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
October 8, 2008
RADIOHEAD REMIX FUN!
June 3, 2008
JIGSAW RE-POST NEWS!
THE BAD SIDE OF YOU TUBE
The video that I made with Garth Jennings for Jigsaw Falling Into Place was recently removed by the good folks at You Tube for so called ‘copyright violation’. As I know very well that the band and the record company were happy with me posting the thing I’m sticking it back up again. It won’t be new to you if you’re a regular here and it’s available elsewhere on You Tube of course, but as I put the fricken thing together I don’t see why I can’t have it on my channel too (you can read more about how it came to be made here).
You Tube are maddeningly hard to reach in these situations. It would be nice to think they had people who would respond to complaints when videos are wrongly removed but that hasn’t been the case in my experience. If anyone out there has a contact for a You Tube human, do get in touch, I’d appreciate it, especially as You Tube continues to be a valuable and mostly enjoyable way for me to post bits and pieces from time to time marred only by twatty vandals and Andrew Marr. And Johnny Marr. That was a joke based on the word ‘marr’ by the way. I love Andrew and Johnny as much as anyone. I have to point these things out for the avoidance of pro-Marr troll fury.
By the way, just saw this great Jigsaw Falling Into Place cover complete with helmet cam! Nice one yo!
January 14, 2008
RADIOHEAD NEW YEAR FUN, LISTEN AGAINST CLIPS, BUG 05 & RHINO GIG
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Every year it takes me longer and longer to sort myself out after Christmas. I get so over-excited by Santa, the Holy Spirit and the accompanying jollity that everything else is swept to one side ensuring that every January is just 31 days of filing, bill paying, and various forms of creeping anxiety. Wouldn’t it be a hoot to start a New Year trim, wealthy and with solid employment prospects? Or maybe it would be boring, because then the only way for the year to go would be down. Yes, that’s what I’m telling myself.
Anyway, I’ve finally got round to updating this blog although I’ve just noticed that all the apostrophes in my previous posts now appear as little collections of obscure symbols, which is profoundly undesirable. Here’s an illustration:
You’ll notice however that the problem is not currently affecting this post. Perhaps the Christmas vomit bug infected my blog application too, in which case all it needs is some bed rest and a few days off. Otherwise I’m going to have to go back and retype every single fucking apostrophe for the last two years worth of posts, and I’ll do it too because I’m fairly obsessive compulsive in that way. It’s one of the reasons I’m not considerably more successful than I am. Hang on, I’ve just spoken to my brother and he says he might be able to fix it. This is exciting isn’t it?
RADIOHEAD SCOTCH MIST FUN!
Work wise, 2007 concluded with me returning to Radiohead’s sonic castle outside Oxford to help with a couple more bits for their New Year’s Eve webcast (named Scotch Mist for reasons I don’t quite recall). It was recorded between 17 & 20th December and features specially recorded versions of every song on In Rainbows (including the version of Faust Arp that went out in the previous webcast). Here it is in its entirety.
My role in all of this was vision mixing a couple of tracks (the ones where it cuts to nothing are generally mine) and helping Garth with the webcast video for Nude filmed on a special camera Garth hired that shoots 1000 frames a second enabling you to slow the footage right down without losing quality. As with the video for Jigsaw Falling Into Place this was very straightforward and fun to put together. We got each member of the band to thrash madly about as fast as they could for 7 second bursts (which, because of the 1000 fps shooting rate, was all the camera could store at any one time) then loaded the results onto my laptop and that was more or less it. The stuff flying around in the final section is fake snow, which we chucked at the band to make it look festive. When I look at it now it looks more like there’s a chicken being brutally dispatched off camera but that’s still Christmassy in a way isn’t it? There’s not much to it but it’s kind of moving I think. Having said that, when you’ve got a song as lovely as Nude, you could pretty much film a hairy arse in slow motion and it would be moving. Maybe we’ll do that for the next webcast if I’m invited…
In between the songs are little bits of the band running towards the slo-mo camera away from a sign that says ‘Good Night’ with fireworks on it. This was actually what Garth hired the camera for in the first place. He had set up loads of fireworks around the sign so that the band would be running from a wall of fire and sparks as the sign lit up but unfortunately we got our timing wrong and the fireworks only went off after everyone had left the frame and the 7 second filming window was closed. Garth was gutted but it still looks good I reckon. His idea of the woolly hats being pulled off as they ran worked a treat. Here’s a montage of a few photos I took just before the fuses were lit. That’s producer/technical genius Nigel Godrich skulking in the back. Below that is a picture of Garth looking terroristical in the centre, moments before the camera rolled.
