Mojo - The Music Magazine

On the last weekend of May, comedian and fringe music fan Stewart Lee will be curating his Austerity Binge, three nights of music and comedy at London's South Bank. Here he explains how the event came about, what it has in store, and what we can expect from the new BBC2 series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, recommissioned against all the odds.

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We're amazed to see Nic Jones on the bill. He's barely played live since the accident. [The English folk legend was in a car crash in 1982, which required intensive rehab and left him with permanent physical impairments.]
I always thought that if I ever got to programme anything I would see if I could get Nic Jones. That would be amazing. But you know what, as soon as we asked around we heard that he'd done this thing at Sidmouth Folk Festival in 2010 and they got in touch. It's a real coup, that one.

I first discovered him when I was about 13, in the Virgin Records in Birmingham, and a track from Penguin Eggs came on and, I didn't realize it was folk music, I didn't know you weren't supposed to like it [laughs]. So I went and asked what it was and then bought the record. Back then, there was a public library in Solihull and the record library had a folk section so I just got anything that was on Topic Records and that's how I knew about all that. You can hear Nic Jones in lots of people's styles - the choice of material and the repertoires. But even now, in the world of those internet blogs where pretty much everything is available and the idea of rare doesn't exist anymore, some of the Nic Jones records that were on Trailer you just can't get. So given that that's the case, the fact that there's so many people interested in him is really amazing.

Great to see The Nightingales get their due...
I can't quite understand how say, Gang Of Four or The Slits, or bands who you don't remember as being that significant in their day suddenly seem to be a fixture of things and it hasn't happened for The Nightingales. But the disparity between the Nightingales' critical acclaim and their profile was always disproportionate. They did have one of the most marvellously banal music magazine front covers ever, of [band frontman] Rob Lloyd in his mum's kitchen. Rob says that that was the worst-selling edition of the paper there's ever been. Their record actually went down the charts afterwards. They were sardonic. Also, they had a decade off during which Rob Lloyd kind of did Pulp before the fact. Like a lot of working-class genius artists, Rob Lloyd's got an absolute resistance to the idea of being taken seriously. He would call things out on being pretentious whilst putting out arguably quite pretentious music. Live, The Nightingales can either be brilliant or not work at all. When something's operating at the edge of tolerability it can be like that.

There's something funny about putting these things in the South Bank, the temple of culture. It's like I've relocated them against their will. Look at Nick Drake. Now young writers write about it as if he must always have been a significant figure, but he wasn't. When we were kids, his records were all out of print and if he was remembered at all it was as some hippy dippy thing.

John Cage's Indeterminacy is a work for voice and music. How are you approaching it?
I'm doing this with Steve Beresford and Tanya Chen who are free improvisers and composers. Steve Beresford was, like, for hire in the '70s and '80s. He was The Slits' keyboard player and was part of The Flying Lizards. They'd seen me doing stand-up and they thought that my monotonous voice would be perfect for this piece with lots of spoken word in it. We've done it three times and it's been really interesting. You've got 90 cards and you have to read them all in a random order but try and get them all to work, so it feels like a story at the end.

Cage's direction is that the musicians are supposed to ignore you. That's interesting, and also I get a lot of reviews as a stand-up saying I'm boring and that things go on too long and I've always taken great comfort in this John Cage quote where he says, "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's really not boring at all, but very interesting." But I didn't know it was from Indeterminacy. There's something about the piece that gets really hypnotic.

Also on the same night we've got Alan Tomlinson doing this piece where you basically just disassemble a trombone, play a little bit, and put it back together. And also there's this piece called Water Walk, which Cage did on telly, where he'd do stuff in a kitchen for two minutes. He's on a quiz show called What's My Line, and the interviewer says, 'Do you mind if people laugh?' and Cage says, 'It's a response.' And I just started to find Cage really funny and close to a lot of things I like about comedy. What I really like about it is that he just offers the work up for your consideration.

I don't claim for a moment to be an expert on it, but you don't often get spoken-word performers doing Cage's spoken-word stuff; it's often musicians finding their way through it. So for me it's quite interesting, knowing a bit about timing, and where stresses fall, to try and do it. That'll be a good night.

You're also rewriting comedy history with At Last! The 1981 Show...
Often when there are histories of comedy, they don't reflect my memory. The history of comedy is written by the victors. When I was about 12 I remember a BBC2 programme called Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights. It was produced by Paul Jackson who went to The Comedy Store and The Comic Strip and all these places. And he put together an incredibly cheap sort of showcase that had of all these comedians and I remember thinking, Who the hell are all these people? There was Alexei Sayle, Rick Mayall and Ade Edmondson doing their double-act, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson, Tony Allen, Arnold Brown, and all these things that just seemed utterly unlike anything. Unless you lived in London you had no idea that there was this thing called alternative comedy.

