EP.255 - DAVID BYRNE

Adam talks with American musician, author, director and co-founder of Talking Heads, David Byrne, about Reasons To Be Cheerful https://reasonstobecheerful.world/, biking in London and New York, outsider music, his new album Who Is The Sky https://whoisthesky.davidbyrne.com/, songwriting, music videos, dancing and memories. List of the song clips used in the introduction on Adam's website HERE https://www.adam-buxton.co.uk/ Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on June 10th, 2025 Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for additional editing Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ Pre-order Adam's album 'Buckle Up' https://shop.decca.com/products/buckle-up-vinyl-signed with limited signed artwork Order Adam's book 'I Love You Byeee' https://lnk.to/iloveyoubyeee_ NORD VPN EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal https://nordvpn.com/buxton Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS 2 EVENTS AT MANNINGTON BOOK BASH: I LOVE YOU, BYEE WAFFLE & NIGEL PLANER INTERVIEW https://www.manningtonbookbash.co.uk/, 27th September, 2025 ADAM IN CONVERSATION WITH SAMIRA AHMED @ WIMBLEDON BOOKFEST https://www.wimbledonbookfest.org/events/adam-buxton/, 10 October, 2025 ADAM AT THE LONDON BOOK FESTIVAL @ ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/adam-buxton-i-love-you-byeee/, 26 October, 2025 TALKING HEADS LINKS AND PICS ON ADAM'S WEBSITE http://adam-buxton.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Adam Buxton?

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcast? It's Adam Buxton here, I'm delighted to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me out here in the Norfolk countryside, East Anglia, UK, towards the end of August 2025. I'm here with my best dog friend, Rosie. She's a whippet poodle cross and right now, possibly a little bit more cross than whippet and poodle. Because it's been a hot day out here and I'm pretty sure she would rather be in the shady spot in the kitchen from which I extracted her a few minutes ago. Is that correct, Rosie? That's a stupid question, I'm not answering.

• 1:15Adam Buxton?

  I'm sorry, but look, it's a beautiful evening. It's lovely and breezy. And once we get out there to the top field in the evening sun, you will be so happy. I dragged you along on this walk. I certainly hope treats will be forthcoming upon my return. Of course, dog legs. Anyway, how are you doing, podcast? I hope you're doing well out there and your summer has been behaving itself. Now, look, let's get down to business. My guest this week is American musician, author and director David Byrne. Ooh, someone whose music has been a cherished part of my life since I was 15.

• 1:55Adam Buxton?

  And that was when I walked into the study of a friend of mine at school. And he was playing The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, a live album. I think it was the song Don't Worry About the Government that grabbed me first. I borrowed the album, made myself a cassette copy and set off on my Talking Heads and David Byrne adventure. Within a few months, David Byrne was in my art rock pantheon alongside David Bowie and Brian Eno. And you know what? He resides there still. So what I'm saying is that for me, this podcast was a big deal.

• 2:40Adam Buxton?

  However, if you're not up for the deep introduction dive, just skip ahead fifteen minutes from this point. And you'll find me and David Byrne waffling in London back in June this year. For the remainers, here's some selected Byrne facts and personal highlights for you. Byrne facts, David Byrne was born not in America, but in Dumbarton, Scotland in nineteen fifty-two. But he was still a toddler when he and his family moved to the Canadian port city of Hamilton, Ontario, where they lived for a few years before settling on the east coast of the USA in Maryland. There, in his late teens, David briefly attended the Maryland Institute College of Art.

• 3:25Adam Buxton?

  After having dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design, that was where David had met drummer Chris France and his girlfriend, later wife and bass player Tina Weymouth, with whom David would come to form Talking Heads, once they'd all moved to New York in nineteen seventy-four. In June nineteen seventy-five, the three-piece version of Talking Heads played their first show at the CBGB music venue, then just a couple of years old, opening for venue regulars The Ramones, who, along with acts like Blondie, Patti Smith and Television, were helping to make CBGBs the focus of New York's emerging punk and new wave scene. The songs Talking Heads played were sparse and choppy,

• 4:10Adam Buxton?

  and David Byrne's stage presence, along with his lyrics and vocals, were angular, odd, and intriguing. The band didn't look like rock stars, but dressed in preppy clothes, and in a strained, high-pitched voice Byrne sang lyrics like: "Girls are getting into abstract analysis, they want to make an intuitive leap. They're making plans that have far-reaching effects, and the girls want to be with the girls. And the boys say, 'What do you mean?'" There were no other bands singing songs like that at the time. Another song that became an early Talking Heads anthem was written from the point of view of a murderous psychopath who was brushing up on his French.

