works. His style and intensity of jokes vary in exactly the same format, and as always there is a ten minute section performed in the crowd, as well as many other things it would be boring to point out in a review like this. But seriously, he had now reason to change: this is the third show that this structure has worked and his is still able to create new material to fit it. In particular, he plays the downtrodden tantrum thrower well. At one point he makes reference to the fact he can not complain about chief executives disliking him because of his television series; he now has to move onto complaining about his DVDs being ripped-off and downloaded on torrent sites and low viewing figures for his program from earlier this year: Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
Overall, there is only one fault to point out with Lee's routine. He would appear to have fallen down the same pitfall Russell Brand did when he pointed out the 'grammatical' error on one of his fan's signs which was being held up at a gig: Russell criticised his fan for not having an 's on the end of a pictorial representation of a heart; claiming that he could never be attracted to anyone with such loose grammatical standards. I'm sure I don't need to point out that fact that in this circumstance an apostrophe is definitely not needed. And I must point out, this was not done for ironic effect.
In much the same way, during his show Lee criticised the cider makers Magners for making a mistake in the advert, saying: 'Give it to me straight like 100% pear.' instead of Pears (plural.) Whilst referring to this error, Lee ranted about the issue saying 'Especially as they've quoted it wrong.' as opposed to the conventional adverbial form 'wrongly,' or better still 'incorrectly.'
Nitpicking aside, Stewart Lee is, in my opinion, the best working comedian around at this particular moment of time. If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One may not have exceeded the standard he set himself with 41st Best Stand Up Comedian, but he has definitely matched it. Lee is the comedians' comedian, the intelligentsia's comedian and most importantly a comedian from which anyone willing to look can find something which appeals from them – unless they are a fundamentalist Christian, of course. They don't find Lee very funny for some strange reason.
Stewart Lee
2009-12-01T16:22:53+00:00
Running into the theatre with thirty seconds until the curtain went up, I thought I might have time to settle down, observe the deathly blank stage and pale green antique walls, take a sip of whisky and make some preliminary notes. Not so. From the very first second Lee stops just short of grabbing audience members and shaking them whilst shouting, 'You better understand these jokes or you're not welcome!' Lee immediately gets involved with putting a member of the audience in a ridicule making situation which quickly twists into a bizarre but overly familiar looking world. He appeared to be miffed at the fact he didn't get a straight answer to the question, 'What's your favourite high-street coffee chain?' In truth, this is exactly what he wanted; and he's off: herding the audience to crowd round a cage to watch a spectacle which is really a mirror.Stewart Lee If I had to put my finger on where Lee's true master-stroke dwells, I'd say it lies in his fusion of slapstick suggestions and intelligent observations of the unspoken inner workings of the world packed to bursting with snivelling sub-text, full of meanderings and tangents which serve the purpose of making the show tempting for even the inexplicable observer. This usually inhabits itself in the logical analysis and deconstruction of people attitudes, preconceptions, misconceptions and even his own jokes whilst in the process of telling them. In this show particularly, he showed his skill and experience by excelling at a technique which is famous for its semblance of ease: references to tension and responses from the audience. He clearly gives the impression of a third-person observer hovering over his own act with a lucid understanding of the situation: at one point a heckler tried to interject from the front row; Lee...
I appeared on Radio 4's CHAIN REACTION twice in January 2005.
20th Jan, interviewed by Johnny Vegas & 27th Jan, interviewing Alan Moore.
Stewart Lee
2005-01-27T01:08:02+00:00
I appeared on Radio 4's CHAIN REACTION twice in January 2005. 20th Jan, interviewed by Johnny Vegas & 27th Jan, interviewing Alan Moore.
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/mp3/chain-reaction/
This is an extended version of sardonic Stewart Lee’s acclaimed 2007 Edinburgh show, prompted by his ranking in a Channel 4 run-down.
His rating got him pondering the importance of popularity – particularly given that his own mother doesn’t think he’s in the same league as Tom O’Connor, whom she once saw perform on a cruise ship. He further questioned his own worth when he founds himself performing stand-up to an audience of entomologists, dressed as an insect, for no obvious reason.
But it’s not all so introspective, as in various lengthy digressions, Lee also ponders such topics as the Celebrity Big Brother racism row and the niceties of a liberal atheist trying to deal with the religious beliefs of those trying to appease a God he doesn’t believe in.
As usual, it’s all thoughtful stuff, and as he points out to the audience in one of many self-referential asides: ‘If you’ve not seen me before, the jokes are there, but some of you might have to raise your game.’
His comedy resolutely never takes the straightforward route, and he’s derisive of fellow comedians who do. Indeed, his parody of bad observational stand-up seems to have found its way into Lee Evans’s actual set. But S. Lee is equally cheeky about his own pomposity, his deliberately slow and repetitive style, and the whole ridiculousness pretence of stand-up.
This is definitely a knowing show, filmed in front of a suitable comedy-savvy crowd at The Stand in Glasgow. Often the laugh is at our own cleverness in getting his frame of reference; he only needs read in a sarcastic tone the statement that Big Brother sponsor Carphone Warehouse issued over racism row for us to know, and share, his derision. But there are also strong, original jokes, to back up his arguments, too.
Lee also records his DVD rather differently from most, not only delivering some of the set from among the audience, but often addressing the camera directly, making those at home feel more involved, rather than just a passive observer.
Lee has a BBC Two show coming out next year. If it’s as good as this, we’ve a treat to look forward to.
Sample joke:‘ When the bad racism happened, it meant that Russell Brand was contractually obliged to look meaningfully into the camera, making a serious face, and to condemn racism in the strongest terms possible… while dressed as a cartoon pirate. '
Extras: A 45-minute interview with Lee, conducted by Johnny Vegas, and his perfromace at Pestival, an international festival about insects.
Stewart Lee
2008-12-22T22:10:55+00:00
This is an extended version of sardonic Stewart Lee’s acclaimed 2007 Edinburgh show, prompted by his ranking in a Channel 4 run-down. His rating got him pondering the importance of popularity – particularly given that his own mother doesn’t think he’s in the same league as Tom O’Connor, whom she once saw perform on a cruise ship. He further questioned his own worth when he founds himself performing stand-up to an audience of entomologists, dressed as an insect, for no obvious reason. But it’s not all so introspective, as in various lengthy digressions, Lee also ponders such topics as the Celebrity Big Brother racism row and the niceties of a liberal atheist trying to deal with the religious beliefs of those trying to appease a God he doesn’t believe in. As usual, it’s all thoughtful stuff, and as he points out to the audience in one of many self-referential asides: ‘If you’ve not seen me before, the jokes are there, but some of you might have to raise your game.’ His comedy resolutely never takes the straightforward route, and he’s derisive of fellow comedians who do. Indeed, his parody of bad observational stand-up seems to have found its way into Lee Evans’s actual set. But S. Lee is equally cheeky about his own pomposity, his deliberately slow and repetitive style, and the whole ridiculousness pretence of stand-up. This is definitely a knowing show, filmed in front of a suitable comedy-savvy crowd at The Stand in Glasgow. Often the laugh is at our own cleverness in getting his frame of reference; he only needs read in a sarcastic tone the statement that Big Brother sponsor Carphone Warehouse issued over racism row for us to know, and share, his derision. But there are also strong, original jokes, to back up his arguments,...
The American comedians Paul Provenza and Penn Gilette (?) have made a documentary about stand-up comedy called The Artistocrats, released here next week. It features clips of over a hundred principally American comics telling variations on a joke, known as The Aristocrats, which concerns an obscene vaudeville act. The film becomes an hilarious and often moving treatise on shock, surprise, taste, humour, the art of storytelling and the creative imagination. After an Edinburgh film festival screening last month, enthusiasm for The Aristocrats spread like Asian bird flu through the comedy community in the fringe. We may already be living in the post-Aristocrats era.
Apparently, the Aristocrats gag, though never repeated on stage and unknown in Britain, has been a dressing room staple of American comics for decades It begins with a man entering a showbiz agent’s office to pitch him a nightclub act comprising a man, his wife and their two children, whose performance is then described in as much pungent, pornographic and scatological detail as possible, limited only by the imagination and scruples of the teller. The horrified agent then asks what the act is called. The man replies “The Aristocrats.” The humour arises from the contrast between the repellent nature of the act, and the polite, gentile title it has been given. The lure of the aristocrats gag for the film-makers was the infinitely extendable central section, which pushes boundaries of both endurance and taste, and can be extended for as much as an hour and a half.
“The editing process reflected a conscious decision to make the movie about ideas,” explains Pronenza. “In fact, we ended up doing some comics a disservice because we didn’t necessarily use their funniest bit, but the bit that best helped to illustrate the ideas of the movie clearly. The movie starts repetitively, but if you listen to each version of the joke, hearing the same gag again and again shows how people take off with it and create different things. In the first six minutes George Carlin does a version that’s totally grossed-out and scatological, then we move on to Drew Carey teaching us how to do the joke, then into a riff constructed entirely of little sound-bites until, I think, your moral judgement is suspended. You’ve been bludgeoned. Boom! And then you can concentrate on the absurdity of the thing, the structure of the gag, and the different layers of offence. It’s about the singer not the song. Repeating the same joke actually allows us to get over the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.”
Someway around the mid-point of the film, after an especially hilarious sequence in which a clown-faced mime acts out the gag silently on Venice Beach, there’s a twenty minute section where, for me, the joke wears thin. I began to feel as if I was being dragged through a trench of filth, and the violence against women in the various versions of the story became so relentless that when Bob Saget described one of the male performers smashing his penis repeatedly into a drawer I was almost relieved. That said, other sections of the comedian-packed cinema were still splitting their sides. Seen in public, The Aristocrats becomes a living object lesson in the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach to making decisions about what is acceptable just won’t fit. It doesn’t even work in one room full of people who all do the same job.
In its closing section The Aristocrats transcends its base subject material to become genuinely profound and emotional. We are softened up for the final sequence with a specially made South Park short, in which the animated toddlers describe a version of the vaudeville act where the perverted family run around impersonating the victims of the 911 disaster whilst covered in various bodily fluids. Next we go to a charity event filmed in New York three weeks after 911 itself. “The shock of hearing the South Park bit makes us close to the state of the room when Gilbert Gottfried takes the stage at a Friars’ Roast,” explains Provenza, of the startling closing set by the legendary chimp-like American humorist. “Inadvertently, we had somehow created our own third act of The Aristocrats. We had already shot Gilbert doing the Aristocrats joke in private three or four weeks before 911, so the joke was in his mind." On stage, Gottfried’s gag about taking an internal flight with a connection at the Empire State building dies. Someone shouts “Too soon”. “You can see him stall,” remembers Provenza, “and his fingers twitch, and then he decides to start the Aristocrats gag. He didn’t plan to do it. There were no paradigms. But if you look at his face you can see him doing the math in the moment. He chose it for a reason. The room was full of comedy pro’s busting his ass for ‘crossing the line’. And all around town the comedy clubs were closed and club owners were asking when it would be time for people to start laughing again. Gilbert was proving a point. The Artistocrats gag became a kind of safety rope. It was all about crossing the line. And he knew an audience of comedians would intuit the subtext. He was asking us when it’s ok to laugh. The transgressive nature of the piece was the cathartic relief that everyone wanted after the confusion of 911.”
Cutting between Gottfried’s grinning face and the sight of people literally falling off their chairs laughing, and gasping, in pain, for breath, The Aristocrats makes a convincing case for absurdity as a logical response to tragedy. I wept, not tears of laughter, but tears of joy. I wept tears of joy watching a tiny man describe a family of four sexually and physically abuse each other, and any animals in the vicinity, in the name of entertainment. And after an hour and ten minutes of The Aristocrats’ surgically precise analysis of how we are made to laugh, and why we laugh, I think I almost understood why.
Stewart Lee
2005-09-04T18:37:00+01:00
The American comedians Paul Provenza and Penn Gilette (?) have made a documentary about stand-up comedy called The Artistocrats, released here next week. It features clips of over a hundred principally American comics telling variations on a joke, known as The Aristocrats, which concerns an obscene vaudeville act. The film becomes an hilarious and often moving treatise on shock, surprise, taste, humour, the art of storytelling and the creative imagination. After an Edinburgh film festival screening last month, enthusiasm for The Aristocrats spread like Asian bird flu through the comedy community in the fringe. We may already be living in the post-Aristocrats era. Apparently, the Aristocrats gag, though never repeated on stage and unknown in Britain, has been a dressing room staple of American comics for decades It begins with a man entering a showbiz agent’s office to pitch him a nightclub act comprising a man, his wife and their two children, whose performance is then described in as much pungent, pornographic and scatological detail as possible, limited only by the imagination and scruples of the teller. The horrified agent then asks what the act is called. The man replies “The Aristocrats.” The humour arises from the contrast between the repellent nature of the act, and the polite, gentile title it has been given. The lure of the aristocrats gag for the film-makers was the infinitely extendable central section, which pushes boundaries of both endurance and taste, and can be extended for as much as an hour and a half. “The editing process reflected a conscious decision to make the movie about ideas,” explains Pronenza. “In fact, we ended up doing some comics a disservice because we didn’t necessarily use their funniest bit, but the bit that best helped to illustrate the ideas of the movie clearly. The movie starts...
He's discussed wealth. He's dealt with Islamaphobia. He's taken a wry look at patriotism.
Along the way he has failed to hide his disappointment at losing the comedy Bafta to Graham Norton, and recalled the time a Muslim woman on the bus sat on a copy of the Watchtower.
Now all that fades into insignificance as Stewart Lee handles 'the big one', spending half an hour entertaining the audience at Stoke Newington's Mildmay Club, as well as the viewers at home, with his thoughts on death.
Throughout, script editor Chris Morris will be trying to find out what makes the funnyman tick.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-23T21:48:33+00:00
He's discussed wealth. He's dealt with Islamaphobia. He's taken a wry look at patriotism. Along the way he has failed to hide his disappointment at losing the comedy Bafta to Graham Norton, and recalled the time a Muslim woman on the bus sat on a copy of the Watchtower. Now all that fades into insignificance as Stewart Lee handles 'the big one', spending half an hour entertaining the audience at Stoke Newington's Mildmay Club, as well as the viewers at home, with his thoughts on death. Throughout, script editor Chris Morris will be trying to find out what makes the funnyman tick.
Apparently, the Labour party leadership contest frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, wants to dredge the decomposing corpse of Osama bin Laden from the seabed and then marry it.
And he wants to live with the dead body of Bin Laden in Islington, as if it were his gay-zombie husband, in a sick leftwing pantomime of the heterosexual Christian wedding ceremony. And this arrangement is also a perversion of Islam, which is of course a peaceful religion.
It was Monday morning. I logged off from the Daily Mail website. I only went on the damn thing to check whether migrants were currently a swarm of vermin, or decent loving parents like you or I, or if leggy Israeli model Bar Refaeli would take the plunge in a tiny wraparound oriental miniskirt, and then I got bogged down in all this Corbyn necrophilia stuff. It’s all so confusing.
Later, after I’d dropped the kids at school, I saw the cover of the Daily Express in a newsagent and read that Corbyn had also said it was a tragedy that he and Bin Laden had not met during the latter’s unfairly curtailed life, as Corbyn was sure that after they had become lovers, they would have sponsored a sloth at London zoo.
I raised my eyebrow at the newsagent, a bearded Islamic man in long flowing robes with an inscrutable expression of fundamentalist certainty. But he said that whatever people did behind closed doors was up to them, as long as the sloth had given its consent and was not harmed.
Later, I attended a local radical artists’ and writers’ meeting in the last squatted tower block in Tower Hamlets. We were trying to decide how best to respond creatively to the political implications of austerity, and whether there was a place in our empty gesture for puppetry and dance.
Turning to sip my tea, I looked out of the window to see Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats fly by in a hang glider, with a picture of Jeremy Corbyn kissing Bin Laden printed on its outstretched wings.
Farron’s pained democratic face suggested either constipation, sexualised religious ecstasy, the vain hope that someone would remember that he existed, or some fair and just proportional representation of all three positions.
But a cat by the Museum of Childhood merely looked briefly up from burying its excrement on the lawn, as the desperate Cumbrian wafted himself westward toward Wapping.
The artists and I screwed up our agenda and discussed what we had seen. Of course, these days, rather than being reliant on squinting at the speeding news through the shit-smeared windscreen of newspapers, as it flashes by in full Doppler effect, we all agreed that we can use newfangled internet technology to seek out and then freeze-frame the source of the supposed story.
“Had Corbyn really said the death of Bin Laden was a ‘tragedy?’” asked a painter. “Not really,” offered a young woman tapping at an iPhone. It appeared the veteran leftwinger had used those words, but as part of a forward moving collection of sentences, which contextualised them in the way that sentences in a supporting argument do, in order to lament the lack of due process in Bin Laden’s killing, which Corbyn believed, rightly or wrongly, had ongoing global implications.
Anyone familiar with human language, such as a baby, a dolphin, or a cleverer than average dog, would have experienced such a syntactical procedure before, perhaps involving nouns and verbs and various qualifying phrases.
Only by decontextualising these words entirely were the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the actual genuine leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, able to misrepresent Corbyn so absurdly.
The digitally enhanced, bionic GM news flies past us with such high velocity that within 24 hours the surface of the Corbyn teacup was again millpond still. Only occasionally did the becalmed Fairtrade brew in the chipped Corbyn mug begin to ripple once more, as Tony Blair’s impotent ape footsteps pounded counter-productively on the tea tray around it.
Incoherently outraged, and yet in possession of a megaphone, the wounded and once powerful monkey god lashed out this way and that in a doomed quest for meaning. Or bananas. It’s so difficult to tell since the creature no longer has Alastair Campbell to interpret for him. “We don’t do bananas.”
Like Jeremy Corbyn, I too have experienced the agony of decontextualisation. A DVD of a 2009 standup routine, in which I used depictions of violence against TV motoring journalists as a way of questioning their own right to operate outside accepted taste boundaries, ended with a direct, down the lens, plea to Mail journalists not to decontextualise the images within the 50-minute bit in order to misrepresent me.
But, brilliantly, this did not stop the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir doing exactly that. Moir’s article was swiftly withdrawn from the paper’s website presumably when it became clear that my patented Jan Moir trap, baited with the stinking cheese of assumed outrage, had worked like a dream.
But apart from me, and Jeremy Corbyn, there was another man, wasn’t there, long long ago, whose wise words were often shorn of context by stupid fools, and used against him. And perhaps that man had a beard, and maybe he wore sandals too. And perhaps he too came to lead his lost followers away from false idols towards the promised land.
And this lowly man, would he have gone among the people in fine Raja Daswani shirts like Tony Blair? No, he would have dressed like me, in an XXL T-shirt he got free from an indie band; or like Jeremy Corbyn, in a pair of itchy alpaca wool underpants knitted for him by his mother, as a gesture of solidarity with the Sandinistas. And with all the oppressed peoples of the Earth.
I’m not saying, by the way, that Corbyn and I are the new Christs. But I don’t have any say in what headlines the subeditors and page layout people choose to put on these pieces. I hope that “new Christs” bit isn’t the attention-grabbing phrase that the Observer elects to pull out of this column.
Nobody on Twitter or Comment Is Free reads to the end of the pieces they are complaining about. And a headline like “Jeremy Corbyn And I Are The New Christs” will only serve to convince the Conservative content-provider Tim Montgomerie that Guardian newspapers have finally lost the plot, and send Baron Daniel Finkelstein, OBE, into a tail-chasing tailspin of baronic confusion. What’s the point?
But in such moments of despair I think to myself, WWJCD? What would Jeremy Corbyn do? And the sadness just fades away.
Stewart Lee’s A Room with a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 from 21 Sept.
Stewart Lee
2015-09-06T01:00:53+01:00
Apparently, the Labour party leadership contest frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, wants to dredge the decomposing corpse of Osama bin Laden from the seabed and then marry it. And he wants to live with the dead body of Bin Laden in Islington, as if it were his gay-zombie husband, in a sick leftwing pantomime of the heterosexual Christian wedding ceremony. And this arrangement is also a perversion of Islam, which is of course a peaceful religion. It was Monday morning. I logged off from the Daily Mail website. I only went on the damn thing to check whether migrants were currently a swarm of vermin, or decent loving parents like you or I, or if leggy Israeli model Bar Refaeli would take the plunge in a tiny wraparound oriental miniskirt, and then I got bogged down in all this Corbyn necrophilia stuff. It’s all so confusing. Later, after I’d dropped the kids at school, I saw the cover of the Daily Express in a newsagent and read that Corbyn had also said it was a tragedy that he and Bin Laden had not met during the latter’s unfairly curtailed life, as Corbyn was sure that after they had become lovers, they would have sponsored a sloth at London zoo. I raised my eyebrow at the newsagent, a bearded Islamic man in long flowing robes with an inscrutable expression of fundamentalist certainty. But he said that whatever people did behind closed doors was up to them, as long as the sloth had given its consent and was not harmed. Later, I attended a local radical artists’ and writers’ meeting in the last squatted tower block in Tower Hamlets. We were trying to decide how best to respond creatively to the political implications of austerity, and whether there was a place in our empty...
The elements of chance and improvisation mean that no two performances of Indeterminacy will ever be the same - each time we are witnessing something perfectly unique and strange. Featuring a variety of unusual instruments, and a highly unorthodox use of children's toys, Alan Tomlinson, Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford experiment with the elements of chance in performance, and they blur the lines between contemporary concert and art - as well as between absurdity and high seriousness.
Contemporary pianists Chen and Beresford opened the evening with dual piano improvisations, laying the groundwork for John Cage with their freeform, playful experiments. Chen plucked at the strings of the open piano; Beresford knocked on silenced keys and clicked the music stand; at times tentatively leaving each other space, and at others more aggressively assaulting the audience with tumultuous amelodic storms.
Next, Alan Tomlinson introduced his interpretation of Cage's Solo for Sliding Trombone with a brief explanation of some of the score's playful-yet-inevitably-frustrating difficulties. Cage's instructions are vague enough to allow the piece to be mostly improvised - the score is provided in "small, medium and large" notes, the dynamics and durations of which are left up to the performer. The piece consists of a range of short, mostly one-note bursts of sound - Tomlinson described this as "a series of small events" - none of which are of the same quality. What Tomlinson clearly relishes in this piece is the chance to seriously explore the range of the trombone's sound, and indeed he does just about everything you can imagine with a plastic cup and two or three mutes. He picks up a tin-foil pie pan; he teases us a bit by reaching for a plastic cup - but no, he replaces it once again; he leaves achingly long pauses between notes; he spins in a circle; and finishes the whole thing by gurgling into his instrument before defiantly releasing the spit valve on the floor. It's cheeky, it's avant-garde, and it sounds like a seriously odd jumble of noise-events, but Tomlinson's skill and confidence in presenting such a difficult piece to us shone through.
John Cage's Indeterminacy - the evening's main event - plays with similar themes of chance and improvisation. The piece was originally comprised of 90 cards on which 90 short stories or anecdotes were written. In this performance, comedian Stewart Lee (giving a rather sober, straight-faced reading) has shuffled through the deck and selected 40 of these cards. The stories he tells - another "series of small events" - range from trivial accounts of Cage's acquaintances to very funny memories of mushroom exhibitions and strange parables about monks. Some are more serious - discussing freedom, modern music, the meaning of life - but by contrast anecdotes on the homely pigeon and grandmothers are all the more funny and absurd. These stories are also of wildly varying length - and Lee deftly manages to adjust his reading speed (with hilarious results) to fit each card into the space of one minute, while maintaining a discomforting monotone voice devoid of dynamic variation or expression. The whole performance is totally absurd and disorienting - and the seriousness with which Lee reads, with which Chen and Beresford carefully pick up a child's noisemaker, comes across as extremely comical on more than one occasion.
Sound and text are in tension throughout - Chen and Beresford perform improvisations on a truly unusual range of instruments and non-instruments, occasionally completely overpowering Lee's reading. We are told that these sounds are meant to bear no relation to the meaning of the text - which partially explains the incredibly incongruous set of soundmakers, including toy pianos, flashing guns, rubber balls in a barrel, graters, and a music box playing the Pink Panther theme - yet Cage's text does give us little knowing winks of meaning now and then, commenting on sound drowning out speech, on the nature of understanding, and recalling moments of incongruity in which he played two different pieces at once, by accident, with his friend David Tudor.
So - what was Indeterminacy after all? Was it a piece of theatre, or was it just a very avant-garde concert? Was it a rare window on the inner lives of artists engaged in a strange, private ritual of creativity? And, most importantly, can you ever really take such avant-garde performance seriously? Cage, and the evening's performers, give us no determinate answers - but they poke at us, playfully, with strange new sounds that left me with the undefined buzz of experiment.
Stewart Lee
2012-09-26T21:37:28+01:00
The elements of chance and improvisation mean that no two performances of Indeterminacy will ever be the same - each time we are witnessing something perfectly unique and strange. Featuring a variety of unusual instruments, and a highly unorthodox use of children's toys, Alan Tomlinson, Stewart Lee, Tania Chen and Steve Beresford experiment with the elements of chance in performance, and they blur the lines between contemporary concert and art - as well as between absurdity and high seriousness. Contemporary pianists Chen and Beresford opened the evening with dual piano improvisations, laying the groundwork for John Cage with their freeform, playful experiments. Chen plucked at the strings of the open piano; Beresford knocked on silenced keys and clicked the music stand; at times tentatively leaving each other space, and at others more aggressively assaulting the audience with tumultuous amelodic storms. Next, Alan Tomlinson introduced his interpretation of Cage's Solo for Sliding Trombone with a brief explanation of some of the score's playful-yet-inevitably-frustrating difficulties. Cage's instructions are vague enough to allow the piece to be mostly improvised - the score is provided in "small, medium and large" notes, the dynamics and durations of which are left up to the performer. The piece consists of a range of short, mostly one-note bursts of sound - Tomlinson described this as "a series of small events" - none of which are of the same quality. What Tomlinson clearly relishes in this piece is the chance to seriously explore the range of the trombone's sound, and indeed he does just about everything you can imagine with a plastic cup and two or three mutes. He picks up a tin-foil pie pan; he teases us a bit by reaching for a plastic cup - but no, he replaces it once again; he leaves achingly long pauses...
You have to have a thick skin to be a columnist. I went off the idea of blogging regularly when I published a think-piece about an offhand remark Josie Long made onstage and Jason Manford responded by saying that I didn’t have to turn every thought into a column. Stewart Lee must have the hide of an elephant as he has managed to turn out enough Observer, Shortlist & New Statesman columns (plus a press release for the band Wolf People who I assume really exist) in five years to fill this book.
Then again, he is probably a better writer than me and someone who has the ability to make pertinent points and get a laugh on subjects as diverse as Spotify playlists, duck pate, UKIP, Bill Hicks, the insect community and Grant ‘who he?’ Shapps. Grayson Perry, no less, has called him “a true artist of comedy” while Al Murray calls him “the Grand Poobah of Stand-Up.” One for either Flintstones fans or Gilbert and Sullivan fans there.
Despite the book title making it sound like the barrel-scrapings of a desperate man trying to earn a crust by stitching together old work, the candid, opinion-packed, self-mocking-yet-haughty prose is consistently excellent and although I'm already an Observer reader I'm more than happy to re-read him. Lee has nurtured the happy knack of sounding like a fully paid up member of the liberal intelligentsia while constantly skewering the liberal intelligentsia. A subtitle could have been Now That’s What I Call Having Your Cake And Eating It. It is a similar technique to the way he balances positive quotes from fans with hateful quotes from enemies on his promotional posters.
Lee set the benchmark for comedy-related books with the densely brilliant, brilliantly dense career-critique How I Escaped My Certain Fate. This newish work does not boast that book's exemplary copious footnotes. Instead the pages are peppered with online comments responding to Lee’s scribbles at the time of publication. “Who is this fathead and why does he have the weirdest byline photo in the Guardian?” asked James Roberts when Lee wrote about crisps in January 2013. I expect that’s a line he could use on his next tour poster.
Stewart Lee
2016-08-06T23:19:43+01:00
You have to have a thick skin to be a columnist. I went off the idea of blogging regularly when I published a think-piece about an offhand remark Josie Long made onstage and Jason Manford responded by saying that I didn’t have to turn every thought into a column. Stewart Lee must have the hide of an elephant as he has managed to turn out enough Observer, Shortlist & New Statesman columns (plus a press release for the band Wolf People who I assume really exist) in five years to fill this book. Then again, he is probably a better writer than me and someone who has the ability to make pertinent points and get a laugh on subjects as diverse as Spotify playlists, duck pate, UKIP, Bill Hicks, the insect community and Grant ‘who he?’ Shapps. Grayson Perry, no less, has called him “a true artist of comedy” while Al Murray calls him “the Grand Poobah of Stand-Up.” One for either Flintstones fans or Gilbert and Sullivan fans there. Despite the book title making it sound like the barrel-scrapings of a desperate man trying to earn a crust by stitching together old work, the candid, opinion-packed, self-mocking-yet-haughty prose is consistently excellent and although I'm already an Observer reader I'm more than happy to re-read him. Lee has nurtured the happy knack of sounding like a fully paid up member of the liberal intelligentsia while constantly skewering the liberal intelligentsia. A subtitle could have been Now That’s What I Call Having Your Cake And Eating It. It is a similar technique to the way he balances positive quotes from fans with hateful quotes from enemies on his promotional posters. Lee set the benchmark for comedy-related books with the densely brilliant, brilliantly dense career-critique How I Escaped My Certain Fate. This...
The Japanese commune rockers' seventieth album focuses the usual free-form freak-outs into a flowing suite of sound.
Chinese Flying Saucer is twelve minutes of hard rock riffing doused in disorientating swooshing; the quarter of an hour of modal blues droning and octopus poly-rhythms that comprises Back Door Man Of Ghost Rails Inn sounds like Jim Morrison fronting San Francisco beatniks The Serpent Power; at twenty minutes a piece each, Shine On You Crazy Dynamite out-Syd Barretts Pink Floyd's first line-up, and Electric Death Mantra delves deeper into the heart of the sun than its second.
Stewart Lee
2012-01-01T00:40:03+00:00
The Japanese commune rockers' seventieth album focuses the usual free-form freak-outs into a flowing suite of sound. Chinese Flying Saucer is twelve minutes of hard rock riffing doused in disorientating swooshing; the quarter of an hour of modal blues droning and octopus poly-rhythms that comprises Back Door Man Of Ghost Rails Inn sounds like Jim Morrison fronting San Francisco beatniks The Serpent Power; at twenty minutes a piece each, Shine On You Crazy Dynamite out-Syd Barretts Pink Floyd's first line-up, and Electric Death Mantra delves deeper into the heart of the sun than its second.
Stewart Lee . . . offering a peep behind the curtains. Photograph: Jo Hale/Getty Images
No one under 30 will believe this, but stand-up comedy was once exciting and unpredictable. You could actually enjoy it sober. Like the punks before them, the alternative comedians who sprang up in the 1980s saw it as their duty and their pleasure to challenge the old farts who dominated both showbiz and the country. They were going to smash the system. Yes, even Ben Elton! True story!
Stewart Lee started on the circuit in 1989, just as the movement was losing its way. Five years before, as a Solihull schoolboy, he'd had his head turned by Ted Chippington, an obscure West Midlander with a scowl and a monotone delivery. Watching Chippington, Lee says, he realised that "Stand-up could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn't even have to look as if you were enjoying it."
Lee rarely did: he's one of those few people who can look both smug and miserable at the same time. But for most of the 90s it seemed to outsiders that he was doing very nicely. His double act with Richard Herring spawned 10 radio and television series for the BBC. Alone, he played thousands of live dates. Yet, he says now, he was barely scraping by. He kept finding himself in front of audiences who wanted undemanding gags about soccer or Space Hoppers, not a man whose idea of a good time was to alienate his public and then, with luck, win it back. He stopped enjoying himself. In 2001, during a particularly painful gig in Liverpool, he realised he was "a mumbling relic from another age . . . Alternative comedy was dead. I was spent . . . So, quietly and without any fuss, I decided, then and there, to stop." And, just like that, he did.
Nine years on, however, Lee is once more standing up and loving it. His latest BBC TV show, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, has been commissioned for a second series, and next month sees him performing in 18 cities. How I Escaped My Certain Fate is the story of how he regained his taste for performance, and a paying audience. It's a reminder that sometimes you need to work out what you do best and chuck out everything that gets in the way. In Lee's case that included his former management company, Avalon.
The book is also a masterclass in how to appreciate comedy – at least Lee's intellectual, sometimes wilfully inaccessible kind of comedy. "Within a few years," he threatens, "'jokes', as we comedians call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silences and passive-agressive monotony."
Although there are bits of introduction and conventional exposition – notably covering Lee's involvement with the allegedly blasphemous Jerry Springer – The Opera, which he directed during his break from stand-up, the heart of the book is three live shows: Stand-Up Comedian, which began his comeback in 2004; the following year's 90s Comedian, "a single hour-long shaggy-dog story about anal investigation, religious persecution and a blasphemous physical encounter with Jesus"; and 2007's 41st Best Stand-up Ever, about the disparity between Lee's supposed high status and his inability to earn a decent crust.
For each of these, Lee provides not only a full transcript but a parallel narrative in the form of exhaustive footnotes, the longest of which stretches to three and a half pages. Here he explains the workings of the jokes he hasn't yet managed to eradicate, or revels in their failure. His basic philosophy is that the customer is always wrong. "It is a constant source of frustration to comics," he writes, "that you, the public, are often inordinately thrilled by things that we do which are quite easy, and baffled or bored by the stuff we are proud of, or else assume that our finest moments are errors or accidents." It's no surprise to learn that he's a fan of free jazz, with its "sheer bloody-mindedness" and its "take-it-or-leave-it attitude to critical and public approval".
You don't often see the inner workings of a comedian's act, and in most cases that's no loss. This time, however, it feels like a privilege to peep behind the curtains.
Stewart Lee
2010-11-18T12:53:58+00:00
Stewart Lee . . . offering a peep behind the curtains. Photograph: Jo Hale/Getty Images No one under 30 will believe this, but stand-up comedy was once exciting and unpredictable. You could actually enjoy it sober. Like the punks before them, the alternative comedians who sprang up in the 1980s saw it as their duty and their pleasure to challenge the old farts who dominated both showbiz and the country. They were going to smash the system. Yes, even Ben Elton! True story! Stewart Lee started on the circuit in 1989, just as the movement was losing its way. Five years before, as a Solihull schoolboy, he'd had his head turned by Ted Chippington, an obscure West Midlander with a scowl and a monotone delivery. Watching Chippington, Lee says, he realised that "Stand-up could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn't even have to look as if you were enjoying it." Lee rarely did: he's one of those few people who can look both smug and miserable at the same time. But for most of the 90s it seemed to outsiders that he was doing very nicely. His double act with Richard Herring spawned 10 radio and television series for the BBC. Alone, he played thousands of live dates. Yet, he says now, he was barely scraping by. He kept finding himself in front of audiences who wanted undemanding gags about soccer or Space Hoppers, not a man whose idea of a good time was to alienate his public and then, with luck, win it back. He stopped enjoying himself. In 2001, during a particularly painful gig in Liverpool, he realised he was "a mumbling relic from another age . . . Alternative comedy was dead. I was spent . . . So, quietly and without any fuss,...
1. T-SHIRT FRENZY - STEWART LEE “I DON’T THINK THAT’ T-SHIRTS
WAX FACE return to the crowded official Stewart Lee t-shirt marketplace with their most self-consciously cool design yet, cynically targeted at the ageing indie-hipster audience that make up Stewart's delusional following.
"I don't think that. I think the opposite of that.", is Stewart's philosophy of comedy boiled down to one zen-sized nugget, serving as a chest-sized signal to other secret adepts, and offering protection against psychic attack.
'I Don't Think That, I Think The Opposite Of That' is the Stewart Lee T-Shirt available on Pre-Order now via https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee
The T-Shirt available in two colourways.
Silk Screened and hand printed on Anthem Organic t-shirts.
2. TV SNOWFLAKE TORNADO
Snowflake and Tornado are both on the BBC iplayer now.
The tour of the new stand-up show, BASIC LEE, resumes active service at the Leicester Square Theatre in December and nationwide from January 2024
December 2023
Saturday 9th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 10th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 10th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Monday 11th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 12th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 13th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 14th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 15th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 16th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 17th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 17th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Monday 18th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 19th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 20th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 21st December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 22nd December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
January 2024
Thursday 4th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 5th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 7th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 7th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Monday 8th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 10th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 11th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 14th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Monday 15th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 16th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 17th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 18th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 19th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 20th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 20th January 2024 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Monday 22nd January 2024 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Tuesday 23rd January 2024 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 24th January 2024 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Thursday 25th January 2024 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Friday 26th January 2024 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Saturday 27th January 2024 - The Forum, Bath - TICKETS
Sunday 28th January 2024 - Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton - TICKETS
Monday 29th January 2024 - The Marlowe, Canterbury - TICKETS
February 2024
Friday 2nd February 2024 - The Hawth, Crawley - TICKETS
Saturday 3rd February 2024 - Symphony Hall, Birmingham - TICKETS
Sunday 4th February 2024 - William Aston Hall, Wrexham - TICKETS
Tuesday 6th February 2024 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Wednesday 7th February 2024 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Thursday 8th February 2024 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Friday 9th February 2024 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Saturday 10th February 2024 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Sunday 11th February 2024 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle - TICKETS
Sunday 18th February 2024 - DeMontfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Sunday 18th February 2024 - DeMontfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Tuesday 20th February 2024 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - TICKETS
Wednesday 21st February 2024 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - TICKETS
Thursday 22nd February 2024 - The Baths Hall, Scunthorpe - TICKETS
Friday 23rd February 2024 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Saturday 24th February 2024 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Sunday 25th February 2024 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Monday 26th February 2024 - Wycombe Swan, High Wycombe - TICKETS
Thursday 29th February 2024 - The Hexagon, Reading - TICKETS
March 2024
Friday 1st March 2024 - Royal & Derngate, Northampton - TICKETS
Saturday 2nd March 2024 - The Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Sunday 3rd March 2024 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth - TICKETS
Monday 4th March 2024 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro
Wednesday 6th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Thursday 7th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Friday 8th March 2024 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Saturday 9th March 2024 - Storyhouse, Chester - TICKETS
Tuesday 12th March 2024 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Wednesday 13th March 2024 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Thursday 14th March 2024 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS
Friday 15th March 2024 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - TICKETS
Saturday 16th March 2024 - Hippodrome, Darlington - TICKETS
Sunday 17th March 2024 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Thursday 21st March 2024 - King's Theatre, Portsmouth - TICKETS
Friday 22nd March 2024 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Saturday 23rd March 2024 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Sunday 24th March 2024 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS
Tuesday 26th March 2024 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Wednesday 27th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 28th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
April 2024
Thursday 18th April 2024 - St. George's Hall, Bradford - TICKETS
Monday 22nd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 25th April 2024 - The Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
I rewrote the Porter scene for Wils Wilson’s brilliant new production of Macbeth at the RSC in Stratford. The show is open now and runs until the 14th Oct.
It is ace, with lots of things done in radical ways I have never seen them, under the heavy manners of a pervasive folk horror feel, and it’s a great entry point for Shakespeare. There’s only the odd seat left but give it a go… https://www.rsc.org.uk/macbeth/tickets
6. I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME 2023 HAPPENINGS AND THINGS
Botallock O’Clock If you are near Mousehole Cornwall on 16th Sept see Eddie Elks’ excellent play about the artist Roger Hilton, performed by Dan Frost, here in the Solomon Brown Hall at 7.30, doors 6.30 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thesolomonbrownememorialhallassociation/980851 A rehearsed reading of Botallack O’clock written by Eddie Elks and performed by Dan Frost and Jason Calder For the last two years of his life, Roger Hilton took permanently to his bed, in his cliff top cottage on the coastline of Botallack, Cornwall. Here he continued to work, painting over the side of his bed on sheets of paper laid on the floor. A small downstairs room became his bedroom, living space and studio, where Roger would work through the night with only his thoughts, his imaginings and a temperamental radio for company. Botallack O'Clock is a funny, moving and thought–provoking journey into the creative mind of one of the most unique voices in post–war British art. Having premiered at the Half Moon, Herne Hill in 2011, Botallack O”Clock transferred to the Edinburgh Festival 2012 and then on to the 59E59 Theaters, New York as part of the Brits Off Broadway Festival 2013. Botallack O”Clock returned to London in 2016 and 2018 at the Old Red Lion Theatre, Islington.
TIME OUT CRITIC'S CHOICE ★★★★★ "Dazzlingly eloquent yet always just beyond sense... Botallack O'Clock is a stunning miniature; surprising, profound and very very funny... a phenomenal and uncompromising performance by Dan Frost”. Matt Trueman, Time Out
Running time: approximately 50 minutes Doors open at 6:30pm -Bar Open for Refreshments: Show starts at 7:30pm
Evelyn De Morgan - The Gold Drawings. Leighton House, London until October 1st. Sometime visionary, sometime cheesey, Victorian mystic. https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/museums/evelyn-de-morgan-gold-drawings YO LA TENGO Gods of American indie APRIL 10TH Dublin Olympia, 12th M’cr New Century, 13th Bristol SWX, 14th London Palladium,
ALAN WILKINSON Europe’s second greatest livi8ng fee jazz saxophonist has some dates;
Sunday, September 10th - Alan Wilkinson/Oren Marshall/Steve Noble at Hundred Years Gallery, London, from 15.30. Wilkinson/Marshall/Noble HYG £8 cash on door;
Thursday, 14th September - Alan Wilkinson/Oren Marshall/Steve Noble at Robyn's Rocket, Cafe Oto, London 8.30pm Robyn's Rocket at Cafe Oto £10;
Friday 15th September - Alan Wilkinson/Dominic Lash/Steve Noble at Finch Café, London. Dominic will be playing electric guitar. 8pm. £8 cash on the door. Wilkinson/Lash/Noble Finch Cafe
FALLEN LEAVES Punk-mod showmen. OCT 7th London West Hampstead Arts; Nov 11th Kingsdton Upon Thames Fighting Cocks; Jan 27th Brighton Hope & Ruin
SCIENTISTS Sydney Swamp Punks OCT 5th Leeds Brudenell; 8TH London 100 Club; 9th Northampton Black Prince; 10th Newcastle Cluny 2
CARLTON MELTON California sunshine boys OCT 12th OSP Fest London; 13th Glastonbury King Arthur; 14th Hebden Bridge Trades; 18th Bristol Crofters.
CHRIS STAMEY Power pop progenitor at 69 OCT 30th - 31st London Betsey Trotwood; NOV 1st Glasgow Glad; Nov 9th Dublin Wheelans
HAWKWIND This current Hawkwind iteration channels their classic ‘70s space rock sound unashamedly, with keyboardist Thighpaulsandra of Coil, Cope and Spiritualised clearly living out a childhood dream. OCTOBER 29TH Royal Albert Hall.
MARTIN CARTHY Venerable and invaluable folk veteran DEC 8th London Mycenae House
TREEBOY & ARC Televisionary young post-punks OCT 18th London Moth Club
THE BOO RADLEYS Reformed 90s psychedelic Britpop era fish out of water OCT 32st B’ham Institute, NOV 4th Islington Academy
EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD Plangent no wave influenced serial minimalists. Have to be seen! Cut here SEPT 15th London St John on The Green
DISCHARGE Hardcore punk pioneers SEPT 3rd Derby Victoria Inn, 8th Bristol Fleece, 9th Exeter Phoenix, OCT 20th London New Cross Inn, 21st Stamford Mama Liz’s, 28th Bournemouth Anvil, DEC 23rd B’ham Castle & Falcon
RED GUITARS / THE ROOM Hull’s Afro-inflected political indie rock innovators, Red Guitars, reform, supported by returning and massively underrated Liverpool scallydelia also-rans The Room.
BRISTOL Exchange, 13 SOUTHAMPTON The Joiners, 14 BIRMINGHAM O2 Academy 3, 16 NORWICH Waterfront, 17 LONDON 100 Club, 18 OXFORD The Bullingdon, 20 BRIGHTON Chalk
ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN Another tilt at the infinite horizon from the cosmic scallies SEPT 12TH Nottingham Royal Concert Halls, 14th Edinburgh Usher Halls, 16th L’pool Bank Arena, 18th London Royal Albert Hall
DEATHCRASH Youthful slowcore revivalists
SEPT 14th Leeds Mill Hill Chapel, 15th Glasgow CCA, 16th Salford White Hotel, 17th Bristol Cube, 23rd Dublin Workman’s Cellar, 28th London Fabric
BEVIS FROND - Psychedelic survivors of epic grandeur. Cut here 11th M’cr Aatma, 12th Leeds Hyde Park Book Club, 14th Bristol Louisianna, 15th Leytonstone Social Club, 17th St Leonard’s Piper’s.
ELIZA SKELTON - Album Launch + Special Guests, Brighton Unitarian Church, 22.09.2023
Doors 7pm / Start 7:30pm, £12 + booking fee / £16 on the door
Brighton-based singer songwriter and accomplished multi- instrumentalist Eliza has been quietly making music in the south coast for many years. Known for The Desperate Ones, her collaboration with Paul Simmons, and a long-serving member of Oddfellow’s Casino, Eliza has now produced this magnificent, fully-fledged debut solo album of beautiful material.
Eliza's songs are a genre bending blend of atmospheric, gothic tinged folk rock, electronica and lush pastoral vocal harmonies, complimented with visionary narrative lyrics. 'The Lookerer' is out now on Blue Matter records.
‘The Lookerer is the twenty-first century filmic folk rock album everyone needs.’ – Stewart Lee. ‘**** An entrancingly good debut.' - Shindig Magazine
BLUE AEROPLANES/WAVE PICTURES Superb double bill of classic indie intellectuals. SEP 29th London Electric ballroom
THE SONICS ‘60s garage punks of ‘Have Love Will Travel’ and Strychnine fame, still slogging on OCT 12th Bristol Fleece, 13th London garage, 14th Glasgow Room 2, 17th Leeds Brudenell
KID CONGO POWERS & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS. California garage punk guitar legend of Fur Bible non-fame. OCT 24th - Newcastle Cluny; 26th Nottingham Boat; 27th London Oslo.
DETROIT COBRAS Garage punk party band NOV 3rd London Forge; 4th Birmingham Crossing; 5th Bristol Lost Horizon; 6th Southampton 1865; 8th Leeds Old Woolen; 9th Glasgow Oran Moor; 10th Edinburgh Liquid; 11th Blackpool Bootleg; 12th M’cr Rebellion.
NECKS Nov 20th Kings Place London one-off for down under jazz ambience miniminalists
LARGE PLANTS Cheesecloth hairy funk-folk Vertigo-flavoured revivalists return to London Grace Nov 25th
CRIME & THE CITY SOLUTION Australian cinematic blues punks of Wenders cameo fame return NOV 24th London Moth, 25th Bristol Cube, 26th Colchester Arts
BLUE ORCHIDS Dishwater visionaries NOV 21st Glasgow Hug & Pint, 24th Newcastle Cumberland Arms, DEC 1st London 229, 2nd St Leonard’s Piper, 3rd Leicester Musician
CALEXICO Tucson’s cinematic desert rock band NOV 1st Bexhill-on-Sea Pavillion, 2nd London Electric Ballroom, 3rd Sunderland Fire Station, 4th M’cr New Century, 5th Dublin Helix
SLEAFORD MODS Shouting men NOV 22nd B’ham Academy, 23rd Glasgow Academy, 25th Dublin Academy, 28th Leeds Academy, 29th M’cr Victoria Warehouse, 30th Bristol Academy, DEC 2nd London Alexandra Palace (with me as support at the final one)
MICHAEL ROTHER Neu! noise man still motoring FEB 3rd 2024 London Barbican
7. IN OUR LAMENTATIONS 2023
Ruggero Deodato (Junk genius, 1939)
Kelly Monteith (Lucky pants stand-up, 1942)
Alan Rankine (Associate musician, 1958)
Darryl Hunt (Pogue bass, 1950)
Jeff Beck (He happened ten years time ago, 1944)
Jane Suck (punk chronicler, 195?)
Yukihiro Takahashi (Sadistic Mika Man, 1952)
Ronald Blythe (Akenfieldsman, 1922)
Piers Haggard (hack genius of Claw and Quatermass, 1932)
Van Connor (sturdy psychedelic tree, 1967)
David Sutherland (Bash Street basher, 1933)
David Crosby (Byrdmaniac, 1941)
Tom Verlaine (Sui generis genius Televisionary, 1949)
Burt Bacarach (Musical cheesnius, 1928)
Eugene Cheese (chucklin’ cheesenius moocher, 1944)
Betty Boothroyd (croaky speaker, 1939)
Wayne Shorter (Shorter no longer, 1933)
David Lindley (Kaleidoscopic guitarist, 1944)
Keith Johnstone (Improvisational Canadian, 1933)
Rolly Crump (West Coast Pop Artist, 1930)
Paul O’Grady (Proudly woke drag act, 1955)
Peter Usborne (Generation-spooking publisher, 1937)
Tony Coe (Jazz panther, 1934)
Barry Humphries (Machenalian Australian, 1934)
Mark Stewart (Bristol pre-post-punk pioneer, 1960)
Gareth Richards (Comedian, 1979)
Johnny Fean (Horslips guitar bandit, 1951)
Frank Kozik (the Giotto of grunge, 1962)
Andy Smart (Bull-running comedian, 1959)
Alan Frank (Gateway ‘70s film scribe, 1942)
Algy Ward (Damned bass Saint, 1959)
Andy Rourke (Sainted bass Smith, 1964)
Pete Brown (Battered ornament, 1940)
George Logan (The Black Cap’s breakout Hinge, 1944)
Jah Shaka (Sound system shaker, 1948)
Spot (SST soundman, 1951)
Ahmad Jamal (cool jazz piano 1931)
Harry Belafonte (anti-apartheid boat singer, 1927)
Gordon Lightfoot (Fitzgerald wrecker, 1938)
Stu James (Mojo not working, 1945)
Jon Povey (Pretty bass Thing, 1942)
Broderick Smith (Singing Dingoe, 1948)
Wee Willie Harris (2 I’s wild man, 1933)
Cliff Fish (Paper Bass, 1949)
Simon Emerson (Afro-Celt Weekender and a very nice man, 1956)
Bruce Barthol (Fish bass, 1947)
Top Topham (Yardbird & man with ‘top’ twice in name, 1947)
Renee Geyer (Voice of Sun, 1947)
Tony McPhee (Hoglord, 1944)
Martin Duffy (He Felt the keys, 1967)
Jack Lee (He nervously hung on the telephone, 1952)
Cormac McCarthy (The real writing deal, 1933)
Peter Brotzmann (Machine-gunner, 1941)
Henrietta Soames (Novelist, theatregoer, gardener, guerrilla rose grower, 1958)
Bill Allerton (Outstanding Stand Out Gentleman disc dealer)
Lord Creator (Rocksteady artistocrat, 1935)
Blackie Onassis (Urge Overkiller, 1966)
Tony Butler (Alan Partridge of Birmingham, 1935)
Jane Birkin (Je t’aime, 1946)
Adrian Street (glam wrestler, 1940)
Ron S Peno (He died pretty, 1955)
Sixto Rodriuguez (rediscovered man, 1941)
Robbie Robertson (bandleader, 1943)
Erkin Koray (Turkish delight, 1941)
David LaFlamme (It’s a beautiful violin, 1941)
George Tickner (Fruminous snatchman, 1946)
Louis Tillet (Dark poet of the keys, 1959)
Brian McBride (Star of The Lid, 1970)
Charles Gayle (Jazz sax titan, a real blow,1939)
Richard Davis (Jazz bass sidesman, 1930)
Malcolm Hay (Comedy listings magnate without whom...1941)
Stewart Lee
2023-09-11T14:38:01+01:00
1. T-SHIRT FRENZY - STEWART LEE “I DON’T THINK THAT’ T-SHIRTS WAX FACE return to the crowded official Stewart Lee t-shirt marketplace with their most self-consciously cool design yet, cynically targeted at the ageing indie-hipster audience that make up Stewart's delusional following. "I don't think that. I think the opposite of that.", is Stewart's philosophy of comedy boiled down to one zen-sized nugget, serving as a chest-sized signal to other secret adepts, and offering protection against psychic attack. 'I Don't Think That, I Think The Opposite Of That' is the Stewart Lee T-Shirt available on Pre-Order now via https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee The T-Shirt available in two colourways. Silk Screened and hand printed on Anthem Organic t-shirts. 2. TV SNOWFLAKE TORNADO Snowflake and Tornado are both on the BBC iplayer now. Snowflake is here. & Tornado is here. AVAILABLE FOR 18 MORE DAYS. 3. BASIC LEE The tour of the new stand-up show, BASIC LEE, resumes active service at the Leicester Square Theatre in December and nationwide from January 2024 December 2023 Saturday 9th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Sunday 10th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Sunday 10th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Monday 11th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Tuesday 12th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Wednesday 13th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Thursday 14th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Friday 15th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Saturday 16th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Sunday 17th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Sunday 17th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS Monday 18th December 2023 - Leicester Square Theatre, London -...
Richard Buckner wallowed in the wake of Alternative Country's first wave, arriving in the mid-nineties with looks, licks, and sparsely affecting lyrics that hit home harder than his competitors'.
His ninth release, delayed by business wrangles and questions regarding a headless corpse found hear his home, arrives trumpeted by feted followers, Bon Iver and Richmond Fontaine. Few albums accommodate cameos by members of both Sonic Youth and The New Riders Of The Purple Sage, but assembled largely by Buckner alone Our Blood rarely swings like the best of his back-catalogue.
Nonetheless, the instrumentation throughout has a nice noir-ish Western feel, and Buckner's quavering, cracking voice could still fell a cynic at fifty feet.
Stewart Lee
2011-10-23T01:52:59+01:00
Richard Buckner wallowed in the wake of Alternative Country's first wave, arriving in the mid-nineties with looks, licks, and sparsely affecting lyrics that hit home harder than his competitors'. His ninth release, delayed by business wrangles and questions regarding a headless corpse found hear his home, arrives trumpeted by feted followers, Bon Iver and Richmond Fontaine. Few albums accommodate cameos by members of both Sonic Youth and The New Riders Of The Purple Sage, but assembled largely by Buckner alone Our Blood rarely swings like the best of his back-catalogue. Nonetheless, the instrumentation throughout has a nice noir-ish Western feel, and Buckner's quavering, cracking voice could still fell a cynic at fifty feet.
Stewart Lee seeks to divide his audience. His own biography is evidence of this, ending as it does with two quotes:
“One of the top three or four living stand-ups..” – Time Out
“The worst stand-up I have ever seen” – Graham Simmons, Chortle
He begins his set by complaining about the type of audience he gets in the provinces, claiming that those who are there as ‘friends of the theatre’ or as guests of someone who actually bought tickets won’t understand his material. He complains about the theatre (the air conditioning is too noisy) and about people who couldn’t get their act together to see the show when it was on in London, claiming it was much better there because the audience all agreed with him. He then complains about people who agree with him saying they don’t laugh at the jokes but simply clap material if it expresses a view matches their own.
Having neatly set-out to alienate everyone in the room he then begins to lay into other comics, pointing out that the stage set he is standing in comprises DVDs of live performances by comedians, all of which were bought online for just 1p each. His own live DVD, he points out, is currently priced at £3.67.
His material, he says, is based around politics, language and history. But if you don’t agree with the politics (especially if you voted leave) you may have a hard time getting through to the other two elements. But he professes not to care, deliberately setting-up material for fans to like, only to under-cut their ‘metropolitan liberal elite views’. Being a Stewart Lee fan is not easy because it seems he’s just as likely to dislike people for agreeing with him as anyone else.
But all this is (surely) a front. He’s playing with the stand-up norms, deconstructing his jokes and techniques as part of his act – in the same way Penn and Teller show how their magic tricks work. And throughout he is expertly and apparently effortlessly manipulating the room for the precise effect he wants. Apparent ad libs and random interjections from the audience are woven in. Or are they as carefully planned and rehearsed as everything else? Who knows? It’s hilarious comedy that credits you with some intelligence and rewards you accordingly, provided you don’t mind that sneaky feeling that Mr Lee doesn’t really like you at all!
Stewart Lee
2017-05-12T17:22:19+01:00
Stewart Lee seeks to divide his audience. His own biography is evidence of this, ending as it does with two quotes: “One of the top three or four living stand-ups..” – Time Out “The worst stand-up I have ever seen” – Graham Simmons, Chortle He begins his set by complaining about the type of audience he gets in the provinces, claiming that those who are there as ‘friends of the theatre’ or as guests of someone who actually bought tickets won’t understand his material. He complains about the theatre (the air conditioning is too noisy) and about people who couldn’t get their act together to see the show when it was on in London, claiming it was much better there because the audience all agreed with him. He then complains about people who agree with him saying they don’t laugh at the jokes but simply clap material if it expresses a view matches their own. Having neatly set-out to alienate everyone in the room he then begins to lay into other comics, pointing out that the stage set he is standing in comprises DVDs of live performances by comedians, all of which were bought online for just 1p each. His own live DVD, he points out, is currently priced at £3.67. His material, he says, is based around politics, language and history. But if you don’t agree with the politics (especially if you voted leave) you may have a hard time getting through to the other two elements. But he professes not to care, deliberately setting-up material for fans to like, only to under-cut their ‘metropolitan liberal elite views’. Being a Stewart Lee fan is not easy because it seems he’s just as likely to dislike people for agreeing with him as anyone else. But all this is (surely) a...
Dusty function rooms and faded TV stars in English seaside towns felt abruptly moribund when, in 1993, The Mary Whitehouse Experience (a comedy revue featuring Robert Newman, David Baddiel, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis) sold out 12,000 seats at Wembley Arena [NOTE; This is the author's error. Newman & Baddiel did this as a double act, after TMWE folded].
The event seemed to rubber-stamp the dawning of a loud, monetised era in UK standup, ready-branded with its Janet Street-Porter-appropriated sound-bite: comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll. In the midst of this boom, Stewart Lee, in his double-act partnership with Richard Herring, made two television series, toured nationally, and earned radio credits for Chris Morris’s influential current affairs satire On the Hour – and yet, it’s plain that he found most of the work in this period conspicuous and unfulfilling. Interest in performance dwindled, and in 2001 Lee co-wrote (with Richard Thomas, to initial acclaim) Jerry Springer: The Opera, which transferred to Theatreland premises, only to attract both controversy from the religious right and no money.
Success on his own terms came relatively late for Lee, well into the mid-2000s, materialising only, we learn, after a period of intense disenchantment. It’s a time eloquently rendered in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, which is the more substantial of the books here. However, Content Provider – superficially a cut-and-paste grab-bag of comment pieces, in this case written mainly for The Observer newspaper – is perhaps more immediately recognisable, playing as it does on the irascible, slightly dysfunctional relationship between Lee and his audience these days. Critics consider Stewart Lee synonymous with The Observer. He’s supposed to represent the whole idea of its archetypal, comfortably liberal reader, sniping at a system that sustains him. However, instead of cosying up, Lee alters this situation by writing either in self-parody or in the skewed on-stage character version of himself. Live, it’s a now-familiar but complex dynamic: Lee can grant tolerance to his ‘established’ audience while displaying intolerance towards newcomers, to whom he once wearily directed, “you’re going to have to raise your game.” It’s a struggling Grotesque that we’re seeing — the once-balanced entertainer mutated into a monster fuming at being denied the recognition that it deserves.
This shtick (which Alan Moore describes as the “innovative technique of spraying his own audience with caustic bile”) is certainly funny to witness; there are shades of John Cleese as Basil Fawlty in its apparent truth. (It’s strange that Lee, also Oxbridge-educated, with a wide-reaching and authentic fascination for music, literature and the arts, felt unable to accept a role presenting a well-known culture show on BBC Television. But of course his irritable character, placed in the real world, in that actual job, would be unable to approach another artist without rancour and jealousy of the work under discussion. And for similar reasons of creative integrity, a kind of “what would I be doing there?” test, adverts and panel shows have also remained off limits.)
The articles compiled in Content Provider (on pretty standard topics such as William-and-Kate; Brexit; television; political pratfalls) were written – mainly, anyway – to plug absences in a regular Observer column by the comic actor David Mitchell. Lee is more inclined to include rudimentary, self-defeating errors in his copy, or toy with the rules of acceptability, than to provide Mitchell’s arch, wry, and distinctly echoing commentary on events of the week. Anyone who reads these things online will know that they unfailingly prompt a deluge of incredulous ‘below-the-line’ abuse, counteracted by Lee’s legacy fan base dutifully attempting to enlighten the naysayers. Lee uses the worst of the comments on his own website, and republishes some choice bile in Content Provider. It’s a typical acceptance of hatred, quoted on stage, promotional posters, and books (Lee “is not funny and has nothing to say,” boasts the front of Content Provider), which goes back to Lee and Herring’s Fist of Fun spin-off book, with its ‘celebration of mediocrity’ sections.
Content has been provided, by Lee and (unwittingly) his detractors, but only half of the equation gets paid. No bones are made about this being an assemblage of disposable writing intended to space-fill the print media – in Lee’s own words, to be smiled at and then become “the lining of a cat’s litter tray.” This is slightly harsh: the new forewords to many of these articles add a lot of value, as does a revealing, angsty introductory chapter. All in all, Lee seems quite chuffed that the exaggerated replica of himself has wound up pulling this off.
A character is never wholly fictional, and it’s interesting, reading How I Escaped My Certain Fate, to map the development of the performance to a chronological autobiography. This is essentially what the book is: a highly (and at times, ridiculously) annotated account of the ups and downs of Lee’s work up to roughly 2008, including verbatim transcriptions of three key shows, ums and ers dutifully included. (In possible homage to Flann O’Brien, of whom Lee is a fan, the footnotes intrude on and disrupt the narrative with infectious glee.)
“I never wanted to be a comedian,” the book begins, inviting the obvious riposte. Indeed, it has been justifiably asked: is Lee really a comedian? Does he truthfully want to stand in front of people and make them laugh? To give folks an enjoyable evening out? The answer to all these questions is yes – Lee has no interest in “driving to Cardiff and ruining someone’s night” – but at the same time his comedy is like awkward, experimental jazz, hovering near the outer reaches of a circle whose epicentre is occupied by Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay. There’s room for all, of course, and one of the most charming aspects of Certain Fate is Lee’s admiration for stand-up as an art form, one for which he seems to have near-unconditional love. His description of the early 1980s movement known as Alternative Comedy is a high point, recalling Malcolm Hardee (who claimed to have invented the phrase), Arnold Brown, Peter Richardson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French, Andy de la Tour and more.
Alternative Comedy, says Lee, had an ideological standpoint “for about a week in 1980,” which may be true, but sounds like the curmudgeon alone with his pint in the corner of the pub, and prompts the editor to warn in the footnotes that the book may come across as “the demented ramblings of an inexplicably bitter man.” It’s a description that sums up the development of the Stewart Lee character fairly well —intentionally or not. These notes are alive with anecdotal and heartfelt interludes, regaling us with tales of performers whose careers are mere footnotes themselves. They are particularly absorbing in their examination of the three transcribed shows, explaining the minutiae of each set-piece: its delivery, exactly why it did or did not work. We’re taken back to when Radio One had “weird bits,” when Channel Four was radical, and the NME had superb writers. There is sadness in the loss of those things; in fact, the presence of emotion may surprise those expecting blanket cynicism. Depressed in Australia, and rather absurdly, Lee buys Bovril and an Oasis record out of sheer nostalgia.
The book accumulates a roll-call of comedy personalities, some better-known than others, and is dedicated to Ted Chippington, a minor but cult figure in 1980s standup. Seemingly forever misplaced on an unsuitable bill, often supporting bands, Chippington’s act was to repeat, with minor variations, the same joke involving a tortuous misunderstanding of something’s name. Cue nods of recognition from followers of Stewart Lee, who, after first seeing Chippington live, made up his mind to strive for chiefly the same thing. Chippington and another obscure comic, Simon Munnery, are cited as major influences, as is a documentary named The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s film about a legendary US standup joke. Arcane and obscene, yet routinely performed by myriad comedians, the less said here about the joke itself the better, but as Provenza says, “it’s about the singer, not the song. Repeating the same joke allows us to get over the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.” This provides an apt juncture to conclude the book, with Lee telling us “this was what I had been trying to do in comedy for nearly twenty years.” That aim has been achieved, as most who have seen his standup any time in the last dozen years would confirm. The story closes in a mode of tainted celebration – a long-sought solo BBC series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, has been commissioned – as Lee finds himself in the Chinese restaurant of a Salford retail park, with a disinterested and preoccupied colleague, and ultimately drinks his champagne alone. “The me you see onstage,” he says, “is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty, and my most patronising.” It’s an act fronted up so well, people think that the monster is real. How I Escaped My Certain Fate could reverse that view, but books like this are for the converted: Lee’s decriers will have little inclination to read it.--Neil Jackson
Stewart Lee
2018-02-05T17:15:30+00:00
Dusty function rooms and faded TV stars in English seaside towns felt abruptly moribund when, in 1993, The Mary Whitehouse Experience (a comedy revue featuring Robert Newman, David Baddiel, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis) sold out 12,000 seats at Wembley Arena [NOTE; This is the author's error. Newman & Baddiel did this as a double act, after TMWE folded]. The event seemed to rubber-stamp the dawning of a loud, monetised era in UK standup, ready-branded with its Janet Street-Porter-appropriated sound-bite: comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll. In the midst of this boom, Stewart Lee, in his double-act partnership with Richard Herring, made two television series, toured nationally, and earned radio credits for Chris Morris’s influential current affairs satire On the Hour – and yet, it’s plain that he found most of the work in this period conspicuous and unfulfilling. Interest in performance dwindled, and in 2001 Lee co-wrote (with Richard Thomas, to initial acclaim) Jerry Springer: The Opera, which transferred to Theatreland premises, only to attract both controversy from the religious right and no money. Success on his own terms came relatively late for Lee, well into the mid-2000s, materialising only, we learn, after a period of intense disenchantment. It’s a time eloquently rendered in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, which is the more substantial of the books here. However, Content Provider – superficially a cut-and-paste grab-bag of comment pieces, in this case written mainly for The Observer newspaper – is perhaps more immediately recognisable, playing as it does on the irascible, slightly dysfunctional relationship between Lee and his audience these days. Critics consider Stewart Lee synonymous with The Observer. He’s supposed to represent the whole idea of its archetypal, comfortably liberal reader, sniping at a system that sustains him. However, instead of cosying up, Lee alters this...
After looking at such a tiny detail of the Ultrasound song in the last entry, I need to mention stand-up comedian Stewart Lee‘s ferociously brilliant new book How I Escaped My Certain Fate as a great resource if you’re into developing any kind of self-absorbed analysis of your own work-in-performance.
(I did have a powerful personal reaction to the book as well, but prefer to blog it here, not on Blognostic, to focus on its value as a resource. But I did LOVE it; it punched me in the face with recognition over and over again, on different levels.)
It is partly a memoir of Lee’s abandoning of live performance after near stardom in the 1990s, his confidence shattered, then his unexpected success with Jerry Springer: The Opera, leading to a tentative, more thoughtful return to stand-up in 2004. The book features three full transcriptions of key live shows since that return, which have been annotated in intricate, lengthy detail. The shows are transcribed from specific live performances (the sets used for DVDs I think, since they were taped) rather than using some kind of generic ‘perfect’/'idealised’ script.
Lee makes a jawdropping success of writing down his insightful analysis of his own creative performance process, of breaking down each stand-up show and relating clearly how the prepared material blends with the live unfolding moment, how the set might digress or not, what he says and what he’s trying to say. It’s not just fascinating but truly useful: obviously (the task of) stand-up is a magnified, concertina’d version of (the task of) music performance: the audience feedback that happens every 3-4 minutes for a songwriter, at tacitly agreed points (between each song) happens near constantly, second-by-second for a comedian. They need to be far greater masters of crowd control than we are, especially if they’re trying to do more than tell jokes, if they have an underlying point. Thus it would be less relevant if Lee were a populist gag man but his stuff is multi-layered, a complex, ambitious beast unfolding with plot and rhythm.
Beyond the analysis, I also found How I Escaped… brutally honest, yet oddly reassuring about the continuing potential for a career in minority interest, uncompromising performance arts today. Lee’s comedic rebirth and his refusal to bow to the shit he’d bended to in the past, exactly mirrors the ‘new DIY’ approach so many of us musicians are facing/embracing. He’s not trying for an over-arching message but I took from it a determined: ‘the quality will out’.
Read it if you can.
Stewart Lee
2010-10-03T12:43:47+01:00
After looking at such a tiny detail of the Ultrasound song in the last entry, I need to mention stand-up comedian Stewart Lee‘s ferociously brilliant new book How I Escaped My Certain Fate as a great resource if you’re into developing any kind of self-absorbed analysis of your own work-in-performance. (I did have a powerful personal reaction to the book as well, but prefer to blog it here, not on Blognostic, to focus on its value as a resource. But I did LOVE it; it punched me in the face with recognition over and over again, on different levels.) It is partly a memoir of Lee’s abandoning of live performance after near stardom in the 1990s, his confidence shattered, then his unexpected success with Jerry Springer: The Opera, leading to a tentative, more thoughtful return to stand-up in 2004. The book features three full transcriptions of key live shows since that return, which have been annotated in intricate, lengthy detail. The shows are transcribed from specific live performances (the sets used for DVDs I think, since they were taped) rather than using some kind of generic ‘perfect’/'idealised’ script. Lee makes a jawdropping success of writing down his insightful analysis of his own creative performance process, of breaking down each stand-up show and relating clearly how the prepared material blends with the live unfolding moment, how the set might digress or not, what he says and what he’s trying to say. It’s not just fascinating but truly useful: obviously (the task of) stand-up is a magnified, concertina’d version of (the task of) music performance: the audience feedback that happens every 3-4 minutes for a songwriter, at tacitly agreed points (between each song) happens near constantly, second-by-second for a comedian. They need to be far greater masters of crowd control than we...
Stewart Lee returned to Liverpool this week with his latest tour, Content Provider, for a two night residency at the Phil. I had previously reviewed an early version of this latest show when Stew showcased it almost a year ago and which you can read both here and, astonishingly, on Stewart Lee's own website here - I am flabbergasted to think that Stew has seen/read my little rambling about that gig and decided to use it in the review section of his site and yes, this post is essentially my shameless attempt at getting noticed once again!
Having seen an embryonic version of the show, I was intrigued to see what changes had been made along with just generally being unable to resist the opportunity to see Stew live once again. This time around I potentially incurred Stew's wrath by not only bringing a friend along, but a friend who has only recently got into Stew's comedy! Thankfully, despite such noob credentials said friend has already become a massive and confirmed Stew fan. As a result, it felt safe to take our front row seats!
There was actually very little difference between the show tonight and the show I last saw in November 2016, and that's fine - because the humour is of such a high standard that it bears repeated dividends. It's perhaps in the first half, amidst the familiar routines of merchandise, tax and touring, that the show has had some reworking applied; there's a little bit more on Brexit (inevitably), an energetic routine about mythical charity shop home deliveries that left me exhausted just from watching, as well as an absolutely hilarious piss-take of twentysomething comedians who may baulk at Stew's criticism of Russell Howard, and a joyously destructive attack of the set which is, once again, made up of the second hand DVDs of lesser stand ups. Some of the most amusing new bits here where, I suspect, those that were unique to the night itself and were, in the comedian's own words 'self indulgent digressions'; these included Stew momentarily losing his way in his routine and requiring some help from the audience when he was unable to read his own writing of the prompts he scrawls on the back of his hand, an amusing insight into how his career is viewed by his own family and his reactions to some restless audience members who were perhaps itching for their interval drink or toilet break. One throwaway line about audience reactions to his fondness for Turkish funk (which was the interval music) especially amused, as Stew claims in Liverpool this remark gets a laugh whereas in Manchester, the home of Factory Records, it receives the encouraging recommendation to start a club night. Coming from St Helens, a small town between those two North Western behemoths and being neither one nor the other, I can see both sides.
Aside from a few very good bits of business, the second half seemed, as far as my recollection goes, to be virtually unchanged from the previous November. I'm really happy to report this actually as it means that my favourite bits remain intact. These include the amusing little aside about the odd, seemingly unworkable bedfellows of jazz and folk being reminiscent of his own partnership with Richard Herring, the difference between modern day Tinder and late '80s Dateline, Game of Thrones digs ("Peter Stringfellow's Lord of the Rings") the tear-streamingly funny impression of someone under 40 addictively using their iPhone and, best of all, that wonderfully surreal and utterly deliriously hilarious routine about Stew's grandparents practicing a sort of make do and mend S&M in '30s Kidderminster. One new thing I did learn from the second half however was that Stewart Lee buys his boxer shorts from the same place as I do! I didn't expect Stew to drop his trews as a reply to someone tweeting that he had got fat but it was another laugh out loud moment to a very entertaining night.
Unfortunately, despite Stew manning a particularly enticing merch stand immediately after the show I was unable to stick around this time to buy anything or get anything signed due to the massive queue that had formed and the pressing need to catch a train home, but I'm determined to catch Stewart Lee when he's in town again (hopefully with a show entitled 'Managed Decline', the term used to describe Thatcher's abhorrent policy towards Liverpool in the '80s, and one which he wryly referred to as being how he viewed his own career now) and I recommend all fans of good, intelligent comedy to do the same.
PS: A small note to anyone booking for an event at the Liverpool Phil who may receive as I did an email offering you the opportunity of securing a spot and a free drink in their 'VIP bar', the 1840 room. for just £7. It's not worth it. For a start, 'room' is totally the wrong way to describe the corridor with a bloke at a table at the end serving drinks that the 1840 actually is. Granted you can dodge the queues at the main bar here, but you can also dodge the queues by crossing the road and enjoying a drink at The Phil pub.
Stewart Lee
2017-09-15T20:15:15+01:00
Stewart Lee returned to Liverpool this week with his latest tour, Content Provider, for a two night residency at the Phil. I had previously reviewed an early version of this latest show when Stew showcased it almost a year ago and which you can read both here and, astonishingly, on Stewart Lee's own website here - I am flabbergasted to think that Stew has seen/read my little rambling about that gig and decided to use it in the review section of his site and yes, this post is essentially my shameless attempt at getting noticed once again! Having seen an embryonic version of the show, I was intrigued to see what changes had been made along with just generally being unable to resist the opportunity to see Stew live once again. This time around I potentially incurred Stew's wrath by not only bringing a friend along, but a friend who has only recently got into Stew's comedy! Thankfully, despite such noob credentials said friend has already become a massive and confirmed Stew fan. As a result, it felt safe to take our front row seats! There was actually very little difference between the show tonight and the show I last saw in November 2016, and that's fine - because the humour is of such a high standard that it bears repeated dividends. It's perhaps in the first half, amidst the familiar routines of merchandise, tax and touring, that the show has had some reworking applied; there's a little bit more on Brexit (inevitably), an energetic routine about mythical charity shop home deliveries that left me exhausted just from watching, as well as an absolutely hilarious piss-take of twentysomething comedians who may baulk at Stew's criticism of Russell Howard, and a joyously destructive attack of the set which is, once again, made up of the...
Unusually for what is officially a "work in progress", a select number of critics have been invited along this evening, to hear Stewart Lee essentially rehearse three half hours of new material that may or may not make it into his forthcoming BBC series. Knowing that we are in the house, Lee promises he will try out his best material first. "The rest of the run will only get worse", he says, "so please deduct a star from your final reviews". It is a typically disingenuous piece of micro-management from a comedian who has never taken any prisoners, and is not in the mood to start now.
Lee begins, to everyone's surprise, by identifying the one positive about Margaret Thatcher. "She kept the back door open to negotiations with the IRA. My wife only does that on my birthday, or when I've put up some shelves."
On this occasion, Lee positively sprints towards his punchline. Generally, he takes a much more circuitous route. "In the 1980s, Labour believed that the poor didn't deserve to be poor and that the rich didn't deserve to be rich. Labour's position was opposed to the Tories.
"Nowadays", says Lee, "Ed Miliband and David Cameron are like two rats fighting over a courgette in a urinal" – proving that it can hurt more to laugh at the truth.
"For Miliband to make a mess of Labour, after Blair, is like catching a baby that's been dropped out of an aeroplane, then tripping over and dropping it in the gutter." He concludes that those on the left need more imagination than those on the right, if we are to see Miliband as anything more than "the death of a post-war socialist dream".
Lee is at his excoriating best when forcing a ridiculous argument to its logical conclusion. He takes, as his starting point, UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall's assertion that the "brightest and best Bulgarians should stay at home and rebuild an economically prosperous Bulgaria". After much hilarious repetition and reiteration of the history of immigration, Lee finally imagines Nuttall advising the fish to remain in the sea, nullifying millions of years of evolution. I would dearly love to see Nuttall watching himself being eviscerated with Lee's boning knife. Perhaps Channel 4 could invite Nuttall to watch this routine on Gogglebox.
Sadly, some of Lee's more topical observations are unlikely to survive until broadcast – for instance, his assertion that Jeremy Paxman's recent and much-trumpeted interview with Russell Brand was "hardly Nixon and Frost – more like watching a monkey throw his own excrement at a foghorn". But the material on display in this live warm-up reinforces the belief that while Lee may be "an impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old functioning alcoholic father of two", his comedy remains as deadly accurate as an Exocet missile. Stewart Lee is back in the nick of time.
Stewart Lee
2013-11-15T23:21:23+00:00
Unusually for what is officially a "work in progress", a select number of critics have been invited along this evening, to hear Stewart Lee essentially rehearse three half hours of new material that may or may not make it into his forthcoming BBC series. Knowing that we are in the house, Lee promises he will try out his best material first. "The rest of the run will only get worse", he says, "so please deduct a star from your final reviews". It is a typically disingenuous piece of micro-management from a comedian who has never taken any prisoners, and is not in the mood to start now. Lee begins, to everyone's surprise, by identifying the one positive about Margaret Thatcher. "She kept the back door open to negotiations with the IRA. My wife only does that on my birthday, or when I've put up some shelves." On this occasion, Lee positively sprints towards his punchline. Generally, he takes a much more circuitous route. "In the 1980s, Labour believed that the poor didn't deserve to be poor and that the rich didn't deserve to be rich. Labour's position was opposed to the Tories. "Nowadays", says Lee, "Ed Miliband and David Cameron are like two rats fighting over a courgette in a urinal" – proving that it can hurt more to laugh at the truth. "For Miliband to make a mess of Labour, after Blair, is like catching a baby that's been dropped out of an aeroplane, then tripping over and dropping it in the gutter." He concludes that those on the left need more imagination than those on the right, if we are to see Miliband as anything more than "the death of a post-war socialist dream". Lee is at his excoriating best when forcing a ridiculous argument to its logical...
Have you heard the one about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? There was this man, right, who needed a password eight characters long, and… and then he went and gave away the punchline before he'd done the set-up.
I'm hopeless at jokes. I told one to my children the other day that got a laugh, but for the wrong reason, because they'd heard the correct version before. “What's the secret of timing a joke?" I said. “No, wait, that doesn't sound right…"
So I'll try again. As is traditional at this time of year, the best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe has been named. Written by the comedian Nick Helm, it goes like this: “I needed a password eight characters long, so I picked 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves'." The second-best joke this year was written by the man who wrote the best joke last year, Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels."
Yet as Evan Davis and Justin Webb showed on Today when they took it in turns to read out the winner and runner-up, these things are so subjective that it is meaningless to try to judge them. They both thought a gag about the Greek economy that a listener had sent in (it involved taramasalata, hummus and a double dip) was better.
Even worse than judging jokes is trying to analyse them, an exercise Woody Allen satirises in Crimes and Misdemeanours. His character has an annoyingly unfunny brother-in-law, played by Alan Alda, who keeps saying: “If it bends, it's funny; if it breaks, it's not funny."
Yet despite the obvious danger of murdering in order to dissect, trying to work out a formula for funniness seems to obsess comedians. I once interviewed Bob Monkhouse who, on a summer afternoon in his garden in Bedfordshire, gave me a masterclass in how to tell a joke, talking me through the principles of timing, “the rule of three", and the Arthur Askey “check step" you should take before delivering your “topper". He also told me that the joke he was most proud of was: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my father. Not screaming and terrified, like his passengers." The reason? Economy.
The heir to Monkhouse, though he probably won't thank me for saying so, is Jimmy Carr, a Cambridge graduate who has written a semi-academic book on joke-telling. And the latest comedian to do something similar is Stewart Lee, an Oxford graduate whose strange and brilliant memoir, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, has just been published in paperback. In it, he deconstructs his own stand-up routine using footnotes, explaining why he creates tension here, cuts the audience some slack there.
I blame the German philosophers, who couldn't bear to leave comedy alone, either. Kant would write dusty observations such as: “Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing."
Fortunately, most of us can get through life without either analysing jokes or telling them in public. About the only time we men have to do it is when we're made best man. In this respect, a friend of mine, a garden historian, had the worst gig ever. He was best man to Stewart Lee, and the cream of the British comedy world was in his audience. He thought it went well. They seemed to laugh in the right places. But as he was walking back to his seat, he overheard someone ask Harry Hill what he thought of the speech. He gave a one-word answer: “Long."
Stewart Lee
2011-08-27T13:25:35+01:00
Have you heard the one about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? There was this man, right, who needed a password eight characters long, and… and then he went and gave away the punchline before he'd done the set-up. I'm hopeless at jokes. I told one to my children the other day that got a laugh, but for the wrong reason, because they'd heard the correct version before. “What's the secret of timing a joke?" I said. “No, wait, that doesn't sound right…" So I'll try again. As is traditional at this time of year, the best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe has been named. Written by the comedian Nick Helm, it goes like this: “I needed a password eight characters long, so I picked 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves'." The second-best joke this year was written by the man who wrote the best joke last year, Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels." Yet as Evan Davis and Justin Webb showed on Today when they took it in turns to read out the winner and runner-up, these things are so subjective that it is meaningless to try to judge them. They both thought a gag about the Greek economy that a listener had sent in (it involved taramasalata, hummus and a double dip) was better. Even worse than judging jokes is trying to analyse them, an exercise Woody Allen satirises in Crimes and Misdemeanours. His character has an annoyingly unfunny brother-in-law, played by Alan Alda, who keeps saying: “If it bends, it's funny; if it breaks, it's not funny." Yet despite the obvious danger of murdering in order to dissect, trying to work out a formula for funniness seems to obsess comedians. I once interviewed Bob Monkhouse who, on a...
In my shabby north London arts/media ghetto, one is never more than 6ft from a rat or six degrees of separation from a New Labour politician. Only last month, I saw shadow chancellor Ed Balls fingering a homity pie at the farmers' market. Some friends are even acquaintances of opposition bigwigs. And some of them can't keep secrets.
Because my wife is a feminist, (though typically unable to return my CDs to the correct genre, chronological and alphabetical position on the shelves when she brings them in from the car), I do some of the childcare. Being the only dad at Messy Play, a spy in the cab of gender, I realise men's conversations are status-securing exchanges of valuable facts, whereas women's are a two-way ebb and flow of non-assertive opinion, emotional support and bitchy gossip.
"June's friend's friend, the New Labour guy, is having terrible trouble with his plumbing?" "Erectile dysfunction?" "No," said Pauline, "a problem with his actual plumbing. They had to get a man last month because for about five days there was a number two that just wouldn't flush away. It wasn't especially big but what was weird was it looked like Tony Blair." The mums shrieked with laughter. "What do you mean, it looked like Tony Blair?" I asked, smelling a story. "Did it look like the whole of him, with arms and legs, or just his face?" "Just his face, I think," said Pauline. "I don't really know. I'm not supposed to say anything. Apparently the spin guys are really worried about the story getting out."
The next day, I myself had to call a plumber. I had accidentally put cat litter crystals into the dishwasher salt compartment and they needed to be sucked out by a professional. I don't know anything about sport so I volunteered: "Hey. Apparently there's a New Labour politician round here and last month he had to call a plumber because there was a turd with the face of Tony Blair that he couldn't flush away." "Walls have ears," the plumber laughed, adjusting his turban. "That was one of my call-outs. It was really like Tony Blair too." "In what way?" I asked. "That's the funny thing," the plumber said. "It didn't really look like him, but it just was really like him. It was obviously him. It seemed evil. And it was smiling. And no one in the family could remember having done it."
For a few minutes, the plumber sat in silence, staring, fondling his tools, puzzled by the memory, at £80 an hour plus call-out. "Whoever told you got one thing wrong though," he said, snapping out if it. "It wasn't last month. It was yesterday. And it wasn't a he. It was a woman politician. And she told me not to tell anyone about it. So if you wouldn't mind… that'll be £400 please."
Either Pauline was mistaken, and had mixed up the gender of the politicians, or there were two different north London New Labour politicians plagued by persistent voting floaters. And how could Pauline have told me a story last week that the plumber said only happened yesterday? Maybe there were two "Tonys"? Or maybe only one, but it was using the sewer system as a kind of personal transport network between the toilets of former minions. Or the whole thing was nonsense.
After lunch, I saw Diane Abbott, our local New Labour MP, with whom I am on nodding terms having been on Andrew Neil's BBC2 politics show with her three times, in the post office. Intrigued by the toilet tale, I decided to chance my arm. "Have you heard about this poo that looks like Blair?" I laughed. She gripped me tightly by the wrist and dragged me away.
Sitting out of sight, spy style, on a bench in the park, which has recently been beautifully refurbished, Abbott was fearful and nervous, but masked it with a bristling anger. "Who told you about this? The damn thing only appeared this morning. My cleaner is at home spraying it with Febreze and hitting it with the toilet brush but it keeps resurfacing. You'd better not tell anyone. This is a bloody PR disaster waiting to happen. I suppose you bloody know about all the others too? You know about Ed's problem?"
"Ed Balls?" I offered, having assumed the Blair poo Pauline had mentioned at Messy Play was plaguing the toilet of the shadow chancellor, who lives locally. "No. Balls's problem is small time. Ed Miliband." I could see Diane Abbott was torn. On the one hand, she knew she shouldn't be telling me, a standup comedian with an occasional Observer column, about Ed Miliband's plumbing problems, but she was clearly desperate to unburden herself.
"Ed Miliband's personal House of Commons toilet has been home to a persistent floater with the face of Tony Blair for six weeks now." "Can't they just flush it away?" I asked. "That's the problem. Ed flushes it away, dozens of times a day, and it just keeps coming back. In the end, he got John Prescott to go in and do a big massive fast wee on it, smashing it all to bits, and they flushed the fragments away, but then they just seemed to re-form and it came back, looking even more like Tony Blair than before."
"Don't worry, Diane. It will be all right," I said. "No. It won't be all right," she shouted. "The toilets of dozens of senior New Labour MPs all over the country are being regularly infested by a poo with the face of Tony Blair that just won't flush away. What's going on? And if this gets out… it's a gift to the Tories. It's like a joke, a bad joke, some heavy-handed routine about Blair coming back, smiling and… don't you dare write this up in one of your columns."
"You don't have to worry, Diane," I assured her. "I hardly think the Observer would stoop so low as to run a full-page column on some poo with the face of Tony Blair. People would assume the story wasn't true and just think it was the most pathetic, puerile, pointless piece of so-called satire ever run in a British broadsheet newspaper." Then her phone rang. "Pavlika. No, Pavlika. Hit it. Hit the bloody thing with a broom. Smash it to fucking pieces."
Stewart Lee
2012-08-12T14:29:07+01:00
In my shabby north London arts/media ghetto, one is never more than 6ft from a rat or six degrees of separation from a New Labour politician. Only last month, I saw shadow chancellor Ed Balls fingering a homity pie at the farmers' market. Some friends are even acquaintances of opposition bigwigs. And some of them can't keep secrets. Because my wife is a feminist, (though typically unable to return my CDs to the correct genre, chronological and alphabetical position on the shelves when she brings them in from the car), I do some of the childcare. Being the only dad at Messy Play, a spy in the cab of gender, I realise men's conversations are status-securing exchanges of valuable facts, whereas women's are a two-way ebb and flow of non-assertive opinion, emotional support and bitchy gossip. "June's friend's friend, the New Labour guy, is having terrible trouble with his plumbing?" "Erectile dysfunction?" "No," said Pauline, "a problem with his actual plumbing. They had to get a man last month because for about five days there was a number two that just wouldn't flush away. It wasn't especially big but what was weird was it looked like Tony Blair." The mums shrieked with laughter. "What do you mean, it looked like Tony Blair?" I asked, smelling a story. "Did it look like the whole of him, with arms and legs, or just his face?" "Just his face, I think," said Pauline. "I don't really know. I'm not supposed to say anything. Apparently the spin guys are really worried about the story getting out." The next day, I myself had to call a plumber. I had accidentally put cat litter crystals into the dishwasher salt compartment and they needed to be sucked out by a professional. I don't know anything about sport...
In a soft, intelligent manner, Lee used the rather silly fact he had been named in a TV programme as the 41st Best Stand-up of All Time to belittle the television industry, especially Channel 4, the sponsors of his venue, the E4 Udderbelly.
It was hard to argue with Lee’s core assertion that the 20 or 30 people who run the British TV industry have lost touch with beauty and intelligent thought. When you stop watching television, you generally find your life is improved by its absence.
Lee also cleverly used the comedy of repetition to milk a story about his mother praising the quick-wittedness of comedian Tom O’Connor whom she had seen on a cruise liner. He incessantly reiterated his mum’s words until the audience was in tears of laughter.
Equally strong was Lee’s story of his cancelled BBC2 television series, which led to him having to perform to a conference of entomologists, while clad as a giant insect for no reason and no money.
The only flaw with the show was Lee seemed to have written too many endings, all of which he used. Overall, though, it was beautifully delivered and a joy to watch.
Stewart Lee
2007-08-13T21:37:42+01:00
This show marks a return to form for Stewart Lee. In a soft, intelligent manner, Lee used the rather silly fact he had been named in a TV programme as the 41st Best Stand-up of All Time to belittle the television industry, especially Channel 4, the sponsors of his venue, the E4 Udderbelly. It was hard to argue with Lee’s core assertion that the 20 or 30 people who run the British TV industry have lost touch with beauty and intelligent thought. When you stop watching television, you generally find your life is improved by its absence. Lee also cleverly used the comedy of repetition to milk a story about his mother praising the quick-wittedness of comedian Tom O’Connor whom she had seen on a cruise liner. He incessantly reiterated his mum’s words until the audience was in tears of laughter. Equally strong was Lee’s story of his cancelled BBC2 television series, which led to him having to perform to a conference of entomologists, while clad as a giant insect for no reason and no money. The only flaw with the show was Lee seemed to have written too many endings, all of which he used. Overall, though, it was beautifully delivered and a joy to watch.
Just at a time when the wealth of music available to everyone finds young people making connections between previously disparate approaches for themselves, and beating down ancient barriers of culture and history, BBC radio is travelling in the opposite direction, by scrapping the very shows that embody that ideal.
Luke Turner of The Quietus and The Guardian makes the case for LATE JUNCTION and shows like it below, so maybe you'd like to help him by signing his on-line petition
Stew
"Apologies for the impersonal / bcc nature of this email but I'm trying to get this out and wide as fast as possible this week.
We protest the dramatic cuts to Radio 3's programming of specialist music. These have been made to "enhance the distinctive nature of the network". The opposite is happening: the distinctive parts of the network are being dismantled.
British jazz is experiencing a renaissance. Thrilling folk acts are attracting broader audiences. Electronic and experimental music is thriving, and boundaries between genres, mediums and scenes are being dissolved and swirled into ever more exciting permutations.
But in the month of its sold-out festival in London, the brilliant Late Junction, which supports new and existing artists from the worlds of experimental music, folk, jazz and beyond, is being reduced from three shows a week to one.
Jazz Now and Geoffrey Smith's Jazz are being 'rested'. Music Planet, Radio 3's only dedicated programme exploring music from around the world, is being moved to a post-midnight slot, and having its running time cut by half. And while we welcome the unique format of Unclassified, it only has an hour in the schedules. It is not enough.
The remit of BBC Radio 3 is explicit: to "appeal to listeners of any age seeking to expand their cultural horizons through engagement with the world of music and the arts". The disappearance of the programmes above - fertile, adventurous spaces showcasing the creativity and diversity of many genres - goes against this entirely.
Local, national and international culture benefits so much from these programmes.
Music-lovers tune to make new discoveries and build new creative communities. Music-makers rely on these shows as lifelines to support and share their music with enthusiastic audiences, both nationally and internationally.
New works and unexpected collaborations have happened either directly or indirectly due to these shows. This flourishing cultural ecosystem will be damaged, and musicians' careers profoundly affected, as opportunities for their work to be experienced by the mainstream at home and abroad will be drastically reduced.
We urge Radio 3 to think again about how the changes they are making will profoundly affect the broader cultural landscape, and reconsider their decisions. The BBC's enduring principles - to inform, educate, and entertain - live and breathe in the shows they are pulling apart.
A Facebook page collating other petitions - as there are a few - has also been put up by Sliz Gillard, who was involved in the Late Junction festival, to try and connect all efforts and gain momentum: Alan Davey's announcement of the scheduling changes can be found here:
Dear Mail List Just at a time when the wealth of music available to everyone finds young people making connections between previously disparate approaches for themselves, and beating down ancient barriers of culture and history, BBC radio is travelling in the opposite direction, by scrapping the very shows that embody that ideal. Luke Turner of The Quietus and The Guardian makes the case for LATE JUNCTION and shows like it below, so maybe you'd like to help him by signing his on-line petition Stew "Apologies for the impersonal / bcc nature of this email but I'm trying to get this out and wide as fast as possible this week. We protest the dramatic cuts to Radio 3's programming of specialist music. These have been made to "enhance the distinctive nature of the network". The opposite is happening: the distinctive parts of the network are being dismantled. British jazz is experiencing a renaissance. Thrilling folk acts are attracting broader audiences. Electronic and experimental music is thriving, and boundaries between genres, mediums and scenes are being dissolved and swirled into ever more exciting permutations. But in the month of its sold-out festival in London, the brilliant Late Junction, which supports new and existing artists from the worlds of experimental music, folk, jazz and beyond, is being reduced from three shows a week to one. Jazz Now and Geoffrey Smith's Jazz are being 'rested'. Music Planet, Radio 3's only dedicated programme exploring music from around the world, is being moved to a post-midnight slot, and having its running time cut by half. And while we welcome the unique format of Unclassified, it only has an hour in the schedules. It is not enough. The remit of BBC Radio 3 is explicit: to "appeal to listeners of any age seeking to expand their cultural...
An almost full capacity audience waits patiently in line for the opening night of Stewart Lee's new show. Behind me some bloke recites the Edward Lear poem from which the show takes its name.
Stewart Lee takes the stage almost immediately we are seated. He apologises fullsomely for the delay, explaining that the Traverse were trying to clear away the set behind him, part of the preceding play, which consists of rocks, sand, and almost an entire Hebridian island. He says that if we get bored during his show we could imagine living on that island. In actual fact, he couldn't have got a better set if he'd commissioned it himself. It lacks only a bong tree.
You cannot deconstruct nonsense verse, for that way lies madness. And by a similar token, if you try to make sense of nonsense, you will go round in circles like a wee boat adrift at sea. The experienced writer, performer, and director,(here epitomised), knowsthat this really handy, as bathos is a cornerstone of comedy.
Simon Munnery takes on two supporting roles, one of which is that of Lear himself, replete with beard. His fulsome comedic voice can be heard clearly despite the oversized merkin, and he's brilliant; a Shakespearean clown nearing the peak of his talents. Catch him solo at the Stand if you can.
The show is great, doubly so if you're a fan as I'd guess most of tonight's audience were. If you haven't seen Lee before, try this anyway, although those expecting a full and scholarly examination of Lear's most famous work are undoubtedly meowing up the wrong bong tree.
Richard Thomas' multi-award winning musical Jerry Springer - the Opera, which I directed, is finally on the road. Christian groups scared one-third of possible venues off a proposed tour last year with threats of prosecution for blasphemy, but Plymouth Theatre Royal, Birmingham Hippodrome and His Majesty's Theatre Aberdeen helped devise a rescue package on a reduced budget and, after a year of frustration, we are now up and running. Choreographer Jenny Arnold and I returned for our seventh attempt at staging JSTO in a record time of three weeks, waiving our royalty payments, as have all the core creative team, to cut costs.
January 22 2006
I arrive in Plymouth for five days of technical rehearsals. I'm staying at the Quality Inn, east of the multi-storeys, overlooking the sea. As a stand-up, I've been on the road for 12 of the past 14 months. I am at home in hotel rooms, with their tea bags, individually wrapped soaps and the rubbish in-house Fantastic Four movie.
On entering the neutral space of room 405, I line up the books I have brought as a magical firewall. I'm packing Bertrand Russell, Kierkegaard, DH Lawrence essays and Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, so I'm up to speed in the case for the defence. This may seem paranoid to you, but it was only the late entry of the BNP into the Plymouth Stop Springer campaign that seemed to fragment a coalition of 1,200 religious protestors. Never mind, I suppose it's good that the BNP has finally formulated an arts policy.
January 23
Public relations people at Plymouth Theatre Royal discuss how to rescue the show from the Christian right and restate its artistic credentials. Next I hear the theatre house manager's plans for dealing with any violent protestors. This doesn't happen on the We Will Rock You tour. In the afternoon the cast arrive. I feel a paternal love for the young ones, and a filial gratitude to the veterans. An Equity rep tells them the union is fighting for their right to perform, and combating the withdrawal from Sainsbury's and Woolworths of the opera's DVD, following complaints from Christian Voice.
I pitch in that it's about economics, and while it seems odd for the much-trumpeted arts sponsors Sainsbury's to cave in, ultimately Sainsbury's are nothing more than another big business, and capitalism makes slaves of us all. Then I realise I'd probably better leave.
January 24
The vast machine of the technical rehearsal lumbers into action. The 21 actors wait patiently on stage for the following four days while lights and equipment are arranged around them. Everyone is fighting the budgetary restrictions brought about by the Christian fundamentalists. A computerised flying gibbet, to swing Jerry over the fires of hell, would have cost more than our manual one, but might have saved expensive man-hours. Rolf Saxon, the charming American actor playing Springer, rises and falls erratically for half a day while this clanking metaphor for his moral descent is calibrated for maximum symbolic effect.
January 27
Christian Voice assembles outside the theatre, praying for the souls of those involved in the production. Rolf is apparently portraying a version of the Antichrist, a part neither Richard nor I remember writing. Even though only 35 protesters show, it still creates something of a frisson, and the standing ovation at the end of the show, which seems utterly innocuous and good-natured in comparison with the complaints now levelled against it, is perhaps partly informed by the audience's irritation at the protests.
January 28
There were no protestors present tonight but the piece was again brilliantly received, despite the reduced external excitement. I was very relieved by this, realising again that, underneath all the arguments about meaning and freedom of speech, the idea of what you can and can't say and about re-writing the rules of musical theatre, Jerry Springer - the Opera remains a great night out.
January 30
Press night. Previous incarnations of the opera had enjoyed universal acclaim, with the exception of Michael Coveney in the Daily Mail and Maddy Costa in this paper, but will compassion fatigue set in? The Stage suggested that the collapse of the tour was a publicity stunt, which was annoying for people who had spent a year working hard to salvage it. A local vicar wrote in today's Plymouth Herald that the second half of the show, which is set in hell, made him feel like he was "in hell", and said: "You could read it as much as a celebration of Springer, as an attack on it." This, of course, has always been our intention, and the cast have worked hard to avoid applying an ironic gloss to the characters,allowing the audience to make up their own minds about the subject matter. Thus, I was able to read his comments to the company as an example of how well they were doing.
On the way out of the theatre I pick up a letter from a woman in Kingsteignton who is looking forward to the moment that I stand before God and am sent to hell. Idiot.
January 31
Journalists and an MP want me to speak about the government's badly thought out incitement to religious hatred bill, which is debated today, and how it will affect the arts. I'd love to do this, but worry about being billed as a representative of the opera itself, and compromising my co-workers. The bill appears to suggest, for example, that the opera could be closed down immediately if there was a complaint while police investigate it, and that even our own intent for the piece would be no excuse for any offence caused, so I sign on. The show gets another ovation. I get a text from the Lib Dems' Evan Harris saying the bill has been defeated.
February 1
I should have left Plymouth by now, except that I'm down to do an after-show talk later. Cast member Valda Aviks makes an unannounced case for the piece as a Christian allegory for free will, which is delightful, if unexpected. Everyone asks great questions and there's none of the gay-hate angle that characterised some of the questions from born-again Christians at a similar event in Aberdeen last year.
February 3
In my new capacity as sin-eater for the religious guilt of the entire world, I fulfil a lifetime's ambition by appearing on the Today programme, with a member of the Muslim Council to discuss the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy. Everyone's anxious to draw parallels with the opera's persecution by the Christian right, but the Danish cartoonists wandered into a world of protected religious symbols they didn't understand. We have used a set of icons whose implications we appreciate, within a tradition of Christian imagery. And you can now buy Virgin Mary snow-globes in Vatican Square, so it's a bit late to start getting all protective.
February 4
I have a one-off performance of my 2005 stand-up show, 90s Comedian, at the Hackney Empire in London. The piece was a response to my own experiences of religious censorship but, in the light of the Danish cartoon row, I feel like its meaning is running away without my permission, and I find myself trying to re-edit sentences on stage so that I am not misunderstood. The final five minutes feel like a rally, which is always worrying.
February 6
Richard and I do an hour-long live interview with a Yorkshire radio station, to try and defuse the controversy before the show plays York later this month. Afterwards we realise how emboldened we both feel by the show's touring success so far, and it is a pleasure to be able to speak from a position of strength and confidence again, rather than to be on the back foot apologising, often for things that aren't even in the opera. For the record, there aren't 8,000 swear words. There are 174. And Jesus isn't in a nappy. OK?
February 7
I arrive in Birmingham, my old home town, for the press night at the Hippodrome where, as a child, I saw Dexy's Midnight Runners, the Smiths and Rod Hull and Emu. The show plays to 1,400, its biggest ever crowd, and goes down a storm. Local papers are going through a now predictable cycle of outraged editorials and letters pages, followed by praise and articles saying how absurd the negative reaction is when the piece is clearly about love, tolerance and forgiveness. And opera singers swearing, of course.
Outside, a bedraggled protestor hands me a leaflet complaining that the show calls God "the fascist tyrant on high". The line appears in the show on a note written by Satan and is derived from Milton's Paradise Lost. Have any of these protesters actually seen the opera?
February 8
We do a day of interviews and it's brilliant to talk to people who have actually seen the show and know what's in it, rather than to people who haven't and don't. I lost my temper with a Leicester journalist telling me about a coalition of local vicars trying to stop the opera playing a publicly funded venue there. "Public-funded art is for everyone, not just some stupid vicars." Word of mouth in Birmingham, where I once saw sausages thrown into the face of Morrissey, the vegetarian lead singer of the Smiths, is good. At night, my old English teacher comes to see the show. "I expect he's very proud," says a cast member, sarcastically. Tomorrow there's a public debate in York, and more in Leicester at the weekend, but having spent a year in the news, Jerry Springer - the Opera is finally becoming art again.
Stewart Lee
2006-02-15T13:17:49+00:00
Richard Thomas' multi-award winning musical Jerry Springer - the Opera, which I directed, is finally on the road. Christian groups scared one-third of possible venues off a proposed tour last year with threats of prosecution for blasphemy, but Plymouth Theatre Royal, Birmingham Hippodrome and His Majesty's Theatre Aberdeen helped devise a rescue package on a reduced budget and, after a year of frustration, we are now up and running. Choreographer Jenny Arnold and I returned for our seventh attempt at staging JSTO in a record time of three weeks, waiving our royalty payments, as have all the core creative team, to cut costs. January 22 2006 I arrive in Plymouth for five days of technical rehearsals. I'm staying at the Quality Inn, east of the multi-storeys, overlooking the sea. As a stand-up, I've been on the road for 12 of the past 14 months. I am at home in hotel rooms, with their tea bags, individually wrapped soaps and the rubbish in-house Fantastic Four movie. On entering the neutral space of room 405, I line up the books I have brought as a magical firewall. I'm packing Bertrand Russell, Kierkegaard, DH Lawrence essays and Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, so I'm up to speed in the case for the defence. This may seem paranoid to you, but it was only the late entry of the BNP into the Plymouth Stop Springer campaign that seemed to fragment a coalition of 1,200 religious protestors. Never mind, I suppose it's good that the BNP has finally formulated an arts policy. January 23 Public relations people at Plymouth Theatre Royal discuss how to rescue the show from the Christian right and restate its artistic credentials. Next I hear the theatre house manager's plans for dealing with any violent protestors. This doesn't happen...
I rarely go to the theatre, so the only thing I’ve seen recently is Stewart Lee’s show at the Dome in Brighton. If I go to see a play at the theatre – this is an awful confession, I invariably fall asleep.
But Stewart Lee, he’s such a brilliant and brave comedian, he’s my favourite. He doesn’t really do jokes, it’s just one long stream of consciousness, really, but everything he talks about I go along with and agree with him. It was a fabulous evening of two hours and it’s constant – you’re laughing all the time. He does have a final scene which is very, very clever, but I won’t give it away because he’s still on tour.
Stewart Lee
2017-04-09T14:04:36+01:00
I rarely go to the theatre, so the only thing I’ve seen recently is Stewart Lee’s show at the Dome in Brighton. If I go to see a play at the theatre – this is an awful confession, I invariably fall asleep. But Stewart Lee, he’s such a brilliant and brave comedian, he’s my favourite. He doesn’t really do jokes, it’s just one long stream of consciousness, really, but everything he talks about I go along with and agree with him. It was a fabulous evening of two hours and it’s constant – you’re laughing all the time. He does have a final scene which is very, very clever, but I won’t give it away because he’s still on tour.
Ben Clover finds Stewart Lee's Vegetable Stew a little more silly and a little less ranty than usual, but no less precise.
Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s still done with such precision that midway, after taking a gulp of water, he puts the bottle back on the stool, then carefully lies it flat, just in case it falls over.
It’s as if he’d decided very quickly he had no bottle-of-water-falls-over material and that it would be an event that would have to be acknowledged. After all, there’s no point having finely-crafted material questioning the audience’s own relationship to other material immediately preceding it, if they just want something funny about a bottle of water falling over. Best to just lie it flat, just in case, he probably thought.
Maybe his recent book on stand-up was so analytical that it makes you now pay more attention to tiny details than you should. But he seems more annoyed than amused later when, after much affected tuning of a guitar, the low E-string isn’t actually in tune when he needs it for a song.
The song is about the young Bullingdon Club boys now running the country as they rampaged around Oxford as students. It’s the centre-piece to one of the three subjects Lee introduces tonight, that will presumably form half of the second series of his Comedy Vehicle on the BBC next year.
Alongside politics, there are 30 minutes each on charity and Adrian Chiles. It’s not clear if his story about the BBC’s lawyers banning him from making a whole show about the former One Show presenter, because it constituted a “sustained, personal attack” is true, or whether it is untrue but nonetheless conveys the truth about corporation oversensitivity.
It’s all very clever but at the same time there’s fun to be had with words like “slayings” in sillier bits about Lee’s grandad, “a comic character”. Overall this seems like a slightly more hinged set than those from the first Comedy Vehicle series. Less ranty, a little bit less “inexplicably bitter“, but only a little bit.
He says he is trying to slim his audience down into people who share the same tastes and references as him, but also carps about having to play in a cellar while Tim Minchin tickets at the Millennium Dome go for £100+. But if he did narrow his crowd down to people just like him, wouldn’t they be quite a tough crowd; pedantic, prickly, inexplicably bitter?
So however chagrined he may appear, he should’ve been pleased with the press night crowd he does get, they laugh loud and often on their own, as the silliness take holds of them individually. There’s the same winning combination of repetition, sustained personal attacks and simultaneous director’s commentary as always, and always topped with a brilliant line.
But there is less of the walking into the crowd, sitting next to someone and doing the show from there. He might have decided that kind of thing is best left to Ahir Shah now.
At the start of the second half his pint of Guinness seems to sit fairly stably on the stool.
Stewart Lee
2010-11-01T15:04:09+00:00
Ben Clover finds Stewart Lee's Vegetable Stew a little more silly and a little less ranty than usual, but no less precise. Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s still done with such precision that midway, after taking a gulp of water, he puts the bottle back on the stool, then carefully lies it flat, just in case it falls over. It’s as if he’d decided very quickly he had no bottle-of-water-falls-over material and that it would be an event that would have to be acknowledged. After all, there’s no point having finely-crafted material questioning the audience’s own relationship to other material immediately preceding it, if they just want something funny about a bottle of water falling over. Best to just lie it flat, just in case, he probably thought. Maybe his recent book on stand-up was so analytical that it makes you now pay more attention to tiny details than you should. But he seems more annoyed than amused later when, after much affected tuning of a guitar, the low E-string isn’t actually in tune when he needs it for a song. The song is about the young Bullingdon Club boys now running the country as they rampaged around Oxford as students. It’s the centre-piece to one of the three subjects Lee introduces tonight, that will presumably form half of the second series of his Comedy Vehicle on the BBC next year. Alongside politics, there are 30 minutes each on charity and Adrian Chiles. It’s not clear if his story about the BBC’s lawyers banning him from making a whole show about the former One Show presenter, because it constituted a “sustained, personal...
Conservative politicians, and their husbands and wives, have always been obsessed with toilets. Last week's Daily Mail carried a full-page picture of Sarah Vine, partner of the education secretary, Michael Gove, emerging from a "bog standard" public toilet in Westminster, waving an ordinary toilet brush, and declaring that her family will be using public toilets in future, and not the private facilities selected for the ablutions of the families of her husband's Etonian colleagues.
It's easy to be cynical about a politician's spouse using their family to score political points, but finding the original picture of Vine emerging from the Westminster toilet online, before Conservative HQ had cropped it, reveals an image every bit as damaging as that famously suppressed photo of George Osborne poking a proboscis monkey with a pencil.
True, Vine is holding an apparently ordinary toilet brush, of the sort ordinary people like the late Jade Goody or that woman who put the cat in the bin might use, but zoom in on it and it appears that the handle is made from the ivory of the severely endangered African forest elephant, which sells at a million pounds an ounce, while the bristles have been fashioned from the tail hairs of the virtually extinct white rhino. Is this the sort of toilet brush that would wave in the hand of, for example, ordinary folk like Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69 or rap's Dizzy Rascal?
Meanwhile, the tiny brown flecks on Vine's toilet brush are revealed not to be the excrement of ordinary people, like Ray Winstone or Dappy, but tiny flakes of Green and Black's organic Maya Gold dark chocolate, the most expensive chocolate in the world. And the transparent sheet of toilet paper flapping from it is not the tracing paper type we might see wiping the bottoms of working-class heroes like White Dee or the late Bob Crow, but is in fact a gossamer-thin whisper of silk, provided by the top people's department store, Peter Jones of Sloane Square, official silk supplier to Michael Gove's family's bottoms.
View the picture in full, and Vine is not emerging from a "bog standard" public toilet at all, but from the marble edifice of Green Ernie's Church of England Toilet for Girls in Westminster, one of the least socially inclusive toilets in England. While the toilet is nominally open to the public, the majority of its customers are given keys on religious grounds, and a quarter on their ability to work the hand-dryers properly, and when you have factored in the exclusivity of its location and the wealth one would need to move into its economically cleansed catchment area today, the political exploitation of Vine's egalitarian toilet choice begins to look crass. What would Jesus do? It's impossible to say, but like the new pope, he would probably have chosen the tracing paper toilet tissue on purpose.
That said, it is difficult to criticise anyone for the choices they make where their family's toilets are concerned. The Free Toilets Movement, championed by the BBC TV personality Toby Young, aimed to liberate toilets from the interference of the state, allowing toilet users to make their own choices as regards soap brands, toilet paper texture, and whether the graffiti should be in Latin, like in Pompeii. In setting up the pioneering Hammersmith Free Toilet, Young won hearts and minds by explaining there was no guarantee that, once his new experimental toilet was built, his own family would even be allowed to use it. But then, just at the last minute, the rules changed and they were.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I made enthusiastic use of fee-paying private toilet facilities during my teens, having been granted access to them via a bursary for "waifs and strays", and as a result of scoring highly in a test of my abilities to drown flies while using the boys' urinal trough. In the further interests of further full disclosure, I should also admit that I was privately tutored in this skill, during a family holiday in Malta in the mid-70s, by my grandfather, who had been a gunner in the RAF in the second world war.)
While it's difficult to censure Vine for making use of a system that was open to her, it's harder to accommodate the exploitation of that choice, of that cultural and geographical privilege, for political ends. The ginger tomcat from down the road came in through our cat-flap last night and defecated, twice, in the kitchen. It appears to have the same electronic cat-flap collar key as our cat, and so has unlimited access to the house. I saw the first piece of cat excrement, by the radiator, at about 8am this morning while giving the children their porridge. I cleaned it up, mopped the floor with disinfectant, and washed both of my hands, then slapped them together three or four times and shook them out twice, the international Oliver Hardy gesture for having completed an unpleasant task.
Later on, my wife, having seen the second piece of cat excrement, by the window, which I hadn't noticed, accused me of deliberately ignoring it. She said I had left it for her to remove, having misunderstood that when the three-year-old told her that Daddy had "seen the cat poo", she was referring to the first piece of cat excrement, which I had already dealt with. It was not even nine o'clock and already our day had descended into the usual accusation and counter-accusation.
But I bear the ginger cat that defecated in our kitchen no ill will. It did nothing wrong. There is no active moral dimension to the cat's choice of toilet location. Finding itself in our house, in an increasingly gentrified part of Hackney where less well-off cats will soon be a rarity, it merely took advantage of the best toilet facilities available to it. The cat is without blame. What would have annoyed me would have been if the cat had then written a thousand-word piece for the Daily Mail implying that the lovely kitchen it was privileged enough to be allowed to defecate in, by virtue of the accident of its postcode and its electronic collar access key, made it in some way morally superior to other cats.
Stewart Lee appears, in a performance of John Cage's Indeterminacy, as part of the Usurp Chance tour at Birmingham's CBSO Centre on Tuesday. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is on BBC2 on Saturdays at 10pm, except in Wales, where it appears randomly
Stewart Lee
2014-03-16T13:27:37+00:00
Conservative politicians, and their husbands and wives, have always been obsessed with toilets. Last week's Daily Mail carried a full-page picture of Sarah Vine, partner of the education secretary, Michael Gove, emerging from a "bog standard" public toilet in Westminster, waving an ordinary toilet brush, and declaring that her family will be using public toilets in future, and not the private facilities selected for the ablutions of the families of her husband's Etonian colleagues. It's easy to be cynical about a politician's spouse using their family to score political points, but finding the original picture of Vine emerging from the Westminster toilet online, before Conservative HQ had cropped it, reveals an image every bit as damaging as that famously suppressed photo of George Osborne poking a proboscis monkey with a pencil. True, Vine is holding an apparently ordinary toilet brush, of the sort ordinary people like the late Jade Goody or that woman who put the cat in the bin might use, but zoom in on it and it appears that the handle is made from the ivory of the severely endangered African forest elephant, which sells at a million pounds an ounce, while the bristles have been fashioned from the tail hairs of the virtually extinct white rhino. Is this the sort of toilet brush that would wave in the hand of, for example, ordinary folk like Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69 or rap's Dizzy Rascal? Meanwhile, the tiny brown flecks on Vine's toilet brush are revealed not to be the excrement of ordinary people, like Ray Winstone or Dappy, but tiny flakes of Green and Black's organic Maya Gold dark chocolate, the most expensive chocolate in the world. And the transparent sheet of toilet paper flapping from it is not the tracing paper type we might see wiping...
PREMIERES FEBRUARY 6TH ON SKY ARTS (Freeview channel 11) (9PM).
”FEROCIOUSLY ENTERTAINING” MOJO ★ ★ ★ ★
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.
Director: Michael Cumming
Brass Eye, Oxide Ghosts, Toast Of London Writer: Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Producer: James Nicholls
The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, The Ballad Of Shirley Collins
Featuring: John Peel, Frank Skinner, Nigel Slater, Robin Askwith, Samira Ahmed, Gina Birch, Marc Riley, Danny Fields, John Taylor, Paul Morley, Fuzzbox, Kevin Eldon, Nish Kumar, Bridget Christie, Andrew O’Neill, Seann Walsh and more.
KING ROCKER A film about Robert Lloyd and The Nightingales PREMIERES FEBRUARY 6TH ON SKY ARTS (Freeview channel 11) (9PM). ”FEROCIOUSLY ENTERTAINING” MOJO ★ ★ ★ ★ 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. Press for the film can be found here. Running Time: 90 Minutes Director: Michael Cumming Brass Eye, Oxide Ghosts, Toast Of London Writer: Stewart Lee Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Producer: James Nicholls The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, The Ballad Of Shirley Collins Featuring: John Peel, Frank Skinner, Nigel Slater, Robin Askwith, Samira Ahmed, Gina Birch, Marc Riley, Danny Fields, John Taylor, Paul Morley, Fuzzbox, Kevin Eldon, Nish Kumar, Bridget Christie, Andrew O’Neill, Seann Walsh and more. KingRockerFilm.com NEW OFFICIAL TRAILER - youtu.be/UEUuvN9S9I4 AUDIO TRAILER - soundcloud.com/firerecords/kingrocker
Like punk never happened, this youthful Brighton trio’s debut offers ugly-beautiful instrumental progressive rock that aging King Crimson fans think no-one can play anymore. Moogs squelch.
Percussion ploughs complex furrows. The fusion stew suggests electric Miles Davis, but without the significant sweetener of Miles himself.
When Radiohead, whose guitars the physicists echo, swerved progwards with OK Computer in 1997 they intimated meaning via paranoia and politics. Horizons/Raptures communicates principally only its own inventiveness, but is a compelling calling card nonetheless.
Stewart Lee
2013-06-09T21:16:37+01:00
Like punk never happened, this youthful Brighton trio’s debut offers ugly-beautiful instrumental progressive rock that aging King Crimson fans think no-one can play anymore. Moogs squelch. Percussion ploughs complex furrows. The fusion stew suggests electric Miles Davis, but without the significant sweetener of Miles himself. When Radiohead, whose guitars the physicists echo, swerved progwards with OK Computer in 1997 they intimated meaning via paranoia and politics. Horizons/Raptures communicates principally only its own inventiveness, but is a compelling calling card nonetheless.
Like The Jigsaw Seen and The Fleshtones before them, The Grip Weeds are a longstanding American retro-rock band inexplicably driven to release a Christmas album.
The Weeds can pastiche late sixties/early seventies psychedelic pop perfectly, and alongside four acid-flavoured baubles they nail the nasal buzz of Jethro Tull's modal hymnal A Christmas Song, slop out an accurately overblown rendition of the sprout flavoured flatulence that is Greg Lake's I Believe In Father Christmas, and jangle folk-rock style through a rather lovely reading of The Pretenders' 2000 Miles. Your Mojo reading uncle's perfect present, sorted.
Stewart Lee
2011-12-17T19:54:07+00:00
Like The Jigsaw Seen and The Fleshtones before them, The Grip Weeds are a longstanding American retro-rock band inexplicably driven to release a Christmas album. The Weeds can pastiche late sixties/early seventies psychedelic pop perfectly, and alongside four acid-flavoured baubles they nail the nasal buzz of Jethro Tull's modal hymnal A Christmas Song, slop out an accurately overblown rendition of the sprout flavoured flatulence that is Greg Lake's I Believe In Father Christmas, and jangle folk-rock style through a rather lovely reading of The Pretenders' 2000 Miles. Your Mojo reading uncle's perfect present, sorted.
At the Assembly Rooms on George Street (18:05) Stewart Lee mocks those that have come to watch his show as friends of fans.
His usual sarcastic manner and exaggeration are present as he addresses the Fringe audience in a way only he would ever get away with. It is immediately clear that he has essentially taken his two hour long show from his tour and condensed it into an hour and fifteen minutes of loosely structured and rushed material.
Another issue I have with this show is that the space was far too big for him. In an unusual way, it is unfortunate that his television appearances and status as a recognised name have landed him such a big room. 'Carpet Remnant World' would have suited a smaller venue.
Although this is addressed by the alternative comedian, his appearance at the Assembly Rooms is somewhat of a contradiction on his own terms. The actual content of the show is funny, and the deconstruction of an expected act is clever and original.
Stewart Lee's jokes about his online reviews and news based satire bring an opening to the show that is somewhat expected.
It is just a pity that he pretty much ran out of time.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-21T14:56:28+01:00
At the Assembly Rooms on George Street (18:05) Stewart Lee mocks those that have come to watch his show as friends of fans. His usual sarcastic manner and exaggeration are present as he addresses the Fringe audience in a way only he would ever get away with. It is immediately clear that he has essentially taken his two hour long show from his tour and condensed it into an hour and fifteen minutes of loosely structured and rushed material. Another issue I have with this show is that the space was far too big for him. In an unusual way, it is unfortunate that his television appearances and status as a recognised name have landed him such a big room. 'Carpet Remnant World' would have suited a smaller venue. Although this is addressed by the alternative comedian, his appearance at the Assembly Rooms is somewhat of a contradiction on his own terms. The actual content of the show is funny, and the deconstruction of an expected act is clever and original. Stewart Lee's jokes about his online reviews and news based satire bring an opening to the show that is somewhat expected. It is just a pity that he pretty much ran out of time.
Roberts' six solo albums seamlessly incorporated traditional elements into timeless songs. But today he's a full-blown folklorist, compiling the rare Scottish field recordings collection Whaur The Pig Gaed On The Spree, and issuing these Gaelic tunes with the Hebridean singer Mairir Morrison.
An initially serious tone suggests diaphanously gowned highland visionaries in dimly lit Seventies regional television studios, late at night, when viewers had ‘their own programs', but virtuoso guests lighten the anthropological air.
Opening up the spectral lament Ailein Duinn to the rumbling drums of Trembling Bells' Alex Neilson and surges of ensemble playing suggests the project's path forward.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-25T21:25:41+01:00
Roberts' six solo albums seamlessly incorporated traditional elements into timeless songs. But today he's a full-blown folklorist, compiling the rare Scottish field recordings collection Whaur The Pig Gaed On The Spree, and issuing these Gaelic tunes with the Hebridean singer Mairir Morrison. An initially serious tone suggests diaphanously gowned highland visionaries in dimly lit Seventies regional television studios, late at night, when viewers had ‘their own programs', but virtuoso guests lighten the anthropological air. Opening up the spectral lament Ailein Duinn to the rumbling drums of Trembling Bells' Alex Neilson and surges of ensemble playing suggests the project's path forward.
Award winning stand-up comedian Stewart Lee filled the Festival Theatre (17 March 2017) in Edinburgh with hysterical laughter throughout his performance at this sell out night. After years of writing his TV show, Comedy Vehicle, this is Stewart Lee’s comeback to stand-up comedy on stage.
Having not seen him before I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this show. Not like some of the more-high profile comedians, his material was high browed varying from being very heavily focused on current political affairs of Brexit, the Scottish referendum and Donald Trump to the “under 40’s” culture of selfies, technology and bondage sex. Featuring repetition and call back references the performance flowed really well with interaction with the audience throughout. Making light of the lack of understanding to his gags from this “Friday night audience” that may be expecting more commercial comedy. However, Lee did not disappoint what seemed like his huge following with his dry wit and views of all that’s wrong in the world.
The Festival Theatre is a modern extremely spacious theatre with a choice of bars on each floor and helpful, friendly staff. It is a very nice space to have drinks pre, during and post show. The theatre is located in the city centre which means it is easily accessible by public transport and is surrounded by on street parking as well as an array or bars and restaurants for pre and post show drinks and food.
I enjoyed my evening at the Festival Theatre. Overall, I would give the night 3 stars out of 5. Probably not one for the children but certainly a very funny evening for adults. I would recommend to friends and family that would appreciate a slightly different humour than your typical high profile commercial stand-up comedians.
Rating: 3/5
Stewart Lee
2017-03-20T17:33:50+00:00
Award winning stand-up comedian Stewart Lee filled the Festival Theatre (17 March 2017) in Edinburgh with hysterical laughter throughout his performance at this sell out night. After years of writing his TV show, Comedy Vehicle, this is Stewart Lee’s comeback to stand-up comedy on stage. Having not seen him before I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this show. Not like some of the more-high profile comedians, his material was high browed varying from being very heavily focused on current political affairs of Brexit, the Scottish referendum and Donald Trump to the “under 40’s” culture of selfies, technology and bondage sex. Featuring repetition and call back references the performance flowed really well with interaction with the audience throughout. Making light of the lack of understanding to his gags from this “Friday night audience” that may be expecting more commercial comedy. However, Lee did not disappoint what seemed like his huge following with his dry wit and views of all that’s wrong in the world. The Festival Theatre is a modern extremely spacious theatre with a choice of bars on each floor and helpful, friendly staff. It is a very nice space to have drinks pre, during and post show. The theatre is located in the city centre which means it is easily accessible by public transport and is surrounded by on street parking as well as an array or bars and restaurants for pre and post show drinks and food. I enjoyed my evening at the Festival Theatre. Overall, I would give the night 3 stars out of 5. Probably not one for the children but certainly a very funny evening for adults. I would recommend to friends and family that would appreciate a slightly different humour than your typical high profile commercial stand-up comedians. Rating: 3/5
A nakedly corrupt and evidently narcissistic leader, surrounded by a phalanx of accommodating acolytes, enriched his supporters with liquidised public assets and spurious government schemes, flagrantly broke international treaties, trashed domestic political standards, systematically flooded social media with fake news, used his power over the press to spread disinformation over many decades, sought to destabilise the EU, had fruitful meetings with far right figures in Europe and America, weaponised nostalgic nationalism, and allowed refugees to be used as cannon fodder in an ongoing border dispute. But now is not the time for Keir Starmer to call for Boris Johnson’s resignation. (Did you see what I did there? I’m here all week!! Try the fish!!!)
Britain shamefully allowed Russian oligarchs to pay their way into the upper echelons of society, and is internationally despised for it. It is probably the only area of the current conflict in which we do genuinely “lead the world”. Did the wealthy interlopers’ presence protect Putin from meaningful criticism? Kill a British citizen in a Salisbury park, and then sarcastically maintain your trained assassins were tourists, of an ecclesiastical bent, keen to see the cathedral en plein soleil? Step right this way, sir! And would you like to play tennis with the prime minister too? Stick your head in between them and go “Blubby blubby blubby”.
Swathes of the home counties are now populated by oligarchs who look like they saw a Jack Vettriano painting of a woman putting on some stockings while a smoking man masturbates through a French window, and instead of just vomiting, decided that was the lifestyle for them! The Intelligence and Security Committee report on Russia, from July 2020, warned, as cautiously as possible, about their influence on British media and politics, but played down the danger of an oligarch-fuelled Jack Vettriano suspenders and sports car aesthetic dominating the fine art market for decades.
Instead, the report suggested “the UK has been viewed as a particularly favourable destination for Russian oligarchs and their money”, pinpointing visas for cash, the reputation laundering power of British institutions, and the danger of British lawyers, financiers and PR professionals, such as Tory party chairman and oligarch enabler Ben Elliot, presumably, becoming de facto Russian state actors. Having learned at the Telegraph that the best way to belittle anything is to tie it into Brussels, Turds Johnson dismissed its concerns as those of “Islington remoaners”. But the people being shelled in Ukrainian cellars don’t seem too keen on Russian influence either. And they love the EU. Is it possible to be an Islington remoaner if you live 2,500 miles away from Islington and spend all day pouring petrol into milk bottles or hiding? Just asking for a fellow comedian.
Fifteen months prior to the report, while still foreign secretary, Turds evaded his bodyguards for an unapproved jaunt to a party in Italy held by an ex-KGB agent’s playboy son, Evgeny Lebedev, whose name sounds like someone trying to say “Have you any liver please?” underwater (I have checked with Alexa and this joke is officially “not racist”).
Turds was then spotted admitting to fellow passengers he’d “had a heavy night”, in San Francesco d’Assisi airport, on the way home. One onlooker observed of the future PM: “He was such a mess. He was quite dishevelled and his trousers were twisted and creased. He looked like he had slept in his clothes.” To be fair, Turds always looks like that, but the fact that his trousers were “twisted” is uniquely disturbing. What horrendous act could Turds’s host have perpetrated on him that left the future PM’s trousers tangled so, and could it have any relation to Lebedev’s accession to the House of Lords two years later, at Turds’s request, despite the security agencies briefing Turds against it?
Suddenly, the suggestion of Russian interference is taken more seriously, and the systematically maligned Carole Cadwalladr is quietly transforming from Andrew Neil’s “mad cat woman” into the Oracle of All Knowledge from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. The Tories’ own use of disinformation in the last election, where 88% of their online communications were false, showed us the approach can work, and it was always obvious to me that I was being targeted by Russian trolls. Whenever I wrote about Russia around the time of the EU referendum, patriotic counterattacks would appear in the newspaper’s below-the-line comment section in not quite right English. In the end I took to goading the writers of these clearly targeted contributions by including deliberately incomprehensible comments about Russia in my satires, peaking, in June 2015, with the following paragraph (apologies if I have quoted it before).
“To me, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenetic Russian keyboard wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.” But I suspect the author of the subsequent comment, “Even if Putin bee, he struggle for better colony much better for world than western wasp colonialist Lee tries to flag wave”, was an Observer reader joining in.
Did the Kremlin trolls’ cost-effective cyber campaign finally run out of steam? Trump surrendered the White House, eventually; the anticipated EU exit domino effect was headed off by the reality of Brexit; all over Europe, oligarchs’ assets are being seized; even in Britain, Roman Abramovich’s assets were finally frozen and stored in the ice compartment of the Downing Street lockdown party wine fridge. Putin has unplugged the wifi and sent in the tanks. Russia entangled British trousers, as surely as Lebedev tangled Turds’s on that fateful Italian evening. First we must hold the Home Office to account, neutralise the anti-refugee aftertaste of the Brexit campaign, and match European hospitality for the displaced victims of war. Then we must disentangle our trousers. Permanently.
Stewart Lee
2022-03-13T16:06:09+00:00
A nakedly corrupt and evidently narcissistic leader, surrounded by a phalanx of accommodating acolytes, enriched his supporters with liquidised public assets and spurious government schemes, flagrantly broke international treaties, trashed domestic political standards, systematically flooded social media with fake news, used his power over the press to spread disinformation over many decades, sought to destabilise the EU, had fruitful meetings with far right figures in Europe and America, weaponised nostalgic nationalism, and allowed refugees to be used as cannon fodder in an ongoing border dispute. But now is not the time for Keir Starmer to call for Boris Johnson’s resignation. (Did you see what I did there? I’m here all week!! Try the fish!!!) Britain shamefully allowed Russian oligarchs to pay their way into the upper echelons of society, and is internationally despised for it. It is probably the only area of the current conflict in which we do genuinely “lead the world”. Did the wealthy interlopers’ presence protect Putin from meaningful criticism? Kill a British citizen in a Salisbury park, and then sarcastically maintain your trained assassins were tourists, of an ecclesiastical bent, keen to see the cathedral en plein soleil? Step right this way, sir! And would you like to play tennis with the prime minister too? Stick your head in between them and go “Blubby blubby blubby”. Swathes of the home counties are now populated by oligarchs who look like they saw a Jack Vettriano painting of a woman putting on some stockings while a smoking man masturbates through a French window, and instead of just vomiting, decided that was the lifestyle for them! The Intelligence and Security Committee report on Russia, from July 2020, warned, as cautiously as possible, about their influence on British media and politics, but played down the danger of an oligarch-fuelled Jack...
Observer columnist and a stalwart of the standup circuit, Stewart Lee also had a Bafta-winning solo show that ran for four series on BBC2: Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Born in Shropshire, he began performing standup aged 20 and in the 90s formed a comedy duo with Richard Herring. In 2001 he co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, which went on to win four Olivier awards. His current show, Stewart Lee: Content Provider, is at Leicester Square theatre until 28 January and touring throughout 2017. See stewartlee.co.uk for details.
9 Carry On Screaming!
Gerald Thomas, 1966
The League of Gentlemen all cite the same 70s TV screening of Carry On Screaming! as an influence. Because it was parodying a cinematic milieu – British 50s and 60s horror – of which I as a little boy knew nothing, it seemed utterly unanchored, occurring in an incomprehensibly surreal world of saturated-colour Frankensteins, Wolfmans and Draculas. Kenneth Williams, Fenella Fielding, Charles Hawtrey and Harry H Corbett are all superb. And, while remaining tonally accurate, the script bubbles with great stupid jokes. The banquet scene in Carry On Up the Khyber is the series’ highlight, but this is the funniest Carry On film and its Victorian gothic milieu protects it from the ravages of squeamish social revisionism, which have rightly rendered many Carry Ons unwatchable.
10 Festen
Thomas Vinterberg, 1998
The first time I saw Festen’s family reunion gone wrong I found it unremittingly bleak. Then, years later, I watched it again and laughed my head off. It’s possible to view Festen as the blackest black comedy ever made. If you thought your family parties were bad, try this one. Violent beatings, abuse revelations, racist songs and suicides are all relayed via the puritanical dictates of the Dogme 95’s manifesto in a lucid, watery, midnight sunlight. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the standup who refuses to crack a smile but gets you in the end.
11 Get Santa
Christopher Smith, 2014
Jim Broadbent (centre) in Get Santa. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.A family film that pleases everyone on the sofa without being remotely patronising is a joyful thing and a relief for parents. Jim Broadbent, in a career-defining performance, is Santa, who crashes his sleigh into a shed, leaving estranged ex-con father Rafe Spall and his son to save Christmas and round up the reindeer. The scene where Santa, now in jail, talks to the prisoners about their childhoods deftly avoids sugary sentiment. Santa’s delight at meeting jailbird Warwick Davis, whom he naively mistakes for an elf, is brilliantly handled. It’s the funniest film no one has seen, except parents with young families, desperate for a moment’s respite at Christmas.
12 Who Dares Wins
Ian Sharp, 1982
Why not watch this reactionary anti‑CND action thriller while imagining it is actually a Comic Strip parody and pretending it stars Keith Allen instead of Lewis Collins? In one of the nastiest films ever made, coming off like Richard Littlejohn writing The Professionals, married SAS man Collins goes undercover with peaceniks to gallantly probe their firebrand leader (an admirably committed and oddly out of place) Judy Davis, only to murder her in cold blood later. Fairport Convention appear as some kind of beardo commie new wave band, playing a weird boingy protest music that never existed anywhere except in the imagination of the makers of this hilarious atrocity. Wine’s Oz Clarke has a small role as a man looking suspiciously through a window, but refused my requests to appear on stage when I screened Who Dares Wins in the Barbican’s Bad Film Club season.
13 The Unbelievable Truth
Hal Hartley, 1989
When I was twentysomething, Hal Hartley seemed to speak directly to me. I was a fan of his in the way I’d been a Smiths fan in my teens, eager for his next release. The Unbelievable Truth is his first and funniest film and stars the luminous, now late, Adrienne Shelly. Few of Hartley’s subsequent movies are really comedies and I really like his mid-period stuff where he experiments with movement and dance, but his sense of the absurd persists into his current, crowd-funded and criminally neglected work. In The Unbelievable Truth, small-town American parent-child conflict is realised with a kind of Chekhovian minimalism. Deadpan characters spew out lengthy standup soliloquies in crimped cul-de-sacs. Nobody works the jokes. They just lie there, asking for your consideration, indifferent to your approval.
14 Thundercrack!
Curt McDowell, 1975
George Kuchar and Marion Eaton in Thundercrack!McDowell took porn money to fund George Kuchar’s weird comedy noir script. Today, I don’t know if I’d stomach the hairy 70s hardcore scenes he was obliged to include, but Thundercrack! remains a work of deranged genius. Harsh lighting and ponderous piano frame six storm-tossed travellers pursued by an amorous ape, sheltering in the home of a crazy lady whose sexually deformed son is locked in the cellar. In 1994 I turned away from Kuchar’s San Francisco door, having failed to pluck up the courage to congratulate him on his ludicrous vision.
Stewart Lee Observer columnist and a stalwart of the standup circuit, Stewart Lee also had a Bafta-winning solo show that ran for four series on BBC2: Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Born in Shropshire, he began performing standup aged 20 and in the 90s formed a comedy duo with Richard Herring. In 2001 he co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, which went on to win four Olivier awards. His current show, Stewart Lee: Content Provider, is at Leicester Square theatre until 28 January and touring throughout 2017. See stewartlee.co.uk for details. 9 Carry On Screaming! Gerald Thomas, 1966 The League of Gentlemen all cite the same 70s TV screening of Carry On Screaming! as an influence. Because it was parodying a cinematic milieu – British 50s and 60s horror – of which I as a little boy knew nothing, it seemed utterly unanchored, occurring in an incomprehensibly surreal world of saturated-colour Frankensteins, Wolfmans and Draculas. Kenneth Williams, Fenella Fielding, Charles Hawtrey and Harry H Corbett are all superb. And, while remaining tonally accurate, the script bubbles with great stupid jokes. The banquet scene in Carry On Up the Khyber is the series’ highlight, but this is the funniest Carry On film and its Victorian gothic milieu protects it from the ravages of squeamish social revisionism, which have rightly rendered many Carry Ons unwatchable. 10 Festen Thomas Vinterberg, 1998 The first time I saw Festen’s family reunion gone wrong I found it unremittingly bleak. Then, years later, I watched it again and laughed my head off. It’s possible to view Festen as the blackest black comedy ever made. If you thought your family parties were bad, try this one. Violent beatings, abuse revelations, racist songs and suicides are all relayed via the puritanical dictates of the Dogme 95’s manifesto in a lucid, watery,...
The Alternative Comedy Experience, a new stand-up series, starts on Comedy Central tomorrow night. I am executive producer of the show, curated the selection of acts, appear interviewing them backstage, and am obliged to promote the programme.
So here I am, heading direct into the heartland of the comedy cognoscenti on Chortle, with a point by point description of the process and intentions of The Alternative Comedy Experience, too detailed, dull, nuanced, and niche to ever see print in a newspaper. Warning: contains spoilers.
For the first and second series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle we were required to provide extra content for BBC on-line and the red button channel. The producer Richard Webb and I decided to use my existing stage set to spend the last night of filming of each series, shooting stand-ups I liked who were perhaps too quirky, cerebral, unknown, independent or strange to get slots on the mainstream television stand-up shows, including Stephen Carlin, Henning Wehn, Andrew O'Neil, Kevin Eldon's character stuff, and Paul Sinha.
Pleased with the results, we pitched the idea of me fronting a similarly themed series to BBC2 or BBC4 but never heard anything back from anyone about the idea. Bear that in mind, internet commentators who imagine known comics have a hotline to the decision process.
At the same time, Colin Dench, a punk era promoter and comedy maven from Southend, who produced my last few live DVDs, was experiencing unnamable stirrings. Dench had been struck by the sense of an ever-widening gap between his experience of sets by the sort of acts you'd find on the Edinburgh Fringe doing solo shows at, say, comedy fans' favorite space The Stand, and the content of mainstream television stand-up shows, even when that content is provided by the sort of act you might see at The Stand.
Enamored by the unique atmosphere of that particular cave-like venue, described to me by a visiting American comedian as the place 'where all that art comedy happens', Dench took Tim Kirkby and John Walker, who were the director and director of photography on Comedy Vehicle and my live DVDs, to The Stand. They wanted to see the room with a view to asking permission to film there, and Dench, who is teetotal, began to outline his tea-inspired vision of documenting, not necessarily for television, a different form of stand-up experience, for punter and performer, than that offered on Apollo and Roadshow.
Surprisingly, the cable channel Comedy Central were interested but, I suspect needed a sweetener. I was asked on board, I have no doubt, merely in a misguided attempt to give the project some kind of marketing and promotion angle, and it has worked. Do you think you would be reading this if a teetotal man called Colin Dench from Southend had written it? No. I said I would help out as long as my name wasn't in the title, and I didn't introduce the acts in the show.
I wouldn't feel comfortable bringing on, under my name, the sort of people who regularly actually inspire me, as if I were delivering them to the viewer by the grace of my god-like hand. And I felt like the absence of a comic's name in the title helped to democratise the programme, and differentiate it from McIntyre's Roadshow, where the implication is that he is the star and is better than the guests.
Also, Comedy Central weren't about to pay me enough to put my name on the product anyway, although lazy journalists everywhere are calling the finished show Stewart Lee's Alternative Comedy Experience, so that hasn't worked. (For the record, I received less for working on the series than Hal Cruttenden does for a corporate gig, according to BBC2's Funny Business documentary.)
Even before the series was christened, we imagined we should be striving towards some kind of loose overview of the other styles of stand-up that are, and perhaps always have been, available, but are not currently favored by the big TV showcases. I insisted on a final say in the line-up, as it was going to be my face fronting the thing out, although appreciated some compromises would have to be made as we thrashed around an original long-list of 60 or so names to the essence of what we thought defined this 'alternative' strand of stand-up, and which would also be acceptable to Comedy Central, whose commitment to the idea already seen them going out on a long limb.
Advertiser-dependent Comedy Central has to be ratings driven, and is understandably obsessed with maintaining the 18-32 year old market popular with the products that fund it. This is how broadcasting works, the BBC excepted, and it's why we mustn't allow the Right, and its friends in the communications business, to close the BBC down, Savile and Sachsgate or not.
I am well aware that the tentative and delayed re-commissions of my own BBC series Comedy Vehicle were both only achieved as a result of the prestige the show was imagined to have bought to the channel, as the ratings were unspectacular. For some people, rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that Comedy Vehicle was what BBC2 ought to be doing, and so it was eventually returned.
But you can't live on prestige, and Comedy Central does not have the luxury of allowing the clanging bell of hollow praise to be a factor in its commissioning process, (although I fondly imagine they will be pleased with the good advance word on the series so far, ratings aside.) We have been criticized on the internet for the lack of 'new' talent in the show, but we never wanted the talent to be exclusively 'new', and any quotes saying we did are inaccurate glosses of my words.
Indeed, if I'd had full reign there would have been more septuagenarians and twenty-somethings in the bills. But Comedy Central, already making a bold programming decision by their standards, needed our show to draw audiences and were understandably nervous about alienating their core audience with elderly performers, and also about the obscurity and inexperience of some of the proposed younger ones - wrongly in my view, but I conceded.
Two acts we wanted, who remain conspicuously absent in a show claiming to be an overview of all the best working comics who fit the brief, turned us down, as I assumed they would. One big agent's act teasingly told me the show was viewed as some kind of dangerous anarchist splinter group, that he would be ostracised for having appeared on. And I suspect larger agents, their eyes on the prize of the lucrative corporate gig market ensnared by acts' appearances on the big shows, were worried about how their clients' commercial standing would fare if they were filmed performing in a small room.
And the small room of Stand I was key to the show. In a small enough room you can feel different parts of a crowd respond differently, you can engage directly with an audience member two feet from you, and punters can feel a comic making choices in real time. Luckily, there was a team to hand with experience, from my live DVDs and Comedy Vehicle, of filming comedy in smaller spaces than we usually see on TV.
Tim Kirkby, director, and John Walker, director of photography, were essential to the project. Over the last five years both have enabled me to realise the mental rulebook I have been trying to follow in the filming of stand-up. I think stand-up is like juggling, home baking, or sex, in that one of the exciting things about it is the element that it is really happening and that things might go very badly wrong.
Too fussy an edit, with too many different shots, with cuts to too many different angles while a joke or story is being told, remind the viewer they are watching a post-produced construct, and takes them out of the moment. If possible you should be able to pick up audience responses in a wide shot in which you can also see the comic, so we know the response was genuine, rather than appended in the edit in the form of a cutaway to a laughing person.
If there are cutaways to individual audience members they should work against the grain of the performance, showing people who are unhappy, angry, confused or bored, to exaggerate the sense that something is at stake, that a risk is being taken. Extreme close-ups should be favored at the expense of massive wide shots, to force the viewer at home to think for themselves about what is being said and done, rather than giving them the false comfort of seeing a huge crowd all enjoying it, and suggesting by association that they should.
The content of the show should be appropriate to these camera moves. It is all about non-consensus. I appreciate it must be fun to be part of the party atmosphere that the mass-agreement, and mass-recognition, of a Peter Kay or Paddy McGuiness audience provokes (and I do really mean this). But another thing I think is great about stand-up is confusion, doubt, unease, the gradual sea change in a room as the stiffs come round to a point of view they had never considered, as they come to realise that the person they assumed was mad or incompetent really knows what they are doing, and when some of them are in tears while others are still silent.
We had seen all our chosen acts - whether by dint of their silliness, their strangeness, or their sheer smartness - have those effects on a room, as opposed to the instant consensus aimed at by the big TV stand-up shows, and we wanted to see it captured. On Comedy Central. Ideally after a repeat of Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow.
There's a '70s ITV variety show, called The Wheeltappers' and Shunters' Social Club, set in a terrifyingly accurate studio-replica of an old-school Working Men's Club, that also had that same vibe. I loved it as a child, when I was too young to baulk at Bernard Manning, and think I have spent my whole adult life trying to recreate it. It's probably not a coincidence that Comedy Vehicle came to be filmed at The Mildmay Club, one of the last unspoiled Working Men's Clubs left in London.
And another now hated Seventies show had been at the back of Colin Dench's alcohol-free mind all along, - The Comedians. In this once massive ITV stand-up showcase, a talent pool of a dozen or so club comics in bowties performed to a studio audience, each drawing from the same shallow well of shared pub jokes, which were literally crossed off a blackboard in the wings by a production assistant as they were used up, to the dismay of whichever bow-tied racist had to go on last.
But it wasn't the racism, sexism and homophobia that had drawn Colin Dench's fertile mind to The Comedians. It was that the comics' sets were snappily edited together, crossing from one gag to the next, and stripped across the series in an unrelenting cavalcade of bite-sized pre-Political Correctness laughs. Would this be a way of selling our alterno-acts to Comedy Central's imagined viewership of no-attention span youngsters, and ringing another, if retrograde and reactionary, change to the current TV stand-up style?
By June last year the eventually 20-strong line-up of the still untitled show had solidified. Most TV stand-up shows lean heavily on acts represented by the management company that owns the production company that makes them, as Chortle's deranged pie-charts showed yesterday. But internet types have said, in contrast, that although The Alternative Comedy Experience doesn't just have acts from the usual three or four big agencies, it's made up instead of all my friends.
It isn't, and indeed some friends I proposed for the show were lost in the negotiations towards the final list, and some of the acts in the show are people who, though I love their work, make me feel uncomfortable, frightened, and paranoid, though I don't actively dislike them as people. And 50 per cent of the acts, including most of the ones I know best, were on Dench's ideal final squad before I was brought on broad. And two of them, Maeve Higgins and David Kay, were turns I'd never spoken to before. That said…. Admittedly, five of the acts - Stephen Carlin, Josie Long, Henning When, Tony Law and Eleanor Tiernan - are people I got to know well having asked them to come on the road opening for me for months at a time because I already liked their acts; and admittedly, I did once book a babysitter so I could go out on the town with Tony Law, but that one and only time I arranged to meet him socially he fell asleep and didn't turn up; and admittedly, I went to see the group Giant Sand with Robin Ince once in the last century, but that was the only time we ever met out of work, and he didn't like them anyway; and, admittedly, one of the five female performers is my wife of seven years, but as such can hardly be described as a 'friend'; and Simon Munnery, admittedly, was at our wedding, but he hadn't been invited. He just suspected there would be sausage rolls and arrived after everyone had gone to bed to lick the plates.
What defined these disparate performers, I suppose, was not that I knew some of them a bit, but that they are all the sort of acts, I think, that other comics stand at the back of the room admiring, irrespective of what audiences, critics and commissioners think of them. Should enough of you watch the series and we get another go, we will throw the net wider next time. We've a better gender mix than any other TV stand-up show ever, but in the event of a TACE 2 I'll spend a summer seeing only Free Fringe acts for starters, and in addition to that hopefully we'll be able to expand the age rage at both ends of the spectrum, and the cultural and international mix, testing the tolerance of Comedy Central's X-Box-fingering young viewers to the max.
In July we went to The Stand in Edinburgh to film nearly two dozen acts in ten shows over five nights. John Walker lit the venue brilliantly, in such a way as it doesn't look like it had been lit at all, and in the daytimes I began interviewing the acts backstage, to cut between their performances in lieu of a big Roadshow style build-up intro. In the familiar surroundings of the cosy backstage cupboard of their favorite venue, The Stand, most people enjoyed relaxed, candid and charming conversations, somewhere between a therapy session and those Graham Norton-type interviews where he feeds set-ups to people whose material he's read up on.
I did some great fake spontaneous TV chat-show style riffs with Simon Munnery, my backwards knowledge of his back catalogue allowing me to set him up perfectly for his best lines. I got in deep with Dave O'Doherty on comedy theory. Interviewing my wife was the most awkward moment in our relationship since the cheese grater incident. And the former Butlins Red Coat Boothby Graffoe gave away nothing, and remained resolutely 'on' throughout, peppering his Christmas cracker gag-reliant chat with tiresomely forced zingers about my increasing weight and deteriorating appearance.
Everyone's performances on Monday and Tuesday and Friday went brilliantly in both the 7pm and 10pm recordings, the venue itself almost seemed like the star of the show, and Phil Nichol delivered a spontaneously, and massively, extended career-defining set of all his old club set material that I hope one day everyone will be able to see in its entirety. But the early mid-week shows on Wednesday and Thursday revealed an unforeseen problem that slightly derailed those two recordings, and cost us a couple of potentially great performances.
While most of the tickets for most of the shows went to comedy-savvy Stand regulars or fans of the individual performers themselves, we used a TV audience supply company to fill the remainder of the 140 seats. For the early shows on Wednesday and Thursday the majority of the room ended up comprising people who like TV comedy, provided by the audience supply company, and not surprisingly, they struggled with material that Stand regulars would have processed more readily. How do you sell a show that aims to be different to TV stand-up to people who have come along to see TV stand-up?
Robin Ince, like the club hack that he secretly is, somehow sold them a set of quantum physics based observational comedy, that I've seen re-aligning the horizontal plane of a Hammersmith Apollo full of science buffs, but both those early shows were a slog for the acts. Nonetheless, we used much of the footage. There's something satisfying about seeing a comic's look of disappointment in the audience when a line other comedians, and probably even some TV viewers at home, can tell is brilliant, is met with a degree of bafflement by the squares in the room.
We wanted the show to reflect accurately the comedians' experience of performing, and part of that experience is the struggle, I suppose. But if there's a series two though I will lobby to only allow in audience members who can prove they haven't even got a TV licence, thus ensuring some degree of quality.
Negotiations about the title were fraught. I hoped it could include the word 'Alternative' precisely because, in comedy, I remember when 'Alternative Comedy', the post-punk movement that changed the rules in British humour and gave you pretty much everything you value today, became a perjorative term. 'Alternative comedy?', Jim Bowen said to David Baddiel on daytime TV in 1989, 'It's the alternative to comedy.' Also, irrespective of dictionary definitions of what 'alternative comedy' was or is, we were at least offering an alternative to the way most stand-up comedy on TV is presented today.
And suddenly there seems to be enough of a groundswell of discontent with panel show and stand-up showcase comedy to suggest that it was time to actively embrace this debased and hated term, 'alternative comedy'. And 'experience' seemed like a good word to have in there because the show was shot in such a way as to emphasise the unique nature of the one-off performances we'd captured, and to give you a flavor of what it might be like to be there. But we couldn't get that idea past Comedy Central. Until the rough edits began to come together. Then everything changed.
On the editing suite monitor it seemed, to me at least, that the show's line-up belonged together. Even though they offered approaches as diverse as the left-wing or feminist polemic of Josie Long and Bridget Christie respectively, and the arch reactionary rationalism of Henning Wehn or Glenn Wool; as the superb silliness of David Kay and Maeve Higgins and the brutal logical reasoning of Andy Zaltzman and Robin Ince; as the charming indie-folk stylings of Isy Suttie and the one-string freak-noodling of Simon Munnery; as the deadpan minimalism of Eleanor Tiernan and David O'Doherty and the frenzied agitation of Phil Nichol, they belonged together by virtue of what they were not - safe, packaged, and predictable.
Acts like Paul Sinha and Alun Cochrane, who have the range of talent to be able to do extended one-man shows in arts centres and yet also to appear before the stag parties of The Comedy Store, (which I couldn't), were able to show sides of themselves not visible on The Chase or Mock The Week respectively. And they seemed to sit alongside equally talented, but more problematically strange, turns like Tony Law and Sam Simmons. And Boothby Graffoe, whose lineage stretches back to the pre-Alternative Comedy folk-circuit humorists like Mike Harding or Jake Thackray, makes the whole thing seem timeless, standing outside fashion or trends, as I hope the entire series will. Presented with this evidence, even a nervous Comedy Central realised The Alternative Comedy Experience was the ideal title.
In partnership with the editor Jon Blow, Dench's spring-water brain had streamed 20 acts through 12 shows. Each drifts in for a few episodes, appearing a few times each week as you get to know them, and disappears again, making way for others.
I was initially nervous about the short Comedians-style clips, the briefest of which is a zippy 11-second quip from Simon 'King Of The One Liners' Munnery, but they will soften the Comedy Central viewer's resistance readying them for longer clips through each show, some up to six and a half minutes. The format did not best serve Paul Foot or Maeve Higgins, admittedly, whose sets work partly through a cumulative pressure application of escalating ongoing absurdity, so they had to be heavily featured in just one or two shows respectively to show them at their best and to give the viewer a feel for their approach. But again, the strengths and weaknesses of the show's format made me see how well the acts chosen belonged together.
There's no doubt that the acts featured on Apollo and Roadshow are among the best at what they do, offering tight short bulletproof sets to hugely diverse crowds of celebrities and everyday folk. Go to see the turns you've seen on these shows in their theatre tours and you will the same thing as you have seen on TV, but longer, as most of them deliver a value-for- money hour of great gags, unencumbered by any overarching theme, and then speed up and get louder towards the end to tell you the show is approaching its conclusion. In The Alternative Comedy Experience we present snatches of comedians with different aims and methods.
We realised, in the editing process, one of the reasons these acts aren't often regulars on the big shows is because what they do is too evolved to be snipped into those formats. Instead, we've tried to give an impression of their work, and in conjunction with the cut-in backstage interviews, to go some way towards anatomizing what they all have in common. It wasn't until the edit that the true picture of the series emerged - a kind of cross between an Art House documentary and a stand-up showcase - but had we seen where it was heading I think I would have pressured everyone in their interviews harder for definitions and dogma. Which probably would have made for a more self-conscious and less entertaining look at this other parallel world of comedy.
Last time I ever did a job like this was in the early Noughties, when I executive produced a failed stand-up and sketch pilot for Channel 4 called Head Farm, featuring Matt Holness, Richard Ayoade, Dan Antopolski, The Mighty Boosh, Karen Taylor and Johnny Vegas. (Yes, it was an Avalon production and they're nearly all Avalon acts. Sorry. I was young. When I was a baby I used to shit my pants. I don't do that anymore either.)
When it was finally screened, half the cast looked at me with daggers in their eyes, furious about what had been done with their material. But when we came to show a few episodes of The Alternative Comedy Experience to the cast in a Soho cellar at Christmas, there couldn't have been a better atmosphere. I felt like the headmaster at the school disco, so went home early to allow the kids to kick back, but they all seemed pleased to be in the same show, so something was right.
Everyone involved with production and commissioning of The Alternative Comedy Experience is really happy with it, and some advance press has said it's the sort of show BBC2 and C4 should have made, instead of more panel shows, which is nice.
But we're not out of the woods yet. Comedy Central understandably suffer the occasional failure of nerve, despite their support of the project, and the original trailers were edited in such a way as to try and pass this quirky and odd show off as a much more straightforward post-pub proposition, before finally finding a more appropriate visual vocabulary. The channel's keen not to spook its audience, offering The Alternative Comedy Experience as an additional dish on the Comedy Buffet rather than an either/or proposition, but I think its content and style choices raise unavoidable issues and ask uncomfortable questions about where we are in comedy.
So now I have to do press interviews, which I don't enjoy, having an unintentional ability to land myself in tepid water, with one controversial opinion snatched out of 90 minute chat and reduced to a misleading headline. But it's worth the misery, because we believe this project could be the start of something. Comedy Central aren't used to having programmes that papers want to cover in this depth, and we wonder how they will weigh the luxury of favorable column space against the viewing figures they need for the show to survive.
What we hadn't anticipated, and it's something that gives me a sense of pride I rarely feel about anything I work on, is the way that The Alternative Comedy Experience suddenly seems, to my mind, to have a broadly political dimension, just by virtue of its very existence.
We live in brutal times where further education - especially the study of the arts - and theatre and culture generally are being denied funding, the top-down suggestion being that they should all find ways to cover their own costs, and that anything useful or worthy eventually turns a profit. Even places that develop great work, like The Bush Theatre or Battersea Arts Centre, have fallen into the trap of justifying their output in terms of the profits some of their West End transfers make for investors, instead of the inherent worth of the work itself. But even right-wingers like Roger Scruton, Toby Young or Michael Gove profess to believe that some forms of culture have inherent worth, irrespective of the Right's devotion to the dogma of the free market.
A three-page press release I received for some charity gigs a famous comedian did last year covered the shows themselves in half a page, and the rest of the wordcount listed how much money he, and his management's other clients, had turned over, and how many DVDs and tickets they had sold.
We're not interested in the DVD sales and ticket capability of any of the acts on The Alternative Experience - though some of them are quietly massive - and we're not interested in showing them in a huge room for the sake of it, like some fascist display of empty military and economic power.
We believe these acts are all inherently worthwhile, whether they end up filling the 02 and lining David Cameron's DVD shelf or not. They advance the form of stand-up comedy, consolidate its strengths, and are the sort of people that have no other choice but to be comedians.
They discover, develop and maintain the new routes that perhaps better known names then simplify into stadium-filling styles. You've been distracted by the pretty blooms for too long. We have done our best to show you where some of the real work is being done. Can I go now, Chortle?
