Hey ho hoo ha lu la! Back from my holidays and feeling quite blue at the impending closure of another Summer but cheered by gig shaped thoughts.

I did the Popcorn night at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle a few months back and enjoyed it very much. It feels like a wedding reception in a lovely cross between a small concert venue and a fancy village hall (but better than that sounds) so I’m looking forward to going back there and doing about an hour of laptop based bits and pieces that will probably be along the lines of me showing some videos (mostly new-ish I hope), reading out some You Tube comments and singing the odd song. Whatever I do is likely to look a little slipshod after Tim Key and Rufus Hound with whom I share the bill along with compere Carl Donnelly, but I’m going to try my guts out, I promise you!

Book tickets and read the hyperbolic preview HERE

BUG AT THE NORWICH PLAYHOUSE, 8PM, THURSDAY 9th SEPTEMBER 2010

Both the BFI shows for BUG 21 on Thursday 16th September at 6.30pm and Friday 24th September at 8.45pm are now sold out but don’t forget, it’s always worth phoning the BFI box office (0207 928 3232) on the day of the show as last minute tickets often become available.

If you’re round my woodneck next week then come along to the wonderful Norwich Playhouse on Thursday evening at 8pm for our 5th Norwich BUG. I bumped into a fellow yesterday who’d dragged his girlfriend along to the last one and had this to say: “We got in there and she saw the programme with all the details of the videos on it and she thought, ‘oh god what’s this? It looks really boring’ but in the end she loved the whole night. You’d just never get to see things like that otherwise really.” I paraphrased a little and possibly made the fellow sound more goofy than he actually was, but you get the idea, and that’s typical of a lot of comments I get from people after their first BUG. It sounds as if I’m saying ‘don’t worry if you’re a bit simple and you fear art, you’ll still have a good time!’ but actually I’m saying something more profound that I refuse to explain. Come along though. We can have talk about the Labour leadership election in the bar afterwards. Or not.

Book tickets for BUG at the Norwich Playhouse HERE

BUG AT THE GREENWICH FESTIVAL, 5PM, SUNDAY 12th SEPTEMBER 2010

BUG festival shows tend to be a little more ramshackular even than the BFI shows which themselves, seldom shy from shackle ramming. As with last year’s Greenwich show, this should be a mix of my favourite Bug videos of the last 12 months as well as the odd serving of semi fresh steaming mash from my own rusty pot. Apparently we’re in a big tent this year, which is great because I’m a very in-tents person. That’s the kind of top class intellectual word play that’s got me where I am today: sitting in a field, updating my blog and noticing that I partly sat on a fresh cow shit. See you soon, I certainly hope!

Book tickets for BUG at the Greenwich Festival HERE

I’m wary of being evangelical about Apple. Their products have transformed my life and enabled to me to have a huge amount of fun making my stupid crap but they’ve also siphoned off a large part of my income and given me back and eye problems, although they can’t really be blamed directly for those. The Apple Store makes me salivate though, I can’t help it. It’s almost as bad as the loin stirring that goes on in M&S when confronted by giant cardboard pictures of ladies in pants with big smiles. And those tubs of flapjack squares. I loathe myself for being so predictable. For that reason, I’m holding off on the i-Pad as long as I possibly can. Say, a month, maybe even two.

Here’s Steve ‘Big’ Jobs trying to persuade the rebel alliance that they need one.

Incidentally this came out of something I started working on about 4 years ago. I thought it would be a good idea to create an entirely new audio track to go with Star Wars Episode IV so that you could download it as a podcast and listen to it along with the movie, thereby not infringing any copyright. That’s why I haven’t added any other elements to the picture and left it unedited. I know that this is something people have kind of done with MST3000 style talk along podcasts recently and of course sections of movies are dubbed on You Tube all the time but I wanted to do something insanely ambitious and build up a whole alternative soundtrack with new dialogue, music and effects, as well as sections of DVD commentary, foreign language tracks etc. Needless to say I never finished. So far I have created new ridiculous audio effects for about two thirds of the film and revoiced about three scenes. For one section Joe came round and pretended he was an old special effects guy from Pinewood, which was pretty funny in parts. One night Julian Barratt and Rich Fulcher came over and I forced them to have a go too. Julian played some crazy electric guitar stuff over the dog fight scenes and Rich pretended to be George Lucas for a while but we’d had a lot of wine and tortilla chips and the project got away from us a little.

Recently I had a look at everything I’ve done so far on Star Wars: A New Audio (as I was lamely calling it) after hearing that the brilliant St Sanders was doing something vaguely similar with Bladerunner. I was thinking perhaps I should try to finish, but the moment seems to have passed and Star Wars tinkering is so widespread it’s hard to add anything new to the genre. Plus, to bring it back to the i-Pad again, I keep thinking, what’s the point? My time might be better spent writing a new film than carefully laying semi amusingly inappropriate audio fx over someone else’s film!

