As the comedian and broadcaster prepares to take a new show on tour, he talks Alex Dewing through the songs that have soundtracked and shaped his life, even if he had to make up his own rules to do it.
“There’s a time in your life where you think, ‘I like music’, and then a time where you realise you like it so much you start obsessively compiling lists of everything.”
For Nish Kumar, that impulse gradually became more deliberate. Music shifted from something he simply consumes into something he organises around himself: a practice of listing, sorting, and structuring listening. It’s an instinct that stretches back to CD-Rs, mixtapes, and radio recordings, where listening was never entirely passive. It had to be placed within a wider system of meaning.
The playlists he now builds even sit inside the architecture of his shows, playing both backstage and as audiences enter the auditorium. They’re not decorative; they set a tone in real time, shaping the space while also acting as a personal archive of whatever period he’s working in. “I’ve made playlists that are just the year,” he explains. “A mixture of stuff that came out in that year, and also stuff loosely connected to my life in that year.”
For 2026, a new Mitski track sits next to a Chet Atkins and Dolly Parton duet; a fresh release alongside something older that re-entered his life through context rather than chronology. The result is still less about curation in a traditional sense than about building a running map of mood and time, one that moves fluidly between listening, performance and escape.
That same instinct extends into performance in a more direct way through DJing with fellow comedian James Acaster, something he is quick to qualify as “DJing” in what he calls “the biggest inverted commas in human history.” For Kumar, it sits somewhere between escape and environment-building. “It’s kind of a bit of everything, to be honest,” he says. “I use music for everything; it’s an escape for me.”
It’s a kind of escape that is less about shutting the world out and more about shaping a different kind of space. He describes thinking constantly about music in terms of movement and atmosphere, including when working with Acaster in front of an audience. “I’m often thinking about the physical escape as it pertains to DJ sets.”
These architectural ways of engaging with music makes our Nine Songs feature an uneasy exercise for the comedian. The idea of narrowing everything down cuts against the systems Kumar has built around listening, and he is quick to describe it as destabilising.
“This thing did my fucking head in and gave me a huge amount of stress,” he admits. “I basically had to bring in my own parameters. I’ve picked songs that connect to albums that define different phases of my life. Well, eight of them. We’ll come to the ninth. This is what happens when the list maker is asked to make lists.”
Still, taken together, his selections suggest a pattern: urgency, political pressure, emotional volatility, and a parallel pull towards introspection and form. For someone known for being one of comedy’s leading political comedians, this is perhaps not surprising.
Talking about his upcoming tour, Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy, Kumar speaks about feeling, for now, excited about the prospect of doing it, given that it’s far enough away to still be a “semi-abstract concept”. With stand-up defined by a willingness to stay inside political discomfort rather than resolve it, working through systems of power and contradiction in real time.
Even at its most personal, his material rarely detaches from wider pressures, moving between individual experience and broader political weight without separating the two. A similar instinct runs through his broader relationship with music, not just in the playlists he builds for shows or the way he uses music in performance, but in how he listens and organises it more generally, treating music less as background or escape and more as something to structure time, mood, and memory around, in the same way his comedy structures and processes experience.
From these Nine Songs then, emerges less a set of influences than a shared instinct across forms: a tendency to organise intensity rather than diffuse it. Music, like comedy, becomes a way of holding pressure in place long enough to make sense of it, even if only temporarily.
“Everything is Everything” by Lauryn Hill
BEST FIT: I had something else to ask about your first song, but what I actually wanted to say was I don’t like this song. So, tell me why I’m wrong.
NISH KUMAR: That's so interesting. So, with Lauryn Hill, this album is the first time I was conscious of an album as an entity, and not as a collection of the 10 songs that the person had been writing at that point in their life.
