Kosmischer Laufer – The Secret Cosmic Music Of The East German Olympic Program 1972-1983, Volume II - April 2014 April 21st, 2014

Martin Zeichnete was an electronics boffin press-ganged by the state into writing trance music for East German Olympians. This second newly unearthed volume of Zeigler’s Kraftwerk and Neu fuelled visions is marginally inferior to the first, but it’s strangely moving to experience these stirring retro-futurist analogue fusions now both the Communist and the Olympic ideal…

Dan Stuart – Arizona: 1993 – 95 - April 2014 April 12th, 2014

In the ’80s, Dan Stuart’s Green On Red played punk in a Crazy Horse style, a hardcore era heresy, dissolving messily in bad drugs and bad business. His 1994 comeback, Can O’Worms, sounds even better here than twenty years ago; a heady country blues fever dream, with spicy Mexican flavoring, and Carveresque deadbeat lyrics, painting…

The Nightingales – For F**k’s Sake - April 2014 April 12th, 2014

Birmingham’s Peel session perennials The Nightingales should be profitable post-punk survivors, a Fall or a Gang of Four, with submerged pop sensibilities that mean you can yodel along yourself. Is their balti bowl of rock and roll, Beefheart twang, throbbing krautfunk, and Robert Lloyd’s meticulous pop-cultural lyrics too hot for you? Album eight explodes with…

Stewart Lee: A Revolution In Standup - April 2014 Huffington Post - By Julian Dutton - April 10th, 2014

In a collection of critical essays published in 1929 as a prolegomena to the appearance of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Our Exagmination round his Factification of Incamination of Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett begins his contribution with the words “With Joyce, form is content.” With Stewart Lee, comedy is content: Joyce’s novel is a novel about…

Mentioned by Michael Palin - April 2014 Chortle - By Michael Palin - April 8th, 2014

Interview with Michael Palin – 8th April 2014 “And there are some brilliant people around, Stewart Lee, and people like that. Yet the way television and radio are run now, executives and number crunchers are far more in control than they used to be because there are so many more channels and they’re all fighting…

Review: Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle - April 2014 The Yorker - By Lewis Dunn - April 6th, 2014

Stewart Lee has won a BAFTA. Not just one for his show, but he himself has also won a BAFTA. He is, according to BAFTA, the Best Male Television Comic. He won that, and unless they can revoke BAFTAs, like they revoked knighthoods to Fred Goodwin, he will always have it. He’s the Best Male…