by Adam Buxton
Then over the next few nights the thing happened again, and Low started slipping its hand into mine. A pleasing change of key in ‘Speed of Life’ distracted from the ugly drums. The mess of ‘What in the World’ became an amiable clown car bouncing along with its intoxicated occupants singing winsomely in the back. ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’, which initially seemed such an unappealing mix of plodding greyness and hysterical warbling, suddenly located a nascent seam of teenage melancholy and mined the self-pitying shit out of it.
Meanwhile the turgid instrumentals on side two transformed into the soundtrack to my own sci-fi epic. Lying in bed with my headphones on, I imagined flying over the surface of a hostile planet at multiple sunrise during ‘Warszawa’, exploring twinkling underground cities to the sound of ‘Art Decade’ and getting tipsy in the sun-lit cloud palace of a saucy alien as we listened to ‘Subterraneans’.
Low was also my introduction to Brian Eno, whose name I took to be an invented juxtaposition of the mundane and the exotic, like Mike Fooza, Ron Swoosh or Gary Voobelix. I didn’t really understand what Eno did on Low, but given his name I thought there was a good chance he was responsible for a lot of the electronic sci-fi stuff, and I was up for more of that.
When Mum asked me and my sister for Christmas-present ideas that year, I mentioned Eno, and in my stocking, along with a cassette of the music from Ghostbusters (one of the year’s movie highlights), I found Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Credited to Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno (ooh! More Enos?), Apollo contained electronic instrumental pieces embellished with pedal steel (or ‘country guitar’, as I thought of it) that had been created for the soundtrack to a documentary about the 1969 moon landings called For All Mankind.
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RAMBLE
Mum had picked out Apollo from the wide and weird array of other possible Eno options because she knew I liked space and she had a sentimental attachment to the moon landings. Very early one July morning in 1969, she had sat in front of the TV in Earl’s Court and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon with me, just six weeks old, sat on her lap. As she tells it, Dad came in at one point and said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Look! They’re on the moon!’ exclaimed Mum.
‘Why would you want to watch that in the middle of the night? You must be dotty,’ said Dad and returned to bed.
* * *
The second side of Low had shown me how pleasurable it was to be immersed in a largely instrumental moodscape rather than the three-minute pop songs that made up most of my musical diet, but on first listen Apollo was as cold and forbidding as the lunar surface itself. Most tracks sounded like distant industrial machinery with some whale noises on top (‘Matta’, ‘The Secret’), and the more overtly melodious, country guitar sections (‘Silver Morning’ and ‘Deep Blue Day’) struck me as the kind of inoffensive sludge that might be played in a care home to keep the geriatrics passive.
I discovered the trick with Apollo was to have it playing in the background while I was drawing and not listen to it so much as let it become part of the room (the way my wife sometimes does with me). Once I’d forgotten it was supposed to be music, I became aware that Apollo created a mood of calm strangeness, and as my familiarity with the individual tracks grew, so, too, did my appreciation for the industrial machinery, the whale noises and the care-home muzak, all of which, as ever, I had massively underestimated.
Modern Bowie, meanwhile, was still dutifully plopping out the product.
At the end of the summer holidays in 1984, Bowie released ‘Blue Jean’, the first single from his new album Tonight. The song was amiable but daft, like one of the characters Bowie played in Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, the extended pop promo directed by Julien Temple that accompanied the single’s release. Joe and I went to see the bizarre British horror fantasy The Company of Wolves, and Jazzin’ for Blue Jean was shown before the main film as a short support feature (a practice once common in British cinemas that was becoming increasingly rare by 1984).
I had assumed that Bowie’s best years were behind him and that he was now a rather wearisome old rocker more interested in selling a lot of records than doing anything as interesting as Low, but Jazzin’ for Blue Jean suggested the coma patient might at least be twitching.
