The Smiths – I Know Its Over - April 2011 Mojo Magazine - By Stewart Lee - April 1st, 2011

I Know It’s Over is The Queen Is Dead’s first pause for breath. As usual, Morrissey’s mordant wit is mistaken, historically, for unmitigated misery. “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.” What an opening line! Remember all those classic blues and folk songs that billow forth from the point of view of…

There Are No Comedy Gods - September 2010 Dodgem Logic - By Stewart Lee - September 1st, 2010

This is the story of a spontaneous comment that got out of hand, and grew, momentarily confusing an accommodating Japanese performance art group, and, ultimately, inconveniencing a corporate arts sponsor. But it’s also a story about how we value creativity. Is Art about books sold, tickets bought, and units shifted, pleasing the largest possible number…

Razorcuts album reissue sleevenotes - September 2010 Razorcuts Sleeve Notes - By Stewart Lee - September 1st, 2010

Stumbled upon unwares upstairs in an Oxford pub, in the Winter of 1986, Razorcuts were the coolest looking band I’d seen to date. Magnificently stylish beatniks, but clad in threads you could snag from charity shops, beamed in from bohemia. For the next three years it seemed impossible to avoid them. And the sound was…

Frank Chickens – Fairness & Change - July 2010 From The Desk Of Stewart Lee - By Stewart Lee - July 29th, 2010

In the small hours of Tues 20th I received a badly punctuated e-mail advertising Foster’s through the medium of The Foster’s Comedy God poll, which invites the public to vote for the all-time Comedy God from 30 years of Perrier/Eddies/Edinburgh Comedy Awards nominations. Three pints drunk, on Foster’s ironically, I responded with admittedly ill-advised rudeness,…

Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste - November 2009 By Stewart Lee - November 7th, 2009

When Today was first reissued, in 1997, nine years after it was recorded, Byron Coley’s illuminating sleeve notes compared Galaxie 500’s astonishing and all but unprecedented land-grab of the margins of late Eighties mainstream rock culture, with the post-Nirvana landscape, where previously alternative combos were suddenly hobnobbing with Hollywood stars and hogging the headlines. And…

Morrissey, Live - January 2008 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - January 27th, 2008

Camden’s historic counter-cultural hotbed The Roundhouse reopened in 2006, with a concrete stack of bars, holding areas and walkways appended to its tubby body, like those glaringly modern visitor centres attached to prehistoric remains at World Heritage Sites. Crossing the metal bridge from the brightly lit 21st century annexe into the darkness of the 19th…