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!
February 26, 2009
OUT OF FOCUS GROUP C NEWS!
BOOK NOW FOR FRIDAY, MARCH 13th @ BFI SOUTHBANK!
In between trying to write the ultimate 80’s song for next week’s Song Wars I’m preparing frantically for the third Out Of Focus Group at the BFI Southbank. If you haven’t been to one of these before it’s basically an excuse for me to show some old and new video morcels I’ve made in between live performances from myself and other more talented actors, comedians and musicians. Finalising the running order is always a fairly last minute thing because foolishly I ‘organise’ these shows myself and never really get to grips with the logistics so I can’t say exactly who’ll be appearing, but it’s always a good night, one way or another.
The show starts at 6.50pm on Friday 13th, March and should be over by 8.30pm. Let’s have a drink at the Benugo bar at the BFI after the show! Lovely. I wonder if any of you reading this are the kinds of people who refuse to go out if it’s a Friday 13th because you’re so superstitious. If you are, I wonder if you’re also an atheist. If that’s the case you’re my kind of totally irrational fuckwit and all I can say is it’s a great shame you won’t be able to make it to the show because I think you’d like it.
You can book you tickets for Out Of Focus Group C here
Here’s the kind of thing I’ll be showing at the BFI. It’s another Signing For The Deaf thing from my BBC3 pilot, MeeBOX, but this is a longer edit than the piece that was actually broadcast. The twatty annotations feature on You Tube is actually quite brills for these as it means that you can enjoy them (or not) if you are actually deaf. I had a few complaints from deaf people that the last one of these I put up didn’t have subs and they felt that to be playing about with deaf signing while not even letting deaf people in on the joke was a bit much, so I’m glad to be able to fix that here. By the way, don’t forget you can always turn the subs off. I’ve been thinking about doing some more signing bits but I may not get it together for the 13th, especially with Song Wars. Wish Phil Oakey or someone from New Musik or Landscape would get in touch with a backing track, then I’d be sorted. It’s possible they have better things to do, but you never know! Hope to see you on the 13th March!
I notice that when playing the vid in HD it’s got all lines and shit innit. Field dominance issues. These are exactly the kind of issues that I hoped Obama would address when he came to power but so far, nothing. It’s all very well saying you want to help the Odds (lower?) AND the Evens (higher?!) but sometimes they just have to remain de-interlaced. Either that or you drop a field, but who wants the responsibility of making that kind of decision? Not I.
November 7, 2008
NEW PRESIDENT NEWS!
THE ROAD TO OBAMA
What a week! I finally read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, it’s a rollicking post apocalyptic father & son trek, which is now being made into what is sure to be a fun movie with exciting cannibals and Charlize Theron. The only slightly disappointing thing is that they’ve cast Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the leads, and I was very much hoping Harrison Ford & Shia LaBeouf would team up again and reprise their winning father/son chemistry from Indiana Jones and The Incredibly Crap Alien Skull. Don’t these Hollywood twats know anything?
If you have read The Road however then you’ll know that upon finishing the book one is badly in need of something outrageously positive to refit all the bits of you that have been shaken loose so waking up on Tuesday morning to see Obama’s victory speech on the news was like a giant gift box of sweet smelling salve. He’s even more comfortingly charismatic than Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact! And he’s real!! Now do us all a favour Barack and stear clear of blowjobs and pathetic conflicts, unless they’re with your wife.
I couldn’t help fantasising about what earlier drafts of his speech might have been like though. Or what a less gracious man might have said…