• 5:02Adam Buxton?

  That's a bit of "Psycho Killer", recorded live at CBGB's in 1975. Keyboard player and guitarist Gerry Harrison joined the band in 1977, the same year they released their debut album called Talking Heads '77. And one of the people who was impressed by it was ex-Roxie Music noise maker and producer Brian Eno. He produced the next three Talking Heads albums: 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food, 79's Fear of Music, which some people consider to be the best Talking Heads album, and 1980's Remain in Light, which some other people consider to be the best Talking Heads album. Me? Oh, I like them all.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Letting good things go far.

• 6:22Adam Buxton?

  That was a few moments from "The Good Thing", from more songs about buildings and food. "Memories Can't Wait", from Fear of Music, and "Once in a Lifetime", from Remain in Light. It was Brian Eno who introduced Talking Heads to the music of Nigerian artist Fela Kuti, sometimes called "The Father of the Afrobeat Genre", that's what I always call him. The influence of Fela's polyrhythmic blend of African music, odd pop, funk and jazz can be heard on Fear of Music, very much on Remain in Light, and also on Eno and Byrne's album, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", which the pair started working on after Talking Heads had finished touring Fear of Music at the end of the 70s.

• 7:05Adam Buxton?

  When I bought "Bush of Ghosts" in 1986, five years after it was released, I loved the weird mix of grooves and what I thought of as ominous ethnic robot music, overlaid with sampled recordings of people chanting, delivering monologues, ranting on radio phone-ins, or just singing in other languages.

• 7:38Adam Buxton?

  That's a bit of "The Carrier", from "Bush of Ghosts", which features the voice of Lebanese singer Dunya Yunus. And there's a link in the description to a Guardian article from 2022 around the time of the reissue of "Bush of Ghosts", in which Byrne, Eno and Dunya Yunus talk a little bit about some of the charges of cultural appropriation that have swirled around the record over the years. That's a whole concept that didn't even occur to 16-year-old me when I was first listening to "Bush of Ghosts". I just liked the voices, which, given my musical diet back then, I was unlikely to hear anywhere else. Soon after buying "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", I bought "The Catherine Wheel",

• 8:22Adam Buxton?

  an album of music composed by David Byrne for a 1981 theatre project by American dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, some of which sounded to me like a companion piece to "Bush of Ghosts".

• 8:50Adam Buxton?

  That's "The Red House", from David Byrne's 1981 album, "The Catherine Wheel". In 1983, Talking Heads released "Speaking in Tongues", which featured what would be their biggest commercial success up to that point, "Burning Down the House", and one of my favourite ever songs by any band, "This Must Be the Place", Naive Melody.

• 9:14Adam Buxton?

  Literally just saying the name of it makes me feel emotional, because I'm mad, I think, accompanied by a lovely video directed by David Byrne, which featured David, Tina, Chris and Gerry watching home movies along with members of the expanded touring line-up recruited to do justice to the more musically ambitious and complicated music Talking Heads had been making.

• 9:59Adam Buxton?

  Director Jonathan Demme, later best known for his film Silence of the Lambs, filmed four of Talking Heads' LA shows in December 1983 and released them the following year as the concert film, "Stop Making Sense", an enduringly wonderful record of a group of musicians at the top of their game. Talking Heads' last three albums sounded very different to those that had preceded them. 1985's "Little Creatures", which included the hits "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere", was less funky and drew instead from Americana and country music, as well as the Louisiana sounds of Cajun and Zydeco. That was the soundtrack to my O levels that summer.

• 10:41Adam Buxton?

