Too much has happened for me to start recapping since my last post. Suffice to say, you did it! and Joe and I should be back around November. Now before the festival season ends…

A couple of years back Joe and I did songs about festivals for Song Wars. Joe’s was about Glastonbury and mine was about people like myself who love the idea of music festivals but cherish a degree of comfort. I ‘sung’ my Festival Song as part of BUG at Latitude this year (at least a sweaty, breathless version of singing) and some people thought I was biting the hand that tightly attaches the wristband. Not at all! I love Latitude and the more friendly, clean, comfortable and diverse festivals get, the happier I’ll be. It’s not as if you can’t still go off to some litter strewn wasteland and burn plastic bottles while you listen to Zane Lowe endorsed shouting music, it’s just nice to have the option to sit on pillows in the Robin Tent and listen to Robin Ince introduce Robyn Hitchcock instead. Here’s a video for the song which I started last year (hence lack of beard) and only just completed. I mean I haven’t ONLY been doing this video for a year. I have done other things in that time, though it’s hard to think what…

On the last night at Latitude I snuck back after bedtime with my 8 year old son and I was in Rock Dad fantasy festival paradise. We’d already seen Sweet Baboo that day who had gone down very well and Buxton jr was eager to see Vampire Weekend so we tooled up with doughnuts and drinks and went roamin’. Before long we found ourselves in the Robin tent and sure enough, there was Robyn Hitchcock with whom all my children are familiar from car journeys peppered by salvos from the ‘Cock’s tremendous psychedelic folk cannon(!) At one point we seemed to be the only people in the little tent laughing at Robyn’s weird inter song rambles that night and I wondered if he felt fed up. Perhaps he was fed up with me laughing at him. Hmmm.

On the Friday I’d seen Spoon, one of my very favourite bands, getting tetchy with a noncommittal late afternoon crowd on the main stage and I wanted to jump up and give them a hug then electrocute them into action, but they seemed depressed by it all. Not so Robyn who will not be diverted from ploughing his eccentric furrow by anything or anyone it seems and is well loved for it. He was on very good form and with Frank looking on admiringly I got to join him on the tiny stage with other more musical guests and we sang Olé Tarantula, something of a tradition in the Robin Tent I hear. It sounded good (I was INCREDIBLE!) and as we left the stage Robyn said “Ooh, I welled up there” and sure enough his eyes were glistening. Then I started welling up. The Paul Weller started welling up.

Vampire Weekend are not the kind of band that would ever really scramble your mind but they delivered a well drilled and energetic set and deserve all their success IMHO. Would I have been happier in some no man’s land watching a more ‘important’ band with my son 20 years ago? I’m glad you asked, it’s a very pressing question. No, is the answer.

Speaking of Robyn and Spoon, here’s a couple of acoustic performances I shot in London back in 2007. I was doing my pilot for BBC 3 at the time and wanted to cram it with everything I could possibly think of that I thought was any good and music was going to be an important part of that if it ever got to series, which of course it didn’t and I’m still very, very bitter. I shot 3 performances with Robyn at his home in Chiswick (‘Chinese Bones’, ‘I Often Dream Of Trains’ and ‘My Wife and My Dead Wife’) and 3 with Britt Daniel of Spoon backstage at The Borderline before they played the most amazing gig I’ve ever seen. I’ve already uploaded Britt playing ‘Black Like Me’ but I’ve posted ‘Advance Cassette’ below. He also sang ‘The Beast And Dragon, Adored’ which I’ll post later, along with the other Robyn stuff. Thanks Robyn and Britt!

Cheerio ho ho. Hope you enjoy the rest of the festival season! Now here’s some men with acoustic guitars…

Love Adam, 6th August, 2010

I keep bumping into people at gigs who are nice enough to ask what’s happening with MeeBOX, so here’s the deal. BBC3 have decided against taking it further because they don’t feel it caters to their 16-24 target demographic. It’s disappointing news because although you might imagine that TV companies everywhere are desperate to give me millions of pounds to make programmes for them and be their king, this was in fact the closest I’d got to getting a show off the ground since the last series of The Adam & Joe Show in 2001. I’ve always done other things of course but making a whole show, either with Joe or solo has been the most fun.

