I’m hosting the irreverent TV pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks tonight at 10pm on BBC2. It’s my third time on the show. Last time Simon Amstell was hosting and I had fun (read about the fun here). The first time I went on Mark Lamarr was hosting and I had none (read about the none fun here)

Hosting is altogether more enjoyable. The producer and writers were great and keen to make me feel at home by incorporating whatever ideas I had for the show and Phil & Noel were welcoming as heck. I approached it as if I were getting ready for a show with Joe on 6 Music. First I made some jingles for the rounds. I haven’t seen the finished show yet so I have no idea how many of these they will use or how odd they will look. Look out for a reworking of my BIG MIX TAPE THEME in the jingle for the Intros Round (if they use it). I also customized the video for my Moby Song (that you may have seen if you’ve been to a Best Of BUG show recently) for use in the event of a tie break and I brought in a few You Tube comments to use for the final round, which worked nicely.

The taping itself went fine although my nerves prevented me from interacting with the guests, Margaret Cho, Reggie Yates, Beverly Knight and Dynamo in any meaningful way and my delivery of some of the scripted jokes was so rotten that the audience went silent and appeared to have been instantly killed on a few occasions. Thing is, I’m not too good at telling jokes, especially of the ‘Pete Townshend is a pervert’ Mock The Week variety. So anyway, let’s hope they keep all those bits in and make me look really shit and unfunny.

I also brought in a video of me, Joe and Louis Theroux dancing around to Deee Lite in my Clapham flat one fun filled Friday night circa 1990. Joe and Lou were very nice about signing release forms so the video could be used on the show but in the end I heard it didn’t make the cut because there was just too much other good stuff to cram in (Pete Townshend jokes etc.) I think Joe and Lou borrowed the baseball caps from me. I had lots, as well as a hairstyle that required an entire tube of fixing gel every other day and could be used to fry eggs and chop veg. I still have that lumberjack shirt/jacket thing. I had it all going on in those days. We wanted to put this on The Adam & Joe DVD back in 2004 but we couldn’t clear the music so fingers crossed I don’t get penalized for sticking it up on You Tube. Hope you enjoy Never Mind The Buzzcocks!

ADDENDUM Seen the show now. Here’s the final jingle that got talked over by the continuity guy at the end on the terrestrial broadcast.

NEVER MIND THE BUZZCOCKS -- END OF SHOW JUNGLE JINGLE

I’M ON TWITTER AGAIN! @AdamRealBuxton

Let’s see how long I last this time. I can’t help feeling that Twitter just isn’t a medium to which I’m well suited, but someone told me I should get back on it after a BUG show in Liverpool last week and because I do everything that strangers tell me to do, I did. I’m hoping it might be useful for letting people know about upcoming shows in a pithy way and posting a few more links to bits and pieces that I’m enjoying, which I don’t really do often enough on this blog. I hope I’ll get some good recommendations back from ‘followers’ too. Glad that they’re known as ‘followers’. Makes me feel like Jesus! Ha ha ha! I should tweet that! That’s gold!

I love you bye bye bye.

Hadem Barkstone

To run a successful blog that people keep coming back to you should post frequently and resist the temptation to post too much. The same could be said of most creative endeavours. So, is my refusal to follow that advice some kind of strategy? Yes, that’s exactly what it is. A strategy. I like long pauses followed by a torrent of content when the levee breaks. I should have posted a few weeks back when Adam & Joe’s Song Wars Volume 2 was released but I was in the middle of things with my Ken Korda project (thanks to those of you who helped out BTW). Now I’m in bed, dosed up to the tits with ill pills, necking cough syrup like L’il Wayne and generally cashing in my ill chips.

Yesterday was grim. I was shaking, groaning and coughing til I expected to see blood spraying the duvet (that’s a nice festive image isn’t it?) but there are also periods of fluey remission when it’s quite fun to be just tooling about in bed and not having to do any other chores. Last night with feverish focus I watched Francois Truffaut’s 1959 film The 400 Blows for the first time. It was either that or The Last Airbender.

400 Blows is good! It’s about a Parisian boy rebelling against crappy parents and teachers. There are many memorable moments but the one that really got its hooks in was a scene in the second half where dozens of children aged between about 4 and 7 are watching a puppet show. Every shot is filled with these little rapt faces all concentrating on the show, each one so expressive and filled with personality they could star in a film themselves. It was a little like watching my boys watching Harry Hill’s TV Burp. They can’t possibly understand all the jokes but they roll about, literally holding their sides with joy.

