Hey ho hoo ha lu la! Back from my holidays and feeling quite blue at the impending closure of another Summer but cheered by gig shaped thoughts.

I did the Popcorn night at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle a few months back and enjoyed it very much. It feels like a wedding reception in a lovely cross between a small concert venue and a fancy village hall (but better than that sounds) so I’m looking forward to going back there and doing about an hour of laptop based bits and pieces that will probably be along the lines of me showing some videos (mostly new-ish I hope), reading out some You Tube comments and singing the odd song. Whatever I do is likely to look a little slipshod after Tim Key and Rufus Hound with whom I share the bill along with compere Carl Donnelly, but I’m going to try my guts out, I promise you!

Book tickets and read the hyperbolic preview HERE

BUG AT THE NORWICH PLAYHOUSE, 8PM, THURSDAY 9th SEPTEMBER 2010

Both the BFI shows for BUG 21 on Thursday 16th September at 6.30pm and Friday 24th September at 8.45pm are now sold out but don’t forget, it’s always worth phoning the BFI box office (0207 928 3232) on the day of the show as last minute tickets often become available.

If you’re round my woodneck next week then come along to the wonderful Norwich Playhouse on Thursday evening at 8pm for our 5th Norwich BUG. I bumped into a fellow yesterday who’d dragged his girlfriend along to the last one and had this to say: “We got in there and she saw the programme with all the details of the videos on it and she thought, ‘oh god what’s this? It looks really boring’ but in the end she loved the whole night. You’d just never get to see things like that otherwise really.” I paraphrased a little and possibly made the fellow sound more goofy than he actually was, but you get the idea, and that’s typical of a lot of comments I get from people after their first BUG. It sounds as if I’m saying ‘don’t worry if you’re a bit simple and you fear art, you’ll still have a good time!’ but actually I’m saying something more profound that I refuse to explain. Come along though. We can have talk about the Labour leadership election in the bar afterwards. Or not.

Book tickets for BUG at the Norwich Playhouse HERE

BUG AT THE GREENWICH FESTIVAL, 5PM, SUNDAY 12th SEPTEMBER 2010

BUG festival shows tend to be a little more ramshackular even than the BFI shows which themselves, seldom shy from shackle ramming. As with last year’s Greenwich show, this should be a mix of my favourite Bug videos of the last 12 months as well as the odd serving of semi fresh steaming mash from my own rusty pot. Apparently we’re in a big tent this year, which is great because I’m a very in-tents person. That’s the kind of top class intellectual word play that’s got me where I am today: sitting in a field, updating my blog and noticing that I partly sat on a fresh cow shit. See you soon, I certainly hope!

Book tickets for BUG at the Greenwich Festival HERE

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…

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

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.

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.

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

I’m posting this as an open letter on my blog rather than once again going through the proper channels because you seem more approachable on-line than off for some reason and I’m hoping that there’s a chance you might somehow be directed to read this! It’s worth a try.

I wonder if you’d consider being a guest on my radio show on BBC 6 Music: Adam Buxton’s Big Mix Tape (Sunday, 12-2pm)?

The format is straightforward: I make a themed compilation tape each week, the way people did in analogue times, and I’m joined by a guest for the central section. For example, this week’s show features music for a tape you’d make for a new boyfriend/girlfriend. The title of the tape is Wave Of New Relations (after a misheard Pixies lyric) and my guest is Jon Ronson, a journalist and documentarian whose work I’ve always admired and enjoyed (check out his brilliant radio show Jon Ronson On or his superb documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes). Jon contributed a few tracks for the mix tape and talked to me about his books, TV and radio shows and whatever else happened to come up. As usual my interview style was far from slick but I hope that my encounters are entertainingly conversational at least.

I was told via a series of Chinese whispers that you’d heard a version of Changes that I recorded in support of 6 Music, which you apparently liked! Perhaps you were being polite and supportive or perhaps you never heard it and the Chinese was mistranslated, but I was pleased nonetheless. One of our listeners (Chris Salt, the Saltman) made a fantastic Lego video to go with it look!

At this point I’m going to put myself in your boots and consider how unappealing my request seems. I have after all spent a large part of my life doing bad impressions of you, often with my sometime comedy partner Joe, mainly based on saying ‘wuzza wuzza wuzza’ which, if I were you, I would find perplexing. Joe and I also spend in inordinate amount of time considering your role and your magnificent packet in Labyrinth when there is a good case to be made for some of your other film roles being more significant. Also I might appear to be a silly man on a number of levels but you’re someone whose work I’ve loved in all it’s forms since I was very young and I’ll never give up the meagre hope that our paths might one day cross.

I’m not a physical or mental threat and the show would be recorded at the BBC with responsible humans around and would take only an hour of your time so what’s the worst that could happen?! Best case scenario: we make a memorable radio show that thousands of highly intelligent 6 Music listeners will cherish! Worst case scenario, you find me an unctuous prat and make a mental note never to respond to online petitions for your guest services again (though you may have already made that mental note). If you don’t want to be alone in a studio with me, we could ask Joe to come too!

Give our producer James Stirling a call at 6 Music. I could do any time next week. Or any time after next week. Hoping this finds you well and eating a Bowiesnack.