Stewart Lee
2013-02-04T21:18:08+00:00
The Alternative Comedy Experience, a new stand-up series, starts on Comedy Central tomorrow night. I am executive producer of the show, curated the selection of acts, appear interviewing them backstage, and am obliged to promote the programme. So here I am, heading direct into the heartland of the comedy cognoscenti on Chortle, with a point by point description of the process and intentions of The Alternative Comedy Experience, too detailed, dull, nuanced, and niche to ever see print in a newspaper. Warning: contains spoilers. For the first and second series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle we were required to provide extra content for BBC on-line and the red button channel. The producer Richard Webb and I decided to use my existing stage set to spend the last night of filming of each series, shooting stand-ups I liked who were perhaps too quirky, cerebral, unknown, independent or strange to get slots on the mainstream television stand-up shows, including Stephen Carlin, Henning Wehn, Andrew O'Neil, Kevin Eldon's character stuff, and Paul Sinha. Pleased with the results, we pitched the idea of me fronting a similarly themed series to BBC2 or BBC4 but never heard anything back from anyone about the idea. Bear that in mind, internet commentators who imagine known comics have a hotline to the decision process. At the same time, Colin Dench, a punk era promoter and comedy maven from Southend, who produced my last few live DVDs, was experiencing unnamable stirrings. Dench had been struck by the sense of an ever-widening gap between his experience of sets by the sort of acts you'd find on the Edinburgh Fringe doing solo shows at, say, comedy fans' favorite space The Stand, and the content of mainstream television stand-up shows, even when that content is provided by the sort of act you...
Comedy as art? It may seem like a strange idea but the guys at Avalon have been working on this concept for a while now and the end product is one of the most bizarre comedy shows in town. The brainchild of Simon Munnery, Cluub Zarathustra takes its inspiration from a vast number of sources. The Fluxus Movement, Dadaist art, Expressionism, Goethe, Film Noir and puerile playground humour are the starting points for this mixture of sketches, poetry, slide shows and surrealist gags.
Munnery acts as host in an array of illuminated and floral jackets, challenging the definition of humour and usually succeeding. Roger Mann regales us with spooky ghost stories and a demonstration on how to snog various members of the animal kingdom illustrated with photos.
Underused Stewart Lee is superb as M. Qui N'arrivez Pas and Kevin Eldon, is as ever, the best thing on stage.
The concept occasionally collapses under its own weight and there are some sections of the audience who never get the gag. Is comedy as art worth the effort?
Most of the time. (Seen in preview)
Stewart Lee
1995-08-17T19:10:57+01:00
Comedy as art? It may seem like a strange idea but the guys at Avalon have been working on this concept for a while now and the end product is one of the most bizarre comedy shows in town. The brainchild of Simon Munnery, Cluub Zarathustra takes its inspiration from a vast number of sources. The Fluxus Movement, Dadaist art, Expressionism, Goethe, Film Noir and puerile playground humour are the starting points for this mixture of sketches, poetry, slide shows and surrealist gags. Munnery acts as host in an array of illuminated and floral jackets, challenging the definition of humour and usually succeeding. Roger Mann regales us with spooky ghost stories and a demonstration on how to snog various members of the animal kingdom illustrated with photos. Underused Stewart Lee is superb as M. Qui N'arrivez Pas and Kevin Eldon, is as ever, the best thing on stage. The concept occasionally collapses under its own weight and there are some sections of the audience who never get the gag. Is comedy as art worth the effort? Most of the time. (Seen in preview)
I always maintain that I take on a persona when writing columns for the Observer: that of an adopted man, from a relatively normal social background, who is an obvious victim of imposter syndrome. I don’t so much write the columns as transcribe them. The adopted man stands at my shoulder, just out of sight, biting his nails and chewing the inside of his face, mumbling things into my ear, some of which I mishear. He simply can’t believe he is being employed by a posh left-leaning newspaper that his own parents wouldn’t have read, and knows there has been some mistake.
Thus, he tries to compensate by employing overfinessed language and attempting to give a good account of himself, politically and intellectually, aware that he is being scrutinised by his betters.
Obviously, as this persona is the same as me, it is not a massive stretch to channel it, although I am surprised this other me hasn’t been sacked. What is true of both the columnist and the standup characters of me is that over the period of producing work in the interregnum between the EU referendum, in June 2016, and the supposed departure date, 29 March 2019, both became increasingly angry, bitter and incoherent.
Similarly, comments from members of the public, like those on the column republished below, from members of the public who uploaded their views to social media or the paper’s website, while often astute in identifying weaknesses in the work, also become more frenzied as the months pass, as if we are witnessing a collective national unravelling of sense. Many of them, it is increasingly clear, are also the work of anonymous agents, perhaps hired for the purpose, intent on advancing very specific disruptive processes on behalf of unnamed paymasters.
The only voice you can trust is the one the footnotes are written in, which seems to be pursuing its own agenda: an autobiographical unburdening intent on setting various stories straight, as if the author, now suddenly finding himself in his 50s and watching the world he knows fall apart and decay as he himself in turn falls apart and decays, can sense death on the horizon and wants to leave his personal effects in order, to minimise the inconvenience caused to his family.
Extract
Observer column, 1 May 2016: ‘The EU debate is a battle of big beasts, not beliefs’
Last weekend I found myself trapped on an isolated, monster- infested Pacific atoll with a pair of twin psychic Japanese schoolgirls. A skyscraper-sized lizard, with three fire-breathing heads, the result of careless radioactive experiments in the 50s, and now a huge and clumsy metaphor for both the dangers of human scientific meddling with Mother Nature and postwar Japanese identity anxiety, had cornered us in a cave on the beach. *1
My new friends Lora and Moll hoped to summon to our aid a gigantic moth, with roughly the dimensions of an airship, over which they exercised a strange interspecies erotic sway. Anticipating this titanic struggle of equally matched opponents, each driven by blind instinct and insensible to reason, my thoughts naturally turned to June’s forthcoming Brexit vote.
Arguments about Brexit are tearing my family apart. In March, drunk in the late dark, and loose on the internet, I had ordered a European flag from Amazon, intending to fly it from the roof come the week of the Eurovote, so as to annoy any divs living locally.
But I forgot about the flag and left it on the sofa, and now the cat has taken to sleeping under it. *2
Which is odd, as previously he was an avowed Eurosceptic, and would hiss aggressively whenever I put any European free jazz on the stereo. Indeed, we have on occasion used Günter “Baby” Sommer’s Hörmusik solo percussion album to drive him from the room when he made a smell.
In a heated late-night argument with my pro-Brexit stepbrother two weeks ago, I used the contented cat’s obvious happiness underneath the European flag to show him how Europe could shelter and comfort us, like cats under a flag. My stepbrother, brilliantly, snatched the European flag off the cat’s back to show how the creature, and by association the nation, was quite capable of functioning without the embrace of Europe. I think this is an example of the kind of easy-to-understand argument the British public claim has been denied them in favour of tedious figures and facts about trade, environmental legislation, human rights and immigration.
The cat looked annoyed and eyed both of us with resentment. Already, the Brexit debate is tearing families apart, stepbrother against stepbrother, stepbrother against stepbrother‑in-law, stepbrother-in-law against stepcat. “Shouldn’t you be in Japan by now, anyway?” he said, throwing my flag on the fire.
A few days later I arrived in the so-called Land of the Rising Sun for a meeting with the famous Studio Haino, who had begun work on an anime version of my multiple Bafta- and British Comedy award-winning BBC2 series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which they believed would play well with young Asian hipsters, jaded geisha and disillusioned samurai. *3
Because Fuck! Stewart Lee Pee-Pee Charabanc (the literal Japanese translation of Studio Haino’s new title for the show) was already expected to be a big hit, various merchandise spin-offs were almost up and running. A string of love beads, each sporting a different picture of my face, is already available in Japanese adult stores.
And since January I have been wearing four or five new pairs of pants a day, all of which will eventually take pride of place, when suitably soiled, in vending machines on the streets of Tokyo’s most fashionable districts.
My wife, of course, finds this turn of events ridiculous, but she will be laughing on the other side of her stupid face when the flyblown briefs she currently uses as dishcloths become priceless collector’s items.
And in the increasingly likely event of a British Brexit, the sale of these fetishised items will then fund our family’s relocation to the newly independent free Scotland, from where I will harry the airwaves of England and Wales with liberally biased leftwing satire, the Lord Haw-Haw of sparkling-wine socialism.
In retrospect, the scrum of the Scottish independence referendum looks dignified compared with the dirty war of Brexit. In Scotland, politicians on both sides of the divide at least seemed sincere in their beliefs, rather than selfishly using the nation’s concerns about its future to try to secure theirs.
Indeed, the day when Boris Johnson cynically accused the pro-Europe and “part-Kenyan” President Obama of being ancestrally ill-disposed towards Britain marks the moment at which the mayor of London changed from being merely a twat into a full-blown cunt.
It is appropriate to describe Johnson with pure witless swearing, for that is all he deserves. He is of a political class where any insult, no matter how vicious, is acceptable, if it is delivered with the rhetorical flourishes and classical allusions of the public-school debating society. Hence, Cameron can scornfully sneer at Jeremy Corbyn and describe Dennis Skinner as a dinosaur, yet the venerable beast himself is dismissed from the house when he calls Cameron merely “dodgy”.
The problem for the pro-Europe voter currently is that while obviously despising Cameron as both a person and a politician, one nonetheless wants him to prevail over Johnson, Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and the Brexit camp.
And as the giant moth arrived above the beach, momentarily blocking out the Japanese sun itself, and set about the three-headed lizard with electric rays from its head, I continued to ponder the Brexit campaign.
“Did he who made the lamb make thee?” asks William Blake of the Tyger. It was instinct that drove the moth and the lizard to fight, not ethics. They were as they were. Likewise, Johnson’s Brexit position represents only a fight for personal betterment, not a considered view on Europe. *4
There is an African fly that lays its eggs in the jelly of children’s eyes, the hatching larvae blinding them by feeding on the eye itself. But the fly has no quarrel with the child. It is merely following its nature.
Likewise, Boris Johnson, a vile grub laying his horrible eggs in the soft jelly of the EU debate, has no agenda beyond his own advancement. He believes in nothing, and neither does his spiritual soulmate, the eye-scoffing African fly.
We cowered in our cave, the twins and I, and watched the combat of the monsters. The honest open war of the giant moth and three-headed lizard made prime minister’s questions seem contrived and banal. The earth shook beneath their feet, triggering tidal waves and rivers of lava from the atoll’s smouldering volcano; vast explosions of startled birds scarred the sky; the landscape cracked. There was no “Mr Speaker”, no “Order, order”, no classical allusion and no drawing-room wit. There was only war, terrible war.
Footnotes
*1 From 1977 onwards, the Midlands television region had a slot called The ATV Thursday Picture Show, broadcasting innocuous movies from 4.30 to 6pm after school. In my favourites, the giant monster epics of Japan’s Toho studios, skilled kabuki theatre practitioners in rubber lizard suits battled giant canvas moths and massive stucco lobsters in the beautiful ruins of miniature hand-crafted cityscapes. I was lucky enough to be able to recreate my childhood enthusiasm for the genre in a film item for series two of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, in which I, dressed in a half-Godzilla costume, attacked the physical theatre performer Rob Thirtle (Space Precinct, Brum, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha), who appeared as some kind of crustacean, with a shopping bag. These Japanese monster performances still move me more than any computer-generated artifice because I can see the human hand at work. I would rush home from Widney junior school every Thursday, let myself in with the flowerpot latchkey and make toast, my mum still at work, ready for the highlight of the week. My favourite Japanese monster movie was Jun Fukuda’s 1967 effort Son of Godzilla, in which Godzilla fights giant web-shooting spiders to save his ugly turnip-faced crying son, Minilla. My own father wasn’t around much when I was young, and Godzilla taught me everything I know about parenting. You basically roar and stomp and everything works out in the end, as long as you love your kids and make sure that they know that. For God’s sake, make sure that they know that. And kill any lobster that threatens them. Burn it! Burn its face off!!
*2 This cat died in mysterious circumstances in 2017. We were all inconsolably distraught, to the point where friends and relatives must have worried that we had lost all sense of perspective. But for the first 10 years of our marriage, my wife and I toured our standup acts relentlessly, trying to consolidate our appeal before it was too late, one of us away performing, the other at home parenting tiny children, in lonely rotation. And that cat was a constant, the family member you saw when you got in at 4am from Telford, waiting to greet you and welcome you home. He was a conduit that closed all four of us into a circle. How many substandard spaghetti westerns did I watch in the small hours, with the cat my only companion? How many late nights would I have spent drinking alone to kill the post-show adrenaline, like some sad alcoholic, unless that cat had been sitting up with me, making a legitimate social event of what would otherwise have been evidence of a gradual slide into a terrible addiction? “Have you caught any mice today?” I would ask him. That cat saved our marriage, I suspect, and when he knew we would be OK, he sensed his work was done and took himself away. Anyone who doesn’t like cats must be dead inside.
*3 There is no Japanese version of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, though much of my standup appears on YouTube with handmade Russian subtitles, and a Russian comedy fan has had a tattoo of one of my jokes, about the 70s Liverpudlian comedian Tom O’Connor, done on his arm, despite none of my work, or that of Tom O’Connor, being available commercially in Russia. How did I get here?
*4
Last year, I organised a benefit to raise money for a memorial stone for William Blake, my favourite autodidact poet-artist, even though I suspect he would have been a leave voter. I couldn’t attend the unveiling, which was lucky, as I was frightened of a lot of the people who were going to be there, but the William Blake Society gave me an impressive chunk of the leftover marble, inscribed with a gilded “B” by the engraver, which I was able to pretend was a birthday present I had had specially made for my wife.
Below the line: readers respond to the column
Can we please keep this sort of hysteria out of the EU debate? We need sober analysis and reflection, not this.
Richard Whittington
Stewart Lee: a propagandist masquerading as a comedian, who is promoted as sophisticated and as a confidence trick to make people buy into the narrative.
Williebaldtschmidt
I suppose everyone has a right to write as much unfunny, impenetrable gobbledygook as they judge will make them rich and famous.
Freespeechoneeach
Painfully unfunny as per usual.
Markb35
Poppycock.
Ferdinand8
Typical public school socialist.
Kontrol
“Want stories like this in your inbox?” it reads at the bottom of the article. What? Do I want more stories about giant three-headed lizards fighting to the death with giant moths with x-ray eyes that also manage to describe Boris Johnson as an eye-eating grub laying vile eggs in the EU membership debate? Are you kidding? Of course I do! Have you actually got any though?
Tybo
Stuart, you are a total arse, using “pro-Europe” for “pro-EU”. It occurred to us last night that calling the EU “Europe” is like calling Nato “the Atlantic Ocean”, or Fifa “Earth”.
Jean Noir
Stewart Lee – another smug, millionaire Marxist from the well-heeled comedy establishment.
Henry Clift
This is probably the most ridiculous article I have seen! Can’t the remainers come up with any sensible arguments about the issues?
Jemima15
You too? Underwear turned into dishcloth (by being cut in half)? Trouble is the dishcloth ones often end up back in my underwear drawer, so on a dark winter’s morning I frequently find myself trying to struggle into tatty half-sized briefs with no leg holes.
Cloud9cuckoo
Stewart Lee
2019-08-25T22:52:16+01:00
I always maintain that I take on a persona when writing columns for the Observer: that of an adopted man, from a relatively normal social background, who is an obvious victim of imposter syndrome. I don’t so much write the columns as transcribe them. The adopted man stands at my shoulder, just out of sight, biting his nails and chewing the inside of his face, mumbling things into my ear, some of which I mishear. He simply can’t believe he is being employed by a posh left-leaning newspaper that his own parents wouldn’t have read, and knows there has been some mistake. Thus, he tries to compensate by employing overfinessed language and attempting to give a good account of himself, politically and intellectually, aware that he is being scrutinised by his betters. Obviously, as this persona is the same as me, it is not a massive stretch to channel it, although I am surprised this other me hasn’t been sacked. What is true of both the columnist and the standup characters of me is that over the period of producing work in the interregnum between the EU referendum, in June 2016, and the supposed departure date, 29 March 2019, both became increasingly angry, bitter and incoherent. Similarly, comments from members of the public, like those on the column republished below, from members of the public who uploaded their views to social media or the paper’s website, while often astute in identifying weaknesses in the work, also become more frenzied as the months pass, as if we are witnessing a collective national unravelling of sense. Many of them, it is increasingly clear, are also the work of anonymous agents, perhaps hired for the purpose, intent on advancing very specific disruptive processes on behalf of unnamed paymasters. The only voice you can...
WHEN alternative comedy emerged in the 1980s, a new wave of stand-ups savaged their celebrity predecessors for their crass sexism and racism and naff commercialism. Stewart Lee recalls “taking the piss out of Max Bygraves or whoever … tax-dodging multimillionaires who did any piece of shit that came along, all their material written by other people”.
Yet somehow, he marvels: “That’s where we are again. The mainstream telly comedian is now part of the same world of stupid, banal shit as the people we made fun of 30 years ago.”
Alongside Michael McIntyre and Frankie Boyle, with whom he shares a strangely symbiotic relationship – surpassed only by the “schizophrenic” bond he maintains with his barely repressed, teenage “cultural snob” – Lee has become our most influential stand-up, essentially in spite of himself and his ambivalence towards fame. His show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle won a Bafta and has been recommissioned for two further series on BBC Two in 2014 and 2015, yet his forthcoming book TV Comedian will describe stand-up and television as a “toxic mix”.
We’re at The Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh, “the essence of the Fringe” as he puts it. While McIntyre courts controversy with two £31 “work-in-progress” shows at the Playhouse down the road this weekend, it was here that Lee tested out his own show, Carpet Remnant World, for a relatively modest tenner last year.
He cherishes this room, outside the commercial cartel of the big venues’ breakaway Edinburgh Comedy Festival, and which he says “is most decent comedians’ favourite place to play”. A few days ago, I watched Josie Long on stage here enthusing about taxpaying, never mentioning Jimmy Carr but relishing the crowd tacitly making the connection and distinction.
Long’s set was being filmed for The Alternative Comedy Experience, broadcasting early next year on the Comedy Central channel. Handpicked by Lee, the likes of Glenn Wool, Sarah Kendall, Paul Foot, Andy Zaltzman, Robin Ince, Stephen Carlin and Simon Munnery have little television pedigree, but a calibre, he claims, to get “comics at the back of the room laughing while the public are going, ‘Oh, I’m not sure about this.’”
He’s hoping the show will retain the club atmosphere, “warts and all” – including mobile phone interruptions during Long and Alun Cochrane’s sets and the “huge, rotund skinhead who feigned a sexual assault” on Phil Nichol.
Provocatively, he suggests that it’s part of a growing, comedian-instigated backlash against tightly edited, shiny-floor showcases. He’d wanted to call it ‘Not Live At The Apollo’ but claims to have been “threatened” by Live at the Apollo’s executive producer Addison Cresswell. Concurrently, Paul Provenza’s improv challenge Set List is transferring from the Fringe to Sky Atlantic, while Frankie Boyle’s forthcoming cabaret show for Channel 4, The Boyle Variety Performance is, Lee asserts, “‘Not The F***ing Apollo’ basically. All the rape joke acts.”
“Apollo’s content is nominally safe, whereas the content of a Frankie Boyle curated showcase would be nominally unsafe,” he explains. “Set List too, because you’re getting to see people think on their feet. Much as I’m sceptical about rape comedy as an end in itself, it is interesting that these are the things that make comedy exciting for comedians – taste issues, improvisation and weird stuff in intimate spaces.
“Between them, they could show that stand-up is a very wide and varied thing, that there’s all kinds of different ways of doing it, and that [the Apollo] model isn’t necessarily the only one. The idea is to show the public what they ought to like,” he cackles. “If they were any good at understanding comedy.”
He failed to persuade Jerry Sadowitz to participate, acknowledging that, while he finds the hate-spewing Scot “life-affirming” in the context of a 90-minute performance, in isolation even virtually unedited rants could be “unjustifiable to the point where you might imagine it would be legally actionable [and] risk misrepresenting him”.
Lee has largely eschewed panel shows for similar reasons, his anti-consensual humour at odds with 8 Out of 10 Cats’ conspiratorial banter. Still, an inability to perform lucrative corporate gigs saves him “having to avoid tax”.
This combination of self-deprecation and sniping is typical, almost a reflex. Carr offered to fund Lee’s first DVD and is someone he personally likes, “with very, very good jokes”. But “Stewart Lee the Comedian” can’t resist.
“Stewart Lee the Comedian” is a burgeoning character, nurtured at school, where he instinctively disdained heavy metal because it was popular, so “now I’m the only person at the age of 44 to discover Black Sabbath and go, ‘Oh, this is really good, why did I write it off?’” Lee became aware of his (not wholly distinct) alter ego while writing his 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian.
He thrives on internet abuse about his act, if not that directed towards his marriage to fellow comic Bridget Christie. But increasingly, despite Comedy Vehicle’s ratings plunge between series, the awards and critical acclaim have accumulated and his approval ratings with loyal viewers have soared, boosting his live following.
A father of two, he’s successful and happy. To retain his dyspeptic, marginalised edge, therefore, he’s had to take “the memory of what I might have felt about things ten years ago and graft it on to current experiences”. Exceptionally clear-sighted on the comedy industry, he maintains a wilful ignorance of hyped new acts, preferring to sustain Stewart Lee the Comedian’s prejudices on five-minute television clips, simplistic media coverage and PR spin. So Bo Burnham is dismissed as a YouTube comedian; Russell Howard is mocked for his charity work and Russell Kane is derided as “a guy who’s got funny hair, he lies about his age, he’s won awards and he’s talked about his dad dying. I don’t know him though, he might be alright”.
However, irrespective of the low, outsider status he strives to retain, and which Stewart Lee the Comedian affords him, his opinions carry significant weight in comedy. Several fellow stand-ups and admirers have been stung by his jibes or learned to take themselves less seriously. But it’s invariably less about them than what they represent.
“There’s a boom or bust attitude to comedy now, with young comedians marketed like pop stars and celebrities. The assumption is that another one will come along. They’re on a short cycle and the problem of appealing to that market is that it likes novelty, then goes on to the next thing. I’m wondering if I can stay at a mid-range level forever.”
Despite being “in at the f***ing start of this”, he never expected the current stand-up boom. He recalls Robert Newman and David Baddiel booking the 314-seater Cochrane Theatre in London and thinking “it was hilarious, sort of ostentatious, almost an act of hubris”. When the pair sold out Wembley Arena in 1993 – a “fluke” he suggests – it created a “subconscious model” for the management company he then shared with them, Avalon, fostering “a set of unworkable expectations that have dogged the industry ever since”. More cackling.
Lee sees the Fringe as an opportunity to develop a coherent, hour-long “piece”, and objects to “big management” instructing emerging comics to “come out of it with ten six-minute bits for ‘Stand-Up For The Week’, Live at the Apollo, whatever. What are they for? To create an advert. In art, the things you do should be worthwhile in and of themselves, not endlessly deferred towards some presenting role.”
He quit stand-up for a time in the early noughties, but kept working as a Sunday Times music critic – making Rupert Murdoch his sole arts patron. Yet when the BBC dithered on renewing Comedy Vehicle, he knew any audience for a show on Sky Atlantic would be tiny and resisted the satellite broadcaster’s overtures, unwilling to boost their broadsheet credibility and efforts to “detoxify the brand by association” with the Australian. He recalls Saturated, a film he’d planned to make in the mid-1990s with Peter Fonda, Alan Rickman and Daryl Hannah, for which he spent five years gathering funds, two-thirds from digital television company ONDigital, which collapsed. Panorama recently alleged that a News Corp subsidiary was involved in leaking the codes for cards that allowed free access to OnDigital’s paid services. After hearing that, he says, “I’d feel a bit of a mug going to work in a place that used such dirty tricks.”
Still, collaborators like Armando Iannucci continue to defect, and he identifies Sky’s head of comedy, Lucy Lumsden, as “really intelligent, the only person in that job with any kind of vision”. Ultimately, however, selling out was anathema to Stewart Lee the Comedian.
“Because he’s got no self-belief but is also arrogant, he would stay at the BBC, a place he suspects he’s not really wanted anyway. He’d simultaneously complain about the defection to Sky and the BBC’s collapse, preferring to be a rat going down on a sinking raft. The degree of confusion suits the character, which works better trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy than in a Phillip Dick, futuristic, Bladerunner broadcasting company.”
Forsaking television when his young son becomes a teenager, if his audience continues growing in the meantime, the “long-term, mad plan” for 2016 is “to tour a big theatre show that has the same relationship as my ordinary shows do with stand-up generally? Could I use monitors but on the monitors it’s not me, it’s an actor who’s better looking? Could you literally dismantle the theatre? What if there were speakers in different parts of the room playing different things? Is the template of the big scale, telly comedian tour so established in the public mind that they’re ready to see the rules broken?”
• Stewart Lee: Carpet Remnant World is at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, today until 26 August.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-02T00:49:42+01:00
WHEN alternative comedy emerged in the 1980s, a new wave of stand-ups savaged their celebrity predecessors for their crass sexism and racism and naff commercialism. Stewart Lee recalls “taking the piss out of Max Bygraves or whoever … tax-dodging multimillionaires who did any piece of shit that came along, all their material written by other people”. Yet somehow, he marvels: “That’s where we are again. The mainstream telly comedian is now part of the same world of stupid, banal shit as the people we made fun of 30 years ago.” Alongside Michael McIntyre and Frankie Boyle, with whom he shares a strangely symbiotic relationship – surpassed only by the “schizophrenic” bond he maintains with his barely repressed, teenage “cultural snob” – Lee has become our most influential stand-up, essentially in spite of himself and his ambivalence towards fame. His show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle won a Bafta and has been recommissioned for two further series on BBC Two in 2014 and 2015, yet his forthcoming book TV Comedian will describe stand-up and television as a “toxic mix”. We’re at The Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh, “the essence of the Fringe” as he puts it. While McIntyre courts controversy with two £31 “work-in-progress” shows at the Playhouse down the road this weekend, it was here that Lee tested out his own show, Carpet Remnant World, for a relatively modest tenner last year. He cherishes this room, outside the commercial cartel of the big venues’ breakaway Edinburgh Comedy Festival, and which he says “is most decent comedians’ favourite place to play”. A few days ago, I watched Josie Long on stage here enthusing about taxpaying, never mentioning Jimmy Carr but relishing the crowd tacitly making the connection and distinction. Long’s set was being filmed for The Alternative Comedy Experience, broadcasting early next...
The American motivational speaker has rapidly become a staple of character comedy, which returns to the fringe in cycles of approximately three years. On paper then, Will Adamsdale’s Chris John Jackson, author of Maximum Jackson and inventor of the philosophy of Jackson’s Way, is not an appetising proposition. But Adamsdale merely uses this familiar trope as a framing device for a rigorously funny, and often poignant, exploration of the human imagination. Jackson’s theory is this. Around every action that has a point, such as walking along, waving at someone, or looking at an interesting event, exists a vast unexplored area of pointless actions, an untapped reservoir for human non-achievement. Jackson demonstrates some of his favorites. He attempts to put his hand in two places at once. He tries to make the words People and Church rhyme. He fails to drag the stage into a small glass. None of these things are possible.
This, he explains, is the zone Jacksonites must strive to inhabit, and he encourages his audience to pepper their lives with similarly futile activities. It is not made clear how Jackson arrived at this zen-like state of grace, though there are vague allusions to an embarrassing incident in a business park, and memories of his older brother seem to weigh heavily upon him. Jackson occupies the thin sliver of space that exists between the socially acceptable delusions of faith and religion, and the socially unacceptable delusions of mental illness. It is a wonderful region to visit. And it stays with you. On leaving the venue I took a wrong turn alongside a parked car, ended up trapped between the vehicle and a brick wall, and had to turn back upon myself, but instead of being irritated I was momentarily elated. I had completed my first Jacksonian action.
Stewart Lee
2004-08-01T18:09:12+01:00
The American motivational speaker has rapidly become a staple of character comedy, which returns to the fringe in cycles of approximately three years. On paper then, Will Adamsdale’s Chris John Jackson, author of Maximum Jackson and inventor of the philosophy of Jackson’s Way, is not an appetising proposition. But Adamsdale merely uses this familiar trope as a framing device for a rigorously funny, and often poignant, exploration of the human imagination. Jackson’s theory is this. Around every action that has a point, such as walking along, waving at someone, or looking at an interesting event, exists a vast unexplored area of pointless actions, an untapped reservoir for human non-achievement. Jackson demonstrates some of his favorites. He attempts to put his hand in two places at once. He tries to make the words People and Church rhyme. He fails to drag the stage into a small glass. None of these things are possible. This, he explains, is the zone Jacksonites must strive to inhabit, and he encourages his audience to pepper their lives with similarly futile activities. It is not made clear how Jackson arrived at this zen-like state of grace, though there are vague allusions to an embarrassing incident in a business park, and memories of his older brother seem to weigh heavily upon him. Jackson occupies the thin sliver of space that exists between the socially acceptable delusions of faith and religion, and the socially unacceptable delusions of mental illness. It is a wonderful region to visit. And it stays with you. On leaving the venue I took a wrong turn alongside a parked car, ended up trapped between the vehicle and a brick wall, and had to turn back upon myself, but instead of being irritated I was momentarily elated. I had completed my first Jacksonian action.
To listen to Robert Pollard speak is to spiral at 45 rpm through the worn-out grooves of a mind so stuffed with obscure musical ephemera, you'd swear he was spieling rock-star cocaine-babble. Except that it's 10am on a Monday in Dayton, Ohio, and Robert Pollard is a 38-year-old primary-school teacher with two teenage children who has given up his job to concentrate full time on the Sunday afternoon hobby band Guided by Voices that has suddenly taken over his life.
As a schoolboy, Pollard performed all the usual adolescent rock-fan rituals, scribbling exercise books full of song lyrics and designing imaginary album covers. And then he grew up, and just carried on. Since 1983, Pollard has been putting his childhood fantasies into action through Guided by Voices, with the assistance of a shifting set of acolytes, a four-track home recording studio and an incurable addiction to the onanistic vice of songwriting.
In 1993, after releasing 10 primitively engineered albums and about 117 psychedelic/beat-pop songs, Guided by Voices suddenly found themselves at the centre of a bidding war between Warner Bros and the ultimately more attractive indie label, Matador. Now Pollard is the trainspotter who has somehow found himself managing the railway.
The last three Guided by Voices records have averaged about 25 songs apiece, none much more than two minutes long, with Pollard tossing away more melodies and infuriatingly catchy hooklines in one album than most bands write in a career. The band's devotion to basic recording techniques has made them icons of musical integrity for millions of misguided musos who equate tape hiss with honesty. "I never strove to be some example of indie credibility,'' counters Pollard. "I always just wanted to be a big tunes rock band. We only used the four-track out of necessity, not choice. We wanted to be spontaneous, and not to squeeze the life out of the songs.''
It seems amazing that Guided by Voices learned to make a stylistic virtue of no budget and to exploit the varying timbres of each other's bathrooms and basements, but the early Beatles albums are still used as a yardstick of quality today, and they were all recorded in one take around a piece of bare electrical wire tied to a stick. The sleeve of Hard Day's Night talks of the innovative double-tracking of Lennon's vocal with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the discovery of an astonishing new medicine. "I think that raw 1960s stuff sounds better anyhow,'' says Pollard. "Most studio stuff is overproduced. With Matador's money behind us, we've been using an 82-track studio to try and duplicate the sound we had before.''
Pollard's love of the Beatles reflects his own ambitions for Guided by Voices. He admires Lennon for his "impatience, for wanting to write and record quickly'', and the more pedestrian McCartney for his "sequencing skills, for the way the tracks are ordered. You can't beat the late 1960s Beatles. The White Album was esoteric and spontaneous, everything you want.''
Pollard's catholic range of tastes and influences embraces old 1960s garage bands, early 1970s British and German progressive rock, REM, and the post-punk of English bands such as Wire and XTC. "I loved all British music up until about 1981, but not any more. I think the New Romantics broke everything down, and British music has never recovered.'' Tragically, Pollard is right. The new album by Guided by Voices, Under the Bushes, under the Stars, sounds like a hit-single compilation from a parallel universe where Dolby was never invented and it was not Merseybeat that gripped the imaginations of 1960s youth, but Daytonbeat. A 38-year-old American man in sneakers and, I expect, a backwards baseball cap with the logo of some farming machinery company on it, is writing better guitar songs than any of our feted Brit-pop bands.
The new single, The Official Ironman Rally Song, is an insinuating piece of self-mythologisation comparable to the Clash's Garageland or Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy. Pollard sheepishly maintains that all he does is "spin unrelated phrases together because of the way they sound'', but the song goes some way towards a definition of the Guided by Voices ethic, describing the band as a mechanism to "trigger a synapse'' and "free us from our traps''.
They promise to take the "freaks and happy little babies with red cheeks'' suckered by the bombast of post-grunge rock and "rock them gently out of sync''.
"Matador keep telling me to quit writing songs for a while as they're not ready to put a new record out,'' concludes Pollard. "`Take a vacation,' they say, `watch TV.' But I can't...''
Stewart Lee
1996-04-07T16:36:18+01:00
To listen to Robert Pollard speak is to spiral at 45 rpm through the worn-out grooves of a mind so stuffed with obscure musical ephemera, you'd swear he was spieling rock-star cocaine-babble. Except that it's 10am on a Monday in Dayton, Ohio, and Robert Pollard is a 38-year-old primary-school teacher with two teenage children who has given up his job to concentrate full time on the Sunday afternoon hobby band Guided by Voices that has suddenly taken over his life. As a schoolboy, Pollard performed all the usual adolescent rock-fan rituals, scribbling exercise books full of song lyrics and designing imaginary album covers. And then he grew up, and just carried on. Since 1983, Pollard has been putting his childhood fantasies into action through Guided by Voices, with the assistance of a shifting set of acolytes, a four-track home recording studio and an incurable addiction to the onanistic vice of songwriting. In 1993, after releasing 10 primitively engineered albums and about 117 psychedelic/beat-pop songs, Guided by Voices suddenly found themselves at the centre of a bidding war between Warner Bros and the ultimately more attractive indie label, Matador. Now Pollard is the trainspotter who has somehow found himself managing the railway. The last three Guided by Voices records have averaged about 25 songs apiece, none much more than two minutes long, with Pollard tossing away more melodies and infuriatingly catchy hooklines in one album than most bands write in a career. The band's devotion to basic recording techniques has made them icons of musical integrity for millions of misguided musos who equate tape hiss with honesty. "I never strove to be some example of indie credibility,'' counters Pollard. "I always just wanted to be a big tunes rock band. We only used the four-track out of necessity, not choice. We...
You probably won’t like Stewart Lee, which will mean he’s doing his job. That job, being a professional stand up comedian, which he celebrates when viewing it through a lens of improvisational jazz and performance art.
Yet he’ll be simultaneously mocking and tearing it down as a stupid line of work, compared to prostitution that kills the very soul of himself. I almost feel like I love his work so much he’d hate me the most, far more than the people who actually, actively hate him.
If you’re like me and “stateside”, in “the colonies” and “across the pond” the chances are very good that you’ve never heard of Stewart Lee. I’m friends with many people in the stand up community and when his name is mentioned it often seems remotely familiar or totally foreign. You won’t know about his coming of age during the alternative comedy boom in Britain in the 1980s (you probably aren’t even aware of the alternative comedy boom, though you’re more than likely familiar with the after effects), his popular 90s sketch show with Richard Herring (another name totally foreign despite its piscatorial associations), his retirement from performing, his stand up come back, his writing of Jerry Springer: The Opera which led to massive public backlash from Christian Right groups in the UK, or the continuing development of his stage persona and comedy legacy leading to his BBC2 television series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle(SLCV) which just finished it’s fourth series this week.
His show is the inverse of the comedy programs in America that are centered around a comic and their world view. Over here, through shows like Chapelle’s Show or Inside Amy Schumer, the audience is treated to momentary bursts of the performer’s routine, just enough to set up a barrage of sketches that will, at least at first, tangentially connect with the just seen comedy snippet. But on SLCV the show is almost nothing but Lee’s performance. The live act flow is interrupted briefly and occasionally by Christopher Morris (himself a UK comedy God, being the mind behind such cult shows as Brasseyeand The Day Today) who acts as an agitated interrogator, attacking the very episode that it itself is a part of and tearing down the philosophies that Lee seems to espouse. Almost always ending in a short sketch that works to take one prominent idea from the preceding episode and create as genuinely disturbing yet genuinely hilarious (and sometimes genuinely moving) spectacle of Lee’s constant stream of absurdist, satirical language.
One episode from this past series was centered around the theme of Islamaphobia, which is as much of a problem in the UK as it is in America. During the 28 minute episode Lee talks about living near Quakers and invents a series of hilarious yet ridiculous interactions with the Quaker community of his London borough wherein they trash all the porridge in local shops and destroy all the chocolate. This small segment of a much bigger theme and discussion is brought to life at the end of the episode through the incredible sketch performance from SLCV regulars Kevin Eldon and Paul Puttner creating a horror movie parody that is bizarrely funny while being creepy beyond belief.
Another episode, one dealing with death and the childhood conception of death ends with a reenactment of the prior routine wherein young Lee as a boy checks to see if his mouse came back to life after his mother had tried to revive it with brandy and a blow dryer. At first we see the mouse looking like Dave Hill from the UK 70s glam outfit Slade, playing their ubiquitous Christmas novelty hit, “Merry Xmas Everybody” while dozens of real mice scurry about a tiny mouse sized version of the Top Of The Pops studio. A delighted and enchanted Lee watches on at the magical Christmas miracle until the light fades away and the boy is left gazing at the corpse of his pet mouse, staring back at him from a sock, no festive music, no tiny mouse party.
It’s hard to write about what Stewart Lee does, to explain his performance to the uninitiated, because so much of his live act needs to be seen to be understood. It possibly explains why there aren’t (to my knowledge) comedy albums of his sets. He’s released live DVDs but no comedy LPs and that’s probably because you need to watch him as well as listen to him. He may joke about how horribly he’s aged (or mention how people have compared him to a “squashed Albert Finney” or a “crumpled Morrissey”) but that doesn’t seem to have taken away from his physical comedic prowess when he’ll explode in seeming rage at the audience for either their inability to follow along or their laughing at the wrong part.
The episode titles for this just finished series are; Wealth, Islamaphobia, Patriotism, Death, Migrants and Childhood. They sound like they could be a list of talking points from a dreadful topical news debate show, but here they act as springboard’s into Lee’s seemingly bottomless well of self-hatred, self parody, caustic satirical take downs of prominent figures and constant self-aware stand up comedy deconstruction.
Lee often compares himself to Miles Davis and his work to free form jazz and he’s not off the mark. There are two stages of Stewart Lee fandom I’ve discovered; the first where you’re blown away by the imagination and daring-do of his on stage persona and the second where you’ve discovered the actual brilliance at what he actually does through his constant dedication to exploring the craft of comedy publicly and with the dedication of a scholar. It’s true Lee did go to Oxford, but as Morris says during one particular interview segment, “You sound like someone who went to Oxford but didn’t pay attention.”
There’s a formula you can pick up when you immerse yourself in his work. Even if you just know of him through the television series, even if you just start your Stewart Lee education with the most recent one, you can begin to pick up on the formula of his craft. It’s the difference between someone like me enjoys music (that is someone with no real musical knowledge or education) where I hear something I like and think, “That’s good I like the way that sounds.” and that’s about the end of the thought. Whereas someone who KNOWS music and UNDERSTANDS the mechanics of it can get frustrated with an uninspired remark like that, insisting that the true brilliance is in the chord arrangements or the bass…level…settings. It’s like I said, I don’t know anything about music.
Lee follows a pattern that goes something like “Disconnected opening > Funny transition regarding the nature of transitions > Attempt at topic > Become distracted by the audience > Go off topic obsessively > Genuine improvisation > Brutal repetition > Deconstruction of stand up comedy > Attempt to bring it home.”
This is formula and formula is different from content because formula allows the constant creating of unique and different experiences but from within established, proven confines that allow for creative comedic experiments. Some comics, Louis CK for example, seemingly have an opposite approach, where it’s the content, rather than the formula that is repeated over and over and over again in special after special.
If you haven’t seen a Louis CK comedy special, let me give you the complete experience, “I’m physically detestable > I’m obsessed with sex > Men and women are different > I’m famous and rich but I’m still sad and a loser > My partner either hates me or has divorced me > I have kids > I was a child once > I’m mad at young people > Maybe something genuinely inspired if there’s time.” I just saved you 6 hours on Youtube, you’re welcome.
It’s always nice to have someone to compare to when trying to introduce a foreign subject and make it relatable and I’m sure that people have compared Lee to Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, probably focusing on his more challenging, counter culture, anti-authoritarian views and routines. Yet that avoids what really makes Lee so in step with those holy, stand up legends because the answer is (like Lee’s comedy) more nuanced than that.
You can see Lenny Bruce’s jazz inspired comedy performance in Lee, creating subtle hypnotizing rhythms and being unafraid to treat ridiculous words and over the top sartorial scenarios as high art. You can see Lee work in the manner of Hicks by maintaining an attitude of smug superiority over the audience while simultaneously insisting that they themselves are a willing martyr for the same group of people they’ve just admonished. Another Hicksian device Lee makes his own (and really has practically built his career around) is the format of taking a joke and beginning to repeat it over and over and over again while the audience moves from finding it funny, to finding it annoying to finding it hilarious to finding it obnoxious to finding it hilarious again. In fact Lee has worked this angle so hard and for so long, I almost hesitate to give Hicks credit for it since Lee has done so much more with it. Though that may be a tad unfair to Bill since he’s been dead for over 20 years.
Lee is aware of his avant garde, comedy experience and there’s much discussion given to it throughout the course of the series, both on stage and in the quiet moments with Morris. “What kind of stand up do people like?” asks Lee at one point, “It’s not this.” “This isn’t entertaining, no one would think that” he says at another while discussing the show’s loss at a British award show.
When you watch a Stewart Lee program you get all of this, comedy wisdom from a grandmaster, a constant war with the audience, a constant war with himself (that is so meta it would make Charlie Kauffman disappear into a portal in the back of his own head), and a constant war with the world in roughly 28 minutes making it a viewing experience totally unlike anything else you’ve seen. Not only can I not compare it to anything being done in American stand up, I can’t think to compare it to anything being done by anyone, anywhere.
What keeps Lee from becoming a grating, obnoxious, lampoon of himself is that his war against the world, far from being an attempt to come off as a hip, counter culture guru (Russell Brand), is done through a more focused war against himself. He’ll take on the world but only if he can first take himself apart to do it. It’s almost like comedy inception trying to follow, that he not only writes the entire performance (and really when you watch it, it takes a lot of scrutiny to be able to pick up on the bits that are genuinely improv and the bits that are just written to sound like it. It’s like a stand up version of Exit Through The Gift Shop where you’re never entirely certain if what you’re watching was actually real or not) but he also then writes a complete and total attack on the entire performance and uses Morris to dismantle his own opinions and bleak world view. He’s his own worst enemy and greatest supporter, which makes him hate himself more, which makes him take his own side more seriously and with greater compassion, only to enrage his stage persona more and on and on and on.
Over the course of the series Lee decries how he’ll be forced into performing well into his 70s to pay for his children and his house. His skills have become so sharp over the last 25 years of performing it’s like trying to wrap your mind around the inner dimensions of a black hole trying to imagine what his performance will look like given another 25. It may be a depressing nightmare for Lee, but it’s a blessing for fans of comedy not only challenging and intelligent, but also hilarious and surprising.
If you’re in the UK you can see episodes on the BBC iPlayer. If you’re elsewhere in the world you’ll need a VPN and a bit of luck and fortitude. I believe at least one of his specials is available on YouYube and you owe it to yourself to give him a chance to bring you into his world.
Stewart Lee
2016-04-09T21:38:33+01:00
You probably won’t like Stewart Lee, which will mean he’s doing his job. That job, being a professional stand up comedian, which he celebrates when viewing it through a lens of improvisational jazz and performance art. Yet he’ll be simultaneously mocking and tearing it down as a stupid line of work, compared to prostitution that kills the very soul of himself. I almost feel like I love his work so much he’d hate me the most, far more than the people who actually, actively hate him. If you’re like me and “stateside”, in “the colonies” and “across the pond” the chances are very good that you’ve never heard of Stewart Lee. I’m friends with many people in the stand up community and when his name is mentioned it often seems remotely familiar or totally foreign. You won’t know about his coming of age during the alternative comedy boom in Britain in the 1980s (you probably aren’t even aware of the alternative comedy boom, though you’re more than likely familiar with the after effects), his popular 90s sketch show with Richard Herring (another name totally foreign despite its piscatorial associations), his retirement from performing, his stand up come back, his writing of Jerry Springer: The Opera which led to massive public backlash from Christian Right groups in the UK, or the continuing development of his stage persona and comedy legacy leading to his BBC2 television series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (SLCV) which just finished it’s fourth series this week. His show is the inverse of the comedy programs in America that are centered around a comic and their world view. Over here, through shows like Chapelle’s Show or Inside Amy Schumer, the audience is treated to momentary bursts of the performer’s routine, just enough to set up a barrage of sketches that will, at least at first, tangentially...
The DVD of the fourth and final series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle was released yesterday (Buy here). Here, the comedian exclusively reveals the genesis of the first three episodes – with notes on the remaining episodes to follow tomorrow:
You can also download a PDF of these to print out & add to your DVD case FRONT | BACK.
Episode 1: Wealth
This episode came together pretty quickly, and I had a lot of fun doing the Baftas bit on tour. There was a ten-minute plank about owning a home and S&M which went missing for time and narrative issues and will be the basis of a big block in the new tour show, Content Provider.
I saw seagulls peck a duckling to death at Camden Lock while men laughed; I assume the unnamed hated Oxbridge comedian in Lee Mack's autobiography is me; Dominic Cavendish at The Daily Telegraph left one of my shows at half time, openly lied about it, and gave it a no star review; I actually won a Bafta once but had to ignore that to make my faux-resentment of the awards work; James Corden comes to my gigs in little pubs and sits secretly in the dark, which I don't mind, but the stage version of me is consumed by resentment of his noble patronage; the council have promised CCTV to tackle the prostitute punters on the street where I live. I wonder where the girls will go then?
I was a school with the original line-up of Napalm Death, though I wasn't friendly with all of them, and I did go mountain walking with Rat, Simon, Daryl and Robbo.
My initial idea for the film item was a Michael Bentine's Potty Time style thing of tiny metalers moving around a landscape. Then I asked Tim Kirby, director, what he would do if asked to direct an orienteering-themed extreme metal promo video. He came up with a superb storyboard. We shot the extract in real time, with patient lookalikes, as if for a three-minute clip, then sped it up to match the Napalm Death track.
Episode 2: Islamophobia
Right-wing columnists moan that we liberals don't do enough anti-Islamic jokes, and so does James Naughtie on Radio 4. This episode was an attempt to do just that, on my own terms, whilst also making fun of the idea that I was obliged to do so by The Daily Mail.
In the summer of 2014, having visited a site in East London as part of the Chelsea Garden Festival Fringe, I was on the 149 bus with the kids and a saw a veiled Muslim woman sit on a copy of the Jehovah's Witnesses magazine Watchtower.
I used an old bit from the Carpet Remnant World tour as a frame to hang new ideas about religion on, from which only the running around bit, and the basic idea of the Roy Chubby Brown riff, actually survived into the programme.
Ridiculous right-wing reactions to a Muslim winning Bake Off in 2015 bled into the material.
In reality a Sikh man got on the 149 bus and made the Muslim woman move up, and then he or she sat on the Watchtower, I forget which, but when I told this story it never seemed quite funny enough. One night I changed it to a Quaker and the whole closing bit started to come together, I think because no-one in the world could realistically have any kind of grudge against Quakers.
The film item was inspired by John Carpenter's The Fog. Our old friend the Irish comedian, writer and activist Tara Flynn is woefully underused.
Episode 3: Patriiotism
This show started to take shape in January 2015 as a long routine about UKIP and patriotic symbols. The previous November the Labour MP Emily Thornberry had ignited a row about flying the England flag, and loads of spineless creeps who knew better were forced to pretend it is never used as a fascist symbol. Indeed, right now Theresa May is again using the idea that the 'liberal elite' are 'unpatriotic' as a shit-stirring device.
But, after Cameron absorbed UKIP supporter's anxieties in the spring 2015 election, the party suddenly seemed irrelevant and uninteresting, and it seemed weird to even be talking about them. Key elements of the bit were salvaged and made into a show about Jeremy Corbyn, which didn't work quite as well. Sadly, for me and the world, within months of the show being recorded, UKIP again played a major part in British politics in the run up to the Brexit crisis, as if they had never been away.
I did win a hamster in a drawing competition in She magazine in 1979. I drew it as if it were an astronaut in a space-suit. The magazine sent me a voucher. I called the hamster Ray Bradbury, after the science fiction writer I was reading at the time. This never got a laugh until I changed it to Karlheinz Stockhausen. I don't know why. Comedy is alchemy. And our dachshund did break its back, jumping up at the hamster.
I did not have a dog named after Matthew Broderick, but I did see Matthew Broderick through a doorway at the Four Seasons Hotel in LA in 1999, sitting alone, looking sad, waiting to be interviewed about Inspector Gadget. I was trying to fund a film I wrote that never got made.
Live, the cat defecation routine had a musicality to it, and an unpredictability, that regularly created waves of hysteria in rooms of 500, 1,000, or 2,000 people. In the smaller space where the series was recorded it seemed far more provocative.
I knew I wanted the film item to be a montage of news but couldn't get my head round it. Tim Kirkby suggested Zak Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead as a reference, Jon Culshaw did some brilliant voices, our researcher pulled out some fantastic clearable footage, and the whole thing came together.
Episode 4: Death
I had been chasing down a routine about the death of my pet hamster, the aforementioned Ray Bradbury [see yesterday's guide to episodes 1-3] since I began writing series 3 in 2012, but could never make my memories on stage as funny as they seemed in conversation with friends.
I saw Dara O Briain and Brian Cox talking about the eclipse on TV in a Glasgow hotel room on March 20, 2015, and had the idea for the opening gag immediately. I walked down to a bridge over the Clyde to watch the sky. Oddly, Wilco Johnson was there, and he recognised me and talked to me. I changed to location of the joke from Glasgow to Dundee. Loads of tragic things kept happening in Glasgow during that period and the name of the town made people nervous. Dundee is an inherently funny name anyway. I learned that from Jerry Sadowitz.
The details of my father's weekend routine are largely unchanged. He was a very funny man to be around and I miss him. The idea of mocking young comedians for doing shows about their dead father is hijacked, and then reworked, from the Carpet Remnant World live show. It is supposed to reflect my own perceived anxieties about my own impending obsolescence. I don't have any genuine opinion about people doing shows about their dead fathers one way or the other.
When I changed the hamster in the story to a mouse, it somehow started to seem funnier. The story happened exactly as written, except I never saw my pet rodent morph into a member of Slade.
For the Slade/mice/diary thread, Thorin in the art department asked me what my childhood diary was like, and recreated it, even down to the now out-of-print 1970s Marvel Comics bubblegum stickers that he attached to its cover.
Kevin Eldon and Paul Putner clearly studied their characters' moves far beyond the call of duty; the exteriors and interiors of the home are exactly like the little terraced house I grew up in; the little me was a perfect little me; the mum, somehow, even looks like my late Mum, though no-one was given a photo reference. The whole thing was a bit overwhelming.
The music is Hilary by The Durutti Column.
Episode 5: Migrants
This and the dead mouse episode were the hardest to assemble. This show went wrong for months, during the live shows, because I became hung up on basing it on an Observer column I had written about the migrant crisis happening in my garden which, though enjoyed by executives overseeing the show as a piece of writing, always sounded, to me, too written as a piece of stand-up. I recorded this bit anyway and it's on the DVD as an extra.
I did take some clothes to a migrants' charity in Dalston where the hip gear on offer did make me laugh.
I started to become fixated on the inane way newspaper columnists dealt with the crisis. The Rod Liddle poppadom bit again caused hysteria in large rooms, and seemed to me to be an appropriately meaningless response to the ongoing banality of newspaper comment. We had a couple of goes at it in the Mildmay Club. Neither worked anywhere near as well as it did live. In the two months of touring after the show was recorded I introduced little comedy tricks that meant it always landed in a more conventional way.
There was a lot of mess surrounding all this material as it was recorded – glasses breaking in the room, random introductions, cameramen being where I wasn't expecting them. In the end we decided to include all these, at the expense of the film item (another DVD extra), and the garden routine, and try to assemble the impression of a gig in out-of-control freefall, to capture the real stand-up experience of a room on the edge.
It would have been equally easy to edit it to look like an unqualified success, as Nick Helm revealed they do with acts that go to silence on Live AT The Apollo, but choosing the scrappiest bits and amplifying them seemed more interesting on this occasion.
My initial, and turned down, proposal for Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, in May 2005, had been to record the sets at Pontin's holiday camps, and cross channel ferry bars, and Speakers' Corner, in places where I would struggle. In the end, we managed to make an episode of Comedy Vehicle that felt like that, even in front of my own audience.
Episode 6: Childhood memories
My kid was having trouble at school. But I don't like writing about my immediate family. I started thinking about my own schooldays and remembered that, as a very small boy, I had been kicked into a urinal and urinated on at Streetsbrook Infant School in Shirley. I remembered the ringleader's name, googled him, and changed it for legal reasons.
I did urinate in my grandad's face when I was in hospital in Exeter with a fractured elbow, after I had fallen blowing bubbles on the caravan step in Beer; he and I did urinate together on Maltese flies, and he had been an RAF engineer on Lancaster bombers. He did say he liked to pretend the flies were Germans.
Robin Williams had committed suicide, depressed. There were lots of newspaper articles about comedians being mentally unstable products of circumstance. I thought about my childhood. The two ideas came together. In a sudden late-night burst of inspiration, when some shows took years to crystallize, this half hour was written in about as long as it takes to perform.
What wasn't there on the page was the tension, and the space for intense improvisations around my supposed grief in rooms which often bought into it entirely. In Dublin, a Sunday Times journalist on the front row took camera phone footage and fled to file an exclusive on how Stewart Lee was having a nervous breakdown live on stage, only dissuaded later by Twitter users telling her it was all part of the act. In London, a supposedly psychic woman intervened, offering to help me deal with ghosts that only I could see.
I'm not an actor, and I don't believe in ghosts or the afterlife, but each night I got through the bit and made it real by remembering a vivid ghost of a loved one that had once appeared to me in Wolverhampton. I was glad when I didn't have to do the bit any more, and I think it represents the end point of a certain strand of stand-up I had been pursuing.
My wife has a photograph of herself with a very handsome ex-boyfriend on a tropical beach, on which she looks happier than I have ever seen her since. I want it blown up and framed.
I've been going deaf since my teens. It's an inherited condition, I learned, when I met a blood relative for the first time some years ago. I wonder if I genuinely have developed a stand-up style that seemed indifferent to approval as a result of perhaps not being able to hear any, when it may have been there all along? Since I had my hearing aids on stage, I sometimes feel like I am performing on LSD, absorbing all stimuli. It was nice to be able to take them out, and get a laugh.
I decided I wanted to perform an MGM swimming musical style routine in a massive tank of urine fairly early on in the writing process and spent a year trying to get fit enough to be able to dive underwater through rotating hoops of synchronized swimmers.
In the end the underwater cameraman who came with the place in Essex where the tank was had his focus wrong, and, after a day in the water, only one actual underwater shot, of me swimming through the swirling bodies of the 2012 British Women's Olympic Synchronised swimming team, survives.
Luckily, the rest of the crew had pretty much everything else covered, and the art direction, camera work and editing of this piece were all superb. This episode, which turned out to be the final one, was my favourite edition of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
Stewart Lee
2016-10-11T00:33:27+01:00
The DVD of the fourth and final series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle was released yesterday (Buy here). Here, the comedian exclusively reveals the genesis of the first three episodes – with notes on the remaining episodes to follow tomorrow: You can also download a PDF of these to print out & add to your DVD case FRONT | BACK. Episode 1: Wealth This episode came together pretty quickly, and I had a lot of fun doing the Baftas bit on tour. There was a ten-minute plank about owning a home and S&M which went missing for time and narrative issues and will be the basis of a big block in the new tour show, Content Provider. I saw seagulls peck a duckling to death at Camden Lock while men laughed; I assume the unnamed hated Oxbridge comedian in Lee Mack's autobiography is me; Dominic Cavendish at The Daily Telegraph left one of my shows at half time, openly lied about it, and gave it a no star review; I actually won a Bafta once but had to ignore that to make my faux-resentment of the awards work; James Corden comes to my gigs in little pubs and sits secretly in the dark, which I don't mind, but the stage version of me is consumed by resentment of his noble patronage; the council have promised CCTV to tackle the prostitute punters on the street where I live. I wonder where the girls will go then? I was a school with the original line-up of Napalm Death, though I wasn't friendly with all of them, and I did go mountain walking with Rat, Simon, Daryl and Robbo. My initial idea for the film item was a Michael Bentine's Potty Time style thing of tiny metalers moving around a landscape. Then I...
Edinburgh's art school guitar popsters FOUND insist on capital letters. Their sometime scratchiness will satiate those weaned on scuffed Scottish indie rock from way back, like Josef K or Fire Engines, but they're clean and lean and melodic enough to clobber the casual consumer with chiming guitars and suckable hooks and falsetto vocal leaps, and clever clever enough for their third album to sport a Scottish Arts Council logo.
Ziggy Campbell's Lowland blab is pleasantly unreconstructed, but for a band that began as an improvisatory experiment sometimes Factorycraft sounds a little tidy. Nonetheless, it's easy to imagine them being massive.
Stewart Lee
2011-04-03T19:41:11+01:00
Edinburgh's art school guitar popsters FOUND insist on capital letters. Their sometime scratchiness will satiate those weaned on scuffed Scottish indie rock from way back, like Josef K or Fire Engines, but they're clean and lean and melodic enough to clobber the casual consumer with chiming guitars and suckable hooks and falsetto vocal leaps, and clever clever enough for their third album to sport a Scottish Arts Council logo. Ziggy Campbell's Lowland blab is pleasantly unreconstructed, but for a band that began as an improvisatory experiment sometimes Factorycraft sounds a little tidy. Nonetheless, it's easy to imagine them being massive.
Mrs Barbara Nice is finally persuaded to sit down for half an hour or so and share what’s she’s been getting up to that week. Spend time in Barbara’s world and meet some of her friends too as they discuss topics close to her heart.
Stewart Lee
2021-02-04T13:41:44+00:00
Mrs Barbara Nice is finally persuaded to sit down for half an hour or so and share what’s she’s been getting up to that week. Spend time in Barbara’s world and meet some of her friends too as they discuss topics close to her heart.
Following his hugely acclaimed TV come-back, Comedy Vehicle, Lee finds himself spent and in search of ideas for a new Edinburgh show. On a long walk across London, he endures a coffee shop humiliation involving a loyalty card, which suggests itself as a comedy routine about everyday life that anyone could enjoy.
Later that month, thanks to Jeremy Clarkson's jokes about Gordon Brown's blindness and the appearance of a well-meaning young comedian in a pear cider advert, a show is born.
Featuring a transcript of the show fully annotated with footnotes, the If You Prefer A Milder Comedian EP confirms Stewart Lee as the most original, daring and brilliant comedian of his generation.
'Stewart Lee is a true original.' Observer
'I've always though of Stewart Lee's comedy as doing the opposite of what really good comedy should do.' Toby Young, BBC Radio 4
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T23:35:02+00:00
Following his hugely acclaimed TV come-back, Comedy Vehicle, Lee finds himself spent and in search of ideas for a new Edinburgh show. On a long walk across London, he endures a coffee shop humiliation involving a loyalty card, which suggests itself as a comedy routine about everyday life that anyone could enjoy. Later that month, thanks to Jeremy Clarkson's jokes about Gordon Brown's blindness and the appearance of a well-meaning young comedian in a pear cider advert, a show is born. Featuring a transcript of the show fully annotated with footnotes, the If You Prefer A Milder Comedian EP confirms Stewart Lee as the most original, daring and brilliant comedian of his generation. 'Stewart Lee is a true original.' Observer 'I've always though of Stewart Lee's comedy as doing the opposite of what really good comedy should do.' Toby Young, BBC Radio 4
Veteran stand-up Stewart Lee explains the lure of the Fringe, 10 comics, young and old, tell us whether the scene is all smiles. And, for the punchline, a concise history of 'alternative comedy'Rich Hall (in hat, then clockwise), Sean Lock, Stewart Lee, Tameka Empson and Phill Jupitus
Next year I'll turn 40, and for my generation of stand-up comedians there's a Year Zero attitude to 1979. Holy texts found in a skip out the back of the London listing magazine Time Out tell us how Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders destroyed the British comedy hegemony of Upper-Class Oxbridge Satire and Working-Class Bow Tie-Sporting Racism with a few explosive, post-punk punch-lines. Then, with the fragments of these smashed idols and their own hands, they built the pioneering stand-up clubs The Comedy Store and The Comic Strip. In so doing they founded the egalitarian Polytechnic of Laughs that is today's comedy establishment. Every religion needs a Genesis myth and this is stand-up comedy's...
The comedy community I joined in the late Eighties still retained traces of its birth in opposition to both the political and the entertainment establishments of its day. But what's happened to comedy on the front line, in comedy clubs and at the Edinburgh Fringe? Would the pioneers of yesteryear recognise the territory they carved out?
In the Eighties, London clubs such as Jongleurs and The Comedy Store hosted stand-up comedy, satirical songs, and even magic. Now a massive chain of Jongleurs and Comedy Stores nationwide sells simple man-and-a-mic stand-up to audiences of stag and hen nights – they're a branded franchise, like TGI Fridays or Pizza Hut, serving up comedians and chips in wicker baskets before the disco and late bar. For this reason, the better acts that play Jongleurs gigs have a set which bears little relation to their best work. The London Comedy Store declares itself the National Theatre of Comedy. But like Jongleurs, the Store is now a night out first and foremost, and a platform for adventurous work second. Their bookers ignore the risky, innovative acts that would justify their hyperbolic marketing in favour of guaranteed crowd-pleasers with often breathtaking people skills, squashed talents struggling to work good material into an environment where it's not necessarily wanted, and a few jaded veterans hanging in there for the not-enormous fees.
But the blandness of the big chains means that in every city that has a Franchised Laff Retail Outlet ™, at least one alternative venue seems to have thrived in opposition to it, such as XS Mallarkey in Manchester, or The Comedy Box in Bristol, which have almost no crossover with the franchises in terms of acts. The same sort of seismic shift that pitched The Comedy Store against Bernard Manning's Embassy Club 30 years ago now plays itself out again, but in a post-Blair Britain. What we need is a phrase, such as Janet Street-Porter's early Nineties classic: "Comedy is the new rock'*'roll" , to nail the New Alternative Comedy and we'll have a full-scale movement, primed and ready, for fans and performers to align themselves to. The difference today is that the front line that the French and Saunders generation manned has moved North from Soho and Leicester Square and permanently repositioned itself in Edinburgh in August.
I first worked on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987 (I'm approaching my 20th Fringe), so I feel qualified to state that, right now, Britain and Ireland have the greatest stand-up comedians on the planet and that the Edinburgh Fringe is, for one month, the world's comedy capital. And they come from all over to be in the Scottish capital in August. There are brilliant Antipodean acts, such as Greg Fleet who is visiting the Fringe this month. All Canadians, meanwhile, are hilarious. But while American stand-ups, such as Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, crystalised the art form, their successors have largely forgotten what it is for. Whenever a high-profile US act tours here the quality of their work is usually disappointing. Any US comics with a real love of the form, such as Paul Provenza, end up returning to the Fringe again and again, in awe of our superior skills; or, as Rich Hall does, they spend as much time as possible in the UK, where the diminished commercial opportunities are vastly outweighed by the value of participating in a comedy community that seems to care about what it's doing.
The schism in the live stand-up scene is most evident in Edinburgh. For the last few years at the Fringe, acts that would wither before the hen and stag parties of the franchised comedy club chains have received superb reviews and won awards, before returning to their usual life of obscurity, near-poverty and patronising dismissal by big club promoters. Conversely, reliable franchise-club headliners – who can clear £80,000 a year doing corporate gigs andJongleurs weekends – venture to the Fringe to sacrifice a month of massive pay-days in search of credibility, but usually wind up with a set of two-star reviews from the critics and massive chips on their shoulders. Why? Because in Edinburgh stand-up is actually reviewed by critics and consumed by audiences who believe it's more than just something you go to to get drunk with a big gang of mates (one of whom will end the night chained to a dead horse with his pubic hair shaved off).
So, instead of complaining that stand-up comedy in Edinburgh is destroying theatre at the Festival (it isn't), we should accept the fact that we are still world leaders in something, and that we got here without public subsidy or private investment, via endless clammy summers of little weirdos working away in tiny Scottish rooms at their own expense. At the Melbourne Comedy Festival and at Montreal's Just For Laughs, a lot of public and private money is spent enticing comedians from all over the world to perform. Just For Laughs struggles to feel like much more than the Comedy Industry Trade Fair that ignorant journalists and cynical pundits accuse the Edinburgh Fringe of being. In Montreal, American actors pretending to be stand-ups perform endless strings of seven-minute showcases in the hope of a lucrative TV deal to audiences comprised largely of American industry insiders. The Montreal festival's choices of foreign talent often reflect this conservatism, or are the result of strong-arming by powerful agents. Last year Just For Laughs took the bold initiative of scheduling a series of actual full-length shows by respected practitioners of the art of stand-up from all over the world, and local media and visiting LA media executives reeled with shock as they struggled to comprehend true stand-up comedy, beyond its degraded American form.
But nothing like the breadth, quality or quantity of Edinburgh Fringe comedy is achieved. At the world's biggest and best arts festival, the performers in the Edinburgh Fringe effectively promote themselves and cover their own inevitable losses. In Edinburgh there is still a sense that strange things are happening without anyone's permission. Unlike any other major festival in the world, there isn't a selection procedure for the Edinburgh Fringe – the Fringe director is an administrator, not a curator or a programmer. People just invite themselves by booking slots, buying a "line-ad" , or entry, in the programme, and getting overdrafts to pay for their shows (an afternoon slot in a middling venue might cost a stand-up £5,000 to £10,000 for the three-week duration).
Sure, TV commissioners and journalists and agents can come and spectate, but the Fringe would be happening with or without them. From the bars of their hotels, industry visitors and cultural commentators may imagine the Fringe is the stock exchange with jokes: "Sell white male stand-ups! Buy female Asian sketch groups!", "The improv market is about to crash! " But here on the trading floor it feels like Babel, and it's brilliant.' Not that you'd know this from the comedy broadcast on TV or radio. A BBC Radio 4 producer earlier this year put the problem in this way: he explained how his father once came to the Fringe to visit him, and was exposed to talents in tiny rooms above pubs far superior to anything he came across on TV or radio, and was confused as to why this was the case.
The producer explained that the procedures which led to talent being spotted or commissioned were many and complex, and that it was often difficult to translate what was great about them to other mediums. Then eventually he heard the sound of his own dissembling voice and blurted out, "You're right. It's ridiculous isn't it." Few first-time visitors to the Fringe return with their sense of cosmic fair-play intact. "These people are br illiant," they say, "why haven't I heard of any of them when Joe Pasquale is a household name?" Well, I haven't really worked in television or radio comedy for nearly a decade now, but here's an urchin's eye view through the letterbox of that big, fancy house.
We know that the BBC's own trailers are as believable as their phone-in competiton results. Imagine if the BBC was actually allowed to make programmes as fascinating, tasteful and diverse as its promotional " idents". (I'm still waiting for that show where the contemporary dancers perform in slow motion on top of a skyscraper.) The most dishonest BBC ident is the one that alludes to everyone's favourite sit-com of the last 10 years, The Office, as being a product of risk-taking enabled by " the unique way the BBC is funded", however, everyone in the business knows that the then controller of BBC2 hated it and tried to pull it after the first show. The Office was unique in tone, style and vision, and as such is not at all typical of television comedy commissioning procedures, which punish flair and reward malleable, cooperative conformity.
It's unfair to single out any particular programme as an example, but perhaps the worst example of recent years is the BBC3 sketch show Rush Hour. Where classic sketch shows such as Big Train or Monty Python's Flying Circus were defined by the distinctive writing and performing style of the teams, Rush Hour, and its contemporary ilk, are defined thematically, by subject. It is hard for TV executives to quantify style or a particular comic aesthetic. They are more comfortable talking about where a comedy might be set, or what kind of objects might feature in it. Rush Hour differed from many of the current crop, which have concentrated almost exclusively on the world of thirty-something relationships lately, to look instead at the hilarious world of transport. The result was a loveless, producer-led mechanism for squandering talents such as Marek Larwood and Adam Buxton, both of whom have appeared at The Fringe pursuing their own unique, individual ideas. This, like many current comedy shows, was clearly a programme that no one, in their hearts, really wanted to make.
Radio, by its simpler nature, could act quickly to capture blossoming talents in the moment with small mobile units. But Radio 4's laborious commissioning procedures mean its comedy remains almost exclusively the kind of middle-class sketch shows where people wander in and out of shops asking for things, establishing an absurd premise, and working it through to its logical and predictable conclusion in irritating student-review voices. Radio 4's most formally radical comedies remain the subversive quiz-show formats, such as Just a Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, developed in the Sixties and Seventies by the now wizened veterans that still staff them. I am a middle-aged, middle-class man, who once wrote for a 1980s Oxbridge student review, and even I find Radio 4 comedy middle-aged, middle-class and studenty.
It takes courage to allow talents with a vision to follow that vision – and The Office happened despite the BBC rather than because of it – and the only place you will see the comedian's vision undiluted by television executives is on The Fringe, or, increasingly, on the internet.
There are few modern sights more depressing than a 39-year-old man who has just figured out iTunes sitting down to write a piece about how he feels the internet may change the entertainment industry. At the moment, YouTube is full of genius-nerds developing their own funny 50-second fragments, that can generate enormous feedback without an orchestrated campaign. But now TV comedy producers want some of that internet excitement. Again, because none of them are smart enough to analyse the tone of individual aesthetics of comedy, they are excited instead by the delivery mechanism, in this case the internet. It was the YouTube success of some short pieces the writer-performer Peter Serafinowicz shot himself and posted that gained him his forthcoming BBC series, rather than his years of quiet and diligent work on various, hugely worthwhile projects such as Look Around You and Spaced.
But maybe the heady frontier days of the internet are already over. The suits are wise to it. Earlier this year, I took a script to a television production company. They suggested developing the characters on the web as icons people could interact with, to generate a buzz. I just wanted money to write a script, words and jokes and stuff, on pieces of paper, like in the old days, so I went home and cried. But on the positive side, if a stand-up comedian could eliminate the desire for mass acclaim, the internet could be one of the tools that relieves him or her of the need to cooperate with broadcasters. I have 5,000 MySpace friends. If each of them came to a gig, or bought a cd, every year, I would make a great living for the rest of my life without needing my popularity to be brokered by the unreliable interface of television or radio. The age of the MySpace comedian cannot be far off. Then we will be able to make the transition from the pre-lapsarian comedy paradise of the Edinburgh Fringe and bypass the broadcaster to achieve direct access to mass audiences, without needing to get any dirt on our shoes. Oh, let it be soon.
In the meantime, the Fringe remains the best place to experience the real cutting edge of comedy, and its role in facilitating cultural exchange, introducing new talents and establishing critical criteria is more important than it has been for some time. This is the good stuff. And a quick statistical scan of show titles in a festival that hasn't been programmed by a governing intelligence, or inhibited by any across-the-board artistic policy, or dumbed-down by TV producers, will tell you what comics really want to talk about.
Last year the Blair government threatened free speech with their woolly, but only narrowly defeated, Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred Act, and continued its "elephant in the room" approach to the causes of terrorism here at home by refusing to even discuss the possibility that British foreign policy in Iraq was in any way a factor. Twenty comedy shows in Edinburgh last year mentioned these subjects in their titles alone – but how many people caught, say, Abie Bowman's plucky Jesus – The Guantanamo Years?
Television can't respond to cultural shifts with the same speed or precision, and radio doesn't seem to want to. As for the internet, its full potential for the dissemination of quality comedy has yet to be realised. Meanwhile, the Fringe comedy show is written and up and running, without any interference. And because the Fringe attracts people, in all fields of performance, who, however delusionally, believe they are doing their thing for its own sake, it's the best barometer we have of where artists and audiences want to go next...
Stewart Lee's new show '41st Best Stand-Up Ever' is at the Udderbelly @ The Underbelly, Edinburgh, 0870 745 3083, to 26 August
Stewart Lee
2007-08-05T19:56:02+01:00
Veteran stand-up Stewart Lee explains the lure of the Fringe, 10 comics, young and old, tell us whether the scene is all smiles. And, for the punchline, a concise history of 'alternative comedy'Rich Hall (in hat, then clockwise), Sean Lock, Stewart Lee, Tameka Empson and Phill Jupitus Next year I'll turn 40, and for my generation of stand-up comedians there's a Year Zero attitude to 1979. Holy texts found in a skip out the back of the London listing magazine Time Out tell us how Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders destroyed the British comedy hegemony of Upper-Class Oxbridge Satire and Working-Class Bow Tie-Sporting Racism with a few explosive, post-punk punch-lines. Then, with the fragments of these smashed idols and their own hands, they built the pioneering stand-up clubs The Comedy Store and The Comic Strip. In so doing they founded the egalitarian Polytechnic of Laughs that is today's comedy establishment. Every religion needs a Genesis myth and this is stand-up comedy's... The comedy community I joined in the late Eighties still retained traces of its birth in opposition to both the political and the entertainment establishments of its day. But what's happened to comedy on the front line, in comedy clubs and at the Edinburgh Fringe? Would the pioneers of yesteryear recognise the territory they carved out? In the Eighties, London clubs such as Jongleurs and The Comedy Store hosted stand-up comedy, satirical songs, and even magic. Now a massive chain of Jongleurs and Comedy Stores nationwide sells simple man-and-a-mic stand-up to audiences of stag and hen nights – they're a branded franchise, like TGI Fridays or Pizza Hut, serving up comedians and chips in wicker baskets before the disco and late bar. For this reason, the better acts that play Jongleurs gigs have a set...
Savage Clinking is a punk-historian, and is the author of almost two books on the music and politics of the era, featuring random use of capitals and some photos of Sid Vicious falling over.
So, farewell then, Hammersmith Palais, venue of PUNK Legends. Long may you ROT in peace! I was there when THE PISTOLS told THE QUEEN to shove it up her annus horriblis! I was there when JOE and THE CLASH city rockers contracted Hepatitis B from a stage-bound tsunami of SPIT! And it was at the Hammersmith Palais, watching Lydon’s PIL in ’78, amidst a tidal wave of pogoing punks, cheering, shouting, jerring, and LIVING in the MOMENT for THE NOW, that I realiseed that what PUNK really needed was to be carefully documented using accurately cited references to the major cultural, social and political movements of the 20th century in a seven or eight hundred page academic book with copious footnotes and appendix of essential recordings, retailing at £12.99.
By now the bulldozers are already levelling The Palais, where my generation fought THE PUNK WARS in a blitzkrieg of warm beer and hot sweat so that you could be FREE from PROGRESSIVE ROCK and FACISM. And how did you repay us? By buying Radiohead records and electing BLAIR. I wasn’t battered senseless by HIPPIES and TEDS, admittedly, (I ran away, and that’s not easy in BONDAGE trousers), but if I had been, it wouldn’t have been so you could turn back the clock to 1975. ARE YOU ENJOYING THE LIFE YOU HAVE CHOSEN FOR YOURSELF? That is my QUESTION to YOU!
We were born in the 50’s. Our FATHERs bent over our cradles and told us they fought World War II for us. “Well, Dad, I got news for you,” I said to him in ’78, as he lay dying on his hospital bed, “I’m fighting a war too, a war against FLARES and MELLOTRONS and DISCO music. And I got a uniform too. Not a uniform like yours, like a soldiers. A uniform of bondage trouser and TATTERED t-shirt. And the war I fight, weekly, at The Hammersmith Palais, is more important than anything you did in France and Germany.” And my Dad died with those words ringing in his ears, and to this day I don’t regret it.
Even when PUNK was over (Summer of ’78, don’t let anyone tell you any different) The SPIRIT OF PUNK still pervaded the Palais. It was in the walls, like smacked-out woodworm, or a load of amphetamine-addled cockroaches, and it wasn’t going to ley go. For that last few years The Palais’ big draw was School Disco, a night where accountants and estate agents from West London who had recently graduated from former polytechnics got to dress up in their old school uniforms from three years ago and dance to DISPOSABLE POP MUSIC of the 80’s and 90’s. Had The Palais betrayed its punk heritage? No. NOTHING could be more PUNK than a grown woman dressed as a SCHOOLGIRL dancing to an EAST SEVENTEEN single? NOTHING! And if you don’t understand why then I refer you to THE SITUATIONIST MANIFESTO of Guy Debord.
And now the wrecking ball batters the walls of The Hammersmith Palais, temple of PUNK. Don’t look back. Don’t get sentimental. In the words of Captain Sensible – “SMASH IT UP! SMASH IT UP!”. The Hammersmith Palais, venue of legends, is gone. Yet Hammersmith Carling Apollo, venue of hypnotists, lives on. Say it LOUD. Hammersmith Palais is gone. But Buckingham Palais is still standing. Where’s the JUSTICE in that?
Savage Clinking was talking to Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2007-04-10T16:59:07+01:00
Savage Clinking is a punk-historian, and is the author of almost two books on the music and politics of the era, featuring random use of capitals and some photos of Sid Vicious falling over. So, farewell then, Hammersmith Palais, venue of PUNK Legends. Long may you ROT in peace! I was there when THE PISTOLS told THE QUEEN to shove it up her annus horriblis! I was there when JOE and THE CLASH city rockers contracted Hepatitis B from a stage-bound tsunami of SPIT! And it was at the Hammersmith Palais, watching Lydon’s PIL in ’78, amidst a tidal wave of pogoing punks, cheering, shouting, jerring, and LIVING in the MOMENT for THE NOW, that I realiseed that what PUNK really needed was to be carefully documented using accurately cited references to the major cultural, social and political movements of the 20th century in a seven or eight hundred page academic book with copious footnotes and appendix of essential recordings, retailing at £12.99. By now the bulldozers are already levelling The Palais, where my generation fought THE PUNK WARS in a blitzkrieg of warm beer and hot sweat so that you could be FREE from PROGRESSIVE ROCK and FACISM. And how did you repay us? By buying Radiohead records and electing BLAIR. I wasn’t battered senseless by HIPPIES and TEDS, admittedly, (I ran away, and that’s not easy in BONDAGE trousers), but if I had been, it wouldn’t have been so you could turn back the clock to 1975. ARE YOU ENJOYING THE LIFE YOU HAVE CHOSEN FOR YOURSELF? That is my QUESTION to YOU! We were born in the 50’s. Our FATHERs bent over our cradles and told us they fought World War II for us. “Well, Dad, I got news for you,” I said to him in ’78,...
Dave Marshy lives in N16 and works for Foxley’s, a large estate agent with branches all over London. He is 29 years old.
Every morning I go down to Starbucks for a coffee and a tiny biscuit. It used to be a second hand bookshop, but we hiked up the rent and sold it to Starbucks because N16 is ‘on the up’. I prefer coffee to books. Books are all the same - loads of lines and symbols and pieces of paper all stuck together. Once you have looked at a book it is done with and you have to throw it in the bin with the others. But there are loads of different kinds of coffee. Black, white, instant. Some people at Uni used to read books. Where are they now? Teaching. In Zone 6! Losers.
Next I drive to work at Islington Green in one of our green Foxley’s BMW Minis. Last year was the thirtieth anniversary of punk rock, which was invented here in London at The Screen On The Green in 1976. The city became a world centre of culture and fashion, adding at least 40% to current property values. To celebrate punk we had the entire fleet of Foxley’s BMW Minis decorated in a standardised Punk Rock livery. On the boot it says ‘Punk Is Not Dead’, and there can be no greater indication of punk’s ongoing importance than its adoption as a brand recognition tool by a vibrant estate agent like Foxley’s. An old punk stuck his head through the window when I was in a traffic jam on Essex Road and spat in my face. For a moment, I fell silent. As the spit dribbled down my chin, I realised that I deserved it.
Things like this seem to happen more and more often. Once I was showing a client round a live-work space in Cannonbury and she asked if there was access to the shared garden and I just looked at her and said, “What does it matter? It’s just property. We’re all prisoners. Prisoners of London! Do you think I wanted to be a Foxley’s estate agent? Isn’t there a country you’ve always wanted to visit? Let’s go! Let’s go there together now!” And then she walked out of the flat silently and drove away, leaving me there alone, staring at a crumpled up copy of London Lite.
Sometimes I forget that I am actually at work. Foxley’s has been designed to look like a cool Shoreditch type bar. There’s no boring desks or annoying chairs, just a long chrome fridge full of beer and energy drinks, and XFM piped in on a loop for ever and ever and ever and ever. Buying a home at Foxley’s is as much fun as spending the whole weekend at Jongelurs with all your mates from the office, drinking and laughing and drinking and laughing, with the music in the after-show club just too loud to hear what anyone is saying but you still manange to get off with the new girl and she hates herself for it and she hates you too and you realise London is Hell and that’s why you’re here. You’re a Foxley’s estate agent. It’s what you deserve.
After work, I go home and look at myself in the mirror and think about property prices, and my genital warts, and my impotence, and my cocaine problem and then I smash my head repeatedly into the mirror, crying and vomitting and remembering the hopes and dreams I entertained as a child. I used to play the French horn. Then I go to bed and dream of RATS TEARING MY FACE OFF! The next day I get up and go to Starbucks. And it all starts all over again.
Dave Marshy was talking to Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2007-01-23T16:48:53+00:00
Dave Marshy lives in N16 and works for Foxley’s, a large estate agent with branches all over London. He is 29 years old. Every morning I go down to Starbucks for a coffee and a tiny biscuit. It used to be a second hand bookshop, but we hiked up the rent and sold it to Starbucks because N16 is ‘on the up’. I prefer coffee to books. Books are all the same - loads of lines and symbols and pieces of paper all stuck together. Once you have looked at a book it is done with and you have to throw it in the bin with the others. But there are loads of different kinds of coffee. Black, white, instant. Some people at Uni used to read books. Where are they now? Teaching. In Zone 6! Losers. Next I drive to work at Islington Green in one of our green Foxley’s BMW Minis. Last year was the thirtieth anniversary of punk rock, which was invented here in London at The Screen On The Green in 1976. The city became a world centre of culture and fashion, adding at least 40% to current property values. To celebrate punk we had the entire fleet of Foxley’s BMW Minis decorated in a standardised Punk Rock livery. On the boot it says ‘Punk Is Not Dead’, and there can be no greater indication of punk’s ongoing importance than its adoption as a brand recognition tool by a vibrant estate agent like Foxley’s. An old punk stuck his head through the window when I was in a traffic jam on Essex Road and spat in my face. For a moment, I fell silent. As the spit dribbled down my chin, I realised that I deserved it. Things like this seem to happen more and more...
Ever since the time of the court jesters, it's been the comedian's social function to get paid for saying things that normal people can't get away with. So it's easy to understand the bewildered response of the professional iconoclast when some media vested interest or other decides - generally for reasons unconnected to the alleged offence - to make an example of them for having trespassed outside the boundaries of public taste and decency.
After all, they were only doing their job.
Both Glaswegian shaggy-dog storyteller Billy Connolly and gonzo ironist Stewart have felt the hot breath of the tabloid lynch-mob on the back of their necks in the past few years. The last time Connolly forsook his customary Californian exile for a marathon residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, he was pilloried for a gratuitously flippant remark about the death of Iraq war hostage Ken Bigley.
While Stewart Lee - who might still have been basking in the profitable artistic backwater of musical theatre had the evangelical pressure group Christian Voice not misunderstood the profoundly religious sensibility at work in his Jerry Springer: The Opera - has recently been in hot water for disputing the messianic credentials of Top Gear's Richard Hammond.
Connolly's natural insouciance has expressed itself in the decision to embark on a month-long season of sold out shows without making the slightest attempt to prepare an actual act. Happily, this eternally Rabelaisian 67 year-old does a lot of his best work staggering delightedly around the hinterland of an anecdote like one of the Caledonian street-drunks to whose sacred memory so much of his comedy is still dedicated.
So by the time he finally hits his stride after a ragged first hour - with an exquisitely eloquent description of a condemned tenement surrounded by a fence made of internal doors - this particular full-house is miraculously still with him.
Stewart Lee's scrupulously well-planned yet satisfyingly spontaneous performance at the Leicester Square Theatre is a master-class in subversive pedantry. No-one - not his audience, not his fellow comedians, not his favourite high-street coffee chain, and certainly not Lee himself - escapes this ruthlessly self-aware 41 year-old's kestrel's eye for linguistic bad faith. In the belief that “the last taboo in stand-up is a man trying to do something sincerely and well", he ends the show by singing a favourite folk song to the best of his ability. By a strange quirk of evolutionary fate, that's how Billy Connolly's career started.
Stewart Lee plays Leicester Square Theatre (0844 8472475) at 4pm today.
Billy Connolly is at the Hammersmith Apollo till Jan 31st (0844 8444748).
Stewart Lee
2010-01-10T17:09:52+00:00
Ever since the time of the court jesters, it's been the comedian's social function to get paid for saying things that normal people can't get away with. So it's easy to understand the bewildered response of the professional iconoclast when some media vested interest or other decides - generally for reasons unconnected to the alleged offence - to make an example of them for having trespassed outside the boundaries of public taste and decency. After all, they were only doing their job. Both Glaswegian shaggy-dog storyteller Billy Connolly and gonzo ironist Stewart have felt the hot breath of the tabloid lynch-mob on the back of their necks in the past few years. The last time Connolly forsook his customary Californian exile for a marathon residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, he was pilloried for a gratuitously flippant remark about the death of Iraq war hostage Ken Bigley. While Stewart Lee - who might still have been basking in the profitable artistic backwater of musical theatre had the evangelical pressure group Christian Voice not misunderstood the profoundly religious sensibility at work in his Jerry Springer: The Opera - has recently been in hot water for disputing the messianic credentials of Top Gear's Richard Hammond. Connolly's natural insouciance has expressed itself in the decision to embark on a month-long season of sold out shows without making the slightest attempt to prepare an actual act. Happily, this eternally Rabelaisian 67 year-old does a lot of his best work staggering delightedly around the hinterland of an anecdote like one of the Caledonian street-drunks to whose sacred memory so much of his comedy is still dedicated. So by the time he finally hits his stride after a ragged first hour - with an exquisitely eloquent description of a condemned tenement surrounded by a fence made of...
1. T-SHIRT FRENZY - STEWART LEE “I DON’T THINK THAT’ T-SHIRTS
WAX FACE return to the crowded official Stewart Lee t-shirt marketplace with their most self-consciously cool design yet, cynically targeted at the ageing indie-hipster audience that make up Stewart's delusional following.
"I don't think that. I think the opposite of that.", is Stewart's philosophy of comedy boiled down to one zen-sized nugget, serving as a chest-sized signal to other secret adepts, and offering protection against psychic attack.
'I Don't Think That, I Think The Opposite Of That' is the Stewart Lee T-Shirt available on Pre-Order now via https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee
The T-Shirt available in two colourways.
Silk Screened and hand printed on Anthem Organic t-shirts. Shipping starts on April 21st
2. TV SNOWFLAKE TORNADO
Snowflake and Tornado are both on the BBC iplayer now.
The new stand-up show, BASIC LEE hits the road and the Royal Festival Hall.
April 2023
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
June 2023
Wednesday 28th June 2023 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Thursday 29th June 2023 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Friday 30th June 2023 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
July 2023
Saturday 1st July 2023 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Sunday 2nd July 2023 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
Sunday 2nd July 2023 - Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London - TICKETS
4. EDINBLUR
I will be doing a truncated compacted 70 min version of BASIC LEE, stripped of nuance and heavy on laffs, in the Edinburgh Fringe at The Stand’s New Town Theatre from Aug 11-20th at 1.50pm
Other top shows in the same space include Bridget Christie’s Who Am I?, Danny Bhoy’s Now Is Not A Good Time, the always exceptional Paul Sinha’s Pauly Bengali, Robin Ince’s Melons, and Heard It, by the mighty sin-eater of manly stand-up Seann Walsh.
And remember, because of the unique way The Stand is run, none of the less visible August acts go home financially ruined for ever.
5. JAZZ ABOUT ME
I am delighted to be the subject of a new album of improvised music which took me totally by surprise.
THE VA ALBUM SERIES.
This is a series of albums, each dedicated to and sent to a living person who has been an inspiration to those various artists who contribute to each album, hence the collective name VARIOUS ADMIRERS.
This is a non-profit venture made out of the love of music and the wish to thank the people each album is dedicated to with a collection of songs and pieces.
6. I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME 2023 HAPPENINGS AND THINGS
LOVELY EGGS TV -
It’s becoming abundnatly clear, under a government that consider the BBC too left wing and Channel 4 too niche, that if we don’t make our own alternative culture we will lose it.
6 Music staples the indefatigable indie-art duo The Lovely Eggs spent lockdown making the kind of ‘80s arts coverage television series subscribers to this email will love, all under their own steam and self-financed. And they are drip-feeding them week by week to you for free.
I’m in week 2, talking about 19th c comedians in a graveyard, at the height of my lockdown unwellness.
Quentin Smires is in it, who is ace.
And so is King Rocker director Michael Cumming, doing his funny art! See the shows now before they get pulled! https://www.thelovelyeggs.co.uk
They say...
“Never afraid to experiment, unfurl the flags and set sail into unknown territory, independent DIY psych punk duo The Lovely Eggs have done it again. This time they’ve made their own TV show: EGGS TV. Teaming up with artist Casey Raymond, Eggs TV embarks on a televisual odyssey, shining a light on alternative and underground art, music and British subculture, sucking you spiralling down the plughole into The Lovely Eggs’ distinctly odd and off the wall universe. Gruff Rhys stuck up a mountain, Stewart Lee’s tour of comedian’s graves, John Grant’s fridge magnet collection, David Shrigley’s ‘Stuff’, odd smells emanating from Katie Puckrik, Ian MacKaye waxing lyrical about a life in punk rock, Tim Presley, Cate Le Bon, Gwennifer Raymond, John Cooper Clarke, The Space Lady, Andy Votel, strange films from the minds of Quentin Smirhes, Bedwyr Williams and Michael Cummings, animation, music, poetry, bagpipes for the eyes and much much more. Sick of the pap offered by mainstream television, Eggs TV is an art/experimental TV channel featuring live performances, spoken word, art and animation. "It’s the type of show that used to exist in the deepest darkest corners of alternative TV programming, and EGGS TV is here to bring it back," said Holly. "We've known Casey since we worked together on a music video over 10 years ago and became pals. The idea of making a TV series together seemed like an absolutely brilliant and ridiculous thing to do, so we just cracked on with it."
The first episode will be released on The Lovely Eggs’ Youtube Channel on April 6th at 11am GMT.
The remaining 5 episodes will be released weekly via Youtube.
KIM NOBLE - LULLABY FOR SCAVENGERS Rend your heart and mind once again with more of Noble’s art-comedy genius
MARCH 15TH - APRIL 8TH London Soho Theatre
THE DAMNED/THE NIGHTINGALES 2 punk era legends of wildly differing levels of fame in one double bill.
MARCH 31ST Cardiff Great Hall, APRIL 1st Southend Cliffs, 4th Nottingham Rock City, 5th Liverpool Academy, 7th Newcastle NX, 8th Glasgow Academy, 10th Leeds Academy, 11th M’cr Albert Hall, 13th B’ham Town Hall, 15th Norwich Nick Rayns, 17th Brighton Dome, 18th S’hampton Guildhall, 20th/21st London Alexandra Palace,
ALASDAIR ROBERTS Songwriter re-wiring Scottish folk tradition
MARCH 28th London Sutton House, APRIL 1st Cambridge Blue Moon, 6th W’chester Hyde Tavern, 7th Oxford Florence Park Community Centre, JUNE 23RD London West Hampstead Arts, 24th London Barbican
ALASDAIR BECKETT-KING - The Interdimensional Alasdair Beckett-King.
I saw this sharp absurdist show in Edinburgh and it is brilliant.
APRIL 8th Bath Rondo,
13th Oxford Glee,
14th Birmingham Glee,
20th Aldershot West End,
21st New Milton Forest Arts,
22nd Brighton Komedia,
27th Norwich Arts Centre,
28th Bristol Comedy Box @ Hen & Chicken,
29th Tiverton Community Arts Cent
MAY 5th Maidstone Hazlitt,
6th Cambridge Junction,
11th Fareham Ashcroft,
12th Winchester Arc,
13th Swindon Arts,
16th Newcastle Stand,
17th Edinburgh Stand,
18th Glasgow Stand,
19th Belfast Limelight,
20th Derry/Londonderry Nerve,
27th M’cr Home,
28th Leeds Wardrobe
JUNE 27th London Leicester Sq Theatre
YO LA TENGO Gods of American indie APRIL 10TH Dublin 3Olympia, 12th M’cr New Century, 13th Bristol SWX, 14th London Palladium,
TONY! Tony Blair rock opera by Harry Hill and Steve Brown.
APRIL 15TH - MAY 21ST London Leicester Sq Theatre
BEN MOOR Various things, 18th April - 23rd May. The superbly gifted performance art comedian has two shows on the go. With Jo Neary he offers his amazing Russian Doll of a show BookTalkBookTalkBook, a sublime parody of literary events, at Machynlleth Comedy Festival on Sunday 30th April, and at The Hen and Chickens, Islington, London, on Tuesday 23rd May. I cannot recomment it enough. His current solo show Who Here's Lost? is at The Hen and Chickens on 18th and 19th April.
SONIC BOOM A middle class man ruins his mind so you don’t have to.
APR 19th M’cr Band On The Wall, 20th Glasgow Room 2, 22nd Leeds Brudenell, 27th London Studio 9294
IMPRESSIONS OF JOHN COLTRANE w Alan Skidmore, Dominic Lash
APRIL 21ST London Café Oto
THE OLDEST COMEDY CLUB IN BRITAIN is a documentary about Crouch End’s DOWNSTAIRS AT THE KING’S HEAD and Londoners can see screeiningds of it at the Art House cinema there from April 29th. I am in it as usual. TICKETS HERE
RICHARD DAWSON Genius art-folk-noise songwriter
APRIL 25th M’cr New Century, 26th Glasgow St Luke’s, 27th L’pool Tung, 28th Leeds City Varieties, MAY 3rd Cardiff Gate, 5th London Barbican
BLUE AEROPLANES Bristol beat poets APRIL 28TH London Electric Ballroom
THE FALLEN WOMEN APRIL 28th - The Moon, Cardiff; 29TH - The Ill Repute, Bristol.
HAWKWIND This current Hawkwind iteration channels their classic ‘70s space rock sound unashamedly, with keyboardist Thighpaulsandra of Coil, Cope and Spiritualised clearly living out a childhood dream. APRIL 28th Manchester Academy I, 29th April – Rock City Nottingham, 30th – Northern Kin Festival Durham, JUNE 16th – Hall for Cornwall, AUGUST 28th - Castell Roc, Chepstow Castle
SWELL MAPS C21 Surviving Swell Maps augmented w celebrity guests APRIL 29TH London Café Oto
ROSIE HOLT Satire’s Rosie Holt will be satirising the shit out of shit at the following places in 2023;
APRIL 29th Ipswich Corn Exchange,
30th Leeds City Varieties,
MAY 4th & 5th Bristol Hen & Chicken,
May 7th Salford Lowry,
JULY 1st Oxford Festival Marquee
ROBERT LLOYD (Nightingales), JANET BEVERIDGE BEAN (Eleventh Dream Day/Freakwater), LINDY MORRISON (Go-Betweens), MARK BEDFORD (Madness) & PETE BYRCHMORE (Membranes)
LONDON BUSH HALL, MAY 2ND
This is the event of the year in my mind - and I can’t go.
Nightingales frontman and post-punk steamroller Robert Lloyd (the star of the doc King Rocker that Michael Cumming and I made) has a long term sideline in brilliant blue collar country songs, like a Cannock Lee Hazelwood offering black country country and western.
Under lockdown he hatched a plan to document this other facet of his talent with Janet Beveridge Bean, of the legendary Chicago bands Eleventh Dream Day and Freakwater, on vocals.
And for one night only - May 2nd - they are performing this amazing soon-to-be-released set of tearjerkers at London’s Bush Hall, accompanied by a veritable Blind Faith made up of members of many of the bands I love the most in the world.
The Go-Betweens’ rightful drummer Lindy Morrison sits behind the traps with her trademark fills, Pete Byrchmore of The Membranes is on guitar, and the bass is Mark Bedford from Madness - and if you remember his playing on Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding you’ll know he’s adept at the sensitivity required here as he is at holding down a rocksteady rhythm.
DO NOT MISS THIS. IT CAN NEVER BE REPEATED.
Here’s a flyer. Tell your friends. 0208 222 6955. Or the Dice.fm ticket ap.
OTOBOKE BEAVER Japanese noise-girls
MAY 2nd London Electric Ballroom,
4th M’cr Club Academy,
5th Glasgow St Luke’s,
7th Belfast Empire,
8th Dublin Button Factory,
10th Bristol Fleece
LAUREN CONNORS & ALAN LICHT - Lucid guitar duo MAY 5TH/6TH London Café Oto
JOSIE LONG
The absolutely brilliant stand-up is on tour
MAY 12th Berwick-Upon-Tweed Maltings,
14th Salford Lowry,
18th Trebah Ampitheatre,
19th Ivybridge Watermark,
20th Clevedon Curzon,
27th Warwick Arts,
30th Lawrence Batley Huddersfield,
JUNE 3rd Giffnock Eastwood Park,
21st Wigan Old Courts,
22nd Halifax Square Chapel,
23rd Oxford Old Fire Station,
27th Druimfin Mull Theatre,
30th Cambridge Junction,
JULY 1st Folkestone Quarterhouse,
7th Stirling Tolbooth,
9th Exeter Phoenix TICKETS HERE
THE FALLEN LEAVES
Gentleman mod-punks
MAY 13th Camden Dublin Castle,
SEP 9th Camden Dublin Castle.
GAVIN BRYARS never failed us yet MAY 15TH/16th London Café Oto
HOUSE OF ALL M’cr post-punk supergroup, a kind of 6 Music evening show Asia, hit the road.
HANLEY HANLEY GREENWAY BRAMAGH!
LONG RYDERS Alt country pioneers return, again
MAY 19th Leamington Assembly,
20th London 229,
21st Leeds Brudenell,
22nd Glasgow Oran Moor,
23rd L’pool Cavern,
25th Brighton Patterns
LOOP Heavy psyche survivors
MAY 20th Dublin Wheelans, 21st M’cr Deaf Institute, 22nd Glasgow Room 2, 23rd Leeds Brudenell, 25th London Garage, 27th Norwich UEA
CHUCK PROPHET Chisel-cheeked Alt Country guitar-slinger
MAY 31st London Garage
JUNE 2nd Nottingham Metronome,
4th Oxford Bullingdon,
6th Leeds Brudenell,
7th Glasgow St Luke’s,
10th N’castle Cluny,
12th B’ham Hare & Hounds,
13th Bristol Fleece,
14th Southampton 1865
LAURA CANNELL Hypnotic fenland dronemadchen JUNE 17th London King’s Place
THE CHAMELEONS Most convincing line-up for years of the always emotionally edifying Big Music should-have-beens.
JUNE 20th Leeds Old Woollen,
21st L’pool Hangar 34,
22nd N’castle Riverside,
23rd Edinburgh Liquid Room,
24th Glasgow Garage,
26th Aberdeen Lemon Tree,
28th Norwich Epic,
29th Cambridge Junction,
30th Leamington Assembly,
JULY 1ST London Islington Assembly,
3rd Bristol Fleece,
4th Brighton Chalk,
7th Castleton Devil’s Arse,
8th Holmfirth Picturedrome
MUSIC FROM SUMMERISLE Various artists play the Wicker Man s/track, including Magnet (!), and Alasdair Roberts JUNE 24th London Barbican
BMX BANDITS Also-beens of classic Scottish indie JUNE 30TH Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms
ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN Another tilt at the infinite horizon from the cosmic scallies SEPT 12TH Nottingham Royal Concert Halls, 14th Edinburgh Usher Halls, 16th L’pool Bank Arena, 18th London Royal Albert Hall
BRITISH CRYPTIDS ON YOUTUBE In 1974 the producer of Hereford Wakes, David Emlyn Edwards, made a series of films about unknown animals in the United Kingdom.
The films were presumably destined to be sold to a UK broadcaster - either BBC or ITV - but they seem to only have been shown at schools and ended up languishing in public libraries.
The music for the series was written and produced by Hereford Wakes' Thorsten Schmidt, continuing his professional collaboration with David Emlyn Edwards.
The latest restoration to be released is 'The Woodwose of Cannock Chase'. If you enjoyed Hereford Wakes, we're sure you'll enjoy this too! https://youtu.be/loZwFNT8H_s
6. IN OUR LAMENTATIONS 2023
Ruggero Deodato (Junk genius, 1939)
Kelly Monteith (Lucky pants stand-up, 1942)
Alan Rankine (Associate musician, 1958)
Darryl Hunt (Pogue bass, 1950)
Jeff Beck (He happened ten years time ago, 1944)
Jane Suck (punk chronicler, 195?)
Yukihiro Takahashi (Sadistic Mika Man, 1952)
Ronald Blythe (Akenfieldsman, 1922)
Piers Haggard (hack genius of Claw and Quatermass, 1932)
Van Connor (sturdy psychedelic tree, 1967)
David Sutherland (Bash Street basher, 1933)
David Crosby (Byrdmaniac, 1941)
Tom Verlaine (Sui generis genius Televisionary, 1949)
Burt Bacarach (Musical cheesnius, 1928)
Eugene Cheese (chucklin’ cheesenius moocher, 1944)
Betty Boothroyd (croaky speaker, 1939)
Wayne Shorter (Shorter no longer, 1933)
David Lindley (Kaleidoscopic guitarist, 1944)
Keith Johnstone (Improvisational Canadian, 1933)
Rolly Crump (West Coast Pop Artist, 1930)
Paul O’Grady (Proudly woke drag act, 1955)
Peter Usborne (Generation-spooking publisher, 1937)
Stewart Lee
2023-04-03T20:17:21+01:00
1. T-SHIRT FRENZY - STEWART LEE “I DON’T THINK THAT’ T-SHIRTS WAX FACE return to the crowded official Stewart Lee t-shirt marketplace with their most self-consciously cool design yet, cynically targeted at the ageing indie-hipster audience that make up Stewart's delusional following. "I don't think that. I think the opposite of that.", is Stewart's philosophy of comedy boiled down to one zen-sized nugget, serving as a chest-sized signal to other secret adepts, and offering protection against psychic attack. 'I Don't Think That, I Think The Opposite Of That' is the Stewart Lee T-Shirt available on Pre-Order now via https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee The T-Shirt available in two colourways. Silk Screened and hand printed on Anthem Organic t-shirts. Shipping starts on April 21st 2. TV SNOWFLAKE TORNADO Snowflake and Tornado are both on the BBC iplayer now. Snowflake is here. & Tornado is here. 2. BASIC LEE The new stand-up show, BASIC LEE hits the road and the Royal Festival Hall. April 2023 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...
The sleeve of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's debut reveals the trio in 1972 flares and trainers.
A bulbous bird head apes countless album covers by the Seventies Welsh blues rock wranglers Budgie. But the period product within is dispatched with a New York 1976 punk energy and flanged with iridescent late Sixties psychedelic effects.
Don't Hear It... Fear It! is further evidence of the internet-expediated end of linear cultural progression, but its sick thrills more than justify the threat it poses to the space-time continuum.
Stewart Lee
2012-10-14T00:42:21+01:00
The sleeve of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's debut reveals the trio in 1972 flares and trainers. A bulbous bird head apes countless album covers by the Seventies Welsh blues rock wranglers Budgie. But the period product within is dispatched with a New York 1976 punk energy and flanged with iridescent late Sixties psychedelic effects. Don't Hear It... Fear It! is further evidence of the internet-expediated end of linear cultural progression, but its sick thrills more than justify the threat it poses to the space-time continuum.
We are no longer a nation of shopkeers, we’re a nation of property developers. If we’re not stripping back fireplaces and slapping on the terracotta tiling, we’re hunted down by images of others adding value to their lives by doing the same. Thanks to Sarah Beeny and co, the boundary between home-making and money-making has never been finer.
Our living rooms? Lovelier. Our hearts? Uglier.
Hence this fresh, funny and affecting new show from Johnny Vegas and Stewart Lee: a performance piece that has Vegas’s character Jeffrey Parkin showing potential purchasers around his desirable Manchester semi. And, along the way, giving us a glimpse of the way he has gutted and whitewashed his own life.
It’s a satire on property culture in the shape of a house tour: one of those blindingly obvious ideas that is only blindingly obvious once someone else has been bright enough to think of it for you. We meet at a bus-stop rendezvous, to be handed the hyperbolic details of the £235,000 two-bed house at the end of our 15-minute journey.
Vegas can be an intimidating performer, even in a large venue - something his television work can’t always convey. But as Jeffrey he is not volubly drunk but wilfully bourgeois. “You don’t own a home,” he says as 20 of us congregate in his hall, “you belong to a home. Although,” Jeffrey hastens to reassure us, “I do own this home.”
We don’t laugh at Jeffrey - he’s too savvy, too good-blokish, too enviable with his pan-rack laden with Le Creusets and his coffee table hewn from “root wood”. There is no trace in this house of the ex whose departure has prompted him to move to Montenegro. But then there’s no trace of Jeffrey either among these polished floorboards and chrome fridges, or the pile of world cinema DVDs that sits oddly with his conversational references to "Top Gun" and "Highlander". By the time the tour ends, with a sucker punch in the second bedroom, Jeffrey’s facade has peeled away.
"Interiors" is a bit scrappy in places.
Part improvised, part scripted, it lets Jeffrey’s subtext drift out slowly through the hour.
Yet the house, decorated for the show by designer Robert Thirtle, is really rather fanciable.
So we become complicit in this tyranny of tastefulness, giving real purchase to Vegas and Lee’s conclusion that a house is not a home without people, people with more on their minds than fitting shelves and fitting in.
Vegas is superb. Friendly but distracted in his smart-casual jacket and loafers, he sells the show’s metaphor with mastery. He is authoritative on DIY - “that’s less a wallpaper, more a dirty protest” he spits at a brown design pasted up by his ex - yet unable to repossess his own life. He is, in short, deceptively specious.
Stuff, this show reminds us, is just stuff — tasteful or not.
The stuff of life, meanwhile, can’t come included in the asking price.
Stewart Lee
2007-07-06T00:49:14+01:00
We are no longer a nation of shopkeers, we’re a nation of property developers. If we’re not stripping back fireplaces and slapping on the terracotta tiling, we’re hunted down by images of others adding value to their lives by doing the same. Thanks to Sarah Beeny and co, the boundary between home-making and money-making has never been finer. Our living rooms? Lovelier. Our hearts? Uglier. Hence this fresh, funny and affecting new show from Johnny Vegas and Stewart Lee: a performance piece that has Vegas’s character Jeffrey Parkin showing potential purchasers around his desirable Manchester semi. And, along the way, giving us a glimpse of the way he has gutted and whitewashed his own life. It’s a satire on property culture in the shape of a house tour: one of those blindingly obvious ideas that is only blindingly obvious once someone else has been bright enough to think of it for you. We meet at a bus-stop rendezvous, to be handed the hyperbolic details of the £235,000 two-bed house at the end of our 15-minute journey. Vegas can be an intimidating performer, even in a large venue - something his television work can’t always convey. But as Jeffrey he is not volubly drunk but wilfully bourgeois. “You don’t own a home,” he says as 20 of us congregate in his hall, “you belong to a home. Although,” Jeffrey hastens to reassure us, “I do own this home.” We don’t laugh at Jeffrey - he’s too savvy, too good-blokish, too enviable with his pan-rack laden with Le Creusets and his coffee table hewn from “root wood”. There is no trace in this house of the ex whose departure has prompted him to move to Montenegro. But then there’s no trace of Jeffrey either among these polished floorboards and chrome fridges, or...
Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media’s last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos’s supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social media sluices, such as Ketamine Ken’s Twitter, currently X, essentially an ape with a megaphone standing in a crowded marketplace shouting unsubstantiated rumours at babies, and showing pornographic photographs to children.
But was it ever thus? Did it just take the unalloyed unpleasantness of Elon Musk to make us see ourselves as we always were, toilet paper people fluttering on the whims of wealthy men’s media outlets, 8 billion dogshit golems, Frankingsteins made of farts?
A radio phone-in about social media on Monday made me understand, with sudden clarity, that horrible hysterical stories drive engagement more than thoughtful true ones. Sorry it took me so long. And so digital media surges right towards the money and JD Vance calls it freedom of speech, as if a barely sentient tapeworm reaching towards a clump of rotten offal was acting with some kind of moral imperative.
A black-cab driver tells a passenger imprisoned in their back seat that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer’s father; your sister-in-law casually announces that most benefits are claimed fraudulently; and JD Vance informs Europe that it’s illegal to pray in your own home in Scotland. The world thinks what rich men want it to and the truth is a touring lineup of Lynyrd Skynyrd with no original members that you’re still listening to in the hope its version of Free Bird will kick ass.
So what is the point of writing supposedly funny columns about current affairs for a broadsheet newspaper like the Observer? An adjudicated sex abuser is in the American White House, Boris Johnson is in a moated manor house, and I’m supposed to poke fun at them from a three-bedroom terrace house. Liberal media has failed and it doesn’t have the funds to fight back.
I’ve been writing these columns for 14 years now, and fascism and sea levels are still on the rise despite me doing some really good jokes about both of them. I am comedy’s Cnut. Why feed myself through the news mincer when I’m still going to be looking at a world full of damp Hitlers when I die on the end of a Russian bayonet?
Sometimes these screeds take me a few hours, slipping out like baby giraffes, wobbly and slimy but standing. And sometimes they take me dead-eyed haemorrhoidal days on end to finish, baking in the back passage of my brain like something malevolent that gestates in Donald Trump’s colon after a week of KFC family bucket meals.
Over the years I have come to love negotiating acceptable levels of profanity with the patient section editors, and trying to bury odd ideas in the prose to see what the brilliant artist David Foldvari will do with them. On balance, I’ve spent 7,000 hours writing 400,000 words of remunerated sarcasm. It’s the longest piece of continuous employment I’ve ever had and is my last line of defence when people say, correctly, that I have never done a decent day’s work in my life.
I don’t think I did this job especially well for the first 150,000 words. Was there any real value in anything I wrote in those pre-Brexit days of comparative political equilibrium? How many trees died just because I found politicians like David “Dave” Cameron and George “Pencils” Osborne merely inchoately reprehensible, instead of utterly contemptible, in those simpler sillier times? And then, as Dave said, “doo, doo, doo, doo … Right.” And it was never the same again.
Brexit was the making of these spews. It sharpened them because it exposed an interconnected web of corruption worming through Westminster, and made me appreciate the privilege of having a platform to piss on people from. But how many forests fell fruitlessly, five years ago, when I finally revealed the full secret cabbalistic name of 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson? I had my own viral moment in miniature. But was it worth it?
And yet, as I wandered the streets in lockdown, ordinary Observer readers and their dogs regularly stood at reasonable distances and told me these columns made them feel less alone, and for a moment I understood how Christ felt when all those lepers told him he was a really great bloke. I doubt anything like that ever happens to Giles Coren. Or to Jesus, to be honest, who was probably sick to the back teeth of all those selfish lepers.
But here’s the rub. I appreciate that, as someone who is too tight to advertise his tours, and who has not been invited on to The Graham Norton Show, the market penetration achieved by online circulation of a popular Observer column probably sells me more than a few standup comedy seats. Maybe I need this. That said, twice as many people come to see me live as read the Observer, though this can be explained by lots of angry middle-aged men bringing their bored wives with them.
But since Elon Musk showed social media how to downgrade the visibility of liberal comment and monetise the outraged engagement caused by right-skewed clickbait, I have watched my online views wither. Social media is engineered to suppress the material you are reading now. If you have been directed to this column online somehow, then somewhere there’s a rightwing billionaire that needs to rejig his algorithms.
Stewart Lee
2025-03-16T14:50:12+00:00
Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media’s last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos’s supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social media sluices, such as Ketamine Ken’s Twitter, currently X, essentially an ape with a megaphone standing in a crowded marketplace shouting unsubstantiated rumours at babies, and showing pornographic photographs to children. But was it ever thus? Did it just take the unalloyed unpleasantness of Elon Musk to make us see ourselves as we always were, toilet paper people fluttering on the whims of wealthy men’s media outlets, 8 billion dogshit golems, Frankingsteins made of farts? A radio phone-in about social media on Monday made me understand, with sudden clarity, that horrible hysterical stories drive engagement more than thoughtful true ones. Sorry it took me so long. And so digital media surges right towards the money and JD Vance calls it freedom of speech, as if a barely sentient tapeworm reaching towards a clump of rotten offal was acting with some kind of moral imperative. A black-cab driver tells a passenger imprisoned in their back seat that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer’s father; your sister-in-law casually announces that most benefits are claimed fraudulently; and JD Vance informs Europe that it’s illegal to pray in your own home in Scotland. The world thinks what rich men want it to and the truth is a touring lineup of Lynyrd Skynyrd with no original members that you’re still listening to in the hope its version of Free Bird will kick ass. So what is the point of writing supposedly funny columns about current affairs for a broadsheet newspaper...
Stewart Lee’s latest show ‘Tornado/Snowflake’ revolves around two things that have been written about him. Firstly, the Netflix blurb for his show Stewart Lee: Content Provider which inexcusably describes the outrageous plot for the horror B-movie Sharknado: “Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.”
Having spent the best part of 20 years working in TV listings and previews, I can appreciate how easily these mistakes can occur. Although the notion that, according to Stew, it stayed online for two years, I found a bit far-fetched.
But Lee has never been one to let the truth get in the way of good anecdote, and that particular grumble leads him nicely into the first half of the show, ‘Tornado’, in which he questions his position on the comedy circuit.
“Greyer, fatter and more deaf” since his last tour two years ago, Stew juxtaposes his acclaimed comic talents with his lack of global appeal and commercial pull. His main targets are the big-budget comedians on Netflix, in particular Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Dave Chappelle.
And that brings me onto the second thing that has been written about Lee that helps him form the show, The Times newspaper labelling him “the world’s best living stand-up” in 2018.
Chappelle, despite raking in millions, is only No 9 in Rolling Stone‘s list, while Gervais is apparently making a living out of “saying the unsayable”, which, as Lee points out is actually impossible. This leads to a five-minute long (although it felt longer), surreal and cringeworthy routine in the second half.
Post-interval, I found Lee on more familiar ground, having binge-watched his award-winning Comedy Vehicle series on the BBC iPlayer. Much like a member of the Magic Circle who shares the secrets of his/her illusions (“a peek behind the wizard’s cloak”), Lee regularly refers to the work of his comedy peers, before dissecting it and shooting them down spectacularly.
I particularly enjoyed his musings on Phoebe Waller-Bridge and how her globally acclaimed series Fleabag is not so groundbreaking after all.
‘Snowflake’ also sees Lee (always ironically) criticising the audience for not being intelligent enough to understand his jokes. But that doesn’t stop him from getting thoughtful with them, and the section in which he describes how Alan Bennett has compared him to a string of obscure philosophers is particularly amusing and thought-provoking.
On the whole, I preferred the second half of the show, as Stew moved on from looking at his worth on the comedy circuit to how he fits into a society which is riding roughshod over the liberal values he has so long championed.
Although the evening was billed as two separate shows, each half is fairly similar in theme, perhaps because Lee believes the comedy industry somehow reflects what is going on in politics – in particular in a country run by Boris Johnson.
And that brings me back to the two statements that were written about Stew, and which form the basis of ‘Tornado/Snowflake’.
Yes, the incorrect billing for his show is laughable and he does deserve more commercial kudos than he tends to receive (although I doubt that is his main goal in life). And secondly, The Times’ accolade “world’s greatest living stand-up”. Stew refers to it umpteen times during his show, albeit ironically.
But I actually find it hard to disagree with.
Stewart Lee
2020-02-10T14:56:56+00:00
Stewart Lee’s latest show ‘Tornado/Snowflake’ revolves around two things that have been written about him. Firstly, the Netflix blurb for his show Stewart Lee: Content Provider which inexcusably describes the outrageous plot for the horror B-movie Sharknado: “Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.” Having spent the best part of 20 years working in TV listings and previews, I can appreciate how easily these mistakes can occur. Although the notion that, according to Stew, it stayed online for two years, I found a bit far-fetched. But Lee has never been one to let the truth get in the way of good anecdote, and that particular grumble leads him nicely into the first half of the show, ‘Tornado’, in which he questions his position on the comedy circuit. “Greyer, fatter and more deaf” since his last tour two years ago, Stew juxtaposes his acclaimed comic talents with his lack of global appeal and commercial pull. His main targets are the big-budget comedians on Netflix, in particular Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Dave Chappelle. And that brings me onto the second thing that has been written about Lee that helps him form the show, The Times newspaper labelling him “the world’s best living stand-up” in 2018. Chappelle, despite raking in millions, is only No 9 in Rolling Stone‘s list, while Gervais is apparently making a living out of “saying the unsayable”, which, as Lee points out is actually impossible. This leads to a five-minute long (although it felt longer), surreal and cringeworthy routine in the second half. Post-interval, I found Lee on more familiar ground, having binge-watched his award-winning Comedy Vehicle series on the BBC iPlayer. Much like a member of the Magic Circle who shares the secrets of his/her...
Periodically, I am changed into a monstrous verminous bug. My wife recognises the signs, locks me in the cellar and slides saucers of milk and slivers of lard under the door to sustain me. We do not know why this transformation occurs. We suspect it may relate to some form of deep-seated shame or self-loathing, perhaps rooted in a childhood experience, or brought on by watching too many ITV celebrity reality shows, which we know are wrong, and yet are drawn to despite knowing better. But the vile metamorphoses are soon over. I become an insect for little more than a month at most each time, so we continue with our lives as normal, my poor wife making increasingly feeble excuses as to why she must attend all the cheese evenings, ceilidhs and tombolas alone.
My second life as a bug is not without its consolations. Crawling around our cellar, I was easily able to identify the source of a persistent damp patch in the scullery above, a task that a visiting specialist would have stung us heavily for. And in many ways I find the society of insects preferable to that of humans. Currently they hide in cracks in cavity walls, and I hide with them, looking over your shoulders as you watch I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. The insect community's response to the degrading ITV1 hit is extremely illuminating.
Earlier this week I lay in a brickwork fissure on my armour-hard back with Franzi, an ant, and Josef, a cockroach, and discussed the new series of Ant and Dec's jungle-based exploitation freak show. Franzi, the ant, is infuriated by it. She is not against humans per se, and indeed considers me a friend. But she has been angered in the past by what she calls our "boiling water thing", admits that our use of ants as an off-the-peg simile for something that is easy to crush irks her, and is saddened by the gradual global failure of communism, which she saw as the only chance humanity had of organising itself into a sustainable social structure. But even Franzi despairs of I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!.
Josef the cockroach explained the insect world's hostility to the show. "It's not so long ago you seemed to seek to understand us. You were watching The World About Us and Life On Earth, sympathetic portrayals of the natural world, produced by your brilliant BBC, surely the pinnacle of human achievement. David Attenborough avoided clumsy anthropomorphism or the tendency to attribute morality or consciousness to creatures such as Franzi and I, who are essentially automatons driven by need and instinct. But even all those sentimental computer-animated films where a succession of Jewish-American standup comedians make various innocent insect species into unwilling vehicles for their own urban sexual neuroses seem like War and Peace compared with I'm a Celebrity…. It represents humanity at its worst."
Franzi elaborates. "Take this Eric Bristow of yours that you have now, for example. Once he threw his mighty stings with terrible accuracy, like a deadly Japanese wasp. Now what is he? In our nests, when a male ant has outlived his sexual usefulness, he is flung out into the cold to die. It is the kindest thing. Look at your Bristow, hanging around the fringes of human society, sniping at the young females and the homosexual, angered by his own impotence. We would let him grow flimsy wings and fly away to a dignified death, not make an entertainment of his decay." But Franzi the ant is not angry. Instead she seems to pity us.
"Your David Haye that you also have now is no better," continues Josef, the cockroach. "He is supposed to be a fighter. But when they locked him in the box of our insects he pretended to be so bored he asked to be let out, as if it were somehow beneath him to remain, leaving your old women and your young girls shaking, alone and afraid. He is a liar and a coward. Would this David Haye be brave enough to climb up and nibble the crust of a scab on the arm of a sleeping British tourist, many thousands of times his size? No. In the cockroach kingdom this David Haye would be shunned and left to die. We would have no use for him and his lies."
"Bees would recognise the plight of your Nadine that you have now," explains Franzi, "the overwintered queen, her fertility diminished, due for replacement. But bees give their old expendable sovereigns the option of living out their last days in peace. Her pitiless subjects merely expelled her. You are beneath contempt. And the core of the problem is this. In your I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! you use us insects as a source of entertainment, a fear resource, to be showered in clusters on to the burned faces of your famous citizens as if all we were good for were to amuse you by our supposed repulsiveness…"
And then Josef interrupts, "but it is you who are repulsive. You view the natural world as a mere sideshow to entertain your indolent masses. Your starving birds fly away. Your poisoned trees die. Your filthy rivers choke. Your pathetic harvests fail. Your miserable cities flood. All because of your selfishness and laziness. You know what will outlast the entire collapse of your species?" he asks rhetorically. "Cockroaches!"
"And Paxo stuffing," I offer, "the sell-by dates on the Paxo stuffing in the cupboard upstairs are two or three hundred years away. I only noticed recently. It's amazing." Franzi and Josef ignore my attempt to lighten the mood.
"Rosemary the Large is the only human in the show who would earn the respect of insects," suggests the ant, after an awkward pause. "She thinks of the collective good of the group. She is without ego. That is why, when she lay down and slept amid the crawling creatures, they left her unscathed. They recognised her nobility. She is a queen among humans. The rest of you… you're like boys poking an ants' nest with a stick. You make me sick."
"One other thing," pipes up the cockroach, "your Ashley Roberts that you have now looks much better with her hair down. Like a different person. Amazing."
Upstairs I can hear my wife calling. Weeks have passed. She wonders if I am in a fit state to return. But up there in the light, everyone is talking about I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. I tighten my thorax and refuse to shed my skin. It is better down here in the dark.
Stewart Lee's Carpet Remnant World DVD is out now. David Mitchell is away
Stewart Lee
2012-11-25T14:17:16+00:00
Periodically, I am changed into a monstrous verminous bug. My wife recognises the signs, locks me in the cellar and slides saucers of milk and slivers of lard under the door to sustain me. We do not know why this transformation occurs. We suspect it may relate to some form of deep-seated shame or self-loathing, perhaps rooted in a childhood experience, or brought on by watching too many ITV celebrity reality shows, which we know are wrong, and yet are drawn to despite knowing better. But the vile metamorphoses are soon over. I become an insect for little more than a month at most each time, so we continue with our lives as normal, my poor wife making increasingly feeble excuses as to why she must attend all the cheese evenings, ceilidhs and tombolas alone. My second life as a bug is not without its consolations. Crawling around our cellar, I was easily able to identify the source of a persistent damp patch in the scullery above, a task that a visiting specialist would have stung us heavily for. And in many ways I find the society of insects preferable to that of humans. Currently they hide in cracks in cavity walls, and I hide with them, looking over your shoulders as you watch I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. The insect community's response to the degrading ITV1 hit is extremely illuminating. Earlier this week I lay in a brickwork fissure on my armour-hard back with Franzi, an ant, and Josef, a cockroach, and discussed the new series of Ant and Dec's jungle-based exploitation freak show. Franzi, the ant, is infuriated by it. She is not against humans per se, and indeed considers me a friend. But she has been angered in the past by what she calls...
Comedian, writer and director Stewart Lee is well known for his controversial show Jerry Springer - the Opera, as well as being and established comedy writer, stand-up and one half of the comedy partnership Lee and Herring.
He speaks to The Stage between performances at the Bush Theatre, to talk about his recent move towards theatre.
You’ve returned to the topic of Christianity for your new show What Would Judas Do? Were you secretly missing all the attention from the religious fundamentalists?
Well, they’re stories everyone knows so they’re a good way of looking at other ideas. I don’t miss the attention from fundamentalist groups and it’s quite put me off any kind of high-profile exposure. One of the nice things about the Bush Theatre is it’s not the kind of place that psychopaths find out about, although some of the responses to questions I ask in the show have, in the last few days, suggested there might be people coming to try and make some kind of point, who are then a bit confused that it isn’t what their prejudices would lead them to expect.
Has this show received any negative interest from religious groups or protesters?
No. The religious right in the UK is only interested in things that will get its hate agenda into the mainstream and hassling someone in an 80-seater room achieves little.
You’ve used Christian beliefs as material since your early days but it has matured from simple jokes through to an expression of ideas which happen to use comedy as a tool to help make a point. Is this your comedic abilities and tastes evolving or more the case that, in order to express yourself in the current social climate, the nature of expression has to change in order to be viewed as acceptable, or to be viewed at all?
It’s just getting older, and doing more complex things, I think. That said, in the current climate, you do need to be able to justify what you are doing more as it is likely to be subjected to aggressive scrutiny in a way things weren’t when I was growing up.
By staging this as a theatre piece, rather than stand-up or presenting it as outright comedy satire, is this a slightly less provocative way of reworking themes you’ve touched on in your previous work, such as the Sunday Heroes portion of This Morning With Richard Not Judy, to inspire a discussion? Were you deliberately setting out to diffuse any fundamentalist reactions to the work after your previous experiences in regards to Jerry Springer - the Opera?
I don’t understand what provokes people. Negative responses to Jerry Springer - the Opera were mainly based on things that weren’t even in it, or on wilfully or accidentally ignorant misreadings of things. I wasn’t setting out to diffuse fundamentalists with What Would Judas Do?, nor were we trying to provoke them with Jerry Springer - the Opera. I’ve got better things to think about. Who cares?
Are those back references simply a hidden extra for the long-term fans to enjoy?
They’re there because they fit the story and got me around a couple of holes.
Your show suggests that the motives behind Judas’ actions weren’t quite as clear cut as many of us may have been previously taught. Do you see your show almost a parable in itself - serving to both tell the audience a story and to educate or make a statement?
I’m not really interested in the truth or not-truth of the bible story. I just wanted to use it as a way to look at obsession, fan worship, loyalty and how reputations are made.
Are you slowly edging towards drama and straight theatre or will the temptation to make people laugh always define your work for the foreseeable future?
I’d like to do both and this has been a kind of experiment in working out if people will accept that when the lines start to blur.
Do you worry there is almost a danger that any serious comment you are making or might wish to make will be lost among the humour, or the expectations people have for you to be ‘funny’?
Yes. I am surprised at some of the bits that get laughs from the What Would Judas Do? audience when, to me, they are tragic.
Do you think comedy is still seen as the one thing that guarantees an audience to anything you wish to raise, where a seminar or debate may fail?
I don’t know. Live stand-up is the one thing that guarantees me an income.
Do you think alternative comedy itself is shifting away from stand-up and more towards comedic theatre with more comedians choosing to take themed shows on tour?
Well, the better people are but there are more Jongleurs/Comedy Store franchises than ever and more and more comics that want to play them, so there is no danger of ‘chicken in a basket’ stand-up being wiped out by themed shows just yet. Most people’s stand-up experiences will still be being drunk at a stag night at Jongleurs. We are still a minority.
How much of comedy do you find is performance in relation to the actual material?
Most of it. I think critics focus on material because it’s easier to understand and write about that the vague nuances of timing, rhythm, tone and trust, which are probably more important elements of stand-up.
You’ve mentioned before that the German Stand-Up Show changed your approach to comedy, did it hone your physical comedy or merely the structure of your comedy?
It meant I wanted to get away from puns and wordplay and structures that are funny - ie; the kind of ‘pull back and reveal, Joe Pasquale is on a bus all along’ type gag and do more stuff about inherently funny ideas.
Are there any plans to bring the German stand-Up Show to the UK?
Richard Thomas (the composer) wants to do it here in English, and so do I but we need funding and can’t work for free anymore.
You’ve also shown your abilities as a director, both in TV with Simon Munnery’s Attention Scum and also live work such as Jerry Springer - the Opera and Talk Radio. How did you start directing, did you have any training or experience in directing?
It was a kind of accident. I thought I was script-editing the Mighty Boosh’s 1999 show and it kind of became directing it. I was in the office when the director of Attention Scum dropped out at the last minute and I knew the material. I thought I was co-writing Jerry Springer - the Opera but there wasn’t any money for a director at BAC and so I kind of did it. I sought out Talk Radio to try and do a square normal theatre directing job, so that when I’m next offered one I can take it if I need to earn money. I had no proper directing experience prior to Talk Radio, just doing things that I’d already been kind of collaborating on. I’m not desperate to do more, unless it’s things I’m devising or writing or co-writing.
So, what’s next? Are you taking What Would Judas Do? to Edinburgh this year?
I’m doing a new stand-up show at the Underbelly, called March of the Mallards. People want me to do Judas but my wife has a show on in Edinburgh too, and at the moment we are planning to split the child-minding and that may not be possible if I end up doing two shows a day.
* Stewart Lee’s What Would Judas Do? is on at the Bush Theatre, London until February 3.
His DVD of Stewart Lee - 90’s Comedian is available exclusively online from www.gofasterstripe.com, priced £10.
Stewart Lee
2007-01-21T21:03:13+00:00
Comedian, writer and director Stewart Lee is well known for his controversial show Jerry Springer - the Opera, as well as being and established comedy writer, stand-up and one half of the comedy partnership Lee and Herring. He speaks to The Stage between performances at the Bush Theatre, to talk about his recent move towards theatre. You’ve returned to the topic of Christianity for your new show What Would Judas Do? Were you secretly missing all the attention from the religious fundamentalists? Well, they’re stories everyone knows so they’re a good way of looking at other ideas. I don’t miss the attention from fundamentalist groups and it’s quite put me off any kind of high-profile exposure. One of the nice things about the Bush Theatre is it’s not the kind of place that psychopaths find out about, although some of the responses to questions I ask in the show have, in the last few days, suggested there might be people coming to try and make some kind of point, who are then a bit confused that it isn’t what their prejudices would lead them to expect. Has this show received any negative interest from religious groups or protesters? No. The religious right in the UK is only interested in things that will get its hate agenda into the mainstream and hassling someone in an 80-seater room achieves little. You’ve used Christian beliefs as material since your early days but it has matured from simple jokes through to an expression of ideas which happen to use comedy as a tool to help make a point. Is this your comedic abilities and tastes evolving or more the case that, in order to express yourself in the current social climate, the nature of expression has to change in order to be viewed as...
The most controversial and brilliant live show of the year was Stewart Lee's 90s Comedian, a riposte to the fundamentalist Christians whose wrong-headed and misinformed protests against the BBC's screening of Lee's West End hit Jerry Springer The Opera, last January have cost Lee dearly, financially and psychologically. Deluged with hate mail and threatened with the cancellation of the Springer tour and a prosecution for blasphemy, Lee attempted to meet prejudice with thoughtful explication.
When that didn't work, he wrote his sell-out Edinburgh show, which demonstrated what blasphemy really could be when it tried. Let's hope the BBC will uphold free expression by televising that too.
Greatest dignity in the face of bigotry: Stewart Lee
Stewart Lee
2005-12-18T23:16:51+00:00
The most controversial and brilliant live show of the year was Stewart Lee's 90s Comedian, a riposte to the fundamentalist Christians whose wrong-headed and misinformed protests against the BBC's screening of Lee's West End hit Jerry Springer The Opera, last January have cost Lee dearly, financially and psychologically. Deluged with hate mail and threatened with the cancellation of the Springer tour and a prosecution for blasphemy, Lee attempted to meet prejudice with thoughtful explication. When that didn't work, he wrote his sell-out Edinburgh show, which demonstrated what blasphemy really could be when it tried. Let's hope the BBC will uphold free expression by televising that too. Greatest dignity in the face of bigotry: Stewart Lee
The percussionist Clare Moore of blues punks The Moodists, and the pianist Kaye Louise Patterson of alt country pioneers Acuff’s Rose, are grand dames of Australia’s underground. Moore offers four arch negotiations with the downward gravitational pull of kitsch, Barry Adamson’s filmic mix reimagining cocktail lounge muzak as a psychedelic formica.
Patterson pounds baroque pop from the piano with shades of Billy Joel or Ben Folds.
A sinuous version of John and Beverley Martyn’s languidly sinister Auntie Aviator takes wing on the meshed guitar muscle of Dave Graney and Matt Walker.
Stewart Lee
2013-10-06T11:29:38+01:00
The percussionist Clare Moore of blues punks The Moodists, and the pianist Kaye Louise Patterson of alt country pioneers Acuff’s Rose, are grand dames of Australia’s underground. Moore offers four arch negotiations with the downward gravitational pull of kitsch, Barry Adamson’s filmic mix reimagining cocktail lounge muzak as a psychedelic formica. Patterson pounds baroque pop from the piano with shades of Billy Joel or Ben Folds. A sinuous version of John and Beverley Martyn’s languidly sinister Auntie Aviator takes wing on the meshed guitar muscle of Dave Graney and Matt Walker.
Long term Londoner and Alternative Country godfather Sid Griffin's twenty-first century bluegrass blueprint is a nostalgic negotiation with his native Kentucky's indigenous music.
Producer John Wood brokered Fairport Convention's sixties deals with British folk, and now he carves common ground between Carla Frey's fleet Western Swing fiddle, Griffin's mandolin, and his Scottish lieutenant Neil Robert Herd's Celtic flavoured songwriting contributions. Bowie's Heroes breathes anew as a stately banjo-driven cover, and the whirling reel Betsey Trotwood fairly ignites, but a sitar spangled Paint It, Black smacks of novelty.
The Coal Porters walk a fine line with bold barefacedness.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-23T01:58:49+01:00
Long term Londoner and Alternative Country godfather Sid Griffin's twenty-first century bluegrass blueprint is a nostalgic negotiation with his native Kentucky's indigenous music. Producer John Wood brokered Fairport Convention's sixties deals with British folk, and now he carves common ground between Carla Frey's fleet Western Swing fiddle, Griffin's mandolin, and his Scottish lieutenant Neil Robert Herd's Celtic flavoured songwriting contributions. Bowie's Heroes breathes anew as a stately banjo-driven cover, and the whirling reel Betsey Trotwood fairly ignites, but a sitar spangled Paint It, Black smacks of novelty. The Coal Porters walk a fine line with bold barefacedness.
In comedy circles, Stewart Lee has long been acknowledged as an influential, intelligent and principled stand-up almost beyond reproach. But it was nonetheless a courageous move for BBC Two to order a series from him that’s equally likely to alienate viewers as widen his niche. Given the debate raging about the BBC and public service broadcasting, the long-overdue decision to back his smart wit, rather than the raucous dumbed-down comedy that seems to win so many commissioning budgets, has to be applauded.
Demonstrating a strange misunderstanding of Lee’s demographic, the first instalment of his Comedy Vehicle was bookended by trailers featuring Horne and Corden – whose much-derided BBC Three sketch show seems about as far from the platonic comedy ideal Lee strives for as it is possible to get. It’s as if the BBC was saying ‘don’t worry if this isn’t for you – we also make comedy revolving around fat men wobbling their obese bellies’.
The sort of laddish celebrity culture that James Corden, especially, seems too enthusiastic to embrace was a main theme of Lee’s debut. The topic was bad literature, with forest-wasting tomes by the likes of Russell Brand, Jeremy Clarkson, Dan Brown, So Solid Crew’s Asher D and Chris Moyles being skewered by his poisonous wit. There’s perhaps an unacknowledged debt to Robin Ince’s live Book Club shows in this subject matter and derisive attitude, but Lee makes it all his own.
This Oxford graduate is elitist and proud of it. No, he hasn’t read Harry Potter – he’s 40 years old for Chrissake – but yes, he has read the complete works of William Blake, thank you very much. He has the unshakeable belief that his entire audience is as educated and erudite as him; or at least that if they’re not, they want to appear to be. Thus he reinforces a middle-class intellectual ambition, rather than playing dumb to broaden his appeal. He might be pandering to his audience as much as any comedian, but it’s an audience that’s under-served on TV.
Lee destroys his topics with the precision, relentlessness and brutality of a medieval torturer; repeatedly and meticulously attacking the same small point until it becomes weakened to the point of collapse. The entire oeuvre of Dan Brown is dismissed as: ‘The famous man looked at the red cup’ – and it will be impossible not to think of that phrase whenever the Da Vinci Code author is mentioned again.
The presentation matched the content, producing a show didn’t feel like a traditional stand-up production. The mood was more muted and intimate – the showbiz glitz of Live At The Apollo replaced with the understated class of a gentleman’s club. As he did on his recent DVD, Lee sometimes addresses the camera directly, as if making eye contact with the home audience, rather than leaving them as passive observers.
The pace wasn’t all bang-bang-bang jokes either, though Lee has some brilliantly inspired lines. Segments such as the over-extended routine describing in unnecessarily precise detail what a rapper is and where you might find one deliberately stretch the patience. Shorter jokes would be funnier, but nowhere near as transfixing, as the audience are compelled to see just how far he dare push it, and left to marvel at the man’s sheer audacity. There’s some tension as to whether it will work or not, and occasionally it doesn’t, quite – but that’s again a refreshing antidote to the over-polished presentation of most stand-up on TV.
Lee’s pauses are as important as his words; he builds up expectation and tension in those gaps that only a laugh can reveal. Who else could elicit chortles for dusting the mic stand with his hand or fiddling wordlessly with one of the light fittings?
The thoughtful monologue is interrupted by sketches, Dave Allen style. The quickies that illustrate the point Lee was making work well, but others don’t. Paddy McGinlay’s Goat seemed especially self-indulgent – though that’s a hard charge to level at Lee given that his entire show, indeed career, is built on self-indulgence. Still, it’s nice to play ‘spot the comedian’ with the likes of Simon Munnery, Miles Jupp, Tony Law, Tara Flynn, Paul Putner, Kevin Eldon and Michael Redmond in the ensemble.
Some other respected names are involved, too. Executive producer Armando Iannucci’s role is well-known – and he conducted an hilariously lofty interview with Lee as a ‘red button’ extra for digital viewers after the broadcast. Look carefully, and you’ll also spot that the script editor is one Christopher Morris.
This really is the comedy elite, and if they, led by Lee, can’t prove that a show can be literate, edifying and funny all at the same time, no one can. Thankfully, they’ve succeeded perfectly, making an appointment-to-view programme for everyone who believes comedy is art as well as entertainment. Great stuff.
Stewart Lee
2009-03-17T11:02:36+00:00
In comedy circles, Stewart Lee has long been acknowledged as an influential, intelligent and principled stand-up almost beyond reproach. But it was nonetheless a courageous move for BBC Two to order a series from him that’s equally likely to alienate viewers as widen his niche. Given the debate raging about the BBC and public service broadcasting, the long-overdue decision to back his smart wit, rather than the raucous dumbed-down comedy that seems to win so many commissioning budgets, has to be applauded. Demonstrating a strange misunderstanding of Lee’s demographic, the first instalment of his Comedy Vehicle was bookended by trailers featuring Horne and Corden – whose much-derided BBC Three sketch show seems about as far from the platonic comedy ideal Lee strives for as it is possible to get. It’s as if the BBC was saying ‘don’t worry if this isn’t for you – we also make comedy revolving around fat men wobbling their obese bellies’. The sort of laddish celebrity culture that James Corden, especially, seems too enthusiastic to embrace was a main theme of Lee’s debut. The topic was bad literature, with forest-wasting tomes by the likes of Russell Brand, Jeremy Clarkson, Dan Brown, So Solid Crew’s Asher D and Chris Moyles being skewered by his poisonous wit. There’s perhaps an unacknowledged debt to Robin Ince’s live Book Club shows in this subject matter and derisive attitude, but Lee makes it all his own. This Oxford graduate is elitist and proud of it. No, he hasn’t read Harry Potter – he’s 40 years old for Chrissake – but yes, he has read the complete works of William Blake, thank you very much. He has the unshakeable belief that his entire audience is as educated and erudite as him; or at least that if they’re not, they want to...
I wrote an introduction for Tim Bradford's An Urban Country Diary
For fifteen years, Tim Bradford has meandered round the quiet streets of his North London home, seeking out the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sublime and the ridiculous.
A London Country Diary documents his wanderings - he attempts to rescue a deer in Clissold Park, talks to a magical old man in Holloway, breaks up a fight in Stoke Newington and has issues with foxes in Highbury. And that's just the beginning.
All of life is in these pages. Well, some. OK, just a little bit.
But with its idiosyncratic wit and charming illustrations, this book is a timely reminder that you can find beauty, humour and life, wherever you call home.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T21:50:23+00:00
I wrote an introduction for Tim Bradford's An Urban Country Diary For fifteen years, Tim Bradford has meandered round the quiet streets of his North London home, seeking out the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sublime and the ridiculous. A London Country Diary documents his wanderings - he attempts to rescue a deer in Clissold Park, talks to a magical old man in Holloway, breaks up a fight in Stoke Newington and has issues with foxes in Highbury. And that's just the beginning. All of life is in these pages. Well, some. OK, just a little bit. But with its idiosyncratic wit and charming illustrations, this book is a timely reminder that you can find beauty, humour and life, wherever you call home.
BEFORE the gig starts, a man in the row behind muses on the fact that you have to produce a whole new stand-up set when such a large amount of your material has gone into six half-hour episodes of the BBC show Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
Though it was Lee's first foray into TV for a number of years, it seems he's never had much trouble coming up with new material. Not just new material, but quality stuff - full of incisive comment and beautifully realised every time.
Stepping out to introduce his support act, Lee takes the opportunity to make some self-deprecating comments about his first performance of the night (an extra show slotted in at 5pm when the 8pm one sold out), typically playing down just how good the second of the night was to be.
Then there were twenty minutes or so of the marvellously offbeat Canadian Tony Law, with such musings as why wolves and not squirrels tend to nurture feral human young in the wild.
After the kind of rock 'n' roll entrance of the type that "belongs to a much younger comedian", Lee's latest show begins with the delightfully ridiculous tale of a spat he had in his favourite high street coffee chain.
Relating the incident leads to a pathos-imbued breakdown, when a funny noise gets a bigger laugh than a carefully constructed pirate joke (complete with a call back).
The 38-year-old comedian Frankie Boyle has added to Lee's ennui with his devil-may-care comments about over-40 comics having lost their anger. The 41-year-old Lee finds himself mildly disappointed by this.
As ever with Lee, there's plenty of intelligent self-reflexive humour on the nature of stand-up. There's a lovely deconstruction of the young angry comics on Mock The Week and a deliberately prolonged observational piece of the type oft used by comedians ('I know I look like…').
Already having attracted some misguided attention from aspects of the press with his Richard Hammond rant, it transpires that his thoughts on 'the Hamster' play around both with 'ironic', un-PC humour; and notions of 'truth' in what people say in stand-up.
Lee's performance is wonderfully nuanced too, largely deadpanning his way through; and occasionally letting a playful smirk slip then tripping off into the crowd in an (staged of course) unhinged moment.
He rounds off with a magnificent rant about plagiarism (a persistent problem that is notoriously difficult to prove in the stand-up community and something that Lee famously speaks out against) - this time suggesting that a ludicrously unlikely saying his granny used to spout had been poached by a TV advertising campaign.
Sheer, inspired brilliance.
Stewart Lee
2009-11-30T16:21:24+00:00
BEFORE the gig starts, a man in the row behind muses on the fact that you have to produce a whole new stand-up set when such a large amount of your material has gone into six half-hour episodes of the BBC show Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. Though it was Lee's first foray into TV for a number of years, it seems he's never had much trouble coming up with new material. Not just new material, but quality stuff - full of incisive comment and beautifully realised every time. Stepping out to introduce his support act, Lee takes the opportunity to make some self-deprecating comments about his first performance of the night (an extra show slotted in at 5pm when the 8pm one sold out), typically playing down just how good the second of the night was to be. Then there were twenty minutes or so of the marvellously offbeat Canadian Tony Law, with such musings as why wolves and not squirrels tend to nurture feral human young in the wild. After the kind of rock 'n' roll entrance of the type that "belongs to a much younger comedian", Lee's latest show begins with the delightfully ridiculous tale of a spat he had in his favourite high street coffee chain. Relating the incident leads to a pathos-imbued breakdown, when a funny noise gets a bigger laugh than a carefully constructed pirate joke (complete with a call back). The 38-year-old comedian Frankie Boyle has added to Lee's ennui with his devil-may-care comments about over-40 comics having lost their anger. The 41-year-old Lee finds himself mildly disappointed by this. As ever with Lee, there's plenty of intelligent self-reflexive humour on the nature of stand-up. There's a lovely deconstruction of the young angry comics on Mock The Week and a deliberately prolonged observational piece...
Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times.
“I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times
★★★★ Financial Times
★★★★ Chortle
“One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus
“The new gold standard for rockumentaries” - The Scotsman
I just did this piece of KRS1-style edu-tainment for BBCR4 with Resonance 104.4FM alumney Michael Umney, called Stewart Lee - Unreliable Narrator. Lots of comedians in it.
The record store day dbl vinyl of Asian Dub Foundation’s Access Denied album includes a ‘neolithic’ remix of the no 1 single Comin’ Over Here (feat. Stewart Lee) Facebook Link
‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album.
B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album, which didn’t happen after something got spilt on the laptop that had all the tracks on it.
Fire Records/King Rocker Records.
It looks like all the SNOWFLAKE TORNADO tour dates outstanding from 2020 will be shifted into 2022, starting in Jan, and below are the ones we know about so far.
Local venues will contact you if they haven’t already.
All the warm-up club dates you may have bought tickets for have been slotted in to Nov and Dec, covid willing, and venues will contact ticket holders.
Please do not hassle venues about all this. They will contact you. We will get there!
I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point.
It’s all bacon!
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 Leicester Square Theatre in January 2022 and then 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 first half, Snowflake, will be 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 second half, Tornado, 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.”
January 2022
Tuesday 4th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 5th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 6th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 7th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 8th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Monday 10th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 11th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 12th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 13th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 15th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS
Monday 17th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Tuesday 18th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Wednesday 19th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Thursday 20th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Friday 21st January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Saturday 22nd January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Tuesday 25th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Wednesday 26th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 27th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Friday 28th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 29th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Sunday 30th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
February 2022
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd February 2022 - Rose Theatre, Kingston - TICKETS
Friday 4th February 2022 - Westlands Entertainment Venue, Yeovil - TICKETS
Saturday 5th February 2022 - Westlands Entertainment Venue, Yeovil - TICKETS
Tuesday 8th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 9th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Thursday 10th February 2022 - De Montfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Friday 11th February 2022 - Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry - TICKETS
Saturday 12th February 2022 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Sunday 13th February 2022 - Hippodrome, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 25th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Saturday 26th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Sunday 27th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Monday 28th February 2022 - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - TICKETS
March 2022
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Friday 4th March 2022 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS
Saturday 5th March 2022 - Playhouse, Salisbury
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
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
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
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
Wednesday 11th May 2022 - Palace Theatre, Watford
Thursday 12th May 2022 - Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells
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
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
Wednesday 8th June 2022 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester
Friday 10th June 2022 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro
Saturday 11th June 2022 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro
Friday 17th June 2022 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Saturday 18th June 2022 - Hippodrome, Darlington - TICKETS
Sunday 19th June 2022 - Festival Theatre, Edinburgh - TICKETS
Sunday 26th June 2022 - Theatre Royal, Plymouth
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
I would be delighted if, if you are coming to see me, you could do your best to get vaccinated, irrespective of what the gvt or the venue insist upon.
I doubt that my snowflake audience will contain many people who deny the existence of Covid or believe the vaccine is George Soros or Bill Gates trying to put tiny Transformer robots into your blood.
But I and my team will be interacting with over 150 000 people on the next leg of the tour, and I would like to minimise our risk, and the risk to my audience, so meet me half way.
I will be selling and signing stuff as usual, I hope, but I won’t be shaking hands to thank you all this time around, and will probably be positioned behind some kind of screen like William Shatner in Airplane 2. Sad.
7) MEDIA GARAGE SALE
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits, as have NETFLIX, the utter bastards.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
To try and promote King Rocker I have been pimping myself about like Priss Fotheringham on every Podcast going, alone or with dir M Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast), saying the same things in the same room in the same clothes to all different people, all of whom were very kind.
I don’t know what a podcast is really but I think you go on the internet and click on something.
As my grandfather once said, in 1983, “Do you know, in America, there are shops that only sell Kentucky Fried Chicken?” I enjoyed being on the internet with all these people enormously, but will put some blue water between me and the next wedge.
David Baddiel told me it was good to be on the internet, though. These are available..
A rambling chat in which I fail to promote King Rocker at the expense of a Marxist analysis of culture and history from the inventor of Alternative Comedy ™ ®
Dir Michael Cumming and I discuss King Rocker with Britain’s top film guru and skiffle enthusiast, who has been very supportive of the no-budget project.
Andy Miller and John Michinson’s long running and much loved books podcast. I discuss the waspish poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks with them, Nicky Birch and Jennifer Hodgson.
This is a marvellous ongoing Podcast which is unashamedly civilised in an unenlightened era, and this episode is full of great writing, batshit radiophonic music and clever women.
North London echo chamber fun sure to irk people of all political persuasions with the forensically-minded folk devil for the far right and snowflake do-gooder Owen Jones, and me, talking about King Rocker and more general stuff. His current run of ‘casts has some great guests.
Informed Wolverhampton-based comedy and music enthusiast of uncommon warmth and knowledge talks to me about KING ROCKER and what the Gray Pays ‘n’ Bacon are like at the Great Western pub.
I asked Adam if I could go on this massively popular podcast and he said yes which was very kind of him. It was fun hearing his Mark E Smith story from the horse’s mouth and he asked me hard questions of the type I usually avoid.
I answer questions from various utterly delightful members of the Idler’s thoughtful middle class readership from their wine and book filled homes.
They are the real stars here! You will emerge from watching this in love with at least one of them.
In this episode of The Last Line, James talks to comedian Stewart Lee about his new film King Rocker, a documentary about Robert Lloyd, lead singer of 70’s post-punk band The Nightingales.
During their conversation they discuss the new film, its central protagonist Robert Lloyd, stand up comedy, Stewart’s propensity to defend stand up comedians against the views of the general public and his reluctance to participate in podcast interviews.
There’s an interview with Michael Cumming on this podcast too, link below.
Sometime in March you will be able to hear me eat a really lovely Sri Lankan mutton curry from the Kolama restaurant, Soho, with bon viveur jazz pianist Jay Rayner. (I see how this works now!)
This is the most showbiz thing I have ever done, and I am glad it was with jazzy Jay Rayner.
This is a new series of docu-chats on different esoteric subjects.
You have to pay for them because they are finished pieces of work not just some fuckers talking or wandering about.
I have appeared on three of them - on Hawkwind, Penda’s Fen and John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy.
The first comedian my kids ever saw live was Paul Currie, so they think everything else is boring unless it ends with a massive breadfight.
He is ace, a deceptively clever surrealist clown who generates a genuine sense of comedy panic, and is best seen on his own terms in a fringe vibe.
Paul Currie says - “I AM PLAYING EDINBURGH this August on the Fringes of the fringe. I’ll be performing my new show TEET from 9th-29th August in the HIVE on Niddry Street @thehivenightclub.
Strict Covid rules must be followed by all punters before, during and after the show. Social distancing will be in place. NOTE: I’m doing this independently of the fringe festival on my own, a “fringe of the fringe” if you will.
As myself and many artists have been hit so badly with zero furlough over the past 17 months I truly can’t afford the admin fees to be part of the corporate fringe so I’m doing this completely DIY. There will be no physical tickets & No box office.
It will be £5 cash on the door entry fee. Pay What you Want donation on exit of the show. Minimum of 50 socially distanced seats so get there early. 6pm doors open. 7pm SHOW STARTS .late comers not permitted. 8pm SHOW ENDS.
TEET merchandise available to all who attend.
As I’m not using the fringe website or their online program this can only work as word of mouth and people sharing the show through social media and telling friends about it. So please if you could share the details and this advert as much as you can I’d really appreciate it, so we can try fill the venue each night. Thank you for taking time to read this and I hope to see you at the Hive in August.”
Henry Lowther’s Birthday show
British jazz veteran celebrates at London Vortex JULY 31st
Shirley Collins
Folk legend in sonic installation JULY 31ST/AUGUST 1ST Charleston, Lewes.
The Nightingales
Birmingham post punk veterans and KING ROCKER stars.
AUGUST 6th Preston New Continental.
SEPTEMBER 3rd Birmingham Moseley Folk Festival.
OCTOBER 28TH M’cr Gullivers, 29th Newport Le Pub, 30th Exeter Cavern, 31st Lewes Con.
NOVEMBER 1st Sheffield Greystones, 3rd London Lexington, 4th B’ham Hare & Hounds, 5th Bristol Rough Trade, 6th Southsea Wedgewood, 7th Bedford Esquires, 8th London Lexington W BLUE ORCHIDS & TED CHIPPINGTON, 9th Barrow-in-Furness Underground, 10th Glasgow Hugh & Pint, 11th Edinburgh Caves, 12th Middlesbrough Westgarth, 13th Hebden Bridge Trades, 14th Leicester Cookie
Blue Orchids
6th Aug Bristol Thunderbolt, 7th Aug Dublin Castle London, 8th Aug Brighton Prince Albert.
Post-punk dishwater psychedelia.
Ruts
DC Dub punks AUGUST 7th London Jazz café.
SEPTEMBER 10TH Liverpool Positive Vibrations, 25th Newcastle Northumbria Uni
Sleaford Mods
Angry loud man and quiet man. AUGUST 7TH Bromley South Facing.
SEPTEMBER 2ND End of The Road fest.
NOVEMBER 26TH Oxford Academy.
DECEMBER 2ND London Printworks, 3rd Brighton Dome
The Shadracks
Youthful garage punk AUGUST 13TH London Moth
MDC 14th Aug Edinburgh Sneaky Pete’s.
Veteran angry American hardcore innovators. Can this be true?
The Rebel
The Jerry Sadowitz of garage country.
AUGUST 14TH London Lexington
Lucinda Williams
19th Aug Cambridge Junction.
Is this on? Odd one-off date by the Queen of Alt Country?
Hawkwind
Psychedelic survivors. AUGUST 20TH Devon Beautiful Days Fest.
SEPTEMBER 11th Cambridge Corn Exchange, 12th Leamington Spa Assembly, 17th Swindon Mecca, 27th M’cr Ritz.
OCTOBER 28TH London Palladium.
The Wolfhounds
Cheesewire realists
AUGUST 20TH Preston Popfest.
NOVEMBER 5TH London 229, 19th Middlesbrough Westgarth, 20th Preston Ferret
Bo Ningen
Lots of dates from Japanese noise-niks.
AUGUST 27TH Preston Ferret,
SEPTEMBER 4th M’cr Pscyh Fest,
OCTOBER 1st Bristol Fleece, 2nd Ramsgate Music Hall, 3rd S’hampton Loft, 6th B’ham Hare & Hounds, 7th Sheffield Record Junkee, 8th L’pool District, 9th Glasgow Stereo, 10th Bristol Fleece, 12th Oxford Bullingdon, 13th London Village U’ground, 14th Brighton Chalk
The Primevals
Glasgow garage rockers.
SEPTEMBER 3rd Middlesbrough Westgarth.
NOVEMBER 27TH London Hope & Anchor.
The Catenary Wires
Overqualified popticians
SEPTEMBER 4TH London Amersham Arms, 10th Rainham Oast, 12th Brighton Prince Albert, 24th Oxford Fusion, 25th Coventry Coal Vaults.
The Chameleons
M’cr post punk visionaries on another victory lap.
SEPTEMBER 8th Bedford Esquires, 25th Holmfrith Picture Dome.
NOVEMBER 12TH Minehead Shine On.
DECEMBER 14TH Huddersfield Parish, 16th Blackpool Waterloo, 17th/18th M’cr Ritz.
JANUARY 14TH Leicester Academy, 15th Birmingham Institute.
FEBRUARY 1ST Nottingham Rescue Rooms.
The Fallen Leaves
Gentlemen mod punks.
SEPTEMBER 11TH London Camden Fiddler’s Elbow.
OCTOBER 30TH London 100 Club.
NOVEMBER 20TH Brighton Prince Albert.
The Scientists
16th SEPTEMBER Spicejazz Soho London. Can this one off by Australian garage gurus be for real?
The Meat Puppets
We are lead to believe that the amazing Meat Puppets, who you must see before you or they die, are doing four UK dates. Grateful Dead crossed w Husker Du. Desert punk psyche.
SEPTEMBER 23rd London Islington Academy, 24th M’cr Bread Shed, 25th Newcastle Cluny, 26th Dover Booking Hall
Fossil Fools
24th Sept Swindon Victoria. Tentative return by top XTC tribute band.
Alison Cotton
Psychedelic folk OCTOBER 27TH London Café Oto
The Fallen Women
Female Fall tribute band w guest vocalists incl me.
DECEMBER 5th London Lexington.
Nina Hamnett
Exhibition of the art of the underrated bohemian Fitzrovian, Charleston, East Sussex.
