The New Cue #389 June 17: Stewart Lee
"I thought, if I can disguise seeing bands as work then that’ll be handy."
Wotcha,
We’ve done nearly four hundred of these editions and, to be honest, thinking of the opening greeting is the only tiresome aspect - so I’ve gone with a ‘wotcha’ today. Might use it more often: it’s satisfying said out loud.
We’re very happy to have the country’s greatest comedian Stewart Lee after the jump. Ted Zoom-ed him at home on Friday morning, as Stewart’s got several exciting events to let you know about: he’s got three gigs at The Lexington in London during the first week of July, when he’ll stress-test 45-minutes of brand new stand-up before a garage-punk band of his choosing performs; he’s then appearing alongside Billy Childish at Rough Trade East on July 4th for the launch of To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish by JR Hartley ; and he’s curated a stage at the Brighton Psych Fest on the last Friday of August. We’ll also hear about the material in his next stand-up show. All good stuff.
It’s free to read, so tuck in and we’ll see you on Friday.
Ted, Niall and Chris.
Start The Week With…Stewart Lee
Good morning, Stewart.
Hello. How are you?
I’m alright, thanks. How’s your week been?
I just seem to be in a constant battle against a huge backlog of emails. Terrible when that’s all you can remember of the week, answering emails.
So, we are here to talk about a couple of events you’ve helped curate. First, tell me about the Brighton Psych Fest which is happening on the last weekend in August. There are five acts on your stage.
They just asked me if I’d help curate and compere a stage. So, I’m doing the one on the Friday at the Komedia in Brighton, which is a great privilege. I tried to think about who would fit the bill of the festival and also people I liked. I tried to choose some things that were vaguely from that area, too.
We’re starting off with Secluded Bronte, which is possibly a stretch for a psych festival. It’s sort of a cross between improvisational music and theatre. It’s absurdly funny, captivating and oddly moving. There’s no telling what they’ll do, really. They’ll have objects on stage that make sounds. They may say things. They might walk about. They’re like characters who haunt music.
Eliza Skelton’s on. She’s been knocking about for years in Brighton. She does the sing-along Wicker Man events, where a folk group play the songs from the Wicker Man film, and you can sing-along. She’s been in lots of groups, but this is her first solo album, The Lookerer, from last year, and it’s sort of ‘70s Fleetwood Mac doing acid folk. It’s superb. If it was on a bigger label it would be everyone’s favourite record. She’s got a band together from locals, including Bevis Frond: that’ll be really good.
We also have Alison Cotton who used to be in The Left Outsides. She’s doing solo records now, sort of droning, bit John Cale-ish. She’s done a concept album about smuggling Jewish people out of Germany in the 1930s. I’m really looking forward to seeing her live as I like her music a lot.
The Physics House Band are on. They’re a proggy band, really. Like King Crimson or Radiohead, lots of instrumentals. From Brighton. And, of course, The Bevis Frond are playing: if you know about psych music at all you must know them. They’ve been recording for forty years, having bought a Portastudio with compensation money from Camden Council after Nick Saloman rode his motorbike through a pothole. He started pressing up his own albums in the early ‘80s and it snowballed. It’s like a combination of very heavy ‘60s psychedelia and indie pop, plus Robyn Hitchcock/Julian Cope English psychedelia. He’s a great songwriter. He articulates a particular kind of aging male doubt with real wit and precision. If you told him he’s a great improviser he’d be quite suspicious of that, but he is.
Do you have any gateway drug tunes for each of these?
Yes. So, with The Physics House Band if your readers start with Death Sequence 111. I’m on it. Talking. They said, ‘Would you come in and do a vocal on this?’ I tried to sing something. They said, ‘Don’t do that.’
For Alison Cotton, go to the album before last. Try, The Wooden Ship off The Portrait You Painted of Me. It’s very long.
Bevis Frond: well, High in A Flat.
Secluded Bronte, if you link to Cyclops then I think people will get the idea.
The whole Eliza Skelton album is great. But maybe go for Above Whitehawk Hill.
What’s your source for all this stuff, where do you get your psych musical leads?