I’m aware that left to my own devices the kind of stuff I produce is not particularly in synch with the world of Lilly Allen and Gavin & Stacey and it may never have the potential to cross over the way those chaps have but I hoped there might be room for a diversity of shows on BBC3, especially as a series of MeeBOX would have cost less to produce than a couple of episodes of The Wall, so it could hardly be thought of as a costly risk.

Most people seemed to like the show although I heard some criticism that it didn’t work as a parody of You Tube. Although that was one way I explained it to people in interviews and such, it was never meant to be the whole point of it. The vague on-line look was more just a peg on which to hang the videos. What was important to me was that each individual element was funny in some way. If it had been commissioned I guess I would have gone further with the You Tube spoof angle or perhaps pulled back from it completely but as it was a pilot I didn’t get too hung up about it.

I think MeeBOX is funny, not particularly obscure and very televisual. The BBC said they agreed absolutely but it had been a case of unfortunate timing. When the pilot was commissioned BBC3 was still a place where wonderful shows like Snuff Box (more BOX based marginalia!) could co exist with the channel’s more obviously teen-brained fare. Now that’s apparently no longer the case and there is a ‘brand’ in position that needs to be consistently maintained, or some such. I guess that’s the reality of life in the dirty UK multi channel world: get successful or fuck off. Well, duh! you may say, but in TV as with most other things ‘successful’ is by no means always the same thing as ‘good’.

As you can see, it’s impossible to analyse these kinds of policies without sounding like a bitter and twisted old fartcake so I’ll try to resist and say instead that I hope you watched the show and if you liked it, you might find some way of letting BBC3 know. They’re unlikely to reverse their decision but hey, who knows? If on the other hand you thought the show should have been called ShiteBOX, then I guess your interests are being well served.

Either way I was pleased with MeeBOX and I’m very grateful the nabobs at the Big British Castle gave me the opportunity to make it in the first place. I’m also indebted to everyone who helped on the show, especially Dougal Wilson who directed several segments, Garth Jennings who made Sausages with me, Jonny Greenwood who wrote and recorded the title music, David O’Reilly who worked tirelessly to create the title sequence and most of the graphics for the show, John Pocock who produced it, Robin Hill who edited it with me and tied it all together, Jack Cheshire who exec-produced and championed it from the start (along with Armando Iannucci) and all the actors and comedians who were kind enough to be in it. Thanks too to the rest of the crew and production team who helped it turn out exactly the way I hoped it might.

Love Adam

9th July 2008

OK, so there’s no way you’re actually going to watch it as it goes out on telly unless your life has gone wrong or you’re some kind of young party person, but why not record the show so you can watch it over and over and over?! Your other option is catch it on the BBC’s iplayer. In a way that’s preferable because then the geniuses at the Castle can see how many people actually watched it rather than doing their insane pseudo scientific TV ratings guesstimates. I’ll post a few more clips (and possibly some out-takes) and say more about what’s happening with the show in the next few days. I know the BBC are keen to see if people respond to it, so please do respond and if you like it perhaps you could encourage your friends to watch before it vanishes from the radar! Here’s a quintet of recently uploaded clips to get you going

Fanques!

Love Adam

BAAADDAD’S CLICHED MEMORIES OF PUNK

FUNKY SONGS OF PRAISE

TODAY ON XANTIAR

KEN KORDA: TALKING INDEPENDENT FILM

FAMOUS GUY INTERVIEW 1

MeeBOX, the pilot I made for BBC3 last year is finally being transmitted on the night of Sunday 22nd at 11.45pm. I showed a few clips from the show when I was MCing at the 100 Club last weekend (thanks for making it a very enjoyable night if you were there) and they all went down very well so I’m hoping the massive audience I’m bound to get in this incredible slot will respond with similar enthusiasm. It was made for very little money but I had a very happy time putting it together and I’m deeply grateful to all the many people who helped. When the show goes out I’ll say more about the production and give some proper credit for anyone who’s interested. As far as the future of MeeBOX goes, I have a meeting at the BBC next week so I hope I’ll be able to tell you soon if I’ll be making any more for TV.