This time round I had more opportunities to just watch the band play, whether it was while I was vision mixing or just standing about while they were rehearsing and it was quite a thing. At one point I was in the kitchen when I heard the intro for House Of Cards. I assumed Nigel was playing it back from the CD but it was live. I swear the version they play for the webcast sounds even better than the one on the album. Even when you’re watching them singing and playing it’s hard to believe they’re actually making the noise you’re hearing. Can’t wait to see them back on stage in the summer. At some point I imagine they’ll put out a DVD of a lot of the webcast stuff, which I hope would also feature some of the unseen behind the scenes footage we shot as we went along. That’s pure conjecture but if anything more solid materialises I’ll let you know.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND – A PUNK
Speaking of Garth, here’s the video he did recently for the excellent Vampire Weekend. In many ways it’s the exact opposite of the Nude vid, being one eight minute shot that was speeded up to fit the length of the song, it’s also a lot more ambitious with lighting, choreography and costume changes all happening in one take. Like Nude though, I think it was designed to be quick, cheap and a relatively simple accompaniment to a great song.
LISTEN AGAINST MILIBAND CLIPS
Here are my four contributions to Jon Holmes’s Radio 4 show, Listen Against, which went out towards the end of 2007. That’s me pretending to be David Miliband in case you hadn’t guessed. I did the first one of these when he was still the environment secretary and I must confess I’d never actually heard him speak (I just chopped his bits out of various interviews without listening to him) so my impression bears little relation to his actual voice. I didn’t need to tell you any of that did I? I just like the sound of my own keyboard.
BUG 05, 8:45PM, BFI SOUTHBANK, THURSDAY 31st JANUARY, 2008
The fifth BUG, a show featuring a selection of some of the best and most interesting pop videos around (as chosen by David Knight of Promo News) with me talking crap in between, will take place on Thursday 31st January. You can book tickets here. The last few shows have all sold out and I think the Independent are also doing a little piece to plug it either this weekend or the next so unless you want those Independent types stealing your seat I’d book now!
SAVE THE RHINO GIG @ COMEDY STORE, 21st JANUARY 2008
I love rhinoceroses but other people hate them and seek to destroy them. I’m determined to save all of them so I will be doing about 10 minutes of live comedy (as Famous Guy probably) at the Comedy Store on Monday 21st and then I’m pretty sure the rhinos will be fine. As far as I know Noel Fielding is going to be performing too so that’s got to be worth it right? Book tickets and see more details here but bear in mind that if you don’t attend you may as well buy a shotgun and shoot a baby rhinoceros in the head, it comes to the same thing.
November 10, 2007
LISTEN AGAINST, LADIES & GENTLEMEN & RADIOHEAD WEBCAST NEWS!
Yo yo. Things have got unreasonably busy with the radio show, the BBC pilot and various other bits and ballbags hence rather infrequent posting action, but today’s update should keep you going for a little while, especially if you’re a Radiohead aficionado. But first other news from my gammy hamlet.
LISTEN AGAINST, RADIO 4, WEDNESDAY 14TH NOVEMBER 2007, 6:30PM
I’ve been contributing some fairly demented pieces to a new comedy/topical-ish/satire-ish Radio 4 show called Listen Against which starts this Wednesday. It’s the brain baby of our 6 Music brother Jon Holmes and if the pilot was anything to go by it should be hoot packed. I don’t think I’m in every episode but I pop up as foreign secretary David Miliband from time to time. Have a bite!
BOOK NOW FOR BUG 04, THURSDAY 29th NOVEMBER @ NFT (BFI SOUTHBANK)
I have to deliver my pilot the next day so I may well be stressed and under prepared when I host this night of hot new music video and talking but that’s never stopped it being a good evening before so come along. Mo details here. I see they call me ‘inimitable’ on the site! Nice but not strictly true. To imitate me just stick out your tummy and say ‘I’m the shizbot!’ in a plummy drawl. Don’t do it in front of me though please.
LADIES & GENTLEMEN NEWS!