I’m of an age when it was fanzines. I used to read Bucketfull of Brains in the ‘80s. I specifically remember buying a Bucketfull of Brains in about ’87 that had a free 7-inch by the Bevis Frond which was High in a Flat. Shindig, I read. Quietus does some stuff. But you get into grooves where you see the spin-offs from the things you already like and follow that. I see stuff live. But I don’t really know anymore. You could put The Lovely Eggs on at a psych festival and they’re a quintessential 6 Music late nigh band: so, I listen to that sometimes. Weirdly, the Internet has made it harder. You used to be able to get Time Out or the NME, look through it, see what’s on. Now you rely on algorithms suggesting things, or friends suggesting things. I feel like I don’t know what’s going on at all now. I have to wait. It’s the lack of trusted people, like yourself. I suppose a lot of you just carried on the trusted brand of your name from the days when there was a physical press into cyberspace. But where does the next generation of trusted writer brand names come from, that’s the question.
I guess they’ll have to self-publish on the Internet or start fanzines from the ground up again.
Yeah.
So, before that, between July 1st and 3rd, you have three nights of comedy and music at The Lexington in London.
Well, my last stand-up show Basic Lee has been put to bed now. It’ll be on telly, actually. On the 20th of July it’s on Sky Arts. Then it sits on Now TV for five years. There’s a really large window there. I’ve done that and now I’m starting to write the next one. It’s called Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf. That’ll open in London in December and then tour the UK all next year.
I never liked opening for bands. When alternative comedy was invented in the ‘80s, you used to see people opening for bands. I saw Peter Richardson of the Comic Strip opening for Dexys in 1982. Oddly, I’m going to see Dexys tonight, at Koko, forty-two years later. I saw Phil Jupitus when he was called Porky the Poet opening for Billy Bragg in 1983. And I saw Ted Chippington opening for The Fall in 1984, which was really my Sex Pistols at the 100 Club moment.
I have opened for bands, though. I opened for The Nightingales on tour, which was alright. Sleaford Mods at Hammersmith Apollo was great, but it didn’t really work at Ally Pally. It was like being on a platform at an Exhibition Hall. But the Lexington asked if I wanted to do something for their anniversary and I thought, I’ll open for some bands for two weeks because it’s quite difficult and it might kick my arse to really start on the next show. If I can write something robust enough to work for a standing audience at The Lexington then I can tinker about with it for the theatres. It’s a bit of a cheat, as well. Because a lot of the time my kids’ mum will be working and I’ll be looking after my daughter. I thought, if I can disguise seeing bands as work then that’ll be handy. So, I’m putting on Stewart Lee introduces The Garage Punk Greats.
Monday, July 1st, I’m doing 45 minutes before The Primevals, who are an ‘80s Scottish garage band who are still going. They’ve got that thing, which I think is funny, where you’d go see them when you were young and think they were grizzled, hard-living veterans, but now they actually are. They write Gun Club-type songs about life on the road or being an old drunk in a bar but now in their sixties they just seem to have grown into their material. Saint Jack is a great song, and it turned out to be only song that’s made them any money because it got used on that American cop show, Tin Star.
On Tuesday, there’s The Shadracks, who are Billy Childish-affiliated – it’s his son, Huddie. And they’re young for God’s sake! That music, garage punk, it’s almost like folk music now. When you see it done really well by some young people you think, ‘Ah, the tradition’s in safe hands!’ You could put Don’t Let Go off their last album as a link.
Then, on Wednesday, we have The Fallen Leaves who are just superb. They’re bits of the Subway Sect, they dress really smartly, they were nice hats, they have a tambourine-playing singer, and they write really precise garage-pop where every song sounds like it should’ve been a hit in 1967. They really deliver the goods every time. You could take anyone along to see them and they’d feel like they were entertained. It’s like showbiz, in a way, they’re not a destructive mess. They hit the ground running and bash out these fantastic sets. Green Eyes is good.
Then in the second week of August I’m doing the same thing with indie bands, but I’m not allowed to say it’s me until July. We put these garage punk ones on sale a month ago without saying it’s me, just to make sure that at least half the audience have come for the music. I wanted to make sure people stayed for them, and also to give myself a challenge of playing to people who didn’t know or who may not even like me.
What’s the material about this time?
Weirdly, with this show I know what it is, I just haven’t written it yet. Normally, the process of writing it is the process of finding out. But I know what this will be. The first half will be me as me, doing the normal-ish material about things that I do, but ideally in a slightly more discursive way than usual. More talking to the audience. Running through that will be a thread of material about identity. Like, do we take on personas to achieve things? If you want to make $60 million a special as a stand-up, then you have to do nasty, reactionary material like Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais: then you’ll get on Netflix. But how can I do that, because it’s not me? At the end of the first half, I turn into a werewolf. I do the second half as a kind of reactionary werewolf stand-up comedian, doing horrible material about minorities and stuff. In a costume, I’ll be able to physically get in the audience, because I’ll have a protected identity. Then that werewolf will get a really good deal off a streaming service to do his horrible act. That’s the idea, so I know what it’s going to be and I just need to colour it in. It seems really do-able.
