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
May 4, 2009
BUG 13 & NORWICH BUG 2 NEWS!
BUG 13 SOLD OUT BUT BOOK NOW FOR 17th SEPTEMBER IN NORWICH!
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
March 26, 2009
NATE VID NEWS!
A MESSAGE TO A YOU TUBER FROM THE AUDIENCE OF BUG
Lat night’s BUG 12 The Directors Cut at the BFI Southbank was one of my favourites so far. We showed some wonderful stuff including an animation called Story From North America by talented young animator Kirsten Lepore, Reuben Sutherland’s video for Royksopp’s Happy Up Here, Martin De Thurah’s for Fever Ray, Karni & Saul’s for Flogging Molly, a very funny vid for French band Odelaf’s song Le Café, a jaw dropping skate vid for UNKLE’s lovely track Heaven directed by Ty Evans with Spike Jonez, and various things I made myself and with Garth Jennings who was our guest at the previous week’s show.
One of the standout animated videos we showed was by super smart directing team Walter Robot for Deathcab For Cutie’s Grapevine Fires. I read out some of the comments that had been left by You Tubers including one mini thesis from a chap called NathanY579. You can find the comment if you scroll down far enough but in case it gets removed or whatever, here’s a pic:
Intrigued, I navigated the BUG audience to Nathan’s channel where I found a video he’s posted of himself singing the traditional American song Wildwood Flower. The bad part of me was hoping it would be dreadful and he would be revealed as a colossal ponce, but only the very hard would deny he’s got talent and throws himself manfully into his early Johnny Cash routine. I couldn’t help noticing that someone calling himself devinoxford had left a message on his home page, clearly part of an exchange that had taken place elsewhere on You Tube telling Nathan that:
you’re only a poor musician because you suck, it’s that simple!
to which Nathan replies with an unguarded candor seldom found in You Tube comment sections:
I wasn’t referring to myself and you have hurt my feelings. However you are entitled to your opinion.
When the audience at BUG saw that comment they let forth a loud and sincere ‘Aww’ of sympathy for Nathan’s hurt feelings which spurred me to take it a few steps further and film a message of support on my camera which I have posted below. I’m not suggesting anyone should further hound devinoxford (who as Nathan magnanimously points out is entitled to his opinion) or overload Nathan with commentary to make him even more self conscious than I may have already, but I thought it would be a good chance to reach out to a man admirably unafraid of writing essays beneath Deathcab For Cutie videos and posting vids of himself doing heartfelt Johnny Cash impressions for all the scary internet to see. Good on you Nate! And I’ll see the rest of you at BUG in May.
February 17, 2009
BUG 12 NEWS!
BOOK NOW FOR BUG 12 THE DIRECTORS CUT, WEDNESDAY 25th MARCH 2009!
BUG 12 on March 19th is already sold out but BUG 12 the Directors Cut (the same show minus interview but with additional music vids and joy added) still has a few seats available as I write this. As usual the show takes place at London’s wonderful BFI Southbank, starts at 8.45 and features a selection of interesting, unusual and brilliant music videos along with the occasional very short film and some random bullshite from the mad, mad world wide web. In between I drink beer and make asinine comments.
Our inaugural BUG at the Norwich Playhouse a couple of weeks back was a lot of fun with a really good, varied and enthusiastic crowd turning up for the show and staying for a drink in the very cosy Playhouse bar afterwards. I hope we’re going to do be doing more in a few months time and will of course keep you posted in my semi efficient way. Hope to see you in London though.
In the meantime you can book tickets for BUG 12 The Directors Cut here