I had bought a bunch of stuff before this; I had a couple of Blur albums, a couple of Oasis albums, but when I got The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, I thought, “Oh, there's a reason that the songs are in this order; I think the skits are actually trying to tell me a story about Lauryn Hill's life.” At the time, this song was my favourite on the album. It isn’t necessarily now, but I think what it does give you is a slight flavour of everything that she does over the course of that record, because she's kind of a soul singer and a rapper, and also the arrangements are all really ambitious, so it has a kind of sonic ambition.
It was something that really captured my imagination when I first heard it. I still think it’s pretty much perfect. I’m not sure there’s another album from that era- even now, I still think: ‘No, it’s Lauryn Hill.’ That’s a full, flawless record.
I did go and listen to the whole thing, and with the context this single is so different.
Yes, I can see that. I think, out of context, it can seem like motivational speaking. Over the course of the album, though, it earns the right to have this song at the end, because of the emotional turmoil you're taken through to get there. When it comes on the album, it's like her reflecting on her experiences and trying to offer something positive to people who are about to go through the same period of youth and adolescence that she's described on the record.
“Crosstown Traffic” by Jimi Hendrix
I always like to see Hendrix on any Nine Songs pick. This is such a classic, tell me why it's here.
[Pointing back to the wall behind him] This is a poster that I bought in either Delhi or Mumbai, and it says “Jimmy Aaja” on it, which is a song from a Bollywood movie called The Disco Dancer. Instead of the movie star, it's got Jimi Hendrix on it. So Jimi’s always looking over my shoulder.
So, I think of Lauryn Hill as like the first 13 years of my life. Then when I was about 14, we went to the Sheffield Museum of Popular Music, which I don’t think exists anymore. I was putting some albums on randomly. I knew my cousins liked Prince and Jimi Hendrix, and there was Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, and I remember listening to “Crosstown Traffic”. It probably changed the trajectory of my taste and love and personality, because after I heard it, I thought, “Well, everything else is bad”.
This song completely re-shifted things. I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. It didn’t really sound like anything else. So I then immediately went and bought Electric Ladyland. “Crosstown Traffic” is so funny and goofy and mad and exciting, and he’s making the kazoo effect by blowing through a comb.
It sounds so mad and funny, but also it feels very exciting and energizing, and so, for whatever reason, “Crosstown Traffic” is the song that my whole life is divided into - pre-“Crosstown Traffic” and post-“Crosstown Traffic.” It's hard to understand why it is that, what it was that particularly affected me, but it really did. I think it's a perfect pop song.
It sits in this album that has so many different tones and textures. "Voodoo Child (Slight Return) is almost like the archetypal blues rock guitar song, but then “Rainy Day, Dream Away” is like a jazz jam.
There’s also a big Curtis Mayfield influence on the title track, and there are songs like “Long Hot Summer Night” that feel like they’re connecting to his R’n’B roots on The Chitlin’ Circuit, as well as the original, the first “Voodoo Chile”, which is this sort of 15-minute psychedelic blues freak out.
There are so many different tones and textures. Then in the middle of all of this, you’ve got this funny little pop song that feels almost Motown-y in its lyrics. It’s just a perfect two and a half to three-minute little package of joy.
That’s a really nice way of describing it, like a packet of joy. The whole album is so broad, but it never feels like “look how much I can do”; it feels like, “this is fun, this is what I’m doing.” And then there’s “Crosstown Traffic” to prove it, “I’ll grab a comb and tissue and make a kazoo”. It’s just funny.
It's somebody trying to explore the limits of their talent, and in this case, specifically in the case of Jimi Hendrix, essentially finding that there are no limits. That is what Electric Ladyland is: somebody slowly realising that there is no ceiling to their ability.
“GhettoMusick” by Outkast
I'd never heard of this song before, but it's so much fun, very frantic. You can see some similarities with “Crosstown Traffic”. What is it about it that sticks with you?
From when I was 15 until I was about 18/19, I bought very few new albums that were released in that era.