In the meantime, here’s the first of a few clips to whet your appetite and maybe encourage others to tune in. This is a video for a song called Sausages that I made with Garth Jennings. It pretty much speaks for itself I think. It’s nice and short so I hope you’ll send it around to all the Sausage lovers and haters out there. Lord knows, everybody’s one or the other!

love Adam. 12th June, 2008

I’ve just had a couple of days filming with a proper digibeta crew this week for my BBC3 pilot, MeeBOX. Pop video/commercials whizboy Dougal Wilson was directing and every department was top notch. One of the things we shot was a fake clip from one of my Hollywood star character Famous Guy’s films (a sci-fi thriller) and it looked exactly as I’d hoped it might, which is very seldom the case with these things. In fact everyone was so good at what they were doing that a couple of times I felt a little embarrassed of some of the less well formed ideas that we were working on. Thing is, a couple of days like this eats up a large proportion of our meagre budget so you may as well shoot as much as you can even if you only end up using a couple of bits. The majority of the show (which is broadly internet themed) is going to be shot on mini DV, webcams, digital cameras and the like.

The digibeta shoot was a lot of fun though and we got some great stuff but when I got back last night I felt a little sick that I hadn’t spent some more time thinking about the point of a couple of bits! We’ll see how they look when they’re edited. I’m indebted to those who came along to help with little scenes here and there including Jo Bobin, Gareth Tunley Leah Charles, Tony Law, Jo Neary, Matt Berry, Emma Pierson and my dad, a.k.a. BaaadDad. I hope they had a good time too.

The only downside was that the filming coincided exactly with the worst cold I have had in a while. I was feeling a little dodge on the eve of the first day but assumed it was the usual feeling of vague physical collapse I often get before I do anything of personal importance in my life but it just got worse over the course of Monday and Tuesday and now I’m writing this in bed having had a night of feverish dreams. One of them was about working in a deserted fast food joint that had pubes scattered about the counter. That can’t mean anything particularly good can it? Anyway I’m feeling pretty positive about the pilot, which we still have a good couple of months left to work on so I’ll keep you briefed from time to time.

STARDUST PREMIERE ILLNESS QUANDRY NEWS!

The question preoccupying me right now, is am I going to feel well enough to attend tonight’s star-pebbledashed premiere of Stardust in London’s glamorous Leicester Square? I asked my Mum to come along with me and she’s making the long journey from Reading this afternoon so I don’t want to let her down, but what if I go along and sneeze on De Niro then he gets my cold and it affects his performance on the incredible ‘return to form’ film he may be working on? Not that he isn’t on form in Stardust of course, he’s great and very funny but still, I have to be responsible. Oh fuckit, I’m going to dose up on Lemsip Max and go along. Apart from anything else I want to say a personal thankyou to Neil Gaiman, the author of the graphic novel from which the film was adapted. He got in touch the other day to say that he’d brought me back a Stardust poster from Japan and I’m on it! How cool is that? And how incredibly nice of him to think of bringing me one back! So unless I take a significant turn for the worse later to day I’m going to put a bad suit on and head over there!

I’M IN ‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN’, C4, FRIDAY 12th OCTOBER 2007, 10PM

The pilot I shot back in June by Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jessie Armstrong is being shown next week as part of Channel 4’s Comedy Playhouse series. The cast includes Reece Shearsmith, Darren Boyd, Lucy Punch and Rosie Cavaliero as well as myself and is a sitcom set in Victorian England. I have no idea what its chances are of getting commissioned as a series but I was a little unsettled by the fact that Radio 4 recently ran a series with a superficially similar sounding conceit called Bleak Expectations starring Mitchell & Webb regular James Bachman. Apparently it was very good although I didn’t hear it. I can’t quite work out if that’s a good thing for Ladies and Gentlemen’s chances or not. Regardless, I hope you’ll check out the show when it airs on Channel 4 on the 12th. This is a picture I put together as an invite for a screening a while back as well as a picture of me and Reece who I’m still kind of in awe of being a big League Of Gents fan. Excitingly, he and Steve Pemberton are going to be making a new show for BBC2 next year! Should be wickles.

