Sound and vision

Creativity is a slippery sort of concept. We talk about it in relation to everyone from Da Vinci to Chanel, in fields from baking to genetics. There’s no doubt Adam Buxton has it – it’s there in everything he makes, as plain as food in his beard. Granted, in his case, it does take some pretty odd forms.

On the day he speaks to Fest, Buxton turns up lugging a Barbie-pink Brompton bike, his helmet highlighter-yellow and his shoes electric blue. He’s in London for what’s billed as a creative symposium, placing him alongside luminaries of print and illustration, film and fashion.

So where does he fit into all this? “I don’t really have anything to say beyond my normal crap,” he shrugs. “I’m not like Brian Eno, I don’t have a talk I can do about olfactory science or whatever.”

Recent years have seen this all-purpose buffoon flit from radio DJ to filmmaker to actor to presenter. He's a self-confessed dilettante, but for today's purposes he makes songs – daft ones, touching on such pressing issues as sushi, Stephen Fry and something called a “poo poo party.” Rashly, he has set himself the challenge of composing one on stage in just 30 minutes, armed with only his ever-present laptop and a puerile sense of humour.

The latter has served him well, from the days of the Adam & Joe Show—the late-90s Channel 4 series that made cult heroes of him and school friend Joe Cornish—to the BBC 6Music slot that, until 2011, saw the pair compete for listeners’ votes in their long-fought Song Wars feature. 

But the pop pastiches they wrote were real labours of love; Buxton isn’t relishing the prospect of going against the clock. “Broadly speaking, the rules are that if you want to encourage creativity of any kind, then you shouldn’t be tense and you shouldn’t have time pressure... doing it live in front of an audience is absolutely guaranteed to produce something terrible.”

It’s just as well, then, that he’s become accustomed to crowds of late, thanks to warm-up gigs for his bite-sized Edinburgh run, which he describes as four nights of “sketchy odds and sods” loosely themed around his relationship with his computer.

It will be the first time the Fringe has seen a brand-new solo project from Buxton since 2005, when his character comedy I, Pavel found him under the guise of a deranged Slavic filmmaker and eight months’ worth of facial hair. 

The show was a success, even if the beard got bad reviews. James Nesbitt, of The Hobbit and Yellow Pages ad fame, was among those who took exception. Buxton still remembers their encounter at a BBC3 shindig: “He was having a pee next to me—I’d never met him before then—and he looked over and just went: ‘Jeeesus, that is a horrible beard!’ I was quite offended, but it was a very frightening-looking piece of furniture on my face. It just looked like my face had exploded.” 

The whiskers, since domesticated, have been a permanent fixture ever since. Buxton calls it vanity, a convenient mask as the years add wrinkles and chins.

The topic of age crops up a few times during our conversation. He says nurturing an online following is "a young man’s game". He can’t keep up with a generation who grew up around the editing software he’s slowly mastering. He wants to cast his friends in films, the way Edgar Wright and Seth Rogen do, except they’re all too busy or distant, and he says: “I’m too old to wangle my way into someone else’s gang now.”

Buxton is, of course, no codger. But he's impatient to create some sort of magnum opus, complaining that, apart from the Adam & Joe Show best-of DVD, “everything else I’ve ever done has just vanished into the ether.” That’s not strictly true, thanks to a vast online repository of blog posts, taped TV spots, snapshots and that 1990 footage of him, Joe Cornish and documentarian Louis Theroux dancing like the gawky young fools they were.

Yet with his comedic other half sadly lost to Hollywood screenwriting for now, it’s understandable that Buxton wants to get his teeth into something more enduring. The one constant in his career these days is hosting Bug, the regular music video showcase where, since 2007, he’s been mocking rabid YouTube comments and dropping in his own lovingly crafted, shamelessly stupid clips. Despite an eight-part adaptation on Sky Atlantic last year, it’s not enough.

“I mean, I love doing Bug but there’s a slight anxiety that I could do that for the rest of my life,” he says. “I think I’m going to take a bit of a sabbatical next year and force myself to do a couple of different things.”

Buxton spends his workdays cloistered in a home studio outside Norwich, trying to explain to his wife why trawling through teenagers’ internet tiffs means he’s too busy to take their three kids to school or walk the new dog he wasn’t allowed to call Boggins (non-fans, consult your Adam and Joe glossary now).

Although he has the time, space and desire to attempt a career-defining oeuvre, he’s wary. What if the idea’s a dud? “It’s dangerous, but I’m due for a midlife crisis anyway,” he reasons, thinking of others he's seen charge down creative cul-de-sacs. “I’m going to go totally Joaquin Phoenix.”

Buxton doesn’t say quite what form this work would take, though creating the right vehicle for his acting is one option. Then there's his fantasy about making a Talking Heads biopic like the stop-motion toy movies he and Cornish used to do: he’s visibly delighted at the prospect of shopping for “a weird, long-necked chicken” to play David Byrne. 

It’s clear the fervent fanboyism that has fuelled so much of his output is still at work today. And with growing success, he has made the shift from devotee to collaborator, directing promos for Pixies frontman Frank Black and Radiohead. What's more, his obsessions have earned him authority: this year he was commissioned to make a 6Music documentary on his resurgent idol David Bowie, which he says, at just two hours, demanded some agonising pruning of his knowledge. 

Though his work has brought him closer to his heroes, he remains in awe of them – indeed, as he talks about what a comedy geek guitarist Jonny Greenwood is, he is wearing a Radiohead T-shirt. It’s safe to assume he’s joking, then, when he says "Party Pom Pom," his jungle-style banger about Nintendo-addicted brats, is “obviously as good as anything on [Bowie’s 1977 classic] Low”.

Back to the task in hand, it’s time to plug in and put those songwriting skills to the test. Buxton takes off for his symposium and later a glance at the online reactions suggests his ad-libbed tune brought the house down. One witness relays his boast that “creativity comes out of me quickly and easily, like a healthy turd.” Is it any wonder Joe lost Song Wars?