The avant-garde creativity of comedy also flavours his musical projects, including his latest release – a new-old album whose wonky brilliance was dug up from the 2000s and honed to unpredictable perfection.

The Wow! Scenario features Kettering comedian and guitarist , challenging audiences with their experimental jazz pop. A sprawling debut album, ‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’ is a hugely ambitious work, one that took a decade to complete.

Sessions owe a debt to the magical year of 2016 – a year James dubs one of the best in music history – before being perfected alongside original producer Chris Hamilton in 2018, 2023, and 2025.

Out on October 23rd via the fine folks at Bella Union, the album is an enriching love letter to music’s continuous pull in our lives. CLASH caught up with James Acaster to find out more.

It’s ten years since the year you branded the greatest year for music. How do you reflect on those albums a decade on, and which ones do you return to the most?

My favourite albums are still from that year. The ones I go back to most are ‘Blonde’, ‘Telephone’ by Noname, ‘Worry’ by Jeff Rosenstock. There’s also ones when I was doing the project that I thought were fine but I wasn’t going to focus on, but now I really love and regret not talking about more – ‘A Seat At The Table’ by Solange was hugely celebrated, and it’s been forgotten a bit, and your ‘Blondes’ get talked about more, but that’s still a flawless album.

How different was the album at each stage?

When we first recorded it in 2007, we’d already decided to stop doing the band. We weren’t even planning on releasing it. There was a real sense of freedom: ‘let’s make the exact thing we had in our head, live in a studio and sleep on the floor’, that was a limitless experiment.

When we’d had a decade away from it, we decided, ‘oh, these aren’t the songs we had in our head because the singing’s awful’. We had one song on the album where my sister had come to the studio to play sax on it, which sounded so good. So it felt more focused in 2018. We took the vocals off and replaced it with sax, clarinet and fiddle. But even then, we weren’t planning on releasing it on any big scale.

Doing the vocals in 2023 felt more urgent, because I had the two vocalists, Emma Daman and BC Camplight, coming to record the parts. But then I got a part in a Ghostbusters film and the first day of filming was in the middle of this recording session, so I was going back and forth between Liverpool and Reading. That’s while recording this album that means so much to me, while doing my first supporting role in a film, and being very out of my depth doing that. When you compare it to the first session we did in 2007, when we’re doing it for ourselves, then you fast-forward to recording the vocals and you’re filming a scene with Paul Rudd, it was surreal to be recording the final parts of this massive project that’s taken up a lot of my life, while simultaneously starting this new thing.

How did you realise the more unusual instruments were so effective?

I went to a music festival and there was a snake charming flute. It had a big body in the middle and a long reed coming out of the bottom. But it was two quid, and I quickly realised it because it didn’t really work. Then it broke and you could only get three notes out of it. It sounded horrible. Live, I had to do it while playing the drums with my feet on the pedals. It’s a nice moment of levity.

There was a lot more whistle on ‘Golf Socks’! It was really annoying, like we’d unleashed a referee. I think we got it down to a really good amount, I love the whistle on it now.

How would you describe your musical ability when the songs were written?

We were going for things that were just out of reach. We knew enough about time signatures to know what the top number meant, but not the bottom number. You can hear with my drumming that I didn’t have the patience to learn about proper metronome timing, there’s just the eagerness to learn these fancy drumbeats. Instead of learning the rules first and then breaking them, we went straight into breaking the rules, which is obviously quite naive. But I like that you can hear we just dove headlong into it.

Why did you want to keep the final track an instrumental with minimal percussion?

The first and last tracks were the first songs that we had. Me and Graham used to be in a different band, a post-hardcore band. When that stopped we wanted to do something totally different, and Graham had these two songs he’d been working on that were deliberately unlike what we’d been doing before. We had an upbeat jazzy song that used a loop station and a long solo guitar piece I thought was amazing. I didn’t want to get in the way of it, play drums all over it. I’d just learned about gamelan, but again, not properly – just the basics. I thought, ‘I’ll do that but on the piano’. I played over the top and emphasised Graeme’s notes. We used to end our gigs on that song, if it was a nice gig – if it wasn’t a nice gig, we’d just bail.

We recorded it in one take – we didn’t want to do a bunch of stitched-together guitar takes. There’s even mistakes in there that actually make the song sound better. We did the classic thing of just having candlelight in the studio, like we were Sting, but that helped us to focus; it makes you feel like you’re doing something important even if you’re not.

The only change we made was when I was mixing it last year and I thought, ‘I do want a tiny bit of drums. I asked Mark to record some sax for it, which he did then I forgot about it, and I only remembered after we finished. So I clearly didn’t think it needed it, because I only remembered at the end. We recorded 17 songs originallY, and I just wanted to get it down to the ones that worked, but that was never on the chopping block.

How much did your love of crafting playlists and tracklists play affect the album?

I’ve always loved figuring out playlists, sequences of setlists, in that case with comedy as well – that really helps with make an album like this. In 2007 when we recorded seventeen tracks, we had it in a certain sequence, but I was really happy to create a different journey.

That’s a part of my brain that’s always been engaged with anything creative. It’s almost certainly a trait of my autism, but, as with a lot of autistic traits, it’s very fortunate to have.

How did you adapt to the unexpected hurdles that faced this album and Temps, which was initially a Louis Theroux produced mockumentary?

If you embark on any creative project you have to accept that you can’t control all of it, so for the bits that happen unexpectedly, you’ve got to roll with them in a way that folds into the project and makes it better. You can never start with a complete finished product in your head, and you’ll reflect on the finished product and find joy in the parts that were unplanned and you incorporated with the preconceived ideas.

Did the Hecklers Welcome tour reignite your love for playing drums live?

It gave me an itch to do drumming live again. Neither of us could play those songs or remember what we did. So I knew we weren’t going to play this live. But it made me think that playing drums live with other people again would be fun, because I really enjoyed playing drums onstage and found myself improving throughout the tour. It was this child’s drum kit but with good skins, and you could really hammer the hell out of it. I really loved being able to let loose on this tiny drum kit in a way that I didn’t in this band. It made me want to be in a noisy band and play a kid’s drum kit as loud as I could.

‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’ will be released on October 23rd via Bella Union.