CHECK OUT THE PETER SERAFINOWICZ SHOW, THURSDAYS, BBC2, 9:30PM!

I’m not in it or anything, I’m just excited about it. Here’s a bit here. Apart from being someone whose work I enjoy hugely, Peter is the person who got me into You Tube, which I guess you could say has indirectly lead to me being able to do this BBC pilot so cheers Peter! I’ve no doubt his BBC2 series is going to be a smash so why not get in at ground level and check it on Thursday then you’ll be the one with the hot new catchphrases in the playground on Friday morning. Is that how it still works with comedy? I need more Lemsip.

You may have noticed that I have removed the Spoon video I made from You Tube. This is not because the band were unhappy with it but because looking at it again I thought it might actually fit quite well into my BBC pilot so now that most of you, my dot comrades have had a look, I’m going to keep it in my trousers for the next few months. As far as the rest of the pilot goes, it’s just such a great feeling to actually be working on something like this again. I have no idea what it’s chances of being commissioned are, but I’m digging it while it lasts!

6 MUSIC NEWS

Tomorrow is our last day covering for Sean Keavney at BBC 6 Music. We’ve had a blast there and although I never want to get up that early for that many consecutive mornings ever again in my life, I really hope it won’t be the last time we do a radio show for the Big British Castle. Sure, they can be a little rigid with certain rules and regulations, making some of the spontaneity we use to enjoy at Xfm a little harder to indulge, but that’s more than made up for by the smoothness with which everything runs (thanks to our great production team for that!) and the variety and quality of the music which you get to play. Plus I’ve got a plastic pass with my photo on it that makes all kinds of doors click and swish open gratifyingly. Aaah, the feeling of belonging, if only for a couple of weeks! Thanks if you listened and texted or e-mailed. We were very heartened by the messages we got. It makes a big difference!

GIG NEWS: KNOCK2BAG @ BAR FM, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19th 2007

I’ll be performing at the Knock2bag Comedy night, on September 19th at Bar FM, but you probably worked that out from the headline, right? I thought I’d make it perfectly clear. You can see details of how to find Bar FM here and reserve tickets for the night here. Make sure you specify which night you’re reserving for, otherwise there might be a slip up of some kind and the world could end. Apparently someone made a mistake reserving tickets for one of these nights a while back and the next thing you know; Global Warming. So do be careful. I’ll be doing about 15 minutes of something or other. Probably Famous Guy, I don’t know…

BOOK NOW FOR THE NEXT ‘BUG’: FRIDAY 14th SEPTEMBER 2007 @ BFI

There’s been a bit of confusion about the exact date for this, the 3rd BUG (a selection of the most mind blowing and innovative new music videos hosted by the dreadful Adam Buxton) but I have been assured by the organisers that it will be on Friday 14th of September and not Thursday 13th and has been indicated in some BFI publications. So do book now; it was fairly rammed last time. Now, if I was reading that about someone else’s event I would think ‘well if it’s rammed I’ll skip it’ because I don’t enjoy the discomfort of the rammed, but at the BFI Southbank (formerly the NFT!) your comfort is always guaranteed as the cinema seats are spacious and comfy and best of all, you can take booze (or soft drinks if you’re one of those non boozers!) into the auditorium with you. It’s a fun night so book here.

KEN’S SADDAM STATUE COMMENTARY

To make up for taking down the Spoon video, here’s one from the vaults, part of which turned up in Time Trumpet last year. I was sat home one afternoon in April 2003 when I turned on the TV to find several of the big terrestrial and digital channels had decided to provide live coverage of a small group of western troops and Iraqi civilians laboriously yanking down a statue of Saddam Hussein. It took fucking ages to get this thing down, but the TV stations had all decided that this was ‘an historic occasion’ and the fear that if they cut away to something else they would miss the actual tumble was so intense that they just kept broadcasting this utterly rubbish footage. The unfortunate reporter charged with turning the torpor into telly gold for the BBC was Iraq Invasion journo star Rageh Omaar. He did is best it but wasn’t enough to paper over some desperately crap questions from the studio as well the overwhelming sense that we were watching something that may well have been stage managed to give the invasion some kind of uplifting conclusion. Anyway, I didn’t have a lot going on at the time so I taped the coverage, removed the Rageh (can’t help saying that name in a Scooby Doo voice) and replaced him with Ken Korda. It was one of the first kinds of these things that I did and it was fun although not brilliantly funny. This is a much bigger chunk than the one that appeared in Time Trumpet. That may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your affection for Ken. Ta ta!

