Stewart Lee's picks on Kate Huchinson's WWFM show.

[Sebastian Cobb]

This is actually from 2017 but they replayed it as she couldn't present her show this week, thought I'd throw it out there as it's quite an interesting listen.

https://www.mixcloud.com/worldwidefm/kate-hutchinson-with-stewart-lee-24-11-17/

Street Pulse – Handsworth Revolution [Mango]
The Bachelors – The Sound Of Silence
Dangerous Girls – Dangerous Girls [Happy Face Records]
Nikki Sudden – Green Shield Stamps [Troubadour]
Napalm Death – You Suffer [Earache Records]
The Fall – Garden (John Peel Session) [Rough Trade]
Razorcuts – Sorry To Embarrass You [Creation Records]
Baris Manco – Kol Basti [Guerssen]
Faust – Krautrock [Virgin]
Nico – All Tomorrows Parties
Richard Dawson – Orge [Weird World]
Nick Pynn – Afterplanesman [Roundhill Music]
Big Country – Inwards [Mercury]
Frank Morgan – In The Sentimental Mood [Antilles]
Howe Gelb – The Shiver Revisited [Fire Records]

[Pink Gregory]

https://m.mixcloud.com/the_Quietus/the-quietus-hour-stewart-lee-special/

Stewart Lee on the Quietus Hour, also good

[sutin]

Nice that he picked Razorcuts.

[sardines]

https://m.mixcloud.com/the_Quietus/the-quietus-hour-stewart-lee-special/

Stewart Lee on the Quietus Hour, also good

Reminds me that Lee did another Quietus live q&a around the end of 2019. At the time I remember John Doran (I think) sent out some tweets that it was a surprisingly emotional conversation. The audio was supposed to be released but was never put out.

Anyone remember this or was there?

[billyandthecloneasaurus]

probably really unfair, but stewart lee doesn't strike me as someone particularly interested in or interesting on music.  any list of tracks i've seen attached to him seem like a box ticking exercise

kraut rock   ✓
the fall   ✓
some heavy metal/hard rock you wouldn't expect me to like ahhhhhh    ✓
etc etc

again, really unfair, but i feel like if you had approached a 20 year old stu lee at a uni bar and asked him what music he was into, it would be no more performative and insincere.  it's not really his fault that people keep asking him to do radio slots and stuff, and i wouldn't decline them either, but like...eh. 

[PlanktonSideburns]

Bit mean of him

What did the show ever do to him?

[sardines]

Don't know if billyandthecloneasaurus post is genuine or a level of irony that I miss. Either way it is bollocks.

[holyzombiejesus]

Nice that he picked Razorcuts.

Although that track was on Subway rather than Creation.

[Brundle-Fly]

probably really unfair, but stewart lee doesn't strike me as someone particularly interested in or interesting on music.  any list of tracks i've seen attached to him seem like a box ticking exercise

kraut rock   ✓
the fall   ✓
some heavy metal/hard rock you wouldn't expect me to like ahhhhhh    ✓
etc etc

again, really unfair, but i feel like if you had approached a 20 year old stu lee at a uni bar and asked him what music he was into, it would be no more performative and insincere.  it's not really his fault that people keep asking him to do radio slots and stuff, and i wouldn't decline them either, but like...eh.

Unfair, I'd say. Stewart Lee being a pseud about music? I think not. You're overthinking this, Billy, and being a bit like a 20 year old student about it but like eh?

[sutin]

Although that track was on Subway rather than Creation.

Ha, well spotted!

[Sin Agog]

I dunno about that list so much, but I know Lee's music taste can be interesting.  For example, I believe he's into Plastic People of the Universe, that wicked skronky illegal band at whose gigs Vaclav Havel would begin his designs to free the Czech Republic.  He also did a whole bit about the Irish Incredible String Band, Dr. Strangely Strange, and their album Kip of the Serenes, which is more than just entry-level posing I reckon.  That's a really fun album.

I've got a pretty storming Barış Manço bootleg somewhere.

Also...Steel Pulse.

[Magnum Valentino]

Maybe if I listen to the show he'll prove otherwise but You Suffer is the Napalm Death song someone who didn't listen to Napalm Death would showcase for something like this as a means of pointing out they'd heard of them. See also Chris Evans doing so on TFI Friday (although they played about another minute of music on that as well, it was an extension of the same 'isn't this short?' gag).

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

Baffling that he picked Big Country.

[NoSleep]

For example, I believe he's into Plastic People of the Universe, that wicked skronky illegal band at whose gigs Vaclav Havel would begin his designs to free the Czech Republic.