A lot of the music that came out, I listened to subsequent to this. Apart from maybe Radiohead, I wasn’t really listening to any new bands. I was just listening to Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Stones, The Velvet Underground, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone. My music taste was reaching from about 1960 to about 1975, with the occasional diversion into some Clash, some pre-World War Two blues music, and Radiohead, so I was not really branching out of this sort of 15-year-old period particularly.
I knew “Ms. Jackson” because it was a huge song, I thought it was funny and interesting and weird. When “Hey Ya!” came out, I saw the video and immediately thought, ‘Oh, this is a parody of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan’, and then I couldn’t stop listening to it, so I thought, “Right, I’ve got to go and buy this album”.
So much of my pre-Lauryn Hill period was basically Blur, Oasis and rap music, and I hadn’t really been listening to a lot of new rap particularly actively. And then I bought Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and I could not believe it. I couldn’t believe how diverse it was musically, and the quality of the rapping I thought was unreal. And then I immediately went back and bought all the OutKast albums and listened to them obsessively.
“GhettoMusick” is a miracle of production. If you’re quickly trying to explain to somebody what is good about OutKast you play them that song, because it has that big, trance keyboard sound that then, with no warning, explodes into a Pearl Jam song.
It’s one of the manifestos that OutKast laid down, which was they were not going to be confined by anyone’s expectations of rap music, but also, they were not embarrassed to be rappers. They were proud rappers but were not going to be confined by anyone else’s expectations of what rap music had to sound like.
But this is the thing: André 3000 is the greatest rapper of all time, but Big Boi is the second greatest rapper of all time, and it’s slightly lost on people. And it’s worth reminding people of Big Boi’s lyrical genius, and the way that he tears into that verse always makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, like “Campaign in vain for the same lame fame / You've obtained, you ought to be detained / By the hip-hop sheriff” It’s like internal rhymes, the technical ability of that is unbelievable, and it’s a good reminder to people that Big Boi is a phenomenal, phenomenal rapper.
I definitely agree with that. It was such a surprising song for me. I was so glad to have this way of being introduced to them, because I don't think I'd ever have otherwise gone “I'm going listen to OutKast”, because the only ones I knew were the parody adjacent ones, that have been taken out of their contexts.
The double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Aquemini and Stankonia, and to be honest, ATLiens, are absolutely without comparison. I mean, everything on those albums is phenomenal.
“Golden Age” by TV On the Radio
So, tell me about this one. It’s quite a tonal shift, very different to Outkast.
The OutKast album probably defines the first half of the 2000s for me, and then the end of the 2000s definitely is very closely connected to TV On The Radio. I think I must have read a review of this album, and the review might have quite crudely used the phrase “Prince covers Radiohead”. I was also aware that they had the blessing of David Bowie, because he does backing vocals on one of their songs on the second album Return to Cookie Mountain.
I also found out that their debut album was called Ok Calculator, which really made me laugh, so I think I must have read that description, heard that Bowie liked them and thought, “Well, that’s good enough for me to at least give them a proper check out.”
I listened to “Golden Age”, and that helicopter bass is an incredible signature for that song, it’s amazing. Dear Science is another perfect album. It has so much to it and yet at the same time, if you did say to somebody “this is Prince covering Radiohead”, you wouldn’t be far off the texture of that record.
Every single song is brilliant, it builds in the exact right way, and “Golden Age” is the centerpiece of it. If you give people one song from that album, it’s “Golden Age”. It’s something I play at DJ nights, and it does work.
I saw them on that tour as well, which was brilliant. There’s very little better than really loving an album and then seeing the act tour that album. There was a real excitement to it, because it felt like a breakthrough moment, having been underground darlings for a long time. It’s just a brilliant, brilliant album.
I was at their reunion shows last year and that TV On The Radio reunion was the equivalent of Oasis ticket day for elder millennial hipsters.
How many times have you seen them live now then?
