July 25, 2009
BUG @ GREENWICH & LATITUDE NEWS!
BOOK NOW FOR BUG @ GREENWICH COMEDY FESTIVAL, SEPTEMBER 11th 2009!
We’ll be doing a show at the Greenwich Comedy Festival at 7pm on Friday September 11th. I think Garth Jennings is coming along as my guest again so we’ll be showing some of his fabulous Hammer & Tongs music videos as well as some of the work he and I did for Radiohead. There’ll also be a selection of our favourite videos from past BUG shows as well as a few newer nuggets so it should be a peach. Hope you can make it.
You can book tickets for BUG at The Greenwich Comedy Festival here.
BUG 14 @ BFI
Thanks to everyone who came along to BUG 14 last night which went well despite not being able to show a lot of the stuff we had planned because the broadband went down at the BFI. Fricken broadband! They landed a man on the moon and invented the internet but what have they done recently? Yeah? Not the BFI, ‘they’. When are ‘they’ going to get round to fixing the broadband in every flipping place I try to use it?! Right?! Why is that not the big priority??!
My guest last night was the extraordinarily talented and ludicrously young David O’Reilly. There’s no point singling out one of his films, just work your way through them all on his Vimeo page. ‘Inspiring’ doesn’t nearly cover it. Here’s a pic of me on the right next to David after the show along with Stuart Brown on the left who runs the BFI (left) and next to him in the bike helmet and splendidly nerdiferous cardigan, Dougal Wilson who helped me out with Nutty Room and is a magnificent director in his own right of course.
BUG AT LATITUDE 2009
Last weekend we took the BUGwagon to the Latitude festival. I even took my family along to see me one of my gigs for the first time and they had a hoot, as did I. If you were there, thanks for coming, I hoped you enjoyed it. I met a lot of people over the course of the weekend who listen to our 6 Music show and as usual they were an extremely cool and friendly bunch, like some gregarious bananas in a fridge. Black Squadron and Digiforce are looking good.
BUG was on Friday afternoon and that night while my family were sleeping I snuck out and explored the site. I wondered along prettily lit woodland paths stopping at clearings to check out the little happenings in each one. I saw a brilliant man in a robot suit festooned with coloured lights and rapping through a vocoder while firing off samples with the various buttons that covered him. I think this is the guy here but he looks better in a wood at night, trust me. In another clearing three decorated walls and some sofas had been used to create a front room set in which people performed on a tiny stage. One time I saw a charming rubbish band playing there, delighted that the rain had suddenly increased their audience with people looking for shelter. Another time there were 6 seemingly random people on stage sat facing eachother on stools and having a hilariously serious and boring discussion about making art while myself and about 3 other people looked on bemused. I saw a bit of the Pet Shop Boys set, which was like being at an outdoor disco. I spent a fair bit of time in Robin Ince’s excellent book tent watching the likes of Robin Hitchcock, Kevin Eldon and Gary Le Strange who were all fantastic.
On Sunday I saw Thom Yorke playing at midday on the main stage. He was on his own for the whole set, performing stuff from The Eraser, In Rainbows and a adding a few Radiohead rarities and offcuts that all sounded beautiful. Some songs he played super minimal, accompanying himself on grand piano as well as electric and acoustic guitar. For others like Weird Fishes he would use a synth and a basic beat or build up rhythms and bass lines with loop pedals for other songs. All the while a lovely breeze blew over us in the audience and big white clouds occasionally stopped the sun from beating down too fiercely. It was perfect! Thanks to Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich I managed to get backstage after the set and film a short very stupid interview with Thom, which consisted mainly of me asking ludicrous questions and Thom laughing and saying ‘next!’ He’d been very nervous about the show but ended up enjoying it hugely and was in a good mood. When we get back on air in late August I’ll cut a few bits of the interview together and play them on the 6 Music show and post the video version on this blog too if I can.
Later that afternoon I caught the end of Casiokids set. They were amazing, kind of like The Rapture with more of a geeky sense of humour. I wonder if they sound as good on record. I’ve stopped wondering now. Magazine were terrific but didn’t play any of my faves. How very rude of them. Tom Robinson was doing his 6 Music show from the festival so after seeing Magazine he invited me to come and talk about the gig and Latitude in general. He once mentioned to me that he liked my Help Tha Police sketch (in which the swearing in NWA’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’ is covered by family friendly raps) so I did a live version for him in the studio. His producer looked pretty sick at the possibility of one of NWA’s bits of potty mouthery accidentally slipping through from the backing track during a live Big British Castle programme but my rendition passed without incident.
After talking to Tom R I decided to try and find Magazine lead singer Howard Devoto whose solo album Jerky Versions Of The Dream is one of my favourite records ever. Magazine’s trailer was surrounded by Keith Allen and his scallywag entourage and Devoto was not in evidence. Keith A. suggested I come to the poetry tent to see Mik Artistik who he assured me was brilliant. I never saw his set because I had to leave before he went on but Mik gave me a CD of his winsome John Cooper Clarke-esque recitals that I enjoyed as I drove home in the sunshine the next day.