Herewith, an update on the sitcom I appeared in as part of Channel 4’s Comedy Showcase recently. Last night I had a long weird dream about it and at one point I bumped into Andrew Newman, currently head of comedy and entertainment at Channel 4. He said “Hi Adam. Good news about Ladies & Gentlemen isn’t it?” “What do you mean?” I said, “I thought it wasn’t being commissioned.” “No, we changed our minds” said Andrew from behind his large dream glasses. “We realized it was too good to let it slip away so we’re going to go ahead and start shooting early next year” and off he went. As I turned round I saw Kevin Lygo (director of television and content at Channel 4) who came up and embraced me warmly. “Well done on Ladies & Gentlemen” he said and wandered off after Andrew. I woke up feeling fantastic. Then I remembered that Channel 4 have indeed decided not to commission Ladies & Gentlemen for a series and do not, as far as I know have any plans to change their minds and issue me with congratulations and embraces as if I was solely responsible for the thing in the first place. If that situation does arise however, I’ll be the first to let you know!
RADIOHEAD NEWS!
not endorsement of irresponsible drinking!
I just got back from the Oxford countryside where I’ve spent the last couple of days with the members of Radiohead and a few of their friends putting together a three hour webcast, which went out live last night, to celebrate the completion of their album In Rainbows. It was intense but fun. Funtense! Like the band themselves I suppose.
My friend Garth Jennings and I drove up to the band’s residential studio on Thursday morning and as soon as we’d unpacked our gear and marveled at the coolosity of the place, we sat down for lunch with the webcast team: the five bandmembers, producer and technical mindhub Nigel Godrich, the artist currently known as Stanley Donwood (who along with Thom is responsible for all the Radiohead artwork), and various other friends and helpers.
I’m a long time fan of Radiohead and I’ve only recently got to know them a little (Jonny did the theme tune for my BBC pilot MeeBOX) so I’m still not properly over the strange feeling of excitement and anxiety you get when you see musicians you admire in ordinary situations having formed a very personal one way relationship with them through their work. I think it’s something that’s peculiar to music because a good song becomes part of you on a far more fundamental level than a great performance from an actor or even a really good book. So when you’re suddenly presented with the architect(s) of so many things that mean so much to you, there is an understandable desire for them not to think you’re a dick. Unfortunately that pressure is often exactly the thing that makes a fan immediately revert to dick mode. Or is that just me?
Anyway, there I am sat in Radiohead’s kitchen thinking ‘I’m in Radiohead’s kitchen!’ and all around me are bits and pieces that I recognise or am curious about, but I’ve go to focus on the matter at hand, which is: what are we going to shoot in the next 30 hours or so that we can play in to supplement the live elements in the webcast? Nigel, Stanley and the band have already got a good few items in the bag but they need more. Thom looks at Garth. “What have you got?” he says. Brilliantly concealing his fear that the band will pour buckets of tepid scorn over the few fairly silly ideas he and I have come up with, Garth pitches his arse right off. Luckily everyone seems up for pretty much anything so when Garth suggests we take Thom and Jonny out to a field somewhere to shoot a performance of Faust Arp it’s not long before the four of us are squeezed inside a mini on our way to Wittenham Clumps, a hill overlooking Didcot powerstation that was a hang out for the band in their younger days.
FAUST ARP
The sun is almost down as we scramble up the hill and after some brief, breathless discussion over whether the wind is going to ruin the sound and whether Jonny and Thom should sit or stand, we start filming. They perform the song, one of my favourites from In Rainbows, three times. The third one is the best and the wind even holds off for a gap in Thom’s vocal before blustering into the mics. It’s pretty dark by then but luckily my camera picks up enough to make it worth it. We get a final cutaway of Thom and Jonny silhouetted against the streaks of orange behind the powerstation then head back to the studio.
