Show 17 – Stewart Lee

This week The Quietus is celebrating its eighth birthday as a fully independent music and culture website…. Cheers! Luke will have a pint of flat, room temperature Thadeus Marsh-Hermit’s Brain Cleaver porter in a pewter tankard poured by a gender fluid bar person naked bar for a roll of clingfilm and John would gladly take a well-mashed mug of rooibos and barrel-aged goat sweat tea poured straight from the hollowed out skull of Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There hasn’t been any time for celebrating for anyone who works at tQHQ however as we’re all preparing for the big changes which are afoot here… but more on that before the end of the year. In the meantime we’re very happy to be launching a new podcast for The Quietus Hour, with the first special bonus episode featuring the one and only Stewart Lee. When the comedian and writer visited tQHQ recently we only gave him one instruction: ‘Pick nine songs - no theme, no rationale, doesn’t matter how obscure, how popular or how radio unfriendly, the choice is entirely yours.’ Between the clutch of tracks that he chose - which range from a 1950s field recording of a Roma child singing about boats to a live recording of The Fall playing heavier and more frenziedly than The Stooges - Lee talks at length to tQ editor John Doran. The pair discuss his new prose anthology for Faber Content Provider, getting spiked with acid at a mid-80s Cornish rock festival, his relationship with Shirley Collins, what it feels like to have your writing critiqued by operatives for Communist regimes, his new Brexit-inspired stand up show, what the meaning of vitriol of under the line commentary really signifies, destroying Simple Minds LPs with power tools, releasing Edward Lear-inspired drone poetry on vinyl and how free jazz makes his children cry. If you want to listen to the show with full versions of the songs intact, you can do via Mixcloud. Thanks as always to producer Seb White.