Our two week stint covering for the excellent Sean Keavney on the 7am – 10am breakfast show on BBC 6 Music begins on Monday. I think Joe and I are both a little anxious that doing a 3 hour show every morning for two weeks at that ludicrous hour might test our radio skills to breaking point but we’ll give it our best shot. At the very least I’m looking forward to playing some good music. We’ve been told that we can plunder the Peel Sessions archives too so I’m pretty excited about that. We were going to revive a few of the competitions we used to do on Xfm like Crap Commentary Corner and maybe Celebrity Regression but the BBC seems to have banned everything that is in any way like a competition so that may be out. Mind you, the competition element of those features was never really what made them entertaining so perhaps we’ll find a way to squeeze them past the competition police. I’m looking forward to it!

MEEBOX NEWS

MeeBox, my pilot for the BBC is now well underway and after a few days of meetings with the very small team at the heart of it I’ve got stuck into writing and looking through some of the chunks of random TV I’ve recorded over the past few months in the hope of having some edit fun with it. I’ve also been lining up a few musical guests for possible inclusion as the fanboy in me is desperate to have some kind musical element to the thing despite the received wisdom in TV that music, especially less mainstream music, makes people switch off immediately. That may or may not be true but all I know is that I loved seeing bands on shows like The Word and even The Young Ones and if I can get some of the music I love into this show I’ll be very happy.

On Friday night I took my camera along to Spoon’s gig at The Borderline (more of which later) and before they went on I filmed lead singer Britt Daniel playing three numbers on an acoustic in the tiny dressing room backstage. I hope it’s a more intimate performance than you would normally see on TV and the idea is for it to look like one of the thousands of videos on the net of people playing songs in their bedroom, except not shit. Rather than just pinning my hopes to one performance then waiting to see if we get commissioned, I think I’m going to try and shoot as many artists as possible then have them in the locker if and when the time comes. Whether the show goes ahead or not everything I shoot will see the light of day on You Tube at some point anyway so nothing’s wasted.

In fact if it wasn’t for You Tube I might be a little more gloomy about the prospects for this pilot, especially in the light of all this stuff about the BBC considering cutting costs by axing BBC3 and BBC4! This article about the whole thing refers to BBC3 having an annual budget of £93.4 BILLION! If that’s not a typo, that certainly does seem a trifle too lavish, even for Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps. Our budget for MeeBox is nowhere near a billion though, so maybe we’ll be OK. I don’t think most people understand how expensive it really is to make a TV show however. Just shooting Britt Daniel at the Borderline last night cost over a million pounds. Then watching it back this morning cost another 3 million and editing it all, even though it’s just one locked off shot will probably cost at least 25 million. And all that’s before my fee. It’s crazy.

SPOON NEWS & ‘DON’T MAKE ME A TARGET’ VIDEO

You may well have read or heard me bollocking on about how much I love this band from Austin Texas so apologies if you’re saddened by the prospect of me doing it again but I just gotta! Ever since I bought their album Series Of Sneaks in Sister Ray records in Soho back in 2002 my life has been immeasurably improved by their music. I tried measuring it a couple of times but my music improvement ruler broke around the ‘very, very’ stage so I had to stop. I’ve got so many happy memories with Spoon as the soundtrack but here’s a couple of particularly special ones.

GAY HORNBY WARNING!! (SOME VERY GAY SUB NICK HORNBY SENTIMENTAL MUSO DRIVEL AHOY!)