Three times, and I’d do it again. Because of my average working hours, it’s not hugely conducive to seeing a lot of gigs, but whenever I can go, I do go. That TV On The Radio Dear Science tour at the Bristol Academy is one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. Their music is very technically complicated, it can be very intellectual, but the last time we saw them, as we were leaving my friend said, “I’ve forgotten how many straight up bangers they have,” because if you think about “Golden Age” and “Wolf Like Me”, they have some straight down the line banging songs.
And “Golden Age” has grown. The lyrical content is guarded and jaded optimism, which I think is always an interesting place to be writing from.
“Thinking Bout You” by Frank Ocean
Next up we have “Thinkin Bout You” by Frank Ocean, which is obviously a defining song from Channel Orange. What part of your life did this one define?
The early 2000s. It’s also inextricably connected to the beginning of my relationship, because my partner, who I’m still with now, and I started going out just after this album came out. So, if you talk about someone connecting you to a very specific period in your life, more than anything else, that probably connects me most directly to 2012.
It’s probably not my favourite Frank Ocean song and increasingly Channel Orange may not even be my favourite Frank Ocean album, but in terms of the most meaningful song to me, it’s this song and that album.
Frank Ocean is the person who taught men of my age how to express their emotions. I think he’s kind of a genius, and even Endless - which feels like a bit of a throwaway thing because it came out the night before he released Blonde - when you go back and listen to it, it’s still an extraordinary album. It’s brilliant. And Nostalgia, Ultra is brilliant too. But Channel Orange is such a modern record, and yet it has such a classic album feel to it.
Every time I listen to something like “Super Rich Kids”, the piano part almost feels like an Elton John song, it really does. And there’s so much in there that feels connected to Stevie Wonder albums from the early ‘70s, but it also feels totally new. The bridge of “Thinkin Bout You”, “I remember / How could I forget how you feel”, and when the guitar comes back in, that’s a real standout moment from a single song, from a single album.
And his vocals on it are just stunning.
His vocals in general are stunning. There's a performance of it on Jimmy Fallon that is really, really special. We're constantly told that he's the type of person that doesn't really exist anymore: someone who retains a huge amount of mystique, isn't making every facet of his life available for public consumption and disappears between projects.
I'm one of those people that get suckered in by “it’s a new Frank Ocean album coming tomorrow”. I text my friend Gabriel, and I say, “Gabriel, it's going to happen”, and he says, “don't. You've forgotten about the 7,000 other times this happened”. Even if Frank Ocean never does anything ever again, his place in the pantheon of music history is assured.
“The Blacker the Berry” by Kendrick Lamar
Moving on to another incredible album which, compared to some of your other picks, is a lot more urgent and unflinching.
Well, that album came out in 2015 and it was the year I turned 30.
I think there’s a part of you that assumes you’re going to lose your capacity for fandom - or obsessive fandom - because I thought that was something you do in your teenage years and your 20s.
But the year I turned 30, Kendrick put out To Pimp a Butterfly, and I had got so into good kid, m.A.A.d city, that the day To Pimp a Butterfly came out I went to HMV, like I used to. Even in 2015 there were only about 20 HMVs left. I lived near one of them and I walked to it. I bought it like I did when I was a kid, like I had done for years.
I brought it home, put it in my CD player, and I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was one of those exciting moments. There’s some stuff on here that grows on you, there’s other stuff that takes you a second to get into. I remember I immediately thought, “Well this is it. This is what’s going on. This is It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. This is The Times They Are A-Changin’. This is the urgent topical record of our era.”
Once you get to a point where people at BLM marches are chanting “We Gon’ Be Alright” at the police, you understand that that album did transcend popular culture and became part of a cultural and political moment in a way that very few things do.
I could have picked any song from that album, but I think, as a piece of writing, “The Blacker the Berry” is so complicated. Protest music is often, by definition, quite straightforward, because you have to straightforwardly communicate a message. “There’s too many of you crying, there’s far too many of you dying, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.” It has to be direct. “This land is your land.” It’s literally trying to get a message across to people.
But “The Blacker the Berry” is the most complicated version of protest music, because he’s talking about his country being built on racialised violence against his community, but he’s also talking about complicity in violence within his own community, because he grew up in the LA gang wars.
