I’m doing two BUG shows at the Norwich Playhouse this week (same show Thursday 6th and Friday 7th @ 8pm), which will feature some of my favourite videos the last couple of London BUGs. Thursday’s show is pretty well sold out but as I write there are still loads of tickets left for Friday so if you find yourself east at then end of the week, come along and we can have a drink in the bar after. Check the events calendar to the right or click here to buy tickets.

WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU BEEN DOING DR BUCKLES?

Great question net pal.

CRABBING!

I went crabbing with my family in Southwold on the weekend enjoy the weird late summer sun. It was idylic. Crabbing is the shiz for children. Dangle a bit of bacon in a bag and the crabs can’t clamber on fast enough. Then at the end of the day you tip your bucket over and watch them all race back onto the sea. No one gets hurt! At least if you do it right.

DOMINATING THE AWARD WORLD!

Last week I went to the BT Digital Music Awards with the 6 Music team, Tom, Lucy, James and of course Joe who I hadn’t seen for a while. It was a fun night and we won our award (best digital radio show or podcast)! Still no immediate plans for a return to 6 Music sadly. We’re waiting for a good chunk of time to open up but it’s hard with me so busy doing BUG and crabbing. Joe’s got some commitments too apparently.

READING LADYBIRD BOOKS!

If you’re feeling deprived of my warm and friendly voice (and you’re under 10), here’s something I contributed to that may help. It’s a picturebook app that been very nicely put together and features the voices of people like Josie Lawrence, Simon Farnaby and Doctor Adam Buckules. My 3 year old daughter thinks it’s excellent and now I no longer have to read to her at night, giving me extra time to drink alcohol and gamble. Buy the app here. Once you’ve downloaded the app you can purchase books via your ‘device’. So far i’ve done Goldilocks, Chicken Licken and 3 Little Pigs. Think I’ll be recording some more titles in the next few weeks.

BEING A POSTER PONCE!

A few weeks back we did a short BUG show at the Kings Place festival. It was an enjoyable show but significant for me in that it marked by banner debut! When Joe and I were younger we always fantasised about being on posters and were always hoping we might make it onto a billboard or some such but it never happened. Now Joe’s well and truly popped his poster cherry and his name is on billboards round the world thanks to his film work but this was my first time as a giant poster ponce. Of course strictly speaking, aspiring to being a poster ponce is rather tragic and futile and you can sort of see that in my expression as I point to the banner. It’s a look of shame as people walk by and think ‘who’s that guy pointing at that poster ponce I’ve never heard of?’

Louise who is part of the BUG team, told me the other day that she was able to keep the banner and she’s going to send it to me. I haven’t run it by my wife yet but I plan to drape it from a tree near my house and aim some lights at it. That way visitors will know what kind of man they’re dealing with: Dr Buckles -- massive poster ponce.

I’ll be doing two BUG shows at the Leicester Comedy Festival this coming Friday evening at 6pm and 8.30pm. The shows will consist of a selection of my favourite music videos, web interestingness and You Tube commentary from the last few London BUG shows so it should be fun packed and of course, inspiring! Although the shows are being billed 1 hour in length I’m hoping we might be able to go over that on the night.

There’s also a chance for you to win an extraordinary goody bag of special Adam & Joe and Dr Buckles related offal that I have put together specially, including a super rare Adam & Joe Show tee shirt (plus not particularly rare ‘Best Of’ DVD), in insanely rare copy of Ken Korda’s director’s commentary for an entire episode of The Priory, a so rare that it hardly exists hand made DVD compilation of highlights from Shock Video, a copy of Adam & Joe’s Song Wars Volumes 1 & 2, plus other amazingballs that I’ll stuff in there before I get on my bike and head for the station on Friday. Click on the link below for tickets and details of the competition. Really hope to see you there.

GET TICKETS FOR BUG AT THE LECIESTER COMEDY FESTIVAL HERE

That’s an incredible prize! Oh thank you, THANK YOU!

OH AND BTW, THAT GUARDIAN TRAVEL PIECE…

that I was talking about in my previous post is here.

Love A Buxt.

If you want to read about a week of ludicrous luxury I was lucky enough to spend with my wife in the Maldives last November thanks to the Guardian Weekend travel section, you will be able to do so this coming weekend (29th January) when I believe the piece is due to appear. My Dad, Nigel Buxton (a.k.a. BaadDad) made his living as a travel writer and still writes about his twin passions of walking and wine. He encouraged me to write about holidays I took as a teenager but this will be my first published travel piece as a (sort of) grown up man. I think Paul Theroux will almost certainly be quaking in his boots.