Part of the problem is that I planned to start writing this about three weeks ago and I was putting in little club gigs for it. But the election, while not a crucial part of it, it doesn’t seem worth starting on a massive part of stuff until we know what the public mood is. For the last fourteen years, the strategy of the Tories has been to fabricate culture wars. That’s partly why reactionary comedy seems strange to me now. In the 90s, I really loved Jerry Sadowitz, and I still think he’s great, but the mood music of people going to shows was that we were part of a liberal consensus, so it was funny for Sadowitz to kick against that. To say stuff like, ‘Nelson Mandela, what a cunt. You lend some people a fiver and you never see them again.’ Because we all went to ANC benefits and that kind of thing.
Whereas now, saying that kind of thing is kind of the same as the things Suella Braverman or The Daily Telegraph are saying. There’s actually a comedy night that’s sponsored by Spiked that’s the kind of place you specifically go to hear that kind of joke. The kind of place Reform councillors go for a night out. On some level, I’ve provided an alternative to that – or made fun if it. I hope that the culture war will just run out of steam as soon as the Labour Party get in, because it’s been partly about controlling power and creating conflicts. ‘Don’t look at our economic record: there’s a man who’s gone into a toilet.’ We just have to see what happens. Interestingly enough, Lebedev – you know, the KGB-bloke’s son who owns the Evening Standard – he’s announced he’s going to pull the plug on the paper in a few weeks. Because there’s no point in it existing when the Tories are wiped out. He got his peerage because he’s a supporter of that world. Is it financially worth the press stoking that stuff if 75% of the electorate just aren’t interested in it? I don’t know if that will affect what I write about.
There’s a joke among comedians at the moment that 75% of us are liberal-leaning and, in a way, we’ve done rather well of this idiotic government, because they are very easy to make fun of. As are the far-right. So, I just don’t know what the colouring part of the show will be until after July 4th.
An evening we are going to be spending together.
Yes! That’s right. We’ll be doing the Billy Childish thing that evening at Rough Trade East. When you interviewed me for your book about Billy, I don’t remember it being for the foreword.
No, it wasn’t. I’m sorry about that. I was collating a dozen ‘Childish Witnesses’ for it, first-person accounts: Tracey Emin and other girlfriends, band members, old friends, collaborators. Yours just seemed to work best at the front and thus became the foreword. Hope that’s OK…
It's funny, because when I read that I thought, ‘Oh, I’d have written that differently as a foreword’, but what’s good about it is that its directness works really well for this book about Billy Childish. I’m glad that it worked out. It’s not yet, is it?
No, published the day we’re at Rough Trade, 4th of July, election night. Have you ever discussed politics with Billy Childish?
Well, he’s the kind of person who I imagine thinks political correctness really has gone mad. He imagines that because he’s married to a mixed-race half-Native American woman and has a friend who’s Black, he’s allowed to say what he wants. He’d hate the comparison, but Mark E Smith was like that as well. He’ll take against something just because everyone thinks it, but everyone thinks it sometimes because it’s right. What’s funny is he likes me when he comes to see me. And I am the absolute cliché of the North London liberal metropolitan elite. He probably thinks I am a contrary individual, but I certainly think land mines would go off if we were to talk about some aspects of politics. I imagine he’s a Labour voter though.
Well, did you see the poster he did with L-13 last week about Farage?
Oh, I did see that, and I thought, ‘That looks like Billy Childish’s artwork’.
It is.
That’s great. It’s interesting to talk to you about him. I’ve never met anyone who knows him well enough to say that about him. I think that he imagines he’s done his time, having been abused as a kid and so forth, people shouldn’t pussy-foot around him.
We’ll all be together on election night, and you can finally talk politics with him in real time, as it happens.
But the results won’t really be in until after we’ve finished, which will be what, 9-ish or something.
No, but there’ll be a mood.
It doesn’t seem quite straight-forward to me as ’97, when there was a Labour landslide. This Labour Party have made so many compromises that a lot of people are voting for them to get rid of the Tories rather than they feel especially enamoured about this situation. It will be a huge relief. If the Labour victory just stems the massive theft of money from the public purse and the normalisation of lying that will be a start.
It would be a step forward. I recall in ’97 a lot of hope around Labour that within a year or so turned to disappointment.
Yes, this time we are already disappointed.
OK, thanks for sparing half an hour for us Stewart.
No problem. I’ll see you on 4th of July.
TK