December 30, 2009
CALIFORNIA COMPETITION NEWS!
CALIFORNIA COMPETITION NEWS!
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO ON A LUXURY TRIP TO CALIFORNIA AND APPEAR IN THEIR TV AD?
If the answer is ‘no’, this isn’t the post for you. If it’s ‘yes’ then BONGO PARTY! I’ve been hired by the Californian Tourist Board to tell people about this competition they’re running so I hope you’ll forgive me if I slip queasily into advertising mode for a while. Yes, I’m being paid but I really think the prize is pretty amazing and I get the feeling it might not be too hard to win if you’re up for filming yourself being charming in an audition video.
Enter the competition and find out more details HERE
Basically they want someone to appear briefly in the Visit California TV ad, you know the one with Rob Lowe looking soulfully out to sea, David Beckham kicking balls on the beach and Arnold Schwarzenegger having a romantic meal, completely free of guns and explosions, with his lovely wife on a terrace somewhere. Here it is here…
I imagine it’s been your dream to appear in one of these ads for almost as long as you can remember. Well now that dream is one step closer to coming true. Even if there’s something wrong with you and you have never dreamt of appearing in a TV ad extolling the virtues of the Golden State, you might be up for the rest of the prize which includes a first class round trip to LA, luxury accommodation, spending money and over the top sounding activities for a week. Here’s a video I’ve made outlining the prize and explaining what you have to do to enter in a bit more detail.
Go on, have a go! Your audition tape has got to be better than some of the stuff they’ve had through so far! Oh lordy. I’ll be posting a few more related vids over the next few weeks to keep the competition pot bubbling. Good luck and a very happy nude year to you!
December 25, 2009
QUEEN’S SPEECH NEWS!
LORRA LORRA HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
As promised on our radio show, here’s the Queen’s Speech for you with her Maj looking uncannily like Noel Edmonds, in other words about as seasonally correct as it’s possible to be. OK, I’d better get back to my family and pretend I’ve been doing something other than uploading stupid videos during the Big Jesus Party! I hope you’re having a good day, whoever and wherever you are.
Love Adam
Christmas Day 2009
December 17, 2009
STEREOPHONICS NEWS!
WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?
The big music news story of 2009 was of course the release of the 7th album by one of Britain’s best loved bands, The Stereophonics. The title of their new album Keep Calm and Carry On is taken from a never used World War 2 poster but they’ve given it contemporary twist by photoshopping themselves into a scenario that sees them eating a café style breakfast on a beach which is the kind of zany and surreal unpredictability you’d expect from the Phonicles.
Anyway, they seem to have gone into a post-prandial trance, which has made them indifferent to the fact they’re being overwhelmed by the incoming tide. Now, I don’t know if you know but the world is currently under threat from climate change which was started by Al Gore a few years back so it’s possible that this image is some kind of comment on the human race’s collective folly in ignoring it (Copenhagen? Come on guys!), or it might just be an amusing pic of a band that ran out of luck while eating too close to the sea one day. Who can tell what they were thinking? Well now you have the opportunity to find out:
December 16, 2009
BUG 17 NEWS!
TICKETS ON SALE FOR LONDON & NORWICH 2010 SHOWS NOW!
The box office is open for BUG 17 on Thursday January 21st at 8.45pm and BUG 17, the Directors Cut (same show minus director interview but with other nuggets) on Thursday January 28th, 8.45pm both at London’s BFI Southbank.
Book tickets for BUG 17 @ BFI Southbank HERE
I’m also doing another couple of nights at the wonderful Playhouse in Norwich on Wednesday February 3rd and Thursday February 4th, both starting at 8pm.
Book tickets for Norwich BUG 3 @ Playhouse HERE
As usual I’ll be showing a recent selection of interesting, unusual and outstanding music videos interspersed with bits of weird shite we’ve found on the internet, a few YouTube comments and delicious but unhealthy waffle from myself. Visit the new improved BUG website to see some of the music vids we’ve shown in previous shows. I’d love to see you there!
Love Adam, 16-12-09
July 16, 2009
NUTTY ROOM NEWS!
LOOK AT THE JARS! LOOK AT THE JARS!!