NEW FILMS
Ronnie’s, Ronnie Scott & His World Famous Jazz Club (Oliver Murray)
The Dig (Simon Stone) ★★★★★ Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) ★★★★ The News Of The World (Paul Greengrass) ★★★★ Nomadland (Chloe Zhao) ★★★★ County Lines (Henry Blake) ★★★★★
Animal Antics (Patrick Goddard) ★★★★★
OLD FILMS
Box Of Moonlight (Tom DeCillo, 1996) ★★★★★
Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) ★★★★★
Where Eagles Dare (Brian G Hutton, 1968) ★★★★★
The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967) ★★★★★
The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) ★★★★★
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) ★★★★★
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)★★★★★
Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D’sa/Glen Leyburn, 2013)★★★★★
Caliber 9 (Fernado di Leon, 1972) ★★★★★
‘71 (Yann Demange, 2014) ★★★★★
Big Night (Campbell Scott/Stanley Tucci, 1996) ★★★★★
Jason & The Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) ★★★★★
Goldstone (Ivan Sen, 2016) ★★★★★
Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) ★★★★★
Avengers Infinity War (Russo Brothers, 2018) ★★★★
Avengers Endgame (Russo Brothers, 2019) ★★★★
In Order of Disappearance (Hans Peter Molland, 2014)★★★★★
Iron Man III (Shane Black, 2013)★★★★★
Pauline A La Plage (Eric Rohmer, 1983) ★★★★★
Gone To Earth (Powell/Pressburger, 1950) ★★★★
The Odd Couple (Neil Simon, 1968) ★★★★★
Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) ★★★★
Samurai 1 : Mushashi Miyamoto (Hiroshi Inagaki, 1954) ★★★★
Cache / Hidden (Michaek Haneke, 2005) ★★★★★ Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980) ★★★★★
Summer In February (Christopher Menaul, 2013) ★★★★ Guardians of The Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) ★★★★★
All Tomorrow’s Parties (Jonathan Caouette, 2009) ★★★★ Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969) ★★★★★
Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund, 2015) ★★★★
Lift To The Scaffold (Louise Malle, 1958)★★★★★
Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)★★★★★
OLD BOOKS
Rosemary Tonks - Emir (1963)★★★★★
Rosemary Tonks - The Bloater (1968) ★★★★★
John Berger/Jean Mohr - A Fortunate Man (1967) ★★★★★ Ann Quin - Berg (1964) ★★★★
Sir John Mandeville - The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1357)★★★★ Sean Bythell - Diary of a Bookseller (2018)
Robert Aickman - The Inner Room (1988) Virginia Nicholson - Amongst The Bohemians (2003)
Joanna Moorhead - The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington (2017)
Betty May - Tiger Woman (1929)
Val Doonican - My Story, My Life (2009) Dave Graney - Workshy (2017)
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde - R L Stevenson (1985)
Hide & Seek - Dennis Potter (1973)
NEW BOOKS
Tessa Norton/Bob Stanley - Excavate!
Alan Stafford - Wilson, Keppel & Betty, Too Naked For The Nazis Peter Oborne - The Assault On Truth Nesrine Malik - We Need New Stories ★★★★★ Sean Bythell - Diary of a Bookseller (2018) ★★★★★
Robert Aickman - The Inner Room (1988) ★★★★★ Alicia Foster - Nina Hamnett Charlie Hill - I Don’t Want To Go To The Taj Mahjal
Hill’s economic autobiography is a simplistic list of addresses, dead end jobs, cultural ephemera, and brief assignations, garnished with two or three short paragraphs of barely formed reflection. And yet, in reducing his life to these most basic elements, it manages to be a more profound comment on existence then many more self-consciously analytical efforts. As if to confound Wittgenstein, it appears the unexamined life was worth living after all.
NEW COMICS
Joe Sacco - Paying The Land (2020)
NEW TV
Ghosts S2 (BBC, 2020)
Ghosts - Xmas Special 2020 (BBC, 2020) The Mandalorian S2 (Disney, 2020) ★★★★★ Call My Agent S3 (France 2, 2018)★★★★★
Call My Agent S4 (France 2, 2021) ★★★★★
The Trump Show (BBC, 2020-1)★★★★★
Lupin S1 (Netflix, 2021)★★★★★ Wandavision (Marvel, 2021)★★★★★
Stonehenge The Lost Circle Revealed (BBC, 2021) ★★★★★
Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (BBC, 2021)★★★★★ Raiders Of The Lost Past With Janina Ramirez (BBC2, 2021) ★★★★
Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing S3 (BBC, 2020) ★★★★★
The Falcon & The Winter Soldier (Marvel, 2021) ★★★★★
Homeland s8 (Netflix, 2020)★★★★★
Into The Night S1 (Between a Dog & A Wolf, 2020) ★★★★
Unforgotten S4 (ITV, 2021) ★★★★
Inside No 9 S6 (BBC, 2021) ★★★★★ Great British Bake Off S11 (C4, 2020) ★★★★★
An Evening With Tim Heidecker (Youtube, 2020) Time (BBC, 2021) ★★★★★ Loki (Kate Herron, Marvel, 2021)
INTERNETS, RADIOS, YOUTUBES AND PODCASTS
Rob Auton’s Daily Podcast
Alastair Beckett-King on Youtube
Shawn Woods’ Mouse Trap Monday on Youtube
An Evening With Tim Heidecker (Youtube, 2020) ★★★★ Bridget Christie - Mortal (BBCR4)
Rosie Holt’s Youtube characters
THEATRE
Under Milk Wood - Dylan Thomas (National) ★★★★★
The Pin’s The Comeback (Noel Coward Theatre) ★★★★
This felt like it was from the 1870s, the 1950s and now all at the same time.
It was of a tradition at the same time as exploding it. It reminded me of THE RIGHT Size and it would be great if The Pin could hold the partnership together in the way they didn't as there's probably lots to find out about how elastic it can be, and what you can subsume into it.
A Victorian audience would have recognised it as Music Hall and a ‘50s audience would have recognised it as Absurdism, which Beckett knew was music hall anyway. Were they even in a theatre, really, them blokes? I hope it tours.
NEW RECORDS
Lady Leshurr - Quaranqueen
The Primevals - New Trip
Cult Figures - Deritend Vapour Trails - Celestial Scuzz ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - Before Computers (demos)
Kevin March - Last Night
Doug Gillard - Douglas Scott Gillard II
Guided by Voices - Earth Man Blues Gwenifer Raymond - Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain Ustad Saami - Pakistan Is For The Peaceful ★★★★★ The Blue Orchids - Speed The Day Dave Graney & The Mistly - Live At Byrds ★★★★★
Mainliner - Dual Myths ★★★★★
Hawkwind - 50th Anniversary Live
The Amorphous Androgynous w Peter Hammill - We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orcestrea - s/t
Major Murphy - Access
Eleventh Dream Day - Since Grazed Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg
Guided By Voices - Earth Man Blues
Fixed Horizon - Grenouille Lucinda Williams - Runnin’ Down A Dream
Krallice - Demonic Wealth
Catenary Wires - Birling Gap
Cub Scout Bowling Pins - Heaven Beats Iowa ★★★★
Pat Todd & The Rank Outsiders - There’s Pretty Things in Palookaville ★★★★
Robyn Hitchcock - The Man Upstairs ★★★★
Chris Forsyth - First Flight
Chris Eckerman - Where The Spirit Rests ★★★★
The Scientists - Negativity
David Grubbs & Ryley Walker - Husky Pants ★★★★ Shirley Collins - Heart’s Ease ★★★★★ Gary Louris - Jump For Joy ★★★★★
Fixed Horizon - Full Circle ★★★★
Trees Speak - Post Human ★★★★ William Loveday Intention - People Think They Know Me ★★★★★
Hawkwind - Somnia The Bevis Frond - Little Eden ★★★★★
Pat Todd & The Rank Outsiders - There’s Pretty Things In Palookaville ★★★★★
Goat - Headsoup Adele & The Chandeliers - First Date
Trees Speak - Post Human
Sun Ra Arkestra - Swirling ★★★★★
Phil Minton - Woke Up At 8 ★★★★★
Rudimentary Peni - The Great War Lucinda Williams - Southern Soul
NEW OLD RECORDS
V/A - Rough Guide To Avant-Garde Japan
Guided by Voices - Live At Irving Plaza (1996)
Damo Suzuki & Echo Ensemble - Live @ Green Door (2013) Heavenly - A Bout De Heavenly (1989-1996)
Martin Stone - Down But Not Out In Paris and London (1992-2013)
John Russell & Terry Day - Russell & Day (1979?)
Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts & Terry Day - At LTC (1972?) Sonny Rollins - Rollins In Holland (1967) ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - I Sell The Circus (demos) (2015) The Fall - St Helen’s Technical College (1981) ★★★★★
Charles Gayle, John Edwards, Mark Sanders - Seasons Changing (2017) ★★★★★
The Misunderstood - Children of The Sun(1965-66) ★★★★★
Dexter Gordon - Live In Chateauvallon (1978) ★★★★★
The Loft - Ghost Trains & Country Lanes (1984-2015)
And Also The Trees - s/t (1984)
Neil Young - Young Shakespeare (1971)
T2 - It’ll All Work Out In Boomland (1970)
The Outsiders - Count For Something (1976-78)
The Selecter - Too Much Pressure box (1980)
Brown Acid 11 - v/a (1969-73)
Fleur de Lys - Circles (1964-1969)
J Jazz Deep Jazz From Modern Japan vol 3 - V/A (1962-1985)
The Black Keys Present Hill Country Blues - v/a
Brown Acid 12 - v/a (1968-80)
Raw Material - s/t (1970)
Open Road - Windy Day (1971)
Dave Graney, Clare Moore, Georgie Valentino & Malcolm Ross - s/t (2017) ★★★★
Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters - Smashed Full Of Wonder (1987)
The Lipstick Killers - Strange Flash (1976-81)
The Hawks - Obviously 5 Believers (1979-81) ★★★★
v/a - Goitse A Thaisce (1960-2020) ★★★★★
v/a - Fire Draw Near (1940-2020) ★★★★★
OLD RECORDS
Cocteau Twins - Treasure (1984) ★★★★ Billy Bragg - Life’s A Riot (1983) ★★★★★
Billy Bragg - Brewing Up with (1984) ★★★★★
The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional (1986) ★★★★
Siouxsie & The Banshees - A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (1982) ★★★★
Bunny Striker Lee - The Bunny Striker Lee Story (1967-80) ★★★★
V/A - Dub, A Journey Into Bass Culture (1970s) ★★★★
V/A - Dub, Original Bass Culture (1970s) ★★★★
V/A - Dub, More Bass Culture (1970s) ★★★★
Tomorrow’s Gift - Goodbye Future (1973) ★★★★
Jackson C Frank - s/t (1965) ★★★★
V/A - Down Home Blues, Chicago Fine Boogie (1947-1958)★★★★ Maggie Bjorklund - Shaken (2014)★★★★ June Tabor - Airs & Graces (1976) ★★★★★
John Martyn - The Very Best Of (1967-1996) ★★★★★ The Owl Service - The Garland Sessions (2007) ★★★★★
John Lee Hooker - Tantalising With The Blues (1965-70)★★★★★
Furry Lewis, Memphis Willie B, Memphis Slim - Bluesville 3 (1963?) ★★★★ Lightnin’ Hopkins - Prestige Profiles (1960-4) ★★★★★
Magic Slim - Live @ Ma Bea’s (1976) ★★★★
Jimmy Dawkins - Come Back Baby (1977) ★★★★
Allman Brothers - At Filmore East (1971) ★★★★ John Fahey - The Yellow Princess (1968) ★★★★★
Freedy Johnston - Can You Fly? (1992)★★★★ Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day (2009) ★★★★
Tragically Hip - Man Machine Poem (2016) ★★★★
Tragically Hip - We Are The Same (2009) ★★★★ Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996) ★★★★★
Grant Lee Buffalo - Storm Hymnal (1993-98) ★★★★
Shiva Burlesque - Mercury Blues (1990) ★★★★ Yo La Tengo - President (1989) ★★★★★ Yo La Tengo - Fakebook (1990) ★★★★★ Yo La Tengo - That Is You La Tengo (1991) ★★★★ Yo La Tengo - May I Sing With Me? (1992) ★★★★ Yo La Tengo - Painful (3 cds) (1993) ★★★★ Tim Buckley - Dream Letter (1968) ★★★★★
Those Bastard Souls - Debt & Departure (1999) ★★★★★
Wanderlust - Prize (1995) ★★★★
Chain - Towards The Blues (1971) ★★★★
The Schramms - Omnidirectional (2019) ★★★★
Cannonball Adderley - Soul Zodiac (1972)
Fred Anderson - Quintessential Birthday Trio Vol II (2015)
Greg Bendian’s Interzone - Requiem For Jack Kirby (2001)
Nels Cline & Greg Bendian - Interstellar Space Revisited (1999)
The Beat - Bounce (2016) Nina Simone - To Be Free (1959-1993)
Swervedriver - 99th Dream (1998)
Road - s/t (1972)
Mudhoney - Morning In America (2019)
Necromandus - Orexis of Death (1973)
Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide (1991)
Ultravox - Rage In Eden (1981)
Siouxsie & The Banshees - Tinderbox (1986)
Blues Pills - Live In Paris (2017)
Gram Parsons - Alternate Takes (1973-4)
Mike Westbrook - Mama Chicago (1976)
The Fall - Grotesque (1980)
Truly - Fast Stories From Kid Coma (1995)
Echo & the Bunnymen - Evergreen (1997)
Echo & The Bunnymen - What Are You Going To Do With Your Life? (1999)
Blues Pills - Lady In Gold (2016)
Leo Bud Welch - The Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name (2019)
The Black Keys - Chulahoma (2006) Nanci Griffith - One Fair Summer Evening (1988)
The Soft Boys - Invisible Hits (1983)
Robyn Hitchcock - Robyn Sings (2003)
Raw Material - s/t (1970)
Don Carlos & Gold - Them Never Know Natty Dread Have Him Credentials (1982)
Henry Junjo Lawes - Volcano Erruption (70s-80s)
Don Carlos - Day To Day Living (1982)
Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee - Full Up (1968-72)
Bunny Lee & Friends - Tape Rolling (1971-4) ★★★★
v/a - Trojan Roots Dancehall Box (‘70s, ‘80s)
Charlie Chaplin & Papa San - Respect Due (1986?)
Robert Forster - The Evangelist (2008) ★★★★★
John Stewart - California Bloodlines (1969) ★★★★
v/a - Trojan Dancehall Box (‘70s, ‘80s)
Don Carlos - In Dub (1980)
Yabby You - Deeper Roots (‘70s, ‘80s)
Yabby You - Deeper Roots Part 2 (‘70s, ‘80s)
Norma Winstone - Edge Of Time (1972) ★★★★
Atlas - Just Playin’ Rhythm & Blues (1967-71)
V/A - Alan Lomax Songbook (1939-76) ★★★★
Shirley Collins - Lodestar (2016) ★★★★★
The Go-betweens - Loving Shocks (1989) ★★★★
Red House Painters - Songs For A Blue Guitar (1996) ★★★★
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Mind Control (2013)
The Damned - Music For Pleasure (1977) ★★★★
Skids - Days In Europa (1977)
Big Country - The Crossing (1983) ★★★★
Big Country - Steel Town (1984)
Jon Dee Graham - Escape From Monster Island (1997) ★★★★
The Fall - Live At The Witch Trials (1979) ★★★★★
10) WOKE CAUSES - THIS MONTH, GOOD LAW PROJECT, GET OFF MY MED RECORDS, GBNEWS ADVERTISERS
GOOD LAW PROJECT
LINK
It’s evident that the corrupt kleptocracy of Boris Johnson isn’t going to dislodged by Kier Starmer’s PMQ’s however forensic, or by the biased media, or by legal investigations in which the gvt essentially investigate themselves.
However, despite the threats to judiciary in the Queen’s speech, at present the gvt are required to obey the law.
Champagne socialist fox-whacking lawyer Jolyon Maugham’s donation funded Good Law Project seems to be better than the opposition currently at holding the gvt to account, and proving where they have broken the law, so if you can spare a pound crowd fund them, as they do seem to be making an impact.
MEDICAL RECORDS OPT OUT
LINK
Did you know that the gvt are about to sell all your medical records off to the highest bidder? Thought not. We weren’t consulted.
I don’t care about the privacy aspect, but I do object to my life being monetised to give leverage to some horrible massive info-tech company.
You can withdraw the gvt’s right to farm your medical history as if you were some kind of data-pig at the link above. THIS IS NOW DELAYED TO SEPTEMBER DUE TO OPPOSITION BUT STILL WORTH DOING
GBNEWS ADVERTISERS
Stop Funding Hate say - Advertising sales for GB News are reportedly handled by Sky Media.
We’re aware of at least one company who say they were unaware that they were going to appear on GB News and suspended those ads when they found out. If you work for a company that buys programmatic advertising from Sky, it may be worth checking with them to ensure that your ads aren’t placed on GB News.
A huge thanks to the Stop Funding Hate volunteers who have come together to help identify GB News advertisers.
Brands that we’ve seen so far include: Vodafone, Octopus Energy, Ovo Energy, Co-op, Ikea, LV, Virgin Media, Kelloggs, Deliveroo, Nivea, Kenco coffee, AA, Premier Inn, American Express, Benadryl (Johnson and Johnson), Wickes, Starbucks, Weetabix, Listerine (Pfizer), National Lottery, Boomin, Cadbury, Taylors coffee, Amazon, Cazoo, Microsoft, Google, Alpen (Weetabix), Beko Harvestfresh, Pinterest, Ladbrokes, Rana pasta, Burger King, Warburtons, The UK Government (EU resettlement scheme), Bosch, Specsavers, TalkTalk, trivagoWeekend, itchpet.com, MSC Cruises, Grolsch, Indeed recruitment, Motability, Feel Multivitamins, Green Flag, Clean G non alcoholic gin, Facebook,Volvo, Bazuka, fiverr, Motability, Ibuleve Gel, Toyota, Appeal home shading / blinds, People’s Postcode Lottery, Just Eat, Petit Filous, Direct Bullion, Compare the Market, Kardia Mobile, Bupa, Verisure, The Open University.
There’s more information here about Stop Funding Hate, and the impact of our campaign so far. If you’re able to help build our movement tackling toxic media in the UK and internationally, please consider becoming a committed supporter and making a regular donation.
11) IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS
Adam Schlesinger (Fountain of Wayne) (1967)
John Prine (outlaw country singer) (1946)
Henry Grimes (jazz bassist) (1935)
Dave Mountfield (Ornate Johnson) (1970)
Hal Wilner (arranger) (1957)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Goodie) (1940)
Lee Konitz (jazz saxophonist) (1927)
Matthew Seligman (Soft Boy) (1955) Millie Small (ska singer) (1946)
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk robot) (1947)
Bill Rieflin (drummer for hire) (1960)
Hugh McKenna (Tear Gas pianist) (1949)
Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounder) (1942) Astrid Kirchherr (photographer) (1938)
Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra saxophonist) (1947)
Aubrey Burl (archaeologist) (1926)
Phil May (Pretty Thing) (1944) The Clacton Fin Whale (circa 2000)
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (artist) (1930) Doll Tor stone circle (3300 BC)
Kay Carroll (The Fall) (1948)
Bob the Cat (73 bus) (2006) Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew)
Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959)
Carl Reiner (director) (1922)
Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928)
Keith Tippett (jazz pianist) (1947)
Jimmy Cobb (jazz drummer) (1929) Barbara Smoker (Humanist) (1923)
The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
Tony Elliot (Time Out) (1942) Judy Dyble (folk singer) (1949)
Peter Green (blues guitarist) (1946)
Emitt Rhodes (power pop auteur) (1950) Annie Ross (jazz bohemian) (1930)
Joe Ruby (Scooby-Doo) (1933)
Craig Weatherhill (folklorist) (1950)
Don Weller (jazz saxophonist) (1940)
Simeon Coxe (Silver Apple) (1938) Diana Rigg (Avenger) (1938)
Toots Hibbert (reggae got soul) (1942)
Dele Fadele (carry bag man) (1962)
George Jeffrie (man’s-laughter maker) (1964)
Dave Kusworth (Brum punk Stone) (1960)
Gary Peacock (jazz bassist) (1935)
Doorkins (Southwark Cathedral Cat) (2005?)
Spencer Davis (Brumbeat pioneer) (1939)
Bunny Lee (dubmaster) (1940) The Cubbington Pear Tree (1770)
Fungie The Dingle Dolphin (1979) Jill Paton Walsh (humanist novelist) (1937)
Val Warner (poet) (1946)
Guy N Smith (Lord of The Crabs) (1939)
Richard Corben (decadent cartoonist) (1940)
David Johnson (Duke of Soho) (1960)
Leslie West (Mountain man) (1945)
- 2021 - Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Celia Drummond Ford (voice of Trees) (1950)
The Happy Man Tree (Stoke Newington Tree) (1870)
John Russell (guitar guru) (1954)
Marcel Uderzo (Asterisk artist) (1933)
Tom Stevens (Long Ryder and Magus) (1956)
Dougie Anderson (Coda’s Edinburgh record dealer (1952)
Captain Tom (Covid Walkman) (1920) Rynagh O’Grady (Ted’s Mary) (1954)
Mary Wilson (Supreme) (1944)
Chick Corea (Miles’ tinkler) (1941)
Iain Pattinson (You wanted to see me Prime Minister?) (1951)
U-Roy (Toastmaster) (1942)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (bookstore beat) (1921)
Wink O’Bannon (Eleventh Dream Day) (1956)
Bunny Wailer (Wailer) (1947)
Doug Parkinson (Oz vocal celeb) (1946)
Milford Graves (temporal explorer) (1941)
Johnny Rogan (Byrds’ Boswell) (1953) Jessica Walter (Play Misty For Me) (1941)
Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight) (1941) Anita Lane (Oz punk chanteuse) (1958)
Barbara Ess (Theoretical Girl) (1944)
Michael Collins (Apollo 11) (1930)
Mohammed Ag Itale (Tinariwen) (1960)
Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) (1929)
Sonny Simmons (jazz hobo) (1933)
Charles Grodin (The American Tim Key) (1935)
Franco Battiato (Italian Fetus) (1945)
Yoshi Wada (bagpipe minimalist) (1943)
Ned Beatty (squealing piggy) (1937)
Davey Datblygu (Davey Datblygu) (1964)
S Clay Wilson (Captain Pissgums) (1941)
Peter Zinovieff (sonic pioneer) (1933)
Richard Donner (kebab pioneer) (1930) Alix Dobkin (feminist folksinger) (1940)
Patrick Sky (native American folksinger) (1940)
Tom O’Connor (raconteur) (1939)
Stewart Lee
2021-07-29T15:55:26+01:00
1) KING ROCKER NOW TV Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times. “I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times ★★★★ Financial Times ★★★★ Chortle “One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus “The new gold standard for rockumentaries” - The Scotsman All Press is collecting here. You can also watch it, ad-free, on NOW TV if you have that; NOW TV LINK 2) UNRELIABLE NARRATOR DOC BBCR4 I just did this piece of KRS1-style edu-tainment for BBCR4 with Resonance 104.4FM alumney Michael Umney, called Stewart Lee - Unreliable Narrator. Lots of comedians in it. You can listen here. 3) ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION The record store day dbl vinyl of Asian Dub Foundation’s Access Denied album includes a ‘neolithic’ remix of the no 1 single Comin’ Over Here (feat. Stewart Lee) Facebook Link The original 12” remains available... Bandcamp X Ray Production 4) TEN BOB / USE YOUR LOAF 7” ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album. B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album, which didn’t happen after something got spilt on the laptop that had all the tracks on it. Fire Records/King Rocker Records. Order 7” here: https://fire-records.lnk.to/TenBobUseYourLoaf 5) LIVE DATES NEWS It looks like all the SNOWFLAKE TORNADO tour dates outstanding from 2020 will be shifted into 2022, starting in Jan, and below are the ones we know about so far. Local venues will contact you if they haven’t already. All the warm-up club...
Stewart Lee is one of comedy's big success stories. No, he's not filling the arenas like McIntyre, Bishop or Flanagan, and his BBC Two stand-up series is aimed at a niche audience: those of us who are happy to hang on as he works through his carefully convoluted and playfully abrasive ideas, basting his dry routines with reminders that they are routines, that comedy is a contrivance.
Yet in standing his ground and finding his crowd over the nine years since his breakthrough stand-up set - his first after co-creating Jerry Springer: The Opera, which followed his years in a double act with Richard Herring - he has made himself the 21st -century's poster boy for the art form formerly known as alternative comedy.
It runs in the family; his wife, Bridget Christie, has just won the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards. And her old man's new show, Much A-Stew About Nothing, is his funniest and most focused for a while.
That's partly because, as he keeps reminding us, the evening's three half-hour routines are destined for his third television series next year. He makes it clear that this show will be a fragmented, no-frills show - "Anyway, that's the end," is his final line - after noting that this, the second date to go on sale at this 1,700 seater is not quite full. "You're the people that applied late for tickets...I'm glad you came, but you're not really my crowd."
Ah, irony. We all like to think we can handle it. Only a few of us can do so without it farting in our faces. Lee is an irony grandmaster. He has made sure to write plenty of cherishable lines. He's also sidelined the obsession with analysing his position in the market placethat was making his act eat it's own tail. And as he works through a routine about Tories, one about Englishness and multiculturism, and a wickedly morose finale about being "an impotent, vasectomised 45-year-old father of two", he plies a sharp, sophisticated look at the post-political correctness cultural landscape.
Lee explains the changing hegemony between Thatcherism and now in little more than a breath; ponders the political affiliation of Helena Bonham Carter; rubbishes a UKIP politician's disingenuous concern for Bulgarians in a reducto ad absurdum rant that takes little-Englander worries all the way back through the HUgenouts and the Anglo-Saxons to the Big Bang. Masterful.
He toys, he teases, he mocks he plays. And if you can't make it out to a theatre to be spoken down to in person, the good news is that, on this evidence, that next television series is going to be a treat.
Stewart Lee
2013-09-23T18:14:04+01:00
Stewart Lee is one of comedy's big success stories. No, he's not filling the arenas like McIntyre, Bishop or Flanagan, and his BBC Two stand-up series is aimed at a niche audience: those of us who are happy to hang on as he works through his carefully convoluted and playfully abrasive ideas, basting his dry routines with reminders that they are routines, that comedy is a contrivance. Yet in standing his ground and finding his crowd over the nine years since his breakthrough stand-up set - his first after co-creating Jerry Springer: The Opera, which followed his years in a double act with Richard Herring - he has made himself the 21st -century's poster boy for the art form formerly known as alternative comedy. It runs in the family; his wife, Bridget Christie, has just won the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards. And her old man's new show, Much A-Stew About Nothing, is his funniest and most focused for a while. That's partly because, as he keeps reminding us, the evening's three half-hour routines are destined for his third television series next year. He makes it clear that this show will be a fragmented, no-frills show - "Anyway, that's the end," is his final line - after noting that this, the second date to go on sale at this 1,700 seater is not quite full. "You're the people that applied late for tickets...I'm glad you came, but you're not really my crowd." Ah, irony. We all like to think we can handle it. Only a few of us can do so without it farting in our faces. Lee is an irony grandmaster. He has made sure to write plenty of cherishable lines. He's also sidelined the obsession with analysing his position in the market placethat was making his act eat it's...
POSH comic Stewart Lee stunned fans by confessing: “I wish Richard Hammond was dead.”
Lee, who went to the same school as “The Hamster”, claimed the Top Gear star should have been “decapitated” in his crash three years ago.
And the 41-year-old comedian, star of BBC2 show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, said Hammond, 39, deserved to die as he and his Top Gear pals were “bullies”.
He made his “sick joke” during a 20-minute on-stage verbal attack on the pint-sized TV star.
Lee, who was two years ahead of Hammond at the £9,400-a-year Solihull School, shocked his live audience with his bizarre comments.
Hammond suffered brain injuries in the smash. His jet-propelled Vampire dragster flipped and crashed at about 280mph during a land speed record attempt at a Yorkshire airfield.
He defied the odds to make a speedy recovery and attracted record ratings of almost 10million fans for his return to the BBC show.
But Lee had no sympathy for Hammond as he took to the stage during his show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One, at the Edinburgh Festival.
During his rant, he said: “I wish he had died in that crash and that he had been decapitated and that his head had rolled off in front of his wife and that a jagged piece of metal debris from the car had got stuck in his eye and blinded him. And then his head had rolled on a few more yards into a pool of boiling oil and retained just enough neural capacity for him to be able to think ‘ooh, this is bit hot’ before the whole thing exploded into tiny pieces.”
Later, he told the packed crowd: “Of course it’s a joke, but coincidentally, it’s what I believe.”
Oxford graduate Lee has often blasted Top Gear during his BBC2 show.
He says Hammond and his colleagues Jeremy Clarkson, 49, and James May, 46, are “bullies”.
One member of the Festival audience said: “He certainly didn’t pull any punches.” Another added: “They must have some form of history.”
Hammond did not wish to comment last night but privately he believed the comments were unnecessary and in “bad taste”.
Lee, who co-wrote the controversial musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, said last night: “I don’t want to talk about it.
“They do jokes on Top Gear don’t they? Treat it as a joke.”
Clarkson has Top Gear chiefs pack the front of the studio crowd with pretty babes and hide all the ugly blokes, he told a session at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
Stewart Lee
2009-08-31T15:21:14+01:00
POSH comic Stewart Lee stunned fans by confessing: “I wish Richard Hammond was dead.” Lee, who went to the same school as “The Hamster”, claimed the Top Gear star should have been “decapitated” in his crash three years ago. And the 41-year-old comedian, star of BBC2 show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, said Hammond, 39, deserved to die as he and his Top Gear pals were “bullies”. He made his “sick joke” during a 20-minute on-stage verbal attack on the pint-sized TV star. Lee, who was two years ahead of Hammond at the £9,400-a-year Solihull School, shocked his live audience with his bizarre comments. Hammond suffered brain injuries in the smash. His jet-propelled Vampire dragster flipped and crashed at about 280mph during a land speed record attempt at a Yorkshire airfield. He defied the odds to make a speedy recovery and attracted record ratings of almost 10million fans for his return to the BBC show. But Lee had no sympathy for Hammond as he took to the stage during his show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One, at the Edinburgh Festival. During his rant, he said: “I wish he had died in that crash and that he had been decapitated and that his head had rolled off in front of his wife and that a jagged piece of metal debris from the car had got stuck in his eye and blinded him. And then his head had rolled on a few more yards into a pool of boiling oil and retained just enough neural capacity for him to be able to think ‘ooh, this is bit hot’ before the whole thing exploded into tiny pieces.” Later, he told the packed crowd: “Of course it’s a joke, but coincidentally, it’s what I believe.” Oxford graduate Lee has often...
Poor Stewart Lee. Despite BBC Two's best efforts to conceal the second series of his stand-up show, he finds himself more popular than ever, attracting audiences big enough to sustain a residency in London's Leicester Square Theatre from now until the middle of February.
But such success does not sit easy on Lee's weary shoulders, and it gives rise to a new catchphrase. 'It's not aimed at you,' he repeatedly tells the Jimmy Carr fans finding their way into his audience, desperately trying to deter all but his hardcore demographic.
It's all part of the way Lee's fractious, intransigent elitism has become as much of an in-joke as his curmudgeonly harrumphs at other comedians - a self-awareness that softens his 'passive-aggressive monotony' without compromising it.
Yet for all his avowed desire to return to the days when he played to a devout cabal of middle-aged liberals, the first section of Carpet Remnant World is perhaps some of his most accessible, as he offers his cantankerous take on big news stories such as the assassination of Bin Laden - even including a few actual jokes in the mix. But Lee's take on topical comedy is nonetheless more complex than the material that makes it on to Mock The Week - as his distinctive, tongue-in-cheek, version of Frankie Boyle's gag about the Queen's ancient vagina proves.
Nor can he do observational comedy with quite the conviction of a Michael McIntyre. He tries with limited success - hence the material about shops with 'world' in their name - but eventually throws his hands up in defeat, acknowledging this is a fragmented, out-of-touch show. His life now involves only driving to gigs and looking after his four-year-old son.
In sarcastic commentary on fellow middle-aged comics, he has to concede that his viewpoint has drastically narrowed as the range of influences and experience shrinks to the mundanely domestic. After all, what comic could possibly find enough mileage in Scooby Doo And The Pirate Zombie Jungle Island to fill an extended routine?
Well, Lee could obviously. A gloriously self-referential rant about the ghost-hunting teenagers remains awkwardly funny while providing a sharp satire on the irrelevance of most comedy. It fits in with the ethos of the show in exposing the tricks of the modern stand-up trade, such as tear-jerking through lines or the structural devices to make disparate routines seems like they are true to a theme.
The next disparate routine here is a convincing argument about how the likes of Twitter have reduced us to a surveillance society, with his every move being noted and commented upon. It leads to a catalogue of viciously vitriolic abuse Lee has sustained by online trolls wishing him harm. He's not the first comedian to have made capital from his critics, but it is very effective, set to a inappropriately relaxing jazz soundtrack.
Maybe parenthood has softened him a little, as Carpet Remnant World is less intense and less challenging than some of his more powerful shows - and less reliant on the repetition and pregnant pauses, too. But it's no less funny, nor less thoughtful, for it - appealing both to both the comedy anoraks who are Lee's core audience and, whisper it quietly, new converts. If all goes horribly wrong, this could make his fan base expand again.
Stewart Lee
2011-11-24T12:58:37+00:00
Poor Stewart Lee. Despite BBC Two's best efforts to conceal the second series of his stand-up show, he finds himself more popular than ever, attracting audiences big enough to sustain a residency in London's Leicester Square Theatre from now until the middle of February. But such success does not sit easy on Lee's weary shoulders, and it gives rise to a new catchphrase. 'It's not aimed at you,' he repeatedly tells the Jimmy Carr fans finding their way into his audience, desperately trying to deter all but his hardcore demographic. It's all part of the way Lee's fractious, intransigent elitism has become as much of an in-joke as his curmudgeonly harrumphs at other comedians - a self-awareness that softens his 'passive-aggressive monotony' without compromising it. Yet for all his avowed desire to return to the days when he played to a devout cabal of middle-aged liberals, the first section of Carpet Remnant World is perhaps some of his most accessible, as he offers his cantankerous take on big news stories such as the assassination of Bin Laden - even including a few actual jokes in the mix. But Lee's take on topical comedy is nonetheless more complex than the material that makes it on to Mock The Week - as his distinctive, tongue-in-cheek, version of Frankie Boyle's gag about the Queen's ancient vagina proves. Nor can he do observational comedy with quite the conviction of a Michael McIntyre. He tries with limited success - hence the material about shops with 'world' in their name - but eventually throws his hands up in defeat, acknowledging this is a fragmented, out-of-touch show. His life now involves only driving to gigs and looking after his four-year-old son. In sarcastic commentary on fellow middle-aged comics, he has to concede that his viewpoint has drastically...
"I read a book about ten years ago by Howard Jacobson called 'Seriously Funny'. It was a massive historical overview of comedy, but what really caught my imagination were these two paragraphs about Native American Clowns.
Six years ago I'd come to the American southwest to research the area and find out more about the clowning tradition of the Hopi, but no-one would talk to me. I wrote to the Hopi Culture Centre and
to all these different academics but no-one would tell me anything about the clowning. I think the problem was I didn't realise it was regarded as a spiritual religious kind of thing.
They haven't allowed anyone to document it, but it really caught my imagination and I wanted to find out as much as I could.
As I went on an organised walk with an old woman around the Hopi village with some Swedish tourists, they asked the woman something about a rock we passed-- and I knew it was a sacred rock - but she just pretended not to hear them and look the other way. I understood this immediately, as they obviously thought that asking this was intrusive about their beliefs.
I now realise that they felt the same way about comedy and that's why no-one would tell me anything. On my first trip, I also had not realised how lucky we are that it still survives in any way and part of why it survives in a reasonably pure form is because they kept us out. It's for them and not for us and, yes, we're invited to be onlookers but it's not up to us to take it like we do with so many things from other cultures and use it for our own ends.
I partly ended up going back there for a Radio 4 documentary series as a spectator of the yearly St Geronimo festival because it was the Hopi that I'd mainly read about. But they were all very secretive about the clowning stuff. This festival at Taos, which takes place every year in September, was where you could go and see the stuff first-hand, as long as you didn't take any recording equipment of any sort in.
I'd got to do this documentary, 'White Face Dark Heart', after meeting the producer, Alison Vernon-Smith, through a documentary she had made about the late comedian, Malcolm Hardee. I mentioned this whole thing to her and she became very excited by the idea. She then somehow managed to get Radio 4 to fund a trip for us to go and see the pueblo clown ritual even though they knew we were not going to be allowed to record it. It was kind of weird radio, where at the end of the day I ran outside into the car, hid and dictated all my immediate thoughts and memories into the recorder.
I liked the notion of making a documentary about a thing that you had no material to show of. I could only describe it. The really great thing about that was you realised how much - when touring your acts - that there's people with camera phones, and here you were forced for the six hours you were there in Taos Pueblo to appreciate it here and now. It reminded you of what theatre is. What's theatre and what's life performance? It's about something that exists in the moment and isn't necessarily there to be documented.
I think that with the kind of existence of so much broadcast media and great storage facilities, we kind of forget that there is something amazing about the moment that will never come back and can only be written about or remembered in your memory. That was really great and I think comedy and improvised music are the best kind of examples of that; things that are very hard to capture – you have to be there.
On the Friday night of this St Geronimo's festival, there's a big service in the church on the Taos reservation, which we didn't go to because you're not really invited. I had been inside little white church before, though, full of Catholic icons and you can kind of see why Catholicism almost did well in those cultures, with the very pagan images with the saints and all the colours surrounded.
The next day there's obviously what is the ancient, traditional ceremony where there's six hours of clowning. You'd be walking around and there's like these eight to ten guys all turning up naked with stripes on them. They stood around me shouting and then they got my producer's drink and threw it on the floor.
Everyone was trying to look to the floor and not look at them, which in itself is hilarious. They look amazing but you're worried that if you look at them, they're going to get you. Once you've made eye contact, you're fucked.
During the course of the celebrations, the clowns would come up and snatch the kids off the parents - who would let them go - and these children were screaming, naturally terrified that these clowns were taking them, putting them in the water and desperately escaping back to their parents. There was none of this kind of stupid stuff about, "Ooh will they be traumatised?" Yeah, probably! I expect it's good in some way - I don't know how - but it was really funny seeing children made upset!
The ceremony itself sees the clowns climb up a pole and they have to get this dead sheep off the top of it, but part of that involved climbing this roof – a big wooden structure - that had three life-size crucifixes made out of branches and covered in leaves.
At the end of the first lot of clowning, the clowns dismantled these giant crosses and threw all the branches at everyone, with these people then running off with them.
I don't know what it all meant; whether Saturday was maybe a day where the clowns made fun of Friday's ceremony. But you can't necessarily assume that the Native American Clowns were against religion.
One of the things that really annoyed the white settlers and the Catholic Church were these clowns because they thought it was all a bit dangerous, scatological, rude and disrespectful. So it was kind of driven underground and the only photographs there are of this sort of thing are from the early part of the last century.
So what seems to happen that's really interesting for the society is that you have this serious ritual but alongside of it, or part of it, the clowns are there making fun of it, so it is sort of like a self-satirising society.
It's like the clowns seem to relieve you and relieve the other members of the society of the responsibility of misbehaving or upsetting the order by doing it themselves.
Likewise, what I saw of the clown behaviour, although funny, there was obviously a lot that was going on about social control, or lancing the boil of imminent problems.
An old woman I was talking to in a book shop about it said it was the best piece of theatre in the south west. I think she was vastly underestimating it; it was the best piece of theatre.. actually, probably the best thing I have ever seen.
I used research about the Hopi for my first novel, The Perfect Fool, but I wouldn't have written that book now having been to Taos and had some contact with them. I feel it was really naive and thoughtless of me to use the aspects of Hopi clowning culture in the novel in the way that I did. I would still have done something similar but I would make it totally fictionalised rather than have bits of true stuff.
I think the problem with the book was that some of it was accurate and the rest of it they're there to try and speculate what those people would be thinking about or what they were doing. I don't think you can really know and in retrospect it seems rather presumptuous stomping into a whole load of religious symbolism without understanding it.
Now I know a little more about it, I regret it. There was a point where I was kind of 60 per cent towards funding a film version of it and I'm really glad it never happened because I think it would have been really crass to do it as it stood. I'd of really had to change it all and I didn't realise that at the time.
It was really hard to find out about and I now totally understand why that is and it's partly because the people there are used to be patronised and stereotyped. What I found was that if you began a conversation about what was going on, people were initially extremely hostile. After 30 seconds they would realise that I wasn't a twat and they would be alright, but it's kind of hard to get your head around.
You're watching a load of clowns running around and pushing people over and jumping in rivers, but you're also watching something that's of spiritual importance to people. It's a bit like if I were to be standing in St Peter's in Rome where all the stuff was happening, to be turning to Catholics and going, "What's going on now? What is it?" and then applauding the communion.
A few days later on the way back from Taos Pueblo I met Steve Coogan in L.A., who I used to write for 15-20 years ago and he was talking to me about how he was trying to get various projects going and how this thing had been knocked back or something else had been picked up and I just thought, "You need to go to this thing on the 30th September every year and it will make you feel like the best thing you could possibly do as a comedian or clown."
As comedians, we worry about 'Aw, they wouldn't give us a place at this gig' or 'Aw, they turned my idea for a radio sitcom down' and like here was a whole culture of comedians that were effectively trying to be stamped out for being too weird, too mad and too disturbing to the status quo. I think it's worth remembering what a privileged position it is to be paid in any capacity - or even just allowed - to behave wrongly and to say the wrong things.
About the time I was writing that book, I was in the process of giving up and I think partly why I gave up actually was reading about the Hopi clowns and about what comedy could be. At the risk of sounding self-aggrandising, I think some of that was brought to bear on Richard Thomas whose Jerry Springer the Opera, in the National Theatre at least, did have a feeling of being like a day of misrule; like the loonies had somehow got into the theatre and all these differently sized, different kinds of people were doing really mad stuff and saying wrong things.
What I understood about pueblo clowning and this kind of karnival (with a capital k) influenced my work in the National Theatre where I managed to get these extensions built to the stage that kind of came out round about half the audience. People would feel engaged and like they were in the middle of it.
Really early on when I was work shopping, I met this Italian Clown, Marcello Magnini, and he told me that I should think of Jerry Spring the Opera – when I came to direct it – as being like a circus in Rome. Circus Maximus-esque with all the guests in the middle and all the people all the way around it. That was a really good start, but I think thinking about the clowns as well made me try getting the action off the stage and fill it all up rather than just this circular space.
Partly why I gave up stand-up amongst other things for four years was because I felt, when reading about pueblo clowns, that there was sort of something there that was really vital. It wasn't cynical. I felt all the stand-up I did in the 90s was tending to be sneering about things and when I came back to it, I wondered if there was a way that I could complain about things in a more energetic fashion and perhaps leave people with a broadly positive feeling somehow. I think again that was partly about reading all this stuff and it's difficult to say how it all influences you but just that feeling that comedy could be a good thing, rather than just bitter.
I'm always surprised when I get described now as cynical. I think cynicism now is very, very close to sort of defeated romanticism. I think it's always more interesting to watch a romantic than a cynic.
I worry a lot about things and I worry about what's the point of being a comedian and what's it for. I came away from it all with much more of an idea. It has already started informing the things I do.
I'm not a religious person but obviously everyone has something that they attach significance to, that either becomes the way you understand things or the systems that you work out to process your feelings.
For the last decade I've had at the back of my mind this romanticised idea of this pure essence of comedy.
In a way that's a patronising image to impose on native people, like saying, "We're so corrupted. If only we could go back to the source." It's sort of racist, but actually it wasn't as simple as that. It was much more complicated because lots of what they were doing was about their relationship with the colonisation.
I think there's something very romantic about pueblo clowns and they seem to believe that turning things around is a sort of end in itself.
To make beautiful people ugly and at the same time also romanticise and praise the people who are the outcasts.
This way of making fun of people that everyone liked and being kind to people that everyone was uncomfortable about was reversing the order of everything. This is what the essence of comedy is - to overturn the rules.
It was an ambition fulfilled, but I now want everyone I know to go. I really want to go back with my wife and my kid - when it's due in April. I want my son or daughter to be picked up by a terrifying, large clown and have them screaming and crying. My kid will be about five months old then, so just about the right age to have them thrown in a river by a clown.
I feel like its been a real revelation. The great thing about that was everything I'd read about the festival had led me to believe it would just simply be as described, and I was very worried about fully knowing what to expect and being disappointed.
Just the experience, though, of being there in the moment was superb."
Stewart Lee
2007-01-01T00:19:55+00:00
"I read a book about ten years ago by Howard Jacobson called 'Seriously Funny'. It was a massive historical overview of comedy, but what really caught my imagination were these two paragraphs about Native American Clowns. Six years ago I'd come to the American southwest to research the area and find out more about the clowning tradition of the Hopi, but no-one would talk to me. I wrote to the Hopi Culture Centre and to all these different academics but no-one would tell me anything about the clowning. I think the problem was I didn't realise it was regarded as a spiritual religious kind of thing. They haven't allowed anyone to document it, but it really caught my imagination and I wanted to find out as much as I could. As I went on an organised walk with an old woman around the Hopi village with some Swedish tourists, they asked the woman something about a rock we passed-- and I knew it was a sacred rock - but she just pretended not to hear them and look the other way. I understood this immediately, as they obviously thought that asking this was intrusive about their beliefs. I now realise that they felt the same way about comedy and that's why no-one would tell me anything. On my first trip, I also had not realised how lucky we are that it still survives in any way and part of why it survives in a reasonably pure form is because they kept us out. It's for them and not for us and, yes, we're invited to be onlookers but it's not up to us to take it like we do with so many things from other cultures and use it for our own ends. I partly ended up going back there...
BOOKS:
David Rees' How To Sharpen Pencils,
Penguin's new edition of Arthur Machen's White People,
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe,
a deliberately unreliable history of obscure '90s comedy called You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham,
Julian Cope's Copendium,
Sean Howe's Marvel Comics The Untold Story.
TV:
Endeavor (Young Morse) on ITV.
BBC's Sherlock Holmes,
Call The Midwife,
Hollow Crown,
She Wolves,
Vikings,
Limmy's Show,
and Upstairs Downstairs.
E4's Cardinal Burns,
C4's Grayson Perry's All In The Best Possible Taste,
Sky's Touch of Cloth.
LIVE MUSIC:
The Fall at Islington Town Hall,
The Ex at Café Oto,
Howe Gelb and KT Tunstall together and unannounced in a Stoke Newington cafe,
Han Bennink solo at Bishopsgate Festival,
Jane Bom Bane's harmonium and bespoke hats mash up on the Edinburgh Free Fringe,
Fushitsusha at St John's Church Hackney.
RECORDS :
Matthew Bourne - Montauk Variations,
Earth - Angels of Darkness Demons of Light II,
Bill Fay - Life Is People,
Giant Giant Sand - Tucson,
Belbury Poly - The Belbury Tales,
The Bohman Brothers - Back On The Streets,
The Woodbine & Ivy Band - s/t,
Rich Hopkins & Luminarios - Buried Treasures,
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill.
THEATRE :
Dublin Gate's Watt in the Edinburgh International Festival,
Teatr Biuro Podró?y's satirical stiltwalking sci-fi space rock opera Planet Lem,
Jeff Achtem's Beefheartian kids' puppet show Swamp Juice.
Sunday Times End Of Year Round-up 2012
1) Matthew Bourne - Montauk Variations (Leaf)
Alone at the piano, Bourne's uncharacteristically meditative improvisations used cautiously melodic figures to trace penumbral shadows of memory and regret. Cecil Taylor slips Erik Satie something heavy on the way back from the gents.
2) Earth - Angels Of Darkness, Demons of Light II (Southern Lord) Earth's rustically tinged folk metal, scratched out of iron at impossible volumes and immobile tempos by the infernal method, attained a new level of dumbstruck, devotional awe.
3) Bill Fay - Life Is People (Dead Oceans) The sainted singer-songwriter descended from the top of his North London pole to deliver his first album proper for forty years, a gravitationally weighty set of holy-minimalist bar room ballads.
4) Giant Giant Sand - Tucson (Fire) The durable Arizona outfit Giant Sand expanded in size to assimilate everything they've dabbled with, from cocktail crooning to ambient tex-mex grunge, re-imagining Tucson as a Lynch-Lurman musical.
5) Belbury Poly - The Belbury Tales (Ghost Box) Belbury Poly sound like dispirited psychedelic era survivors, attempting to subvert the soundtrack demands of the seventies television executives now employing them, whilst eating ploughman's lunches.
6) The Bohman Brothers - Back On The Streets (Peripheral Conserve) This year the kranky spoken word artists enjoyed a silent cameo as pointing men in the art house hit Berberian Sound Studio. But these apparently random recitations of everyday verbal detritus threatened to reorder our very reality.
7) The Woodbine & Ivy Band - s/t (Folk Police) Manchester indie types played British folk standards, and a Wicker Man song, late '60s Californian style, creating a historically implausible but highly satisfying hybrid.
8) Rich Hopkins & Luminarios - Buried Treasure (Blue Rose) A textbook liberal who rocks like a redneck, Hopkins 28th album feeds small town heartaches, border country crises, and personal anxieties through the filters of Detroit proto-punk, blue collar country, and Crazy Horse-style feedback jams.
9) Witch - We Intend To Cause Havoc! (Now Again) Who even knew '70s Zambia had its own indigenous hard rock, hairy funk, garage punk band, let alone that they'd left a legacy of four cd's worth of invigoratingly unvarnished stash.
10)The Azusa Plane - Where The Sands Turn To Gold (Rocket Girl) This vast document compiled the complete works of the late Jason Demilio, who imagined My Bloody Valentine or The Velvet Underground without the pop scaffolding, and all that abstract sonic dressing dragged center-stage, where it could carry whatever emotional weight you cared to place upon it.
Wire magazine 2012 End Of Year Round Up
TV
Morse Year Zero in ITV's Endeavor.
BBC's Sherlock Holmes, Call The Midwife, Hollow Crown, She Wolves, Vikings, and Upstairs Downstairs.
E4's Cardinal Burns,
C4's Grayson Perry's All In The Best Possible Taste,
Sky's Touch of Cloth;
Books
David Rees' How To Sharpen Pencils is the book of the century so far,
Penguin's new edition of Arthur Machen's White People,
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe,
You Are Nothing which was a deliberately unreliable history of obscure '90s comedy by Robert Wringham,
Julian Cope's Copendium,
Sean Howe's Marvel Comics The Untold Story;
Film
Troll Hunter,
The Artist,
Avengers Assemble,
Looper,
and Andrew Kotting's comically and calmly meditative Swandown, which I was in for 5 minutes;
Gigs
Giant Sand's Howe Gelb & pop's K T Tunstall together and unannounced in a Stoke Newington cafe,
Han Bennink solo at Bishopsgate Festival,
Jane Bom Bane's harmonium and bespoke hats mash up on the Edinburgh Free Fringe,
Kunt & The Gang's scatological Depeche Mode grooves on the Free Fringe,
The Caesareans acoustic at a birthday party, Fushitsusha transcending time and space at St John's Church Hackney,
Patti Smith shaming everyone in Bethnal Green;
Theatre/comedy
Dublin Gate's Watt in the Edinburgh International Festival,
Teatr Biuro Podró?y's satirical stiltwalking sci-fi space rock opera Planet Lem,
Jeff Achtem's Beefheartian kids' puppet show Swamp Juice.
Bad thing - Paddy Power desecrating the Uffington White Horse.
Good thing - Obama, relatively speaking.
Stewart Lee
2012-12-31T21:04:49+00:00
BOOKS: David Rees' How To Sharpen Pencils, Penguin's new edition of Arthur Machen's White People, Savage Continent by Keith Lowe, a deliberately unreliable history of obscure '90s comedy called You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham, Julian Cope's Copendium, Sean Howe's Marvel Comics The Untold Story. TV: Endeavor (Young Morse) on ITV. BBC's Sherlock Holmes, Call The Midwife, Hollow Crown, She Wolves, Vikings, Limmy's Show, and Upstairs Downstairs. E4's Cardinal Burns, C4's Grayson Perry's All In The Best Possible Taste, Sky's Touch of Cloth. LIVE MUSIC: The Fall at Islington Town Hall, The Ex at Café Oto, Howe Gelb and KT Tunstall together and unannounced in a Stoke Newington cafe, Han Bennink solo at Bishopsgate Festival, Jane Bom Bane's harmonium and bespoke hats mash up on the Edinburgh Free Fringe, Fushitsusha at St John's Church Hackney. RECORDS : Matthew Bourne - Montauk Variations, Earth - Angels of Darkness Demons of Light II, Bill Fay - Life Is People, Giant Giant Sand - Tucson, Belbury Poly - The Belbury Tales, The Bohman Brothers - Back On The Streets, The Woodbine & Ivy Band - s/t, Rich Hopkins & Luminarios - Buried Treasures, Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill. THEATRE : Dublin Gate's Watt in the Edinburgh International Festival, Teatr Biuro Podró?y's satirical stiltwalking sci-fi space rock opera Planet Lem, Jeff Achtem's Beefheartian kids' puppet show Swamp Juice. Sunday Times End Of Year Round-up 2012 1) Matthew Bourne - Montauk Variations (Leaf) Alone at the piano, Bourne's uncharacteristically meditative improvisations used cautiously melodic figures to trace penumbral shadows of memory and regret. Cecil Taylor slips Erik Satie something heavy on the way back from the gents. 2) Earth - Angels Of Darkness, Demons of Light II (Southern Lord) Earth's rustically tinged folk metal, scratched out of iron at impossible volumes...
The current sensation at the Battersea Arts Center in London delves into the themes of any number of beloved operas: infidelity and misdirected love, rage and untimely death. An aging diva, cheated by life, sings a heart-rending aria expressing her profound weariness with failure: ''I've had enough of dying/I just want to dance.'' But the gavotte is nowhere in this diva's thoughts -- her dream is to become a professional lap dancer, working the pole in some squalid dive. Such is the seamy lyricism of ''Jerry Springer: The Opera.''
The opera, which is still unfinished, began as an even rougher one-act last summer, and is very much in keeping with the ''trash TV'' spirit of Springer's show. But it doesn't stop at a simple musical rendition of the syndicated program's sideshow ethos. It is in equal parts satirically bigoted, transcendentally melodic, philosophical and unremittingly profane, a musical wilderness of amorality that somehow manages to come off as life-affirming and peculiarly epic.
The often-staid realm of the London stage has gone wild for ''Springer.'' Although it has yet to reach the phase where it's open to critical review, it has already drawn a torrent of adoring press, even from the grayest corners of established opera criticism. The London Daily Telegraph, for example, hails its score as ''wonderfully inventive'' and calls the production ''revoltingly funny.''
Stage luminaries of every stripe, from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Nicholas Hytner, have swarmed to see the thing. Hytner, who will take the reins as director of the Royal National Theater next year and directed the new Broadway musical ''The Sweet Smell of Success,'' can't get enough of it. ''What I love is its violent marriage of high and low culture,'' he says. ''To hear the kind of vulgar chaos of 'Jerry Springer' submitted to the disciplines of classical opera, weirdly enough, results in something more than the sum of those two halves.''
Even Harold Prince has taken notice. Last year, upon reading about it, he wrote to the opera's creators asking to see the libretto; by the time Prince heard back from the Battersea staff, he'd read in the newspapers that he was expressing interest in the production. ''I suppose I am,'' he now says. ''It's so nice to hear of a modern opera that isn't -- to put it mildly -- pompous.''
It certainly is not that. Richard Thomas, 37, who composed the music and wrote the libretto with the English comedian Stewart Lee, 33, has created a pell-mell score that bangs together musical fragments in unrelated keys and unrelated tempos -- though the result, somehow, feels all of a piece. The work contains traces of many of Thomas's formative influences: Bach, Miles Davis, Harrison Birtwhistle, Arvo Part, Burt Bacharach, the Sex Pistols, Mozart and even the French composer Olivier Messiaen's blend of religious harmonics and bird song. Stewart Lee's contribution, besides a shared comic sensibility with Thomas, is a surprising dose of John Milton, William Blake and Samuel Beckett.
''I don't really view musical styles as styles -- just as textures,'' Thomas says. ''You've got your sonic canvas, and you've got all these amazing colors. And I like to paint bright.''
Of course, operas based on topical subjects have become a controversial fixture of the form in recent years. You need hardly look further than John Adams's 1987 ''Nixon in China'' or his 1991 epic based on the Achille Lauro hijacking, ''The Death of Klinghoffer.'' There have been renditions of the lives of Harvey Milk and Malcolm X; in 1992 came ''Tania,'' a work by Anthony Davis that told the story of Patty Hearst's kidnapping, and meticulously jumbled reality by including a bluesy love duet between Betty Ford and Fidel Castro.
Whereas these so-called CNN Operas sought to create melodramatic contexts for high-profile news stories, ''Springer'' burrows in quite the opposite direction -- into the anything-but-newsworthy lives of dispossessed souls whose ambition is to confess their most lurid proclivities and throw chairs at one another on TV. It's scarcely an innovation akin to the once-shocking realism of Mascagni's ''Cavalleria Rusticana,'' but ''Springer'' offers a similar corrective. Just as tragedy once abandoned its Aristotelian marriage to the downfall of nobles, so here does opera turn away from their modern-day equivalents: news celebrities, even the hapless Leon Klinghoffers of the world. CNN Operas elevate the lives of characters who loom large in the televisual reality of the public imagination, while ''Springer'' elevates those who loom small. And the surrealistic clash of genres works brilliantly. In fact, it makes you think not only that modern opera can be relevant: it can actually be fun.
The thing begins, as it would, with a surrogate ''audience'' of six singers, a cadre of sleazily dressed fans who act as a chorus. One woman, richly tattooed, is decked out in fishnet stockings and plenty of leather; another ''crowd member'' is a nebbishy man wearing a neck brace, reason unknown, with ''Jerry'' embroidered on it in red.
As darkness descends, a beatific chant --"Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!'' -- begins, very much in the reverent structure of a Mozart requiem. Then the chorus gives an idea of what it has come to see: ''My mum used to be my dad/I was jilted by a lesbian dwarf.'' They call out for the ''cocaine abusers with no noses'' and an array of more obscenely labeled types. In full-throated ecstasy, they cry, ''Bring on the losers!'' This command heralds the arrival of Jerry himself, ever abiding the madness over which he presides. Unlike his guests, Jerry does not sing; he must act as the solid ground upon which animals tear one another's flesh.
The Damage Parade hobbles by at a brisk pace. We hear the dishy revelation that Kylie, Tremont's fiancee, is actually a man. Bisexuals are unmasked and belt out the standard ''talk to the hand'' retort. After a tenor coprophiliac exposes his diaper fixation, a 40-ish woman called Baby Jane takes center stage. Clad in fetishistic little-girl attire, she stops the show with a starry-eyed aria about daytime-TV fame. With the hopeless elation of a Kurt Weill heroine, she sings: ''This is my Jerry Springer moment/I don't want this moment to die/So dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians/I don't want this moment to die.''
Dysfunctions heap upon the stage until it becomes an emotional Gettysburg. But any notion that the opera offers a mere pageant of American freaks is shattered -- for, in the atonal chaos that ends Act 1, Jerry Springer is gunned down.
And so, a Don Giovanni without the panache, Jerry descends into hell, where he is called upon to referee a cosmological skirmish that's every bit as histrionic as the brawls on his show. Satan, it seems, is still bitter at being cast out of Paradise. As Jerry looks on in bewilderment, the Devil gets into a verbal scuffle with none other than Jesus Christ. (Their complex four-minute duet climaxes with Jesus singing the following dismissal: ''Taaaaalk to the stigmata!'')
After the kind of baroque plot twists that always figure into opera, a moment of truth arrives. Jerry is given a chance to plead for his soul. He chokes out a botched series of ''Final Thoughts'' -- the homilies that end his show -- but the gambit fails miserably. Disappointed glissandi emanate from the tormented souls who surround him. Then Jerry does something that, in the midst of this freewheeling celebration of vulgarity, is so unexpected that it's hilarious: he evokes William Blake. ''Without contraries is no progression,'' he begins haltingly. ''Energy is pure delight.'' He ends with a roar: ''And all that lives is holy!''
Miraculously, this does the trick. Jerry high-fives his fellow damned. (Metaphysical it may be, but this is Springer.) He is suddenly transported back to the moment of his shooting, where he lies cradled in the arms of Steve, the show's stony-faced security man, and dies. Steve brushes a tear from his cheek, for Jerry's all-seeing, all-abiding eye has closed -- and now all that remains is bleakness and censure and Ricki Lake.
"Jerry Springer: The Opera'' might never have come into being without the efforts of Tom Morris, the artistic director who has revitalized the Battersea Arts Center since taking over in 1995. Morris, whose boyish face never quite matches his authoritative gestures, is obsessed with the notion that theater in its current state is creaking to a halt and has become almost medicinal -- a cultural obligation that people submit to without any hope of edification, far less of actual enjoyment. And in spreading the pestilence of posh tedium, opera has been the worst offender.
''It's absurd to think of opera as grand or stodgy,'' Morris says. ''If you'd have characterized it that way to Mozart or Gluck, they'd have laughed you off the premises. Opera evolved as a crude and accessible form. The audience would be eating dinner or having sex while watching it! So the idea now that one should sit in a grim-faced state to impress the president of his company and suffer through, well, that's just madness.''
Under Morris's tenure, the B.A.C., cached in the backwater of Lavender Hill in South London, has become one of the bright spots of the city's fringe theater. Morris is known for putting on ''Scratch Nights,'' evenings filled with 10-minute bits of low-tech cabaret in which artists present not shows but sketchy ideas for shows -- then interrogate audiences about how to arrive at what he calls ''the suitable theatrical language for a subject.'' The method produces odd but never dull results. Another recent Richard Thomas piece consisted entirely of an operatic (and profane) sparring match between two sopranos called ''Tourette's Diva.'' One of the few printable ariettas was ''You remind me of chemotherapy.'' All of which did much to further obscure the line between high art and guttersnipe lingo, if there was ever such a line to begin with.
The inception of ''JS:TO,'' as it is locally known, was not as an opera but as a Richard Thomas Scratch presentation called ''How to Write an Opera About Jerry Springer.'' In front of an audience, Thomas sat alone at a piano and puzzled out how such a work might take shape, tossing bottles of cheap lager to anyone who came up with an interesting idea.
Not all of the feedback was gold. ''There wasn't one good specific idea that came out of the beer thing,'' Thomas says equably. ''One guy said we should include a guest that's a goldfish.'' As the work took shape, though, some of the reaction was invaluable. Thomas was especially keen to hear if the audience felt bored at any point. Bridging the distance between opera and the crowd, he believed, was paramount.
Curiously, both Thomas and co-librettist Lee (who is also the new opera's director) have arrived at this moment of wild critical success not via the classical-music circuit but through comedy. The two complement each other much like a cinematic comic duo. Thomas is the refined iconoclast, a Cambridge-educated eclectic who likes to pretend his work is haphazard. Lee, with his affable leer and rogue forelock, is a comedian at first glance and has won many awards for his stand-up work. The two have teamed up not only on the ''Springer'' project but also on English TV shows with titles like ''Attention Scum.''
Thomas's career hasn't always been swathed in silk and adulation. He spent years performing comedy-music acts in mangy British clubs. ''I've come a very weird route to where I am,'' Thomas says. ''I was booed out of more rat holes than you can imagine. In one bit we did, based on Handel's 'Water Music,' we performed on pianos like synchronized swimmers. We had flippers on our feet, a lady drowned, we played the theme from 'Jaws.' So I know the experience of getting shouted offstage, taking that slow humiliating walk up the aisle with flippers, literally being spat on.''
''So 'Springer' is your revenge?'' I ask the duo.
''Actually, 'Stand-up: The Opera' would be the real revenge opera,'' Lee says ecstatically. ''People stealing each other's cocaine backstage, the waitress everyone's shagged. Should we do that?''
''Maybe next summer,'' Thomas says, nodding.
Not surprisingly, the two agree that beautiful rhythm in music is parallel to precise comic timing. They speak lovingly of ''The Simpsons'' and of the perfect deadpan cadence of the American comedian Stephen Wright. ''See, not many people know about both opera and Stephen Wright,'' Thomas says. ''That's part of the problem.''
Richard Thomas knows where theatrical accessibility lives. When he plays the piano for a ''Springer'' performance, he shaves a good 10 minutes off the show. His comedy days have instilled in him a terror of boring the crowd and, betraying the intricate beauty of his own music, he can't resist racing ahead to get to the punch lines.
This whole ''Springer'' phenomenon, as Lee is always pleased to point out, was Thomas's vision. In fact, when Lee was asked to help structure it, he'd only seen one opera in his life, ''Das Rheingold,'' Part 1 of Wagner's ''Ring Cycle.''
''That's why I knew Jerry had to enter hell,'' he says, wryly savoring his ignorance over a slice of gray pizza one gray afternoon. ''From my experience of opera, I assumed someone always had to get dragged down somewhere.''
The original idea for the Scratch performance came to Thomas like a shot. ''I'd get back from jobs late at night and sit watching Jerry on cable,'' he recalls. ''There were always six people screaming at each other with a crowd baying for blood; you couldn't understand what people were saying half the time. It struck me -- that's opera.''
Anyone who sees the production might expect an English composer to demean Jerry Springer, even though the host himself was born in England. He's an easy mark. Americans demean him, and most Americans don't dislike Americans. But not only do Thomas and Lee genuinely like Americans, they revere Jerry. ''There's such a refreshing honesty about him,'' Lee says. ''He's not about that brainwashing, self-help attitude of American culture you see on 'Oprah.' It's so cruel and funny. We think he's really good.''
''I love him!'' adds Thomas, sipping some wine.
''He is deeply amoral,'' Lee says admiringly. ''As in Blake, everything is holy. He gives people a forum whether they're right or wrong. All he wants is to have them treated with human respect.''
Britons are mad for Springer's scabrous, confessional tactics. His show is broadcast on cable most hours of the day and night; he has addressed the Oxford Union and substituted for beloved breakfast-TV hosts, to the country's delight. When Springer's episode titled ''I Married a Horse'' was refused by stateside networks, British TV enlisted all the program's guests and put on a splashy hour of its own on bestiality.
Even in conversation, Lee has a cheery habit of knocking high and low art against each other to see what flies off. ''Milton, Blake said, was of the Devil's party but didn't know it -- for energy without judgment,'' he says. ''Jerry's quite like that. He enjoys expression of individuality, irrespective of morality. I'm not religious, but I wouldn't want people offended by this opera. There actually isn't a hint of blasphemy.''
Thomas nods and adds, ''In the show, Jesus and the Devil do the same job they do in the Bible.''
So the show manages to drag profound metaphysical questions of humanity into the dirt -- or perhaps it elevates Jerry Springer to the level of high philosophy. The distinction has been blurred beyond recognition.
Then again, so have a lot of other distinctions: those between ''operas'' and ''musicals,'' for instance. This isn't an issue confined to the London fringe. Nicholas Hytner, for one, seems content with the muddle. ''In London especially,'' he says, ''boundaries of form seem to be crumbling. Those between musical theater, spoken theater, dance, opera. And the established operas, like the English National Opera, are becoming more and more alert to that. What music 'should' sound like is much more an open question than it was 20 years ago. The retreat into intellectual atonality was probably a necessary thing, and music seems to be coming out the other side -- though no one yet knows what the other side actually is.''
The Springer work doesn't necessarily offer a grand solution in its precise approach, but it is emblematic of the form's search for ways to marry high art and pop structure. In fact, Thomas and Lee aren't the only ones who see operatic potential in trash TV. The American composer Mikel Rouse has created his own ''talk-show opera'' called ''Dennis Cleveland,'' which will be performed as part of Lincoln Center's New Visions series in May. Though Rouse watched the Ricki Lake and Gordon Elliott shows to study their seething emotional terrain, it's a far chillier work than ''Springer.'' His ''Cleveland'' is cryptic and, despite the score's rock rhythms, arcane. Where ''Springer'' offers broad comedy, Rouse's text is oracular: ''This time the plastic/That connects you to the world/Will be borrowing your image.'' By virtue of its accessibility, ''Springer'' is certain to pull a more diverse audience.
And accessibility, of course, is Richard Thomas's meat and drink. He hopes that composers will simply re-examine what subjects are available to them, and Nicholas Hytner agrees. ''Richard is a serious composer engaging the underbelly,'' he says, ''not on behalf of those who come to the opera to be punished by tedium. The point is that classical disciplines can be applied to all kinds of accessible forms. And composers will be invigorated by contact with a nonopera audience.''
Hytner, having now seen ''Springer'' at two stages of its gestation, has little doubt that the work will find its way into a much larger venue -- though that will most likely have already occurred, quite possibly in the West End, by the time he takes over the National in April 2003. Having missed his shot at ''Springer,'' he wants to commission Thomas to compose a new opera.
In the meantime, Thomas and Lee are still focused on actually finishing the ''Springer'' opera. One very real question is whether a big-venue production (complete with a faithful replica of the TV show's set, which would make the work even more mind-bending) might draw a lawsuit -- not from Jerry Springer himself but from Studios USA, which owns all the rights. The opera's creators are heartened that they've yet to hear any minor-key rumblings from the production company's lawyers.
In any event, no one's claiming this opera is about the real-life Springer. Its creators have never met him. ''It really is an ur-Springer,'' says Lee. ''He's an icon, Jerry. I think of a story people told about 'Being John Malkovich.' Malkovich read a line and said, 'I wouldn't say that!' And the writer replied, 'Yeah, but The Malkovich would.' That made me feel better about the whole thing.''
Jerry Springer himself -- the actual Springer, who hears far more shrieking than singing during his workday -- couldn't be more pleased to hear about the opera and its success. I spoke to him on his 58th birthday; he was between taping programs whose topics were ''Wild and Bizarre Sex Fantasies'' and ''I'm in a Cheatin' State of Mind.''
After assuring me that his was ''the stupidest show on TV, of no redeeming social worth whatsoever'' and that he could not imagine why anyone would like it, he said he'd love to see the opera. His only regret was that, should he ever attend, he'd have to show up in disguise, since to appear as himself would be ''unbearably presumptuous.'' But he had no doubt that his work lends itself to the medium of coloratura.
''When you do away with the screaming on our show,'' he said, ''we're dealing with universal issues, core human drama. If you dressed our audience up and taught 'em the queen's English, they'd be discussing many of the same things wealthy people talk about. Our show has all the themes: transvestism, cheating . . . it's all there. Opera has stabbings. We have the Throwing of the Chair. They just use different weaponry.''
Marshall Sella is a contributing writer. He last wrote about the director Wes Anderson.
Stewart Lee
2002-03-17T16:49:23+00:00
The current sensation at the Battersea Arts Center in London delves into the themes of any number of beloved operas: infidelity and misdirected love, rage and untimely death. An aging diva, cheated by life, sings a heart-rending aria expressing her profound weariness with failure: ''I've had enough of dying/I just want to dance.'' But the gavotte is nowhere in this diva's thoughts -- her dream is to become a professional lap dancer, working the pole in some squalid dive. Such is the seamy lyricism of ''Jerry Springer: The Opera.'' The opera, which is still unfinished, began as an even rougher one-act last summer, and is very much in keeping with the ''trash TV'' spirit of Springer's show. But it doesn't stop at a simple musical rendition of the syndicated program's sideshow ethos. It is in equal parts satirically bigoted, transcendentally melodic, philosophical and unremittingly profane, a musical wilderness of amorality that somehow manages to come off as life-affirming and peculiarly epic. The often-staid realm of the London stage has gone wild for ''Springer.'' Although it has yet to reach the phase where it's open to critical review, it has already drawn a torrent of adoring press, even from the grayest corners of established opera criticism. The London Daily Telegraph, for example, hails its score as ''wonderfully inventive'' and calls the production ''revoltingly funny.'' Stage luminaries of every stripe, from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Nicholas Hytner, have swarmed to see the thing. Hytner, who will take the reins as director of the Royal National Theater next year and directed the new Broadway musical ''The Sweet Smell of Success,'' can't get enough of it. ''What I love is its violent marriage of high and low culture,'' he says. ''To hear the kind of vulgar chaos of 'Jerry Springer' submitted to the disciplines...
IT'S 30 years since he was a student in the city, but Oxford is still very much home territory for Stewart Lee.
Lee, whose comedy divides audiences like few others, is reigniting his love affair with the Dreaming Spires when he plays a week of his latest show, Content Provider, at the Playhouse – the theatre where he just happens to be a patron.
The author and columnist, who helped create the award-winning – and controversial – Jerry Springer The Opera, is famous for his comedic attacks on right-wing politicians and commentators. The likes of Paul Nuttall of UKIP (or 'the UKIPs', as Lee refers to them), Katie Hopkins, Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn have all been savaged by him. So Remain-voting, Trump-opposing Oxford should be his sort of place.
But does he ever worry that he's preaching to the converted?
"I hope so," he says. "I hope I am preaching to the converted, well not preaching to them, but having a laugh with them.
"I don't really want people that voted to leave Europe or support Trump to come and see me, as they will probably slow the show down and not get the jokes, and be confused by its reliance on understanding of facts, and its assumption of shared positive human values. Obviously you can't stop them coming, and if they do come they may enjoy it if they concentrate and quell the burning rage that dwells within them, but I think at the moment one of the purposes of this current show is to bring a bit of fun and comfort to nice people who have taken a hammering because of their beliefs these last few months. Other comedy shows are available."
So many comedians are doing Question Time these days. Has he ever been tempted?
"I have been offered it twice. I didn't do it," he says. "I'm not a professional politician. I don't have the time or the inclination to know about the relevant subjects one should know about in the appropriate depth before going on Question Time.
"Some comedians – Shappi Khorsandi for example – have been very good on QT, but on the whole – think we tend to let the side down and I don't want to be part of the problem that makes liberal values look like they belong to confused well-meaning media celebrities."
Lee was last in Oxford a year ago, performing segments from the fourth – and final – series of his BBC shows Comedy Vehicle. How does he feel about the Beeb's decision not to commission a fifth series?
"Absolutely fine," he says. "They have had big cuts from the Tories, 20 per cent in the comedy department, and so things had to go. Why not the work of someone who has had four successful series and was established? Give some kid a break.
"On a purely selfish level, my material is worth much more to me financially toured live for two years than sold to telly, and as I get older and weaker as a self-employed dad of two little kids, and me with no pension, I could do with working the live market a bit more thoroughly, as it pays better than TV, while the interest is there."
Born in Shropshire, but raised near Birmingham, has his West Midlands background had an influence on Lee's comedy?
"It is hard to sound pretentious in a Birmingham accent," he admits. "Mine comes and goes depending on what I am trying to say.
"Birmingham has never been cool. You're in a more powerful position as an outsider in comedy, I think."
Lee was an English student at St Edmund Hall from 1986-1989, and he'll be paying his former college a visit while he's in town.
"I am now, undeservedly, an Honorary Fellow of SEH, which means I am allowed to tether a young pig on Magdalen Bridge, but only on Michaelmas Day.
"For the first 20 or so years after I left college I felt a bit intimidated by the memories. The three years I was in Oxford burned so brightly and vividly in the memory that it was sometimes hard to come back. Nothing ever seemed quite as sharp. I feel like I can taste the October air of Queens Lane 1986, and feel a breeze blowing over a backstreet meadow in summer off Iffley Road, whenever I want, in a moment of self-willed time-travel.
"In my little student room overlooking the high street at St Edmund Hall, surrounded by books I was getting a government grant to read, and talking to loads of clever women about them, I was as utterly happy as I ever was in my life, and nothing since ever seemed quite as complete," he adds.
"I stood in my old room last September. I was almost physically sick with an overwhelming sense of sheer joy at the memory of the past. I have a sense of impossible gratitude to the place. I don't fully understand the circumstances that positioned me there. My whole life has been a string of lucky flukes.
"My wife [fellow comedian Bridget Christie] came to SEH once and just couldn't believe that I had been allowed to study there. I think I felt a bit like a cuckoo in the nest, maybe. I feel like I have to do my absolute best, maybe, to justify the trust shown in me, and the opportunity I was given.
"But now I have a really good relationship with my actual adult life, my career, and the family I belatedly spawned, and with St Edmund Hall itself, and I have done a few events with English students there. At one or two key times in my adult life the college seemed to call out to me and help me, in mysterious ways, as if it were some kind of sentient entity. I am aware I am probably projecting on to it, in the absence of a belief in God!
"I am supposed to be doing something at SEH in the week of the Playhouse shows. Arts subjects seem to be under threat as the values of the enlightenment disappear into the distance and we enter a new anti-intellectual, philistine dark age in Europe and America, so it's good to support young people who might want to read a poem or two. I'd like to see the jazz cellar again at the Oxford Union, where a load of us did student comedy in the 80s, but the Oxford Union feels a bit like enemy territory somehow. I can't really explain what I mean. It's a long time ago. Feelings get muddled up. Everyone wore black. No-one had a mobile phone. Culture was in flux, in a good way."
Lee's comedy collaborator Armando Iannucci was made Oxford University’s Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media a few years ago. As such a student of stand-up – Lee is constantly dissecting and analysing comedy in his act – would a 'professor of comedy role' interest him if it ever came up?
"I think Armando is probably better suited to this than me," he admits. "A drama professor at Kingston once described me to my face as 'all practice and no theory'."
Finally, how many times a week do people tell him he's 'asking for the moon on a stick'?
"For readers who won't know what you're on about, this was a line in a sketch on a show I did 22 years ago on BBC2 called Fist of Fun," he says.
"People don't say it to me very often now. Maybe about three times a year. Which is fine. All that stuff is two decades ago now, but some of it was good, I think, especially the first series of Fist of Fun. I don't really like the second series much now.
"I should have quit the double act after series one probably. I'm very grateful to people who remembered it and liked it at the time and come and see me now, and so is Richard Herring who I did it with. I learned a lot from him about how to work, so I wouldn't undo the past. We have a vague plan to do a reunion in our 80s."
Stewart Lee
2017-01-27T11:42:51+00:00
IT'S 30 years since he was a student in the city, but Oxford is still very much home territory for Stewart Lee. Lee, whose comedy divides audiences like few others, is reigniting his love affair with the Dreaming Spires when he plays a week of his latest show, Content Provider, at the Playhouse – the theatre where he just happens to be a patron. The author and columnist, who helped create the award-winning – and controversial – Jerry Springer The Opera, is famous for his comedic attacks on right-wing politicians and commentators. The likes of Paul Nuttall of UKIP (or 'the UKIPs', as Lee refers to them), Katie Hopkins, Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn have all been savaged by him. So Remain-voting, Trump-opposing Oxford should be his sort of place. But does he ever worry that he's preaching to the converted? "I hope so," he says. "I hope I am preaching to the converted, well not preaching to them, but having a laugh with them. "I don't really want people that voted to leave Europe or support Trump to come and see me, as they will probably slow the show down and not get the jokes, and be confused by its reliance on understanding of facts, and its assumption of shared positive human values. Obviously you can't stop them coming, and if they do come they may enjoy it if they concentrate and quell the burning rage that dwells within them, but I think at the moment one of the purposes of this current show is to bring a bit of fun and comfort to nice people who have taken a hammering because of their beliefs these last few months. Other comedy shows are available." So many comedians are doing Question Time these days. Has he ever been tempted? "I...
One of my favorite places in the world is the neolithic Tomb of The Eagles on Orkney. Instead of making it easy for themselves and just reburying it, the farming family that owned the land it occupied tried to run it for the benefit of visitors, with young volunteer archaeologists staffing a museum full of amazing objects. They marked out a stunning route from the farm to the tomb and installed a little trolley on wheels with a rope so you couldn’t haul yourself along the entrance passage into the chamber. I have visited three times and I loved it. But obviously covid wiped out tourism temporarily and picking up the financial pieces proved impossible and this incredible place closed to the public.
These people of the Island of South Ronaldsay (below) are trying to crowdfund reopening the Tomb so please help!
About the Tomb
The internationally famous Neolithic chambered cairn at Isbister, known as the Tomb of the Eagles, occupies a spectacular clifftop location in the South Parish of South Ronaldsay. The 5,000+ year-old burial tomb is currently in private ownership. For over 20 years it was a successful family-run, and family-friendly, visitor attraction comprising the chambered cairn, scenic walks, a Bronze Age burnt mound, and a visitor centre. The Tomb provided employment opportunities for young people, and established itself as a much-loved and unique part of South Ronaldsay and Orkney’s tourism scene.
Why is it closed?
In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the suspension of tourism activity, and the tomb was closed to visitors. It did not reopen, and the family has now decided to retire, and to sell the Tomb and associated assets.
What are we doing about it?
With the family's full support, we, the South Ronaldsay community, are working to buy these assets, reopen the tomb, and redevelop the site using sustainable tourism principles.
To buy the site and make it safe, we are actively applying for funding from several places, including the Scottish Land Fund, the National Heritage Lottery Fund, and Orkney-based resources. Crowdfunding and sponsorship from local businesses will then help us staff and run the site, creating a sustainable and welcoming hub for the South Ronaldsay and wider community.
What has happened so far?
We have commissioned expert surveys of the tomb itself to assess its structural integrity, of the buildings and land that will support the visitor experience, and of the financial viability of running the site as a community-owned place. Each report has shown that our plan is viable, as long as we can upgrade the facilities already in place. Best of all, the 5000 year-old tomb remains in excellent condition!
Why this crowdfund?
Through our crowdfunder campaign, we hope to raise a minimum of £20,000 to re-open the visitor centre, including renovating the museum displays, shop and toilet facilities, and providing a snack and hot drinks service. If successful, we plan that the centre and site will once again welcome visitors starting in late summer 2025.
Why can’t we have nice things? Predictably this superb grass roots music and comedy venue, with real atmosphere and fantastic sound and sightlines where we shot much of King Rocker, is at risk of closure due to a dodgy housing development. Two housing proposals have been deliberately split into two applications to avoid the obligation to include social housing. Save The Moth Club here
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
Glasgow’s garage punk veterans The Primevals announce a new single as featured in the new Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf 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 were released on a 7” 45 in January.
See The Primevals live JUNE 27th London Hope & Anchor, 28th Preston Ferret.
John Mackay & Sally Homer, in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present
STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF BRAND NEW SHOW
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.
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
June 2025
Wednesday 18th June 2025 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 20th June 2025 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 21st June 2025 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 21st June 2025 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - 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
7. SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO
Stewart’s 2019-2022 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, but buy them from us to defeat American fascism.
We are currently preparing a physical release of these shows but it’s got delayed as I got pneumonia and 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.
8. 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, The Alarm (!!!!???), Beans on Toast, dub legends Zion Train, Angeline Morrison, Miki Berenyi from off of The Shoegazing Lushes, The Vaselines, Stick In The Wheel, Paul Heaton, and afro-rock avatars W.I.T.C.H. www.beardedtheory.co.uk.
18TH – 20TH JULY Toldpuddle Martyrs’ Festival, Tolpuddle, Dorset. I will be doing 20 mins on a mixed bill here one night. Looks great. https://www.tolpuddlemartyrs.org.uk/festival
22nd – 24th August Krankenhaus, Muncaster Castle, Lake District Sea Power, Arab Strap, the legendary Throwing Muses, Jane Weaver, The Lovely Lovely Lovely Eggs, the awesome Richard Dawson, the amazing Nightingales, King Rocker film, the quirky Personal Trainer, the mesemerising Ex-Easter Island Head, the hypnotic Alison Cotton. www.krankenhausfestival.com
10. IDLER FEST 11-13 JULY, HAMPSTEAD HEATH, LONDON
I will be amongst the knobheads being grilled at the Idler magazine’s annual 3 day garden party. It’s a lovely event. “FENTON HOUSE & GARDEN, HAMPSTEAD, LONDON. The Idler Festival is a weekend of philosophy and merriment, comedy, talks, music, workshops and salons in the bucolic surroundings of Fenton House and gardens near Hampstead Heath. You’ll be entertained and enlightened by the Idler’s favourite thinkers, comedians, writers, and musicians. There’ll be walks, ukulele, bibliotherapy, agony aunts, beekeeping and plenty of time to loaf under the apple trees. There’ll be dancing lessons on the lawn, loafing to DJs in the orchard and salons in the house. Join us for our dream garden party. Headlining a stellar line up will be comedians Michael Palin and Stewart Lee and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Plus Daisy Dunn, Miranda Sawyer, a mini pilgrimage with Guy Hayward, evensong on Sunday and much more to be announced. “Britain’s best arts and literary festival,” Spectator”
CODE: DAMPExperimenta Mixtape. Curated by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson.+ Q&A with Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, hosted by Stewart Lee
A new book on the dark shadows of 1970s British TV comedy, centred around the work of Leonard Rossiter, provides the inspiration for a new Experimenta Mixtape in which, as ever, no further information is provided in advance of the event.The textures, domestic surrealism and atavistic underbelly of the British television sit-com are unpicked and excavated in singular, idiosyncratic fashion in Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s strange, new book CODE: DAMP, and this one-off, adjunct, ExperimentaL, film and television, cut-up, screening mix. With references to The Fall, the situationists, medieval musical instruments, 1970s horror, and Holsten Pils, Sleigh-Johnson’s world is at once: weird, wonderful and frightening.
GO FUND JOHN MANN, COMEDY’S ESSEX UNCLE
Comedy fans of a certain age will remember John Mann as a safe pair of hands, great gagsmith, classic era Big Breakfast energy courier, and indefatigable supporter of new ‘90s talent at the Harlow Square comedy club. Now he needs your help. Promoter Jim Howarth writes, ““Hi there everyone, Jim Howarth here and I am coming to you for help raising some funds for one of our own in the comedy industry. John Mann has been making people laugh for over 30 years and during that time he has up there with the best of them. He has written for some of the biggest names in the business, and some less so. he has mentored and supported and generally been one of the nicest people in our industry. Those close to him will know he has been unwell for a while, but he has been soldiering on but even the toughest soldier have their limits. John has barely worked for the last 2 months as he barely worked and financially that has put him in a very tough situation.He has a serious long term respiratory issue and on top of that he has pneumonia, with an infection on his lung which is proving very difficult to shift. Despite being unwell, John helped to deliver one of my own shows while I was poorly in hospital, and in the past he has helped to raise funds for me at my own time of need. His first thought is always to look after others, and he is always on hand to advise and support. It is now it is time to return the favour by offering him our support. Please give whatever you can to help John get through this difficult situation, he gives so much to others, me in particular and whatever we can raise I know will be a huge help to John. These are the pit falls of being self employed, we have to push through difficult times as we lose income. I am hoping we can take away some of the pressure he finds himself under so he can focus on his recovery. Thank you in advance for your support, and please spread this across our industry to make sure as many people see this as possible. Jim, Comedy Hotspot”
In the 90s it was Al Murray, whose own landlord alter-ego displays a Hulkish bent, who turned me on to the amazing work Peter David was doing in rebooting The Hulk comics, foregrounding with great humour and imagination, and in a modern way, all the kind of moral and psychological dilemmas that were handled in broader strokes in Lee and Kirby’s classic 60s comics, and the collected editions I have of his work have survived numerous culls and domestic upheavals. Of course as a Marvel comics writer David gets no share of profits from any further exploitation of the creative contributions he has made, and as an American he lives in a fascist shithole where healthcare is costly business for creatives and freelancers. Some guy called Graham Murphy says … “Hi, friends. I'm restarting a fundraiser for Peter David and his family. Peter's health issues continue to be a challenge. He has been in recovery now forthree years!Peter is steadily improving - even with his kidney disease, minor surgeries, and some recent small strokes. But Medicaid, which had been taking care of his Long Term Disability, has just dropped him. As a result, medical care and living expenses are mounting beyond current control. So, we are reaching out to you for help. I've known Peter and his family for many years. They are the nicest, kindest, and most generous people you will ever meet. Let's return some of that kindness and generosity and help them make it through this. Please donate and spread the word. Thank you!”
BEN MOOR’S A THREE DAY THING The unassuming performance-art-comedy legend that is Ben Moor has a new project on the go, A Three Day Thing. He says...
“My new stage piece is called A Three Thing Day, and it is highly upcoming. I previewed it at the awesome Bookseller Crow On The Hill in Crystal Palace in late January and I got some great feedback from the lovely audience. Here's yet another brief excerpt:
My sister puts the plant milk on the table – it comes in a landscape carton to differentiate it from the other kind – switches the TV off – it’s been showing That’s Riduckulous! The World’s Funniest Duck Videos.
The aquarium has objects from dry land at the bottom, presumably to acclimatise the fish life for what they’ll be swimming through in the future as the seas rise.
It's a surreal and melancomic journey through a day when I had three things to do, including detours about snacks and dolphins, the nature of time, and different forms of vertigo. I'm currently learning and editing the script, and it should be good to go by the time summer comes round, when I hope to be taking it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The wonderful Simon Oakes and his band Suns of the Tundra are composing and recording a beautiful music score, and I will be printing the full text (along with some other new writing) in a book to be published in July.
More details in the next mailout, but for now, I've scheduled some work-in-progress performances...
16.00 Saturday 29th March 2025A THREE THING DAY - WORK-IN-PROGRESS at THE LAUGHARNE WEEKEND, a weekend of literature, comedy and performance in Carmarthenshire, the home of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. This has an absolutely amazing array of people like John Shuttleworth, Lucy Cooke, Stewart Lee and Mike Brearley, so that's poetry, zoology, comedy and cricket sorted.
I'll be stumbling through the new show in the marquee behind Browns Hotel and enjoying the excellence on offer at all other times. SOME TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE 20.00 Wednesday 23rd April 2025A THREE THING DAY - WORK-IN-PROGRESSCOLCHESTER ARTS CENTRE I'll hopefully have got the show a little closer to the final thing by the time of this date as part of the terrific Colchester Arts Centre's Wonderful Wednesdays. It's Pay What You Can Afford. TICKETS ON SALE HERE
12.00pm Sunday 4th May 2025A THREE THING DAY - WORK-IN-PROGRESS
MACHYNLLETH COMEDY FESTIVAL Another fantastic bill for this weekender of oddball comedy excellence. Tons of great acts (lots off the telly even) over the Bank Holiday in a lovely setting and a marvellous festival spirit. And the camping in the sheepfield is always a highlight of a perennial celebration of comedy and creativity. TICKETS ON SALE NOW 16.00pm Saturday 7th June 2025A THREE THING DAY - WORK-IN-PROGRESSEXETER COMEDY FESTIVAL Last year's inaugural Exeter Comedy Festival was a joy - great programme, delicious pizza and special late-night acts too!
Again - what a brilliant set of comedians - Christie, Hegley, Long, Hill, Watson, Adamsdale, Brookes etc. TICKETS ON SALE NOW
11th-13th July 2025A THREE THING DAY - WORK-IN-PROGRESS
THE IDLER FESTIVAL A special few days of summer ease at Fenton House in Hampstead celebrating the pleasures of taking things slowly. There'll be talks from Michael Palin, Rowan Williams and Stewart Lee; dancing, strolling, loafing.
I'll have the show nearly ready by now and will probably be on early on the Saturday... TICKETS ON SALE NOW”
TIRZAH GARWOOD: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery London, until 26 May 2025.
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.
ITHELL COLQUHOUN – BETWEEN TWO WORLDS Tate St Ives, Feb 1st – May 5th. 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.” Here’s an audio guide to this with bits of me on it https://www.tate.org.uk/story-player/ithell-colquhoun
THE FALLEN LEAVES Mod-punk veteran assassins. MAY 3rd Stockton-On-Tees Volume, 4th N’Castle Billy Bootleggers, 31st London Dublin Castle, June 8th Southsea Edge of The Wedge, SEPT 27th London Dublin Castle
DEAN WAREHAM Galaxie 500/Luna guitar guru on the road. APRIL 1st Glasgow Garage, 2nd M’cr Band On The Wall, 3rd Liverpool Rough Trade, 4th Leamington Spa Assembly, 5th Leeds Brudenell, 6th Bristol Fleece, 7th London 229
JOHN SHUTTLEWORTH One of the all-time funniest character comics. Surely he can’t go on for ever? The once so elderly John is now younger than his creator Graham! APRIL 6th Glasgow, 11th Scarborough Spa, 14th Exeter Phoenix, MAY 16th Bude Lit Fest. An inspiration! Oppressive kitchen sink surrealism in spades!
EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD Groovy minimalists. APRIL 20th Colchester Arts
DAVID LANCE CALLAHAN I cannot arrogantly recommend enough the former Moonshake and Wolfhounds man’s amazing solo folk-blues-noise workouts, nailing the state of the world over a superb stripped down sound in some great small venues that we all should support.
APRIL 3rd Penzance Acorn; 16th Leytonstone What’s Cookin’.
MAY 9th Brighton Hope and Ruin.
JUNE 5th Birmingham Rock’n’roll Brewhouse, 6th Sheffield Bishop’s House.
AUGUST 3rd Chilterns Awamu Together Festival
FOLK ROOTS, NEW ROUTES – CARVED HEADS OF SHIRLEY COLLINS AND DON LETTS BY CORIN JOHNSON The Fitzrovia Chapel, London, April 4th – 15th. The chapel is one of London’s hidden gems and so are these two icons of Englishness.
MEKONS/NIGHTINGAKES. STEWART LEE April 12th – Signature Brew, Haggerston, London. I host an album launch show by Welsh country punk legends the Mekons w support from The Nightingales and a short set from me.
THE MAGPIE ARC Fabulous young British country-folk-rock act on the road, augmented for the final time by the mighty guitar legend Martin Simpson APRIL Thursday 17th – The Glasshouse, Gateshead Buy Tickets, Tuesday 22nd – The Phoenix, Exeter Buy Tickets, Thursday 24th – Chapel Arts, Bath Buy Tickets
HAWKWIND 2025. Another implausible trip for the psychedelic survivors, Dave Brock still imperious, even from his octogenarian stool. APRIL 17th – Gateshead Glasshouse, 18th – Guildford G Live, 19th – Bournemouth Pavillion, 20th – B’ham Symphony Hall. MAY 9th – Aylesbury Waterside, 10th – Liverpool Auditorium, 11th – M’cr Bridgewater Hall, 23rd – Sheffield City Hall, 25th – Cambridge Corn Exchange, 26th – London Barbican
RICHARD DAWSON Unmitigated art-folk genius, and funny with it
APRIL 23rd & 24th M’cr Stoller Hall, 25th Kendal Brewery Arts, 27th Leeds City Varieties, 29th London Clapham Grand, MAY 1st Cardiff Gate, 2nd Notts Metronome, 17th Gateshead Glasshouse, 20th Edinbro Pleasance, 21st Glasgow St Lukes, 22nd L’pool Philharmonic, 23rd Brighton St Georhe’s , 24th Folkestone Quarterhouse.
MARTIN SIMPSON Folk guitarist who mines the hidden connections between British and American traditional musics with taste and virtuosity. APRIL 26th London Kings Place. JULY 21st Croydon Ruskin House. SEPT 6th Howden Shire Hall
THE ICEMAN AT TABERNACLE GALLERY, NOTTING HILL, LONDON
April 28th – 4TH May. Anthony Irving Iceman (aim) says, “aim is surfacing from deepest Dorset for his first London show which is taking place at the Tabernacle Gallery in Notting Hill. Here is a group of paintings from the previous 10 years selected by aim himself. There is also a series of more recent paintings based on The Iceman’s ground-breaking Lecture at the Bill Murray Club in September 2024 where The Iceman explained his Block melting work in the form of an academic lecture. All aim’s paintings are based on the live performance and relational work of The Iceman who has spent his adult life melting Blocks of ice for reasons that escape most people. The Iceman and aim are one and the same person. Humanly speaking, they coalesce as Anthony Irvine.“The Blocks live on”-that is the Iceman’s mantra and now aim’s as well. aim’s paintings have been described in numerous ways. He looks forward to hearing more adjectival phrases to describe his work during this run. aim is sometimes labelled as an ‘outsider’ artist because of the raw energy of his painting style and the idiosyncratic subject matter. But aim himself simply describes himself as a “painter with clear aims.” Although in one sense the pieces could be described as obsessional self-portraits, in another sense they are paintings of ‘Everyman’ and “’Everywoman’ in life’s struggles and joys. Taking a leaf from Andy Warhol’s dictum that Business is the best kind of art to heart,The Iceman will be clearly delineating the prices of individual paintings. He will also be offering a wide spectrum of aesthetic merchandise for sale at bargain prices: Postcards, Posters, his ’75 braimnd new paintings’ art Book, his “Melt It! Book”, etchings, engravings, signed block photocopies on authentic fax paper, Melt It Badges and even his children’s book, “Lockdown Melter”, will all be available for purchase. Truly there is something for everyone. The Iceman will have a padlocked cash box on site and provide his own security for his priceless paintings and all goods. aim hopes visitors enjoy viewing his insightful canvases. The opening do is at 7pm on 29th April 2025 [Thank you to “Music Business Associates” for kindly sponsoring the refreshments for that event] The Iceman/aim will be in the Tabernacle Gallery in person every day of the run. But he will not be shaking anyone’s hand, for health and safety reasons, due to the freezing effect of such a gesture. *Thank you to Artcetera, Bournemouth who generously supply aim with free quality cut-offs of mounting board upon which to paint. **FYI The Iceman’s Blockbuster Documentary film “Melt It!The Film of the Iceman” is due to be released this year 2025”
WATERBOYS The Waterboys ebb and flow like the tides of time, under the ongoing stewardship of mad Mike Scott. He saw the crescent. MAY 1st Basingstoke Anvil, 2nd Bath Forum, 3rd Bexhill-On-Sea De-La-Warr, 5th Brighton, 7th Nottingham Rock City, 8th Liverpool Philharmonic, 9th Sheffield City Hall, 10th Gateshead Glasshouse, 12th Blackpool Opera House, 13th M’cr Bridgewater Hall, 15th York Barbican, 16th Birmingham Symphony Hall, 18th Bournemouth Pavillion, 19th Cardiff New, 20th Cambridge Corn Exch, 22nd Bristol Beacon, 23rd Oxford New, 24th Stockton Globe, 25th Llandudno Venue Cymru, 27th Guildford G Love, 28th Leicester De Montfort, 31st London Roundhouse. JUNE 1st London Roundhouse, 7th Dublin 3 Arena.
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. Make sure to see Ben Moor’s A Three Thing Day. May 2nd - 4th. Once visited, never forgotten. DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT OR YOU WILL RUIN IT!!!!
BEVIS FROND Psychedelic survivors reaching a late career phase of imperial majesty MAY 16th Lewes Con Club, 17th & 18th London Lexington, AUG 8TH Built Wells Kozfest.
DINOSAUR JR The Crazy Horse of the hardcore era in another turn of the wheel MAY 18th M’cr Albert Hall, 20th Glasgow Barrowlands, 22nd London Troxy
SAMANTHA CRAIN Heart-rending Choctaw country-folk. MAY 19th Brighton Green Door, 20th London Neon 194, 21st M’cr Gullivers
THE NIGHTINGALES Birmingham post-punk leg-ends hit the road again. When will it end? MAY 21ST Leeds Brudenell, 22nd Newcastle Think Tank, 23rd Glasgow Stereo, 24th M’cr Deaf Institute, 25th B’ham Castle & Falcon, 27th Bristol Exchange, 28th Brighton Chalk, 29th Cambridge Junction, 30th London Oslo, 31st Swansea Bunkhouse. ALSO ----- The Nightingales release their first studio album since 2022’s much-praised ‘The Last Laugh’. Celebrated in the Stewart Lee-narrated film King Rocker of 2020, where the curtain was raised on the magic of the “long serving punk/alternative rock volunteer” (The Quietus) Robert Lloyd, The Nightingales are as pertinent as ever as they release a poignant tirade on modern times heralded, quite rightly, as ‘The Awful Truth’. Released on April 4th on Fire Records, their new album ‘The Awful Truth’ is a modern mutant music hall interpretation of the day’s news, a haunting jolt into realism narrated with all the angst of an insistent, slightly dishevelled late-night newscaster. BUY A BUNDLE HERE. https://thenightingales.org.uk
BOOTHBY GRAFFOE & ANTONIO FORCIONE May 28th, The Old Woollen, Leeds. A MUST!! ONE OFF SHOW!!!! “20 years ago a stand-up comedian made an album with a virtuoso guitarist. They did a bunch of shows and got a bunch of 5 star reviews. Then they toured Australia, and won a bunch of awards. One of which they left in an Italian restaurant in Adelaide. Now they're back, performing songs from Wot Italian? and some other songs too. Boothby is funny & Antonio is one of the best guitar players in the whole wide world. Seriously.” https://oldwoollen.seetickets.com/tour/antonio-forcione-boothby-graffoe-wot-italian-
SONGHOY BLUES The Mali Clash. JUNE 1st Sheffield Crookes, 2nd Leeds Brudenell, 4th B’ham Castle & Falcon, 6th London Islington Assembly Hall, 7th Bristol Thekla
BO NINGEN Japanese art psyche-punks JUNE 5th Liverpooo Arts, 7th London Dome.
0SEES I am a late adopter of the extreme noise power of this veteran combo, amazing live, who share the same t-shirt provider as me. JUNE 9th Edinburgh Liquid, 15th Bristol Marble Factory, 16th M’cr Ritz, 18th Glasgow Galvanisers, 20th Leeds Irish Cent, 21st B’ham Digbeth Crossing, 23rd London Electric Ballroom, 24th London Earth, 25th Brighton Chalk.
LEN PRICE 3 Durable punk-mods. JUNE 18th – 229 London
CHRIS ECKMAN Former frontman of dark alt country prgenitors The Walkabouts in what I think is his first UK date this century. June 19th Water Rats, London
SKEP WAX WEEKENDER July 17th – 20th, Islington, London
Four nights of radical indiepop - Thursday and Friday evening at the Lexington, Saturday evening at Islington Town Hall, Sunday (4pm) back at The Lexington: see full line-up below. The 'Weekender' ticket will admit you to all four nights. Day tickets are available for each of the four shows. Thursday (The Lexington) Jeanines, Sassyhiya, Panic Pocket Friday (The Lexington) The Would-Be-Goods, The Orchids, Swansea Sound Saturday (Islington Assembly Room) Heavenly, Lightheaded, Crumbs Sunday (The Lexington), Marlody, The Gentle Spring, Special Friend
Venue addresses: The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, London, N1 9JB.
Islington Assembly Hall, Upper St, London, N1 2UD. (The venues are less than a mile apart.)
Heavenly's new 7" single will go on sale at this event.
Ticket prices include £1.50 Venue Levy for Islington Town Hall.
The Lexington is 18+ admission, The Islington Assembly Hall is 16+
MILLIONS OF DEAD COPS / MDC American hardcore heroes of NO KKK NO FASCIST USA chant fame. AUG 4th – New Cross Inn, London
EDWYN COLLINS Orange Juice’s indiepop originator SEPT 27th Glasgow Theatre Royal, 29th Buxton Opera House, 30th Bath Komedia. OCT 2nd S’hampton Central Hall, 3rd Brighton St Georges, 4th London RFH, 6th Norwich Epic, 7th Manchester Albert Hall, 8th Newcastle Boiler Shop
BOB MOULD Hardcore punk pioneer of Husker Du/Sugar lineage. NOV 18th Glasgow Oran Mor, 19th Leeds Brudenell, 20th London Dome
SAINTS 73-79 Superb! The original line-up of the Australian Punk progenitors, but with Mudhoney's Mark Arm deputising for the departed Chris Bailey (a gentleman and a scholar who once came to my show!). His co-writer and co-guitarist Ed Kuepper remains undimmed and the rhythm section will rattle your bones. NOVEMBER 21ST Bristol Trinity, 22nd Leeds Project, 23rd Glasgow Garage, 24th M’cr Academy 2, 26th London Camden Electric
16. IN OUR LAMENTATIONS 2025
Barre Phillips (Jazz bassman, 1934)
Bob Grover (Brighton Piranha, 1956)
Riro (Japanese sea otter, 2007)
Nora Orlandi (Spaghetti symphonist, 1933)
Ed Askew (Acid folkie, 1940)
Tony Slattery (The vile blows of the world made him reckless, 1959)
David Lynch (He erased our heads, 1946)
Landy Randerson (Museum access pioneer, 1949)
Garth Hudson (Bandolier, 1937)
Brian Murphy (Instantly aged actor, 1932)
Rab MacWilliam (Hackney historian, 1951)
Barry Goldberg (His flag was electric, 1941)
Peter Yarrow (He left on a jetplane, 1938)
Snowy Fleet (Easybeater, 1939)
Jamie Muir (Absolute fucking rhythmical genius, 1942)
Mike Ratledge (Moon in June Soft Machine man, 1943)
Gabriel Yacoub (Malicorne muso of French folk, 1952)
Bill Fay (Christian mystic songwriter seer, 1943)
Roberta Flack (Made Ewan MacColl sexy, 1937)
Gene Hackman (an actor who knew when not to,1930)
Jay Rayner’s Observer restaurant column (1999)
David Johansen (New York Doll, 1950)
Bill Dare (Even his socks were funny, 1959)
Johnny Green (A gentleman, a dandy, and always a pleasure,)
Ken Parker (The Blue Bender, 1943)
Edweena Banger (Her nose bled, 1959)
John Cassady (Planetary penman, 1971)
Joey Molland (His finger was bad, 1947)
Peter Farrelly (Fruuppster, 1949)
Jesse Colin Young (He got it together, 1941)
Brian James (Lord of The Damned, 1955)
Roy Ayers (Good vibes, 1940)
Bob Rupe (Brilliant Gutterball and Silos bottom end)
Nadia Cassini (Starcrash starlet, 1949)
Nike Arrighi (The Devil Rides Out, 1944)
Bill Smith (Original Corrie, 1936)
DG Hessayon (Garden expert who answered my questions, 1928)
Elliot Ingber (Winged Eel Fingerling, 1941)
Leanne Cowie (Scientific drummer, 1964?)
George Foreman (Meat griller, 1949)
17. AN IMPRISONED CLIMATE CHANGE PROTESTOR WRITES...
This heroic young man, George Simonon, has written about his time in prison for climate change activism for the Guardian
“‘The prison system is insanely broken’: a climate activist on his experience in jail
George Simonson says you learn about society by seeing how it treats its prisoners – and jail has strengthened his belief that change is crucial
Wed 19 Mar 2025 05.00 GMT
George Simonson, 24, from London, had recently graduated inmechanicalengineering from the University of Edinburgh when he wasgivena 24-month custodial sentence for climbing a gantry over the M25 in 2022. He was also found guilty of criminal damage and sentenced to a further six-week custodial sentence for spraying paint on a wall of Exeter University in 2023. He sent this letter from prison before he was released in January.
I remember the day I was sentenced like it was yesterday. I was filled with anxiety the entire time. It’s a strange situation to be in, not knowing whether or not you’d have your liberty at the end of the day, or for how long it might be taken away. My mind was racing and I had no idea how to operate.
At the moment the judge read out my sentence, I felt so many things at once. Sadness, strength and some relief, if I’m honest. Simply because the uncertainty was gone. I stood up and blew kisses to my family and partner who were sitting in the gallery. I wanted them to know that I was going to be OK.
But I didn’t look at the judge. I wanted those precious moments to be shared with the people I love. As I walked down to the court cells, my eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know when I’d see any of them next and I didn’t know what the next few months would bring.
The whole experience has shaped me and made me who I am today
My first few days in jail felt like weeks. It was the end of summer and it was something like 30 degrees at HMP Chelmsford. The heating was on constantly and the tiny windows offered no relief. The Olympics were on, so I and my co-defendant, who I was sharing with, spent our time watching and re-enacting the events in our hot, sweaty cell. I’ll always be grateful for his company during that time. It was the first time in prison for both of us so we were able to work through it together.
It took several weeks to sort out communication with my family. Several times my application forms would get lost or forgotten about by staff.
I was hungry a lot of the time, too: vegan options weren’t on the menu, so often I’d have digestive biscuits for dinner and eat my cereal with water rather than milk. I didn’t kick up too much of a fuss. I was new on the wing and I knew that prison wasn’t going to be particularly nice.
I was sustained by the belief that a better future is possible. I fought for it, and now, as a result, I’ve been sent to prison. But I wasn’t going to let the experience break me.
The action itself was over two years ago now. I remember many friends, family and even strangers were supportive, but some weren’t. One family friend told me that they would run me over if they were stuck in the traffic I caused. I understand their anger, and I just hope that one day they will understand why I chose to take this action – simply, I didn’t think there was any other option left.
The days here run on a rigid routine which changes only slightly between weekdays and weekends. In the week, we wake up at 7.30am. I listen to the radio while I eat my prison-issue breakfast and drink my coffee. We’re unlocked at 8.05am and I leave the wing after a pat-down from the guards. Thankfully, I’m in full-time work, so I spend much of the day fixing bicycles in the workshop for a charity. There is a two-hour break at lunchtime when we’re locked up again. After work in the afternoon, we’ll grab our dinners before going to the gym, which we can attend a few times per week. We aren’t allowed out into the yard during the week, so I only spend five to 10 minutes each day outside walking to and from work.
On the weekends, it’s a lot slower and loneliness often creeps in. I’ll have biscuits with my coffee for a treat. I play card games, write letters or watch TV in my cell. We all dread the weekend: Saturdays and Sundays feel longer than the working week.
If I was alone it would be so much worse, but the people I’ve met in here have given me so much strength and support. They’re friends that I’ll keep in contact with once I’m released.
I’m convinced that civil resistance works, and it’s absolutely justified when you’re fighting for the survival of the human race. I’d voted, signed petitions, written to my MP, attended marches … I tried all the conventional ways to make my voice heard like everyone else, but it didn’t change a thing. So I feel content with the choices I’ve taken. Ultimately, the action that I took did work: it played a part in getting the demands of no new oil and gas drilling into the Labour manifesto. And now it’s policy.
It angers me that politicians have known about global warming and climate change for decades. They’ve known that fossil fuels are causing it, and they’ve known that it’s going to kill, displace and starve millions of people. But they ignored it.
Whatever stability people had is ripped away when you step inside
Our politicians are perfectly willing to lead when the country goes to war, but not when it comes to stopping emissions, which will save lives. In light of all of this, it was clear to me that civil resistance was the only option left. I didn’t do it for fun, for attention or for the sake of it. I did it because I knew that it could work. We’re taught about Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the suffragettes in school: they’re celebrated as heroes now. But nobody pays much attention to the fact that they were absolutely vilified by the government, the judiciary and the journalists at the time.
In the end I’ve done what I can, and a judge chose to send me to prison for it. I don’t blame him, and I don’t spend my time wishing things had gone differently. The whole experience has shaped me and made me who I am today.
You learn about society by seeing how people are treated in its prisons, and it’s an absolute mess in ours. This whole experience has deepened my understanding of our system and strengthened my conviction that change is desperately needed. Not reform – we need revolutionary change. The prison system is insanely broken – people here are not treated like human beings.
The entire apparatus is executed with maximum emphasis on punishment and a superficial mention of rehabilitation. Many people resort to smashing the contents of their cells or self-harming as a way to access the help that is available. It is absolutely no wonder that re-offending rates are so high when those leaving prison are in a worse way than when they came in.
And whatever stability people had in their lives before prison, whether it’s housing or employment, is ripped away when you step inside and there is minimal help to put things back together. Once you’ve received a prison sentence, it’s harder to get a mortgage, car insurance, or a job. How is any of this fair? This country has a huge problem and the evidence is hidden away behind razor wire and brick walls where nobody can see it.
I’m going to be released with extraordinarily broad licence conditions, with the purpose of stopping my involvement in “political activism”. Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence. In my case, that would be 19 months.
Before I got involved in civil resistance, I was so depressed. I buried my head in the sand because I felt so powerless in the face of it all. I was terrified about what the rest of my life would be like.
Looking at the positives, though, I’m going to come out of prison with a fresh appreciation for the things around me. I can’t wait to savour the things that gave me happiness. I took so much for granted before. Whether it’s walking in nature, listening to music, or spending time with my family and partner, I’m going to savour every minute. Even things like being able to use a toilet or shower in privacy and go to sleep knowing you won’t be woken up by a night guard. There’s a lot to settle back into, but I feel lucky that the day of my release is coming – something that many people in here don’t have.
Stewart Lee
2025-03-27T12:05:08+00:00
1. SAVE THE TOMB OF THE EAGLES One of my favorite places in the world is the neolithic Tomb of The Eagles on Orkney. Instead of making it easy for themselves and just reburying it, the farming family that owned the land it occupied tried to run it for the benefit of visitors, with young volunteer archaeologists staffing a museum full of amazing objects. They marked out a stunning route from the farm to the tomb and installed a little trolley on wheels with a rope so you couldn’t haul yourself along the entrance passage into the chamber. I have visited three times and I loved it. But obviously covid wiped out tourism temporarily and picking up the financial pieces proved impossible and this incredible place closed to the public. These people of the Island of South Ronaldsay (below) are trying to crowdfund reopening the Tomb so please help! About the Tomb The internationally famous Neolithic chambered cairn at Isbister, known as the Tomb of the Eagles, occupies a spectacular clifftop location in the South Parish of South Ronaldsay. The 5,000+ year-old burial tomb is currently in private ownership. For over 20 years it was a successful family-run, and family-friendly, visitor attraction comprising the chambered cairn, scenic walks, a Bronze Age burnt mound, and a visitor centre. The Tomb provided employment opportunities for young people, and established itself as a much-loved and unique part of South Ronaldsay and Orkney’s tourism scene. Why is it closed? In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the suspension of tourism activity, and the tomb was closed to visitors. It did not reopen, and the family has now decided to retire, and to sell the Tomb and associated assets. What are we doing about it? With the family's full support, we, the South Ronaldsay community,...
Recording a duet with Derek Bailey in 2005, the pianist Augusti Fernandez was drawn into stark stillness by the British guitarist's meditative mood. The American improviser Joe Morris displays a more obviously kinetic approach.
His fingers tumble around the frets of a bubbling acoustic guitar, the strings skewered and scratched, provoking liquid right hand cascades and left hand bee sting stabs from his collaborator.
Morris forces ongoing flurries of possibilities, and leaves implicit trajectories resolutely unresolved, even as the young Spaniard provokes him from beneath the lid with scraped piano wire, and hangs vast fluttering sheets of notes out to dry.
Stewart Lee
2011-08-14T20:49:43+01:00
Recording a duet with Derek Bailey in 2005, the pianist Augusti Fernandez was drawn into stark stillness by the British guitarist's meditative mood. The American improviser Joe Morris displays a more obviously kinetic approach. His fingers tumble around the frets of a bubbling acoustic guitar, the strings skewered and scratched, provoking liquid right hand cascades and left hand bee sting stabs from his collaborator. Morris forces ongoing flurries of possibilities, and leaves implicit trajectories resolutely unresolved, even as the young Spaniard provokes him from beneath the lid with scraped piano wire, and hangs vast fluttering sheets of notes out to dry.
This article has since been removed from the Daily Mail's own website. Download a PDF of the article here. View Stewart's riposte to the article, here.
John Martyn’s 70’s, folk-fusion experiments with the echoplex guitar pedal have led to the lazy byline, ‘godfather of trip-hop’, but this is to damn him with ludicrously feint praise. The Don’t Look Back series of concerts, in which artists perform an album from beginning to end, encouraged Martyn to revisit his finest hour, 1973’s Solid Air, last September. The original record saw the dashing young guitarist, members of Fairport Convention and Pentangle, and guests such as the jazz saxophonist Tony Coe, achieve a still unsurpassed blend of songwriterly moves and expansive dynamics.
But on the first night of the Solid Air tour, the kind of band you’d see jamming in a coctail bar in a 1980’s Tom Cruise vehicle subjected Martyn's masterpiece to the full Level 42 treatment, with swathes of cluttering keyboard effects, trite sax solos, and session musician style fretless bass plonking. Martyn, now wheelchair bound, has survived battles with the bottle, the amputation of a leg, and collaborations with Phil Collins. But could he survive being made to sound like the Miami Vice soundtrack?
Whatever idignities Martyn’s band heaped on his music, his great wounded bear of a voice was still there at the centre, and when he picked up the acoustic guitar for Over The Hill, something of the charm of the original emerged. May You Never, Martyn’s signature song, originally a perfectly formed solo acoustic performance, started well, before the band joined in, the saxophonist getting so excited he was forced to push his glasses back up his nose in between blasts. Ironically, Martyn’s roadie was wearing a Johnny Cash t-shirt, reminding us that, with the right producer, it’s never too late for great artists to reconnect with their essential selves. Even Dylan had to begin again. John Martyn could still surprise us. The goodwill is there. It would be wrong to fail to mention that the evening ended with a rapturous standing ovation.
Martyn’s support act, the anonymously named young singer-songwriter John Smith, was an object lesson in how taste and imagination always outweigh mere musical virtuosity, coaxing all manner of unexpected sounds from his acoustic guitar, and taking daring chances with timing and song-structure. The two verses he sang entirely unaccompanied, to catch the audience’s attention as they wandered into the room at the start of his set, were the highlight the night. You could say it peaked early.
Stewart Lee
2007-01-21T19:44:35+00:00
John Martyn’s 70’s, folk-fusion experiments with the echoplex guitar pedal have led to the lazy byline, ‘godfather of trip-hop’, but this is to damn him with ludicrously feint praise. The Don’t Look Back series of concerts, in which artists perform an album from beginning to end, encouraged Martyn to revisit his finest hour, 1973’s Solid Air, last September. The original record saw the dashing young guitarist, members of Fairport Convention and Pentangle, and guests such as the jazz saxophonist Tony Coe, achieve a still unsurpassed blend of songwriterly moves and expansive dynamics. But on the first night of the Solid Air tour, the kind of band you’d see jamming in a coctail bar in a 1980’s Tom Cruise vehicle subjected Martyn's masterpiece to the full Level 42 treatment, with swathes of cluttering keyboard effects, trite sax solos, and session musician style fretless bass plonking. Martyn, now wheelchair bound, has survived battles with the bottle, the amputation of a leg, and collaborations with Phil Collins. But could he survive being made to sound like the Miami Vice soundtrack? Whatever idignities Martyn’s band heaped on his music, his great wounded bear of a voice was still there at the centre, and when he picked up the acoustic guitar for Over The Hill, something of the charm of the original emerged. May You Never, Martyn’s signature song, originally a perfectly formed solo acoustic performance, started well, before the band joined in, the saxophonist getting so excited he was forced to push his glasses back up his nose in between blasts. Ironically, Martyn’s roadie was wearing a Johnny Cash t-shirt, reminding us that, with the right producer, it’s never too late for great artists to reconnect with their essential selves. Even Dylan had to begin again. John Martyn could still surprise us. The goodwill...
Mixing unorthodox jazz music with a deliberately screwed up pre-show announcement, and entering the vicinity wearing incongruous trainers, the audience are at once given a clue as to just how complex, multi-layered, and stand alone Stewart Lee’s A Room With A Stew is going to be.
Constantly breaking all the unwritten rules about how a comedian is supposed to act, his routine is inimitable, admirable, and at times ostentatious – obnoxiously sneering at the audience, consulting his notes, and perfectly replicating a parody of amateur comedians.
Providing a detailed description of the anatomy of a joke, and self-deprecating about his rise to middle-class status, his brilliantly created stand-up is not only impossible to steal, it’s also impossible to replicate, meaning he has a style of performing that as well as being thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud enjoyable, is also timeless.
Ostensibly a “work in progress”, the truth is he’s been performing this routine for years: every minute of it is deliberate, systematically controlled, and hilariously contagious, pulling the audience in and using them as collaborators, leaving most wondering which of his opinions are actually genuine.
The way he juxtaposes intellectualism with idiotic moments is particularly enjoyable, and whether it’s nostalgic urine related jokes, or well executed metaphors about the younger generations political naivety, Stewart Lee will have you perpetually laughing for the entirety of the performance.
Stewart Lee
2015-08-27T00:27:55+01:00
Mixing unorthodox jazz music with a deliberately screwed up pre-show announcement, and entering the vicinity wearing incongruous trainers, the audience are at once given a clue as to just how complex, multi-layered, and stand alone Stewart Lee’s A Room With A Stew is going to be. Constantly breaking all the unwritten rules about how a comedian is supposed to act, his routine is inimitable, admirable, and at times ostentatious – obnoxiously sneering at the audience, consulting his notes, and perfectly replicating a parody of amateur comedians. Providing a detailed description of the anatomy of a joke, and self-deprecating about his rise to middle-class status, his brilliantly created stand-up is not only impossible to steal, it’s also impossible to replicate, meaning he has a style of performing that as well as being thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud enjoyable, is also timeless. Ostensibly a “work in progress”, the truth is he’s been performing this routine for years: every minute of it is deliberate, systematically controlled, and hilariously contagious, pulling the audience in and using them as collaborators, leaving most wondering which of his opinions are actually genuine. The way he juxtaposes intellectualism with idiotic moments is particularly enjoyable, and whether it’s nostalgic urine related jokes, or well executed metaphors about the younger generations political naivety, Stewart Lee will have you perpetually laughing for the entirety of the performance.
It’s almost becoming old hat hearing comedians defending what is considered ‘offensive comedy’ in the aftermath of Sachsgate and Adlingtongate.
By now, everything that needs to be said has been: If you’re offended, switch off. Comedy needs to challenge taboos etc etc etc... All valid opinions I might add, but opinions that now almost feel stale due to how tiresome the debate has become. The Daily Mail and their brigade will never change, and neither will the rest of us.
Recently I’ve been re-watching Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s 1998 series This Morning With Richard Not Judy, and it’s fascinated me that two of the most ‘offensive’ and challenging stand-ups in the country had a LIVE show on Sunday morning TV.
Nowadays the idea of any comedian, let alone an ‘edgy’ one, having a live comedy show in the Country Tracks slot seems like something from a mad parallel universe, yet it did actually happen and not that long ago at all. Even though I was only a kid at the time, I knew the show was funny, but this time around I’m finding it fascinating for a different reason.
You only have to listen to Herring’s As It Occurs To Me podcast, or watch Lee’s latest live show, to see that the two of them love playing with taboo subjects and tackling difficult material my mother would be disgusted by.
Yet here, on a Sunday morning, the reins are tied in. They can only flirt with the edgier material and, in a way, the restrictions make it funnier, especially since there is the added element of danger due to its live broadcast. There are sketches, such as The Organ Gang, that are hard to imagine Lee and Herring writing nowadays, while even The Ironic Review and Jesus scenes, perfect examples of their humour, must have had to been softened due to the time the show was aired.
Despite this restriction, all of these skits are hilarious and memorable. It is testament to the writing that Lee and Herring don’t ‘sell-out’ at all; the material still manages to be thoughtful and challenging in places, but without the element of ‘offensiveness’. One could argue that Lee and Herring wouldn’t get away with such a show in the current climate, but that’s to forget that they DID get away with it without anybody taking offence.
I don’t think the Consider The Lily routine would have gotten Daily Mail readers as quite as riled compared to what happened to poor old Manuel. Yet that childish routine still manages to be a scathing and funny attack on Christianity.
It’s hard to imagine, impossible even, the likes of Frankie Boyle or Russell Brand doing a similar show. Obviously softer humour isn’t their forte, but neither is it Lee or Herring’s You could argue that the restrictions that Lee and Herring faced due to their shows’ timeslot forced them to create material and jokes they never would have if they had a completely free rein – and the comedy world would be a worse place without TMWRNJ for sure.
In comparison Brand and Boyle’s controversial jokes seem crude and unfunny, but I’m pretty sure these talented individuals could produce something far more subtle if working under such restrictions. Maybe the next taboo comedy should break is for ‘clean’ humour by comedians we don’t expect it from. It would be fascinating to see the what likes of Boyle et al out of their comfort zone if forced to be more creative. If Lee and Herring have proved they can still be funny while heavily editing themselves, then maybe it’s time for other comedians to do the same too.
After all, if comedy keeps going down the offensive route it will be in danger of becoming predictable. Comedy shouldn’t have to bow down to unfair boundaries and be scared of the consequences of offending people – but that’s not to say there can’t be great benefits from a little restriction too.
Stewart Lee
2010-01-10T00:40:38+00:00
Jack Cooper wants a break from offensive gags It’s almost becoming old hat hearing comedians defending what is considered ‘offensive comedy’ in the aftermath of Sachsgate and Adlingtongate. By now, everything that needs to be said has been: If you’re offended, switch off. Comedy needs to challenge taboos etc etc etc... All valid opinions I might add, but opinions that now almost feel stale due to how tiresome the debate has become. The Daily Mail and their brigade will never change, and neither will the rest of us. Recently I’ve been re-watching Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s 1998 series This Morning With Richard Not Judy, and it’s fascinated me that two of the most ‘offensive’ and challenging stand-ups in the country had a LIVE show on Sunday morning TV. Nowadays the idea of any comedian, let alone an ‘edgy’ one, having a live comedy show in the Country Tracks slot seems like something from a mad parallel universe, yet it did actually happen and not that long ago at all. Even though I was only a kid at the time, I knew the show was funny, but this time around I’m finding it fascinating for a different reason. You only have to listen to Herring’s As It Occurs To Me podcast, or watch Lee’s latest live show, to see that the two of them love playing with taboo subjects and tackling difficult material my mother would be disgusted by. Yet here, on a Sunday morning, the reins are tied in. They can only flirt with the edgier material and, in a way, the restrictions make it funnier, especially since there is the added element of danger due to its live broadcast. There are sketches, such as The Organ Gang, that are hard to imagine Lee and Herring writing nowadays, while...
I believe it was a frog who wrote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White. You understand it better but Elwyn Brooks White dies in the process, ideally before completing Stuart Little.” I may have got this the wrong way round.
I am a multiple British comedy and Bafta award-winning “comedian”. Once my “comedy” routines were written, performed and then largely forgotten. Now they hang around the street corners of YouTube like homeless drunks, shouting and shorn of context, detached from the peculiarities of the times that shaped them, their relative merits debated enthusiastically by furious and illiterate racists from all over the globe. Isn’t technology amazing!
Whenever Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips hits the news, a routine I wrote about him on 25 April 2013 lurches back into involuntary digital circulation. Indeed, “Stewart Lee” is now the third most popular Google appendage to Paul Nuttalls, below “MEP” and above “wife”. (The “wife” search is presumably the result of patriotic women all over England, keen to be the broodmares for a better tomorrow, checking to see if Mr Nuttalls of the Ukips is available.)
Every time I think my Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips bit has been forgotten it returns to the public consciousness more powerful and frightening than before, like a horrible Frankingstein, a persistent faecal clod that keeps floating back up the U-bend, or Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips himself.
In 2008 I wrote a 45-minute routine on Top Gear, imagining the presenters’ Christmas drinks ending with Clarkson kicking a tramp to death, while Hammond and May fail to intervene, laughing and filming the attack on cameraphones.
Predictably, every time Clarkson was nasty, the Top Gear bit accumulated more hits, the routine oddly foreshadowing the assault which was to end his BBC career. Sometimes I wonder if I am some kind of God. Does my work reflect reality, or am I actually shaping it? Was my 2008 routine a sort of sigil that ultimately drove Clarkson’s steak-crazed fists into the face of his cheese-proffering servant?
And, in turn, was it the traffic my Paul Nuttalls routine generated over the past few years that actually raised his profile to the point where he was able to become leader of the Ukips? I wonder, typically as one of today’s self-lacerating liberals, was it I who baked this golem and sent it out to rampage around the ghetto?
Some routines take years to write. But the Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips routine shot out hot and fast, in one unbroken coil, like a good shit. I was running late on the morning of 25 April 2013 and so I drove my son to school, with the Today programme on the radio.
Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips came on and said something odd about Bulgarians, which seemed to me an attempt to portray his hostility to immigration as a genuine concern for the Bulgarians’ own welfare. I went home and transcribed the interview from the iPlayer and by midday the 10-minute bit, imagining the escalating absurd rhetoric of the Ukips’ opposition to Britain’s historic waves of immigration, was done.
In performance, I played up self-consciously to a stereotype of myself as a metropolitan liberal, angry that the lack of east European immigration would affect my ability to get cheap cups of coffee in central London. And I extended hostility to Huguenots and Anglo-Saxons and Neanderthal man to a general hatred of matter itself; to a longing for a better time where not only were there no immigrants, but there was actually nothing, just a vast void. A void in which there was no crime. Obviously.
Because behind the practical critiques of immigration offered by the far right of today, there seems a more mysterious backstory, a kind of gaseous nostalgia for an imagined England that maybe never quite was, of warm beer, and old maiden aunts on bicycles, and the satisfying thwack of willow on a Gypsy’s brown face.
The routine now bobs beyond my reach on YouTube in a variety of different edits, some without the metaphysical coda, some with the removal of a burst of choice swearing, directed at an insolent prehistoric fish daring to come on to our land, which served crucially to leaven the polemic with ludicrous obscenity.
My showbiz friend Andreas Schmid, of krautrock legends Faust and Birmingham post-punks the Nightingales, even altered me to a German standup whose verbatim translation of the routine had scored 10 times more YouTube hits than my own original, for which the young comic has since apologised.
The Ukips routine generated a flurry of oddly literal critiques, mistaking its intended effects for the writer’s unintended errors, their blank analysis funnier than anything one could contrive: “Lee is becoming so absurd,” offers a contributor to a website called Western Defence, “that one does have the impression the audience is laughing as much at him as with him. He adopts a (more) juvenile tone and begins singing a childish song, repeating himself all the time as usual. In an incredible display of immaturity for a 45-year-old man (perhaps befitting of the old children’s television programme Rainbow), Lee continues his song. We are now supposed to laugh at the fact that Lee is really not making any sense at all. His arguments have been fully taken to absurd extremes.”
I am glad the bit has a second life and I hope it cheers people up, and perhaps takes away their fear for a moment or two. Maybe it will even sell me some tickets! But I don’t know if I could write it today. Despite having been photographed hobnobbing with the EDL, claiming he wants to see the NHS dismantled, denying climate change, not supporting the ivory trade ban, and refusing to quite disavow the BNP supporters he accepts the Ukips may have assimilated, the personable Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips seems eminently electable in post-fact, hate-fuelled Britain, even with his inexplicable loathing of elephants.
It’s not inconceivable that, in a few years’ time, former Labour supporters might be tactically voting Conservative to keep Nuttalls’s far right out. Dancing around, singing childish songs, and swearing at imaginary fish as a response to the Ukips seems to belong to simpler times, when Paul Nuttalls’s avowed intent to ban comedians who did jokes about the Ukips from theatres seemed laughable. I don’t know where I’d start a half-hour set on the Ukips today. I feel depressed, defeated, and often more than a little afraid for the future. This frog is now dead.
Stewart Lee
2016-12-04T12:53:41+00:00
I believe it was a frog who wrote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White. You understand it better but Elwyn Brooks White dies in the process, ideally before completing Stuart Little.” I may have got this the wrong way round. I am a multiple British comedy and Bafta award-winning “comedian”. Once my “comedy” routines were written, performed and then largely forgotten. Now they hang around the street corners of YouTube like homeless drunks, shouting and shorn of context, detached from the peculiarities of the times that shaped them, their relative merits debated enthusiastically by furious and illiterate racists from all over the globe. Isn’t technology amazing! Whenever Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips hits the news, a routine I wrote about him on 25 April 2013 lurches back into involuntary digital circulation. Indeed, “Stewart Lee” is now the third most popular Google appendage to Paul Nuttalls, below “MEP” and above “wife”. (The “wife” search is presumably the result of patriotic women all over England, keen to be the broodmares for a better tomorrow, checking to see if Mr Nuttalls of the Ukips is available.) Every time I think my Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips bit has been forgotten it returns to the public consciousness more powerful and frightening than before, like a horrible Frankingstein, a persistent faecal clod that keeps floating back up the U-bend, or Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips himself. In 2008 I wrote a 45-minute routine on Top Gear, imagining the presenters’ Christmas drinks ending with Clarkson kicking a tramp to death, while Hammond and May fail to intervene, laughing and filming the attack on cameraphones. Predictably, every time Clarkson was nasty, the Top Gear bit accumulated more hits, the routine oddly foreshadowing the assault which was to end his BBC career....
Separate Motorhead's 20th album from the Lemmy legend, and it's a set of effective punk metal belters.
But the 67 year old frontman's ravaged growl remains unique, unexpectedly suggesting a speed-damaged Louis Armstrong on the contemplative Dust And Glass.
Keep Your Power Dry sees enduring outlaw truisms coagulate into the gnomic, but the album's fatally fractured by formulaic splayed sneaker guitar soloing.
The Motorhead machine still runs, if rather too noisily, but deserves a reputational retune of the kind Rick Rubin once gave Johnny Cash.
Stewart Lee
2013-11-03T21:04:17+00:00
Separate Motorhead's 20th album from the Lemmy legend, and it's a set of effective punk metal belters. But the 67 year old frontman's ravaged growl remains unique, unexpectedly suggesting a speed-damaged Louis Armstrong on the contemplative Dust And Glass. Keep Your Power Dry sees enduring outlaw truisms coagulate into the gnomic, but the album's fatally fractured by formulaic splayed sneaker guitar soloing. The Motorhead machine still runs, if rather too noisily, but deserves a reputational retune of the kind Rick Rubin once gave Johnny Cash.
The Ohio trio Bitch Magnet, named with knowing naughtiness back in a lamentably lost PC world, recorded from 1988 to 1990, and in that two year period plied hardcore punk with a whole new palette of post-rock possibilities.
Here's everything you need on three discs, in advance of two belated British dates next week.
Escape velocity belters lie down alongside snail paced crawls of monumental hugeness; complex prog rock time changes play out like cro-magnon Stooges riffs; extended epics refuse, insolently, to resolve; and two decades later, Ducks and Drakes' spiky stegosaurus shell still hides a deceptively soft centre.
Stewart Lee
2011-12-04T01:25:48+00:00
The Ohio trio Bitch Magnet, named with knowing naughtiness back in a lamentably lost PC world, recorded from 1988 to 1990, and in that two year period plied hardcore punk with a whole new palette of post-rock possibilities. Here's everything you need on three discs, in advance of two belated British dates next week. Escape velocity belters lie down alongside snail paced crawls of monumental hugeness; complex prog rock time changes play out like cro-magnon Stooges riffs; extended epics refuse, insolently, to resolve; and two decades later, Ducks and Drakes' spiky stegosaurus shell still hides a deceptively soft centre.
Maria Dada, from Lebanon, and Manchester's Amy Pennington, open their debut with Daddy's Bulge, two shouty schoolgirls traversing the bristly ridge of Captain Beefheart's Sue Egypt with a drum machine in tow.
Doomed is bed-sit electro-pop, home-taped by Duracell Gary Numans, and Oh Boy She Moans is a sluggardly Seventies Fall rant. Eighties fixtions surface in the muffled, no-budget, power ballad Berlin and in a lint fluffed reading of Billy Idol's White Wedding.
But is Greatest Hits Vol : 1 an album proper, or just the audible run-off of an arch performance art project?
Stewart Lee
2011-10-16T20:52:46+01:00
Maria Dada, from Lebanon, and Manchester's Amy Pennington, open their debut with Daddy's Bulge, two shouty schoolgirls traversing the bristly ridge of Captain Beefheart's Sue Egypt with a drum machine in tow. Doomed is bed-sit electro-pop, home-taped by Duracell Gary Numans, and Oh Boy She Moans is a sluggardly Seventies Fall rant. Eighties fixtions surface in the muffled, no-budget, power ballad Berlin and in a lint fluffed reading of Billy Idol's White Wedding. But is Greatest Hits Vol : 1 an album proper, or just the audible run-off of an arch performance art project?
How does a four-piece rock band set about covering a composition like Yoko Ono's 1961 Voice Piece for Soprano, a set of notes reading simply - "Scream. 1. Against the wind. 2. Against the wall. 3. Against the sky."? Presumably, its copyright is infringed by millions of mewling babies or arachnophobic women worldwide on a daily basis. But it takes veteran New York art-rockers Sonic Youth, and Coco, the toddler daughter of band members Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, just 12 seconds to dispatch it and, against all odds, emerge with their dignity intact.
Sonic Youth's new album, the archly titled Goodbye 20th Century, is a double set of 13 post-war avant garde pieces by the likes of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and Steve Reich, but it doesn't represent as much of a departure for the former rock-festival headliners as the casual listener might expect. "We've been doing experimental work all along," protests guitarist Lee Ranaldo, predictably. "It's just that now we have our own studio, we're able to record it in a releasable form. We've never been strictly pop or avant garde, we just follow what we like. That's the reason we've not stagnated."
In the mouth of the average forty-something punk survivor, such words would ring hollow, but the secret history of Sonic Youth shows that the band are above suspicion.
When Sonic Youth formed in New York in 1981, they already straddled the art and rock divide, Moore having played in new-wave band the Coachmen and Ranaldo serving time in composer Glenn Branca's massed choir of electric guitarists. Seen as spiritual forebears of Nirvana and the grunge movement, which sold punk noise to the MTV generation at the start of the 1990s, Sonic Youth controversially signed to corporate giant Geffen in 1989. Since then, they've admirably honoured their more commercial commitments while also jamming and recording with distinguished free-jazz freaks and contemporary composers such as William Hooker or Christian Wolff, issuing their more elliptical music on their own label, SYR. Barefoot in the Head, Moore's 1988 collaboration with avant-jazz saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich of Borbetomagus, was described by alleged sleeve-note writer "Thomas Pynchon" as "two free men meet a slave". Goodbye 20th Century is the result of Sonic Youth's two decades' jangling of the fetters of rock.
Ranaldo explained the album with deference and modesty: "We'd done an improvised show with (free music wunderkind) Jim O'Rourke and (John Cage percussionist) William Winnant in San Francisco. They were very knowledgable about graphically scored work, and we liked the idea of Sonic Youth trying some. So over the next year we put together a shortlist and made phone calls to try to track down scores. They came rolling in and we got excited. Sometimes graphic scores look like music, sometimes they look like Jackson Pollock paintings. Soon we had a big stack of scores to whittle through."
Sonic Youth's version of Steve Reich's 1968 piece, Pendulum Music, was almost something of a coup. "As far as we knew, there wasn't a recording of it, but a Dutch ensemble beat us to it by a couple of months. Again, it's a set of instructions - hang the microphones on stands over the amps and pull back and swing until they give out a bleat of feedback. It ends when they're hanging limp."
Unlike the band members' various solo projects, the scary, serious art of Goodbye 20th Century is issued under the Sonic Youth banner, possibly alienating more conservative fans. When Ranaldo and Moore jammed with acorn-shaped jazz horn player Lol Coxhill and British free-noise group Ascension at the Camden Jazz Cafe in 1996, the audience bewilderment was tangible. Ranaldo concedes some anxieties: "People come with certain expectations because our name's on the bill, but those shows aren't a one-off thing for us, we're wholly committed to that area. But we forget sometimes that outside of New York people are very surprised by it. In newsgroups on the internet, people are divided over whether it's tripe with no songs or the best music we've done. Some are totally knocked out, some are totally bummed out. But it's the right time for this. There's a generation of younger kids interested in improvised formats. Not all new bands want to be the next indie-rock sensation. They're as tied to Stockhausen as they are to rock'n'roll."
Sonic Youth's millennial rethink follows the theft, earlier this year, of all their instruments from the back of their van. "At the time it was a real drag," recalls Ranaldo. "All the equipment we wrote the last eight years of material on, with guitars modified to our specifications. We were devastated. But we're using it to our advantage. It's forced us to look in other directions, or use guitars from 20 years ago that we'd left to gather dust, and it's altered our sound."
At least the stolen instruments will have survived the treatment meted out to the piano featured in the band's version of Fluxus composer George Maciunas's 1962 work Piano Piece No13 (Carpenter's Piece). Computer-literate listeners will find a bonus four-minute video clip included on the first CD, showing the group taking turns to hammer nails into the keys. Drummer Steve Shelley seems a little reluctant, whilst bassist Kim Gordon's ungainly two-handed grip begs the question: which member of the band is best at putting up shelves?
"I would have to say that I am," answers Ranaldo without a moment's hesitation, shattering the illusion of the group's mutually supportive ethic. "I'm definitely the best."
Goodbye 20th Century is out tomorrow on SYR records.
For sample graphic scores and Winnant's essay on the making of the album, visit www.smellslikerecords.com
Stewart Lee
1999-12-05T17:36:46+00:00
How does a four-piece rock band set about covering a composition like Yoko Ono's 1961 Voice Piece for Soprano, a set of notes reading simply - "Scream. 1. Against the wind. 2. Against the wall. 3. Against the sky."? Presumably, its copyright is infringed by millions of mewling babies or arachnophobic women worldwide on a daily basis. But it takes veteran New York art-rockers Sonic Youth, and Coco, the toddler daughter of band members Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, just 12 seconds to dispatch it and, against all odds, emerge with their dignity intact. Sonic Youth's new album, the archly titled Goodbye 20th Century, is a double set of 13 post-war avant garde pieces by the likes of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and Steve Reich, but it doesn't represent as much of a departure for the former rock-festival headliners as the casual listener might expect. "We've been doing experimental work all along," protests guitarist Lee Ranaldo, predictably. "It's just that now we have our own studio, we're able to record it in a releasable form. We've never been strictly pop or avant garde, we just follow what we like. That's the reason we've not stagnated." In the mouth of the average forty-something punk survivor, such words would ring hollow, but the secret history of Sonic Youth shows that the band are above suspicion. When Sonic Youth formed in New York in 1981, they already straddled the art and rock divide, Moore having played in new-wave band the Coachmen and Ranaldo serving time in composer Glenn Branca's massed choir of electric guitarists. Seen as spiritual forebears of Nirvana and the grunge movement, which sold punk noise to the MTV generation at the start of the 1990s, Sonic Youth controversially signed to corporate giant Geffen in 1989. Since then, they've admirably honoured...
“I would like to carry on doing this into my mid to late-60s, minimum. I am not going to write a play or do a novel or host anything or do a film. I would like to do this”
Stewart Lee has returned for a fourth series of his acclaimed, complicated and bellyachingly funny BBC2 comedy series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle – and now he has to deal with that success.
For those who haven’t seen it, the show is a stand up routine in which Lee adopts the persona of Stewart Lee – a kind of more idealistic, angrier and pettier version of himself – and performs in front of an audience. The first episode (Wealth) was last week and episode two (Islamaphobia) is on tonight. They are brilliant.
The show offers a fascinating interplay between Lee and his live audience (“who are sort of trapped”), Lee and the audience at home (whom he frequently addresses by pointing his face at the camera) and, most importantly, between Lee and himself.
“He is mainly me but I have to create some distance to do it night after night,” Lee tells RadioTimes.com. “It’s like being in a double act but with yourself. He’s more of a bad drunk version of me. He’s more arrogant. He’s more given to emotional outbursts, he’s more petty-minded. But on the positive side he’s also a moral absolutist about what’s right and wrong. He’s like an exaggerated version of me. He’s able to live a different side of me.”
It’s finely crafted, deeply nuanced stuff and the character has developed from series one where he was a man on the outside, trying to get in, having been given a BBC TV series and berating people who couldn’t recognise his genius. With four series now under his belt, the outsider shtick won’t rub, as Lee himself admits.
“I think a comedian has to be low status on some level, that gives you the right to do all sorts of jokes about all sorts of different kinds of people. But that idea was compromised because the series kept getting recommissioned which sort of lends me a degree of status.
“If you look at the first couple of series I am much more arrogant on stage. And I could afford to be because the series was still a new thing. Now it’s more established you have got to undercut yourself even more. So you have a right to do jokes. So now I am making myself look like I am on the edge of losing it.
“My character now hates himself because things are going well. In the first series he was convinced he was brilliant and the problem was entirely with the audience for not getting how good he was. Now it’s going well, he’s wracked with this terrible doubt about what he’s doing which of course, is from me. I have always been the sort of person who thought that popular things were rubbish. It’s a bit of a double bind.”
In reality too, Lee’s audiences – the real Lee’s audiences – have swelled since his TV show. But instead of killing off the concept (as he feared) that has actually made it funnier and more complex. His frustrations as he struggles with his success are the point now.
Truth and identity are elusive concepts in this universe, but Lee admits there are sections of his act where he deliberately tells good stand-up gags (despite having frequently taken apart more conventional comics like Lee Mack and Michael McIntyre) just to keep his hand in.
“I am not comparing myself to great artists but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it’s reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise when you listen to the 50s jazz people who do these vast solos you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune. The assumption [made of me] is you can’t do it so you do this weird shit. Still. It doesn’t make any difference. Critics still say I can’t do it.”
Another problem with his increased professional success, is that he has become more recognised and says that the night before we spoke, he went out with a friend and their evening was ruined by people who kept coming up and talking to him.
“It ruined my friend’s evening definitely and my night was sort of ruined,” he says.
“You get those little surges of things. The amount of people who wanted to talk to me was difficult, actually. I haven’t figured out how to work that in my life. In a way I would love to do another series but increasingly the downside of it, the way it affects your life and the life of your children, is being a recognised figure. Some people love it. But I don’t go to Jonathan Ross’ Halloween party, I go to see a band in a pub and it’s difficult to do that sometimes.”
The use of a persona allows him to talk about his wife and children and family life, creating a scenario where he is performing in order to help support them and pay his mortgage.
The reality is pretty close. In real life he and his wife, the award-winning comedian and writer Bridget Christie have two children. They talk about their stand up, of course, and obviously exchange ideas. But he’s been banned from seeing her last two shows.
“She says if I go I make the room weird. I understand she’s very good, she’s won loads of awards.”
Meanwhile, a fifth series of Comedy Vehicle for Lee is a possibility but he is relaxed about it.
“It depends on how long the BBC takes to tell me whether they want another one. A new tour could develop into a series or another long-term story tour.
“Weirdly, financially, I am better off not doing telly. Because you can tour the material for longer. But really telly means I can do long theatre runs in London working it out and not touring so much. And also there’s probably an argument to be had that doing the telly helps build the live audience. It’s creatively interesting trying to write six half-hour blocks and it’s also creatively interesting trying to write a story show which I haven’t done for four years, so we will see what happens next.”
One thing he is sure about is that he wouldn't want to do anything else.
“I would like to carry on doing this into my mid to late 60s minimum. I am not going to write a play or do a novel or host anything or do a film. I would like to do this.
“I’m 47 now. The ends in sight. I once interviewed [musician and writer] Julian Cope who was 55 at the time and he said ‘I am 60 in five years’ time and if I make it to 60 instead of becoming an embarrassment I become a legend’. And once you carry on after 60 you are a cult figure.”
He snorts with laughter at that, clearly too modest to put himself in that category. But he does muse that if he makes it to 60 “that’s only 20 hours of material, just 80 more jokes I’ve got to write...”
Personally, I think he’s got it in him…
Stewart Lee
2016-03-10T04:44:19+00:00
“I would like to carry on doing this into my mid to late-60s, minimum. I am not going to write a play or do a novel or host anything or do a film. I would like to do this” Stewart Lee has returned for a fourth series of his acclaimed, complicated and bellyachingly funny BBC2 comedy series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle – and now he has to deal with that success. For those who haven’t seen it, the show is a stand up routine in which Lee adopts the persona of Stewart Lee – a kind of more idealistic, angrier and pettier version of himself – and performs in front of an audience. The first episode (Wealth) was last week and episode two (Islamaphobia) is on tonight. They are brilliant. The show offers a fascinating interplay between Lee and his live audience (“who are sort of trapped”), Lee and the audience at home (whom he frequently addresses by pointing his face at the camera) and, most importantly, between Lee and himself. “He is mainly me but I have to create some distance to do it night after night,” Lee tells RadioTimes.com. “It’s like being in a double act but with yourself. He’s more of a bad drunk version of me. He’s more arrogant. He’s more given to emotional outbursts, he’s more petty-minded. But on the positive side he’s also a moral absolutist about what’s right and wrong. He’s like an exaggerated version of me. He’s able to live a different side of me.” It’s finely crafted, deeply nuanced stuff and the character has developed from series one where he was a man on the outside, trying to get in, having been given a BBC TV series and berating people who couldn’t recognise his genius. With four series now under his belt, the...
A different kind of haunting takes place in Interiors, a site-specific show that proves the comedian Johnny Vegas is more than a funnyman - he's a well-rounded actor, too. Vegas plays Jeff Parkin, a freelance corporate consultant who is hoping for a quick sale on his suburban semi near Old Trafford.
As he conducts a guided tour to his starkly under-furnished dwelling, Vegas brilliantly ad-libbing away in friendly-tetchy character, it becomes clear that our host's life has gone belly-up and that his partner has left him.
You could describe this tragicomic tour de force as an astute satire on the nation's ideal-home pretensions, nailing the consequences of consumerist individualism - but what makes it another triumph for the Manchester International Festival is that it shows how theatre can be more visceral and risk-taking, without losing its brains.
Stewart Lee
2007-07-07T00:47:06+01:00
A different kind of haunting takes place in Interiors, a site-specific show that proves the comedian Johnny Vegas is more than a funnyman - he's a well-rounded actor, too. Vegas plays Jeff Parkin, a freelance corporate consultant who is hoping for a quick sale on his suburban semi near Old Trafford. As he conducts a guided tour to his starkly under-furnished dwelling, Vegas brilliantly ad-libbing away in friendly-tetchy character, it becomes clear that our host's life has gone belly-up and that his partner has left him. You could describe this tragicomic tour de force as an astute satire on the nation's ideal-home pretensions, nailing the consequences of consumerist individualism - but what makes it another triumph for the Manchester International Festival is that it shows how theatre can be more visceral and risk-taking, without losing its brains.
Dusty function rooms and faded TV stars in English seaside towns felt abruptly moribund when, in 1993, The Mary Whitehouse Experience (a comedy revue featuring Robert Newman, David Baddiel, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis) sold out 12,000 seats at Wembley Arena [NOTE; This is the author's error. Newman & Baddiel did this as a double act, after TMWE folded].
The event seemed to rubber-stamp the dawning of a loud, monetised era in UK standup, ready-branded with its Janet Street-Porter-appropriated sound-bite: comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll. In the midst of this boom, Stewart Lee, in his double-act partnership with Richard Herring, made two television series, toured nationally, and earned radio credits for Chris Morris’s influential current affairs satire On the Hour – and yet, it’s plain that he found most of the work in this period conspicuous and unfulfilling. Interest in performance dwindled, and in 2001 Lee co-wrote (with Richard Thomas, to initial acclaim) Jerry Springer: The Opera, which transferred to Theatreland premises, only to attract both controversy from the religious right and no money.
Success on his own terms came relatively late for Lee, well into the mid-2000s, materialising only, we learn, after a period of intense disenchantment. It’s a time eloquently rendered in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, which is the more substantial of the books here. However, Content Provider – superficially a cut-and-paste grab-bag of comment pieces, in this case written mainly for The Observer newspaper – is perhaps more immediately recognisable, playing as it does on the irascible, slightly dysfunctional relationship between Lee and his audience these days. Critics consider Stewart Lee synonymous with The Observer. He’s supposed to represent the whole idea of its archetypal, comfortably liberal reader, sniping at a system that sustains him. However, instead of cosying up, Lee alters this situation by writing either in self-parody or in the skewed on-stage character version of himself. Live, it’s a now-familiar but complex dynamic: Lee can grant tolerance to his ‘established’ audience while displaying intolerance towards newcomers, to whom he once wearily directed, “you’re going to have to raise your game.” It’s a struggling Grotesque that we’re seeing — the once-balanced entertainer mutated into a monster fuming at being denied the recognition that it deserves.
This shtick (which Alan Moore describes as the “innovative technique of spraying his own audience with caustic bile”) is certainly funny to witness; there are shades of John Cleese as Basil Fawlty in its apparent truth. (It’s strange that Lee, also Oxbridge-educated, with a wide-reaching and authentic fascination for music, literature and the arts, felt unable to accept a role presenting a well-known culture show on BBC Television. But of course his irritable character, placed in the real world, in that actual job, would be unable to approach another artist without rancour and jealousy of the work under discussion. And for similar reasons of creative integrity, a kind of “what would I be doing there?” test, adverts and panel shows have also remained off limits.)
The articles compiled in Content Provider (on pretty standard topics such as William-and-Kate; Brexit; television; political pratfalls) were written – mainly, anyway – to plug absences in a regular Observer column by the comic actor David Mitchell. Lee is more inclined to include rudimentary, self-defeating errors in his copy, or toy with the rules of acceptability, than to provide Mitchell’s arch, wry, and distinctly echoing commentary on events of the week. Anyone who reads these things online will know that they unfailingly prompt a deluge of incredulous ‘below-the-line’ abuse, counteracted by Lee’s legacy fan base dutifully attempting to enlighten the naysayers. Lee uses the worst of the comments on his own website, and republishes some choice bile in Content Provider. It’s a typical acceptance of hatred, quoted on stage, promotional posters, and books (Lee “is not funny and has nothing to say,” boasts the front of Content Provider), which goes back to Lee and Herring’s Fist of Fun spin-off book, with its ‘celebration of mediocrity’ sections.
Content has been provided, by Lee and (unwittingly) his detractors, but only half of the equation gets paid. No bones are made about this being an assemblage of disposable writing intended to space-fill the print media – in Lee’s own words, to be smiled at and then become “the lining of a cat’s litter tray.” This is slightly harsh: the new forewords to many of these articles add a lot of value, as does a revealing, angsty introductory chapter. All in all, Lee seems quite chuffed that the exaggerated replica of himself has wound up pulling this off.
A character is never wholly fictional, and it’s interesting, reading How I Escaped My Certain Fate, to map the development of the performance to a chronological autobiography. This is essentially what the book is: a highly (and at times, ridiculously) annotated account of the ups and downs of Lee’s work up to roughly 2008, including verbatim transcriptions of three key shows, ums and ers dutifully included. (In possible homage to Flann O’Brien, of whom Lee is a fan, the footnotes intrude on and disrupt the narrative with infectious glee.)
“I never wanted to be a comedian,” the book begins, inviting the obvious riposte. Indeed, it has been justifiably asked: is Lee really a comedian? Does he truthfully want to stand in front of people and make them laugh? To give folks an enjoyable evening out? The answer to all these questions is yes – Lee has no interest in “driving to Cardiff and ruining someone’s night” – but at the same time his comedy is like awkward, experimental jazz, hovering near the outer reaches of a circle whose epicentre is occupied by Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay. There’s room for all, of course, and one of the most charming aspects of Certain Fate is Lee’s admiration for stand-up as an art form, one for which he seems to have near-unconditional love. His description of the early 1980s movement known as Alternative Comedy is a high point, recalling Malcolm Hardee (who claimed to have invented the phrase), Arnold Brown, Peter Richardson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French, Andy de la Tour and more.
Alternative Comedy, says Lee, had an ideological standpoint “for about a week in 1980,” which may be true, but sounds like the curmudgeon alone with his pint in the corner of the pub, and prompts the editor to warn in the footnotes that the book may come across as “the demented ramblings of an inexplicably bitter man.” It’s a description that sums up the development of the Stewart Lee character fairly well —intentionally or not. These notes are alive with anecdotal and heartfelt interludes, regaling us with tales of performers whose careers are mere footnotes themselves. They are particularly absorbing in their examination of the three transcribed shows, explaining the minutiae of each set-piece: its delivery, exactly why it did or did not work. We’re taken back to when Radio One had “weird bits,” when Channel Four was radical, and the NME had superb writers. There is sadness in the loss of those things; in fact, the presence of emotion may surprise those expecting blanket cynicism. Depressed in Australia, and rather absurdly, Lee buys Bovril and an Oasis record out of sheer nostalgia.
The book accumulates a roll-call of comedy personalities, some better-known than others, and is dedicated to Ted Chippington, a minor but cult figure in 1980s standup. Seemingly forever misplaced on an unsuitable bill, often supporting bands, Chippington’s act was to repeat, with minor variations, the same joke involving a tortuous misunderstanding of something’s name. Cue nods of recognition from followers of Stewart Lee, who, after first seeing Chippington live, made up his mind to strive for chiefly the same thing. Chippington and another obscure comic, Simon Munnery, are cited as major influences, as is a documentary named The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s film about a legendary US standup joke. Arcane and obscene, yet routinely performed by myriad comedians, the less said here about the joke itself the better, but as Provenza says, “it’s about the singer, not the song. Repeating the same joke allows us to get over the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.” This provides an apt juncture to conclude the book, with Lee telling us “this was what I had been trying to do in comedy for nearly twenty years.” That aim has been achieved, as most who have seen his standup any time in the last dozen years would confirm. The story closes in a mode of tainted celebration – a long-sought solo BBC series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, has been commissioned – as Lee finds himself in the Chinese restaurant of a Salford retail park, with a disinterested and preoccupied colleague, and ultimately drinks his champagne alone. “The me you see onstage,” he says, “is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty, and my most patronising.” It’s an act fronted up so well, people think that the monster is real. How I Escaped My Certain Fate could reverse that view, but books like this are for the converted: Lee’s decriers will have little inclination to read it.--Neil Jackson
Stewart Lee
2018-02-05T17:18:37+00:00
Dusty function rooms and faded TV stars in English seaside towns felt abruptly moribund when, in 1993, The Mary Whitehouse Experience (a comedy revue featuring Robert Newman, David Baddiel, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis) sold out 12,000 seats at Wembley Arena [NOTE; This is the author's error. Newman & Baddiel did this as a double act, after TMWE folded]. The event seemed to rubber-stamp the dawning of a loud, monetised era in UK standup, ready-branded with its Janet Street-Porter-appropriated sound-bite: comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll. In the midst of this boom, Stewart Lee, in his double-act partnership with Richard Herring, made two television series, toured nationally, and earned radio credits for Chris Morris’s influential current affairs satire On the Hour – and yet, it’s plain that he found most of the work in this period conspicuous and unfulfilling. Interest in performance dwindled, and in 2001 Lee co-wrote (with Richard Thomas, to initial acclaim) Jerry Springer: The Opera, which transferred to Theatreland premises, only to attract both controversy from the religious right and no money. Success on his own terms came relatively late for Lee, well into the mid-2000s, materialising only, we learn, after a period of intense disenchantment. It’s a time eloquently rendered in How I Escaped My Certain Fate, which is the more substantial of the books here. However, Content Provider – superficially a cut-and-paste grab-bag of comment pieces, in this case written mainly for The Observer newspaper – is perhaps more immediately recognisable, playing as it does on the irascible, slightly dysfunctional relationship between Lee and his audience these days. Critics consider Stewart Lee synonymous with The Observer. He’s supposed to represent the whole idea of its archetypal, comfortably liberal reader, sniping at a system that sustains him. However, instead of cosying up, Lee alters this...
Once described as the 'comedian's comedian' Stewart Lee has been performing stand up since 1988. https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe
He is known for pushing boundaries with his intelligent, self-referential and often provocative style of comedy but in his new show 'Stewart Lee vs the Man Wulf' he questions his place on the comedy circuit in an era of increasing populism rhetoric and the popularity of, in his words “$60m Netflix comedians of hate.”