BUG YOU TUBE PLAYLIST NO.1!

Towards the end of 2010 we held a special mini BUG in the Paradise pub in Kensal Green. We showed a few of our favourite videos from previous BUG shows as well as some newer ones and filmed the whole thing in order to share it with you on a You Tube playlist.

In theory the link below should take you to a page that plays my intro with the music videos and the rest of the links laid out in a row beneath, all ready to start playing automatically when each clip ends. The great thing about this format is that you can skip whichever bits you get tired of and move on to what looks interesting at any point. It’s the future of TV I tell you! Except, so far there’s no money in it whatsoever so it’s hard to say why we’re doing it, other than for love, which isn’t such a bad reason. Anyway, it’s only our first attempt so there’s vast amounts of room for improvement but see what you think and please do pass on the link to your pals.

WATCH BUG PLAYLIST NO. 1!

In other BUG news, I’ve been increasingly aware of people getting peeved that they’re unable to buy tickets for shows because the BFI members get first dibs and the remaining seats tend to get snaffled in block bookings from our sponsors and other eager beavers. My advice is to sign up to the mailing list because tickets always materialise on the day of a show and notification to that effect is sent without fail to those on the BUG list so you should always be able to get a ticket if you really want to come along (though of course if it’s last minute we can’t 100% guarantee). Just send your e-mail details to info@bugvideos.co.uk and you’ll be among the first to know about new shows, tickets etc. We are also thinking of doing one extra show every couple of months which should make it a lot easier to get tickets but that deal isn’t completely done just yet.

TABERNACLE HEADLINE SLOT, Thursday10th February, 2011

Yes, I’m back at this charming and comfortable Notting Hill venue, that boasts tables, chairs, toilets, drinks, food (I think) and a giant video screen for around 45-60 minutes of laptop based jinx that should be mid to high. If you’ve seen me doing live stuff within the last year or so there may be a few bits you’re familiar with but there should be some fresher morsels too. It would be a terrific treat to see you!

BUY TICKETS FOR FEBRUARY 10th HERE

Cheery ho bye!

Love Adam

I just woke up after a fantastic BUG last night at the Vimeo Festival. Look at my view! It’s not photoshopped. It’s solid Nu Yark & Buxty!

I was very nervous last night that no one would show up and those that did would be mystified by me, the vids, the You Tube comments, my face etc. but people really seemed to enjoy it. After the show a few people came and said hello including a young animator called Kirsten Lepore who’s wonderful Story From North America we showed at BUG in London a couple of years back. It was a thrill to meet one of the people responsible for the vid having loved it and shown it to a lot of friends. Also met a lady called Anne who produced a laptop and nervously showed me the music video she’d made (her first she said). I was thinking ‘oh sweet Jesus biscuits, please don’t let this be excruciatingly awful’ but it was a treat! Checkon! I also met some computer animation men with good beards. No Stephenage though…

The success of BUG makes me more excited about doing some other gigs over the next few nights although again I’m a little anxious that the attendance may be a tad sparse, given the shortness of the notice and the relative obscurity of Dr Buckles in the US. If you happen to be reading this and you’re in New York, it would be great to see you, and if you do come, could you pretend I’m much more famous in England than Rick Gervais, Russell Brand et al? That’s what I’ve been doing.

Anyway, I’ll be doing 50 minutes of twatting about and showing my videos tonight at 9pm at The Creek & The Cave in Long Island City, just across the bridge from Manhattan, so maybe see you then. I’m pretty certain it’s the best comedy venue in New York so I’m excited.

OK, I’m off to wander around, stare at people and imagine I’m Shtung.

Cheery yellow cab hoo ha! ( that’s another authentic New York sign off)

Love Ad

I’m about to get on the first transatlantic flight I’ve made for a long while for a special BUG show at the Vimeo Festival and Awards tomorrow evening. While I’m in town I’m doing a few other gigs too so if you’re local, come along and give me a Stephen! Or you could just say hello.

I’ll be doing about an hour’s worth of videos, You Tube comments and random laptop balls at The Luca Lounge on Sunday night. It’s a very small venue but with no advance publicity and no reason for New Yorkers to know who the heck I am, there may well be lots of room! I just couldn’t visit New York and not at least try to expose my balls to them.

Cheery Hot Dog ho ha! (that’s a typical New York sign off)

Love Adam, 7th October, 2010

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9KTtgHVtA

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9KTtgHVtA

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

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh5gC-ziH2w

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh5gC-ziH2w

That’s enough Spike news.

Go and see Where The Wild Things Are though, I thought it was lovely!

Adam 14-12-09

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6A6oTFdcw

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