After my edifying dose of Truffaut I finished listening to Frank Skinner’s account of returning to stand up after his TV years. Like many comedians he’s a mix of self effacing, conceited and solipsistic but unlike many comedians he gets the balance pretty much exactly right throughout, even in a bizarre and pornographic recollection of a banana based casual sex encounter. I even found myself laughing at a joke about football. Speaking to Frank about his Roman Catholic faith David Baddiel asks if it bothers him that most other religious people seem to be stupid or mad or both. Skinner asks him if he feels that way at Chelsea matches. Now I’m downloading Alexei Sayle’s autobiography. Then I’ll watch The Last Airbender. Incidentally I’d like to take this opportunity to say I’ve finally got the point of the I-Pad. My wife got me one for my birthday last year and if you’re ill, or otherwise at leisure, it’s your best friend.

It was the fun aspect of non life threatening illness that inspired my Flu Song.

FLU SONG

It’s one of the ones I did for Song Wars when Joe was away for Glastonbury 2009 and Garth Jennings sat in. Garth beat me with a song about Hay Fever which I accept sounds superficially more appealing, but my flu song deserves serious analysis nevertheless. So you can imagine my delight when I came across this review on line:

Buxton’s clever and tuneful journey through the highs and lows of a bout of flu is an unfairly overlooked gem. The plummy, nasal vocal recalls Syd Barrett and perfectly compliments the woozy psychedelic feel of the guitar part, which drenched in a pleasing tremolo was played by Buxton himself and suggests a considerable talent that begs further exploration. Lyrically The Flu Song is certainly one of his strongest. The nod to You’re The One That I Want’s “I’ve got chills” is just one of many inspired moments like the observation that, for a heterosexual man of limited intelligence, an attractive woman with flu seems somehow less contagious than anyone else. There’s useful information too in the section about chewing vitamin C tablets only to find ones bowels distressingly loosened thereafter. All in all it’s hard to understand why this wasn’t included on the recent Song Wars Volume 2 album. Next time you have flu make sure this is the song playing in a fevered loop in your mind!

OK. I wrote that. But it’s all true. The reason it wasn’t included on the album was that we thought we should stick to competition entries between Joe and myself though my brilliant Bob Dylan’s DVD Box Set song appears as does Joe’s unaccountably popular Retro Text The Nation jingle. So, the album…

ADAM & JOE’S SONG WARS VOLUME 2

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT HERE OR SEND OFF FOR THE ADORABLE PHYSICAL VERSION HERE

SONG WARS FACTONS

• The release came about thanks to Dreamboat records. They pointed out to us that very little of Adam & Joe exists in the physical world and it would be nice to create a treasurable CD/vinyl object with which to dignify our musical efforts as much as possible.

• In that spirit I lavished both time and care on the artwork which features an inner montage packed with details to pore over and fathom for years. I was a little disappointed to see someone’s already ripped the cover off though.

• For a while we were considering a different design. How exciting for you to see it here!

• We didn’t go ahead with it because some ponces ripped that one off too.

• We decided not include every song we’d done since Song Wars Volume 1 for reasons of space and decency. Instead we chose our favourites.

• On the whole the critics have been fulsome in their praise and many consider Song Wars Volume 2 one of the best albums of this or any other year. However there have been one or two troubling comments that I’d like to address.

Some people seem think I thrashed out songs like Bob Dylan’s DVD Box Set and Bums & Binge Drinking (Kate Nash Song) in ‘a giggling 10-minute rush of post liquid lunching’ implying a kind of dissolute, freewheeling disregard for songcraft that I for one refuse to accept. Can’t speak for Cornballs but as far as I know he’s not much of a lunchtime drinker. Bums & Binge Drinking was carefully constructed from pure scratch and was a considerable investment of both time and emotional energy. DVD Box Set didn’t take quite so long, created as it was over a pre existing backing track, but now a whole year after that momentous recording session, I sing that song to myself quite often and find it to be excellent. To see someone saying that my Zimmerman ‘bears absolutely no resemblance to Bob Dylan’ is hurtful and maddening. The impression is of the Bob Dylan who sings on last year’s Christmas album and it is both accurate and moving, as Bob himself would readily attest if he were given the opportunity. But no, certain so called journalists just don’t want to go the extra distance do they?

• The album is divided into an A side (with my songs on) and a J side (with Joe’s songs on). This is great on the vinyl but a bit weird on the CD. I guess no one listens to CDs in order any more though, do they?

