January 28, 2008
SAVE THE RHINO (& MY EGO)
I’m glad last week’s over. I spent most of it feeling thoroughly deflated. Mentally that is. Physically I look and feel as if I’ve had a compressed air pump shoved up me.
Last Monday’s Save The Rhino gig at The Comedy Store went well and a good time was had by all. I’d asked to be first on as I was keen to get back home early, but it was fun seeing people like Tom Basden, Dan Clark, & Noel Fielding backstage before the gig and after I’d done my 10 minutes of Famous Guy (which went down fine I thought) I decided to hang out and keep chatting as well as catching the other performers (including Paul Kerensa, Jack Whitehall, Vicky Frango and MC John Fothergill, all very good indeed). I’ve been sat in my nutty room doing radio bits and pieces and going slightly mental for the last few weeks so it was great to get out and see some nice people. Thanks to all of you who came along. It was very good meeting those of you who said hello.
Here’s a pic of Famous Guy in off duty gear (taken by Alex Sudea). Usually I would do this character dressed in a flight suit, as if he’d just come from the set of one of his exciting films (you’ll see a clip in my MeeBOX pilot, transmission date still pending) but I wanted to try out some new bits for which his regular clothes would be more appropriate. In the end I ran out of time and ended up doing the usual stuff.
In this pic, Tom Basden and his guitar, backstage at The Comedy Store. Noel in background revising. If you haven’t properly investigated Tom’s sometime comedy family ‘Cowards’, you really should. They’re the real deal.
Here we see the charming Paul Kerensa, Dan Clark (who has his own series coming up on BBC3), Adam Buxton (who wishes he had his own series on BBC3) Noel Fielding (who practically owns BBC3) & the ludicrously young and talented Jack Whitehall.
Despite all the rhino saving fun and bonhomie I woke up the next day feeling inexplicably blue. During the afternoon my agent called to say I’d been bumped from Thank God You’re Here, the ITV improv show on which I was due to appear last weekend (Saturday 26th Jan). There was a clause in my contract for the show saying I shouldn’t discuss my appearance as it was supposed to be a surprise for the audience or something but it turned out I was listed as a guest on their website for a couple of weeks before I was due to appear and was there still on the weekend.
My Ma left a message saying she’d seen I was going to be on the prog and was very excited as she ‘d watched it before and thought I’d be good. I was excited too! I think I might have done a decent job! Someone at ITV didn’t agree and I was booted in favour of bigger names. The people from the production company were very nice about it indeed but it’s always hard in these situations not to feel like a kind of pathetic loser. I spent much of last week trying not to imagine someone from ITV bursting into the production offices and yelling, as if in a scene from Moving Wallpaper: “you booked Adam Buxton?! I had to fucking Google him to remind myself who the fuck he fucking is!! Did you see him on Have I Got News For You?! We don’t want people to instantly fall asleep for fucks sake! Get me Vernon Kaye immediately!” SLAM! (That’s them storming out in my mind). I had to phone my Ma and break the news.
I spent the rest of last week trawling through our first 10 or so 6 Music shows to find stuff we might include in a possible extra podcast in addition to specially recorded bits (which was how we did our Xfm podcasts). That did nothing to lift my spirits. I hate listening to myself unedited! Part of the reason we did the Xfm podcasts was so we could have something that wasn’t just unedited chunks of rambly crap, which is fine if it’s in the context of a live show with music and all, but not so great for a podcast. There’s a totally different feel to stuff that Joe and I do when it’s not a live show and we can be more offhand safe in the knowledge that the really worthless bits can be chopped (more for my benefit than Joe’s who’s much happier off the cuff than I). However now that the 6 Music podcast is out there (the condensed version of our Saturday morning can be found here) it seems a little superfluous to have another one. We’ll see.