JIGSAW FALLING INTO PLACE
The next item on our agenda is the Helmet Cam video for Jigsaw Falling Into Place, the first single from the album. The Helmet Cam is something I made a couple of years ago to shoot some bits for my comedy night. It’s a mini surveillance camera mounted on the front of a bicycle helmet which makes the head of the wearer appear stationary while everything around them slides around nauseatingly. It’s a technique that’s been used a lot (Martin Scorcese and Peter Gabriel spring to mind), but it always occurred to me that the bike helmet version might be good for some kind of music video. When I found out we were doing the Radiohead webcast I got to work making 5 new ‘units’ for the band. A bike helmet is ideal for mounting the camera because you can strap it on tight enough for it not to wobble too much, but it has the downside of making you look like a bit of a prat so I was concerned that a band like Radiohead might be uncomfortable with that. If they were they didn’t show it and when Garth and I had hooked up all 5 helmets in the band’s main studio and checked they were all recording, we got everyone in, strapped the helmets on and ran through the song a couple of times. That was it. After supper Garth and I loaded everything onto a laptop and it looked great. We stayed up til 2.30am chopping the footage from the 5 cameras together and when we were finished it looked pretty good. In fact we were very pleased. The band give a fantastic performance made pleasingly odd by the Helmet Cams so that by the last section my heart was soaring as we watched it back. What a band! What a song! Crank it up. I hope you like it.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
On Friday morning Garth and I finished tweaking the Jigsaw video and put together the Faust Arp footage then began to think of what was next. Garth had an idea about using the climactic scene from David Fincher’s Seven for something. Although to me it seemed quite well trodden territory (we did our own version for The Adam & Joe Show years ago) the idea of incorporating Thom somehow was too tempting to pass up so Garth found a box and went off to pitch to Yorkles. A few minutes later I found Thom sat on the sofa in the main studio with Garth facing him on a chair with the box between them. It looked like a doctor’s surgery where the patient has just been told he’s going to have to have his leg amputated. Thom took a deep breath and said “come on then, let’s do it.” Once his head was in the box Thom said “hang on, this is familiar. It’s No Surprises all over again!” We gave him a little slap and stuffed some packing foam in his mouth to show him who was boss and he was fine after that.
Everyone seemed to like the finished item although Thom was worried that there would be copyright infringement trouble. Garth and I reassured him that as it was a non profit exercise it shouldn’t be a problem unless anyone at the film company was feeling particularly humourless. You’re not though, are you chaps?
The rest of the day was a scramble to get things finished and transfer bits to various computers for the webcast. It was deeply impressive to see everybody getting this thing together themselves without any help from so called professionals other than the guy sat outside in the satellite truck. Nigel and his two man team sat in his little control room surrounded by old vision mixers he’d bought off E-Bay and various laptops and put together a three hour live show that was slicker (in a good, home made way) than it had any right to be. In the end the last 20 minutes of the thing went out with no audio thanks to a problem with the satellite link, but as far as I could tell there was still an amazing amount of wonderful stuff in those three hours, including about 5 live performances from the band in addition to pre recorded pieces that I would certainly have been delighted with had I been watching at home. At one point I even found myself doing a scrappy link with Thom, which may have made for some pretty awkward viewing (see below) but was certainly one of my prouder presenting moments! What other band would work so hard to do something like that for their fans though? Maybe Jimmy The Hoover and Living In A Box in their heyday but very few since.
As if all that wasn’t enough we had been visited earlier in the day by David Byrne who was conducting an interview with Thom for Wired magazine. When they had finished David came up to the control room and watched the Helmet Cam video. I was stood next to him as he chuckled away at the sight of them all being so serious in the silver helmets. “What a great performance!” he said. “And you can crop the helmets later, right?” I had to spend the next couple of minutes explaining to David and Thom why I thought we should keep the helmets in vision. Good times. Byrne is completely white haired now and very dapper indeed. Apart from Bowie I loved David Byrne in a kind of romantic way more than anyone when I was growing up so the old gay Byrne fancier in me was delighted to find him looking so good. I’m sure he’d be pleased to hear that. He’s so great though. No wonder Radiohead took their name from one of his songs, even if it was one of the unlikliest and least representative in the Talking Heads cannon (I have a soft spot for it nonetheless). If you’re a fan, you should really check out The Catherine Wheel (almost a lost Talking Heads album) and The Knee Plays which has just been re-released. It’s grade A art pop that’s great to listen to while you’re making art. Details of all those can be found on Byrne’s well maintained website here where you’ll find all kinds of treats including this wonderful clip of a NY City bike ride with commentary from David. For a cycle nerd and Byrne obsessive it doesn’t get much better.
ADDENDUM
Here’s how the Wired piece turned out.
What a couple of days though! I do hope it won’t be the last of my Radiohead dalliances. Cheery Ho.