• When I play the album I like to add more treble and turn up the volume. No disrespect to Ali Chant who mastered the thing, that’s the just the way my ears groove.

• The album has parental guidance stickers and the word EXPLICIT all over it because of the word ‘shit’ that I left unbleeped in Nutty Room. I honestly didn’t think ‘shit’ was considered explicit any more. I guess I wouldn’t say it on the radio or in front of my children. I might say it in front of your children though.

• Song Wars Volume 2 was number 1 in the i-tunes comedy charts for a while. I’m well aware that this mainly serves to highlight the craziness of the i-tunes chart system, but I’m still very happy to enjoy my formal status as a number 1 artist (or to put it another way an artist adept at doing number 1s. A piss artist?)

That’s it for now.

6 MUSIC

The question people keep asking is of course, ‘when are you both back on the radio?’ We’ve done a pre-recorded Christmas day show, which will go out from 10am to 1pm on the big day and that was fun but both of us were well aware that it’s not the same. The regular live show is the important thing and we both want to do more, it’s just a question of when we can find a few months to have another decent run.

Until then, time and 6 Music permitting, I may well do some more Big Mix Tape shows or perhaps something live again, either on my own or with someone else. I’ll let you know if and when things materialise on any of these fronts.

I did an I-TUNES PLAYLIST recently that features a lot of the songs I played on Big Mix Tape shows as well as few more recent purchases. For a while my photo sat next to the members of Take That and gratifyingly, it seemed as though we’d been at the same photo session.

Do leave a comment and the same goes for the Song Wars album too, whether you’re on Amazon or wherever, it’s always nice to see lively debate raging below if not blanket praise!

I’ll try to post in a few days with details of the on-line version of BUG we recently put together but for the time being…

love Adam

Thanks to talented illustrator Angela Rozelaar whose work this is. I want to be clear that I don’t think Lenny Henry is horrid though. I’m not a Lennybasher but this was too good not to include in what I now think might be a series that may make an incredible book. Or at least a book that isn’t significantly shitter than a lot of the unbelievably shit books cluttering up the shelves this Christmas. Here’s a not shit book that a lot of my friends and family are getting from me this year. If you’re reading this Dave, pretend to be surprised when you get it, will you? And here’s one to read on the lavvy from a great podcast that makes me miss doing one. A podcast, that is, not a tod.

love Adam, 26th November, 2010

I’ve had this art & design blog bookmarked for a while but here’s a nudge in case you haven’t had a look yet. There’s always something interesting and pleasing there and twice a year the blog takes on book/mag form so you can enjoy it in the bath without getting electrocuted (though of course bath based reading is not recommended for healthy paginal maintenance). I had the honour of being asked to write the introductory It’s Nice That page for the 4th issue which is on sale now so have a buy why not? To put it another way, have a whynotbuy?

CHILDREN’S BOOK COMEDIANS NO. 2!

Thanks to my You Tube pal CyberRuby for ensuring the second part of what I assumed was going to be a series of 1 with her suggestion for this comedian in a children’s book. Any more suggestions or links to illustration welcome (you can post them in the comments section of my You Tube channel if you like).

Enjoy the miserable weather with me!

Dr Buckles

I suspect that’s the end of the Celebrity Children’s Book Comedians series. What a series though!

First of all, apologies for, as usual being about 18 months late to the party. I’ve been doing something incredibly important but I can’t think what. Anyway, swinging from vine to vine one afternoon on You Tube recently I came across the video of Billy Bob Thornton having a difficult interview alongside his band The Boxmasters (they’ve mastered boxes!) last year.

I can’t account for how I failed to receive the memo on this one, but having watched it about 400 times now and having obsessed about it in every waking moment for nearly a week, I must say my sympathies are firmly with Billy Bob. I think trying to punish the DJ for mentioning your distinguished acting career in the intro, by behaving like a monged out petulant teen was exactly the right call. It’s infuriating when you want stupid people to do exactly what you want, even if it makes no sense at all, and those stupid people let you down. Those bloody people are stupid bastards! Don’t they realise it’s difficult when you’re an Oscar winning actor who has an amazing band called The Boxmasters (they are the masters of boxes!) and the other guys in the band are incredibly dull and no one really wants to talk to them as much as the celebrated film genius who once feasted on Angelina Jolie’s fluids at every meal? OK, so the DJ did actually talk to the other guys and yes, Billy Bob’s main career was mentioned only by way of introduction after which every attempted question was about music but STILL! It wasn’t EXACTLY what Billy wanted and THAT’S UNACCEPTAFUCKINGBLE!