Rick and Ade's double-act did this routine about a gooseberry in a lift, 'What's green and goes up and down?' It was that joke and it took them five minutes to do it. I remember the next day knowing it off by heart. I think maybe we had different memories before there were video recorders, because you weren't going to see this thing ever again. So I thought let's try and do a show with all the people from 1981. Some people have gone on to be names, a lot of those people stopped doing live stuff after two or three years, but also there are people from then who are still going and are really interesting. At the moment we've got Alexei Sayle and Frank Chickens, who are now a 35-piece group, and I want to ask people like Kevin McAleer, who I think is one of the ten greats. I also hope to ask Arnold Brown and Tony Allen as well. I think it will be really interesting whatever happens. I don't expect Alexei will do anything like what he did 30 years ago but it will be interesting to see how they respond to the evening.

And there's contemporary British folk from Trembling Bells...
I don't know what they're like live. I've never seen them. I keep missing them because of doing gigs. They wanted to do it with Mike Heron, which is perfect. Also there's a guy I really like called Nick Pynn who's a multi-instrumentalist, a little bit like, 'If Mike Oldfield wasn't naff', but he always does these incredible one-man shows in the Fringe but I've also started using him when I do music stuff. But he's also in Mike Heron's little pick-up band. So it should work quite well to put them all on together. Forty years ago you had Fairport Convention and Pentangle play somewhere like the Royal Festival Hall, it's that kind of thing. It fits in with that world. I really want to see them - although, perversely, that's ended up being the same night as the John Cage thing so I'm probably going to miss them again.

Hubristically, you've also scheduled your own stand-up show: Vegetable Stew...
I'd been chasing after an elderly legend of British comedy who I was unable to pin down. I think there's something slightly naff about being offered a weekend of programming and going, 'Oh, well, I could do it.' For my last live show I had six half-hours on the go and I'd normally do three or four of them depending on the timing. And I had six half-hours together for the next telly show which is all filmed now. So I thought, you know what, I'll do the whole lot in one night. 20,000 people came to the London run but they'll have only seen half the material. I think it's a mad thing to do three hours. Will people walk out?

What in God's name is "The Real Food Market"?
You know what? That was a misprint. They sent the original programme design through and for some reason there were two events on there that I had nothing to do with: a concert by some Japanese musicians and this Real Food Market were in the font and layout of my thing. I said, you'd better take that Japanese thing off, but without them knowing I rewrote the press release on the Real Food Market as if it looks like I've chosen it. I like the idea that one of seven things I've put on is a Real Food Market. Also, the South Bank press department had chosen to highlight the availability of fennel and I imagine people looking at it thinking 'Why has he chosen fennel?' I don't actually know what the Real Food Market is but I'm sure it will be very good.

"Austerity Binge": the title has a nice, typically downbeat ring to it...
We were going round and round for ages. One of the promoters came up with Austerity Binge. They get very worried about stupid names. I wanted it to be called Puke Bag at one point. They said, I don't think people will want to appear in Stewart Lee's puke bag. Now, I don't think most people would have minded that. Maybe some of the Nic Jones people. But 'John Cage's indeterminacy is appearing as part of Puke Bag,' I quite like that. I'd go.

Was there anything you'd have liked to have put on, but couldn't?
A pivotal thing for me was 15 years ago at the Jazz Café in North London. Sonic Youth, who were then, like, trendy because of grunge, did an improv set with loads of old fellas who were part of the British free jazz scene [including Lol Coxhill - Ed]. I tried to do that but no-one's diaries worked. I tried to see if you could get the reformed Guided By Voices. They're all things from the past that you'd like to see. I gave the South Bank a huge list of things and they said, 'We can't do that, we're not having that, they're too mad...' I'd have liked to have put on more free jazz and foreign stuff, but it's come out with a disproportionate amount of folk music in it, to the point where I imagine people going, 'Oh, I didn't know he was a morris dancer.'

You have a new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle on the BBC. What fresh outrages can we expect?
What was interesting about filming the new TV show is that it was quite hard to get tickets, and even then there were people walking out, during a sketch I do about the IRA. But I ended up using those walk-outs in the show. Then I started doing this song and I got one verse into it and someone walked out during it. The show was obviously nearly over and I sort of lost my temper and said, in the show, 'God, I hate the public. If only there were some way to eliminate them from the equation so that everything was a closed dialogue between me and broadsheet journalists in a mutually congratulatory circle,' or something like that. Weirdly for me, I don't ever lose my temper on stage and I did then because I thought, they must have some sense that we only have two goes at filming this. That's now the end of the programme, which means you don't even get to hear the song. It just cuts off with this man walking out.

You never see that on television. What you tend to see with stand-up comedy on telly... they film it in such massive places that it could be going badly and you'd never know. In the Michael McIntyre roadshow you just cut away to a celebrity laughing, to drive it home. Look, it's good! Look, Gok Wan likes it! Whereas I like the idea of trying to let people in on the struggle. A lot of things I like are like that. I think I partly got that attitude off Ted Chippington. About half of the Ted Chippington album is him going down quite badly. If you're a comedian you think it's funny and about a quarter of a century later we've managed to get that into a TV show, a film being broadcast of something not working, something ineffectual. Is it working, is it not working? I quite like that.

As told to Andrew Male

Stewart Lee's Austerity Binge runs at London's South Bank Centre from 27 to 30 May, 2011. The new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2 Wednesday May 4. For more info go to southbankcentre.co.uk and bbc.co.uk

Top photo: Gavin Evans