by Adam Buxton
By this time I was thinking David Byrne could do no wrong, and my final New York purchase was Music for ‘The Knee Plays’, an album put together in 1984 as part of an avant-garde opera by experimental theatre maestro Robert Wilson. After the joy of discovering … Bush of Ghosts and The Catherine Wheel, The Knee Plays came on like indefensibly pretentious dog crap that threatened to make me think less of my beloved Mr Byrne. Every track featured mournful brass-band music with Byrne occasionally reading out lyrics that might have been written by a child on the least interesting part of the spectrum.
‘She turns on the tap and the water comes out, so she fills up a glass and drinks it. The glass is good for holding water. Other things that are good for holding water are bowls, bottles, and bags, but not jackets. Jackets are good for holding groceries …’ I made those lyrics up, but that’s the sort of thing you’re dealing with.
I played Music for ‘The Knee Plays’ a couple of times just to check I hadn’t judged it too harshly, then, deciding that I hadn’t judged it harshly enough, I put it away and forgot about it. Five years later, at art school, I stuck it on one afternoon out of curiosity. Suddenly, in an environment that lovingly nurtured indefensibly pretentious dog crap, Music for ‘The Knee Plays’ sounded magnificent; the brass-band music strange and hypnotic, and Byrne’s lyrics intriguing and funny. It’s still one of my favourite albums to listen to if I’m doing manual labour or working on a new installation that explores the tension between collective memory and farts.
Fubar
On my last night in New York Chad invited me to join him and his friends Ralph and Hank on a trip to see a new film everyone was raving about called Platoon. There was a big queue of people standing in the cold outside the cinema, but rather than join the line immediately, Ralph led the way round the corner and lit a joint.
Mum had told me that people who smoked marijuana ended up injecting heroin, and I knew from the ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ public information campaign that heroin instantly gave you spots, made you ill, then killed you – three of my top Worsties. But Chad, Ralph and Hank were cool, funny and friendly, and I didn’t want them to think I was uptight, so despite the risk of spots, illness and death, I had my first drag on a joint.
I started to feel dizzy almost immediately, but when Chad and the others headed back to the cinema I did my best not to let on and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as I followed them. Back in the queue for Platoon, with the edges of my vision darkening, I suddenly felt a sensation like water flushing from my head down through my body, and before I’d had a chance to warn anyone, my legs had buckled and I’d sunk to the Manhattan pavement (or ‘sidewalk’).
I was aware that Chad and the others were peering down at me with expressions of concern and amusement, but I was too spaced out to care. My only vaguely coherent thought was that one of New York’s many muggers might be making a note of my defenceless state and adding me to their ‘To Mug’ list. However, I also knew that if I was helped to my feet, I would black out completely, so I sat cross-legged in the queue as Chad, Ralph and Hank kept me entertained doing impressions of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd fighting in Vietnam. ‘It’s Loony Platoony!’ said Hank, and everyone in the queue laughed, even Ratso having a whitey on the pavement.
By the time we were seated in the packed auditorium, I felt like Major Tom floating about my malfunctioning tin can and wondering if I’d ever make it back to earth. Then Platoon started.
Like Charlie Sheen’s character, I felt I’d been dropped in the middle of an overwhelming nightmare and was struggling not to panic. My fearful confusion peaked about 15 minutes into the film, during a chaotic night-time jungle firefight scene in which Star Wars-style laser bolts appeared to be zipping between the soldiers. ‘Why are there lasers in the jungle?’ I whispered to Chad.
‘Dude, they’re tracer bullets. How you doin’, man?’ smiled Chad.
‘I’m OK, I think.’ I was no longer in physical difficulty, but every intense and upsetting scene was emotionally amplified and I was helplessly grateful for Willem Dafoe’s kindness, scandalised by Tom Berenger’s ruthlessness and in love with Charlie Sheen.
When Platoon was over we said goodbye to Ralph and Hank and began walking back through the sobering cold to Chad’s place. My stomach was groaning so I bought a flapjack square from a convenience store and wolfed it as we walked. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted – like biting into eternal love. Chad laughed as I ran back to the store and bought another ten.