The two characters Bowie plays in the 20-minute film are Screaming Lord Byron and Vic. Byron is a ludicrous rock star who veers between the arrogant self-assurance of Bowie in Ziggy mode and the whimpering paranoia of mid-Seventies cocaine Bowie. In one scene Byron sits in his dressing room before a show looking glum, munching pills and applying his make-up while listening to ‘Warszawa’ from Low, a reference I was convinced that only I could possibly have appreciated.
Bowie’s other character Vic is a geezerish chancer who ends up stalking Lord Byron in the hope of impressing a girl he fancies. With hindsight, the Vic character, as well as eerily prefiguring many of Ricky Gervais’s comic ticks and mannerisms, was far more like the public persona Bowie adopted in the late Eighties when he was hanging out with the lads in Tin Machine.
In an age before celebrities taking the piss out of themselves became mandatory, the self-deprecating in-jokes and meta-textual references in Jazzin’ for Blue Jean were, for the 15-year-old Buckles at least, thrillingly fresh and clever.
At the end of the video the girl cops off not with cheeky Vic but with ludicrous Lord Byron, and as his car pulls away Vic calls after him, ‘You conniving, randy, bogus-Oriental old queen! Your record sleeves are better than your songs.’ ‘Marvellous stuff,’ thought Buckles, but there was more! As the camera pulls back and the credits roll, Bowie breaks character and, playing himself, starts complaining to the director that the ending was not what they’d agreed. Take that, Fourth Wall!
My renewed enthusiasm for modern Bowie took a kicking when I listened to the whole of the Tonight album. Though I agreed with Mum that ‘Loving the Alien’ was rather great, and I was fond of the cod-reggae swagger of ‘Don’t Look Down’, which had featured throughout Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, the rest of the album sounded as though Bowie had sat at the mixing desk and demanded: ‘More massive drums! More backing vocals! More cheesy synth! More zaxophone! MORE Eighties!’ Like so much mainstream culture around at that time, Tonight was one big messy Moregasm.
CHAPTER 12
ADAM AND JOE’S SCHOOL PROJECTS
Look, I wish I could tell you that when we were at school Joe and I were dreaming up ways to save the planet and cure society’s ills, but the truth is we were fantasising about running a giant media company called The JOEADZ Corporate.
I honestly can’t recall if it started ironically or not, but within a few months of becoming friends Joe and I had designed a corporate emblem in the style of the Thompson Twins logo that we agreed was futuristic and cool, and I’d drawn a picture showing us standing on top of our corporate headquarters: a giant industrial communications tower from which we could survey our vast media empire. It was a different time.
But let me tell you about the JOEADZ creative vision, and how Joe and I synergised within it.
‘Life is serious, but art is fun!’ Joe had scrawled on his school bag. I assumed Joe had coined the phrase himself and I was impressed, not realising it was a reference to the motto of a suicidal street clown in John Irving’s book The Hotel New Hampshire. I don’t know if Joe thought of himself as a suicidal street clown or not, but it occurs to me now that all our creative schemes were informed by that philosophy and what we convinced ourselves was a noble desire to escape serious things and have fun.
Joe was older than me by six months (in fact, he still is), and that age difference along with his confidence and imagination conferred on him a seniority that meant he was the one who decided what projects we should pursue, and whether we were making a video or a short film or putting on a play, Joe directed and I helped out. What I brought to the table, apart from contributing very good ideas and being great fun to have around, was an awesome versatility as a pe
rformer and a unique vision as a designer/producer of artwork and publicity material when it was time to unveil a new JOEADZ joint.
My drawing of the JOEADZ Corporate telecommunications tower from 1984. That platform Joe and I are standing on doesn’t seem safe at all.
You’d think this level of drive and self-belief would be met with nothing but respect and admiration from our fellow students, but surprisingly that wasn’t always the case. One day in the school yard, Louis, smirking, said that he and Zac were also forming a media company. ‘It’s going to be called “LOUZAC”,’ said Louis. ‘What do you think?’
‘It sounds like toilet cleaner,’ said Joe defensively, ‘so, yeah, probably about right.’ Ooh! Time to quit smirking, Theroux!