To compound my state of self absorbed mania I spent far too long on my Net Piracy song for last week’s Song Wars. At one point it was well over 3 and a half minutes and I was way too into it! It was my Smile! I have to confess I was pleased with my final song and I cycled into town for our 6 Music show on Saturday morning feeling upbeat. However, I’m ashamed to say my merciless drubbing for the previous week’s Instructional Songs For Children got to me and I’m afraid lost it a little bit. Of course the thing to do in the face of a humiliating defeat is to buck up your ideas and plough on (this is jolly Britain after all!!!) but I suddenly had a vision of myself a few months from now having done nothing but try in vain to beat Joe at Song Wars. My wife would have left me and taken the children, the BBC would have laughed off the idea of commissioning a show from me and I’d be sat in a room rocking back and forth listening to my Frozen Meatballs song over and over and wondering why no one had voted for me. And I’d look like…
So as of this week Song Wars is on sabbatical. But the weekend still had one more ego bruising biff to deliver. When I got home and checked my e-mails I saw that I’d been sent a link for a review of the Rhino gig by Evening Standard comedy critic Bruce Dessau. You can read it here. He seemed to have mentioned every performer that night except me! What was that all about?! Thanks James from London for pointing out the fact below the review (I appreciate it even if you’re my Mum or my agent masquerading as an audience member) but it wasn’t enough to stop me e-mailing Mr Dessau to ask if there was a special reason he blanked me…
I hasten to add that I would never think to question or complain about a shitty review but in my post-bump paranoid state, I was just genuinely curious to establish whether it was an oversight or a more pointed omission. He would have had every right to ignore me but he replied very quickly explaining that his main aim that night was to review Noel Fielding and had only mentioned a few of the other acts in passing. He pointed out that I was not the only person he hadn’t mentioned as well, which on closer inspection was true. Of course it’s a shame he didn’t think enough of Famous Guy include a reference to it, but that’s entirely his prerogative. I’m just lucky he didn’t blacklist me for e-mailing him like a total psychopath. Jesus, what a week.
I’m hoping this one will be a little jollier (as long as nothing I’ve written here gets me into trouble somehow!) I’m very much looking forward to BUG 05 on Thursday. I’m very glad to say it’s sold out so apologies if you were unable to get tickets, but if there had only been 6 people there I think they would have witnessed a full scale ego collapse of the sort normally reserved for Amy Winehouse gigs, except without the amazing talent.
Pipples!
Love Adam, 28th January 2008
PS. Halfway through series 2 of Battlestar Galactica and it’s getting good now. I’ve already had death threats after calling it ‘fracking rubbish’ on the show last weekend. It’s just Mary McDonnell’s brave, sad smile I can’t handle. Still at least she’s done for. Hang on a second, what’s Baltar doing with that half Cylon, half human blood?! No you moron, no! Oh Christs. She’s smiling her brave sad smile again…
January 14, 2008
RADIOHEAD NEW YEAR FUN, LISTEN AGAINST CLIPS, BUG 05 & RHINO GIG
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Every year it takes me longer and longer to sort myself out after Christmas. I get so over-excited by Santa, the Holy Spirit and the accompanying jollity that everything else is swept to one side ensuring that every January is just 31 days of filing, bill paying, and various forms of creeping anxiety. Wouldn’t it be a hoot to start a New Year trim, wealthy and with solid employment prospects? Or maybe it would be boring, because then the only way for the year to go would be down. Yes, that’s what I’m telling myself.
Anyway, I’ve finally got round to updating this blog although I’ve just noticed that all the apostrophes in my previous posts now appear as little collections of obscure symbols, which is profoundly undesirable. Here’s an illustration:
You’ll notice however that the problem is not currently affecting this post. Perhaps the Christmas vomit bug infected my blog application too, in which case all it needs is some bed rest and a few days off. Otherwise I’m going to have to go back and retype every single fucking apostrophe for the last two years worth of posts, and I’ll do it too because I’m fairly obsessive compulsive in that way. It’s one of the reasons I’m not considerably more successful than I am. Hang on, I’ve just spoken to my brother and he says he might be able to fix it. This is exciting isn’t it?
RADIOHEAD SCOTCH MIST FUN!
Work wise, 2007 concluded with me returning to Radiohead’s sonic castle outside Oxford to help with a couple more bits for their New Year’s Eve webcast (named Scotch Mist for reasons I don’t quite recall). It was recorded between 17 & 20th December and features specially recorded versions of every song on In Rainbows (including the version of Faust Arp that went out in the previous webcast). Here it is in its entirety.