Here Billy Bob explains his frustration further to US talk show host Jim’ll Kimmel. Bloody ‘hump back geeks’ on their shitting PC’s! Don’t they have anything better to do than hurl abuse at Billy Bob in a rare display of touching unanimity, simply because he stood up to a horrid bullying DJ? Kim’ll agrees wholeheartedly; if muggles suddenly start trying to have normal conversations with famous people that haven’t been agreed in their entirety with the PR people beforehand, the whole fabric of the entertainment industry’s knickers will suddenly be covered with excrement. Is that really how you want to thank multi talented Billy Bob for allowing you to enjoy his terrific band The Boxmasters (they will not be dominated by boxes!)? Well fuck you then.

To help you calm down, here’s the second instalment of inspiring country based insight from Monty Buggershop-Hooty.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZH5GFe8Gmk

I’ve been back from New York a few days and I’m still claiming jet-lag as my excuse for rising unusually late. Think my luck will run out if I try it tomorrow though.

The rest of my time in Tall Town (only tourists call it The Big Apple) was a total hoot. The Saturday night following BUG I had a 50 minute show of my own offal booked at a venue called The Creek & The Cavern.

This was the furthest out of town of all the gigs I did and I got there at 8pm, an hour before I was due to go on to plug my laptop into the projector and make sure it was all working (one of the drawbacks of being more of a sit-down, A/V comedian than a proper stand-up). When everything was sorted I went to the bar to get a drink and struck up a conversation with Mike and his friend Sally, from Manchester and Newcastle respectively, who had moved out to New York last year. They’d seen my previous blog post and decided to come along. We talked about music and Mike told me he had a friend serving in the current line up of The Fall which was cool, though I believe most young men from the north end up in the Fall at some point.

I looked at my watch and it was 10 past 9! I was supposed to be on at 9 and wondered why no one had come to get me. I rushed upstairs to the 60 seat black box theatre. Every seat was full…with none people. I’d realised this was going to be a possibility but had blocked the notion hitherto. I only considered buggering off for a second before, feeling a tad loserish I went to the bar to fetch Mike and Sally and escorted them to their seats whereupon I performed my show for them. I’ve had worse gigs. At least everyone there (all 4 people if you count the venue owner and the tech) seemed to dig it, though admittedly it would have been hard for them to do anything other than appear to be enjoying themselves unless they really wanted to stick the knife in.

Below is a pic of me with Mike & Sally in the bar afterwards. As this was being taken I was thinking ‘surely this is the apex of my reverse career; doing a gig for two people then asking them if they’ll pose for a photo with you afterwards’. Thank goodness for Mike and Sally, who for the time being kept my ignominy from totalosity.

On Sunday night I was booked for another 50 minute showcase at The Luca Lounge over in the East Village. After checking my laptop hooked up OK at the Lounge I got a taxi to the Bronx for a quick 10 minutes at The Union Hall. It was a packed room of attractive hipsters there to see the wonderful Kurt Braunohler and friends (though apparently it’s usually hosted by the equally wonderful Eugene Mirman). This seemed like a great night with a very warm and responsive audience who forgave my nerves and made me feel completely welcome. Feeling jazzed and relieved to have performed in front of more than two people and gotten laughs I got a taxi back to the Luca Lounge just as they were letting people in for the show.

There were several Brits there including a regular poster from The Adam & Joe Blog who contributed the title of my 12th Big Mix Tape (2010: A Tape Odyssey). So satisfying to put a face to people like this, and in such an unlikely setting! At this point I should say a long overdue thank you to Auntie Nubbins and the Adam & Joe fansite who do an amazing job of keeping interested parties abreast of news relating to both Joe and myself out of pure demented sweetness. It was their tweets and posts that got a good few members of my audience along that night (as well as the Hot Fuzz reference on the board outside of course). Thanks chaps!

Host for the night was the thoroughly amiable Sean Crespo who warmed up a good full room for very funny, hot new thing Jessie Klein. By the time I took the tiny stage I was battling with jet laggy tiredness and, as always with my longer sets, I was feeling odd just showing videos a lot of the time, but that was the object of the exercise: to hopefully introduce a few people to stuff they wouldn’t otherwise have seen with tooling about in between. Also if you’re someone like me it’s probably not a good idea to watch an extremely moving and inspiring documentary about a real stand up before getting up and doing your ridiculous thing. I’m sure Bill would have loved it though…

On Monday night I did another 10 minutes at the legendary Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre alongside some intimidatingly funny comedians (my favourite was John Mulaney) and delightfully, Simon Amstell who was in town for several shows of his highly intelligent and chucklesome introspection at the UCB. I love Simon. He helped turn Never Mind The Buzzcocks from a stinking, bile filled decomposing corpse of a show into a fragrant, witty, bile filled, more attractive corpse that always made me laugh when I stumbled across it. Thought his sitcom Grandma’s House was excellent too. He’s one of those people who’s in for the long haul and will just keep getting better.

