Patti Smith Live At QEH, London - September 2006 The Sunday Times - September 10th, 2006

The Seventies New York punk survivor Patti Smith reminds us of what we have lost. Smith still believes music and poetry can change the world, and, in a time where Bono Vox poses for photo-op’s with George Bush, asking us to visualise the bigger, if severely blurred picture, her stark, uncompromising sloganeering seems increasingly of…

The World’s Greatest Art Event & How To Survive It - July 2006 The Guardian - July 8th, 2006

There are few things upon which I am qualified to express an opinion. I have no interest in sport, and only last night was shamed by a Bulgarian mini-cab driver who could not belive I didn’t know the World Cup was about to start. I cannot understand electricty, its meaning, or its practice. I have…

Lost in translation - May 2006 The Guardian - By Stewart Lee - May 23rd, 2006

In 1873 the British scholar and traveller Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited Japan. He recorded his views of the nation’s music in his subsequent book, Japanese Things: Being Notes On Various Subjects Connected With Japan. “Music,” he wrote, “if that beautiful word must be allowed to fall so low as to denote the strummings and…

Pogue In A Hole - April 2006 The Sunday Times - April 9th, 2006

The musician and artist Jem Finer arrives in the car park of Kings Wood, near the village of Challock in Kent, on a wet Sunday afternoon in late May. Deep inside the forest, on the side of a hill, is a seven metre deep concrete shaft, constructed at Finer’s behest, after he won a commission…

What Is A Bad Movie? - April 2006 The Guardian - April 2nd, 2006

By a strange quirk of fate, in September 1995, I found myself waiting to meet a friend in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, Hollywood, California, as the cast and creative team of Paul Verhoeven’s subsequently much-derided Showgirls arrived from the film’s first screening. Advance word on the softcore Las Vegas fable had reached…

Damned, funny and deadly serious; Opinion - March 2006 The Times - March 31st, 2006

Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer The Opera, which I directed, is finally on tour. Last spring, it was closed down indefinitely by the Religious Right. Threats from the gay-hate group Christian Voice convinced Sainsbury’s to withdraw the show’s DVD from sale in its shops and prompted a cancer charity to reject proceeds from a benefit performance.…