Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste - November 2009 By Stewart Lee - November 7th, 2009

When Today was first reissued, in 1997, nine years after it was recorded, Byron Coley’s illuminating sleeve notes compared Galaxie 500’s astonishing and all but unprecedented land-grab of the margins of late Eighties mainstream rock culture, with the post-Nirvana landscape, where previously alternative combos were suddenly hobnobbing with Hollywood stars and hogging the headlines. And…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #4 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 26th, 2007

For twenty years now I have treated the fringe as a vast smorgasboard of talent, sometimes sampling as many as sixty or seventy different shows of wildly varying quality each Summer. This year, my wife and I have a baby, so when we get time off the shows we chose assume a greater significance. We…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #3 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 15th, 2007

For many performers, the Fringe offers a chance to launch their career on the international stage. An example of the latter is the Australian comedian Greg Fleet, who alongside the musician Mick Moriarty, brings a show called Fleetwood Mick to The Gilded Balloon this month. Amongst those in the know, The Fleetster, as he is…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #2 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 7th, 2007

Some say The Fringe is becoming too commercial. My new stand-up show, 41st Best Stand-Up In Bristo Square, is in The Milk Carton, an 8000 capacity Big Top Sports Arena in Bristo Square. Ted Whey and Harley Curd, two can-do former Guards officers with an interest in Fringe Theatre and alcopop retail, opened their Milk…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #1 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 1st, 2007

Another year, another Edinburgh Fringe. I am on my 21st, and for me the Fringe used to be a fun place, where my own brand of pretentious, experimental stand-up enjoyed no end of effusive reviews, if little or no financial reward. But this year I really need Edinburgh to work out for me in a…

Scottish Humanists Podcast - January 2007 By Stewart Lee - January 1st, 2007

Last year, as I crossed a picket-line of religious protestors trying to ban a theatre piece I’d co-written, a phrase popped unbidden into my head. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Few would disagree that the stories and sayings of religions and myths are an unavoidable part of the imaginative fabric…