Fountains Of Wayne - February 2004 The Sunday Times - February 8th, 2004

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…

A Mighty Wind - January 2004 The Sunday Times - January 11th, 2004

Below is a piece on Christopher Guest’s film, A Mighty Wind. The PR company pulled the quote “The film’s genius … American folk of the 1960s gets the Spinal Tap treatment” from the piece and put it on the posters. In the piece, ‘the film’ refers to Spinal Tap, not A Mighty Wind, the apostrophe…

Jerry Springer: The Opera - December 2003 Time Out - December 1st, 2003

Two and a half years ago the composer Richard Thomas asked me to help with a Battersea Arts Centre workshop of his un-finished epic, Jerry Springer The Opera. I thought it would take a couple of months. We didn’t expect a National Theatre run, or a West End transfer, and we certainly didn’t expect to…

Nick Cave - September 2003 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - September 14th, 2003

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.…

Calexico - February 2003 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - February 11th, 2003

Joey Burns has been biding his time. To see his group, Calexico, delivering their enthralling fusion of twangy guitars and widescreen soundtrack atmospherics live, often accompanied by a Mariachi band in traditional costume, one wouldn’t assume that such an explosive performance was the result of patience. But for over a decade, the rhythm section of…

The Folk’s Back Home – Shirley Collins - January 2003 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - January 5th, 2003

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…