Before we started to collaborate on more ambitious projects, the first things Joe and I made together were sketches and parodies (which we shot on the big, clunky video camera my dad had been given) of the Gold Blend coffee adverts, the science and technology magazine show Tomorrow’s World and the children’s current affairs programme John Craven’s News-round. We also re-enacted half-remembered bits of Monty Python sketches and regurgitated jokes we’d heard on topical satire shows such as Spitting Image and Week Ending. Then we’d play the tape back and chuckle away, just excited to see ourselves on a TV.
Friends for Dinner
We used the Sharp video camera to film behind-the-scenes footage for our first official JOEADZ production towards the beginning of 1985: a short film called A Few Friends for Dinner. The film itself was shot on a Super 8 cine camera that Joe had bought with money he’d managed to wangle out of some sympathetic teachers when they agreed to revive the school’s defunct film club.
The story concerned a group of obnoxious toffs whose dinner party is interrupted by a hooded homeless man seeking shelter – a premise that perhaps owed a debt to Monty Python’s Meaning of Life when the Grim Reaper shows up at a dinner party at the end. In A Few Friends for Dinner the toffs rudely rebuff the visitor and pay a terrible price when (SPOILER ALERT!) a monster emerges from the homeless man’s robes and slaughters and consumes the toffs one by one (so you see the monster is ‘having a few friends for dinner’, i.e. eating them, whereas that phrase would normally indicate that you’ve invited some acquaintances to join you for a meal. The title works in more than one way).
Joe made the monster by customising a ventriloquist’s dummy, ending up with something that looked like an angry teddy bear with a row of nails for teeth held in place with Sellotape, like a kind of cuddly Alien. As we were too timid to ask any of the sixth-form girls to help us, Patrick and I played the female dinner-party guests and we very much enjoyed putting on dresses and make-up in order to look as pretty as possible.
We had permission to film in a smart section of the school library and were given access to lights, sound equipment and a small budget that we spent on cine film and After Eights for the posh dinner party, most of which I consumed before the camera had even started turning, to the irritation of J-Corn.
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RAMBLE
After Eight mints are thin, roughly textured chocolate squares with a layer of fondant minty brilliance at their centre. Each one comes in its own little black paper envelope and they sit together, like a tiny chocolate record collection in a tasteful green box, from which they may be individually plucked by wealthy-looking people in evening dress shooting each other saucy looks as their candle-lit dinner party draws to a close. At least, that was the image that After Eight portrayed in their TV ads during the Seventies and on into the Eighties, and in purely aspirational terms it worked well.
I can recall my parents throwing a dinner party in Earl’s Court that looked exactly like an After Eight ad, with the men in dinner jackets and the women in nice dresses and sparkly jewellery, everyone smoking and laughing a lot, and at the end, out came the After Eights. I was supposed to be asleep, but the laughter woke me up and my mum, smelling sweetly of smoke and perfume, let me have one of the wafer-thin mints if I promised to go back to bed.
Whether that dinner-party memory is real or not, I grew up thinking After Eights were the most delicious and sophisticated thing you could possibly eat. Then, on my first trip abroad without my parents, I bought a box of them in duty free and a few minutes later I had munched every one and was vainly riffling through the empty paper sleeves hoping to discover one more that still contained its minty chocolate treasure. After Eights never seemed quite so alluring again.
* * *
Making A Few Friends for Dinner was the most fun I’d had since starting at Westminster, and though I had been the Andrew Ridgley to Joe’s George Michael, it felt as though we made a good team. As far as the finished film was concerned, I don’t recall anyone being particularly whelmed. Dad was worried that with only a few months to go before my O-level exams, I had been spending too much time ‘fooling about’ at the expense of my studies, though he did concede that Patrick and I made quite attractive young women.
