The Folk’s Back Home – Shirley Collins - January 2003 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - January 5th, 2003

While appearing in a production at the National Theatre in 1977, the English folk singer Shirley Collins lost her voice to nerves, and her musician husband to an actress. She rarely performed in public again, eschewing the peripatetic life of the entertainer to raise her children alone. But, in the previous quarter-century, she had travelled…

Spinner Takes All - May 2002 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - May 12th, 2002

Four decades after his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, Columbia Pictures’ Spider-Man movie has honoured the original adolescent anti-hero with an undisclosed budget so high that, according to its director, “if you knew how much it was, it would give you a nosebleed”. Spider-Man once survived attack from an alien entity disguised as his…

Patti Smith - April 2002 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - April 7th, 2002

The assumed rivalry between Blondie’s vocalist, Debbie Harry, and the poet and singer Patti Smith is one of the most persistent subplots in histories of the 1970s New York punk movement. Apparently, downtown wasn’t big enough for the both of them. But despite their shared pedigree, Harry has become an icon and Muppet Show guest,…

Steve Albini / All Tomorrow’s Parties 2002 - March 2002 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - March 10th, 2002

I don’t accept that aspiring to mainstream success is natural,” says Steve Albini. “By the time I was 10, I realised it didn’t matter what people thought of me. I have to look at myself in the mirror when I shave in the morning. I’d rather not look at a coward or someone who was…

Thor’s Hammer - January 2002 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - January 27th, 2002

In the early 1960s, Iceland didn’t have the music of Bjork, or even the quizmaster skills of Magnus Magnusson, to put it on the cultural map; it didn’t even have television. But, somehow, Iceland did have its own home-grown garage-rock group, every bit as vibrant and vital as the more famous counterparts then flowering in…

Alan Moore - January 2002 The Sunday Times - By Stewart Lee - January 6th, 2002

In the coffee bar of the 1976 Comics Convention at the NEC in Birmingham, a bearded American introduced himself to my mother: “I’m Chris Claremont.” Then he turned to me: “I write X-Men. Do you read that?” I was eight years old, but I suddenly realised, with some regret, that penning stories of spandex-clad mutants…