The next day I woke feeling foggy and sad. I liked the Buckles who had never smoked drugs, but now, with a single puff, he was gone forever. My consolation lay peeking out from beneath the pile of clothes on the floor by my bed: the Flapjack Squares of Eternal Love. I reached over for one, unwrapped it excitedly and took a bite. It was like sawdust from a hamster cage.
BOWIE ANNUAL
I didn’t investigate Bowie’s 1977 album “Heroes” for ages because I wasn’t fond of the title track. My favourite Bowie songs were mysterious caverns in which nameless feelings were illuminated by lines like ‘… it was midnight back at the kitchen door, / Like the grim face on the cathedral floor’, but the sentiments in “Heroes” just seemed a bit obvious, triumphalist even. Blah blah, Kings, blah blah, Queens, blah blah, aren’t dolphins brilliant? Yeah! Let’s spend the day beating people.
I liked the “Heroes” album cover, though. The black-and-white shot of Bowie staring blankly with stiffly posed hands was exactly the kind of robotic sexiness I was after from Zavid, so, hoping there was more of that inside, I eventually dived in.
I’d never been to Berlin, but after listening to “Heroes” a couple of times I felt as though I’d been stuck there for months, talking to weirdos in a dark, rainy alley outside a jazz club where they keep the bins and all the jazz people do their wee-wees. With the exception of the title track, “Heroes” was full of music I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the world listening to (especially ‘Joe the Lion’ and ‘Sons of the Silent Age’), and I got into it much faster than I had any of his albums previously.
Side two contained more instrumental ‘moodscapes’. Like Low, but bleaker. I especially liked ‘Neuköln’ (Noykern), which I thought of as the soundtrack to the rainy alley outside the jazz club, the desolate wails of Bowie’s saxophone at the end sounding like someone who’s just discovered their lover has been murdered. Or maybe they’ve just lost their wallet and missed the last bus home. Either way, somebody’s having a shit evening.
One weekend late in 1986, while I was still in my sanctimonious pre-marijuana days, I found myself the only not-stoned person in a group of stoned people who wouldn’t shut up about how stoned they were. Feeling fed up and left out, I put on ‘Neuköln’, turned out the lights, held a torch under my mouth and lip-synced to Bowie’s anguished saxophone screams until one of the stoned people started to get the fear. The rest of them told me to stop being a prick and turn the lights back on.
* * *
RAMBLE
I bet some of you are still annoyed by what I said about the song ‘“Heroes”’. Perhaps I went a bit overboard. I always liked it perfectly well, but it took me another 30 years to properly appreciate it. In 1986 the thing I liked best about Bowie’s Seventies music was that it made me feel like a member of an exclusive club, and the song ‘“Heroes”’ felt like an anomaly, because, as with ‘Let’s Dance’, the door policy was too slack. After he died, ‘“Heroes”’ became a rallying point for brokenhearted fans and the remnants of my snobbery fell away. Every time I showed the video for ‘“Heroes”’ at the end of the BUG David Bowie Specials I did in the years following his death, I got weepy.
* * *
The best bit about Bowie’s cameo in Absolute Beginners, Julien Temple’s stagey adaptation of Colin MacInnes’s novel about late-Fifties London groovers released in April 1986, is a tiny moment when his advertising-executive character Vendice Partners is showing the film’s protagonist Colin a mode
l of a new housing development. ‘It’s lovely,’ says Colin hesitantly, and for a moment Bowie drops the rotten American accent he’s been doing and says in his own geezerish tones, ‘No, it’s not, son, it’s ’orrible.’ Then he goes back to being crap American again.
To me it seemed as though the real David, my David, the arty contrarian who just nine years before had released Low and “Heroes” a few months apart, was peeping through the Eighties and saying, ‘What am I doing here? It’s ’orrible!’