The UCB gig was the most nerve wracking for me but it was a peach and a great way to end my trip. There’s something inexplicably thrilling about finding that people in another country get what you do and enjoy it. It’s hardly the beginning of some kind of campaign to ‘crack’ America but it’s very heartening nonetheless and I look forward to returning before too long.

See ya heckface! (my last traditional New York sing off)

Love Adam 16th October, 2010

Hey hey hey hey hey heyyyy! Hay? How are you? I’m alright. I’ve got a new video for you but first, some random recommendations.

I finally got round to seeing Four Lions the other night and it blew me away, literally! Ha ha. Why didn’t they get me to write it? For some reason part of me expected to feel the same way about this film as these confused Aussies. Instead I laughed right the way through as well as finding myself increasingly moved as it progressed. A brief scene in a hospital where the protagonist has to say a coded goodbye to his wife in front of a couple of police officers is making my throat hurt just thinking about it. The two leads Riz Ahmed and Fonejacker, Kayvan Novak are so amazingly likeable and convincing that the tricky business of achieving the right tone with this kind of subject matter is dealt with in the first few scenes and isn’t a problem thereafter, not for me at any rate. Good DVD extras too.

Also making me chuckle the last few days (and another party I’m late arriving at) is the Twitter feed of Fitty Cent. If he really writes these, and we’re lead to believe he really does, then he’s a kind of comedy genius and the rapping is a waste of his talents.

As far as my own ludicrous efforts go, apart form the usual array of potentially exciting projects that will almost certainly see me being crowned king of the world by the end of next year, I’ve been doing some videos for the BBC’s comedy website with me titting about in nature. The first is below and was shot during a camping expedition to Dartmoor with some pals including Garth Jennings. They should arrive with jarring regularity every few weeks now so you’d better get used to it.

If the march of my greying hair continues at its current zip, by the time I’ve finished making these (at the moment I’m signed up for 12 in all) I will be as white as Pip Schofield’s snowy peak. Now and then I catch myself imagining that in a while the white hairs in my beard will simply recede and my lower face will fade back to black, but then I remember, this is a one way trip isn’t it? A trick I could play on age would be to shave my beard off, but then I’d be confronted by the expanse of middle aged flesh beneath. Oh! The huge vanity! Anyway, I like having a beard. I’m pretty sure it forces people to respect me (though it didn’t work on the guy at BUG the other day whomst I overheard calling after his friend as he approached me for a picture “oh, are you off to get bummed by Adam Buxton?” Kids eh? Jeezuz!) Hope you like Country Man!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMEfT3Ej0Zo

Who owned the footage of Lily Allen, Dizzee etc that I used for the Christmas Messages video I posted yesterday and were upset that it had been used without their permission which is why the video has been taken off You Tube. I wish to say that I acted alone in the creation of the Celebrity Messages and no else needs to be executed. Please let me just have Christmas with my family and then you can do what you need to do.

Yours very, very sorry.

Adam

It’s over halfway through the series and I’m digging it so much. It’s on BBC2 on Monday nights at 10pm in case you haven’t caught it yet. Quite apart from the fact that it’s very satisfying to have a comedy show this intelligent being commissioned ‘these days’ (he says sounding like an old fartprick) it’s properly funny stuff. Even the bits that don’t make me laugh are so artfully done I’m happy to wait for the next very funny/brilliant bit, of which there are many. The riff on nostalgic memories of Woolworth’s, MFI and Zavvi this week was a peach. My wife, who normally has low tolerance for TV comedy said “he’s very dishy isn’t he?”. Yes he is, I thought, which I guess makes me a kind of groupie.

So it was exciting for me to contribute to the show, kind of. OK, I contributed to the first of the red button interviews that Armando Iannucci did with Stewart that you can see after the show goes out each week. I was excited to be involved even though I don’t imagine Stewart even knew I was. Can you spot my input? Is it sleazy to want you to spot my input? Sorry if so.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbekcRE30Iw