Stewart Lee’s Guide to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

A musical tour of past and present festival highlights from terrifying memories of Krautrockers Faust, a surreal Scottish tradition and some favourite Fringe regulars.

"One of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen and a great way to get control of an audience."

Alan Parker is the comedy creation in the 90s of the comedian Simon Munnery and that track was from one of his Radio 1 shows. Simon’s on in Edinburgh as usual. He’s got an experimental film show in the evenings at Heroes @ The Hive which is part of the Free Fringe – where you pay what you can – which has really given an injection of life into the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and it’s a great place to try out weird stuff.

In 1997 German Krautrock pioneers Faust were back and Richard Herring and I used to do a comedy chat show… We thought let’s ask Faust so two members came and they were terrifying. They set up an angle grinder and fed metal into it that shot sparks all over loads of old Edinburgh ladies who assumed it was some kind of parody of the avant-garde, but then realised it was terrifying and it was for real.

A track where Daniel Patrick Quinn interviewed Edinburgh museum guard Duncan Grahl about the Burryman. In Queensferry on the second Friday of August a man is made to wear a suit made of thistles and he is paraded around the town and people give him whisky. He has to be held up by people because he gets plastered, basically, and tired. Obviously 1,000 years ago he would have been burnt to keep the crops going but they don’t do that anymore.

I’m looking forward to so many things this year… There’s lots of great music most of it is on at Summerhall which is sort of the 6 Music of the Edinburgh venues in that it’s inherently worthwhile and it’s really kept the spirit of the Fringe alive.

Sun Ra Arkestra are performing at Summerhall on Thursday 20th August and Dutch anarcho-jazz punks The Ex on Saturday 22nd August.