In this episode of Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy he discusses the state of comedy today and what he thinks of the comedy style of comics like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle as well as why he wouldn't tour America right now.
As The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper begins a new era under Tortoise media he also reflects on his column for the paper which he's stopped after 15 years.
Produced by Holly Snelling and Sachin Croker
Stewart Lee
2025-05-09T15:29:48+01:00
Once described as the 'comedian's comedian' Stewart Lee has been performing stand up since 1988. https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe He is known for pushing boundaries with his intelligent, self-referential and often provocative style of comedy but in his new show 'Stewart Lee vs the Man Wulf' he questions his place on the comedy circuit in an era of increasing populism rhetoric and the popularity of, in his words “$60m Netflix comedians of hate.” In this episode of Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy he discusses the state of comedy today and what he thinks of the comedy style of comics like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle as well as why he wouldn't tour America right now. As The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper begins a new era under Tortoise media he also reflects on his column for the paper which he's stopped after 15 years. Produced by Holly Snelling and Sachin Croker
Are we naturally selfish? Or do we have an innate sense of empathy for our fellow living things? The radio journalist Herbert Morrison watched the Hindenberg come down and announced, “Oh! The humanity!” And once I stood outside a pub on the canal in Camden and watched a crowd of drunken men laughing and cheering as five seagulls pecked a fluffy baby duckling to death. I said nothing. But I suddenly understood why Mock the Week was so popular.
Perhaps there is hope for our species, despite the popularity of TV comedy panel shows. On Friday I witnessed at close hand the first flowering of the spontaneous collective act of compassion that has since dominated celebrity social media feeds all weekend, reaching critical mass at around 2pm Saturday, when the sheer density of tweets caused Danny Dyer’s nut to freak out, and saw Ricky Gervais append the heartwarming story to a breakdown of Netflix viewing figures for Derek.
Soon after breakfast on Friday morning I had crossed the Scottish border, driving north between standup shows, from the St Cuthbert’s Players Playhouse in Alnwick up to the Kate Middleton Memorial theatre in St Andrews, where the young Prince William’s eye first fell upon his future bride’s Scaramouche in a performance of Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You.
Gradually, on the southbound side of the A1, an enormous convoy of vastly varied Scottish vehicles appeared to take shape, streaming endlessly towards England, honking in celebration as they passed. But why? Not having a car radio, eschewing the iPhone, and unable to buy a copy of Friday’s Guardian that far north, I wasn’t able to make sense of the incoherent events. I pulled off the road to watch at Ayton, by the sign for Q’s Cat Motel, which was where I ran into Steven Moffat.
I had met the Scottish Doctor Who writer-producer once before, at a BBC thinktank. I had suggested a new long-running drama series about a little old man whose face and body stay the same for millions of years, but whose buttocks are played by the buttocks of a succession of currently fashionable character actors, as the decades progress, of all races and genders. Needless to say my idea was rejected by the fearful “suits”, concerned, doubtless, about appearing too “politically correct”, and in terror of losing the licence fee under a Tory government.
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And now here was this Moffat again, by chance, at a cat motel off the A1 in Berwickshire, checking in his prize Persian, Erato, in anticipation of a long journey south. Perhaps Moffat could explain to me what on earth was going on. “Ian Rankin direct-messaged me and told me that Wattie from the Exploited was on Twitter encouraging all Scots to form a relief convoy,” Moffat explained, “and then Miss Barbara Dickson phoned me up in tears saying we had to mobilise the Scottish public. I asked myself, ‘What would Doctor Who do?’ Doctor Who would help. I know that better than anyone.”
In the sudden and unexpected political shift of the green island we all call home, the liberal left south of the border had been marooned, abandoned without hope. The Scottish celebrities’ heartstrings had been twanged and, overnight, their fans and followers had used social media to spring into action. I ran to the road and watched the first of the flotilla of little vehicles beginning the return journey north, their available space crammed with escapees.
All Scottish life was there, taking to their highland home those with nothing left to lose. A tweed-clad Loch Lomond laird in a spluttering vintage car turned his head toward the backseat to laugh with a gaggle of London schoolkids, avoiding academy status and the dead hand of Gove; half a dozen turbaned Scottish Sikhs, in a mobile festival catering wagon, partied with northbound Brighton lesbians, fearful of life under an equality minister who voted against gay marriage; and a whisky-nipping gillie at the wheel of a Land Rover softly stroked a young Yorkshire vixen and her sleeping cubs, escaping the repeal of the hunting ban.
I repositioned myself on the central reservation to continue to observe the convoy. Edinburgh Muslims, chefs from the Mosque Kitchen, drove a delivery van usually laden with cash and carry rice, and planned their pause for Friday prayers with the family of left-leaning north London Jewish academics they were taking with them, thinkers and readers for whom life in England was about to become intellectually intolerable; Heriot-Watt students, dressed as vampires, had rerouted the Haunted Auld Reekie Tours bus they worked on at weekends on an unscheduled excursion, and now swapped alcopops with southern arts and humanities graduates, finally accepting that they had no future in a culture that saw the outpourings of the human heart as nothing more than missed opportunities for monetisation. And farm trucks from the far north, thick with the ground-in dung of prize highland cattle, trundled towards the tartan utopia, their fenced flatbeds now thronged with teachers, poets, artists, dreamers, the poor and the unprofitable.
And then, as I crossed back to my car, there came the most moving sight of all. Celtic fans and Rangers fans, working together, taking turns to steer a hastily commandeered ambulance north, nursing the brows of dying old folk, bed-blockers from beneath the border, soon to be set adrift by the ongoing privatisation of their home visits, their tragic plight dissolving age-old sectarian differences. And all these noble Scots, it would transpire, had set their ancient grudges aside to assist those condemned to suffer by the unwieldy splitting of the democratic deck. I got back in the car and followed the convoy north.
As the makeshift convoy stopped at Dunbar for the night, the practical limitations of Wattie from the Exploited’s vision became apparent. The volunteers’ vehicles discharged their human cargo into a succession of hastily commandeered campsites, Dunbar Camping and Caravanning at the golf course, and Belhaven Bay by the reservoir, which were soon overwhelmed. “Is this what you wanted?” I asked Wattie, who was using a stolen golf club to direct the traffic. Wattie looked weary, his red mohican wilting a little. “I’m no genius,” he said, “but I looked at those poor people and I knew we had to do something. I don’t have a plan. I don’t even know what we’re going to do tomorrow. But at least we did something. You know what they’re calling this? The Miracle of Dunbar. Not bad, eh?”
Stewart Lee
2015-05-24T09:28:41+01:00
Are we naturally selfish? Or do we have an innate sense of empathy for our fellow living things? The radio journalist Herbert Morrison watched the Hindenberg come down and announced, “Oh! The humanity!” And once I stood outside a pub on the canal in Camden and watched a crowd of drunken men laughing and cheering as five seagulls pecked a fluffy baby duckling to death. I said nothing. But I suddenly understood why Mock the Week was so popular. Perhaps there is hope for our species, despite the popularity of TV comedy panel shows. On Friday I witnessed at close hand the first flowering of the spontaneous collective act of compassion that has since dominated celebrity social media feeds all weekend, reaching critical mass at around 2pm Saturday, when the sheer density of tweets caused Danny Dyer’s nut to freak out, and saw Ricky Gervais append the heartwarming story to a breakdown of Netflix viewing figures for Derek. Soon after breakfast on Friday morning I had crossed the Scottish border, driving north between standup shows, from the St Cuthbert’s Players Playhouse in Alnwick up to the Kate Middleton Memorial theatre in St Andrews, where the young Prince William’s eye first fell upon his future bride’s Scaramouche in a performance of Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You. Gradually, on the southbound side of the A1, an enormous convoy of vastly varied Scottish vehicles appeared to take shape, streaming endlessly towards England, honking in celebration as they passed. But why? Not having a car radio, eschewing the iPhone, and unable to buy a copy of Friday’s Guardian that far north, I wasn’t able to make sense of the incoherent events. I pulled off the road to watch at Ayton, by the sign for Q’s Cat Motel, which was where I ran into...
Julian Cope's first novel, 131, opens with its protagonist, a former rock star brilliantly named Rock Section, trapped in an aircraft toilet, covered in his own excrement. "Your novel begins at the point where many would end," I suggest. "Yes," agrees Cope, "it's the same as 'Like A Hurricane' by Neil Young. Straight in with the lead guitar solo, no messing about. I consciously began the book with utter humiliation, his brown trousers all round his ankles. I thought, 'Yes. The only way is up.'"
In his legendary solo performance piece The Furtive Nudist, the late shaman-clown and zen-ventriloquist Ken Campbell claimed he was able to move around the world entirely undressed and entirely unnoticed, because the last thing anyone was expecting to see was a naked man, and therefore passers-by just screened the image out of the collective consciousness. Likewise, as I move among the ancient standing stones of the Wiltshire village of Avebury early on a Tuesday morning in June in the company of local resident Julian Cope, who is dressed as a cross between an '80s peace convoy anarchist and a WWII Nazi flying ace, what's remarkable is not how much attention he draws, but how little.
"I can be lying in bed and then forty seconds later I am dressed," he rationalizes, from behind impenetrable shades, standing on a bank above the stone circle, as sheep bleat into my 1995 Sanyo TRC-570M Dictaphone behind him, "but small communities have room for a local figure like this. All the old guys round here that come and do building and plumbing for our house saw Hendrix in Bath in 1967 and they've all got a crush on him. They don't see him as a guy, but as an exotic peacock creature. There's always room for one fucker. Everyone's got space in their hearts for one mad cunt." Cope could be describing the berdache, the sacred 'man-woman' of the Zuni people, allowed to stand both within and without the community, as well as describing himself. But which self is he describing?
Stew & Julian Cope
Fifty-six year old psychedelic survivor Julian Cope has played many roles since he emerged, a nice lower middle class boy from Tamworth, Staffs, immersing himself into the nascent post-punk scene of late 70s Liverpool alongside Echo & The Bunnymen and the denizens of Eric's. "Wylie, McCulloch and Pete Burns only had to fall out of bed and spend 8p and they were in Liverpool. It was their birthright. They were royalty as far I was concerned. I had only been into Tamworth."
Cope's been the chart-topping early 80s pop pin-up of The Teardrop Explodes; the damaged Scott Walker/Syd Barrett hybrid of the early solo years; the shamanic shaven-headed eco-rocker of Peggy Suicide, Jehovakill, Autogeddon and 20 Mothers; and finally the definitive 21st century experimental cult artist, holed up in his Wiltshire fastness, self-releasing everything from the Viking Detroit pagan punk metal of Brain Donor to the Miles Davis meets Tangerine Dream drones of Queen Elizabeth, to the street-protest commune rock chants of Black Sheep, via the lysergic balladry of his solo records.
As a writer, Cope's similarly versatile. His two volumes of memoirs were reliably entertaining dry runs for his more vital works; 1996's Krautrocksampler critically rehabilitated dead-in-the-water German pre-punk and changed the sound of alterno-rock forever, long before the world wide web brought the forgotten past back within instant reach; 2007's Japrocksampler did the same for the even more vilified and obscure sounds of 60s and 70s Japan; and the unlikely archaeological texts, the two hefty volumes of studies of prehistoric sacred sites, The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European, sold ancient history to skeptics in the beat-prose of Lester Bangs and even aroused the interest of professional professors, when Cope posited the persuasive notion of stone circles as ur-rock & roll performance spaces, drawing on a personal experience denied to the dusty haired experts.
But now Cope comes to us in his most bewildering guise to date, that of the writer of the world's first "time-shifting Gnostic hooligan road novel", 131, named after a Sardinian highway and published, no less, by TS Eliot's heavyweight literary imprint, Faber and Fucking Faber! "Harper Collins was so massively corporate you could use voodoo on them. It was so hard to even have a meeting about The Modern Antiquarian so I was in control of the situation. But Faber is more intellectual. They want to be rock & roll but they can also invoke spirits of TS Eliot and Robert Graves."
Was the 'literary novelist' another of Cope's off the peg guises? "I did go into character to write it," he confesses, "not as a novelist, but as an anti-novelist, because I figured no novelist would have been privileged enough to have lived such an extreme existence as I have. I had done things that a novelist would have to imagine."
If Cope ever sounds immodest, remember these self-aggrandising proclamations arrive from the mouth of a balloon-pantalooned biker Messerschmitt pilot standing in a sheep field. Context is not a myth. And Cope, the shaman-clown, has certainly stage managed set and setting this morning. He can be as arrogant as he likes, and he knows it, as long as he's surrounded by sheep and dressed like a Black Metal Worzel.
Worrying about which experiences of Cope's inform 131 quickly becomes a futile exercise, as facts and fiction interweave in a novel, conceptually and stylistically, unlike any other. An aging musical cult figure, DH Lawrence disciple and archaeology maven called Rock Section arrives in Sardinia in pre-soiled trousers to investigate the deaths of football hooligan friends he flew to the Island with way back in the 1990 world cup. They were apparently slain by Barry Herzog, a former DJ and promoter, who is now the figurehead of a quasi-fascist cult based on his prison writings, which are disproportionately, and accurately, hostile to Narnia-author CS Lewis.
Section is accompanied by his researcher Anna, whom Cope deftly avoids making into a standard love interest cipher, even though she and Section eventually become entangled. There's not even any physical description of Anna's actual appearance until about ¾ of the way through the book, Cope concentrating instead on her driving skills and archaeological knowledge. "That's deliberate," he admits. "Rock Section is so cunted he doesn't even notice her. He's a former rock star. He's not even interested in other people." The pair travel in a different culturally significant hire car every day as Rock Section takes a road trip to oblivion via a succession of prehistoric monuments, where he endures lengthy and illuminating past-life experiences as an early man in a pre-lapsarian wilderness.
Or at least I think that's what happens. There were whole swathes of 131 where I couldn't tell what was going on, which time stream we were in, or whether Rock Section was real or a past-life fantasy version of himself. But I didn't care. Some of Cope's digressions into ancient history, nationalist politics, and pop cultural ephemera were real, others imaginary, and some could have been either. (I know there was an early 70s Danish freak-folk band called Furekaben, but did they really soundtrack a Scandinavian exploitation biker movie? Was there an early 70s Sardinian cave-based proto-punk scene? Didn't Jim Morrison die in Paris in 1971?)
Cope admits this confusion was a deliberate strategy. "My very useful and very intense literary agent Robert Kirby said "the way you write reminds me of Cervantes and Dante. You've got to get this book out fast." I demand of the reader to the point where they don't know what's real and what's not real. I was very pragmatic about cultural references. I said, this is going to be like a road movie but the characters aren't going to be driving in any car that isn't incredibly symbolic. Even when stuck behind trash it will be post war Italian trash that means something."
Any anxieties about the literal sense of 131 are swept asunder by Cope's audacious prose style, which carries the reader along on a wave of unrelenting energy. I read it in one sitting. If I stopped I felt I wouldn't be able to get back on. The words were moving too fast. Like many of Cope's musical endeavors, 131 plunders high and low culture, stealing from artists of accepted stature, and from those abandoned by the canon. Its less obvious debt is to (the now terminally unfashionable) DH Lawrence, with his brilliantly bombastic and heavily symbolic rants. Some of Anna and Rock Section's psychiatrically self-knowing exchanges appear to be built brick by brick on similar scuffles in Women In Love or The Rainbow.
Cope's interest in Lawrence as a character has been ongoing, though I couldn't work out how many of Lawrence's actual books, beyond the Sardinian travelogues, he had actually read. About seven years ago I encountered Cope by chance in the car park of a service station on the M4. He was on his way back from DH Lawrence's childhood home in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence set Sons And Lovers. "I'd been writing there. Lawrence fascinated me as the perfect vehicle for the character of Rock Section." Cope transposed Section from his own adolescence in Tamworth eastwards to the similar midland town of Nottingham. "I thought, "Great, you can rent Sons And Lovers cottage, so I went up there and realized Old Tamworth was like Eastwood, so I attached my own childhood onto Eastwood and had Rock Section come from there. Nottingham's relationship to Liverpool was the same as Tamworth's relationship to Birmingham. Tamworth was Birmingham overspill. I walked to school with Selwyn Brown, the keyboard player from Steel Pulse."
131 also has something of the flavour of the breathless blitzkrieg amphetamine deadline splurges of anonymous booze hacks knocking out accidentally experimental biker books and hippy sex and drug trash on their infinite monkey typewriters for the New English Library in the early 70s. Rock Section and pals' battle against Italian football hooligans during Italia 90 shares the same brutal and immoral enjoyment of senseless violence as a Sven Hassel Nazi novel or a Robert E Howard barbarian brawl. "It took me so long to research it," Cope explains, "that I knew how it would work, following the route of the 131 etc, that when I finally went for it I knew it so well that I could just draw it down from the heavens."
Cope's sentence structures collapse into rhythmic repetition and editorially suspect sub-clause clusters, three at one point all ending in the same three words, and all heroically deliberate. One section attempts to convey a character's drugged confusion by repeating variations on the same three letters for five pages. The fool persists in his folly. He becomes wise. Likewise the eighty minute drones of Cope's Queen Elizabeth records were a conscious choice. "Yes," he agrees, "I didn't just stumble across a sound and then forget to turn it off. And I worked really hard on the cadences of the book, on the rhythms. That's the musician part of me. People will get it who wish to get it but I don't want to turn on tossers."
"It's like Christianity," Cope says, brilliantly comparing his fiction debut with a major world religion of some 2000 years standing, "If you're going to stand on street corners shouting you're only going to pick up people who are utterly lost. I don't want people attaching themselves to me who are lost. I want them to already be in some way on a trip. It's demanding but great art is demanding. I really wanted to write something that people could complete themselves."
But who is equipped to review 131? It's clearly set out what it intended to do, and it succeeds on its own terms, and there's enough points where its experiments with conventional literary devices are successful enough for skeptical critics to concede that Cope can really write, but who is 131 for?
"It doesn't do what 21st century fiction is supposed to do and I had no desire to do that or any respect to any lit conventions," Cope declares. As his Brain Donor project posited a kind of pre-civilisation rock & roll, so 131 could almost be described as pre-literary.
The Icelandic sagas are defined by an absence of the individual. There's no first person narrator in any of them. But in 131 there are so many different Copes that, as he does via the many guises of his musical and literary careers, he almost becomes anonymous. 131 finds Cope engaged in a staged Socratic dialogue with various possible versions of his past and future selves.
Rock Section is a Cope gone wrong long term, his drug intake hampering his forward process rather than enhancing it; Judge Barry Herzog is the fascist Cope, the guru turned nasty, still surrounded by groupies into late middle age, and using his celebrity to spew hate; then there's that other Cope, the stone-worshipping tribesman and son of Old Tüpp, that Rock Section meets in some visionary parallel world, which lost me if I'm honest. But I accept this may be my fault. Cope albums I didn't click with as the deadline to file the review approached revealed themselves in full splendor months, years later. There's a good reason last year's Revolutionary Suicide opens with three dirges, and saves the good stuff to last, but at the time it just seemed like bad sequencing. Cope was making us work.
"I gave Judge Barry Herzog all the good lines," Cope confesses and in one sense he enjoyed being able to indulge in a playful silliness, via the mouths of his creations, that might sit ill with followers' perceptions of Cope himself. One of Section's street-poet acolytes has penned a piece called Knee My Wounded Heart At Bury, just one of many laugh out loud moments punctuating 131's stream of consciousness narrative and dam-burst digressions on race, history, culture and drugs.
"People looking for versions of themselves might find themselves too," Cope reflects as we pose for photos in sight of the swelling mound of Silbury Hill. "What's essential is that everybody in the book is a cunt. Of a kind. I stopped doing TV because I couldn't hope to make sense in two minute sections. So instead I just became an utterly mysterious force. You complete projects. The most important thing is completing a project. I can't make it better than this. It fucked me up to write a novel but surely it should. If you've got commitment, you can't beat it."
A decade ago now, I interviewed Cope for The Sunday Times. He stood above me in his kitchen on a work surface, peering at me through sunglasses, and declaiming at me, as I sat below on a low stool, in a wonderfully staged piece of self-conscious theatre that I surrendered to unquestioningly. It feels like last week, to be honest, but at the time Cope said, "I know I'm not current, and I don't believe I'm timeless. But I am in my forties, and I'm in sight of fifty. And once you're over fifty, sixty's not far away. And then you are allowed to be legendary. So I just have to keep my head down and keep working. And then I can be legendary."
"All morning," I admit to him, after what has been an in some ways frustrating attempt to pin Cope's sparkling magpie mind down to explain his intentions with and hopes for 131, "I've been searching for what a paper would call the pull quote, some kind of pithy sentence that sums up what the piece is all about. I suppose that's it, what you just said. "If you've got commitment you can't beat it." That's the bit they'd pull out, that's what you could say about the book, both from the reader's and the writer's point of view." But I don't know if Cope is listening. He's already off towards the road, through the West Kennet stone avenue, talking about his next book, a manual for life which is to be called Pagan Defensive Driving. If anyone can write a book as good as that title, it's Julian Cope.
(Ever the gnostic, Cope worked through the musical background of the novel by recording in the guises of the various imaginary musical entities mentioned in the book, from 70s Sardinian drone rockers that never were, to 90s novelty football rave anthems. A selection is available here, many free to download.)
Stewart Lee, writer/clown
Stewart Lee
2014-06-27T18:51:13+01:00
[caption id="attachment_7227" align="aligncenter" width="395"]Julian Cope[/caption] Julian Cope's first novel, 131, opens with its protagonist, a former rock star brilliantly named Rock Section, trapped in an aircraft toilet, covered in his own excrement. "Your novel begins at the point where many would end," I suggest. "Yes," agrees Cope, "it's the same as 'Like A Hurricane' by Neil Young. Straight in with the lead guitar solo, no messing about. I consciously began the book with utter humiliation, his brown trousers all round his ankles. I thought, 'Yes. The only way is up.'" In his legendary solo performance piece The Furtive Nudist, the late shaman-clown and zen-ventriloquist Ken Campbell claimed he was able to move around the world entirely undressed and entirely unnoticed, because the last thing anyone was expecting to see was a naked man, and therefore passers-by just screened the image out of the collective consciousness. Likewise, as I move among the ancient standing stones of the Wiltshire village of Avebury early on a Tuesday morning in June in the company of local resident Julian Cope, who is dressed as a cross between an '80s peace convoy anarchist and a WWII Nazi flying ace, what's remarkable is not how much attention he draws, but how little. "I can be lying in bed and then forty seconds later I am dressed," he rationalizes, from behind impenetrable shades, standing on a bank above the stone circle, as sheep bleat into my 1995 Sanyo TRC-570M Dictaphone behind him, "but small communities have room for a local figure like this. All the old guys round here that come and do building and plumbing for our house saw Hendrix in Bath in 1967 and they've all got a crush on him. They don't see him as a guy, but as an exotic peacock creature. There's always...
The grindingly algorithmic controversialist Toby Young was always painfully and obviously in the oedipal shadow of his socialist intellectual father, Michael Young. Each of his desperately politically incorrect tweets was an attempt to cuckold and castrate his progenitor.
Toby Young has wasted his life spitting cold mucus at a ghost and throwing clumps of his own hot excrement at a shade, a raging zoo monkey. Toby Young was at war with a phantom cloud of semen, long since turned to dust motes, bobbing on the west London thermals. But, because I am kind and good, I take no pleasure in the slow-motion farce of his downfall.
On Wednesday night, the probable reason for the sudden twin resignations of the self-styled “right-of-centre maverick” from both the spurious universities regulator and the Fulbright Commission became clear. Despite having survived last week’s cataloguing of his hastily concealed career of context-free non-character-driven monetisable offence, on Monday evening Toby Young finally ran out of options and fell on his own cucumber spiraliser.
Even though he was defended by his chum, Boris “Picaninny” Johnson, as being a “caustic wit”, the maverick self-styled “Toadmeister” had to go. Because, while national media slept, or commissioned supportive thinkpieces from his wealthy and powerful celebrity friends, the London Student newspaper was about to reveal that the Maverick Toadmeister had attended a secret conference on “intelligence”, featuring notorious speakers including in previous years white supremacists and a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil.
Of course, attending a secret conference alongside white supremacists does not amount to endorsing their ideals. I once attended a performance of We Will Rock You, the Queen musical by Ben Elton and Queen, and, if anything, it made me despise the dreadful group even more than I did before, from a position of greater understanding. The Maverick Toadmeister, by his own admission, only attended the secret event for a few hours, only sat at the back, didn’t inhale any of the nazism that was being handed round, and nor did he supply any to anyone else.
But on Monday night, the Maverick Toadmeister realised that even declarations of love from his greatest champions, the environmental opportunist Michael Gove, the Daily Mail hate-funnel Sarah Vine, and the napkin’n’knick-knack guru Kirstie Allsopp, would not overwhelm the taint of his incidental association with genuine white supremacists.
For God’s sake, that’s what paranoid community activists in 70s blaxploitation movies thought white folk were doing – having secret meetings about how to stop them breeding – and it turns out we are! In fact, that’s the plot of the martial arts and black power musical Three the Hard Way (Gordon Parks Jr, 1974), but now with Toby Young as a curious bystander watching the evil Dr Fortrero plot to wipe out the black population, and claiming it’s research for a forthcoming speech.
If Boris Watermelon Smile Johnson’s brother, Boris Johnson Junior, intended the appointment of the Maverick Toadmeister to the universities regulator to counteract the influence of the Political Correctness Gone Mad Brigade, it’s fair to say he may have overplayed his hand somewhat.
The Maverick Toadmeister’s fellow secret conference attendee Richard Lynn, for example, advocates that predominantly white American states secede from the Union, making them dangerously likely to sink into the sea under the excess weight of the massive arses, and brains, of their remaining inhabitants.
The question presupposed by the title of the Maverick Toadmeister’s bestselling book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had been fairly comprehensively answered.
Asked last week to comment on his attendance at a second intelligence jamboree, this time in Canada, a clearly discombobulated Maverick Toadmeister said he had been giving the “Amanda Holden Memorial Lecture”. Amanda Holden? Les Dennis’s ex-wife? Was the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home’s celebrity ambassador now a eugenicist? And also dead? Thank God Dustin Gee didn’t live to see the memory of The Laughter Show tarnished so.
I knew that there had been a famous science writer called Constance Holden. Had the Maverick Toadmeister, as no one is calling him ever, suffered a slip of his toad tongue? There wasn’t time to check the facts, sadly, as the witch hunt countdown clock was ticking. Needless to say, I immediately mobilised my massive bullying Twitter following of furious politically correct snowflake hypocrites to have Amanda Holden, eugenics apologist, erased from history.
By Wednesday public pressure had seen Holden lose her role as the face of Alpen, the colonic cleansing breakfast dust. And on Thursday Holden was digitally erased from every episode of Britain’s Got Talent and replaced by a surgically enhanced Christopher Plummer, verdicts on ventriloquists dripping like honey from glossed lips down a low-cut satin dress shimmering seductively in the light.
Then I realised the Maverick Toadmeister had made a mis-speak. He had meant Constance Holden. Amanda Holden was not a Nazi (nor, it turned out, was Constance Holden), and she was not dead. A newly confident and self-assured Christopher Plummer reluctantly submitted herself to the painful reverse-Holden procedure as long as she was allowed to keep the dress. (Luckily, Plummer’s most crucial organ had not yet been incinerated and was found still salvageable in an ashtray at a Soho cigar bar frequented by his surgeon.)
I don’t know the Maverick Toadmeister and I have never met him, though he did once make a winsome face at me across a corridor at Heston services, Britain’s worst services, on the M4. I recognised him from somewhere, but something about his curious smirk and his strange gait made me assume he was a lesbian, dressed as a homosexual, who had assumed I was a lesbian dressed as a heterosexual man and was trying to pick me up. What a tangled web we weave.
But where now for the Maverick Toadmeister? Can even vile jam-rags like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail employ him now? Who calls themselves, as an adult, the “Toadmeister” anyway? And “maverick” is what the commissioner shouts at Dirty Harry. It’s not what Dirty Harry tells the commissioner he is himself. That would be very uncool. Who does these strange and desperate things? Someone in search of an identity that has eluded them.
Sometime around 20 years ago Toby Young started being nasty about people less fortunate and privileged than him, and, like a shit Clarkson, he found it was easy to do and paid good money; and then the wind changed, and Toby Young was stuck with the horrible face he had made. And now people all over the internet will be drawing foreskins on his bald head. For ever. And Captain Von Trapp will never urinate standing up again.
Stewart Lee
2018-01-14T16:00:14+00:00
The grindingly algorithmic controversialist Toby Young was always painfully and obviously in the oedipal shadow of his socialist intellectual father, Michael Young. Each of his desperately politically incorrect tweets was an attempt to cuckold and castrate his progenitor. Toby Young has wasted his life spitting cold mucus at a ghost and throwing clumps of his own hot excrement at a shade, a raging zoo monkey. Toby Young was at war with a phantom cloud of semen, long since turned to dust motes, bobbing on the west London thermals. But, because I am kind and good, I take no pleasure in the slow-motion farce of his downfall. On Wednesday night, the probable reason for the sudden twin resignations of the self-styled “right-of-centre maverick” from both the spurious universities regulator and the Fulbright Commission became clear. Despite having survived last week’s cataloguing of his hastily concealed career of context-free non-character-driven monetisable offence, on Monday evening Toby Young finally ran out of options and fell on his own cucumber spiraliser. Even though he was defended by his chum, Boris “Picaninny” Johnson, as being a “caustic wit”, the maverick self-styled “Toadmeister” had to go. Because, while national media slept, or commissioned supportive thinkpieces from his wealthy and powerful celebrity friends, the London Student newspaper was about to reveal that the Maverick Toadmeister had attended a secret conference on “intelligence”, featuring notorious speakers including in previous years white supremacists and a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil. Of course, attending a secret conference alongside white supremacists does not amount to endorsing their ideals. I once attended a performance of We Will Rock You, the Queen musical by Ben Elton and Queen, and, if anything, it made me despise the dreadful group even more than I did before, from a position of greater understanding. The Maverick...
Villagers – Ship Of Fools
Essentially benign, Villagers here lay a tense and never quite consummated Eighties post-punk/neo-psychedelic guitar chug over nautical singer-songwriterly metaphors. Ship Of Fools is sure to comfort morbidly introspective young people who feel adrift, or at sea, or storm-tossed, so to speak, in their daily lives. Sadly, it seems to fade at just the point where older and more reckless musicians would cut loose and wig out.
The Middle East – The Darkest Side
More apparently fearful youths, this time from Australia, where bands could once be relied upon to do something extreme. The Darkest Side is over-produced and over-cluttered with floaty flutes and whispered backing vocals, burying the stark vulnerability it might have had in a slurry of designer schmaltz. Doubtless some depressive teen imagines it speaks directly to them.
The Heartbreaks – I Didn’t Think It Would Hurt To Think Of You
A potentially euphoric indie-pop record is ruined by airless production, note perfect playing, a metronomic failure to push the beat, and X-factor type emotive singing. There’s a strange, context free, nod towards proper rock and roll with a twangy Link Wray run at 1min 55, followed by cheesey Rubettes b-side style sincere spoken word section. The Railway Children revival starts here. Oh Manchester, so much to answer for.
Tuung – Don’t Look Down Or Back
Tuung take the same elements The Middle East muck up, diaphanous female harmonies and softly plucked acoustic guitars, but offset them against twittery electronics, big beats that are equal parts Terry Cox and pro-tools, rural religious chanting, and sudden snatches of noise, lifting the whole thing out of the mire. No-one involved in this need feel the least bit ashamed of themselves.
Ash – Carnal Love
Ash’s first single, Jack Names The Planets, was a hormonal instinctive surge of unknowing genius that they never bettered. Sixteen years later this not un-engaging mid-paced rock ballad is untroubled by either effervescent adolescent enthusiasm, or the gravity of approaching middlescence, but does its job just fine. Once again, in the closing seconds, the briefest of hanging cadences on the closing guitar chord suggests things were just about to get more interesting.
Marina and The Diamonds – Oh No.
Look, I’m a 43 year old man, this record isn’t really aimed at me, and to be honest I’m not even really sure it’s appropriate for me to be listening to it. After four decades on the earth, I am none the wiser about this kind of music. Presumably you jump around to it in night clubs and tap your feet to it in the car. But then what? The young woman’s staccato singing phrasing in the verse is quite amusing and I enjoyed the knowing histrionics in the ‘Oh no’ bit. What am I supposed to be feeling? I don’t know. Can I stop doing these reviews now? It’s twenty years since I read the NME.
Stewart Lee
2010-07-11T20:30:17+01:00
Villagers – Ship Of Fools Essentially benign, Villagers here lay a tense and never quite consummated Eighties post-punk/neo-psychedelic guitar chug over nautical singer-songwriterly metaphors. Ship Of Fools is sure to comfort morbidly introspective young people who feel adrift, or at sea, or storm-tossed, so to speak, in their daily lives. Sadly, it seems to fade at just the point where older and more reckless musicians would cut loose and wig out. The Middle East – The Darkest Side More apparently fearful youths, this time from Australia, where bands could once be relied upon to do something extreme. The Darkest Side is over-produced and over-cluttered with floaty flutes and whispered backing vocals, burying the stark vulnerability it might have had in a slurry of designer schmaltz. Doubtless some depressive teen imagines it speaks directly to them. The Heartbreaks – I Didn’t Think It Would Hurt To Think Of You A potentially euphoric indie-pop record is ruined by airless production, note perfect playing, a metronomic failure to push the beat, and X-factor type emotive singing. There’s a strange, context free, nod towards proper rock and roll with a twangy Link Wray run at 1min 55, followed by cheesey Rubettes b-side style sincere spoken word section. The Railway Children revival starts here. Oh Manchester, so much to answer for. Tuung – Don’t Look Down Or Back Tuung take the same elements The Middle East muck up, diaphanous female harmonies and softly plucked acoustic guitars, but offset them against twittery electronics, big beats that are equal parts Terry Cox and pro-tools, rural religious chanting, and sudden snatches of noise, lifting the whole thing out of the mire. No-one involved in this need feel the least bit ashamed of themselves. Ash – Carnal Love Ash’s first single, Jack Names The Planets, was a hormonal instinctive...
Jerry Springer - the Opera creator Stewart Lee has revealed he is uneasy over the commercial West End success of his hit show. He admitted: "If I had known it would run in the West End as an independent commercial venture I would not have got involved."
Lee's comments come after he launched an impassioned appeal on behalf of the troubled BAC, where the show began its life, as he accepted the Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Although it was developed at BAC and the National Theatre, the multi awardwinning production transfered to the Cambridge Theatre, owned by Really Useful Theatres.
He added: "I went into this project thinking it would be the usual two-month job and I don't feel any more proud of it because it has become a West End success.
It is a great piece of theatre but a vast amount of work is produced in places like BAC for the specific community they serve and not with a view to providing a script that will give someone his next hit. It is wrong to justify the fringe as a support for the West End." Lee confirmed that he would be supporting BAC in its campaign to make up for a #113,000 funding deficit after Wandsworth Borough Council decreased its annual grant in 2004.
This is expected to result in reductions to programming and outreach work and the theatre management is meeting on Monday to decide where the cutbacks will occur. The first fundraising event will take place in June with Lee organising a standup comedy show featuring Harry Hill and Al Murray.
Lee said: "Everybody is referring to BAC as a hot-bed of development on the back of Jerry Springer and yet it has just had its annual funding cut. I feel an obligation to help out in some way."
Stewart Lee
2004-02-26T19:00:46+00:00
Jerry Springer - the Opera creator Stewart Lee has revealed he is uneasy over the commercial West End success of his hit show. He admitted: "If I had known it would run in the West End as an independent commercial venture I would not have got involved." Lee's comments come after he launched an impassioned appeal on behalf of the troubled BAC, where the show began its life, as he accepted the Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Although it was developed at BAC and the National Theatre, the multi awardwinning production transfered to the Cambridge Theatre, owned by Really Useful Theatres. He added: "I went into this project thinking it would be the usual two-month job and I don't feel any more proud of it because it has become a West End success. It is a great piece of theatre but a vast amount of work is produced in places like BAC for the specific community they serve and not with a view to providing a script that will give someone his next hit. It is wrong to justify the fringe as a support for the West End." Lee confirmed that he would be supporting BAC in its campaign to make up for a #113,000 funding deficit after Wandsworth Borough Council decreased its annual grant in 2004. This is expected to result in reductions to programming and outreach work and the theatre management is meeting on Monday to decide where the cutbacks will occur. The first fundraising event will take place in June with Lee organising a standup comedy show featuring Harry Hill and Al Murray. Lee said: "Everybody is referring to BAC as a hot-bed of development on the back of Jerry Springer and yet it has just had its annual funding cut. I feel an obligation to...
Called the "world's greatest living standup" by The Times, listen to Stewart chat with Clare about the mechanics of comedy, his favorite music and whether or not he's ever seen a ghost, also features Orkney oatcakes.
Stewart Lee
2025-08-26T11:29:00+01:00
Called the "world's greatest living standup" by The Times, listen to Stewart chat with Clare about the mechanics of comedy, his favorite music and whether or not he's ever seen a ghost, also features Orkney oatcakes.
The Hate-Monger is a minor Marvel comics villain, first documented by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in December 1963, who is a clone of Hitler and wears a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. In Fantastic Four issue 21, The Hate-Monger bounces his Hate-Ray off the moon, amplifying people’s feelings of dread, fear and anxiety, inflaming their prejudices and turning humanity against itself. And yet somehow, last week, The Hate-Monger himself was given a job at the very heart of Dominic Cumming’s government. And this despite his saying the “underclass” should undergo enforced contraception, women’s sport is like the paralympics, wives should provide sex on demand and black people were more stupid than white people. And all while bouncing a Hate-Ray off the moon and wearing a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. And being a clone of Hitler.
“We should prevent racists coming into No 10 or wherever The Hate-Monger was working,” said Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng, MP for Spelthorne, former undersecretary of state for the Department for Exiting the European Union and current minister of state for business, energy and clean growth, “and I think that we do need to look at these processes.” What will it take for black Conservatives to disavow the Cumming government they facilitate? Didn’t the fact that The Hate-Monger was wearing a purple Ku Klux Klan robe while bouncing a Hate-Ray off the moon and being a clone of Hitler set off some alarm bells? Views such as The Hate-Monger’s define Cumming’s government. The assertion last November, by the resentful foundling and reformed coke-face Michael Gove, that Stormzy should stick to rapping and stay out of politics, assumes black folk are made for singing, dancing and running, while white people are better suited to white people’s activities – such as Latin, crown green bowls and the clarinet. And the now muzzled Jacob Rees-Mogg blamed the Grenfell victims’ stupidity for their misfortune.
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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Johnson is the rarely visible public face of the Cumming government that hired The Hate-Monger.
PM Turds’s spokesperson refused to clarify PM Turds’s position on eugenics 32 actual genuine times in succession during a press briefing on Monday. “The prime minister’s views are well documented,” said the spokesperson repeatedly. And they are. In 2013 Turds, born into incredible privilege, said: “I am afraid that a violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth… for one reason or another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and God-given talent of boardroom inhabitants – the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.”
This was a not especially coded message, a Eugenics for Dummies, to Turds’s privileged audience, at the opaquely funded Centre for Policy Studies thinktank at 57 Tufton Street, that their privilege was a result of their “natural and God-given talent”, innate “raw ability” and superiority to the poor, rather than of fortuitous accidents of birth. How comforting for everyone involved. Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.
I didn’t grow up in a house full of books. I fumbled my way via a charity bung and a scholarship into the educational privilege I now benefit from at others’ expense. Old Marvel comics were the holy scrolls that made me. “With great power comes great responsibility”: it is because of Spider-Man’s unequivocal moral system that I won’t perform my multiple-award-winning standup shows in venues that work with the immoral secondary ticketing agencies Sajid Javid described as “classic entrepreneurs”. It is because of Howard the Duck’s studied cynicism that I have a healthy disdain for the absurdity of the world I never made, and it is because of Ant-Man that I have made slaves of dozens of ants, with which I will fight our own enslavement by the far right. My ants shall not sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land.
The radical socialist principles of Christ are still almost visible through the curtain-twitching windowpane of the modern Church of England; at the start of this month, Dave Hill sacked Don Powell from Slade, leaving Hill the sole original member, but the group carries with it the spirit of Noddy Holder in a tartan romper suit with Christmas faggot juice all round his mouth; and likewise the original values of those psychedelic 60s and progressive 70s Marvel comics, flowing from the mushy pens of working-class, liberal Jewish autodidacts and acid-casualty, space-travelling college dropouts respectively, still haunt the dimmer recesses of their cinematic blockbuster manifestations, like the starving ghosts of early Christian saints in Pope Benedict’s Prada slipper chamber.
Marvel’s chairman is now the Trump-donor Ike Perlmutter, who reportedly said it didn’t matter which black actor played Iron Man’s pal James Rhodes as all black people “look the same”, but its original four-colour countercultural pointillist visions continue to liquefy into damning prophesies of the populist age. In the 2011 Marvel comic Fear Itself, The Hate-Monger returns to a world where many of the cartoon Nazi values his former purple-robed form embodied half a century ago have now nudged into mainstream politics. But the modern Marvel Hate-Monger isn’t a clone of Hitler who uses a Hate-Ray to transmit hate to Earth from the moon. He’s an everyday guy who thinks his opportunities are being taken by immigrants and he spreads his hate with internet forums and conspiracy theory websites. He’s just the kind of weirdo misfit Dominic Cumming is looking for. He may need to lose the purple Ku Klux Klan robe, however. We’re not quite ready for that. Yet. I give it a matter of months. There are some very fine people on both sides.
Stewart Lee
2020-02-23T16:31:05+00:00
The Hate-Monger is a minor Marvel comics villain, first documented by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in December 1963, who is a clone of Hitler and wears a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. In Fantastic Four issue 21, The Hate-Monger bounces his Hate-Ray off the moon, amplifying people’s feelings of dread, fear and anxiety, inflaming their prejudices and turning humanity against itself. And yet somehow, last week, The Hate-Monger himself was given a job at the very heart of Dominic Cumming’s government. And this despite his saying the “underclass” should undergo enforced contraception, women’s sport is like the paralympics, wives should provide sex on demand and black people were more stupid than white people. And all while bouncing a Hate-Ray off the moon and wearing a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. And being a clone of Hitler. “We should prevent racists coming into No 10 or wherever The Hate-Monger was working,” said Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng, MP for Spelthorne, former undersecretary of state for the Department for Exiting the European Union and current minister of state for business, energy and clean growth, “and I think that we do need to look at these processes.” What will it take for black Conservatives to disavow the Cumming government they facilitate? Didn’t the fact that The Hate-Monger was wearing a purple Ku Klux Klan robe while bouncing a Hate-Ray off the moon and being a clone of Hitler set off some alarm bells? Views such as The Hate-Monger’s define Cumming’s government. The assertion last November, by the resentful foundling and reformed coke-face Michael Gove, that Stormzy should stick to rapping and stay out of politics, assumes black folk are made for singing, dancing and running, while white people are better suited to white people’s activities – such as Latin, crown green bowls and...
Bozulich's 2002 album Red Headed Stranger illuminated the itinerant art-punk survivor's exhaustingly immersive world with familiar country and western sounds, but here she's adrift in an alien landscape of tortured heroin-blues and unstructured torch songs, scarred by industrial noise and collapsing percussion.
There are no simple signposts in this stormy sea, but if Boy emerged from the oeuvre of a broadsheet friendly icon like Nick Cave, Patti Smith or Tom Waits, it would be lauded as an uncompromising work of genius.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-02T01:55:11+00:00
Bozulich's 2002 album Red Headed Stranger illuminated the itinerant art-punk survivor's exhaustingly immersive world with familiar country and western sounds, but here she's adrift in an alien landscape of tortured heroin-blues and unstructured torch songs, scarred by industrial noise and collapsing percussion. There are no simple signposts in this stormy sea, but if Boy emerged from the oeuvre of a broadsheet friendly icon like Nick Cave, Patti Smith or Tom Waits, it would be lauded as an uncompromising work of genius.
Last time anyone checked Michael Chapman was a forgotten Seventies songwriter, but American revisionists, citing his guitar instrumentals, have found a lost folk-blues primitivist in the John Fahey vein. Nothing in the Yorkshire troubadour's catalogue presaged these two lengthy electric guitar drones, buoyed on throbbing loops, and serrated with scratchy noise, the first a low end rumble, the second a high end Himalayan temple bell tingle.
The kids get a new cult figure to restock the depleting stock, and grand-dad gets to play loud and tour with noisy new-boy Dean McPhee. Everybody's happy.
Stewart Lee
2012-02-12T01:57:58+00:00
Last time anyone checked Michael Chapman was a forgotten Seventies songwriter, but American revisionists, citing his guitar instrumentals, have found a lost folk-blues primitivist in the John Fahey vein. Nothing in the Yorkshire troubadour's catalogue presaged these two lengthy electric guitar drones, buoyed on throbbing loops, and serrated with scratchy noise, the first a low end rumble, the second a high end Himalayan temple bell tingle. The kids get a new cult figure to restock the depleting stock, and grand-dad gets to play loud and tour with noisy new-boy Dean McPhee. Everybody's happy.
Gnod, sometime collaborators with White Hills (above), underpin echoing guitar and bad dream vocal snippets with metronomic Krautrock rhythms. Ingnodwetrust's two offensively single-minded epics are available on vinyl or as downloads only, the band looking from their Salford lair towards the future and the past, oblivious to the decaying present.
The twenty minute, monochromatic splurge of Tony's First Communion is belatedly brightened by the sunlit shafts of a two chord keyboard part. Vatican's compellingly turgid fourteen minutes sound like a clinically depressed Can. Halfway through someone screams, and a wonky Italian progressive rock cathedral organ clouds the closing section oppressively.
Impressively unapologetic.
Stewart Lee
2011-06-05T19:51:43+01:00
Gnod, sometime collaborators with White Hills (above), underpin echoing guitar and bad dream vocal snippets with metronomic Krautrock rhythms. Ingnodwetrust's two offensively single-minded epics are available on vinyl or as downloads only, the band looking from their Salford lair towards the future and the past, oblivious to the decaying present. The twenty minute, monochromatic splurge of Tony's First Communion is belatedly brightened by the sunlit shafts of a two chord keyboard part. Vatican's compellingly turgid fourteen minutes sound like a clinically depressed Can. Halfway through someone screams, and a wonky Italian progressive rock cathedral organ clouds the closing section oppressively. Impressively unapologetic.
Many on the left have blamed Keir Starmer, and the white working class’s perceived abandonment by Labour’s patronising metropolitan elite, for the political survival of the corrupt liar Boris Johnson. And it helps that Johnson showered our body-strewn streets with costly vaccines, like a negligent drunken father suddenly treating his starving children to a spaff-up Saturday dinner at McDonald’s. But Starmer alone cannot be held responsible for failing to inculcate a sense of Johnson’s mendacity into, for example, the citizens of Hartlepool. They are, after all, people whose forebears hanged a monkey in case it was French. One may as well try to teach wool to sing.
In a civilised democracy, a shameless pariah such as Boris Johnson should not thrive. The fact that he can is evidence not simply of Starmer’s shortcomings, but of a dereliction of duty by the nation’s cowed media, which have a moral responsibility to explain clearly to the electorate why Johnson is unsuitable for office; and by its trembling cultural institutions, which should be using public funds to discredit Johnson daily in mediums such as drama, sculpture, dance, tasteful nudity and the morris. This is what they are for.
Instead, the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, is an undaunted Johnson fantasist who looks at the prime minister with the same loyal longing that the Welsh myth-hound Gelert gazed upon his lord Llywelyn, later to slaughter the dog in a hut. Last week, Kuenssberg spaffed 2,000 words up the wall of the publicly funded journalism toilet of the BBC while avoiding calling the prime minister categorically dishonest and finding more than a dozen gently teasing synonyms for lying. What larks! Greater love hath no political editor than to lay down her credibility for her lord.
Johnson, according to Kuenssberg and her unnamed sources, “chooses to remember certain things or not remember others”. Johnson’s “attitude to the truth and facts is not based on what is real and what is not, but is driven by what… he desires, rather than what he believes”. Johnson is a “fibster”, a “pseudophile”, a “verb fluffer” and a “truth felcher”. The “white thighs of Johnson’s desires are too slippery to grasp the dance pole of truth”. The “wallpaper paste of Johnson’s lie-spaff rarely sploshes on to the decorator’s radio of fact”. And Johnson “orders the truth to suit his ambitions”. In short, the BBC’s political editor blames the feckless universe itself for not conforming to Johnson’s view of it. How inconvenient of space and time to bow relentlessly to the unbending laws of physics!
All through this land, where Christ’s foot once did walk, the Conservatives seek to limit broadcasters’ and cultural organisations’ abilities to inform and entertain and to hold the proven liar Boris Johnson to account, by stuffing their administrative bodies with supporters and by removing pesky intellectuals and black people. The government attempted to block Mary Beard as a trustee of the British Museum because of her pro-European views and because beards mean beatniks; the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is poised to regulate British media as the new head of Ofcom, a move akin to giving Jimmy Savile the keys to a morgue; the government-appointed BBC chair, banker Richard Sharp, donated £400,000 to the Conservatives. And yet even Sharp must know that a BBC so toothless it allows the clearly wrongful Johnson to reign unchecked, instead of driving the populace to No 10 with flaming torches, is not doing its publicly funded job and must offer his resignation.
As should the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden. Aristotelian ethics maintain art should save society from itself. Johnson’s rising ratings evidence Dowden’s failure to inspire and support creatives. The descendants of those ennobled by William the Conqueror still control the majority of wealth and power in Britain. The Conservatives’ placement of pliant ghouls in positions of inappropriate influence could strangle our news sources and art funnels for ever. Conscientious board members, such as Royal Museums Greenwich’s Sir Charles Dunstone, quit in protest, exposing Britannia’s white flanks, a culture war win for the Conservatives. But someone, a visionary artist of course, saw this coming.
Like many postwar comics writers, the anglophile X-Men scribe Chris Claremont, who bought my bored mother a coffee at the 1979 Birmingham Comics Convention, was an accidental seer in pixelated panels. In 1989, in Marvel’s Excalibur issue 13, Claremont posited a prophetic storyline. The do-gooding mutants and philanthropic aristocrats of the Arthurian-inspired British super-team Excalibur ™ ® were partially replaced, at the Conservative government’s insistence, with right-leaning loyalist mortals. The Bavarian circus-freak Nightcrawler ™ ® was substituted for the News of the World’s 71-year-old “Voice of Reason” Lord Woodrow Wyatt, who viewed Britain’s black population as being largely “lawless, drug-taking, violent and unemployable”. The teenage telepath Shadowcat ™ ® was benched for TV’s 64-year-old Record Breakers fact-fascist Norris McWhirter, a far-right Freedom Association figurehead opposed to sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Meggan ™ ® the Gypsy bat-girl surrendered her place to Mary Whitehouse, the crimplene-faced 79-year-old sex-arbiter from the National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association. The comic’s preteen readership was traumatised.
Though the Excalibur ™ ® team still included fan-favourites Captain Britain ™ ®, the orange space-dragon Lockheed ™ ® and the alternate Earth incarnation of Phoenix ™ ®, the Wyatt/McWhirter/Whitehouse version swiftly relocated its headquarters from Lord Braddock’s enchanted Cornish lighthouse to the cramped offices of an opaquely funded, right-leaning thinktank, the Policy Study Centre for Centralised Policy Studies, at 55 Tufton Street, London. How could coffee-proffering Chris Claremont have known, that in just over four decades, his vision of noble British institutions infested with gerrymandered Conservative wreckers would come terrifyingly true?
Stewart Lee
2021-05-09T15:24:56+01:00
Many on the left have blamed Keir Starmer, and the white working class’s perceived abandonment by Labour’s patronising metropolitan elite, for the political survival of the corrupt liar Boris Johnson. And it helps that Johnson showered our body-strewn streets with costly vaccines, like a negligent drunken father suddenly treating his starving children to a spaff-up Saturday dinner at McDonald’s. But Starmer alone cannot be held responsible for failing to inculcate a sense of Johnson’s mendacity into, for example, the citizens of Hartlepool. They are, after all, people whose forebears hanged a monkey in case it was French. One may as well try to teach wool to sing. In a civilised democracy, a shameless pariah such as Boris Johnson should not thrive. The fact that he can is evidence not simply of Starmer’s shortcomings, but of a dereliction of duty by the nation’s cowed media, which have a moral responsibility to explain clearly to the electorate why Johnson is unsuitable for office; and by its trembling cultural institutions, which should be using public funds to discredit Johnson daily in mediums such as drama, sculpture, dance, tasteful nudity and the morris. This is what they are for. Instead, the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, is an undaunted Johnson fantasist who looks at the prime minister with the same loyal longing that the Welsh myth-hound Gelert gazed upon his lord Llywelyn, later to slaughter the dog in a hut. Last week, Kuenssberg spaffed 2,000 words up the wall of the publicly funded journalism toilet of the BBC while avoiding calling the prime minister categorically dishonest and finding more than a dozen gently teasing synonyms for lying. What larks! Greater love hath no political editor than to lay down her credibility for her lord. Johnson, according to Kuenssberg and her unnamed sources, “chooses to...
I still die on stage frequently. Last month I could feel the room drifting away during a high-profile big top bill in the Greenwich Comedy Festival, but my worst death of recent years was in August 2009 at a private performance for the Friends and Corporate partners of the Edinburgh Fringe, seated around desert laden tables at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
I headlined with half an hour to total silence. There weren’t even heckles. I don’t think they even got as far as thinking me a bad comedian. I don’t think they believed I was a comedian at all.
Stewart Lee
2010-09-14T20:37:34+01:00
I still die on stage frequently. Last month I could feel the room drifting away during a high-profile big top bill in the Greenwich Comedy Festival, but my worst death of recent years was in August 2009 at a private performance for the Friends and Corporate partners of the Edinburgh Fringe, seated around desert laden tables at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. I headlined with half an hour to total silence. There weren’t even heckles. I don’t think they even got as far as thinking me a bad comedian. I don’t think they believed I was a comedian at all.
When one of the people who helped give your festival its name is annoyed with you, does that mean it’s time to call it quits? The latest in a line of troubles for the beleaguered holiday camp weekender All Tomorrow’s Parties came in the lead-up to mid-April’s Stewart Lee-curated festival at Pontins in Prestatyn and the following weekend’s subsequently cancelled Drive Like Jehu event, which had already been downsized from North Wales to the heart of Manchester.
“We did our best to believe in the organizers, in the end, they let us all down,” tweeted John Cale, who had been scheduled to take part in both, and who felt he had to cancel his appearances at the eleventh hour. That and the Drive Like Jehu cancellation announcement at the climax of Stewart Lee’s event, along with some stern words from the reformed American hardcore band from the 1990s, made for one of the worst weeks in the festival’s history.
“It’s stating the obvious that there were a few hiccups,” says Barry Hogan, the promoter who runs All Tomorrow’s Parties (or ATP, as everyone knows it), of the Lee weekender, “but there was some great music; people like Sleaford Mods, (the) Sun Ra (Arkestra), Richard Dawson. It was well-received by a lot of artists and fans.” He points to an untrue but widely-spread rumour back in March that the festival had been cancelled as the beginning of this spring’s troubles. “It killed the sales, it really went against us. And the numbers just weren’t there for Jehu. I know people will ask why we waited until that week to cancel, but we really tried to salvage it and we just weren’t able to.”
This isn’t the first time ATP has found itself in a similar position; but before repeating the issues it’s had in recent years, it’s important to remember just why its fans feel so proprietorial, and why their trust has willed it on through the bad times. Created by Hogan in 2001, in the wake of the Belle & Sebastian-organised Bowlie Weekender in 1999, ATP followed the same format as Bowlie: block book a traditional British holiday resort near the sea; fill it with fans of alternative and marginal music looking for the home comforts of a chalet rather than a tent in a muddy field; book a variety of under-the-radar artists of different genres; and leave their selection up to the headliners - usually a reformed or still-active alternative titan of the 1980s or 90s, for example Slint, Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine – in turn pioneering the use of the term ‘curation’ when referring to festival programming.
It was a simple but very popular idea, leading to as many as three events throughout the year in its heyday. “We had the best weekend, great music was happening everywhere and when we felt a little tired we would go back to our chalet to make a cup of tea,” says Laetitia Sadier, whose band Stereolab attended the first Bowlie event. “It felt very civilised, not having to confront the discomfort of a tent and being able to go for walks nearby. The people who were there made it special; during the first edition I remember there being mostly Scottish people and Scandinavians, for some reason. It wasn't yet the hip festival to go to and be seen at, which it became later. It was strictly a music lover’s festival and it still is. That’s what I love most about it.”
For more than a decade ATP was a DIY success story, earning a move from Camber Sands in Sussex to the larger Minehead in Somerset. Events were held in London, upstate New York, an Australian ski resort and at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. In 2009 Warp released a film about ATP. Yet in 2012 the company went into administration bearing unsustainable debts, and the formation of a new company to carry on the ATP brand didn’t stop the cancellation of 2014’s Jabberwocky event in London three days before it was due to go ahead.
Now, in light of its recent problems, there’s a sense that the world may have moved on around All Tomorrow’s Parties; that in contrast to its name, its time is in the past. When it began, there was no similar national meeting place for an audience whose natural home may have been through shared listenership of John Peel’s radio show. Now, the options for listeners of marginal music are many, from city festivals like Newcastle’s Tusk and Glasgow’s Counterflows, to a venue like London’s Café Oto, whose programming is challenging and inspired. When London post-punks This Heat reformed earlier this year, they played Café Oto before ATP.
And of course, when a flight to the continent is on a financial par with a trip to Prestatyn from London or Glasgow, its competition has become the likes of Primavera itself, sometime collaborators with ATP. Contacted for this article, the rapidly-growing Primavera confirmed that numbers travelling from the UK to its festival have increased by 315% since 2012, with 61.3% of that increase happening between 2015’s edition and this year’s. “The market’s changed dramatically in the last few years,” says Hogan. “There are so many festivals out there, and people have more pressures than ever on where to spend their money.”
“I wasn't always a fan of their programming,” says Lee Etheridge, creative director at Tusk, of ATP, “and as a festival organiser myself, I wouldn't want to hand over programming to a guest curator, but it seemed to work for a lot of people. The three I’ve been to – curated by Tortoise, Thurston Moore and Stewart Lee - were all great. I'm also not personally a fan of getting bands who stopped functioning in the mid-80s to reform and play again, but then it’s fair to say they will have brought a new, younger audience to bands like Slint.”
Amongst anyone who knows and loves ATP, and still hotly debates its future online, there are two clear camps; those who think it’s had its day and deserves to be left behind, and those who believe it’s something special which should be nurtured and cherished for as long as possible. Etheridge is in the former camp, and his view isn’t uncommon.
“ATP gives a master class in how not to treat your audiences and artists sometimes,” he says. “Seeing how they communicate leaves a great deal to be desired, to put it politely. It’s amazing, after all they've done in this regard, that they clearly still have a reservoir of good will to draw on, I guess that's because people really do enjoy their festivals. But personally, and speaking as the manager of someone who played Prestatyn, I think it’s time to draw the curtain on the whole thing. But I'm a hypocrite too, of course – I’m sceptical about bands reforming for a nostalgia trip but I loved seeing the Stooges at ATP.”
Sadier, however, thinks the opposite. “Criticism is easy,” she says, echoing a post she made on Facebook the week after Prestatyn. “Organising and running a festival isn't. People are always so quick to slag off the ones that stick their necks out. Maybe Barry isn't the best businessman but he is one of the most inspired promotors in London, he’s taking a risk for all of us. I see (ATP) as being made and organised with love, unlike a lot of other festivals I've been to, where people are treated like cattle in a field. It isn’t cool to not be paid in full, and have festivals cancelled and not be reimbursed, but if we drag the thing down then there’s an even greater chance of there being no ATP at all. No-one would benefit from this.”
ATP isn’t over yet; its website still lists a bunch of London shows throughout the year and the return of its popular event in Iceland in June, headlined by the film composer John Carpenter, and Hogan says there’s no threat to these. “April was far from ideal, but we’re carrying on as normal,” he says, pointing out that new investors are being consulted about how to move ATP forward. Band fees from April and customer refunds from Drive Like Jehu, he says, are “being processed – the money won’t be magicked overnight, but they will go through.”
Otherwise he refuses to rule out more festivals under the holiday camp banner, although he says they’re in no rush to book any more imminently. “I don’t know if it’s the right format any more,” he says. “Maybe we should leave it alone or try something new? But all we want to do is put music on that we believe in, to bring together a nice, like-minded crowd who are all into the same thing. I mean, if we wanted to become super-rich we could have been putting massive, shite bands on all this time.”
Stewart Lee
2016-05-05T20:04:33+01:00
When one of the people who helped give your festival its name is annoyed with you, does that mean it’s time to call it quits? The latest in a line of troubles for the beleaguered holiday camp weekender All Tomorrow’s Parties came in the lead-up to mid-April’s Stewart Lee-curated festival at Pontins in Prestatyn and the following weekend’s subsequently cancelled Drive Like Jehu event, which had already been downsized from North Wales to the heart of Manchester. “We did our best to believe in the organizers, in the end, they let us all down,” tweeted John Cale, who had been scheduled to take part in both, and who felt he had to cancel his appearances at the eleventh hour. That and the Drive Like Jehu cancellation announcement at the climax of Stewart Lee’s event, along with some stern words from the reformed American hardcore band from the 1990s, made for one of the worst weeks in the festival’s history. “It’s stating the obvious that there were a few hiccups,” says Barry Hogan, the promoter who runs All Tomorrow’s Parties (or ATP, as everyone knows it), of the Lee weekender, “but there was some great music; people like Sleaford Mods, (the) Sun Ra (Arkestra), Richard Dawson. It was well-received by a lot of artists and fans.” He points to an untrue but widely-spread rumour back in March that the festival had been cancelled as the beginning of this spring’s troubles. “It killed the sales, it really went against us. And the numbers just weren’t there for Jehu. I know people will ask why we waited until that week to cancel, but we really tried to salvage it and we just weren’t able to.” This isn’t the first time ATP has found itself in a similar position; but before repeating the issues...
IT not exactly something to boast about, but it was a gig in Liverpool which put Stewart Lee right off stand-up.
"I had a moment on stage at Rawhide where I thought I’ve got to stop doing this and I gave up from about 2001 to 2004," he reveals.
"A guy in the audience kept shouting at me "talk about illegal immigrants" and I went, why don’t you then?"
Stewart got the mouthy punter on stage to see what would happen, but security were having none of it and brought his experiment to a swift end.
"So I thought I can’t be bothered," he says. "It was a number of things, but that was one of them and I stopped gigging for three years."
Luckily the 41-year-old is firmly back in the stand-up groove and is relishing his latest tour of the UK which comes to the Playhouse next week.
The comedian, writer and director has been plying his trade for two decades, starting as a student at Oxford University where he studied English.
His interest in stand-up was fired by the alternative comedians he saw acting as support acts for bands in the early 1980s.
"In the immediate post punk era a lot of gigs were a lot more cabaret," he explains.
"Billy Bragg was like that, he used to have a country band on and some Japanese performance artists and a comedian. The first comics that I saw, apart from seeing the Two Ronnies as a kid, were opening for bands.
"When I was 15 I saw Ted Chippington open for The Fall at the Powerhouse in Birmingham and I can quite honestly say that was the point at which I thought I’d like to be a stand-up.
"Before then I didn’t think I could do stand-up because I thought you had to be confident and funny and talk about stuff people were interested in.
"But when I saw Ted Chippington I realised you could stand still and talk really quietly and not appear to be interested in the audience and I thought I could probably do that!"
Stewart went on to make his name in the 1990s in a comedy partnership with Richard Herring.
Then there was the acclaimed but controversial Jerry Springer the Musical which he co-wrote and directed, novel The Perfect Fool and, in the last few years, a host of stand-up shows and one-off TV appearances.
A new TV series - Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle - earlier this year brought him firmly back into the public eye.
"It’s really great," he says, punctuating his explanation with barks of laughter.
"I’ve never had so many offers of gigs and they’re filling up more then they ever have, and also they’re filling up with people that know what they’ve come to.
"Sometimes, particularly at weekends, people come to see some comedy and you’re not necessarily what they want.
"This time, having done the TV show, people know they’re coming to something quite slow, turgid, repetitive, so they don’t feel disappointed!"
He is, of course, being disingenuous.
Expect If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One to include his views on Richard ‘Hamster’ Hammond, coffeeshop loyalty cards, advertisers hijacking his favourite song and plenty of trademark intelligent irony.
He smiles: "Stand up was my first love, and it is again now having been all around the houses."
Stewart Lee
2009-11-13T16:00:20+00:00
IT not exactly something to boast about, but it was a gig in Liverpool which put Stewart Lee right off stand-up. "I had a moment on stage at Rawhide where I thought I’ve got to stop doing this and I gave up from about 2001 to 2004," he reveals. "A guy in the audience kept shouting at me "talk about illegal immigrants" and I went, why don’t you then?" Stewart got the mouthy punter on stage to see what would happen, but security were having none of it and brought his experiment to a swift end. "So I thought I can’t be bothered," he says. "It was a number of things, but that was one of them and I stopped gigging for three years." Luckily the 41-year-old is firmly back in the stand-up groove and is relishing his latest tour of the UK which comes to the Playhouse next week. The comedian, writer and director has been plying his trade for two decades, starting as a student at Oxford University where he studied English. His interest in stand-up was fired by the alternative comedians he saw acting as support acts for bands in the early 1980s. "In the immediate post punk era a lot of gigs were a lot more cabaret," he explains. "Billy Bragg was like that, he used to have a country band on and some Japanese performance artists and a comedian. The first comics that I saw, apart from seeing the Two Ronnies as a kid, were opening for bands. "When I was 15 I saw Ted Chippington open for The Fall at the Powerhouse in Birmingham and I can quite honestly say that was the point at which I thought I’d like to be a stand-up. "Before then I didn’t think I could do stand-up because...
In August, a television producer asked me to contribute to a forthcoming documentary about the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Swift is best known for writing the children’s story Gulliver’s Travels, which is about a man who keeps going all different sizes and riding around on mice. Swift failed to use the then fashionable travelogue format to address the moral and philosophical concerns of the day in favour of a series of childish Grandpa in My Pocket-style adventures that David Walliam could have written, the idiot.
I am not an expert on Swift, but the producer said some of my standup routines are like his essays, though she conceded that she didn’t think these columns were as good as my live stuff. I explained that I saw the columns as being written by an alternative version of myself, one who doubted that he had the talent, intelligence or social standing to write for a posh newspaper, and was compensating for his nest-cuckoo paranoia by overstating his political and intellectual qualifications. “Which version of you is writing this paragraph that we are both in now then?”, she asked over her clipboard at a socially distanced meeting on Tuesday. Realising I didn’t have a satisfactory answer, I pretended to be choking on a Frazzle and lay down on the floor.
Normally I resist appearing on anything that anyone will see, as it only encourages rightwing commentators to cynically traduce you online for things you obviously haven’t done, raising your blood pressure and compromising your children’s relationships with their friends. But there was a fee for agreeing that I was the new Jonathan Swift, an offer hardly as reputationally damaging to a champagne Corbynista as appearing on Have I Got News for You. As I haven’t really worked since March, and as the boy needs a new bike and the cat needs an endoscopy, I succumbed, already regretting the loss of the Strictly Come Dancing slot I had recklessly ceded to Bill Bailey earlier in the year, under medical advice admittedly.
In preparation, I reimmersed myself in the works of Jonathan Swift, reading from the same copy of Martin Price’s The Restoration and the 18th Century that the lady my gran did cleaning for in the 80s had bought for me when I went to university 34 years ago, subsidising the punishingly expensive required book list. But we still got grants! Back then, politicians regarded knowledge as valuable in itself, rather than as a commodity that could only be judged in terms of its financial impact. Swift’s eugenics satire A Modest Proposal, I suddenly realised, applied the same now fashionable rationale to human flesh itself, proposing eating poor Irish infants as an economic solution to their burden on society. Nothing had changed.
Under the spell of Swift, on 12 October, I tried to write the coming Sunday’s column by transposing his satirical argument for eating the Irish poor on to the argument by Priti Patel’s Home Office in favour of netting channel migrants. I tried to use the same mixture of fake sympathy and brutal logic that Swift deploys to convince his readers of the expediency of infant cannibalism, as you may see:
“God provided the Channel to divide us from our fair neighbour France, the sadly suppurating wound from whose festering Northernmost ports oozes the tragic pus of this vile but intrepid tide of human filth, optimism and vigour. I do therefore further humbly offer it to public consideration, given that any netted migrants must be either imprisoned upon Southern Atlantic islands, or in rotting prison hulks off Portsmouth, might not a gentleman be tempted to view the already agreed upon act of entrapping or deterring these persevering pests as a noble sport? For a small fee, payable to a Beefeater, a gentleman might man the nets himself, keeping tally against his fellow of migrants caught or driven away. The deterred migrant would have a higher value than the migrant entangled, for the latter will need to be dealt with at further damage to the national purse.
“But what if, come the agreed time, two sportsmen have alighted upon the same score? How may the deadlock be broken? Were the migrant to expire and slip back lifeless into the cold waves, that expiration having perhaps been abetted by a swift seal-blow upon the head from a shillelagh, should not the netsman who eased the heavenward migration of such a brave but misguided soul be rewarded with an extra point against the tally of his fellow?
“And might not the expiry of a child migrant be worth twice the points of a parent, the infant threatening to further drain the coffers should it survive and breed? As the hunting of the fox for sport is easily justified by Reynard’s taste for the flesh of Chauntecleer, so the watery rest-taking of the child mariner, though doubtless an amusing process in which to participate, is made acceptable by way of its benefits to the national balance.”
But it seemed contrived, the concepts of state-approved cannibalism and state-approved migrant-murder not quite grinding together, and I deemed it unworthy of publication in so august a journal as the Observer. Instead, I wrote a simple parody of that week’s Conservative attempts to pass off the incoming no-deal Brexit as an Australian-style trade bonanza, and returned to my monetised study of Swift.
But last week, the Conservative scum voted down the footballer Marcus Rashford’s plea that the increasing number of economically untenable families in Covid Britain should be assisted in feeding their children during half-term. And the arguments offered up in defence of this decision were couched in terms the writer of A Modest Proposal would have recognised. I looked from one to the other and it was impossible to tell which was which. And it made me wonder, would it be such a bad idea, really, to take those children our society cannot feed, and to make some practical use of them?
Stewart Lee
2020-11-01T11:59:25+00:00
In August, a television producer asked me to contribute to a forthcoming documentary about the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Swift is best known for writing the children’s story Gulliver’s Travels, which is about a man who keeps going all different sizes and riding around on mice. Swift failed to use the then fashionable travelogue format to address the moral and philosophical concerns of the day in favour of a series of childish Grandpa in My Pocket-style adventures that David Walliam could have written, the idiot. I am not an expert on Swift, but the producer said some of my standup routines are like his essays, though she conceded that she didn’t think these columns were as good as my live stuff. I explained that I saw the columns as being written by an alternative version of myself, one who doubted that he had the talent, intelligence or social standing to write for a posh newspaper, and was compensating for his nest-cuckoo paranoia by overstating his political and intellectual qualifications. “Which version of you is writing this paragraph that we are both in now then?”, she asked over her clipboard at a socially distanced meeting on Tuesday. Realising I didn’t have a satisfactory answer, I pretended to be choking on a Frazzle and lay down on the floor. Normally I resist appearing on anything that anyone will see, as it only encourages rightwing commentators to cynically traduce you online for things you obviously haven’t done, raising your blood pressure and compromising your children’s relationships with their friends. But there was a fee for agreeing that I was the new Jonathan Swift, an offer hardly as reputationally damaging to a champagne Corbynista as appearing on Have I Got News for You. As I haven’t really worked since March, and as the boy...
Stewart Lee is undoubtedly one of our finest comedians despite his standing outside of the comedy mainstream. Long time fan Dave Griffiths gave us the following review of one of his recent shows.
Like a magician who reveals his tricks, I thought Lee's book (How I Escaped My Certain Fate) about his stand-up routines and the fact and fiction in them would lessen the impact of future shows.
Not at all - it makes him even more intriguing. For example, the show was being filmed and we were told if we nipped out while he was on, we wouldn't be allowed back in. Lee started a tale about his dad the cardboard salesman and a woman walked out. He used her exit in his patter, dropping the story about his dad, and the woman came back in 30 seconds later.
Was she a plant? Did his dad really sell cardboard?
Lee later explained that certain bits of the show were true and some made up. But even then you were in doubt. He kept reviewing parts of the show and never made it easy for himself - 'grumpily' and 'patronisingly' spurning new fans, 'agonising' over easy laughs, saying the show was 'about nothing', doing a politics section with daft references to Scooby Doo, and mocking the trendy young comedians - 'the Russells' (I think he was really mocking them).
According to Lee, people in the stalls were his real fans while people in the balconies only came because he was on TV. Another clever move which made the stallees feel good and the balconites wishing they were in with the in crowd.
All this works because he has great presence and calm authority - something I particularly remember when I first saw him 20 years ago - as well as superb timing and delivery, and a hilarious, deadpan face. He may be desperate to escape the 'traditional' ways of making people laugh but he uses all the techniques of the great comedians.
Stewart Lee
2012-04-27T14:11:58+01:00
Stewart Lee is undoubtedly one of our finest comedians despite his standing outside of the comedy mainstream. Long time fan Dave Griffiths gave us the following review of one of his recent shows. Like a magician who reveals his tricks, I thought Lee's book (How I Escaped My Certain Fate) about his stand-up routines and the fact and fiction in them would lessen the impact of future shows. Not at all - it makes him even more intriguing. For example, the show was being filmed and we were told if we nipped out while he was on, we wouldn't be allowed back in. Lee started a tale about his dad the cardboard salesman and a woman walked out. He used her exit in his patter, dropping the story about his dad, and the woman came back in 30 seconds later. Was she a plant? Did his dad really sell cardboard? Lee later explained that certain bits of the show were true and some made up. But even then you were in doubt. He kept reviewing parts of the show and never made it easy for himself - 'grumpily' and 'patronisingly' spurning new fans, 'agonising' over easy laughs, saying the show was 'about nothing', doing a politics section with daft references to Scooby Doo, and mocking the trendy young comedians - 'the Russells' (I think he was really mocking them). According to Lee, people in the stalls were his real fans while people in the balconies only came because he was on TV. Another clever move which made the stallees feel good and the balconites wishing they were in with the in crowd. All this works because he has great presence and calm authority - something I particularly remember when I first saw him 20 years ago - as well as...
I loved my gran. And my gran loved the Queen; because of the second world war; because of the corgis; and because of getting a television to watch the coronation in 1953. When I lived with her in the early 70s she had just upgraded to a colour TV and would not allow me to watch the old black-and-white films of Kurosawa or Truffaut that I coveted as a child, as she had “paid for colour”. However, if “coloured” people came on the TV, such as Ken Boothe singing Everything I Own on Top of the Pops, the channel would be swiftly changed. It seemed there was one rule for blah blah blah insert punchline here. Take my wife! Please!! I’m here all week!!! Try the Daylesford Organic farmshop hampers!!!!
My gran was a spiritual forebear of that generation that voted for Brexit, ruined their great-grandchildren’s futures and then promptly died. And I loved her. My gran’s royalism was formed by the crucible of the Blitz, by wattle and daub Coventry immolating on the eastern horizon and by the Queen Mother picking through great craters with a grateful public on Pathé news, perhaps the most selfless and inspiring act of any member of the royal family until the current Queen paid Prince Andrew’s £10m sex-case costs. With our money. She could just have auctioned that jewelled hat surely, the one that gets driven around the Mall in its own car.
I’m a Queen sceptic now, I suppose. But in the summer of 1977, the year of the silver jubilee, I was dressed in a patriotic polythene tabard-wristband combo that came free with issue 32 of Marvel’s Captain Britain comic and I ran around the street party in the rectangle of green grass in the middle of the housing estate singing the national anthem in sunshine-sticky bliss, my egg-white face stained with Mum’s homemade pavlova. I was 28 years old.
I’m joking of course! In 1977 I was nine!! And to this day I bitterly regret making a stupid scrunched-up monkey face to my mum’s camera as the royal car drove past us and the Queen waved her white glove, after our eight-hour wait at the railings on Solihull high street. “Why do you always have to act stupid all the time and ruin everything?” my gran despaired, not realising there was a career in it. She never really forgave me for spoiling the royal moment, though I think I partially redeemed myself by introducing her to my showbiz acquaintance Nicholas Parsons on lower Regent Street in 1993. He had seemed so much bigger in real life that my gran wondered how he fitted inside the colour television.
I want to enjoy the jubilee, but I am conflicted. The red, white and blue bunting that be-swaddles the celebration just makes me think of Rwandan deportations, the weaponised nostalgia patriotism of Brexit and Boris Johnson bewitching the bewildered as he waved the union flag while drooping deliberately from a zip wire. Funny Boris. It’s not my flag any more. I want my country back.
I entered a theatre in Derbyshire last week through a union flag forest foyer and suddenly turning into my surly childhood self again, immediately changed the house music playlist for my show that evening to include the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the Kunts’ similarly suppressed single Prince Andrew Is a Sweaty Nonce. My gran would have slapped my legs.
But what does it mean to wave a British flag, now that Brexit has trashed our international reputation, compromised England’s relationship with Scotland and Northern Ireland and left our most precious cultural institutions at the mercy of the sadistic philistine gentleman thugs elected to deliver it? Having been the prorogue patsy of an early entanglement in Johnson’s spaff-woven silk-web of lies, the Queen is as much a victim of Brexit as that Ukip-supporting eel farmer whose anguilliformes are now all rotting in a warehouse in the Forest of Dean, but she stinks less of dead fish.
And given that democracy fans must respect the result of the Brexit referendum, whether we voted for it or not, we should make the best of the benefits it brings. On Wednesday, Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed scrapping EU vacuum-cleaner regulations was one of the “most interesting” freedoms offered by Brexit. I will use an anti-EU Henry to suck up my Remainer tears. I hear they also work well on the corpses of rotten eels.
On Monday, Kent county council gave a largely unreported £180,000 contract to the disaster relief charity RE:ACT Disaster Response to provide food and water to stranded Brexit backlog lorry drivers. Thoughtfully, this weekend’s compensatory package for the permanently parked has taken the form of a special deluxe jubilee parcel. Each stationary trucker will receive a Prince Andrew pizza slice, a Prince Philip “slitty-eyes” mask and a small furry wipe-clean vibrating scale model of the Queen’s final corgi, Willow, which can be plugged into the cigarette lighter in the driver’s cab to provide much needed comfort and relief.
It’s a strange time to celebrate the Queen. The patriotic fug that frames her is the same brain-fog that saw the failing Brexit government reach out to the stirring memory of imperial measurements. The return of the gill, the furlong and the peck are further attempts to distract from the gallons of Friday fridge wine, the perches of £840 rolled-gold wallpaper and the fluid scruples of vomit at the 18 December Downing Street party. So sod the Queen.
But in 2014, the traumatised Syrian war veteran Dr David Nott visited the palace and was overcome by a PTSD attack when the Queen asked him about his work. She invited him to come and feed the corgis with her, to take his mind off the atrocities he was reliving.
Stewart Lee
2022-06-05T18:55:07+01:00
I loved my gran. And my gran loved the Queen; because of the second world war; because of the corgis; and because of getting a television to watch the coronation in 1953. When I lived with her in the early 70s she had just upgraded to a colour TV and would not allow me to watch the old black-and-white films of Kurosawa or Truffaut that I coveted as a child, as she had “paid for colour”. However, if “coloured” people came on the TV, such as Ken Boothe singing Everything I Own on Top of the Pops, the channel would be swiftly changed. It seemed there was one rule for blah blah blah insert punchline here. Take my wife! Please!! I’m here all week!!! Try the Daylesford Organic farmshop hampers!!!! My gran was a spiritual forebear of that generation that voted for Brexit, ruined their great-grandchildren’s futures and then promptly died. And I loved her. My gran’s royalism was formed by the crucible of the Blitz, by wattle and daub Coventry immolating on the eastern horizon and by the Queen Mother picking through great craters with a grateful public on Pathé news, perhaps the most selfless and inspiring act of any member of the royal family until the current Queen paid Prince Andrew’s £10m sex-case costs. With our money. She could just have auctioned that jewelled hat surely, the one that gets driven around the Mall in its own car. I’m a Queen sceptic now, I suppose. But in the summer of 1977, the year of the silver jubilee, I was dressed in a patriotic polythene tabard-wristband combo that came free with issue 32 of Marvel’s Captain Britain comic and I ran around the street party in the rectangle of green grass in the middle of the housing estate singing...
To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform one Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness.
I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash.
And dead also is Wilde’s contemporary Little Tich, the resilient dancing midget, whose spectacular gravity-defying boots can still be seen on display in Bloomsbury’s bijoux Museum of Comedy, alongside Tommy Cooper’s fez and a jar of thoughts John Cleese was forbidden from articulating owing to political correctness. But I dread to think of the havoc a capering music hall midget might have wrought on today’s international flight paths. It is a relief that Trump has targeted the diversity policies that could lead, directly up the gently sloping access ramp of woke inclusivity, to millions of appalling aviation disasters.
Call me a textbook member of the tofu-munching north London wokerati, but I am proud to live in a world where people of shorter stature, while still entitled to dance in funny shoes if they so desire, can also be air traffic controllers. And call me a textbook member of the cinnamon latte-guzzling liberal elite, but it does seem wrong for the new president of the US to blame dwarf diversity hires and lazy amputees and those pesky epileptics for an air crash, without any evidence, especially when he’s reportedly just laid off loads of air traffic controllers.
On a recent Friday in York, I had a lovely north African tapas lunch with a longstanding comedy promoter who, though still young, was old enough to remember working for a special bowling alley in Blackpool, where small people in crash helmets mounted on little trolleys were ricochetted down the aisles at speed towards clusters of vulnerable skittles by violently drunk stag parties. In the end, this massively popular seaside attraction – dwarf bowling – closed early, not because someone in Blackpool had a belated anxiety about whether it was ethical, but because of the injuries sustained by those being bowled down the lanes by the intoxicated revellers.
In the 1920s, Blackpool’s midgets lived in their own Midget Town on top of the Blackpool Tower, where tourists paid to see them go about their daily business in suitably scaled-down settings. It was a living. But when Midget Town finally closed, the pre-PC future offered only pantomime, seasonal work and bowling. It’s a world Trump would like to return to.
Ah, well! Meet our potential major trading partner, whose return, according to Boris Johnson, was to be celebrated as another welcome victory over the woke. Witnessing the adjudicated sex abuser and convicted felon’s inauguration, Johnson, perhaps scenting his own second chance in the offing, related in the Daily Mail how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the hand of Trump: “I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.” I can’t even be bothered to write anything funny about a man who could pen something so cynical, stupid and self-serving. I wish Johnson, the wounded wild pig of world politics, wandering around the central reservation wailing, having been winged by a passing Winnebago, would just fuck off. For ever.
Too many of our politicians and pundits seem willing to take a wait-and-see approach to the wild swings of Trump’s pendulous wrecking balls. We should stand strong against Trump alongside Canada, the harmless honey bear of international politics suddenly rearing up like an animatronic grizzly in an 80s B-movie. Keir Starmer is in danger of being on the wrong side of history, his only consolation being that, at the current rate of collapse, there may not be much history left. Like the natural world Starmer wishes to destroy, it seems history may be a finite resource.
“Drill, baby, drill!” cries Trump, as Los Angeles burns and Greenland’s permafrost unfreezes to the point where the previously unexploitable country may actually be worth him invading. Meanwhile, Starmer’s cry is the same but more complex and no less stupid. “Build a third runway and drill in the Rosebank oilfield, baby, build a third runway and drill in the Rosebank oilfield! And while you’re at it, lock up peaceful environmental protesters too. Especially the elderly.”
Starmer can’t really criticise Trump’s planet-pulverising withdrawal from the Paris agreement, let alone his baseless hostility to a phalanx of imaginary disabled air traffic incompetents, when he too has decided to throw all life on Earth under the bus, despite having once been an idealistic teenager who left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present”. Bless!
I began this supposedly funny column on Monday morning, when the US president was still saying Starmer was “very nice” and there’d be no UK tariffs. Then I travelled to Oxford to do a show, and one takeaway coffee and a homemade sausage sandwich later, the UK seemed to have drifted back into Trump’s target zone, depending on which interpretation of his last mouth-fart of vengeful gobbledy-vomit you chose to believe. There’s no point trying to make plans around the whims of Trump. Starmer may as well throw cake at a hippo or try to cajole a box jellyfish. Go to Brussels on bended knee and beg for brotherhood.
Stewart Lee
2025-02-09T13:08:23+00:00
To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform one Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness. I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash. And dead also is Wilde’s contemporary Little Tich, the resilient dancing midget, whose spectacular gravity-defying boots can still be seen on display in Bloomsbury’s bijoux Museum of Comedy, alongside Tommy Cooper’s fez and a jar of thoughts John Cleese was forbidden from articulating owing to political correctness. But I dread to think of the havoc a capering music hall midget might have wrought on today’s international flight paths. It is a relief that Trump has targeted the diversity policies that could lead, directly up the gently sloping access ramp of woke inclusivity, to millions of appalling aviation disasters. Call me a textbook member of the tofu-munching north London wokerati, but I am proud to live in a world where people of shorter stature, while still entitled to dance in funny shoes if they so desire, can also be air traffic controllers. And call me a textbook member of the cinnamon latte-guzzling liberal elite, but it does seem wrong for the new president of the US to blame dwarf diversity hires and lazy...
Last week, Donald Trump falsely attributed admirable human qualities to a dog. Many Trump supporters have done the same to the president. The hero dog, Trump explained on Monday, had played an important part in the operation that saw the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “die like a dog”, the president managing to both praise dogs and use them as a metaphor for cowardice, in the same speech.
An American journalist friend has told me, confidentially, that the heroic Belgian malinois has been put out to stud, touring puppy farms in the key Republican-voting states of Trump’s supporter base. Patriot puppy farmers can breed their bitches with the canine assassin, who is priced at $10,000 per penetration or $300,000 for a day’s companionship in a private kennel. Extra canoodling time increases the chances of impregnation incrementally, with profits given to Trump’s legal defence fund. You couldn’t make it up!
Supportive breeders will be able to charge proud puppy purchasers top rates to own a dog spawned from the semen of the very hound that left Baghdadi, in the words of the president’s official press conference statement last Monday, “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way”, an emotional state the virile sex-animal is also expected to induce in satiated bitches.
I should have seen this unbelievable state of affairs – the post-rationalised monetisation of a military operation – coming. The American novelist Jarett Kobek, who wrote to me years ago asking if he could quote a bit of my standup in a book, is now a regular correspondent. While Kobek’s 2017 opus The Future Won’t Be Long shows he could have spent his life writing the kind of classic New York novel critics love, 2016’s superb content-form fusion I Hate the Internet and this year’s ecstatically disorienting Only Americans Burn in Hell explode ideas of literary taste and style to slice open his homeland’s poisoned abdomen. But real life seems to have a habit of providing Kobek with experiences that confirm his paranoia.
On 1 September, Kobek emailed me from New York to say: “I had the strangest experience of my life the other night. I was at the Comedy Store and watched the guy who shot Osama bin Laden do his tight five about shooting Osama bin Laden.” I assumed Kobek, who has written extensively on jihadist terrorism, was using me as an unwitting pawn in some satirical experiment understood only by him, but he confirmed the experience.
“He [Robert J O’Neill] came out years ago, against Navy Seal protocol or whatever, to take credit, and has sort of gone through the entire gamut of celebrity, but I assure you none of that was as weird or as surprising as seeing him come up and do his material, which absolutely 100% killed.” Kobek, you will not be surprised to learn, is, like me, a virtue-signalling snowflake.
Three weeks later, the same story drifted across my digital consciousness. The internet, now a sort of digital camera obscura, showed me a clip where, as a prank, the American comedian David Spade had secured Bin Laden’s assassin a slot at the Comedy Store. He and another American comedian, Whitney Cummings, fed the likable former Seal lines through an earpiece (like Frankie Boyle and Russell Howard, O’Neill used writers), and secretly filmed the show. This was the very same performance Kobek had attended.
O’Neill tells the crowd he shot Bin Laden because he was “tired of taking my shoes off at the fucking airport”. In his military service, O’Neill continues, he got “two silver stars, four bronze stars of valour and a ton of pussy”. While trading on a certain amount of jingoism, the act also works, perhaps unintentionally, as a parody of normal comedy. How, for example, would the SAS man who shot three IRA members in Gibraltar describe his experiences, were he obliged to do so on Live at the Apollo in the style of Chris Ramsey?
In closing, O’Neill’s puppeteers allow him the blackly comic observation: “My favourite thing about killing Osama bin Laden is that it finally ended all the wars in the Middle East.” One wonders if, as O’Neill exits past a bewildered looking Kobek sporting a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, he is at all traumatised by his past and whether his assassination-induced celebrity acts as any kind of balm? Perhaps Spade and Cummings intended to explore this idea. I don’t know. I didn’t feel culturally equipped to decode whatever was going on and no criticism of the piece is intended.
Meanwhile, in a White House press conference on the subject of the hero dog, defence secretary, Mark Esper, who will tour the animal sex farms with the national canine gigolo, said the assassin hound could be guaranteed to “perform a tremendous service”. And in the unlikely event that America’s sex-dog is unable to rise to the occasion, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has confirmed that he will personally hand-milk the malfunctioning malinois into whatever receptacle the customers provide and that he will get the job done however long it takes. God bless America!! We are through the looking glass here, people!!!
Perhaps the first-born spawn of the soldier-hound could be offered to dog-loving 10 Downing Street, to live alongside Dilyn dog, as a sweetener to stop 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds” Johnson making too much fuss about that unfortunate incident in Northamptonshire. After all, as President Trump said: “Driving on the wrong side of the road happens.”
Stewart Lee
2019-11-03T14:59:02+00:00
Last week, Donald Trump falsely attributed admirable human qualities to a dog. Many Trump supporters have done the same to the president. The hero dog, Trump explained on Monday, had played an important part in the operation that saw the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “die like a dog”, the president managing to both praise dogs and use them as a metaphor for cowardice, in the same speech. An American journalist friend has told me, confidentially, that the heroic Belgian malinois has been put out to stud, touring puppy farms in the key Republican-voting states of Trump’s supporter base. Patriot puppy farmers can breed their bitches with the canine assassin, who is priced at $10,000 per penetration or $300,000 for a day’s companionship in a private kennel. Extra canoodling time increases the chances of impregnation incrementally, with profits given to Trump’s legal defence fund. You couldn’t make it up! Supportive breeders will be able to charge proud puppy purchasers top rates to own a dog spawned from the semen of the very hound that left Baghdadi, in the words of the president’s official press conference statement last Monday, “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way”, an emotional state the virile sex-animal is also expected to induce in satiated bitches. I should have seen this unbelievable state of affairs – the post-rationalised monetisation of a military operation – coming. The American novelist Jarett Kobek, who wrote to me years ago asking if he could quote a bit of my standup in a book, is now a regular correspondent. While Kobek’s 2017 opus The Future Won’t Be Long shows he could have spent his life writing the kind of classic New York novel critics love, 2016’s superb content-form fusion I Hate the Internet and this year’s ecstatically disorienting Only Americans...
I’d given up on ever again finding stand-up on TV funny, so Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle didn’t arouse antic expectations. But actually it is properly funny, and what makes him funny is instructive. He plays a character. It’s not him, it’s a performance. He’s not just a spooky, needy fat man telling jokes; Lee’s character is a spooky, needy fat man, a metropolitan socialist with a bucket of self-loathing, insecurity, thin skin and well-deserved doubts, telling jokes. He is a Corbynista Tony Hancock, and it’s a good creation, delivered with astute vehemence.
Lee points out that comedy has made him a member of the middle class, where he is hated, and you know this is an act because, in real life, Lee went to a public school — he was a contemporary of Richard Hammond, whom he once hilariously wished was dead — and then to Oxford; and he writes musicals. His mockable working- class persona is tee-hee gold. If you regret the passing of really whiny political humour and wondered who on earth was going to pick up the jester’s cap, look no further.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-06T17:36:15+00:00
I’d given up on ever again finding stand-up on TV funny, so Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle didn’t arouse antic expectations. But actually it is properly funny, and what makes him funny is instructive. He plays a character. It’s not him, it’s a performance. He’s not just a spooky, needy fat man telling jokes; Lee’s character is a spooky, needy fat man, a metropolitan socialist with a bucket of self-loathing, insecurity, thin skin and well-deserved doubts, telling jokes. He is a Corbynista Tony Hancock, and it’s a good creation, delivered with astute vehemence. Lee points out that comedy has made him a member of the middle class, where he is hated, and you know this is an act because, in real life, Lee went to a public school — he was a contemporary of Richard Hammond, whom he once hilariously wished was dead — and then to Oxford; and he writes musicals. His mockable working- class persona is tee-hee gold. If you regret the passing of really whiny political humour and wondered who on earth was going to pick up the jester’s cap, look no further.
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/slcv4/tv-review/
Richard Youngs is a forty year old librarian, transplanted from a childhood in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire to Glasgow, from where he maintains musical connections with an international network of similarly independent, but musically disparate, cult figures. The first Richard Youngs album I ever heard was Making Paper. It was released in February 2001 on the reliable American label Jagjaguwar, sixteen years into Youngs’ recording career. Improvised directly to mini-disc in Edinburgh the previous year, with lyrics that occurred to Youngs as he played, Making Paper featured two twenty minute pieces and one three minute one, all built solely on nothing more than a keening, high-lonesome vocal and some simple, stately, repetitive, resolutely minimal piano figures, with occasional jarring bum notes and lengthy silences. But it was May, Youngs’ next solo release, featuring just acoustic guitar and vocals, that hit that wonderful mid-space where great art somehow becomes accessible without losing any of the edge that makes it great.
May was released in 2002, but Youngs had recorded another album on acoustic guitar five years previously. 1997’s Sapphie, named for a friend’s dead Alsatian dog, pasted the same kind of minimalist aesthetic found on Making Paper over folksy textures, but when Youngs returned to the acoustic for May it was for six shorter pieces. The tracks were all laid down live, and the words were all drawn from a single thirty verse lyric Young wrote in an evening. The sleeve tells us May was “recorded Christmas 2000, Easter 2001 and last day of May 2001 in Harpenden, England”, but these significant sounding dates, with connotations of spiritual death and rebirth, merely represent times when Youngs went home to visit his father. “I recorded May at my Dad's house on an old reel-to-reel over about half a year, doing a little each time I visited.”
On May, Youngs left the distorted Casio keyboards and sheet-metal guitar of many of his previous thirty or so releases in Glasgow and disguised himself as a troubadour, with years of avant-garde experimentation at his back to inform his every, apparently straightforward gesture. Nowadays there’d be an easier route to reviewing or marketing May. You’d call it acid-folk, or avant-folk, and drop the appropriate names, but unlike much of the contemporary music that gets scooped up under those unwieldy banner headings, May is genuinely psychedelic, avant-garde and traditional, and does not require the performer involved to dress as a mediaeval clown. But it’s difficult to know if Youngs arrived at May’s distinctive sound accidentally, or by design.
Youngs’ first release under his own name, the extremely limited 1988 solo album Advent, for example, seemed derived from the kind of droning, 1960’s minimalism defined by Tony Conrad and The Dream Syndicate group. But recording at home between terms of his Nottingham University Maths course, Youngs had arrived at the sound in isolation, unaware of its precedents. “I knew about minimalism, but I'd only heard rather slick versions of it. I wasn't up on the more rough and ready stuff.”, he confesses. Youngs describes his work as if it’s automatic, almost unconsidered, and the title of his most recent solo album, 2005’s The Naïve Shaman, could almost be a self-conscious in-joke, but the traditional textures of May represented a more knowing appropriation of existing styles. “In the 80s I used to play at folk clubs simply because you didn't have to submit demo tapes or pass auditions,” Youngs recalls, “The open floor policy suited me. I wasn't playing folk music. But I do have a soft spot for those recordings of (traditional unaccompanied singers) like Walter Pardon and Harry Cox, and an endless amazement at the guitar style of Martin Carthy.”
Youngs’ admiration for Carthy is cautiously evident throughout May. The grand old duke of English folk holds steadfastly to the central figures of old folk tunes, relying on variations in tone and texture, rather than through on demonstrations of musicianly dexterity. Likewise, throughout May, Youngs’ guitar playing boldly resists elaboration, so that when there is a brief moment of extemporisation around the central tune of Wynd Time Wynd, it has an incredible impact. But Youngs denies there’s a process at work. “Playing like that feels pretty natural to me. I think I'm just not a very elaborate guitarist.” The uncompromising avoidance of any vocal inflection during Bloom Of All, which reflects the great folk singer Shirley Collins’ technique of allowing songs to speak for themselves unembellished, was “nothing deliberate - I just had a tune and I stuck with it.” And when the treble strings on Gilding resonate for unnaturally long periods, as if they've been extended somehow beyond their natural lifespan, Youngs says, “I probably mis-set the compression on the pre-amp.” Even the brilliant sequencing of the album, from Neon Winter’s almost impassable opening salvo of one string guitar part and baleful vocal, to the closing ballad Wynd Time Wynd, which sounds like something off Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left stripped of any orchestration, seems all but accidental. “A few people have told me that they skip Neon Winter when they listen to May,” Youngs muses, unconcerned. “I think the album gets easier to listen to with each track.”
May stands at the apex of a superb sequence of solo albums from 1997’s Sapphie onwards, via Making Paper and May, to the recent trio of Airs Of The Ear, River Through Howling Sky, and The Naïve Shaman. These two final releases throb with the experimental electronics and fuzzy feedback familiar from Youngs’ more uncompromising work, but never lose sight of the beating, human heart he finally found the confidence to foreground on May. No-one else comes close to achieving this fusion of folk music’s sensibilities and avant-garde music’s strategies. Richard Youngs is the British underground’s last great unknown.
Credits
Tracks: Neon Winter
Bloom Of All
Trees That Fall
Wynding Hills Of Maine
Gilding
Wynd Time Wynd
Producer: n/a
Recorded: Richard Youngs’ Dad’s house, Harpenden, Hertfordshire
Released : May 2002
Chart peak: n/a
Personnel : Richard Youngs (guitar, vocal)
Available : Jagjaguwar 56605 20432
Stewart Lee
2007-02-01T19:47:10+00:00
Richard Youngs is a forty year old librarian, transplanted from a childhood in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire to Glasgow, from where he maintains musical connections with an international network of similarly independent, but musically disparate, cult figures. The first Richard Youngs album I ever heard was Making Paper. It was released in February 2001 on the reliable American label Jagjaguwar, sixteen years into Youngs’ recording career. Improvised directly to mini-disc in Edinburgh the previous year, with lyrics that occurred to Youngs as he played, Making Paper featured two twenty minute pieces and one three minute one, all built solely on nothing more than a keening, high-lonesome vocal and some simple, stately, repetitive, resolutely minimal piano figures, with occasional jarring bum notes and lengthy silences. But it was May, Youngs’ next solo release, featuring just acoustic guitar and vocals, that hit that wonderful mid-space where great art somehow becomes accessible without losing any of the edge that makes it great. May was released in 2002, but Youngs had recorded another album on acoustic guitar five years previously. 1997’s Sapphie, named for a friend’s dead Alsatian dog, pasted the same kind of minimalist aesthetic found on Making Paper over folksy textures, but when Youngs returned to the acoustic for May it was for six shorter pieces. The tracks were all laid down live, and the words were all drawn from a single thirty verse lyric Young wrote in an evening. The sleeve tells us May was “recorded Christmas 2000, Easter 2001 and last day of May 2001 in Harpenden, England”, but these significant sounding dates, with connotations of spiritual death and rebirth, merely represent times when Youngs went home to visit his father. “I recorded May at my Dad's house on an old reel-to-reel over about half a year, doing a little each...
Stewart Lee is probably one of the first alternative comedians that burst onto the scene in the late eighties, as he says himself he has been doing stand-up for seventeen years, but despite forays into the world of journalism and his somewhat publicised involvement with the controversial Jerry Springer The Opera.
While these have obviously influenced Mr Lee, it certainly has not adversely affected the man's undoubted talent and charisma as a comedian. Playing to a capacity audience, a lot of whom could have only been a nursery school, is laid back style entertained throughout on a variety of subjects and had the audience glued to his every word.
If last night was anything to go by Stewart Lee maybe a 90's comedian, but he could till be attracting an audience when he himself is in his nineties.
Stewart Lee
2005-08-12T22:53:02+01:00
Stewart Lee is probably one of the first alternative comedians that burst onto the scene in the late eighties, as he says himself he has been doing stand-up for seventeen years, but despite forays into the world of journalism and his somewhat publicised involvement with the controversial Jerry Springer The Opera. While these have obviously influenced Mr Lee, it certainly has not adversely affected the man's undoubted talent and charisma as a comedian. Playing to a capacity audience, a lot of whom could have only been a nursery school, is laid back style entertained throughout on a variety of subjects and had the audience glued to his every word. If last night was anything to go by Stewart Lee maybe a 90's comedian, but he could till be attracting an audience when he himself is in his nineties.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
1 BASIC LEE
The tour of the current stand-up show will be finished in April.
Dates here;
March 2024
Wednesday 27th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 28th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
April 2024
Monday 15th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Tuesday 16th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Thursday 18th April 2024 - St. George's Hall, Bradford - TICKETS
Monday 22nd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 25th April 2024 - The Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
But if you live in Paris you can see the very final go at it, in a small room with no frills on May 15th
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
3rd December 2024 – 17th January 2025 & UK TOURING THROUGHOUT 2025
In this brand new show, Lee shares his stage with a tough-talking werewolf comedian from the dark forests of North America 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 ("the world's greatest living stand-up comedian" The Times), is in danger of being left behind. He's approaching sixty with debilitating health conditions, his TV profile has diminished, and his once BAFTA award-winning style of stand-up seems obsolete in the face of a wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars. But can Lee unleash his inner Man-Wulf to position himself alongside comedy legends like Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Jordan Peterson at the forefront of side-splitting stadium-stuffing shit-posting?
Opening at Leicester Square Theatre in December 2024 the new show will tour to UK cities throughout 2025.
Leicester Sq Theatre, London 3rd Dec 2024 – 17th Jan 2025 7pm, except for 6pm and 8.30 pm Sat 4th Jan. 0207 734 2222 www.leicestersquaretheatre.com
STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF 2024-2025 TOUR SCHEDULE
Small club dates of these seem to sell in a few hours as the venues announce them to their lists but I will be doing some ½ hrs of new material at various festivals and bigger gigs between now and Dec which I will announce here, and a small venue London run at some point.
4) SNOWFLAKE TORNADO
Stewart’s 2019-2022 touring show Snowflake/Tornado, which was originally broadcast as a BBC Special in Autumn 2022 us is now available to buy or rent “on demand” from www.mediagarageproductions.com.
5) KING ROCKER
King Rocker, the Nightingales rockumentary I made with Michael Cumming, is now available to stream globally.
“One of my all-time favourite rock docs” MARK KERMODE, BBC
“It’s warm, it’s funny, it’s fascinating” - Radcliffe and Maconie, BBC6 Music “The film is ace, the band is ace, Rob is a remarkable man” - Marc Riley, BBC6 Music
“A beautiful and fucking hilarious and moving film” -Shaun Keavney, BBC6 Music
To celebrate 3 years since the acclaimed film King Rocker premiered on Sky Arts and Robin Ince noticed that "the whole country is watching King Rocker" we will be making the film available internationally on that exact same day. From February 6th everyone, anywhere, will be able to watch. 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 band’s The Prefects and The Nightingales, has survived under the radar 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. Featuring Frank Skinner, Nigel Slater, Robin Askwith, Samira Ahmed, John Peel, Gina Birch, Marc Riley, Danny Fields, John Taylor, Paul Morley, Fuzzbox, Kevin Eldon, Nish Kumar, Bridget Christie, Andrew O’Neill, Sean Walsh, Paul Putner, Steve Beresford, and more. ‘King Rocker’ is now available to pre-order. From February 6th you can stream and download globally.
On tour I have seen many of Waxface’s Stewart Lee designs in the wild, and their owners are very satisfied with them. April sees two new designs, by the artist Rich Penfold, commemorating my Shitteron routine, and the time I was dealt with by Dave Chapelle’s security guards. Available soon here...
https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee
7) THE GIANT SYNDICATE 27TH APRIL EARTH HACKNEY LONDON
From 1pm – 10pm In the month of my 56th birthday, and Fire records’ 40th, I introduce various combinations of Dream Syndicate, Giant Sand and Kristen Hirsch at my local live music emporium. Teenage me can’t believe it. https://www.ticketweb.uk/event/the-giant-syndicate-earth-tickets/13278203
8) STOP THE TORIES
Carol Vorderman wants us all to work together to stop the Tories, and here’s how https://stopthetories.vote
9) GO FUND STEVE BERESFORD
The national treasure and pillar of the UK improv community that is Steve Beresford needs your help. You may have seen me with Steve doing John Cage’s Indeterminacy, or spotted him in Chris Morris’ Brass Eye playing the piano, or noticed him being very dry and funny in King Rocker.
"Hi. I am Steve Beresford. I’ve played the piano since I was 7 and now I’m 74. Sometimes I was a university lecturer. I mainly play improvised music and up until Covid had an OK time. But my savings went during Covid, my pension is small and post-Covid gigs are sparse. I need financial help, not least because I’ll be having an operation for a thing I’ve had since birth. I’d appreciate your help."
Steve has set up a GoFundMe account so that you can
JOLIE HOLLAND Alt-country chanteuse returns APRIL 1st Cambridge Portland Arms, 2nd Birmingham Kitchen Garden, 3rd Belfast Black Box, 4th Edinburgh Summerhall, 6th M’cr St Michael’s, 7th Brighton Komedia
DANIEL KITSON -COLLABORATOR. The world’s greatest living stand-up’s new show. APRIL 1st to 2nd Exeter Phoenix, 9th to 11th – Cardiff Sherman Studio, 19th -20th – Scarborough Stephen Joseph, MAY 4th and 5th – Belfast Black Box, 15th to 17th – Prescot - Shakespeare North, 22nd to 24th - Birmingham – MAC, JULY 7th and 8th - Bolton Octagon - On sale Now (with code Kitson2024)
KISTON says, “You can still Buy or Rent Tree (a good film or a good play i did with good Tim Key in the solid past) by clicking HERE.”
HOUSE OF ALL M’cr Fall-related supergroup tour APRIL 2nd Sheffield Leadmill, 3rd Glasgow Stereo, 8th London Dome, 9th Brighton Hope & Ruin, 20th M’cr Gorilla, 25th Portsmouth Wedgewood, 16th Bedford Esquires
SIMON MUNNERY – JERUSALEM. The struggle continues for The Peter Cook of his generation. APRIL 3rd Swindon Arts, 10th Norwich Arts, 11th S’hampton Attic, 16th N’castle Stand, 17th E’burgh Stand, 18th Glasgow Stand, 20th Bath Rondo, 21st Colchester Arts, 25th B’ham Glee, MAY 19th Salford Lowry, 29th Leeds Brudenell, 20th York Theatre
JERRY SADOWITZ The struggle continues for the Jerry Sadowitz of his generation.APRIL 3rd Exeter Corn Exchange, 4th-5th Bristol Hen & Chicken, 6th Worcester Huntingdon Hal
THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE More dates for a brilliant adaptation, by Graham Eatough, of David Keenan’s life-affirming fiction. APRIL 3rd – 6th E’burgh Traverse, 23RD – May 11TH London Riverside
HAWKWIND This current Hawkwind iteration channels their classic ‘70s space rock sound unashamedly, with keyboardist Thighpaulsandra of Coil, Cope and Spiritualised clearly living out a childhood dream. April 4th M’cr Academy, 5th Newcastle City Hall, 6th Edinburgh Academy, 7th Glasgow Academy
PAUL FOOT – DISSOLVE. Paul Foot is one of the all-time great British stand-ups and everyone that has seen his new show tells me it is a real step up, and that he’s doing something very innovative and unexpected too. APRIL 4th Poole Lighthouse, 5th Corsham Pound Arts, 6th Street Strode, 7th Cardiff Glee, 10th Leeds Wardrobe, 11th York Crescent, 12th Knaresborough Frazer, 13th Halifax Square, 14th Sale Waterside, 17th Canterbury Gulbienkin, 19th Milton Keynes Stables, 20th Colchester Arts, 21st Deal Astor, 24th Nottingham Metronone, 25th Lincoln Performing Arts, 26th Hull Truck, 27th Stockton-on-Tees Arc, MAY 1st Brighton Kommedia, 2nd Southampton Attic, 3rd Salisbury Attic, 4th Ivybridge Watermark, 9th Oxford Old Fire Station, 10th Cambridge Junction, 11th Norwich Playhouse, 15th Newhampton Arts, 16th Warwick Arts, 17th Leicester Square Theatre London
ALISON COTTON Violin-toting art-folk dronemadchen APRIL 5th London St Pancras Old Church, 18th Reading South Street Arts
CRASS ART The art of Crass, The Horse Hospital, London APRIL 12th – 17th
14 ICED BEARS Can it be that proto-shoegazers the Bears are really back? APRIL 6th Sheffield Shakespeares, MAY 18th Paris Point Ephemere
JOHN ROBB Spoken word tour by the James Boswell of post-punk. APRIL 10 SHEFFIELD Leadmill, 11 POCKLINGTON Arts Centre, 12 BUXTON Pavilion Arts, 18 WORCESTER Huntingdon Hall, 19 BRISTOL Folk House, 20 SOUTHAMPTON The Attic, 21 CAMBRIDGE Junction, 22 SUDBURY Quay Theatre, 23 COLCHESTER Arts Centre, 24 NORWICH Arts Centre, 26 CHESTER Storyhouse Garret, 27 LIVERPOOL Philharmonic Music Room, 28 LEEDS The Old Woollen, MAY 01 BRIGHTON Komedia, 03 WOOLWICH Works, 04 LONDON 21 Soho, 09 EDINBURGH Voodoo Rooms
MARTIN NEWELL/CLEANERS FROM VENUS Unexpected return from ‘80s English psyche-pop legend suddenly beloved by the young APRIL 11th London Stoke Newington St Mattias, 13th Glasgow CCA, 20th Southend Tea & Oranges
KEVIN MCALEER. The most I have ever laughed is at this reclusive Irish comedy genius, making a rare greatest hits return, apparently for the last time. APRIL 11th Dublin Vicar Street, 21st Belfast Mandela Hall.
ROSIE HOLT – THAT’S POLITAINMENT Woke satirist on the road. APRIL 11th Didcot Cornerstone, 12th Newbury Corn X, 13th Winchester Theatre Royal, 18th-19th London Leics Sq Theatre, 20th Swindon Royal, 21st Bristol Redgrave, 24th Poole Lighthouse, 25th Bridgwater McMillan, 26th Cardiff Sherman, 27th Norwich Playhouse, 28th N’hampton Derngate, MAY 1st Bradford Kings, 2nd Maidenhead Norden Farm, 3rd Tunbridge Wells Trinity, 4th Bury St Edmunds Royal, 5th Colchester Arts, 9th Birmingham MAC, 10th Farnham Maltings, 12th Leeds City Varieties, 22nd Lyme Regis Marine, 23rd Brighton Komedia, 24th Milton Keynes Stables, 25th L’pool Playhouse, 26th Salford Lowry, 31st Chipping Norton Theatre.
ALASDAIR BECKETT-KING The hilarious and brave multi-media surrealist takes his Nevermore show to your town APRIL 2nd Colchester Arts, 5th Cambr Junction, 6th Canterbury Gulbienkin, 10th Nottingham Just The Tonic, 12th S’hampton Attic, 13th Salisbury Arts, 17th Basingstoke Anvil, 19th Leeds City Varieties, 20th L’pool Hot Water, 21st M’cr Home, 24th Bristol Redgrave, 25th Shrewsbury Walker, 27th N’castle Stand, MAY 1st Norwich Playhouse, 2nd Brighton Komedia, 3rd Bury St Edmunds, 7th Swindon Arts, 8th Cardiff Glee, 9th Exeter Phoenix, 10th Taunton Tacchi-Morris, 16th & 24th London Leicester Sq Theatre
JASMINE MINKS Victory lap for Glasgow’s very old C86 era mod-ish janglers APRIL 19th Bristol Thunderbolt, 20th London Waiting Room
ELIZA CARTHY The first lady of folk and reigning Queen of The Faeries in full flight APRIL 20th Oxford North Wall, 26th Bristol Folk House, 27th Sheffield Greystones, MAY 10th Cambridge Stoney’s Field, JUNE 19th Gateshead Glasshouse
GIANT SAND The great improvising Americana Arizona legends unexpected return to active service. APRIL 22nd Newcastle Cluny, 23rs Glasgow Broadcast, 24th M’cr Yes, 27th London Hackney Earth w Dream Syndicate, Kristen Hirsch, Islet, Stewart Lee and more.
PETER CASE/SID GRIFFIN British dates from American power-pop progenitor turned Grammy-awarded grizzled folk-bluesman, with Long Ryders leader Sid Griffin in support. A must. APRIL 23rd Chester St Mary’s, 24th Birmingham Kitchen Garden, 26th Edinburgh Bannermans, 27th Glasgow Glad Café, 28th Leeds Northern Guitars, 29th Bristol Hen & Chicken, MAY 1st London Leytonstone Social, 2nd Dublin Upstairs At Wheelans, 3rd Belfast Cathedral Quarter, 4th Kilkenny Roots Festival
THE GIRL WITH THE REPLACEABLE HEAD ‘80s indie Hurrah/Go-Betweens staffed micro-supergroup. APRIL 26TH Newcastle Cumberland Arms, 29th London Waiting Room
FLAT & THE CURVES – GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT TOUR. The prosecco hen night from hell housed in a surprisingly savage musical comedy form by these witty, obscene, often clownishly grotesque, and also unnecessarily musically gifted, four best girlfriends you never had. I love Flat & The Curves and I don’t know why! The Nolans of Filth! APRIL 26th Scarborough SJT, JUNE 4th Kings Lynn Corn Exchange, 5th Maidstone Hazlitt, 6th Rickmansworth Watersmeet, 7th Wellingborough Castle Theatre, 8th Coventry Albany, 9th Hereford, 10th East Grinstead Chequer Mead, 12th Harpended Eric Morecambe Centre, 13th Mansfield Palace, 14th Stockport Plaza, 15th Rotherham Civic, 16th Leeds City Varieties, 18th Middleton Arena, 20th Redditch Palace, 21st Bishop’s Stortford South Mill Arts, 22nd Bury St Edmunds Theatre Royal, 23rd Newport Riverfront, 26th St Helen’s Theatre Royal, 29th Lowestoft Marina JULY 3rd Aberdeen Tivoli, 4th Dundee Gardyne, 5th Dunfemlin Alhambra, 6th Livingston Howden Park, 10th South Shields Custom House, 11th Lancaster Grand, 14th Camberley Theatre, 16th Taunton Brewhouse, 18th Winchester Theatre RoyaL, 19TH Tewkesbury Roses, 20th Stevenage Gordon Craig, 21st Tamworth Assembly Rooms
JONNY & THE BAPTISTS – THE HAPPINESS INDEX Filthy communist musical comedy from the much more talented than strictly necessary Simon & Garfunkel of sinngalongasocialism APRIL 26th Maidenhead Norden Farm, 27th Lancaster Dukes, 28th Newcastle Stand, 29th Glasgow Stand, 20th Alnwick Playhouse, MAY 9th Eastleigh Point, 12th Bristol Tobacco Factory, 15th – 18th Plymouth Drum, 31st Chorley Theatre, JUNE 1st Leeds Hyde Park Book Club, 2nd York Theatre @41, 13th-14th Bath Rondo, 15th Cambridge Performing Arts, 16th Colchester Arts, 17th Exeter Phoenix
NIGHTINGALES Off the beaten track small town dates for Birmingham post-punk heroes of belated King Rocker film fame May 2nd Kendal Glisky, 3rd Telford Firefly, 4th Halifax Square Chapel, 5th Milton Keynes Crawford Arms, 6th Ramsgate Music Hall, 8th W’chester Railway, 9th Newport Le Pub, 10th Warrington Irish, 11th Dunoon Burgh Hall
THE HANDSOME FAMILY Literary Lynchian Alt-Country duo MAY 3rd Dublin Liberty Hall, 7th Glasgow St Luke’s, 10th M’cr Stoller Hall, 12th Leeds Irish, 14th Norwich Arts, 16th Cardiff Gate, 18th Salisbury Winchester Gate, 21st London Union Chapel, 23rd Folkestone Quarterhouse
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE Punishing Japanese acid-jam veterans. MAY 9th Brighton Hope & Ruin, 10th London Dingwalls, 12th Dublin Workman’s, 16th Dundee Church, 17th N’castle Lubber Fiend, 20th Chelmsford Hot Box, 22nd Cambridge Portland Arms
EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD You must see this group. They are minimalist noise art but come on like entertainment. Absolutely captivating, classy, beautiful and sublime. No-one could fail to think this was amazing and brilliant. MAY 17th Bristol Cube, 18th Stoke Newington Old Church London x 2, 24th M’cr St Michaels, 25th Sheffield Sidney & Matild1, 31st Hebden Bridge Trades, JUNE 7th Brighton Hope, 8th Cambridge Storey’s Field
THE BEVIS FROND Psych legends Lexington, London May 18th
THE LOVELY EGGS Art-punk duo MAY 23rd Glasgow St Luke’s, 24th Edinburgh Belle Angele, 25th N’castle Grove, 26th Leeds Brudenell, 27th Birmingham Xoyo, 28th Bristol Thekla, 29th Brighton Chalk, 30th London Earth, 31st Nottingham Rescue Rooms JUNE 1st M’cr New Century
THE PRISONERS Psychedelic Medway mods return MAY 24th London Camden Roundhouse
ROBERT FORSTER Former Go-Between all grown up into silver fox troubadour MAY 24th/25th London Omeara
WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM Black metal with an eco-bent MAY 28th Limerick Dolans, 29th Dublin Opium, 30th Bristol Fleece, 31st London Earth, JUNE 1st Glasgow Garage/Scarborough Fortress
FALLEN LEAVES The Gentlemen Adventurers of sharp-dressed mod-punk JUNE 8th London Dublin Castle, JULY 20th Kingston Fighting Cocks, SEPT 14th London Dublin Castle, NOV 2nd London Hope & Anchor
RAIN PARADE LA’s ‘80s psychedelic revivalists revived JUNE 14th Bristol Strange Brew, 15th Leeds Brudenell, 16th M’;cr Night & Day, 18th Nottingham Metronome, 19th London 229
PATTI SMITH QUARTET June 25th Brighton Dome, 27th-28th Dublin Vicar St, JULY 21st London Somerset House
DETROIT COBRAS Garage punk party time JULY 2nd Bristol Lost Horizon, 3RD M’cr Rebellion, 4th Glasgow Oran Mor, 5th Leeds Brudenell, 6th London Camden Forge
THE SADIES Surf-twanged country-Canadiana JULY 3rd Oxford Bullingdon, 4th Leeds Brudenell, 5th Eaton Farm Park Woodbridge, 6th London 100 Club
BLUE AEROPLANES Lone one-off from poet Gerard Langley’s televisionary performance art post-punks, generations of Bristol beatniks in full flight.
LLOYD COLE Solo tour by the godfather of arch introspective indieSEPT 4th Limerick Lime Tree, 6th Ballycotton Sea Church, 8th Bexhill on Sea De La Ware Pavillion, 9th Exeter Corn Exchange, 10th Bath Komedia, 13th Guildford G Live, 14th Bury St Edmonds Apex, 16th B’ham Town Hall, 18th Shrewsbury Severn, 19th Lytham St Anne’s Lowther Pavillion, 21st Hamilton Town House, 22nd Greenock Beacon, 24th Whitley Bay Playhouse, 25th Ilkley King’s Hall, 26th Sheffield City Hall
MARK RADCLIFFE AND MARC RILEY LIVE SEPT 26th Shepherd’s Bush Empire London NOV 3rd Shrewsbury Severn, 5th Crewe Lyceum, 10th Warrington Parr Hall.
LONG RYDERS Another final chance to see the resurrected and now seemingly immortal Alt Country Punk pioneers – like the Clash gone Nashville – The Long Ryders. OCTOBER 10th Glasgow Oran Mor, 11th Birkenhead Future Yard, 13th M’cr Band On The Wall, 14th Nottingham Metronom2, 16th London 229, 18th St Leonards Piper
TIRZAH GARWOOD: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery London, 19 November 2024–26 May 2025. 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.
THE DAMNED Black Album/Strawberries line-up, with hard-wristed Holy Grail headhunter Rat Scabies back on drums. DEC 4th Newcastle NX, 5th Glasgow Barrowlands, 6th M’c Academy, 8th Leeds Academy, 9th Nottingham Rock City, 10th W’hampton Halls, 12th Bristol Beacon, 13th S’hampton Guuildhall, 14th Eastbourne Winter Gardens, 16th Cambs Corn X, 18th London Roundhouse
11) WEBSITE NEWS
I’ve had to close down various sections of my website indefinitely. There are places where I have put up scans of newspaper articles I either wrote or was interviewed for and it turns out that the images are only cleared for their original point of use in the paper, not for reprint of the article on-line, and I am being rinsed for £1000s by these agencies until I can sort it out. www.stewartlee.co.uk
12) 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)
Ewen Macintosh (Office secondary superstar, 1973)
Alan Tomlinson (Jazz trombonist, dry northern wit, beatnik, 1947)
Ewan 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)
Stewart Lee
2024-03-26T10:37:15+00:00
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. 1 BASIC LEE The tour of the current stand-up show will be finished in April. Dates here; March 2024 Wednesday 27th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS Thursday 28th March 2024 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS April 2024 Monday 15th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS Tuesday 16th April 2024 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS Thursday 18th April 2024 - St. George's Hall, Bradford - TICKETS Monday 22nd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS Tuesday 23rd April 2024 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS Thursday 25th April 2024 - The Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS But if you live in Paris you can see the very final go at it, in a small room with no frills on May 15th https://www.anythingmatters.com 2) STEWART LEE VS THE MAN-WULF Exclusive 24 HOUR PRIORITY BOOKING PERIOD at LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF - BRAND NEW SHOW - 3rd December 2024 – 17th January 2025 [caption id="attachment_15507" align="aligncenter" width="867"] STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF Artwork by Mark Reynolds[/caption] 24...
Late in my life I have become the owner of a house with a garden. But there are very few gardens in the area of the inner city where I live and naturally my garden has become a focus of envy from the deserving poor.
Last Sunday I was in my garden, drinking fine champagne from the bottle and playing croquet on the lawn with my pantalooned children, when I began to notice some of the people with no gardens from other less salubrious parts of the borough straddling my fence. They were probably jealous of my lawn and flowerbeds, and wished they could have them, which they can’t because they are mine and I must deserve them otherwise why would they have come into my possession?
I squirted the grasping interlopers in their puzzled faces with greenfly spray and then poked them off the fence with a hoe, sending them tumbling down into the fly-tipped mattresses and old nappies below in the council flats’ parking area. Then I went off to smash up some champagne bottles so I could fix broken glass to the top of the fence, in order to lacerate off the interlopers’ buttocks and genitals should they try to climb the fence again, the vile cockroaches. A newt lives below the steps up to the house. I am kind to it.
Later in the day I became aware that the North London Hang Gliding Club were holding their monthly glidepast in the sky above my garden, with the usual and inevitable consequences. Soon the bodies began falling, the mortal shells of poor misguided souls who mistakenly hoped they could find their way into my garden from the air, and had clung to the glider wings, like kittens gone viral on Twitter, but not cute enough to earn their own hashtags.
Illustration by David Foldvari
Luckily, I had already taken the precaution of suspending cricket nets from the tree branches that hang over the garden to catch the falling corpses, which I then threw into the compost to decompose out of sight. My neighbour, who is Australian, has taken to bribing the glider pilots to have their flying fun further south, so that any stowaways make their fatal final landfall in the nearby boroughs of Islington or Camden, rather than onto our immaculate lawns, solving the immediate problem.
At around teatime I was wearing small tight white tennis shorts and drinking champagne again, while playing swingball with a TV producer friend from the media, when I heard a noise coming from the old sewer below the patio. The ongoing escalation of these constant interruptions, all in one afternoon remember, was rapidly becoming tiresome.
Handing Alan my champagne and racket, and crouching down on my bare knees by the manhole cover, I heard a voice say, “Please can we come in your garden? We haven’t got a garden where we live.” And I said, “No, get back in that sewer, you no garden people. I’m very sorry that you haven’t got a garden but this is my garden and I deserve it.” And I walked away. But the tapping continued.
I listened again. “Please, it’s really horrible in the sewer. We’ve been crawling through it for days. And back at the other end of it there’s no food and a man trying to behead us.” This changed things, I suppose. A straightforward narrative based on simple avaricious envy of my garden had been complicated to encompass a basic human desire for survival, a trickier thing to dismiss out of hand.
But as I considered the problem, the manhole lid started coming off. Luckily, I managed to force the woman beneath it back down into the sewer, kicking her in the face and punching her. And then I slammed the cover back down, at least buying myself a little more time to ponder the moral dilemma her plea had posited.
Then, still wrapped in thought, I put a really big flowerpot on the manhole cover so that she and the other people without gardens couldn’t get into my garden through their hole. This solved the problem to an extent. They still hadn’t got gardens but at least they weren’t in my garden. They were trapped in a sewer underneath my garden, dying, which was better I think. And also, their deaths would hopefully deter any other people without gardens from trying to come through the sewer into my garden, which they can’t, because it’s mine.
I wondered if it was really humane to have people trapped in a sewer and dying just for trying to get into your garden. Then it came to me. The real cruelty lay in my allowing people to go into the sewer in the first place. So I found an old drainage plan on the internet, noting that the sewer surfaced somewhere out on Hackney Marshes, which had recently been occupied by a sadistic fascist death cult hellbent on the murder of anyone they disagreed with even remotely, which was unfortunate, but hardly my fault.
I got into the armoured 4x4 I use for the school run, and drove round to the sewer opening, where the people without gardens were getting in, and poured petrol all over it and blew it up in a massive explosion, so that all the people without gardens who had been going into the sewer could stay where they were and die there from being starved and beheaded, like they were supposed to, rather than dying in a sewer on the way into my garden which is mine.
And then I thought, if only there were something I could do to make the whole world fairer so that the people trying to get into my garden didn’t feel the need to try and get into my garden in the first place. But there just isn’t I suppose.
And so I laze in my garden, champagne glass in hand, the bubbles popping in the sun, as the fence wobbles and buckles, and bodies block out the light as they tumble into the cricket nets, and the manhole cover over the sewer rumbles and grumbles. Later I will raise the fence an inch or so and stick more glass on the top of it, and roll another old flowerpot over the manhole cover. And before bed I will tighten the nets once more and empty the day’s catch into the compost. But for now, I will swing here in my hammock, sipping my champagne, and sniffing my freshly-mowed lawn in the dying of the midsummer day.
Stewart Lee is curating the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in April 2016, and A Room with a Stew is playing Edinburgh and London.
Stewart Lee
2015-06-28T21:30:10+01:00
Late in my life I have become the owner of a house with a garden. But there are very few gardens in the area of the inner city where I live and naturally my garden has become a focus of envy from the deserving poor. Last Sunday I was in my garden, drinking fine champagne from the bottle and playing croquet on the lawn with my pantalooned children, when I began to notice some of the people with no gardens from other less salubrious parts of the borough straddling my fence. They were probably jealous of my lawn and flowerbeds, and wished they could have them, which they can’t because they are mine and I must deserve them otherwise why would they have come into my possession? I squirted the grasping interlopers in their puzzled faces with greenfly spray and then poked them off the fence with a hoe, sending them tumbling down into the fly-tipped mattresses and old nappies below in the council flats’ parking area. Then I went off to smash up some champagne bottles so I could fix broken glass to the top of the fence, in order to lacerate off the interlopers’ buttocks and genitals should they try to climb the fence again, the vile cockroaches. A newt lives below the steps up to the house. I am kind to it. Later in the day I became aware that the North London Hang Gliding Club were holding their monthly glidepast in the sky above my garden, with the usual and inevitable consequences. Soon the bodies began falling, the mortal shells of poor misguided souls who mistakenly hoped they could find their way into my garden from the air, and had clung to the glider wings, like kittens gone viral on Twitter, but not cute enough to...
It seems like an act of monumental and inexcusable self indulgence to do notes on your own book, but seeing as how you have found this place and made it this far, here's some attempts to explain where things came from and why they are as they are.
Click on the different chapters to read the footnotes
Stewart Lee
2001-06-01T14:57:58+01:00
It seems like an act of monumental and inexcusable self indulgence to do notes on your own book, but seeing as how you have found this place and made it this far, here's some attempts to explain where things came from and why they are as they are. Click on the different chapters to read the footnotes
Hmmm... writing about stand-up comedy when you're not a stand-up comedian is tricky... Like writing about sausage production when you aren't involved in the production of sausages - what you end up with is a piece that probably puts you off the product whatever you say.
Lee is a comedian who frequently requires perseverance (a bit like that above meaningless metaphor). As he suggests in his own show, staring balefully down the lens of the camera 'I imagine watching this at home you'd find this terribly tedious'. The argument against this style of comedy is that comedy is frequently perceived as a form of escapism rather than as an art-form in itself. But that's the argument that justifies switching television channels from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The A-Team: the latter is more instantly accessible - but the former will last forever as a significant cultural moment.
Similarly, sticking with Lee (if you can find him late at night on BBC2), and
learning to find his nuanced comedy funny is a worthwhile and rewarding exercise.
Stewart Lee is a difficult comedian to like, and when you do like him - he's a difficult comedian to persuade other people to like.
The problem is there are the bare minimum of traditional jokes - no catchphrases and almost no enclosed, defined moments of humour. His routines rely on his spending time building a rapport with the audience - then challenging that rapport thereby daring the audience to stay with him. All of this is blended with a self-mockery. Lee, in the best style of a preacher, approaches his craft with a theme. He describes the theme at the beginning of his set, unpacks the theme during the set, and then explains how the theme has worked - and somehow he manages to do all this comedically. In his fabled comeback set, '90s Comedian, this technique was an essential one. In the midst of being accused of blasphemy and receiving hate mail from right wing Christians for his work on Jerry Springer: The Opera, Lee decided to devote the second half of his show to a single, visceral anecdote that combined alcohol induced emesis with an encounter with Christ. The first half of his show involved his attempts to prepare the audience in time for the second half. Somehow, he gets away with it.
His television series, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is a condensed and truncated version of his live shows. Each episode follows a similar format - he opens his routine with a more traditional set of stand-up anecdotes, follows this with a more abstract piece illustrating the first half in which he 'acts' as a character or characters in conversation. These two halves are punctuated by filmed inserts showing him in interview with producer Armando Iannucci who, in the role of a BBC executive, criticises Lee's lack of jokes and idiosyncratic approach to comedy. The episodes all end with an elaborately filmed piece drawing the themes of the set together - the first episode, for example, depicted Lee dressed as Godzilla defending a model city from a giant lobster, while the second depicted Lee besieging an isolated house dressed as a pearly king/biker arms with a shotgun.
It's almost impossible to relay Lee's comedy after the event - his style is such that repeating his lines or trying to re-enact his anecdotes are guaranteed to not be funny. Lee's comedy relies so much on both seeing the whole routine and on his tone, the silences between the lines, even his posture. Disconcertingly, it's difficult to relay Lee's comedy even when talking to someone who has seen a whole episode. Watching Lee is an hilarious ordeal. When you get him it makes it much easier to stick with him - but if you fail to make that first step then you're lost. But Lee helps you along the path to finding him funny. His sets are designed carefully to guide you (or manipulate you depending on your cynicism) towards the laughs. I know this because his book, effectively a transcription of his three most notable routines with footnotes, describes the skills and techniques Lee employs to hold the audience.
Of course - it would be useless if, to understand Lee's comedy, you needed to read his book in advance. Fortunately, like his book, his routines come with footnotes. The filmed inserts in the television episodes are part of this trick - they undercut the frequently contentious, apparently arrogant content of the main stand-up by mocking both Lee personally and his style. These moments act as points of reference, driving the theme of the set home, but also as breathing spaces, allowing the audience to take stock before Lee proceeds towards more contentious material. This is the key to Lee's style - he refuses to compromise but also refuses to leave the audience behind. Those he loses are almost collateral damage, grudgingly sacrificed in the knowledge that if they fail to find Lee funny in half an hour, they probably won't be able to persevere for an hour or more of his live show. As such, Lee hones his audience . He suggests in his book, mockingly but not without reason, he has carefully selected his audience - and it is clear even in the limited time-spans of these television episodes how he manages to do this.
So - love him or loathe him, or love him and loathe him (it is possible), you need to understand Lee's place in the hierarchy of current stand-up comedy. He stands apart from recent, stadium behemoths such as Michael McIntyre, Russell Brand and Frankie Boyle partially by being less popular - but this position allows him the freedom to mock his fellow comedians 'from below' - and his moments of self-reflexivity allows him to do so without appearing genuinely jealous or bitter. In this way, he is, perhaps, the most ethical of comedians.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-16T22:09:27+01:00
Hmmm... writing about stand-up comedy when you're not a stand-up comedian is tricky... Like writing about sausage production when you aren't involved in the production of sausages - what you end up with is a piece that probably puts you off the product whatever you say. Lee is a comedian who frequently requires perseverance (a bit like that above meaningless metaphor). As he suggests in his own show, staring balefully down the lens of the camera 'I imagine watching this at home you'd find this terribly tedious'. The argument against this style of comedy is that comedy is frequently perceived as a form of escapism rather than as an art-form in itself. But that's the argument that justifies switching television channels from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The A-Team: the latter is more instantly accessible - but the former will last forever as a significant cultural moment. Similarly, sticking with Lee (if you can find him late at night on BBC2), and learning to find his nuanced comedy funny is a worthwhile and rewarding exercise. Stewart Lee is a difficult comedian to like, and when you do like him - he's a difficult comedian to persuade other people to like. The problem is there are the bare minimum of traditional jokes - no catchphrases and almost no enclosed, defined moments of humour. His routines rely on his spending time building a rapport with the audience - then challenging that rapport thereby daring the audience to stay with him. All of this is blended with a self-mockery. Lee, in the best style of a preacher, approaches his craft with a theme. He describes the theme at the beginning of his set, unpacks the theme during the set, and then explains how the theme has worked - and somehow he manages to do all...
In 1978 Kim Salmon split Perth's Cheap Nasties for The Scientists and invented grunge. As recently as 2007, his archly lumpy Rock Formations album offered a constructivist critique of The Riff.
His new duo Precious Jules suggest a dirty minimalist reading of The New York Dolls' camp cavemen aesthetic, until Shine Some Darkness On Me licks at the blues, The Urban Swamp posits new wave noir, and Seein' Spots disco lights a Stonesy stomp.
Lest things get too sophisticated, a reading of The Nasties' Cheap ‘n' Nasty hoiks something slimy into the chardonnay.
Stewart Lee
2012-01-16T21:17:57+00:00
In 1978 Kim Salmon split Perth's Cheap Nasties for The Scientists and invented grunge. As recently as 2007, his archly lumpy Rock Formations album offered a constructivist critique of The Riff. His new duo Precious Jules suggest a dirty minimalist reading of The New York Dolls' camp cavemen aesthetic, until Shine Some Darkness On Me licks at the blues, The Urban Swamp posits new wave noir, and Seein' Spots disco lights a Stonesy stomp. Lest things get too sophisticated, a reading of The Nasties' Cheap ‘n' Nasty hoiks something slimy into the chardonnay.
...the BBC had a third moment of thrilling sanity and balls-finding this week: recommissioning Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle.
Initially axed after the first series, a campaign by Lee's fans resulted in Vehicle returning for a second series, to the relief of anyone with an interest in modern comedy. Lee doesn't really tell jokes — something which, ironically, he tells quite a lot of jokes about — but, instead, kind of ... jazzes around with language, hitting words, or images, over and over again until their unexpected reappearance on the off-beat (or the anticipation of it returning to the on-beat) forces out a snorty, honking, pig-goose laugh from the viewer. Or maybe that's just me.
This week's episode revolved around the word “crisps", and Lee's unbearable sibilance on pronouncing it. It's exactly the kind of single-minded, off-beat, quietly glorious thing that the BBC should be broadcasting. A significant bellwether in the schedules.
Yes, it was a good week for Auntie.
Stewart Lee
2011-05-05T22:18:23+01:00
...the BBC had a third moment of thrilling sanity and balls-finding this week: recommissioning Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. Initially axed after the first series, a campaign by Lee's fans resulted in Vehicle returning for a second series, to the relief of anyone with an interest in modern comedy. Lee doesn't really tell jokes — something which, ironically, he tells quite a lot of jokes about — but, instead, kind of ... jazzes around with language, hitting words, or images, over and over again until their unexpected reappearance on the off-beat (or the anticipation of it returning to the on-beat) forces out a snorty, honking, pig-goose laugh from the viewer. Or maybe that's just me. This week's episode revolved around the word “crisps", and Lee's unbearable sibilance on pronouncing it. It's exactly the kind of single-minded, off-beat, quietly glorious thing that the BBC should be broadcasting. A significant bellwether in the schedules. Yes, it was a good week for Auntie.
A two hour film of Stewart Lee's recent, amazing, Content Provider show will be aired by BBC 2 on Saturday night.
The show, which goes out at 10.45pm and will be available afterwards on the BBC iPlayer, was filmed at The Palace Theatre, Southend leg of the 18 month, 214 date tour.
The show, which stemmed from a writer's conundrum - how do you write about dynamically evolving political situations such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump without alienating half of your potential audience or generating material that is immediately out of date - and deals with other anxieties created by the current digital media landscape, has proved to be the most successful point in the comedian's three decade long career so far.
tQ Editor John Doran went to see the show and had this to say: "It was fucking brilliant. Not just incredibly funny and very timely but fiendishly structured as well. I'm sure Lee will flatter his own aesthetic by telling himself it has the structure of a piece of avant garde jazz but it's loads better than that in my mind: too well rehearsed, too entertaining, too mind-boggling. It was more like the equivalent to some funky French prog from the late 70s in the Zeuhl-style with strong connections to the rhythm section of Magma.
"In fact it reached a state of such meta referentiality part way through the second half that I had a very intense acid flashback and nearly had to leave the theatre because my head was so kippered. Full disclosure - it's the only time I've seen any stand up comedy this century so I don't have much to judge it against. I don't know - maybe all stand up comedy is this good in 2018 and I'm just in the wrong job but my gut tells me that this isn't the case... that this show is completely out there on its own."
Stewart Lee
2018-07-23T12:28:49+01:00
A two hour film of Stewart Lee's recent, amazing, Content Provider show will be aired by BBC 2 on Saturday night. The show, which goes out at 10.45pm and will be available afterwards on the BBC iPlayer, was filmed at The Palace Theatre, Southend leg of the 18 month, 214 date tour. The show, which stemmed from a writer's conundrum - how do you write about dynamically evolving political situations such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump without alienating half of your potential audience or generating material that is immediately out of date - and deals with other anxieties created by the current digital media landscape, has proved to be the most successful point in the comedian's three decade long career so far. tQ Editor John Doran went to see the show and had this to say: "It was fucking brilliant. Not just incredibly funny and very timely but fiendishly structured as well. I'm sure Lee will flatter his own aesthetic by telling himself it has the structure of a piece of avant garde jazz but it's loads better than that in my mind: too well rehearsed, too entertaining, too mind-boggling. It was more like the equivalent to some funky French prog from the late 70s in the Zeuhl-style with strong connections to the rhythm section of Magma. "In fact it reached a state of such meta referentiality part way through the second half that I had a very intense acid flashback and nearly had to leave the theatre because my head was so kippered. Full disclosure - it's the only time I've seen any stand up comedy this century so I don't have much to judge it against. I don't know - maybe all stand up comedy is this good in 2018 and I'm just in the...
In the nineties, Earth taught a generation of stoned seekers to slow Sabbath riffs into abstract endurance tests, and disappeared.
A new Earth features Dylan Carson on crawling king snake guitar, the jazzy drums of Adrienne Davis, the sphincter-dilating cello of Lori Goldston, and the modestly minimal bass of Karl Blau, forming a sentient musical mold, improvising a vast and spacious blues, a nerve gas cloud of neo-primitive Americana, that hangs suspended in time, content merely to exist, throbbing and growing oppressively, until it contaminates your consciousness.
The tantalising almost-funk of The Rakehell closes this unapologetic statement.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-11T12:29:46+00:00
In the nineties, Earth taught a generation of stoned seekers to slow Sabbath riffs into abstract endurance tests, and disappeared. A new Earth features Dylan Carson on crawling king snake guitar, the jazzy drums of Adrienne Davis, the sphincter-dilating cello of Lori Goldston, and the modestly minimal bass of Karl Blau, forming a sentient musical mold, improvising a vast and spacious blues, a nerve gas cloud of neo-primitive Americana, that hangs suspended in time, content merely to exist, throbbing and growing oppressively, until it contaminates your consciousness. The tantalising almost-funk of The Rakehell closes this unapologetic statement.
Stewart Lee likes to paint himself as an outcast. So how does he cope when, even with his BBC2 series long gone, he has already sold out three months in this 400-seater with a long tour and five nights at the Royal Festival Hall to follow? When Alan Bennett is among his fans? When this newspaper (specifically me, sorry) labelled him the best comedian in the world after his stunning previous show, Content Provider?
Well, there’s always his looks and health issues to contrast with his career. “I’m deaf, I’m blind, I’m grey, I’m fat,” suggests the bulkier-than-before, 51-year-old Lee. And then there is the indignity of having Netflix put completely the wrong description on his work, while Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr et al plough on from smash hit to smash hit.
If the challenges of being both exalted and excluded sound like a neat cul-de-sac for Lee to wander down rather than the basis for a whole show, then you have the limitations of Tornado, the first of two supposedly separate hours of stand-up. Lee roasts his rivals with enjoyable spite. He retains his buoyant way with knotty ideas. Yet the self-obsession that was previously a fizzing footnote to his act is a flatter proposition when it lacks larger topics to interact with. And a closing Bennett parody is a tame target for a comedian of Lee’s extraordinary skill and ambition.
The second hour, Snowflake, has Lee mocking-cum-celebrating his status as a peddler of endangered liberal values. Political correctness? He’s for it, give or take. He gets stuck into artful ironies and pointed nonsense about Phoebe Waller-Bridge and James Bond and Noddy and computer games, and mocks comedians (Gervais again) who supposedly “say the unsayable”. The details are accomplished, but the evening lacks the polyphonic verve of Lee at his best.
Stewart Lee
2019-11-07T19:25:17+00:00
Stewart Lee likes to paint himself as an outcast. So how does he cope when, even with his BBC2 series long gone, he has already sold out three months in this 400-seater with a long tour and five nights at the Royal Festival Hall to follow? When Alan Bennett is among his fans? When this newspaper (specifically me, sorry) labelled him the best comedian in the world after his stunning previous show, Content Provider? Well, there’s always his looks and health issues to contrast with his career. “I’m deaf, I’m blind, I’m grey, I’m fat,” suggests the bulkier-than-before, 51-year-old Lee. And then there is the indignity of having Netflix put completely the wrong description on his work, while Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr et al plough on from smash hit to smash hit. If the challenges of being both exalted and excluded sound like a neat cul-de-sac for Lee to wander down rather than the basis for a whole show, then you have the limitations of Tornado, the first of two supposedly separate hours of stand-up. Lee roasts his rivals with enjoyable spite. He retains his buoyant way with knotty ideas. Yet the self-obsession that was previously a fizzing footnote to his act is a flatter proposition when it lacks larger topics to interact with. And a closing Bennett parody is a tame target for a comedian of Lee’s extraordinary skill and ambition. The second hour, Snowflake, has Lee mocking-cum-celebrating his status as a peddler of endangered liberal values. Political correctness? He’s for it, give or take. He gets stuck into artful ironies and pointed nonsense about Phoebe Waller-Bridge and James Bond and Noddy and computer games, and mocks comedians (Gervais again) who supposedly “say the unsayable”. The details are accomplished, but the evening lacks the polyphonic verve of Lee at...
An actual physical 12” EP of Asian Dub Foundation(feat. Stewart Lee)‘s Brexit day number 1 Comin’ Over Here came out on March 26th and can be ordered here...
The remixes are of other bits of the Paul Nuttalls routine and work great.
You can d/l them too I think. I can’t believe how well the ADF’s made this work. I was their mere tool.
Also, Asian Dub Foundation announce the “Singalong with Stewart” competition where you can do your own rant over “Comin Over Here” and help keep the anti-xenophobia vibe that fuelled the Brexit No.1 campaign alive.
Record yourself ranting over the “Singalong Version” of “Comin Over Here” (available on all formats of the Comin’ Over Here EP) and send us a video or audio to singalongwithstew@gmail.com by May 1st.
The best ones will win a vinyl copy of our album "Access Denied" signed by us and Stewart Lee and we will post them to our social media platforms.
‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album.
B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album. ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ will be released 15th May on Fire Records/King Rocker Records.
I didn’t really understand what podcasts were until I went on loads this year to promote KING ROCKER.
I didn’t know how good they could be and how much work some people put into them. This one is especially good.
It is about folk songs and they asked me to talk about one. If you listen to it now you might be able to participate in the second part, whatever your ability.
It looks like all the SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO tour dates outstanding from 2020 will be shifted into 2022, starting in Jan, and below are the ones we know about so far. Thanks for bearing through all this with patience.
Local venues will contact you if they haven’t already. All the warm-up club dates you may have bought tickets for have been slotted in to Nov and Dec, covid willing, and venues will contact ticket holders. Please do not hassle venues about all this. They will contact you. We will get there!
I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point. It's all bacon!
Currently, the following dates have been re-arranged;
January 2022
Saturday 15th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS
Tuesday 25th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Wednesday 26th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 27th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Friday 28th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 29th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Sunday 30th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
February 2022
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Friday 4th February 2022 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Saturday 5th February 2022 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Tuesday 8th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 9th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Thursday 10th February 2022 - De Montfort Hall, Leicester
Friday 11th February 2022 - Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry
Saturday 12th February 2022 - Festival Theatre, Malvern
Sunday 13th February 2022 - Hippodrome, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 25th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Saturday 26th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Sunday 27th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Monday 28th February 2022 - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - TICKETS
March 2022
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Friday 4th March 2022 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS
Wednesday 9th March 2022 - Theatre Royal, Wakefield - TICKETS
Thursday 10th March 2022 - Opera House, Buxton - 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
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 - Churchill Theatre, Bromley
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
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
Sunday 24th April 2022 - Mayflower Theatre, Southampton - 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
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
Friday 13th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Saturday 14th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Tuesday 17th May 2022 - Corn Exchange, Cambridge - TICKETS
Wednesday 18th May 2022 - Corn Exchange, Cambridge - TICKETS
Sunday 22nd May 2022 - The Grand, Wolverhampton - TICKETS
Monday 23rd May 2022 - Hippodrome, Bristol - TICKETS
Tuesday 24th May 2022 - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - TICKETS
June 2022
Sunday 19th June 2022 - Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
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
The gvt may not impose vaccine passporting, as their will be questions about who is responsible if you can’t get into your local pub/club/theatre/brothel.
I would be delighted if, if you are coming to see me, you could do your best to get vaccinated, irrespective of what the gvt or the venue insist upon.
I doubt that my snowflake audience will contain many people who deny the existence of Covid or believe the vaccine is George Soros or Bill Gates trying to put tiny Transformer robots into your blood.
But I and my team will be interacting with over 150 000 people on the next leg of the tour, and I would like to minimise our risk, and the risk to my audience, so meet me half way. I will be selling and signing stuff as usual, I hope, but I won’t be shaking hands to thank you all this time around, and will probably be positioned behind some kind of screen like William Shatner in Airplane 2. Sad.
7) MEDIA GARAGE SALE
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits, as have NETFLIX, the utter bastards.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
To try and promote King Rocker I have been pimping myself about on every Podcast going, alone or with dir M Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast), saying the same things in the same room in the same clothes to all different people, all of whom were very kind.
I don’t know what a podcast is really but I think you go on the internet and click on something.
As my grandfather once said, in 1983, “Do you know, in America, there are shops that only sell Kentucky Fried Chicken?” I enjoyed being on the internet with all these people enormously, but will put some blue water between me and the next wedge.
David Baddiel told me it was good to be on the internet, though. These are available..
OLD TUNES FRESH TAKES
A lovely podcast about folk music that I do a bit on.
A rambling chat in which I fail to promote King Rocker at the expense of a Marxist analysis of culture and history from the inventor of Alternative Comedy ™ ®
Dir Michael Cumming and I discuss King Rocker with Britain’s top film guru and skiffle enthusiast, who has been very supportive of the no-budget project.
Andy Miller and John Michinson’s long running and much loved books podcast. I discuss the waspish poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks with them, Nicky Birch and Jennifer Hodgson.
This is a marvellous ongoing Podcast which is unashamedly civilised in an unenlightened era, and this episode is full of great writing, batshit radiophonic music and clever women.
North London echo chamber fun sure to irk people of all political persuasions with the forensically-minded folk devil for the far right and snowflake do-gooder Owen Jones, and me, talking about King Rocker and more general stuff. His current run of ‘casts has some great guests.
Informed Wolverhampton-based comedy and music enthusiast of uncommon warmth and knowledge talks to me about KING ROCKER and what the Gray Pays ‘n’ Bacon are like at the Great Western pub.
I asked Adam if I could go on this massively popular podcast and he said yes which was very kind of him. It was fun hearing his Mark E Smith story from the horse’s mouth and he asked me hard questions of the type I usually avoid.
In this episode of The Last Line, James talks to comedian Stewart Lee about his new film King Rocker, a documentary about Robert Lloyd, lead singer of 70’s post-punk band The Nightingales. During their conversation they discuss the new film, its central protagonist Robert Lloyd, stand up comedy, Stewart’s propensity to defend stand up comedians against the views of the general public and his reluctance to participate in podcast interviews.
There’s an interview with Michael Cumming on this podcast too, link below.
Sometime in March you will be able to hear me eat a really lovely Sri Lankan mutton curry from the Kolama restaurant, Soho, with bon viveur jazz pianist Jay Rayner. (I see how this works now!)
This is the most showbiz thing I have ever done, and I am glad it was with jazzy Jay Rayner. Not Out Yet. Coming Soon.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
with post-mod post-man, old school Labour face, and former near pop-soul star, Alan Johnson.
Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day (2009) ★★★★
Tragically Hip - Man Machine Poem (2016) ★★★★
Tragically Hip - We Are The Same (2009) ★★★★
Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996) ★★★★★
Grant Lee Buffalo - Storm Hymnal (1993-98) ★★★★
Shiva Burlesque - Mercury Blues (1990) ★★★★
Yo La Tengo - President (1989) ★★★★★
Yo La Tengo - Fakebook (1990) ★★★★★
Yo La Tengo - That Is You La Tengo (1991) ★★★★
Yo La Tengo - May I Sing With Me? (1992) ★★★★
Yo La Tengo - Painful (3 cds) (1993) ★★★★
Tim Buckley - Dream Letter (1968) ★★★★★
Those Bastard Souls - Debt & Departure (1999) ★★★★★
Wanderlust - Prize (1995) ★★★★
Chain - Towards The Blues (1971) ★★★★
The Schramms - Omnidirectional (2019) ★★★★
Cannonball Adderley - Soul Zodiac (1972)
Fred Anderson - Quintessential Birthday Trio Vol II (2015)
Greg Bendian’s Interzone - Requiem For Jack Kirby (2001)
Nels Cline & Greg Bendian - Interstellar Space Revisited (1999)
The Beat - Bounce (2016)
Nina Simone - To Be Free (1959-1993)
12) IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS
Adam Schlesinger (Fountain of Wayne) (1967)
John Prine (outlaw country singer) (1946)
Henry Grimes (jazz bassist) (1935)
Dave Mountfield (Ornate Johnson) (1970)
Hal Wilner (arranger) (1957)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Goodie) (1940)
Lee Konitz (jazz saxophonist) (1927)
Matthew Seligman (Soft Boy) (1955)
Millie Small (ska singer) (1946)
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk robot) (1947)
Bill Rieflin (drummer for hire) (1960)
Hugh McKenna (Tear Gas pianist) (1949)
Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounder) (1942)
Astrid Kirchherr (photographer) (1938)
Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra saxophonist) (1947)
Aubrey Burl (archaeologist) (1926)
Phil May (Pretty Thing) (1944)
The Clacton Fin Whale (circa 2000)
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (artist) (1930)
Doll Tor stone circle (3300 BC)
Kay Carroll (The Fall) (1948)
Bob the Cat (73 bus) (2006)
Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew)
Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959)
Carl Reiner (director) (1922)
Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928)
Keith Tippett (jazz pianist) (1947)
Jimmy Cobb (jazz drummer) (1929)
Barbara Smoker (Humanist) (1923)
The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
Tony Elliot (Time Out) (1942)
Judy Dyble (folk singer) (1949)
Peter Green (blues guitarist) (1946)
Emitt Rhodes (power pop auteur) (1950)
Annie Ross (jazz bohemian) (1930)
Joe Ruby (Scooby-Doo) (1933)
Craig Weatherhill (folklorist) (1950)
Don Weller (jazz saxophonist) (1940)
Simeon Coxe (Silver Apple) (1938)
Diana Rigg (Avenger) (1938)
Toots Hibbert (reggae got soul) (1942)
Dele Fadele (carry bag man) (1962)
George Jeffrie (man’s-laughter maker) (1964)
Dave Kusworth (Brum punk Stone) (1960)
Gary Peacock (jazz bassist) (1935)
Doorkins (Southwark Cathedral Cat) (2005?)
Spencer Davis (Brumbeat pioneer) (1939)
Bunny Lee (dubmaster) (1940)
The Cubbington Pear Tree (1770)
Fungie The Dingle Dolphin (1979)
Jill Paton Walsh (humanist novelist) (1937)
Val Warner (poet) (1946)
Guy N Smith (Lord of The Crabs) (1939)
Richard Corben (decadent cartoonist) (1940)
David Johnson (Duke of Soho) (1960)
Leslie West (Mountain man) (1945)
- 2021 -
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Celia Drummond Ford (voice of Trees) (1950)
The Happy Man Tree (Stoke Newington Tree) (1870)
John Russell (guitar guru) (1954)
Marcel Uderzo (Asterisk artist) (1933)
Tom Stevens (Long Ryder and Magus) (1956)
Dougie Anderson (Coda’s Edinburgh record dealer (1952)
Captain Tom (Covid Walkman) (1920)
Rynagh O’Grady (Ted’s Mary) (1954)
Mary Wilson (Supreme) (1944)
Chick Corea (Miles’ tinkler) (1941)
Iain Pattinson (You wanted to see me Prime Minister?) (1951)
U-Roy (Toastmaster) (1942)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (bookstore beat) (1921)
Wink O’Bannon (Eleventh Dream Day) (1956)
Bunny Wailer (Wailer) (1947)
Doug Parkinson (Oz vocal celeb) (1946)
Milford Graves (temporal explorer) (1941)
Johnny Rogan (Byrds’ Boswell) (1953)
Jessica Walter (Play Misty For Me) (1941)
Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight) (1941)
Stewart Lee
2021-04-24T08:00:06+01:00
1) King Rocker Now TV Thanks for watching our documentary KING ROCKER on Sky Arts if you did, and spreading the word, and crowd-funding it, if you did. Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times. “I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times ★★★★ Financial Times ★★★★ Chortle “One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus “The new gold standard for rockumentaries” - The Scotsman All Press is collecting here. Anyway, it appears you can now watch it, ad-free, on NOW TV if you have that; NOW TV LINK 2) COMIN’ OVER HERE 12” AND COMPETITION An actual physical 12” EP of Asian Dub Foundation(feat. Stewart Lee)‘s Brexit day number 1 Comin’ Over Here came out on March 26th and can be ordered here... Bandcamp | X Ray Production The remixes are of other bits of the Paul Nuttalls routine and work great. You can d/l them too I think. I can’t believe how well the ADF’s made this work. I was their mere tool. Also, Asian Dub Foundation announce the “Singalong with Stewart” competition where you can do your own rant over “Comin Over Here” and help keep the anti-xenophobia vibe that fuelled the Brexit No.1 campaign alive. Record yourself ranting over the “Singalong Version” of “Comin Over Here” (available on all formats of the Comin’ Over Here EP) and send us a video or audio to singalongwithstew@gmail.com by May 1st. The best ones will win a vinyl copy of our album "Access Denied" signed by us and Stewart Lee and we will post them to our social media platforms. For a demonstration, check out this video. [evp_embed_video url="https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Content-Provider/adf-competition.mov" ratio="4:3"] 3) TEN BOB/USE LOAF 7” ‘Ten Bob...
Self-billed ‘90s comedian’ and ‘41st best stand up ever’– Stewart Lee – returned to Salford’s Lyric Theatre on Saturday afternoon with A Room with a Stew. His distant, arrogant, passive-aggressive onstage persona culminated in him declaring to the audience, “no one is equipped to review me”. This is because no one can fully understand the nuances of a performance of “high risk Brechtian theatre”. The routine consisted of half an hour of “Islamaphobic observational comedy” (in response to public demand), half an hour on urine, 45 minutes on UKIP, and finally, the Stewart Lee staple: the state of comedy. The state of comedy ‘bit’ was accompanied by the customary mental breakdown.
John Coltrane’s 15 minute avant-garde jazz interpretation of ‘My Favourite Things’ was played on repeat, and at full volume, in the half hour before Lee’s arrival. The show then began with a 15 minute introduction outlining the structure of the show and ridiculing two latecomers in the front row for buying their tickets on Gumtree for £80: “It’s not worth 80 quid, this. It’s barely even worth the 21 quid everyone else paid.”