  So, bummer at first, but then, later that summer, party time! David Byrne delved deeper into the idiosyncrasies of small-town American life and culture when, in 1986, he wrote and directed his feature film True Stories, which was released soon after an album of the same name by Talking Heads. That album, True Stories, at least the one by Talking Heads, there is another album which contains music from the film and lots of really nice bits of incidental music, but the Talking Heads album contains a track called Radiohead, which, according to the actor Stephen Tobolowsky, aka Ned Ryerson, "bing",

• 11:23Adam Buxton?

  in Groundhog Day, was written after a conversation he once had with David Byrne in which he claimed to be able to see and hear distinct musical tones that people apparently emit. Some form of synesthesia, I would imagine. Anyway, the resulting song may not be a Talking Heads classic, but Radiohead made enough of an impression on a young Thom Yorke for him to name his band after it.

• 12:02Adam Buxton?

  The last Talking Heads album, Naked, was released in 1988 and featured a mix of summery Afrobeat and Latin sounds on tracks like "Nothing But Flowers" and "Totally Nude", alongside darker, more political material. And at the time, it sounded to me less like a Talking Heads record and more like a step towards David Byrne exploring different directions on his own, which is what it turned out to be. After the rather messy, perfunctory dissolution of Talking Heads, Byrne wasted no time recording a solo album and setting up a label, Luaca Bop, through which he released compilations of some of his favourite Brazilian music from the Tropicalia movement of the late 60s and 70s,

• 12:46Adam Buxton?

  which blended traditional Brazilian sounds with more avant-garde pop and psychedelic styles. Byrne's first solo album, post-Talking Heads, was Ray Momo, released in 1989, and it incorporated some of those sounds but with songs sung mainly in English and with a band made up of top Latin American players and backing vocalists. I love that album. You know, I love the cerebral art-rock.

• 13:15Adam Buxton?

  That David Byrne did so well with Talking Heads, but the songs on Ray Momo are often very straightforwardly emotional. I put it on the night before I met David Byrne for this podcast, having not heard it for a while, and I was instantly joyfully shredded. The songs are so beautiful, but they also remind me of falling in love at the end of my teens and of my mum, who also loved that album. So anyway, it didn't take long before I was sat there with tears streaming down my face as Ray Momo played Carnival Eyes.

• 14:25Adam Buxton?

  That's Carnival Eyes from Ray Momo. Five more David Byrne solo albums followed between 1992 and 2004, filled with many more magical meetings of catchy pop and avant-garde strangeness. And in 2008, David reunited with Brian Eno for the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Another particularly successful collaboration came about in 2012 for the album Love This Giant with American musician Annie Clark, aka St Vincent.

• 15:11Adam Buxton?

  That was "Who" from Love This Giant by David Byrne and St Vincent. All along, David has continued to make music for films, TV and stage shows. He won an Oscar in 1987 for the score he wrote with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kongzoo for The Last Emperor. He collaborated with Fatboy Slim in 2005 on the Amel de Marcos musical Here Lies Love. And in 2007, contributed a soundtrack to the TV show Big Love, in which Bill Paxton starred as the polygamous patriarch of a fundamentalist Mormon family in contemporary Utah. Byrne also composed music for two productions by experimental theatre maestro Robert Wilson:

• 15:54Adam Buxton?

  The Knee Plays in 1985 and The Forest in 1991. As far as the music went, they were a little too experimental for my taste. I never really got to grips with The Forest, but I did develop a massive crush on Byrne's Music for the Knee Plays, which is 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.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  In the future, it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed. In the future, men will be super masculine and women will be ultra feminine. In the future, half of us will be mentally ill.

• 16:37Adam Buxton?

  That was "In the Future" from David Byrne's Music for The Knee Plays. Before this year, 2025, David Byrne's last solo album was 2018's American Utopia, for which he went on tour, playing elaborate shows that included a stage full of musicians who performed choreographed routines to solo material and Talking Heads classics on wirelessly amplified instruments. The American Utopia concert film, directed by Spike Lee no less, was released at the end of 2020. And watching it at the end of that year was another emotional moment, especially as everything about the film, from the staging, the costumes and the way the songs were played, worked so well.

• 17:21Adam Buxton?