Now his musical output was a series of histrionic pop songs of variable quality tied to other projects: the brilliant ‘This Is Not America’ from the film The Falcon and the Snowman; the less brilliant but thoroughly amiable cover of ‘Dancing in the Street’ with Mick Jagger for Live Aid; one excellent and two so-so songs for the Absolute Beginners soundtrack; the blustering ‘When the Wind Blows’ for the depressing animated film of the same name and a good, uplifting theme song along with four other pieces of syrupy cat sick for Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth (though I’m aware there are people who believe ‘Magic Dance’ to be a work of stone-cold genius).
Indeed, many fans will tell you Labyrinth is where their journey with Bowie began, but when Joe, Louis and I went to see it at the Odeon Leicester Square one Saturday night a few weeks after it was released in November 1986 I thought it was where my journey with Bowie might end.
At 17 I was too old to find Labyrinth delightful and too young to embrace it ironically. I didn’t like the songs; I didn’t like the middle-aged Goblin King’s Kajagoogoo wig or the fact that his name was basically ‘Gareth’; I didn’t like Gareth’s unsavoury obsession with a young girl, and I didn’t like being able to see the outline of Gareth’s genitals through his leggings – at least, not as much as you might expect.
CHAPTER 16
DOGFUN
My wife grew up around dogs, but our family never had pets. We travelled too often to make it practical, but it didn’t help that my dad’s antipathy towards the dog community was pronounced and legendary. Dogs offended his sense of order and he hated the chaos they could cause: the mess, the noise, the licking, the slobbering, the humping, the vandalising and, of course, the pissing and the shitting. If a dog turned up unexpectedly and began bounding across people and furniture, Dad would exclaim loudly, ‘Get that bloody dog out of here!’ even if he was in someone else’s house and it was their dog.
I inherited this intolerance to a degree, but the older I got the more it was challenged by my animal-loving friends, and on one occasion my sister-in-law Harriet just came out and said it: ‘You’re a Dog Nazi.’
I parroted Dad’s line that it was only the badly behaved dogs I didn’t like, and when that didn’t placate her I continued by saying, ‘Look, maybe I am uptight, but if a friend came round and their six-year-old child took a big shit on the hall carpet, and there were no extenuating medical circumstances, I think it would be reasonable to at least be a little dismayed. And yet if I object to an animal running around the house depositing dog turds, which are, let’s face it, some of the most offensive turds in the Turd World, I’m supposed to be some kind of Dog Nazi?’
‘Not some kind of,’ responded Harriet, ‘an actual Dog Nazi. Yes. That’s what you are.’
Though I did at least manage to stop myself mentioning that Hitler adored dogs, it was one of those arguments, conducted in front of friends, that started out as banter, then became uncomfortable and acrimonious and I was left wondering how much truth there was to Harriet’s position.
My initial response was to do an impression of Harriet’s dog on the BBC 6 Music radio show Joe and I were presenting at the time. I imitated her dog’s tendency for loud panting and slobbery licking and also implied a fondness for farting and indiscriminate shitting (which wasn’t at all accurate). Joe christened the fictional dog ‘Boggins’ and for a while Boggins was a semi-regular feature on the show.
Some people thought Boggins was funny, while others found him repulsive and offensively childish and, in an eerie prefiguring of Brexit, our listeners divided themselves into two distinct camps: ‘Save Boggins’ and ‘Kill Boggins’.
At times, the Boggins debate became so heated that it was difficult to know how seriously to take some of the messages we received (examples below, both genuine):
Subject: BOGGINS
although i am a dog person (not a half man half dog) i plead with you to put boggins down as hearing a grown man pretend to be a dog and eat his own poo while licking another grown mans face is just wrong and makes me feel uncomfortable week in and week out. it almost ranks up there with George Galloway pretending to be a cat! STOP THE MADNESS KILL THE DOG!!! ttfn
Glen (Simpson)
This message stung because it invoked one of the most excruciating moments in British TV history when in 2006 the outspoken Scottish politician George Galloway appeared on the reality show Celebrity Big Brother and with chilling enthusiasm threw himself into a task that required him to act like a cat. He could have just said ‘miaow’ a couple of times and pretended to scratch something, but instead Galloway surprised everyone by crawling about in a bathrobe, licking his whiskery lips and nuzzling at the cupped hands of the actor Rula Lenska as she fed him imaginary treats and cooed that he was a ‘Good pussy’, a compliment that made him purr.