Lee also displayed antipathy towards people bringing friends and lovers – an action that was seen to compromise audience quality. He described his ideal audience as one which responded to every joke with, “well, it’s a complex issue”, and one which had passed a history exam on arrival at the venue. As Lee stated in his TV series last year: “I’m not interested in laughs. I’m interested in creating a temporary liberal consensus that bursts on contact with air.”
As “the Lee Mack of cultural relativism”, Lee delivered his signature mix of Ted Chippington-style lowbrow and multifaceted highbrow. When north of the Watford Gap, Lee deliberately constructs an onstage persona of ‘social difference’ – in which the audience are comically treated with utter contempt. At the Lowry, his core following of “liberal Guardian readers” represented less the norm and more a diaspora. Furthermore, he suggested that all the young people present in the audience should leave, and return to their hobbies of Minecraft and bondage sex.
The show’s funniest moment came when the latecomers were asked to name an obscure country carrying no cultural stereotypes. The Gumtree customers chose Qatar – the choice was reluctantly accepted. Twenty minutes on his friend Lesley only recently discovering he was in fact Qatari followed. This was in spite of the fact that Lesley had participated in stereotypical Qatari traditions all his life – for example, setting fire to a puffin in a peddle bin, the ritual of pouring 19 month old beakers of urine while humming ‘Three Lions’, listening to Qatari radio under the bedclothes in the 1970s (this included Lee making goat noises for 5 continuous minutes), and nailing a fez to a llama’s head.
Harking back to his own satirical categorisation of satire as “anything with animals in it” in last year’s Comedy Vehicle, the hilarious UKIP routine revolved around his cat, named ‘Paul Nuttalls from the UKIPs’, and included 200 mini England flags and no toilet paper. Stew lives in multicultural Hackney – a London borough he describes as “like Jerusalem but more violent”. His three closest ‘neighbours’ are a 70 year old Rastafarian, an 85 year old Pakistani, and a 95 year old Jew – all of which were featured in the UKIP section.
After accusing comedy audiences (“like you people”) of murdering “all the dead comedians” due to inconsistent reactions to jokes, a heckler smugly suggested ‘Stew’ take his own life. Ten seconds of genuine anger from Lee followed.
Despite this moment of antagonism, A Room with a Stew was a hilarious and hugely entertaining show. I urge anyone reading this to wade through Stewart Lee’s brilliant back-catalogue and to tune in to Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Series 4, to be aired on BBC 2 early next year.
Published in The Mancunion
Stewart Lee
2015-02-16T01:03:21+00:00
Self-billed ‘90s comedian’ and ‘41st best stand up ever’– Stewart Lee – returned to Salford’s Lyric Theatre on Saturday afternoon with A Room with a Stew. His distant, arrogant, passive-aggressive onstage persona culminated in him declaring to the audience, “no one is equipped to review me”. This is because no one can fully understand the nuances of a performance of “high risk Brechtian theatre”. The routine consisted of half an hour of “Islamaphobic observational comedy” (in response to public demand), half an hour on urine, 45 minutes on UKIP, and finally, the Stewart Lee staple: the state of comedy. The state of comedy ‘bit’ was accompanied by the customary mental breakdown. John Coltrane’s 15 minute avant-garde jazz interpretation of ‘My Favourite Things’ was played on repeat, and at full volume, in the half hour before Lee’s arrival. The show then began with a 15 minute introduction outlining the structure of the show and ridiculing two latecomers in the front row for buying their tickets on Gumtree for £80: “It’s not worth 80 quid, this. It’s barely even worth the 21 quid everyone else paid.” Lee also displayed antipathy towards people bringing friends and lovers – an action that was seen to compromise audience quality. He described his ideal audience as one which responded to every joke with, “well, it’s a complex issue”, and one which had passed a history exam on arrival at the venue. As Lee stated in his TV series last year: “I’m not interested in laughs. I’m interested in creating a temporary liberal consensus that bursts on contact with air.” As “the Lee Mack of cultural relativism”, Lee delivered his signature mix of Ted Chippington-style lowbrow and multifaceted highbrow. When north of the Watford Gap, Lee deliberately constructs an onstage persona of ‘social difference’ – in which...
It's very tempting NOT to review Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (BBC2, Thursday), because the tirelessly self-analytical comedian does such a good job of doing that himself. He also told us in the first show of his fourth series: “No one is equipped to review me.”
Maybe he’s right, but let’s give it a go, anyway.
Despite being a comedy craftsman who is quite possibly at the top of his game, Lee attracts the most vicious criticism and abuse from his detractors. I don’t know whether it says more about him or his haters, but he seems to be brilliant at winding people up.
It doesn’t seem to be a case of people saying “I can take him or leave him” – more “Five minutes of Stewart Lee makes me want to kill myself. Completely unfunny, dated, painful S**T”, as one of many non-admirers once said, according to the very entertaining online critiques section of the comedian’s website.
And in this week’s show, Lee recalled how a Daily Telegraph reviewer gave him no stars: “Normally they give you one for turning up”.
The reviewer apparently thought Lee had contempt for the public – a “toxic scorn”.
Although I don’t think you can beat a bit of toxic scorn now and again, I reckon Lee has enormous respect for his audiences – based on the amount of time he takes to hone his shows (I’ve seen many works in progress at the Edinburgh Fringe).
But Lee seems to revel in the abuse and bad reviews – and he’s far less happy, or at least his on stage persona is, about receiving bouquets from certain people: “James Corden is always going on in interviews about how brilliant he thinks I am – and the feeling is NOT reciprocated.”
Anyway, how could anyone not like a comedian who says things like “I want you to laugh in spite of me, not because of me” and uses terms like “Brechtian alienation”? Honestly, you detractors need to lighten up – it’s the way he tells ‘em!
Like one of his favourite bands, The Fall, Lee loves the three Rs – repetition, repetition, repetition – and this show’s wonderfully long-winded and repetitive routine was about Graham Norton winning a Bafta Lee had also been up for (“I don’t care, I don’t care” he kept saying, over and over again, before pointing out the reasons why he did, really, care).
This was funny – very funny – but not as funny as the line of the night, about how Lee allegedly used to go “orienteering with (extreme metal band) Napalm Death”... “That’s not a new BBC4 programme – it was second wave anarcho punk orienteering; we had maps, but all the boundaries were crossed out.”
Stewart Lee
2016-03-04T17:23:49+00:00
It's very tempting NOT to review Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (BBC2, Thursday), because the tirelessly self-analytical comedian does such a good job of doing that himself. He also told us in the first show of his fourth series: “No one is equipped to review me.” Maybe he’s right, but let’s give it a go, anyway. Despite being a comedy craftsman who is quite possibly at the top of his game, Lee attracts the most vicious criticism and abuse from his detractors. I don’t know whether it says more about him or his haters, but he seems to be brilliant at winding people up. It doesn’t seem to be a case of people saying “I can take him or leave him” – more “Five minutes of Stewart Lee makes me want to kill myself. Completely unfunny, dated, painful S**T”, as one of many non-admirers once said, according to the very entertaining online critiques section of the comedian’s website. And in this week’s show, Lee recalled how a Daily Telegraph reviewer gave him no stars: “Normally they give you one for turning up”. The reviewer apparently thought Lee had contempt for the public – a “toxic scorn”. Although I don’t think you can beat a bit of toxic scorn now and again, I reckon Lee has enormous respect for his audiences – based on the amount of time he takes to hone his shows (I’ve seen many works in progress at the Edinburgh Fringe). But Lee seems to revel in the abuse and bad reviews – and he’s far less happy, or at least his on stage persona is, about receiving bouquets from certain people: “James Corden is always going on in interviews about how brilliant he thinks I am – and the feeling is NOT reciprocated.” Anyway, how could anyone not...
When Boris Johnson announced in a press conference on Thursday his intent to fly to the moon in a basket carried by enormous swans, as part of an ongoing quest to seek out new post-Brexit trading partners outside the EU, it seemed the logical end point of a political career characterised by the propagation of elephantine falsehoods. And yet no lie is too big it seems and Johnson endures.
Any half-decent journalist would have destroyed Johnson’s moon-swan lies immediately, but his Friday morning interview with Nick Robinson on Radio 4 displayed the feeble indulgence we have come to expect from the gumless Today programme.
Johnson told Robinson he was looking forward to meeting the moon king, Irdonozur, who he thought was “exactly the sort of person we should be in business with”, and Robinson didn’t even feel the need to point out that no such lunar monarch exists.
Robinson didn’t even intervene when Johnson declared that he wasn’t “the least bit scared of moon-picaninnies or moon-bumboys for that matter”, and that he would be taking his friend the convicted fraudster and gold smuggler Darius Guppy to the moon with him, and that Darius would have any disobedient moon-picaninnies and moon-bumboys “knocked to the ground” and covered in horse manure.
Footage on CBBC’s Newsround later, of Johnson standing by a bus emblazoned with the legend “Let’s fly to the moon in a swan-drawn basket and knock the moon-bumboys to the ground and cover them in horse manure”, barely even a raised eyebrow from presenter Ricky Boleto, who seemed stricken with a terrible ennui beyond his years at the very thought of more of Johnson’s colossal and time-consuming lies.
Meanwhile, predictable newspaper cartoons slung the familiar image of the crash-helmeted Johnson, waving flags while suspended from a zip wire, beneath a flock of soaring swans.
Even seasoned political observers finally find themselves asking: what on earth is Johnson playing at? Some think the answer lies in the Dead Cat Strategy, pioneered by the Tories’ former attack dog Lynton Crosby.
Crosby’s main contribution to political discourse has been the idea that a massive distraction, such as throwing a dead cat on a table or announcing your intention to fly to the moon with Darius Guppy in a swan-drawn basket, will divert public attention from some ongoing political disaster, such as the entire last 18 months.
Some cynics even suggest that the public disgrace of Johnson’s crony Toby Young was actually dead-cat driven. Did the Conservative media machine maintain Young’s implausible career only so as to have a dead cat ready to fling on the table when they needed one? Was Toby Young the Lee Harvey Oswald of the failing Brexit negotiations?
I’m not sure that Johnson’s pathological dishonesty is quite that calculated. I suspect Johnson liked the attention that his lies got him. But suddenly he is being trounced in the funny toff stakes by Jacob Tree-Frog and his Brexit lies – the £350m a week for the NHS, the fabled “cake and eat it” trade deal – are dissolving like David Davis in a hail of hot facts.
So Johnson is having to mouth ever more vast lies to get the attention he once earned from lesser falsehoods, like a veteran motorcycle stuntman, long past his peak, incrementally driven towards an audience-maintaining jump over a massive lake of sharks that he knows will finally kill him.
On my desk is a stack of commemorative Brexit coins, price £4.99 each. I ordered them from a Brexiter on eBay in a moment of mean-spiritedness, because they are emblazoned with the misspelt slogan “I voted to get back our sovereign independance”. The tragedy of it, the black black comedy of the thing.
But the coins made me remember the act I did on the fledgling comedy circuit, back in the 1980s, and how it related to the nuclear escalation of Johnson’s weaponised lies. Older comedy fans may remember the early days of “Alternative” comedy, when bills weren’t simply twentysomething standups in trousers remembering recent cultural ephemera.
Back then, those pub back-room bills featured a host of absurd “spesh” acts; the Amazing Mr Smith, who sang satirical songs with his head in a birdcage; Steve Murray, who dismembered teddy bears while doing an impression of Tommy Cooper; the Ice Man, a favourite of mine, who stood on stage with a big block of ice, describing how and why it was melting; and the late Malcolm Hardee who, among other things, could make his testicles look like various British wartime politicians.
My own spesh involved me stuffing, or giving the impression of stuffing, a succession of coins of various foreign currencies up my back passage, while dressed in a tutu and playing the bodhrán. “And now ladies and gentlemen, the Icelandic 50 kroner coin, the 50 kroner. Here we go…”
I was starting to make a name for myself, although admittedly that name was Roger Rectum Currency. Then suddenly, sometime around 1985, along came the uber-clown Chris Lynam, who launched actual lit fireworks from his actual anus, and now a man pretending to put yen into his wasn’t impressive any more. I soon switched to straight standup, as it happened a more lucrative, but arguably less dignified, art form.
Suddenly, his lies no longer igniting the public imagination like they once did, Johnson himself is Roger Rectum Currency in his managed decline, needing to draw the public eye with ever more extravagant lies.
And maybe I am facing a similar dilemma. The political situation has been so stupid now, for so long, it seems beyond satire. In print, and on stage, I reach for ever more desperate methods to mock it. And then my eye falls on that pile of commemorative British “independance” coins. And I realise I may have stumbled across the answer. I’m sure I have that tutu somewhere.
The jazz-noise album Bristol Fashion by capri-batterie with Stewart Lee is available to download at bandcamp.com. Content Provider continues to tour and will finally end on 19, 20 and 23 April at the Royal Festival Hall, London
Stewart Lee
2018-01-28T16:06:56+00:00
When Boris Johnson announced in a press conference on Thursday his intent to fly to the moon in a basket carried by enormous swans, as part of an ongoing quest to seek out new post-Brexit trading partners outside the EU, it seemed the logical end point of a political career characterised by the propagation of elephantine falsehoods. And yet no lie is too big it seems and Johnson endures. Any half-decent journalist would have destroyed Johnson’s moon-swan lies immediately, but his Friday morning interview with Nick Robinson on Radio 4 displayed the feeble indulgence we have come to expect from the gumless Today programme. Johnson told Robinson he was looking forward to meeting the moon king, Irdonozur, who he thought was “exactly the sort of person we should be in business with”, and Robinson didn’t even feel the need to point out that no such lunar monarch exists. Robinson didn’t even intervene when Johnson declared that he wasn’t “the least bit scared of moon-picaninnies or moon-bumboys for that matter”, and that he would be taking his friend the convicted fraudster and gold smuggler Darius Guppy to the moon with him, and that Darius would have any disobedient moon-picaninnies and moon-bumboys “knocked to the ground” and covered in horse manure. Footage on CBBC’s Newsround later, of Johnson standing by a bus emblazoned with the legend “Let’s fly to the moon in a swan-drawn basket and knock the moon-bumboys to the ground and cover them in horse manure”, barely even a raised eyebrow from presenter Ricky Boleto, who seemed stricken with a terrible ennui beyond his years at the very thought of more of Johnson’s colossal and time-consuming lies. Meanwhile, predictable newspaper cartoons slung the familiar image of the crash-helmeted Johnson, waving flags while suspended from a zip wire, beneath a flock...
German comedian Nico Semsrott has been ripping off the 'Paul Nuttals of the UKIPs' bit from series 3 of Comedy Vehicle (6min 50 in the video of his set). Challenged on it by a Facebook user, he has provided this explanation...
"Dass das Original des Abschlussteils auf einer Idee von Stewart Lee beruht, hab ich schon im November auf Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicosemsrott/videos/10153695466017836/ Und auf Youtube auch so angegeben: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo_kLKOKJHY Steht auch hier: http://www.stern.de/.../nico-semsrott--afd-anhaenger-sind... Dass ich das bei diesem Slam-Auftritt nicht erwähnt habe, ist uncool. Ich war vorher über vier Jahre nicht mehr in einem Wettbewerb aufgetreten, hatte das das ganze Jahr in meinem Solo-Programm drin, ein bisschen was verändert und dann einfach nicht mehr dran gedacht. Das war doof von mir. Tschuldigung. Zerknirscht: Nico (So, das poste ich jetzt auch nochmal unter dem Youtube-Video)" Google translate renders his explanation as;
"The fact that the original of the final part is based on an idea by Stewart Lee , I've been in November on Facebook : [ LINK ] And on Youtube have been defined thus : [ LINK ] Is also here: [ LINK ] That I not in this Slam appearance I mention is uncool . I was not previously in a competition occurred over four years , which had all year in my solo program in there , a little bit changed and then simply not thought about it . That was stupid of me . Sorry. Contrite : Nico ( So that I post now again under the Youtube video )"
Stewart Lee
2016-09-08T00:23:47+01:00
German comedian Nico Semsrott has been ripping off the 'Paul Nuttals of the UKIPs' bit from series 3 of Comedy Vehicle (6min 50 in the video of his set). Challenged on it by a Facebook user, he has provided this explanation... "Dass das Original des Abschlussteils auf einer Idee von Stewart Lee beruht, hab ich schon im November auf Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicosemsrott/videos/10153695466017836/ Und auf Youtube auch so angegeben: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo_kLKOKJHY Steht auch hier: http://www.stern.de/.../nico-semsrott--afd-anhaenger-sind... Dass ich das bei diesem Slam-Auftritt nicht erwähnt habe, ist uncool. Ich war vorher über vier Jahre nicht mehr in einem Wettbewerb aufgetreten, hatte das das ganze Jahr in meinem Solo-Programm drin, ein bisschen was verändert und dann einfach nicht mehr dran gedacht. Das war doof von mir. Tschuldigung. Zerknirscht: Nico (So, das poste ich jetzt auch nochmal unter dem Youtube-Video)" Google translate renders his explanation as; "The fact that the original of the final part is based on an idea by Stewart Lee , I've been in November on Facebook : [ LINK ] And on Youtube have been defined thus : [ LINK ] Is also here: [ LINK ] That I not in this Slam appearance I mention is uncool . I was not previously in a competition occurred over four years , which had all year in my solo program in there , a little bit changed and then simply not thought about it . That was stupid of me . Sorry. Contrite : Nico ( So that I post now again under the Youtube video )"
It’s the best comedy festival in the world, but don’t tell anyone about it!
We are screening the KING ROCKER movie with Q&A on Saturday morning, I am doing Man Wulf on Sunday, and on Saturday afternoon there’s this...
Joking Apart: Stewart Lee Asks Robert Lloyd to Explain Old Jokes. 2 Pilot episodes of an exciting new podcast featuring Stewart Lee and his mentor, the Birmingham punk legend Robert Lloyd of Prefects, Nightingales and King Rocker repute. Saturday May 2nd, 2 pm, Ysgol Bro Hydden – Main Hall
I am the reader of the audiobook of The Big Midweek, Steve Hanley from The Fall’s book about playing bass for two decades in the greatest British band, against twenty years of social change. You can hear it here...
I am now writing 1000 funny words a week for Carole Cadwalladr’s new on-line newspaper The Nerve, run by people who were sacked or quit when Tories and Telegraph/Times types took over The Observer. It is immediately ace. Sign up here and it would also really be great if you could pay them £6.95 a month as the 5 women at the helm sunk all their redundancy money into it. Carole understands that the only story in town is how the tech-bros choose what news we see and how we understand the world, and The Nerve will address this head on. The only news that matters. Please send the link below and this begging request to anyone you can. https://www.thenerve.news
4. THE MEMORY BLOCKS, SAT 28TH MARCH, WATERSHED, BRISTOL
My favourite pan-disciplinarians Andrew & Eden Kotting want me to arrive as unprepared as possible and host this experimental investigation of memory, from 6pm – 8.15. In the future, people will say, if you can remember it you were there!
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
Glasgow’s garage punk veterans The Primevals’ new single is featured in the new Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf 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). Vinyl sides a&b were released on a 7” 45 in January. https://primevals.bandcamp.com
John Mackay & Sally Homer, in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present
STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF BRAND NEW SHOW
UK TOURING THROUGHOUT 2026
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.
Sunday 3rd May 2026 - The Mach Arena, Machynlleth Comedy Festival - TICKETS
Wednesday 6th May 2026 - The Playhouse, Weston Super Mare - TICKETS
Thursday 7th May 2026 - The Playhouse, Weston Super Mare - TICKETS
Friday 8th May 2026 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Saturday 9th May 2026 - Richmond Theatre, Richmond - TICKETS
Monday 11th May 2026 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Tuesday 12th May 2026 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Wednesday 13th May 2026 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Thursday 14th May 2026 - Floral Pavilion Theatre, New Brighton - TICKETS
Friday 15th May 2026 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Saturday 16th May 2026 - Stockton Globe, Stockton On Tees - TICKETS
Tuesday 19th May 2026 - Palace Theatre, Southend On Sea - TICKETS
Wednesday 20th May 2026 - Palace Theatre, Southend On Sea - TICKETS
June 2026
Monday 1st June 2026 - 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin - TICKETS
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 - Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin - TICKETS
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 - The Tommy Leddy Theatre, Drogheda - TICKETS
Thursday 4th June 2026 - Millennium Forum, Derry - TICKETS
Friday 5th June 2026 - National Opera House, Wexford - TICKETS
Sunday 7th June 2026 - Opera House, Cork - TICKETS
Wednesday 10th June 2026 - Theatre Royal, Waterford - TICKETS
Sunday 14th June 2026 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Monday 15th June 2026 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Tuesday 16th June 2026 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Thursday 18th June 2026 - Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
Friday 19th June 2026 - Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
Sunday 21st June 2026 - New Victoria Theatre, Woking - TICKETS
Tuesday 23rd June 2026 - Venue Cymru, Llandudno - TICKETS
Wednesday 24th June 2026 - Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield - TICKETS
Thursday 25th June 2026 - Grand Opera House, York - TICKETS
Friday 26th June 2026 - Grand Opera House, York - TICKETS
Saturday 27th June 2026 - Grand Opera House, York - TICKETS
Tuesday 30th June 2026 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
July 2026
Wednesday 1st July 2026 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
Thursday 2nd July 2026 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
Saturday 4th July 2026 - The Hawth, Crawley - TICKETS
Tuesday 7th July 2026 - Lyceum, Crewe - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th July 2026 - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - TICKETS
Thursday 9th July 2026 - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - TICKETS
Friday 10th July 2026 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 11th July 2026 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Monday 13th July 2026 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Tuesday 14th July 2026 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Wednesday 15th July 2026 - Playhouse, Edinburgh - TICKETS
Thursday 16th July 2026 - Perth Theatre, Perth - TICKETS
Friday 17th July 2026 - Eden Court, Inverness - TICKETS
September 2026
Thursday 3rd September 2026 - King's Theatre, Portsmouth - TICKETS
Friday 4th September 2026 - Pavillion, Weymouth - TICKETS
Saturday 5th September 2026 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - TICKETS
Thursday 10th September 2026 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Friday 11th September 2026 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Saturday 12th September 2026 - William Aston Hall, Wrexham - TICKETS
Sunday 13th September 2026 - Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton - TICKETS
Wednesday 16th September 2026 - Marina Theatre, Lowestoft - TICKETS
Thursday 17th September 2026 - Marina Theatre, Lowestoft - TICKETS
Friday 18th September 2026 - Castle Theatre, Wellingborough - TICKETS
Saturday 19th September 2026 - The Central Theatre, Chatham - TICKETS
Sunday 20th September 2026 - The Central Theatre, Chatham - TICKETS
Thursday 24th September 2026 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Friday 25th September 2026 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Saturday 26th September 2026 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Tuesday 29th September 2026 - Truck Theatre, Hull - TICKETS
Wednesday 30th September 2026 - Truck Theatre, Hull - TICKETS
October 2026
Thursday 1st October 2026 - The Spa Centre, Scarborough - TICKETS
Friday 2nd October 2026 - Alhambra Theatre, Bradford - TICKETS
Saturday 3rd October 2026 - Alhambra Theatre, Bradford - TICKETS
Tuesday 6th October 2026 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Wednesday 7th October 2026 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Thursday 8th October 2026 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Friday 9th October 2026 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Saturday 10th October 2026 - Belgrade Theatre, Coventry - TICKETS
Monday 12th October 2026 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Tuesday 13th October 2026 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Saturday 17th October 2026 - Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury - TICKETS
Sunday 18th October 2026 - Hippodrome, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 23rd October 2026 - New Theatre, Peterborough - TICKETS
Saturday 24th October 2026 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Sunday 25th October 2026 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Friday 30th October 2026 - Pavilion Theatre, Worthing - TICKETS
Saturday 31st October 2026 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS
November 2026
Sunday 1st November 2026 - Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne - TICKETS
Thursday 5th November 2026 - City Hall, Salisbury - TICKETS
Friday 6th November 2026 - The Anvil, Basingstoke - TICKETS
Saturday 7th November 2026 - New Wimbledon Theatre, Wimbledon - TICKETS
Monday 9th November 2026 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Tuesday 10th November 2026 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Wednesday 11th November 2026 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Thursday 12th November 2026 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Friday 13th November 2026 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
9. SNOWFLAKE TORNADO / BASIC LEE
Stewart’s 2019-2022 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, but buy them from us to defeat American fascism.
We are currently preparing a physical release of these shows but it’s got delayed as I got pneumonia and 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.
10. TEENAGE CANCER TRUST COMEDY NIGHT
– ROYAL ALBERT HALL, 24TH MARCH. I am on in this with Bridget Christie, Athena Kugblenu, Miles Jupp and more. Robert Smith from The Cure is in charge this year. http://lnk.to/TCT26
11. KEVIN ELDON’S PODCAST
The actor Kevin Eldon has a new podcast called Speakers.
12 CHURCHILL’S URINAL BY ROSIE HOLT, KING’S HEAD THEATRE, ISLINGTON LONDON 13TH MAY – 6th JUNE
I did a script editing pass on an early draft of this play last year, which was full of great funny ideas about the comedy of the culture war, and contributed some end of the pier gags to lower the tone of an otherwise sophisticated conceit, but it sounds like the writer-performer and the director have really moved it on and massively changed and upgraded the central thrust of it. I am looking forward to seeing it in its first incarnation.
“Freshly installed in 11 Downing Street, a fearless female Chancellor of the Exchequer is determined to get rid of the ancient urinal in her grace-and-favour en-suite. Intrigue overflows into outrage when it transpires that the porcelain was first tinkled on by that undying icon of Britishness, Winston Churchill. Soon, the whole nation has a view on this storm in a pisspot. Join us for this rambunctious romp through the corridors of power and discover whether our fearless Chancellor’s grip on her Budget red box can survive the clamour for her Whitehall washroom to be awarded a Blue Plaque. Known for her alter ego MP who has achieved more than seven million views with her online videos, and toured two stage shows nationally, satirist and Chortle award-winner Rosie Holt shares the world premiere of her new play, first seen in a reading at Shedinburgh last year. Directed by Dan Clarkson, whose previous show starring Rosie Holt The Crown Live sold out at the King’s Head Theatre, and whose other credits include Olivier Award nominees Potted Potter, and Potted Panto, as well as Biff To The Future which is currently on an extensive tour. Early Booker Preview Special: First two performances (13 & 14 May) - top price tickets only £25.” https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/churchill-s-urinal-ncmf
13.SKIDS PORTMERION WEEKENDER 13TH – 15TH MARCH
Kevin Eldon (above) used to get the bus to school in Scotland with The Skids, and I am special stand-up guest of the Scottish punk pioneers at their weekender at Portmerion Prisoner village in N Wales. Come and see me get booed off by old geezers. https://skidsofficial.com/news-1/f/the-absolute-weekend-2026-1 What an amazing life I am having in my late 50s.
The Trawl Marina Purkiss and Gemma Forte had me on their unashamedly political podcast. They are twin national treasures. You can find it in the usual places.
Alexei Sayle Podcast I just done this again with the Podfather of Alternative Comedy. Usual outlets.
It’s the best book festival in the world but don’t tell anyone about it. I will be amongst many appearing at Laugharne including Carole Cadwalladr, Gwenno, Budgie, Laetitia Sadier, Nicky Wire, Nigel Planer, Angeline Morrison, Dave Rowntree, Armando Iannucci, Joe Dunthorne, Martin & Eliza Carthy, Tessa Hadley, Elizabeth Alker, Mark Thomas, Kate Mossman, Mike Joyce, Henry Normal, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Jeremy Deller, Charlie Higson, Zakia Sewell, Luke Wright, Carys Eleri, Nick Revell, Fflur Dafydd, Daniel Rachel, Robin Ince, Emma Warren, Jake Arnott, Steve Punt, Debsey Wykes, John Higgs, Paul Gorman, Peter Finch, Pete Brown.” https://www.thelaugharneweekend.com
16. FESTIVALS I will be doing short stand-up sets at the following festivals
BEARDED THEORY 20TH – 24TH MAY, CATTON PARK DERBYSHIRE https://beardedtheory.co.uk w Pixies, Damned, Maytals, Au Pairs, Nightingales & Ted Chippington. This is a great, friendly festival that totally feels like it is run for the benefit of the people, and it has a brilliant tent called Convoy Cabaret which is all proper hardcore anarcho-punk and traveller music.
DEER SHED 24TH – 26TH JULY, BLADERSBY PARK, N YORKS https://deershedfestival.com Sleaford Mods, Angeline Morrison, New Eves & The Adam Buxton Band. The village fete vibe of indie rock!
KRANKENHAUS, 28TH-30TH AUGUST, MUNCASTER CASTLE, LAKE DISTRICT. It’s the best music festival in the world but don’t tell anyone about it. Sea Power, House Of All, Laura Cannell, Fallen Women, Stereolab, lectures, talks, walks, mountains. All the fun of the farm!
More to follow
17 CULT NIGHT 30th April Moth Club, London
Weird muso’s Grham Reynolds and Mike Lindsay soundtrack weird films The Portcullis and The Last Sacrifice and I introduce them.
18. GOLDSMITH’S TALK, GOLDSMITHS, LONDON MARCH 10TH. I blab on.
Stewart Lee: In Praise of the Outcast - MA Art & Politics,
Tuesday, Mar 10 from 12 pm to 1 pm GMT
MA Art & Politics + Art & Politics Society, Goldsmiths, London present a talk by comedian Stewart Lee. In Praise of the Outcast: Stewart Lee on clowning and the essence of comedy (hint: to overturn the rules).
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? – EDWARD ALBEE, DIR MIKE TWEDDLE. Oxford Playhouse until March 7th. If you hurry you might get into the superb production which I saw on the opening night. I say, “Mike Tweddle's radical new production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf runs at Oxford Playhouse until March 7th and crumbles the colossus of the Burton-Taylor reading in a quietly radical reinterpretation. Innovative staging frames the two couple's conflicts very much as a form of performance, sets of curtains in the increasingly claustrophobic house echoing our assumptions about theatre, confessional monologues repositioned downstage like old-school front-curtain stand-up comedy, and fourth-wall breaking antics spilling the collapsing third act into the main house itself. Big laughs! Sick revelations! And lots of booze! It's the shortest three hours you'll ever experience.” https://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/events/edward-albees-whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf
BOHMAN BROTHERS AND CO Stunning sound artists the Bohman Brothers appear in various combo’s.
March 22nd Christ Church John Marshall Hall, London. The Remote Viewers – John Edwards (double bass), Steve Beresford (electronics), Adrian Northover (soprano sax), Dave Petts (tenor sax,composition)-quartet/Annie Kerr (violin, piano) & Matt Clark (guitar)-duo/ Sue Lynch (tenor sax), Adam Bohman (amplified objects) , Rory Salter (guitar,electronics)-trio/ Doors 5.00pm – Music 5.30pm-8.00pm 27 Blackfriars Rd SE1 8NY Suggested fee £8/10 cash or card OTD https://horseimprovclub.wordpress.com/
ROB AUTON The comedian poet philosopher is on tour with a new show called Can. “ This year my new show is an hour long story, written and performed by me. It is about a man who at one point in his life was the world's best motivational speaker, and then something happened. If you would like to come to one I'd love to see you there.” March 5 - Edinburgh Stand, March 7 - Glasgow Stand, March 8 - Newcastle Stand, March 10 - Cambridge Junction J2, March 11 - Margate Where Else, March 12 - Brighton Komedia, March 13 - Bristol- 1532, March 18 - York- Crescent, March 19 - Sheffield- Steamworks, March 20 - Chester- Storyhouse, March 21 - Chorley- Theatre, March 29 - Colchester- Arts Centre, April 9 - Salford- Lowry Quays, April 10 - Lancaster- Dukes, April 11 - Birmingham- Rep The Door, April 15 - Bath- Rondo, April 16 - Cardiff- Sherman, May 2- Machynlleth Comedy Festival, May 26-30 LONDON SOHO THEATRE EXTRA DATES
THURSTON MOORE 3 DAY CAFÉ OTO RESIDENCY, LONDON March 9th-11th
Monday 9 March - Thurston Moore (guitar), Akira Sakata (sax), Evan Parker (reeds)
Thursday 10 Match - Thurston Moore (guitar), Ståle Liavik Solberg (percussion) + guest TBA
Friday 11 March - Thurston Moore (guitar), Carlos Giffoni (electronics) + guest TBA
The 4th Kallin Family Exhibition The wonderful Kallin family make an exhibition of themselves at Burgh House, Hampstead, from 11th - 29th March 2026. Once again the Kallin Family bring together their artworks into a joint exhibition showcasing their textile landscapes, ink drawings, paintings, dollshouse sculptures and mysterious figures. The collection explores themes of childhood nostalgia, dreams and the urban landscape. Featuring the work of: Sophie Levi-Kallin, Hamish Kallin, Jenny Kallin and Phoebe Bowman. Also featuring the launch of Outwith, a book of 'poetry' by Ivor Kallin, with illustrations by Jenny Kallin. Burgh House, New End Square, NW3 1LT
JETSTREAM PONY 12TH March, Waiting Room, London. Rare one off from the Trembling Blue Stars descended indie pop classicists.
WARRINGTON RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN I am late to the WRNTDP party, but he/they play/s 70’s style public information electronica that suggests the dashed hopes of the post war Utopian social project. I don’t know how it will work live. I wish I could see it but I am touring. MARCH 13th Leeds Seven Arts, 19th Oxford Bullingdon, 20th Liverpool Capstone.
RON SEXSMITH The taken-for-granted Canadian troubadour is back.
MARCH
01 LIVERPOOL Hangar 34
04 LIMERICK Dolan’s Warehouse
05 WATERFORD Theatre Royal
06 KILKENNY Set Theatre
07 CORK St Lukes
08 DUBLIN Ambassador Theatre
10 GALWAY Town Hall
11 DUNDALK Spirit Store
12 BELFAST Limelight
PSYCHEDELIC PORN CRUMPETS Australian prog-psyche MARCH 1st B’ham Digbeth Crossing, 3rd Southampton 1865, 4th London Forum
HEAVENLY Suddenly boosted by fleeting Tic Toc fame with Punk Rock Girl, here’s another victory lap for the mould-making indie veterans in 2026. MARCH 5th Ramsgate Music Hall, 6th Paris Petit Bain, 8th London Lexington all ages matinee, 14th Oxford Nest, 18th M’cr Yes, 19th Glasgow Mono, 20th Sunderland Pop Recs, 21st Sheffield Sidney & Mathilda, 26th Brighton TBC, APRIL 4th Cardiff Wales Goes Pop
THE WAVE PICTURES Brilliant British indie rock band in the vein of Go-Betweens, Loft etc… All the greats. MARCH 1st - Oxford @ Jericho Tavern - TICKETS, 3rd - Bristol @ Strange Brew - TICKETS, 4th - Cardiff @ Clwb Ifor Bach - TICKETS, 5th - Manchester @ YES - TICKETS, 6th - Brighton @ DUST - TICKETS. MAY 9th - London @ Bush Hall - TICKETS
KID CONGO & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS Cramps/Gun Club/Bad Seeds/Knoxville Girls gunslinger with current combo MARCH 5th B’ham Hare & Hounds, 6th Oslo London, 7th Nottingham Boat Club.
KEIJI HAINO Japanese brain-bending noise improvisor London ICA 17th March
A BELTER FOR THE SHELTER, HACKNEY EMPIRE, LONDON MARCH 19TH. Benefit for Hackney Night Shelter. Belter for the Shelter is back! Hackney Night Shelter’s legendary comedy benefit night returns to the Hackney Empire. Get ready for a stellar line-up hosted by Laura Smyth with the likes of Jeff Innocent, Red Richardson, Rosie Holt, Athena Kugblenu taking to the stage, plus more. Your ticket doesn’t just get you an evening of laughs, it raises crucial funds to keep Hackney Night Shelter open all year round. With your support, the shelter can provide emergency accommodation and routes out of homelessness for another 200 people each year who would otherwise be sleeping on the street. Full line-up: Jeff Innocent, Red Richardson, Rosie Holt, Kevin Eldon, Andrew Mensah, Bobby Mair, Athena Kugblenu, Sharon Wanjohi, Laura Smyth (MC)
DELINES Cinematic symphonic country rock sophisticates. MARCH 21st Trowbridge 7 Hills Fest, 22nd Bury Met, 23rd L’pool Hangar, 24th Nottingham Metronome, 25th Norwich Epic, 26th London Union Chapel, 27th Brighton Old Market, 28th Cardiff Gate, OCTOBER 2nd Glasgow GUU, 3rd Gosforth Civic, 4th Leeds City Varieties
MAN Welsh 70s psyche-blues outfit appear to be on the road, and are supported in London by survivors of Help Yourself as The Green Ray, who are currently superb live. MARCH 22nd Kinross Backstage, 23rd N’castle Cluny, 24th B’ham Hare & Hounds, 25th Leicester Int’l, 26th Swansea Hangar 18, 27th Aberdare Jacs, 28th St Leonards Piper, 29th London Leytonstone O’Neills.
SIMON LOVE Welsh purveyor of a certain kind of vintage indie pop.
2 April - The Waiting Room, London (album launch show)
3 April - Wales Goes Pop, The Gate, Cardiff
26 June - The Fighting Cocks, Kingston-Upon-Thames
28 June - Prince Albert, Brighton (Afternoon show)
RUTS DC Reggae-punks on the road. APRIL 4th London Electric Ballroom, MAY 22nd Dunfermline PJs, 28th Glasgow King Tut’s, AUG 21st Dublin Academy No
COSMIC PSYCHOS Australian idiot-savants who have reduced rock and roll, and by association, life itself to its core essentials. Profound. But last time I had to leave ‘cos it was TOO LOUD. APRIL 7th Nottingham Bodega, 8th Glasgow Nice’n’Sleazy, 9th M’cr Pink Room, 10th London Dome, 11th Cardf Clwb Ifor Bach, 12th Brighton Green Door
THE ROOM Bunnymen/Teardrops-adjacent 80s Liverpool psychedelic survivors return in dishevelled majesty. APRIL 24th Future Yard in Birkenhead 24th April, 25th Aces & Eights London, SEPT 11TH Future Yard Birkenhead album launch. November 13th at Dublin Castle London with St Vitus Dance & Vernons Future.
COWBOY JUNKIES Smoke-suffused Canadian country stoners. APRIL 29th Bath Komedia, 30th Bexhill De-La-Warr, MAY 3rd Edinburgh Queen’s Hall, 6th Sunderland Fire Station, 7th B’ham Town Hall, 11th London Palladium, 14th Norwich & Norfolk Festival
THE UTOPIA STRONG Snooker genius’ Steve Davis’ space-rocking outfit. May 8th N’castle Star & Shadow, 9th N’hampton Black Prince, 15th London St Mattias Stoke Newington, 17th Luton Castle, 20th Glasgow Cottiers, 22nd Cambridge Storey’s Field, 24th St Leonard’s Piper.
THE EX Heroically inspiring Dutch jazz-punks. MAY 20th London 100 Club, 21st B’ham Castle & Falcon, 22nd Glasgow Flying Duck, 23rd M’cr White Hotel.
SUGAR Apparently they’ve reformed MAY 23rd, 24th London Forum
TAMIKREST Malian blues-wranglers in snake-charming mode JUNE 8th Glasgow Rum Shack, 9th Leeds Belgrave, 11th Norwich Arts, 12th Bristol Strange Brew, 13th London Jazz Café, 15th M’cr Band On The Wall, 176th Bristol Hope & Ruin.
BEVIS FROND One of Britain’s all-time greats, frontman Nick Saloman now a 70-something psychedelic survivor still at the top of his game. Will it ever end? JUNE 5th M’cr Pink Room, 7th Edinburgh Sneaky Pete’s, 8th Gateshead Central Bar, 9th Leeds Attic, 10th London Moth Club (hosted by S Lee)
OH-SEES Mighty psyche-punk juggernaut. JULY 14th Leeds Irish Centre, 16th & 17th London Earth.
MILLIONS OF DEAD COPS Hardcore originators. New Cross Inn, London August 10th
LEMONHEADS Melodic hardcore countryfied punk cherub soldiers on
30 Sep: Electric, Sheffield, UK
01 Oct: De La Warr, Bexhill, UK
02 Oct: Troxy, London, UK
03 Oct: UEA, Norwich, UK
05 Oct: Boiler Shop, Newcastle, UK
06 Oct: SWG3, Glasgow, UK
07 Oct: Albert Hall, Manchester, UK
09 Oct: Electric, Bristol, UK
10 Oct: O2 Institute, Birmingham, UK
11 Oct: Rock City, Nottingham, UK
Finally, the wonderfully dry comedian Jackie Kashian, who I did a lovely tour of Australia with 21 YEARS AGO!!!! has a new video/album out.
Gunter Schickert (G.A.M guitar man, 1949)
Amos Poe (He squashed a banana in the street, 1949)
Sly Dunbar (definitive dub drummer, 1952)
Sal Buscema (Marvel mastercraftsman, 1936) Catherine O’Hara (Fucking hilarious, I wish we’d met, 1954)
Philippe Gaulier (Our clown enemy, our clown king, 1943)
Stewart Lee
2026-02-27T14:28:42+00:00
1.MACHYNLLETH COMEDY FESTIVAL MAY 1ST – 3RD https://machcomedyfest.co.uk/category/year/2026/ It’s the best comedy festival in the world, but don’t tell anyone about it! We are screening the KING ROCKER movie with Q&A on Saturday morning, I am doing Man Wulf on Sunday, and on Saturday afternoon there’s this... Joking Apart: Stewart Lee Asks Robert Lloyd to Explain Old Jokes. 2 Pilot episodes of an exciting new podcast featuring Stewart Lee and his mentor, the Birmingham punk legend Robert Lloyd of Prefects, Nightingales and King Rocker repute. Saturday May 2nd, 2 pm, Ysgol Bro Hydden – Main Hall https://machcomedyfest.co.uk/show/2026/joking-apart-stewart-lee-asks-robert-lloyd-to-explain-old-jokes/ The King Rocker screening is at 11 am on Saturday https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qc91 Stewart Lee Vs The Man-Wulf is on Sunday at 1.30 https://machcomedyfest.co.uk/show/2026/stewart-lee-stewart-lee-vs-the-man-wulf-4/ 2. THE BIG MIDWEEK I am the reader of the audiobook of The Big Midweek, Steve Hanley from The Fall’s book about playing bass for two decades in the greatest British band, against twenty years of social change. You can hear it here... https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Big-Midweek-Audiobook/B0FXBJJD4X?source_code=AUKFrDlWS02231890H6-BK-ACX0-479031 3. THE NERVE I am now writing 1000 funny words a week for Carole Cadwalladr’s new on-line newspaper The Nerve, run by people who were sacked or quit when Tories and Telegraph/Times types took over The Observer. It is immediately ace. Sign up here and it would also really be great if you could pay them £6.95 a month as the 5 women at the helm sunk all their redundancy money into it. Carole understands that the only story in town is how the tech-bros choose what news we see and how we understand the world, and The Nerve will address this head on. The only news that matters. Please send the link below and this begging request to anyone you can. https://www.thenerve.news This recent piece on enshittification is especially good https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-enshittification-internet-craphound-lyft-political-organising All my columns are collected...
I spent the weekend at the Latitude festival in Suffolk with my children, Nelson and Mandela. Like a good metropolitan liberal elitist, I had all my tastes and prejudices confirmed, and all in a safe family-friendly environment. But when I left the site on Monday it seemed that, while I was eating sushi in recyclable rice coatings and cheering the snowflake oi of Idles, the post-second world war power balance had shifted beyond all recognition. I can’t turn my back for a second.
Donald Trump, having spent the previous week calling the European Union his “foe”, like a mad medieval king, was now taking the dictator Vladimpaler Putin’s side against evidence-based investigations into the kind of Russian meddling that helped swing an American election, destabilise the EU, fan the global far right, popularise Fortnite, drive swarms of hornets into Dorset, kill our English newts, and deliver Brexit.
“I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” Trump proclaimed at the press conference, having already fondled a football presented to him by master-puppeteer Putin, which made the president look like a disturbed zoo monkey given toys to stop him flinging his excrement at visitors. I expected the tanks to roll west into the Baltic states unchallenged within hours, showered with stars-and-stripes confetti in a New York-style ticker-tape parade.
Luckily, overnight, Trump realised that what he had meant to say was not “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” but “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” This is fortunate, as otherwise he could have been executed for treason, an event that would doubtless have drawn even larger crowds than his famously full inauguration, especially if it saw a repeat performance from the TwirlTasTix baton-twirling group.
Overnight, the Republicans had constructed a paper-thin plausible denial, hoping that no news agencies, in our micro-attention-span world, would run Trump’s explanation of his misspeak alongside the press conference footage, where context and his repeated use of the preposition “but” would show he had clearly meant to say exactly what he said in the first place, without a shadow of a doubt. Which is exactly what happened.
Nonetheless, even in a period of unprecedented stupidity and cynicism, Trump’s “would”/”wouldn’t” gambit represents a new low in contempt for human intelligence, and a rejection of language itself, words and their actual meanings now a kind of obsolete tool in the battle for the hearts and minds of the very worst people on earth.
How easy it appears to be to unravel and reverse the great statements of the past with a simple negative insertion. Neville Chamberlain returns from seeing Hitler in 1938 and utters the reputation saving denial: “I do not have in my hand a piece of paper.” Martin Luther King’s 1963 address is reremembered, to satisfy the racist vote, as: “I do not have a dream, and anyone who says I did must have misheard me.”
Descartes is reverse-engineered to proclaim the perfect philosophy for the Trump-Brexit era: “I do not think, therefore I am.” And his philosophical forebear Shakespeare is retooled to offer the timeless truism: “ To not be, or to be, that is not the question.”
Meanwhile, our cowardly, self-interested MPs were given many opportunities in parliament earlier this week to sabotage Brexit in the national interest, but the traitors put pride and party loyalties before the future of the country, choosing instead to stoke the petrol engine of the out-of-control Brexit Flymo™ with even more incendiary lies as it hurtles towards the landscaped no-deal ha-ha.
Instead of voting against Brexit, the Liberal Democrat Tim Farron was actually in Dorset charging milkmaids £5 to watch him struggle to accommodate his feelings about the homosexuals and his feelings about an all-knowing God he imagines has very strong views on the specifics of marriage legislation.
God would have wanted Tim to vote. Anyone can tell that snowflake God would obviously be a remainer, but if the result of the corrupt referendum must be honoured, the Lord would at least favour a soft Brexit. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Jesus Christ would be a hard Brexiteer, but only because he imagined a fairer society could be built from the ruins of the old one. Drive your plough over the bones of the dead.
Nonetheless, if Tim and Vince Cable had turned up, Monday’s Brexit trade vote would almost have been a dead heat, and the nation would be a little bit closer to avoiding the need to stockpile tins of Alphabetti Spaghetti in its cellars.
As an ardent remoaner, I was at least looking forward to enjoying a degree of post-Brexit schadenfreude, as leavers were forced to own their bullshit. But Trump’s “would”/“wouldn’t” strategy must be a great comfort to our bold buccaneering Brexiteers, many of whom have recently quit their jobs in order to avoid being held accountable to statements they made two years ago, now demonstrably revealed as dishonest and undeliverable.
Now the brave Brexiteers can merely rewrite what they said in retrospect. What’s that squeaking noise? It’s Brexiteer privateer Daniel Hannanananan, peering out from behind an effigy of Elgar, to declare: “absolutely nobody is not talking about threatening our place in the single market”.
And there, towelling himself down on a union jack jolly roger, Liam Fox announces that the Brexit deal “will not be one of the easiest in human history”, before hopping on to a bus emblazoned with the legend “Let’s not give our NHS the £350m the EU doesn’t take every week”, driven by a doleful Boris Johnson, looking at a cake he has on the dashboard but which he is, on this occasion, unable to also eat.
Once you were post-fact. Now you are post-post-fact. That’s going to work out well. Not.
Stewart Lee’s Content Provider will be on BBC Two at 10.45pm on Saturday 28 July, and then on iPlayer
Stewart Lee
2018-07-22T13:49:19+01:00
I spent the weekend at the Latitude festival in Suffolk with my children, Nelson and Mandela. Like a good metropolitan liberal elitist, I had all my tastes and prejudices confirmed, and all in a safe family-friendly environment. But when I left the site on Monday it seemed that, while I was eating sushi in recyclable rice coatings and cheering the snowflake oi of Idles, the post-second world war power balance had shifted beyond all recognition. I can’t turn my back for a second. Donald Trump, having spent the previous week calling the European Union his “foe”, like a mad medieval king, was now taking the dictator Vladimpaler Putin’s side against evidence-based investigations into the kind of Russian meddling that helped swing an American election, destabilise the EU, fan the global far right, popularise Fortnite, drive swarms of hornets into Dorset, kill our English newts, and deliver Brexit. “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” Trump proclaimed at the press conference, having already fondled a football presented to him by master-puppeteer Putin, which made the president look like a disturbed zoo monkey given toys to stop him flinging his excrement at visitors. I expected the tanks to roll west into the Baltic states unchallenged within hours, showered with stars-and-stripes confetti in a New York-style ticker-tape parade. Luckily, overnight, Trump realised that what he had meant to say was not “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,” but “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” This is fortunate, as otherwise he could have been executed for treason, an event that would doubtless have drawn even larger crowds than his famously full inauguration, especially if it saw a repeat performance from the TwirlTasTix baton-twirling group. Overnight, the Republicans had constructed a paper-thin plausible denial,...
It's a tag bout to drive wrestling enthusiasts wild. On guitars, Holland's Terrie Ex and Scotland's Andy Moor, from Amsterdam's anarcho-punks The Ex; on drums, the Norwegian improviser Paal Nilssen-Love; and on tenor, Chicago's free jazz drill sergeant, Ken Vandermark.
The twelve minute appetiser Knuckle Cracking Party lets the guitarists spew electric sparks at each other uninterrupted.
Then the half hour Chunk Of Lung adds Nilssen-Love's pounding percussion and Vandermark's bubbling horn, a pot of coffee too long on a stove, and dares an unexpectedly exposing tenderness around the twenty minute mark. Seconds away!
Stewart Lee
2011-09-11T20:45:30+01:00
It's a tag bout to drive wrestling enthusiasts wild. On guitars, Holland's Terrie Ex and Scotland's Andy Moor, from Amsterdam's anarcho-punks The Ex; on drums, the Norwegian improviser Paal Nilssen-Love; and on tenor, Chicago's free jazz drill sergeant, Ken Vandermark. The twelve minute appetiser Knuckle Cracking Party lets the guitarists spew electric sparks at each other uninterrupted. Then the half hour Chunk Of Lung adds Nilssen-Love's pounding percussion and Vandermark's bubbling horn, a pot of coffee too long on a stove, and dares an unexpectedly exposing tenderness around the twenty minute mark. Seconds away!
You might think that after so many visits to Brighton, including three last year, Stewart Lee would be comfortable in the familiar right-on cocoon of Brighton.
But the veteran stand-up derided the sold-out Dome from the moment he took the stage, mercilessly mocking the audience for “not knowing any things” and for being too stupid to appreciate the sophistication of his writing.
Such an aggressive approach would be suicide for almost anyone else, but for Lee it was all part of the act.
You got the real impression he hoped the Mock the Week loving newbie would be thoroughly alienated, while he took pride in quoting a zero star review from the Daily Telegraph.
Delving into the tragi-comic, he took particular glee in mentally unravelling and acting out a slow death on stage.
Even the untimely deaths of comic friends were mined for material - mainly to lambast audiences for pushing his peers to suicide.
This was the final leg of shows which will become his fourth Comedy Vehicle series on BBC. Aside from the meta diversions there were some very funny jokes too – delivered in Lee’s inimitable deadpan style.
Still on a slow-rising career trajectory spanning 27 years, Lee never made anything easy for his audience.
But while in person Lee would be borderline sociopathic, his comic creation was outright hilarious.
Four stars
Stewart Lee
2016-01-28T18:16:56+00:00
You might think that after so many visits to Brighton, including three last year, Stewart Lee would be comfortable in the familiar right-on cocoon of Brighton. But the veteran stand-up derided the sold-out Dome from the moment he took the stage, mercilessly mocking the audience for “not knowing any things” and for being too stupid to appreciate the sophistication of his writing. Such an aggressive approach would be suicide for almost anyone else, but for Lee it was all part of the act. You got the real impression he hoped the Mock the Week loving newbie would be thoroughly alienated, while he took pride in quoting a zero star review from the Daily Telegraph. Delving into the tragi-comic, he took particular glee in mentally unravelling and acting out a slow death on stage. Even the untimely deaths of comic friends were mined for material - mainly to lambast audiences for pushing his peers to suicide. This was the final leg of shows which will become his fourth Comedy Vehicle series on BBC. Aside from the meta diversions there were some very funny jokes too – delivered in Lee’s inimitable deadpan style. Still on a slow-rising career trajectory spanning 27 years, Lee never made anything easy for his audience. But while in person Lee would be borderline sociopathic, his comic creation was outright hilarious. Four stars
He spent a lot of the first half of his show Content Provider, which is nearing the end of its 18- month tour, lamenting the fact that only a small section of the audience got his jokes, the venue was half empty, and he got a better reception in King’s Lynn.
While he may not have got as big a laugh for some of the jokes as expected, which resulted in him painstakingly dissecting it to explain its intended humour, this grumpy demeanour is all part of the act.
With his material ranging from Brexit and Game of Thrones to bondage in the 1930s and annoying under 40s who drink yogurts from pouches for breakfast, it was varied, original and clever.
Whereas the first half felt like a diatribe against the world, including us fans, with plenty of ad-libbing, the second part felt calmer and more storytelling in its nature, less bothered about how much laugh each joke received.
However the reason he wins so many industry accolades is that it is very much crafted - as if his shows are presented for a study on how comedy should be done.
There are few comedians this gifted on the circuit, so please come back to Ipswich again. Your like-minded out of touch metropolitan liberal elite need you.
Stewart Lee
2018-03-26T22:49:59+01:00
He spent a lot of the first half of his show Content Provider, which is nearing the end of its 18- month tour, lamenting the fact that only a small section of the audience got his jokes, the venue was half empty, and he got a better reception in King’s Lynn. While he may not have got as big a laugh for some of the jokes as expected, which resulted in him painstakingly dissecting it to explain its intended humour, this grumpy demeanour is all part of the act. With his material ranging from Brexit and Game of Thrones to bondage in the 1930s and annoying under 40s who drink yogurts from pouches for breakfast, it was varied, original and clever. Whereas the first half felt like a diatribe against the world, including us fans, with plenty of ad-libbing, the second part felt calmer and more storytelling in its nature, less bothered about how much laugh each joke received. However the reason he wins so many industry accolades is that it is very much crafted - as if his shows are presented for a study on how comedy should be done. There are few comedians this gifted on the circuit, so please come back to Ipswich again. Your like-minded out of touch metropolitan liberal elite need you.
PudCast family, we're rolling out the red carpet for comedy royalty in the shape of Stewart Lee.
He's been bringing his humour the stage, TV, radio and more since the 90s and has known Paul just as long. With a style that is observational, topical, and sometimes biting he rarely holds back but in this episode of the PudCast we ask the question..."Is Stewart Lee just a character?".
Check out Stewart's projects, he's also back on tour!
Whilst your fingers are busy see www.paulchowdhry.com for Paul's latest live dates as well and get them tapping the subscribe and follow button for the PudCast.
Stewart Lee
2021-07-01T13:57:26+01:00
PudCast family, we're rolling out the red carpet for comedy royalty in the shape of Stewart Lee. He's been bringing his humour the stage, TV, radio and more since the 90s and has known Paul just as long. With a style that is observational, topical, and sometimes biting he rarely holds back but in this episode of the PudCast we ask the question..."Is Stewart Lee just a character?". Check out Stewart's projects, he's also back on tour! King Rocker - https://kingrockerfilm.com Unreliable Narrator - https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/radio_appearances/stewart-lee-unreliable-narrator Whilst your fingers are busy see www.paulchowdhry.com for Paul's latest live dates as well and get them tapping the subscribe and follow button for the PudCast.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I ranged on Saturday afternoons across the ravaged industrial-revolution landscapes of the West Midlands, arguing politics, progressive rock and religion with a gang of similarly precocious, shandy-fuelled ranters, on a succession of free public transport options. We deserved to be beaten soundly by strangers. And often were. But we saw ourselves in the grand tradition of Birmingham’s intellectual sects – the Lunar Society of Handsworth, the Birmingham Surrealists of the Kardomah Café and, from Shard End, both the Electric Light Orchestra and the radical splinter group ELO Part II (featuring Bev Bevan and Kelly Groucutt), formed as as result of philosophical differences.
One Saturday afternoon, when we were 16 or so, we descended drunkenly from the lush green archipelago of the Lickey Hills to the grounds of Oratory House, to smoke upon the shared grave of the 19th-century theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman and his friend Ambrose St John. Newman had asked to be buried with Ambrose, presumably in light of the scarcity of serviceable holes in overcrowded Victorian Birmingham. Our A-streamer friend Plimpton, a tortured, repressed homosexual Christian with a Cambridge classics scholarship looming, said the Latin headstone read: “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth.” We made it our motto and gave our adolescent philosophy group a name, in honour of Newman’s friend. We were the New Ambrosians, and the world was ours for the taking.
On the way home, some Zulu Warriors, local football hooligans, clubbed me to the concrete with a rolled newspaper near Paradise Circus for “looking gay” and spat on me. They knew not what they did. Such were the sufferings and degradations of a New Ambrosian, but they would not break me. Sadly, the New Ambrosians were soon to divide into the Original New Ambrosians and radical splinter group the New New Ambrosians (featuring Plimpton and Speccy Hawkins), as a result of philosophical differences.
I lost touch with Plimpton, who struggled to reconcile his faith with his sexuality throughout his life. He was last seen, some time at the turn of the century, by none other than Speccy Hawkins. Hawkins’s contact lenses had clocked his fellow New New Ambrosian, sat alone in soiled trousers at Newman’s headstone, as he cruised past the graveyard on Leach Green Lane in his grey Ford Focus.
On Tuesday night, along with many other self-congratulatory Observer readers, I saw the young rap singer Kate Tempest looking and sounding like the prophet this absurd age deserves, an Abiezer Coppe for the Deliveroo generation. If we were young today my fellow Original New Ambrosians would have loved her as I did. I went home, anxieties amplified, values confirmed, an evening well spent.
Meanwhile, beyond the Hammersmith Apollo, police job definitions deformed to encompass arresting environmentalists who will, within years, be hailed unequivocally as heroes by a drowning, burning, starving humanity. Struggling with implications beyond his paygrade, a police spokesman on LBC on Tuesday complained that driving vans of officers from Scotland to capture protesters was actually increasing emissions. It was clear that the environmental impact caused by crushing the demonstrations was weighing heavily upon his conscience, a sure sign that Extinction Rebellion’s message was getting through.
But in the midst of all this misery, some good news. One of the Catholic church’s marketing strengths is that it has a patron saint for everything. St Adrian of Nicomedia is the patron saint of arms dealers and butchers; St Jesús-Malverde is the patron saint of drug-traffickers and bandits; St Maturinus is the patron saint of comic actors and plumbers generally, and of sailors, but only if they hail from Brittany. (I can’t help thinking the Panini company are missing a major collectible sticker-set market here.)
So weep no more, disappointed liberals in the Age of Hate. Last Sunday the pope himself, who often seems to be operating to an agenda designed to amuse him personally in private at a later date, made a saint of a man who was probably gay, and hailed from Birmingham, where homophobic hate crime is up 333% in the wake of School Gate-gate’s religious aggravations; a man who, says Father Ignatius Harrison, the provost of Birmingham Oratory, “would have been a Remainer”. In the shape of Cardinal John Henry Newman, we now have a patron saint for Remainers, homosexuals and people from Birmingham. All three of these are traduced and demonised groups whom Christ would obviously have held close to his heart, as he did prostitutes, lepers and people who worked for the Inland Revenue.
There were some teething troubles in Newman’s canonisation. The church had tried to separate Newman’s remains from his friend Ambrose’s in 2008 but found none left. The Oratory website explains: “There are no First Class relics of Saint John Henry Newman available for distribution.” Presumably that’s what happens if you bury a saint in a damp city, and it explains the Brummie saying, “It’s so black over Bill’s mother’s we’ll have no First Class relics available for distribution.”
Late on Wednesday night I found myself wondering what my old friends the Original New Ambrosians would think of Newman’s sainthood. I even found myself remembering fondly the traitorous New New Ambrosians (featuring Plimpton and Speccy Hawkins), whose dissenting views on the relative merits of the second Hatfield and the North album no longer seemed important. Then the phone rang. “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth,” said a shaking voice, and the line went dead. It was Plimpton, 40 years since I last heard him. I tried unsuccessfully to call the number back. On Thursday morning, an anonymous package arrived, a lone femur swaddled in bubble wrap. Plimpton, it appeared, had made his peace with his god in his own particular way. I expected no less from a New Ambrosian.
Stewart Lee
2019-10-20T20:47:07+01:00
As a teenager in the 1970s, I ranged on Saturday afternoons across the ravaged industrial-revolution landscapes of the West Midlands, arguing politics, progressive rock and religion with a gang of similarly precocious, shandy-fuelled ranters, on a succession of free public transport options. We deserved to be beaten soundly by strangers. And often were. But we saw ourselves in the grand tradition of Birmingham’s intellectual sects – the Lunar Society of Handsworth, the Birmingham Surrealists of the Kardomah Café and, from Shard End, both the Electric Light Orchestra and the radical splinter group ELO Part II (featuring Bev Bevan and Kelly Groucutt), formed as as result of philosophical differences. One Saturday afternoon, when we were 16 or so, we descended drunkenly from the lush green archipelago of the Lickey Hills to the grounds of Oratory House, to smoke upon the shared grave of the 19th-century theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman and his friend Ambrose St John. Newman had asked to be buried with Ambrose, presumably in light of the scarcity of serviceable holes in overcrowded Victorian Birmingham. Our A-streamer friend Plimpton, a tortured, repressed homosexual Christian with a Cambridge classics scholarship looming, said the Latin headstone read: “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth.” We made it our motto and gave our adolescent philosophy group a name, in honour of Newman’s friend. We were the New Ambrosians, and the world was ours for the taking. On the way home, some Zulu Warriors, local football hooligans, clubbed me to the concrete with a rolled newspaper near Paradise Circus for “looking gay” and spat on me. They knew not what they did. Such were the sufferings and degradations of a New Ambrosian, but they would not break me. Sadly, the New Ambrosians were soon to divide into the Original New Ambrosians and...
Three decades after its initial release, the former advertising jingle writer Jeff Wayne wants to take his era-defining concept album adaptation of HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds on the road. The live version of the thirteen-million selling 1978 classic is to be a mixture of stadium rock show and musical theatre, two simplistic forms of large scale live art not renowned for their ability to communicate the kind of intellectually slippery knowledge embodied by Wells’ book. Today, most people’s idea of the Victorian science-fiction classic is second or third hand, and takes the shape of the iconic images of Martian Tripod fighting machines, handed down through often cavalier cinema adaptations. But The War Of The Worlds is not so much a novel, as a meditation on the era of Empire, with supporting dramatic evidence. Civilisation’s strengths and weaknesses are exposed as it is put under pressure by seemingly unstoppable alien colonists.
Though music fans of a certain age may wrongly remember Wayne’s progressive rock folly as a fabulously overblown piece of kitsch, where Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott did battle with Martian invaders in a duet with Julie Covington, and David Essex argued with Richard Burton about a Nietzschean notion of mankind’s manifest destiny, it was in fact not insensible to the peculiar strengths of Wells’ original. Abetted by various big names of the day that Punk was about to consign to oblivion, Wayne attempted to render Wells’ terrifying vision as best he could. And he pulled it off. The War Of The Worlds album is sincere in its intentions, genuinely gripping, and ceaselessly inventive, given the technological limitations of the time. Unlike Ben Elton’s Queen musical, Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds was not performed ironically or in inverted commas by its participants, as if in some pre-emptive act of damage limitation. Everyone gave their all. And you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the Justin Hayward’s Forever Autumn, the journalist character’s lament for his lost love, even thought it began life as a Lego commercial.
At 62, Jeff Wayne, also an ex-tennis pro, exudes a healthy glow. And he loves HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds. “There’s no doubt that when I approached it my dream was to write honestly and passionately. What made me want to attempt making the album wasn’t the sci-fi ‘shoot ‘em up and knock ‘em down ‘ part of it, but the fact that HG was writing about Martians, not as some freaky aliens, but as an analogy for good and evil. He was criticising the British Empire, which at the time was spreading its tentacles around the world. It resonates today because it doesn’t matter which side of the coin of democracy or religion you are on, it’s all about conquering or being conquered. That’s what suckered me into HG Wells.” Wayne’s enthusiasm drove the project along. “Two thirds of the money in the album was my life savings so I did it my way. This was going to be out there on its own, whether it was good bad or indifferent.” Wayne’s stepmother Doreen Wayne, author of the 1968 romantic best-seller Love Is A Well-Raped Word, stream-lined and scripted the story, softening some its more unforgiving philosophical aspects, but with such economy that her opening line, as intoned by Richard Burton on the album, now sounds definitive. “No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.” Cue the music.
In the Autumn of last year, Wayne was to be found in his massive country pile towering over models of the The War Of The Worlds live experience, like some insane Titan. “There’s two different types of production planned. This production,” he says, pointing at miniature Martian fighting machines stomping through a stadium, “is not the Wembley touring one. This is giant scale, for audiences of approximately 25 000 up. We want to start it off in Beijing just before the Olympic games and then tour very selective venues, like how Cirque Du Soleil tour, taking a week or two to set up and then doing thirty nights.” Wayne turns his attention to a different model. “The tour that I am doing with The War Of The Worlds is this arena sized tour, going to Wembley Arena, the Manchester Evening News Arena, places like that. I’m conducting a ten-piece band and a forty eight-piece string section. There’ll be a forty foot high Martian Fighting Machine, and this will be very impressive for the audience, and it will fire a heat ray, which is a Martian weapon, and the hull swivels and tilts and telescopes up and down a bit. And we are using large projections of animations and still images and lights and surround-sound so hopefully we’ll entertain the audience.”
So far so good. But Wayne continues. “Anybody who knows the album knows there’s certain parts that are performed as characters, and those are being performed live. The one exception is Richard Burton. He’s coming to life as a three dimensional head that suspends over the audience doing exactly what has been heard on the album.” Dave Clark of the Dave Clarke Five directed a hologram of Lawrence Olivier’s head in his 1986 West End musical TIME. It was not received well. The windswept desert of large-scale commercial theatre is littered with enormous abandoned holographic heads, their half sunken shattered visages serving as a terrible warning to ambitious producers. But of course, technology has moved on. “We are digitising images that Richard Burton’s late wife Sally has provided for us,” explains Wayne, who now has the air of Doctor Frankenstein, “The whole process is that there is a gentleman who is an uncanny Richard Burton look-alike and, with make-up and bits and pieces he really becomes a very much genuine looking look-alike of Richard Burton. He is filmed and the digitised images go over him then he sits for a sculpture of his head which then gets projected onto this 3D head and it becomes Richard Burton.” Ironically, Wells’ novel addresses man’s hubris, and his arrogant belief that science can make him a God. Perhaps Jeff Wayne needs to read it again.
This possible error of taste apart, if anyone is equipped to bring Wells’ novel into the unlikely form of a stadium-sized, rock circus it is Jeff Wayne. He has a fanatical enthusiasm for Wells’ book, and having secured the rights to it in all media except film in 1975, has a paternal, protective relationship with the text. Whether Wells would approve, however, of the mobile phone ring-tones available with the new edition of the album is debateable. Wayne’s album itself has survived for thirty years with its legend unblemished. But it is of its time. Why would Wayne risk puncturing the hermetically sealed bubble that surrounds its mid-70’s genesis, and compromising its integrity by staging it? “Well, why don’t you ask me that at the end of the tour, and let’s see if we haven’t blown it.”, he laughs. You can’t help but wish him well.
Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds opens on the 13th April Bournemouth International Centre
Stewart Lee
2006-03-12T18:43:44+00:00
Three decades after its initial release, the former advertising jingle writer Jeff Wayne wants to take his era-defining concept album adaptation of HG Wells’ The War Of The Worlds on the road. The live version of the thirteen-million selling 1978 classic is to be a mixture of stadium rock show and musical theatre, two simplistic forms of large scale live art not renowned for their ability to communicate the kind of intellectually slippery knowledge embodied by Wells’ book. Today, most people’s idea of the Victorian science-fiction classic is second or third hand, and takes the shape of the iconic images of Martian Tripod fighting machines, handed down through often cavalier cinema adaptations. But The War Of The Worlds is not so much a novel, as a meditation on the era of Empire, with supporting dramatic evidence. Civilisation’s strengths and weaknesses are exposed as it is put under pressure by seemingly unstoppable alien colonists. Though music fans of a certain age may wrongly remember Wayne’s progressive rock folly as a fabulously overblown piece of kitsch, where Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott did battle with Martian invaders in a duet with Julie Covington, and David Essex argued with Richard Burton about a Nietzschean notion of mankind’s manifest destiny, it was in fact not insensible to the peculiar strengths of Wells’ original. Abetted by various big names of the day that Punk was about to consign to oblivion, Wayne attempted to render Wells’ terrifying vision as best he could. And he pulled it off. The War Of The Worlds album is sincere in its intentions, genuinely gripping, and ceaselessly inventive, given the technological limitations of the time. Unlike Ben Elton’s Queen musical, Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds was not performed ironically or in inverted commas by its participants, as if in some...
Mark Jorgensen visits the Lowry for an alternative comedy experience
IF comedians were films – which granted, they aren't - Stewart Lee is the type you'd watch at the Cornerhouse rather than the Odeon.
He is the only comedian in the world who can tell you the exact time, content and rationale of a 'joke' well in advance, yet still make it funny.
The cover of his book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate – The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, proudly features two quotes; one from The Sun referring to him as the worst comedian in Britain, while the other from The Guardian dubs him the best.
While my opinion is more than firmly pitched with the latter, there is a distinct divide with Stewart Lee that either you 'get him' or you don't.
It's worth noting, of course, this is very much intentional on Lee's part.
His act is meticulously and brilliantly crafted with an intentionally anti-comedy steer, leaving him often (over)dubbed a 'comedian's comedian'.
Much A-Stew About Nothing is Lee's latest tour and his introduction at the Lowry explained that this show will comprise of three main segments which will go on to form the new series of his excellent BBC3 show Comedy Vehicle, along with "seven minutes of optional encore", written on a piece of paper.
The suggestion of an 'optional encore' underpins how Lee approaches the audience. For an act to introduce at the start that he has an encore lazily prepared "if you want it", illustrates Lee's intentionally sneery-yet-almost-sneakily-affectionate approach to his show. It's a monologue that you are there to observe, rather than participate.
With this in mind, he explained that the last time he played at the Lowry, the show was ruined by a "crazy Maltese gentleman" in the crowd, resulting in Lee having to personally pay back the audience ticket fees. Whether this is true was unclear, but it gave the perfect base to craft his inimitably tongue-in-cheek contempt for the audience and his surroundings.
Although perhaps an unlikely yet earnest slip of the tongue, 'accidentally' referring to being in Manchester as opposed to Salford (which he later referred to as being "Just a couple of museums and a dock – not even a book shop"), he used both qualms brilliantly as sarcastic reference points throughout the show, casually and almost sympathetically, later referring to Greater Manchester as a 'racially-divided EDL heartland'.
The subject matter for the show included politics, Thatcher's death, artisan alcohol 'connoisseurs', a wildlife piece about Johnny Morris, but undoubtedly the stand-out part of the show was a section on UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall's comments on skilled and educated Bulgarian migrants who come to the UK for low paid manual labour work.
Lee recalled Nuttall (or 'Nuttalls' as he perpetually and intentionally mispronounced) suggesting they should stay at home for the benefit of their own country ("as we all know, one of UKIP's fundamental objectives is a commitment to the development of the Bulgarian economy").
Using the old 'they come over here taking our jobs...' adage, he expertly ridiculed the comments using gradually increasing and repetitive fervour; from the Huguenots of medieval France, to the Anglo-Saxons, Neolithics, to the first fish to ever set fin onto land before finishing wonderfully on grey matter.
"Before there was nothing, a void, and we liked that. Then you come over here, with your big bang, forming the basis for everything that has ever existed, ever." He concluded that with his level of insight, perhaps Nuttall(s) should have stayed in Liverpool for the better of the city, much to the approval of the Manchester, sorry Salford, crowd.
The second half of the show in particular was Stewart Lee at his very best.
The ability to take a relatively innocuous statement or notion, pick a standpoint (usually the opposite to what he actually thinks), lead the audience on a bizarre journey of repetition - with the odd nugget of intelligent detail or insight casually dropped in just to confirm if you weren't already aware that he knows exactly what he's talking about – almost past the point of being funny and back again, is what makes him arguably the finest stand up in the country.
On the strength of the material in Much A-Stew About Nothing, the next series of Comedy Vehicle promises to be as good as I hoped it would be, and I really can't recommend enough you getting tickets next time he's in Manchester.
Sorry, Salford.
Whatever.
Stewart Lee
2013-10-08T18:22:48+01:00
Mark Jorgensen visits the Lowry for an alternative comedy experience IF comedians were films – which granted, they aren't - Stewart Lee is the type you'd watch at the Cornerhouse rather than the Odeon. He is the only comedian in the world who can tell you the exact time, content and rationale of a 'joke' well in advance, yet still make it funny. The cover of his book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate – The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, proudly features two quotes; one from The Sun referring to him as the worst comedian in Britain, while the other from The Guardian dubs him the best. While my opinion is more than firmly pitched with the latter, there is a distinct divide with Stewart Lee that either you 'get him' or you don't. It's worth noting, of course, this is very much intentional on Lee's part. His act is meticulously and brilliantly crafted with an intentionally anti-comedy steer, leaving him often (over)dubbed a 'comedian's comedian'. Much A-Stew About Nothing is Lee's latest tour and his introduction at the Lowry explained that this show will comprise of three main segments which will go on to form the new series of his excellent BBC3 show Comedy Vehicle, along with "seven minutes of optional encore", written on a piece of paper. The suggestion of an 'optional encore' underpins how Lee approaches the audience. For an act to introduce at the start that he has an encore lazily prepared "if you want it", illustrates Lee's intentionally sneery-yet-almost-sneakily-affectionate approach to his show. It's a monologue that you are there to observe, rather than participate. With this in mind, he explained that the last time he played at the Lowry, the show was ruined by a "crazy Maltese gentleman" in the crowd,...
Saturday: It is just under a week until my TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2.
I’ve been a stand-up comedian for 20 years, and it’s the first TV I’ve done for more than a decade. But filming is all over now, so I take my two-year-old son out for the day.
First we ride on the bus from Hackney to St Pancras, where I buy rail tickets for next weekend’s escape to Europe. We’re planning to be away for the whole run of the series in case of an unforeseen Jonathan Ross-gate type scandal, or a repeat of the largely groundless fuss which attached itself to Jerry Springer The Opera, which I co-wrote, four years ago.
Next we walk to a Caffè Nero in Camden to meet my live producer David Johnson, and sort out some paperwork about a stand-up tour I’ll be doing in the autumn. I have to sort the dates out now, and think of a title, even though I don’t know what the show will be about yet and, rather worryingly, have no ideas.
Since I became a parent I love Caffè Nero, as they will always microwave the little pots of risotto or mash potato chicken mush we mix up for the kid. Today I also have a Caffè Nero loyalty card full of stamps, which I aim to cash in for a free coffee.
But Caffè Nero will not accept my loyalty card. Two of the nine Caffè Nero logos, an “N” in a circle, have been stamped using blue ink, not red ink. They are only allowed to accept the red ink stamps. I wonder what they think I have done? It’s obvious to me that the stamps are at least from a branch of Caffè Nero somewhere, or else they’re saying I have gone to the trouble of fabricating a Caffè Nero stamp of my own, but for some reason only used it to steal 2/9th of the price of a cup of coffee.
I feel like registering a serious complaint and then I realise – this sort of incident is a perfect framing device for an hour and a half of stand-up by a middle-aged comedian complaining about his frustrations with the world. I put the Caffè Nero loyalty card in my wallet and the tour show begins to write itself in my head.
Sunday: My wife and fellow stand-up is currently preparing previews of her August Edinburgh Fringe show, about her time working on the The Daily Mail’s gossip column. She feels that the painting “The Singing Butler”, by the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, in which a selfless butler uses an umbrella to shelter a pair of waltzing sophisticates on a windswept beach, echoes one of the themes of her show – that the hired help can only look into the world of wealth from a distance. I am dispatched, along with our son, by bus to London’s West End to buy a print of the picture, which is apparently the top-seller in Britain today.
As you may know, Vettriano is irked by the refusal of the British art establishment to acknowledge him, despite his popularity. And, searching for his painting along Oxford Street, where ideas of taste and aspiration blurred and bent, I begin to sympathise with his annoyance.
None of the major department stores stocks the Vettriano print. One home furnishings expert reacts rather stuffily when I ask about it – as if I’d said I was going to hang that old Athena poster of the lady tennis player scratching her bum in the Sistine Chapel – and directs me to the store’s own range of prints: images of boats and harbours and flowers and cats created with no higher purpose than simply filling space and matching fabrics. And yet these stores seem to think that Vettriano was beneath them.
Where will I find him in London’s West End? Perhaps around Leicester Square, in poster racks in tourist tat shops, alongside life-size images of Lily Allen and a pot-smoking alien saying “Take me to your dealer”? Is that his constituency? It appears not. It’s cold and raining, and I head up Charing Cross Road for a final search.
And there’s “The Singing Butler”, in a proper swanky print shop, selling alongside Monet, whose status has transferred over the years from outrageous provocateur to chocolate box lid content provider, and Munch, who gave us “The Epic of the Slavs”, but also dozens of nightclub posters and soap tins.
I phone my wife to see what size print she wanted. Later, I wonder why I did this. Was I being cautious? Or, despite my newfound sympathy for Vettriano, did some unresolved part of me not want the print seller to think I was buying “The Singing Butler” for myself?
On stage that night, upstairs in a Camden pub, my wife is doing a show and tell about the print of “The Singing Butler”. Initially, people laugh at the image – it’s so familiar, and the shabby stage is such an odd context in which to see it – and then gradually it starts to mean something quietly profound, that makes one wonder how it could ever have become such a mass-consumed item in the first place.
Monday: I spent four years working on the new TV series. I’m very pleased with it. It’s a record of the kind of comedy I’ve been doing for the past decade or so, caught on film before it withers and I, inevitably, lose my knack. It’s also the first time I’ve ever actually really been paid anything substantial for anything, which matters more now than it did when I had no responsibilities. Soon we will be proper London middle class. We will go on holidays. We will eat cheese. One day, the baby will sleep in his own room.
I should be relieved. All the work is done. So why then, do I wake up frozen and shaking, feeling crushed and terrified? My head hurts. I can’t stand up.
When I was a teenager, neck deep in A-levels and Oxbridge exams, I used to get similar psychedelic fevers, often depending on which album I’d listened to before I went to bed. After Black Uhuru’s Red I woke up in a hallucinatory state being crushed by millions of falling Rastafarians and even more of them tipped on to me off the top of the doorframe when our Jack Russell terrier ran into the room.
What am I afraid of? Why do I feel sick? I suppose it’s all very well, being an abstract quantity, getting good reviews in broadsheets for live shows that most people will never actually see; being the kind of person that Newsnight Review contributors are obliged to fabricate an opinion about, whether they have seen me or not. But now there will be an actual piece of work out there, which anyone can watch. Will the bubble burst? I was hoping that the TV shows might, even if a second series isn’t commissioned, push my live audiences up above the 200 mark. But what if, having seen me close up, and learned all my little linguistic tricks, no one ever comes again?
The boy came home from nursery and gave me a kiss. We had pork chops for tea. I lay on the sofa in a kind of coma and watched Julia Bradbury on BBC4, walking along a disused railway line.
The first episode of ‘Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’ is on BBC2 on March 16 at 10pm. Stewart Lee’s ‘41st Best Stand-Up Ever’ is available on DVD
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Stewart Lee
2009-03-14T11:32:12+00:00
Saturday: It is just under a week until my TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2. I’ve been a stand-up comedian for 20 years, and it’s the first TV I’ve done for more than a decade. But filming is all over now, so I take my two-year-old son out for the day. First we ride on the bus from Hackney to St Pancras, where I buy rail tickets for next weekend’s escape to Europe. We’re planning to be away for the whole run of the series in case of an unforeseen Jonathan Ross-gate type scandal, or a repeat of the largely groundless fuss which attached itself to Jerry Springer The Opera, which I co-wrote, four years ago. Next we walk to a Caffè Nero in Camden to meet my live producer David Johnson, and sort out some paperwork about a stand-up tour I’ll be doing in the autumn. I have to sort the dates out now, and think of a title, even though I don’t know what the show will be about yet and, rather worryingly, have no ideas. Since I became a parent I love Caffè Nero, as they will always microwave the little pots of risotto or mash potato chicken mush we mix up for the kid. Today I also have a Caffè Nero loyalty card full of stamps, which I aim to cash in for a free coffee. But Caffè Nero will not accept my loyalty card. Two of the nine Caffè Nero logos, an “N” in a circle, have been stamped using blue ink, not red ink. They are only allowed to accept the red ink stamps. I wonder what they think I have done? It’s obvious to me that the stamps are at least from a branch of Caffè Nero somewhere, or else...
They say you should never meet your heroes. But they don't say anything about them meeting each other, so I had very little idea of what to expect at Kings Place on Monday night when comedian Stewart Lee performed John Cage. In the event, this was a hugely enjoyable short recital, though I do wonder if it wasn't a bit funnier than should really be expected from a Cage gig.
Cage's composition-cum-party-game Indeterminacy has a slightly confusing history, existing first of all as a recording made by Cage with pianist David Tudor in 1959. It's a set of short, first-person stories by Cage to be read out such that each takes a minute, and it can be performed alongside or not alongside instrumental performance, which can basically be anything. Here, pianists Tania Chen and Steve Beresford provided some simultaneous though unrelated improvising at or near a piano while Lee read out 40 of Cage's strange fables.
If I'm completely honest, I'm not quite sure if Lee was uniquely suited to this role or uniquely unsuited to it. As evinced by his standup shows, he has an incredible gift for finding punchlines where there should rightly be none - at one moment in his last TV series he managed to make the word “plain", said blandly with around 30 seconds' silence either side of it, completely hilarious. And so, inevitably, he made all of Cage's anecdotes sound like leftfield jokes. Very funny ones, of course, but I do wonder if this was exactly what the piece was meant to be. If it was meant to be anything, that is; it's hard to tell.
This is not to say that I wasn't in fits of laughter. Watching Steve Beresford throw a ping-pong ball into the body of a grand piano while Lee read out three short Japanese poems was really, genuinely funny, for some reason, and the 40 minutes of this performance flew by in a way that experimental music evenings (much as I love them) rarely do. It's a wonderful tribute to the humour inherent in Cage's work - though the combination of Lee's brilliantly straight delivery and a particularly wacky range of props for Chen and Beresford to improvise with did have the effect of exaggerating this comic element. This must have been a lot of the audience's first exposure to Cage's music live, and it wasn't a totally representative experience.
The performance also highlighted the problematic nature of Cage's relationship with improvisation. While many of Cage's scores allow performers huge amounts of freedom, this doesn't turn them into improvisations: rather, his pieces become fascinating because of the tension which exists between the precision of his musical scores and the bizarrely broad range of outcomes which these scores permit.
Alan Tomlinson's fascinating introduction to the Solo for Sliding Trombone, which he performed in the first half, demonstrated this well: in this piece, the size of a note in the score determines - at the performer's discretion - either the length or volume (or both) at which it is to be performed.
The sound which results is hence completely different each time the piece is played, but nonetheless still controlled in a very tight way by Cage's instructions. Hence, opening the evening with a series of short improvisations by the performers was not really completely Cageian in spirit. And particularly with the comic element always so clearly at the forefront - Tomlinson's trombone improvisation involved him manically taking his instrument apart, muting it with a table, and other crazy antics - the connection to Cage seemed all but lost.
Maybe I'm being pedantic though - this was a very entertaining evening, and it can only be a good thing that Cage is getting such wide exposure. This might not have been the most completely faithful Cage tribute in his anniversary year, but it was certainly the funniest, and I'm delighted that these two heroes of mine have met each other. I only hope that “Bob Dylan reads Umberto Eco" comes to town soon.
Stewart Lee
2012-09-27T21:45:26+01:00
They say you should never meet your heroes. But they don't say anything about them meeting each other, so I had very little idea of what to expect at Kings Place on Monday night when comedian Stewart Lee performed John Cage. In the event, this was a hugely enjoyable short recital, though I do wonder if it wasn't a bit funnier than should really be expected from a Cage gig. Cage's composition-cum-party-game Indeterminacy has a slightly confusing history, existing first of all as a recording made by Cage with pianist David Tudor in 1959. It's a set of short, first-person stories by Cage to be read out such that each takes a minute, and it can be performed alongside or not alongside instrumental performance, which can basically be anything. Here, pianists Tania Chen and Steve Beresford provided some simultaneous though unrelated improvising at or near a piano while Lee read out 40 of Cage's strange fables. If I'm completely honest, I'm not quite sure if Lee was uniquely suited to this role or uniquely unsuited to it. As evinced by his standup shows, he has an incredible gift for finding punchlines where there should rightly be none - at one moment in his last TV series he managed to make the word “plain", said blandly with around 30 seconds' silence either side of it, completely hilarious. And so, inevitably, he made all of Cage's anecdotes sound like leftfield jokes. Very funny ones, of course, but I do wonder if this was exactly what the piece was meant to be. If it was meant to be anything, that is; it's hard to tell. This is not to say that I wasn't in fits of laughter. Watching Steve Beresford throw a ping-pong ball into the body of a grand piano while Lee...
You should pretty much know what to expect when you buy a ticket to see Stewart Lee. If you don’t you have most definitely gone to the wrong gig. In the final year of his forties, Lee is not one to suffer fools gladly – not that he ever has. And as ever – we, his loyal fee-paying audience, are the butt of his jokes. There are very few comedians who can make a whole room laugh so much at their own inadequacies.
Stewart Lee is still bitter from his BAFTA-winning BBC 2 show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle not being recommissioned after its fourth series and he has no qualms in sharing. His stage persona is not just of arrogance but we would be mistaken in thinking he believes himself a demi-God of stand-up comedy. Boasting four and five-star reviews of his tour so far, he firmly asserts that if we don’t find him funny the problem will not be on his side of the stage.
Lee has often been described as a surreal satirist throughout his career and there is no avoiding the political landscape in Content Provider – no matter how much he states he didn’t want to write a show about Brexit or the rise of Trump. For years Lee has had the pleasure of referring to his leftist audience as the bourgeoisie and tonight we are lambasted many times for being a “metropolitan liberal elite”. He knows his audiences’ Achilles heel and he isn’t afraid to give it repeated swift kicks. When writing about Lee’s stagecraft it is impossible not to refer to his self-referential cleverness as he deconstructs everything about what he is and what he does: his role as a stand-up comedian and the actual jokes themselves. He loves to play with his audience and keep them guessing what is actually scripted and what he can improvise in the moment after thirty years of being one of Britain’s most respected comedians.
The first half of Lee’s show is a superb, polished hour of comedy. He doesn’t hold any prisoners and delivers everything we love about him with such delicious viciousness. His set, cruelly, is constructed of mounds of other comedian’s DVDs he claims to have bought from the internet for one pence or the odd fifty pence in a charity shop. The cheapest you can buy a second-hand copy of one of his DVDs, he gleefully informs us, is for about £3.60. And at one point takes delight in trampling on and kicking over piles of the worthless artifacts he describes as the cheapest building blocks available. The second half, however, lacks the drive and bite he so successfully establishes. With a similar running time to the first half, the attention in the room begins to wane a little as his topic strays to the imagined sex life of the increasingly elderly population. Without his trademark self-aggrandising, he occasionally slips into the realm of the stand-up comedians he tells us he so vehemently despises.
Despite seeing him several times over the years Stewart Lee never fails to impress. With such carefully constructed turns of phrase, it is no surprise that at one point of the show he even quotes himself from an interview in a broadsheet newspaper. After years of shunning television panel shows, it seems that TV has finally shunned Lee despite the critical acclaim he received. He has always been a live stand-up, first and foremost, and now entering his fifties one hopes he doesn’t want to slow down anytime soon.
Stewart Lee
2017-05-22T15:50:20+01:00
You should pretty much know what to expect when you buy a ticket to see Stewart Lee. If you don’t you have most definitely gone to the wrong gig. In the final year of his forties, Lee is not one to suffer fools gladly – not that he ever has. And as ever – we, his loyal fee-paying audience, are the butt of his jokes. There are very few comedians who can make a whole room laugh so much at their own inadequacies. Stewart Lee is still bitter from his BAFTA-winning BBC 2 show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle not being recommissioned after its fourth series and he has no qualms in sharing. His stage persona is not just of arrogance but we would be mistaken in thinking he believes himself a demi-God of stand-up comedy. Boasting four and five-star reviews of his tour so far, he firmly asserts that if we don’t find him funny the problem will not be on his side of the stage. Lee has often been described as a surreal satirist throughout his career and there is no avoiding the political landscape in Content Provider – no matter how much he states he didn’t want to write a show about Brexit or the rise of Trump. For years Lee has had the pleasure of referring to his leftist audience as the bourgeoisie and tonight we are lambasted many times for being a “metropolitan liberal elite”. He knows his audiences’ Achilles heel and he isn’t afraid to give it repeated swift kicks. When writing about Lee’s stagecraft it is impossible not to refer to his self-referential cleverness as he deconstructs everything about what he is and what he does: his role as a stand-up comedian and the actual jokes themselves. He loves to play with his audience...
There is no doubting the writing or performance skills of Stewart Lee. He is a top class stand-up as well as the brains behind Jerry Springer - The Opera.
This show, however, left you feeling disturbed and nauseous, with a sense that something was awry in Lee’s life. In nine years at the Fringe, I have never seen a show as gratuitously offensive and profane.
Lee, who rightly had a blasphemy charge thrown out in court early this year for the Jerry Springer production, was like a delinquent teenager who had got off for shoplifting and decided to try his hand at armed robbery.
The result - three people walked out of this show, which contained a passage about being sick into an intimate part of Christ’s anatomy. Many others listened in stunned silence. Lee’s intellectual mind revelled in their discomfort, dissecting the bond of trust between audience and performer he had just severed.
If Lee had delivered an anti-Jewish or anti-Islamic show, rather than an anti-Christian one, he would have had a hell of a ride. Even so, he emerged, in my view, looking like a bigot - surely not his intention.
Stewart Lee
2005-08-12T22:58:32+01:00
There is no doubting the writing or performance skills of Stewart Lee. He is a top class stand-up as well as the brains behind Jerry Springer - The Opera. This show, however, left you feeling disturbed and nauseous, with a sense that something was awry in Lee’s life. In nine years at the Fringe, I have never seen a show as gratuitously offensive and profane. Lee, who rightly had a blasphemy charge thrown out in court early this year for the Jerry Springer production, was like a delinquent teenager who had got off for shoplifting and decided to try his hand at armed robbery. The result - three people walked out of this show, which contained a passage about being sick into an intimate part of Christ’s anatomy. Many others listened in stunned silence. Lee’s intellectual mind revelled in their discomfort, dissecting the bond of trust between audience and performer he had just severed. If Lee had delivered an anti-Jewish or anti-Islamic show, rather than an anti-Christian one, he would have had a hell of a ride. Even so, he emerged, in my view, looking like a bigot - surely not his intention.
The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth.
On 10 April, Neil told his social media followers: “The hard left throws about ‘Tufton Street’ the way the hard right throws about ‘Globalist’ and ‘Soros’… It’s become a cover for them to avoid thinking/analysing.” Meanwhile, the same Dubai-based Legatum Group that owns half of Neil’s former employer GB News also boasts the Russian oligarch-coddling life peer Matthew Elliott of the Tufton Street thinktank Vote Leave and the Tufton Street thinktank the TaxPayers’ Alliance as a senior fellow of its Legatum Institute. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a gaping Sooty for the fist of Tufton Street’s pullcinelean Harry Corbett.
Within its first week of broadcasting in June 2021, GB News, then fronted and legitimised by Neil, interviewed two commentators – Tory peer Matt Ridley and the chartered accountant Andrew Montford – associated with the climate science denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is based in Tufton Street. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, an elongated Emu to Tufton Street’s rampant rabbit Rod Hull.
And Dubai’s GB News backer Legatum also employed the US lobbyist Shanker Singham, before he left to work for the Tufton Street thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, the “educational charity” that helped Liz Truss launch the historic economic policies that secured our speedy downward destiny. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a birthday-bouncing Gus Honeybun to Tufton Street’s tentacular Fern Britton.
And the NHS wrecker, climate crisis denier and BBC bullshit Question Time regular Kate Andrews, who sprouted from the same Tufton Street thinktank as Singham, is now the economics editor of the Spectator, of which Andrew “nothing to see here” Neil is chairman. A fireworks factory explodes next to a nuclear reactor during a volcanic eruption. And there’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, Ed the Duck’s quacking cloaca to Tufton Street’s oil-greased Andy Crane.
Of course the obvious connections between opaquely funded Tufton Street thinktanks, media outlets and nobbled policymakers matter. And larger-than-life TV personalities like Andrew Neil should be using their TV fame to amplify this scandal for the public good. Be more Vorderman, Andrew, and less Voldemort.
Tufty the TV squirrel taught a generation about road safety; Wenlock and Mandeville, the Lycra cyclopses of the 2012 Olympics, warned athletes against getting javelins in their eyes; and Buzby, who was only a yellow bird, used his TV fame to help people of the 70s understand what to say when the phone rang. But what has Andrew Neil ever done? Nothing!
Last month’s attacks on the National Trust, for example, from both the Legatum Institute and the Tufton Street-aligned Restore Trust pressure group, on voting practices and scone recipes respectively, were then amplified by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, proving how the Tufton Street groups’ influence works, even if their financial incentives for destroying the heritage charity remain unclear. If there’s an “avoidance of thinking and analysing”, it appears to be in the GB News-addled bisc-bonce of Andrew Neil himself.
But Andrew Neil is not alone in his denials of the depths to which we have sunk, and the tide of Tufton Street turds, corrupt politicians and client journalists engulfing British life has a fabular precedent. The fifth of Hercules’s legendary 12 labours required him to sluice 30 years of manure from the stables where the immortal horses of King Augeas had deposited endless dung. This Hercules did by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus, the twin responsibilities of water supply provision and waste management solutions combining so much more simply in the pre-privatisation era.
(It is fortunate for Hercules that his task took place in ancient Europe rather than in Brexit Britain, as the use of any modern British river to clean a filthy stable would now only contaminate it further. Had Hercules been required to investigate a complex series of shell companies designed to filter British bill payers’ money, and profits extracted by the water companies at the expense of infrastructure maintenance and safe sewage dispersal, into the pockets of shareholders and the coffers of foreign pension funds, the labour of the Augean stables would have been a far less enduring tale. Though doubtless the Sunaks would have read it approvingly to their kids as an example of clever business practice.)
As Britain’s ecosystem chokes in human filth, we see the Shakespearean idea that a mortal “body natural” is wedded to an abstract “body politic” made too too sullied flesh. Every tributary of the infosystem is clogged with sewage. Angela Rayner is hounded for peanuts by a billionaires’ media loyally providing covering fire for the perpetrators of Tory thefts of millions, siphoned from the public purse to Tory donors and friends via dodgy lobbying and unchallenged public contracts; while we listen to the debating-society digs of a prime minister whose non-dom wife may have avoided up to £20m in tax while he was chancellor; while Tory MP Mark Menzies allegedly rang an elderly local party volunteer at 3.15am to help raise £6,500 (or “four Angela Rayners”, as Vorderman would put it) to pay off “bad people” detaining him in a flat, an episode of Yes Minister directed by Quentin Tarantino.
But, like Menzies, we are all hostages. To truth. Rayner’s alleged historical council house error wouldn’t cover even a fifth of the booze bill for one of Boris Johnson’s illegal lockdown parties. Meanwhile, media moguls like Andrew Neil stand by the open sewer, not even holding their noses, high on the stench they create.
Stewart Lee
2024-04-21T12:39:42+01:00
The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth. On 10 April, Neil told his social media followers: “The hard left throws about ‘Tufton Street’ the way the hard right throws about ‘Globalist’ and ‘Soros’… It’s become a cover for them to avoid thinking/analysing.” Meanwhile, the same Dubai-based Legatum Group that owns half of Neil’s former employer GB News also boasts the Russian oligarch-coddling life peer Matthew Elliott of the Tufton Street thinktank Vote Leave and the Tufton Street thinktank the TaxPayers’ Alliance as a senior fellow of its Legatum Institute. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a gaping Sooty for the fist of Tufton Street’s pullcinelean Harry Corbett. Within its first week of broadcasting in June 2021, GB News, then fronted and legitimised by Neil, interviewed two commentators – Tory peer Matt Ridley and the chartered accountant Andrew Montford – associated with the climate science denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is based in Tufton Street. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, an elongated Emu to Tufton Street’s rampant rabbit Rod Hull. And Dubai’s GB News backer Legatum also employed the US lobbyist Shanker Singham, before he left to work for the Tufton Street thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, the “educational charity” that helped Liz Truss launch the historic economic policies that secured our speedy downward destiny. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a birthday-bouncing Gus Honeybun to Tufton Street’s tentacular Fern Britton. And the NHS wrecker, climate crisis denier and BBC bullshit Question Time regular Kate Andrews, who sprouted from...
Ah! The turning of the seasons! Once it was always early summer, as swifts swooped from gables, when the private limited company Restore Trust would announce the “anti-woke” candidates it hoped to parachute on to the National Trust board. As the elephant hawk-moths emerged in the simmer dim, Restore Trust would unveil would-be guardians of our heritage such as the evangelical Christian Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for some homosexuals in Uganda, and the pliable biographer Andrew Gimpson, who is even worse, having described Boris Johnson as “a statesman of astonishing political gifts… impelled by a deep love of his country and a determination to serve it to the uttermost of his powers”. I wouldn’t trust Gimpson with a single Jammie Dodger, let alone our national scones. Either way, Restore Trust’s declaration of war on the woke National Trust has become an annual event as comforting, in its own way, as the once reliable blooming of the daffodils. But suddenly, like that yellow splash of colour, it seems to happen earlier every year.
Nostalgia is an illness. But it always seemed important to my mother that the daffodils were out by my birthday in the first week of April. Perhaps, because my earliest birthdays were skewed by the uncertainties of orphanages and foster homes, it mattered to her that something as permanent as the daffodils, and by association the apparently endless cycle of seasons, should mark the anniversary of my arrival on your Earth. I still think of all daffodils as mine, and resent Wales’s cultural appropriation of my flower. Especially when it already has the leek, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Pot Noodle’s “too gorgeous” Peter Baynham.
But this year, the daffodils are already emerging. And so is Restore Trust. But its annual cycles should not be affected by climate. The supposed grassroots pressure group is in fact a 55 Tufton Street-affiliated outfit, hiding in plain sight like the Jimmy Savile of scones and aiming to discredit the current National Trust board. Its former director Neil Record is a chief donor to 55 Tufton Street’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, part funded by a charity commemorating an American oil heiress, and which opposes many net zero environmental policies. It’s a small world. But I wouldn’t want to cool it.
Restore Trust places easily discredited news stories in the Daily Telegraph and the Times, and uses opaquely funded social media campaigns to try to strong-arm its preferred candidates on to the National Trust board. Mysteriously, company records show its funding has almost doubled in the accounts it filed this month. But the National Trust’s arcane constitution enables it to operate as a lone Asterix village-style holdout in a public sector that has seen the Tories place whichever go-to golems they like on to boards. At the BBC, it’s Robbie Gibb, shameless Maitlis-wrangler and former adviser to GB News.
And the Victoria and Albert Museum has benefited from the expertise of the former Restore Trust director Zewditu Gebreyohanes. She has also worked for the ExxonMobil-funded thinktank the Policy Exchange, one of the Tufton Street gang of organisations, and is now a senior researcher at the pro-Brexit Legatum Institute thinktank. Another arm of Legatum funds GB News, alongside the dad of the thick twat who banjoed for Mumford & Sons. I’m aware this gibberish sounds as if it’s designed to make anyone who’s noticed what’s happening look insane. Hold on to What You Believe!
But why does Restore Trust want to take over the National Trust? Apparently, it objects to tiny plaques explaining in very small writing that slave trade money may underpin some of our aristocracy’s enormous wealth. But cloaks of ideological concern often conceal naked avarice. Did the disgraced Brexit-backing hedge fund manager Crispin “the Crisp” Odey, who made an estimated £220m shorting the pound because of the negative financial impact of the Vote Leave victory, regularly ponder abstract notions of sovereignty? Maybe Restore Trust’s tentacular chthonic backers want to drive up the value of the scone stocks that capturing the National Trust would see them monopolise.
On Thursday 18 January, with unprecedented earliness, a calculatedly misleading Restore Trust advert appeared on social media announcing, innocuously: “If you love unspoilt historic houses, gardens and countryside you should be a member of the National Trust and use your vote to keep it unspoilt. Sign up at Restore Trust.” Was it a pre-emptive attempt to sabotage the National Trust elections? Or an example of data harvesting, like the Tories’ helpful online “tax calculator” that then gives them all your details, in an apparent breach of privacy rules? Only Restore Trust’s undisclosed backers know for sure.
The dishonest announcement was gone within days, and in turn an uncharacteristically clarified Keir Starmer called out the fabricated culture war on the National Trust, Britain’s most trusted public institution. On Tuesday, the dead-eyed Tory eugenics-fanboy Ben Bradley, who recommended vasectomies for workless families with several children in order to avoid a “vast sea of unemployed wasters”, described Starmer’s concerns as “vacuous nonsense”, before it was pointed out that he himself had previously described the National Trust as being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the woke agenda”. The stupid worm’s cock.
National Trust staff have trees to pollard, paintings to restore and scones to bake. It doesn’t serve our nation’s interests for them to be relentlessly bullied by well-funded fake grassroots groups trying to force their place-people into positions of power. But the fact that the National Trust has, so far, been able to resist dark forces that in the end, I regret, will inevitably overwhelm it, has shone a light on how vulnerable other British institutions are to capture. It’s 11pm on Wednesday night now and the early daffodils are glowing outside my Cheltenham hotel window. They are earlier every year now. Like Tufton Street’s first fetid forays.
Stewart Lee
2024-01-28T20:10:18+00:00
Ah! The turning of the seasons! Once it was always early summer, as swifts swooped from gables, when the private limited company Restore Trust would announce the “anti-woke” candidates it hoped to parachute on to the National Trust board. As the elephant hawk-moths emerged in the simmer dim, Restore Trust would unveil would-be guardians of our heritage such as the evangelical Christian Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for some homosexuals in Uganda, and the pliable biographer Andrew Gimpson, who is even worse, having described Boris Johnson as “a statesman of astonishing political gifts… impelled by a deep love of his country and a determination to serve it to the uttermost of his powers”. I wouldn’t trust Gimpson with a single Jammie Dodger, let alone our national scones. Either way, Restore Trust’s declaration of war on the woke National Trust has become an annual event as comforting, in its own way, as the once reliable blooming of the daffodils. But suddenly, like that yellow splash of colour, it seems to happen earlier every year. Nostalgia is an illness. But it always seemed important to my mother that the daffodils were out by my birthday in the first week of April. Perhaps, because my earliest birthdays were skewed by the uncertainties of orphanages and foster homes, it mattered to her that something as permanent as the daffodils, and by association the apparently endless cycle of seasons, should mark the anniversary of my arrival on your Earth. I still think of all daffodils as mine, and resent Wales’s cultural appropriation of my flower. Especially when it already has the leek, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Pot Noodle’s “too gorgeous” Peter Baynham. But this year, the daffodils are already emerging. And so is Restore Trust. But its annual cycles...
Jim O'Rourke's latest album, Eureka, features delicately finger-picked acoustic guitar, funereal New Orleans jazz, a Bacharach and David cover, and ambient washes of abstract sound, buoyed up on imaginative string arrangements. It is provocative and intelligent, asks subtle questions about how and why we consume music, yet is tuneful enough to sing in the bath and - despite O'Rourke's free-noise background - your Mum would still recognise it as "proper music".
However, such is O'Rourke's low profile that a London listings magazine recently described Eureka as the unassuming 30-year-old's second album, when in fact it's the 30th to carry his name. Somehow Eureka has become a fixture of current "pick of the moment" columns, despite O'Rourke's evident obscurity, despite its lack of radio airplay and despite the fact that the cover features a painting of a naked Sumo wrestler in lipstick holding a small stuffed rabbit. What is Jim O'Rourke suddenly doing right?
O'Rourke is currently in London producing Stereolab, far from his Chicago home. His back catalogue conjures a Romantic artist straight out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, surveying the world with lofty detachment, but in fact he's a small man in glasses and a green woolly hat, who is genuinely surprised you've heard anything he's done. In his teens O'Rourke was making tape collages and coaxing everything out of his guitar but a regular chord, and by the age of 19 he'd forged working relationships with the British improvisers Eddie Prevost and Derek Bailey. Early 1990s solo albums such as Scend, Terminal Pharmacy and the two-inch CD Rules of Reduction, mixed drones and tones imbibed from the 1960s violinist Tony Conrad with the spatial awareness of the British anti-rockers AMM, and the odd Krautrock klang. Collaborations with Japanese and European noise-niks gave him a substantial international profile, admittedly within a Lilliputian musical landscape.
O'Rourke's first connection with most consumers was as half of Gastr del Sol - the folkish avant-rock group, whose founder member David Grubbs was then beginning a long journey from his punk roots in Squirrelbait to the fully fledged cosmic Americana of his solo albums. "I was actually writing a lot of the more melodic songs in Gastr del Sol," protests O'Rourke, "but people think I just did the weird noises."
O'Rourke first encountered Grubbs in 1993, when he was assembling the studio group Brise-Glace. "I'd become obsessed with the idea of trying to figure out what makes music conform to the genre that it is. I wanted to make some kind of pseudo-documentary about this and present it as if it was about a real rock band. So I put together a band to watch the dynamic of how these people work."
Thus Brise-Glace was a sort of anti-Monkees, configured artificially to examine rock's internal organs at work.
"It seemed rock musicians felt constant frustration if they weren't allowed to rock, and I wanted to constantly frustrate the urge to rock," O'Rourke explains. "Not that I'm against 'rocking', but in any music there are established gestures that signify it as this type of music, and if you constantly frustrate expectation hopefully people eventually question why they expected certain things at all. That was the idea."
Brise-Glace's When in Vanitas album perhaps prepared O'Rourke for producing Rien, the 1995 comeback album by the reanimated 1970s avant-rock barbarians Faust. O'Rourke's experience of the scary German metal bangers, whose most recent London show saw them clear the venue with CS gas, was not entirely pleasant: "This label had asked Faust to do a record. Then they showed up and everybody quickly discovered that it wouldn't work. Faust didn't really play much on the album."
What? O'Rourke has let slip a scandal as shocking as the news that Geri Spice might not really have been such a great vocalist. "Yeah. It was mostly me. That's what they wanted. They did a recording session that didn't work, so they gave me tapes of their tour, and I found moments where a drum or a guitar note was alone, put everything on reel-to-reel and spliced every possible individual note out. Then I stayed in my room for a year with drums pinned up on one wall and guitars on the other, and hand-spliced every note on that album together. I tried to make a Faust record and not a Jim O'Rourke record, but it was difficult when I was playing about half of everything. I actually went broke because I spent all my money making that record. It doesn't bother me though," he says, and laughs madly in the way that only someone who really was bothered would. "And whenever I hear about the record being used for a commercial in Germany, and they got $100,000 for it, I just accept it."
Not all O'Rourke's experiences of his musical heroes have been so distressing. His 1997 collaboration with Sonic Youth actually outsold their subsequent studio album A Thousand Leaves, and it seems that producing Womblife, the 1996 album by the 1960s folk blues guitarist John Fahey, gave him the confidence to return to more expressly melodic music, such as 1997's gorgeous acoustic suite Bad Timing. "Maybe," he concurs, "but the finger-picking thing wasn't the focus for me - it was the arrangements. There's plenty of mistakes on Bad Timing, but I didn't care. All the guitar playing was done first-take and then I spent eight months on the arrangements. Being obsessed with technique is something I can't relate to."
Eureka (out now on the Domino label) is a logical progression from Bad Timing, and O'Rourke's most accessible album to date sees him making the journey from cacophony to melody in the opposite direction to the average ageing pop star desperate for a bit of artistic credibility. "I found after years of listening to avant-garde music it started to ring false. Scott Walker got across more profound feelings than any Faust piece. You can listen to his songs and think they're beautiful, but if you just go a little beyond the surface..." Similarly, on their recent Hoffman Estates album, O'Rourke used editing and some beautiful arrangements to deliciously season improvised duets by the spiky guitarists Alan Licht and Loren
Mazzacane Connors, without compromising their distinct identity. "I try to do that. I don't like doing things that I can do, so the challenge is to try to find a way of doing stuff that I can't. Even when I'm making a record - and that record is about the act of making a record - I still want to respect the material. That's why I really used to like Sparks."
Sparks? The 1970s chart band with the keyboard player who looked like Hitler? "Yes. They were able to be self-commentating but still be pop, and that's a hard line to be on."
True. But if anyone can walk it, it's Jim O'Rourke.
Stewart Lee
1999-04-11T17:31:29+01:00
Jim O'Rourke's latest album, Eureka, features delicately finger-picked acoustic guitar, funereal New Orleans jazz, a Bacharach and David cover, and ambient washes of abstract sound, buoyed up on imaginative string arrangements. It is provocative and intelligent, asks subtle questions about how and why we consume music, yet is tuneful enough to sing in the bath and - despite O'Rourke's free-noise background - your Mum would still recognise it as "proper music". However, such is O'Rourke's low profile that a London listings magazine recently described Eureka as the unassuming 30-year-old's second album, when in fact it's the 30th to carry his name. Somehow Eureka has become a fixture of current "pick of the moment" columns, despite O'Rourke's evident obscurity, despite its lack of radio airplay and despite the fact that the cover features a painting of a naked Sumo wrestler in lipstick holding a small stuffed rabbit. What is Jim O'Rourke suddenly doing right? O'Rourke is currently in London producing Stereolab, far from his Chicago home. His back catalogue conjures a Romantic artist straight out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, surveying the world with lofty detachment, but in fact he's a small man in glasses and a green woolly hat, who is genuinely surprised you've heard anything he's done. In his teens O'Rourke was making tape collages and coaxing everything out of his guitar but a regular chord, and by the age of 19 he'd forged working relationships with the British improvisers Eddie Prevost and Derek Bailey. Early 1990s solo albums such as Scend, Terminal Pharmacy and the two-inch CD Rules of Reduction, mixed drones and tones imbibed from the 1960s violinist Tony Conrad with the spatial awareness of the British anti-rockers AMM, and the odd Krautrock klang. Collaborations with Japanese and European noise-niks gave him a substantial international profile,...
Dublin Trinity College students Dr Strangely Strange's 1969 debut Kip Of The Serenes is a whimsical acoustic hippy record in the vein of The Incredible String Band. 1970's Heavy Petting, re-released with extra tracks, featured the psychedelic blues licks of future Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore, making for a cautious but compelling hybrid of fragile folk forms and more muscular rock moves.
The lengthy Sign Of My Mind, with both a tentative first effort, and the strident second take, included here, is a slowly uncoiling acid-folk classic, rivaling Fairport's A Sailor's Life and Trees' Sally Free And Easy.
Stewart Lee
2011-11-13T12:26:53+00:00
Dublin Trinity College students Dr Strangely Strange's 1969 debut Kip Of The Serenes is a whimsical acoustic hippy record in the vein of The Incredible String Band. 1970's Heavy Petting, re-released with extra tracks, featured the psychedelic blues licks of future Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore, making for a cautious but compelling hybrid of fragile folk forms and more muscular rock moves. The lengthy Sign Of My Mind, with both a tentative first effort, and the strident second take, included here, is a slowly uncoiling acid-folk classic, rivaling Fairport's A Sailor's Life and Trees' Sally Free And Easy.
Hey-ho! It’s that time of year again when the opaquely funded Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust expends expensive effort seeding its right-leaning candidates (formerly including the evangelical Stephen Green, who denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals) on to the board of its hated “woke” National Trust. What do Restore Trust’s unnamed backers want? The National Trust’s land? Its coastlines? Its artworks? Or are they as annoyed as me that it’s increasingly difficult to buy commemorative thimbles in the gift shops?
National Trust supporters combat masses of inexplicably blue-ticked social media accounts, with names full of numbers, pushing the Restore Trust narrative in idiomatically odd language riddled with strange spelling mistakes. (The democratic process is apparently “manipulated by the encumbant. Because the encumbant doesn’t like the opposition.”) The Washington Post proved that Russia deploys social media voices to shape discourse and create division. Is it Vladimir Putin, ultimately, who covets the National Trust’s delicious vegan scone recipes, despite them having been made with woke margarine for some years?
Whatever! It is beholden to you to get online as soon as possible, join the National Trust if you haven’t already and follow the board’s block vote advice in the forthcoming AGM to protect our national heritage and natural assets from appropriation by the private limited company Restore Trust and its anonymous funders under false pretences. Take back control! But this stuff is everywhere.
Despite regime change, the bent-over backwards and beaten black and blue BBC remains a mouthpiece for rightwing talking points, this month amplifying the views of the Tufton Street-based TaxPayers’ Alliance, founded by Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott, who was made a baron by Liz Truss in a final act of gratuitous violence against the British body politic she had already strangled into unconsciousness.
The BBC explained how Tufton Street’s TaxPayers’ Alliance said bankrupt Birmingham should sell off the city’s artworks, even though they are held in trust and are the best thing in Birmingham after the grave of one of the shortest women who ever lived (Nanette Stocker – 83.82cm, or 2.75ft). Why not sell her corpse off while we’re at it? I’m sure the fabulous Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities in Hackney, east London, could find her a tasteful corner next to the Rolling Stones’ used condoms. Or perhaps the surviving members of UB40 could be hired out to the city’s creditors as sexual playthings.
Public art galleries in Britain are in a sorry enough state as it is. When I last visited Peterborough art gallery in 2020, it was then managed by the fitness company Vivacity. Works by Alan Davie, Julian Trevelyan and Patrick Heron shone unseen, and a wild boar sculpture by the mighty Elisabeth Frink was used to prop up mops in a corner, perhaps the ultimate expression of William Morris’s dictate that art should be both beautiful and useful.
But who do the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s backers want Birmingham’s art sold to? What good to us is John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl holding its value in the private lobby of a bank HQ, unadmired by the monied? Should Ford Madox Brown’s epochal The Last of England languish unloved as a company asset in the vault of a distant oligarch? I suppose, like good right-thinkers, we should let the market decide.
The problem for comedians and columnists in trying to “find the funny” in the new government is that the evils of the last one, and its attendant claque of mysteriously funded thinktanks and accommodating journalists – Tufton Street and Laura Kuenssberg’s supine BBC News, for example – still poison everything. My attempts to initiate a comedy critique of one-tier Keir on stage at a big outdoor standup festival last Sunday night in Manchester were met with silence, so I moved on to making fun of a moth that had flown on to the stage instead, which was tragically more interesting than Starmer. Ultimately, artists too must let the market decide.
Which brings us neatly to the Oasis scandal, where ordinary bucket hat folk are fleeced for £355 for already obscene £135 tickets, another Conservative crime. Tory MP David Davis, the least dislikable of the now discredited Brexit dickheads, criticised the dynamic pricing of Ticketmaster, which has basically become its own touts, so I wrote to him, two weeks ago, asking why he didn’t speak out against the Tories’ encouragement of ticket price hikes years ago. His chief of staff said he’d reply. He hasn’t. But we remember.
Challenged in parliament on ticketing price hikes in 2011, the future Conservative culture secretary Sajid Javid said those selling secondary tickets were “classic entrepreneurs” and those complaining were “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living as a middleman”. To Tories, art and nature are just opportunities to make money. And that’s all. They even stood by as publicly subsidised tickets for publicly subsidised venues were resold at prohibitive prices, ignoring the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse. But Oasis fans aren’t chattering middle-class champagne socialists. The Tories’ toxic legacy, from prisons to sewage to ticketing, has finally become too big to ignore, but those responsible have fled the scene.
I would love to be making fun of Labour, particularly its failure to address the imprisonment of environmental protesters. But it would be like ridiculing Hercules for trying to sluice the Augean stables clean of 14 years of accumulated Tory shit.
In other news, the former batshit banjo player from Mumford & Sons’s GB News-funding dad, Paul Marshall, just bought the skeletal remains of the Spectator. Don’t expect the flow of insidious disinformation and inflammatory opinion, now under the banner of a once credible legacy title, to abate any time soon. Kicking out the Tories might have cut off the Hydra’s head, but the tentacles of Tufton Street, Marshall and the Brexit battalion still writhe.
Stewart Lee
2024-09-15T14:51:02+01:00
Hey-ho! It’s that time of year again when the opaquely funded Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust expends expensive effort seeding its right-leaning candidates (formerly including the evangelical Stephen Green, who denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals) on to the board of its hated “woke” National Trust. What do Restore Trust’s unnamed backers want? The National Trust’s land? Its coastlines? Its artworks? Or are they as annoyed as me that it’s increasingly difficult to buy commemorative thimbles in the gift shops? National Trust supporters combat masses of inexplicably blue-ticked social media accounts, with names full of numbers, pushing the Restore Trust narrative in idiomatically odd language riddled with strange spelling mistakes. (The democratic process is apparently “manipulated by the encumbant. Because the encumbant doesn’t like the opposition.”) The Washington Post proved that Russia deploys social media voices to shape discourse and create division. Is it Vladimir Putin, ultimately, who covets the National Trust’s delicious vegan scone recipes, despite them having been made with woke margarine for some years? Whatever! It is beholden to you to get online as soon as possible, join the National Trust if you haven’t already and follow the board’s block vote advice in the forthcoming AGM to protect our national heritage and natural assets from appropriation by the private limited company Restore Trust and its anonymous funders under false pretences. Take back control! But this stuff is everywhere. Despite regime change, the bent-over backwards and beaten black and blue BBC remains a mouthpiece for rightwing talking points, this month amplifying the views of the Tufton Street-based TaxPayers’ Alliance, founded by Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott, who was made a baron by Liz Truss in a final act of gratuitous violence against the British body politic she had already...
'Forget house music, the truly hip have moved on...to folk," predicted the style magazines a year or so ago, probably as an excuse to run some shots of heroin-addled waifs dressed up as Morris dancers. The folk revival never happened, of course, but Eliza Carthy, at 22 the youngest recording artist of the venerable Waterson-Carthy clan, English folk's royal family, has transcended the hype with a brilliant third solo album, the double set Red Rice (out now on Topic Records).
Martin Carthy has been the shire horse of the English folk scene since the 1960s (barring brief membership of Steeleye Span), nobly shouldering the burden of tradition while his contemporaries went electric. Norma Waterson sang with the Watersons, the vocal harmony quartet whose recordings of the likes of John Barleycorn and Here We Come A-Wassailing helped English folk to consolidate a sense of identity distinct from Celtic music, and provided the model for every sketch show parody of an English folk group ever since. She was a surprise nomination for the Mercury prize in 1996.
But their daughter, the fiddler and singer Eliza Carthy, has a pierced face and a love of the Orb as well as a natural feel for interpreting traditional music. "In the current musical climate
everybody is hearing everything," she explains in a forthright Yorkshire burr. "People are so universal in their tastes, these days, I think it's unrealistic to box them up." Fair enough, but Eliza's own press release proclaims her "the future of folk". "Well, that's what I am. I'm a folk singer. I'm not trying to hide that, but the folk scene is, in fact, very eclectic. The people in my band can turn their minds to anything."
Carthy is caught between two worlds: the archival and valuable parochialism of her predecessors and the fact that, like anybody in their twenties today, she's a global citizen, by default. Initially Red Rice appears to embody this dichotomy almost too literally. The first CD, Red, takes jazz inflections, occasional drum'n'bass beats and a full band to traditional tunes and Carthy's original compositions. The second, Rice, leaves them more or less unmolested.
On the opening track of Carthy's last album, the gauche dub reggae effects filtered into the fiddle tune Cuckold Came out of the Amery genuinely grated, but here the mixing of styles doesn't seem forced in any way. "That's 'cos it wasn't," says Carthy. "I didn't really set out to experiment or anything. What happened on the drum'n'bass tracks is that I've got some friends in Halifax, Paul and Shack, that do that, and put on raves and events, and we just got really drunk and went into their little studio and started messing around with loops while I just played."
While it's possible to trace the genesis of some of Carthy's leaps into the unknown, others eem almost alchemical. There's a version of the forgotten folk standard 10,000 Miles, on Red, that is without precedent. The adolescent Carthy approached the song in a predictably downbeat tone on her 1996 debut, Heat, Light and Sound. Nic Jones had already pulled off the definitive melancholy take on 1977's The Noah's Ark Trap. "That's where I first heard it," Carthy admits. "A very nice album. My dad gave me his copy of it about three years ago.
I expect he would like it back by now." On Red's version, the accordionist Martin Green establishes an upbeat, optimistic melody, utterly at odds with the sadness of the song, that breathes a whole new life into it and makes it all the more affecting.
Early reports compared the Rice CD unfavourably to Red, and it's true that material such as The Miller and the Lass, and Tuesday Morning, and the fact that one Lucy Adams is credited with "singing, feet, and clogs" might make it too stereotypically "trad" for all but the most austere folk adept, but, in many ways, the thrills and spills of Red serve to soften up the suspicious listener for Rice. And, of course, it is easy to forget that a lot of unadulterated English folk music is just really, really weird, anyway. Blow the Winds and Benjamin Bowmaneer are stark, empty and quite disturbing, Carthy's lone piano and vocal on the latter bowing to the influence of June Tabor, the Nico-like folk diva who first brought out the gothic Weltschmerz dormant in English folk. A sleeve note that reads, "The traditional material on this album is all English and out there. Not to exclude anyone or anything, but just because we can," indicated that the role of an interpreter of English material is one close to Carthy's heart.
Was this inevitable, growing up in the family she did?
"I've developed a real passion for it," she says. "It started off as a nostalgia thing - I knew all the words to my parents' songs, it was my childhood, but then I found myself thinking, 'I would quite like to be involved. I would like to have that sort of thing for myself.'" And how does that square with being an innovator? "Traditions evolve, and then if they stop you can't just latch onto the end of it and go, 'Ah well, that's it then.' As soon as a tradition has faded a bit, you can pick and choose from the whole of it and start developing it again...which is what I'm doing."
And what is life like in the Waterson-Carthy family? Are there ever musical differences? "Well, my dad fairly indoctrinated me with all his likes and dislikes before I ever got into choosing music, and so I would never play anything he'd hate anywhere near him. My mum really can't hack ambient music at all. Especially the Orb. It sends her heart funny. It gets her scared and spooks her out a bit." This news comes as a disappointment. An Orb remix of the Watersons' For Pence and Spicy Ale album would have been a record worth hearing.
With a fluency in modern and traditional music, an accessible album reverent enough to placate purists and innovative enough to draw in outsiders, guest spots on Billy Bragg and American country rockers Wilco's forthcoming LP of unreleased Woody Guthrie songs, and a possible role in the American all-women Lilith Fair tour, Eliza Carthy may yet be an international star of English folk in the next century. Topic Records clearly thinks so, and there's obviously some thought and marketing budget behind the striking visual identity to the Red Rice package. Isn't there?
"Yes and no," Carthy concedes. "They think you won't get anywhere unless you do a bit of marketing. It was received positively at first, but now people have started to get a bit fed up. People are going, 'Oh she's had another makeover!' and 'Oh, she's had another face piercing.' I'm not gonna take it out for the picture, am I? It's like 'Okay, folkie, get back in your box! You're taking the piss!' But you never know," she concludes nobly, "people have to pick on you for something, don't they?"
Stewart Lee
1998-06-07T17:21:28+01:00
'Forget house music, the truly hip have moved on...to folk," predicted the style magazines a year or so ago, probably as an excuse to run some shots of heroin-addled waifs dressed up as Morris dancers. The folk revival never happened, of course, but Eliza Carthy, at 22 the youngest recording artist of the venerable Waterson-Carthy clan, English folk's royal family, has transcended the hype with a brilliant third solo album, the double set Red Rice (out now on Topic Records). Martin Carthy has been the shire horse of the English folk scene since the 1960s (barring brief membership of Steeleye Span), nobly shouldering the burden of tradition while his contemporaries went electric. Norma Waterson sang with the Watersons, the vocal harmony quartet whose recordings of the likes of John Barleycorn and Here We Come A-Wassailing helped English folk to consolidate a sense of identity distinct from Celtic music, and provided the model for every sketch show parody of an English folk group ever since. She was a surprise nomination for the Mercury prize in 1996. But their daughter, the fiddler and singer Eliza Carthy, has a pierced face and a love of the Orb as well as a natural feel for interpreting traditional music. "In the current musical climate everybody is hearing everything," she explains in a forthright Yorkshire burr. "People are so universal in their tastes, these days, I think it's unrealistic to box them up." Fair enough, but Eliza's own press release proclaims her "the future of folk". "Well, that's what I am. I'm a folk singer. I'm not trying to hide that, but the folk scene is, in fact, very eclectic. The people in my band can turn their minds to anything." Carthy is caught between two worlds: the archival and valuable parochialism of her predecessors and...
A group of six women returned to Earth from space on Monday, including Katy Perry, the former wife of the Trump cheerleader Russell Brand; and the former Fox news presenter and philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, fiancee of Donald Trump’s media lapdog Jeff Bezos, who bent Washington Post editorial policy to favour the New American Fascism ™ ®. It’s a shame they didn’t fly straight into the heart of the sun.
The six compliant women were sent to space as a costly PR exercise for Bezos’s commercial space flight ambitions, although Perry said it was actually about “finding the love for yourself” and “feeling that divine feminine”. Tell that to all the women worldwide whom Bezos’s pal Trump’s policies are penalising. Singing idiot. Katy Perry said she kissed a girl and she liked it. As Trump rolls back on LGBTQ+ rights I’m surprised the Trump-adjacent Bezos allowed a bi-curious woman into space. I suppose discussions of sexual identity don’t matter if they’re mere titillation. And if Perry is bisexual, she is at least less likely to influence vulnerable young people while orbiting the Earth.
Sánchez, meanwhile, is vice-chairman of Bezos’s Bezos Earth Fund, an environmental group that ended its funding of decarbonisation initiatives in February, in line with Bezos’s support of Trump, who denies climate change while simultaneously seeing that a defrosting Greenland offers superb mineral mining opportunities. Why are all these wankers so totally and unashamedly full of shit?
So I have come to Cornwall for a week, but still I can’t escape the news. As I drove the Penwith peninsula in search of sacred underground Cornish fogous to decompress in, the dead car radio suddenly found a frequency to tell me Perry had sadly survived her Bezos-boosting spaceflight. If those women really cared about the future of the planet they’d have sabotaged themselves to discredit Trump’s big tech donor, but they selfishly chose not to. History will be their judge.
Ostensibly I’m here to see the Tate St Ives exhibition of the mighty 20th-century surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, whose greatest works were inspired by the landscapes of Cornwall, and who died in its loving arms in 1988. Like the late standup comedian Jethro, Colquhoun is indivisible from the land that nurtured her talent, and both created works called This Train Don’t Stop Camborne Wednesdays, though only one features an impressionistic portrayal of the vulva as twin columns of flame.
Thirty years ago I’d pick up Colquhoun’s signed books, their value unacknowledged by vendors, in secondhand shops and wonder at her obscurity. But tides turn, and now she is venerated, 37 years from her passing. Maybe one day I may yet help Bloomsbury’s Museum of Comedy stage that long mooted Jethro retrospective? But first, I have to file my final Observer column.
My sister asks why I am not appearing at Norwich Theatre Royal, and so do I, as my tour shows always sell it out, sometimes twice over. I begin rambling about “visibility”, and how a whole generation of us, as printed news and trustworthy current affairs television began to wither, came to rely on social media to bob us along on its churning sewage-strewn surface. Then Trump’s tech bros skewed the algorithms away from liberal content and, in Google’s case, even agreed to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to appease him. History is mutable, it seems.
I can feel people glazing over as I explain this. What does the end of verifiable information matter to them? After all, The White Lotus was fine, despite the flawed final episode, and that’s enough surely? And all politicians are as bad as one another anyway. And I realise I sound like that American bloke on acid at a Butthole Surfers gig in 1988 saying The Man is controlling our minds with miniature ear robots and hidden smells. But this time around, all those stoned paranoid imaginings are finally true!
We put our futures, and it seems the future of facts themselves, in the hands of bent balding billionaires, still nursing a grudge against the kids from their high school who played guitar or drew cool comics. The Trump administration, accommodated by the likes of Keir Starmer and Katy Perry, is the geopolitical equivalent of a football player stuffing the face of the boy who won the spelling competition into the toilet bowl. For ever.
Here’s where we, and random Venezuelans with random tattoos, start paying. Sometimes, I think one routine I wrote about immigration sometime in the early 00s was shared by socials so often it basically gave me a career, culminating in the Times calling me the world’s greatest living standup comedian by osmosis. I’m the Ralph McTell of champagne socialist satire. Let me take you by the hand.
But now everything has changed. Campaigns, comedians, critics, charities, writing careers and worthy causes that gained traction in the tiny toilet window between the downturn in print media and the twin horrors of Musk’s annexation of Twitter and Google’s apparent abandonment of its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra would never flourish today. We give birth astride the grave. The light gleams an instant as Twitter helps Tracey Thorn from Everything But the Girl become a bestselling author. Then it’s night once more.
I think someone needs to build a new global news network, disinvested from media money men and Trump knee-benders, to save objective truth as we know it. Maybe Andrew Neil could do it, using the skills he learned from kickstarting GB News? Meanwhile, sign up to my monthly mailing list at stewartlee.co.uk to find out if I ever play Norwich Theatre Royal again, or whether my permanent absence from eastern England becomes just another victory for the fascist future. So long and thanks for all the fish!
Stewart Lee
2025-04-20T16:12:26+01:00
A group of six women returned to Earth from space on Monday, including Katy Perry, the former wife of the Trump cheerleader Russell Brand; and the former Fox news presenter and philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, fiancee of Donald Trump’s media lapdog Jeff Bezos, who bent Washington Post editorial policy to favour the New American Fascism ™ ®. It’s a shame they didn’t fly straight into the heart of the sun. The six compliant women were sent to space as a costly PR exercise for Bezos’s commercial space flight ambitions, although Perry said it was actually about “finding the love for yourself” and “feeling that divine feminine”. Tell that to all the women worldwide whom Bezos’s pal Trump’s policies are penalising. Singing idiot. Katy Perry said she kissed a girl and she liked it. As Trump rolls back on LGBTQ+ rights I’m surprised the Trump-adjacent Bezos allowed a bi-curious woman into space. I suppose discussions of sexual identity don’t matter if they’re mere titillation. And if Perry is bisexual, she is at least less likely to influence vulnerable young people while orbiting the Earth. Sánchez, meanwhile, is vice-chairman of Bezos’s Bezos Earth Fund, an environmental group that ended its funding of decarbonisation initiatives in February, in line with Bezos’s support of Trump, who denies climate change while simultaneously seeing that a defrosting Greenland offers superb mineral mining opportunities. Why are all these wankers so totally and unashamedly full of shit? So I have come to Cornwall for a week, but still I can’t escape the news. As I drove the Penwith peninsula in search of sacred underground Cornish fogous to decompress in, the dead car radio suddenly found a frequency to tell me Perry had sadly survived her Bezos-boosting spaceflight. If those women really cared about the future of the planet they’d...
This is the book that proves that Birmingham is not just the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, but the cradle of civilisation.
It’s the definitive guide to the 101 things that made the world what it is today – and all of them were made in Birmingham.
Read how Birmingham gave the world the wonders of tennis, nuclear war, the Beatles, 'that smell of eggs' and many more... 97 more.
It also includes a foreword by Stewart Lee called 'A Birmingham of the memory,' all about his relationship with the city.
"101 Things Birmingham Gave The World, is not a Birmingham of the memory. It is a living breathing thing, wrestling with the city's contradictions, press-ganging the typically arch and understated humour of the Brummie, and an army of little-known facts, both trivial and monumental, into reshaping its confusing reputation."
Stewart Lee
Written by: Jon Bounds, Jez Collins, Liz Cooke, Julia Gilbert, Simon Fox, Stuart Harrison, Craig Hamilton, Libby Hayward Bounds, Jon Hickman, Jon Neale, Steve Nicholls, Nick Stevens, Danny Smith, and Howard Wilkinson.
Cover design by Mark Murphy.
Edited by Jon Bounds and Jon Hickman, from an original idea by Craig Hamilton. Additional editorial support from Libby Hayward Bounds, Julia Gilbert, and Nick Moreton.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T21:48:15+00:00
This is the book that proves that Birmingham is not just the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, but the cradle of civilisation. It’s the definitive guide to the 101 things that made the world what it is today – and all of them were made in Birmingham. Read how Birmingham gave the world the wonders of tennis, nuclear war, the Beatles, 'that smell of eggs' and many more... 97 more. It also includes a foreword by Stewart Lee called 'A Birmingham of the memory,' all about his relationship with the city. "101 Things Birmingham Gave The World, is not a Birmingham of the memory. It is a living breathing thing, wrestling with the city's contradictions, press-ganging the typically arch and understated humour of the Brummie, and an army of little-known facts, both trivial and monumental, into reshaping its confusing reputation." Stewart Lee Written by: Jon Bounds, Jez Collins, Liz Cooke, Julia Gilbert, Simon Fox, Stuart Harrison, Craig Hamilton, Libby Hayward Bounds, Jon Hickman, Jon Neale, Steve Nicholls, Nick Stevens, Danny Smith, and Howard Wilkinson. Cover design by Mark Murphy. Edited by Jon Bounds and Jon Hickman, from an original idea by Craig Hamilton. Additional editorial support from Libby Hayward Bounds, Julia Gilbert, and Nick Moreton.
Did you know the UK government had a Flickr account? A fast-moving succession of unexplained photographs create an impression that things involving Tory politicians are happening, at a very high level, and at some speed, but offer no explanation of what they mean. It is perfect – the taxpayer-funded, vanity-engineered photo-diary of a group of globe-trotting lightweights, hopelessly out of their depth, the subject of international ridicule and domestic contempt, making the sort of shapes and faces they imagine appear significant. Arrive in conference room holding document. Wear face mask at railway station. Gesture towards thing. Don helmet near scaffolding. Laugh with peasant. Concerned expression. Hi-vis jacket. Hat.
I’m filing this column 36 hours early. I have been able to snap up a holiday abandoned last week by a politician keen to be seen as taking Ukraine seriously, in a PR move already known as the Reverse Raab. (Indeed, it is rumoured that some politicians who weren’t actually on holiday quickly arranged one so they could be seen to return from it.) By the time you read these words they will be five days old and anything could have happened. Madness. Madness. War.
In the past two weeks our horse-heating apology-doormat education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, has argued about his leader’s obvious dishonesty with some small schoolchildren who found out about it on Newsround; the police are suddenly Dickless; and, in an act of heroic hypocrisy, the tonally inconsistent comedian Jimmy Carr was condemned as “deeply disturbing” for his Holocaust material by the prime minister, Boris Piccaninny-Watermelon Muslim-Letterbox Tank-Topped-Bumboys Romanian-Vampires Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Gay-Marriage-Three-Men-and-a-Dog Jimmy-Savile Wallpaper Johnson, who is presumably an expert in the area of monetised, attention-grabbing offence. Newspaper columnist satirists’ attempts to make jokes about current events are like trying to nail eels to a curtain. The curtain is ruined and the eels die.
As I begin this column it’s Sunday 13 February and last time I looked at UK government Flickr it was mid-afternoon and Liz Truss was standing with her mouth open in front of a tapestry of some lakes while Sergei Lavrov scratched his head, like an itchy chimp, and who can blame him? Now it’s 6am on Monday and defence secretary Ben Wallace is making a gesture of judgmental evaluation towards a fur-covered microphone, as if accusing someone at the British embassy in Moscow of attempting to mock him by providing it. Was this where he diplomatically brought up appeasing Hitler, in a place that lost 27 million people in the second world war? The irony is, if Wallace was able to get round the table with Putin he would find they have much common ground – a homophobic opposition to gay rights, a fondness for the dark art of the groundless political smear, and early onset baldness – but the UK government Flickr account has instead given the impression that Wallace is talking tough with some furry audio equipment.
I scroll back five days to the famous Liz Truss fur hat fiasco. There’s the foreign secretary framed by a wooden doorway, against a backdrop of serious Soviet architecture, looking like a bit-player in the sort of 80s espionage drama where Alexei Sayle would steal the show as a KGB pastry chef; the notorious Red Square fur hat sequence portrays Truss as a contemplative loner cutting her be-hatted swathe through the diplomatic landscape, trailed only, presumably, by her photographer, her makeup person, her stylist, her milliner, some Peta protesters, and one of those men who hold those big circles of silver foil.
A day earlier, we see Michael Gove, on a “Levelling Up Visit to Birkenhead and Liverpool”, the latter city one Margaret Thatcher’s government notoriously wanted to put into “managed decline”. There’s a thin blue line between levelling up a red wall seat and simply levelling it. As Gove passes a hair salon, the awkward obscuring of an aide’s grey bonce behind his raised fist makes it look as if the secretary of state for levelling up is addressing a small furry rodent, asleep in his hand. “Nosey Nip gives me all my policy advice. He lives in a tin in my anorak.”
On 3 February, transport secretary Grant Shapps and Michael Portillo, the Cuprinol Wood Goblin, are on a bench at Marylebone station laughing uproariously at an immediately discredited railway policy announcement. In all four shots a delighted Portillo models a bright purple blazer, but Shapps’s stylist has given him a bright red blazer for two shots, and a black one for the others. Or perhaps black blazer Shapps is the real Shapps, while red blazer Shapps is Michael Green, Corinne Stockheath or Sebastian Fox, the pseudonymous identities under which Shapps shepherded dodgy get-rich-quick schemes.
At Hammersmith academy, on 6 January, stallion-snuggler Zahawi makes menacing claw-like gestures towards a year 7 Newsround viewer soon to become his chief ideological opponent. And on Monday, former culture secretary Sajid Javid visits Willows care home, and calls two elderly Michael Bublé ticket holders, who paid five times over the odds, “chattering middle-class champagne socialists who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”.
Lacking context and looking cynically stage-managed, the UK government’s Flickr photographs can be made to tell almost any story, surely a gift to those endlessly creative members of the public who manufacture the satirical memes that delight us daily. Michael Gove is alone on a windswept pier; Steve Barclay stands in front of a projected slide headed “Arp Spoofing”; Liz Truss jogs at speed over Brooklyn Bridge, but cannot outrun the judgment of history. UK government Flickr has given you the tools, internet mischief makers. Now do your work. On the other hand, why bother? The Tories’ Flickr account’s vainglorious follies herald the arrival of Britain’s first self-ridiculing government.
Stewart Lee
2022-02-20T12:20:19+00:00
Did you know the UK government had a Flickr account? A fast-moving succession of unexplained photographs create an impression that things involving Tory politicians are happening, at a very high level, and at some speed, but offer no explanation of what they mean. It is perfect – the taxpayer-funded, vanity-engineered photo-diary of a group of globe-trotting lightweights, hopelessly out of their depth, the subject of international ridicule and domestic contempt, making the sort of shapes and faces they imagine appear significant. Arrive in conference room holding document. Wear face mask at railway station. Gesture towards thing. Don helmet near scaffolding. Laugh with peasant. Concerned expression. Hi-vis jacket. Hat. I’m filing this column 36 hours early. I have been able to snap up a holiday abandoned last week by a politician keen to be seen as taking Ukraine seriously, in a PR move already known as the Reverse Raab. (Indeed, it is rumoured that some politicians who weren’t actually on holiday quickly arranged one so they could be seen to return from it.) By the time you read these words they will be five days old and anything could have happened. Madness. Madness. War. In the past two weeks our horse-heating apology-doormat education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, has argued about his leader’s obvious dishonesty with some small schoolchildren who found out about it on Newsround; the police are suddenly Dickless; and, in an act of heroic hypocrisy, the tonally inconsistent comedian Jimmy Carr was condemned as “deeply disturbing” for his Holocaust material by the prime minister, Boris Piccaninny-Watermelon Muslim-Letterbox Tank-Topped-Bumboys Romanian-Vampires Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Gay-Marriage-Three-Men-and-a-Dog Jimmy-Savile Wallpaper Johnson, who is presumably an expert in the area of monetised, attention-grabbing offence. Newspaper columnist satirists’ attempts to make jokes about current events are like trying to nail eels to a curtain. The curtain is ruined...
“Gentlemen,” began the Baron to his two companions, faces flickering in the guttering coals, “I beg your indulgence on a very peculiar matter, and I would ask you not to mock me, nor worse, to think me quite mad, until you have considered fully the whole of my sorry tale. For if what I am about to say is true, then I am of the mind that it has the capacity to be the ruination of all of us.”
It was the evening of the winter solstice, and time once more for the quarterly meeting of three somewhat awkward acquaintances, bound by shared shame to a secrecy they regularly reassembled to reaffirm. Before falling upwards, as men of his birth do, their host Lord James, the 5th Baron of his line, had managed a nightspot in the stews south of the river named the Ministry of Sound, in a foreshadowing of his belatedly discovered vocation. For during the Great Pandemic, the Baron was to be appointed minister for a short-lived medical novelty called Test and Trace, by the then prime minister, Letterbox Turds of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, himself also present, tousled-haired and trousers stained as usual.
But that night the harsh winter cold bit into baronial bones, as frostily it would into peasant flesh, and as he poked the dying embers, the Baron knew what had to be said. “Tell me, gentlemen,” the Baron continued, casting his eye over the aforesaid Turds, and his diminutive prime ministerial successor, referred to only as the Banker, whose short legs dangled childishly over the edge of the armchair like worms, “do you think, in your wildest imaginings, it could be possible for an object so commonplace as a phone… to be haunted?”
Turds and the Banker were in no mood for Christmas parlour games. It had been a difficult week. During the pandemic certain monies had journeyed ambiguously through the companies of certain people. One, a common lingerie seller from the slums of Glasgow, who had been chosen, accommodated, rewarded and subsequently ennobled, precisely because she had seemed unlikely to attract suspicion, had made a fatal error, the Baroness conspicuously spending the sidelined sums quite publicly, disporting herself on a yacht in revealing swimwear and becoming the belated subject of no small amount of controversy. “I simply sought to distance myself from the Baroness,” began the Baron, “by sharing a message in which she did not make clear her financial links to the company we were publicly funding, but…”
“But…”, exclaimed Turds, suddenly realising the full implications of the Baron’s words, “the message you have shared dates from the period where the three of us agreed we had lost all our messages.” “Yes,” replied the Baron, ruefully, “that’s about the shape of it, Turds,” and he stoked the dying fire again, more in hope than expectation.
“But Baron!”, shrieked the Banker, hysterically, kicking his tiny legs furiously, “they know the messages aren’t lost now. We’re ruined! You fool!” And with that the Banker buried his little head in his soft hands, sobbing. “You can’t talk, Banker,” snapped Turds. “When you were questioned, you forgot the statement we’d agreed on – ‘It looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then, aaah, coming up again but somehow, ah, not it, it, it automatically erasing all the things, ah, between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up, so I, I can’t give you the technical explanation but that’s the best I’m able to do’ – and just kept saying: ‘I don’t recall’ over and over again. But what I don’t understand, Baron, is how you accessed the messages. We agreed to put them, ah, so to speak, beyond use.”
The Baron’s face turned ashen and he drank deeply from a crystal glass of whisky, staring hollow-eyed into the last flickering flame, as the traffic at the junction of Theobalds Road and Gray’s Inn Road outside grew uncharacteristically silent for the hour. “That’s just it, Turds, old man,” he muttered, “I did. But they keep popping up on to my phone.” “Let me see!” snapped Turds, snatching up the offending item and turning it on, his fat eyes suddenly widening in horror as he scrolled the screen. The messages! Thousands of them! Thousands of deals! Thousands of deaths! Billions of pounds! “Destroy this phone, Baron, destroy it!” shouted Turds.
“That’s not the end of it, Turds, old boy,” gibbered the Baron, like a man witness to a horrific vision of such virulence he is no longer accountable to reason, “they’re everywhere.” And with that, the Baron flipped up the lid of his laptop and Turds saw those same swathes of incriminating texts rolling endlessly past, Saint Peter’s Book of Life aflame. The final flicker of fire in the grate suddenly died and the Banker burst into tears in the darkness, but as he did, the Baron’s television exploded into life, the flatscreen filling with disputed litanies of funnelled funds and the expendable dead.
“The dead!”, squealed the Banker, as Turds tried to slap the fear out of him, “The dead will not be silenced! The dead will speak and we must answer.” Then, with a crackling surge of arcane power, each of the Baron’s three devices burned out and the room went black. Turds smoothed out his shivering successor’s crumpled jacket and straightened his tie. “Probably a simple connectivity issue, Baron,” he suggested, unconvincingly. “I’ll have MI5 send round a sympathetic tech wallah. Toodle-oo.”
His guests hurriedly departed, the Baron stood alone at the window of his mansion block apartment, the whisky untouched in the glass he clasped in his cold and frozen hand. The sun began to climb over the Wren spires of the City, spires that rose like fingers, coming out from the damp earth and pointing for ever, fingers rising from the damp earth and pointing forever at him.
Stewart Lee
2023-12-24T21:57:18+00:00
“Gentlemen,” began the Baron to his two companions, faces flickering in the guttering coals, “I beg your indulgence on a very peculiar matter, and I would ask you not to mock me, nor worse, to think me quite mad, until you have considered fully the whole of my sorry tale. For if what I am about to say is true, then I am of the mind that it has the capacity to be the ruination of all of us.” It was the evening of the winter solstice, and time once more for the quarterly meeting of three somewhat awkward acquaintances, bound by shared shame to a secrecy they regularly reassembled to reaffirm. Before falling upwards, as men of his birth do, their host Lord James, the 5th Baron of his line, had managed a nightspot in the stews south of the river named the Ministry of Sound, in a foreshadowing of his belatedly discovered vocation. For during the Great Pandemic, the Baron was to be appointed minister for a short-lived medical novelty called Test and Trace, by the then prime minister, Letterbox Turds of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, himself also present, tousled-haired and trousers stained as usual. But that night the harsh winter cold bit into baronial bones, as frostily it would into peasant flesh, and as he poked the dying embers, the Baron knew what had to be said. “Tell me, gentlemen,” the Baron continued, casting his eye over the aforesaid Turds, and his diminutive prime ministerial successor, referred to only as the Banker, whose short legs dangled childishly over the edge of the armchair like worms, “do you think, in your wildest imaginings, it could be possible for an object so commonplace as a phone… to be haunted?” Turds and the Banker were in no mood for Christmas parlour games. It...
Like Happy Mondays, The Fall, and William Blake, Sleaford Mods are English visionary ranters, seeing the big picture reflected in the toilet bowl.
The East Midlands duo's second album throws Andrew Fearn's decade dissolving scuffed dance loops and churning post-punk bass under Jason Williamson's kitchen sink hallucinations, profanity strewn, furiously funny.
Reporting from Poundland Britain's frontlines, the perfect antidote to Clarkson-Hopkins comment culture, and operating entirely outside traditional music biz structures, Sleaford Mods are the band of the moment.
Massive by Christmas.
Stewart Lee
2014-03-05T21:40:45+00:00
Like Happy Mondays, The Fall, and William Blake, Sleaford Mods are English visionary ranters, seeing the big picture reflected in the toilet bowl. The East Midlands duo's second album throws Andrew Fearn's decade dissolving scuffed dance loops and churning post-punk bass under Jason Williamson's kitchen sink hallucinations, profanity strewn, furiously funny. Reporting from Poundland Britain's frontlines, the perfect antidote to Clarkson-Hopkins comment culture, and operating entirely outside traditional music biz structures, Sleaford Mods are the band of the moment. Massive by Christmas.
Stewart Lee is past it. Ensconced in comfortable middle-age, the essential anger of comedy has deserted him. It’s time for him, at 41, to retire gracefully.
Or so Frankie Boyle would have you believe.
The Mock The Week star’s comments that no stand-up over 40 is funny was the spark that ignited these 90 unforgiving minutes of perfectly-measured sarcasm, using deconstruction, repetition and moral superiority as the sharpened tools with which to slay the very idea.
Boyle’s proposition is conclusively refuted, while he becomes the object of Lee’s scorn, his supposedly controversial line about the Queen’s vagina being meticulously picked apart, revealed as ridiculous under the scrutiny. This is Lee’s usual MO, and it’s as effective today as it has ever been.
The show’s title, as well as serving as a warning for those who like their humour lass challenging to stay away, comes from the sign behind every Caffe Nero counter. It was there that Lee was embarrassed when his loyalty card was refused because of an irregularity in the accumulated stamps.
The incident is typical of the sort of minor irritant that middle-class comics of a certain age – the very people Boyle was presumably thinking about – often build routines around, getting laughs from their impotent fury. Lee proves he can easily fit into this category, though it soon becomes apparent his heart is not in it. He berates us for chuckling at the ‘wrong’ places and subtly highlights the artifice of the supposed rage behind the genre. Never mind the free coffee, he’s certainly having his Danish raisin swirl and eating it….
This show of extended set pieces then moves on to the life expected of a fortysomething parent, skewering the bucolic idea of moving to the country with its cultural malnourishment before moving on to an attack on the unedifying ‘politically incorrect’ ideology as espoused by Top Gear that culminates in a daring piece about Richard Hammond’s near-fatal crash. Here, Lee moves the audience between discomfort and laughter with deceptive ease.
Because they are so distinctive, it’s easy to focus on Lee’s techniques; the deadpan delivery, the constant reiteration of his themes, the aloof demeanour. But there’s also a playfulness that imitators often miss, while the intelligent but unpretentious writing builds skilfully to make punchlines out of the most unexpected places.
Only in his final routine, based on the artistic bankruptcy of advertising executives, is in danger of becoming a parody of his own methodology – but the payoffs are certainly well worth it, and you’ll never watch Mark Watson’s Magners cider ads in quite the same way again.
Comedy in-jokes are, of course, an integral part of the show’s fabric. As well as Boyle, Lee takes pot-shots at the easy target of Michael McIntyre and creates a whole new genus of stand-up: the ‘Russell comedian’. But such asides hit a wider audience, not just the comedy cognoscenti.
In what will come as a surprise to long-term fans – though it’s entirely in keeping with his compulsion to keep the audience out of their comfort zone – Lee ends with a sincere song. It’s a cover version of a Steve Earle track, not a schmaltzy Lee Evans-style number; but it’s enough to show that he still has the capacity to surprise – even at a positively geriatric 41
Stewart Lee
2009-12-09T16:32:36+00:00
Stewart Lee is past it. Ensconced in comfortable middle-age, the essential anger of comedy has deserted him. It’s time for him, at 41, to retire gracefully. Or so Frankie Boyle would have you believe. The Mock The Week star’s comments that no stand-up over 40 is funny was the spark that ignited these 90 unforgiving minutes of perfectly-measured sarcasm, using deconstruction, repetition and moral superiority as the sharpened tools with which to slay the very idea. Boyle’s proposition is conclusively refuted, while he becomes the object of Lee’s scorn, his supposedly controversial line about the Queen’s vagina being meticulously picked apart, revealed as ridiculous under the scrutiny. This is Lee’s usual MO, and it’s as effective today as it has ever been. The show’s title, as well as serving as a warning for those who like their humour lass challenging to stay away, comes from the sign behind every Caffe Nero counter. It was there that Lee was embarrassed when his loyalty card was refused because of an irregularity in the accumulated stamps. The incident is typical of the sort of minor irritant that middle-class comics of a certain age – the very people Boyle was presumably thinking about – often build routines around, getting laughs from their impotent fury. Lee proves he can easily fit into this category, though it soon becomes apparent his heart is not in it. He berates us for chuckling at the ‘wrong’ places and subtly highlights the artifice of the supposed rage behind the genre. Never mind the free coffee, he’s certainly having his Danish raisin swirl and eating it…. This show of extended set pieces then moves on to the life expected of a fortysomething parent, skewering the bucolic idea of moving to the country with its cultural malnourishment before moving on to...
The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction pictures Albert Camus smoking a cigarette on the cover, and struggles to define its terms. A cult writer should have died, ideally in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind one seminal work and a whiff of wasted potential. The obscure Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, (1863-1947) almost qualifies as a cult, but soon the man his American publisher described as ‘the flower-tunicked priest of nightmare’ may be too well known to maintain the epithet. Just look around you.
The director Guillermo del Toro cited Machen’s The Great God Pan as an inspiration for his anti-fascist fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, which swept the board at this year’s Academy Awards. For a moment, Machen’s hellishly degenerate 1890 novel was tenuously linked to the Oscars’ host Ellen Degeneres. Machen's supernatural first world war fiction The Bowmen is the real story behind the forthcoming film, The Angel Of Mons. And Machen is a quiet influence on a new album of retro-electronica out today, We Are All Pan’s People, by The Focus Group.
Meanwhile, Machen’s band of devoted followers continues to spread the word. Last month Mark E Smith of The Fall told The Independent, “MR James is good, but Machen's fucking brilliant”. Barry Humphries remains a professed devotee, as does the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the comic book writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell, has allowed Machen minor roles in many of his works, and sees him as a template for contemporary approaches to the literature of landscape. But who was Arthur Machen, and why is he suddenly leaking into your life?
A vicar’s son from Caerleon, Machen arrived in London in 1881 at the age of eighteen, bent on becoming ‘a man of letters’ by sheer force of will, denied a University education by lack of funds. His first novel, The Great God Pan, was eventually ignored in the wake of the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, as the public turned away from the decadent themes it expressed. The Guardian described it as “the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable book we have yet seen in English”, while The Observer declared, “one shakes with laughter rather than dread.” 1907’s The Secret Glory explored Christian symbolism and was dismissed by The Morning Post as ‘too formless to be brought with in any literary mode’. Machen’s genre-resistant qualities continue to fascinate admirers. His next major work, the semi-autobiographical study of mental collapse, The Hill Of Dreams, is regarded his best, but Machen was most famous for the short story, The Bowmen.
This morale-boosting tale of First World War soldiers receiving supernatural assistance gave rise to the popular folk-myth of The Angel of Mons. In an ironic twist of fate, Machen eventually found himself pilloried by the credulous public for claiming he was the source of the story. Even today, the press release for Chocolate Chilli Films’ forthcoming Angels Of Mons movie ignores Machen’s role in the yarn. Between 1922 and 1926 Machen enjoyed an upsurge in popularity that saw his previously dismissed work published in Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library alongside DH Lawrence, HG Wells and James Joyce, all of whom survived the decade rather better remembered.
But by the 1930’s, Machen’s fortunes were in decline. 1933’s The Green Round was knocked out for a quick cash fix as part a series of ninepenny thrillers, but it captures the strange ordinariness of city streets, its narrator haunted by a miniature man in the environs of The British library, anticipating existential literature and prefiguring the rise of ‘psychogeography’. In the end, it was only an appeal sponsored by TS Eliot and John Masefield that ensured Machen some financial support for the last five years of his life. Today, you won’t find Machen in Waterstones, but he echoes around the edges of mass culture.
Jim Jupp and Julian House run the record label Ghost Box, home to primitive electronica and a faux-folk music derived from The Wicker Man and weird 70’s children’s television. “Machen is a constant background influence on the Ghost Box label,” explains Jim Jupp, “Julian and I grew up near Caerleon, where Machen was born, and used to spend a lot of time drinking there. Cosmic horror from the likes of Machen, Algernon Blackwood and HP Lovecraft is a big part of Julian's design work for the label and we like to refer to gateways, thresholds and "thin places" in track titles for our various projects.”
House’s Focus Group release We Are All Pan’s People today, nodding knowingly towards 70’s cultural ephemera and Machenalian mysticism simultaneously. Jupp’s own band, Belbury Poly, have just issued The Owl’s Map. The cd’s accompanying booklet details the fictional border town of Belbury, with photo inserts of pagan Sheela Na Gig sculptures alongside 70’s civic architecture. It’s an approach to landscape and environment that Machen would recognise, with different eras overlapping as the sacred slots in amidst the secular. Is it this aspect of Machen’s work that explains his increased near-visibility?
“Over last ten years there’s been a rise in people writing about place,” explains Alan Moore, “Iain Sinclair, for example, was influenced by Andre Breton and the surrealists’ jaunts around Paris, but also by Arthur Machen. Machen was travelling around London making observations of his surroundings, and making fictions from those impressions. When artists focus on a city they are also constructing it, building their vision into it. There is still a Machenesque imprint on London.”
The literary appreciation society, The Friends Of Arthur Machen, don’t need excuses to pursue their stated aims of “encouraging a wider recognition for Machen's work, providing a focus for critical debate, and enhancing the social lives of members.” It was the latter that was most evident on the first weekend of this month, when a diverse group of two dozen Friends met for their annual dinner at the Three Salmons Hotel in Usk, Monmouthsire. Gwilym, the goth librarian, issues the journal Machenalia twice a year. Ray’s Tartarus imprint specialises in luxurious editions of Machen’s books. Nicolas’ London Adventure organises literary guided walks around the city. Erik co-manages The Fantasy Centre bookshop on the Holloway Road, and remembers the Roundhouse and Arthur Lee’s Love. And, unusually for such an event, there are even four women present.
The Friends are, thankfully, friendly. Their dinner is refreshingly free of the internecine squabbling that often divides such special interest groups. Wine was paid for by the proceeds of an auction of Machenalian texts, donated by members, that took place earlier that day. And at ten o’clock the lights went down, significant figures were toasted, and extracts of Machen’s work were read by flickering candlelight. Then the party staggered into the streets of Usk to watch a fortuitously timed eclipse, which almost, but not quite, turned the moon blood red.
