Pop culture’s past is growing faster than its present - February 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 3rd, 2013

Saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell: appreciated by 17-year-olds and septuagenarians. Photograph: Massimo Valicchia/Demotix/Corbis Just before Christmas, I saw the early-80s Boston hardcore band Mission of Burma in a Shoreditch cellar, playing to a crowd of young people barely born this century, typically too inarticulate to explain exactly what had led them to a room I expected to…

As HMP goes under, we can wave goodbye to underpant passion - January 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 20th, 2013

Mine is a generation of men that was defined by its underpants. We prized them for their garish styles and loud colours; and because they annoyed our baffled parents, still shell-shocked from the second world war; and because they told people – teachers, the police, girls – who we were. It is painful for men…

New year raises the eternal question: is it possible to live a life without crisps? - January 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 13th, 2013

Crisps. Those perfect golden wonders transform even the loneliest moments into treasured memories. Consumed with caution, crisps provide salty rewards for the dreary daily tasks of my paternal and professional duties. As a child, every school holiday I would be left in the hot car outside a succession of Devon pubs with only a pint…

What’s so bad about Ukip members being foster parents? - December 2012 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - December 2nd, 2012

I have been commissioned to write a libretto about Tarzan by an American minimalist composer who wishes to remain anonymous, and who, I suspect, will have little difficulty in doing so. My new patron initially thought the apeman story a worthy operatic subject, having noticed the inherent musicality of Tarzan’s famous cry: “Ooh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-ooh”. Our Tarzan…

What does the insect community make of ITV’s celebrity freak show? - November 2012 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 25th, 2012

Periodically, I am changed into a monstrous verminous bug. My wife recognises the signs, locks me in the cellar and slides saucers of milk and slivers of lard under the door to sustain me. We do not know why this transformation occurs. We suspect it may relate to some form of deep-seated shame or self-loathing,…

Brooks and Cameron’s texts? They’re pure Shakespeare - November 2012 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 11th, 2012

Rebekah Brooks: overcome by the Utopian dream? Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images There has been much inappropriate, salacious, and opportunistic speculation about the exact nature of the withheld communications between the former News International redhead Rebekah Brooks and the current Conservative party brownhead David Cameron, much of it in extremely dubious taste. I doubt, for example, whether the…