It was a moment I had watched with my wife when it was originally transmitted and we had squirmed on the sofa, stood up, sat down, held up our hands to block out the TV and beseeched, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, please, no, no, no, no, don’t do that, no, no, no, no, no, no …’ so painful was it to see another human being humiliating themselves to such a degree while seeming to think it rather fun.
Now, according to Glen, that’s exactly what I was doing by pretending to be a dog called Boggins. I’m a comedian, not a politician, so humiliating myself is part of the job, but as George Galloway showed, there’s a thin line between irreverent larking and cringe-inducing ignominy. Or maybe it’s a big fat line, but Pussy Galloway and Boggins Buckles had bounded across it regardless.
I think a lot of the messages we got about Boggins were intended as banter, but a few appeared to be expressing genuine annoyance:
Subject: BOGGINS IS RUINING IT
Whenever Boggins is around, my hands automatically reach for the ‘stop play’ button.
Not sure why but I can’t stand him and he has been ruining my fun. It would really help if you had a warning that said ‘this show features Boggins’ then I would know that I can give the show a miss rather than stop half way through completely exasperated and frustrated. I have been a longstanding fan but this feels like the end of a beautiful affair and just because of a stupid dog? How could you.
Corinne
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
The final Adam and Joe 6 Music show was broadcast live from the Glastonbury festival in 2011 and it was then that we finally released Boggins into the mud, the filth and the stinks where he truly belonged. I’m told by regular festival-goers that he lives there still, hibernating in the base of the Manic Street Preachers’ private Portaloo all year round and only emerging in June when he smells roadie musk, drug-infused urine and/or Goan seafood.
By early 2013 our youngest son, Nat, then aged eight, had been asking if we could get a dog for a while. I wasn’t keen. With the children a little older and life at home becoming less messily unpredictable for the first time in a decade, I was reluctant to introduce a new agent of random disruption, but Harriet’s upsetting accusations of dog Nazism still rang in my ears. I was also coming round to the argument that taking care of an animal would be good for the children, though I made it clear I would not personally be responsible for the dog’s welfare and had no intention of ever picking up a single one of its turds.
A whippet-poodle cross would be easy-going and not too barky, said a friend. My wife looked online and found a litter of five being sold by a couple in Durham. She chose the smallest one and a week lat
er Nat was stood in our kitchen with the three-week-old puppy in his arms. ‘What are you going to call it?’ I asked.
‘Steve,’ replied Nat immediately.
‘It’s a girl, Nat,’ said his older brother. ‘You can’t call a girl Steve, it’s ridiculous, you just can’t do it. We should call her Rosie.’
‘Who cares if she’s a girl?’ protested Nat. ‘Steve’s a cool name.’ I was about to step in to mediate, but to everyone’s surprise Nat continued, ‘But Rosie’s fine, too. Let’s call her Rosie.’
Rosie was sweet, no doubt. Very sweet. She was as small, soft and light as my daughter’s little black stuffed toy puppy (the distressingly named ‘Puppalina’), but that was where the similarity ended.
Puppalina didn’t get on the kitchen table and eat my scrambled eggs if I turned my back for more than four seconds. Puppalina didn’t leave pools of lurid yellow piss on every inch of floorboard, carpet and bedspread.
Puppalina didn’t drag out and chew each valuable item that was left accessible, including a brand-new pair of prescription glasses with expensive German varifocal lenses, a trendy coat I’d bought my wife in Sweden, which she said was the best present I’ve ever got her, and the first set of headphones I’d ever had that delivered properly punchy bass, smooth mids and detailed treble while always sitting snuggly in my ears, whatever the environment.
If everyone was out of the house, Rosie was left in the kitchen with all the chairs either stacked on the table or ranged against lower shelves in order to prevent further wanton destruction. My wife would leave Radio 4 playing, saying the sound of people talking would stop Rosie getting lonely, but I was concerned that the range of voices Rosie was hearing was not sufficiently diverse and that the political bias she would be absorbing was tantamount to ‘in-dog-trination’ (pfffrrt).
