Free Improvisation - April 2010 The Sunday TImes - April 11th, 2010

Over the May bank holiday weekend, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival bends its boundaries a little, making space for a music that’s entering its fifth decade of sustainable cult status, despite minimal airplay, minimal subsidy, and dismissal from mainstream critics. I’ve been pulled in to help promote three nights of so-called Free Improvisation, under the banner…

The Diary: Stewart Lee - December 2009 The Financial Times - December 5th, 2009

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…

Robyn Hitchcock – Live - February 2009 The Sunday TImes - February 15th, 2009

Islington’s Union Chapel is a foreboding venue for rock musicians. Its vaulted Victorian interior amplifies and supports the unplugged guitar or the naked human voice, but electrify the proceedings and indecipherable white noise bounces round the buttresses. Sometimes the holy formality of the space adds a magical, crispy frosting to an event, but sometimes it…

Jukebox - December 2008 The Sunday Times - December 7th, 2008

I bought my jukebox, a 1974 Wurlitzer Americana 3800, in the Spring of 1999. She holds 200 7” singles, gives off the purple glow of a fading radioactive sunset, hums like a fifties refrigerator, and reminds you what records were supposed to sound like, – not thin and compressed into machine computer code, but vast,…

Vandermark / Guy / Sanders & Brötzmann / Wermueller / Pliakas - November 2008 The Sunday Times - November 16th, 2008

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…

Tom Waits – Live - July 2008 The Sunday TImes - July 27th, 2008

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…