At the time it was suggested that he was indulging it, or engaging in respectability politics, or letting white people off the hook by saying that Black people are complicit in their own crimes, which is a racist talking point in itself. But actually, what he’s doing is embracing the complexity of his upbringing in the LA gang wars and widening the historical lens to show how that is inextricably connected to white racist violence.
It’s an incredible piece of writing. He deserved that Pulitzer. He is one of the best writers that we have culturally in the West, and have had for the last decade, and it is all on display in that song.
It’s also an incredible production, it’s unbelievable. If you look at To Pimp a Butterfly, Untitled Unmastered, and then all of the live performances he was doing - The Colbert Report, Jimmy Fallon, and other late-night shows - it’s just pouring out of him continuously. It’s like he can’t stop writing in that three-year window. You see somebody operating on a plane that puts him with the best.
I’m not a fan of Mount Rushmore or G.O.A.T talk, but there are moments where people lock into their talent and get all of that skill working in chorus with an unreal work ethic. You see these periods where everything they release is extraordinary. I definitely think if you look at those albums and the Black Panther soundtrack - the title track is one of the best things he’s ever done - he was operating on a different planet at that point.
“Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” by Car Seat Headrest
I love Car Seat Headrest so much. I don't think they get as much love as they deserve. How did you find them?
James Acaster got obsessed with music from 2016, he was buying every single album that came out in that year, and he wrote a book about it. It was one of history’s most productive nervous breakdowns.
But he said to me, “you’ve got to listen to this album,” because there was a period a few years ago where it felt like indie rock was in a doldrum, and there wasn’t much happening. Everything exciting seemed to be coming out of every other possible musical area other than that.
But I think Will Toledo is very, very clever. He sort of synthesizes stuff like Television and Pavement; I think there’s a streak of Springsteen in him as well. I think Teens of Denial is a masterpiece. I think “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” is, for a certain type of person, a sort of late 2010s anthem.
The great thing about it is that it had two iterations: there’s the album version, which is this indie rock odyssey, and then he rearranged it to perform with The Roots on The Tonight Show and turned it essentially into a Bruce Springsteen song which he then re-recorded that version as the single. That was the walk-on track for my tour show in 2018–19.
It’s an anthemic song about a period of deep depression, and an anthemic song about realising you might be drinking too much. In one of the versions there’s a bit where it says, “if you run out of drugs, you could sleep without them.”
I can’t remember if that’s in the album version or the single version, but it’s a hell of a thing to make a big indie rock song out of, depression and alcoholism. That’s the sort of trick that the song pulls off.
I love how a lot of the music is so vulnerable and very honest, but also quite rousing.
I thought for a long time, “Oh yeah, this is just the latest guy of sad boy indie,” but there is a dexterousness to his musical brain. I really like Making a Door Less Open, which is an album that even Car Seat Headrest fans don’t like, but there’s stuff on there where he’s almost cosplaying David Byrne at points.
He has this lyricism that oscillates between being really self-aware and at points very funny, and also very intimate and personal. And “Fill in the Blank” is a pretty amazing piece of disaffected sad boy songwriting that opens that album.
“Masterpiece” by Big Thief
We’re moving on to another sad song now. Do you classify this as a sad song?
I’d say so. It’s a song about grief, or certainly it’s always felt to me like a song about grief. This song and this band have probably been pretty definitive of the last three or four years of my life because I’ve seen them live so many times.
I saw them at Glastonbury in 2022, then I saw them twice the following tour on consecutive nights, then I saw Adrianne Lenker twice on consecutive nights when she did the solo shows at the Barbican, and I saw them again last Saturday.
This means almost two things to me; because I have a lot of really good memories of seeing them live with some of my best friends. We’ve essentially been following Big Thief around like Deadheads for the last few years, so I have really, really great memories of going to see their gigs with my friends.
