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…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #4 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 26th, 2007

For twenty years now I have treated the fringe as a vast smorgasboard of talent, sometimes sampling as many as sixty or seventy different shows of wildly varying quality each Summer. This year, my wife and I have a baby, so when we get time off the shows we chose assume a greater significance. We…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #3 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 15th, 2007

For many performers, the Fringe offers a chance to launch their career on the international stage. An example of the latter is the Australian comedian Greg Fleet, who alongside the musician Mick Moriarty, brings a show called Fleetwood Mick to The Gilded Balloon this month. Amongst those in the know, The Fleetster, as he is…

STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #2 - August 2007 Big Issue - By Stewart Lee - August 7th, 2007

Some say The Fringe is becoming too commercial. My new stand-up show, 41st Best Stand-Up In Bristo Square, is in The Milk Carton, an 8000 capacity Big Top Sports Arena in Bristo Square. Ted Whey and Harley Curd, two can-do former Guards officers with an interest in Fringe Theatre and alcopop retail, opened their Milk…