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Adam Buxton: ‘If I Met Bowie I Genuinely Think I Would Cry’

Karaoke, jingles, and not meeting David Bowie.

Earlier this month, we toddled off to a small London pub to watch Adam Buxton take part in a very entertaining PowerPoint Karaoke night; an odd mash-up of live stand-up and visual presentation, hosted by Red Stag. It involved Buxton going head to head against Noise Next Door, a five-man comedy troupe who specialise in improvised comedy. At the end of the gig, Bevis Man had a chat with the man himself.

How did you feel the PowerPoint karaoke went?
I have to admit, to do improvised comedy in that way was a little terrifying – but we had a very nice audience though! There’s a certain size of room that I like to play, between 200 and 400 people is best as it’s nice and cosy, but when you get to under a hundred, and if the silence goes on for just a little bit too long, you just start to die.
 
Talking about more conventional karaoke…
When it comes to karaoke, I’m a crooner, so I’d sing something croonable like Elvis. Once I was at a karaoke party and Frank Skinner was there who is a karaoke demon. I ended up doing Bridge over Troubled Water and it was awful awful awful! I thought I knew all the words and the melodies but I didn’t, on this occasion it was just traumatic. Joe and I went to Japan to do a show for the BBC a few years back, and we found a very small karaoke bar on the outskirts of Tokyo with only Japanese people in there. I was amazed they even had Paranoid Android on the list, I ended up screaming my lungs out to that and just got some very funny looks from the locals there.
 
How much of your day is spent humming, singing or making jingles?
Mmm, quite a large percentage, maybe about half of my day? I talk to myself a lot anyway. Generally Fridays I will dedicate to the radio show, so I’ll wake up and pretty much do 12 hours solid of reading emails. People send you a lot of links and you end up surfing for ideas for the show [broadcast on Saturday morning]. I start doing jingles in the evening with a glass of wine - evenings are the best time for jingles I’ve discovered. I think of myself as an evening person. Morning is the best time for ideas and writing. By the time my three kids are in bed, all you think about is supper, watching TV and going to bed, but that’s also my most productive time.
 
You have your own show; you’re on TV, what’s best thing about doing your job?
God, I guess I feel like an enthusiast or a fan about stuff. My job is like going round to a friend’s house, getting out your laptop and then spending the whole evening looking at things on the screen saying, ‘ah man look at this!’ I’m lucky I get to do this show called BUG which is my perfect show in a way. A while ago I went to this show called Antenna which was solid music videos throughout, so when we started BUG, we infused a bit more funny stuff and fooling around from me. To me, music videos can be as good as watching a good film, when you combine a good piece of music and visual, sometimes you feel 'fuck that was amazing!'
 
So musically who’s on the radar for you?
Well, I have a two pronged attack when it comes to the music I buy. I tend to buy music from 30 and 40 years ago gradually going through the years towards the modern stuff. Bowie is the father of my interest in music really and from there little you get little offshoots of Brian Eno, Lou Reed and the Ramones. On the other side there is Talking Heads, Television and all those other more arty bands. That’s the old stuff.
Then there came more of the new wave stuff my friends were into, artists like Nick Drake and Neil Young. My soul buddy Joe was listening to a lot of rhythm and blues, so I naturally got into a bit of that as well. Of the modern stuff, I like arty pop I guess you can say. I just got the Tune-Yards album, the first track on that is amazing. I really like Wild Beasts’ Two Dancers, I thought that was brilliant. I guess I cherry pick in that MP3 way you do. There were some really good remix tunes on the recent Warp 20th anniversary box set. Usually remixes can be a bit stinky, but I really liked the box set. Oh I love Deerhoof and Deerhunter, anything with deers in it, though I don’t like The Dears.
 
If Bowie said he would be interviewed by only you or Joe, who would do it?
Fucking hell that’s a good question! I would hope Joe would let me talk to him, because he knows I LOVE him. We’ve come so close to meeting him on so many occasions, but it’s just never worked out. When Bowie did Glastonbury in 2000, he was wandering around backstage and Alan Yentob [BBC Executive] said he’d go fetch Bowie. We were so excited, especially when Bowie said he’d only do one interview: either Jo Wiley or Adam and Joe. In the end he did neither and he disappeared on his Bowie bus. I think if I met Bowie I genuinely think I would cry in the same way a girl might cry for meeting a Beatle. I remember thinking ‘why cry?’ But I know now, if you love someone so much, you idolise someone so much, what they’ve done means so much to you, his music was the sound track to my life.
 
So what’s the best Bowie album?
I mean shit man, all those 70s albums, Bowie didn’t put a foot wrong! It’s got to be Hunky Dory. I met Nigel Godrich who produces Radiohead, and also produced Beck’s Mutations and he told me when he produced that record, he was aiming for the sound of Hunky Dory.
 
What’s next once this stint of Adam and Joe finishes?
I don’t know man; I hope we can do more. We’re playing it by ear, but it doesn’t look that good. It’s getting harder and harder to meet our schedules. Joe’s film schedule means he’s unavailable for long periods of time. I’m always around and he isn’t, so it gets a bit unworkable. For me, there are always fingers in the pie, but so far I’ve not plucked out any plums. BUG is working great, so I’m going to do more. It’s really fun, but I admit I do miss Joe.
 
Maybe another run of Adam Buxton’s Mixtape on BBC 6Music?
Maybe, but the shows are much harder [to do] on your own. The thing is, I get more self-conscious by myself, and I feel awkward. I feel like I’m not a very good interviewer, and with Joe it’s different because we just talk shit, he knows what I do and I know what he does. I really do hope we get to do more stuff, hopefully work on a film together.

You can find out about what Adam Buxton is up to via adam-buxton.co.uk.