The first one is a sunny morning in early 2005 the week that Spoon’s album Gimme Fiction came out. I was a massive fan by this stage and a few months previously the band had put a demo version of a new song called I Summon You on their website. It was just Britt and his acoustic and the first time I heard I was knocked out. I got that wonderful feeling you sometimes get hearing a fantastic song for the first time, kind of like the odd familiarity of bumping into an old girlfriend who you kind of still love and you suspect she probably still loves you a little bit but you’ve changed and she’s changed. It’s nice to see her though. We’ve both put on a bit of weight but she looks good. Why is she wearing that hat though? Anyway, I Summon You.

So I loved this song and I worked myself into a such pitch of insane anticipation about the new album that I became convinced I was going to be let down and this would be the one that soured my relationship with Spoon (a little like Get Behind Me Satan did with The White Stripes for me). Nevertheless I ordered my copy of Gimme Fiction from the band’s website and one morning as I was on my way out to a meeting, there it was on the doormat. I couldn’t help dashing back to my computer and loading it onto my I-pod (making myself late quite for the meeting in the process) and then I cycled off in the cold sunshine listening to Gimme Fiction for the first time.

It was great. The first song, The Beast And Dragon Adored seemed almost to be a manifesto for what I loved about Spoon, including the line “When you don’t feel it, it shows, they tear out your soul! But when you believe, they call it rock and roll!” which looks a bit daft written down, but when Britt Daniel is yelling it winningly, it makes sense of the whole world. I could tell I was going to fall in love with this album completely in a few weeks then as I was cycling up Whitehall the proper album version of I Summon You came on. The beginning sounds almost the same as the demo but after a few bars the drums and the rest of the band come in closely followed by these lovely swells of synth that sound like the wonderful atmospheric keyboard beds on With Our Love by Talking Heads. Now this is very Gay Hornby indeed but at that point I got a massive lump in my throat and was close to blubbing like a ladyman right there on my bike. I was just so supremely happy to be hearing this band that I liked so much pulling it out the bag so beautifully! Like meeting an old girlfriend who you kind of still love and clearly still loves you and she isn’t wearing a bad hat. I was dancing on the ceiling. So that’s happy Spoon memory 1.

Happy Spoon memory 2 was Friday night. The new Spoon album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga came out a few weeks ago and once again it’s a lovely old girlfriend minus bad hat. One song in particular called Black Like Me has been causing me a number of lump-in-throat ladyman moments. I saw the band was in town doing a couple of shows so with the help of some folks at 6 Music I got in touch with their extremely genial PR guy and arranged to film something for my show. I turned up at the Borderline with all my video gear in my backpack in time to see Spoon soundchecking. I had never seen them at such close proximity before, especially in such a wee venue. I was over excited. They sounded great. Minutes after they’d finished I was in a dressing room the size of a small lavvy with lead singer Britt Daniel tuning up an acoustic guitar as I hooked up my camera.

Britt played The Beast And Dragon Adored, Black Like Me and Advance Cassette, one of my favourite songs EVER! Despite the fact he was trapped in a tiny room alone with someone who was clearly something of a stalker (he later recalled that a few years ago I actually wrote to him to gush at length about the band), Britt performed his bollocks off, very unselfconsciously. Watching him sing the first lines of Black Like Me, which I’d been listening to on an almost hourly basis for the past few weeks is my happy Spoon memory 2. (Fun fact for any Spoon fans reading this: Britt told me that Dorian’s isn’t a drinking bar as I assumed but a shoe bar in Portland Oregon where Britt gets his boots repaired when he’s in town. In fact re-reading the lyrics for this track, it could well be written from the point of view of one of Britt’s shoes!) The band went on to play better than I’ve ever seen them play. The sound was perfect (the Borderline has got to be one of the best places in London to see a gig) and the band seemed to be having a great time. The guy they have on bass now, Rob Pope, is a fucking demon and Jim Eno and Eric Harvey on drums and keyboard respectively are tight as the seal on an airplane door! Wow, I could go on hyperbolising rockjournalistically but I won’t right now.

ADDENDUM

I made a video for the song Don’t Make Me a Target from the new album GA GA GA GA GA, which I posted here for a couple of weeks but I’ve taken it down for the time being because it may end up as part of my BBC Pilot, more of which soon…

ADOUBLEDENDUM But now I’ve reposted the video. Here it is.