Hey ha! What is up? I just got back from 5 sold out nights of BUGging at the Edinburgh Festival! Thanks to all of you who came and those of you who said hi after the show. Nice to meet you. The only slightly awkward moment was when a very nice lady tried to pat my leg while we were having a photo taken but accidentally patted my joolies because she forgot how short I am. At least I think it was an accident. Hey, there’s worse accidents, right?

For those of you who may not know, BUG is a show I host every couple of months at the BFI Southbank featuring a selection of top notch recently produced music videos as well as a few of my own contributions in the form of songs, ludicrous videos and the reading of You Tube comments. The Edinburgh shows (like most of the one off shows we do outside the BFI) consisted of some of my favourite videos from the last few BFI BUGs and more of my own bits than we’d normally have at a regular show.

If you haven’t been able to catch our recent Best Of BUG shows in Edinburgh and Bristol then there are more opportunities for you to do so coming up.

QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL, 4th September

This weekend I’ll be at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the Southbank Centre on Sunday 4th September at 7.30pm as part of the Vision Sound Music Festival, the UK’s first festival of Music for Visuals. You can book tickets here.

KING’S PLACE FESTIVAL, 9th September

Then I’m doing a shorter version of the Best Of show at the King’s Place Festival on Friday 9th September at 8.30pm. If over 90 minutes of BUG seems a little excessive, (though why anyone would think that is beyond me) then maybe this is the show for you, plus it’s cheaper too! Book tickets here

GREENWICH COMEDY FESTIVAL, 10th September

Then we’re back with the full Best Of BUG show at the Greenwich Festival on Saturday 10th September at 3pm. Get yo tickles here

Can’t wait to see you.

RACIST VIDEO NEWS!

Here’s a video that relies heavily on outdated national stereotypes. I’ve road tested it on living mates from Australia and so far, no beat ups, but it is most certainly retrograde, reductive and cheap so I might steer clear of my local Walkabout for a little while.

Did I mention that I’m very fond of you?

Goodbyeeee!

Dr A Buxstein

Hey you! The blogsteady crew!

We’re taking BUG to the Edinburgh Fringe this year! We won’t be doing the whole 4 weeks because I’m no longer young/determined to be on TV/insane, but I’ll be there for the last 5 nights from 25th – 29th August at The Pleasance (10.30pm each night).

The shows should be around 90 minutes and will consist of my favourite music videos from this year’s London BUG shows as well as You Tube comments and a few of my own music and video bits and pieces, some of which would be familiar to people who have seen me doing non BUG live stuff recently. It’ll be more or less the same programme each night though the fun of doing a little run like this is shuffling things about and introducing new nuggets here and there from show to show. I’m a nugget shuffler.

I’m looking forward to being back in Edinburgh hugely. In many ways I feel I am Scottish. Half English, a third Australian and half Scottish. So I hope you’ll come and join me for what promises to be a very moving half-homecoming. Altogether now: “Och, Mr Henderson! You’re horting ma totties!”

Book tickets for EDINBURGH BUG HERE

Here’s a couple of old Adam & Joe directed music vids to get you in the mood. That’s my Dad (BaaadDad) in the Frank Black vid and the promos we spoofed in the Gorky’s vid were Addicted To Love, Bittersweet Symphony, Song Two, Firestarter and No Surprises. Though I have no doubt in my miniature mind that Frank & the Gorks would be happy for me to post these (they were the official promos in both cases), it’s a little nerve wracking to post anything with commercially available music in it nowadays. I feel as if You Tube is just waiting for me to put a foot sufficiently wrong and my channel will just vanish in a puff of fartsmoke one morning. I know I could just not post anything that was problematic, and indeed I have been holding back a few things that I think would increase the hotness of the rights water too extremely but really, can’t a guy have some fun with the music he loves after all the money the guy has spent and continues to spend on this shit? Especially as we have to watch ads in front of an awful lot of You Tube content now. (In Australian accent) Come on mate! Ease off! Yeah? Mate!? Daphne?

Here’s something that the BUG team filmed at BUG 24, The Directors Cut on March 25th 2011 at the BFI. It was a good night despite the fact that I was in the grip of a full blown cold/chesticle infection as you may be able to tell from my voice and somewhat gruesome appearance. Also there’s the bowler hat. I’ve convinced myself this is a good look for me having worn it for our Song Wars Volume 2 photoshoot, but I was also wearing it at BUG because we were showing Garth Jennings’s Radiohead vid that night. It makes me look like a hairy Oddjob here.

The You Tube comment reading at BUG and my own shows is something I’ve been doing for around 3 years now. There’s a few videos of me doing it as part of the BUG playlist (here’s me reading out comments for Enter The Ninja by Die Antwoord) but I think this one gets closer to making it work for You Tube itself. I would still like to try an audience free version commenting on newer videos, more in the style of one of You Tube’s in no way irritating fast-cut behemoths but that may have to wait til I’ve got too much times on my hands again.