Also on the car CD player was an album given to me at Latitude by a band called Sky Larkin (I wonder if that’s a Philip Larkin thing?) which I loved. I played it through twice followed by the new Wild Beasts album, Two Dancers (it’s going to be a grower I think). Below is a picture of me with various Sky Larkin members and Newton Faulkner the marmalade-dreadlock folk machine, who was wondering by and introduced himself very sweetly and shyly as a Black Squadron member. A very likeable chap I thought. All in all I thought Latitude lived up to all the good things I’ve heard about it and I look forward to returning next year, hopefully to perform again but certainly to ponce about.
Cheery bye booty bye bye. Love Adam
July 16, 2009
NUTTY ROOM NEWS!
LOOK AT THE JARS! LOOK AT THE JARS!!
Hello friends! It’s been so long. So much has happened. I’m so sorry. We only just finished shooting the BBC2 sitcom I’m acting in last Friday and I haven’t had a free blog shaped minute for ages. In between the sitcom and the radio show I’ve also been making a few short videos for the BBC’s wonderful relaunched comedy website which I heartily recommend you visit and bookmark forthwith.
As well as my Nutty Room video, which you can see below, there’s also a thing I did for Eurovision a few months back which is exclusive to that site for the time being.
I’ve also finished a video for a drum’n’bass/pirate radio song about the film Ratatouille which should be up there before too long so keep an eye out (though if you are coming to/were at BUG at Latitude you’ll have seen it), but for now, here’s Nutty Room and beneath it some info about its creation.
The song was created as part of Song Wars, the competitive song-writing feature our 6 Music show in which Joe and I write songs on a given subject and our listeners vote for which one they like best. The theme of that week’s battle was ‘scary songs’. Joe did one about a ghost that I recall he wasn’t that pleased with and I did one about the lair of a movie style disturbed nutbag called Nutty Room. I’m proud to say our listeners voted my song the winner that week and I was delighted as I had spent many long minutes on its complex harmony arrangements. In fact Nutty Room is considered one of the best songs ever written (if the list of the best songs ever written were to include every song ever written).
The video was shot on Thursday 23rd April 2009 in an old abandoned house nearby where I live in Norfolk. It was boarded up years ago but dishonest people bust in and stripped out the fittings, floor tiles and everything else of any value. Now it’s just a shell, overwhelmed by vines and weeds, the walls crumbling and the floorboards rotten and treacherous. According to many local residents the house is haunted by the ghost of a monk (as opposed to being haunted by a living monk which can also happen). I often passed the house on walks and after a few weeks I couldn’t resist poking around. It scared the crap out of me, not so much because of the ghost monk (who I imagine would be fairly mellow) but because there are so many dark corners, blacked out rooms and cellars. As everyone who’s ever watched a horror film knows, these are exactly the kinds of places in which twisted homicidal nuts love to hang out and dissect annoying teenagers. I knew this was the perfect place to make a video for my song.
To create the nutty room you see in the video I spent a couple of weeks painting crazy childish art all over the walls just as twisted lunatics so often do in films to create what looks like the cover of a bad indie album. There were times when I worried that spending lonely hours scrawling on the walls of an abandoned house for a 3 minute internet-only video was not a good use of my time and might even indicate that I was partially insane but when I started collecting jars and filling them with sausage meat and hair to enhance the nuttiness of the room, those worries seemed quaint and trivial. Finally the nutty room was complete and all that was needed was someone to help me realise my vision.
I called my friend Dougal Wilson, the award winning director of videos for Coldplay, Dizzee Rascal, Jarvis Cocker, and many others and he got on the next train to Norwich. Dougal arrived around 11pm and we drove straight to the scary house where I had set up some lights and my video camera. I put on my best nutty-hat and an old lab coat, loaded a syringe with red paint and we got to work. Filming went smoothly apart from a moment when we set light to a load of old newspapers from the 60’s that we’d found in a bath tub in one of the rooms. It was a profoundly stupid thing to do and we nearly died of smoke inhalation. By 4am the next morning we decided it was time to pack up and go home only to find that the lights of the car had been left on and the battery was dead so we had to walk back to my house in the foggy chill of the night. We didn’t care because we felt that we had created something truly stupid. I hope you agree.
Adam Buxton, July 2009
ADDENDUM
I just came across this animation that a chap named Jordan made for Nutty Room a few months back. Nice job yo! And of course he has used the version that was originally broadcast on Song Wars last year which contains the reference to Patrick Swayze rather than Kevin Spacey as it is now. A few people have asked why I changed it and it was simply that I wasn’t aware how ill poor old Patrick Swayze was when I did the song and upon making the vid decided to switch the names (which were only ever intended to rhyme with ‘crazy’ of course) to avoid potential ghoulishness of an unpleasant kind, as opposed to fun ghoulishness like making clothing out of other people’s skin and keeping winkies in jars. Cheers Jordan!