Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

  L to R: Zac Sandler, Louis Theroux, Joe Cornish and me at Louis’s house, New Year’s Eve, 1989.

  Ten years after I asked Joe if he thought we’d still be friends in ten years, we were making The Adam and Joe Show together and Zac was helping us, contributing songs, models and cartoons. No idea what happened to Louis.

  BOWIE ANNUAL

  ‘David Bowie “back on course” with Tin Machine’ said the cover of Q magazine in June 1989. I was reading the Bowie interview at the restaurant one afternoon before starting my bar shift and, though I didn’t much like his new beard, Zavid was making all the right noizes.

  He’d lost his way with his last three albums, he said. Yes, David, I agree! He wanted to pick up where he’d left off with Scary Monsters, he said. Yes, David, Scary Monsters! That’s where we fell in love, back in the art room at boarding school, remember? He’d been inspired to return to a more stripped-down rock sound after listening to Pixies, he said. Fucking hell, David, YES! I love Pixies, too! Uh-oh … Looks like I’m excited about the new Bowie album.

  I bought Tin Machine from Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus on my way into work the next day and when the shift was over I listened to it as I walked to Trafalgar Square to get the night bus. Two tracks in, I was thinking, ‘Have I done something to offend you?’

  Everything about the record struck me as an unwelcome exercise in trying to be one of the lads. Manly men in suits playing manly blues rock with a manly nod to the jagged guitar sound of the Pixies, but with none of the vitality. The title track especially sounded like a strange rock’n’roll nursery rhyme written by a grumpy dad at a music festival. ‘Tin machine, / Tin Machine, / Take me anywhere, / Somewhere without alcohol, / Or goons with muddy hair.’

  I wondered if the name ‘Tin Machine’ was inspired by the Pixies song ‘Bone Machine’? If so, that was the problem in a nutshell.

  What is a Bone Machine? A machine for crushing bones? A machine made from bones? A machine inside someone’s bones? It’s disturbing David Lynchy shit whichever way you slice it. But a Tin Machine? That’s just a machine made of metal. A lot of machines are made of metal. They tend not to be made of tin because tin is crap and would make the machine more likely to fall apart.

  But maybe I was being too hard on David and, not for the first time, too literal. A couple of the songs on Tin Machine were actually pretty good. ‘Prisoner of Love’ had the same tone of grand, romantic desolation that I heard in ‘Because You’re Young’, a song I always liked from Scary Monsters. ‘I Can’t Read’ also stirred the emotions with its drunk punk swagger and was the closest the record got to being as edgy and interesting as some of its influences. But that wasn’t very close.

  I really put in the hours with Tin Machine, but it was competing for my valuable time with albums I’d recently discovered by The Stone Roses, De La Soul, Magazine, Grace Jones, XTC, Public Enemy, The Velvet Underground and of course Pixies, so repeated wading through po-faced rock sludge for two serviceable tracks just didn’t add up. Even The Traveling Wilburys had more pep. Way more, in fact.

  ‘I’m zorry you feel that way, son,’ said imaginary Bowie. ‘But to be honest with you, I don’t care any more. Or maybe I care too much and that’s why I’m making a machine out of tin – a machine designed to collapse on itself, thereby enabling me to pop it in the rezycling bin and move on with my career without constantly being made to feel I’m dizappointing people like you. You and me have both changed a lot in the last ten years. We’ve had some good times. We’ve had some bad times. And we’ve had some really embarrassing times, but now I think it might be best for both of us if we zpent some time apart. You can check in on me now and then and see what I’ve been up to if you like, but if you see me in a corridor backstage after a show for BBC Radio 2 at Maida Vale Studios, don’t be surprised if I make a beeline for a more zuccessful comedian.’

  Fair enough.

  My pre-ordered copy of Bowie’s last album, Blackstar, arrived on 11 January 2016, just hours after I’d read the news of his death. I’d heard the singles and a couple of the older tracks already and thought they were good, but now that he was gone everything on the album sounded as mysterious, sad and uplifting as his music had back when I was a boy. For about two weeks Blackstar was the only music I could listen to. It gave shape to a confusion of feelings about Bowie, about Dad, about getting older, about all of it, but the final track, ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, was the one I kept coming back to.