Hello friends! It’s been so long. So much has happened. I’m so sorry. We only just finished shooting the BBC2 sitcom I’m acting in last Friday and I haven’t had a free blog shaped minute for ages. In between the sitcom and the radio show I’ve also been making a few short videos for the BBC’s wonderful relaunched comedy website which I heartily recommend you visit and bookmark forthwith.
As well as my Nutty Room video, which you can see below, there’s also a thing I did for Eurovision a few months back which is exclusive to that site for the time being.
I’ve also finished a video for a drum’n’bass/pirate radio song about the film Ratatouille which should be up there before too long so keep an eye out (though if you are coming to/were at BUG at Latitude you’ll have seen it), but for now, here’s Nutty Room and beneath it some info about its creation.
The song was created as part of Song Wars, the competitive song-writing feature our 6 Music show in which Joe and I write songs on a given subject and our listeners vote for which one they like best. The theme of that week’s battle was ‘scary songs’. Joe did one about a ghost that I recall he wasn’t that pleased with and I did one about the lair of a movie style disturbed nutbag called Nutty Room. I’m proud to say our listeners voted my song the winner that week and I was delighted as I had spent many long minutes on its complex harmony arrangements. In fact Nutty Room is considered one of the best songs ever written (if the list of the best songs ever written were to include every song ever written).
The video was shot on Thursday 23rd April 2009 in an old abandoned house nearby where I live in Norfolk. It was boarded up years ago but dishonest people bust in and stripped out the fittings, floor tiles and everything else of any value. Now it’s just a shell, overwhelmed by vines and weeds, the walls crumbling and the floorboards rotten and treacherous. According to many local residents the house is haunted by the ghost of a monk (as opposed to being haunted by a living monk which can also happen). I often passed the house on walks and after a few weeks I couldn’t resist poking around. It scared the crap out of me, not so much because of the ghost monk (who I imagine would be fairly mellow) but because there are so many dark corners, blacked out rooms and cellars. As everyone who’s ever watched a horror film knows, these are exactly the kinds of places in which twisted homicidal nuts love to hang out and dissect annoying teenagers. I knew this was the perfect place to make a video for my song.
To create the nutty room you see in the video I spent a couple of weeks painting crazy childish art all over the walls just as twisted lunatics so often do in films to create what looks like the cover of a bad indie album. There were times when I worried that spending lonely hours scrawling on the walls of an abandoned house for a 3 minute internet-only video was not a good use of my time and might even indicate that I was partially insane but when I started collecting jars and filling them with sausage meat and hair to enhance the nuttiness of the room, those worries seemed quaint and trivial. Finally the nutty room was complete and all that was needed was someone to help me realise my vision.
I called my friend Dougal Wilson, the award winning director of videos for Coldplay, Dizzee Rascal, Jarvis Cocker, and many others and he got on the next train to Norwich. Dougal arrived around 11pm and we drove straight to the scary house where I had set up some lights and my video camera. I put on my best nutty-hat and an old lab coat, loaded a syringe with red paint and we got to work. Filming went smoothly apart from a moment when we set light to a load of old newspapers from the 60’s that we’d found in a bath tub in one of the rooms. It was a profoundly stupid thing to do and we nearly died of smoke inhalation. By 4am the next morning we decided it was time to pack up and go home only to find that the lights of the car had been left on and the battery was dead so we had to walk back to my house in the foggy chill of the night. We didn’t care because we felt that we had created something truly stupid. I hope you agree.
Adam Buxton, July 2009
ADDENDUM
I just came across this animation that a chap named Jordan made for Nutty Room a few months back. Nice job yo! And of course he has used the version that was originally broadcast on Song Wars last year which contains the reference to Patrick Swayze rather than Kevin Spacey as it is now. A few people have asked why I changed it and it was simply that I wasn’t aware how ill poor old Patrick Swayze was when I did the song and upon making the vid decided to switch the names (which were only ever intended to rhyme with ‘crazy’ of course) to avoid potential ghoulishness of an unpleasant kind, as opposed to fun ghoulishness like making clothing out of other people’s skin and keeping winkies in jars. Cheers Jordan!