To get the most from this video you need to have seen Dennis Liu’s Apple Mac Music Video first. We showed it at BUG when it came out back in 2008 and it was one of the first that I read out comments for. A reminder that these are real comments. If you’re insane you can go and find them for yourself. Don’t hassle the commentators though. That’s how wars start. Hope you enjoy it and do leave your own comments on You Tube or right here on my new look blog, which I believe allows you to sound off beneath posts now. OK, I’m off to write a song for Kate and Wills.

Love Adam

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx-WBaSNrTQ

6 MUSIC

Since my last post Joe and I announced that we’re starting a 12 week run of shows on 6 Music from Saturday 2nd April (2011) in our usual slot (10am – 1pm). I’m mainly nervous that the chest infection I’ve had for the last few weeks (the stubborn legacy of my Christmas stint of illin’) will mean that every time I laugh listeners will be treated to a wheez that sounds like a tramp trying to start a car that he and his tramp friends have just hauled from a pond. The doc (not Dr Sexy sadly) gave me some Amoxycillin yesterday so I’m sure that’ll clear it right up in no time (is my pro-biotic sarcasm dripping through OK?) Even if it halts the wheezing by the time I’m back on the radio there may be evidence of lightheadedness, insomnia, confusion, anxiety, sensitivity to lights and sounds, and unclear thinking. A normal show in other words! Ha ha ha. You thought those were side effects caused by the Amoxycillin but it turned out that’s what I’m always like! You fell for it!!

Speaking of the show, the big news is that we are in the process of completely reinventing the entire programme. There’ll be 10 guests every hour, all of them plugging their new book/CD/TV show/film/charity exercise/unhinged philosophy, and every interview we conduct with them will leave you confused and depressed. In between interviews there’ll be a lot of music by Bruno Mars who is also providing us with new jingles and a new theme song. Features like Text The Nation and Made Up Jokes are to be replaced with new interactive features like Where You Callin’? wherein people tell us where they are calling from then hang up, and Weather Whot, which gives callers an opportunity to tell us very briefly about the weather where they are (I thought of this and I think it’s a good one).

We’ll also have a fuck of a lot of stuff about Charlie Sheen. There’ll be regular ‘Sheenews’ updates, ‘Winning!’ mashups and Charlie jingles along with a lot of Sheen based humour and banter. Joe wasn’t really up for this stuff but I forced it through and I think it’s a winner because everyone is focused on Charlie right now and you need to give people what they want, even if they don’t realise they want it or don’t need it or even if they actively resist it.

Needless to say I can’t wait to be back. I’ve missed doing the show a lot. On a serious note (not that the other stuff about all our new features wasn’t serious of course) Joe and I are both heavily indebted to Andrew Collins and Richard Herring who stepped in for us all those months ago then ended up making our lovely warm slot their own despite not really knowing how temporary or not the arrangement was, quite an enervating position to be in I’ll warrant. I don’t imagine for a second our 3 month return spells the end of the line on 6 for them, but anyway, wanted to say thanks.

In the meantime, you can help us with our first show back by getting in touch with any personal anecdotes you may have accrued in the last 15 months(!) since we’ve been away. I know that’s a bit vague but if your message is sufficiently interesting we will almost certainly fit it in to a special edition of ‘Anecdotties’ between the Charlie Sheen stuff and whichever Bruno Mars songs we’re playing.

E-mail your enjoyable anecdotes to adamandjoe.6music@bbc.co.uk (not ‘Adam&Joe’ as a hairy moron put in a blog post recently) and please use the subject header ANECDOTTIES!

COUNTRY MAN 3!

Here’s the latest episode of fun fieldism from Monty BH. There should be another along next month. Thanks to Jamie Johnson who helped me shoot the bits where the camera is moving.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNSgIMQ0L2s

IN YOUR FACE!

I did this when 6 Music was saved last year but really it’s a timeless piece of music suitable for any victory celebration, as long as you’re happy to celebrate like a tool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNSgIMQ0L2s

Til next we do meet, keep your room nice and neat.

Love A Buxtn

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

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

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…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCgfLSuf2O8

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2-V-1sivA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCgfLSuf2O8

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

The BUG shaped part of my life seems to be getting busier, which I’m all up for as it’s still my favourite live assignation. In the last few weeks we had a pair of shows in Norwich then Leicester, all of which seemed to go down pretty well and I had a good time meeting some of the audience after the shows, some of whom gave me some great tips for videos and internet weirdness that we’ll certainly include in forthcoming BUG nights. And only one person gave me a hard time about The Persuasionists!

One of the videos I made for BUG was an analysis of a Joss Stone video that has been doing the rounds online for a while. This is something I thought might be a good strand, not only for the live shows but for a possible TV/internet version of BUG that I’m putting together in pilot form over the next few weeks. I’ve always wanted to do some kind of music show (I wrote about past attempts here) and maybe some form of BUG hybrid is the way to go.

We’ll see, but for the time being, here’s Ken. Oh, and if you have any suggestions for other videos that would benefit from Ken’s analytical skills, do leave a link on my You Tube channel comments section. I love you byeeee!

Download the single of Baby Baby Baby here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-q1MtKmMew

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tRXpkYLSIc