  Mostly the song seemed to be a rumination on mortality, but as ever with Bowie, it contained little references to his career that catapulted me back to my study at school, not knowing how to feel about so many things and thinking as I listened to his records, ‘Well, maybe I feel like that.’

  ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ also seemed to be a final word on the game Zavid had played all his life. A game that was part high art and part junk. Part truth and part bullshit. Part meaningful connection and part selfish isolation. Part original and part stolen (I’m just going to do a few more of these and then I’ll stop). Part Hero and part Zero. Part one and part two. Part Glass Spider and part Sparse Glider. OK, you get the idea.

  It couldn’t always have been an easy or rewarding game for him to play, but I dare say he got more out of it than just money, back pats and blowjobs. I hope so.

  CHAPTER 21

  BAAADDAD

  Yo! Open up the doh, muthafucka,’ called a voice through the raised flap of my parents’ letterbox.

  Dad bent down and loudly demanded, ‘TRANSLATE.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Nigel, I thought you were Adam,’ said Joe.

  It was Christmas Eve 1993 and I was home from art school and looking forward to seeing Cornballs and Louis for what had become a traditional festive get-together at my parents’ place in Clapham.

  Though I was 24, my relationship with Dad was still very much closer to naughty student and stern teacher than adult son and father. Sitting around in the front room enjoying glasses of sparkling wine and Sainsbury’s finest middle-class nibbles, Joe and I found it hard to keep a straight face when talking to Dad, but Louis was a master at supplying what my father craved: first-class Oxford-undergraduate banter with sprinkles of history, politics and current affairs, i.e. the kind of thing he was unlikely to get from his eldest son.

  The Glenn Miller played, the sparkling wine flowed and Joe and I did our best to make Louis laugh as Dad regaled him with stories of his glory days at Worcester College, becoming more pompous and animated as the evening wore on. Despite our low-level piss-taking, it was great to see Dad showing off to Louis like this, money worries and rows with Mum temporarily set aside as he played the posh, worldly bon vivant for someone who actually got most of the references.

  Three years later Louis was making a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic as a reporter on Michael Moore’s TV Nation, but whenever he was in town we’d get together, hang out and talk about what we were up to. When Joe and I told him about our pilot for The Adam and Joe Show Louis said, ‘Ads, you should get your dad in it. He’s funny. You could get him to review gangster rap records.’

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  HOW WE GOT INTO TV

  For the first half of the Nineties, Joe and I spent much of our free time pissing about and making videos.

  We’d imagine we were the presenters of edgy youth TV shows – ‘Today on Interlog 10, we talk to film director Marvin Gaye about his new film Star Wars’ – we’d wander round galleries pretending to be critics, reviewing fire extinguishers, emergency exit signs and anything else that wasn’t supposed to be art, and we’d make spoof commercials for invented products like Bigot Beer, Pro Labia moisturiser and Books – ‘The words are all bunched up together! Try finding your way through them with a pen. Come on! It’s time to Book!’

  Meanwhile back at art school in Cheltenham, I was making more of my own videos in between half understanding books about post-modernism and the media, and getting into work by an
y artist who seemed to have a sense of humour, especially Nam June Paik, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and William Wegman.

  When a new local radio station called CD 603 opened up in Cheltenham, I sent in a tape of some songs and sub-Chris Morris news parodies I’d been recording. They gave me a job as the traffic and travel reporter for the breakfast show, cycling round Cheltenham dressed as a cowboy on a Sinclair battery-powered ‘Zike’. I was also given a three-hour slot on Sunday nights between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. where, without the pressure of anyone actually listening, I was able to play sketches and songs I’d recorded.

