Sonic Youth - December 1999 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - December 5th, 1999

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…

John Fahey - September 1999 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - September 19th, 1999

From the late 1950s onwards, guitarist John Fahey has forged a unique fusion of traditional American musics and avant-garde conceits, bending blues and folk templates into new forms and dousing them with found sounds. Today, Fahey is flattered by the collaborative attentions of underground guru Jim O’Rourke, Sonic Youth’s ever-adventurous Thurston Moore and experimental rockers…

Bevis Frond / Terrastock - August 1999 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - August 22nd, 1999

Andy Partridge of XTC once described record fairs, and more specifically record collectors, as “smelling of broken biscuits”. Butlocating a mint-condition second West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album or a bootleg of Sonic Youth rehearsing is a difficult job that someone has to do. Be thankful, then, to Phil McMullen and Nick Saloman, publishers…

The Go-Betweens - May 1999 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - May 16th, 1999

‘Hair is important,” began Robert Forster, the co-frontman of the Go-Betweens, Australia’s criminally underrated band, in an article on haircare for the Manchester fanzine Debris in 1987. “Hair is placed fairly and squarely upon your head, to be admired and cared for. At a younger age, I almost drifted into hairdressing, and thankfully didn’t, but…

Jim O’Rourke - April 1999 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - April 11th, 1999

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…

Roky Erikson - March 1999 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - March 14th, 1999

Things started to go wrong for Thirteenth Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson when he was arrested for possession of six marijuana joints in 1969. Faced with statutory imprisonment by the State of Texas, Roky cunningly pleaded insanity on the basis of having taken 300 LSD trips, and so spent three years in Rusk State Hospital…