December 14, 2009
SPIKE JONEZ INTERVIEW NEWS!
INTERVIEW PODCAST & PATHETIC SLAP FOOTAGE!
Hello there. Just before new year’s resolution: post more bollocks on this blog. To kick off, here’s a picture of me and Spike Jonze at the BFI Southbank after I interviewed him about Where The Wild Things Are at The Apple Store in Regent Street on Saturday 5th December 2009. It was a really exciting day, as you may be able to tell from my special slightly-too-smiley smile.
Photograph by Linda Nylind
Listen to the podcast of the Spike Jonze interview HERE
I thought Spike might appreciate a break from the kind of indepth Q&A’s he must usually get and decided instead to read him some of the comments the You Tube trailer for Wild Things has accrued which I copied into photoshop for the audience to see. I’ve been doing the You Tube comments thing at BUG for a couple of years now and I’ve done it with my own clips at the odd live gig too and it’s always fun. I’m thinking of ways to do it on You Tube too so the whole process comes full circle. Anyway, here are the comments I used for Spike for you to enjoy at your own pace.
Luckily Spike had a sense of humour about it as I imagined he would and he seemd to enjoy himself as much as I did although upon listening back to the podcast I was a little shocked by how inarticulate I was at times. I was nervous and interviews are not my forte but still, I don’t think Mark Kermode concludes his critical musings by saying ‘…and stuff’ as much as I flipping do. Also it takes a while for me to get the ball rolling and it seems an age before you hear Spike do anything but breathe and chuckle. When he was finally allowed to speak however, he was as engaging and candid as I’ve seen him in front of an audience and though our conversation never got particularly indepth there’s some interesting moments I think.
One of the things we mention briefly is the time in 2003 that Spike and I found ourselves reading through the script for The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy for our friend Garth Jennings who was vaguely considering Mr Jonze as a possible Ford Prefect. Below is a brief clip of us reading through a scene for the first time, which Spike decided to punctuate by slapping me hard on the face. It doesn’t look like much in the video but as I say in the podcast I was genuinely shocked albeit a little excited at having been slapped by Spike Jonze.
Another thing we mention in the interview is the video for UNKLE that was cut from the skate video Fully Flared that Spike worked on with Ty Evans. It’s pretty explosive stuff! (That’s a funny thing to say because the video involves explosions so I’m using the word ‘explosive’ both literally and metaphorically. Not bad eh?) Check it.
That’s enough Spike news.
Go and see Where The Wild Things Are though, I thought it was lovely!
Adam 14-12-09
November 19, 2009
BUG 16 LAST MINUTE TICKET NEWS!
HELLO FROM THE BUG TEAM!
Just a note to anyone coming along to BUG #16 The Director’s Cut tomorrow: the show will start at the slightly-earlier-than-published time of 6.20pm, so don’t be late! It’s our last show of the year at the BFI Southbank and we’ve got some real gems lined up for you.
If you don’t have a ticket for the show but would like to come along, a limited number of last-minute tickets have just been put on sale. These tickets are not available online, so call the BFI Southbank Box Office now on 020 7928 3232 to grab them!
Hope to see you tomorrow evening!
Love the BUG team
October 19, 2009
BUG 16 NEWS AND A CLASSIC NEIL YOUNG VID!
BOOK NOW FOR BUG 16 OR BUG 16 THE DIRECTORS CUT: 12th & 20th NOVEMBER 2009
As I write there’s a few tickets left for both nights of the music video forum I host at the BFI Southbank and I’m very keen that you, a real, warm, intelligent, compassionate human being book them rather than some block booking from a production company who then fail to turn up having prevented you, the compassionate ones from getting tickets, resulting in great swathes of free seats in a supposedly sold out show which as we all know is a problem far greater than climate change, the credit crunch or any other of today’s so called ‘issues’. If you’ve never been to BUG before, please come, it’s one of the few live things I do and easily my favourite. I really think it might cheer you up and after the month you’ve had, you could use it! If you’ve had a really good month and you’re feeling emotionally robust you can go and see The Invention Of Lying instead.
You can book tickets for BUG 16 on Thursday 22nd starting at 8.45pm here
Or you can book tickets for BUG 16 The Directors Cut on Friday20th starting at 6.20pm (and featuring mostly the same content as BUG 16 but without the director interview and with a few extra sprinkles) here
WONDERIN’ DIRECTED BY TIM POPE
In the meantime here’s a video for Neil Young directed by Tim Pope, my charming guest at BUG 15. I suggest you spend a long time watching his vids and reading the accompanying anecdotes on his excellent website here. Tim is perhaps best known for his great Cure videos but amongst a huge amount else he has for a long time been a trusted Neil Young collaborator and though he’s ended up making vids for some of Young’s more outré material (and by ‘outré’ I do of course mean ‘stinké’) he always gets something unexpected and often hilarious out of the grumpy old genius.
The video for Wonderin’ below is from 1983 when Young had just released Everybody’s Rockin’, an album of doo wap pastiche that Geffen (his label at the time) decided was not what Neil Young fans wanted or expected to hear and sued him for being ‘unrepresentative of himself’. Incidentally that kind of twattish behaviour from Geffen was apparently what convinced Michael Stipe that REM should sign with IRS records and not Geffen. Here’s a review of Everybody’s Rockin’ that looks more kindly on it than perhaps it deserves but makes the point that looking back ‘through the lens of time’ (!) there are things to love about this crappy and bizarre detour, not least the superbly demented performance that Tim Pope gets out of Neil for this vid.
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!