  In early 1994, during my last year at art school, I saw an ad in the NME asking for ‘weird, funny and original’ home videos for Takeover TV, a new public-access-style clip show on Channel 4. I sent in a VHS of things I’d made with Joe as well as some of my own efforts, including a video for one of my songs about a fictional New York performance artist called Randy Tartt.

  Back in Clapham that summer I got a call from World of Wonder, the production company that was making Takeover TV. Fenton Bailey, who ran the company with his American partner Randy Barbato, had seen my tape and liked it. In fact, he described my Randy Tartt video as ‘genius’.

  ‘Perhaps he’s just fond of the name Randy,’ I thought. When I met Fenton at World of Wonder’s office above The Body Shop in Brixton, it turned out he was mainly fond of the word ‘genius’, which he used about everything from the coffee a researcher brought him, to the incredibly annoying recent chart hit ‘Doop’ (by Doop). I liked Fenton and it turned out that he and Randy had made several TV shows that I’d loved when I was at art school, so I was delighted when I was offered a job on Takeover TV as a researcher watching and logging tapes that people like me had sent in.

  Takeover TV went out on Channel 4 in early 1995. My Randy Tartt clip was shown along with some videos I’d made with Joe. Fenton also invited me to present a couple of episodes, and when the show was recommissioned I got the job of presenting the whole series, though this time I tried to get Cornballs more involved.

  One of Joe’s ideas was to use our childhood toys (including my old Star Wars toys that Mum still had safely stored in the attic) to make parodies of movies and TV shows. Our first one was a two-minute version of Apollo 13 featuring three stuffed toys in a bin (called ‘Appallo 13’), and when it was finished we knew we’d hit on something incredibly special that would propel us into the very margins of cult micro stardom.

  Peter Grimsdale, Takeover TV’s commissioning editor at Channel 4, suggested Joe and I come up with some ideas for our own show. After many false starts and tense conversations with Joe, whose frustration that he wasn’t yet working on films I failed to properly appreciate at the time, we began putting together The Adam and Joe Show, and an incredibly small footnote in the annals of DIY television began to be written.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure I was up for having my dad as part of our show. After all, he’d spent the whole of my adolescence taking a series of dumps on every TV programme, film and piece of music I enjoyed, plus he was my dad, and aside from the odd booze-fuelled family get-together, I still found it hard to relax when he was around, but we needed material and Joe convinced me to give it a go. Dad agreed to help as soon as I asked and was only a little disappointed when I explained we didn’t have the budget to actually pay him anything. ‘I imagine there’ll be other rewards when I become famous,’ he reasoned.

  On a grey day in August 1996 we loaded a mini DV tape into the Sony DCR-VX1000 camcorder (mandatory for every cheap TV production in the Nineties) and made our way over to the Olympia Exhibition Centre in West London where we were shooting the first footage for our pilot at the launch of the new-look Action Man doll. It was the first of many items we shot while we were still in the process of figuring out what the show actually was, and our producer Debbie would send us off to random events in the hope that they might provoke some solid-gold tomfoolery from me and Joe. The highlight of the Action Man launch was interviewing a human model who looked exactly like the new Action Man. We asked him to look surprised by something off-camera and then said, ‘Nice reaction, man!’ It didn’t make it into the show.

  From Olympia we headed over to Clapham and, with Dad sat in his favourite Christmas Eve pompous pontification chair, we recorded his first music review.

  Feeling that gangster rap might be too narrow a remit, we’d given him a mix of genres to comment on, starting with ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ by Josh Wink, ‘Men in Black’ by Frank Black and ‘Natural Born Killaz’ by Dr Dre ft. Ice Cube.

  Dad’s initial response to the screeching techno of ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ was to recite from memory the poem ‘In No Strange Land’ by the Victorian writer and mystic Francis Thompson. It was a beautiful poem and Dad recited it movingly, but we were after something a bit pithier and a bit funnier.

  ‘This isn’t going to work,’ I thought, but Joe persevered, asking Dad questions until he came out with something funny or interesting, at which point he’d ask him to repeat it in soundbite form. The finished piece with the soundbites appearing inside old-fashioned picture frames over the music videos went down well with everyone we showed it to. Back in 1996 it was still a novelty to see a plummy-voiced septuagenarian analysing youth culture in that way.

