The Countryside - December 2010 Best Western Hotel Magazine - By Stewart Lee - December 1st, 2010

Cheap Channel 4 Television lifestyle shows espouse the benefits of leaving the stinky city, with its failing schools and stabby schoolchildren, and moving to the countryside, a bucolic idyll where everyone is happy and you can catch and eat your own hedgehogs. And I love the countryside. Two or three weekends a year I still…

Giant Sand - November 2010 The Sunday Times - November 19th, 2010

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…

THE SUPER MOBY DICK OF SPACE - November 2010 Dodgem Logic - November 1st, 2010

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…

The Comedy Boom - October 2010 The Independent - By Stewart Lee - October 28th, 2010

For decades, stand-up comedians entered the palace of entertainment by the tradesmen’s entrance. Now the red carpet is rolled out, do we have any idea what to do next? And where did this change in our status begin? In 1993, after David Baddiel and Rob Newman became the fist comics to play Wembley, Janet Street…

THE NIGHT I DIED - September 2010 Time Out - September 14th, 2010

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…

Anthony Howell – Table Moves - September 2010 The Observer New Review - September 12th, 2010

BEST PERFOMANCE It was my school friend Simon Smith, perpetually and enviably ahead of the curve, who made me see the then unknown REM catch fire at a small student gig at Warwick University in 1984. And so when Simon suggested we see some ‘live art’, at the gallery in Birmingham, by a man called…