  And I haven't even mentioned the books and the art projects and the bicycle racks he designed. But we've got to get to the conversation. I nearly got to record a podcast with David around the time of American utopia, but it fell through, so I was very happy when the opportunity came around again, thanks to the release of David's new album, Who Is The Sky?, out on the 5th of September on Matador. Song titles include, I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party, My Apartment Is My Friend, and the first single from the album, Everybody Laughs.

• 18:10Adam Buxton?

  I met David on a hot day in London, back in early June this year, and there were so many nerdy music questions I wanted to ask him about Talking Heads and the music he's made over the years, but instead, we had a more free-flowing conversation that did touch on some of those nerdy areas, but was more about making music in general. I also asked David about the iconic video for Once In A Lifetime, the 64th video ever played on MTV when it launched in 1981. First video they played was, Anybody, Anybody, Bueller? Video Killed The Radio Star, by Trevor Horn's band, Buggles. David made the Once In A Lifetime video with choreographer and Oh Mickey star, Tony Basil,

• 18:54Adam Buxton?

  who I asked David about, as well as mentioning Californian multimedia maverick and music video pioneer, Bruce Connor. He made a couple of videos for tracks from Bush of Ghosts, which, in the same spirit as the album, used found footage from science and educational films, as well as documentaries and TV ads, to create visuals as stark, hypnotic, and unsettling as the music. There's links to one of those Bruce Connor videos, as well as many other things we mentioned, and loads of my favourite Talking Heads videos, in the description of today's podcast. Okay, we've made it through the intro. Well done, team. I'll be back at the end for some live show news, but right now with David Byrne, here we go.

• 20:20Adam Buxton?

  Have you done Louis Theroux's podcast yet?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  That's coming up, I think, tomorrow or the next day.

• 20:24Adam Buxton?

  Right, so I've stolen a march on Louis, that's good.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yes, okay.

• 20:28Adam Buxton?

  He is an old school friend of mine, and he made his name in documentary filmmaking. But now he has latterly branched out into podcasting, which is my turf. So he is encroaching on my turf.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Is he still doing documentaries?

• 20:45Adam Buxton?

  He is, yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Oh, but now he's trying to do both.

• 20:48Adam Buxton?

  He's trying to do both, which I feel threatened by.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 20:52Adam Buxton?

  But, um, yeah, no, he's-

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Well, we can talk about that.

• 20:56Adam Buxton?

  He's brilliant. What, with him?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  No, with you.

• 20:58Adam Buxton?

  Okay, good, good.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  We can be your psychiatrist.

• 21:01Adam Buxton?

  Well, basically, yes. If there's any way that you can just give everything you've got to me.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yes, I won't tell him anything.

• 21:09Adam Buxton?

  And then when you see him, just be as cold as you possibly can be.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:15Adam Buxton?

  And just give him absolutely nothing, like monosyllabic answers.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yes, like that, yeah.

• 21:19Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Adam Buxton?

  That would be great. Thank you. Do you enjoy the process of doing press for your records?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Up to a point. If it got to be, if it got to be weeks of doing nothing but press, I would probably start to repeat myself and I would start to bore myself. But at this point where I'm just starting and just doing it, beginning it, beginning doing some promo, it's actually kind of good. It means I have to, as best I can, and it's really difficult, try and verbalize what it is I'm doing. If I'm talking about a new record, which I am, talk about what it is, that kind of thing. I don't verbalize or come up with a good,

• 22:10Speaker 02

  oh, here's the pitch concept for this. I kind of don't do that. So this forces me to kind of think about, self-reflect and think about what it is that you've been doing. What does it mean?

• 22:24Adam Buxton?

  And is that an enjoyable process or something that feels uncomfortable and strange and forced?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  It's a little strange, but I think in the end it's pretty good. It's good for me. I think it helps me realize, oh, this is what I'm doing. Therefore, if you're talking to myself, if I'm doing a a performance, I should keep that in mind so that it fits with the other, now that I know what I'm doing, it should fit with the other things I'm doing.

• 22:56Adam Buxton?

  When did you finish this record?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  I think it was kind of finished in January or February.

• 23:03Adam Buxton?

  Okay, not that long ago.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Not that long ago.

