Flat-cap Clarkson only wants his nose in the trough - November 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 24th, 2024

I read Andrew Michael Hurley’s new novel, Barrowbeck, in preparation for co-hosting Tales of the Weird, a timely event on the folk horror genre at the British Library earlier this month. I’m not the most informed commentator on this literary subset by any means, but I am, after Mark Gatiss, one of the most famous,…

If I were Captain America, I’d quit - November 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 10th, 2024

The presidency of Donald Trump contaminates everything that touches it, like dogshit on the end of a pointed stick. Be careful, politicians of the world, entertainment brands, and commercial properties, that you don’t get any on you. It stinks. On Monday night, one of my lovely rescue cats, having battled the cat flap into submission,…

Sick of overpriced gig tickets? Here’s the Cure - October 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 27th, 2024

The first time I saw the Cure was on 29 April 1984. The Birmingham Odeon show opened with a set from rural Worcestershire’s pre-Raphaelite goths And Also the Trees, whose early albums remain a guilty pleasure, and about whom I once sent a self-aggrandising letter to ZigZag magazine. The Cure’s set drew heavily on the…

Starmer’s tiny gaffe has made him a sausage to fortune - September 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 29th, 2024

Addressing the subject of Gaza on Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer called for the “return of the sausages”, which was a surprise to those of us who didn’t know they were missing. Although, come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a big fat bulldog with a string of them in its…

The Tories have left the stage but their toxic cultural legacy is doing an encore - September 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 15th, 2024

Hey-ho! It’s that time of year again when the opaquely funded Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust expends expensive effort seeding its right-leaning candidates (formerly including the evangelical Stephen Green, who denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals) on to the board of its hated “woke” National…

Oasis: a guilty pleasure without fringe benefits - September 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 1st, 2024

“In Russia, nostalgia is regarded as an illness,” declared the mighty comedian Simon Munnery once, “or at least it used to be, in the good old days.” Zing! Oasis, who 30 years ago represented a kind of condensed nostalgia for the previous quarter-century of British rock, are re-forming. The cocaine dealers of Britain are already…