Pvt Wars
The next JOEADZ production took place during our first term as sixth-formers. It was a three-man play called Pvt Wars (pronounced ‘Private Wars’) by American playwright James McLure, about three emotionally damaged Vietnam veterans who banter and bicker with one another while recuperating in an army hospital – perfect subject matter for three 16-year-old public-school boys of varying acting ability.
Joe played Natwick, a supercilious upper-class type from Long Island, Ben Walden was Silvio, a loudmouthed Italian-American given to exposing himself to the nurses despite having been rendered impotent by a war injury, and I played Gately, a hillbilly obsessed with fixing a broken radio. I didn’t know what a Southern accent sounded like, so I ended up doing a sort of generic East Coast drawl while Joe kept his accent clipped, rolling his ‘r’s now and then. Ben, a Rocky fan, went full Italian Stallion as Silvio.
One autumn weekend during a rare family supper, Dad asked what had been taking up so much of my time and I showed him my copy of Pvt Wars. After studying it for a few minutes he declared, ‘I would strongly advise you not to do this.’
‘Why?’ I laughed, not even considering taking him seriously.
‘I think the subject matter, the bad language and the accents are likely to make you all look very foolish.’
‘Screw you, old man!’ I shouted as I overturned the kitchen table and stormed out of the room. Or maybe I just said, ‘Oh, OK,’ and continued making gravy channels in my instant mash.
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RAMBLE
Dad must have known that I’m the kind of person who finds it almost impossible to take advice – it’s a trait I probably got from him – and yet he felt compelled to dispense it. As I got older the advice transformed into critiques that were sometimes barbed.
In 2007 I phoned Dad to tell him I had been asked to appear on the topical TV panel show Have I Got News for You, thinking he’d be impressed. He responded, without a trace of malice, by saying, ‘I would have thought Have I Got News for You is exactly the kind of programme on which you are thoroughly ill suited to appear. It’s full of people being witty and telling jokes and that’s not at all what you’re good at.’
Now that I’m a parent I know it’s very hard to stand by and watch your children making choices they’ll probably regret. The instinct is to pull back the people most important to you from the cliff edge, but usually, as long as you think they’ll survive the fall, it’s best just to let them go over and to shout ‘Good luck! I love you!’ as they drop.
Dad was completely right about Have I Got News for You, though. It was a slow car crash and I wasn’t invited back.
* * *
Pvt Wars went ahead, announced weeks before the first performance by a giant poster that I made and hung on the main school noticeboard, a hand-painted logo at the bottom proclaiming that this was ‘A JOEADZ production’. At the top of the poster was the movie-style tagline we’d come up with: ‘Once they went over the top to kill people. Now they’re going over t
he top to kill time’. Some people missed the clever double meaning of ‘over the top’ and I had to explain on several occasions that the tagline referred to soldiers going ‘over the top’ of trenches into battle, as well as going ‘over the top’ in terms of the behaviour they displayed in the army hospital. I mean, who wouldn’t immediately get that?
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RAMBLE
In the weeks running up to the UK release of the first Ghostbusters film just before Christmas 1984, posters appeared all over London that bore the now-iconic Ghostbusters logo, a date and nothing else. Being good film nerds, Joe and I knew what the posters were about, but we didn’t think of them as advertisements. To us, they seemed like the essence of something amazing punching through the dreary wall of phoney commercial imagery that characterises so much of the modern world. It was the first time we’d seen a ‘teaser campaign’. If Ghostbusters had been shit, we’d immediately have become cynical about such tactics, but Ghostbusters wasn’t shit.
Sub Ramble
Ghostbusters was one of a tiny handful of films (including Flash Gordon, The Killing Fields and Dances with Wolves) that I went to see with my whole family, even Dad. When we came out of the cinema after Ghostbusters I wanted to know if Dad had liked it as much as I had. He said he liked the bit with the smarmy, troublesome health-inspector character Walter Peck, who in one scene gets referred to as ‘Dickless’ by Ray Stantz. ‘One comes across that type so often. He played it perfectly,’ said Dad afterwards.