Havel was only involved from the point when the band were on trial and subsequently imprisoned, I believe, although he may have known of them and even heard them, being fellow artists in the same culture of resistance. However their most noted artistic association was with the writer and philosopher Egon Bondy who criticised the authorities from a Marxist perspective and who had criticised Havel's Charter 77. Probably not that many had the opportunity to hear their music at the time of its creation; the band existed in defiance of the authorities, staging gigs in people's homes and such and they were jailed on account of their mere existence as an officially unendorsed band. Their music is great, whatever.

[Sin Agog]

Hasn't he said in interviews how he and others went to Plastic People and DG307* gigs to foment dissent, as there really weren't any other viable meeting places at the time?  There're even clips of Lou Reed talking about it after being given some kind of special commendation by Havel for inspiring the scene.


*always loved this footage of DG307 in action.  Right bunch of feral klatterstompfing longhairs they were.  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RaNjmivU_-Y

[NoSleep]

I'm sure they all knew of each other, but the writer PPU were mostly associated with; Egon Bondy, was critical of aspects of Charter 77, apparently.

[Pink Gregory]

Maybe if I listen to the show he'll prove otherwise but You Suffer is the Napalm Death song someone who didn't listen to Napalm Death would showcase for something like this as a means of pointing out they'd heard of them. See also Chris Evans doing so on TFI Friday (although they played about another minute of music on that as well, it was an extension of the same 'isn't this short?' gag).

He put their new record in his best of the year in his newsletter; would he really bother putting up that kind of pretense?

[coinneach]

he's mentioned he went to school with napalm death so possibly the plugs are an old pals thing rather than being proper into them

[Magnum Valentino]

He's also clarified that he wasn't pals with them, that they were in the year above, and that no-one he went to school with has been in Napalm Death since the mid 1980s.

I don't think he is given to pretense, though, no. Haven't seen this/last year's roundup, I must check that out.

Right now!

[coinneach]

He's also clarified that he wasn't pals with them, that they were in the year above, and that no-one he went to school with has been in Napalm Death since the mid 1980s.

ah right fair dos

[Magnum Valentino]

In his list of albums he listened to in 2020, the other two Napalm albums he listened to are proper deep cuts which are unlikely to see concert representation possibly ever again.

I retract my accusation of posturing entirely.

[thugler]

He is pretty seriously into music. His resonance shows in the guise of baconface focusing on a different part of the world's psych/folk music were very good I thought.

That new napalm death should be on all lists of the year, it's wonderful

[Magnum Valentino]

It's just always struck me as disingenuous when 'normal' people (ie those who aren't visibly into extreme metal they way extreme metal fans overwhelmingly often tend to be) profess to like this stuff. I still have those 15-year-old barriers up. "Oh ya like Entombed do ya, you there, you in your FILA top, away back to the gaelic pitch ya fuckin townie". That attitude. It's stupid really.

[McChesney Duntz]

He is pretty seriously into music. His resonance shows in the guise of baconface focusing on a different part of the world's psych/folk music were very good I thought.

And it's all right here, for proof: https://www.baconfacecanada.com/global-globules/

To do 104 hours of radio as an unpaid (? - can't imagine resonancefm pays much, or at all) side gig under a pseudonym doesn't seem like the act of a performative hipster. Or maybe it does, to some. Either way, I don't think so.

[sardines]

Lee has written music pieces for the Times since the mid 90s (they used to be archived on his website). These Include lengthy articles on the likes of John Fahey who was pretty niche at the time. It is a pretty sustained and I'd imagine expensive bit of posturing, if that is the case.

[Magnum Valentino]

Yep, two posts in a row there lads, just to confirm, I don't think this. I do not think Stewart Lee is pretending to like Napalm Death. Just saying that again so I don't feel there's any chance these replies are directed at me later on.

[Avril Lavigne]

I don't know, none of you are selling it to me. Why and how would he like music, especially enough to have opinions on it? Something doesn't add up.

[sevendaughters]

I read an interview with Jim O'Rourke, who spent some time in the UK in the early 90s attempting to study at the feet of Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, who latterly realised that the sneery guy who seemed to be at all these oddball shows was Stewart Lee.

[Avril Lavigne]

I read an interview with Jim O'Rourke, who spent some time in the UK in the early 90s attempting to study at the feet of Evan Parker and Derek Bailey

In light of that, I don't know if the fact that I only know him for his cover of Viva Forever by Spice Girls says more about me or him.

[drummersaredeaf]

You Suffer is surely the ultimate Stew track in terms of attempting to subvert the form of what a song is meant to be. Rather than dragging a song out over 20 minutes he could condense it into 3 seconds and then spend  19:57 breaking down what is interesting about it.