But would Machen have approved of the evening’s events? For the society’s secretary Mark Samuels, the social side of the Friends is essential; “Machen held that the average tavern was often a more sacred place than the average church,” he maintains, “since he despised the notion that the purpose of the Christian faith was to promote a series of prescriptive moral codes rather than revealing itself, without preconditions, as a profound source of mystical tradition and symbolism. To Machen, a pint of foaming ale was a sacrament as deserving of awe and wonder as the Latin Rite.”
While Machen’s interest in place seems like the most obvious contemporary resonance for his work, each member of The Friends Of Arthur Machen finds something different to love. Theologians admire Machen’s spirituality, secularists his rationalism. There’s enough skill in his writing to make a case for it as literature, and it’s shocking enough to consume as first rate pulp. “My theory, for what its worth, is that Machen specifically appeals to those who suffer from the nagging sense that they're outlanders in a strange world,” explains Mark Samuels. “I don't think this necessarily indicates any spiritual or religious predisposition, just the sense that our essential nature is to seek after mysteries.” Alan Moore makes a more dramatic claim for Machen’s resurgent popularity. “Machen was like Blake in that he used the irrational world of romantic visions to find something meaningful at the heart of human existence. The public’s belief in The Bowmen shows that after World War I people yearned for something spiritual. It’s the same today. Machen is ripe for revival.”
Stewart Lee
2007-02-01T19:45:43+00:00
The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction pictures Albert Camus smoking a cigarette on the cover, and struggles to define its terms. A cult writer should have died, ideally in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind one seminal work and a whiff of wasted potential. The obscure Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, (1863-1947) almost qualifies as a cult, but soon the man his American publisher described as ‘the flower-tunicked priest of nightmare’ may be too well known to maintain the epithet. Just look around you. The director Guillermo del Toro cited Machen’s The Great God Pan as an inspiration for his anti-fascist fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, which swept the board at this year’s Academy Awards. For a moment, Machen’s hellishly degenerate 1890 novel was tenuously linked to the Oscars’ host Ellen Degeneres. Machen's supernatural first world war fiction The Bowmen is the real story behind the forthcoming film, The Angel Of Mons. And Machen is a quiet influence on a new album of retro-electronica out today, We Are All Pan’s People, by The Focus Group. Meanwhile, Machen’s band of devoted followers continues to spread the word. Last month Mark E Smith of The Fall told The Independent, “MR James is good, but Machen's fucking brilliant”. Barry Humphries remains a professed devotee, as does the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the comic book writer Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell, has allowed Machen minor roles in many of his works, and sees him as a template for contemporary approaches to the literature of landscape. But who was Arthur Machen, and why is he suddenly leaking into your life? A vicar’s son from Caerleon, Machen arrived in London in 1881 at the age of eighteen, bent on becoming ‘a man of letters’ by sheer force of will, denied a University education by lack of funds. His...
I hope you are all well. I had a great summer of weird music and Welsh mountains, but I have been a bit ill with covid or something and had to cancel some warm-ups, so sorry of that affected your plans. I went into a bad acid world of wet cement and sat still for days staring at Italian ‘70s cinema. I ate only sausages, I think because Keir Starmer mentioned them in a speech which reminded me how much I love them, and that I don’t eat them enough, so well done Sir Keir.
One of my cats is really pissing me off as he will never let me catch him for flea and worm treatment, but to be fair he was a rescue kitten and his siblings were pretty much all killed by foxes so he is jumpy. My other cat was found abandoned in a box on a busy road, but you wouldn’t know it as he is cool. It makes you think about nature and nurture, as does the book Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? by Jakko M Jakszyk, who I am interviewing in London in November. We are all dust in the wind.
In September I had a great night with the American gentleman musician Steve Wynn, of Dream Syndicate, and his partner the drummer Linda Pitmon, when I hosted an event for Steve’s new book I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True. The book reminded me how I was shaped by the things I was sold on as a teenager, how lucky I was that one of them was Steve’s work, and what a quiet inspiration his art and attitude has been for four decades.
In August, I realised I was much blinder than I thought and got some new glasses for reading which has changed my life and pushed me back into books again with glee. The newfound funnelling of information will hopefully bleed out on the stage, as I am struggling more than usual with the new show, as you will see. Now I am blind, deaf, and with a heart condition. I don’t ever need to see a Samuel Beckett play again.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of farts.”
1) VOTE IN THE NATIONAL TRUST A G M
This may seem a strange start to a comedian’s newsletter, but just because the government has changed ongoing attempts by sinister organisations and individuals to infiltrate and influence our cultural and educational institutions have not ended. Every year a mysteriously funded, Tufton St associated astroturfed, fake grass roots pressure group called, plausibly, Restore Trust tries to get its candidates onto the board of the National Trust. Their previous candidates have included the ‘Reverend’ Stephen Green, the homophobic far right evangelical who attempted to close down Jerry Springer The Opera. The group enjoys the support of Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg and benefits from sympathetic, if often inaccurate and legally actionable, pieces in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail etc.
If Restore get control of board of the National Trust they could free up – for God knows what use – land and property and artwork that has been held in trust on our behalf since the 19th c. We don’t know exactly what they want because, typically of Tufton St afiliated groups, they won’t say who funds them.
So if you are a National Trust member you MUST VOTE for the National Trust’s recommended candidates by Nov 2nd (online below), and of you are not maybe join and vote to protect our environment, our inheritance and our history from those who would repurpose such things for their own financial and political ends. You’ve seen what they did to the BBC.
Do you agree with the high keening complaints of Feargal ‘Teenage Kicks’ Sharkey that British seas and rivers should be shit-free, so we can swim and so living things can live, and that the private companies that have profiteered from them should pay up and clean up, or pack up and clear off? Then go on the march for clean water – it’s a basic right! Make Keir Sausages Starmer hear the song of the sea!
3) AN EVENING W JAKKO JAKSZYK, WEST HAMPSTEAD ARTS, OCT 11TH
West Hampstead Arts Club - 32 Mill Lane, London, NW6 1NR Doors 7.30pm | 8.30pm start Limited tickets available to purchase from here
Stewart Lee is to host An evening with Jakko Jakszyk, that celebrates the release of Jakko’s new memoir - ‘Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? The Unlikely Memoir of Jakko M Jakszyk’. Jakko is best known as lead singer and guitarist for the founding fathers of progressive rock, King Crimson, since 2013. Jakko...“I’m a huge admirer of Stewart, so I’m thrilled he’s agreed to be part of this evening. Indeed he once wrote of my one man show in Edinburgh, that I should ‘stop wanking on about being an orphan like a loser’ So he’s clearly the right man for the job!” In his new memoir - ‘Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? The Unlikely Memoir of Jakko M Jakszyk’ Jakko tells the story of his life, from finding and meeting his birth mother and self-proclaimed ‘white supremacist’ step-siblings, to encounters with Michael Jackson, Kate Bush, Cliff Richard, Jack Charlton, Audrey Hepburn, the Dalai Lama and Millwall Football Club’s dodgy director Reg Burr. It is about how his journey to discover his family allowed him to reflect on who he could have been had he not been given away at birth. Pre-order ‘Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? The Unlikely Memoir of Jakko M Jakszyk’ here
4) SAMHAIN RITUAL, EARTH, HACKNEY, LONDON OCT 29TH
Weird Walk magazine presents Stewart Lee introducing wyrd musicians headlined by Daisy Rickman, 6pm Earth, Hackney, London. Tickets: https://thesamhainritual.eventbrite.com There may be Were-action, costume pending.
5) TALES OF THE WEIRD BRITISH LIBRARY NOV 2ND
I’m hosting an event with the novelists Daisy Johnson and Andrew Michael Hurley as part of this folk-horror lit fest at the British Library on Nov 2nd
Rob Curry and Tim Pleister (Way Of The Morris, The Ballad of Shirley Collins) are in the process of making a charming film about a day in the life of the enduring septuagenarian British legend of psychedelia Nick Saloman, of the group Bevis Frond, Little Eden, which may or may not be finished.
I will be hosting a screening, and the group will play a rare acoustic set, on Sunday Nov 3rd at 5pm at the Rio Dalston in London. There is also another screening and acoustic set, but without me kakking on, the next day in Brighton at the Duke of York’s cinema at 6.15pm
7) SO WATT! LONDON JAZZ FESTIVAL FILM SHOW NOV 16TH
So Watt: Jazz and Improvisation on British TV Jazz on Screen Sat 16 Nov 2024, 14:30, BARBICAN, LONDON Cinema 2. Diving into the British TV archives of the 70s!
Stewart Lee (Host): Lee’s passion for the genre ensures a thoughtful exploration of the themes and historical context behind these films.
Maggie Nicols (Special Guest): Celebrated jazz vocalist and improviser Nicols has been a prominent figure in the British jazz scene for decades.
Ian Greaves (Co-Curator) is a writer and researcher whose books include edited collections of the work of Dennis Potter, Jonathan Miller and Ivor Cutler.
Open Door: Musicians' Action Group (1974) is introduced by the inimitable Spike Milligan and features rare footage of The Tony Oxley Unit, Stan Tracey, Norma Winstone and Maggie Nicols. Aquarius: Sounds Amazing (1975) features saxophonist Evan Parker, percussionist Paul Lytton, Max Eastley, David Toop, and Hugh Davies. There will also be the earliest known footage of Derek Bailey performing for Omnibus (1973). And Richard Williams speaking to Ornette Coleman on an early edition of The Old Grey Whistle Test (1972).
Michael Cumming’s Oxide Ghosts, a blurred documentary about Chris Morris’ Brass Eye, is on the road again. Michael and I are both appearing at the 21st Nov event in Finsbury Park, London. Other dates, and other guests, are available
"Reviewing a new Stewart Lee show is the easiest work in the world if your audience already knows who Lee is and what he does. Then you just stand by the side of the road, maybe dressed in the uniform of the typical Stewart Lee fan (all London media-hipster-type denim waistcoat and caramel twill rollups, topped with a herringbone baker boy) and you point the traveller in the right direction (Basic Leenow streaming on Sky Comedy until 24th August).You can also reassure them and say it’s "more of the usual" and, in that smug way that all true fans of Lee are said to display, give them a knowing wink and say it’s fearsome stuff and blisteringly good.
But if your audience doesn’t know Lee, then the work becomes more difficult...
You begin by mumbling "Lee is kind of like... but nothing like..."
Daniel Kitson and Simon Munnery are widely cited as his main similarities but it’s also Tony Hancock’s pathos with a dash of Steve Martin’s eclectic brilliance; the misanthropy of George Carlin with a hint of Don Rickles willingness to jump off the stage and pick a fight. Then again, it’s nothing like that. Lee is uniquely Lee; the beats are familiar but the paths taken on his long rambles are entirely his own.
Basic Lee is Lee’s attempt to return to pure standup after some higher concept (and more expensive) shows, including his last (Snowflake/Tornado) which involved a large shark’s head. He presents an argument about the evolving nature of standup comedy, starting with the oldest material he’d written, and working his way to the present day. But that’s not really "the show".
Skim the surface and you might describe the show as a series of encounters between Lee and his audience. What you don’t get are jokes or punchlines, or, certainly, not in the traditional sense. Jokes are there but delivered as if through a meat grinder. It’s up to you to pick the bones from the gristle.
The fun is in the asides, the digressions, and the continual baiting of the audience. "It’s like jazz," says Lee at one point, adopting the voice of those insufferable types who constantly whine on about how watching Stewart Lee is like listening to jazz.
But it is like listening to jazz. He plays with motifs and form, and then, just in case you missed the influence, riffs on the history of jazz. We should only be thankful that he doesn’t break out a trombone and give us a 20-minute exploration of the Phrygian Minor scale (maybe on his next tour when he promises to adopt a Wolfman mask).
Gary Winogrand, the great(est) American street photographer, once said, "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed". With Lee, you sense he’s performing material to see what it looks like when performed as standup. He constantly talks about himself doing standup; reminding us thatThe Timesonce described him as "the world’s greatest living stand-up comedian". He talks about the role he’s played in popularising long-form stand-up and delivers a particularly biting (but fair) verdict on Phoebe Waller Bridge’s breaking of the fourth wall inFleabag. Yet Lee draws back how insufferably egotistical this would be by leaning into the insufferable character he’s playing.
This gives rise to the tension underlying the drama on stage; that of an artist trying to create art inside a genre unaccustomed to art and against an audience hostile to the entire venture. It’s tightly crafted, even as it often feels like it’s falling apart. At one point, he liberally takes the old Pagliacci joke, made most famous by its appearance in Alan Moore’sWatchman, and offers it as his own. It’s theft but I’m constantly reminded of Lewis Hyde’s seminal book on the nature of disruptive imagination,Trickster Makes This World. "Trickster isn’t a run-of-the mill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds."
At which point, I can hear Lee’s voice pointing out that only "another monotonous, passive-aggressive man" would reference a little-known book on anthropology to recommend a standup special.
But that’s just it. To love Lee’s work is to loathe yourself for enjoying comedy pulled apart so you can see how it’s done. I am that monotonous passive-aggressive man. Why the hell can’t I just enjoy jokes? Why can’t I just go see Tim Vine, like everybody else?
I saw "Basic Lee" four times on tour, proving (as if this needs proof) that I am that insufferable bore. I can explain why each one was so very different. I first saw it at the start of the run, in the Leicester Square Theatre in Soho. Lee had just broken his foot and hobbled around the stage with a large protective boot on his foot. He kept wincing in pain, which lent the show pathos. That night he thanked the audience for helping make it the best show of the run (to that point). I saw it again once again in Salford, and twice in Liverpool, including the show that Lee would claim to have been his worst.
From my place in the audience, ranging from the front row to almost the back row, the standard never dipped. Some nights, Lee extemporised more than he would on other nights, but it was never easy to spot which bits were new. "That bit normally doesn’t get a laugh," he’ll say, though, of course, that bit always got a laugh.
The version ofBasic Leenow showing on Sky Comedy is perhaps the purest distillation of the run’s material. It also adopts a few of his familiar tricks you might know from his TV series and other specials, especially the commentary he addresses straight to camera. It’s another of the things he does so well, creating a paratext to the main text; asides functioning like footnotes and adding another layer of abstraction to the entire proceeding.
And, still, none of that really explains Lee, which is why his comedy is worth return visits. Compared to many stand-ups who play familiar games ("blah, blah, rhythm of a joke" as Lee puts it), Lee deliberately places himself on the edge between success and failure. But even writing that is to borrow from Lee, who mocks those of us who point out that it’s best when it’s failing. But that’s why Stewart Lee remains a paradox. The closer you get to enjoying his work, the more he pushes you away; the more you loathe his work, the more he wants to draw you closer.
See if you’re on the inside or the outside of his comedy on Sky Comedy."
10) 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
3rd December 2024 – 17th 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 from the dark forests of North America 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, ("the world's greatest living stand-up comedian" The Times), is in danger of being left behind. He's approaching sixty with debilitating health conditions, his TV profile has diminished, and his once BAFTA award winning style of stand-up seems obsolete in the face of a wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars. But can Lee unleash his inner Man-Wulf to position himself alongside comedy legends like Dave Chapelle, Ricky Gervais and Jordan Peterson at the forefront of side-splitting stadium-stuffing shit-posting?
Opening at Leicester Square Theatre in December 2024 the new show will tour to UK cities throughout 2025.
Leicester Sq Theatre, London 3rd Dec 2024 – 17th Jan 2025 7pm, except for 6pm and 8.30 pm Sat 4th Jan.
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 - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 2nd April 2025 - Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield - ON SALE SOON
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
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
September 2025
Monday 8th September 2025 - Lighthouse, Poole - ON SALE SOON
Tuesday 9th September 2025 - Lighthouse, Poole - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 10th September 2025 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - ON SALE SOON
Thursday 11th September 2025 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - ON SALE SOON
Friday 12th September 2025 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - ON SALE SOON
Saturday 13th September 2025 - Westlands Entertainment Venue, Yeovil - ON SALE SOON
Sunday 14th September 2025 - Westlands Entertainment Venue, Yeovil - ON SALE SOON
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 - ON SALE SOON
Sunday 28th September 2025 - His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen - ON SALE SOON
October 2025
Wednesday 15th October 2025 - Grand Theatre, Swansea - ON SALE SOON
Thursday 16th October 2025 - Grand Theatre, Swansea - ON SALE SOON
Friday 17th October 2025 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Saturday 18th October 2025 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Tuesday 21st October 2025 - Storyhouse, Chester - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 - Storyhouse, Chester - ON SALE SOON
Thursday 23rd October 2025 - Opera House, Buxton - ON SALE SOON
Friday 24th October 2025 - Opera House, Buxton - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 29th October 2025 - Cast, Doncaster - ON SALE SOON
Thursday 30th October 2025 - Cast, Doncaster - ON SALE SOON
Friday 31st October 2025 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - ON SALE SOON
November 2025
Saturday 1st November 2025 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - ON SALE SOON
Sunday 2nd November 2025 - Harrogate Theatre, Harrogate - ON SALE SOON
Monday 3rd November 2025 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Tuesday 4th November 2025 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Tuesday 11th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 12th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - ON SALE SOON
Thursday 13th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - ON SALE SOON
Friday 14th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - ON SALE SOON
Saturday 15th November 2025 - Brighton Dome, Brighton - ON SALE SOON
Monday 17th November 2025 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - ON SALE SOON
Tuesday 18th November 2025 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - ON SALE SOON
Wednesday 19th November 2025 - Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham - ON SALE SOON
11) SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO
Stewart’s 2019 touring show Snowflake/Tornado, which was originally broadcast as a BBC Special in Autumn 2023 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. Hopefully I can give them a physical release at some point so you are slaves to the whims of licensing but you know what it’s like. These days.
MUDHONEY Grunge godheads still growling OCT 1st Bristol Academy, 2nd London Electric Ballroom
LONG RYDERS Another final chance to see the resurrected and now seemingly immortal Alt Country Punk pioneers – like the Clash gone Nashville – The Long Ryders.
OCTOBER
10th Glasgow Oran Mor,
11th Birkenhead Future Yard,
13th M’cr Band On The Wall,
14th Nottingham Metronom2,
16th London 229,
18th St Leonards Piper
MARK RADCLIFFE AND MARC RILEY LIVE Slack muthafuckas shoot the breeze. NOV 3rd Shrewsbury Severn, 5th Crewe Lyceum, 10th Warrington Parr Hall.
TIRZAH GARWOOD: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery London, 19 November 2024–26 May 2025. 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.
THE DAMNED Black Album/Strawberries line-up, with hard-wristed Holy Grail headhunter Rat Scabies back on drums.
CHUCK PROPHET Chuck’s last live tour was on 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 19 - Oxford - The Bullingdon
February 20 - Leeds - Brudenell Social Club
February 21 - Manchester - Yes Pink Room
February 22 - Newcastle - The Cluny
February 23 - Glasgow - St Lukes
February 24 - Sheffield - Greystones
February 25 - Leicester - The International
February 26 - Nottingham - Metronome
February 27 - Cambridge - Portland Arms
February - 28 Norwich - Arts Centre
March 1 - Hassocks - Mid Sussex Music Hall
March 2 - Bristol - Lantern
March 3 - Birmingham - Hare & Hounds
March 4 - Southampton - 1865
March 5 - London - The Garage
14) 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 na Bóinne architect)
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)
Stewart Lee
2024-09-27T13:35:51+01:00
Dear fans! I hope you are all well. I had a great summer of weird music and Welsh mountains, but I have been a bit ill with covid or something and had to cancel some warm-ups, so sorry of that affected your plans. I went into a bad acid world of wet cement and sat still for days staring at Italian ‘70s cinema. I ate only sausages, I think because Keir Starmer mentioned them in a speech which reminded me how much I love them, and that I don’t eat them enough, so well done Sir Keir. One of my cats is really pissing me off as he will never let me catch him for flea and worm treatment, but to be fair he was a rescue kitten and his siblings were pretty much all killed by foxes so he is jumpy. My other cat was found abandoned in a box on a busy road, but you wouldn’t know it as he is cool. It makes you think about nature and nurture, as does the book Who’s The Boy With The Lovely Hair? by Jakko M Jakszyk, who I am interviewing in London in November. We are all dust in the wind. In September I had a great night with the American gentleman musician Steve Wynn, of Dream Syndicate, and his partner the drummer Linda Pitmon, when I hosted an event for Steve’s new book I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True. The book reminded me how I was shaped by the things I was sold on as a teenager, how lucky I was that one of them was Steve’s work, and what a quiet inspiration his art and attitude has been for four decades. In August, I realised I was much blinder than I thought and got some...
Snowflake/Tornado was recorded in May 2022 on the UK tour, in York, and was broadcast on the BBC in September 2022.
Snowflake went out on the 4th September, and Tornado on the 29th (following a delay imposed by program rescheduling after the death of the Queen).
Snowflake & Tornado are now available to download via THE MEDIA GARAGE.
Snowflake/Tornado was recorded in May 2022 on the UK tour, in York, and was broadcast on the BBC in September 2022. Snowflake went out on the 4th September, and Tornado on the 29th (following a delay imposed by program rescheduling after the death of the Queen). Snowflake & Tornado are now available to download via THE MEDIA GARAGE. There are plans for a DVD release later in 2024. Reviews / Press here.
Like a great sloppy spaff, the flying shit of the Queen’s speech has hit the fan of functioning democracy full in the face. More than two million of the electorate least likely to support Boris Johnson are to be robbed of their right to vote, while millions of the sort of true Brits who moved to Spain when the local shopping centre installed a Muslamic prayer room are to have theirs reinstated; key environmental protections are to be scrapped or diluted; legitimate protests can be closed down if they’re “too noisy”; cub scout groups that fail to invite the anti-feminist meat-man Jordan Peterson to address the boys are to be fined; even Tuesday’s belated announcement of a conversion therapy ban was, in fact, conditional on “consultations with the public”. What’s the point of consulting them? The British public would vote to make conversion therapy compulsory if the Conservatives spent millions on an 88% false Facebook campaign saying lesbians killed the fishing industry. On TV, a typically acquiescent BBC journalist, Chris Mason, nodded encouragingly as two genuinely distressed Hartlepool men blamed the Labour party for 12 years of Conservative policies. Job done! Monkeys beware!!
But how have we slid so swiftly from unstable democracy to proto-totalitarian kleptocracy? And is Angela Rayner, the Wookiee-in-waiting to Starmer’s would-be Han Solo, the answer to the woes of we the woke? Even to centralists like me, Starmer’s abandonment of Angela Rayner seemed odd. There are many reasons for Labour’s current woes. Angela Rayner isn’t one of them. Sacking Angela Rayner was like cutting off your leg to fix a blocked toilet. Reinstating Angela Rayner was like finding the toilet still blocked and then trying to unblock it with your severed leg. This sort of leg-toilet-based political analysis is what Robert Peston lacks.
A transcript of my standup “comedy” show, from 13 April 2018 in Southend-on-Sea, includes the following “routine”. “People voted to leave the EU for all sorts of different reasons – they did, don’t snigger down there. Not everyone that voted to leave the EU wanted to see Britain immediately descend into being an unaccountable single party state exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely. Some people just wanted bendy bananas. ‘Oh no, I only wanted bendy bananas and now there’s this chaotic inferno of hate.’ ‘Oh well, never mind, at least the bananas are all bendy again, aren’t they?’ Like they always fucking were.”
Since I stopped performing the “routine” I have learned with embarrassment that in 1994 the EU did recommend some premium graded bananas be free from “abnormal curvature”, though this advice was later withdrawn and is nothing like the supposed across-the-board bendy banana ban maliciously propagated by the shameless liar Boris Johnson when he was the Daily Telegraph’s official European reality distortion agent. The existence, however brief, of Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94 does slightly dent the impregnable hull of my banana “joke”, but I don’t think the Times is about to withdraw its 2018 decision that I am “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” any time soon!
In contrast, the section of the “routine” where I declare that Brexit will deliver “an unaccountable single party state exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely” was “funny” three years ago, I believe, because a) it played into managed perceptions of the character of the standup “comedian” Stewart Lee as a depressive champagne socialist and b) because its clearly pre-written complexity deliberately critiques the unspoken understanding that standup affects to be spontaneous and conversational. The “joke” delivers the required “humorous” content at the same time as flattering the audience’s innate knowledge of its form. The “joke” is “funny” on two levels, then, and on a third as well, because it includes a rhythmically and musically satisfying plosive obscenity, in this case the word “fucking”, at or near the end and swearing is innately amusing if deployed correctly.
But suddenly the idea that Britain should “descend into an unaccountable single party state exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely” sounds less like a set-up for a “punchline” and more like a genuine Tory manifesto commitment. Only two weeks ago in this very slot, I believe I opined that lying Boris Johnson’s wallpaper-funding farrago might be the trivial thread that unravels the knitted bra of his falsehoods generally. The gangster Al “Scarface” Capone was eventually taken down not for the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, but for tax evasion. Boris “Spaff face” Johnson might be undone not by tax-free phone-a-friend contracts and development handouts to his sofa surfer, but for initially supplementing the unnecessary redecoration of an already redecorated flat with funds from undisclosed donors, surely likely to seek favours at a later date. Well, that misplaced optimism lasted me and the other Luc Belaire Leninists of the Commentariat about a week.
The media comply with Boris Johnson’s lies; he ignores the judgments of government bodies designed to curtail malpractice; his under-the-radar internet campaigns direct-market false claims to socially profiled susceptibles. At least the law itself remains beyond his control. Crowdfunded, do-gooding lawyers could surely whack Boris Johnson as soundly as Jolyon Maugham’s baseball bat thwacked that fox. But check the small print in the Queen’s speech! On page 145 “a Judicial Review Bill will protect the judiciary from being drawn into political questions”. I wonder what that means? The future? It’s Boris Johnson’s bare white buttocks going up and down on a human face – for ever. Terms and conditions apply. Boris Johnson’s buttocks may go up as well as down.
Stewart Lee
2021-05-16T12:50:07+01:00
Like a great sloppy spaff, the flying shit of the Queen’s speech has hit the fan of functioning democracy full in the face. More than two million of the electorate least likely to support Boris Johnson are to be robbed of their right to vote, while millions of the sort of true Brits who moved to Spain when the local shopping centre installed a Muslamic prayer room are to have theirs reinstated; key environmental protections are to be scrapped or diluted; legitimate protests can be closed down if they’re “too noisy”; cub scout groups that fail to invite the anti-feminist meat-man Jordan Peterson to address the boys are to be fined; even Tuesday’s belated announcement of a conversion therapy ban was, in fact, conditional on “consultations with the public”. What’s the point of consulting them? The British public would vote to make conversion therapy compulsory if the Conservatives spent millions on an 88% false Facebook campaign saying lesbians killed the fishing industry. On TV, a typically acquiescent BBC journalist, Chris Mason, nodded encouragingly as two genuinely distressed Hartlepool men blamed the Labour party for 12 years of Conservative policies. Job done! Monkeys beware!! But how have we slid so swiftly from unstable democracy to proto-totalitarian kleptocracy? And is Angela Rayner, the Wookiee-in-waiting to Starmer’s would-be Han Solo, the answer to the woes of we the woke? Even to centralists like me, Starmer’s abandonment of Angela Rayner seemed odd. There are many reasons for Labour’s current woes. Angela Rayner isn’t one of them. Sacking Angela Rayner was like cutting off your leg to fix a blocked toilet. Reinstating Angela Rayner was like finding the toilet still blocked and then trying to unblock it with your severed leg. This sort of leg-toilet-based political analysis is what Robert Peston lacks. A transcript of...
By his own admission, last time Stewart Lee played the Greenwich Comedy Festival marquee - in front of a beered-up crowd in 2010 - it was a disaster, and the gig had to be rescued by Daniel Kitson. But if he had second thoughts about returning, he slayed that demon at the opening night of this year's event in the grounds of the National Maritime Museum, thanks to a virtuosic routine about the perceived wisdom that liberal comics wouldn't dare tackle Islam in the same way they would lay into Christianity.
It's a peculiar prejudice that he's laid into before, but this extended routine - loosely based around an incident involving a woman in full niqab on the 149 bus - was a dazzling, hilarious display of manipulating audience's sensibilities and thwarting their expectations. In turns evoking Roy Chubby Brown while defiantly telling the large sell-out crowd precisely why they are allowed to laugh because ‘I'm not an idiot and know what I'm doing.'
Indeed he does. He may have a superiority complex on stage, but he's earned it. Under the guise of delivering the anti-Islamic stand-up he's told people crave, he prompts examination of prejudice while taking brilliant side-swipes at the young plagiarist pretenders to his comedy crown, the crowd-sourced surveillance of Twitter, and his own reputation for pause-filled delivery. In fact, it is far more nuanced than that; for a minute or so getting laughs from hesitancy in a way not seen since Frankie Howerd's day. It's not all about the super-smart material - although clearly most of it is.
At the start of his headlining set, Lee promised us two routines: the called-for Islamophobia and 25 minutes entirely about urine purely, he claims, because if he heard about a comedian doing such a thing he would assume it was abysmal or brilliant - and he wanted to prove it could be neither.
He was possibly right. Even though the section was foreshortened, the fictional family catchphrases based around pee didn't quite gain enough traction. But the mixed reaction opened the door for a masterful berating of he audience, holding us collectively responsible for real-life tragedies - with the exaggeration of blame played entirely deadpan.
Lee's slot was prefaced by two other heroes of the alternative comedy scene, Tony Law and Josie Long, and held together with the skilful compering of ever-affable Ed Gamble. Not that he had to do too much at the start - this corner of South-East London has a fine reputation for audiences who mess with comics, thanks largely to Up The Creek and the Tunnel Club in their heydays - and the lies spun by ‘Noddy' and ‘Big Ears' got some instant laughs. Whether by luck or instinct, Gamble also unearthed two cops - one a police diver, the other an undercover officer who poses as a prostitute - which provided the sort of running gags any MC would hope for.
It's fair to say the unabashed absurdity of opening act Tony Law was a tent-splitter - and he probably wouldn't have it any other way. Playing to a much wider crowd than his natural audience, his nonsense garners huge laughs, but also some stony faces.
However anyone who comes onstage in way-too-snug onesie and carrying a trombone and a shopping bag is clearly not a comic who takes themselves too seriously, and there are gags at his own expense a plenty. He may be weird, but he's also that archetype of the mainstream comedy ‘saying what we're all thinking'. It's just that what we're all thinking is ‘that guy's odd' - though there's more to his comedy than that superficial impression.
Long, like Law, performed edited highlights from her Edinburgh show, about her struggles to enter enter the successful relationship she believes she ought to have now she's in her early thirties, especially given her inherently romantic nature. There's a strong narrative structure to this, starting off with her stupidity in going to the wrong airport and weaving deftly around her own family and - making something of a departure for her, a sex story.
It's not as overtly political as her reputation - save for a dark fantasy about doing away with Nigel Farage or the odd aside about the warped priorities of those who seek wealth above all else. But there's something more subtle about reclaiming the ‘period joke' from being an inaccurate slur against female comics. A strong ending for a warm, thoughtful, and funny routine.
Stewart Lee
2014-09-25T21:22:13+01:00
By his own admission, last time Stewart Lee played the Greenwich Comedy Festival marquee - in front of a beered-up crowd in 2010 - it was a disaster, and the gig had to be rescued by Daniel Kitson. But if he had second thoughts about returning, he slayed that demon at the opening night of this year's event in the grounds of the National Maritime Museum, thanks to a virtuosic routine about the perceived wisdom that liberal comics wouldn't dare tackle Islam in the same way they would lay into Christianity. It's a peculiar prejudice that he's laid into before, but this extended routine - loosely based around an incident involving a woman in full niqab on the 149 bus - was a dazzling, hilarious display of manipulating audience's sensibilities and thwarting their expectations. In turns evoking Roy Chubby Brown while defiantly telling the large sell-out crowd precisely why they are allowed to laugh because ‘I'm not an idiot and know what I'm doing.' Indeed he does. He may have a superiority complex on stage, but he's earned it. Under the guise of delivering the anti-Islamic stand-up he's told people crave, he prompts examination of prejudice while taking brilliant side-swipes at the young plagiarist pretenders to his comedy crown, the crowd-sourced surveillance of Twitter, and his own reputation for pause-filled delivery. In fact, it is far more nuanced than that; for a minute or so getting laughs from hesitancy in a way not seen since Frankie Howerd's day. It's not all about the super-smart material - although clearly most of it is. At the start of his headlining set, Lee promised us two routines: the called-for Islamophobia and 25 minutes entirely about urine purely, he claims, because if he heard about a comedian doing such a thing he would assume...
On Wednesday evening a high-level spook I had known vaguely at Oxford, a former Etonian and a Bullingdon Club chum of David Cameron's, rang me up with interesting findings and a resistible offer. "You've been following this Birmingham schools thing, Lee?" "Yes," I replied. "It's outrageous. No child should have to go to school in Birmingham." "Very funny," said the spook. "But what do you make of it?" "Well, Doug," I answered, "it appears that where education is concerned, all faiths are equal, but some are more equal than others." "Don't be smart, Lee. People's lives are at risk. This could kick off into a bloody civil war. Luckily, Dave's got a plan."
Indeed he had. Like a man distracting his children's attention from a terrible car crash by pointing at a funny pig, David Cameron had deftly skirted the ideological collapse of the education system by saying all schools had to teach British values, and then disappearing back into his office before anyone had the audacity to ask what that actually meant.
As he monitors all communications of any sort all the time, Doug had noticed that my standup comedy act was much discussed online by the sort of fidgety middle-class liberals inherently sceptical about notions of patriotism. Doug wanted me to fill a gaping hole in an emergency celebrity thinktank in Westminster the following morning, aiming to produce a workable definition of British Values as quickly as possible.
This definition could then be translated into Welsh, Gaelic, Cornish, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian and Urdu, printed up on massive boards mounted on the front of intimidating armoured personnel carriers, and driven around areas with high immigrant populations by masked gunmen, instructed to shoot on sight anyone who so much as tutted at them.
There was no fee for the focus group, but unlimited Fanta and party eggs were to be provided for all the celebrities, and each of the entertainers was to be given a £4 voucher to spend in the House of Commons bar at the end of the day. The token could not, however, be exchanged for sparkling water or continental beers, which were to be paid for at a till linked directly to an account in Luxembourg, as part of an arrangement organised by the chancellor.
It was not the first time I had been invited to help shore up British national interests. Earlier this year, the famous adventurer Rory Stewart had asked me to be part of a continuous Auld Lang Syne of e-list celebrities, their arms linked along the border in a gesture of Anglo-Scots solidarity. I was to take my place on Adrian's Wall, joining hands with the Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan, and a lifesize wash mitt of Archie the Laird of Balamory.
Gaughan, a staunch nationalist, declined, and the foamy Archie mitt became saturated with tepid bathwater and collapsed in on itself, uselessly. Besides which, my own opposition to Scottish independence had by then collapsed too. In the light of Ukip's success I now rather wished that I too could become independent of Britain and Farage's bewildering policy void. Nonetheless, anxious to defer bloodshed in my home town of Birmingham, the city of a thousand faiths, I accepted Doug's offer.
The next morning, Thursday, I found my letter box compromised by a free copy of the Sun newspaper, which was aiming to win new readers. In the wake of Ukip's success and our forthcoming national football fever, 22m patriotic editions of a special England issue were delivered free to unwitting households all across Britain. Some made landfall in beatnik hipster urban zones such as mine, where the paper was so rarely seen by human eyes that it had assumed a folkloric air, like the sasquatch or the kelpie.
I was to be charged later that day with defining a national identity – Britishness – and the collective good was at stake. Tangentially, the Sun was struggling with a similar conundrum. The paper was trying to define Englishness, through the thoughtful writings of my fellow celebrity columnists James Corden, Tony Parsons, Jeremy Clarkson, Katie Hopkins and Rod Liddle. If anyone could wrestle this age-old problem to the mat it was this dream team of clockwork opinion monkeys. Perhaps I could learn something that would be useful later that day.
For Parsons, the English are "gentle, tolerant … and love animals and freedom… and hate people who aren't polite". Parsons' definition of Englishness sounds like a transcript of the envelope upon which Ricky Gervais worked out his Derek character. Hopkins maintains she's English because if you cut her to the core her blood's "red, white and blue", which presumably means Katie washed her England flag along with a non-colourfast Conservative Party HQ sauna wash mitt. Corden appears in the paper in knitted tie, his face painted with a cross of St George, looking like the Man at C&A version of the Christian soldier who goes crazy and dynamites the Cajun's shack in Southern Comfort. The image illustrates his column. There is no need to read his column.
A Sgt Pepper-style Sun collage of 117 definitive English people included James Corden, Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson, Michael McIntyre, David Cameron, Jeremy Clarkson, and Nigel Farage, but no Mark E Smith, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ted Chippington, or Pauline Black from the Selecter, which my superior version would have boasted. At which point during the preparation of the artwork was Gary Barlow crossed out? When did they realise they'd forgotten to include Rik Mayall, who narrowly escaped this unasked-for honour?
Doubtless the Sun's choices exemplify Englishness to someone, but not to me. It was as if ideals of identity were almost entirely subjective. Making David Cameron's dream of a definition of Britishness a living reality was going to take some doing.
I arrived at Westminster at 8am, ready for a day of defining national identity with the other key British celebrities hurriedly assembled by Cameron's advisers; Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, Judaism's Rabbi Sachs, television's June Sarpong, Top Gear's Richard Hammond, thought's Brian Eno, women's PJ Harvey, history's David Starkey, comedy's Leo X Muhammad, Scotland's Lulu, Northern Ireland's Van Morrison and Wales's Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Rabbi Sachs embraced each of us in turn at length, weeping; Hammond began sucking hard on a Calippo; Van Morrison took off his wellington. The debate had begun.
Stewart Lee is appearing at the Bloomsbury theatre, London, this Wednesday and Thursday, in Tell Me Something I Don't Know, a benefit for Arts Emergency, a charity helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Stewart Lee
2014-06-15T13:14:23+01:00
On Wednesday evening a high-level spook I had known vaguely at Oxford, a former Etonian and a Bullingdon Club chum of David Cameron's, rang me up with interesting findings and a resistible offer. "You've been following this Birmingham schools thing, Lee?" "Yes," I replied. "It's outrageous. No child should have to go to school in Birmingham." "Very funny," said the spook. "But what do you make of it?" "Well, Doug," I answered, "it appears that where education is concerned, all faiths are equal, but some are more equal than others." "Don't be smart, Lee. People's lives are at risk. This could kick off into a bloody civil war. Luckily, Dave's got a plan." Indeed he had. Like a man distracting his children's attention from a terrible car crash by pointing at a funny pig, David Cameron had deftly skirted the ideological collapse of the education system by saying all schools had to teach British values, and then disappearing back into his office before anyone had the audacity to ask what that actually meant. As he monitors all communications of any sort all the time, Doug had noticed that my standup comedy act was much discussed online by the sort of fidgety middle-class liberals inherently sceptical about notions of patriotism. Doug wanted me to fill a gaping hole in an emergency celebrity thinktank in Westminster the following morning, aiming to produce a workable definition of British Values as quickly as possible. This definition could then be translated into Welsh, Gaelic, Cornish, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian and Urdu, printed up on massive boards mounted on the front of intimidating armoured personnel carriers, and driven around areas with high immigrant populations by masked gunmen, instructed to shoot on sight anyone who so much as tutted at them. There was no fee for the focus...
From 1989 to 1991 I lived in Finsbury Park, decades before it began to show signs of gentrification. I'd get home late from unpaid standup try-out spots, and it was hard to hold down a day job. At the end of my street, outside a hardware shop on Tollington Park, was a contraption so unusual that each night, in a state of adrenaline-driven imbalance, I would find myself staring at it in the small hours in bleak fascination. It was a maggot vending machine; faintly glowing, dimly humming, and stuffed with millions of live maggots throbbing gently en masse in a barely warmed state of collective suspended animation. As a younger, and more impressionable, man I couldn't help but find it vaguely profound.
One hot July night in 1990, around 1.30am, I was staring at the maggot machine as usual, a contraband comedy club's can of Carlsberg in hand, thinking about the maggots as metaphors for something or other, when my musings were interrupted by a sharply dressed young man, of around my age, emerging from a van bearing the legend "House of Maggots". "Excuse me sir," he said, politely, "maggot maintenance", and he wheeled over a pallet of plastic cool boxes. Unlocking the maggot machine he began to pour gallons of immobilised maggots into it, topping up the depleted stock within.
"Can I have a look, mate?" I asked. "I walk past this machine every night and I've wondered how it works." "By all means," said the man, and helped me up with a politeness and confidence that my prejudiced assumptions hadn't led me to expect in a man who vended maggots. Beneath me, millions of maggots pulsated slowly in comatose contentment. "I keep them just warm enough to live," he said, "but not hot enough to get excited, nor cold enough to expire. Here, pour this on them. It's their food." The man handed me a sachet of yeasty smelling flakes and I sprinkled it over the ignorant maggots.
"You're out late," the maggot man said, as he locked up the machine. "I'm trying to be a comedian," I replied. "I get back late from all these try-out gigs and the buzz keeps me awake. It's making it hard to hold on to temp jobs." "Oh," the man said. "Can you drive?" One cup of tea at an all-night cafe in Crouch End later and I became House of Maggots' second ever staff member.
Each night after my try-out gigs, I would get a train up to Watford to meet Grant, who patrolled his patch (principally London, and vast swaths of Norfolk and Suffolk, where early-morning anglers gathered by his machines in laybys and car parks), nocturnally maintaining his maggot empire. Like me, Grant had left further education a year previously, having studied finance at Manchester Polytechnic. One morning, setting off early on a fishing trip with an uncle who had forgotten to pack live bait, Grant spotted a gap in the market that his business brain could exploit. And House of Maggots was born.
There was less traffic in the nighttime, and between midnight and morning Grant and I swiftly circumnavigated his machines in a minivan full of permanently chilled larvae. Pretty soon our roles were established. I did all the heavy lifting and driving, while Grant sat in the passenger seat doing paperwork, maintaining his swelling maggot supply lines. Grant's enthusiasm was infectious. I liked him, though we rarely saw eye to eye on politics. Mick Jones from the Clash was Grant's cousin, and we'd blast his tapes from the tinny stereo, singing along to the words while debating the sentiment.
"How can you like the Clash," I asked Grant, "when you're obviously a Tory entrepreneur?" "Easy," he answered. "A protest group like the Clash? They're extremely valuable. The disgruntled proles go and see them on a Saturday night, get drunk, jump around, and feel like their grievances have been addressed. Then they're much happier going back to being wage slaves for the rest of the week." I laughed. Back then I assumed Grant was joking. "Out you get," he continued, "and don't forget to feed the maggots."
One night, as I was topping up a maggot machine in a layby near Thetford, an angler arrived to fill a Tupperware box with comatose larvae. While he made small talk he threaded the fattest maggots on to a succession of hooks, spiking them between two black, eye-like markings on one end. It seems silly to write about it now, but when I got back in the van with Grant I felt a twinge of conscience. "Grant," I said, "don't you ever feel bad about this? We spend the absolute minimum on maintaining those barely alive maggots, just so someone can buy them and then throw them to their deaths?" "My dear fellow," he said, buoyant as ever, "the maggots are comfortable, and they're fed, and they're warm-ish. They are serving an economic purpose. Their pointless existence is being monetised. I validate them."
When I got my first unpaid half spot at the old Comedy Store, on the east side of Leicester Square in December 1990, I told Grant I was quitting and he kindly came to see the show. The hot Saturday night sweat box was stuffed with drunken revellers, packed together at 2am in tight rows like sardines, though I got the feeling Grant saw them as something else. I stumbled through a typical anti-Tory alternative-comedy set and Grant handed me a good-luck card. When I got home I realised it contained the most eloquently written letter of encouragement and £50 in cash. I never saw Grant again.
Grant left House of Maggots, by then a successful outfit with nine employees, in 1997, when he stood as a Conservative MP, but remained a director until 2009, three years before he became chairman of the Conservative party. The skills Grant picked up in marketing maggots seemed to have deserted him earlier this week, when he blundered on to Twitter with an ill-judged graphic about the budget that swiftly sent the social network into meltdown. But I liked Grant back then and I still like him now, despite never actually having met him. Grant just wants all hardworking people to be content, fit for purpose, and able to do more of the things they enjoy.
Stewart Lee appears at the Brighton Dome tonight, in an evening celebrating the music of Nick Pynn, with Kevin Eldon, Boothby Graffoe, Mike Heron and Arthur Brown. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is on BBC2 on Saturdays at 10pm
Stewart Lee
2014-03-23T13:24:30+00:00
From 1989 to 1991 I lived in Finsbury Park, decades before it began to show signs of gentrification. I'd get home late from unpaid standup try-out spots, and it was hard to hold down a day job. At the end of my street, outside a hardware shop on Tollington Park, was a contraption so unusual that each night, in a state of adrenaline-driven imbalance, I would find myself staring at it in the small hours in bleak fascination. It was a maggot vending machine; faintly glowing, dimly humming, and stuffed with millions of live maggots throbbing gently en masse in a barely warmed state of collective suspended animation. As a younger, and more impressionable, man I couldn't help but find it vaguely profound. One hot July night in 1990, around 1.30am, I was staring at the maggot machine as usual, a contraband comedy club's can of Carlsberg in hand, thinking about the maggots as metaphors for something or other, when my musings were interrupted by a sharply dressed young man, of around my age, emerging from a van bearing the legend "House of Maggots". "Excuse me sir," he said, politely, "maggot maintenance", and he wheeled over a pallet of plastic cool boxes. Unlocking the maggot machine he began to pour gallons of immobilised maggots into it, topping up the depleted stock within. "Can I have a look, mate?" I asked. "I walk past this machine every night and I've wondered how it works." "By all means," said the man, and helped me up with a politeness and confidence that my prejudiced assumptions hadn't led me to expect in a man who vended maggots. Beneath me, millions of maggots pulsated slowly in comatose contentment. "I keep them just warm enough to live," he said, "but not hot enough to get excited,...
It's difficult, if you are of a certain age and political bent, not to talk about Smallfilms without sounding reactionary.
Smallfilms makes me naively nostalgic for a world before free-market doctrines and focus groups, when a publicly funded body gave two indefatigable eccentrics and, we now realise, avatars of a distinctly British folk art, licence to pursue their particular and quietly subversive ideas, unencumbered by crass commercial expectations.
This would not and could not happen nowWhole series of Smallfilms were green-lit because someone in an ashtray-filled office somewhere saw an eight-page book of pasted-up scripts and scraps of sketches and decided it was worth commissioning. This would not and could not happen now. And the social circumstances and value systems that shaped those paper and scissors, arts and crafts-cowshed visionaries of another era, Firmin and Postgate, are long gone.
The astonishingly thorough archive of Smallfilms - thank Godso much of it survived intact - are a collection of artefacts detailing some much-admired 20th-century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada.
Here are pieces of felt flickering into being as dragon scales. Here's paper and Blu-Tack bringing a tonally accurate reimagining of Norse sagas into life; here's a swanee whistle, its scurrying glissandos suggesting identifiable speech patterns, and here's the saggy cloth cat, its purring weight palpable, its aching fluffiness alive.
Smallfilms' technical expertise, their inventiveness, their hands-on, can-do adaptability are important object lessons in How Art Works to a generation reared on digital products. Audiences - especially young audiences - appreciate seeing the hand of the artist at work, and admiring the artist's inventiveness.
CGI technology may render fleets of three-dimensional spacecraft in vivid, almost real, depth. But such an image will never spark the imagination of a child in the way The Clangers' flying tin space bath can. It's not objectively perfectly finished in the way Buzz Lightyear is but it is something you could hold, touch and - given time and effort - even make yourself. It inspires.
When David Cameron makes his platitudinous remarks about how British artists need to be more commercial and make internationally saleable content, one wonders where the Iron Chicken, visibly assembled from kitchen junk, or the Organ Mice, with their jerky dances and cracked wheezing chorale, would fit into his prescriptive homilies.
Bagpuss and The Clangers were both against waste, green recyclers in waiting. Perhaps without realising it, Firmin and Postgate fashioned an aesthetic, the methodology of which supported the ideals of their era. Bagpuss and The Clangers were both against waste, green recyclers in waiting. The cloth cats' multi-skilled team of experts could salvage anything, and the pink woollen aliens were especially alert to alterations in the micro-environment they called home.
Likewise, Firmin and Postgate built enduring images and still-resonant stories from recycled boxes, plastic pots and beaten copper. I am relieved, on a profound level, that samples of the processes behind Smallfilms' work have been preserved for posterity.
In a political panic our rulers struggle for a definition of Britishness. They could do worse than prescribe a study of the quirky, inventive, adaptable, liberal and profoundly humane back catalogue of Smallfilms.
Stewart Lee
2014-10-13T21:18:37+01:00
It's difficult, if you are of a certain age and political bent, not to talk about Smallfilms without sounding reactionary. Smallfilms makes me naively nostalgic for a world before free-market doctrines and focus groups, when a publicly funded body gave two indefatigable eccentrics and, we now realise, avatars of a distinctly British folk art, licence to pursue their particular and quietly subversive ideas, unencumbered by crass commercial expectations. This would not and could not happen nowWhole series of Smallfilms were green-lit because someone in an ashtray-filled office somewhere saw an eight-page book of pasted-up scripts and scraps of sketches and decided it was worth commissioning. This would not and could not happen now. And the social circumstances and value systems that shaped those paper and scissors, arts and crafts-cowshed visionaries of another era, Firmin and Postgate, are long gone. The astonishingly thorough archive of Smallfilms - thank Godso much of it survived intact - are a collection of artefacts detailing some much-admired 20th-century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada. Here are pieces of felt flickering into being as dragon scales. Here's paper and Blu-Tack bringing a tonally accurate reimagining of Norse sagas into life; here's a swanee whistle, its scurrying glissandos suggesting identifiable speech patterns, and here's the saggy cloth cat, its purring weight palpable, its aching fluffiness alive. Smallfilms' technical expertise, their inventiveness, their hands-on, can-do adaptability are important object lessons in How Art Works to a generation reared on digital products. Audiences - especially young audiences - appreciate seeing the hand of the artist at work, and admiring the artist's inventiveness. CGI technology may render fleets of three-dimensional spacecraft in vivid, almost real, depth. But such an image will never spark the imagination of a child in the way The Clangers' flying tin space bath can. It's not...
Stewart Lee hasn’t been on telly for a long time, but I have fond memories of when he used to be a regular on our screens. I was probably too young for Fist of Fun on the radio, but I was just old enough for This Morning with Richard (Herring, of course) Not Judy – a comedy show which inexplicably found itself broadcast on Sunday mornings. We should bring that back, Sunday morning comedy. Anyway, Mr Lee – having penned a musical and spent years on the stand-up circuit – returned to TV last night. And he’s got a few things to get off his chest.
TV has struggled with the best way to showcase quality stand-ups for years now – should comics simply adapt to the medium and star in a sit-com, should they speak straight to the camera, should they have a live audience? Many formats have been tried with varying success, but to be honest I’m coming round to the belief that just pointing a camera at comedians while they do their thing is probably the best idea.
That’s what happens here, for the most part, with Stewart Lee performing a straight stand-up gig with just a few little sketches interspersed between the rants and ramblings. And that’s a great thing, and we need much more of it on our tellyboxes – comedians at the top of their game showing a much wider audience than would ever normally be achievable just how wonderful, uplifting, clever and intricate really great comedy can be.
I have a problem though… a lot of what Stewart Lee said irked me a little. In last night’s episode, Lee turned his admittedly sharp mind to books, and in particular toilet books and celebrity hardbacks. Perhaps it is just me, but isn’t it a little obvious to suggest that these genres are inherently crappy? Taking potshots at the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and Chris Moyles felt pedestrian, and to suggest that he shouldn’t read Harry Potter because it’s intended for kids seems close-minded.
But – surprisingly for a comic not known for set-up-and-punchline jokes – he had some great one-liners: to say of Asher D’s book “it doesn’t do to over-perfect things” is a delightful backhanded compliment, and when Dan Brown writes the line “The famous man looked at the red cup” all the work’s been done for you.
Mixed feelings then: on one hand I love seeing stand-up on TV, especially when supported by veterans of the comedy circuit we don’t often see on the telly such as Tony Law and Simon Munnery, but the comedy itself didn’t suit me personally. But I can be heartened by the very fact that this show – along with the likes of We Need Answers and Cowards – has been commissioned at all.
Stewart Lee
2009-03-17T10:51:01+00:00
Stewart Lee hasn’t been on telly for a long time, but I have fond memories of when he used to be a regular on our screens. I was probably too young for Fist of Fun on the radio, but I was just old enough for This Morning with Richard (Herring, of course) Not Judy – a comedy show which inexplicably found itself broadcast on Sunday mornings. We should bring that back, Sunday morning comedy. Anyway, Mr Lee – having penned a musical and spent years on the stand-up circuit – returned to TV last night. And he’s got a few things to get off his chest. TV has struggled with the best way to showcase quality stand-ups for years now – should comics simply adapt to the medium and star in a sit-com, should they speak straight to the camera, should they have a live audience? Many formats have been tried with varying success, but to be honest I’m coming round to the belief that just pointing a camera at comedians while they do their thing is probably the best idea. That’s what happens here, for the most part, with Stewart Lee performing a straight stand-up gig with just a few little sketches interspersed between the rants and ramblings. And that’s a great thing, and we need much more of it on our tellyboxes – comedians at the top of their game showing a much wider audience than would ever normally be achievable just how wonderful, uplifting, clever and intricate really great comedy can be. I have a problem though… a lot of what Stewart Lee said irked me a little. In last night’s episode, Lee turned his admittedly sharp mind to books, and in particular toilet books and celebrity hardbacks. Perhaps it is just me, but isn’t it a...
Stewart Lee, who Mark Watson describes as the compass of comedy, hosts a part standup comedy part sketch show called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Just the fact that this show has been on the air for three seasons, and what’s more has been picked up by Hulu in America, gives us hope that intelligent comedy consumers still exist among us, especially after Comedy Central’s cancellation of Stewart Lee’s The Alternative Comedy Experience after just two seasons last year. Another reason it’s so remarkable it’s still on the air is that the content is aimed at the type of people who don’t like standup comedy or television, so it’s offered to them in a format they are already not interested in.
Like most standup comedy television programs, this show’s main goals are sending an incoherent message to Russell Brand, commenting on a post-Adrian Chiles England, lowering the sales on Dan Brown books, and bringing back Asher D’s band So Solid Crew. That or everything Stewart tells Armando Iannucci in the Red Button bonus features is a lie. Take your pick. These black-and-white, straight-faced interviews are partly written by Iannucci’s once personal assistant.
Lee’s standup portions of the show largely contain material he has used in his touring shows in the past. Because he is a long-form comic, he has time for just one routine per episode, allowing each episode to have just one theme, like about how he hates celebrity hardbacks or how American stand up, such as that of jazz comedian Franklyn Ajaye, has no value. As always, the humor is layered. Lee tells a typical mainstream joke: “My dad used to call the telly the idiot’s lantern…which is why he lost his job as head of ITV.” He then tells the joke two more times: “…which is why he was hired as head of ITV.” “…which is why he lost his job as inventor of television.” On one layer, haha, each joke is kind of funny. On another layer, he’s making fun of cliche joke structure. On a third layer, which he couldn’t possibly have intended since this season aired in 2009, Mark Watson, who Lee famously tore a new one in his pear cider routine, was placed #3 in the top ten funniest jokes of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2014 with the joke “Always leave them wanting more, my uncle used to say to me. Which is why he lost his job in disaster relief.” For the most part, Lee’s comedy is un-compromised by the television network, but there is a bit about Islamic Dogs that the television lawyers made him take out of the script. No one believes that the actual script existed, but if you read his book How I Escaped my Certain Fate, you’ll learn that it’s true. As always, Lee is not afraid to go off mic, hang from the balconies, or sit in the laps of his audience members.
The sketches are brief, usually with an extended one of epic proportions, most notably the celebration of Del Boy falling through the bar (based on the poll that the British public consider this to be the funniest thing ever on television) or the apple sketch, which goes post-modern when Kevin Eldon and Paul Putner destroy the set. Other sketch actors include Simon Munnery, Tony Law (doing a Lenny Bruce spoof), Setphen K. Amos, Tim Vine, Miles Jupp, and many other recognizable character actors.
At the moment, season 1 only seems to be available in region 2/Pal on DVD, where you can treat yourself to the commentary tracks, deleted scenes that include interaction with the audience, clips of Scottish comedian Stephen Carlin doing the warmup, and many interviews with Armando Iannucci where you learn all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes “facts” like that the audience is made of fruit.
Stewart Lee
2016-02-22T04:45:11+00:00
Stewart Lee, who Mark Watson describes as the compass of comedy, hosts a part standup comedy part sketch show called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Just the fact that this show has been on the air for three seasons, and what’s more has been picked up by Hulu in America, gives us hope that intelligent comedy consumers still exist among us, especially after Comedy Central’s cancellation of Stewart Lee’s The Alternative Comedy Experience after just two seasons last year. Another reason it’s so remarkable it’s still on the air is that the content is aimed at the type of people who don’t like standup comedy or television, so it’s offered to them in a format they are already not interested in. Like most standup comedy television programs, this show’s main goals are sending an incoherent message to Russell Brand, commenting on a post-Adrian Chiles England, lowering the sales on Dan Brown books, and bringing back Asher D’s band So Solid Crew. That or everything Stewart tells Armando Iannucci in the Red Button bonus features is a lie. Take your pick. These black-and-white, straight-faced interviews are partly written by Iannucci’s once personal assistant. Lee’s standup portions of the show largely contain material he has used in his touring shows in the past. Because he is a long-form comic, he has time for just one routine per episode, allowing each episode to have just one theme, like about how he hates celebrity hardbacks or how American stand up, such as that of jazz comedian Franklyn Ajaye, has no value. As always, the humor is layered. Lee tells a typical mainstream joke: “My dad used to call the telly the idiot’s lantern…which is why he lost his job as head of ITV.” He then tells the joke two more times: “…which is why he was hired as...
Shameless criminals are exploiting the plight of desperate asylum seekers for their own ends. Yes, that’s right. Boris Johnson attempted to distract the public from his own transgressions with his hastily announced and arguably unworkable Rwanda Solution. Did you see what I did there? I’m here all week! Try the cake!! But keep it in the Tupperware box!!! Then it isn’t a cake. Schrödinger’s lockdown birthday.
Was Boris Johnson’s Rwanda Solution even meant to be taken seriously? Was it no more real than his garden bridge, his Scotland-Northern Ireland tunnel, his bus-brokered £350m for the NHS, his marital commitments, his late-night promises to help his friend the former fraudster Darius Guppy maim a journalist, his 20-year fabrication of fake stories about Brussels bureaucrats and his personal integrity?
Johnson’s Rwanda Solution is the political equivalent of a distraction theft, but while there may be a certain artistry to the well-crafted street con, Johnson’s Rwanda Solution was just an especially eggy stink bomb, let off in a court room, so he could run away before the jury condemned him. Hours later, Johnson boasts like Billy Bunter about his wizard wheeze behind the closed doors of the 1922 Committee: “I didn’t transport your refugees to Rwanda, Jenkins, and anyway, they smelled horrible.”
But Johnson’s Rwanda Solution did give the Brexit government the opportunity to do what it does best, namely creating new and blameless enemies for the asset-stripped and non-specifically aggrieved British public to hate, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style, instead of them hating Johnson and his shameless cabal of outright liars and thieves as they ought to. In the halcyon days of the Brexit referendum, it was Brussels bureaucrats and Polish builders. Then it was high court judges, that girl with the EU flag costume and Terry Christian. Now it is the Conservatives’ client news-filter the BBC and any holy clerics who objected to the government’s 21st-century attempt at transportation. Rwanda-resistant religious leaders have actually been accused by the government of “virtue-signalling”, an activity that is literally the main point of religious leaders. You may as well criticise lifeboat crews for saving lives at sea, although the Brexit brigade do that as well.
The archbishop of Canterbury told us that God himself would be against Johnson’s Rwanda Solution, which presumably makes Almighty Jah-Jah part of what the Daily Mail describes as the woke “army of leftwing lawyers and naysayers lining up to thwart Boris Johnson’s plan”. If God is on the Conservatives’ blacklist, that may explain why he has not been allowed to miraculously intervene in the Covid pandemic, all the contracts instead going to Tory party donors and a man Matt Handcock met in a pub.
But by Wednesday, Johnson’s wall-spaffed Rwanda Solution was all but spent. It had served its purpose, buying the corrupt Tory party a day or so more of breathing space as the net of incontrovertible evidence of its leader’s undeniable moral bankruptcy tightened a little more. Another dead cat would need to be sacrificed on Carrie’s bloodstained kitchen table to get the government through to the weekend. Spurts of crimson gore spatter on Lulu Lytle’s mysteriously financed wallpaper and the house eunuch, Lord Geidt, sponges them off compliantly with a damp cloth, disposed of in a pedal bin full of non-birthday non-cake.
It was strange trying to assemble this so-called “funny” “column” last week, as the political ground landslipped beneath us. I began it on Tuesday night in a Swindon hotel room overlooking an abandoned building project, after easily the worst gig of my tour. The night had been a disappointing throwback to my apprenticeship as a 90s club comedian, all my energies occupied by moment-to-moment crowd management, forcing me to take on a one-dimensional, high-status standup persona, stripped of nuance. Some stray rectangles of purple ticker tape that had been left in the theatre eaves by the selfish children’s entertainer Mr Tumble (MBE) kept falling down at key moments, sabotaging important lines, even though Tumble himself had already moved on to Hull City Hall. And the persistent and meaningless interjections of an indefatigable yet incoherent woman meant the second hour never reached the escape velocity required to sustain the closing 20 minutes of virtuoso free-jazz comedy soloing, so I had to abandon the show inconclusively. People’s time was wasted. I felt depressed and wondered if it was too late to get a different job.
But on Wednesday night in Kingston, after another day’s drip-feed of Johnson’s duplicity, my closing Nuremberg-style litany of Johnson’s many crimes and misdemeanours suddenly seemed incontrovertible. What was once comic exaggeration coalesced into simple statements of fact. As of the middle of the week, it was undeniable to audiences that Johnson was a criminal and unfit for office, however passive-aggressively Jacob Rees-Mogg might state the opposite. The question was simply whether people were prepared to tolerate it any more. As I parroted my Covid-delayed 2020 routine once more, I realised I had to perform it until the end of August and worried my closing 10 might fall apart somewhat should justice be done and Johnson be deposed or even charged. I am probably the only champagne socialist hoping he clings to power, simply because I have a tight three of real zingers about all his various moral and ethical failings that gets me out of a 150-minute show on a high.
I went back to the hotel to finish this column and realised I had lost my glasses somewhere in Kingston and the laptop screen was a blur. Luckily, I didn’t need them. The truth is written in letters a mile high. It’s up to the electorate if, when they go to the polls, they choose to ignore it because Brexit funny Boris immigration blah wank.
Stewart Lee
2022-04-24T19:59:57+01:00
Shameless criminals are exploiting the plight of desperate asylum seekers for their own ends. Yes, that’s right. Boris Johnson attempted to distract the public from his own transgressions with his hastily announced and arguably unworkable Rwanda Solution. Did you see what I did there? I’m here all week! Try the cake!! But keep it in the Tupperware box!!! Then it isn’t a cake. Schrödinger’s lockdown birthday. Was Boris Johnson’s Rwanda Solution even meant to be taken seriously? Was it no more real than his garden bridge, his Scotland-Northern Ireland tunnel, his bus-brokered £350m for the NHS, his marital commitments, his late-night promises to help his friend the former fraudster Darius Guppy maim a journalist, his 20-year fabrication of fake stories about Brussels bureaucrats and his personal integrity? Johnson’s Rwanda Solution is the political equivalent of a distraction theft, but while there may be a certain artistry to the well-crafted street con, Johnson’s Rwanda Solution was just an especially eggy stink bomb, let off in a court room, so he could run away before the jury condemned him. Hours later, Johnson boasts like Billy Bunter about his wizard wheeze behind the closed doors of the 1922 Committee: “I didn’t transport your refugees to Rwanda, Jenkins, and anyway, they smelled horrible.” But Johnson’s Rwanda Solution did give the Brexit government the opportunity to do what it does best, namely creating new and blameless enemies for the asset-stripped and non-specifically aggrieved British public to hate, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style, instead of them hating Johnson and his shameless cabal of outright liars and thieves as they ought to. In the halcyon days of the Brexit referendum, it was Brussels bureaucrats and Polish builders. Then it was high court judges, that girl with the EU flag costume and Terry Christian. Now it is the Conservatives’ client news-filter...
Following hot on the heels of our sell-out CONTENT PROVIDER t-shirt comes this tasteful ALL THE CHEESES design.
The front celebrates Stewart's famous CHEESE joke while the rear print is a delightful tapestry of negative reviews from politicians and their media clients.
The new shirts are available in two colourways - black t-shirt with liquid silver ink and navy t-shirt with golden yellow (mustard) ink.
There is a front print and a back print on each shirt.
Black Tee Front
Black Tee Back
Navy Tee Front
Navy Tee Back
Stewart Lee
2021-10-25T11:05:31+01:00
More T Shirts Dear Interested Parties Following hot on the heels of our sell-out CONTENT PROVIDER t-shirt comes this tasteful ALL THE CHEESES design. The front celebrates Stewart's famous CHEESE joke while the rear print is a delightful tapestry of negative reviews from politicians and their media clients. CLICK HERE TO BUY - LINK GOES LIVE AT 12pm TODAY The new shirts are available in two colourways - black t-shirt with liquid silver ink and navy t-shirt with golden yellow (mustard) ink. There is a front print and a back print on each shirt. Black Tee Front Black Tee Back Navy Tee Front Navy Tee Back
When I was starting out as a standup, I worked nights in an orange juice factory. I got £3.50 an hour and as much orange juice as I could lick off my two hands. The amount of orange concentrate we added to the raw drink at the initial stages determined whether it was bound for expensive upmarket outlets or to cut-price corner-shop providers. It was a quick and easy process to alter the product according to demand.
The worst part of the job was hosing out the maggots that hatched from fruit fly eggs laid beneath the conveyor belts, and periodically jammed up the gears with their crushed bodies. Sometimes I stayed on the shop floor after hours, pleading with the insects to find a safer place to deposit their unborn. But, like my readers, they didn't listen to me, preferring to repeat the same errors endlessly, as do you.
David Cameron visited the Pinewood film factory recently and told the UK film industry it should "try to support more commercially viable pictures", laying his eggs beneath the production line. But can "commerciality" be added to a piece of art as simply as adding extra concentrate to orange juice? David's friend, the Tory peer Julian Fellowes, who made scattershot implausibility universally addictive with the arbitrarily scripted second series of Downton Abbey, endorsed a review of UK film that said public money should be spent on films "that more people want to see". British film-makers, represented as usual by Ken Loach, joined a queue of soon-to-be-silenced dissenters seeing all Tory policies as ideologically driven mind-control programmes disguised as economic rationalism.
But perhaps David is right. Maybe it is actually possible to manufacture a hit. Admittedly, no one saw the smash new movie The Artist, a silent black-and-white comedy with no name stars, coming; Stan Lee's publisher advised him against writing Spider-Man because "people don't like spiders"; David's unwilling faves the Smiths were written off in their first NME live review as "Go-Betweens copyists"; the BBC, which eventually took credit for The Office, was still asking how to bury it when it was first broadcast; and Life's Too Short, a supposed dead cert from The Office's creatively and commercially successful team, was a critical and ratings disaster. But maybe David is party to a formula for popularity, despite the fact that no art of any real value, including all Hollywood films of the past 30 years, has ever been made by pursuing one. Good artists do what they believe in and don't merely court public approval. In these respects they are the opposite of politicians. Zing!
Today's Conservatives rationalise everything by financial value. When I was still young, Mrs Thatcher toured St Hilda's College, Oxford, and asked a girl what she studied. "Norse literature," she said. "What a luxury," replied the prime minister, anticipating the current government's suspicion of humanities, but not anticipating the subsequent global financial value of the Lord of the Rings franchise. Fed by Tolkien's study of Norse myth, the trilogy bled out of The Hobbit, which he originally wrote for a minority audience no bigger than that comprising his own bedtime children.
(Tolkien is, however, rumoured to have charged his offspring all their pocket money to hear the end of the tale, having already got them hooked. This "first hit's for free" technique he learned dealing heroin to CS Lewis, who only began the Narnia chronicles in order to have a reason to meet his supplier every week in the Eagle and Child pub. Anyone who has ever tangoed with Sister Brown Eye will recognise immediately the safe warm feeling of falling into a wardrobe full of fur coats. And then having tea with a man with goat's legs.)
So, is Tolkien's own luxurious study of Norse retroactively financially validated by box office and sales of Gandalf action figures with the face of Sir Ian McKellen, or was it worth doing anyway because a civilised country values knowledge in and of itself? And would these McKellen-faced toys fall foul of Thatcher's Clause 28 legislation anyway, by virtue of promoting homosexuality, or at least a magical homosexual, to impressionable children?
Because the press tire of stories quickly, David's next prescriptive encounter with disgruntled creatives was largely ignored. On Friday David was winched bodily up the Faraway Tree to Slumberland, for a photo-op with the Traum Gnaums, who weave our dreams in their mouths from gossamer and hope, before travelling to Earth to spit them into the brains of sleeping people. David intended to convince the Gnaums to take a more practical approach to the business of dreams. But their ruler, Prince Guabo, was not impressed.
"Cameron got off on the wrong foot immediately," he confided. "His opening gambit was, 'Now, which one of you was it gave Ed Miliband the dream of being leader of the Labour party?' It was the kind of route-one gag that would probably get a round of applause off the claques of city boy Top Gear wankstains he usually addresses, but dream-weaving is a creative vocation, not a business. A lot of the Traum Gnaums are liberal arts types so it fell a bit flat."
David suggested that, instead of dreaming of being dancers or spacemen or clowns, children should be encouraged to dream of, for example, studying economics while being financed by corporate sponsors with a view towards structured apprenticeships within approved educational partner companies. And he said that the meaning of dreams should be clearer, in order to give them a greater mass appeal. Gnaum Guabo disagreed. "For us, that's the beauty of dreams. They're mysterious and opaque, collisions of symbols and stories all swooshing around. They stay with you, but it's not clear why. And often their meaning isn't apparent until months or years later. Cameron's telling us dreams should match people's desires in an obvious and more immediately profitable way. I think I can speak for the Traum Gnaums when I say that isn't why any of us got into dream weaving."
Last week I went out for my daily Calippo with comedian Richard Herring, who I used to write with in the last century. I told him about this piece. He said: "It sounds like the sort of clanking satire we used to grind out for Radio 4's Week Ending in the 1980s. Take some existing fantasy or mythological trope and overlay it with contemporary policy. Is the Observer buying it?" "Yes," I admitted, sheepishly. "Then well done," he spat through his frozen flavoured ice. "It's a commercial idea. And so it is good."
Stewart Lee is currently appearing in Carpet Remnant World at the Leicester Square theatre, London, and touring nationally from February. stewartlee.co.uk
Stewart Lee
2012-01-22T14:59:02+00:00
When I was starting out as a standup, I worked nights in an orange juice factory. I got £3.50 an hour and as much orange juice as I could lick off my two hands. The amount of orange concentrate we added to the raw drink at the initial stages determined whether it was bound for expensive upmarket outlets or to cut-price corner-shop providers. It was a quick and easy process to alter the product according to demand. The worst part of the job was hosing out the maggots that hatched from fruit fly eggs laid beneath the conveyor belts, and periodically jammed up the gears with their crushed bodies. Sometimes I stayed on the shop floor after hours, pleading with the insects to find a safer place to deposit their unborn. But, like my readers, they didn't listen to me, preferring to repeat the same errors endlessly, as do you. David Cameron visited the Pinewood film factory recently and told the UK film industry it should "try to support more commercially viable pictures", laying his eggs beneath the production line. But can "commerciality" be added to a piece of art as simply as adding extra concentrate to orange juice? David's friend, the Tory peer Julian Fellowes, who made scattershot implausibility universally addictive with the arbitrarily scripted second series of Downton Abbey, endorsed a review of UK film that said public money should be spent on films "that more people want to see". British film-makers, represented as usual by Ken Loach, joined a queue of soon-to-be-silenced dissenters seeing all Tory policies as ideologically driven mind-control programmes disguised as economic rationalism. But perhaps David is right. Maybe it is actually possible to manufacture a hit. Admittedly, no one saw the smash new movie The Artist, a silent black-and-white comedy with no name...
JOHN BURNS catches several of his comedy heroes, and feels the barriers of the form itself being pushed ever further.
STEWART LEE is the vindaloo of stand up comedy - he is spicy and sometimes hard to swallow. You know what you are in for, the slug line of his show tells it all: If you wanted a milder comedian you should have asked.
Lee has you squirming in your seat with your eyes stinging and a little perspiration forming on your top lip. The heat of his comedy does not come from obscenity, swearing or even blasphemy, as you might be led to expect given some of Lee's most controversial work in Jerry Springer the Opera.
His comedy is hot because he is constantly pushing the medium, trying to find out just where you can take this simplest of theatrical forms consisting, as it does, of a man talking to an audience.
For me, seeing Lee came at the end of a long but eventful week in which I had actually fulfilled three comedy ambitions. In that week I had seen Dylan Moran at London's Apollo Theatre, seen Eddie Izzard at Glasgow's SECC, and finally I saw Lee, a man I had wanted to see for over two years.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to see so much comedy in a short space of time. It's possible that I'm developing dependence - maybe I should see someone or join a support group.
There are interesting comparisons in the styles of the three comedians I saw this week. All of them break the rules of comedy in different ways. Here are just a couple.
Rule 1. Only do material about things people can relate to in their own lives.
Izzard shattered that rule a long time ago with material he gathered from his classical education. In Glasgow he told stories about the ancient Persian's wars with the Spartans. Possibly that has some relevance to Sauchiehall Street on a Friday night [no, more a Saturday - Ed.], but there the comparison ends.
Lee was equally cavalier with that rule, relating stories about the sayings of his family and his favourite songs being stolen by advertising men. Most comedians try to work with stories that at least might be true. Lee has no such truck with reality, allowing his audience to see clearly that he is feeding them fiction.
Rule 2. Keep whatever you are saying as brief as possible and keep it to the point, the comedy point that is, and never repeat yourself.
Dylan Moran wanders about through the frustrations of his middle age like a rudderless ship bumping into islands of despair. Lee has gone one stage further and turned his meandering style into an art form. He delights in repetition, coming back to the same point over and over again as he teases the audience.
He always returns to his focus on how the audience relates to him at the precise moment of his performance. Lee's brilliance is in his ability to play with his relationship with the audience, to torment them, to ask them why they think they are laughing and what is it they are laughing at.
If you wrote down what Lee says you would be unlikely to find much humour. The comedy for Lee exists not in what he says but how he says it. On Wednesday night he was able to get a laugh merely from a glance or the way he turned his head or how he walked on stage. Of all the comedians around today, Lee is the one most concerned with evolving the art form, he is the comedian most likely to find new routes for stand up and he is frighteningly talented.
The theatre was disappointingly only two-thirds full, but those who did attend clearly had an enjoyable if challenging evening. It is perhaps fair to say the Lee rarely captured the whole audience in his comedy, with some people laughing at parts of his act and others not. That is not surprising given the unpredictable and quirky nature of his comedy. Lee often takes you by surprise and most of the time you are not really sure why you are laughing.
Lee is prolific in his writing, with not only the Springer show to his name, but also other plays such as Johnson and Boswell, which was performed at Eden Court's OneTouch Theatre to much acclaim by comedians Miles Jupp and Simon Munnery last year.
His TV appearances are rare but the short run of his own show surprisingly titled Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle was original and entertaining as he blended sketches and stand up in a way not seen before. Stewart Lee will always be an acquired taste and he will remain too hot to handle for many, but for those whose taste buds are accustomed to the heat he is a rare delight.
Stewart Lee
2009-11-16T16:05:51+00:00
JOHN BURNS catches several of his comedy heroes, and feels the barriers of the form itself being pushed ever further. STEWART LEE is the vindaloo of stand up comedy - he is spicy and sometimes hard to swallow. You know what you are in for, the slug line of his show tells it all: If you wanted a milder comedian you should have asked. Lee has you squirming in your seat with your eyes stinging and a little perspiration forming on your top lip. The heat of his comedy does not come from obscenity, swearing or even blasphemy, as you might be led to expect given some of Lee's most controversial work in Jerry Springer the Opera. His comedy is hot because he is constantly pushing the medium, trying to find out just where you can take this simplest of theatrical forms consisting, as it does, of a man talking to an audience. For me, seeing Lee came at the end of a long but eventful week in which I had actually fulfilled three comedy ambitions. In that week I had seen Dylan Moran at London's Apollo Theatre, seen Eddie Izzard at Glasgow's SECC, and finally I saw Lee, a man I had wanted to see for over two years. I'm not sure it's a good idea to see so much comedy in a short space of time. It's possible that I'm developing dependence - maybe I should see someone or join a support group. There are interesting comparisons in the styles of the three comedians I saw this week. All of them break the rules of comedy in different ways. Here are just a couple. Rule 1. Only do material about things people can relate to in their own lives. Izzard shattered that rule a long time ago with...
The reputation of Judas is enjoying a comeback that even Noel Edmonds must envy. Academics are re-evaluating his role, not just as the betrayer of Christ, but as fulfilling a vital role in his destiny. Even that indefatigable truth-seeker, Jeffrey Archer, is churning out a book in Judas’s defence.
So, what better time for a comedian to enter the debate – and not just any comedian, but the Archbishop Of Blasphemy himself, Stewart Lee; the man who’s overblown opera about a trashy talk show prompted a jihad from the medieval heretic-burning bigots of Christian Voice.
It’ll come as no surprise to these narrow-minded fundamentalists – nor anyone else for that matter – that Lee has also adopted the revisionist, sympathetic approach. In his eyes, Judas was not a traitor, but a disillusioned revolutionary frustrated at Jesus’s lack of action in overthrowing the corrupt Roman state and building a civilisation true to his teachings. He wanted Jesus a martyr, whose death would galvanise his many followers into rebellion – and he honestly believed Jesus wanted the same fate.
Put that way, this sounds more like a theological thesis than a comedy show, but it successfully combines the two. Lee takes on the role of Judas, as if he was a 38-year-old man brought up in the West Midlands. ‘I’ve worn a hat,’ he explains. ‘That’s acting.’
The device allows him to give a fictionalised first-hand account of Christ’s last week on earth. Lee’s Judas is marginalised by the rest of the disciples - always the one to be sent on trivial errands and perpetually sneered at for daring to question their Messiah when his preachings were at their most opaque. This is where Lee’s trademark mocking of the Gospels comes into its hilarious own. This Judas is so pedantic and questioning that he makes Doubting Thomas look like a gullible fool. And the very mundane, matter-of fact discussion of such defining moments in mankind’s history also provide fodder for knowing laughs.
This monologue is not, as detractors who’ve never seen Lee’s work would like to imagine, an out-an-out attack on the tenets of Christianity. Rather, it provokes a debate over the motives and meanings of the Gospels, which any robust religion should welcome. As he so brilliantly demonstrates – in the unlikely event that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did accurately chronicle what Jesus said, what they didn’t catch the way that he said it.
Lee is obviously well read about his subject, and highly engaging in the way he explores it. He interacts with the audience, probing their knowledge of Bible stories and pulling in volunteers to recreate the Last Supper, complete with body and blood of Christ all round in what turns out to be a brilliant sketch about transubstantiation – and that's a phrase you don't see very often. In another context, this could almost be Sunday school, with a creative teacher sparking his pupils’ imaginations. But it’s a lot more amusing than that, and flirts with the sacreligious a lot more freely.
It’s in the grey areas of the Gospels where the comedy lies, and Lee is adept at mining it, although with the help of his director Will Adamsdale – who won the 2004 Perrier for Jackson’s Way – he also ensures there’s some dramatic development. Not so much in the story, as it’s pointed out from the get-go that we all know how it ends, but in the mood.
What starts off close to stand-up, with a casual Lee bantering with the audience and setting out his stall without the fourth wall, gradually becomes more weighty and theatrical until the Crucifixion brings proceedings to a surprisingly pathetic end.
This is a very modern take on an ancient story. It’s not hard to see where his inspiration for this version of Jesus came: a once-charismatic man who rose to power on fine rhetoric he couldn’t act upon, who embarked on a fight he had no exit strategy for, and who worries about his legacy while indulging himself in expensive extravagances.
But more than that, it is a mature and intelligent piece of one-man theatre, infused with the dry yet irreverent wit fans of Lee have come to expect, and guaranteed to make you think as much as you laugh.
Stewart Lee
2007-01-12T20:57:45+00:00
The reputation of Judas is enjoying a comeback that even Noel Edmonds must envy. Academics are re-evaluating his role, not just as the betrayer of Christ, but as fulfilling a vital role in his destiny. Even that indefatigable truth-seeker, Jeffrey Archer, is churning out a book in Judas’s defence. So, what better time for a comedian to enter the debate – and not just any comedian, but the Archbishop Of Blasphemy himself, Stewart Lee; the man who’s overblown opera about a trashy talk show prompted a jihad from the medieval heretic-burning bigots of Christian Voice. It’ll come as no surprise to these narrow-minded fundamentalists – nor anyone else for that matter – that Lee has also adopted the revisionist, sympathetic approach. In his eyes, Judas was not a traitor, but a disillusioned revolutionary frustrated at Jesus’s lack of action in overthrowing the corrupt Roman state and building a civilisation true to his teachings. He wanted Jesus a martyr, whose death would galvanise his many followers into rebellion – and he honestly believed Jesus wanted the same fate. Put that way, this sounds more like a theological thesis than a comedy show, but it successfully combines the two. Lee takes on the role of Judas, as if he was a 38-year-old man brought up in the West Midlands. ‘I’ve worn a hat,’ he explains. ‘That’s acting.’ The device allows him to give a fictionalised first-hand account of Christ’s last week on earth. Lee’s Judas is marginalised by the rest of the disciples - always the one to be sent on trivial errands and perpetually sneered at for daring to question their Messiah when his preachings were at their most opaque. This is where Lee’s trademark mocking of the Gospels comes into its hilarious own. This Judas is so pedantic and questioning...
Stew compiled and annotated this compilation by The Fall.
...this is a fine collection; brave, broad and admirably biased...
It is, of course, an appalling concept. Allowing writer/ comedian Stewart Lee to compile a selection of his favourite, latter-day Fall tracks smacks of misguided marketing;an ill-informed attempt to glean the collegiate vote for what surely remains the most virulently anti-student band in Britain. Duh!
Anyway. The onset of the ’90s saw Mark E Smith-uh and his ever-changing chums embrace new technology with gusto – a gambit that would provide a fresh framework for Smith’s misanthropic, beanbag-faced rants. While tracks such as last year’s brilliantly disorderly ‘Touch Sensitive’ could’ve been plucked from the riotous preserve of their late-’70s heyday, ‘A Past…’ shows the ramshackle approach of yore superseded by a battalion of samples and grinding, zeitgeist-courting techno beats. It’s an approach that has yielded some of The Fall‘s finest songs – with the synth-heavy, anti-EU wrath of 1991’s ‘Free Range’ and the deceptively sweet ‘Rose’ proving Smith‘s invective wears many, equally effective, disguises. With ‘The Chisellers’ being the only glaring omission, this is a fine collection; brave, broad and admirably biased.
Stew compiled and annotated this compilation by The Fall. ...this is a fine collection; brave, broad and admirably biased... It is, of course, an appalling concept. Allowing writer/ comedian Stewart Lee to compile a selection of his favourite, latter-day Fall tracks smacks of misguided marketing;an ill-informed attempt to glean the collegiate vote for what surely remains the most virulently anti-student band in Britain. Duh! Anyway. The onset of the ’90s saw Mark E Smith-uh and his ever-changing chums embrace new technology with gusto – a gambit that would provide a fresh framework for Smith’s misanthropic, beanbag-faced rants. While tracks such as last year’s brilliantly disorderly ‘Touch Sensitive’ could’ve been plucked from the riotous preserve of their late-’70s heyday, ‘A Past…’ shows the ramshackle approach of yore superseded by a battalion of samples and grinding, zeitgeist-courting techno beats. It’s an approach that has yielded some of The Fall‘s finest songs – with the synth-heavy, anti-EU wrath of 1991’s ‘Free Range’ and the deceptively sweet ‘Rose’ proving Smith‘s invective wears many, equally effective, disguises. With ‘The Chisellers’ being the only glaring omission, this is a fine collection; brave, broad and admirably biased. - NME
Laura Cannell: Hi Stewart, So here we go, I thought I would ask you some questions and please can you can ask me some too? A conversation really…
We were going to work together live for the first time in July at Kings Place which has now been postponed until 2021, the idea for a collaborative piece was already in our heads though. At the same time I was working on a piece I was commissioned to compose for the incredible Irish Contemporary Cellist Kate Ellis called ‘The Last Wild Wolf in Ireland’, and the premiere for that was also cancelled.
One email led to another, and with the addition of Kate on Cello and Double Bass and new writings from Jennifer Lucy Allan and Polly Wright we made an album which is out on my Brawl Records label this autumn called ‘These Feral Lands Volume I’. But none of us met or spoke to each other in person, and you didn’t all hear each others parts until they were whole pieces.
Stewart Lee: I remember you asking me about writing some words for the live version of your landscape project. When we first spoke a few years ago – at Radio 3 on the Xmas Mixing It – I was surprised to find you were from the same part of Norfolk as my birth-family, who I had eventually traced after years of putting it off, and that your Mum knew my sister, and that your friend Polly knew my auntie. Obviously, I am sort of belatedly fascinated by the myths and geography of that region as I suppose biologically I am ‘of’ it, but culturally it is irrelevant to me. I spent lots of time in East Anglia in the early ’90s weirdly, and always find it a bit frightening… sort of vertigo-inducing. The skies are too big. I don’t really like being on the right hand side of this Island. I like the middle, the west and the top end.
LC: This is interesting, I hadn’t put it into words before but I did a project with the brilliant Angharad Davies called Mythos of Violins a few years back, and we performed in 3 countries England, Wales and Scotland, when we were in Wales on the extreme west coast I felt that same vertigo of the sea being in the wrong place, I lost all sense of direction. I don’t get it in the North, one of my favourite places is Northumberland (and ancestrally its in my blood), but the west makes me woozy.
SL:Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to write about Norfolk/Suffolk and other locations connected with my newly traced family, as you asked about what landscape meant to us. And I suppose my relationship w those landscapes is complicated. What do you think about the landscape you write in and how it affects you? You are very much from there.
LC: I am quite stubborn in that as soon as someone you say that I am very much from here, I want to fight against it. It’s good to have a place to draw ideas from, but it’s more about what isn’t here that I’m interested in, always looking at the spaces in-between. Creating new things out of seemingly void spaces. I have gone from wanting to leave Norfolk at 18 and moving straight to London, which I did, to gradually returning for the space. I realised that so much of what I need is visual space, I get a bit aggro if I’m around buildings too much. The nature changes all the time and buildings stay the same, I find it rigid and I find it hard not to get into repetitive thoughts patterns about buildings and the people in them. In the countryside I like the stillness because my head is never quiet, it’s always noisy except when I am playing or creating, so I don’t need extra noise. But getting the balance between isolated, inspiring and outright depressing has taken a few years.
I’m glad you wrote about Norfolk and Suffolk, and the Welsh Borders.
LC: Did making this album help your head during Lockdown? Did it need helping?
SL:It was great to have something to do. All my live work is over and I just did home-schooling of the 9 year old. It was such an escape, and it directed my reading to all the source materials I needed. And it made me think about being outside.
LC: I know that I got completely obsessed with it, and it got me through a really hard patch (with a loss in the family from C19), which is why I optimistically called it Volume I.
SL:I’m really sorry to hear that. We escaped immediate tragedy but there are deaths in our extended network. I feel guilty that I quite enjoyed the 1st month – silence, birdsong, no traffic, the smell of flowers instead of petrol, clear skies day and night, and all of Columbo on DVD, because we were insulated against immediate disaster. How was the process of the record different to others?
LC: It also felt like such a departure for me in some ways, working with words, although when I think back through my previous performing, before I was a solo performer under my own name, I have actually worked with quite a lot of spoken word/storytellers. But working with you was different as your words, speech and vocals feel like an equal instrument and very much in tune with the idea of leaving space. I didn’t feel like an accompanist, it felt like a band even though we’ve worked remotely.
SL: It’s really kind of you to say this. I felt very honoured to be asked – we love your music in our house – and I was very worried about letting you down. Maybe I have done? Who knows? The more I tried to get the vocals to work the worse they got. Shirley Collins (name drop clang) said I can only sing any song well once, the first time I do it, and then I try to perform it. I know I sent you another effort at the Barsham Light vocals but I think the originals were maybe better even though they were even more tuneless. It is particularly shaming because what you sent through is so brilliant. At least there’s lots of parts of the album where people can hear just you. I was proud of the words though. Usually I try and slip the writerly writing into the comedy so it was nice to just be able to do it for real.
LC: You recorded some of your vocals as individual tracks, and because they were improvised they came out in harmony which I love, I know that you sing at the end of your current show Snowflake / Tornado because I jumped up on stage with my fiddle in Leicester Square Theatre earlier this year. Do you think you would go further into singing? (asking for a friend / thinking about TFL Volume II). Also do you have a favourite traditional song, and have you ever been taught one purely by ear?
SL: My favorite trad song is POLLY ON THE SHORE. I know it from The Trees’ ON THE SHORE from 1970, which I got in about 1986, but a blind bloke used to sing it in the folk club in Oxford that I went to in the Port Mahon pub up Cowley Rd in Oxford around 1988. I got to sing it with TREES when the reformed a couple of years back. When I had a crap acid-folk band (we did 3 gigs 1989-91) we used to do a psychedelic heavy metal 20 minute jam on it.
LC: I LOVE this song, I just revisited it because you mentioned it! (also my dad sings it all the time in his van).
SL: I don’t think I can sing really, but I was in a church choir (I don’t really know why – my childhood friend Nigel Short got me to join it and he now runs a posh choral group called Tenebrae) from 1975 to about 1979. I loved lots of the music especially Tallis. We did 3 services on Sundays and weddings on Saturdays and 2 or 3 practises a week. I liked the language of the Anglican services, and the pacing of the sermons, and soaked it all up. We went on week long courses where we filled in for Cathedral school choirs during their holidays at St Asaph, Hereford, Gloucester, Tewkesbury. I remember Mouseman carvings of little mice and weird bench ends in the cathedrals. On the St Asaph trip one of the ex-trebles had hardcore pornography which I was shown on a day trip to Bedgellert which freaked me out. In Hereford I think I probably slept in a room once occupied by the young Arthur Machen, the horror/mystic writer I am now a huge advocate for. The choir also had a weird claustrophobic atmosphere too. The choirmaster was periodically obsessed in quite oppressive depth with whichever boy soprano was the best at any given time, and the ex-trebles and priests used to go off on long weekend trips to Amsterdam. The ’70s was like that. I think my love-hate relationship with organised religion may have been formed by this clammy experience. I love the art and philosophy and history of the church of England but it also nauseates me, sickens me on a visceral level.I am glad I listened to all those services though, as it decodes Blake and Milton and all the greats. I also did classical guitar to grade 4 but then then teacher said I was as much use as ‘a fart in the wind’ and he was right. I wish I had worked at guitar and I should have learned the saxophone. Alan Wilkinson and Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann look so free. All I ever wanted from stand-up was for it ti give me a life where I was free. Did you do music as a child? I mean – what meshed together to mean you ended up sounding like you do and operating in the space you do? There is no-one else.
LC: I think Tenebrae is another name drop (esp. in the classical/early music world). I didn’t know about all of your singing, I love Tallis too and all those renaissance polyphonic composers. I used to sing in a Renaissance Choir in Beccles run by Philip Thorby, a professor of Early Music and major inspiration to my early music learnings (he also guested on some of my old bands albums on viola da gamba).
We’ve found quite a lot of common ground in terms of attitudes towards the practice of improvisation as well as our own personal folklore histories. These Feral Lands has acted as a vessel for us to do our own thing, and then bring it together into a coherent (to us) whole. I think it’s really interesting that we can bring such different ideas together, we didn’t really discuss what any of it would sound like at all. It’s all based on not over planning.
SL: It’s kind of you to say that. I was in the dark really but I knew what you had sent was great, so I tried not to get in its way. My son, 13, helped me record the vocals, in our cat-shit smelly cellar, on his computer, but he was so embarrassed by what I was doing he couldn’t stand being in the room during the actual recordings. My family took personal offence at the Black Shuck one. They said it wasn’t fair to make those sounds in the house and were worried people at the bus stop outside would hear.
LC: I did feel bad for you trying to record the Black Shuck track near other people! It’s not something you can do if you feel inhibited/unsupported by people nearby! This has been the main reason for me doing so much recording in rural churches! When I’m experimenting I don’t want to know or be worried what anyone else thinks or the noise! Anyway they will have just thought it was an toothless local haunted by a demon dog and carried on along their way.
SL: They all like your stuff though, and it was great when we went to that installation for the soldiers at the tower of London and we could identify your sound in the mix, even though we hadn’t known you were part of it. I expect they will just think I have ruined half of your record. I am glad it was all something you felt you could work with. Writing the words was therapeutic for me and I am usually entirely resistant to writing anything so obviously personal. But I worry that the addition of words limits the emotional range of what you do. Your music makes us make our own choices. It doesn’t direct them. The words have put a gloss of meaning on it haven’t they?
LC: But that’s what I wanted. I have been so adamantly instrumental for my whole career that I wanted to see how it would work with words, and especially the contrast between your explosive diaphragm driven expulsions and the more personal and folkloric vocalisations. There is plenty of space in there.
As a starting point I sent over some solo violin improvisations recorded in January 2020 while watching a buzzard outside my living room window, who was watching me.
SL: I didn’t know you had been watching a buzzard. That is why they were all called Buzzard 1 or Buzzard 4 and things like that. It really makes sense that you were improvising off the sight of a buzzard. That is exactly what they feel like. The pieces are stationary like a hovering bird of prey but vibrant and alive at the same time. I don’t know how anyone can create in a vacuum. I sort of argue with another version of myself in my own head, like someone with two personalities. Sometimes the other voice makes me do things I don’t really know how to do. Do you know the painter Gina Southgate? She was at ATP. She paints improvising musicians in real time. She sees the finished painting I think as a kind of collaboration with them.
LC: I thought at the time that none of it had worked, I was judging in the moment, I honestly thought it was all grot.
SL: I don’t know why you would think that of them, as they are great, except that I normally hate everything I have done after a while. I have to revive a show I was half way through touring, that I wrote in 2019, when the theatres open next year and I don’t know what I will think of it. I don’t really understand people reviving their old work – we aren;’t the people that wrote it anymore – but I do love it when my fave bands tour a classic album or whatever. What do you think of things you did a decade ago?
LC: Having seen your latest show I think it will be an amazing for people to experience it now. There is so much breadth to it and now that we have all shifted together, in some kind of reckoning and grief, I think it will be even more poignant! (I’m not being complimentary for the sake of it, I’ve already got you on the album!)
A decade ago I was touring and writing music with my band Horses Brawl. How I feel is that I was desperate to prove that I could play and write music, I was insecure but also completely driven, I knew I had something to say but I didn’t know what and I think some of the compositions had a very intense energy because I was frustrated with some of the places we were playing and the scene, because we basically didn’t fit into any scene, but would get bookings at Arts Festivals, airplay on BBC Radio 3, Arts Centres, but often I felt I wasn’t playing to my peers, though I think we did play Cambridge Folk Festival around that time. I was desperate to find people like me who were immersed in music but not either completely old school classical in mindset or rigidly traditional folk or just totally different. Anyway…
… when I listened back to the Buzzards in April at the beginning of our project I realised that I needed to open the door and see what response you would have to this music without telling you too much, and the pieces are now the backbone to the album, they are in every track, whether audible or not they are all there.
SL: This sounds nuts but when I am doing a new show, at some point in the development I will perform what I have in hand a bit drunk, to see what a pissed incoherent remix of the material does to it, like handing it over to someone to deface, or improvising with a stranger. It is usually improved. The act has the persona of a belligerent drunk, or a half-cut person who thinks he is clever and people should listen to him. But it is an act. I’m not someone who has enormous faith in the idea that chemically altering your perceptions is a key to creative breakthroughs. It makes me sad when I see these old punk guys I like fall off stages fucked. It reminds me of things in my childhood I’d rather forget. I do eat a lot of cheese though which is good for dreams I suppose. What do you think? There’s a good cheese from Bungay isn’t there? And that St Peter’s ale?
LC: ’He was off his head on Baron Bigods Cheese & St Peter’s Ale when he wrote this bit!’, did you know they have a vending machine in the middle of no-where for that cheese? I like the idea of doing a pissed version, in private. I can’t drink and play at all. I used to find it really stressful doing gigs in bands with people who could (or did). I just felt like I had got to this great place of being open and free with my playing and combatting performance anxiety etc, and getting as close as possible to my intentions. I don’t really get why you do all this work to create something, and when you come to share it with people you do a weird drunk version! I know some people do it to calm nerves or because they think they do it better ‘relaxed’ but my plan is to be so in the performance that however awkward it feels I can use that and channel it into the playing. I say, have a drink after or the next day! Let the audience have a drink and do your thing with wild abandon and as much cheese as you like, and I personally don’t want to watch someone off their head, fall on their head (unless it’s part of the show).
When you are creating new material do you actually get rid of anything or do you keep creating and making and them come, back to ideas?
SL: I love abandoning things. I gives me a sick thrill to dump something I have worked on for months. But it is different every time. The UKIP half hour episode of Comedy Vehicle that is always on social media took about as long to write as it does to say. Some other half hour bits took 2 years of back and forth, until nothing of the original draft is left at all.
LC: Or do you do something else entirely? Sometimes I forget that that best thing is not to make a judgement on what you are doing in the moment, the feeling to the performer can be so different to the outcome.
SL: We are lucky in comedy. The laugh noise tells us how it’s going. What do you look for in audience responses.
LC: I decided a few years ago to stop second guessing what the audience response should be. I think I look pretty grumpy when I’m listening and watching music, so I think it’s fair enough not to get a visual response like that. Also I really want to go on stage and just play without talking, but I always end up talking, I think it’s good to acknowledge that we’re all there together, and that also gives people an opportunity to let out a sound, otherwise they are usually being very quiet. My favourite thing in the world is whoops at the end of an improvisation around a 5th century psalm of repentance, I live for that stuff kind of response. I think my best verbal audience was at Unsound Festival in Poland a couple of years back, they were all really cool and they loved it!!! I had no idea until the end of the set when the room erupted.
SL: Do you consider yourself an ‘entertainer’ or an ‘artist’ or both. I have tried self-consciously I suppose to make ‘arty’ stand-up but I like the fact that I am performing it in a vaudeville tradition where it was supposed to be entertainment. It grounds it. What’s the difference between what you do now and playing at ceilidhs?
LC: I think it’s that difference between functional music and a performance. In ceilidhs people tend to fall into different categories, drunk, Ernest, and self-conscious. I did ceilidhs for about 10 years around East Anglia, London (and one in Ireland). It’s not about the performer, you are playing traditional tunes in your way, and people like it, but it’s not about you. Thousands of fiddlers could do that job. But I can be at the same venue performing my music and they headspace is in a different world. I remember once playing at Ceilidh at The Union Chapel in London, and then a few years later performing my music. I don’t think I’m an entertainer but I do have a lot to give from the stage, I think that’s the most important thing. It’s not about the audience just being entertained, it’s about sharing time and feelings.
If something feels like a battle in performance, do you push into it more?
SL: I try to see how bad I can make everything go before I turn it around. Mark E Smith always seemed to be trying to snatch failure from the jaws of success, and then make the jaws of failure vomit the success back out again. I suppose I have copied that. Do you ever feel audiences are on the edge?
LC: I’ve spent a long time trying to see how crunchy and dissonant I can make my overbow fiddle playing before I give some sort of release or resolution… if I do. I think that sort of suspended sonic angst is an amazing place to be, to go from crunching, biting atonal strings to a pure individual note. I think a lot of my playing is quite feral, and I’ve played into that more and more since realising that I don’t want to be and am not a classical violinist. I’m not neat but I have ways of playing that I’ve developed. Like I said earlier, it’s about a vessel for performance and expression. I need to feel that edginess in order to feel like something is happening. I think people have been on the edge with my music, I love pulling them in, and strangers being visually surprised at themselves that they liked it whether they wanted to or not.
These Feral Lands Volume 1 is out on Friday 13th November 2020 www.brawlrecords.co.uk & all good record shops
Stewart Lee
2020-09-09T12:17:52+01:00
Laura Cannell: Hi Stewart, So here we go, I thought I would ask you some questions and please can you can ask me some too? A conversation really… We were going to work together live for the first time in July at Kings Place which has now been postponed until 2021, the idea for a collaborative piece was already in our heads though. At the same time I was working on a piece I was commissioned to compose for the incredible Irish Contemporary Cellist Kate Ellis called ‘The Last Wild Wolf in Ireland’, and the premiere for that was also cancelled. One email led to another, and with the addition of Kate on Cello and Double Bass and new writings from Jennifer Lucy Allan and Polly Wright we made an album which is out on my Brawl Records label this autumn called ‘These Feral Lands Volume I’. But none of us met or spoke to each other in person, and you didn’t all hear each others parts until they were whole pieces. Stewart Lee: I remember you asking me about writing some words for the live version of your landscape project. When we first spoke a few years ago – at Radio 3 on the Xmas Mixing It – I was surprised to find you were from the same part of Norfolk as my birth-family, who I had eventually traced after years of putting it off, and that your Mum knew my sister, and that your friend Polly knew my auntie. Obviously, I am sort of belatedly fascinated by the myths and geography of that region as I suppose biologically I am ‘of’ it, but culturally it is irrelevant to me. I spent lots of time in East Anglia in the early ’90s weirdly, and always find it a bit...
The boys from TV's Fist of Fun, pack 'em in for another show. Richard Herring wanders about the stage like a penguin with memory loss, spewing juvenile fun to which the audience applaud and groan vigorously.
Stewart Lee tries to talk as gently as possible for much of the time and gives his logical and structured analysis to, among other things, annoy his pal Herring.
Lee acts as an all-knowing big brother, continually arguing and trying to outwit Herring in a battle of wills. There's a good mix of conversational humour and reminiscing about amusing schoolteachers' names.
The pair also enjoy a monologue each which gives good balance to a well-structured show of bickering and ponderous moments. The aspect that partly propels them to their present status is their tremendous chemistry and banter, even during their disagreements.
It's a very audience-friendly show with solid material that is extremely polished and well delivered. And there's some stupid talk about a stick on a moon or something
Stewart Lee
1996-08-29T21:50:47+01:00
The boys from TV's Fist of Fun, pack 'em in for another show. Richard Herring wanders about the stage like a penguin with memory loss, spewing juvenile fun to which the audience applaud and groan vigorously. Stewart Lee tries to talk as gently as possible for much of the time and gives his logical and structured analysis to, among other things, annoy his pal Herring. Lee acts as an all-knowing big brother, continually arguing and trying to outwit Herring in a battle of wills. There's a good mix of conversational humour and reminiscing about amusing schoolteachers' names. The pair also enjoy a monologue each which gives good balance to a well-structured show of bickering and ponderous moments. The aspect that partly propels them to their present status is their tremendous chemistry and banter, even during their disagreements. It's a very audience-friendly show with solid material that is extremely polished and well delivered. And there's some stupid talk about a stick on a moon or something
Refugees cross the Serbian-Hungarian border last week. Photograph: Matthias Schrader/AP
On Monday, David Cameron revealed that a Welsh Isis recruit had been killed in Syria by an unmanned drone, or defence secretary Michael Fallon, as the unmanned drone is better known.
The Sun responded with characteristic restraint, depicting the Welsh terrorist’s head in cross hairs, alongside a coupon you could save for a chance to get your own unmanned drone and carry out the next killing yourself.
Amazon are in talks with Michael Fallon about a public-private finance initiative. Could an unmanned drone drop off a birthday copy of Richard Hammond’s Caravan Confidential book at your dad’s house in Kidderminster while en route to Syria to take out another Welsh terrorist? And would the chancellor be able to ensure that any savings made were passed on to Amazon shareholders as non-taxable dividends? And can we be certain that human error doesn’t leave your dad’s semi destroyed, while Isis murderers get to sit around in Syria having a laugh at how rubbish Richard Hammond says caravans are?
While I appreciate the need for drastic action, and commend the diligent drone on a job well done, I am not sure it is terribly civilised to actively celebrate the foolish Welshman’s death. Nonetheless, Cameron’s next step must be to kill one Isis recruit a piece from Scotland and Northern Ireland too, so as he doesn’t appear to be targeting any of his English partner nations’ home-grown terrorists unfairly.
On Tuesday, I discussed with a Quaker acquaintance whether we should take refugees into our homes. The problem is my spare room roof has fallen in, and now the whole attic conversion needs recarpeting, replastering, and repainting. At the moment it looks like a bomb has hit it, and I became genuinely confused as to whether this was appropriate accommodation or not.
I wondered if a nice Syrian family might move in and do it all up for me, as I don’t have the time. Then I realised that I was entertaining an arrangement that could, conceivably, on some level, be described as crudely exploitative in the very worst possible sense.
Last Sunday, because I am much better than you, I took donations for the migrants to a collection point in Dalston. I did wonder what sort of booty the CalAid volunteers would harvest from our admirably diverse borough. Orthodox Jewish skull caps, Islamic hijabs, Quakers’ white tights, gay bondage rubber gimp suits, feminist dungarees, and ironic 70s soft-rock hipster T-shirts. And that was just in the bin bag I took down!
So you like jokes, eh, monkey boy? Well, since January, like some kind of horrible laughing fly, vomiting the enzyme of satire onto the rotten vegetable of human tragedy, I have been trying to work out how to do a standup comedy routine that addressed the migrant crisis. This was not an attempt to be deliberately tasteless or politically incorrect. I think political correctness is a good thing.
Indeed, I believe it was the broadcaster and thinker Toby Young who once said of me, “He essentially uses comedy to browbeat people into agreeing with his dogmatic leftwing points of view, taking what is the prevailing politically correct dogma of his generation and using comedy as an instrument to enforce conformity, not as a means of subversion.” It’s probably the most accurate review I have received, and one I regularly use on posters.
I need six half-hour standup routines written by December for my next BBC2 series. I had a workable 30 minutes on the go after Christmas about Ukip, and while I personally welcome the failure of the far right, (see above), I was professionally worried that the amusing party might disappear after the May elections and render my new routine irrelevant.
My sofa was paid for with humanity’s tears. Don’t imagine I am proud of this process
Consequently, I actually spent much of March and April in Kent campaigning for Ukip out of pure self-interest, just to be able to keep the bit in, but all to no avail. Sadly my serviceable “lining a cat litter tray with an England flag” half-hour is now in the used joke bin.
I am in a symbiotic relationship with The Appalling. The worse the world becomes, the easier it is for me to make fun of it for financial gain. My sofa was paid for with humanity’s tears. Don’t imagine I am proud of this process.
The migrant crisis is much worse than, for example, a large number of buses all arriving at once, so you would imagine it would be easy to write standup comedy about. But I have been wrestling with the subject for months now. I’m not trying to make light of the terrible situation, but I wish Isis and Tony Blair and President Assad would think of some of the hidden costs of their actions. I’m just trying to make a living here.
From April to June I tried a bit where I pictured myself trying to stop hordes of migrants swarming into my garden to escape being beheaded in the garden next door. But it seemed too brutal to say aloud to paying punters who had innocently booked a babysitter for a fun night out in good faith.
In the end, I squeezed an Observer column from the idea, instead of delivering the words personally to confused unsympathetic audiences. Back in those simpler times of summer, people were still unsure of what they felt about the migrants. Pundits spoke of vermin and cockroaches. And prime ministers talked of swarms.
The drowned dead no longer swarm, it seems
Then a Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach, where maybe you had been on holiday. And on Wednesday you watched film of a Hungarian woman kicking a frightened girl, and sending a fleeing man tumbling to the ground, his child in his arms. And over the last fortnight the migrant crisis moved in your minds from the realm of abstract information into a flesh and blood reality of palpable suffering.
Now, even David Cameron proclaims an emotional understanding of events. But only “as a father”, not as a human generally, which might have been a more profitable outcome of the hours doubtless spent sculpting his statement. The drowned dead no longer swarm, it seems.
So the big boil is lanced at last. But how long will the fashion for compassion last? In 10 minutes, I’ll leave this Premier Inn room and go down to the cellar of a Brighton cafe, and read these words aloud to 25 people, to see if and why, at this point in time, anyone laughs. And then I’ll start the rewrite. It’s a living.
Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 from 21 Sept. stewartlee.co.uk
Stewart Lee
2015-09-13T00:51:14+01:00
Refugees cross the Serbian-Hungarian border last week. Photograph: Matthias Schrader/AP On Monday, David Cameron revealed that a Welsh Isis recruit had been killed in Syria by an unmanned drone, or defence secretary Michael Fallon, as the unmanned drone is better known. The Sun responded with characteristic restraint, depicting the Welsh terrorist’s head in cross hairs, alongside a coupon you could save for a chance to get your own unmanned drone and carry out the next killing yourself. Amazon are in talks with Michael Fallon about a public-private finance initiative. Could an unmanned drone drop off a birthday copy of Richard Hammond’s Caravan Confidential book at your dad’s house in Kidderminster while en route to Syria to take out another Welsh terrorist? And would the chancellor be able to ensure that any savings made were passed on to Amazon shareholders as non-taxable dividends? And can we be certain that human error doesn’t leave your dad’s semi destroyed, while Isis murderers get to sit around in Syria having a laugh at how rubbish Richard Hammond says caravans are? While I appreciate the need for drastic action, and commend the diligent drone on a job well done, I am not sure it is terribly civilised to actively celebrate the foolish Welshman’s death. Nonetheless, Cameron’s next step must be to kill one Isis recruit a piece from Scotland and Northern Ireland too, so as he doesn’t appear to be targeting any of his English partner nations’ home-grown terrorists unfairly. On Tuesday, I discussed with a Quaker acquaintance whether we should take refugees into our homes. The problem is my spare room roof has fallen in, and now the whole attic conversion needs recarpeting, replastering, and repainting. At the moment it looks like a bomb has hit it, and I became genuinely confused as to...
The Plimsouls played melodic sixties mod pop with punk aggression, Peter Case's grazed white soul vocals and Eddie Munoz' plangent guitars bleeding through the surface noise and cheerleader air-punch rhythms.
This 1983 live recording, the group in explosive form after their second album, betters their studio output in terms of sheer energy and reveals The Plimsouls as one of the great lost groups.
A cover of Moby Grape's Fall On You holds on to the hippy harmonies whilst serrating them with nerve shredding guitars at white knuckle velocity. I'm sorry, but they don't make them like this anymore.
Stewart Lee
2012-03-04T21:17:12+00:00
The Plimsouls played melodic sixties mod pop with punk aggression, Peter Case's grazed white soul vocals and Eddie Munoz' plangent guitars bleeding through the surface noise and cheerleader air-punch rhythms. This 1983 live recording, the group in explosive form after their second album, betters their studio output in terms of sheer energy and reveals The Plimsouls as one of the great lost groups. A cover of Moby Grape's Fall On You holds on to the hippy harmonies whilst serrating them with nerve shredding guitars at white knuckle velocity. I'm sorry, but they don't make them like this anymore.
As a comedian and F-list celebrity I am occassionally asked to appear as a talking head on TV shows called the ‘Greatest Stand-Up Comedians of All Time’. But most the people I want to discuss – Simon Munnery, Kevin MacAleer, and Ted Chippington for example, - are deemed inadmissable by the producers, who want to use footage of pre-approved performers. History is written by the victors. The official story of moden stand-up that has coalesced from Broadsheet articles and TV factual-entertainment programmes is one that remains unrecognisable to many comedians themselves.
I first saw ‘top comedian’ Ted Chippington on October 28th 1984 at a little rock club in Birmingham called The Powerhouse. Don’t look for it. It’s not there anymore. But Ted’s performance that night remains the coolest thing I ever saw. In the early 80’s, as a young stand-up fan outside London, one was largely untouched by the supposed mainstays of the Alternative Comedy Boom. Now that the tonal inference of the movement is everywhere – from McDonalds adverts to day-time Radio 1 dj’s – it’s worth remembering that, back then, there were few provincial equivalents of The Comedy Store or The Comic Strip. Beyond the metropolis you would see the new comedians supporting bands or at forgotten hippy festivals like The Elephant Fayre. In the immediate post-punk era, music audiences accepted variety-style line-ups, and I saw Peter Richardson with Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a young Phill Jupitus doing performance poetry before Billy Bragg, and Ted Chippington, the Ted-shaped hole in the history of comedy, supporting The Fall.
Ted took the stage to a crowd that weren’t expecting him, rooted to the spot in Teddy Boy regalia, scowling and supping a beer. He spent half an hour delivering variations on the same joke, each of which began with the phrase “I was walking down this road the other day,” in a flat midlands monotone, interspersed with listless interpretations of pop hits. People were paralysed with laughter, or furious with irritation. Just as Britain was processing the new stand-up styles of Ben Elton and Alexi Sayle, Ted was already dismantling the form itself. With every frill removed, and with the very notion of what a joke was boiled down to the barest of bones, Ted was stand-up in its purest form, belonging neither to the politicaly-charged world of Alternative Comedy, nor the reactionary hinterlands of Working Men’s Clubs. I was utterlly transfixed and my heart was racing as I realised that stand-up could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn’t even have to look as if you were enjoying it.
Eventually, Ted became a minor cult, though he never played any conventional comedy clubs, prefering to perform where he was not necessarilly wanted. In 1986, a collaboration with Birmingham bands The Nightingales and We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It nudged Rocking With Rita to the bottom of the charts, and the DJ Steve Wright’s fascination with Ted’s oddly moving take on The Beatles’ She Loves You led to brief major label interest and three TV appearances. Years later Vic Reeves arrived by another route at a similar, but more sophisticated, form of bent light entertainment. At the dawn of the 90’s, Ted’s audiences were in on the joke, so he split to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles, eventually ending up driving trucks to Mexico and working as a cook. And then the trail went cold.
In the late 80’s, at Univeristy and the Edinburgh fringe, I met other teenage, would-be comics who knew Ted’s lone album, Man In A Suitcase, off-by heart. Monday’s Tedstock benefit at the Bloomsbury Theatre sees us convene to raise money for a 4cd reissue of all his recordings. Ted’s releases documented him struggling with hostile crowds, though his indifference seems now almost sublime. Ted taught us that a bad audience reaction didn’t necessarily mean that what you were doing was worthless, and we co-opted his low-energy insolence and fed off it. At the risk of seeming delusional, I now think you can hear second and third hand echoes of Ted in the routines of comics who probably never even heard him. The relentlessness of Ricky Gervais’ Aesop’s Fables bit is Ted with a tailwind, and in in 2005, when I had the superbly baffling young Edinburgh fringe award-winner Josie Long open for me on tour, a disgruntled Leeds punter remarked. “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since Ted Chippington, twenty years ago.” I couldn’t have been happier.
It’s difficult to say who the first alternative comedian was. Ben Elton? Alexi Sayle? Victoria Wood? John Dowie, if you really know your stuff? Or maybe the folksingers – Billy Conolly or Jasper Carrot? But one things is for certain. Ted Chippington was the first post-alternative comedian, and without him, everything would be different. Not necessarily worse. But different.
Stewart Lee
2007-02-04T19:48:46+00:00
As a comedian and F-list celebrity I am occassionally asked to appear as a talking head on TV shows called the ‘Greatest Stand-Up Comedians of All Time’. But most the people I want to discuss – Simon Munnery, Kevin MacAleer, and Ted Chippington for example, - are deemed inadmissable by the producers, who want to use footage of pre-approved performers. History is written by the victors. The official story of moden stand-up that has coalesced from Broadsheet articles and TV factual-entertainment programmes is one that remains unrecognisable to many comedians themselves. I first saw ‘top comedian’ Ted Chippington on October 28th 1984 at a little rock club in Birmingham called The Powerhouse. Don’t look for it. It’s not there anymore. But Ted’s performance that night remains the coolest thing I ever saw. In the early 80’s, as a young stand-up fan outside London, one was largely untouched by the supposed mainstays of the Alternative Comedy Boom. Now that the tonal inference of the movement is everywhere – from McDonalds adverts to day-time Radio 1 dj’s – it’s worth remembering that, back then, there were few provincial equivalents of The Comedy Store or The Comic Strip. Beyond the metropolis you would see the new comedians supporting bands or at forgotten hippy festivals like The Elephant Fayre. In the immediate post-punk era, music audiences accepted variety-style line-ups, and I saw Peter Richardson with Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a young Phill Jupitus doing performance poetry before Billy Bragg, and Ted Chippington, the Ted-shaped hole in the history of comedy, supporting The Fall. Ted took the stage to a crowd that weren’t expecting him, rooted to the spot in Teddy Boy regalia, scowling and supping a beer. He spent half an hour delivering variations on the same joke, each of which began with the phrase...
In 1972 the British band Janus had their lone album of ‘70s hard rock doused in '60s psychedelic effects by German studio engineers.
The band disowned the awkward hybrid but this reissue uncovers Janus’ fascinating, acid flanged, proto-metal silhouette.
A second disc sees guitarist Colin Orr politely and rather pointlessly remix the brilliantly bewildered record, though the softening of the seagull sound effects during the Rodrigo Guitar Concerto rip-off in the monumental twenty-five minute title track is a demonstrable improvement.
Stewart Lee
2013-07-07T20:29:06+01:00
In 1972 the British band Janus had their lone album of ‘70s hard rock doused in '60s psychedelic effects by German studio engineers. The band disowned the awkward hybrid but this reissue uncovers Janus’ fascinating, acid flanged, proto-metal silhouette. A second disc sees guitarist Colin Orr politely and rather pointlessly remix the brilliantly bewildered record, though the softening of the seagull sound effects during the Rodrigo Guitar Concerto rip-off in the monumental twenty-five minute title track is a demonstrable improvement.
Content Provider was released on 4th August 2016, through Faber. “Over the last five years, often when David Mitchell has been on holiday, the comedian Stewart Lee has been attempting to understand modern Britain, and his own place in it, in a series of irregular newspaper columns.
Will Scotland become the Promised Land of the Left? Is it possible to live a life without crisps? Who was Grant Shapps? What does your Spotify playlist data say about you? Are Jeremy Corbyn and Stewart Lee really the new Christs? And so on.
Selected, introduced and, where necessary, explained by the author and corrected by readers, Content Provider is funny, grumpy, provocative, confusing and brilliant.”
NOTE: CONTENT PROVIDER (the book) IS NOT RELATED TO CONTENT PROVIDER (the show). It is NOT a transcript of the show, in the same way as the MILDER COMEDIAN book is a transcript of that show, or CERTAIN FATE is a transcript of the three preceding ones.
For a transcript of CONTENT PROVIDER, please see MARCH OF THE LEMMINGS.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-30T23:38:12+00:00
Content Provider was released on 4th August 2016, through Faber. “Over the last five years, often when David Mitchell has been on holiday, the comedian Stewart Lee has been attempting to understand modern Britain, and his own place in it, in a series of irregular newspaper columns. Will Scotland become the Promised Land of the Left? Is it possible to live a life without crisps? Who was Grant Shapps? What does your Spotify playlist data say about you? Are Jeremy Corbyn and Stewart Lee really the new Christs? And so on. Selected, introduced and, where necessary, explained by the author and corrected by readers, Content Provider is funny, grumpy, provocative, confusing and brilliant.” NOTE: CONTENT PROVIDER (the book) IS NOT RELATED TO CONTENT PROVIDER (the show). It is NOT a transcript of the show, in the same way as the MILDER COMEDIAN book is a transcript of that show, or CERTAIN FATE is a transcript of the three preceding ones. For a transcript of CONTENT PROVIDER, please see MARCH OF THE LEMMINGS.
Stewart Lee joins on the non-affordability of bands today, alternative comedy and the different classes of comedians, losing money on tour, his old band and fighting facism dressed as a man-wulf. STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF continues to tour throughout 2026, ending at Leicester Square Theatre in December.
Stewart Lee
2026-04-21T19:12:10+01:00
Stewart Lee joins on the non-affordability of bands today, alternative comedy and the different classes of comedians, losing money on tour, his old band and fighting facism dressed as a man-wulf. STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF continues to tour throughout 2026, ending at Leicester Square Theatre in December.
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.
Stewart Lee
2013-10-06T13:44:19+01:00
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...
The C86 Show is weekly show inspired by an NME cassette of the same name. We feature new, exciting, in-depth interviews with bands and artists of the time. Check out our other arts and culture content too!
The Nightingales - with Stewart Lee & Michael Cumming in conversation - discussing King Rocker A film about Robert Lloyd & The Nightingales
PREMIERES: SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6TH ON SKY ARTS (9pm)
Stewart Lee
2021-01-25T16:00:58+00:00
The C86 Show is weekly show inspired by an NME cassette of the same name. We feature new, exciting, in-depth interviews with bands and artists of the time. Check out our other arts and culture content too! The Nightingales - with Stewart Lee & Michael Cumming in conversation - discussing King Rocker A film about Robert Lloyd & The Nightingales PREMIERES: SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6TH ON SKY ARTS (9pm)
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/mp3/the-c86-show/
On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak opened his tiny mouth wide, as wide as it could possibly go, and announced “a new plan to stop scams at the source and help make it easier for people to protect themselves from fraudsters”. Meanwhile, his former boss Boris Johnson, who had persuaded some mug to pay for his wallpaper and the British taxpayer to pay for his Partygate legal costs, frolicked around on the lawn like a dog with two defence lawyers.
It’s hard to imagine how the political, or even literal, fraudsters that comprise the Conservative government could appear any more comically unselfconscious. Perhaps they could have launched their anti-fraud initiative with a short animation of a cartoon fox advising us on how to protect chickens, while seated on a huge throne made of chicken bones, licking chicken blood off its own fingers and ostentatiously wearing a hat that is just a dead chicken.
They are doing this sort of thing on purpose now, surely. Is the slowly auto-asphyxiating Tory party desperately tightening a pair of Nadine Dorries’s old tights around its neck in search of one final sick thrill before it passes out for ever? In its breathless, priapic death thrash, Sunak’s government has reached the stage where the announcements it makes either indicate an impossible lack of self-knowledge, or else they are intended to make people like me waste privileged column inches, which should instead highlight the stripping-away of the right to protest, perhaps, sneering at the latest inane Tory communique. In which case I, like some woke north London tofu-munching Wile E Coyote, have just walked into another Tory Acme™® trap.
The Conservatives are going to protect us from fraudsters? Really? Hoo ha! Perhaps the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, who once ran an online business called How to Corp under the false name of Michael Green, endorsed by glowing reviews from people who appear to be entirely fictitious, can help catch the fraudsters? If not, perhaps the punters who gave Shapps’s fake identity such great endorsements – Corinne Stockheath of Surrey, Dr JLM Richards of the Wallerson Trust in Dallas, or Richard Warton of Tektriox in New York – could be enlisted to help. They shouldn’t be too busy, due to the fact that there is no sign that any of them exist.
It should be noted, in the interest of fairness, that in 2013 the police concluded that Shapps’s sale of software “may constitute an offence of fraud” but they decided not to follow up their investigation. Perhaps Sunak’s promised “new powers” will make it easier for them to do so. I expect they will be too busy arresting teenagers for demonstrating against the climate crisis to investigate Shapps, last seen wasting energy resources buzzing around on a ride-on lawnmower that was a metaphor for how great Brexit is. Or something.
Sunak has at least changed the Tories’ previous position on fraud. In February 2022, the then business secretary and morning-news-radio-interview-round punchbag, Tufton Steet’s now quietly disappeared economic Jimmy Hat, Kwasi Kwarteng, justified fraudulently removing fraud from the official statistics by fraudulently saying it wasn’t “a crime that people experience in their day-to-day lives”. But even as Kwarteng fraudulently used the fraudulent removal of fraud from the now fraudulent official figures to fraudulently drive the official crime rate down, the 2021 telephone-operated crime survey for England and Wales named fraud as the crime people were most likely to experience. Viewers in Scotland suffered their own forms of deception.
Investigating the government’s own Action Fraud service in 2019, itself outsourced to an American company called Concentrix, an undercover reporter found call handlers were trained to let callers think their cases would be investigated when most were ignored, while managers mocked the public as “morons”, “screwballs” and “psychos”. All Sunak’s new fraud initiative has to do is remove dishonesty and active contempt for the victims from the equation and it will be an improvement.
“We will take the fight to these fraudsters wherever they try to hide,” Sunak crowed, despite having lost about £16bn to fraud on his own watch during the pandemic’s demonstrably leaky emergency loan schemes. In February 2022, reflecting on that missing £16bn, a treasury spokesperson said, “the taxpayer protection taskforce is expected to recover up to £1bn from fraudulent or incorrect payments”, as if it were worth saying.
To be fair to Sunak, it is not always easy to find people, “wherever they try to hide.” But it’s lucky that the Conservative peer and bra magnate Michelle Mone, who with her children secretly received £29m in profits from a PPE firm favoured by a government VIP channel, is not wanted for fraud, as she has been inconspicuously hanging out in plain sight in a white bikini on a luxury yacht.
It’s encouraging, however, that Sunak aims to ban “SIM farms that can send thousands of texts in one go”, and to “stop spoof calls, which trick people into thinking they’re speaking to legitimate businesses”. This should be easy for the Conservatives. During the 2019 election campaign, 88% of their most-shared Facebook advertising contained false information, compared with 6.7% for Labour. The Conservatives fraudulently re-edited footage of Keir Starmer and cynically and fraudulently rebranded their own Twitter account as if it were an independent fact-checking service, or a “legimate business”, as Sunak said in his statement condemning fraudsters. Meanwhile, the people of North Shropshire thought they were electing a local MP, when in fact they were effectively electing a paid lobbyist in disguise. All Sunak needs to do to stop industrial-scale fraud is look at how his own party have defrauded the electorate on a similar industrial scale in recent years, learn some lessons, and work backwards. It’s not rocket science.
Stewart Lee
2023-05-07T18:21:56+01:00
On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak opened his tiny mouth wide, as wide as it could possibly go, and announced “a new plan to stop scams at the source and help make it easier for people to protect themselves from fraudsters”. Meanwhile, his former boss Boris Johnson, who had persuaded some mug to pay for his wallpaper and the British taxpayer to pay for his Partygate legal costs, frolicked around on the lawn like a dog with two defence lawyers. It’s hard to imagine how the political, or even literal, fraudsters that comprise the Conservative government could appear any more comically unselfconscious. Perhaps they could have launched their anti-fraud initiative with a short animation of a cartoon fox advising us on how to protect chickens, while seated on a huge throne made of chicken bones, licking chicken blood off its own fingers and ostentatiously wearing a hat that is just a dead chicken. They are doing this sort of thing on purpose now, surely. Is the slowly auto-asphyxiating Tory party desperately tightening a pair of Nadine Dorries’s old tights around its neck in search of one final sick thrill before it passes out for ever? In its breathless, priapic death thrash, Sunak’s government has reached the stage where the announcements it makes either indicate an impossible lack of self-knowledge, or else they are intended to make people like me waste privileged column inches, which should instead highlight the stripping-away of the right to protest, perhaps, sneering at the latest inane Tory communique. In which case I, like some woke north London tofu-munching Wile E Coyote, have just walked into another Tory Acme™® trap. The Conservatives are going to protect us from fraudsters? Really? Hoo ha! Perhaps the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, who once ran an online business called How to Corp under...
If Neil Young released Buried Treasures, it would be hailed as a return to form.
And when Drive-By Truckers evidence similarly unselfconscious immediacy, we praise their ability to inhabit characters.
But Rich Hopkins is for real, a regular guitar-toting guy who grew a conscience in the Peace Corps, cowriting his best songs to date with his hair-salon-owner girlfriend, Lisa Novak.
The Tucson troubadour's 28th studio set offers Crazy Horse-style workouts and plangent psychedelic feedback jams, but, as shown by the bleakly beautiful Friend of the Shooter, they are increasingly engaged with the southwest's dark underbelly.
Stewart Lee
2012-02-02T20:17:58+00:00
If Neil Young released Buried Treasures, it would be hailed as a return to form. And when Drive-By Truckers evidence similarly unselfconscious immediacy, we praise their ability to inhabit characters. But Rich Hopkins is for real, a regular guitar-toting guy who grew a conscience in the Peace Corps, cowriting his best songs to date with his hair-salon-owner girlfriend, Lisa Novak. The Tucson troubadour's 28th studio set offers Crazy Horse-style workouts and plangent psychedelic feedback jams, but, as shown by the bleakly beautiful Friend of the Shooter, they are increasingly engaged with the southwest's dark underbelly.
Not everyone who voted to leave the EU wanted to see Britain immediately descend into being an unaccountable single-party state, exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely. Some people just wanted to have bendy bananas.
As a member of the metropolitan liberal elite in the pre-Brexit wasteland, I wake up every day, my little liberal heart fit to burst with grief. Momentarily, I took bitter comfort in the fact that it could be worse. I could be American. In which case, not only would I be broken-hearted, I would also be even fatter.
But in the daily Doomsday Clock countdown of Donald Trump’s presidency we at least see the foot-soldiers of the American government machine hurling themselves bodily into its gears, unconcerned for their own careers. Our opposition simply folded in front of Brexit like shit-smeared toilet tissue and posted itself politely into the municipal recreation ground bin full of dog muck that is the future of the parliamentary Labour party.
My constituency voted 78% remain. On Wednesday, my MP was too ill to vote. I’m joining the Liberal Democrats, itself on some level a hopeless admission of defeat.
On the Sun’s 29 June front page, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promised ongoing single-market access, a promise now dematerialised unchallenged. The weekly £350m for the NHS has disappeared, and the buses the figure was written on have been wrapped up in Boris Johnson’s old gym pants and buried in Sarah Vine’s fennel patch.
Who gave these liars a free pass? Johnson compares François Hollande to Nazi guards and they say it’s “theatrical”. MPs compare Trump’s rise to 1930s Germany and Johnson says it’s “trivialising the Holocaust”. But the historian Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day speech was “classic softcore denial. The Holocaust was de-Judaised.” It’s so hard to tell what trivialising the Holocaust looks like these days. Arguably, Johnson was trivialising trivialising the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Putin threatens Europe. Trump threatens Europe. And Trump threatens the whole planet with climate change denial, although admittedly it is a very overrated planet, one of the most overrated planets in the cosmos. Would Britain still have pursued Brexit last June if it had foreseen this horrible future, less than a year away?
And what must the world think of us? On the many occasions I have been dumped by disappointed women, I was always heartened when they had the kindness to leave me for partners demonstrably superior to me – the clever and athletic Scottish doctor; the rakishly handsome Irish theatre promoter; the talented Canadian interior designer; the charming Australian pianist; the enigmatic and nameless Interrailing Dutchman; I took some comfort in this. At least my exes traded up.
But we have dumped a stable relationship with sophisticated and elegant Europe, fragrant with roquefort and Ricola, and flawed though her thickening beauty may have been, for the promise of having our pussies grabbed behind the bike sheds by Donald Trump and Recep Erdoğan, who look like an-out-of-shape golf instructor and a bloke who sells zombie knives to kids in the market, respectively. How humiliating for us. Looks like we were punching way above our weight when we were lucky enough to get laid in Brussels.
If our Brexit trade plan relies on wooing despised tyrants, what kind of morally bankrupt corner have we backed ourselves into? Public objections to Trump’s state visit are understandable, but are denounced as hypocrisy by shrill Brexit bullies pointing out that no one complained when the Queen hosted the entire entourage of Doctor Victor Von Doom, iron-faced autocratic dictator of Latveria, a totalitarian state policed by Doom’s flying sentinels, the Doombots.
But we do not expect exemplary behaviour from Dr Doom and his fellow dictators. As Doom explained, in horticultural terms, to Prince Charles at a Buckingham Palace state banquet, “My methods are a means to an end, no different than pruning weeds in order to let an orchid flourish.” The president of the United States, however, should be better than a hideously disfigured two-dimensional fictional comic book dictator, and ideally at least as eloquent.
When she was home secretary, in 2014, Theresa May denied a visa to the pick-up artist Julien Blanc on the grounds that his attitudes to women legitimised sexual assault, a charge you could equally well level at Donald Trump. It’s a shame Blanc doesn’t have a load of old smelly chicken going cheap. He might find that, instead of a ban, he received an invitation to the Queen’s high table. By comparison with Trump, Blanc is a gentleman. At least he never boasted on air that he could have “nailed” the Queen’s grandchildren’s “crazy” mum “without hesitation”.
But, with Trump’s trade deal help, at least our bananas will be bendy again. And on 1 February 2019, a man dressed as a sensible pirate will stand at the foot of an obelisk in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and blow an enchanted bendy horn, a horn only to be blown in Britain’s hour of need. And when that bendy horn is blown, as if by magic, all the straight bananas in Brexit Britain will suddenly bend once more, never to be straight again.
Ken Clarke, the treacherous jazz doom-monger, has warned that we cats are messing with forces we do not understand, daddio. There is a risk that all sorts of previously straight things, not just bananas, may, if they are too near the blast of the magic horn, turn bent too. TV idiot Richard Hammond has been advised to avoid Yorkshire altogether during the horn blast, to protect the investment made in his monetisable straightness by Amazon Fire Stick.
Ripon constituency’s referendum split reflected pretty much the national percentages, at 52% to 48% in favour of the reinstatement of perpetually bendy bananas, hence its horn duty. I have already booked a room at the Weatherspoon’s in Ripon square for 2019, in order to be at the epicentre of the people’s populist banana-bending revolution.
Weatherspoon’s owner Tim Martin, a vocal opponent of straight bananas, funded a boisterous chapbook ridiculing the insolent yellow fruits, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Straight Bananas. And Tim has promised to be at his Ripon outlet personally on bendy banana day, handing out free bendy bananas to his regular clientele of terminally nostalgic drinkers and plucky all-day breakfasteers, toasting their own imminent obsolescence.
Me? I will be drunk in the gutter, looking up at the stars, the 12 gold stars of the EU flag. Enjoy your bananas. You twats.
Stewart Lee
2017-02-05T16:07:34+00:00
Not everyone who voted to leave the EU wanted to see Britain immediately descend into being an unaccountable single-party state, exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely. Some people just wanted to have bendy bananas. As a member of the metropolitan liberal elite in the pre-Brexit wasteland, I wake up every day, my little liberal heart fit to burst with grief. Momentarily, I took bitter comfort in the fact that it could be worse. I could be American. In which case, not only would I be broken-hearted, I would also be even fatter. But in the daily Doomsday Clock countdown of Donald Trump’s presidency we at least see the foot-soldiers of the American government machine hurling themselves bodily into its gears, unconcerned for their own careers. Our opposition simply folded in front of Brexit like shit-smeared toilet tissue and posted itself politely into the municipal recreation ground bin full of dog muck that is the future of the parliamentary Labour party. My constituency voted 78% remain. On Wednesday, my MP was too ill to vote. I’m joining the Liberal Democrats, itself on some level a hopeless admission of defeat. On the Sun’s 29 June front page, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promised ongoing single-market access, a promise now dematerialised unchallenged. The weekly £350m for the NHS has disappeared, and the buses the figure was written on have been wrapped up in Boris Johnson’s old gym pants and buried in Sarah Vine’s fennel patch. Who gave these liars a free pass? Johnson compares François Hollande to Nazi guards and they say it’s “theatrical”. MPs compare Trump’s rise to 1930s Germany and Johnson says it’s “trivialising the Holocaust”. But the historian Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day speech was “classic softcore denial. The Holocaust was de-Judaised.” It’s so hard to...
The Conservatives’ unpunished corruption has finally driven the bullshit-bombarded press corps bananas. On Tuesday, the indefatigably starstruck Laura Kuenssberg squandered brave whistleblowers’ testimony in a disgraceful Panorama, reordering the reality of Boris Johnson’s criminality, making it seem like the heroic Shakespearean struggle of an undeniably brilliant politician with his all-too-human shortcomings, somehow worthy of comparison with Keir Starmer’s work curry.
Meanwhile, Sky News’s diligent Sam Coates, unravelling in frustration like a spiralised parsnip, became indistinguishable from a costumed YouTube politico, bellowing desperate but accurate accusations at the centipede of smirking lawbreakers and liars emerging from Downing Street’s chthonic portal. One more display of such journalistic integrity and Nadine Dorries will be looking for a way of privatising him.
The deliberately delayed Sue Gray report finally hit cyberspace on Wednesday, promising clarity at last despite 11th-hour attempts to discredit its author. Between shows in a Bath hotel room I fell upon Gray’s opening paragraph greedily: “Would to heaven that the reader, emboldened and momentarily ferocious as he reads, finds his wild and savage path through the desolate marshes of these dark and poisonous pages, without disorientation; for, unless he brings in his reading a rigorous logic and a tension of mind equal at least to his distrust, the mortal emanations of this text will soak his soul, as water sugar. It is not right that everyone should read the pages that follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands.”
Oh. Do excuse me, my dear friend. That is, in fact, the opening of the heady 1869 proto-surrealist memoir Les Chants De Maldoror by the pseudonymous Comte de Lautréamont, a staple bedside read suddenly less weird than the world and one that my news-muddled mind confused with the document in question.
The Sue Gray report, in turn, begins like this: “On 8 December 2021 the Prime Minister asked the Cabinet Secretary to carry out an investigation into allegations relating to gatherings in No 10 Downing Street and the Department for Education during November and December 2020.”
And yet, to me, the details of both decadent and incoherent texts now seem oddly interchangeable. So I have assembled the following revelation from sentences drawn from both Lautréamont and Gray. Can you identify the sources of Les Chants De Sue Gray, by Sue Gray, aged 64 and a ½?
“The official replied: ‘We would like to do speeches tomorrow when we have your drinks that aren’t drinks. I shall wrap my body with balmy garlands.’ The Deputy Cabinet Secretary provided a karaoke machine. When they were three yards apart they suddenly and spontaneously fell upon one another like two lovers and embraced with dignity and gratitude.
“There was excessive alcohol consumption by some individuals. A mountebank would be jealous of them. One individual was sick, wiped out by the vengeance of the inexorable god. There was a minor altercation between two other individuals, as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Red wine was spilled on one wall and on a number of boxes of photocopier paper. I dreamt I had entered the body of a hog, that I could not easily get out again, and that I was wallowing in the filthiest slime.
“On the 18 December 2020 at 13.19, an invitation was reissued, in the eternity of a horrible and universal night. Instead of ‘Wine & Cheese Evening’ it subsequently read ‘End of Year Meeting with Wine & Cheese’. Woe to the sperm whale who would fight against a louse. The special adviser stated: ‘I’m sure it will be fine – and I applaud the gesture – but a 200-odd person invitation for drinks in the garden of No 10 is somewhat of a comms risk in the current environment.’ The shining worm said to me: ‘You, take a stone and kill her.’
“Wine was available, music was played from a laptop on top of a printer and a number of those present drank excessively. Carnal desire followed this demonstration of friendship. A number of individuals gathered near a child’s swing/slide in the garden, damaging it by leaning on and playing with it. Lice are capable of committing as much harm as their imagination meditates.
“It was unfortunately the case that details of some events only became known to me and my team through reporting in the media. I am already satisfied with the amount of evil which he does to you, O human race. Given the piecemeal manner in which events were brought to my attention, it is possible that events took place which were not the subject of investigation. The justice brought by the laws is worth nothing.
“The hardship under which citizens across the country worked, lived and sadly even died while observing the Government’s regulations and guidance rigorously are known only too well. An extreme power can alone show so much contempt for the faithful who obey it. Every citizen has been impacted by the pandemic. The people would sooner or later disappear from the Earth, like the autumn leaves. Everyone has made personal sacrifices, some the most profound, having been unable to be with loved ones in their last moments or care for vulnerable family and friends. A prolonged breath of sadness, which one would think would be the murmur of your sweet breeze, passes, leaving ineffaceable traces, on the soul deeply shaken, and you recall the memory of your lovers.”
The justice brought by the laws is worth nothing. I leave for work on Wednesday night and it still looks as if Johnson will weather even this. Opposition parties must unite to save British democracy. These are its death throes. The candle gutters.
Stewart Lee
2022-05-29T14:27:40+01:00
The Conservatives’ unpunished corruption has finally driven the bullshit-bombarded press corps bananas. On Tuesday, the indefatigably starstruck Laura Kuenssberg squandered brave whistleblowers’ testimony in a disgraceful Panorama, reordering the reality of Boris Johnson’s criminality, making it seem like the heroic Shakespearean struggle of an undeniably brilliant politician with his all-too-human shortcomings, somehow worthy of comparison with Keir Starmer’s work curry. Meanwhile, Sky News’s diligent Sam Coates, unravelling in frustration like a spiralised parsnip, became indistinguishable from a costumed YouTube politico, bellowing desperate but accurate accusations at the centipede of smirking lawbreakers and liars emerging from Downing Street’s chthonic portal. One more display of such journalistic integrity and Nadine Dorries will be looking for a way of privatising him. The deliberately delayed Sue Gray report finally hit cyberspace on Wednesday, promising clarity at last despite 11th-hour attempts to discredit its author. Between shows in a Bath hotel room I fell upon Gray’s opening paragraph greedily: “Would to heaven that the reader, emboldened and momentarily ferocious as he reads, finds his wild and savage path through the desolate marshes of these dark and poisonous pages, without disorientation; for, unless he brings in his reading a rigorous logic and a tension of mind equal at least to his distrust, the mortal emanations of this text will soak his soul, as water sugar. It is not right that everyone should read the pages that follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands.” Oh. Do excuse me, my dear friend. That is, in fact, the opening of the heady 1869 proto-surrealist memoir Les Chants De Maldoror by the pseudonymous Comte de Lautréamont, a staple bedside read suddenly less weird than the...
Traffic were pea and faggot Mods who became psychedelic popsters and 'got it together in the country'.
Their career-defining third album, from 1970, is reissued this week with a disc of live tracks and outtakes. Its floaty flute-augmented jazz rock, typical of the period, suddenly seems oddly contemporary, with modern day musicians like Wolf People raking the era for licks.
Every Mother's Son impresses, with its strangely weightless gravity, but the entirely unrepresentative title track, in which Traffic essayed, briefly and tantalisingly, a fleet English folk rock more fluid and mysterious than Fairport or Pentangle, would do you as a stand-alone download.
Stewart Lee
2011-02-27T21:59:23+00:00
Traffic were pea and faggot Mods who became psychedelic popsters and 'got it together in the country'. Their career-defining third album, from 1970, is reissued this week with a disc of live tracks and outtakes. Its floaty flute-augmented jazz rock, typical of the period, suddenly seems oddly contemporary, with modern day musicians like Wolf People raking the era for licks. Every Mother's Son impresses, with its strangely weightless gravity, but the entirely unrepresentative title track, in which Traffic essayed, briefly and tantalisingly, a fleet English folk rock more fluid and mysterious than Fairport or Pentangle, would do you as a stand-alone download.
Stewart Lee is once again on stage at the atmospheric Mildmay Club for the second series of his Bafta-nominated series. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Series 2 features six tautly written sets by the man who is officially Britain's twelfth best stand-up comedian (Channel 4's 100 Best Stand-Ups, April 2010).
Punctuating the performances, Armando Iannucci (The Thick Of It) destroys Stewart's self-esteem in a series of no holds barred interviews.
Guests include the septuagenarian stand-up Arnold Brown, the comic book guru Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell), and a giant Japanese moth.
Opening the series, Stewart looks at the subject of charity, but is distracted by crisps.
He has another go in a later episode, but is distracted by Adrian Chiles' similarity to a Toby jug.
In other episodes, the "comedians' comedian" chooses between town and country, denigrates national identity, explores the difference between the idealistic alternative comics of the Eighties and the petty minded practitioners of today, and appears to use personal experience to reveal David Cameron's cabal as champagne swilling bullies.
Unlike any other stand-up series on television today, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is staged and shot to capture the real intensity of live comedy, and transfers it to the television medium with an accuracy that is without precedent.
Stewart Lee
2018-10-15T17:05:28+01:00
Stewart Lee is once again on stage at the atmospheric Mildmay Club for the second series of his Bafta-nominated series. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Series 2 features six tautly written sets by the man who is officially Britain's twelfth best stand-up comedian (Channel 4's 100 Best Stand-Ups, April 2010). Punctuating the performances, Armando Iannucci (The Thick Of It) destroys Stewart's self-esteem in a series of no holds barred interviews. Guests include the septuagenarian stand-up Arnold Brown, the comic book guru Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell), and a giant Japanese moth. Opening the series, Stewart looks at the subject of charity, but is distracted by crisps. He has another go in a later episode, but is distracted by Adrian Chiles' similarity to a Toby jug. In other episodes, the "comedians' comedian" chooses between town and country, denigrates national identity, explores the difference between the idealistic alternative comics of the Eighties and the petty minded practitioners of today, and appears to use personal experience to reveal David Cameron's cabal as champagne swilling bullies. Unlike any other stand-up series on television today, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is staged and shot to capture the real intensity of live comedy, and transfers it to the television medium with an accuracy that is without precedent.
When is a show about Brexit and Trump not about Brexit and Trump? Stewart Lee‘s latest effort was an essay on the social media-driven cultural landscape, refracted through a prism of 2016’s EU referendum and US presidential election. Set against a backdrop of cheap stand-up DVDs and an artistic framing device, Content Provider was yet another triumph from a performer who has steadily grown his fan-base in similar proportion to his critical acclaim.
His first proper show since Carpet Remnant World, having concentrated for a few years on running in material for his Comedy Vehicle TV series, didn’t merely focus on the volatile political climate, also taking in music, Game of Thrones, and the commercialisation of S&M. All were fertile ground, and Lee didn’t disappoint even on such disparate topics.
A fascinating aspect of Lee’s trajectory in the past decade or so has been his indulgence of certain stand-up conventions and his own approach, and in many ways this new outing was a continuation of that oeuvre. Utilising the status of the character ‘Stewart Lee’, he’s been able to maintain a distance which resulted in intelligent, superbly-crafted comedy, while Lee himself looked like he was having enormous fun, occasionally betraying the character’s withering commentary on the audience by being unable to conceal his glee.
Content Provider, in much the same way as all his recent output, was a masterclass in control – a tightly-written and -constructed show which knew exactly how to probe and push the audience, leading them one way and then the other. Upping the pace and using fewer instances of repetition than on the Comedy Vehicle series – without veering too far away from that reliable technique – this felt like a joy of a set, familiar in rhythm but with his singular take on the state of the world and some astonishingly good jokes.
At this stage, he’s so far ahead of the field, the rest are in danger of being lapped.
Stewart Lee
2017-05-18T21:35:55+01:00
When is a show about Brexit and Trump not about Brexit and Trump? Stewart Lee‘s latest effort was an essay on the social media-driven cultural landscape, refracted through a prism of 2016’s EU referendum and US presidential election. Set against a backdrop of cheap stand-up DVDs and an artistic framing device, Content Provider was yet another triumph from a performer who has steadily grown his fan-base in similar proportion to his critical acclaim. His first proper show since Carpet Remnant World, having concentrated for a few years on running in material for his Comedy Vehicle TV series, didn’t merely focus on the volatile political climate, also taking in music, Game of Thrones, and the commercialisation of S&M. All were fertile ground, and Lee didn’t disappoint even on such disparate topics. A fascinating aspect of Lee’s trajectory in the past decade or so has been his indulgence of certain stand-up conventions and his own approach, and in many ways this new outing was a continuation of that oeuvre. Utilising the status of the character ‘Stewart Lee’, he’s been able to maintain a distance which resulted in intelligent, superbly-crafted comedy, while Lee himself looked like he was having enormous fun, occasionally betraying the character’s withering commentary on the audience by being unable to conceal his glee. Content Provider, in much the same way as all his recent output, was a masterclass in control – a tightly-written and -constructed show which knew exactly how to probe and push the audience, leading them one way and then the other. Upping the pace and using fewer instances of repetition than on the Comedy Vehicle series – without veering too far away from that reliable technique – this felt like a joy of a set, familiar in rhythm but with his singular take on the state...
For twenty years, Faunus, the biannual journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, has been publishing an astonishing range of scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to the writer H. P. Lovecraft described as a “modern master of the weird tale.”
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was not only an author of weird and decadent horror fiction lauded by Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro (among many others); he was also a journalist and essayist who, over decades, produced a vast body of nonfiction on subjects ranging from High Church theology to “the truth about curry”. This anthology gathers some of the highlights of Faunus, from its very first issue to its most recent. Subjects include the Great War, the Celtic Church, the “real” little people, Machen and Modernism, Machen and the occult, and myriad other investigations into Machen’s life and legacy.
With a new introduction by long-term Friend of Arthur Machen member Stewart Lee, the book makes newly available reprints of rare pieces by Machen himself as well as items from the Faunus archive by writers including Tessa Farmer, Rosalie Parker, Ray Russell, Mark Samuels, and Mark Valentine.
Stewart Lee
2019-06-20T14:31:56+01:00
For twenty years, Faunus, the biannual journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, has been publishing an astonishing range of scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to the writer H. P. Lovecraft described as a “modern master of the weird tale.” Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was not only an author of weird and decadent horror fiction lauded by Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro (among many others); he was also a journalist and essayist who, over decades, produced a vast body of nonfiction on subjects ranging from High Church theology to “the truth about curry”. This anthology gathers some of the highlights of Faunus, from its very first issue to its most recent. Subjects include the Great War, the Celtic Church, the “real” little people, Machen and Modernism, Machen and the occult, and myriad other investigations into Machen’s life and legacy. With a new introduction by long-term Friend of Arthur Machen member Stewart Lee, the book makes newly available reprints of rare pieces by Machen himself as well as items from the Faunus archive by writers including Tessa Farmer, Rosalie Parker, Ray Russell, Mark Samuels, and Mark Valentine.
In the Autumn of 2000, my partner and I were driving around the deserts of the American Southwest. It was a holiday, really, but I was also trying to research the area, and the culture of native peoples specifically, for a novel I was writing. It was hard to find out much about the Hopi, and all but impossible to read anything about their clowning tradition, which was what I really wanted to know about. I’d been a stand-up comedian for 12 years and I was sick of it. I had some kind of romantic notion that I needed to go back to the source. But due to a serious sense of humour failure by American government officials in the early 20th century, the Hopi clowns now clouded their performances in secrecy. Bizarrely, Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz, has a videotape of a Hopi clown gig, but he won’t show it to anyone. The clowns recognised The Fonz as a fellow funny-man and allowed Winkler to film them as part of a sacred bond of trust. Not even the University of Arizona can match Fonzie’s influence. He is cool.
The Hopi occupy an increasingly encroached plateau, east of Flagstaff, north of Winslow, surrounded on most sides by the lands of the Navajo. The Navajo saw the writing on the wall a lot sooner than the Hopi. Monument Valley has been ceded back to them, and they control tourist access. There’s no shortage of Navajo symbols on baseball caps and shoulder bags. They’re probably the most media friendly of the native American peoples, and, like good capitalists, have ultimately come to view the ongoing occupation of their country as a business opportunity. Good luck to them. The Hopi, however, have seen it all before. They survived Spanish invasion by ambitious conquistadors, and later fought off Navajo attacks from their fortress citadels of their high mesa villages. Hopi holy stories say they will inherit the earth. They have no reason to believe that the white man’s presence, like that of all their other enemies, is anything but transitory. And indeed, when you stand in the ancient cliff-top village of Walpi, surveying the vast empty desert from the roof of a low pueblo house, the rest of the world does seem very far away.
The Hopi’s approach to tourists couldn’t be more different to the Navajo’s. There’s only one place to stay in Hopi Land, and that’s at the Hopi Cultural Centre. It’s clean, efficient and has excellent blue corn tacos, but you feel you’re there mainly to stop you getting in people’s way and nosing about too much. In Walpi you ask at a little office and a somewhat reserved old woman will accompany you on a walk around the village, the oldest continuously inhabited human settlement in the United States, not that the white officials in the tourist information centre at Holbrook, half an hour South, have ever even heard of it. The two Swedes who took the same tour as us asked her questions about The Sacred Rock in the main plaza. The questions remained unanswered, and the Viking fools tampered with a clearly significant clump of feathers nestled in one of its fissures. I imagine that later on they were visited in dreams by vengeful Katsina spirits. As we left Walpi, another old lady showed me some hand carved sculptures of traditional Hopi figures. In Flagstaff and Tucson the souvenir shops were full of plasticised knock-offs, but here was a nine inch wooden replica of a Hopi Mudhead clown carrying a rattle and an ear of golden corn, at a price I could afford.
My Mudhead figure was the closest I came to meeting a Hopi clown and I treasure it. Maybe if I’d stuck around, like the writer Frank Waters, who stayed in Hopi land the best part of a decade to write a story, I’d have made some inroads. But this was the strangest, most alien place I’d ever visited. And I felt that, just by being there, I was causing some indefinable offence. So the next day we drove West away from Walpi.
After a couple of miles we picked up a hitch-hiker. He was a young Hopi boy, in his late teens, wearing jeans and a work-shirt. It was mid-day, and he was walking maybe 20km from Walpi to see his girlfriend in one of the outlying Hopi settlements, I forget which one. He said there was some kind of ceremonial dance later in the week, but it was difficult to ascertain exactly what it entailed. After a while the three of us ran out of things to say. This is always what happens on the few occasions I’ve picked up hitch-hikers. Stifled conversation followed by a tense, embarrassing silence. But this was worse than usual. In my mind, the Hopi were clown-mystics, utterly unrelated to my own culture, mysterious, far away and removed. What did I have to say to them, or they to me. In the wordless gulf, Electric Ladyland was bubbling at low volume in the car CD player. As we let the young man out he said, “Hey, did you know Hendrix was half-Indian?” “Yes,” I said, “yes, yes he was, wasn’t he….”.
Stewart Lee
2004-01-01T21:12:44+00:00
In the Autumn of 2000, my partner and I were driving around the deserts of the American Southwest. It was a holiday, really, but I was also trying to research the area, and the culture of native peoples specifically, for a novel I was writing. It was hard to find out much about the Hopi, and all but impossible to read anything about their clowning tradition, which was what I really wanted to know about. I’d been a stand-up comedian for 12 years and I was sick of it. I had some kind of romantic notion that I needed to go back to the source. But due to a serious sense of humour failure by American government officials in the early 20th century, the Hopi clowns now clouded their performances in secrecy. Bizarrely, Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz, has a videotape of a Hopi clown gig, but he won’t show it to anyone. The clowns recognised The Fonz as a fellow funny-man and allowed Winkler to film them as part of a sacred bond of trust. Not even the University of Arizona can match Fonzie’s influence. He is cool. The Hopi occupy an increasingly encroached plateau, east of Flagstaff, north of Winslow, surrounded on most sides by the lands of the Navajo. The Navajo saw the writing on the wall a lot sooner than the Hopi. Monument Valley has been ceded back to them, and they control tourist access. There’s no shortage of Navajo symbols on baseball caps and shoulder bags. They’re probably the most media friendly of the native American peoples, and, like good capitalists, have ultimately come to view the ongoing occupation of their country as a business opportunity. Good luck to them. The Hopi, however, have seen it all before. They survived Spanish invasion by ambitious conquistadors,...
What can a sexless middle aged married man, whose life now consists mainly of watching Scooby Doo cartoons with a four year old boy, possibly find to write comedy about?
Formerly stand-up's youthful iconoclast, Lee now gawps blankly at News 24 as Britain burns down around him, and blinks weirdly at the vast wayside retail outlets during endless journeys to and from increasingly indistinct provincial theatres.
Once he lived on the pleasure planet.
Now he is trapped in Carpet Remnant World.
And so are you.
The iTunes download includes an exclusive extra where I talk about the music used in the show.
Stewart Lee
2017-01-21T20:29:37+00:00
What can a sexless middle aged married man, whose life now consists mainly of watching Scooby Doo cartoons with a four year old boy, possibly find to write comedy about? Formerly stand-up's youthful iconoclast, Lee now gawps blankly at News 24 as Britain burns down around him, and blinks weirdly at the vast wayside retail outlets during endless journeys to and from increasingly indistinct provincial theatres. Once he lived on the pleasure planet. Now he is trapped in Carpet Remnant World. And so are you. The iTunes download includes an exclusive extra where I talk about the music used in the show.
Four decades since his last album proper in 1971, Bill Fay is now viewed as the great English singer-songwriter that completely got away. Fay's much delayed difficult third album is overseen by pastoral guitarist for hire Matt Deighton, with guests including Fay's cheerleader Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, whose debt to Fay is obvious on the slowly swelling Cosmic Concerto. Life Is People moves inexorably forward with the surging gravitational pull of Fay's best work. A set of self-effacing meditational mantras, their biblical tones disguised in piano balladeer threads, it sounds like the work of someone who never went away.
Stewart Lee
2012-08-26T19:32:22+01:00
Four decades since his last album proper in 1971, Bill Fay is now viewed as the great English singer-songwriter that completely got away. Fay's much delayed difficult third album is overseen by pastoral guitarist for hire Matt Deighton, with guests including Fay's cheerleader Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, whose debt to Fay is obvious on the slowly swelling Cosmic Concerto. Life Is People moves inexorably forward with the surging gravitational pull of Fay's best work. A set of self-effacing meditational mantras, their biblical tones disguised in piano balladeer threads, it sounds like the work of someone who never went away.
The smelly thoughts of Donald Trump bubble up like brown burps in the sort of bombsite pond Chopper bike-riding children were advised to avoid in 1970s public information films. Do they indicate concrete plans, are they designed to provoke, or do they have no meaning, like the gurgles and gasps that can inadvertently escape from a decomposing corpse? My job here is to try to anticipate if anything Trump says or does is likely to be of any lasting significance and to satirise it accordingly, in the small window of time allowed, for money. And it isn’t getting any easier. Yes, Ukraine is suffering, but I am the real victim here.