• 23:06Adam Buxton?

  And have you-

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Seems like a long time to me, but not that long ago.

• 23:10Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Have you discovered new things about it since finishing it? Do you feel differently about it now than you did when you were making it?

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm learning things from people's reactions to it.

• 23:23Adam Buxton?

  What are they saying? What are the typical responses you're getting?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  They're saying this record sounds very cheerful and hopeful and uplifting. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm glad.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  That makes me very happy. I'm glad to hear that, but I didn't go into it thinking, I'm going to make something to make people, make people happy.

• 23:47Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, sounds like a recipe for disaster.

• 23:51Adam Buxton?

  Everybody laughs. Just came out as we're speaking about five hours ago, the video dropped on YouTube and I read the first few comments and yeah, it's people very happy to see you back. So much love for you and so excited to see, you know, pleased that you're in an up tempo mode. I suppose they feel like they've got quite a lot of grim reality and also fairly hardcore grim culture to go around it. That's already freely available.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  As do I, but I also feel like one way to combat that is to make a counter force.

• 24:34Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  So in a way I think to myself, oh, that's what you're doing. That's part of what you're doing anyway.

• 24:42Adam Buxton?

  When you're writing those songs though, are you able to disconnect yourself sufficiently from what's going on in the world or on the news, for example? Like, because I suppose the problem sometimes is that you see what's happening and it makes you, well, I know that when I do silly things sometimes, I'm not suggesting your songwriting is silly, but I do silly things. And when I'm making something stupid or funny or whatever it might be, it's not very easy if I've just been watching the news because the juxtaposition is so stark. Makes me think, what am I doing? Is this going to help? Should I be doing this? Do you ever get that?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yes, of course. Yes, of course I do. Uh. I mean, I think that and other things like,

• 25:29Speaker 02

  oh, what are you doing making just a record with songs? Look at how horrible things are. You should be putting all your effort into dealing with all these things that are happening in the world and, and then I realized, no, this is what I do well and this is my way of kind of making, being a counter force to many of the things that are happening. But yes, it's kind of paralyzing to read a lot of the news every day.

• 25:58Adam Buxton?

  Do you have periods where you cut yourself off?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Um, not so much. I'm kind of a bit of a news junkie, but I do, I read in the morning and then I'm not much after that. And some years ago, I started a kind of web magazine or newspaper called Reasons to be Cheerful. That's, again, it's not just cheering stuff, but it's kind of news stories about people who have found a solution to something or have done something that is hopeful in the world, some project that they're doing or something like that. Um, so that helps because I'm always on the lookout for those kinds of things.

• 26:41Adam Buxton?

  A weekly dose of dopamine in your inbox is what Reasons to be Cheerful bills itself as.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, that's one of our descriptions. I've learned more recently that when someone whose name shall remain nameless appears in one of the news headlines that I'm reading in the morning, I'll just skim right by it. I know what this guy's gonna do. I know what kind of person he is. I don't need to kind of go down a rabbit hole and get wallow in it. I'll just keep flipping. Yeah.

• 27:19Adam Buxton?

  I really appreciated finding Reasons to be Cheerful when it launched. I can't remember how I came across it, but I read about it and I thought, I'm glad someone's doing that. But did you have conversations with friends of yours? Were there any friends of yours who said, David, this is a little Pollyanna-ish, isn't it? We're looking at real problems and you're just trying to distract people with this stuff?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Uh, I was on the lookout for that kind of thing myself, but so far, no. So far, I think we've been fairly diligent. These are proven solutions that can be copied or whatever. It's not just a feel-good thing. It's somebody who's actually done something or a group of people who've actually done something. And they're not things that are like one of. Like if a philanthropist gave a lot of money to a hospital.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  As happens, we wouldn't write about that. That's not a sustainable solution. That's kind of a one-time thing.

• 28:23Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. So for example, this week I was looking at a few stories on the website. One about older adults conquering loneliness through storytelling. Storytelling clubs essentially organized for older people out in the States, many of them homebound or isolated. And so they can meet either in real life or online and they share stories and it's kind of like communal podcasting almost.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  It does sound like that. I haven't tuned into it, but it's kind of tempting to go, I want to hear what some of these stories are.

