Conversational Improvisational: Stewart Lee & EarthBall get Free

EarthBall's Outside Over There is one of this year's best albums. Because it opens with a sample of Stewart Lee talking about pear cider, it felt only right to introduce both parties for a feature. But then a breakdown in communication led to a gloriously unexpected meditation on the nature of improvisation... Stewart Lee Published 8:00am 19 December 2025 “Hello. Very nice to meet you,” someone says, on a currently black laptop screen, “Fuck.” I am a stand-up comedian and writer, and the Canadian free-rock quintet EarthBall have sampled one of my old routines, about an advert for pear cider, at the start of their new album, Outside Over There . I already liked their work, which I think I had first read about in The Wire . I bought their last album from a little shop called Tome records in Hackney and the man behind the counter loved it and was delighted someone was buying it. We noted that it featured Steve Beresford on keyboards, the veteran British second wave improvisor, with whom I had toured as part of a trio interpreting John Cage’s Indeterminacy. Steve had said my monotonous voice was perfect for the piece. <a href="https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/outside-over-there">Outside Over There by EarthBall</a> The first EarthBall album I heard, It’s Yours , took me back in time, its fusion of free jazz sax and New York style noise placing me nearly thirty years ago, on the 16 April 1996, in a packed crowd at Camden’s Jazz Café, to see Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, on a night off from Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine tour, perform a lengthy improvisation with the British free jazz group Descension, alongside the saxophonists Alan Wilkinson and Lol Coxhill, a veteran of the Canterbury scene (both of whom I later got to know). I’d never seen music quite like this before. I knew my way around the scene Sonic Youth spawned, and I was already a habitual inhabitant of the North London attics and cellars and trade union club backrooms where I, and the teenage Jim O’Rourke apparently, regularly saw, but rarely entirely understood, the improvised music of Evan Parker, John Russell and the last remnants of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. But I’d never seen that aesthetic allied to this power. A fellow attendee’s Facebook (yuk!) post from a few years ago recalls angry indie rock fans physically attacking Descension during their support set on Sonic Youth’s London date proper, but I don’t remember any fighting at the Jazz café (the first gig I ever saw was Madness during the sieg-heiling skinhead era so my bar’s pretty high for bad vibes gigs). I just remember being changed for ever by the sounds, and I recognised the memory of that moment in EarthBall. So I was delighted to let them use my pear cider bit, amused at the strange journey my thoughts on the comedian Mark Watson’s Magners advert had made from a lengthy fictional story about my late grandfather’s experiences of the Dresden firebombing to becoming...

Preview: ~500 words