STEWART LEE: I've chosen two Nightingales tracks that segue together on the first album. "Crunch" is a kind of Marxist dialectic about wealth over a Krautrock-style beat. "Well Done Underdog" is basically an a cappella folk song that parodies jokes, which I didn't realise until years later. "Did you hear about the Irish man / Who opened a tandoori restaurant?"

You think it's going to be some joke about curry and Irish food, but then it just says, "He did quite well for himself". It sets the expectation for a punchline, but there isn't one. And I suppose I've spent 35 years doing the same thing.

BEST FIT: You made a documentary King Rocker about The Nightingales with Michael Cumming. What was it about their story you wanted to capture?

The simple answer is that Rob Lloyd asked me to. As a kid I followed everything The Nightingales did, and when they reformed it was great because they came back stronger than before. Rob's a funny mixture of outsider artist and hustler, a small businessman. He's always looking for ways to make the band cost-effective so he said, "There should be a film about the Nightingales, like that one about Anvil".

I told him it shouldn't be like that, because The Nightingales are really, really good in a way that Anvil aren't. It could be a funny film, because the band are funny people, and there's a comic tragedy about any group that hangs in there forever. But it's also a nice little portrait of a person getting by. My favourite bits are when he and his partner are talking about their vegetable garden.

I think during lockdown people found the film enormously comforting, because there were lots of shots of small groups of friends meeting and remembering things and laughing in pubs. A lot of critics said it was the greatest rockumentary for decades, but I think that was indicative of their sheer loneliness at the time.

I liked when Rob said he always imagined his music would be discovered posthumously, only to worry he'll die and no one will care.

Yeah, we initially met in an Indian restaurant just to chat and he said, "What if I peg it and people still aren't interested?" Luckily Michael was there with a camera, because that chat became the spine of the whole film. And it's great because when he dies, that film is going to get shown everywhere. I tell you, I will be cleaning up!

Did that curry set the tone for the film, just having a chat and seeing where things took you?

Rob agreed to make the film only to realise he didn't want to be its subject. He's a private person and he didn't want to be followed round and filmed, but he had asked us to do it. He was an interesting documentary subject because he didn't want to tell you anything. We had to just get information off him when we could.

The whole film was sort of an improvisation, because we'd film him for a few days, raise some more money, then a couple of months later we'd film again. In some ways I became disillusioned with him, because he's such a self-destructive man in many ways and seems to pull back from the brink of success.

Would he and the band have appealed to you as much without that self-sabotaging streak?

Probably not, because there aren't many people who manage to pull off being popular without becoming a bit shit. I know it sounds really infantile and immature, but it's inevitable. When you're in a big stadium, you're looking for a lighter-in-the-air moment that connects with everyone. Even Radiohead had to self-sabotage by making Kid A. They had a big enough audience to be able to do that, but usually where there's investment or crowd expectation, you have to compromise.

What I like to do, and what The Nightingales do, is to create confusion and make the audience uncertain what they're there for – you're not looking for a succession of lighter-in-the-air moments. You're looking for a bit of bewilderment and chaos and people questioning the way they respond to things. It's not necessarily going to go over big, but I suppose it's about finding that sweet spot which The Nightingales are now in.

For a long time, it was obviously a real struggle, but they've reached a point where it's viable to tour not at a loss. And now, when a magazine does a cover-mounted CD or a playlist of post-punk bands, finally The Nightingales are in it.

STEWART LEE: I really like jazz, but it took me years to work that out. I remember I heard "Freedom Suite" on the radio when I was about fourteen. It's an eighteen-minute piece that moves through different phases. I wasn't aware that Sonny Rollins was paying lip service to the new wave of free jazz, while also having a foothold in the old modal kind of camp. I just thought "Wow, that's jazz? I like it."

Then I went to the jazz section in my local library and borrowed a Grosvenor Washington record, who turned out to be a very bland sort of West Coast saxophonist, and then I decided I didn't like jazz after all.

Before the internet, there didn't seem to be anywhere you could find out about jazz – it was a closed world. But now I absolutely love it, and I think about it in comedy terms. If you set up the main theme, you can go anywhere with an improvisation as long as you get back to it at some point.

I've been lucky because I'm old enough to have seen people like Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Charles Gayle. I took my kids to see David Murray, who's a sixty-something jazz saxophonist. They were sceptical, but he was playing at Pizza Express, so I was able to tempt them with a free pizza.

BEST FIT: Do your kids tend to approve of the music you share with them?

You do have to back off and let them find their own things. But weirdly, they really like stuff from about 1985-90. Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive. It's hard to imagine Slowdive were ever thought of as a league division two shoegaze band. We saw them at the Hammersmith Apollo and they were superb. It's fantastic to see people my age get a second chance.

What's also nice is when your kids get into music, they get you into things, like Black Country, New Road. And it's great I can give them my old vinyl, because otherwise it just gets thrown in a skip when you die. I wasn't a very good father to little kids, but I'm quite a good father to teenagers, because I relate to them. I have essentially lived in a state of arrested development all my life.

BEST FIT: Nick Saloman is another outsider figure, at odds with the mainstream. When did you find out about his music?

STEWART LEE: I was around eighteen, reading a fanzine called Bucketfull of Brains. It came with a free single – the A-side was The Dream Syndicate doing "Blind Willie McTell" by Bob Dylan, and the B-side was an eight-and-a-half-minute track called "High in a Flat" by The Bevis Frond. It's a heavy ‘60s psychedelic sort of thing, with samples of him reading out information about housing laws.