• 28:56Adam Buxton?

  Very much. During the pandemic, there was the option to join an app called Good Sam, Good Samaritan, and you could do things in the community. I ended up doing very little. All I did was go and be a steward at the vaccination center for a few days. But one thing that I really wanted to do, and which maybe I will do at some point, is call people up, phone people up and just talk to them if they're at home and they're on their own, especially if they're older. I think that would be a great thing to do. That reminded me of this story and Reasons to be Cheerful.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  You never know what they might have to say.

• 29:32Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. And then there's another story about how shared electric cargo bikes are changing cities. There's quite a few stories on Reasons to be Cheerful about the ways that towns are trying to adapt and plan themselves differently in order to be more sustainable in all sorts of ways. A lot of bike-related stories. You're a big bicyclist, right?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  I am. That's my principal way of getting around in New York City. It's a lot easier than it used to be in the city. There's more bike lanes. Now they're making those bike lanes a little more protected, like putting a buffer or little

• 30:11Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  little things between the traffic and the bike lane, because sometimes traffic would just veer in or use it as a parking spot. If people have trepidations about riding in London or New York or someplace like that, I would say then don't do it. Only do it if you feel kind of safe about it and in control, because there's a lot going on coming at you from every angle. Yeah.

• 30:36Adam Buxton?

  Have you ridden in London?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, many times.

• 30:39Adam Buxton?

  Right. Do you have a Brompton?

• 30:41Speaker 02

  No, I have a different folding one. It's called a turn, but doesn't get quite as small as a Brompton.

• 30:49Adam Buxton?

  Have you tried a Brompton?

• 30:51Speaker 02

  I don't know if I have.

• 30:52Adam Buxton?

  I'm not sponsored by them. I'm just.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  You've got one in the back. I saw that.

• 30:56Adam Buxton?

  They're pretty good.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  I have a friend who has one. Yeah, really likes it. I mean, she can just bring it on to her apartment, take it to the office, bring it in and put it in a closet, whatever. Uh, the one I have is a little bit bigger than that, but it's small enough that I can fit it in the luggage bay of a tour bus.

• 31:13Adam Buxton?

  Perfect. And how's the bike rage situation in New York? I've noticed, this might be just me because I might be a terrible cyclist, but I feel like over the last year or so, the influx of e-bikes and delivery riders on souped up bikes, zipping through all the red lights and everything. It's a little bit Wild Westy at the moment in London.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  It is a little bit Wild Westy at the moment, has been for now a couple of years at least. The delivery guys are kind of going against the traffic really fast, zipping through the red lights, as do some of the non-delivery people.

• 31:51Adam Buxton?

  Absolutely, that's true.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  All that.

• 31:54Adam Buxton?

  Do you tut and shake your head?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, I do. I, I don't know really what to do about it. I mean, occasionally I'll shout out, wrong way.

• 32:03Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  You're going the wrong way. But most of the time, I just, no, I'm not going to be scolding everyone. But yeah, I feel like that had, at some point, I'm hoping that these riders will realize, oh, it's going to be safer if we all go in the same direction.

• 32:20Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  If we stop for pedestrians and traffic at red lights.

• 32:23Adam Buxton?

  I guess it's more about enforcement, isn't it? It's more of a.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Some of it's by enforcement. Now, New York has just done this sort of crackdown

• 32:30Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  on cyclists doing any of those things, but they're being really severe about it. They're giving them a kind of summons that if they don't respond, they get arrested.

• 32:43Adam Buxton?

  Oh.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  That's a bit much. Maybe just a little fine would be enough.

• 32:48Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  If you, or I've gotten those in the past. If you're going the wrong way or running a red light, it just seems like a little bit too much.

• 32:57Adam Buxton?

  This time next year, they'll be shot in the knees.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Something like that, yeah.

• 33:01Adam Buxton?

  By Trump's, uh, Trump's bike police. You know, he drives to work on his bicycle.

• 33:08Adam Buxton?

  In all fairness, with his husband on the back, which is a nice, loving relationship. But, uh, this guy didn't have a clue.

• 33:19Adam Buxton?

  Didn't have a clue.

• 33:21Adam Buxton?