  The name BaaadDad was a nod to another late-night Channel 4 show around that time: Baadasss TV, hosted by Andi Oliver and the rapper Ice-T, who proclaimed it a ‘fly and funky’ look at ‘the idiosyncrasies of black culture’. So yeah, perfect for Dad.

  When the first series of The Adam and Joe Show went out, it was the toy movie parodies and the BaaadDad segments that people seemed to respond to most enthusiastically, and the fact that he was my real father meant we ended up doing quite a few interviews together. These were fun. Dad liked the attention and I liked showing him that all those years of mainlining pop culture might not have been a total waste after all. ‘Perhaps this is the moment when Dad and I start to become best pals,’ I thought.

  When The Adam and Joe Show was recommissioned in 1997 we decided that, as well as continuing with the music reviews, we should take BaaadDad out and about to explore various aspects of youth culture. Now that TV shows featuring comedians going on adventures with their parents has become a well-established genre, it seems odd that I didn’t appear on screen with Dad in these segments. But back then I felt our relationship was too fraught to be entertaining on screen, and anyway, there was a danger it would have unbalanced things with me and Joe. Ensuring that one of us didn’t get significantly more attention than the other was something we had started paying attention to after a few exchanges on the subject in which our breathing went weird and our voices got wobbly.

  So Joe and I tended to stay behind the camera for Dad’s segments and concentrated on getting the best out of him, something that Cornballs was particularly good at. In addition to his phenomenal, award-winning skills as a director, Joe had the advantage of being unencumbered by awkwardness around Dad and was happy to encourage him to do things on camera that I would have been too embarrassed or too protective to suggest.

  We visited the Tribal Gathering dance music festival in 1997, and Joe got Dad to strike up a conversation with a woman in her early twenties who claimed to be tripping on acid (though as far as I could tell she was just Australian), and when she rolled a joint, Joe got Dad to take a couple of drags. I wasn’t sure what to make of the footage when I watched it back. The sight of my 73-year-old father smoking drugs and turning on the charm with the young woman, saying to her at one point, ‘You know, you’re very beautiful,’ made me uncomfortable, not least because he and my mum were getting on so badly at the time and I knew the footage would make her cringe.

  Our editor Jon cut the piece so that Dad’s ‘you’re very beautiful’ line came immediately after his toke on the joint, and it worked well, as if being high (though he claimed not to have inhaled) had instantly made him talk like a hippy, rather than the line just being so
mething a sleazy old guy might say. However, I worried that, in the course of trying to get the best out of Dad while managing the less palatable aspects of his personality, we were turning him into a caricature. Occasionally he, too, would sense that happening and resist. On those occasions, choosing between what was best for the show and what was best for Dad gave me a massive emotional wedgie.

  In 1998 we flew to Ibiza to immerse BaaadDad in the island’s culture of clubbing and hedonism. It was not a relaxing week. Dad spent half the time grumbling about how loud, loathsome and grotesque the music, the clubs and most of the people were, and the other half trying not to make it too obvious that he was ogling topless women on the beach. He was entitled to his opinion and perhaps even his ogling, but it had the effect of making me less protective and tolerant of him.

  The tension between me and Dad came to a head early one morning in Trade nightclub. The music was particularly hard and loud, the lighting intense and disorientating, and he was in a bad mood. There was a muscly man in a loincloth dancing on a podium and Joe asked him whether he’d mind if my dad gave one of his glistening buttocks a quick kiss or possibly a lick. ‘OK,’ shrugged the muscly man over the din of the music and Joe leaned close to give my father the good news.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ replied Dad.

  ‘How about you just touch his bum then?’ said Joe. ‘It’s a beautiful bum.’

  ‘No,’ came Dad’s flat reply.

  ‘He’d be fine if it was a woman’s bum,’ I thought, somewhat redundantly.

  When we got outside I told Dad he was being ‘unprofessional’.