Stewart Lee goes underground to uncover the roots of alternative scenes. Plus, psychedelics become all the rage and Katherine Ryan talks dirty
Shirley Collins didn’t think much of Bob Dylan when she first saw him play at the Troubadour in London. He was an American, singing American songs, badly. Worse, he wasn’t wearing a Stetson, which might have helped to set pulses racing. “We didn’t know what to make of him,” she tells Stewart Lee in his new series What Happened to Counter-Culture? about the history of the movement, from its fighting days to what may reasonably be called the MIA years of the present. “His reaction was to go to the loo and lock himself in for the night.”
That’s the tricky thing about trying to define a cultural phenomenon: one minute, it’s killing time in the toilet, then before you know it, it’s Bob Dylan. Or as our host says: “You can be in the middle of these things and they don’t make sense until after the event.”
Lucky for us, we have the benefit of both hindsight and Lee to try to make sense of what were once called “happenings”; an “intoxicating brew of alternative music, independent ideas, underground presses, writing and art”, not to mention the fashion, the protests, the drugs and the 14-hour Technicolor dream.
It all makes me wish I could wade, like some barefoot bohemian nymph, out of the mainstream: but where would I go? Is there counterculture left for me? Lee (formerly of this parish) will attempt to answer this question when finally he arrives at our dismal digital age. But, for now, he helpfully reminds us that big business has always betrayed alternative culture by “co-opting its allure for commercial gain”.
In the first episode, Lee speeds, Jack Kerouac road trip-style, through a postwar landscape from which rose the Beats, underground jazz, the folk revival and the mods of the 1950s. It’s enough to make you carsick, but the show is expertly steered by Lee and his guests – Collins, Brian Eno, the writer Olivia Laing and Steel Pulse’s Mykaell Riley among them.
This subterranean generation were rebels with a cause, they argue; the cause being to defy their parents, who only cared about security because they literally “got bombed”. Yet even by 11 June 1965, when Eno saw Allen Ginsberg perform Howl at the Royal Albert Hall, one of the poets there noted: “the underground is now on the surface”.
Later in the series, Lee will cover the 1968 protests, the new liberation movements, punks and hippies, then march on to the counterculture of today – and the question of its whereabouts. Perhaps it’s regressed so far rightwards, from mod to trad, that I’d be happy to remain in the realm of convention. If that’s the case, it’s definitely in the toilet.
This subterranean generation were rebels with a cause; the cause being to defy their parents, who only cared about security because they literally “got bombed”
Speaking of edgy things going mainstream, psychedelics were all the rage on the BBC last week, with a double dose of shows about their growing clinical and recreational use (more than 250,000 people aged between 16 and 59 took magic mushrooms in 2023 in England and Wales, says the Office for National Statistics). Same subject, different approach; Tim Hayward’s 10-part Understand: The Trip is a broader study of the shifting science and culture around the drugs – from the “spirit medicine” of Indigenous communities to LSD and DMT (dimethyltryptamine) – and their use as therapeutic treatments, while Ed Prideaux’s one-off Trip Shocked is more polemic than potted history.
This has to do with the hosts’ backgrounds. Hayward, having spent 14 days in a hallucination-filled coma, wants to know why people are chemically inducing similar experiences voluntarily.
Prideaux, meanwhile, has spent a decade suffering the aftereffects of a bad trip. He sounds much too young for this to be the case, until you learn he took LSD when he was just 17; things “went a bit sideways” when, during his A-levels, he realised the mind-altering effects – visual disturbances, flashbacks – weren’t going away. He was suffering from HPPD (hallucinogen persisting perception disorder), a condition he says may affect as many as one in 25 psychedelic users.
Prideaux challenges the narrative that psychedelics are a magic bullet for mental illness and trauma; there’s no evidence, for example, that psilocybin works better than SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) for depression, and much of what we do know comes from the “psychedelic underground” or else the biotech companies that stand to profit from developing treatments. He offers a sensible note of caution amid the excited clamour; advocates, he warns, may be reading from the same PR playbook once used by the opioid companies – a very disturbing flashback.
Yes, the devil works hard, but Katherine Ryan works dirtier. Or, at least, that’s the idea behind the standup’s new “erotic” podcast series Write Me Dirty, made by Jamie Laing and his wife Sophie Habboo’s production company. Ryan asks comedians – Louise Sanders, Grace Campbell, Tatty Macleod and co – to write a piece of naughty fiction around a theme and read it aloud.
The setting of the first episode was a car showroom (shouldn’t it be a body shop?) and Stevie Martin dedicates her story to her nanna – a Mills & Boon devotee – while Fatiha El-Ghorri titles hers Paint Me Like One of Your French Cars. It’s all about as sexy as a Peugeot 206, which is to say, not very, but with a certain risible charm.
A man introduces a sex position called “the car goes into the garage” and a spray gun is ... cocked. Ryan’s worried about corrosive substances entering various orifices, but you sense that’s not all she’s worried about: she has an ear for smut and innuendo, and for her, this is perhaps all a little tame. A little vanilla. “I could do sexy phone work,” El-Ghorri jokes.
As every comedian has heard at least once in their career: don’t give up the day job.
Photograph by Alamy
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