For example, last Saturday Trump opined: “We were the richest… think of this, from 1870 to 1913… because we collected tariffs… We had so much wealth. Wouldn’t it be nice today? Of course, now, we give it away to transgender this, to transgender that. Everybody gets a transgender operation. It’s wonderful. We give it away to crazy things. But in those days, it was different. It was a different world. It was a different country.”
Would Trump’s notion of the damage caused to long-term American prosperity by transgender this surgery, and also to a lesser extent by transgender that surgery, gain any traction, and thus be deserving of the barbs of my quill, or would it be politely ignored as another crazy corpse bleat?
I’m not a historian, though I do follow Prof Janina Ramirez on social media, but surely part of US prosperity in the period Trump describes was built on the proceeding two and a half centuries’ use of free labour in the form of enslaved people stolen in their millions from Africa, their descendants finally getting the vote in 1965, when the Beatles’ Help! was top of the UK charts; and also on the natural wealth appropriated from the country’s Indigenous people, who were systematically ethnically cleansed and robbed of land and resources for which, conveniently, they hadn’t really developed a notion of ownership as Europeans understood it. Have these beads, this whiskey and these smallpox-infected blankets. Thanks for all the pelts. Enjoy your dancing.
To be fair to Trump, studies of Irish history, for instance, show that though three significant famines between 1740 and 1879 did affect the country economically, the main dent in the nation’s finances was caused by the Roman Catholic church’s liberal attitude to notions of gender, and by its demand that the Irish state fund transgender this surgery, and moreover transgender that surgery, for any Irish citizen requiring it, or for anyone who had even been just a little bit curious. I’m joking of course. Trump’s idiotic Trump Theory of Transgender Economics ™ ® didn’t stick and I wisely elected to ignore it in last week’s column. But Trump continues to be a tough call.
For 13 years, I filed these columns on Thursday mornings, hoping that I’d have anticipated any news developments that might destabilise my so-called “jokes” between the deadline and Sunday’s publication. But last year I asked if I could start filing on Tuesdays, as various special-interest, right-leaning groups kept nibbling at the grey area between actionable exaggeration and exaggeration for comic effect, and I wanted to give the Observer’s legal team time to protect me from imprisonment, having already experienced the spleen-dissolving stress of being co-targeted by Britain’s final, and failed, attempt at a blasphemy prosecution in 2005.
But now I’m back to filing at the last possible moment, 10am on Thursday. It’s 9.15 now and I’m cross-checking the paragraphs that follow this sentence with live news updates to see if, perhaps, last week’s Trump Theory of Transgender Economics ™ ® has suddenly resurfaced in a more vociferous form. Trump has turbocharged the news cycle and I’m a tortoise trying to spray-paint the side of speeding trains with clever satirical caricatures, James Gillray on a folding scooter. Those long wavy lines all along the carriages were supposed to be a drawing of Trump hanging a tea towel marked Ukraine out to dry. Or something.
It’s impossible. On Wednesday afternoon, the world briefly combusted when it appeared Trump’s Truth Social feed had shared an impossibly offensive AI-generated film of his vision for Gaza’s future. An image of a soldier pointing a gun at a Palestinian kid’s head dissolves into liberated children running towards a Dubai-style resort, where Elon Musk eats hummus on a beach, bellydancers bellydance, a toddler tugs at a giant golden balloon of Trump’s head, Trump apparently dances with a semi-naked woman, Musk and some infants dance in falling money, a gaudy Trump casino full of small golden effigies of Trump emerges from the ruins, Musk eats some more hummus but indoors this time, a giant golden statue of Trump bestrides a street scene and, finally, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu drink cocktails by a pool in just their pants as a rapper raps: “Trump Gaza number one!”
Theories erupted. Was Trump trying to bait the world? Or had Israel made the film to goad Hamas into breaking the ceasefire? Had Hamas made it to goad the outraged into attacking the US? But looking closely, it seems Trump is uncomfortably overfamiliar with the woman he is dancing with and the beach bellydancers are in fact men with beards in translucent dresses, in a country where transgender this and transgender that is yet to do the economic damage it has in the US.
Had someone made an all too plausible satire of Trump’s ethics and aesthetics that Trump himself had taken as an endorsement and shared online? Or did Trump know it was a parody and have so little regard for the human suffering in the region, he shared it anyway? It’s impossible to know. All that is certain is that, as Steve Bannon advised, the zone is flooded with shit. And every week, it gets harder to wade through.
Stewart Lee
2025-03-02T19:26:17+00:00
The smelly thoughts of Donald Trump bubble up like brown burps in the sort of bombsite pond Chopper bike-riding children were advised to avoid in 1970s public information films. Do they indicate concrete plans, are they designed to provoke, or do they have no meaning, like the gurgles and gasps that can inadvertently escape from a decomposing corpse? My job here is to try to anticipate if anything Trump says or does is likely to be of any lasting significance and to satirise it accordingly, in the small window of time allowed, for money. And it isn’t getting any easier. Yes, Ukraine is suffering, but I am the real victim here. For example, last Saturday Trump opined: “We were the richest… think of this, from 1870 to 1913… because we collected tariffs… We had so much wealth. Wouldn’t it be nice today? Of course, now, we give it away to transgender this, to transgender that. Everybody gets a transgender operation. It’s wonderful. We give it away to crazy things. But in those days, it was different. It was a different world. It was a different country.” Would Trump’s notion of the damage caused to long-term American prosperity by transgender this surgery, and also to a lesser extent by transgender that surgery, gain any traction, and thus be deserving of the barbs of my quill, or would it be politely ignored as another crazy corpse bleat? I’m not a historian, though I do follow Prof Janina Ramirez on social media, but surely part of US prosperity in the period Trump describes was built on the proceeding two and a half centuries’ use of free labour in the form of enslaved people stolen in their millions from Africa, their descendants finally getting the vote in 1965, when the Beatles’ Help! was top...
The third week of the fringe has nearly passed and my goal of seeing 100 shows/exhibitions/happenings this month seems distant, as I have so far managed a mere 40.
My goal of not being a drunk argumentative twat at 1 am in the morning is going well though.
I’m sending this week’s rec’s list out a day or so early to try and get another one in in week 4 before it’s pointless.
Here are my top 9 shows so far
Paul Currie - The Chorus of Ghosts Living in My Skull Keep Telling Me to Take a Shit in the Fruit Salad - Just The Tonic @ Caves - 9PM
A surrealist revivalist church meeting in which anything can happen. Brilliant clowning and unexpected hints of the personal. The sort of perfect fringe experience that grows and grows into something super-special over the month and then, all too regularly, evaporates on contact with the cruel reality beyond an Edinburgh August. I’ve been twice. Lots of the crowd are now clearly regulars, participating in a kind of ritual comic cleansing. Superbly tech’d too. My special place 2022.
Police Cops - Assembly Studios - 7pm
I am late to this party but I suspect this show is a step up. People with the skills to do proper comedy don’t usually have the skills or attitude to do music theatre too, but genuinely funny improvisations weave in and out of a tight cop-show parody script. The cast are fit and handsome, acrobatic and accomplished, and yet also ridiculous and grotesque and clownish in a classic comedy way. The jokes are smart and the musical milieu of ‘80s power rock is dead on. It takes brains to be this dumb! Who the hell are these people, and why haven’t they been ruined for ever by actual West End fame?
Thom Tuck & Tim FitzHigham - Macbeth - Udderbelly - 8.35pm
The drunken fen-lords of comedy recreate Macbeth from memory in a haze of hallucinogenic impro-fuzz, ravaging the text as is their Lordly prima nocte right. What really went on there? We only have this extract? What the fringe is made for.
Alasdair Beckett-King - Nevermore - Pleasance Dome 7PM
Great writerly material which has enough room to breathe to make it feel like it’s alive, and a well-judged and non-interventionist use of tech. Precise and very funny.
An Evening Without Kate Bush - Assembly George Sq Gardens 5.55PM
A Bush-consumed lady channels Bush fandom with persuasive charm, genuine warmth, and accurate choreography
Medea - Liz Locheed - Edinburgh International Festival - various times
A kind of fashion show promenade catwalk performance of the miserable tale in a spectacular space, with darkly comic lines performed in crispy Scottish vernacular by a brilliantly diverse cast offering finely nuanced interpretations of their roles.
Alfie Brown - Sensitive Man - Monkey Barrel - 9pm
A dozen years ago you could tell Alfie could be brilliant, raging against hypocrisy, but he was enslaved by his demons, and couldn’t control the timbre of his work. Now he’s riding them, like a Norse God astride two magic flying goats, and has discovered charm. Persistence paid off. Alfie espouses a furious liberal philosophy, whilst all the while ruthlessly and uninhibitedly interrogating his own reasons - vanity, ego, lust, etc - for subscribing to it. His explosively woke act comes replete with 21st century self-awareness and yet is clearly solidly in the tradition that the American stand-up innovators of the 50s and 60s would recognise. The best British stand-up I have seen for some years. You go girl!
Fata Morgana - Margerita Remotti - Pleasance at IECC - 5.30
In the lonely sad wastelands of the Pleasance’s International Edinburgh Conference Centre a lone Italian actress enters a dispiriting function room to conjure the spirit of the Velvet Underground vocalist and Warhol superstar Nico from the ether. This is a great fringe show. Music, psychedelic lights, a kaleidoscopic overlaying of memories, and the feeling that at any moment Remotti could come at you, so even if you weren’t a Nico fan you’d be caught up in the moment.
If you are a Nico fan Remotti contextualises, in her own dream like way, some of the more troubling aspects of the artist’s persona without ever striking a note of supplicant apology. There were two of us in when I went on Train Strike Thursday and Remotti still sold the show 100%. I saw Nico herself, past her best but majestic and awe-inspiring, a year before her death at 48, six years younger then I am now, during my first fringe in 1987, threatening a talkative audience with violence, her heavy wooden pump organ raised high above her head like a weapon, at the Venue, below Carlton hill. Don’t look for it. It’s not there anymore. And neither is the 19 year old me.
The Tragedy of Macbeth - Flabbergast Theatre - Roxy - 12 midday.
Everything you want from a fringe show, - stuff being banged, terrifying puppets, polyphonic singing, mess, mud, noise, wine, party hats, and an amazingly talented international cast taking on a variety of roles each. In this brilliantly designed show the turns seem to have risen up out if the clay itself to enact a Macbeth that, after the emergence of a Porter Clown who is uncharacteristically actually really funny, takes a turn into a black comedy that Shakespeare himself would surely have enjoyed. I am so glad my kids saw this. It will have made them lifelong converts of real theatre, not West End shit. And I am glad I saw it, because it reminded me of being 19 in 1987 and coming here and having my mind blown, leaving me no choice but to waste my life.
AND I ALSO LOVED this next 6
Fascinating Aida - Assembly George Square - 6PM
Sophisticated satirical songs, performed by jazz-age cabaret muso-dames, with unexpected angry edges and fantastic internal rhyme schemes
Jonny & The Baptists - Dance Like It Never Happened - Assembly George Square 4PM
High energy satirical folk-pop sure to make you dance in your seat, hate the Tories, and question God.
Marvelus - All The Marvel Movies... Kind Of! - Just The Tonic Caves 6.10 PM
Two deeply humane nerds impro-comedy their way through the MCU, making massive and imaginative use of limited props. Great if you know your Marvel movies, and probably weirdly enjoyable if you don’t. Leave your stinky Marvel fan husband there and go for a prosecco.
Omid Djalili - New Town Theatre - 5.20pm
Omid sneaks social commentary and liberal satire into a show so unapologetically entertaining the audience don’t even realise they are being indoctrinated!
Jo Neary - Stand II - 12 mid-day
Superb surreal character comedy with a pin-sharp absurd vocabulary and a fluid sense of the physical from the deathless art weirdo. Unique and special.
Famous Puppet Deaths - Roxy - 6.30pm
Three talented Canadian women explore the beautiful futility of life in a succession of Edward Gorey-esque comic scenes of suffering using puppets and bits of themselves
Kiri Pritchard-Maclean - Home Truths - Monkey Barrel - 7.05
KP Nuts’ hour starts with 30 minutes of fun-feminist body image stuff that this road-hardened pro sells totally with club-timed beats - it’s nourishing comedy comfort food to a generation of discombobulated dames and she owns the space. Then things darken as she descends into a disturbing hall of mirrors regarding her own reflection, a routine that’s got an unexpected brutality about it. The she tries to take her audience with her as she moves into an exploration of race politics, via an edutaining section on Welsh history, and pulls it off, although the slightly concertina’d second half will presumably expand and breathe on tour.
ALSO
If you like jazz art the Dovecote Gallery has an unprecedently thorough mini-retrospective on the overlooked free-jazz/abstractionist Alan Davie, whose work rots unacknowledged in British provincial gallery collection cellars. Ace!
MY SPIES TELL ME TO SEE...
Circus Abyssinia Tulu - Underbelly meadows 1.30 PM The kids said this was utterly brilliant and unaffectedly honest. They want to join the circus now.
WHAT’S ON
Dr John Cooper Clarke - Edinburgh Playhouse - 7.30 24th A big Dr John show w guests, including me
Oxide Ghosts - dir Michael Cumming his showing his Brass Eye documentary/art event at The Cameo, 4pm, on 25th and 27th.
King Rocker - dir Michael Cumming and I are showing our rockumentary King Rocker at The Cameo, 4pm, on 24th and 26th
Stewart Lee
2022-08-20T01:14:45+01:00
The third week of the fringe has nearly passed and my goal of seeing 100 shows/exhibitions/happenings this month seems distant, as I have so far managed a mere 40. My goal of not being a drunk argumentative twat at 1 am in the morning is going well though. I’m sending this week’s rec’s list out a day or so early to try and get another one in in week 4 before it’s pointless. Here are my top 9 shows so far Paul Currie - The Chorus of Ghosts Living in My Skull Keep Telling Me to Take a Shit in the Fruit Salad - Just The Tonic @ Caves - 9PM A surrealist revivalist church meeting in which anything can happen. Brilliant clowning and unexpected hints of the personal. The sort of perfect fringe experience that grows and grows into something super-special over the month and then, all too regularly, evaporates on contact with the cruel reality beyond an Edinburgh August. I’ve been twice. Lots of the crowd are now clearly regulars, participating in a kind of ritual comic cleansing. Superbly tech’d too. My special place 2022. Police Cops - Assembly Studios - 7pm I am late to this party but I suspect this show is a step up. People with the skills to do proper comedy don’t usually have the skills or attitude to do music theatre too, but genuinely funny improvisations weave in and out of a tight cop-show parody script. The cast are fit and handsome, acrobatic and accomplished, and yet also ridiculous and grotesque and clownish in a classic comedy way. The jokes are smart and the musical milieu of ‘80s power rock is dead on. It takes brains to be this dumb! Who the hell are these people, and why haven’t they been ruined for...
My friend Paul is revered in DJ circles for his vast collection of novelty singles, and his team of ironic selecters, wearing masks of 70s cartoon characters, regularly appear at hipster clubs laying Indonesian porno grooves on the jaded ears of the weird beards. “I’ve got the strangest gig,” he said, “so you’re going to come with me, undercover. Some bald creep wants me to play what I think are the sexiest singles ever made, all night long, in a bedroom in… you won’t believe it… Downing Street.”
Consider the facts that inform this story. A self-confessed yet inefficient cocaine user, who lost three jobs due to lying to his bosses, who has fathered an unverifiable amount of children by a variety of since abandoned women (many of whom he was seeing simultaneously), who is currently under investigation by the police due to questions arising from his alleged financial impropriety with a pole-dancer, who was a high-profile member of an organised hooligan gang of teenage vandals familiar to local law enforcement agencies, who assisted a known criminal in plotting a violent assault, who rarely turns up to work (and when he does is woefully underprepared with usually disastrous consequences), and who is supported almost entirely by the public purse, is fathering yet another child. Where is the Daily Mail exposé condemning this disgraceful burden on society?
It is nowhere to be seen. Because this man isn’t your “drunk, criminal and feckless working-class” cousin, who dropped out of school at 14 and fell in with a bad crowd, or a young immigrant who must now be deported for dealing the kind of drugs Michael Gove used to neck in the Notting Hill 90s. No. This feckless criminal is our prime minister, 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 Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Virus-Handshake Three-Men-and-a-Dog Johnson. And normal rules no longer apply. If indeed they ever did.
But the columnist Sarah Vine, a cess-gargling Barbamama made entirely out of cess, whose Daily Mail cess fountains vacillate from the foulest acrid cruelty to headily perfumed sentimentality, has declared that we must now be “kind”. It is the sort of brand-derailing U-turn statement the skull-faced demon Skeletor made in the 1985 He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special, when the attention of a cute puppy finally turned him good. “What’s coming over me?! Whatever it is, I don’t like it! Stop licking my face, you dratted dog! Get away from me! You’re drowning me!” Following the virtuous examples of Vine and Skeletor, I am not about to be rude about Turds’ unborn baby. I may, however, be rude about Turds’ convenient dog, Dilyn. Remember him? Thought not.
Last year, Turds adopted a Welsh rescue dog and spirited it away thoughtlessly, with his intended fiancee, to a grey world of stone and steel where it did not even speak the language. Dominic Cumming, who presumably suggested both the proposed marriage and the de facto dognapping, had calculated that the jack russell’s cute antics could single-pawedly detoxify Turds’ brand in the runup to the election. And on the day that a compliant Dilyn urinated against a carefully placed sculpture of loudmouthed David Lammy, pollsters reported a massive bounce in Tory support. Dilyn was made to wear a dog’s coat depicting a union flag, always a winner with the public, who presumably assumed the dog had bought the garment himself with his own funds, and chosen to wear it as an act of support for his master, rather than simply having been stuffed into it against his will by the cruel finger of Cumming.
When the true history of Brexit, and its role in enabling a calculated far-right coup, is revealed it is unlikely that Dilyn will be spared his share of the blame, and the weak dog will rightly be held to account for normalising the corrupt campaign’s public face. If Dilyn is clever enough to choose his own racist clothing, then surely he can be tried in the courts, following the final overthrow of Cumming’s fascist cabal, and sentenced accordingly, along with Cumming’s own personal lapdog, Laura Kuenssberg.
Peak Dilyn dog was last December and the compliant creature’s appearances and press opportunities have faded this year. Cumming knows the electorate hunger for new novelties and the shelf life of a Welsh dog is short. Insiders say Cumming set Turds a rigorous schedule of carefully timed procreative activity as long ago as last summer, so that the next dead cat distraction could arrive on time. And I can verify this. Because last October I found myself, standing next to DJ Paul, both of us sweating into our Dick Dastardly masks, as we spun our sexy sounds in a dimly lit Westminster bedroom.
Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime segued into Man’s rare 1969 debut Erotica as Cumming lurked behind us, wearing just tennis shorts and a baseball cap, shouting instructions towards the bed through a rowing cox’s megaphone. Suddenly he became furiously convinced that our selections were not doing the trick and tore Jacqueline Taïeb’s breathless 1967 yé-yé stomp Sept heures du matin from the turntable, crying: “For God’s sake boys. This is sex music!” Replacing the record with his own worn copy of the J Geils Band’s 1981 hit Centrefold, Cumming danced round the pre-marital bed bellowing exhortations through his megaphone and singing along: “My blood runs cold! My memory has just been sold!” We made our excuses and left.
But Cumming’s efforts paid off and Turds has already announced paternity leave, though how the country will cope without his famously hands-on style of leadership is anyone’s guess. Floodwaters rise. Viruses throb in cracks. Far-right racists return from Russian meetings. Rights erode and advisers resign. A baby! Look!! A beautiful baby!!!
Stewart Lee
2020-03-08T18:54:50+00:00
My friend Paul is revered in DJ circles for his vast collection of novelty singles, and his team of ironic selecters, wearing masks of 70s cartoon characters, regularly appear at hipster clubs laying Indonesian porno grooves on the jaded ears of the weird beards. “I’ve got the strangest gig,” he said, “so you’re going to come with me, undercover. Some bald creep wants me to play what I think are the sexiest singles ever made, all night long, in a bedroom in… you won’t believe it… Downing Street.” Consider the facts that inform this story. A self-confessed yet inefficient cocaine user, who lost three jobs due to lying to his bosses, who has fathered an unverifiable amount of children by a variety of since abandoned women (many of whom he was seeing simultaneously), who is currently under investigation by the police due to questions arising from his alleged financial impropriety with a pole-dancer, who was a high-profile member of an organised hooligan gang of teenage vandals familiar to local law enforcement agencies, who assisted a known criminal in plotting a violent assault, who rarely turns up to work (and when he does is woefully underprepared with usually disastrous consequences), and who is supported almost entirely by the public purse, is fathering yet another child. Where is the Daily Mail exposé condemning this disgraceful burden on society? It is nowhere to be seen. Because this man isn’t your “drunk, criminal and feckless working-class” cousin, who dropped out of school at 14 and fell in with a bad crowd, or a young immigrant who must now be deported for dealing the kind of drugs Michael Gove used to neck in the Notting Hill 90s. No. This feckless criminal is our prime minister, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster...
The Velvet Underground's second album sank on release in 1968, but became the proto-punk document.
In hindsight, it’s a definitive New York minimalist moment too, more indebted to the departing John Cale’s viola and organ drones than to Lou Reed’s free jazz/doo-wop fusions.
Without the example of Sister Ray’s sleazy, seventeen minute, two chord splurge, avant-noise might never have infiltrated the mainstream and everyone’s trousers would be like Jeremy Clarkson's.
Mono mixes. Live tracks. Essential.
Stewart Lee
2013-12-22T00:57:43+00:00
The Velvet Underground's second album sank on release in 1968, but became the proto-punk document. In hindsight, it’s a definitive New York minimalist moment too, more indebted to the departing John Cale’s viola and organ drones than to Lou Reed’s free jazz/doo-wop fusions. Without the example of Sister Ray’s sleazy, seventeen minute, two chord splurge, avant-noise might never have infiltrated the mainstream and everyone’s trousers would be like Jeremy Clarkson's. Mono mixes. Live tracks. Essential.
An opera based on the Jerry Springer talk show is to be staged at London's Royal National Theatre. The man said by some to epitomise the lowest of low-brow now finds himself at the centre of one of the temples of high culture.
Andrea wants to woo her ex-boyfriend Chuck by revealing to him, in front of a baying audience and millions of TV viewers, that his new girlfriend Tasha has been cheating on him with his best pal.
That pal is Andrea's brother who lauds his treachery in front of his so-called best friend by strutting around like the prize victor in a cock-fight.
Next to Chuck sits Richard who wants to win back his wife and mother of their child. She recently ran off with another man who beats her.
Jerry Springer was once a serious politician
The wife then reveals to all that she is pregnant again but she's uncertain who the father is because she has resumed sleeping with Richard, for money.
This is the staple diet of the Jerry Springer Show which, over the years, has had audiences from some 30 countries to which the programme is syndicated, open-mouthed at the depravities to which people can sink.
"If it's not outrageous, it doesn't get on the show," the host once said.
These outrages have included such themes as "I married a horse" and "They stole my husband's eyes".
Sadly, one of the few boundaries imposed on the show, which often descends into fisticuffs, is that the guests must be telling the truth.
Presidential dreams
It is all a far-cry from the man who was once a serious politician and who might have dreamed of one day becoming president had it not been for the fact that he is precluded by not being born in America.
For Jerry Springer began his life in 1944 during an air raid in London. His parents were German Jews who had escaped to England before the Holocaust began. Some of their relatives were not so lucky and died in Auschwitz.
At the age of five, Jerry and his family sailed to New York where he remembers being woken up to gaze at the Statue of Liberty. When he asked his mother what it meant, he remembers her replying "One day everything".
He studied law at university in Chicago after which, as a fervent Democrat, he helped out on Bobby Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign.
Kennedy's assassination did not curb Springer's appetite for politics and, within six months, he was running for Congress, albeit unsuccessfully, on an anti-Vietnam War platform.
Media star
A few years later, having risen up the greasy pole of Ohio state politics, he was elected mayor of Cincinnati and tipped to become state governor.
He was thwarted in this ambition by a scandal more in keeping with his future career. He was discovered to have had "extras" in a massage parlour, having only recently been married.
The show is so popular because it's so stupid
His political career survived, he later claimed, because he was honest about his shortcomings.
By 1982, with a mixture of charm and authority, he veered his career towards television. He became Cincinnati's most popular newsreader, and after 10 years, was given his own chat show which delved into the serious political issues of the day.
But in a highly competitive field, the ratings didn't hold up. He was told not so much to shape up or ship out, more dumb down and bottom out. He never looked back. "The show is so popular because it is so stupid," he has said. "No one takes it seriously."
The Jerry Springer Show eclipsed the previously uneclipsable Oprah in 1998. Even when he was secretly caught on film having sex with a 21 year-old porn star with her 28 year-old stepmother looking on (both were featured in one of his shows), his popularity didn't suffer.
Neither were the ratings seriously affected when, two years ago, a woman was battered to death after appearing on a Springer show featuring Secret Mistresses Uncovered.
Jerry Springer - the Opera is the brainchild of composer Richard Thomas and he has joined forces with comic writer Stewart Lee who will be making his directorial debut with the show.
"There's such a refreshing honesty about him," says Thomas. "He's not about that brainwashing, self-help attitude of American culture you see on Oprah."
The show was a great hit, as a work in progress, at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
Among its showstoppers are a diaper fetishist confessing to his true love, a chorus refrain of "My Mum used to be my Dad/I was jilted by a lesbian dwarf" and Jesus launching into a swearing tirade against the Devil. One wonders what the Japanese tourists will make of it.
With a degree of wit all too rare on the Jerry Springer Show itself, Stewart Lee said "I'm really pleased to be directing Jerry Springer - the Opera at the National Theatre as it is on the 243 bus route that goes directly to my home in Hackney."
Stewart Lee
2002-12-06T18:32:03+00:00
An opera based on the Jerry Springer talk show is to be staged at London's Royal National Theatre. The man said by some to epitomise the lowest of low-brow now finds himself at the centre of one of the temples of high culture. Andrea wants to woo her ex-boyfriend Chuck by revealing to him, in front of a baying audience and millions of TV viewers, that his new girlfriend Tasha has been cheating on him with his best pal. That pal is Andrea's brother who lauds his treachery in front of his so-called best friend by strutting around like the prize victor in a cock-fight. Next to Chuck sits Richard who wants to win back his wife and mother of their child. She recently ran off with another man who beats her. Jerry Springer was once a serious politician The wife then reveals to all that she is pregnant again but she's uncertain who the father is because she has resumed sleeping with Richard, for money. This is the staple diet of the Jerry Springer Show which, over the years, has had audiences from some 30 countries to which the programme is syndicated, open-mouthed at the depravities to which people can sink. "If it's not outrageous, it doesn't get on the show," the host once said. These outrages have included such themes as "I married a horse" and "They stole my husband's eyes". Sadly, one of the few boundaries imposed on the show, which often descends into fisticuffs, is that the guests must be telling the truth. Presidential dreams It is all a far-cry from the man who was once a serious politician and who might have dreamed of one day becoming president had it not been for the fact that he is precluded by not being born in America....
Bill Frisell plays jazz, folk and blues, but there's no dirt under these fingernails. Frisell's considered interpretations of durable American genres are hand-tooled for the konzerthalle, not the juke joint.
The sixty year old guitar guru is joined on Sign Of Life by the viola player Eyvind Kang, the cellist Hank Roberts, and the violinist Jenny Scheinman.
Tasteful downtown New York types all, working as The 858 Quartet, they frame Frisell's precise, folksy licks in humming, minimalist string parts, making epically respectable Aaron Copland Americana for a miniaturised mythical Ansel Adams landscape.
Stewart Lee
2011-08-28T19:44:04+01:00
Bill Frisell plays jazz, folk and blues, but there's no dirt under these fingernails. Frisell's considered interpretations of durable American genres are hand-tooled for the konzerthalle, not the juke joint. The sixty year old guitar guru is joined on Sign Of Life by the viola player Eyvind Kang, the cellist Hank Roberts, and the violinist Jenny Scheinman. Tasteful downtown New York types all, working as The 858 Quartet, they frame Frisell's precise, folksy licks in humming, minimalist string parts, making epically respectable Aaron Copland Americana for a miniaturised mythical Ansel Adams landscape.
Despite wearing a supportive EU blue-and-gold hat to the first post-referendum parliament, the Queen’s genius was that she remained a mystery, a blank canvas the whole nation could project its hopes and dreams on to. Personally, I loved the Queen. She hung on long enough to accept, definitively, the resignation of Boris Johnson, who lied to her about proroguing parliament and partied under lockdown even though she grieved alone for her late husband, dutifully following the guidance Johnson’s Brexit government had laid down. She knew she could not rest until he was gone.
I’m joking of course. But questions remain. One of the last people the Queen was photographed with was Liz Truss who, as an 18-year-old student politician declared she wanted to see the monarchy destroyed. One thing you can say about Truss is that she never changes her mind about anything and always sticks to her beliefs. You don’t have to be Columbo to realise Truss had both motive and opportunity. And that, like those cheeses, is diz-gusting!
I’m joking of course. But is it appropriate to joke about anything during this period of national mourning? People have been struggling to decide on the correct way to commemorate, and to grieve for, Her Majesty. For example, while the Queen lay in Westminster Hall unsightly homeless people were dispersed by the police, leaving the pavements clear for 30-hour queues of street-sleeping monarchists. Swings and roundabouts.
I’m joking of course! I completely understand the feelings of those who think it wrong to make jokes like the ones above, or indeed about anything, at the moment, and I only wrote them as theoretical examples of some things that it would be wrong to say. People holding blank pieces of paper are being arrested for less. However, my own BBC Two standup special Tornado was pulled, as much comedy has been, at the last moment from last Sunday’s TV schedule for reasons that remain opaque. Tornado contains only one swear word, and doesn’t mention the Queen, or any members of the royal family. And it doesn’t mention death either, apart from a comically exaggerated description of the flying shark scene from the sci-fi film Sharknado, which is also inoffensive, unless of course any members of the royal family have been killed by flying sharks. Which they may have been. We don’t know. They are very private people.
That said, I sympathise with the BBC regarding the transmission of comedy at the moment. The corporation’s bad-faith critics in the Conservative party, and the national press that do its bidding, will find a way of making whatever decision the cowed state broadcaster makes the wrong one. Which is why it is even more puzzling that, having pulled my show, the BBC chose to fill the aching void in the hearts of my millions of disappointed fans with an unscheduled screening of Colette, the 2018 biopic of the 19th-century French writer of the same name, a film arguably far more offensive than the programme it replaced.
My show featured only one sexual reference (describing Netflix’s Scandi-noir style drama After Life as “the televisual equivalent of a nine-hour crying wank”), whereas Colette featured seven actual sex scenes, three involving a man and a woman and four involving two women. It is perhaps insensitive to show lesbians on TV during the current situation, as the Queen’s great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, when invited to pass legislation outlawing them, is rumoured to have said they did not exist. Though reasonable people will have no issues with it, perhaps the presence of some lesbians in a time of national mourning could be construed as a deliberate insult by the Marxist BBC to the memory of Queen Victoria and thus to the royal family generally.
Watching one of Colette’s sex scenes, my mind wandered somewhat, leading to an inevitable involuntary physical reaction. Then I began to worry that, like the Pavlova-eating dogs that all men essentially are, I would come to associate these stirrings with any subsequent period of national mourning, provoking the predictable downward rush of blood when confronted with any image of royal tragedy. I am the BBC’s biggest supporter, but nevertheless it is thoughtless to put innocent male viewers of a certain age in this position.
I think for the BBC to pull me off, when all I’ve done is say wank and describe a shark attack, and to replace me with seven sex scenes, four of which featured lesbians that don’t exist, is misjudged. But perhaps that’s what the Queen would have wanted. We don’t know. She was a very private person.
When assembling the bill for the 1912 Royal Command Performance, to be attended by King George V, the impresario Oswald Stoll seized his chance to steer British comedy away from the radicalism and vulgarity of the music hall, sensing a much larger market for a more sanitised product. Britain’s most popular comedian of the day, Marie Lloyd, was noticeably excluded. Lloyd had sung the refrain: “She sits among the cabbages and peas” and when challenged on its meaning had offered to change the line to: “She sits among the cabbages and leeks.” Perhaps more importantly, Lloyd had also been a huge presence in the 1907 music hall comedians’ strike. Music hall died, variety was born, and from then on “variety shows” featured the sort of acts it would be appropriate to stage before royalty. And of course everything went downhill pretty fast. If you can perform your act in front of a king or a queen it probably isn’t worth doing. At least ask them to rattle their jewellery, as John Lennon did at the Royal Variety Performance of 1963. The young Queen Elizabeth, it was noted, laughed along like everyone else.
Despite wearing a supportive EU blue-and-gold hat to the first post-referendum parliament, the Queen’s genius was that she remained a mystery, a blank canvas the whole nation could project its hopes and dreams on to. Personally, I loved the Queen. She hung on long enough to accept, definitively, the resignation of Boris Johnson, who lied to her about proroguing parliament and partied under lockdown even though she grieved alone for her late husband, dutifully following the guidance Johnson’s Brexit government had laid down. She knew she could not rest until he was gone. I’m joking of course. But questions remain. One of the last people the Queen was photographed with was Liz Truss who, as an 18-year-old student politician declared she wanted to see the monarchy destroyed. One thing you can say about Truss is that she never changes her mind about anything and always sticks to her beliefs. You don’t have to be Columbo to realise Truss had both motive and opportunity. And that, like those cheeses, is diz-gusting! I’m joking of course. But is it appropriate to joke about anything during this period of national mourning? People have been struggling to decide on the correct way to commemorate, and to grieve for, Her Majesty. For example, while the Queen lay in Westminster Hall unsightly homeless people were dispersed by the police, leaving the pavements clear for 30-hour queues of street-sleeping monarchists. Swings and roundabouts. I’m joking of course! I completely understand the feelings of those who think it wrong to make jokes like the ones above, or indeed about anything, at the moment, and I only wrote them as theoretical examples of some things that it would be wrong to say. People holding blank pieces of paper are being arrested for less. However, my own BBC Two standup...
Comedian and columnist Stewart Lee remains “grateful to the people who brainwashed me into listening to Bob Dylan during a period of emotional and physical weakness.”
Episode Notes
Comedian and columnistStewart Lee remains “grateful to the people who brainwashed me into listening to Bob Dylan during a period of emotional and physical weakness.” He remembers seeing Dylan live at Hyde Park with his kids (“one of the greatest nights of my life”) as well as the time he alienated the audience at a Teenage Cancer Trust Benefit. “It was a good gig. 'Cause it was true. Self-sabotage keeps you alive. Chaos and confusion create a bubble that protects you.” Stew namechecks Dylan, Mark E. Smith, Jerry Sadowitz, William Blake, Roky Erickson and Mozart as fellow artists who “develop a split personality that says: what if I make him do this?” Warning: listeners should keep in mind that Mr Lee is “a cultural bully from the Oxbridge Mafia who wants to appear morally superior but couldn’t cut the mustard on a panel game.” (Lee Mack)
This is a review (Dominic Maxwell, The Times) of Stewart’s current show, Basic Lee: "If someone says they’re going back to basics, can they be trusted? When Stewart Lee tells you he is going back to basics you sniff only fresh mischief in his chortlingly bold smush of sarcasm, satire, self-commentary and alternately lugubrious and exultant flights of fancy. It is hard, Lee tells us, to try to be funny in these days of frenetic social and political change. So he bookends this new show, which he wants to stay relevant until its tour ends in 2024, with a reworking of a routine he first performed at the start of his career in 1989. Self-plagiarism? Actually, Lee could profitably spend the rest of his career rejigging old routines, much as Miles Davis was able to find endless new takes on Stella by Starlight. At his best, as he delivers a comedy show that is a kind of lecture about comedy shows, he cheeks the crowd so surely that the effect is insulting yet intimate. Basic Lee is one of his more pretzel-shaped evenings. If its inner logic isn’t always easy to grasp, who cares when something is rendered with this much wit and verve? What’s it all about? It’s all about two hours long, it’s all very clever, but, basically, Basic Lee is very funny."
Stewart Lee
2022-12-25T11:07:42+00:00
Episode Summary Comedian and columnist Stewart Lee remains “grateful to the people who brainwashed me into listening to Bob Dylan during a period of emotional and physical weakness.” Episode Notes Comedian and columnist Stewart Lee remains “grateful to the people who brainwashed me into listening to Bob Dylan during a period of emotional and physical weakness.” He remembers seeing Dylan live at Hyde Park with his kids (“one of the greatest nights of my life”) as well as the time he alienated the audience at a Teenage Cancer Trust Benefit. “It was a good gig. 'Cause it was true. Self-sabotage keeps you alive. Chaos and confusion create a bubble that protects you.” Stew namechecks Dylan, Mark E. Smith, Jerry Sadowitz, William Blake, Roky Erickson and Mozart as fellow artists who “develop a split personality that says: what if I make him do this?” Warning: listeners should keep in mind that Mr Lee is “a cultural bully from the Oxbridge Mafia who wants to appear morally superior but couldn’t cut the mustard on a panel game.” (Lee Mack) This is a review (Dominic Maxwell, The Times) of Stewart’s current show, Basic Lee: "If someone says they’re going back to basics, can they be trusted? When Stewart Lee tells you he is going back to basics you sniff only fresh mischief in his chortlingly bold smush of sarcasm, satire, self-commentary and alternately lugubrious and exultant flights of fancy. It is hard, Lee tells us, to try to be funny in these days of frenetic social and political change. So he bookends this new show, which he wants to stay relevant until its tour ends in 2024, with a reworking of a routine he first performed at the start of his career in 1989. Self-plagiarism? Actually, Lee could profitably spend the rest of...
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 Poetry Incarnation at London’s Albert Hall.
What Happened to Counter-Culture? - where it came from, where it’s been and where it’s heading – is a five-part survey of the subject, stretching from the era just after the Second World War, through art and activism, jazz and psychedelia and punk and the rise of early cyberculture, all rolling on into the new millennium and the digital age.
But the initial episode, entitled ‘Absolute Beginners’ – a knowing reference, clearly, to Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel, a very early fictional attempt to chart London’s teen subcultures mid-century – sets out its stall without reservation: the Beats, the American Beat Generation, are unhesitatingly identified as year zero to this phenomenon, the key catalyst for the gathering and swelling clans of the counterculture which would leave their mark on society over the next seven decades to come.
The series, sheltering under a new alternative culture umbrella called Artworks, is presented by comic Stewart Lee, a performer with pronounced left-wing values and an acerbic, if deadpan, temperament. Here the stand-up adopts quite a serious style, only occasionally inserting a fleeting flash of flippancy. Those asides do not rock the boat critically and his general inclination seems to be one of approval towards these ongoing insurrections of the mind and spirit.
The narrator immediately and effectively teases us in: ‘Counterculture: an intoxicating brew of alternative music, independent ideas, of underground presses, writing and art, of activism, what were called happenings, a philosophy of liberation that swept across Western societies in the second half of the twentieth-century. Living outside the mainstream…’
Lee’s commentary is aided and abetted by some wonderful contemporary audio clips plus a gallery of authoritative voices: experimental music maker Brian Eno, present at the Albert Hall event, psychogeographer and novelist Iain Sinclair, often aligned with the Beat movement, Joe Boyd, music producer of high reputation, legendary folk singer Shirley Collins, Jon Savage, respected specialist in the fields of youth and punk, and John Harris, an expert on political rock.
The premiere show, at 30 minutes, never drags, provides a crisp digest of the main themes and threads and briefly trails the topics that will appear in episodes two and three. It touches upon the ideological issues that often underpin the countercultural thrust and handles the material smoothly and adeptly though one of the fact-checking team might have been sharper on the year ‘Howl’ was written. Not 1957, I can advise.
All in all, nonetheless, a fine and user-friendly introduction to the multiple tangles of ideas and actions that have provided a rallying point for those dissatisfied with the grey certainties of the status quo. This series appears sure to confirm that such challenges to the establishment have not gone away…
Editor’s note: What Happened to Counter-Culture? was first broadcast on BBC Radio Four today, Thursday, August 7th, 2025, at 9.30am. The two shows to follow – ‘Revolution in the Head’ and ‘Beauty in the Streets’ – can be heard on subsequent Thursdays, plus two episodes after that. The series is also available on BBC Sounds.
Stewart Lee
2025-08-07T13:50:36+01:00
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 Poetry Incarnation at London’s Albert Hall. What Happened to Counter-Culture? - where it came from, where it’s been and where it’s heading – is a five-part survey of the subject, stretching from the era just after the Second World War, through art and activism, jazz and psychedelia and punk and the rise of early cyberculture, all rolling on into the new millennium and the digital age. But the initial episode, entitled ‘Absolute Beginners’ – a knowing reference, clearly, to Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel, a very early fictional attempt to chart London’s teen subcultures mid-century – sets out its stall without reservation: the Beats, the American Beat Generation, are unhesitatingly identified as year zero to this phenomenon, the key catalyst for the gathering and swelling clans of the counterculture which would leave their mark on society over the next seven decades to come. The series, sheltering under a new alternative culture umbrella called Artworks, is presented by comic Stewart Lee, a performer with pronounced left-wing values and an acerbic, if deadpan, temperament. Here the stand-up adopts quite a serious style, only occasionally inserting a fleeting flash of flippancy. Those asides do not rock the boat critically and his general inclination seems to be one of approval towards these ongoing insurrections of the mind and spirit. The narrator immediately and effectively teases us in: ‘Counterculture: an intoxicating brew of alternative music, independent ideas, of underground presses, writing and art, of activism, what were called happenings, a philosophy...
Never one for eschewing the big topics, Stewart Lee's fourteenth festival show on the trot covers pretty much the whole damn shooting match. Badly Mapped World is a strange travelogue packed with studied and beguiling humour.
Behind a self-depricating manner lurks honed comic intelligence that sneaks up behind you rather than hitting you squarely in the face. He toys with this audience now in a way he hasn't done previously and the hour-long show format, in which the material builds slowly, suits him well.
His self-expressed opinion of the show as 'obscene and scatalogical issues dressed up as if they were somehow clever' is perhaps a little harsh as World has so much more to offer.
It encompasses such myriad and wholesome themes as space exploration and The Owl and The Pussycat, as well as the areas of obscenity and scatology; anyone remember Gaz Top?
Stewart Lee
2000-08-03T01:39:40+01:00
Never one for eschewing the big topics, Stewart Lee's fourteenth festival show on the trot covers pretty much the whole damn shooting match. Badly Mapped World is a strange travelogue packed with studied and beguiling humour. Behind a self-depricating manner lurks honed comic intelligence that sneaks up behind you rather than hitting you squarely in the face. He toys with this audience now in a way he hasn't done previously and the hour-long show format, in which the material builds slowly, suits him well. His self-expressed opinion of the show as 'obscene and scatalogical issues dressed up as if they were somehow clever' is perhaps a little harsh as World has so much more to offer. It encompasses such myriad and wholesome themes as space exploration and The Owl and The Pussycat, as well as the areas of obscenity and scatology; anyone remember Gaz Top?
In many ways stand-up comedy is as much a science as it is an art. Jokes can be constructed in a careful, thoughtful manner, each word and pause placed in just the right place to generate the maximum amount of humour. And in that area of comedy, Lee has no equal. He’s a true master of the form. Some may say his stretching out of a 20-second anecdote into a ten-minute routine, but the fact that in the course of that routine Lee repeats said anecdote over ten times, getting a laugh for each, turns it into something of a lesson on comedy itself, and how to eek every last bit of humour out of a short and simple tale. It’s just an absolute joy to watch him work, and any new or aspiring comics should go and see this show as soon as possible as it will teach you ten times what any workshop, book or lecture ever will. For the rest of us just wanting something funny, Lee doesn’t disappoint, though if you want to avoid disappointing him you may wish to research 80s Marvel Comics character The Watcher before attending.
Some of the subjects he touches on would likely be considered hack or cliched if performed by any other comic: do we really need another lecture on the declining standards of TV and the Big Brother racism row? Well, yes, we do actually. As TV is still getting worse and worse and Big Brother is a huge part of why that’s happening. Plus Lee’s ideas might not actually be original but his presentation of them far surpasses any other comics who have tackled such issues.
To top it all Lee even talks a little about his family and his personal life, an issue not really tackled in his stand-up before, and it adds an interesting relatable human factor to his stage persona, giving a brief glimpse at the man behind the ‘mask’ and his motivation for doing what he does.
Simply one of the best shows of The Fringe.
Number of arbitrary things out of things for people who can’t be bothered reading the review: 5/5
Stewart Lee
2007-08-12T21:32:36+01:00
In many ways stand-up comedy is as much a science as it is an art. Jokes can be constructed in a careful, thoughtful manner, each word and pause placed in just the right place to generate the maximum amount of humour. And in that area of comedy, Lee has no equal. He’s a true master of the form. Some may say his stretching out of a 20-second anecdote into a ten-minute routine, but the fact that in the course of that routine Lee repeats said anecdote over ten times, getting a laugh for each, turns it into something of a lesson on comedy itself, and how to eek every last bit of humour out of a short and simple tale. It’s just an absolute joy to watch him work, and any new or aspiring comics should go and see this show as soon as possible as it will teach you ten times what any workshop, book or lecture ever will. For the rest of us just wanting something funny, Lee doesn’t disappoint, though if you want to avoid disappointing him you may wish to research 80s Marvel Comics character The Watcher before attending. Some of the subjects he touches on would likely be considered hack or cliched if performed by any other comic: do we really need another lecture on the declining standards of TV and the Big Brother racism row? Well, yes, we do actually. As TV is still getting worse and worse and Big Brother is a huge part of why that’s happening. Plus Lee’s ideas might not actually be original but his presentation of them far surpasses any other comics who have tackled such issues. To top it all Lee even talks a little about his family and his personal life, an issue not really tackled in...
Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American comedy industry patronised by wealthy locals. In super-affluent Aspen, I discovered, to my horror, economically uncompetitive service industry workers were homed in special “employee housing projects”, like castrated catering cyborgs from a Russian science fiction novel, sleeping in pods, dreaming of electric sheep. But today that system seems benign compared with the housing poverty of Sunak island.
In Aspen, the famous comedians were domiciled in luxury hotels. I was in a cheap motel on the edge of town, where I breakfasted daily with a quartet of equally undervalued underground comic book writers, regarded as witless savants nonetheless capable of providing content by the predatory industry vampires. Daniel Clowes told me the contents of his Oscar ceremony goody bag – the film of his Ghost World comic was nominated – were worth more than everything he had earned as a writer to that point.
The Aspen audience nested in the isolated Fabergé eyries of their mountaintop Frank Lloyd Wright villas, overlooking snow-capped peaks and quaffing the finest wines, fed by servants they housed in dormitories. Did they really need to be amused by my jokes about farts and US foreign policy? Anyone whose act goes down well in Aspen probably has to ask themselves what is wrong with it. Ideally, one would write a set so excoriating the audience would climb over their sun terraces and hurl themselves to their deaths.
Wealth and the arts are strange bedfellows. Keir Starmer speechified a good speech at the Labour Creatives conference this month, but it will take more than free infant school recorder lessons and an old man remembering proper music like the Wedding Present and the Juicy Oranges to reignite the cultural explosion that burned through postwar Britain and gave us the international soft diplomatic heft to erase our imperial embarrassment. At the moment, it’s barely affordable to be a doctor. Starmer needs to make it affordable to be an artist, because the value of art is beyond financial metrics. All that artists really need is a garret, a muse and some laudanum. When I moved to Hackney in the 90s, you couldn’t move for muses. Now the muses have all been priced out and gone to live in Glasgow. And Tory politicians have snaffled all the laudanum.
Most punters and performers at the Edinburgh festival fringe, for example, are now either well heeled, happy to camp 10 miles away and cycle in like serfs, or lucky enough to have a relative there who always goes away in August to escape actors shrieking about Andrew Scott in sandwich shops.
Top private schools have better theatre facilities than the entire city of Gloucester. Unlike Gloucester, Eton doesn’t have a cheese named after it or a famous serial killer, admittedly. But it does produce loads of famously cheesy actors, one of whom, Dominic West, got to play a serial killer from Gloucester with the same surname. Put down those puppets! The arts ain’t for you any more, peasants. Back in auspicious alpine Aspen, you could even ski after you’d consumed your culture.
I, of course, chose not to. At my first secondary school games lesson, I rejected all sport for ever, having been ritually humiliated for dropping a weird-shaped ball I’d never seen before by our games teacher, a former rugby international, bonding like a coward with the alpha males. He gave me no choice but to become a writer.
But I wish I had taken that one-off opportunity to go skiing in Aspen. Because within our lifetimes, obviously, the sport of skiing is going to melt out of existence, along with the snowfields that sustain it. Old James Bond films will be digitally corrected to show an out-of-shape Roger Moore wearing goggles and making snappy one-liners about decapitation while he just runs fast down scorched Swiss hillsides.
On Monday, one of the last lines of legal defence for climate protesters who damage property – namely, the beliefs of a defendant – was removed by Tom Little KC and the lady chief justice of England and Wales, Sue Carr, two of these lefty lawyers we read about in the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper. Juries must not consider the “wider motivation” of the defendant and “evidence… about the facts of climate change would be inadmissible”. You can prove anything with facts.
On the last night of the 2005 Aspen comedy festival, the writer Jonathan Ames, Hemingway in a green beanie, whom I admired enormously, declared he would somehow get those of us not important enough to have been invited – him, me and the comic book writers – into the private house party of the richest man in Aspen. Somehow, Ames bulldozed the door-staff at the mountaintop mansion and tailgated us in behind a Sexand the City writer he had charmed. In the bathroom, framed photos showed our host shaking hands with successive American presidents, irrespective of their political affiliations.
Twelve hours later I found myself drinking the last Beck’s alone on a frosted wooden terrace wedged into an icy cliff. I saw a cold gold sun rise, like Shiva the Destroyer, over a die-cut Rocky Mountain snowscape and I clicked the shutter on a Polaroid memory. Then I was finally escorted out by security staff, who I think had known all night that I, like them, would never have been asked to a party like that. I didn’t ski in Aspen. But I’m glad I briefly slid into the social slipstream and saw that snowy scene. I suspect it’s already less impressive and won’t last the century.
Stewart Lee
2024-03-24T20:16:02+00:00
Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American comedy industry patronised by wealthy locals. In super-affluent Aspen, I discovered, to my horror, economically uncompetitive service industry workers were homed in special “employee housing projects”, like castrated catering cyborgs from a Russian science fiction novel, sleeping in pods, dreaming of electric sheep. But today that system seems benign compared with the housing poverty of Sunak island. In Aspen, the famous comedians were domiciled in luxury hotels. I was in a cheap motel on the edge of town, where I breakfasted daily with a quartet of equally undervalued underground comic book writers, regarded as witless savants nonetheless capable of providing content by the predatory industry vampires. Daniel Clowes told me the contents of his Oscar ceremony goody bag – the film of his Ghost World comic was nominated – were worth more than everything he had earned as a writer to that point. The Aspen audience nested in the isolated Fabergé eyries of their mountaintop Frank Lloyd Wright villas, overlooking snow-capped peaks and quaffing the finest wines, fed by servants they housed in dormitories. Did they really need to be amused by my jokes about farts and US foreign policy? Anyone whose act goes down well in Aspen probably has to ask themselves what is wrong with it. Ideally, one would write a set so excoriating the audience would climb over their sun terraces and hurl themselves to their deaths. Wealth and the arts are strange bedfellows. Keir Starmer speechified a good speech at the Labour Creatives conference this month, but it will take more than free infant school recorder lessons and an old man remembering proper music like the Wedding Present and...
There are at least 13 t-shirt designs out there based on lines from my stand-up that are nothing to do with me, and a scarf as well, so my hand has been forced into the land of quality endorsed garments.
Here is an icily obtuse t-shirt which announces your fandom only to other adepts, and confuses the weak.
It's available here from Wax Face, who also do t-shirts for Warren Ellis and the Osees, and make models of Iggy Pop's body and Daniel Clowes' comic book characters.
Buy it for the prematurely aged pseudo-intellectual in your life today!
As TV's James Acaster recently said, "Stewart Lee fans are like Radiohead fans. They have one big thing they like, and because it’s such a connoisseury thing to enjoy they’re like, “I don’t need anything else outside that. And I’m going to tell everyone that if they don’t get it they’re thick.” And they’re the worst kind of fans.”
Come to think of it, that might be the next t-shirt!
Unisex, extra small (xs) to XXXL, and ethically produced as well
S Lee
The shirts are priced £20.00 plus Post and packaging and are on pre order today.
They will begin shipping late September/ Early October 2021.
Pre Orders will start today (Weds 1st September at Noon GMT)
Stewart Lee
2021-09-01T12:00:12+01:00
T Shirts Dear Interested Parties There are at least 13 t-shirt designs out there based on lines from my stand-up that are nothing to do with me, and a scarf as well, so my hand has been forced into the land of quality endorsed garments. Here is an icily obtuse t-shirt which announces your fandom only to other adepts, and confuses the weak. It's available here from Wax Face, who also do t-shirts for Warren Ellis and the Osees, and make models of Iggy Pop's body and Daniel Clowes' comic book characters. Buy it for the prematurely aged pseudo-intellectual in your life today! CLICK HERE TO BUY - LINK GOES LIVE AT 12pm TODAY As TV's James Acaster recently said, "Stewart Lee fans are like Radiohead fans. They have one big thing they like, and because it’s such a connoisseury thing to enjoy they’re like, “I don’t need anything else outside that. And I’m going to tell everyone that if they don’t get it they’re thick.” And they’re the worst kind of fans.” Come to think of it, that might be the next t-shirt! Unisex, extra small (xs) to XXXL, and ethically produced as well S Lee The shirts are priced £20.00 plus Post and packaging and are on pre order today. They will begin shipping late September/ Early October 2021. Pre Orders will start today (Weds 1st September at Noon GMT)
All comedy is essentially divisive. If jokes have an essential direction and attitude, there's always going to be someone who's not happy with the way a joke is going and how it's getting there.
For example, I cite the scientific research conducted by Channel 4, which found that 99.99997 per cent of the human race thinks that the funniest thing ever is Del Boy falling through the bar on Only Fools And Horses. That 0.00003% is down to three people. One's been in a coma since 1975, one is David Jason, who fractured his pelvis falling through the bar and finds that even watching a repeat on a clip show can bring on excruciating twinges. The other person is Stewart Lee.
Stewart Lee is arguably the most divisive comedian working on television at the moment. He can divide hitherto close families and communities, causing gaping unhealable rifts in a manner which organised religion or racial intolerance can only dream of.
For Christmas I was bought a copy of the DVD If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, and for a few months it became my obsession to inflict it on anyone who visited my home, effectively using it as a replacement to This IS Spinal Tap, Withnail & I or Bill Hicks's Goatboy routine as my gauge of the calibre of my visitors. If you liked Stewart Lee then all was well with you and I would open up the chocolate biscuits. Express impatience and confusion and I wouldn't even dust off the rich teas for you.
There were some interesting results. My own father, a self-confessed fan of Michael McIntyre (why hast thou forsaken me?), found himself oddly hypnotised by the quiet calm delivery and repetition until holy, purifying laughter was dragged forth from his very soul like some comedy exorcism.
'I'll say one thing for that guy, he's got balls,' Dad interjected every ten minutes or so, if anything enhancing the DVD experience. My ex-boyfriend however, normally a sarcastic intellectual with an unassailably solid sense of humour, became filled with irrational loathing for Lee within the first five minutes ('What is this boring crap?'), suggesting he may have once been abused by a paedophile in Cafe Nero, and making me realise how right I'd been to end the relationship.
My experiments invariably had the same polarising effect on any given group of guests. Search Stewart Lee on Twitter at around 11.30pm on Wednesday night and you'll see that for every comedian or writer rejoicing in the man's genius there will be ten punters frothing poisonous spleen at the very gall of BBC Two for showing someone who just doesn't make them laugh in the same way that McIntyre or somebody called Russell can. This is why Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is the most important television programme of the past 30 years.
I've always been drawn to Stewart Lee since his too-cool-for-school days as the sneering, smartarse cynic counterbalancing Richard Herring's effusive schoolboy on seminal shows Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy. There's an odd appeal about Lee's face, like a slightly wonky pie or the crumpled Cornish pasty that you're drawn to in a bakers because you suspect its irregular crust promises crispy bits where the fat has bubbled through the pastry and an unctuous oozing of nourishing gravy.
The Fist Of Fun era was supposedly a golden time for a burgeoning comedy scene, developed from the post- punk alternative reaction to the dinosaur gag merchants who dominated Seventis television. Remember the Seventis? Remember Charlie Williams and Bernard Manning on ITV's The Comedians, like Uncle Tom and his Cabbie? Remember the rise of Russ Abbott? It was crap wasn't it?
Remember the Eighties? Remember Friday Night Live with Ben Elton before everyone knew what a good accountant he had? Remember the Young Ones? It was great wasn't it? Like Comedy Jesus had returned smiling to earth. And the Nineties were even more awesome, at last comedy could be pleased with itself, it was right-on yet it was still funny; Guardian readers loved it, and it was on the telly. But early Nineties Stewart Lee wasn't about to complacently rest on his laurels, and spat youthful contempt at 'lazy boring comedy slags'; hangers on to the coattails of alternative comedy garnering cheap laughs from vacuous material like Pavlov ringing a bell. He was like the little boy who realised that the Emperor's New Clothes were non-existent, trying innocently to shake everybody else out of their smug ironic stupor.
Nowadays Stewart Lee still is the little boy who saw through the Emperor's new clothes, but he's emotionally scarred and traumatised through having had to look at a naked liar for so long. By aping and replaying the soothing patterns of today's reassuring mainstream comic heroes, Lee hopes to jolt us out of our indifferent consumption of over-priced and devalued ideas. It isn't to everyone's taste. Some people just want to be made to laugh, not think.
These people accuse Stewart Lee of being 'smug', just because they think hegemony is something you buy a privet with. They haven't realised that the true smugness and superiority lies in their supposed heroes who snicker their way to the bank through bland, poorly thought-out observational humour, urging you to join them in their fool's dance of falsely conjured laughter.
Every time a twentysomething energetic faux mummy's boy puts on a silly voice, like something out of a Carry On film, and the audience erupt into hysterical convulsions, just as they've been trained to by watching Mock The Week; every time a bloke resembling the personification of one of the bad pigs in Animal Farm waggles his head and pops his eyes to signal to his fans that it's chuckle time; every time you watch TV and a laugh sneaks out at one of these cynical churned out moments, a piece of our collective humanity dies.
I think that's what Stewart Lee's trying to tell us, and that's why it's so important to watch his Comedy Vehicle, because like our recent wasted chance to change the vote, it's probably going to be the last opportunity of its kind to challenge the status quo for a few decades. Plus it's really, really funny.
Stewart Lee
2011-06-02T21:48:14+01:00
All comedy is essentially divisive. If jokes have an essential direction and attitude, there's always going to be someone who's not happy with the way a joke is going and how it's getting there. For example, I cite the scientific research conducted by Channel 4, which found that 99.99997 per cent of the human race thinks that the funniest thing ever is Del Boy falling through the bar on Only Fools And Horses. That 0.00003% is down to three people. One's been in a coma since 1975, one is David Jason, who fractured his pelvis falling through the bar and finds that even watching a repeat on a clip show can bring on excruciating twinges. The other person is Stewart Lee. Stewart Lee is arguably the most divisive comedian working on television at the moment. He can divide hitherto close families and communities, causing gaping unhealable rifts in a manner which organised religion or racial intolerance can only dream of. For Christmas I was bought a copy of the DVD If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, and for a few months it became my obsession to inflict it on anyone who visited my home, effectively using it as a replacement to This IS Spinal Tap, Withnail & I or Bill Hicks's Goatboy routine as my gauge of the calibre of my visitors. If you liked Stewart Lee then all was well with you and I would open up the chocolate biscuits. Express impatience and confusion and I wouldn't even dust off the rich teas for you. There were some interesting results. My own father, a self-confessed fan of Michael McIntyre (why hast thou forsaken me?), found himself oddly hypnotised by the quiet calm delivery and repetition until holy, purifying laughter was dragged forth from his very...
Once, Alasdair Roberts leavened his love of traditional Scottish styles with a sloppy-casual indie sensibility.
Now he burns like a convert and demands we meet on his mountaintop.
His egoless, idiomatic writing style indistinguishable from centuries old song, Roberts, and his gifted ensemble, graft surges of orchestrated acid-folk-rock abandon, dainty highland dance tunes, and florid minstrel guitar patterns into vast multi-faceted epics that still sound timeless.
It's a radicalisation of the old rules the young Dylan would recognise, if he looked up from dissecting the songbook.
Stewart Lee
2013-01-20T21:20:30+00:00
Once, Alasdair Roberts leavened his love of traditional Scottish styles with a sloppy-casual indie sensibility. Now he burns like a convert and demands we meet on his mountaintop. His egoless, idiomatic writing style indistinguishable from centuries old song, Roberts, and his gifted ensemble, graft surges of orchestrated acid-folk-rock abandon, dainty highland dance tunes, and florid minstrel guitar patterns into vast multi-faceted epics that still sound timeless. It's a radicalisation of the old rules the young Dylan would recognise, if he looked up from dissecting the songbook.
Stewart Lee has had something of a tumultuous relationship with television. Widely regarded as one of this country's riskiest and most insightful stand-up comedians, the last time Lee fronted a TV show of any kind was ten years ago, when he appeared with Richard Herring in BBC2 show This Morning With Richard Not Judy.
Four years had passed since Lee first appeared on the channel in cult hit Fist Of Fun and the comic was already at breaking point, having had to deal with the frustrations of making comedy by committee. And then came the final straw.
'No one was interested in that show so it got shunted around the schedules,' explains Lee. 'It got to the point where even I couldn't find out when it was on. I remember one week I had to ring up the producer and tell him: “It's on tonight at six!”
And he went: “Oh my God, we haven't even edited the show yet!” That was the extent to which we were valued; the show was scheduled for broadcast and it hadn't even been made.'
After that debacle, Lee finally gave up on television and returned to his first love of stand-up, something at which he never fails to excel.
He did the odd TV project in the following decade but they ended up in either death threats (Jerry Springer: The Opera) or what Lee terms 'the worst professional experience of my life' (a never-to-be-repeated appearance on 8 Out Of 10 Cats).
And then Lee suddenly realised something. 'Over the years you finally recognise what it is you want to do and I started to feel like stand-up was the one thing I'd done really well all my life. I felt I should get some kind of televisual record of it.'
Which neatly brings us to Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, an attempt to combine Lee's talent for live stand-up with the constrictions of television.
Naturally enough, it wasn't an easy journey – the show was first commissioned in early 2005 then dropped a year later – but Lee is finally 100 per cent happy with a TV project, one that's mostly footage of a fantastic stand-up comic performing live, with a few quick sketches thrown in between.
'The whole thing's been great,' he enthuses. 'For the first time with anything I've worked on, everyone from the executives at the top down to the cameramen were pulling in the same direction.'
Still, it's interesting to note that Chris Morris is script editor for the series – another of Lee's traumatic TV experiences saw him and Herring absent from Morris's seminal 1990s show The Day Today when it graduated from Radio 4.
'My manager at the time was just trying to get me and Rich a share of the ownership of some characters. I still think it's slightly unfair that Patrick Marber ended up with a share of Alan Partridge when we'd done all the initial writing on it but I never bore anyone involved in the show any personal malice.'
It seems Lee has finally produced a TV show that's been made completely on his terms and you start to understand why it took this long to get here. He's not afraid of failure any more. In fact, he practically welcomes it. 'Some of the material will make people uncomfortable and confused,' admits Lee.
'I don't think many comics would put things on TV that don't show them at their best. But the thing that makes stand-up so exciting is the possibility of failure. I want that possibility.'
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts March 16 on BBC2 at 10pm.
Stewart Lee
2009-03-11T11:50:21+00:00
Stewart Lee has had something of a tumultuous relationship with television. Widely regarded as one of this country's riskiest and most insightful stand-up comedians, the last time Lee fronted a TV show of any kind was ten years ago, when he appeared with Richard Herring in BBC2 show This Morning With Richard Not Judy. Four years had passed since Lee first appeared on the channel in cult hit Fist Of Fun and the comic was already at breaking point, having had to deal with the frustrations of making comedy by committee. And then came the final straw. 'No one was interested in that show so it got shunted around the schedules,' explains Lee. 'It got to the point where even I couldn't find out when it was on. I remember one week I had to ring up the producer and tell him: “It's on tonight at six!” And he went: “Oh my God, we haven't even edited the show yet!” That was the extent to which we were valued; the show was scheduled for broadcast and it hadn't even been made.' After that debacle, Lee finally gave up on television and returned to his first love of stand-up, something at which he never fails to excel. He did the odd TV project in the following decade but they ended up in either death threats (Jerry Springer: The Opera) or what Lee terms 'the worst professional experience of my life' (a never-to-be-repeated appearance on 8 Out Of 10 Cats). And then Lee suddenly realised something. 'Over the years you finally recognise what it is you want to do and I started to feel like stand-up was the one thing I'd done really well all my life. I felt I should get some kind of televisual record of it.' Which neatly brings...
How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life & Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian By Stewart Lee, Faber & Faber, 378pp. £12.99
STEWART Lee on the 2005 London Al-Qaeda bombings: “Who are they, these inhuman bombers that strike at the very heart of our society with no respect for human life, without even the courtesy of a perfunctory warning? It makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it, for the good old days of the IRA. ’Cause they gave warnings, didn’t they? They were gentleman bombers, the finest terrorists this country’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again. Let’s have a little clap for the IRA . . . ’Cause the IRA, they were decent British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British. But they were. And, as such, they couldn’t help but embody some fundamentally decent British values”.
Imagine the words uttered in a calm drone by a chubby, greying Englishman in a too-tight suit and you have the essence of Stewart Lee: the withering reasonableness, the weary sarcasm, the ready assumption of intelligence and discernment in his audience.
You won’t have seen much of him on television, though he had a semi-successful series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle , on BBC2 last year. When he was skint a few years back he did Have I Got News for You and a few similar spots, but nowadays he turns down offers to appear on Mock the Week and other whimsical panel shows. He isn’t the kind of comedian who does short routines, quips or sound-bites, and younger viewers may not have the attention span to cope with him.
Instead he successfully tours rambling, measured shows, delicately erected from strong foundations of vitriol and contempt, layered with self-deprecation, unpicking and examining his technique and motivation as he laboriously clambers up the comic scaffolding. He can be indulgent and condescending, and tends to preach to the converted, but there is nobody else in British comedy so merrily combining outlandish filth and blasphemy with the most pious kind of political correctness to expose the mediocre and the hypocritical. He has the unstinting respect of his peers, and a loyal fan-base, while remaining fairly obscure on a more general level. “The personal is absent from my work,” he says. “The me you see onstage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most petty and my most patronising.”
How I Escaped My Certain Fate is basically the transcripts of three of his stage shows – from 2005, 2006 and 2008 – with vast amounts of careful explanation and deconstruction of this material in footnotes: one lasts three-and-a-half pages, and two sections actually begin as lengthy footnotes. And it is in these footnotes that we catch almost inadvertent glimpses of a Stewart Lee who seems as privately nice as he is publicly brave: he adores the mum who adopted him as a baby, is slightly defensive about his Oxford education, and is delighting in first-time fatherhood. Through it all, though, he holds his line about the cathartic qualities of comedy, though in truth this is the only stance available for that rarest of creatures, a genuinely principled comedian who has reached middle-age without compromising his integrity and still remains funny and relevant.
Some observations are poignant. In the transcript of a show loosely built around the appropriation by mainstream television personality Joe Pasquale of a joke originated by veteran Irish comedian Michael Redmond he comments in an aside that another old-style British comic, Jim Davidson “is not a performer troubled by the duality of meaning”. The sad footnote adds: “No one cares about this sort of thing any more. To the average punter there’s no difference between Jimmy Carr and Jim Davidson, between irony and intent, except that Jimmy Carr is much better and more original. But ethical and political questions are largely irrelevant to today’s comedy consumers. Comedians are little more than content providers”.
He is scathing about comics who fail to measure up to his own high standards (though there is probably room in the business for only one Stewart Lee), especially self-absorbed American stand-ups unable to translate the personal into the general. Bad writing by Dan Brown and JK Rowling is attacked, too, plus celebrity non-books by the likes of Russell Brand and Jeremy Clarkson. The 18th-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person reputed to have read every book published in his lifetime. Someone who did that today, says Lee, would end up more stupid than the person who read nothing.
How I Escaped My Certain Fate will interest those who believe in the transformative potential of laughter, and provide food for thought for ambitious youngsters tempted to see the art of comedy as little more than a fast-track to quiz-show stardom. And while I eventually got slightly fed up with Lee wagging his finger at me, I have to concede that on most issues he is calmly, smugly, condescendingly, infuriatingly, hilariously correct.
Stewart Lee
2010-07-24T12:11:26+01:00
How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life & Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian By Stewart Lee, Faber & Faber, 378pp. £12.99 STEWART Lee on the 2005 London Al-Qaeda bombings: “Who are they, these inhuman bombers that strike at the very heart of our society with no respect for human life, without even the courtesy of a perfunctory warning? It makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it, for the good old days of the IRA. ’Cause they gave warnings, didn’t they? They were gentleman bombers, the finest terrorists this country’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again. Let’s have a little clap for the IRA . . . ’Cause the IRA, they were decent British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British. But they were. And, as such, they couldn’t help but embody some fundamentally decent British values”. Imagine the words uttered in a calm drone by a chubby, greying Englishman in a too-tight suit and you have the essence of Stewart Lee: the withering reasonableness, the weary sarcasm, the ready assumption of intelligence and discernment in his audience. You won’t have seen much of him on television, though he had a semi-successful series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle , on BBC2 last year. When he was skint a few years back he did Have I Got News for You and a few similar spots, but nowadays he turns down offers to appear on Mock the Week and other whimsical panel shows. He isn’t the kind of comedian who does short routines, quips or sound-bites, and younger viewers may not have the attention span to cope with him. Instead he successfully tours rambling, measured shows, delicately erected from strong foundations of vitriol and contempt, layered with self-deprecation, unpicking and examining his technique and motivation as he laboriously clambers up the comic scaffolding....
With every new series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, I find myself not wanting to watch for fear of those who may judge but then almost immediately concluding that I do not care. Yes, Lee is a spiteful comic, but he is also incredibly astute. One can’t help but admire his craft, even if you don’t agree with his viewpoints, which are of course satirically exaggerated anyway, suggesting that those who feel alienated by his comedy may actually be misinterpreting his message. And with his frequent cuts to camera, a television audience cannot help but be drawn in, without suffering the inevitable heart palpitations that would surely follow with such a predicament.
Take, for example, Episode 2, which sees Lee dryly dissect the ever-prominent issue of Islamophobia and the questions it raises with regard to mocking religion through the medium of stand up comedy. The surface layer can easily cause offence but it would be short-sighted of the viewer to assume that Lee wants us to take what he says at face value. Episode 1 sees the comic approach the topic of prostitution and though many may switch off at quips about such matters coming from someone like the esteemed Stewart Lee we see before us, we hold out for lines that release the tension, such as empathising with those who “provide a service people crave and still be despised for it”.
His observational stints are deliberately placed throughout the series, disguised as digs at others in the comedy industry but serving a greater purpose: as a release of comedic tension. It may seem to be a strange decision, but one that shows great integrity, for Lee to limit his observational material to the extent that he does as he could effortlessly rely on this fine-tuned skill for significant segments of the programme. But it appears that he would interpret this creative decision as laziness and if there is one thing that Stewart Lee abhors (though of course there can’t only be one thing) then it is laziness. This can be appreciate by many, but sometimes it feels like his comments get a little too specific, a little to personal. I genuinely don’t believe that his foremost intention is to cause harm to those he ridicules for it is, most often anyway, their ideas he ridicules rather than their personalities. It seems that offence is a necessary by-product of the message and perhaps we shouldn’t cower from comedy that offends.
All that said, I don’t feel as though I can trust Stewart Lee; perhaps what we read into his jokes are not what he truly means, but I fully appreciate where he is coming from on the majority of occasions, if I am, in fact, correct in where I think he is coming from. A part of me wishes that Chris Morris’ segments were longer or more frequent during each episode, but perhaps this would dilute the impact of Morris’ scorn. Antagonism to say the least, Morris’ role is to demolish any self-righteousness in Lee’s character that has been allowed to fester during his stand up performances on film. The shock of hearing an interviewer speak so rudely to his interviewee, as though there is genuine contempt for Lee and his comedy, is yet another smart release of tension, often resulting in full-blown arguments and a lot of swearing.
Many have criticised Lee of making comedy that is self-indulgent, particularly, as he mentions, “those younger comics they have now,” but only a small amount of closer analysis can enable us to see that there is a reason behind every decision. Stewart Lee overtly works to manufacture an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group’ through his stand up and can I be blamed for wanting to be in the former? I write this on principle, knowing that many would avoid writing an article about the man who famously slams all critics of his work, and coming from a wholly appreciative perspective.
I still pray to God that he doesn’t read this.
Stewart Lee
2016-04-21T22:31:24+01:00
With every new series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, I find myself not wanting to watch for fear of those who may judge but then almost immediately concluding that I do not care. Yes, Lee is a spiteful comic, but he is also incredibly astute. One can’t help but admire his craft, even if you don’t agree with his viewpoints, which are of course satirically exaggerated anyway, suggesting that those who feel alienated by his comedy may actually be misinterpreting his message. And with his frequent cuts to camera, a television audience cannot help but be drawn in, without suffering the inevitable heart palpitations that would surely follow with such a predicament. Take, for example, Episode 2, which sees Lee dryly dissect the ever-prominent issue of Islamophobia and the questions it raises with regard to mocking religion through the medium of stand up comedy. The surface layer can easily cause offence but it would be short-sighted of the viewer to assume that Lee wants us to take what he says at face value. Episode 1 sees the comic approach the topic of prostitution and though many may switch off at quips about such matters coming from someone like the esteemed Stewart Lee we see before us, we hold out for lines that release the tension, such as empathising with those who “provide a service people crave and still be despised for it”. His observational stints are deliberately placed throughout the series, disguised as digs at others in the comedy industry but serving a greater purpose: as a release of comedic tension. It may seem to be a strange decision, but one that shows great integrity, for Lee to limit his observational material to the extent that he does as he could effortlessly rely on this fine-tuned skill for significant segments...
How do you write a one-size fits all stand-up comedy show to tour around divided Brexit Britain?
Stewart Lee found himself having to do exactly that, as he dragged his resilient Content Provider show around the dis-united kingdom for eighteen months and 214 dates, in the wake of the referendum.
Captured in leave-voting Southend-On-Sea, Content Provider sees the country's most consistently critically acclaimed stand-up at the zenith of his powers and the peak of physical collapse, on a stage strewn with obsolete physical media, as he attempts to understand his place in a digital dystopia.
Stewart Lee
2019-07-18T19:17:52+01:00
How do you write a one-size fits all stand-up comedy show to tour around divided Brexit Britain? Stewart Lee found himself having to do exactly that, as he dragged his resilient Content Provider show around the dis-united kingdom for eighteen months and 214 dates, in the wake of the referendum. Captured in leave-voting Southend-On-Sea, Content Provider sees the country's most consistently critically acclaimed stand-up at the zenith of his powers and the peak of physical collapse, on a stage strewn with obsolete physical media, as he attempts to understand his place in a digital dystopia.
Composer John Pierce O'Reilly sets Stew's dead mouse routine (Comedy Vehicle Series 4, Death) to a piece of choral music entitled Mus Mea. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A PERFORMANCE OF IT HERE. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE MUSICAL SCORE HERE.
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/your_art/mus-mea/
Medical revelations about hearing, hypnotherapy, diverticulitis and comedy trousers.
Born left-handed but forced to use his right, ambidextrous Stewart Lee talks through his family medical issues with Dr. Brian Kaplan. Stewart reveals the hyper state of consciousness he reaches through using a hearing aid. And how an attack of diverticulitis whilst on stage took him to hospital where he found himself re-thinking his whole career. Stewart also tells us how he used a hypnotherapist to give up smoking and reveals the secret to making his trousers fall down on stage.
Stewart Lee
2018-07-09T17:14:33+01:00
Medical revelations about hearing, hypnotherapy, diverticulitis and comedy trousers. Born left-handed but forced to use his right, ambidextrous Stewart Lee talks through his family medical issues with Dr. Brian Kaplan. Stewart reveals the hyper state of consciousness he reaches through using a hearing aid. And how an attack of diverticulitis whilst on stage took him to hospital where he found himself re-thinking his whole career. Stewart also tells us how he used a hypnotherapist to give up smoking and reveals the secret to making his trousers fall down on stage.
Stewart Lee is, ironically, one of the biggest comedians working in the UK today. Despite years of stand-up based around the fact he felt he wasn’t as popular as he should be, his wry persona, deadbeat delivery and general disdain for the audience has seen him offer a refreshing kind of stand up; one that progresses the medium, rather than striving for imitation.
Lee brings his new show Content Provider to De Montfort Hall this February as part of the comedy festival, headlining for two nights at one of the city’s largest venues. It seems that the audience he berates for not understanding his comedy may be finally getting the joke. “I am very lucky that an open-minded, clever, tolerant, inquisitive and loyal audience have stayed with me, and self-seeded themselves, for decades now,” Lee explains. “But, on the other hand, I always come back with new shows that develop on what they have come to expect, and I never short change them.”
Content Provider is also a book by the same name, a collection of the best of Lee’s newspaper columns over the past five years. In much the same way as his stand-up, Lee pushed the barriers of what a column is supposed to be. “Having accepted the jobs, I tried to discharge them to the best of my abilities, whilst at the same time trying to bend the rules and push the fringes of the ‘funny column’ genre where possible.”
For those who have read his Observer pieces, his articles have covered wildly varying topics, from advising Corbyn to take advice from Putin, to a piece purporting to be about the Olympic legacy, only to be mainly about a decomposing cat. The absurdity of his comedy has become increasingly popular, as is much of what was previously deemed ‘alternative comedy’, meaning it has begun to move into the mainstream. Yet much of his work has been met with intense hatred, with big Lee-bashers including the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, something he revels in by posting their reviews on his website and even using them to advertise his books.
Lee’s strength lies here; his seeming disregard for anything that might offend him. When the audience doesn’t laugh, he explains why they should. When there is a bad review, he uses it as marketing material. “I may pretend to hate doing stand-up,” he says, “But I really do my best.” His persona’s cynicism and superiority is the result of meticulous craft, and those who don’t respond to his work are often missing the point entirely.
Content Provider is in very much the same vein as most of Lee’s work to date, examining what we know about being a column writer and dismantling it. “A decade or so ago I got a bewildering text asking me if, in the light of attending the Kilkenny Comedy Festival, I had any ‘content’ which I would be willing to ‘provide’ to local ‘content providers’. This was my first encounter with the phrase, and I came to understand that they were asking me if I had any text or film or audio, which I could give to mobile phones or websites,” Lee explains. “We like to imagine we are artists, us writers, but it is funny to see what you do described as if it is just filler to put onto gizmos, which I suppose, increasingly, it is.”
Described as an attempt to “understand modern Britain”, Content Provider in its live form will inevitably have to incorporate Brexit. Little more than a month after the vote that divided the country, the Edinburgh Festival began and comedians had to adapt to the new, untrodden landscape of a post-Brexit Britain.
“People that I had routines about had been instantly forgotten,” Lee explains. “As it is, it’s evolved into something that sort of addresses that issue – what kind of content do I provide to an unstable divided society?”
The society comedians were reflecting before had changed drastically, and so in turn did their shows. Lee was clearly in the Remain camp, something reflected in his columns leading up to the vote, but how does he – rather than his persona – feel about the reality of Brexit now it’s happening?
“Anecdotally, racism is on the rise. Austerity is, it’s official, going to be prolonged and worsened. There will be no cross-continental plan, that includes us, for the Syrian refugee crisis or climate change and environmental pollution. It may be that people will get what they wanted out of Brexit in the end, and feel like the sacrifices have been worth it. But for now there are a tense few years ahead. That said, my comedy is like a horrible vulture feeding off the carcass of human misery, so I’m laughing.”
Fortunately, so is everyone else. Lee sold out both his stand-up show and book festival talk this year in Edinburgh, and has become an increasingly iconic figure in comedy. And so naturally, his return to Leicester’s Comedy Festival is hotly anticipated. “My first ever paid out-of-London gig was Leicester Poly with Jerry Sadowitz in 1990. I remember the hotel room had little soaps and shampoos that you could take away with you. I had never seen anything like it.” Who said Leicester wasn’t a luxury destination, eh? We also have the pleasure of being credited as the place in which he met his wife, fellow comedian Bridget Christie, in 2005. Yet, there’s one thing missing this year.
“Leicester has changed in 26 years. I miss the German progressive rock shop, Ultima Thule, by the station, which is online now, and was run by two identical twin brothers who really knew their stuff.”
Europe’s longest comedy festival this year will see Lee share the stage with other big names including Jimmy Carr, Susan Calman, Dane Baptiste and his former comedy partner Richard Herring. Sadly, it doesn’t look like a Lee and Herring reunion is on the cards.
“We would need to rehearse properly for ages, and there is no time or financial incentive to do that, and also the basic relationship of the double act doesn’t make sense for two men of nearly 50, predicated as it is on an essentially adolescent relationship. That said, I think it might be funny to do it in our 80s.”
Well, at least we can keep it in our diaries for the 2040s. And, if he is right, Stewart Lee will no doubt prove to be as popular then as he is now. “I’m lucky that my stage persona makes more sense, rather than less, as I get older.” If this is a hint at a move towards grumpy old man territory, then it is a humble remark. Lee is in a league of his own, brilliantly breaking down audience expectations of comedy and outwitting us at every turn. But of course, what we think isn’t the point anyway. “People can come if they want but it is what it is and it’s not my fault if they don’t like it.”
Stewart Lee: Content Provider will be on 8th & 9th February at De Montfort Hall.
Stewart Lee
2016-12-08T19:38:21+00:00
Stewart Lee is, ironically, one of the biggest comedians working in the UK today. Despite years of stand-up based around the fact he felt he wasn’t as popular as he should be, his wry persona, deadbeat delivery and general disdain for the audience has seen him offer a refreshing kind of stand up; one that progresses the medium, rather than striving for imitation. Lee brings his new show Content Provider to De Montfort Hall this February as part of the comedy festival, headlining for two nights at one of the city’s largest venues. It seems that the audience he berates for not understanding his comedy may be finally getting the joke. “I am very lucky that an open-minded, clever, tolerant, inquisitive and loyal audience have stayed with me, and self-seeded themselves, for decades now,” Lee explains. “But, on the other hand, I always come back with new shows that develop on what they have come to expect, and I never short change them.” Content Provider is also a book by the same name, a collection of the best of Lee’s newspaper columns over the past five years. In much the same way as his stand-up, Lee pushed the barriers of what a column is supposed to be. “Having accepted the jobs, I tried to discharge them to the best of my abilities, whilst at the same time trying to bend the rules and push the fringes of the ‘funny column’ genre where possible.” For those who have read his Observer pieces, his articles have covered wildly varying topics, from advising Corbyn to take advice from Putin, to a piece purporting to be about the Olympic legacy, only to be mainly about a decomposing cat. The absurdity of his comedy has become increasingly popular, as is much of what was previously...
A few days before the end of the England trip, we managed to watch A Room with a Stew by Stewart Lee, a comedian my wife’s family, who the UK Border Agency hadn’t wanted me to see, gave me the gift of knowing about. Truth is, the hour and a half I spent watching Stew was the only time while I was in England that I felt there’s something to envy the English for.
In a TV interview, Stewart Lee explains that when you see his dark jokes and see other people’s dark jokes, you’ll know exactly why the others never take the extra step — take it to the end — and why he does. Stewart Lee is not famous in Egypt because his videos don’t show up in the related list when you’re watching Louis CK on YouTube.
In A Room with a Stew, Stew jokes about how he’s always named his pets after celebrities. He tells the story of his dog that had the name of a B-list British actor, and how his dog died after a failed jump to a high shelf. He seals the joke with a simile between the dog and the actor and how both met their end while still thinking they could reach something much higher than their true capabilities. A section of the audience releases a sympathetic wince. Stew looks at them and nods unapologetically as if to say: “Yes, it’s not a joke.”
The thing I find most interesting about Stew’s comedy — other than it being extremely English — is how it analyzes the very phenomenon of making people laugh. He doesn’t just superficially bring up his own miseries or other people’s miseries to make you accept sadness and have more hope in tomorrow and love life. When he says something sad he means it. He makes you laugh at how sad it is, not despite how sad it is. There’s no denial in it, and it’s not delivered in a “funny” way. He also judges you in your laughter and tells you why you’re laughing at one thing more than something else.
The first thing I remember watching by Stewart Lee was a show called 41st Best Comedian Ever, where he talks about being ranked as the 41st best comedian in the UK. Of course this is sad, and it’s definitely funny. What does such a ranking mean? What does ranking itself mean after number 3? Or 10? In the show he talks about how his mum attended the show of a famous traditional comedian who was ranked higher than him while she was on a cruise. He imitates his old mother trying — with great admiration — to tell him the joke, he said, that she really loved. It takes him 30 minutes almost, during which he repeats a sentence expressing how clever this other comedian is nearly 30 times. He finally tells the joke his mum loved, in the silliest possible way, and the audience laugh really hard at how silly it is.
Many comedians repeat a joke to milk out the last drop of laughter, yet repeating a joke is a haunting nightmare for a comedian who’s slowly and steadily mauling his self-confidence and his ability to create. Stew breaks into this nightmare, tames it and makes it do exactly what he wants. Despite how dangerous repetition is, repetition is always the most unpredictable joke.
When Stewart Lee makes fun of young people, he first makes fun of himself for being old, then makes fun of the kind of jokes he made when he was younger, then makes fun of what young people are into compared to what old people are into, then he pushes the old person’s game to the end and says today’s kids think they’re into violent sex but our old timers’ violent sex used to end up in death or in hospitals. You find yourself thinking about how ridiculous it is to brag about things you have no hand in, like when you’re born, even though Stew doesn’t say that.
Stew says: Young people aren’t into my comedy? Of course, because they like other stuff. Young people like smartphones. Then he pretends the microphone is a phone and keeps hitting it with his finger with a manic expression on his face, and he does it for 40 seconds until you hate yourself.
Stew is aware of people’s love for the rudeness of jokes, and their longing to hear what should never be said. He appears to have more fun the ruder and more decadent his jokes get. Also what Stew does feels a lot more complicated than a direct response to this primitive urge for impropriety.
Stew plays multiple characters in his show. He says many things he would never say in normal life. He responds to your expectations, ambitions and suppressed dreams and lets you hear what your subconscious wants you to hear, but he does it with conscience. He gets you involved in the moment and explains to you what’s going on. It feels like a psychological experiment.
In A Room with a Stew there’s a 30-minute segment about Islamophobia where he talks about the West’s relationship with Islam and Muslims at the moment. He acts out an imagined argument with an angry right-wing Islamophobic English person who’s mad at Stew and his blind Muslim-aligned prejudice because of Stew’s feeble liberal political correctness. Stew tries to please this angry white person and promises him that within the next half hour he will tear Muslims apart. He starts thinking out loud, and tries to formulate the joke the way the bigot will like it, then he starts saying it. You see very clearly how he comes out of his own skin and down to the level of the argument to please, and you think of every similar public act of rhetoric that lowers itself the same way, and you laugh at Stew swinging back and forth on the stage chewing nothing in his mouth.
In his show Stew calls himself a politically correct liberal comedian. He quietly explains between jokes what he thinks is wrong with his country. He talks about minorities and social harmony, he talks about nationalism and makes fun of the British national anthem. At the same time he presents an extremely funny and extremely complex show. He talks about how he writes, how he designs his script and adjusts his timing. He says what he thinks of himself and other people doing the same job. He also makes fun of religions and religious people, his audience and everything.
To put it simply: He says everything he wants without offending anyone.
>Watching Stewart Lee was a comfortable experience in the middle of the chaos of the England visit, all the emotional expectations around it and actually being surrounded by England. It was comfortable because — unlike central London where the theater was located and unlike Louis CK — it was realistic and honest, and its anaesthetic repetitiveness synchronized smoothly with the world's normal repetitiveness, just like the guitar in The Fall’s Blindness, which played on loop from the theater’s speakers until Stew emerged at the beginning of the show. We just noticed now how similar it is to Roots Manuva’s Witness the Fitness, which I sung with my wife’s family — who the UK Border Agency doesn’t want me to hang out with — throughout the holiday.
Stewart Lee
2016-01-19T20:05:27+00:00
A few days before the end of the England trip, we managed to watch A Room with a Stew by Stewart Lee, a comedian my wife’s family, who the UK Border Agency hadn’t wanted me to see, gave me the gift of knowing about. Truth is, the hour and a half I spent watching Stew was the only time while I was in England that I felt there’s something to envy the English for. In a TV interview, Stewart Lee explains that when you see his dark jokes and see other people’s dark jokes, you’ll know exactly why the others never take the extra step — take it to the end — and why he does. Stewart Lee is not famous in Egypt because his videos don’t show up in the related list when you’re watching Louis CK on YouTube. In A Room with a Stew, Stew jokes about how he’s always named his pets after celebrities. He tells the story of his dog that had the name of a B-list British actor, and how his dog died after a failed jump to a high shelf. He seals the joke with a simile between the dog and the actor and how both met their end while still thinking they could reach something much higher than their true capabilities. A section of the audience releases a sympathetic wince. Stew looks at them and nods unapologetically as if to say: “Yes, it’s not a joke.” The thing I find most interesting about Stew’s comedy — other than it being extremely English — is how it analyzes the very phenomenon of making people laugh. He doesn’t just superficially bring up his own miseries or other people’s miseries to make you accept sadness and have more hope in tomorrow and love life. When he says something...
Last week I attended the ceremonial destruction of BBC TV Centre, which was enthusiastically blown to pieces in a controlled nuclear explosion by a delighted David Cameron. With one hand on the detonator and the other jiggling in his pocket, David Cameron was flanked by representatives of the principal faith groups, as well as leading commercial broadcasters, free-market economists, wealthy pornographers, and a child who had won a hopping competition. The prime minister triumphantly flobbed a final Green Ernie into the crater, before it was filled with a celebratory cocktail of toxic waste, liquid concrete and dogs' messes.
A Red Arrows flypast drowned out the band of the Coldstream Guards, playing a rousing rendition of Phyllis Dillon's Don't Touch Me Tomato, a personal favourite of the reggae-loving prime minister and his family. The fading sun bounced one final time off the smooth golden buttock of TB Huxley-Jones's naked three-metre statue of the former head of entertainment David Liddiment. The media memories of an ungrateful nation sank into a radioactive quagmire of history and animal faeces.
We can all remember where we were when BBC TV Centre was finally erased from the tabula rasa of human consciousness. I was being driven through a Paris underpass, watching a documentary about 9/11 on my iPad, and wearing nothing but a rubber JFK mask. But can we remember where we were when we first became aware of TV Centre's existence? Former BBC director general George Entwistle, for example, claims the first he heard of the building was in a memo in November 2012, despite having already worked there daily for two months.
My own BBC TV Centre awareness began in 1981, during Roy Castle's BBC children's television show Record Breakers. The fact maven Norris McWhirter was, unusually, standing outside the studio in the distinctive concrete doughnut of TV Centre, acknowledging the applause of thousands of members of his centre-right pressure group the Freedom Association. The concerned libertarians were showing their opposition to sporting sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa by dressing up as Zulus and doing a mass hokey cokey to Booker T and the MG's Soul Limbo, the theme for the BBC's cricket coverage. Norris McWhirter's record-breaking dream was to choreograph the largest centre-right dance that had ever been seen in the Shepherd's Bush area. And he realised it spectacularly.
But what stayed with me that day was not Norris McWhirter's freedom dance itself, but the fact that Norris McWhirter's non-partisan followers were cavorting in blackface through an identifiably existent environment, the actual BBC TV Centre itself. At that moment it struck me – the Dream Factory was a real place. And like many a light entertainer before and after me, I realised that one day I, too, had to go there and fashion a few dreams of my own.
It was almost 25 years later, in 1993, when I finally set my two feet firmly in BBC TV Centre for the first time. I was recording a television pilot of the youth-oriented Radio 4 comedy series I appeared in, Doolally Delight, and was to tape a further 12 individual Doolallys in TV Centre over the next five years, my contributions gradually deteriorating in commitment, focus and quality, to the embarrassment of my fellow performers, until the cup of suffering was at last taken forcibly from my lips. But TV Centre itself was every bit as exciting as I'd hoped it would be when I first saw Norris McWhirter's democratically provocative conga line weave through its concrete columns.
When I was a tiny child, my mother had begrudgingly made good on her promise to take me to Disneyland, even though it turned out my fatal brain illness had been misdiagnosed. Thrillingly, a Goofy had waved at me through the Florida haze as it emerged sniffing from a staff toilet cubicle. Goofys, it appeared, were real. But BBC TV Centre knocked Disneyland into a cocked hat in the physical avatar manifestation stakes.
Scurrying around the doughnut daily I soon saw, just going about their business like ordinary people, Alan Yentob, Sue Barker, Barbara Woodhouse and Rory McGrath, to name but four. These real, modern day media Goofys were far more exciting than Disney's ill-defined dog-man hybrid, though Goofy's John Coltrane documentary was more insightful than Alan Yentob's. Sometimes I shared the super-Goofys' canteen, trying discreetly to sit as near as I could to Andrew Graham-Dixon, Lizo Mzimba, Rabbi Lionel Blue or Richard Stilgoe, in the hope of absorbing some of their mysterious powers.
When trying to record comedy shows in front of studio audiences, at BBC TV Centre, the counter-intuitive genius that characterised the building soon became apparent. Three hundred or so disappointed people, who had actually applied for tickets to see Bruce Forsyth's Play Your Cards Right and had already been kept queuing for two hours in the rain with nowhere to get food or drink, were invited in weekly by the Ticket Unit throughout the 90s to sit on plastic pop-up chairs in an aesthetically hostile space and show their audible indifference to anything unfamiliar. It seems to me that TV comedy studio recordings favour dead-eyed autocue gobbling monologists, indifferent to the reality of the room, and penalise proper live performers who are the best really. But the grand old duchess of Shepherd's Bush took me in her dying hand and gently fed me something I had previously never tasted. And that something was called Humility, my friends. And for that alone I will always love her.
It may seem absurd to you that such an instantly recognisable and effortlessly iconic building as BBC TV Centre should be obliterated, as if the optimistic postwar vision of educating, informing and entertaining that it embodied stands for nothing in the modern world. It would perhaps be most fitting if the charred remains of TV Centre were buried under the retail parks, tanning salons and luxury housing developments of the 21st century as quickly as possible. Last weekend, the BBC hosted a whole evening of dreary sentimentalists and weeping salary men crying about TV Centre's collapse, but as the deafening explosion signifying its destruction echoed around west London it spoke to me of a brave new tomorrow, where service providers compete to offer streamlined facilities to a broader range of production outlets, each triangulated towards specifically targeted demographics as outlined in the revised broadcasting remit documentation, at both national and regional level, within a very real virtual thinkspace.
Stewart Lee has curated The Alternative Comedy Experience for Comedy Central, Tuesdays, at 11pm. For new live dates, see stewartlee.co.uk
Stewart Lee
2013-03-31T13:58:15+01:00
Last week I attended the ceremonial destruction of BBC TV Centre, which was enthusiastically blown to pieces in a controlled nuclear explosion by a delighted David Cameron. With one hand on the detonator and the other jiggling in his pocket, David Cameron was flanked by representatives of the principal faith groups, as well as leading commercial broadcasters, free-market economists, wealthy pornographers, and a child who had won a hopping competition. The prime minister triumphantly flobbed a final Green Ernie into the crater, before it was filled with a celebratory cocktail of toxic waste, liquid concrete and dogs' messes. A Red Arrows flypast drowned out the band of the Coldstream Guards, playing a rousing rendition of Phyllis Dillon's Don't Touch Me Tomato, a personal favourite of the reggae-loving prime minister and his family. The fading sun bounced one final time off the smooth golden buttock of TB Huxley-Jones's naked three-metre statue of the former head of entertainment David Liddiment. The media memories of an ungrateful nation sank into a radioactive quagmire of history and animal faeces. We can all remember where we were when BBC TV Centre was finally erased from the tabula rasa of human consciousness. I was being driven through a Paris underpass, watching a documentary about 9/11 on my iPad, and wearing nothing but a rubber JFK mask. But can we remember where we were when we first became aware of TV Centre's existence? Former BBC director general George Entwistle, for example, claims the first he heard of the building was in a memo in November 2012, despite having already worked there daily for two months. My own BBC TV Centre awareness began in 1981, during Roy Castle's BBC children's television show Record Breakers. The fact maven Norris McWhirter was, unusually, standing outside the studio in the distinctive...
Sunday Night At The London Palladium (1955-74 ATV) Youthful Scouse Mod Jimmy Tarbuck, and an already skeletal Bruce Forsythe, host this insanely programmed institution of diamond-honed variety circuit stand-ups, proto-psychedelic beat pop, and people doing weird things with planks. Makes Live At The Apollo look like a content-driven engagement platform.
The Comedians (1971 - 79 Granada) Deftly edited showcase of effortlessly sexist and casually racist Seventies club comics of undeniable skill but no ambition. Their fifty interchangeable quips are interspersed with Dixieland jazz played by white people.
Wheeltappers' and Shunters' Social Club (1974-77 Granada) In a convincing studio mock-up of the sort of Working Men's Club already dying, fag smoke rises and Watneys flows as Bernard Manning and the Frank Skinner-faced Colin Crompton introduce fruity variety, terrible 70s pop, and sometimes unexpectedly palettable pre-Alternative stand-ups. Cannon and Ball's debut is stunning comedy theatre. The usual racist and sexist shit aside, visually and aesthetically this remains a high point of TV stand-up, which I rip off.
Boom Boom Out Go The Lights (1980-81 BBC2) Short-lived, two episode showcase for newfangled "Alternative Comedy", comprising the DNA of the next thirty years of British stand-up. Brightly-lit social workers drinking BBC orange squash fail to process the innovations of Rik and Ade's Dangerous Brothers double act, Pauline Melville, and masked machine-gunman Keith Allen, all inexplicably interspersed with feelgood r'n'b from Paul Jones.
O.T.T. (1982 Central) An over-excited Chris Tarrant reveals his inner-Rugby club social sec, hosting this Janus-faced late night aberration, featuring anti-Thatcher pop bands and communist Alexei Sayle, alongside race hate poster boy Bernard Manning and gratuitous 1970s female nudity, during which the young and unique black British comic Lenny Henry, and the Oxford fine art graduate Helen Atkinson Wood, wilted like whipped dogs.
Saturday Live (1985-88 Channel 4) Blabby Ben Elton shouts over a floodlit sheep-pen of caned casuals, and subtly distances himself from the weird and interesting acts he introduces (such as a brilliant Kevin McAleer with his unequalled owl slide show). Prefiguring the mass modern comedy phenomenon of Failed Irony, Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney scores big with the cash rich Thatcherites it ridicules.
Gas, Comedy Network (C4, Paramount 1997-98) The twin last gasps of straight stand-up on TV in the 20th century, then presumed by executives to "not really work". Endlessly repeated for years on late night cable under the terms of the acts' one-payment buy-out deals, and featuring many stars of the future - Noel Fielding, Lee Mack, Julian Barrat, Jason Byrne, Peter Kay - the shows typify the time when TV stand-up started to feel like worthless one-size fits all filler. Like peasants with free milk we lapped up what they offered us, only to see our virgin sets chopped into differently titled shows, and sliced into 79p audio-only I-tunes clips, for time immemorial.
Live At The Apollo, Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow, Stand Up For The Week (Open Mike Productions, BBC1, C4, 2008 +) Michael McIntyre's management's production outfit dominate the stand-up TV spectrum with a relatively narrow range of acts and approaches, mainly all managed by the production company's parent group and two other big agencies. Mutually masturbatory backroom trade-offs of Masonic complexity inflate their clients' lucrative private corporate gig rates by showing them working in front of vast crowds of laughing people and influential celebrities, which also convince the viewer at home that they are being entertained. Tight six minute sets with little to spook the horses, or with the consensus youth-danger flavor of Stand Up For The Week's ersatz controversialists, characterize three ruthlessly efficient steamroller stand-up vehicles that must, nevertheless, be congratulated for reinvigorating the notion of funny people talking on TV for the new century, even as they kill live club comedy by luring in the alchopop crowd with their TV-induced expectations of post-produced bulletproof content.
The Alternative Comedy Experience (Comedy Central 2013 +) The best stand-up showcase ever made for television places two dozen of the sort of comics broadsheet critics and other comedians rate way above all the shit the public and TV executives like, including the highest ever proportion of women on a TV stand-up show, in a dimly lit Scottish basement. Without any supportive cutaways to laughing claques of no-taste divs, the focus is thrown onto the naked material and the raw performances, not the spectacle and the showbiz. The hard short edits of Granada's The Comedians mesh impossibly with long extended routines in a Wheeltappers' and Shunters' live ambience that eschews the fake bonhomie of the Open Mike Productions showcases for an art house documentary style journey to the flourishing fringes of our rapidly emulsifying TV stand-up scene.
Paul Sinha's ability to spike obsessively detailed sport trivia through artful extended sets detailing the political and social concerns of an out-gay ex-doctor Hindu means club crowds are conned into loving him before they realise they're applauding a textbook liberal.
The low energy Scottish shuffler David Kay sounds like a mumbling old lady, twittering away unnoticed, bit concentrate for a moment and it's clear his uniquely odd worldview has the power to transform the dull mundanities of everyday existence into fascinatingly funny and surreal stories.
Like all the best Irish writers, Eleanor Tiernan sounds like she's bending an unruly English idiom, not historically her own, into service of an essentially Irish vision, a bleak but nonetheless blackly comic view of life, expressed in clipped economic sentences, illuminated with occasional florid flourishes.
Andy Zaltzman, his '60s satirist-shaped brain visibly bulging out of his enormous head, offers dictionary-dense demolitions of global political stupidity with a self-deprecating sleight of hand and a vast vocabulary.
Bridget Christie spouts old-school Eighties style feminist stand-up with a lightness of touch and a playful silliness her female forebears weren't encouraged to entertain, and is the comedian of choice for The South Bank's Women of The World Festival on March 8th.
Hated by crypto-fascist internet trolls the world-wide web over, Josie Long has found a fertile stream of heartfelt yet cuddly anti-capitalist invective, softened by her sentimental streak and occasional lapses into passionate frenzied faux-incoherence.
Stewart Lee
2013-02-01T18:35:11+00:00
Sunday Night At The London Palladium (1955-74 ATV) Youthful Scouse Mod Jimmy Tarbuck, and an already skeletal Bruce Forsythe, host this insanely programmed institution of diamond-honed variety circuit stand-ups, proto-psychedelic beat pop, and people doing weird things with planks. Makes Live At The Apollo look like a content-driven engagement platform. The Comedians (1971 - 79 Granada) Deftly edited showcase of effortlessly sexist and casually racist Seventies club comics of undeniable skill but no ambition. Their fifty interchangeable quips are interspersed with Dixieland jazz played by white people. Wheeltappers' and Shunters' Social Club (1974-77 Granada) In a convincing studio mock-up of the sort of Working Men's Club already dying, fag smoke rises and Watneys flows as Bernard Manning and the Frank Skinner-faced Colin Crompton introduce fruity variety, terrible 70s pop, and sometimes unexpectedly palettable pre-Alternative stand-ups. Cannon and Ball's debut is stunning comedy theatre. The usual racist and sexist shit aside, visually and aesthetically this remains a high point of TV stand-up, which I rip off. Boom Boom Out Go The Lights (1980-81 BBC2) Short-lived, two episode showcase for newfangled "Alternative Comedy", comprising the DNA of the next thirty years of British stand-up. Brightly-lit social workers drinking BBC orange squash fail to process the innovations of Rik and Ade's Dangerous Brothers double act, Pauline Melville, and masked machine-gunman Keith Allen, all inexplicably interspersed with feelgood r'n'b from Paul Jones. O.T.T. (1982 Central) An over-excited Chris Tarrant reveals his inner-Rugby club social sec, hosting this Janus-faced late night aberration, featuring anti-Thatcher pop bands and communist Alexei Sayle, alongside race hate poster boy Bernard Manning and gratuitous 1970s female nudity, during which the young and unique black British comic Lenny Henry, and the Oxford fine art graduate Helen Atkinson Wood, wilted like whipped dogs. Saturday Live (1985-88 Channel 4) Blabby Ben Elton shouts...
Michael Pennington was born in St Helens, Lancashire, in 1971. He gave birth to Johnny Vegas sometime in the early 90’s, after a difficult pregnancy involving pottery, the priesthood and at least one severe beating. Pennington is one of our most misunderstood and maligned talents, and Johnny is one of the greatest comedy characters ever created. Johnny’s live performances, whether they succeed or fail, always do so spectacularly. Despite this, Johnny is best know to the public for his association with a woollen monkey in a series of TV commercials promoting a now bankrupt cable TV supplier. Almost hourly, people in the street shout at him, “Where’s your monkey?” Only once have I seen him crack and reply, “It fucking died!”
I never knew Michael Pennington as Michael Pennington, only as Johnny Vegas, and he’ll be the first to admit that the line between the two burly northern men is blurred. “When I tell people about terrible things that have happened to me, they just seem sad,” he explains, “But if I pretend they’ve happened to Johnny they become hilarious. But sometimes it’s complicated. On Shooting Stars I had to sit there and join in. But Johnny Vegas would have just lost interest, wandered off, come back with a dead rabbit and said, “Look what I’ve found.”” For the purposes of this piece, the Pennington-Vegas phenomenon will be referred to throughout as Johnny.
On location in the Peak District village of Castleton, where he is filming Dead Man Weds, a sit-com written by and staring Phoenix Nights’ Dave Spikey, it is Johnny, not Michael Pennington, whom every passer-by feels entitled to engage in conversation. Moving through any public space with Johnny is a problematic exercise. Everyone wants to shake hands, buy him a drink, or get scraps signed. I have never spent time with a celebrity so genuinely loved, and yet also so unselfconsciously accessible. Nobody leaves Johnny’s orbit without an anecdote or an authenticated fragment. Finally we wrangle him away, and Vegas drinks rum and coke in Castleton pub, turning butts of smoking paraphernalia over in his hands, which are surprisingly small and gentle, like those of a spider monkey, or a young Victorian servant girl.
Johnny’s ongoing presence in newspaper gossip columns, quiz shows and commercials means that although he himself is instantly recognisable, the talent that informs his incendiary live shows remains largely unrecognised. “It’s not my world but that doesn’t stop me passing through,” he protests, “I think anyone who is remotely normal would find it interesting to observe those kind of parties without considering yourself one of the people that ought to be there. The things is though, you go along and you imagine you’re just people watching, but before you realise it, people are watching you.” But to see Johnny live at the Edinburgh fringe in the late 90’s was an unforgettable experience. In some dark, dank room, this gargantuan figure would rage at the audience, often half naked, soaked with spilt pints, demanding their pity, or their respect, forcing them, often out of sheer terror, to enjoy themselves by joining in massed singalongs, whilst he displayed his genuine prowess on the potter’s wheel, creating, as best he could, beautiful clay objects, moulded from muck and beer, within the midst of this maelstrom. Where did this character come from?
“When I was young I did get badly beaten up once and hospitalised. I went through a year of being really timid and I think doing Johnny allowed me to be as confrontational on stage as I’d like to be in real life. I might have been scared in reality, but I’d stand my ground on stage. And a lot of him is like local lads in St Helens where I grew up. You go in their club and they’re dead happy to see you but you only want to have two pints with them, not six. You don’t want to get drawn into it, otherwise it’s, “Come on, sit with me, be my friend, and then watch me reach the point of exploding.”” When Johnny embarks upon free-associating tirades, that often last literally hours, he conjures the same feeling of excitement, fear and hilarity experienced during the desperate revels of just such despairing drinkers. “That’s another drunk-style thing about Johnny,” he explains, “nothing ever gets to a finished point. Drunks think there’s always got to be somewhere else open. Otherwise it’s the horror of going home and living with themselves. Johnny wouldn’t care how much he bored other people. He’d satisfy his own need to be distracted first.”
Was using the potter’s wheel on stage in the early days of the act and attempt to find something delicate in amongst all the violence, despair and anger? “No,” says Johnny, “the pottery was a kind of accident. When I was starting out doing stand-up I accepted a residency somewhere in Manchester and in my blissful ignorance I hadn’t realised people spent years putting their first hour show together. I didn’t have enough material so I just thought of anything I could do to fill the time. I remembered I’d done an arts foundation course and I’d really loved ceramics because I’d had a brilliant teacher. So I brought the Potter’s Wheel on stage. The first time I did it I realised it had a mesmerising, magnetic effect on people. They were amazed I could do it. And the fact that I could actually make pots like I said I could, made them wonder how much else of the act was true. God! He weren’t lying? Maybe he was a Butlin’s redcoat in the 60’s like he says?” The problem with people that come and see my now is they’re not a live comedy crowd. They’re people who want to see someone off the telly. I do what I do and they say, “That’s not what I paid to see. I was expecting stand-up. Not a frightening monster.” I don’t think you can defeat it. You just have to not water down what you do, and not start gearing it towards that kind of audience.”
The Johnny Vegas character has been thoughtfully and carefully drawn to embody blackly hilarious notions of desperation, loneliness and bewilderment. But it’s so convincingly portrayed that, when it encounters an increasingly superficial media, Johnny’s behaviour is portrayed as synonymous with Michael Pennington’s. “What you say on stage becomes a perception of your real life,” Vegas explains, “they won’t draw that line.” Last year some lads shouted out at Johnny on stage, “Why did your wife leave you?” Confronted with such a personal question any stand-up who chose to answer it seriously, or else get angry, would have thrown the gig. Johnny replied, “She didn’t share my belief in sea monsters. I’d be swimming around in the sea looking for them, and she’d get bored.”, brilliantly defusing the whole situation. The next day in the Daily Mirror, this comment was reported as evidence of Michael Pennington’s deteriorating mental state, as had been a previous gig where he had invited men in the audience to lick his nipples, and old Johnny Vegas trick for breaking the ice that fans will have seen him use on stage many times. In the Incredible Hulk film, Eric Bana rampages through the Mojave desert destroying thousands of US army tanks, but he has so far escaped personal censure for this in the pages of the Daily Mirror. That said, I once criticised some friends for saying they had seen Johnny do a shit on stage. I said this was ridiculous and that whilst he may have pretended to do a shit on stage, he wouldn’t actually do a shit on stage. He was a character comedian, an actor playing a role, not a psychopath. I subsequently related this story to Johnny as an example of people’s failure to view Johnny Vegas as a character, but he made a kind of doubtful face, and I decided not to pursue the issue.
The irony is, such stories, whether true or not, add to the myth of Johnny Vegas. Johnny has never been honoured with his own TV vehicle. “TV producers and commissioners come and see the show and love it but when you give them any more in that vein they don’t seem to latch onto it and think you’ve gone too far.”, he concedes. Ben Thompson’s study of British TV comedy in the 90’s, Sunshine on Putty, singles out Channel 4’s failure to commission Johnny’s 1998 pilot as a major downward turning point in British comedy. But, denied of its own TV format, the Johnny Vegas character seems instead to be creating its own narrative in the real world, funnier and more comically tragic than anything a team of writers could contrive.
Earlier this year, Vegas appeared in Sex Lives Of The Potato Men, a film subsequently described as ‘the worst British film ever made’ though presumably, not by people who had seen Love Actually, Shooting Fish or that one with Lee Majors and Bradley Walsh riding around in golf carts. But though being in ‘the worst British film ever made’ might have been a blow for Michael Pennington, there’s something perfect about it for Johnny Vegas. When I went to see Sex Lives Of The Potato Men in Leicester Square the Warner West End ticket machine was broken, and the cashier had give me a handwritten note allowing me access to the film. The very act of going to see Vegas’ film became inherently absurd and this is a typical by-product, somehow, of any of Johnny’s interactions with popular culture. I couldn’t resist ringing him from the largely empty cinema. “It’s the critics,” he said, “they’ve taken to sabotaging the ticket machines now.” But whilst the film’s other stars saw off the flack with various degrees of plausible denial, Vegas, honourably alone, embraced it. “Even when one critic described me as ‘the ugliest man in British cinema’ I still stood by what I’ve done,” he says. “Everyone that read that script wanted to be in it. I don’t moan about it. There are actors in it who’ve tried to distance themselves from it but it’s like stand-up. When they go badly they blame the crowd, and when they go well it’s because they themselves were amazing.”
Vegas may yet become a superstar by doing what he’s actually good at. If not then there remains the consolation that his career will look like some kind of strange art project. Standing alongside soap opera celeb’s in TV listings magazines Johnny, like the skeleton at the feast, renders them all ridiculous, whilst he remains idiotically removed, so low in status that he cannot be harmed, a genius fool. “You can’t touch Johnny because he’s never going to see the sense in taking the blame for anything anyway. That’s another idea drawn from alcoholism too. Everything’s always someone else’s fault. ‘If that butterfly had flapped its wing in Tokyo I’d have got the part in Lord Of The Rings. It’s not my fault.’
The Johnny Vegas character seems entangled in notions of guilt and blame. It’s no surprise that the young Johnny considered training for the Catholic priesthood. “I thought of going into it until the age of ten,” he remembers, “then at 11 I went to seminary, a private school funded and run by the church. The church work out what you can afford and your parents pay it out of shame. The idea was you’ll be a priest, get a taste for the monastic lifestyle of the priesthood – it’s indoctrination really. I don’t want faith through fear. I think it’s about the individual’s acceptance. I thought it was quite good that at the age of 11 I wanted to read George Orwell in bed but they wouldn’t even let me have a reading light because of rules and regulations and I found myself rallying against it. I was the great white hope of the parish and when I said I wasn’t up for it everyone was very disappointed. I was made to feel very special when I wanted to be a priest and everyone was disappointed when I became ordinary again. But I craved the ordinary. I suppose Johnny Vegas is like that. He doesn’t give people what they want. He’s a revolutionary, like Martin Luther, but he doesn’t have anything worked out that he can nail to the church door. Johnny Vegas believes he has something to share but he is constantly humiliated. God is trying to teach Johnny Vegas a lesson, but even the violence doesn’t work on him. You could knock his head in and then he’d just put on baby’s clothes. God is doing it to him. God is saying to Johnny Vegas ‘you are one of the men who deserve to be beaten’. But he’d just tells God he was out of order.”
Does Johnny think God would like the Johnny Vegas act? “God would see that by accident one man has got as much as he can out of misery.”, is all he will say. And what if Johnny Vegas were to do a shit on stage, would God approve of that, would he see it an expression of his love? “Whatever happens,” Johnny Vegas concludes, “I am God’s instrument. Maybe I should have used me own name for some things, and kept Johnny as a character. But I didn’t. And it’s too late now.”
Stewart Lee
2004-12-01T18:18:32+00:00
Michael Pennington was born in St Helens, Lancashire, in 1971. He gave birth to Johnny Vegas sometime in the early 90’s, after a difficult pregnancy involving pottery, the priesthood and at least one severe beating. Pennington is one of our most misunderstood and maligned talents, and Johnny is one of the greatest comedy characters ever created. Johnny’s live performances, whether they succeed or fail, always do so spectacularly. Despite this, Johnny is best know to the public for his association with a woollen monkey in a series of TV commercials promoting a now bankrupt cable TV supplier. Almost hourly, people in the street shout at him, “Where’s your monkey?” Only once have I seen him crack and reply, “It fucking died!” I never knew Michael Pennington as Michael Pennington, only as Johnny Vegas, and he’ll be the first to admit that the line between the two burly northern men is blurred. “When I tell people about terrible things that have happened to me, they just seem sad,” he explains, “But if I pretend they’ve happened to Johnny they become hilarious. But sometimes it’s complicated. On Shooting Stars I had to sit there and join in. But Johnny Vegas would have just lost interest, wandered off, come back with a dead rabbit and said, “Look what I’ve found.”” For the purposes of this piece, the Pennington-Vegas phenomenon will be referred to throughout as Johnny. On location in the Peak District village of Castleton, where he is filming Dead Man Weds, a sit-com written by and staring Phoenix Nights’ Dave Spikey, it is Johnny, not Michael Pennington, whom every passer-by feels entitled to engage in conversation. Moving through any public space with Johnny is a problematic exercise. Everyone wants to shake hands, buy him a drink, or get scraps signed. I have...
If there is anyone I see on TV who makes me laugh on a panel show, I can probably snap up a cheap DVD (maybe for 1p?) of them. But there are two comedians I have always wanted to see live. One was Richard Herring and the other Stewart Lee. They were a great comedy pairing, but arguably funnier apart. And 18 months ago I was due to see Herring at the Hawth Theatre, Crawley. But due to a late invite to a wedding the tickets had to go to a grateful recipient.
If there is anyone I see on TV who makes me laugh on a panel show, I can probably snap up a cheap DVD (maybe for 1p?) of them. But there are two comedians I have always wanted to see live. One was Richard Herring and the other Stewart Lee. They were a great comedy pairing, but arguably funnier apart. And 18 months ago I was due to see Herring at the Hawth Theatre, Crawley. But due to a late invite to a wedding the tickets had to go to a grateful recipient.
But luckily no such invite came my way for Friday, October 13 so I did not have to resent anyone and I got to enjoy Lee - one of Britain's most critically-acclaimed stand-ups. Lee originally wanted his show Content Provider to be based around a 19th-century painting - Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog - but 'then Brexit happened'. The first half of the show at the Hawth - which Lee was keen to point out was the venue with the most unsold tickets - is mainly about Brexit and Lee enjoys directing his comedy at 'the metropolitan liberal elite' in Crawley - we voted Leave remember.
The second half starts in a very clever way (same syntax, different proper nouns) and Lee's views on David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Gary Lineker, Russell Howard, Donald Trump, East Grinstead, bendy bananas, vegetable spiralisers and the under-40s had the audience in roars of laughter.
But the real joy came when the audience did not get a joke - watching Lee point out the audiences' inadequacies is a wonderful thing. Lee mentioned the death of Tommy Cooper and said he wouldn't mind dying like that - but not in Crawley.
And he certainly didn't die on stage tonight - he left the crowd, even the Friends of the Hawth, buzzing.
See this show if you can.
Stewart Lee
2017-10-13T18:20:06+01:00
If there is anyone I see on TV who makes me laugh on a panel show, I can probably snap up a cheap DVD (maybe for 1p?) of them. But there are two comedians I have always wanted to see live. One was Richard Herring and the other Stewart Lee. They were a great comedy pairing, but arguably funnier apart. And 18 months ago I was due to see Herring at the Hawth Theatre, Crawley. But due to a late invite to a wedding the tickets had to go to a grateful recipient. If there is anyone I see on TV who makes me laugh on a panel show, I can probably snap up a cheap DVD (maybe for 1p?) of them. But there are two comedians I have always wanted to see live. One was Richard Herring and the other Stewart Lee. They were a great comedy pairing, but arguably funnier apart. And 18 months ago I was due to see Herring at the Hawth Theatre, Crawley. But due to a late invite to a wedding the tickets had to go to a grateful recipient. But luckily no such invite came my way for Friday, October 13 so I did not have to resent anyone and I got to enjoy Lee - one of Britain's most critically-acclaimed stand-ups. Lee originally wanted his show Content Provider to be based around a 19th-century painting - Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog - but 'then Brexit happened'. The first half of the show at the Hawth - which Lee was keen to point out was the venue with the most unsold tickets - is mainly about Brexit and Lee enjoys directing his comedy at 'the metropolitan liberal elite' in Crawley - we voted Leave remember. The second half starts...
It’s a brave and foolish person who tries to take a photo at a Stewart Lee show. Brave, because you will be singled out and shouted at. Foolish, because what’s the point? Just watch it instead.
Early in tonight’s gig, Lee turns his ire on someone brandishing a phone up on the balcony and it immediately ruins the flow of his routine. Admittedly, it wouldn’t have ruined his flow nearly as much if he hadn’t stopped to point out how much it had ruined his flow. This incident, the first of several such interruptions, is a mirror of his comedy: self-aware to the point of distraction and repetitive to the point of distraction. And yes, that’s kind of the point. Despite a running gag about parents bringing their unsuspecting kids to the show, everyone here must know what they’re in for.
“Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.”
Stewart Lee is in Brighton for four dates on this tour. He’s performing two sets every night, each with a discrete theme and throughline. The first, Tornado, begins a long and winding journey with the amusing discovery that the TV show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was (mistakenly) described by Netflix as being about sharks falling from the sky. The quote above isn’t a spoiler, by the way, and if you’re planning to see the show on this run you’ll be very familiar with it by the end. You know what you’re in for, right?
One of the highlights of the first half hinges on a review written by Alan Bennett in which the playwright earnestly compares Stewart Lee to various obscure academics. It’s a neat section – the sort of thing that Erving Goffman would probably like. Anyway, Lee pulls out a great Yorkshire accent to mimic Bennett’s endearing turns of phrase, and later warps his style brilliantly. Although he rips into the review, it’s clear he’s got lots of respect for the guy. This in itself is refreshing, given how much time is given over to taking potshots at other (lesser) comedians.
We have no idea if the Netflix cock-up ever really happened, but it makes for an entertaining yarn. Lee sometimes seems to get tangled up in random asides, with plenty of self-demeaning anecdotes about ageing, but he knows what’s he doing (and lets you know about it). The first half concludes with him wrapping up these loose ends with a satisfying twist, like one of the better episodes of Columbo. It’s funny and impressive, and it doesn’t even matter that the midpoint finale fails due to a technical hitch.
Lee pads every step of his act with hints about where he’s going with it, and it’s this meticulous structuring that seems to make him so irate at being interrupted by the sight of a mobile phone. But sometimes the fun happens in the gaps. A non-gag in the second half escalates into contagious laughter, which Lee keeps afloat by adeptly berating the audience for laughing at nothing. Which leads to more laughter, and so on. It’s a strange moment, and Lee is loving the absurdity of it. Eventually he has to ask the audience to stop laughing – so he can carry on with his routine. (In the spirit of self-referentiality, we should mention the fact that he asked local press to mention this fact).
The second set is entitled Snowflake, which does a little of what you might expect, and a lot that you won’t. We get some hit-and-run references to Brexit, but the main focus is a defence of political correctness. He makes the very good point that people who think PC politics has “gone mad” have often simply confused it with health and safety legislation. He has fun with this idea, and soon spirals into hilariously extreme imagery. A more sober approach sees him recollecting facets of his younger days to remind us what 70s racism was really like. And it’s an effective message. However, rather than attempting to explore the bizarre civil war that’s erupting in our culture, the show sees him simply reasserting his liberal position. Stewart Lee is exactly what his critics think he is, and he’s fine with that.
Trying to explain the appeal of this comedian would be a fruitless task and the background info required to do so wouldn’t leave much space for anything else. So let’s not go there. Yet without the context of Lee’s thirty-year career, his show wouldn’t function. His material is often about his career, just as much as it is about the material itself. You see where this is going… Commenting on a stand-up show that habitually comments on itself is possibly fruitless as well. We’ve now realised it’s a brave and foolish person who tries to review a Stewart Lee show. Brave, because his shows take the piss out of his reviews. And foolish, because what’s the point? Just watch it instead.
Stewart Lee
2020-02-19T13:31:08+00:00
It’s a brave and foolish person who tries to take a photo at a Stewart Lee show. Brave, because you will be singled out and shouted at. Foolish, because what’s the point? Just watch it instead. Early in tonight’s gig, Lee turns his ire on someone brandishing a phone up on the balcony and it immediately ruins the flow of his routine. Admittedly, it wouldn’t have ruined his flow nearly as much if he hadn’t stopped to point out how much it had ruined his flow. This incident, the first of several such interruptions, is a mirror of his comedy: self-aware to the point of distraction and repetitive to the point of distraction. And yes, that’s kind of the point. Despite a running gag about parents bringing their unsuspecting kids to the show, everyone here must know what they’re in for. “Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.” Stewart Lee is in Brighton for four dates on this tour. He’s performing two sets every night, each with a discrete theme and throughline. The first, Tornado, begins a long and winding journey with the amusing discovery that the TV show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was (mistakenly) described by Netflix as being about sharks falling from the sky. The quote above isn’t a spoiler, by the way, and if you’re planning to see the show on this run you’ll be very familiar with it by the end. You know what you’re in for, right? One of the highlights of the first half hinges on a review written by Alan Bennett in which the playwright earnestly compares Stewart Lee to various obscure academics. It’s a neat section – the sort of thing that Erving Goffman would probably like. Anyway, Lee pulls...
I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them.
My classic “You can prove anything with facts” line, now much beloved by liberal talk radio hosts, was in fact uttered by a driver near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on a summer Sunday morning in 1999, while the interminable “If you say you’re English these days you get arrested and thrown in jail” riff was gifted to me by a cross cabman somewhere between Balls Pond Road and Newington Green in the winter of 2013. The routines were already out there, like Messiaen’s birdsong. All I had to do was listen.
But the past few years have seen slimmer pickings for monetisable reactionary remarks. The average angry person has become more guarded, but the lack of censure of commonsense avatars such as Lee Anderson may, hopefully, embolden unfettered foolishness again. Last month, as we passed the concealed site of the Finsbury town hall nuclear bunker on Rosebery Avenue, a very nice, white, elderly black-cab driver took care not to assume I was heterosexual, asking me if I had a partner of either sex, and then laughing about how you have to do that these days because everything’s gone woke.
It was easy to sympathise with his perception that he wasn’t free to say anything any more, and with his feelings of being blamed for historical attitudes he felt he merely inherited, rather than created. You get old. The world moves on and you’re standing at the side of the road covered in dust and dead leaves and dog shit, agreeing with Nick Ferrari about migrants and enjoying Ricky Gervais’s After Life, while great soggy circles of leaking piss radiate out in incriminating ellipses from the fly of the cream trousers you probably shouldn’t wear any more.
My kids think that I’m reactionary because I sometimes stumble with modern gender terminology. But at their age, I was marching against the homophobic clause 28 – supported by Theresa May – and later had a theatre show picketed by the Christian far right, where tiny children handed out American evangelical comic books saying gay people were going to hell. Today’s LGBTQ+ community owe me their freedoms, but I am yet to receive any formal note of thanks or even a gift voucher.
The driver continued explaining himself as we passed the Halifax bank that I remember as the Pied Bull pub, where my derivative 80s band played its third and final gig. Things change. “I speak as I find,” he found himself saying. “If a black bloke cuts me up I shout: ‘You black bastard!’ at him. I’m not racist. If he was blue I’d shout: ‘You blue bastard!’ It’s the same.” It was at this point our views diverged.
“Yes,” I said, “but there aren’t any blue people, are there? Unless you’ve been overtaken by a Smurf on a moped. And even if you were shouting at a Smurf, calling him a ‘blue bastard’ wouldn’t be the same, because it doesn’t carry the same cultural weight. There’s no history of discrimination against blue people on the basis of their skin colour. Largely because they don’t exist.”
I liked the bloke. I found myself giving him a big tip, I think because he reminded me of my late father who, as I handed the money over in the rain, I suddenly missed dreadfully. Significantly less linguistically cautious than the cab driver, my father had once, and without even breaking a sweat, innocently conjured forth an eight-word sentence that impressively managed to be simultaneously blasphemous, sexist and racist. In fact, it was so relentlessly offensive that the woman it was shouted at probably assumed my father was not entirely well. Today, of course, she might simply assume he was just a rich and untouchable Tory donor, the grateful recipient of millions of pounds worth of NHS contracts.
Another week, and another racism scandal farts out from the dying body politic of this rotting, gaseous corpse of a Conservative government. Seeing Diane Abbott on TV makes the party’s biggest donor “want to hate all black women” and he thinks she “should be shot”. Frank Hester’s remarks were made three years after Jo Cox was actually shot by a white supremacist. But though Hester’s comments have, as usual, been described as “wrong” by any Tory MP self-abasing enough to publicly parrot the party line, they are still chasing the valuable racist vote and dare not give wealthy donors the impression their money will be unwelcome simply because their factory setting is 70s golf-club bar. The party thinks it’s time to “move on”. Be quiet now, black people, and do your work.
At Wednesday’s hotel, I encountered the Daily Telegraph at breakfast, the newspaper equivalent of finding a turd in your Frosties. Opening it, I saw it contained a column by Allison Pearson, the newspaper equivalent of discovering a horrible intestinal parasite still wriggling inside the turd that is the Daily Telegraph.
“Of course Britain is unhappy – it has been taken over by the diversity mob,” says Pearson’s headline. In a presumably deliberately disgusting sidebar the presumably deliberately disgusting columnist, who has said “compassion is the last thing these [Syrian] refugees need”, celebrates adopting a Turkish street cat, which has “a passport she hadn’t chewed up so she could pretend she had been fleeing a war zone”. Looking at Allison Pearson makes me want to hate all white women. I can say that, can’t I? Because you can certainly say it about a black woman. And when that black woman tries to speak in parliament, she will be silenced, disgracefully, while old white men assess her grievance. So in what sense, exactly, has Britain been taken over by the diversity mob?
Stewart Lee
2024-03-17T20:14:14+00:00
I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them. My classic “You can prove anything with facts” line, now much beloved by liberal talk radio hosts, was in fact uttered by a driver near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on a summer Sunday morning in 1999, while the interminable “If you say you’re English these days you get arrested and thrown in jail” riff was gifted to me by a cross cabman somewhere between Balls Pond Road and Newington Green in the winter of 2013. The routines were already out there, like Messiaen’s birdsong. All I had to do was listen. But the past few years have seen slimmer pickings for monetisable reactionary remarks. The average angry person has become more guarded, but the lack of censure of commonsense avatars such as Lee Anderson may, hopefully, embolden unfettered foolishness again. Last month, as we passed the concealed site of the Finsbury town hall nuclear bunker on Rosebery Avenue, a very nice, white, elderly black-cab driver took care not to assume I was heterosexual, asking me if I had a partner of either sex, and then laughing about how you have to do that these days because everything’s gone woke. It was easy to sympathise with his perception that he wasn’t free to say anything any more, and with his feelings of being blamed for historical attitudes he felt he merely inherited, rather than created. You get old. The world moves on and you’re standing at the side of the road covered in dust and dead leaves...
Some of the most memorable sketches featured on Fist of Fun - the cult BBC 2 series created by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring - involved the pair applying their double act dynamic to historical and biblical tales.
Almost a decade later, Lee's Johnson and Boswell - Late but Live feels like a natural progression. It goes without saying that back in the day, Herring would have taken the role of James Boswell while Lee would have assumed the superior air of Samuel Johnson. Here, Miles Jupp and Simon Munnery respectively take on the roles, and the casting proves inspired.
Lee would perhaps blush at the comparison his show invites - after all, Johnson was 'the greatest wit of the age' while he is merely the 41st best stand-up ever. However, when Johnson pours scorn on his host country as an Edinburgh native might pour brown sauce on a deep-fried pizza supper, the two personas merge into a formidable comic creation.
When Johnson reacts with weary contempt to Boswell's gleeful repetition of his best-known witticism, it's easy to see where Lee - haunted as he is by cries of 'moon on a stick' - got his inspiration.
Scotland-bashing makes up a significant proportion of this frequently hilarious hour-long show, which features live drumming, bagpiping and the surprising appearance of a mouth organ. Fortunately, unlike Christian fundamentalists (who took ill-informed umbrage with Jerry Springer - The Opera), the Scots can take a ribbing. Only the roar of approval for mention of a certain airport baggage-handler exceeds the guffaws of laughter.
The 'theatrical' part of the show is perhaps the weakest section, but thanks to its sheer silliness, the use of interminable repetition and a perfectly deflating punchline, it is ultimately a success. The show concludes with a man eating an entire haggis live on stage. What more could discerning Traverse audiences possibly want?
Reviewed at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2007.
Stewart Lee
2007-08-08T19:28:56+01:00
Some of the most memorable sketches featured on Fist of Fun - the cult BBC 2 series created by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring - involved the pair applying their double act dynamic to historical and biblical tales. Almost a decade later, Lee's Johnson and Boswell - Late but Live feels like a natural progression. It goes without saying that back in the day, Herring would have taken the role of James Boswell while Lee would have assumed the superior air of Samuel Johnson. Here, Miles Jupp and Simon Munnery respectively take on the roles, and the casting proves inspired. Lee would perhaps blush at the comparison his show invites - after all, Johnson was 'the greatest wit of the age' while he is merely the 41st best stand-up ever. However, when Johnson pours scorn on his host country as an Edinburgh native might pour brown sauce on a deep-fried pizza supper, the two personas merge into a formidable comic creation. When Johnson reacts with weary contempt to Boswell's gleeful repetition of his best-known witticism, it's easy to see where Lee - haunted as he is by cries of 'moon on a stick' - got his inspiration. Scotland-bashing makes up a significant proportion of this frequently hilarious hour-long show, which features live drumming, bagpiping and the surprising appearance of a mouth organ. Fortunately, unlike Christian fundamentalists (who took ill-informed umbrage with Jerry Springer - The Opera), the Scots can take a ribbing. Only the roar of approval for mention of a certain airport baggage-handler exceeds the guffaws of laughter. The 'theatrical' part of the show is perhaps the weakest section, but thanks to its sheer silliness, the use of interminable repetition and a perfectly deflating punchline, it is ultimately a success. The show concludes with a man eating an entire...
Stewart Lee made his name in the mid-nineties as one half of radio duo Lee and Herring, but today he is best known for his BBC Two stand-up series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.
WHAT IS THE SHOW ABOUT?
A Room With A Stew is a way for Stewart Lee to test new material, most of which will make it into the fourth series of his BAFTA nominated BBC Two series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which began in 2009 and will return Spring 2016 for a fourth (and possibly final) series.
The show is very much a work in progress, and with 180 minutes worth of material ready to go, Stewart only uses 70 minutes of it in Edinburgh, meaning that no two shows are ever the same.
REVIEW
Stewart Lee isn’t, never has been, and never will be a traditional stand-up. Each joke is deconstructed in such a way that you can’t just sit back and let it wash over you, and that’s what I admire about him as a performer.
He began the show by informing us that as he was 5 minutes late, (probably down to the fact there were A LOT of people to get into the Assembly Hall), the show would end at 3:30pm instead of 3:25pm and that it was a 70 minute show, with a 10 minute opener and two 30 minute segments.
He made it very clear that this is a work-in-progress and that he’s still deciding what to include into his next series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. So much so that he was undecided as to what the second half will be about, the options were ‘Urine’ or ‘Islamaphobia’.
Before that, he had some other business to attend to… Graham Norton, who beat him to win the Best Comedy BAFTA earlier on this year. But he’s fine with it, he doesn’t care. And by “doesn’t care” he means cares a great deal and spends the best part of 20 minutes explaining why he should have won the BAFTA instead of Graham Norton. Whilst told in jest, I can’t help but feel that there is some truth there, and Stewart Lee genuinely can’t understand why he didn’t win.
What Stewart has always done really well, is interact with the audience, sure he’s not nice to them, but somehow that has them eating out of the palm of his hands even more. Today he told someone in the front row off for looking at his watch, he told the left side of the audience that they didn’t “get him” and that’s why they’re not laughing and had a mini-breakdown when just over halfway through the show a couple decided that enough was enough and ran out the door.
Luckily I was on the right hand side, the side that “got him”, but that didn’t stop him having a go. Oh no, he said that this was the worst audience he’d ever had and even told us where we went wrong. He’d tell us that we laughed at the wrong moment and that we clapped when we should have laughed, and that we were a bit slow.
If this was any other comedian, I’m not sure they’d be able to get away with it but there’s something about Stewart’s charm that makes the moments he rips into the audience
All in all it was an outstanding show and a great start to my Fringe experience this year. The one downside (but not worth him losing a star over) was when he made a joke about the high suicide rate amongst comedians, and essentially blaming us (a bad audience) for Robin Williams’ death. Aside from that it was an absolute pleasure to see him live and I’d highly recommend going to see him.
A Room With A Stew runs in Edinburgh, at The Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until Sunday 30th August and you can buy tickets here. A Room With A Stew will also tour at the Leicester Square Theatre season in London from September 2015 until January 2016 before moving onto Marathon Nights at the South Bank.
Stewart Lee
2015-08-25T00:21:33+01:00
WHO? Stewart Lee made his name in the mid-nineties as one half of radio duo Lee and Herring, but today he is best known for his BBC Two stand-up series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. WHAT IS THE SHOW ABOUT? A Room With A Stew is a way for Stewart Lee to test new material, most of which will make it into the fourth series of his BAFTA nominated BBC Two series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which began in 2009 and will return Spring 2016 for a fourth (and possibly final) series. The show is very much a work in progress, and with 180 minutes worth of material ready to go, Stewart only uses 70 minutes of it in Edinburgh, meaning that no two shows are ever the same. REVIEW Stewart Lee isn’t, never has been, and never will be a traditional stand-up. Each joke is deconstructed in such a way that you can’t just sit back and let it wash over you, and that’s what I admire about him as a performer. He began the show by informing us that as he was 5 minutes late, (probably down to the fact there were A LOT of people to get into the Assembly Hall), the show would end at 3:30pm instead of 3:25pm and that it was a 70 minute show, with a 10 minute opener and two 30 minute segments. He made it very clear that this is a work-in-progress and that he’s still deciding what to include into his next series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. So much so that he was undecided as to what the second half will be about, the options were ‘Urine’ or ‘Islamaphobia’. Before that, he had some other business to attend to… Graham Norton, who beat him to win the Best Comedy BAFTA earlier on this year. But he’s fine with it, he doesn’t care. And by “doesn’t care” he means cares...
KING ROCKER - SKY ARTS FREE TO AIR (Freeview Channel 11) - SAT FEB 6TH 9PM
Please look after yourselves in the ongoing unknown world and don’t take any unnecessary risks.
Keep fit and keep your brains ticking over with books and films and music and don’t get sad and mad.
Look out for each other.
I appreciate it’s easier for a financially insulated champagne socialist like me to be optimistic.
We have all lost loved ones. I believe that when this is over live comedy and music will feel better than they ever have, and that is all I can offer.
So let’s make sure we are all there post-Covid to join in the Bacanalian rites of THE NEW JAZZ AGE.
1) LIVE DATES NEWS
You know as much as I do.
All my little club dates for Feb will be in the process of being pulled and re-scheduled.
The venues have your money, not me, and although I am sure loads of you could do with it, if you can let these clubs hang on to it for now it could mean the difference between them surviving and going under.
Support The Brixton Windmill. And all independent venues.
We all want a world of live art to go back to.
If major tour dates are moved all the same applies. Thank-you for your patience.
I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point.
2) KING ROCKER DOC - FEB 6TH ON SKY ARTS AT 9PM ★★★★★
The funny and uplifting anti-rockumentary about THE NIGHTINGALES band that I and Michael Cumming (Toast, Brass Eye) made w Fire records, KING ROCKER, replaces it’s covid-wrecked cinema run with a screening on free to air SKY ARTS (Freeview Channel 11) on Saturday Feb 6th at 9pm.
Everyone seems to love it.
You will have to watch it live in real time, old school, as it goes out, like it was 2004 or something.
It includes nostalgic film of people packed together and laughing in a variety of places, inside and outside, and offers a message of hope and survival to humanity.
Yes. Really.
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits, as have NETFLIX, the utter bastards.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
To try and promote King Rocker I have been pimping myself about on every Podcast going, alone or with dir M Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast), saying the same things in the same room in the same clothes to all different people, all of whom were very kind.
I don’t know what a podcast is really but I think you go on the internet and click on something.
As my grandfather once said, in 1983, “Do you know, in America, there are shops that only sell Kentucky Fried Chicken?” I enjoyed being on the internet with all these people enormously, but will put some blue water between me and the next wedge.
David Baddiel told me it was good to be on the internet, though. These are available..
KERMODE ON FILM
Dir Michael Cumming and I discuss King Rocker with Britain’s top film guru and skiffle enthusiast, who has been very supportive of the no-budget project.
Andy Miller and John Michinson’s long running and much loved books podcast. I discuss the waspish poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks with them, Nicky Birch and Jennifer Hodgson.
This is a marvellous ongoing Podcast which is unashamedly civilised in an unenlightened era, and this episode is full of great writing, batshit radiophonic music and clever women.
North London echo chamber fun sure to irk people of all political persuasions with the forensically-minded folk devil for the far right and snowflake do-gooder Owen Jones, and me, talking about King Rocker and more general stuff. His current run of ‘casts has some great guests.
Informed Wolverhampton-based comedy and music enthusiast of uncommon warmth and knowledge talks to me about KING ROCKER and what the Gray Pays ‘n’ Bacon are like at the Great Western pub.
I asked Adam if I could go on this massively popular podcast and he said yes which was very kind of him. It was fun hearing his Mark E Smith story from the horse’s mouth and he asked me hard questions of the type I usually avoid.
I answer questions from various utterly delightful members of the Idler’s thoughtful middle class readership from their wine and book filled homes.
They are the real stars here! You will emerge from watching this in love with at least one of them.
Sometime in March you will be able to hear me eat a really lovely Sri Lankan mutton curry from the Kolama restaurant, Soho, with bon viveur jazz pianist Jay Rayner. (I see how this works now!)
This is the most showbiz thing I have ever done, and I am glad it was with jazzy Jay Rayner.
This is a new series of docu-chats on different esoteric subjects.
You have to pay for them because they are finished pieces of work not just some fuckers talking or wandering about.
I have appeared on three of them - on Hawkwind, Penda’s Fen and John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy.
An actual physical 12” EP of Asian Dub Foundation(feat. Stewart Lee)‘s Brexit day number 1 Comin’ Over Here will be out on March 26th and can be pre-ordered here...
Brilliantly, higher shipping costs on ADF’s Anti-Brexit anthem are due to...Brexit, but they will try and circumvent this.
The remixes are of other bits of the Paul Nuttalls routine and work great.
I can’t believe how well the ADF’s made this work. I was their mere tool.
6) Big Wow Badges
Cool Scottish punk-pin badge makers Big Wow Badges are shutting down at the end of Feb, so this is your last chance to buy the fabulous badges they made, some related to my material over the last decade and a half, and any others of their amazing art and lit designs.
Thanks Big Wow Badges! You made an old man very happy. Good luck in whatever you do next.
Surely, by now, you have lost someone you loved directly to the virus, or to the knock-on effects of ICU hospital beds being occupied by victims, etc. I know I have! But some people in high profile positions - the usual X-Men Of Twats to be honest (T Young, A Pearson, J Hartley-Brewer etc) - remain sceptical about Covid.
We can all do our bit to help save lives by spreading the following website of true facts around.
Some clever bloke writes...
“The Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it an avalanche of misinformation.
A number of myths have persisted that suggest Covid isn't particularly dangerous, or that governments shouldn't try to contain the virus with lockdowns and other distancing measures.
We call the people who promulgate these myths even after they have been disproved "Covid Sceptics". Some have claimed that the number of infections is much lower than it really has been, or that health systems were under less strain than they really were, or that the fatality rate and number of deaths were lower than they have been in reality.
Some have been sceptical that a population-wide policy response to this virus is needed. Many of them have made persistently inaccurate forecasts, repeated long-disproven claims, or engaged in faulty reasoning. The arguments made by Covid Sceptics are frequently misleading, misconceived, or based on misunderstandings of the evidence.
We believe these mistaken arguments are often dangerous, since they might lead people—or entire countries—to take fewer precautions against this deadly virus.
This website is dedicated to debunking common Covid Sceptic arguments, and highlighting the track record of some of the most influential and consistently-wrong Covid Sceptics.
We mostly focus on UK-based people, since most of this site's creators are UK-based as well.
We hope you'll link to our site whenever you see these common arguments appear.”
This year’s Bristol Festival of Slapstick Comedy has gone on line and I will be doing an Ince-chaired event on 6th March at 8pm choosing my favourite moments of Slapstick comedy.
I am all about the slapstick, as you will know from when my trousers fell down at The Bristol Hall Of Slavers in 2016. £6. https://slapstick2021.eventive.org/welcome
The ‘Stuart Lee’ referred to on the site is me, yes.
10) STEVE BERESFORD BOOK
I wrote the intro to Andy Hamilton’s hefty new study of the musician Steve Beresford, Pianos, Toys, Music & Noise.
Maybe ask your local library to stock it or your dad to buy it! Here’s the info.
Steve is a major player in the second wave of British Free Improvisation, a lynchpin of the current scene, and a punk era collaborator with The Flying Lizards, Prince Far-I and The Slits.
He, I and Tania Chen toured Britain over the last decade performing John Cage’s Indeterminacy, and Steve appears playing toys and objects with me and Tania in King Rocker.
Comedy fans will know him as ‘man playing organ’ in a The Day Today sketch about executions, and as the director of music on Vic Reeves’ unnecessarily good album.
11) I Arrogantly Recommend
NEW FILMS
Ronnie’s, Ronnie Scott & His World Famous Jazz Club (Oliver Murray)
The Dig (Simon Stone) ★★★★★
NEW TV
Ghosts S2 (BBC, 2020)
Ghosts - Xmas Special 2020 (BBC, 2020) The Mandalorian S2 (Disney, 2020) ★★★★★ Call My Agent S3 (France 2, 2018)★★★★★
Call My Agent S4 (France 2, 2021) ★★★★★
The Trump Show (BBC, 2020-1)★★★★★
NEW RECORDS
Lady Leshurr - Quaranqueen
The Primevals - New Trip
Cult Figures - Deritend Vapour Trails - Celestial Scuzz ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - Before Computers (demos)
NEW OLD RECORDS
V/A - Rough Guide To Avant-Garde Japan
Guided by Voices - Live At Irving Plaza (1996)
Damo Suzuki & Echo Ensemble - Live @ Green Door (2013) Heavenly - A Bout De Heavenly (1989-1996)
Martin Stone - Down But Not Out In Paris and London (1992-2013)
John Russell & Terry Day - Russell & Day (1979?)
Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts & Terry Day - At LTC (1972?) Sonny Rollins - Rollins In Holland (1967) ★★★★★
FOOD
Kolamba Sri Lankan restaurant, Soho, London
MY OLD NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR - ARE WE EUROPE MAG
Last month I recommended a micro-brewery set up by my old next door neighbour’s son, so I hope you bought some beer.
This month I am recommending something by my other old next door neighbour.
Not all my old next door neighbors are creative geniuses. One of my former next door neighbours, Tony Campino, ran a company producing Standard 8mm movies of a specialized nature, but that was 45 years before I moved in.
Anyway, this month’s former neighbour’s project is ARE WE EUROPE, a beautifully produced, luxuriously illustrated and thoughtfully written book-sized magazine of the type we old folk think they don’t make any more, focusing on climate, the colonial legacy and other major issues of NOW, and assembled by clever talented young people who give you hope for the future. There!
Adam Schlesinger (Fountain of Wayne) (1967)
John Prine (outlaw country singer) (1946)
Henry Grimes (jazz bassist) (1935)
Dave Mountfield (Ornate Johnson) (1970)
Hal Wilner (arranger) (1957)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Goodie) (1940)
Lee Konitz (jazz saxophonist) (1927)
Matthew Seligman (Soft Boy) (1955) Millie Small (ska singer) (1946)
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk robot) (1947)
Bill Rieflin (drummer for hire) (1960)
Hugh McKenna (Tear Gas pianist) (1949)
Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounder) (1942) Astrid Kirchherr (photographer) (1938)
Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra saxophonist) (1947)
Aubrey Burl (archaeologist) (1926)
Phil May (Pretty Thing) (1944) The Clacton Fin Whale (circa 2000)
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (artist) (1930) Doll Tor stone circle (3300 BC)
Kay Carroll (The Fall) (1948)
Bob the Cat (73 bus) (2006) Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew)
Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959)
Carl Reiner (director) (1922)
Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928)
Keith Tippett (jazz pianist) (1947)
Jimmy Cobb (jazz drummer) (1929) Barbara Smoker (Humanist) (1923)
The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
Tony Elliot (Time Out) (1942) Judy Dyble (folk singer) (1949)
Peter Green (blues guitarist) (1946)
Emitt Rhodes (power pop auteur) (1950) Annie Ross (jazz bohemian) (1930)
Joe Ruby (Scooby-Doo) (1933)
Craig Weatherhill (folklorist) (1950)
Don Weller (jazz saxophonist) (1940)
Simeon Coxe (Silver Apple) (1938) Diana Rigg (Avenger) (1938)
Toots Hibbert (reggae got soul) (1942)
Dele Fadele (carry bag man) (1962)
George Jeffrie (man’s-laughter maker) (1964)
Dave Kusworth (Brum punk Stone) (1960)
Gary Peacock (jazz bassist) (1935)
Doorkins (Southwark Cathedral Cat) (2005?)
Spencer Davis (Brumbeat pioneer) (1939)
Bunny Lee (dubmaster) (1940) The Cubbington Pear Tree (1770)
Fungie The Dingle Dolphin (1979) Jill Paton Walsh (humanist novelist) (1937)
Val Warner (poet) (1946)
Guy N Smith (Lord of The Crabs) (1939)
Richard Corben (decadent cartoonist) (1940)
David Johnson (Duke of Soho) (1960)
Leslie West (Mountain man) (1945)
- 2021 - Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Celia Drummond Ford (voice of Trees) (1950)
John Russell (guitar guru) (1954)
Marcel Uderzo (Asterisk artist) (1933)
Tom Stevens (Long Ryder and Magus) (1956)
Dougie Anderson (Coda’s Edinburgh record dealer) (1952)
Stewart Lee
2021-01-30T19:00:17+00:00
KING ROCKER - SKY ARTS FREE TO AIR (Freeview Channel 11) - SAT FEB 6TH 9PM Please look after yourselves in the ongoing unknown world and don’t take any unnecessary risks. Keep fit and keep your brains ticking over with books and films and music and don’t get sad and mad. Look out for each other. I appreciate it’s easier for a financially insulated champagne socialist like me to be optimistic. We have all lost loved ones. I believe that when this is over live comedy and music will feel better than they ever have, and that is all I can offer. So let’s make sure we are all there post-Covid to join in the Bacanalian rites of THE NEW JAZZ AGE. 1) LIVE DATES NEWS You know as much as I do. All my little club dates for Feb will be in the process of being pulled and re-scheduled. The venues have your money, not me, and although I am sure loads of you could do with it, if you can let these clubs hang on to it for now it could mean the difference between them surviving and going under. Support The Brixton Windmill. And all independent venues. We all want a world of live art to go back to. If major tour dates are moved all the same applies. Thank-you for your patience. I am planning on re-writing the SNOWFLAKE half of SNOWFLAKE TORNADO to reflect our drastically altered world and will make as good a recording as possible of the abandoned original SNOWFLAKE available at some point. 2) KING ROCKER DOC - FEB 6TH ON SKY ARTS AT 9PM ★★★★★ The funny and uplifting anti-rockumentary about THE NIGHTINGALES band that I and Michael Cumming (Toast, Brass Eye) made w Fire records, KING ROCKER, replaces it’s covid-wrecked...
In life we all have different guises. There are times at work where we have to dress up our serious side and play the professional. Then at home we can kick off this costume and return to our default role of leading goofball. I mean, this blog I write is another form of characterisation: it is and isn’t me. Despite being far from articulate on this, I’m far more articulate here than I am in real life. In my day-to-day existence I couldn’t hold an audience for five minutes; I don’t have the verbosity to hold someone’s attention. But on here, I have time to pause, to think, to hone and check before pushing send. I don’t see your faces when you read this. Therefore, I’m unconcerned by what you think of me; consequently, I write more personally and honestly about art, religion and politics. In real life I wouldn’t challenge someone on what they watch, practice or think because I’d be worried about hurting someone’s feelings. Herein, lies the pleasure of the arts: it allows you to present your opinions without seeing the reactions of others.
Stewart Lee is a comedian and character. In real-life he is avuncular, a paroxysmal laugher, satisfied with the success he's attained. On stage he is something else: embittered and strained, dissatisfied with the level he's reached. Lee is going through something of a renaissance with this the fourth series of his Comedy Vehicle. No comedian, other than Russell Howard, has had a show devoted to their stand-up for such a sustained period of time (even then Howard’s is more of a magazine show with content deliberately unitised for YouTube viewing). Lee, on the other hand, is a comic that doesn’t ‘chunk’ routines for easy edification- his work will not go viral. Rather, he plots his work with the precision of a playwright: lines that appear inconsequential at the beginning will resonate by the end. Creator of TV masterpiece The Wire, David Simon was once asked his philosophy on screenwriting; his response, ‘Fuck the casual viewer.’ Lee is the same: he is not interested in people who have one eye on Mock The Week whilst they play Candy Crush on their phone, instead he wants people that will invest time in him and be rewarded for their patience. He is the closest thing comedy comes to theatre.
Lee nearly lost patience with stand-up altogether. Following his successful 90's partnership with Richard Herring, he found himself in a rut. His stand-up was regarded without being celebrated. The routines he wrote were well crafted with a Dali eye for the surreal, but they were no masterpieces. By Lee’s own admission, his character didn’t make sense when he was young. People thought he was too precocious, too studenty to be taken seriously. Considering a move away from comedy, he collaborated with Richard Thomas on Jerry Springer: the Opera, a smash hit that was enjoyed by Joe Public and Seb Critic. Unfortunately, a payday was to elude Lee with the Christian-right picketing the show, crying blasphemy. The ensuing lawsuit ate into Lee's profits, leaving him disconsolate. Unwilling to be silenced, Lee took his rage to the stage, turning in a bravura performance in his show 90’s Comedian. Lee begins the show by drawing a circle in chalk around him, a move conceived by Medieval clowns to protect themselves from heresy. Lee proceeds to use his freedom to rail against the restrictive thinking of the Church. The fact that this is done with a closing 40 minute routine that sails so close to blasphemy that the audiences goodwill could capsize at anytime makes it a career turning-point, proving that people could be receptive to long-form jokes.
Lee is now one of the most venerated comedians on the circuit. In a Channel 4 poll he ranked 41 in the World’s Best Stand-Up Comedians – just one place behind Bernard Manning. If only he was more racist. He regularly sells out his tour show, writes a weekly column for The Guardian and is the (self) appointed spokesperson for alternative comedy. Comedians such as John Robins argue that this position is undeserved: Lee’s Second Coming has made him rich, which makes his stand against commercial comedy ring hollow. This is true to an extent: I remember seeing Lee play the Channel 4 sponsored Udderbelly venue in Edinburgh 2007, yet today he attacks comedians that play the big venues. On the other hand, he has used his name to promote other comedians through his curated show, The Alternative Comedy Experience, in which left-field acts have gained screen time on Comedy Central. Despite his growing reputation, Lee’s persona comes from the resentment of his wilderness years. The fact he is now critically acclaimed doesn’t make it any better. Instead of objecting to no one liking him, he now objects to the people who don’t get him. Why when he’s got a loyal following are some people not on board? Why when he’s getting 5 star reviews do people write in to the BBC to tell him his show isn’t funny? Why when he’s clearly a genius do people think he’s incompetent?
Lee’s genius lies in using these slights to make his arrogance more palatable. His recent show begins with a joke that falls flat. He turns to the camera and makes a play out of it, remarking, ‘Where do they get this crowd from? Normally, my audience would go ‘Ha, Ha! Imagine liking Mock The Week.’ Lee has orchestrated his own downfall to make his ensuing pomposity seem less cruel and more ridiculous. In reminding the audience he is against the ropes, they root for him when he hits back. (I don’t know James Corden personally, but he’s always going on in interviews about how brilliant I am. And the feeling is not reciprocated. Britain’s loss is America’s loss also). Lee has cultivated too strong a following to ever be up against it: he is Ali, feigning rope-a-dope to floor his opponents.
For the comedians on the end of Lee's ire, he is a traitor: comedy is a hard enough fight without its participants turning on one another. For me and many of Lee’s fans, it is refreshing: many of his millionaire targets have made their money through selling cheap observations, therefore it’s gratifying to see them pay the price for this. Opponents would argue that Lee’s televisual status makes these attacks nasty and pernicious - Lee Mack being one- but Lee is no household name: if you showed the casual viewer a picture of him, they would say, ‘Terry Christian has let himself go. Leonardo DiCaprio has let himself go. Todd Carty has let himself go. Morrissey has let himself go. KD Lang has let herself go.’ They wouldn’t know who he is. He remains an obscure figure. As long as that stays the same, he is well within his right to stand outside the tent and piss in.
Even though I love Stewart Lee, I cannot guarantee you will like him. I think this fact alone indicates why he is an artist and not an entertainer. Artists write for themselves; entertainers for an audience. Stewart Lee is not an entertainer. His Comedy Vehicle is not entertainment. But only a fool would deny that it isn’t comedy.
Stewart Lee
2016-03-06T11:51:27+00:00
In life we all have different guises. There are times at work where we have to dress up our serious side and play the professional. Then at home we can kick off this costume and return to our default role of leading goofball. I mean, this blog I write is another form of characterisation: it is and isn’t me. Despite being far from articulate on this, I’m far more articulate here than I am in real life. In my day-to-day existence I couldn’t hold an audience for five minutes; I don’t have the verbosity to hold someone’s attention. But on here, I have time to pause, to think, to hone and check before pushing send. I don’t see your faces when you read this. Therefore, I’m unconcerned by what you think of me; consequently, I write more personally and honestly about art, religion and politics. In real life I wouldn’t challenge someone on what they watch, practice or think because I’d be worried about hurting someone’s feelings. Herein, lies the pleasure of the arts: it allows you to present your opinions without seeing the reactions of others. Stewart Lee is a comedian and character. In real-life he is avuncular, a paroxysmal laugher, satisfied with the success he's attained. On stage he is something else: embittered and strained, dissatisfied with the level he's reached. Lee is going through something of a renaissance with this the fourth series of his Comedy Vehicle. No comedian, other than Russell Howard, has had a show devoted to their stand-up for such a sustained period of time (even then Howard’s is more of a magazine show with content deliberately unitised for YouTube viewing). Lee, on the other hand, is a comic that doesn’t ‘chunk’ routines for easy edification- his work will not go viral. Rather, he...