My role in all of this was vision mixing a couple of tracks (the ones where it cuts to nothing are generally mine) and helping Garth with the webcast video for Nude filmed on a special camera Garth hired that shoots 1000 frames a second enabling you to slow the footage right down without losing quality. As with the video for Jigsaw Falling Into Place this was very straightforward and fun to put together. We got each member of the band to thrash madly about as fast as they could for 7 second bursts (which, because of the 1000 fps shooting rate, was all the camera could store at any one time) then loaded the results onto my laptop and that was more or less it. The stuff flying around in the final section is fake snow, which we chucked at the band to make it look festive. When I look at it now it looks more like there’s a chicken being brutally dispatched off camera but that’s still Christmassy in a way isn’t it? There’s not much to it but it’s kind of moving I think. Having said that, when you’ve got a song as lovely as Nude, you could pretty much film a hairy arse in slow motion and it would be moving. Maybe we’ll do that for the next webcast if I’m invited…
In between the songs are little bits of the band running towards the slo-mo camera away from a sign that says ‘Good Night’ with fireworks on it. This was actually what Garth hired the camera for in the first place. He had set up loads of fireworks around the sign so that the band would be running from a wall of fire and sparks as the sign lit up but unfortunately we got our timing wrong and the fireworks only went off after everyone had left the frame and the 7 second filming window was closed. Garth was gutted but it still looks good I reckon. His idea of the woolly hats being pulled off as they ran worked a treat. Here’s a montage of a few photos I took just before the fuses were lit. That’s producer/technical genius Nigel Godrich skulking in the back. Below that is a picture of Garth looking terroristical in the centre, moments before the camera rolled.
This time round I had more opportunities to just watch the band play, whether it was while I was vision mixing or just standing about while they were rehearsing and it was quite a thing. At one point I was in the kitchen when I heard the intro for House Of Cards. I assumed Nigel was playing it back from the CD but it was live. I swear the version they play for the webcast sounds even better than the one on the album. Even when you’re watching them singing and playing it’s hard to believe they’re actually making the noise you’re hearing. Can’t wait to see them back on stage in the summer. At some point I imagine they’ll put out a DVD of a lot of the webcast stuff, which I hope would also feature some of the unseen behind the scenes footage we shot as we went along. That’s pure conjecture but if anything more solid materialises I’ll let you know.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND – A PUNK
Speaking of Garth, here’s the video he did recently for the excellent Vampire Weekend. In many ways it’s the exact opposite of the Nude vid, being one eight minute shot that was speeded up to fit the length of the song, it’s also a lot more ambitious with lighting, choreography and costume changes all happening in one take. Like Nude though, I think it was designed to be quick, cheap and a relatively simple accompaniment to a great song.
LISTEN AGAINST MILIBAND CLIPS
Here are my four contributions to Jon Holmes’s Radio 4 show, Listen Against, which went out towards the end of 2007. That’s me pretending to be David Miliband in case you hadn’t guessed. I did the first one of these when he was still the environment secretary and I must confess I’d never actually heard him speak (I just chopped his bits out of various interviews without listening to him) so my impression bears little relation to his actual voice. I didn’t need to tell you any of that did I? I just like the sound of my own keyboard.
BUG 05, 8:45PM, BFI SOUTHBANK, THURSDAY 31st JANUARY, 2008
The fifth BUG, a show featuring a selection of some of the best and most interesting pop videos around (as chosen by David Knight of Promo News) with me talking crap in between, will take place on Thursday 31st January. You can book tickets here. The last few shows have all sold out and I think the Independent are also doing a little piece to plug it either this weekend or the next so unless you want those Independent types stealing your seat I’d book now!
SAVE THE RHINO GIG @ COMEDY STORE, 21st JANUARY 2008
I love rhinoceroses but other people hate them and seek to destroy them. I’m determined to save all of them so I will be doing about 10 minutes of live comedy (as Famous Guy probably) at the Comedy Store on Monday 21st and then I’m pretty sure the rhinos will be fine. As far as I know Noel Fielding is going to be performing too so that’s got to be worth it right? Book tickets and see more details here but bear in mind that if you don’t attend you may as well buy a shotgun and shoot a baby rhinoceros in the head, it comes to the same thing.