Love Adam

Some more details here

I’m recording a show round the corner in the morning but I’ll be there as soon as I can after we’re finished. I’m not planning on performing or anything but I want to come and show my support so maybe see you there! And hey, guys, let’s try to keep it non violent, yeah? We don’t want a repeat of the ugly scenes that unfolded when Wogan left…

I’ve been working on a song for 6 Music in the style of The Goblin King, who proved once again why he rules not only the Goblins but also the school when he was one of the first big names to come out in support of 6. I’m so sad about the notion that 6 may close. They’ve got a really good thing going there and they’ll really regret it if they break it up. Or perhaps they won’t give a dogshit, but I will.

From a purely personal point of view, the reaction we’ve had from listeners to the Adam & Joe radio show and podcast over the last couple of years has been humbling and wonderful. Best of all, those listeners improved the show itself which transformed when we started basing more of our stupid bollocks on the funny and inspiring texts and emails we get, something we’d never really done before because the contributions you’d get at most radio stations wouldn’t really be good for much more than the occasional dedication most of the time. Last week at BUG a small group of friends who Tweet about the show (twitsquadron) presented me with a hand made album of printed tweets, drawings and photos inside a beautifully made sort of A&J pillow case! Chaps, if you’re reading this, thankyou. I don’t want to get too sentimentile, but it was an amazing thing to receive and I’ll always treasure it.

Adam Buxton, happy in kitchen with gift

I wonder if Thomo and the nabobs at the castle have ever bought something they love from a small outlet because they know that it’s likely to be more special than it would be from a department store? They Mastodon! I mean, I’m not much of a discerning shopper but at Christmas I go into Soho and buy my dad (who is a booze snob) a bottle of Cognac from Gerry’s because I know they will recommend me some phenomenal item that will keep my Pa delighted for a good few months. They’ve never failed me once. Sure, I could get a bottle of Courvoisier from Sainsburys or Oddbins and my dad would be very grateful but he wouldn’t roll his eyes and eulogise about it the way he does with the more offbeat stuff from Gerry’s because the supermarket bottle is always the same.

I don’t know how good an analogy that is for 6 Music (which is more like a special deli counter in a big supermarket), but I think you get what I mean. Breaking it up and farming off the popular bits is missing the point completely. It’s a little corner of the BBC that is prepared to take all kinds of chances because they know their listeners won’t immediately get frightened and confused they way they might if it was a more mainstream channel. Certainly, Joe and I wouldn’t have been hired let alone afforded the latitude we have been anywhere else in the Castle.

It seems that campaigning and complaining about these kinds of decisions seldom gets results but wouldn’t it be amazing if they did reconsider? A truly modern corporation! The BBC Trust are reviewing the situation til May 25th and one would hope they will read every message they receive, either pro or anti the proposed closures so do get in touch.

MAKE YOUR VIEWS ON CLOSING 6 MUSIC HEARD HERE

So anyway, this song! It’s a version of Bowie’s Changes that features my impression of David and some painful singing (with the help of 6 Music’s Tom Robinson on the choruses! Thanks Tom!) I did a full length version but it was a little too gruelling so here’s a slightly shorter one for you to listen to, ignore, use to torture terror suspects, whatever you fancy. However, if you did like it and felt sufficiently moved, you might like to make a video for it! Then in May I’ll pick my favourite and award some kind of prize, say Adam Buxton/Adam & Joe odds and sods and tickets to BUG! Wow! Imagine all the Adam Buxton/Adam & Joe odds and sods and tickets to BUG! What could the Adam Buxton odds and sods be?! My socks! Bits of my hair!! Or my book!!! Not a book I’ve written, just a book I own. I don’t know, I’ll work something out, but anyway, here’s the song with lyrics beneath in case you want to study them for your English degree. And if you do make a video post a link on my You Tube channel comments section.

LISTEN TO THE SONG! (right click to download)

CHANGES (FOR 6 MUSIC) SONG

CHANGES (FOR 6 MUSIC) LYRICS

Incidentally I bought the backing track from a great karaoke versions site here

Finally, here’s my appearance on Channel 4 news a couple of weeks back where I managed to say almost nothing of any value except for inviting the DG out for some pushing and shoving. I haven’t actually watched this vid myself cos it’s too cringey but I hear Thomo’s expression upon hearing my obviously jokey challenge is entertaining.

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.

Hope to see you there!

love Ad

What the heckins is BUG? Find out here. A few extra tickets have been released for our next 2 sold out BUG shows in London’s BFI Southbank on Thursday 21st and Thursday 28th, both starting at 8.45pm. If you’d like to come along call the box office on:

0207 928 3232

BUG NORWICH 3, 3rd & 4th February

Book tickets for BUG at the delightful Norwich Playhouse Wednesday February 3rd or Thursday 4th at 8pm here

LEICESTER COMEDY FESTIVAL, 10th & 11th February

I’ll also be doing 2 nights at the Leicester Comedy festival on Wednesday 10th & Thursday 11th February (same show both nights) so come and join us, why not? Leicester’s nice! Call the box office on:

0116 242 2800

Really hope I’ll see you at one of these shows. I’ve got a couple of new vids to show as well as all the usual weird and wonderful new pop promos, YouTube comments and other bollox, so I’m planning for it to be wicked! Am I still allowed to use the word wicked now I’m over 40?