But this song is a really brilliant piece of writing about grief. It has a kind of uplift to it, but it is also a song about lying there in a hospital bed. I think the line, “there’s only so much letting go you can ask someone to do,” is such an amazing piece of writing about grief, it’s such a brilliant line. I think anybody that’s lost somebody can relate to that specific line.
In the end it’s quite uplifting, because she comes to the conclusion that she’s not… what is it that she says? “I will not give you to the tide.” There’s an idea that by remembering somebody, you’re keeping them alive in some part of your body. So I do think it is a bit of an uplifting song. It makes me cry every time I see them do it live, every time.
Every time?
Every single time. One of the times we saw them at the Apollo, they did a particularly sad version, and I was like, “You're trying to kill me here, Big Thief”.
That’s amazing. As soon as you said you've been following them, I was going to ask if you saw them while they were here last week.
Yes. I love Big Thief. I absolutely love them. I do think “Masterpiece” is a perfect song, but I think Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, that double album, there’s no better album in the last 10 years. I’d be fascinated to see if, when we get to the end of 2029 and we’re making lists, how high that comes, because I think it’s a really, really special record.
I had it on in the tour car the whole time, because they were sort of drip-feeding the singles from the end of 2021. Every single that came out, I couldn’t believe how good it was. So then you start to go, “well, they’re doing a double album, I think we’re going to end up in a situation where there’s 10 amazing songs that maybe are diluted by 10 less good songs”.
Then the double album comes out, and you go, “it’s all good, top to bottom, all good”. There’s some unlikely crowd-pleasers in there too when you see them live, like “Simulation Swarm”. The first time I heard that, I couldn’t have guessed that I would one day be in a crowd of four and a half thousand people singing every word.
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan
With the last song, you said it was different within your own parameters. What is it that’s special about Dylan for you?
This one sits outside of it. If you go from Lauryn Hill to Big Thief, you can map a picture of my musical life in five-year increments. But then, it’s absurd that we’re doing this list and there isn’t a Beatles song on there, or a Bowie song, or a Marvin Gaye song. That’s why this task was deeply frustrating, and I’ll prevent you from ever making me do it again!
But I had to have a Dylan song on here. I had to, because if there’s one musician that matters to me more than anybody else, it probably is him. I went to see him at the Royal Albert Hall in 2024 with my friend Gabriel, who is similarly a Bob Dylan ultra. He played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and I’ve been thinking about that song my whole adult life, really, probably since I heard it when I was 14 or 15.
It came out in 1965, and people saw it as him saying goodbye to the folk music movement, but now in his mid-80s, hearing him sing it now feels almost unbearably moving.
It has lines in it like “crying like a fire in the sun” that I think sum up why, even if you don’t like it, you can hear this song and understand why people have disappeared down a Dylan rabbit hole. Because there is a sense that he knows more than he is letting on about life and existence and the human condition.
He wrote it when he was 23, around 1965, so it’s amazing that somebody at that age could understand that much about loss and about sometimes the things you choose to lose in life. It means something different to me than it did when I was 15, and I’d say it means something different to hear him sing it now than it would have done 50 years ago.
It made me realise how much of my life he has just been bubbling along in the background of, and how I’m glad that it was him that unlocked my brain. When you’re a teenager, you’re just waiting for the thing that’s going to do this. It’s like there are a load of locked boxes in your mind and there are one or two films or books that are essentially the keys that unlock them. Dylan was definitely the one for me.
It was odd to see him and think, “God, I’ve been listening to this song since I was 15, and I don’t think I’ve still fully got to the bottom of it”. That’s how I feel about some of his best songs, like “Tangled Up in Blue”. I still don’t feel like I’ve got all the way to the bottom of what that song is. That was my feeling watching him do it.
When I was thinking about doing this list, I was like, “There has to be Dylan”. It could have been any one of about 600 songs, but for whatever reason, on the day I made this list, it was that song.
Nish Kumar's Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy tour opens in Belfast on 9 September
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