BEST FIT: What appealed to you?

He's a very witty, moving lyricist. He's a great improviser and can do half hour wig-outs that start to sound like Miles Davies' electric period. And yet if you pressed him on it, he would say he hates jazz and thinks it's self-indulgent and instinctively won't do it.

I remember he seemed incredibly old at thirty-five. He'd had a road accident in Camden on his motorbike and used the compensation money to buy a 4-track Tascam recorder. Ever since, he's been able to make a living as a sort of augmented one man band. He's got a hardcore punk sensibility in some ways, with that English whimsical psychedelia you get from people like Syd Barrett, Julian Cope, Robyn Hitchcock.

What's "New River Head" about?

"New River Head" is a lovely song about the new river, just over there in Stoke Newington. It was built to carry fresh drinking water from Hertfordshire to London. You're supposed to be able to walk the whole length, but a lot of the local councils aren't maintaining it. It goes underground in places, and you can put your ear to the manhole covers to hear the new river flowing.

He's obviously using it as a metaphor for relationships, but a lot of his work is particularly vivid to me living in north east London, because he was from Walthamstow and grew up in Camden.

Have you discovered new things in his songs as time goes by?

When I saw him in London recently, there was a guy in his sixties who'd just found out about The Bevis Frond through a Spotify recommendation. He realised there were thirty years' worth of albums and started following them everywhere. That's the effect The Bevis Frond have. A certain kind of person discovers them and realises ‘This is what I've been looking for all my life.’

Like The Nightingales, Nick seems to be hitting his stride at the point most people are getting out their pipe and slippers. As he gets older, he's become really great at writing about a particular type of man who feels that life is slipping away, and wonders what the point is. He really nails that. It's music that gets more relevant to you as you get older, rather than less.

BEST FIT: Listening to this I realised I knew it from a CD of Irish children's folk songs my family used to play in the car – a jaunty murder ballad! I didn't know it had such a long history. How did you find this version?

STEWART LEE: Was it Sarah Makem? That's the great thing about folk music, you sometimes realise you know a song from a completely different context. I discovered Shirley Collins' version when I moved here around twenty-five years ago, at a record shop called Totem. There were piles and piles of second-hand stuff and I'd buy anything from the Topic label. Shirley Collins hadn't been rediscovered at that point, so this album was cheap. I took it home and it absolutely wiped me out.

What’s Shirley Collins story?

She's a folk singer who started out in the 1950s, so she was young enough and close enough to the source to know people who'd sung these songs as gypsies or farm labourers in rural Suffolk. She's almost like the last traditional singer, even though she's worked with people from Fairport Convention, and Jimi Hendrix tried to chat her up at the Roundhouse.

About twenty years ago I wrote a piece about her. She was working in an Oxfam shop at the time and made me a shepherd's pie for lunch. She hadn't sung for twenty years because she'd lost her nerve. She had no idea what was about to barrel down the tracks, or that she was about to become so venerated.

She's a very inspiring person to have met, and not unlike Rob Lloyd, a story of someone having a second go. When they made a documentary about her a few years ago, she gradually realised she did want to sing again, and the film became about getting her confidence back. Since then, she's made three fantastic albums. Her voice isn't the voice that it was, it's the voice of an older person that cracks and isn't as strong, but it has a real vulnerability and humanity about it.

She was also a researcher with Alan Lomax for the Smithsonian Institute. He was an American academic a bit older than her, who took her to the States to help collect songs from the black and white working class. She once played me a 1959 recording of the blues singer Fred McDowell after he'd come in from the farm to record. I asked her what he was like, and she said "Oooh, sex on legs!"

I feel bad I've heard of Alan Lomax but not her. What else did she tell you about gathering those songs?

What no one anticipated was that she had a way in with people. With the best will in the world, a white American man is still an authority figure who represents the oppressive class, whereas Shirley wasn't seen as a threat. People would vouchsafe songs and information to her.

She talked to me about asking to go to the loo at some little shack in the Appalachians. The woman took her out to a latrine, this plank with two holes cut into it, and sat next to her while they took a dump, singing loads of rude songs she didn't want the men to find out she knew.

People would trust Shirley because she wasn't part of the establishment, so by dint of being with her, Lomax got some really amazing work. She's right there at the birth of post-war culture as we understand it really. But in Lomax's account of their journey, all he says is "and I was also accompanied by the young English folk song researcher Shirley Collins".

She was clearly more than a footnote – with such a vast body of work, how did you narrow it down to this song?

It was the first one I heard. I was like that old guy who discovered The Bevis Frond and thought, "I've been looking for this music all my life". Or Frank Skinner hearing the Fall for the first time and buying everything he could find the next day.

But "Cruel Mother" is brilliant. When you hear Shirley sing, you're hearing songs she learned at source from people born in the nineteenth century. It's an incredible act of time travel.

How does she make the songs her own, while still being able to perform them in a sort of ego-less way?

Shirley doesn't allow technique or interpretation to get between her and the material. She tries to just be a conduit. It's anti-performance in a way – she wants to eliminate herself and allow the work to exist without gloss. It's really counter-intuitive to how we think now. I've seen her do a funny impression of people performing songs on things like Britain's Got Talent, the way they flutter their hands and try to act it out. She would never do that. She just stands there.

Sometimes with music we're looking for things that confirm to us we're on track – the subconsciously arrogant part of you wants to be proved right. And I suppose what I like about Shirley Collins is her rejection of performance, and how she lets the work speak for itself. I've spent a long time trying to do the same with stand-up.