Stewart Lee (photo: Idil Sukan)
“When I was six,” Stewart Lee remembers, “I was given a copy of
Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord.” It’s a book about the ancient sites of Britain. “My gran brought me up and whenever we’d be going somewhere, I’d ask to stop because we were near the Rollright Stones or somewhere. And she’d say, ‘Oh, Stewart, you and your old ruins.’ People of her generation weren’t interested. They were trying to escape the past.”
Lee went to school with members of Napalm Death. Their grindcore music is as harsh and difficult as they are personally polite, charming and vegetarian. “I used to go orienteering with Napalm Death,” Lee recalls. “Now you can get ‘Orienteering with Napalm Death’ T-shirts.”