DOWNLOAD ‘PRINCE ANDREW IS A SWEATY NONCE’ BY THE KUNTS BY MINDNIGHT THURSDAY JUNE 2ND FOR JUBILEE CHART NO 2 SLOT VICTORY. https://princeandrew.info
‘The only time I wanna see ‘big break’ and ‘Stewart Lee’ in the same sentence, will also involve his spinal column’ - Centerist Thug, Twitter
WOKE SO-CALLED ‘COMEDIAN’ T-SHIRT
There has never been a wokier time to own a wokely fabricated Stewart Lee ‘Woke so-called ‘comedian’’ leisure garment.
Woke so-called' 'comedian' 'Stewart Lee' says - "As all alt right journalists know, the best way to invalidate a word is to put it in inverted commas.
But if I was Vladimir Putin I'd want my money back! Celebrate the paucity of traditional alt right arguments against woke comedy with this irksome 'so-called' comedian shirt, manufactured in the wokest way possible with the wokest materials available."
Made on Anthem Organic Tee Shirts who are a UK based ethical tee shirt manufacturer. They cost £20,00 each and will start shipping from 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.
WOKE T-SHIRT OFFER CLOSES END OF MAY SO ORDER BEFORE THEN OR FACE A DELAY AS THE BLOKE MAKING THEM GOES OFF ON TOUR WITH A PSYCHEDELIC BAND
I will be launching a new Stand-up tour, BASIC LEE, in the Summer/Autumn of 2022.
Edinburgh previews (Aug), London (Sept – Dec) and 2023 dates on sale – more touring dates to be added.
LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE
Tues - Sat from Sept 20th to Dec 17th 2022
(EXCEPT Oct 18th - 29th and Nov 11th)
7pm (4pm performance Saturday 12th 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
Two shows, on sale March 3rd. 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) - 3rd – 27th August (days off 15th & 16th 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.
The Stand’s New Town Theatre (Grand Hall), 1.50pm (13.50hrs) - 3rd – 28 August (days off 15th & 16th 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!!!!
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.
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 (21st-24th 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 and a Delia Derbyshire Day.
It has been a comms failure by me not to tell you I wrote the intro for this republication of the lost ‘60s classic The Bloater by literature’s new favourite witch-queen of the radiophonic workshop, Rosemary Tonks, and it’s a doozy. Get It Here
'Should The Bloater be republished?
Oh God, absolutely, it's fantastic' - Stewart Lee. Min works at the BBC as an audio engineer, where she is struggling to replicate the sound of a heartbeat. At home, other matters of the heart are making a mockery of life as Min knows it. Min has found herself the object of her lodger's affection. An internationally renowned opera singer she's nicknamed 'The Bloater', Min is disgusted and attracted to him in equal measure. But with a husband so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off on him even when he's still in the room, Min can't quite bring herself to silence The Bloater's overtures. Vain, materialistic, yet surprisingly tender, The Bloater is a sparklingly ironic comedy of manners for all flirtatious gossips who love to hate and hate to love.
'A wonderfully unromantic romantic comedy' - Daily Telegraph
'Uncommonly good' - Guardian
'It is the perfect aperitif, makes you feel warm and careless and much, much happier' - The Times
8. KUNT & THE GANG - PRINCE ANDREW IS A SWEATY NONCE
The forces of neo-fascism conspire to eliminate the channels available to our cheeky Essex electro-punk satirists Kunt & The Gang, now known as The Kunts, as they seek to promote their jubilee single Prince Andrew Is A Sweaty Nonce.
The group have realised there is no way this would be allowed to be the Jubilee no 1 and are wisely aiming for the no 2 slot.
You need to d/l by the end of play Thursday June 2nd.
FOR JUBILEE No.2!
What sort of person would support this?
A certain sort of person. The sort of person who believes that people in positions of power should be held to account for their seedy crimes and shouldn’t be able to use their wealth, status and connections to pay for things to go away.
FAQs for a certain sort of person
Why Jubilee Number 2?
Because let’s face it, even if we did sell enough records they’d never let it be Number 1 anyway!
How can I be most effective come 27 May?
DOWNLOAD - STREAM - SHARE
The most effective way to make yourself count is to:
1. Download all the versions on as many platforms as you are able to. Links at https://princeandrew.info
2. Stream our carefully curated playlists on a premium streaming account. links above.
3. Keep sharing, commenting and spreading the word before and throughout the week of release [try and include www.princeandrew.info #PrinceAndrew and #Jubilee every time you post]. Share screenshots when you have downloaded. Go on Jubilee groups and message boards and share the video.
We realise times are hard and not everyone will be able to afford to do everything so anything you can manage is greatly appreciated and will make a difference.
4. Join the mailing list above - we don’t pester you with a barrage of emails, it just means that you will find out key info that gets lost on social media due to algorithms.
5. Change your social media Avatar to show your support - it really helps spread awareness. The more people do it, the more people see it.
I’m completely skint. what can I do to support the cause?
1. Stream our carefully curated playlists on a free-trial premium streaming account. Set a reminder to cancel when the week has finished.
2.. Tell your friends. If you can’t share on your socials, share with WhatsApp groups and contacts. Every single time you mention it to someone else, it makes a difference.
When do sales open?
0.01 on Friday May 27. They close on 23.59 Thursday June 2.
What’s your strategy?
There are 10 different versions of Prince Andrew Is A Sweaty Nonce available for download at 59p each (the cheapest retail price for a single track). If you download all 10 versions, they are added together to count as 10 sales for the main chart, making your vote 10x more powerful, all for the price of a City Centre pint (or 2 pints in Spoons). If you get them on 2 platforms, that counts as 20 sales.
The 24/7 streaming playlists you can leave running all week. On a premium streaming account 100 streams = 1 sale (600 streams on a free account).
There are limits on how many streams count towards the main chart but streaming 24/7 adds millions of streams to the main platforms and makes the song more visible to casual browsers.
DON’T LET THE ESTABLISHMENT SWEEP IT UNDER THE CARPET!
10 VERSIONS COUNT AS 10 SALES IN THE CHART. AT ONLY 59p EACH, PLEASE DOWNLOAD ALL 10!
24/7 STREAMING PLAYLIST LINKS:
Links to our carefully curated Streaming playlists:
Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and Apple Music are all doing a month’s free Premium trial for new members.
+++STREAMING TIPS to maximise your impact+++
1. Please stream 24/7 from now until Friday 3 June. 100 Premium account streams = 1 sale (600 non premium)
2. Don’t Mute your Playlist, have it on low or headphones.
3. If there is a crossfade (there is on Spotify) turn it up to maximum
4. Check your playlist every few hours / half day to check it is still going.
9. THE LADY MACBETH GUIDE TO AMBITION - STEFAN STERN
If you are a woke snowflake you have more than likely read a few articles by my friend the political journalist Stefan Stern and thought, “Oooh. I agree the fuck out of that.”
So why not help crowdfund his sure-to-be-ace new book.
“Steve Baker was elected as the MP for Wycombe in 2010. We’re a group of local citizens who are worried that our MP isn’t doing the best for us.
We’re particularly alarmed about Steve Baker’s views on climate change but also wonder if he really cares about the people he’s supposed to represent.
We certainly think Wycombe deserves better.
Our aim is to make it easy for local people to scrutinise how our MP spends his time and what he says to enable them to ask the question: “Is he really working for you?”
11. I ARROGANTLY RECOMMEND SOME 2022 HAPPENINGS/THINGS
OM Holy mountain of drone metal JUNE 1st M’cr Gorilla, 3rd London Earth
BO NINGEN Indestructible Japanese noise survivors tour UK and Ireland JUNE 2nd London Railway Tavern Tulse Hill, 7th Newcastle Cluny, 8th Glasgow Broadcast, 8th Dublin Sound House, 10th Limerick Casbah, 13th Birkenhead Future Yard, 14th Manchester Yes, 15th Huddersfield Venn, 18th St Albans Horn.
WILKINSON EDWARDS NOBLE is the greatest current British free jazz trio, and will make instant converts of sceptics. They are at Finch’s Café, 12 Sidworth St in London Fields on June 3rd at 8pm for £8
Until June 5th. Last chance to see Laura Knight & Caroline Walker - A Female Gaze at Nottingham Castle Art Gallery, most notable for displaying loads of Laura Knight pictures from private collections, and displaying them with real sensitivity in a biographical/thematic timeline, alongside other loans from galleries and from the Castle’s own collection, in a way that makes the genius of this pioneering woman utterly undeniable. https://www.nottinghamcastle.org.uk/whats-on/laura-knight-caroline-walker-a-female-gaze/
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS Liberal redneck rockers JUNE 7th Brighton Chalk, 8th London Forum, 9th Leeds Stylus, 11th Dublin Vicar Street
DRY CLEANING Sing-speak post-punkers JUNE 7th London 02, 9th & 12th Edinburgh Hidden Door, 13th London QEH., AUGUST 27TH M’cr Mayfield Depot
Daniel Kitson. The elusive comedy wunderkind has dates a-plenty.
JUNE 7th, 8th, 9th - The Old Mill – Stillington, North Yorkshire;
17th – Midlands Arts Centre Outdoor Theatre – Birmingham;
18th – (Afternoon) - Melbourne Hall, Walled Garden – Derby;
19th - Regents Park Open Air Theatre - LondON;
22nd, 23rd –Lawrence Batley Theatre Courtyard – Huddersfield;
JULY 6th – Compering Mixed Bill – Brighton Comedy Gardens;
17th - Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre – Chester;
18th - Midland Arts Centre Outdoor Theatre – Birmingham;
20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd – Windmill Hill City Farm - Bristol;
24th - Regents Park Open Air Theatre – London;
AUGUST 21st –Regents Park Open Air Theatre - London
Excuse me, can you help me please? I’m terribly worried brings together their work collaborating in one capacity or another for over 34 years. Questions of authorship can be raised: Who made what? Who instigated what? How did this magical world arrive and from who’s universe? While this uncertainty can be questioned, here it is celebrated and laid open, as ownership and authorship are replaced by a creative partnership, with startling results. Working across a wide variety of media, the artists employ it to stand as a portal that cuts through different cognitive worlds and uses it to break down barriers and lazy definitions between traditional visual and neurological pathways. The exhibition includes drawings, collages, paintings and sculptures that were made before during and after the production of their award-winning film Diseased and Disorderly, which will also be shown. Tell-Tale Heads from the film are let loose through the galleries en route to the Tell-Tale Rooms Virtual Reality Experience which will also inhabit the gallery further breaking down the barriers between the artists and the worlds they have created. This exhibition aims to firmly confront the idea that this kind of collaboration is unequal and instead looks to celebrate diversity within collaboration and to let every voice rise up equally. Here the freedom to create is an open door through which many people can enter in their own way. The exhibition not only gives a platform to the different voices that come to us in singular and complex ways it gives you access to the diverse world people around you inhabit, which are so often overlooked.
“They make art as they breathe, hard and fast and memorable; paintings, postcards, installations, rants, poems and freewheeling film ‘songs’…. Eden ventriloquizes her father to provide the written text for her drawings and paintings that are already replete with meaning…. she provides a commentary and series of foot-notes for the Grand Projects that her father is undertaking…. An agenda or appendix in a different form and much truer or closer to the original sign makings and drawings on the walls of caves….” - Iain Sinclair.
“Andrew Kötting has been making films for a long time. But are his films even films at all? Or are they by-products, documenting other processes, their purpose known only to the artist himself? To me the film Gallivant seemed immediately one of the greatest things any human being had ever made. We spend a lot of time peering over our shoulders at the artists we’ve lost, forgetting that, if we look for them, some of the greatest are amongst us now.” - Stewart Lee.
Andrew and Eden Kötting are part of The Project Art Works collective, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. As part of their Turner exhibition they showed a constructed space that held a physical and digital archive from over 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists and makers over two decades. The archive embodies a visible trace of people who are often hidden in the world. Andrew and Eden Kötting were the focus of two episodes of Radio 4’s Film Programme in 2021 when they moved from their studio in the Old Town Hastings to their new one on The Ponswood Industrial Estate in St Leonards-on-Sea. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v9c7
Diseased and Disorderly is a film released in 2021 directed by Andrew Kötting in which Neurodivergent artist Eden Kötting, who was born with Joubert Syndrome, takes the viewer on a journey into her reality through her collages, self-portraits, and still-life drawings. It was funded by the BFI and the National Lottery.
BOB MOULD Husker-dooby-dooby-doo JUNE 9th Brighton Komedia, 10th Ramsgate Music Hall, 12th B’ham Digbeth Mill, 13th S’hampton Engine Rooms, 14th Oxford Academy, 16th London Islington Assembly, 17th Nottingham Rescue, 18th Stoke On Trent Sugar Mill, 20th Bristol Thekla, 22nd Glasgow Oran Moor
THE FALLEN LEAVES Top punk-mod gentlemen entertainers. JUNE 11th London 100 Club, AUGUST 21st London Putney Half Moon, SEPT 10TH London Camden Dublin Castle, 17th Lewes Con Club
MORPHOGENESIS - ORIGINAL LINE-UP OF ART NOISE LEGENDS June 12th Café Oto London
Ben Moor. The storytelling surrealist is out and about in many different iterations.
Tuesday 12th & Weds 13th July 2022 19.30PRONOUN TROUBLE
An Edinburgh slot for my "lecture" about cartoons, friendship and lectures has yet to be confirmed at time of writing, but if you haven't seen it, these dates offer you a chance to embrace the offbeat.
Another Edinburgh preview, this time in a Double Bill with the wonderful Joanna Neary and her fantastic show full of characters, song and dance and delight.
Described by Stewart Lee as "a book talk that swallows itself in a hall of mirrors full of Russian dolls," this is also hopefully on its way to the Edinburgh Fringe - more details to follow.
LONG RYDERS Country-punks JUNE 17TH & 18th London Under The Bridge
MAMMOTH PENGUINS Queens of indue JUNE 23RD London Lexington
THE GOON SAXAustralian indie rockers JUNE 23rd M’cr Ritz, 24th Glasgow QMU, 28th Bristol Motion & Marble, 29th London Forum, 30th Brighton Chalk. JULY 4th London Lexington
ALASDAIR ROBERTS Scottish troubadour JUNE 25TH London West Hampstead Arts. JULY 7th Falmouth Cornish Bank. SEPT 3rd Cardiff Chapter.
DARREN HAYMAN Breton-capped indie troubadour JUNE 24th London Lexington, 28th Newcastle Cumberland Arms, 29th - 30th M’cr Gullivers
ELIZA CARTHY English folk godhead back in active service JUNE 28th Leicester Musician. JULY 16th London Union Chapel. NOV 28TH Birmningham Glee, 30th Cardiff Glee. DEC 5th Cambridge Junction
EARL OKIN The mouth trumpeter runs amok. JULY 1st - The Terrace, 2, Church Plain, Loddon, Norfolk, NR14 6EX. www.shaftofwit.com/music
2nd - The Secret Garden, Mile Tree Lane, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, PE 13 4TR.
RICHARD DAWSON & CIRCLE Geordie art-folkster jams with Finnish acid-rockers JULY 6th London Scala, 7th Leeds Belgrave, 8th M’cr Gorilla, 8th Digbeth Supersonic, 12th Newcastle Boiler Shop, 14th Stirling Rabbithole. AUGUST 26TH Barrow-in-Furness Krankenhaus.
M WARD Giant Sand graduated songwriter and guitarist JULY 1st M’cr Night & Day, 9th Nottingham Bodega, 10th London Jazz Café, 12th Bristol Thekla, 13th Leeds Brudenell, 15th Glasgow Oran Moor
BEVIS FROND One of local show by psyche-rock superstars. JULY 10th Hastings Crypt
MDC Hardcore punk originators JULY 27TH Southampton 1865, AUGUST 1st London New Cross Inn
ACID MOTHERS’ TEMPLE Japanese acid all-fathers OCTOBER 9th Birmingham Norton’s, 10th York Crescent, 11th Glasgow Hug & Pint, 12th Newcastle Star and Shadow, 13th Salford White Hotel, 16th Preston Continental, 19th Bristol Lanes, 20th Brighton Komedia, 21st London Studio 9294
DREAM SYNDICATE Blue collar paisley underground psychedelic explorers in imperial career phase. OCTOBER 18TH London Lafayette
RECC’D INTERNETS, YOUTUBES AND PODCASTS
Rosie Holt’s Youtube characters *****
Ogmios School of Zen Motoring *****
Limmy’s review of After Life *****
The Exploding Heads Alasdair Beckett-King’s various things *****
VonViddy (TikTok) Eleanor Morton - Jack The Ripper (but shot in portrait!?)
Paddy Young - Posh actor in Northern Film
Dan March - British Tourism films
Tom Little Sooz Kempner as Nadine Dorries on Twitter
12. 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 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)
Stewart Lee
2022-05-30T19:31:07+01:00
DOWNLOAD ‘PRINCE ANDREW IS A SWEATY NONCE’ BY THE KUNTS BY MINDNIGHT THURSDAY JUNE 2ND FOR JUBILEE CHART NO 2 SLOT VICTORY. https://princeandrew.info ‘The only time I wanna see ‘big break’ and ‘Stewart Lee’ in the same sentence, will also involve his spinal column’ - Centerist Thug, Twitter WOKE SO-CALLED ‘COMEDIAN’ T-SHIRT There has never been a wokier time to own a wokely fabricated Stewart Lee ‘Woke so-called ‘comedian’’ leisure garment. Woke so-called' 'comedian' 'Stewart Lee' says - "As all alt right journalists know, the best way to invalidate a word is to put it in inverted commas. But if I was Vladimir Putin I'd want my money back! Celebrate the paucity of traditional alt right arguments against woke comedy with this irksome 'so-called' comedian shirt, manufactured in the wokest way possible with the wokest materials available." Available from this link from May 1st... https://wax-face.com/stewart-lee Made on Anthem Organic Tee Shirts who are a UK based ethical tee shirt manufacturer. They cost £20,00 each and will start shipping from 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. WOKE T-SHIRT OFFER CLOSES END OF MAY SO ORDER BEFORE THEN OR FACE A DELAY AS THE BLOKE MAKING THEM GOES OFF ON TOUR WITH A PSYCHEDELIC BAND 'Woke' Burgundy Front 'Woke' Charcoal Front 'Woke' Navy / Mustard Front 'Woke' Burgundy Back 'Woke' Charcoal Back 'Woke' Navy / Mustard Back 2. BASIC LEE I will be launching a new Stand-up tour, BASIC LEE, in the Summer/Autumn of 2022. Edinburgh previews (Aug), London (Sept – Dec) and 2023 dates on sale – more touring dates to be added. LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE Tues - Sat from Sept 20th to Dec...
In the middle of a week of record temperatures, as if unaware of the irony, the business community celebrated the consolidation of its attempts to force the government’s hand to agree to a third filth-generating runway at Heathrow, tipping all species on Earth towards extinction. Everything will die soon, except for cockroaches, and Glastonbury favourite the Fall, who will survive even a nuclear holocaust, though they will still refuse to play their 80s chart hits.
In Norfolk on Thursday, the tarmac melted, and ducklings became trapped in sticky blackness. When a lioness whelped in an ancient Roman street, Caesar thought something was up. Here, solid matter transmuted to hot liquid and swallowed baby birds whole. How surreal do the signs and warnings have to become before we stop in our tracks? Are whales required to fall from the sky? Does Tim Henman have to give birth to a two-headed cat on Centre Court?
CBI director John Cridland says: “The government must commit to the decision now, and get diggers in the ground at Heathrow swiftly by 2020.” Head of the Institute of Directors Simon Walker says: “There can now be no further delay from politicians.” And Segro chief executive David Sleath merely bellows: “Get on with it!”, like some selfish Top Gear presenter demanding his steak dinner after dawdling, the planet itself the powerless BBC employee he punches in the face.
Illustration by David Foldvari.
The business community has thrown its executive toys out of the pram, and now there are chrome ball bearings on strings everywhere, tripping up unpaid interns and making life difficult for immigrant cleaners scrabbling under desks on less than minimum wage. David Cameron, an electoral promise to oppose the third runway sticking in his throat like an undigested salmon bone, can only duck his cowardly head and hope some terrible atrocity or a Wimbledon win wafts our attention away.
When I was a child, my grandmother always referred to our pet dog’s excrement as “business”, so to this day, when I envisage “the business community”, I imagine a vast pile of sentient faeces issuing its demands while smoking a Cuban cigar, an image that seems increasing accurate as the decades pass.
The destruction of all life on Earth is inevitable if fossil fuel use continues unabated. (Legal. Please advise. Are we allowed to say this now without being shouted down by Nigel Lawson?) The business community’s genius move in the third runway debate has been to change the dialogue from an argument which should have been between building a runway and not building a runway at all, and trying to restructure our society to avoid the need for a third runway, into an argument about where exactly it was best to position this massive portent of our world’s forthcoming doom. It’s like offering an innocent man who doesn’t want to be hanged the chance to be poisoned instead.
As with fracking and the academification of all schools, decisions have already been made behind closed doors by forces beyond our control. Heathrow’s third runway will happen. Assurances about air quality are meaningless. The UK has already been threatened with £300m a year fines by those meddling Brussels bureaucrats for our terrible British air, and Boris’s solution in London was to spray adhesive around the city by night to try and stick the pesky pollution particles to the pavement, like a lazy duplicitous boy pushing his mess under his bed rather than tidying up his room.
And in 50 years, will there be anyone left to remember what it was like before a sterile and toxic environment gradually became the norm? Can it only be four decades ago that every summer holiday trek along A-roads to South Devon caravan sites left our Morris Marina windscreen smeared thick with now-disappeared invertebrates, that sparrows swarmed around morning milk bottles, that sticklebacks and minnows spawned in every park pond, that hedgehogs gathered at night in suburban gardens and lay flattened in their thousands on roads every morning, and that an actual hare ran out of the encroached common land of Palmers Rough, on the fringes of Birmingham, to be chased by my grandfather along Arnold Road in that same Morris Marina, a sight that would seem as surreal today as escaped hippos wandering the streets of some collapsed eastern European capital?
The absence of abundance is already accepted. The metaphors of the nature poets, mapping human hearts through once commonly understood imagery, are irrelevant and impenetrable. “The sun of Winter, / The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds / Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, / Are quite shut out.” I’m sorry. The missel-what? Can the juniper be monetised? Is this missel-thing for sale? Our children already have no stable baseline from which to calibrate the loss of all that lives. It’s game over.
Bearing this in mind, I finally find myself reluctantly agreeing with the business community. There is no time for delay. Let’s build the runway. Let’s choke the Earth. Let’s get this damn thing over with, for what can be avoided, whose end is purposed by the mighty gods of business? Hasten our demise, let our children be the last of their sorry line, and spare their unborn descendants any further suffering. We will not save the rhino. We will not even save the hedgehog. How can we save the world?
But, if you can purge cheap sentiment from your mind, how exciting and fascinating it will be to watch as the world becomes uninhabitable. It’s almost worth going on a health kick to survive another 60 years and see everything immolated. How many humans have had the awe-inspiring opportunity to witness such spectacle: the end of all that is?
But something of us should be preserved, I think, for posterity. Perhaps the village of Harmondsworth and its residents, instead of being demolished and paid off at 125% of their homes’ market values, should be sealed within a vast dome and shot spacewards, to drift on the solar winds as a museum of mankind, saving something of our society at the point where it finally became unsustainable.
Under a vast skein of convex glass Harmondsworth floats beyond Orion’s Belt, its ancient tithe barn, Betjeman’s “cathedral of Middlesex”, still and safe under the stars; local resident Graham Wibrew, his once imperilled kitchen extension complete, watches the comets and thinks of home; and the bells of 11th century St Mary’s toll the eternal hours silently in endless empty space. “But far more ancient and dark / The Combe looks since they killed the badger there, / Dug him out and gave him to the hounds, / That most ancient Briton of English beasts.” Edward Thomas, The Combe.
Stewart Lee
2015-07-05T21:26:23+01:00
In the middle of a week of record temperatures, as if unaware of the irony, the business community celebrated the consolidation of its attempts to force the government’s hand to agree to a third filth-generating runway at Heathrow, tipping all species on Earth towards extinction. Everything will die soon, except for cockroaches, and Glastonbury favourite the Fall, who will survive even a nuclear holocaust, though they will still refuse to play their 80s chart hits. In Norfolk on Thursday, the tarmac melted, and ducklings became trapped in sticky blackness. When a lioness whelped in an ancient Roman street, Caesar thought something was up. Here, solid matter transmuted to hot liquid and swallowed baby birds whole. How surreal do the signs and warnings have to become before we stop in our tracks? Are whales required to fall from the sky? Does Tim Henman have to give birth to a two-headed cat on Centre Court? CBI director John Cridland says: “The government must commit to the decision now, and get diggers in the ground at Heathrow swiftly by 2020.” Head of the Institute of Directors Simon Walker says: “There can now be no further delay from politicians.” And Segro chief executive David Sleath merely bellows: “Get on with it!”, like some selfish Top Gear presenter demanding his steak dinner after dawdling, the planet itself the powerless BBC employee he punches in the face. [caption id="attachment_3615" align="alignright" width="212"] Illustration by David Foldvari.[/caption] The business community has thrown its executive toys out of the pram, and now there are chrome ball bearings on strings everywhere, tripping up unpaid interns and making life difficult for immigrant cleaners scrabbling under desks on less than minimum wage. David Cameron, an electoral promise to oppose the third runway sticking in his throat like an undigested salmon bone, can...
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.
Stewart Lee
2014-12-21T21:29:50+00:00
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...
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1. THE BIG MIDWEEK
I am the reader of the audiobook of The Big Midweek, Steve Hanley from The Fall’s book about playing bass for two decades in the greatest British band, against twenty years of social change. You can hear it here….
I am now writing 1000 funny words a week for Carol Cadwalladr’s new on-line newspaper The Nerve, run by people who were sacked or quit when Tories took over The Observer. It is immediately ace.
Sign up here and it would also really be great if you could pay them £6.95 a month as the 5 women at the helm sunk all their redundancy money into it. Carol understands that the only story in town is how the tech-bros choose what news we see and how we understand the world, and The Nerve will address this head on. The only news that matters.
Please send the link below and this begging request to anyone you can.
The Nerve presents an evening with Stewart Lee and Carole Cadwalladr
And if you live in This London, you can see me and Carole yakkin’ at 7.30 sharp on Weds 10th of December at 21 Soho, 3-5 `Sutton Row, LONDON
Link and password to access the tickets: LINK HERE
And use the password: THENERVE101225
3. ALEXANDRA PALACE LONDON MAN-WULF RUN FEB 3RD-15TH2026
STEWART LEE VS THE MAN-WULF.
The unstoppable Man-Wulf show has another London run, having already done 12000 seats at Royal Festival Hall and 12000 seats at Leicester Sq Theatre.
It’s sure to look great in the gothic confines of the Alexandra Palace theatre.
My favourite show to perform and as the world gets worse the basic premise of the show – that the bully boys are taking over in music, comedy and TV cooking shows – only gets funnier. ALEXANDRA PALACE, 3rd – 15th Feb 2026, Tuesday to Saturday at 7.30pm plus Sunday matinees at 3.30pm
Tickets on sale 30th July.
BOOK HERE: https://www.alexandrapalace.com/whats-on/stewart-lee-vs-the-man-wulf/
4. 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
Glasgow’s garage punk veterans The Primevals announce a new single as featured in the new Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf 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 were released on a 7” 45 in January.
See The Primevals live JUNE 27th London Hope & Anchor, 28th Preston Ferret.
John Mackay & Sally Homer, in association with Debi Allen/Curtis Brown present
STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF BRAND NEW SHOW
UK TOURING THROUGHOUT 2026
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.
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 4th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 5th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 6th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 7th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 8th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 10th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Wednesday 11th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Thursday 12th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Friday 13th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 14th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Sunday 15th February 2026 - Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - TICKETS
Tuesday 17th February 2026 - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - TICKETS
Wednesday 18th February 2026 - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - TICKETS
May 2026
Wednesday 6th May 2026 - The Playhouse, Weston Super Mare - TICKETS
Thursday 7th May 2026 - The Playhouse, Weston Super Mare - TICKETS
Friday 8th May 2026 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Saturday 9th May 2026 - Richmond Theatre, Richmond - TICKETS
Monday 11th May 2026 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Tuesday 12th May 2026 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Wednesday 13th May 2026 - Playhouse, Leeds - TICKETS
Thursday 14th May 2026 - Floral Pavilion Theatre, New Brighton - TICKETS
Friday 15th May 2026 - Opera House, Buxton - TICKETS
Saturday 16th May 2026 - Stockton Globe, Stockton On Tees - TICKETS
Tuesday 19th May 2026 - Palace Theatre, Southend On Sea - TICKETS
Wednesday 20th May 2026 - Palace Theatre, Southend On Sea - TICKETS
June 2026
Monday 1st June 2026 - 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin - TICKETS
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 - Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin - TICKETS
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 - The Tommy Leddy Theatre, Drogheda - TICKETS
Thursday 4th June 2026 - Millennium Forum, Derry - TICKETS
Friday 5th June 2026 - National Opera House, Wexford - TICKETS
Sunday 7th June 2026 - Opera House, Cork - TICKETS
Wednesday 10th June 2026 - Theatre Royal, Waterford - TICKETS
Sunday 14th June 2026 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Monday 15th June 2026 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Tuesday 16th June 2026 - Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge - TICKETS
Thursday 18th June 2026 - Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
Friday 19th June 2026 - Alban Arena, St. Albans - TICKETS
Sunday 21st June 2026 - New Victoria Theatre, Woking - TICKETS
Tuesday 23rd June 2026 - Venue Cymru, Llandudno - TICKETS
Wednesday 24th June 2026 - Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield - TICKETS
Thursday 25th June 2026 - Grand Opera House, York - TICKETS
Friday 26th June 2026 - Grand Opera House, York - TICKETS
Saturday 27th June 2026 - Grand Opera House, York - TICKETS
Tuesday 30th June 2026 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
July 2026
Wednesday 1st July 2026 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
Thursday 2nd July 2026 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester - TICKETS
Saturday 4th July 2026 - The Hawth, Crawley - TICKETS
Tuesday 7th July 2026 - Lyceum, Crewe - TICKETS
Wednesday 8th July 2026 - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - TICKETS
Thursday 9th July 2026 - Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury - TICKETS
Friday 10th July 2026 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 11th July 2026 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Monday 13th July 2026 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Tuesday 14th July 2026 - King's Theatre, Glasgow - TICKETS
Wednesday 15th July 2026 - Playhouse, Edinburgh - TICKETS
Thursday 16th July 2026 - Perth Theatre, Perth - TICKETS
Friday 17th July 2026 - Eden Court, Inverness - TICKETS
September 2026
Thursday 3rd September 2026 - King's Theatre, Portsmouth - TICKETS
Friday 4th September 2026 - Pavillion, Weymouth - TICKETS
Saturday 5th September 2026 - Hall For Cornwall, Truro - TICKETS
Thursday 10th September 2026 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Friday 11th September 2026 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Saturday 12th September 2026 - William Aston Hall, Wrexham - TICKETS
Sunday 13th September 2026 - Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton - TICKETS
Wednesday 16th September 2026 - Marina Theatre, Lowestoft - TICKETS
Thursday 17th September 2026 - Marina Theatre, Lowestoft - TICKETS
Friday 18th September 2026 - Castle Theatre, Wellingborough - TICKETS
Saturday 19th September 2026 - The Central Theatre, Chatham - TICKETS
Sunday 20th September 2026 - The Central Theatre, Chatham - TICKETS
Thursday 24th September 2026 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Friday 25th September 2026 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Saturday 26th September 2026 - Bristol Beacon, Bristol - TICKETS
Tuesday 29th September 2026 - Truck Theatre, Hull - TICKETS
Wednesday 30th September 2026 - Truck Theatre, Hull - TICKETS
October 2026
Thursday 1st October 2026 - The Spa Centre, Scarborough - TICKETS
Friday 2nd October 2026 - Alhambra Theatre, Bradford - TICKETS
Saturday 3rd October 2026 - Alhambra Theatre, Bradford - TICKETS
Tuesday 6th October 2026 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Wednesday 7th October 2026 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Monday 12th October 2026 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Tuesday 13th October 2026 - Playhouse, Nottingham - TICKETS
Saturday 17th October 2026 - Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury - TICKETS
Sunday 18th October 2026 - Hippodrome, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 23rd October 2026 - New Theatre, Peterborough - TICKETS
Saturday 24th October 2026 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
Sunday 25th October 2026 - Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
November 2026
Friday 6th November 2026 - The Anvil, Basingstoke - TICKETS
Monday 9th November 2026 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Tuesday 10th November 2026 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Wednesday 11th November 2026 - Playhouse, Oxford - TICKETS
Thursday 12th November 2026 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
Friday 13th November 2026 - Chelmsford Theatre, Chelmsford - TICKETS
8. SNOWFLAKE TORNADO / BASIC LEE
Stewart’s 2019-2022 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, but buy them from us to defeat American fascism.
We are currently preparing a physical release of these shows but it’s got delayed as I got pneumonia and 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.
9. COMPANY 2025 FOR DEREK BAILEY. I am compering 2 nights of this celebration of the late Derek Bailey at Café Oto, London, Dec 15th-16TH
I am compering 2 nights of this celebration of the late Derek Bailey at Café Oto, London, Dec 15th-16TH
Derek Bailey formed COMPANY in 1976.
The premise was an effectively simple one; invite a group of musicians to improvise together, in various ad-hoc formations, with as little pre-planning as possible.
COMPANY 2025 (for Derek Bailey) celebrates this endeavour, and also marks the twentieth anniversary of Derek’s passing.
Khabat Abas (cello)
Julia Brüssel (violin)
John Butcher (saxophones)
Teresa Hackel (recorders)
Charles Hayward (drums)
Petra Heller (tap dance)
Pat Thomas (piano, electronics)
Matt Wand (electronics)
Alex Ward (electric guitar, clarinet)
Mark Wastell (percussion)
Compered by Stewart Lee
COMPANY 2025 (for Derek Bailey) includes musicians that participated in original COMPANY events organised by Derek; John Butcher (1990/91/92/95), Pat Thomas (1990/91), Alex Ward (1988/90/94, 2002), Mark Wastell (1999, 2000/01) and Matt Wand (1992/93), alongside performers new to the form; Khabat Abas, Charle Hayward, Teresa Heckel, Petra Heller and Julia Brüssel. Over two evenings, these ten musicians will combine in various group formations, chosen by a particular individual just moments before going on stage.
The whole event will be compered by Derek Bailey devotee, Stewart Lee. COMPANY 2025 (for Derek Bailey) curated by John Butcher, Tim Fletcher, Ian Greaves and Mark Wastell.
10. DR JOHN COOPER CLARKE AND SPECIAL GUESTS – REMEMBERING JOHNNY GREEN. CADOGAN HALL, LONDON, WEDS DEC 3RD.
Join the legendary Dr John Cooper Clarke, alongside special guests Richard Hawley and Stewart Lee, for an evening celebrating the life and legacy of Road Manager extraordinaire, Johnny Green.
Best known as The Clash’s Road Manager during their meteoric rise, Johnny chronicled this unforgettable chapter in his acclaimed memoir, A Riot of Our Own (available for purchase in the foyer). In the 1980s, his journey took him across the Atlantic, working with icons like Willie Nelson and Joe Ely.
For the past 15 years, Johnny was the ever-reliable Gentleman Companion to John Cooper Clarke, ensuring he was on time and on song for every one of his many gigs.
The evening also features performances from special guests and friends: Mike Garry, Freya Beer, Luke Wright, Toria Garbutt, Clare Ferguson-Walker, Tim Wells, and Johnny’s son, Earl Broad.
A passionate cycling enthusiast, Johnny was a devoted follower of the Tour de France. His behind-the-scenes book, Push Yourself A Little Bit More, is a must-read for fans of the sport. He also penned a regular column for Rouleur magazine, offering hilarious and alternative insights into the cycling world.
The entertainment world has lost a true original, and this evening is its way of remembering Johnny Green. All profits from the event will go to Johnny’s chosen charity, Médecins Sans Frontières. TICKETS HERE
Surrealist psychedelic folk duo Damon & Naomi have a 3 day residency at London’s Cafe Oto and I host each night and talk to Damon Krukowski about his new book Why Sound Matters (Yale Uni Press). Special musical guests are...
Sat 3rd Jan - Laetitia Sadier
Sun 4th Jan - Richard Youngs
Mon 5th Jan - Gina Birch
12. STRONG MESSAGE HERE
I am appearing on BBC podcast with Armando Ianucci. It is ace.
THE OWL SERVICE Unless I am mistaken it looks like Essex’s innovative acid-folkies The Owl Service are making a tentative return to active service. We all now live in a post Owl Service world. DEC 7th M’cr Red Deer, Jan 31st London Good Shepherd Studio.
SWANSEA SOUND Anglo-Welsh indiepop supergroup, combine photo-strip romance and quietly radical politics, the C86 Crass. DEC 20th London Stoke Newington Waiting Room.
DREAM SYNDICATE You must see this enduring American rock institution who impossibly combine free-jazz styled freakouts with classic solid literary songwriting. JAN 30TH London Garage, FEB 1st M’cr Band On The Wall.
SLEAFORD MODS It’s easy to take Sleaford Mods for granted, but go and see them live and be reminded what an amazing act this is, as much Beckettian theatre as it is whatever else it is. £1 on every ticket goes to Warchild. FEB 6th Glasgow Barrowland Ballroom, 7th Manchester Academy, 12th Leeds O2 Academy, 13th Liverpool O2 Academy, 14th Cardiff Great Hall, 19th Dublin 3Olympia, 20th Belfast Limelight, 21st Cork Cyprus Avenue, 26th Oxford O2 Academy, 27th Nottingham Rock City, MARCH 5th Bristol Bristol Beacon, 6th Brighton Dome, 7th London 02 Academy Brixton.
THE NIGHTINGALES King Rocker cats’ annual club circuit FEB 19th Swansea Bunkhouse, 20th Southampton Joiners, 22nd Cambridge Portland Arms, 24th London Moth, 25th B’ham Castle & Falcon, 26th Sheffield Greystones, MARCH 1st Sunderland Pop Recs
PSYCHEDELIC PORN CRUMPETS Australian prog-psyche FEB 24th Newcastle Uni, 25th Glasgow Galvanizers, 28th Leeds Uni, MARCH 1st B’ham Digbeth Crossing, 3rd Southampton 1865, 4th London Forum
HEAVENLY Suddenly boosted by fleeting Tic Toc fame with Punk Rock Girl, here’s another victory lap for the mould-making indie veterans in 2026. FEB 25th Coventry Just Dropped In, 26th London Lexington, 28th Athens Temple, MARCH 5th Ramsgate Music Hall, 6th Paris Petit Bain, 8th London Lexington all ages matinee, 14th Oxford Nest, 18th M’cr Yes, 19th Glasgow Mono, 20th Sunderland Pop Recs, 21st Sheffield Sidney & Mathilda, 26th Brighton TBC, APRIL 4th Cardiff Wales Goes Pop
SUGAR Apparently they’ve reformed MAY 23rd, 24th London Forum
14. IN OUR LAMENTATIONS 2025
Barre Phillips (Jazz bassman, 1934)
Bob Grover (Brighton Piranha, 1956)
Riro (Japanese sea otter, 2007) Nora Orlandi (Spaghetti symphonist, 1933)
Ed Askew (Acid folkie, 1940)
Tony Slattery (The vile blows of the world made him reckless, 1959)
David Lynch (He erased our heads, 1946) Landy Randerson (Museum access pioneer, 1949)
Garth Hudson (Bandolier, 1937)
Brian Murphy (Instantly aged actor, 1932)
Rab MacWilliam (Hackney historian, 1951)
Barry Goldberg (His flag was electric, 1941)
Peter Yarrow (He left on a jetplane, 1938)
Snowy Fleet (Easybeater, 1939)
Jamie Muir (Absolute fucking rhythmical genius, 1942)
Mike Ratledge (Moon in June Soft Machine man, 1943)
Gabriel Yacoub (Malicorne muso of French folk, 1952)
Bill Fay (Christian mystic songwriter seer, 1943) Roberta Flack (Made Ewan MacColl sexy, 1937)
Gene Hackman (an actor who knew when not to,1930)
Jay Rayner’s Observer restaurant column (1999)
David Johansen (New York Doll, 1950)
Bill Dare (Even his socks were funny, 1959)
Johnny Green (A gentleman, a dandy, and always a pleasure,)
Ken Parker (The Blue Bender, 1943) Edweena Banger (Her nose bled, 1959)
John Cassady (Planetary penman, 1971)
Joey Molland (His finger was bad, 1947)
Peter Farrelly (Fruuppster, 1949)
Jesse Colin Young (He got it together, 1941)
Brian James (Lord of The Damned, 1955)
Roy Ayers (Good vibes, 1940)
Bob Rupe (Brilliant Gutterball and Silos bottom end) Nadia Cassini (Starcrash starlet, 1949) Nike Arrighi (The Devil Rides Out, 1944)
Bill Smith (Original Corrie, 1936)
DG Hessayon (Garden expert who answered my questions, 1928)
Elliot Ingber (Winged Eel Fingerling, 1941) Leanne Cowie (Scientific drummer, 1964?)
George Foreman (Meat griller, 1949)
Michael Hurley (He’s gone back to Capistrano, 1941)
Dave Allen (At Home He’s A Bassist, 1955)
Alastair MacKinven (Country teaser and artist, 1971)
Clem Burke (Magic Christian Plimsoul & Elvis Ramone, 1954)
Larry Tamblyn (He loved that dirty water, 1943)
Clive Revill (The Emperor strikes back, 1930)
Amadou Bagayoko (blind bluesman, 1955)
Max Romeo (Wet-dreaming devil chaser, 1944) Clodagh Rogers (Northern Irish Spider-Woman, 1947)
Pope Francis (Relatively inoffensive pope, 1936) Eleonora Giorgi (Young, violent and dangerous, 1953)
David Thomas (Ube Pere, 1953)
Mike Peters (He alarmed Wales, 1959)
James Baker (Hoodoo victim of beastly scientists, 1954)
Larry Lee (Ozark Mountain Devil, 1947)
Wizz Jones (The Lazy Farmer, 1939)
David Briggs (He signalled the test of our whistles, 1943)
Kimble Rendall (Hoodoo Guru from year zero, 1957)
Jack Katz (First Kingdom comics guy, 1927)
Ed Smylie (Saved Apollo 13 with sellotape, 1914)
George Wendt (Barfly Freak Fan, 1948)
Peter David (He turned Hulk grey for peanuts, 1956) Loretta Switt (Hilarious dish of MASH, 1937)
Louis Moholo (S African freedom-drummer, 1940)
Hunt Powers (Spaghetti star, 1929)
Simon House (Hawkstrings, 1948)
Colin Conflict (He could not win a nuclear war, 1963)
David Kaff (He had a good time all the time, 1946)
Daniel Postgate (Together, we held Bagpuss in Totnes, 1963)
Lalo Schifrin (He entered the dragon, 1932)
Brian Wilson (He wished they all could be California girls, 1942)
Junior Byles (His locks be curly, 1948)
Terry Draper (He called occupants of interplanetary craft, 1951) Jill Sobule (She kissed a girl, 1959)
Terry Manning (Stax to the max, 1947)
Roy Ayers (Coffy percolator, 1943)
Edip Akbayram (Turkish funk soul brother, 1950)
Ozzy Osborne (He married a sociopath and pre-empted grunge, 1948)
Hulk Hogan (Worthless steroid-addled Trump-loving metafiction, 1953)
Tom Lehrer (He poisoned the pigeons, 1928)
Allan Ahlberg (Peepoo understands WWII implicitly, 1938)
Terry Reid (Funky folk bluesman, 1949)
Terry Reid (Funky folk bluesman, 1949)
Graham Green (Oneida and actor, 1952)
Mark Volman (Happy turtle, 1947) Claudia Cardinale (Human-divine fusion of earth and stars, 1938)
Danny Thompson (He refuted the jazz-folk impossibility, 1939)
David Ball (Soft cell gridsman who remixed Rainer and very nice chap, 1959)
Bob Franke (Coffeehouse Christian, 1947)
Jim Kimball (Blank Lizard drummer, 1965)
Owen Gray (Another Alpha Boys School ska-man, 1939)
Bruce Loose (Flipperman flipped off, 1959)
Renato Casaro (Italian cinema’s painterly poster artist,1935)
Peter Watkins (Genius of British film, prophet of Privilege, 1935)
Jack DeJohnette (Miles’ funky fusionist, 1942)
Joseph Byrd (The field hippie, 1937)
Archie Fisher (Wrote Witch of The Westmorland, 1937)
Mani (We watched Rico together, 1962)
Jimmy Cliff (He crossed a large number of rivers, 1944) Pam Hogg (She punched me in the face. I deserved it, 1958)
Stewart Lee
2025-12-03T15:00:11+00:00
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: In the week commencing 15th December, we will be migrating this mailing list to a new provider. You will receive an invitation to resubscribe. Please check your email and resubscribe to continue receiving Stewart Lee's newsletters. 1. THE BIG MIDWEEK I am the reader of the audiobook of The Big Midweek, Steve Hanley from The Fall’s book about playing bass for two decades in the greatest British band, against twenty years of social change. You can hear it here…. https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Big-Midweek-Audiobook/B0FXBJJD4X?source_code=AUKFrDlWS02231890H6-BK-ACX0-479031 2. THE NERVE/CAROLE CADWALLADR EVENT I am now writing 1000 funny words a week for Carol Cadwalladr’s new on-line newspaper The Nerve, run by people who were sacked or quit when Tories took over The Observer. It is immediately ace. Sign up here and it would also really be great if you could pay them £6.95 a month as the 5 women at the helm sunk all their redundancy money into it. Carol understands that the only story in town is how the tech-bros choose what news we see and how we understand the world, and The Nerve will address this head on. The only news that matters. Please send the link below and this begging request to anyone you can. https://www.thenerve.news This recent piece on enshittification is especially good https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-enshittification-internet-craphound-lyft-political-organising All my columns are collected here, but please donate https://www.thenerve.news/stewart-lee Also... The Nerve presents an evening with Stewart Lee and Carole Cadwalladr And if you live in This London, you can see me and Carole yakkin’ at 7.30 sharp on Weds 10th of December at 21 Soho, 3-5 `Sutton Row, LONDON Link and password to access the tickets: LINK HERE And use the password: THENERVE101225 3. ALEXANDRA PALACE LONDON MAN-WULF RUN FEB 3RD-15TH2026 STEWART LEE VS THE MAN-WULF. The unstoppable Man-Wulf show has another...
The past twelve months have been, shall we say, rather turbulent for Mr. Lee. Riding high on a wave of critical and popular acclaim for his controversial musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, he became engulfed by a mega tsunami of opposition from the rather more reactionary Christian right that nearly drowned him. Before you stop reading on account of that quite horrible use of metaphor, let me explain. When the BBC made the decision to show a televised version of the show a 600,000 strong hate campaign rose up, demanding that among others, Lee was to be brought down on charges of blasphemy. Every day he received dozens of emails, ranging from cheap insults to very menacing threats. It was then that Lee went through a period of insular retrospective and, by his own admission, heavy drinking. Huge success, it seemed, came with a huge price.
It is chiefly this that drives his new show, the excellent 90s Comedian. This hour-long set is a typically erudite, scathing and hilarious rant that you'd expect from the man who made his name in the early 90s as one half of the alternative double act Lee and Herring alongside Richard Herring. Together, their TV and radio programmes Fist Of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy made them a cult hit with students, much like The Mary Whitehouse Experience did for Rob Newman and David Baddiel. It certainly didn't hinder his popularity amongst the student population that Lee used to strike many similarities with Morrissey, even going as far as appearing to buy his wardrobe from the same Oxfam as the former Smiths frontman and sporting and equally magnificent coquettish quiff.
Now, over a decade later, he still has the same haircut, and has, rather spookily, filled out in exactly the same way as Morrissey had when he made his come back last year! For Lee's return to the stage, he has taken this opportunity to craft more of a therapy session than a stand up act. Throughout his set he takes us into the darkest regions of his mind (and when I say dark, I mean really, really dark - this show ain't for the queasy) on an introspective journey, as he purges his soul from the demons that have been tugging on his quiff over the past twelve months. He also lays into Joe Pasquale.
And that's the key to what makes 90s Comedian such a solid and brilliant show. Lee cleverly interweaves poignant and frank observations about the more serious things in life - terrorism, self doubt and depression - with lashings of childlike vitriol against the more trivial matters, like the collective works of Dan Brown and joke theft at the hands of Joe Pasquale. Throughout his set he reminds us why he is the master of slow, sarcastic delivery, able to break a sentence up with log pauses, drawing huge laughs from each couple of words that he has chosen with almost clinical precision. It is during the last half hour that things turn black as the night, as Lee recounts a bleak shaggy dog story based around the time just after the hate campaign emerged against Jerry Springer, when he was staying with his mum in Worcester and drinking heavily. It would be a crime to explain this any further, but let's just say the he takes the audience to places they may not want to go, while at the same time ensuring that they are hanging on his every word!
Definitely one of the highlights of the festival so far, 90s Comedian is a must for anyone who likes their comedy topical, clever, dark and above all very funny indeed, which is no bad thing in anyone's book. Especially if you don't like Joe Pasquale.
Stewart Lee
2005-08-02T22:54:13+01:00
The past twelve months have been, shall we say, rather turbulent for Mr. Lee. Riding high on a wave of critical and popular acclaim for his controversial musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, he became engulfed by a mega tsunami of opposition from the rather more reactionary Christian right that nearly drowned him. Before you stop reading on account of that quite horrible use of metaphor, let me explain. When the BBC made the decision to show a televised version of the show a 600,000 strong hate campaign rose up, demanding that among others, Lee was to be brought down on charges of blasphemy. Every day he received dozens of emails, ranging from cheap insults to very menacing threats. It was then that Lee went through a period of insular retrospective and, by his own admission, heavy drinking. Huge success, it seemed, came with a huge price. It is chiefly this that drives his new show, the excellent 90s Comedian. This hour-long set is a typically erudite, scathing and hilarious rant that you'd expect from the man who made his name in the early 90s as one half of the alternative double act Lee and Herring alongside Richard Herring. Together, their TV and radio programmes Fist Of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy made them a cult hit with students, much like The Mary Whitehouse Experience did for Rob Newman and David Baddiel. It certainly didn't hinder his popularity amongst the student population that Lee used to strike many similarities with Morrissey, even going as far as appearing to buy his wardrobe from the same Oxfam as the former Smiths frontman and sporting and equally magnificent coquettish quiff. Now, over a decade later, he still has the same haircut, and has, rather spookily, filled out in exactly the same...
I’VE always thought that people from Solihull (or Silhillians, as they pretentiously call themselves) were snobs.
Now Stewart Lee proves it. The comic, who grew up in the town, decided to lay into fellow Midlander Adrian Chiles in his BBC2 Comedy Vehicle this week.
He said of The One Show (watched by considerably more people than his show, by the way): “It’s like being trapped in the buffet car of an express train with a Toby jug which has somehow learned to speak. The inexorable rise of Adrian Chiles makes me long for the days when a regional accent was a professional disadvantage.”
Ooh, how mean!
Stewart went on to have a go at almost everything on television, a medium which doesn’t meet his high standards.
Admittedly, he does have a certain way with words and some of it was quite amusing. It’s true, Andrew Lloyd Webber does look like “a monk in a wind tunnel” and it’s odd Ant and Dec don’t grow old.
But then Stewart took it too far by saying the Geordie duo are “caked in sin”. Hang on!
His whole tone is one of complete, smug condescension, all but saying “I’m so intelligent and you’re all just stupid for watching popular TV.”
Fine, we’ll just switch you off, then.
He tried to recreate Del Boy’s fall through the open bar on Only Fools And Horses, saying “how can this be the funniest thing ever on TV?”. Maybe it isn’t, Stewart, but it’s a lot funnier than you. You’re not nearly as clever as you think you are.
I realise I’m rising to the bait by complaining about him, because he wants to be controversial. This is the man who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, after all. But this is one vehicle that’s way off track.
Stewart Lee
2009-03-29T10:35:10+01:00
I’VE always thought that people from Solihull (or Silhillians, as they pretentiously call themselves) were snobs. Now Stewart Lee proves it. The comic, who grew up in the town, decided to lay into fellow Midlander Adrian Chiles in his BBC2 Comedy Vehicle this week. He said of The One Show (watched by considerably more people than his show, by the way): “It’s like being trapped in the buffet car of an express train with a Toby jug which has somehow learned to speak. The inexorable rise of Adrian Chiles makes me long for the days when a regional accent was a professional disadvantage.” Ooh, how mean! Stewart went on to have a go at almost everything on television, a medium which doesn’t meet his high standards. Admittedly, he does have a certain way with words and some of it was quite amusing. It’s true, Andrew Lloyd Webber does look like “a monk in a wind tunnel” and it’s odd Ant and Dec don’t grow old. But then Stewart took it too far by saying the Geordie duo are “caked in sin”. Hang on! His whole tone is one of complete, smug condescension, all but saying “I’m so intelligent and you’re all just stupid for watching popular TV.” Fine, we’ll just switch you off, then. He tried to recreate Del Boy’s fall through the open bar on Only Fools And Horses, saying “how can this be the funniest thing ever on TV?”. Maybe it isn’t, Stewart, but it’s a lot funnier than you. You’re not nearly as clever as you think you are. I realise I’m rising to the bait by complaining about him, because he wants to be controversial. This is the man who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, after all. But this is one vehicle that’s way off track.
The danger in meeting politicians is that they seem all right and then, as a comedian, it is much harder to summon up the manufactured anger required to despise them for personal commercial gain. I have a mortgage. I can’t afford to find myself thinking things like “You know, Ken Clarke isn’t so bad once you get to know him.” Hate is money! And I have to pump it out to a deadline!!
In the noughties I had a 25-minute routine about Michael Portillo looking like the Cuprinol wood stain goblin, which was gradually becoming the spine of a new three-hour show. But after I met Portillo on BBC1’s This Week, he seemed belatedly reasonable in that way that ex-Tories often do, and I found I could no longer suggest he was a wood stain goblin with any conviction. Another revenue stream ran dry.
I don’t like going on TV, but I will make an exception for This Week, of which I am a huge fan. People always ask me what Andrew Neil’s dogs are like in real life. To answer that question once and for all, Scrubber is nice, but Molly stinks and the BBC had to hush it up when she bit Jacob Rees-Mogg in his North East Somerset constituency. Though to be fair, Rees-Mogg had subjected the dog to a cruel and sustained floccinaucinihilipilification.
Last Sunday morning, I further compromised my embargo and appeared on Peston’s ITV politics niche, Peston’s Weekly Thought Nook™. Peston introduced himself to me while reclining in a makeup chair: “Hello, I’m Peston. And today I’ll be talking to ballroom-dancing politico Ed Balls, and Ukip’s Suzanne Evans. Stay with me.”
I thought Peston’s greeting oddly formal and impersonal, and then realised he was being filmed for a trailer, and was addressing the British public en masse, not me individually. I felt stupid for not understanding how TV worked, like when I was little and I thought Harold Wilson could see me through the television.
Next I went to the green room, which is showbiz language for the place where the stars wait their turn to go on TV with Peston, or Andrew Neil, or whoever’s show it is. In the old days it could have been Russell Harty for example. Or Gus Honeybun.
The green room doesn’t have to be green, or even a room. There isn’t a green room on This Week on BBC1 in case the Daily Mail says it’s too luxurious. On This Week there’s just some chairs in a corridor and a table with old fishing magazines on it, like at the proctologist’s. “Andrew Neil will see you now.” Peston is much better.
I’m aware that writing about what happens in the green room is a betrayal of an unspoken showbiz-politics rule. Like Vegas, what happens in the green room stays in the green room. It’s supposed to be a safe space, in a theatre or at a TV studio, where performers and contributors shouldn’t feel they are being watched. Journalists went into my dressing room at the Leicester Square theatre and reported that I used Lynx deodorant. I felt violated.
Nowadays I find it very difficult being in the green room with younger, newer comedians, as I feel my age and supposed status mean I am permanently required to be in presidential mode. And I mean this in the old sense of “presidential”, meaning magnanimous, patient and generous, rather than in the modern sense of presidential, meaning being a corrupt, pussy-grabbing racist. How quickly words change their meanings.
In the Peston green room I sat next to Suzanne Evans from the Ukips. I tried to make small talk. She agreed that when Nigel Farage, earlier that week, had threatened to unleash a pussy-grabbing Trump sex attack robot on Theresa May, it had been a bit much.
Suzanne Evans from the Ukips was wearing a giant Remembrance Day poppy made of cloth. Jeremy Corbyn came on TV wearing a tiny badge of a poppy. I said, “Your poppy’s massive isn’t it Suzanne? Jeremy Corbyn’s is tiny. He’s a traitor, isn’t he?”
Suzanne Evans from the Ukips didn’t say much, and I worried that she had my card marked for being one of the liberal comedians that dominate all comedy now, to little or no effect in real terms. Perhaps she thought I was trying to generate material for a funny column. Which I wasn’t. At the time.
Later on, when Marine Le Pen came on the BBC news being really, really racist, Suzanne Evans from the Ukips shook her head disapprovingly, as if Le Pen had crossed a racist line in the alt-right sand. I started wondering about gradations of tolerance, of how our relationship with someone, however minimal, affects our attitude to them.
On Christmas morning 1995, I came down to our kitchen, hung over, and the first sentence that was said to me, on Christmas morning, apropos of nothing, was ‘You can say what you like about Hitler, but he had some good ideas. He just went about them the wrong way.” It was Auntie Hattie, on seasonal secondment from the old people’s home, praising Hitler, on Christmas Day! On Christmas Day!! On Christmas Day in the morning!!! Sieg Heil!!!!
But we make allowances for the madness of our relatives, because they are little old ladies, and little old men, and are a bit confused probably; but we must not allow ourselves to make allowances for far-right politicians and their followers. Because the American woman with mixed-race kids I talk to at swimming lessons every Tuesday is afraid to go home; and the day after Brexit, in our cosy comedy community, an Asian comedian was told to go back where he came from by an emboldened heckler at the Comedy Store, historic home of politically correct alternative comedy, the sort of incident I haven’t seen since the 80s.
And that’s why, after next week’s This Week, I’m not meeting any more TV politicians. These aren’t the times for self-loathing liberals to seek to understand the leaders of the global far right, or their supporters. That ship sailed when Trump put Breitbart into the White House. We should be in crisis-management mode. It’s time to reassert a fundamental principle, namely that there’s no excuse for bigotry, whichever alt-right buzzword you get Boris or Steve Bannon to rebrand it with. And if that means no more free green-room bacon sandwiches on Sunday morning for me, then so be it. We are all going to have to make sacrifices.
Stewart Lee
2016-11-20T12:21:44+00:00
The danger in meeting politicians is that they seem all right and then, as a comedian, it is much harder to summon up the manufactured anger required to despise them for personal commercial gain. I have a mortgage. I can’t afford to find myself thinking things like “You know, Ken Clarke isn’t so bad once you get to know him.” Hate is money! And I have to pump it out to a deadline!! In the noughties I had a 25-minute routine about Michael Portillo looking like the Cuprinol wood stain goblin, which was gradually becoming the spine of a new three-hour show. But after I met Portillo on BBC1’s This Week, he seemed belatedly reasonable in that way that ex-Tories often do, and I found I could no longer suggest he was a wood stain goblin with any conviction. Another revenue stream ran dry. I don’t like going on TV, but I will make an exception for This Week, of which I am a huge fan. People always ask me what Andrew Neil’s dogs are like in real life. To answer that question once and for all, Scrubber is nice, but Molly stinks and the BBC had to hush it up when she bit Jacob Rees-Mogg in his North East Somerset constituency. Though to be fair, Rees-Mogg had subjected the dog to a cruel and sustained floccinaucinihilipilification. Last Sunday morning, I further compromised my embargo and appeared on Peston’s ITV politics niche, Peston’s Weekly Thought Nook™. Peston introduced himself to me while reclining in a makeup chair: “Hello, I’m Peston. And today I’ll be talking to ballroom-dancing politico Ed Balls, and Ukip’s Suzanne Evans. Stay with me.” I thought Peston’s greeting oddly formal and impersonal, and then realised he was being filmed for a trailer, and was addressing the British...
During my mandated morning meanderings my mind returns to one of my favourite books, Arthur Machen’s 1924 non-novel, The London Adventure. Alternatively titled The Art of Wandering, the absurd work is 96 years old but has never felt more contemporary. The haughty writer-narrator, newly bound by the responsibility of fatherhood, must now write for money rather than art, “a prostitution of the soul compared with which the prostitution of the body is a little thing”.
Once again Machen mentors me down the tin-can telephone of time. The gaily lit theatres where I plied my trade are darkened. Like the author of The London Adventure, accepting a contracted word count from an unspecified “young man in spectacles” in a Fleet Street tavern on a January afternoon in 1921, with no idea how to fill it, I am now driven to flood this newspaper sewer for money. Though it is “a degradation somewhat below those experienced by the procurers of Soho”, nonetheless, like Machen, I walk my daily allowance, waiting to glimpse the great god Nodens in his great green masquerade.
I spent the first month of lockdown refusing to participate in the daily outdoor exercise hour, as a protest against the Brexiters and their incompetence. Has Matt Handcock looked behind the bins for the Turkish PPE? Or maybe it has been left with a neighbour, or just on the doorstep, by a fleeing Amazon delivery person wrapped up in bin bags. Perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “while you were out” note blew away.
(Note to self. Conspiracy theorists think China invented the virus to secure economic dominance. By this logic Amazon’s Jeff Bezos must have grown it, like an evil dill, in the soft ring of moist skin surrounding his tax-avoiding anus, and then smeared it on every parcel his slaves service, full spectrum delivery dominance within his grasp, the Fu Manchu of superfluous packaging materials.)
But now I am doing my daily 10,000 steps. My exercise strike was as ineffective a gesture against Handcock as the dirty protest that has annoyed my nauseated family so thoroughly, though the cats enjoy stalking the attendant flies, and the manure is good for growing indoor edibles, like dill for example. Thankfully, the world of my walks is one of wonder. I nibble my dill, and Danny Dyer’s face scowls out from a plastic box of ponies and fairies. But wait, old friend. I am getting ahead of myself.
Every morning, not five minutes from the place I have called home for a quarter of a century, I find myself Bermuda-triangulated into square miles of unknown side-streets. On page 11 of The London Adventure Machen, still unsure what to write, wanders unvisited London byways “that might have been behind the scenes of the universe … shapeless, unmeaning, dreary, dismal beyond words; as if one were journeying past the back wall of an everlasting backyard”. Then, suddenly, an urban fig tree appears, “as blessed as any well in an African desert … This was to be the kind of adventure out of which I had agreed to make this book”.
At around 11am I took a random right turn at the shut-up chip shop, noting how the timeless patterns of nature were disrupted. Squawking seagull hordes, which have flown in from the Thames to scavenge at school break times on the doorstep of Pizza-Fish 2000 for centuries, realise there’s no fast food to be found. Instead, the street is silent, and they stay at home, relearning their traditional trade from grey-winged gulls old enough to remember the ancestral fish-catching ways.
I found myself walking empty pavements past rows of mid-sized semis, and placed out front of one is a green plastic box of books, presumably free to take, arranged spines upwards. Chiefly they are children’s stories, the My Magical Pony novels of Jenny Oldfield, Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries, and Meg Cabot’s Allie Finkel series. But staring up between these jolly volumes is the angry face of Danny Dyer, whose The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End is their inexplicable and unexpected bedfellow, my Machen’s fig-tree moment.
Had a little girl, who normally read about ponies and dorks, somehow misused her birthday book voucher to buy The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End? Had she been horrified by the questions Dyer answers, such as “Where have all the old school boozers gone?”, “Are there such things as ghosts?” and “Am I middle class?”? Did the book include the suggestion, given in Dyer’s 2010 Zoo magazine agony column, that you should cut your ex’s face, “so that no one will want her”?
Had the shock of a child’s encounter with Dyer, and the young reader’s realisation that, yes, she probably was middle class, resulted in the sudden rejection of not only The World According to Danny Dyer: Life Lessons from the East End, but of all books? Or did some belatedly resentful father, far from his own cockney roots, displaced to the environs of the liberal elite, inflict Dyer’s thoughts, on ghosts and on pub, on his innocent daughter, to burst her out of “The Bubble”?
I dropped my dill laughing. I could feel an interminable 20 minute standup bit, hell maybe even a whole two-hour show, forming, and took a photo of the box as notes towards my post-Covid comeback. And then I realised. Random perambulations had given me the gift of this private epiphany, a secret tryst between the Dork Diaries, Danny Dyer and me. I would never mention it for money, like the whorish writers Machen despised.
But what to write about instead? On page 137 of The London Adventure, five pages from the end, Machen begins to “reflect very seriously” that he still does not have any idea what to write about. Then someone sent me a link to the video for the new single from Oozing Wound, Surrounded By Fucking Idiots, and I thought maybe I should write about that instead. But it was too late.
Stewart Lee
2020-04-26T12:11:35+01:00
During my mandated morning meanderings my mind returns to one of my favourite books, Arthur Machen’s 1924 non-novel, The London Adventure. Alternatively titled The Art of Wandering, the absurd work is 96 years old but has never felt more contemporary. The haughty writer-narrator, newly bound by the responsibility of fatherhood, must now write for money rather than art, “a prostitution of the soul compared with which the prostitution of the body is a little thing”. Once again Machen mentors me down the tin-can telephone of time. The gaily lit theatres where I plied my trade are darkened. Like the author of The London Adventure, accepting a contracted word count from an unspecified “young man in spectacles” in a Fleet Street tavern on a January afternoon in 1921, with no idea how to fill it, I am now driven to flood this newspaper sewer for money. Though it is “a degradation somewhat below those experienced by the procurers of Soho”, nonetheless, like Machen, I walk my daily allowance, waiting to glimpse the great god Nodens in his great green masquerade. I spent the first month of lockdown refusing to participate in the daily outdoor exercise hour, as a protest against the Brexiters and their incompetence. Has Matt Handcock looked behind the bins for the Turkish PPE? Or maybe it has been left with a neighbour, or just on the doorstep, by a fleeing Amazon delivery person wrapped up in bin bags. Perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “while you were out” note blew away. (Note to self. Conspiracy theorists think China invented the virus to secure economic dominance. By this logic Amazon’s Jeff Bezos must have grown it, like an evil dill, in the soft ring of moist skin surrounding his tax-avoiding anus, and then smeared it on every parcel his slaves service,...
Carpet Remnant World was said to be about idealised notions of society.
As the comic introduced the show, he mocked his own comedy style: "I say one thing for comedy effect. I make a factual bold statement then mean the opposite. I will do this five or six times then talk about something for too long at the end."
For anyone who has seen him before, this is an amusing summary of what he is like on stage - although it is done in an extremely clever and witty manner.
His impression of a comic doing some anti-Islamic comedy - which he is told he should do by some members of the public - was hilarious, with some Michael McIntyre-style running around the stage; a hand on the forehead looking out to the crowd; and repeatedly moving the mic stand around - all sights regularly seen on current stand-up shows.
Talking about the host city, Lee described Wolverhampton as a cross between a medieval town and east Germany: "Normally there are planning permissions in cities, but this seems like a free for all."
Explaining the first half of the show, 44-year-old Lee said he now spends his time driving around on tour and looking after his children - always seeking out The Works bookstores.
Playing in front of a backdrop of rolled-up carpets, Lee explained how he was finding it "hard to work the room" as the crowd were not all laughing together.
As the room filled with "pockets of laughter", Lee explained why people were laughing at some jokes to those who may not have got it.
Speaking of his progression from the former Little Civic to the present venue, he said: "It's frustrating; it was 2004 when I was first booked in Wolverhampton. It was a little place and then I moved downstairs. We could have fit the people here tonight into the room downstairs without the stragglers. But you can't stop people coming in...
"You can feel there is a brilliant gig in here, it's so nearly perfect. I wish I was dead. I wish I was a dead comedian. Bill Hicks is judged on two hours of material, it's easy to be a dead comedian. It's hard to knock out two hours every year, adding to your ever-diminishing obituary."
He added that the show would not receive a five-star review, blaming it on the audience - "three-star maybe, but it'll be two-star because of people's laziness".
As Lee was supposedly forced to end the first half on a different joke to what it should have been (a more high-brow gag that didn't get the laughs he expected, as opposed to his wife asking him if he had soiled himself after seeing he had bought some new pants); the comedian told fans that they got the end of the half first they deserved.
"I'm not proud of getting a laugh out of 'shit yourself'".
As a father who sits around watching Scooby Doo with his son, Lee used parts of the cartoon to explain how Margaret Thatcher was a "jungle canyon rope bridge snatcher".
Harking back to the 80s, Lee told the audience that both Thatcher and Scooby Doo were on a list of the top 10 cliches to do jokes about, written with his former comedy partner Richard Herring.
("If you don't know who Richard Herring is, why are you here?" he shouted.)
As Lee continued to satirise some of his fellow comedians (especially all of the Russells), he said that after a 25-year career he looked for inspiration in the form of shop names ("something to get five minutes out of"). His lengthy descriptions of a literal Office World manned by a person made entirely from old-fashioned stationery was one of the highlights of the night, along with his Brummie accent during the Meat City description.
Picking on one of the current batch of Russells, Lee lambasted the fact that Russell Kane had won an award for a show about the death of his father.
Lee, the co-writer of Jerry Springer The Opera, noted a trend in making comedy shows full of sadness.
In a rant further directed at Kane, he ordered: "Fuck off, shut up and give your award back! "All our Dads are dead. If you're crying at the end of a comedy show, they haven't done their job properly. I could do a sad show! I'm an orphan and 65,000 Christians wanted to kill me!"
Following on from his latest Comedy Vehicle series aired on the BBC, Lee begrudged the fact that half a million people now mistake him for somebody else. The latest list of his lookalikes includes Kim Jong-il and Serbian warlord General Ratko Mladic.
Lee concluded by reinforcing his hatred of all social media like Twitter, saying that the only good thing about it would be the possibility of using it to piece his life back together if he ever had a nervous breakdown.
"It's staffed by gullible volunteers, I feel insane and paranoid," he added.
Backed by some jazz music and a change in light, the comic went on to read some downright funny yet awful internet insults about himself.
Although Lee continually claimed to have no structure or indeed any jokes on this tour, it proved to be yet another cleverly constructed performance full of laughter.
Fans were also treated to autographs at the end, as he ran out to the front of the venue to sell his own merchandise.
Stewart Lee
2012-05-27T14:27:38+01:00
Carpet Remnant World was said to be about idealised notions of society. As the comic introduced the show, he mocked his own comedy style: "I say one thing for comedy effect. I make a factual bold statement then mean the opposite. I will do this five or six times then talk about something for too long at the end." For anyone who has seen him before, this is an amusing summary of what he is like on stage - although it is done in an extremely clever and witty manner. His impression of a comic doing some anti-Islamic comedy - which he is told he should do by some members of the public - was hilarious, with some Michael McIntyre-style running around the stage; a hand on the forehead looking out to the crowd; and repeatedly moving the mic stand around - all sights regularly seen on current stand-up shows. Talking about the host city, Lee described Wolverhampton as a cross between a medieval town and east Germany: "Normally there are planning permissions in cities, but this seems like a free for all." Explaining the first half of the show, 44-year-old Lee said he now spends his time driving around on tour and looking after his children - always seeking out The Works bookstores. Playing in front of a backdrop of rolled-up carpets, Lee explained how he was finding it "hard to work the room" as the crowd were not all laughing together. As the room filled with "pockets of laughter", Lee explained why people were laughing at some jokes to those who may not have got it. Speaking of his progression from the former Little Civic to the present venue, he said: "It's frustrating; it was 2004 when I was first booked in Wolverhampton. It was a little place...
The booker at Dalston’s doughty Vortex club introduces the opening night of London Jazz Festival sponsored events defensively; “ It’s business as usual here at the Vortex”. The club crowns the bend in an underground river of London jazz venues, that once surfaced in the back room of the Red Rose in Finsbury park, but now wends from pub cellars in Stoke Newington, down to the self-consciously cutting edge space of Dalston Junction’s Cafe Oto, nurturing jazz’s experimental wing all year long. Tonight this tiny glass attic is packed with discerning twentysomethings and radical pensioners for a trio that seems hand-picked to appease them, representing a venn diagram of distinct but overlapping schools.
Ken Vandermark, on saxophones and clarinet, swifty rose to the top of the Chicago circuit in the ‘90s. With a drill instructor’s moustache and a green and black wardrobe, tonight he plays like a military man on a mission, making bold, definate statements, essaying a kind of volcanic be-bop. The double bassist Barry Guy’s generation of ‘60s British musicians shaped the sound of free improvisation in Europe. He has a painter and decorator’s face, and a ballet dancer’s grace, and plucks an extra fifth string at choice moments, its trebley tone suggesting twinkling stars, before returning to the collapsing sun rumble of beaten bass notes. Mark Sanders, the drummer, currently plays all over the country, all the time, with everyone. Tonight, he drops rubble or sprinkles fairy-dust, as appropriate. In the closing number, Vandermark blows hard and long on the clarinet and ends, literally, on a high note. Outside in Gillet Square one imagines there is a Chinook Helicopter waiting to wisk him away.
On the London Jazz Festival’s second night, a trio led by the German barbarian Peter Brötzmann, another modest coo for the Festival’s experimental fringe, has been invited into the temple of culture that is The Purcell Room. The saxophonist’s 1968 statement Machine Gun laid waste to jazz history and remains a sacred text for American noise rock bands anxious to claim a classy lineage. Brötzmann’s current trio consolidates his position on the front line of possibilities. The electric bassist X Pliakas plays like an escapee from a Norwegian Black Metal band who has run away to join the Free Jazz circus.
The drummer Michael Wertmuller can shift from a sustained, rhythmical assault on the rim of his snare, to a sudden low end battery of the entire kit that makes the audience, as one, gasp like somone had just pushed them off a precipice. Stage right stands Brötzman, sixty eight years old and looking like a Prussian general in sociology lecturer threads, riding the storm. When it subsides, he takes a long and lyrical solo, that appears to appropriate microseconds of Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, showing you what Brötzmann might have done, had he not chosen to make this thrilling and challenging space his own. A standing ovation coaxes the clearly exhausted trio back to the stage. Surely the London Jazz Festival’s other guests can just pack up and go home now? Peter Brötzmann, the big bad wolf of jazz, came to London, and he huffed and he puffed and he blew your house down.
Stewart Lee
2008-11-16T20:12:56+00:00
The booker at Dalston’s doughty Vortex club introduces the opening night of London Jazz Festival sponsored events defensively; “ It’s business as usual here at the Vortex”. The club crowns the bend in an underground river of London jazz venues, that once surfaced in the back room of the Red Rose in Finsbury park, but now wends from pub cellars in Stoke Newington, down to the self-consciously cutting edge space of Dalston Junction’s Cafe Oto, nurturing jazz’s experimental wing all year long. Tonight this tiny glass attic is packed with discerning twentysomethings and radical pensioners for a trio that seems hand-picked to appease them, representing a venn diagram of distinct but overlapping schools. Ken Vandermark, on saxophones and clarinet, swifty rose to the top of the Chicago circuit in the ‘90s. With a drill instructor’s moustache and a green and black wardrobe, tonight he plays like a military man on a mission, making bold, definate statements, essaying a kind of volcanic be-bop. The double bassist Barry Guy’s generation of ‘60s British musicians shaped the sound of free improvisation in Europe. He has a painter and decorator’s face, and a ballet dancer’s grace, and plucks an extra fifth string at choice moments, its trebley tone suggesting twinkling stars, before returning to the collapsing sun rumble of beaten bass notes. Mark Sanders, the drummer, currently plays all over the country, all the time, with everyone. Tonight, he drops rubble or sprinkles fairy-dust, as appropriate. In the closing number, Vandermark blows hard and long on the clarinet and ends, literally, on a high note. Outside in Gillet Square one imagines there is a Chinook Helicopter waiting to wisk him away. On the London Jazz Festival’s second night, a trio led by the German barbarian Peter Brötzmann, another modest coo for the Festival’s experimental...
The so-called EU Referendum debate on so-called ITV (let us not dignify either by naming them) filled me and all my ABC1 liberal friends with despair. Oh! The humanity!! Drunk on Belgian wine, I watched the Barrier Reef of the Britain I know bleach to nothing in the twin glare of Brexit’s burning certainties and Julie Etchingham’s gleaming teeth.
Leave had no arguments or facts, just pornographically arousing soundbites and lies they knew were lies, but which they calculated might stick to a wall in a depressed town somewhere, if flung with enough force, like compacted pellets of Priti Patel’s shit.
Even Remain’s Amber Rudd, the Countess Bathory of Energy and Climate, seemed clever by comparison to Boris, who managed to make the word “expert” a pejorative term. Nonetheless, it was bleakly obvious that the audience’s disillusion led them to favour the Leavers’ lies.
I wondered how Leave could rationalise their blind stab in the dark and live with the untruths they had told. And my mind turned again to Michael Gove, who, to put their relationship in terms of Gove’s beloved Dennis Wheatley, is the supplicant Simon Aron to Boris’s satanic Mocata, their joint prize the mummified phallus of Conservative party power. “Only they who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour!”
As I have confessed before, in 1992 I was a gag writer on a doomed Channel 4 show, A Pig in a Poke. The experimental satire programme broke new ground by positioning its performers on balsa ladders in a smoke-filled Bat Cave, while they delivered belligerent journalistic monologues to camera, the stylistic integrity of which I and the comedian Richard Herring were encouraged to compromise with jokes.
Lucky Richard was assigned to Poke’s most affable hosts, the restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod and her colleague, the rapper LL Cool J, who plied him with fudge and polystyrene all day, while I was understandably ignored by my master, a capable young comic newspaper columnist called Michael Andrew Gove.
Gove attended one writers’ round-table meeting a week, where all he did was badger the producers to book the former BBC newsreader Jan Leeming, upon whom he was oddly fixated, before leaving with all the office washroom’s toilet rolls secreted in his satchel.
Instead of asking me for jokes, Gove would make me wait on the fire escape outside his Notting Hill flat, occasionally emerging to assign me mundane tasks, such as taking his weekly washing – usually just seven white pants, seven white vests, fourteen grey socks and one yellowing sock – to the dry cleaners.
One week, the old Greek couple in Dryee-Fast seemed unduly amused by Gove’s unusually bulky package. “Tell Michael we try and try but can’t get the stains outta the crotch this time!” they laughed, unravelling a full-size fur suit, the reasonably realistic costume of an unidentified Gove-size rodent. I rolled up the outfit and returned it to Gove without comment. I needed this job. I couldn’t afford to rock the boat. Scruples were a luxury I didn’t have.
Later that day, Gove suddenly appeared beside me on the fire escape, high above the Notting Hill street. He had a habit of sneaking up on you. “Ah, Lee,” he said, “contemplating the incalculable, I see?” “Mr Gove?” I asked, as I felt his hand upon the small of my back, applying gentle pressure.
“The leap, Lee. If you were to leap now, Leapy Lee, from this fire escape, what would happen?” “I’d die I think, Mr Gove,” I answered, unsure where this line of questioning was going. “Perhaps,” Gove countered, “and experts would agree with you, I am sure. But would it not be thrilling to find out if one could profit from such a bold leap?” “There’s nothing to find out, Mr Gove,” I replied, “no one could survive that leap. This is the seventh floor.” “Was it not our lord Christ,” Gove hissed, returning inside, “who urged us to consider the lemming.” I don’t think Christ did say that, did he? Wasn’t it “consider the lily”? What did Gove mean?
The next day, Gove suddenly emerged from his room, carrying a brown parcel, and told me he was going for a walk on Wormwood Scrubs common. “Carry on, Lee,” he called, “with whatever it is A Pig in a Poke pay you for.” I availed myself of my absent master’s sofa and tried in vain to think of a funny introduction for Jan Leeming, should Gove’s ambition of grilling her ever find favour with the producers.
Gove had a crackpot idea that he and Leeming should appear together, both dressed as some kind of rat, and jump off a high diving board into a swimming pool, and he had offered me a bonus, out of his own pocket, if I could contrive a scenario – somehow related to the week’s news – that would convince the producers this would be a good idea.
In Gove’s office, his phone rang persistently and in the end I thought it best to enter, against his strict orders, and answer it. The producer of Pig in a Poke was saying something about how Gove was needed immediately for an urgent overdub of haughty snorting, but my eyes were adjusting to the dark. Gove’s previously unseen office slowly revealed itself to me in the full depth of its demented insanity.
Tiny, tiny... rodents – some soft and grey, some brown with black stripes, in paintings, posters, wallcharts, thumb-tacked magazine clippings and poorly executed crayon drawings, hurling themselves fatally in their thousands over the cliff of their island home; or crudely taxidermied and mounted, eyes glazed and little paws frozen stiff – on every available surface.
Lemmings. Hundreds and hundreds of lemmings. Michael Gove was obsessed with lemmings. And I wasn’t about to let him hurl himself to his death on my watch, although, had I known what he would become, to do so would have been the most moral course of action. I ran to Wormwood Scrubs common.
On a patch of waste ground, upon a filthy mattress, prostrate beneath the abandoned silo from which he had jumped, lay Michael Gove, winded, but alive, and dressed in the lemming costume – for that is what it was – that the dry cleaners had laughed at, the crotch dark once more.
Gove’s eyes flashed open inside the circle of fake fur that surrounded his excited face. “Am I dead?” he bellowed. “Am I dead, Lee?” “No Michael,” I said, “you’re not dead.” “Experts,” he said, “what do they know? Help me up, boy! Help me up!!”
Stewart Lee
2016-06-19T10:22:29+01:00
The so-called EU Referendum debate on so-called ITV (let us not dignify either by naming them) filled me and all my ABC1 liberal friends with despair. Oh! The humanity!! Drunk on Belgian wine, I watched the Barrier Reef of the Britain I know bleach to nothing in the twin glare of Brexit’s burning certainties and Julie Etchingham’s gleaming teeth. Leave had no arguments or facts, just pornographically arousing soundbites and lies they knew were lies, but which they calculated might stick to a wall in a depressed town somewhere, if flung with enough force, like compacted pellets of Priti Patel’s shit. Even Remain’s Amber Rudd, the Countess Bathory of Energy and Climate, seemed clever by comparison to Boris, who managed to make the word “expert” a pejorative term. Nonetheless, it was bleakly obvious that the audience’s disillusion led them to favour the Leavers’ lies. I wondered how Leave could rationalise their blind stab in the dark and live with the untruths they had told. And my mind turned again to Michael Gove, who, to put their relationship in terms of Gove’s beloved Dennis Wheatley, is the supplicant Simon Aron to Boris’s satanic Mocata, their joint prize the mummified phallus of Conservative party power. “Only they who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour!” As I have confessed before, in 1992 I was a gag writer on a doomed Channel 4 show, A Pig in a Poke. The experimental satire programme broke new ground by positioning its performers on balsa ladders in a smoke-filled Bat Cave, while they delivered belligerent journalistic monologues to camera, the stylistic integrity of which I and the comedian Richard Herring were encouraged to compromise with jokes. Lucky Richard was assigned to Poke’s most affable hosts, the restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod and...
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.
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 11th)
7pm (4pm performance Saturday 12th 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
Two shows, on sale March 3rd. 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) - 3rd – 27th August (days off 15th & 16th 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.
The Stand’s New Town Theatre (Grand Hall), 1.50pm (13.50hrs) - 3rd – 28 August (days off 15th & 16th 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!!!!
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
KING ROCKER DVD/SCREENINGS
Our critically acclaimed doc KING ROCKER is available on DVD, and the s/track is out on various formats too.
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 (21st-24th 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
Deer Shed (29th - 31st July https://www.deershedfestival.com) w Dry Cleaners, Billy NoMates, Treeboy & Archie, Yard Actors, Snapped Angles, The Love Eggs, and David O’Doherty
6. SAVE THE WYE
I love the Wye. Let’s save this brilliant river from human foulness.
OXIDE GHOSTS: THE BRASS EYE TAPES + Q&A JAN 29TH - MARCH 5TH
I will be hosting the Crouch End screening of this March 21st
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
2ND Lancaster Dukes,
3rd Kendal Brewery,
5th Glasgow Stand,
6th Edinburgh Cameo,
7th Leeds Hyde Park Picturehouse,
8th Newcastle Stand,
9th York City Screen,
10th M’cr Chapeltown Picture House,
11th Liverpool FACT,
12th Bangor Pontio,
14th Birmingham MAC,
15th Wolverhampton Lighthouse,
16th Halifax Square Chapel,
17th Wigan Old Courts,
18th Derby Quad,
19th Oxford Phoenix,
20th London Gate,
21st London Crouch End Picture House,
22nd London Chiswick cinema,
23rd TBC,
24th TBC,
25th Southampton Harbour Lights,
26th Brighton Duke Of Yorks,
27th Worthing Connaught,
28th Cambridge Arts Picturehouse,
29th London Fulham Rd Picturehouse,
30th London Finsbury Park Picturehouse,
31st London Hackney Picturehouse, APRIL 1st London Brixton Ritzy
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.’
Echo & The Bunnymen Scally psych-survivors APRIL 6TH 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 4th Nottingham Rammel Club, 5th M’cr Anthony Burgess Foundation, April 29th Reading Rising Sun Arts. SECLUDED BRONTE March 20th Rotterdam ?, 26th Amsterdam OCCII, 27th Rotterdam Worm, April 19th Zurich Institut, 20th Geneva Café 12, 21st Paris Les Instants Chavires, 22nd Brussels Les Ateliers Claus, 23rd tba, 25th Café Oto London. MORPHOGENESIS - ORIGINAL LINE-UP OF ART NOISE LEGENDS June 12th Café Oto London
Stiff Little Fingers Still impossibly inspiring NI punk survivors MARCH 10th Bristol Academy, 11th Cardiff SU, 12th B’ham Academy, 14th Nottingham Rock City, 16th Troon Hall, 17th Glasgow Barrowlands, 18th Newcastle City Hall, 19th Leeds Academy, 21st Northampton Roadmender, 24th Bournemouth Academy, 25th M’cr Academy, 26th Camden Roundhouse AUGUST 4th Blackpool Rebellion, OCTOBER 1st- 2nd Sheffield Academy
Robyn Hitchcock Psychedelic surrealist MARCH 17th Cambridge Storey’s Field, 19th London QEH, 20th Leeds Brudenell, 22nd 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 24th Glasgow Academy, 25th Newcastle City Hall, 26th Sheffield Academy, 27th Leeds Academy, 30th Birmingham Academy, APRIL 1st M’cr Apollo, 3rd London T&C.
Melt Banana Endlessly inspiring Japanese pop-art-noiseniks MARCH 31st Margate Elsewhere, APRIL 1st Reading South Street, 6th Cambridge Portland Arms, 9th Huddersfield Parish, 12th Edinburgh Caves, 13th Glasgow Stereo, 14th York Crescent, 17th Bristol Exchange, 18th Cardiff Ifor Bach, 22nd Brighton Patterns
Alex Winter London Prince Charles Cinema 31st March - April 3rd. 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.
Wet Leg Sure to be briefly massive, these waspish Amish-styled Boston-indie-circa-1989-sounding barnstormers hit the road APRIL 17th Edinburgh Mash, 19th Leeds Brudenell, 20th M’cr Gorilla, 21st Bristol Trinity, 23rd B’ham Institute 3, 24th Norwich Arts, 26th London Scala, 27th Southsea Wedgewood, MAY 28th 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 19th Glasgow Cathouse, 20th Liverpool Cavern, 23rd M’cr Deaf Institute, 24th Leeds Key, 26th Norwich Epic, 27th Oxford Academy, 29th Brighton Patterns, 30th Birmingham Academy, MAY 2nd Bristol Thekla, 3rd London Garage, 5th Leek Foxlowe Arts, 7th Nottingham Bodega
Red Guitars Reunited 80’s politicised Hull post-punks w afropop inflections in original line-up configuration. APRIL 19th Leeds Old Woollen, 21st M’cr Night & Day, 22nd Glasgow Attic, 22nd Hull Adelphi, 23rd Brighton Green Door, 29th London 100 Club, 30th 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 21st Dublin Liberty Hall, 25th Glasgow Glee, 27th Birmingham Glee, 28th M'cr Academy, 30th London Hackney Earth
Low Mormon minimalists APRIL 25th Edinburgh Queen’s Hall, 26th Dublin Vicar St, 27th M’cr Cathedral, 28th Brighton St George’s, 29th London St John At Hackney, 30th Bristol Trinity
Bridget Christie - Who Am I? Woke comedienne. APRIL 26th - 30th, Leicester Sq Theatre London.
Flamin’ Groovies - You must see these superb ‘70s American Stones/Byrds/Beatles styled survivors. MAY 3rd York Cowgirl, 4th Newcastle Cluny, 6th Glasgow Room 2, 7th 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 27th London Water Rats, 29th High Wycombe Kingsmead House, 30th Hambrook Village Hall, JUNE 1ST Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen’s Club, 2nd Birmingham Kitchen Garden cafe.
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)
Stewart Lee
2022-03-03T13:54:05+00:00
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. FACTS - Pink / Blue FACTS - Green / Blue FACTS - Green / Black Content Provider Blue / Yellow Hoodie Content Provider Black / Red Hoodie Cheeses Blue / Yellow Hoodie Cheeses Black / Silver Hoodie Face...
Brexit promises evaporate. The hot, wet lie-farts of the liar Boris Johnson, trapped in the glamping yurt of his trousers since last year’s referendum, are now contained no more. Europa leans forward decisively, pulls down the foreign secretary’s pants, and sets his foul gases free. And guess what? They stink.
I write on Wednesday backstage in Wolverhampton. On the internet, a blue hat with yellow stars worn by the bullied Queen has infuriated Daily Mail racists. “Western men,” the millinery seems to murmur, “this is the European Union member country of your wives. Your daughters. Your sons. Stand up. Rise up. Demand action. Do not carry on as normal. Cowed.”
David Davis, the Mayonnaise Ewok, who once so bravely lunged at Diane Abbott in the House of Commons bar and heroically pushed his squashed face into Leanne Wood’s personal space on Question Time, melts before the Eurocrats like the frozen Alaskan pipeline that he is, wilting at the negotiators’ pesky figures and facts.
Twelve years ago, the Mayonnaise Ewok paraded his Tory leadership ambition with the support of a brace of young women, wearing tight T-shirts with the words “It’s DD for me” emblazoned across their breasts. I am no expert in brassiere sizing, despite many years of patient study, but I have scrutinised the pictures of Davis’s T-shirted females at length on the internet, and some of them appear to have been exaggerating their qualifications. Is there no end to the Mayonnaise Ewok’s lies?
The fairytale pageantry of the Queen’s speech to parliament, and its supporting cast of colourful fantasy characters – Black Rod, Black Betty, Black Uhuru and Rom Space Knight – suddenly seems like a desperate ritual of hope, meaningless in itself, but designed to appease a capricious demon with dark designs upon our island race.
In London, there is no government. Nationwide, the tarmac melts. At Ascot, men’s dress code is relaxed, a sure sign of disaster. And, unless my hearing is playing up, someone in the queue behind me at Hilton Park services said that our next Tory prime minister will be a tree frog named Jacob. The centre cannot hold.
Are we in the end times? And if so, when Christ Eternal returns, in judgment and great majesty, will we recognise Him?
In the last week, the leftwing commentariat has written a lot of hysterical rubbish about the Conservatives going into partnership with the apparently antediluvian Democratic Unionists. Caroline Lucas, of the Green party, even called them “dinosaurs”, which shows her own ignorance. The DUP don’t actually believe in dinosaurs, so I imagine her clever metropolitan liberal elite insult was just primordial soup off a hadrosaur’s spine fin.
Besides which, the Democratic Unionists’ supposedly backward views on climate change, homosexuality and how old the planet is are in fact no more conservative than those of Comrade Corbyn’s Islamic “friends” in Hamas.
Indeed, I myself was disparaging about the DUP in this very column on this page in this newspaper only last week, comparing their parade-loving membership to a line of plastic religious fundamentalist Warhammer tabletop gaming figurines called the Plague Rats ™.
But like many other liberally minded content providers, currently back-pedalling on comments they may have made about Jeremy Corbyn, I am now happy to admit I was wrong about the DUP; and that I was wrong about that woman from the DUP too; and that it was wrong of me, and, what is more, perhaps a mite sexist, to mention her and the Gruffalo in the same sentence.
It’s hardly surprising I misread the DUP so badly. Like most people outside Northern Ireland, it hadn’t been necessary for me to know or care who the DUP, or any Northern Irish parties, were before last week. So, naturally, I blundered through the 1,100 words of copy I was obliged to submit last Sunday without taking the time and trouble to understand.
Whatever you may think of the DUP they are, first and foremost, like all of us, patriots loyal to this sceptred isle. I suspect their truculence at the Tory negotiating table means they have realised it is up to them to rescue this beloved British island from the incompetent Conservative government incumbent.
The DUP are as English as Arthur and his knights, long silent in loyal subterranean slumber, now stirring to save sweet Albion from the wound it would wreak upon itself.
Many people in Northern Ireland, it is rumoured, do not want to be British. But they are British, whether they like it or not. And as such, they cannot help but embody the most basic British values of this island. Fairness, justice, tolerance, fairness, reading, riting and rithmetic.
Even Sean Fein, the leader of IRA, would agree that if that woman from the DUP chooses to prop up the invalid Tory government, she would be doing a terrible disservice to the island of England that all Irish people see as their mother country.
Jeremy Corbyn realised, in what might otherwise have been the twilight of his leadership, that he needed to step up to the touchline and bat for Britain, instead of nurturing his brown allotment parsnip.
Similarly, that woman from the DUP has realised, as she alone holds the future of this great island of Britain in her twin hands, that she needs to exercise her great power, like The Transformers, with great responsibility.
Heroes come in unlikely forms. And so do messiahs. In refusing to countenance supporting the Conservatives, for whatever her own private and doubtless honourable reasons, could that woman from the DUP herself be an unlikely and unintended hero, an unlikely and unintended messiah?
Cynics would say that that woman from the DUP delays the Conservative majority in order to maintain the soft flow of goods and services across the sea from Belfast to Dublin, or to ensure that Northern Irish homosexuals cannot be as happy as, for example, the Welsh ones. Perhaps that is the case.
But sometimes all of us can become the instruments of Christ without being aware of it. I am not a religious person, but it is my belief that God does not want us to leave the EU, and so He has forced the sword arm of His most loyal and loyalist handmaiden, that woman from the DUP.
When the noble history of the rejection of Brexit is written, that woman from the DUP will be its Joan of Arc, its Maid of Orleans, its John Thomas Scopes and its Harvey Milk, all rolled in to one tenacious little bundle of heroic resistance! Ulster says No!! Girl power!!!
Stewart Lee
2017-06-25T23:34:37+01:00
Brexit promises evaporate. The hot, wet lie-farts of the liar Boris Johnson, trapped in the glamping yurt of his trousers since last year’s referendum, are now contained no more. Europa leans forward decisively, pulls down the foreign secretary’s pants, and sets his foul gases free. And guess what? They stink. I write on Wednesday backstage in Wolverhampton. On the internet, a blue hat with yellow stars worn by the bullied Queen has infuriated Daily Mail racists. “Western men,” the millinery seems to murmur, “this is the European Union member country of your wives. Your daughters. Your sons. Stand up. Rise up. Demand action. Do not carry on as normal. Cowed.” David Davis, the Mayonnaise Ewok, who once so bravely lunged at Diane Abbott in the House of Commons bar and heroically pushed his squashed face into Leanne Wood’s personal space on Question Time, melts before the Eurocrats like the frozen Alaskan pipeline that he is, wilting at the negotiators’ pesky figures and facts. Twelve years ago, the Mayonnaise Ewok paraded his Tory leadership ambition with the support of a brace of young women, wearing tight T-shirts with the words “It’s DD for me” emblazoned across their breasts. I am no expert in brassiere sizing, despite many years of patient study, but I have scrutinised the pictures of Davis’s T-shirted females at length on the internet, and some of them appear to have been exaggerating their qualifications. Is there no end to the Mayonnaise Ewok’s lies? The fairytale pageantry of the Queen’s speech to parliament, and its supporting cast of colourful fantasy characters – Black Rod, Black Betty, Black Uhuru and Rom Space Knight – suddenly seems like a desperate ritual of hope, meaningless in itself, but designed to appease a capricious demon with dark designs upon our island race. In...
Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times. “I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times
★★★★ Financial Times
★★★★ Chortle
“One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus
“The new gold standard for rockumentaries” - The Scotsman
The film is also screening this month in The Revelation Perth International Film Festival from 3rd - 10th July, so if you are in Western Australia you can hop on a bus, like the Red Dog of Dampier, and see it there! Fair dinkum!
I just did this piece of KRS1-style edu-tainment for BBCR4 with Resonance 104.4FM alumney Michael Umney, called Stewart Lee - Unreliable Narrator. Lots of comedians in it.
Shirley Collins/Stewart Lee 7th July - I am in conversation w the folk singer and writer Shirley Collins at the East Sussex bohemian hangout Charleston.
The venue also features the first ever painting retrospective of the brilliantly bonkers Fitzrovian character, writer and micro-genius Nina Hamnett.
The record store day dbl vinyl of Asian Dub Foundation’s Access Denied album includes a ‘neolithic’ remix of the no 1 single Comin’ Over Here (feat. Stewart Lee) Facebook Link
‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single, featuring a brand-new Nightingales recording, their first since recording their ‘Four Against Fate’ album.
B-sided with Stewart Lee and Nick Pynn covering the band’s second single, ‘Use Your Loaf’, a track that was for a mooted Nightingales tribute album, which didn’t happen after something got spilt on the laptop that had all the tracks on it.
Fire Records/King Rocker Records.
Exclusive Priority Booking for 2022 – GET BEST SEATS AT LST.
SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO (With new material for 2022) will restart at London's Leicester Square Theatre in January 2022.
Mailing list members can book Leicester Square Theatre dates (4 – 13 Jan 2022) 48 hours before they go on sale to the general public on Thursday 24th June.
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 Leicester Square Theatre in January 2022 and then 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 first half, Snowflake, will be 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 second half, Tornado, 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.”
January 2022
Tuesday 4th January 2022 - Thursday 13th January 2022 - Leicester Square Theatre, London - TICKETS
Saturday 15th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Norwich - TICKETS
Monday 17th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Tuesday 18th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Wednesday 19th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Thursday 20th January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Friday 21st January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Saturday 22nd January 2022 - Playhouse, Oxford
Tuesday 25th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Wednesday 26th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Thursday 27th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Friday 28th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Saturday 29th January 2022 - The Lowry, Salford - TICKETS
Sunday 30th January 2022 - Theatre Royal, Newcastle Upon Tyne - TICKETS
February 2022
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 - St. David's Hall, Cardiff - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd February 2022 - Rose Theatre, Kingston - TICKETS
Friday 4th February 2022 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Saturday 5th February 2022 - Westlands, Yeovil - TICKETS
Tuesday 8th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Wednesday 9th February 2022 - Town Hall, Cheltenham - TICKETS
Thursday 10th February 2022 - De Montfort Hall, Leicester - TICKETS
Friday 11th February 2022 - Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry - TICKETS
Saturday 12th February 2022 - Festival Theatre, Malvern - TICKETS
Sunday 13th February 2022 - Hippodrome, Birmingham - TICKETS
Friday 25th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Saturday 26th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Sunday 27th February 2022 - The Dome, Brighton - TICKETS
Monday 28th February 2022 - The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury - TICKETS
March 2022
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Thursday 3rd March 2022 - Northcott Theatre, Exeter - TICKETS
Friday 4th March 2022 - Lighthouse, Poole - TICKETS
Saturday 5th March 2022 - Playhouse, Salisbury
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
Saturday 12th March 2022 - Grand Theatre, Swansea
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
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
Friday 22nd April 2022 - The Hexagon, Reading - TICKETS
Sunday 24th April 2022 - Mayflower Theatre, Southampton - 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
Wednesday 11th May 2022 - Palace Theatre, Watford
Thursday 12th May 2022 - Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells
Friday 13th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - TICKETS
Saturday 14th May 2022 - The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford - 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
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
June 2022
Tuesday 7th June 2022 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester
Wednesday 8th June 2022 - Mercury Theatre, Colchester
Friday 17th June 2022 - Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool - TICKETS
Saturday 18th June 2022 - Hippodrome, Darlington
Sunday 19th June 2022 - Festival Theatre, Edinburgh - 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
The gvt may not impose vaccine passporting, as there will be questions about who is responsible if you can’t get into your local pub/club/theatre/brothel.
I would be delighted if, if you are coming to see me, you could do your best to get vaccinated, irrespective of what the gvt or the venue insist upon.
I doubt that my snowflake audience will contain many people who deny the existence of Covid or believe the vaccine is George Soros or Bill Gates trying to put tiny Transformer robots into your blood.
But I and my team will be interacting with over 150 000 people on the next leg of the tour, and I would like to minimise our risk, and the risk to my audience, so meet me half way.
I will be selling and signing stuff as usual, I hope, but I won’t be shaking hands to thank you all this time around, and will probably be positioned behind some kind of screen like William Shatner in Airplane 2. Sad.
8) MEDIA GARAGE SALE
My trusted sales partner Media Garage has compacted all my available stand-up dvds into one convenient on-line marketplace, with most available to d/load too.
Remember, if you buy here we will pay tax on these purchases, and help with British schools and hospitals, whereas many major physical media suppliers and streaming services have found ways to avoid declaring their profits, as have NETFLIX, the utter bastards.
AMERICANS - stop moaning about not being able to see me and visit MEDIA GARAGE!
To try and promote King Rocker I have been pimping myself about like Priss Fotheringham on every Podcast going, alone or with dir M Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast), saying the same things in the same room in the same clothes to all different people, all of whom were very kind.
I don’t know what a podcast is really but I think you go on the internet and click on something.
As my grandfather once said, in 1983, “Do you know, in America, there are shops that only sell Kentucky Fried Chicken?” I enjoyed being on the internet with all these people enormously, but will put some blue water between me and the next wedge.
David Baddiel told me it was good to be on the internet, though. These are available..
OLD TUNES FRESH TAKES
A lovely podcast about folk music that I do a bit on.
A rambling chat in which I fail to promote King Rocker at the expense of a Marxist analysis of culture and history from the inventor of Alternative Comedy ™ ®
Dir Michael Cumming and I discuss King Rocker with Britain’s top film guru and skiffle enthusiast, who has been very supportive of the no-budget project.
Andy Miller and John Michinson’s long running and much loved books podcast. I discuss the waspish poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks with them, Nicky Birch and Jennifer Hodgson.
This is a marvellous ongoing Podcast which is unashamedly civilised in an unenlightened era, and this episode is full of great writing, batshit radiophonic music and clever women.
North London echo chamber fun sure to irk people of all political persuasions with the forensically-minded folk devil for the far right and snowflake do-gooder Owen Jones, and me, talking about King Rocker and more general stuff. His current run of ‘casts has some great guests.
Informed Wolverhampton-based comedy and music enthusiast of uncommon warmth and knowledge talks to me about KING ROCKER and what the Gray Pays ‘n’ Bacon are like at the Great Western pub.
I asked Adam if I could go on this massively popular podcast and he said yes which was very kind of him. It was fun hearing his Mark E Smith story from the horse’s mouth and he asked me hard questions of the type I usually avoid.
I answer questions from various utterly delightful members of the Idler’s thoughtful middle class readership from their wine and book filled homes.
They are the real stars here! You will emerge from watching this in love with at least one of them.
In this episode of The Last Line, James talks to comedian Stewart Lee about his new film King Rocker, a documentary about Robert Lloyd, lead singer of 70’s post-punk band The Nightingales.
During their conversation they discuss the new film, its central protagonist Robert Lloyd, stand up comedy, Stewart’s propensity to defend stand up comedians against the views of the general public and his reluctance to participate in podcast interviews.
There’s an interview with Michael Cumming on this podcast too, link below.
Sometime in March you will be able to hear me eat a really lovely Sri Lankan mutton curry from the Kolama restaurant, Soho, with bon viveur jazz pianist Jay Rayner. (I see how this works now!)
This is the most showbiz thing I have ever done, and I am glad it was with jazzy Jay Rayner.
This is a new series of docu-chats on different esoteric subjects.
You have to pay for them because they are finished pieces of work not just some fuckers talking or wandering about.
I have appeared on three of them - on Hawkwind, Penda’s Fen and John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy.
Ben Moor/Jo Neary - The Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra of multi-layered serio-comic theatre-art are back! 27th/28th July at the Hen and Chickens, Islington, w national dates to follow TICKETS Blue Orchids 23rd July Hebden Bridge Trades, 6th Aug Bristol Thunderbolt, 7th Aug Dublin Castle London, 8th Aug Brighton Prince Albert. Post-punk dishwater psychedelia. MDC 14th Aug Edinburgh Sneaky Pete’s. Veteran angry American hardcore innovators Nina Hamnett Exhibition of the art of the underrated bohemian Fitzrovian, Charleston, East Sussex.
NEW FILMS
Ronnie’s, Ronnie Scott & His World Famous Jazz Club (Oliver Murray)
The Dig (Simon Stone) ★★★★★ Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) ★★★★ The News Of The World (Paul Greengrass) ★★★★ Nomadland (Chloe Zhao) ★★★★ County Lines (Henry Blake) ★★★★★
OLD FILMS
Box Of Moonlight (Tom DeCillo, 1996) ★★★★★
Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) ★★★★★
Where Eagles Dare (Brian G Hutton, 1968) ★★★★★
The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967) ★★★★★
The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) ★★★★★
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) ★★★★★
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)★★★★★
Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D’sa/Glen Leyburn, 2013)★★★★★
Caliber 9 (Fernado di Leon, 1972) ★★★★★
‘71 (Yann Demange, 2014) ★★★★★
Big Night (Campbell Scott/Stanley Tucci, 1996) ★★★★★
Jason & The Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) ★★★★★
Goldstone (Ivan Sen, 2016) ★★★★★
Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) ★★★★★
Avengers Infinity War (Russo Brothers, 2018) ★★★★
Avengers Endgame (Russo Brothers, 2019) ★★★★
In Order of Disappearance (Hans Peter Molland, 2014)★★★★★
Iron Man III (Shane Black, 2013)★★★★★
Pauline A La Plage (Eric Rohmer, 1983) ★★★★★
Gone To Earth (Powell/Pressburger, 1950) ★★★★
The Odd Couple (Neil Simon, 1968) ★★★★★
Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) ★★★★
Samurai 1 : Mushashi Miyamoto (Hiroshi Inagaki, 1954) ★★★★
Cache / Hidden (Michaek Haneke, 2005) ★★★★★ Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980) ★★★★★
Summer In February (Christopher Menaul, 2013) ★★★★ Guardians of The Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) ★★★★★<br>
All Tomorrow’s Parties (Jonathan Caouette, 2009) ★★★★ Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969) ★★★★★
Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund, 2015) ★★★★
OLD BOOKS
Rosemary Tonks - Emir (1963)★★★★★
Rosemary Tonks - The Bloater (1968) ★★★★★
John Berger/Jean Mohr - A Fortunate Man (1967) ★★★★★ Ann Quin - Berg (1964) ★★★★
Sir John Mandeville - The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1357)★★★★
NEW BOOKS
Tessa Norton/Bob Stanley - Excavate!
Alan Stafford - Wilson, Keppel & Betty, Too Naked For The Nazis Peter Oborne - The Assault On Truth Nesrine Malik - We Need New Stories ★★★★★ Sean Bythell - Diary of a Bookseller (2018) ★★★★★
Robert Aickman - The Inner Room (1988) ★★★★★
NEW COMICS
Joe Sacco - Paying The Land (2020)
NEW TV
Ghosts S2 (BBC, 2020)
Ghosts - Xmas Special 2020 (BBC, 2020) The Mandalorian S2 (Disney, 2020) ★★★★★ Call My Agent S3 (France 2, 2018)★★★★★
Call My Agent S4 (France 2, 2021) ★★★★★
The Trump Show (BBC, 2020-1)★★★★★
Lupin S1 (Netflix, 2021)★★★★★ Wandavision (Marvel, 2021)★★★★★
Stonehenge The Lost Circle Revealed (BBC, 2021) ★★★★★
Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (BBC, 2021)★★★★★ Raiders Of The Lost Past With Janina Ramirez (BBC2, 2021) ★★★★
Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing S3 (BBC, 2020) ★★★★★
The Falcon & The Winter Soldier (Marvel, 2021) ★★★★★
Homeland s8 (Netflix, 2020)★★★★★
Into The Night S1 (Between a Dog & A Wolf, 2020) ★★★★
Unforgotten S4 (ITV, 2021) ★★★★
Inside No 9 S6 (BBC, 2021) ★★★★★ Great British Bake Off S11 (C4, 2020) ★★★★★ Time (BBC, 2021) ★★★★★
INTERNETS, RADIOS, YOUTUBES AND PODCASTS
Rob Auton’s Daily Podcast
Alastair Beckett-King on Youtube
Shawn Woods’ Mouse Trap Monday on Youtube
An Evening With Tim Heidecker (Youtube, 2020) ★★★★ Bridget Christie - Mortal (BBCR4)
Rosie Holt’s Youtube characters
NEW RECORDS
Lady Leshurr - Quaranqueen
The Primevals - New Trip
Cult Figures - Deritend Vapour Trails - Celestial Scuzz ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - Before Computers (demos)
Kevin March - Last Night
Doug Gillard - Douglas Scott Gillard II
Guided by Voices - Earth Man Blues Gwenifer Raymond - Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain Ustad Saami - Pakistan Is For The Peaceful ★★★★★ The Blue Orchids - Speed The Day Dave Graney & The Mistly - Live At Byrds ★★★★★
Mainliner - Dual Myths ★★★★★
Hawkwind - 50th Anniversary Live
The Amorphous Androgynous w Peter Hammill - We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orcestrea - s/t
Major Murphy - Access
Eleventh Dream Day - Since Grazed Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg
Guided By Voices - Earth Man Blues
Fixed Horizon - Grenouille Lucinda Williams - Runnin’ Down A Dream
Krallice - Demonic Wealth
Catenary Wires - Birling Gap
Cub Scout Bowling Pins - Heaven Beats Iowa ★★★★
Pat Todd & The Rank Outsiders - There’s Pretty Things in Palookaville ★★★★
Robyn Hitchcock - The Man Upstairs ★★★★
NEW OLD RECORDS
V/A - Rough Guide To Avant-Garde Japan
Guided by Voices - Live At Irving Plaza (1996)
Damo Suzuki & Echo Ensemble - Live @ Green Door (2013) Heavenly - A Bout De Heavenly (1989-1996)
Martin Stone - Down But Not Out In Paris and London (1992-2013)
John Russell & Terry Day - Russell & Day (1979?)
Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts & Terry Day - At LTC (1972?) Sonny Rollins - Rollins In Holland (1967) ★★★★★
Robert Pollard - I Sell The Circus (demos) (2015) The Fall - St Helen’s Technical College (1981) ★★★★★
Charles Gayle, John Edwards, Mark Sanders - Seasons Changing (2017) ★★★★★
The Misunderstood - Children of The Sun(1965-66) ★★★★★
Dexter Gordon - Live In Chateauvallon (1978) ★★★★★
The Loft - Ghost Trains & Country Lanes (1984-2015)
And Also The Trees - s/t (1984)
Neil Young - Young Shakespeare (1971)
T2 - It’ll All Work Out In Boomland (1970)
The Outsiders - Count For Something (1976-78)
The Lipstick Killers - Strange Flash (1978-91)
The Selecter - Too Much Pressure box (1980)
Brown Acid 11 - v/a (1969-73)
Fleur de Lys - Circles (1964-1969)
J Jazz Deep Jazz From Modern Japan vol 3 - V/A (1962-1985)
The Black Keys Present Hill Country Blues - v/a
Brown Acid 12 - v/a (1968-80)
OLD RECORDS
Cocteau Twins - Treasure (1984) ★★★★ Billy Bragg - Life’s A Riot (1983) ★★★★★
Billy Bragg - Brewing Up with (1984) ★★★★★
The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional (1986) ★★★★
Siouxsie & The Banshees - A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (1982) ★★★★
Bunny Striker Lee - The Bunny Striker Lee Story (1967-80) ★★★★
V/A - Dub, A Journey Into Bass Culture (1970s) ★★★★
V/A - Dub, Original Bass Culture (1970s) ★★★★
V/A - Dub, More Bass Culture (1970s) ★★★★
Tomorrow’s Gift - Goodbye Future (1973) ★★★★
Jackson C Frank - s/t (1965) ★★★★
V/A - Down Home Blues, Chicago Fine Boogie (1947-1958)★★★★ Maggie Bjorklund - Shaken (2014)★★★★ June Tabor - Airs & Graces (1976) ★★★★★
John Martyn - The Very Best Of (1967-1996) ★★★★★ The Owl Service - The Garland Sessions (2007) ★★★★★
John Lee Hooker - Tantalising With The Blues (1965-70)★★★★★
Furry Lewis, Memphis Willie B, Memphis Slim - Bluesville 3 (1963?) ★★★★ Lightnin’ Hopkins - Prestige Profiles (1960-4) ★★★★★
Magic Slim - Live @ Ma Bea’s (1976) ★★★★
Jimmy Dawkins - Come Back Baby (1977) ★★★★
Allman Brothers - At Filmore East (1971) ★★★★ John Fahey - The Yellow Princess (1968) ★★★★★
Freedy Johnston - Can You Fly? (1992)★★★★ Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day (2009) ★★★★
Tragically Hip - Man Machine Poem (2016) ★★★★
Tragically Hip - We Are The Same (2009) ★★★★ Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996) ★★★★★
Grant Lee Buffalo - Storm Hymnal (1993-98) ★★★★
Shiva Burlesque - Mercury Blues (1990) ★★★★ Yo La Tengo - President (1989) ★★★★★ Yo La Tengo - Fakebook (1990) ★★★★★ Yo La Tengo - That Is You La Tengo (1991) ★★★★ Yo La Tengo - May I Sing With Me? (1992) ★★★★ Yo La Tengo - Painful (3 cds) (1993) ★★★★ Tim Buckley - Dream Letter (1968) ★★★★★
Those Bastard Souls - Debt & Departure (1999) ★★★★★
Wanderlust - Prize (1995) ★★★★
Chain - Towards The Blues (1971) ★★★★
The Schramms - Omnidirectional (2019) ★★★★
Cannonball Adderley - Soul Zodiac (1972)
Fred Anderson - Quintessential Birthday Trio Vol II (2015)
Greg Bendian’s Interzone - Requiem For Jack Kirby (2001)
Nels Cline & Greg Bendian - Interstellar Space Revisited (1999)
The Beat - Bounce (2016) Nina Simone - To Be Free (1959-1993)
Swervedriver - 99th Dream (1998)
Road - s/t (1972)
Mudhoney - Morning In America (2019)
Necromandus - Orexis of Death (1973)
Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide (1991)
Ultravox - Rage In Eden (1981)
Siouxsie & The Banshees - Tinderbox (1986)
Blues Pills - Live In Paris (2017)
Gram Parsons - Alternate Takes (1973-4)
Mike Westbrook - Mama Chicago (1976)
The Fall - Grotesque (1980)
Truly - Fast Stories From Kid Coma (1995)
Echo & the Bunnymen - Evergreen (1997)
Echo & The Bunnymen - What Are You Going To Do With Your Life? (1999)
Blues Pills - Lady In Gold (2016)
Leo Bud Welch - The Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name (2019)
The Black Keys - Chulahoma (2006) Nanci Griffith - One Fair Summer Evening (1988)
The Soft Boys - Invisible Hits (1983)
Robyn Hitchcock - Robyn Sings (2003)
Raw Material - s/t (1970)
Don Carlos & Gold - Them Never Know Natty Dread Have Him Credentials (1982)
Henry Junjo Lawes - Volcano Erruption (70s-80s)
11) WOKE CAUSES - THIS MONTH, GOOD LAW PROJECT, GET OFF MY MED RECORDS, STONEHENGE, GBNEWS ADVERTISERS
GOOD LAW PROJECT
LINK
It’s evident that the corrupt kleptocracy of Boris Johnson isn’t going to dislodged by Kier Starmer’s PMQ’s however forensic, or by the biased media, or by legal investigations in which the gvt essentially investigate themselves.
However, despite the threats to judiciary in the Queen’s speech, at present the gvt are required to obey the law.
Champagne socialist fox-whacking lawyer Jolyon Maugham’s donation funded Good Law Project seems to be better than the opposition currently at holding the gvt to account, and proving where they have broken the law, so if you can spare a pound crowd fund them, as they do seem to be making an impact.
MEDICAL RECORDS OPT OUT
LINK
Did you know that the gvt are about to sell all your medical records off to the highest bidder? Thought not. We weren’t consulted.
I don’t care about the privacy aspect, but I do object to my life being monetised to give leverage to some horrible massive info-tech company.
You can withdraw the gvt’s right to farm your medical history as if you were some kind of data-pig at the link above. THIS IS NOW DELAYED TO SEPTEMBER DUE TO OPPOSITION BUT STILL WORTH DOING
STOINEHENGE - WHERE THE DEMONS DWELL, WHERE THE BANSHEES LIVE AND THEY DO LIVE WELL!
We are fast approaching our last chance to stop the massive and irreparable damage to the Stonehenge World Heritage Site have sent out a couple of quick updates. Remember - this is the gvt of pride in Britain etc trashing our most emotive national monument.
Here’s video explaining what the scheme is about and where we currently are with it - WATCH it here (3.5min)
Thank you for helping us raise the profile of our campaign.
Best wishes,
The Stonehenge Alliance
GBNEWS ADVERTISERS
Stop Funding Hate say - Advertising sales for GB News are reportedly handled by Sky Media.
We’re aware of at least one company who say they were unaware that they were going to appear on GB News and suspended those ads when they found out. If you work for a company that buys programmatic advertising from Sky, it may be worth checking with them to ensure that your ads aren’t placed on GB News.
A huge thanks to the Stop Funding Hate volunteers who have come together to help identify GB News advertisers.
Brands that we’ve seen so far include: Vodafone, Octopus Energy, Ovo Energy, Co-op, Ikea, LV, Virgin Media, Kelloggs, Deliveroo, Nivea, Kenco coffee, AA, Premier Inn, American Express, Benadryl (Johnson and Johnson), Wickes, Starbucks, Weetabix, Listerine (Pfizer), National Lottery, Boomin, Cadbury, Taylors coffee, Amazon, Cazoo, Microsoft, Google, Alpen (Weetabix), Beko Harvestfresh, Pinterest, Ladbrokes, Rana pasta, Burger King, Warburtons, The UK Government (EU resettlement scheme), Bosch, Specsavers, TalkTalk, trivagoWeekend, itchpet.com, MSC Cruises, Grolsch, Indeed recruitment, Motability, Feel Multivitamins, Green Flag, Clean G non alcoholic gin, Facebook,Volvo, Bazuka, fiverr, Motability, Ibuleve Gel, Toyota, Appeal home shading / blinds, People’s Postcode Lottery, Just Eat, Petit Filous, Direct Bullion, Compare the Market, Kardia Mobile, Bupa, Verisure, The Open University.
There’s more information here about Stop Funding Hate, and the impact of our campaign so far. If you’re able to help build our movement tackling toxic media in the UK and internationally, please consider becoming a committed supporter and making a regular donation.
12) IN OUR COVID ERA LAMENTATIONS
Adam Schlesinger (Fountain of Wayne) (1967)
John Prine (outlaw country singer) (1946)
Henry Grimes (jazz bassist) (1935)
Dave Mountfield (Ornate Johnson) (1970)
Hal Wilner (arranger) (1957)
Tim Brooke-Taylor (Goodie) (1940)
Lee Konitz (jazz saxophonist) (1927)
Matthew Seligman (Soft Boy) (1955) Millie Small (ska singer) (1946)
Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk robot) (1947)
Bill Rieflin (drummer for hire) (1960)
Hugh McKenna (Tear Gas pianist) (1949)
Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounder) (1942) Astrid Kirchherr (photographer) (1938)
Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra saxophonist) (1947)
Aubrey Burl (archaeologist) (1926)
Phil May (Pretty Thing) (1944) The Clacton Fin Whale (circa 2000)
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (artist) (1930) Doll Tor stone circle (3300 BC)
Kay Carroll (The Fall) (1948)
Bob the Cat (73 bus) (2006) Alex Taylor (Shop Assistant, in 2005, and no-one knew)
Simon H Fell (jazz bassist) (1959)
Carl Reiner (director) (1922)
Ennio Morricone (architect of sonic dreams) (1928)
Keith Tippett (jazz pianist) (1947)
Jimmy Cobb (jazz drummer) (1929) Barbara Smoker (Humanist) (1923)
The Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
Tony Elliot (Time Out) (1942) Judy Dyble (folk singer) (1949)
Peter Green (blues guitarist) (1946)
Emitt Rhodes (power pop auteur) (1950) Annie Ross (jazz bohemian) (1930)
Joe Ruby (Scooby-Doo) (1933)
Craig Weatherhill (folklorist) (1950)
Don Weller (jazz saxophonist) (1940)
Simeon Coxe (Silver Apple) (1938) Diana Rigg (Avenger) (1938)
Toots Hibbert (reggae got soul) (1942)
Dele Fadele (carry bag man) (1962)
George Jeffrie (man’s-laughter maker) (1964)
Dave Kusworth (Brum punk Stone) (1960)
Gary Peacock (jazz bassist) (1935)
Doorkins (Southwark Cathedral Cat) (2005?)
Spencer Davis (Brumbeat pioneer) (1939)
Bunny Lee (dubmaster) (1940) The Cubbington Pear Tree (1770)
Fungie The Dingle Dolphin (1979) Jill Paton Walsh (humanist novelist) (1937)
Val Warner (poet) (1946)
Guy N Smith (Lord of The Crabs) (1939)
Richard Corben (decadent cartoonist) (1940)
David Johnson (Duke of Soho) (1960)
Leslie West (Mountain man) (1945)
- 2021 -
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Katharine Whitehorn (bedsitter cook) (1928)
Celia Drummond Ford (voice of Trees) (1950)
The Happy Man Tree (Stoke Newington Tree) (1870)
John Russell (guitar guru) (1954)
Marcel Uderzo (Asterisk artist) (1933)
Tom Stevens (Long Ryder and Magus) (1956)
Dougie Anderson (Coda’s Edinburgh record dealer (1952)
Captain Tom (Covid Walkman) (1920) Rynagh O’Grady (Ted’s Mary) (1954)
Mary Wilson (Supreme) (1944)
Chick Corea (Miles’ tinkler) (1941)
Iain Pattinson (You wanted to see me Prime Minister?) (1951)
U-Roy (Toastmaster) (1942)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (bookstore beat) (1921)
Wink O’Bannon (Eleventh Dream Day) (1956)
Bunny Wailer (Wailer) (1947)
Doug Parkinson (Oz vocal celeb) (1946)
Milford Graves (temporal explorer) (1941)
Johnny Rogan (Byrds’ Boswell) (1953) Jessica Walter (Play Misty For Me) (1941)
Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight) (1941) Anita Lane (Oz punk chanteuse) (1958)
Barbara Ess (Theoretical Girl) (1944)
Michael Collins (Apollo 11) (1930)
Mohammed Ag Itale (Tinariwen) (1960)
Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) (1929)
Sonny Simmons (jazz hobo) (1933)
Charles Grodin (The American Tim Key) (1935)
Franco Battiato (Italian Fetus) (1945)
Yoshi Wada (bagpipe minimalist) (1943)
Stewart Lee
2021-06-22T08:00:33+01:00
1) KING ROCKER NOW TV & PERTH SCREENING Our labour of love really landed. I arrogantly think it knocks most rockumentaries into a cocked hat and will cheer you up no end in the awful times. “I loved every minute” - Ben Dowell, The Times ★★★★ Financial Times ★★★★ Chortle “One of the best music documentaries of all time” - The Quietus “The new gold standard for rockumentaries” - The Scotsman All Press is collecting here. You can also watch it, ad-free, on NOW TV if you have that; NOW TV LINK The film is also screening this month in The Revelation Perth International Film Festival from 3rd - 10th July, so if you are in Western Australia you can hop on a bus, like the Red Dog of Dampier, and see it there! Fair dinkum! REVELATION FILM FEST LINK 2) UNRELIABLE NARRATOR DOC BBCR4 I just did this piece of KRS1-style edu-tainment for BBCR4 with Resonance 104.4FM alumney Michael Umney, called Stewart Lee - Unreliable Narrator. Lots of comedians in it. You can listen here. 3) SHIRLEY COLLINS E SUSSEX EVENT Shirley Collins/Stewart Lee 7th July - I am in conversation w the folk singer and writer Shirley Collins at the East Sussex bohemian hangout Charleston. The venue also features the first ever painting retrospective of the brilliantly bonkers Fitzrovian character, writer and micro-genius Nina Hamnett. TICKETS / INFO HERE 4) ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION - COMIN’ OVER HERE 12” The record store day dbl vinyl of Asian Dub Foundation’s Access Denied album includes a ‘neolithic’ remix of the no 1 single Comin’ Over Here (feat. Stewart Lee) Facebook Link The original 12” remains available... Bandcamp X Ray Production 5) TEN BOB / USE YOUR LOAF 7” ‘Ten Bob Each Way’ / ‘Use Your Loaf’ is a limited 7” single,...
Richard Thomas's Jerry Springer The Opera, which I directed, is finally on tour. Last spring, it was closed down indefinitely by the Religious Right. Threats from the gay-hate group Christian Voice convinced Sainsbury's to withdraw the show's DVD from sale in its shops and prompted a cancer charity to reject proceeds from a benefit performance.
When the opera was broadcast in January 2005, a concerted campaign led to the BBC receiving 60,000 complaints in advance of the screening, while television executives got police protection after their addresses were put on a Christian website.
And then a proposed tour for late 2005 collapsed after one third of theatres withdrew in the face of Christian Voice's pledge to demonstrate and prosecute them for blasphemy.
It's hard to believe that we are not living in the 1950s. These battles have been fought and won once already within my lifetime. The multi-award winning opera, which Richard and I worked on for four years, was conceived as an infernal version of Jerry Springer's television talk show as imagined by the dying titular host. It is set in Hell, with guests drawn from Judaeo-Christian myth to amplify the opera's themes of sin and guilt. Using religion in such an allegorical way isn't unusual, a fact noted in positive reviews in both the Church Times and The Catholic Herald. In fact, many of the aspects of the opera described as blasphemous by the Christian Right were drawn directly from Milton, Blake and medieval mystery plays, although not, admittedly, the bit where Jesus says he might be "a bit gay".
I've met very few people who have seen the opera and still think it should be banned. Those who do tend to be the sort who argue that Hurricane Katrina was God punishing New Orleans, who believe that all Muslims are going to Hell or who work for the Daily Mail. So it is difficult to care what they think.
Now, thanks to a rescue package, a reduction in cast and set, and the creative team agreeing to work for no royalties, the show is finally back on the road. Jerry Springer The Opera is already enjoying the predictable cycle of negative local paper editorials before each opening, followed by positive local paper reviews that wonder what people's problem is. Things are looking up. Who knows? One day we may even make some money out of it.
In the light of the Danish cartoon controversy, the usual covert racists have been saying that the writers of Jerry Springer The Opera would not have done the same thing with the Koran as we have with the Bible. This is, of course, true. But it is not a case of "political correctness gone mad".
In the opera, we were looking for commonly understood themes to examine universal feelings. American talk shows are commonly understood as is, in the West, the Christian myth. Most people here can't even spell Koran, so it isn't a serviceable story for a project such as ours.
Second, we don't know anything about Muslim culture. But if someone does want to write the first funny opera about Islam, we would be happy to help out, though I doubt you'd be able to raise the necessary investment with the Government trying to criminalise writers who deal with religious themes.
Third, at a time when ordinary Muslims understandably feel somewhat put upon, one has no desire to add to their woes without good reason. In contrast, Christianity is our cultural background, it has a rich history of artistic reappropriation, and we feel entitled to use its symbols as we see fit. That said, a few weeks ago I did begin reading the Koran, as it's obviously going to be hard to write comedy for the foreseeable future without understanding it. The first sentence ends with a warning of the day of judgment. To be honest, it doesn't start well.
The Danish cartoonists stepped on the landmine of depicting Muhammad without realising the seriousness of the taboo, obscuring their indoor firework of weak jokes about suicide bombers. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I look forward to living in a genuinely multicultural society and a genuinely global world where non-sectarian education means we all know enough about each other's cultures to be able to use them in the service of art, music, theatre and, yes, comedy from an informed position of strength.
Sadly, with Tony Blair passing the educational buck to faith schools and attempting to compromise freedom of speech with measures such as the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, this vision seems ever further away.
Never mind. I understand that We Will Rock You is soon to embark on a national tour. You lucky people!
Stewart Lee is a writer, comedian and co-creator of Jerry Springer The Opera, which is currently touring the UK. www.jerryspringertheopera.com
Copyright Stewart Lee 2006.
Stewart Lee
2006-03-31T18:45:06+01:00
Richard Thomas's Jerry Springer The Opera, which I directed, is finally on tour. Last spring, it was closed down indefinitely by the Religious Right. Threats from the gay-hate group Christian Voice convinced Sainsbury's to withdraw the show's DVD from sale in its shops and prompted a cancer charity to reject proceeds from a benefit performance. When the opera was broadcast in January 2005, a concerted campaign led to the BBC receiving 60,000 complaints in advance of the screening, while television executives got police protection after their addresses were put on a Christian website. And then a proposed tour for late 2005 collapsed after one third of theatres withdrew in the face of Christian Voice's pledge to demonstrate and prosecute them for blasphemy. It's hard to believe that we are not living in the 1950s. These battles have been fought and won once already within my lifetime. The multi-award winning opera, which Richard and I worked on for four years, was conceived as an infernal version of Jerry Springer's television talk show as imagined by the dying titular host. It is set in Hell, with guests drawn from Judaeo-Christian myth to amplify the opera's themes of sin and guilt. Using religion in such an allegorical way isn't unusual, a fact noted in positive reviews in both the Church Times and The Catholic Herald. In fact, many of the aspects of the opera described as blasphemous by the Christian Right were drawn directly from Milton, Blake and medieval mystery plays, although not, admittedly, the bit where Jesus says he might be "a bit gay". I've met very few people who have seen the opera and still think it should be banned. Those who do tend to be the sort who argue that Hurricane Katrina was God punishing New Orleans, who believe that...
I remember my first experience of the Edinburgh Fringe through a nostalgic haze. The Fringe was the postwar utopian ideal, but with jokes, experimental theatre and a lot of fried food; anyone could perform in it if they could raise the programme entry fee, still only a modest £246 today. Anyone might get audiences and even reviews. We slept in a church hall with no running water, but in a city that, until 1995, still had a 50p public bathhouse. You couldn't get a bottle of water in Edinburgh today for 50p.
I went for the first of 25 Fringes to date in 1987 when I was 19. Wordsworth's French revolution paen, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" reflected my Fringe experience. (Except, being a student, I was rarely up at dawn, though I was technically alive.) But I will now show you how the state of Comedy in the Fringe today reflects the cultural bankruptcy of late capitalism. And I will also plug my own £15 Edinburgh show (less than half the price of Michael McIntyre, and one that will nudge me into fringe profit when offset against decades of loss), and those of my friends and family, while appearing to rail against property values, lack of social access, and the exploitation of the workers (by which I mean comedians, actors and dancers, who have never done a decent day's work in their lives).
The Fringe, the biggest, best and most diverse arts festival in the entire world, is almost entirely underwritten by participants, most of whom go home thousands of pounds in debt, and who offer more than 2,000 different performances every day, 35% of which are classed as comedy. But because there's no committee of worthies trying to re-brand their shitty town by scheduling Jools Holland's Big Band to close their provincial gin-sponsored krapfest, historically the Fringe has represented a unique middle ground between what artists want to do and what people might suddenly find, unexpectedly, they want to see, even though no one in the straight world thought it worth a platform. Hence Theatre de Complicite, Bill Hicks, Steven Berkoff, and, yes, Puppetry of the Penis.
The publication of the Fringe's programme, and the operation of its box office, are overseen by the Festival Fringe Society, a registered charity. Once neither painfully elitist nor patronisingly populist, Edinburgh in August now threatens to become an oligarchy, a Chipping Norton of the arts, its sluices greased by Foster's lager, rather than by country suppers and police horses.
In 2008, after 61 years, The Edinburgh Fringe fragmented. The Fringe's "big four" venues re-defined themselves alongside the charitable foundation of The Edinburgh Fringe festival, rebranding as the Edinburgh Comedy festival (confusingly showcasing all genres of performance). The big four were, and remain, Pleasance, Underbelly, Gilded Balloon, and Assembly (the company that I call False Assembly, to distinguish it from its former parent venue, Edinburgh Council's Assembly Rooms, which I now call the One and Only Real Assembly Rooms, and where I appear at 6.05pm).
Without asking the city's permission, or notifying acts who had already paid to appear in their venues, the big four distributed literature giving the impression that the previously non-existent Edinburgh Comedy festival had been responsible for discovering decades of talent, rolled out their new brand, and set about re-pointing the fragile but functioning ecosystem of the Fringe for their own ends, with their own printed programme and their own box office. The collapse of the People's Democratic Republic of Arty Farty Twats had begun.
The Edinburgh Fringe had been built up, collectively, over six decades, by the work of many hands, mostly unwaged, and if it belonged to anyone, it belonged to the public and performers who had floated it with their own funds for 61 years. But here was an act of corporate cattle rustling familiar from 30 years of government sell-offs.
The Etonian cabal behind the Edinburgh Comedy festival, Underbelly's own Cameron and Osborne duo of Charlie Wood and Ed Bartlam, maintained that cost-assuaging sponsorship would now be easier to attract, and suggested they would moor an empty cruise ship in Leith, accommodating broke performers. Five years later, costs to performers in the Edinburgh Comedy festival have risen, including their subsidy of its spin-off fake Fringe brochure. The fabled bunk boat, like Marcus Garvey's Black Star Liner out of Babylon, is still yet to arrive.
The establishment of the assumed Edinburgh Comedy festival in isolation from the Fringe festival saw many tacit threads of standardised practise – a mutually observed ticket release date for example – fall away, and the Fringe entered the deregulated free-market phase of late capitalism. Shows performed in the burgeoning Free Fringe cost nothing to see, and little to stage. The fiercely independent Stand underwrites all its shows, so performers lose nothing. But many performers in the simulated Edinburgh Comedy festival's venues will agree to shed upwards of £10,000 this summer.
Sadly, the perception exists among agents, fringe-goers, and even performers, that Edinburgh Fringe festival shows outside the Edinburgh Comedy festival venues are invisible. And monopolising visibility costs money. (I, for example, was only able to get to write this high-visibility article via a costly go-between.)
The agents who nudge their acts towards the big four Edinburgh Comedy festival venues are most likely to be charging their clients huge fees for advertising and networking, because their eyes are set on the prize of TV deals for their own production companies to develop their own acts, and they feel a presence in the Edinburgh Comedy festival, as distinct from the Edinburgh Fringe festival, will best achieve this. They are not wrong.
There are many reasons why the Fringe is now much more expensive than 25 years ago. The property boom means that even the public bath house I used to wash has been converted into luxury flats, and Edinburgh residents, with no apparent grasp of cause and effect, criticise Fringe prices while boasting about how they tripled the rent of their flats for the summer.
The Fringe is less of a commercial trade fair than cynics assume. But the Edinburgh Comedy festival venues lie within easy walking distance in an increasingly grotesque Philip K Dick-style wasteland of alcohol-banner festooned architecture around Bristo Square. Here, the Edinburgh Comedy festival uses performers' and sponsors' money to maintain private bars in abandoned attics, where journalists and media types are schmoozed by PRs in branded anoraks, again paid for by the acts, coaxing them into their clients' nearby shows. Lazy journalists reviewed only one Stand show between them in the national press last year. The 10-minute walk from the Edinburgh Comedy festival was too far and there was no private bar. A Fringe Leveson inquiry would be a mass humbling, with many flying pies.
Newspaper editors and TV bosses want to hear that their scouts have seen "must see" shows, when in fact having seen things everyone else has seen, when there are over 2,000 different shows daily, should be a sackable offence. Agents and PRs and the mendacious Edinburgh Comedy festival maintain a symbiotic relationship to control this consensus, like parasitical worms hanging out of the cat's anus that is Bristo Square in August.
Everyone benefits from the perception that The Edinburgh Comedy festival is the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Except, in the long term, the performers, the public, and the once great open-access arts experiment that was the Edinburgh Fringe.
It can cost so much to perform in the Edinburgh Fringe now, and the very people being deterred by these costs are just the sort of independent minds we used to value as a society; the same people now, demonstrably, priced out of further education. It's another example of the erosion of access, the reversal of social mobility, the entrenchment of privilege, and the gradual silencing of diverse voices. British comedy is much healthier than TV and radio output suggests. But more interesting talents desert its traditional spawning ground, broke, as promoters and performers replicate familiar marketable models. Last year being a young funnyman in a T-shirt, following the currently proven Russell Howard trope, appeared the best way to minimise massive financial risk. And the cycle of Fringe debt makes loyal slaves of artists, perhaps paying off their loss by working for their management's own subsidiary production and promotion companies. Journalists, media types, and the delusive Edinburgh Comedy festival are complicit in supporting a broken system.
All the venues outside the Edinburgh Comedy festival, and inside the Edinburgh Fringe festival, must be supported more by the public, performers, press and media scum. Their lower overheads ensure the possibility of greater creative risk, and of the likelihood of seeing bizarre and sometimes brilliant shows, with no obvious commercial future, that are what makes the Fringe unique. One man vomiting mayonnaise into a circle while a woman shows slides of clouds (Market St Arches, 1993) is worth 50 Live at the Apollo wannabees.
Fringe goers shouldn't penalise performers for appearing at Edinburgh Comedy festival venues by boycotting them outright. Instead, we must all increase our off-piste grazing. If journalists ditch their paid-for press releases and discover talent in the Edinburgh Fringe outside the Edinburgh Comedy Festival there will soon be no incentive for acts to accept its overheads, and the hidden costs of the promoters who collude with it, and the Fringe will flourish again. We've all been the person who complains about the homogenisation of the high street while shopping at the supermarket. Don't turn the Edinburgh Fringe into Tescos, but let the juice of the fresh produce available elsewhere trickle down your chin this August. Old timers talk about the spirit of the fringe. It's still there, and you can have all the fun of finding it.
Stewart Lee's Carpet Remnant World is at the Assembly Rooms, George St, Edinburgh, 2-26 August, 6.05pm.
Stewart Lee's pick of this year's Fringe
With saving the spirit of the Fringe in mind, here are seven cross-genre tips. In the interest of full disclosure, I have had children with one of these. And it isn't Künt & the Gang.
As Of 1.52pm on Friday April 27 2012 This Show Has No Title
Theatre piece by world's best stand-up, Daniel Kitson.
7-26 August, times vary, Traverse, £12.
Tony Law: Maximum Nonsense Canadian comic finally strikes the motherlode.
1-27 August, 12.30pm, the Stand, £8
Jane Bom-Bane
Musical mechanical hat woman.
2-25 August, 4.45pm, Laughing Horse @ Finnegan's Wake, free
Aaaaaaaaaaarghh! It's the Greatest Show on Legs
1980s anarcho-comedy pioneers.
22-26 Aug, 9pm, Hive, £5
Nick Pynn
Transcendental acoustic avant-folk loops in candle-lit intimacy.
2-26 August, 9.45pm, Inalingua, £10
Künt & the Gang
Inventive sub-Depeche Mode musical obscenity.
3-26 August, Laughing Horse @ City Café, 10.30pm, free
Stewart Lee
2012-07-30T14:34:07+01:00
I remember my first experience of the Edinburgh Fringe through a nostalgic haze. The Fringe was the postwar utopian ideal, but with jokes, experimental theatre and a lot of fried food; anyone could perform in it if they could raise the programme entry fee, still only a modest £246 today. Anyone might get audiences and even reviews. We slept in a church hall with no running water, but in a city that, until 1995, still had a 50p public bathhouse. You couldn't get a bottle of water in Edinburgh today for 50p. I went for the first of 25 Fringes to date in 1987 when I was 19. Wordsworth's French revolution paen, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" reflected my Fringe experience. (Except, being a student, I was rarely up at dawn, though I was technically alive.) But I will now show you how the state of Comedy in the Fringe today reflects the cultural bankruptcy of late capitalism. And I will also plug my own £15 Edinburgh show (less than half the price of Michael McIntyre, and one that will nudge me into fringe profit when offset against decades of loss), and those of my friends and family, while appearing to rail against property values, lack of social access, and the exploitation of the workers (by which I mean comedians, actors and dancers, who have never done a decent day's work in their lives). The Fringe, the biggest, best and most diverse arts festival in the entire world, is almost entirely underwritten by participants, most of whom go home thousands of pounds in debt, and who offer more than 2,000 different performances every day, 35% of which are classed as comedy. But because there's no committee of worthies trying...
When he released his 1963 debut, Lee Hazelwood was a 34 year old journeyman producer and songwriter, not the minimalist country-pop visionary he was revered as by the time of his death in 2007.
Trouble Is A Lonesome Town, originally intended as a weekly TV series, is a concept album about the inhabitants of the eponymous settlement, complete with endearingly clunky narrated sections, and sounds like Johnny Cash channeling Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon.
Hazelwood himself emerges from the Mojave heat haze already fully formed.
Stewart Lee
2013-03-03T20:24:53+00:00
When he released his 1963 debut, Lee Hazelwood was a 34 year old journeyman producer and songwriter, not the minimalist country-pop visionary he was revered as by the time of his death in 2007. Trouble Is A Lonesome Town, originally intended as a weekly TV series, is a concept album about the inhabitants of the eponymous settlement, complete with endearingly clunky narrated sections, and sounds like Johnny Cash channeling Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. Hazelwood himself emerges from the Mojave heat haze already fully formed.
The comic creation Stewart Lee took a brief pause as the real-life Stewart Lee came forward to thank us for coming out to watch his rejigged Snowflake/Tornado show, after its enforced mothballing due to the pandemic. The man who has (by his own admission) been left bald, grey, fat, deaf, and with high blood pressure after a 30-year stand up career, looked genuinely delighted to be back on stage.
It was one of the few breaks he gave the crowd on the first night of his week-long run of shows at the Oxford Playhouse. The critically-acclaimed performer and writer was not here to make friends with his audience, or his fellow comedians, for that matter, repeating his oft-used mantra: “I can do jokes: I just choose not to.”
Lee’s work is so much more than just gag-telling. He has made a career out of subverting the stand-up genre, with intricately crafted stories, themes, and sudden digressions, mixing highbrow intellectual theory with blunt invective.
The show is split into two. Kicking off with ‘Tornado’, Lee rants about the fact that, for two years, Netflix’s listings for his Comedy Vehicle TV series actually contained the details for the disaster movie Sharknado instead. Weaving in a series of digs at comics Josh Widdecombe, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, US comedians in general and Dave Chappelle in particular – with whom he shared a venue and against whom he now bears a grudge – it culminates in a pitch-perfect Alan Bennett parody that neatly tops and tails the whole routine.
‘Snowflake’ is a passionate defence of political correctness, so severely under attack in these days of culture wars.
Proudly labelling himself as an advocate of the woke culture, and inspired by an attack on him by Tony Parsons in GQ magazine, Lee goes on the offensive – picking apart the criticism and then responding with plenty of his own.
His trademark techniques are in evidence – particularly when he mimics Ricky Gervais “saying the unsayable” through a long spell of attempting and failing to spit out words, resulting in a series of weird, revolting noises, gradually becoming ever-more ridiculous. Interspersed with Gervais’s casual swig of lager.
It must have lasted about five minutes but seemed like hours – Lee tests his audience’s patience to the limits with his forays into repetition, later admitting that a reviewer on Mumsnet described the piece as “too long”.
“That implies there is a correct amount of time for it to go on for,” he says. “And that she knows what it is.”
The audience is regularly berated, at other times he looks at us with pity for not laughing loudly enough at an obscure reference (“I expected more from you, Oxford”).
He finishes with a song – played on an acoustic guitar and sung with a surprisingly tender voice – but undercut with choice language and a flurry of snowflakes, culminating in a visual gag which is about as close as Lee gets to slapstick.
Monday kicked of a second Oxford run for Snowflake/Tornado, following a week of shows at the Beaumont Street venue in early 2020 – not long before the first lockdown.
“Well, I do like the Playhouse, and I am a patron of the building,” he says. “I was a student in Oxford over three decades ago though and, having made my peace with the place in recent years, I am more than happy to do a long run here. The staff at the Playhouse are really great and it is a very playable room.”
His tours take on hundreds of dates and last many months – even years. How does he make sure they last the distance, even if they get overtaken by political events?
“It was hard to hold the last tour – Content Provider – together in the face of the rapidly escalating Brexit story, but it worked out,” says Lee. “Because my shows have beginnings, middles, ends and narrative-like structures, you can’t just bin the whole thing, so I need to make them impregnable to news if they are to serve for 200 dates of a long tour.
“This usually means corralling off news detail into sections that can pop in and out without bringing the whole edifice down. As it happens, for this tour, the general trend towards the right, and against political correctness and so-called ‘woke’ culture, (both of which ideas I am a fan of), that has happened since I started putting this show together, has actually firmed up the main thrust of the second half, and lots of the silly characters I mention – Boris Johnson, Ricky Gervais – have become more prominent since the tour began, so it has worked out well.”
Ah yes, Boris Johnson. As a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan liberal elite, what’s his take on our Prime Minister?
“Well I think Boris Johnson is a massive lying **** bereft of empathy or morals. I hope the recalibration of British politics can survive the fact that Johnson’s massive lies have crashed many people’s faith in the notion of a functioning democracy.”
Lee has shunned the ubiquitous TV panel shows (or rather, he says, they’ve shunned him) – but what’s the most bizarre programme he’s been offered?
“Too many to mention, but probably one of those Comedy Roast things,” he says. “It’s just not my bag at all. I’m just not a panel show act either.
“When I did them, in 2006, I was conscious of trying to work as part of a group to set things up for the show but people just shut you down and crash over you, people who are normally perfectly nice in real life. It’s like The Stanford Prison Experiment.
“Also, I wasn’t prepared to just learn the generic news jokes the writers had written, which is what most people on them do, and which is why they all have the same one-dimensional beats and tonality. We lost a lot of good comics to panel shows over the years, potentially great stand-ups who had their horizons contracted in to being zingy one-liner monkeys. Some managed to find their way back. Most don’t.”
If you missed the show when Lee visited in 2020, then you’ve still got until tonight (Saturday) to grab a ticket. Even if you did see it then, there are enough changes to keep it fresh – and the original material is still hilarious second time around (depending on which side of the love him/loathe him camp you fall in).
“I seem to have joined that happy band of stand-ups whom proper comedy fans like – Rhod Gilbert, Dylan Moran for example – who hopefully can tour effectively whenever they want without being dependent on the whims of TV,” says Lee. “And then die. Hopefully on stage at the Oxford Playhouse from a massive drug and alcohol induced heart attack.
“Scatter my ashes in a cowpat in a wild flower meadow somewhere near Godstow. I was once happy there.”
Stewart Lee
2022-01-22T12:44:04+00:00
The comic creation Stewart Lee took a brief pause as the real-life Stewart Lee came forward to thank us for coming out to watch his rejigged Snowflake/Tornado show, after its enforced mothballing due to the pandemic. The man who has (by his own admission) been left bald, grey, fat, deaf, and with high blood pressure after a 30-year stand up career, looked genuinely delighted to be back on stage. It was one of the few breaks he gave the crowd on the first night of his week-long run of shows at the Oxford Playhouse. The critically-acclaimed performer and writer was not here to make friends with his audience, or his fellow comedians, for that matter, repeating his oft-used mantra: “I can do jokes: I just choose not to.” Lee’s work is so much more than just gag-telling. He has made a career out of subverting the stand-up genre, with intricately crafted stories, themes, and sudden digressions, mixing highbrow intellectual theory with blunt invective. The show is split into two. Kicking off with ‘Tornado’, Lee rants about the fact that, for two years, Netflix’s listings for his Comedy Vehicle TV series actually contained the details for the disaster movie Sharknado instead. Weaving in a series of digs at comics Josh Widdecombe, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, US comedians in general and Dave Chappelle in particular – with whom he shared a venue and against whom he now bears a grudge – it culminates in a pitch-perfect Alan Bennett parody that neatly tops and tails the whole routine. ‘Snowflake’ is a passionate defence of political correctness, so severely under attack in these days of culture wars. Proudly labelling himself as an advocate of the woke culture, and inspired by an attack on him by Tony Parsons in GQ magazine, Lee goes on the...
"The worst comedian in Britain, as funny as bubonic plague." - The Sun
"I never wanted to be a comedian." writes Stewart Lee in the introduction to his brilliant book. "When I was very young I wanted to be a writer, first of all a writer of philosophically inclined thrillers like Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury or Stan Lee," he continues, "and then later a writer of thrillingly inclined philosophy, like Albert Camus, Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett." - I dare say he has succeeded on both counts!
First of all, it is impossible to read this book on the toilet. It doesn't have a handy wipe-clean cover. It is slightly too large to hold comfortably in your hands while emptying your bowel.
However, it is - to borrow from the Goldilocks story - 'just right' for a prolonged and hungry single-sitting read on a rainy Wednesday night. But I'm getting ahead of myself! Before I move on to the subject matter of this must-have piece of genuine writing (as opposed to page after glossy page of recycled "scenes we'd like to see" jokes from Mock The Week), I want to tell you about the trouble I had buying this book in an actual shop.
The plan was my parents would buy this book, along with Stew's recently released and just as long windedly-titled DVD, "If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One", for Christmas. But I couldn't wait. I had the money in my hands, in coins, which I planned to spend on the book and just get the DVD from Father Christmas.
I went to Waterstones in Cardiff, who told me that they had one copy in stock but couldn't find it anywhere. They even checked the "Celebrity Hardbacks" section - against my many protestation. What an ignorant man he was. Anyway, they couldn't find it anywhere. So I went to W.H.Smith's to see if they had it. Again, there were two in stock. One was missing completely and the other's cover was torn to shreds. Worse still, it was shelved between "Richard Littlejohn's House Of Fun: Thirteen Years Of (Labour) Madness" and some mini-book about Justin Beiber, in the Entertainment section, no less!
I wanted a pristine copy in the hope that I would get it signed by the man himself when I saw his new live show, "Vegetable Stew" at the postponed St David's Hall date (I shall keep the book safe until March). So I meandered toward HMV - I got my copy of Disgusting Bliss there a few weeks earlier, so you never know - and asked the purple-haired young chap with eye-liner at the counter if the store stocked it. He didn't even know who Stewart Lee was! Using my eyes I looked in the "Book" section for my prize and discovered, to my amazement - and that of the camp man behind the counter - the last copy they had, in perfect condition.
And I think that word - perfect - sums up the content of the book fairly well. Comprised of extensively annotated transcripts of his three Stand-Up shows, Stand-up Comedian, 90s Comedian and 41st Best Stand-up Ever, interspersed with detailed and informative - and very funny - autobiographical intros to these shows, How I Escaped My Certain Fate (or HIEMCF, as I shall call it in homage to earlier Lee masterpieces) speaks always honestly, sometimes brutally and often emotionally about Stewart Lee's rise and fall-cycle, which has led to him being known in the trade as "The Comedian's Comedian". I found that I couldn't put the book down!
As I mentioned in my opening paragraph above the "real life" stories he tells read like a personal diary more
than a celebrity autobiography - which, of course, it sort of it. Filled with open and occasionally shocking revelations (£600 for an appearance on HIGNFY?) and the sort of anecdotes that actually interest people (there's nothing in here about "that time I was at Elton's place on Brits night and Cilla Black was in the pool...") the chapters between the transcripts are beautifully written, witty, clever, honest and filled with references to comics I had never heard of; comics I have now looked up and fallen in love with.
The whole thing reads as a kind of love-letter to the art-form of stand-up. Reading of Lee's ups and downs, from glass-strewn Bangor stages to the National Theatre, via Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh (every year bar one) and every other sticky-carpeted, brown-walled pub back room on the way, you can't help but get swept along by his enthusiasm for an industry that he clearly loves. If you're not a stand-up fan then it's very unlikely you'd have heard of Stewart Lee, let alone bought his book. But if you are a fan of stand-up comedy, this perfect-bound stack of 378 pages is everything you've ever wanted to read about.
It's a rare thing. I want to talk about what's in it, but I REALLY WANT you all to read this book. Since reading the book a second time I've decided that there is more to Stewart Lee than most give him credit for. He's not just the most intelligent and interesting stand-up working today, but a true artist. People say he deconstructs comedy and that's his trick, but I think they're wrong. I think Lee sees comedy. Stew gets that what he does is clever; he sees that there is an audience he will never win.
And I don't think he wants them. Much of what he does he talks about in terms of "losing a room and then winning them back" which is daring. He speaks of his wish to make form and rhythm the most important aspect of his comedy, even over material! Again, daring. Stewart Lee does what most comedy audiences - and this isn't arrogance, here - simply don't understand: he takes a joke and tells us why it's funny.
Sidestepping actual punchlines, even when they present themselves blatantly, in favour of a turn-of-phrase or even just a look, Lee provides more seasoned comedy fans with something better.
His book is a must buy, then you'll all know what the hell it is I've been talking about all through this post.
To me, in the nicest possible way, Stewart Lee is like going to the cinema while taking A-Level Media Studies. I have found myself watching Lee Evans in his stadium shows, huge and sweaty on 30ft screens, and getting ahead of him. I've watched mainstream comics like Michael McIntyre and his "Comedy Road-show Massive" telling jokes that have already been explained to me by Lee and others like him.
I was appalled to hear Noel "The Mighty Boosh" Fielding telling a joke on Comedy Roadshow (BBC) last week which Stew had made in his 90s Comedian, and made much more effectively, about the audience making the jokes in their heads, thus rendering themselves and only themselves responsible for their possible lack of enjoyment. I saw this joke retold, not verbatim, granted, and thought to myself "this isn't theft... this is influence". Stewart Lee.
A name that is known by those who know it, and those alone. My Mother hates him despite never having seen him at all, simply because he's "so slow". She doesn't get it. But then again she's seen the best stand-up she'll ever see; she was on this Cruise once...
Stewart Lee's book, "How I Escaped My Certain Fate - The Life And Deaths Of A Stand-Up Comedian" is available to buy from Stew's website, here. If you only read one book... etc.
Stewart Lee
2010-10-28T12:45:14+01:00
"The worst comedian in Britain, as funny as bubonic plague." - The Sun "I never wanted to be a comedian." writes Stewart Lee in the introduction to his brilliant book. "When I was very young I wanted to be a writer, first of all a writer of philosophically inclined thrillers like Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury or Stan Lee," he continues, "and then later a writer of thrillingly inclined philosophy, like Albert Camus, Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett." - I dare say he has succeeded on both counts! First of all, it is impossible to read this book on the toilet. It doesn't have a handy wipe-clean cover. It is slightly too large to hold comfortably in your hands while emptying your bowel. However, it is - to borrow from the Goldilocks story - 'just right' for a prolonged and hungry single-sitting read on a rainy Wednesday night. But I'm getting ahead of myself! Before I move on to the subject matter of this must-have piece of genuine writing (as opposed to page after glossy page of recycled "scenes we'd like to see" jokes from Mock The Week), I want to tell you about the trouble I had buying this book in an actual shop. The plan was my parents would buy this book, along with Stew's recently released and just as long windedly-titled DVD, "If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One", for Christmas. But I couldn't wait. I had the money in my hands, in coins, which I planned to spend on the book and just get the DVD from Father Christmas. I went to Waterstones in Cardiff, who told me that they had one copy in stock but couldn't find it anywhere. They even checked the "Celebrity Hardbacks" section - against my many protestation. What...
Stewart Lee, true to deconstructive, postmodern form, opened his show at De Montfort Hall on the 12th of February by explaining exactly what he would be performing and why. I"m going to take a leaf out of Lee"s book and do the same. I"m writing a review of Stewart Lee"s A Room with a Stew, a stand-up tour in which Lee is refining material which will become BBC Two"s Stewart Lee"s Comedy Vehicle Series 4. It doesn"t make sense to write a review of a piece of work which is incomplete. At the same time, the words ‘work in progress" don"t feature in the show"s title and the tour already has over one hundred dates announced. So what I am writing a review of is the live experience of seeing Stewart Lee, not a finished show.
Lee performed three of the half-hour sets which will make up an episode each of Comedy Vehicle. No one was safe from Lee"s intricate satire; UKIP, the Daily Mail, Mock
I had a new book out on August 4th, Content Provider, through Faber. "Over the last five years, often when David Mitchell has been on holiday, the comedian Stewart Lee has been attempting to understand modern Britain, and his own place in it, in a series of irregular newspaper columns.
This clunky title, as well as being the same name as my next book, will be another full-on, finished, Carpet Remnant/41st Best/Milder Comedian type epic show, with an actual set, although the exact material is currently in freefall post-Brexit.
Comedian Robin Ince, the co-editor of the new comedians' horror fiction anthology, in which I have a piece, writes...
Lee, stand-up comedian and columnist, has won many British Comedy Awards for his television work. He has a cerebral, middle-class approach to comedy. He is a comedian for grown-ups who enjoy irony.
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.
Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s still done with such precision that midway, after taking a gulp of water, he puts the bottle back on the stool, then carefully lies it flat, just in case it falls over.
Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s still done with such precision that midway, after taking a gulp of water, he puts the bottle back on the stool, then carefully lies it flat, just in case it falls over.
First of all, it is impossible to read this book on the toilet. It doesn't have a handy wipe-clean cover. It is slightly too large to hold comfortably in your hands while emptying your bowel.
As I mentioned in my opening paragraph above the "real life" stories he tells read like a personal diary more
First of all, it is impossible to read this book on the toilet. It doesn't have a handy wipe-clean cover. It is slightly too large to hold comfortably in your hands while emptying your bowel.
As I mentioned in my opening paragraph above the "real life" stories he tells read like a personal diary more
Sidestepping actual punchlines, even when they present themselves blatantly, in favour of a turn-of-phrase or even just a look, Lee provides more seasoned comedy fans with something better.