When I start writing my film, here’s the software I’ll use.

BUG NORWICH 04, Thursday June 10th 2010

BUG is returning to the lovely Norwich Playhouse on Thursday 10th June. The show starts at 8pm and will consist of a selection of the best music videos we’ve shown at the last few BUGs in London as well as a few extra nuggets from my own rusty locker. I’d love to see you there and share a fizzy beer in the bar garden after the show, so do come along.

You can buy tickets for BUG Norwich 04 on Thursday June 10th here

Cheery hoo ha bye.

Love Adam

The BUG shaped part of my life seems to be getting busier, which I’m all up for as it’s still my favourite live assignation. In the last few weeks we had a pair of shows in Norwich then Leicester, all of which seemed to go down pretty well and I had a good time meeting some of the audience after the shows, some of whom gave me some great tips for videos and internet weirdness that we’ll certainly include in forthcoming BUG nights. And only one person gave me a hard time about The Persuasionists!

One of the videos I made for BUG was an analysis of a Joss Stone video that has been doing the rounds online for a while. This is something I thought might be a good strand, not only for the live shows but for a possible TV/internet version of BUG that I’m putting together in pilot form over the next few weeks. I’ve always wanted to do some kind of music show (I wrote about past attempts here) and maybe some form of BUG hybrid is the way to go.

We’ll see, but for the time being, here’s Ken. Oh, and if you have any suggestions for other videos that would benefit from Ken’s analytical skills, do leave a link on my You Tube channel comments section. I love you byeeee!

Download the single of Baby Baby Baby here.

Hope to see you there!

love Ad

What the heckins is BUG? Find out here. A few extra tickets have been released for our next 2 sold out BUG shows in London’s BFI Southbank on Thursday 21st and Thursday 28th, both starting at 8.45pm. If you’d like to come along call the box office on:

0207 928 3232

BUG NORWICH 3, 3rd & 4th February

Book tickets for BUG at the delightful Norwich Playhouse Wednesday February 3rd or Thursday 4th at 8pm here

LEICESTER COMEDY FESTIVAL, 10th & 11th February

I’ll also be doing 2 nights at the Leicester Comedy festival on Wednesday 10th & Thursday 11th February (same show both nights) so come and join us, why not? Leicester’s nice! Call the box office on:

0116 242 2800

Really hope I’ll see you at one of these shows. I’ve got a couple of new vids to show as well as all the usual weird and wonderful new pop promos, YouTube comments and other bollox, so I’m planning for it to be wicked! Am I still allowed to use the word wicked now I’m over 40?

The box office is open for BUG 17 on Thursday January 21st at 8.45pm and BUG 17, the Directors Cut (same show minus director interview but with other nuggets) on Thursday January 28th, 8.45pm both at London’s BFI Southbank.

Book tickets for BUG 17 @ BFI Southbank HERE

I’m also doing another couple of nights at the wonderful Playhouse in Norwich on Wednesday February 3rd and Thursday February 4th, both starting at 8pm.

Book tickets for Norwich BUG 3 @ Playhouse HERE

As usual I’ll be showing a recent selection of interesting, unusual and outstanding music videos interspersed with bits of weird shite we’ve found on the internet, a few YouTube comments and delicious but unhealthy waffle from myself. Visit the new improved BUG website to see some of the music vids we’ve shown in previous shows. I’d love to see you there!

Love Adam, 16-12-09

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

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.

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

Hey ho hoo ha hey! BUG 13 and BUG 13 The Directors Cut at the BFI Southbank on Thursday 14th and Friday 22nd are already fully booked although I would stress how much I’d recommend just coming along on the night and seeing if you can hold of a ticket as there are always a few no shows and free seats. Of course I can’t guarantee you’ll get a seat and I wouldn’t want you to put yourself in the position where your night would be ruined if you didn’t, but I really think it’s worth a try if you’ve been unable to book a seat for what continues to be my favourite live engagement in one of London’s most smartiferous cinema shaped venues.

As well as the usual selection of extraordinary music videos from around the world I’ll be unveiling my own no budget effort for my song Nutty Room which I made recently with the help of video whizzmachine Dougal Wilson.

NORWICH BUG 2

If you’re in striking distance of Norwich then here’s some very early notice of the second BUG show at the wonderful Norwich Playhouse on Thursday 17th September at 8pm. The first one of these was a giant East Anglian hoot and I’m looking forward very much to another hoot slice so book early to avoid crushing disappointment and also to make me seem popular and important.

You can book seats for NORWICH BUG 2 here