  He didn't have, he didn't know what he was doing. You know, he drives to work on his bicycle.

• 33:28Adam Buxton?

  Have you done any interviews on this round of press where you're sat in the room? And the host starts by introducing you and reading out a very long list of incredibly effervescent credits and just singing your praises in front of you.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  No, that has not happened this trip so far.

• 33:48Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Are you gonna do, are you gonna do that now?

• 33:51Adam Buxton?

  No, I'm not gonna do that. I don't like hearing it. If I hear that the person they're saying that about is in the room, it always makes me cringe for the person.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:00Adam Buxton?

  Cause it must be weird. Is it weird?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  It's really weird. It's really weird just to be, uh, introduced anytime with some kind of superlative.

• 34:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Cause I feel like, well, I'm bound to be disappointing after all that.

• 34:14Adam Buxton?

  I think they must assume that you would like it. Like, they sort of think, well, look at all you've achieved. I'm gonna tell you all the things you've achieved. Well done.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  It's very nice. Yeah, it's very nice. It's very flattering. But, uh, but yeah, I've got to prove myself now.

• 34:27Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. No, you don't, you don't have to prove yourself. This is a relaxed conversation between two folks who've just met. And it can go any way. It doesn't need to, you don't need to do anything. You can just, you can get annoyed and go all quiet if you want. I'm hoping you don't.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Go quiet.

• 34:46Adam Buxton?

  I really enjoyed the album. Congratulations on it.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. Thank you for listening.

• 34:51Adam Buxton?

  Who is the sky?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  That's the name of it.

• 34:56Adam Buxton?

  Where does that come from?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  It's a text that I got someone doing the whatever speech to text transfer.

• 35:02Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Thing into their phone and saying, who is this guy? And it came up in my phone, who is the sky?

• 35:11Adam Buxton?

  Jimi Hendrix style.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yes. And I thought, oh, I like that. I'll use that as an album title.

• 35:16Adam Buxton?

  I also enjoyed, uh, do you, do you feel like you have a sort of lyrical style that you stick to for an album? Like, it felt like you were doing a certain kind of lyrics sometimes here.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm not aware of that. Okay, that's good to hear.

• 35:33Adam Buxton?

  Uh, maybe, maybe more sort of, um, it feels to me like you're in slightly more satirical mode or?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Oh, there's definitely a lot of storytelling.

• 35:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, okay.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Songs that have a beginning and a middle and an end that arrive somewhere different than when they began.

• 35:50Adam Buxton?

  My apartment is my friend. Did that strike you one day, that sentiment? Did you suddenly start to personify your apartment and think of life from its point of view?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, I've been in my apartment a lot during the pandemic.

• 36:06Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  And so I thought, ah, I think I've written a pandemic song that expresses a little bit of what we went, some of us went through, who were just alone in our apartments. And it was the apartment that was kind of holding us, keeping us together, protecting us, all those sorts of things.

• 36:29Adam Buxton?

  Have you always been someone who likes to have their living environment just so? Or are you, can you sort of live with a certain amount of chaos?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  I can live with a certain, a certain amount of chaos. Yes. My music room tends to get really chaotic, you know, piled with instruments and half finished bits of music or lyrics or whatever, just strewn everywhere.

• 36:53Adam Buxton?

  But do you decorate? Are you someone that likes to have nice pictures on the walls and?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Oh, the walls of my apartment are filled with pictures. Yes.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  I'm a big fan of what's often called outsider art. People who sometimes are maybe not trained as an artist, but are driven to paint or draw or do something like that. And sometimes I strike a nerve. They deal with something uncomfortable.

• 37:20Adam Buxton?

  Where do you get hold of that stuff from?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Oh, there's some galleries that sell those kinds of things. Keep an eye, they keep an eye out for some of those kind of things. If something's sometimes, oh, you know, my uncle just died and I went into his garage and there was, he had hundreds and hundreds of paintings that he'd done and nobody knew about it. That kind of thing. There's also, there is an art fair in York that specializes in that, that kind of thing.

• 37:50Adam Buxton?

  Does that appreciation of outsider art extend to music? I'm thinking about, there was a book called Songs in the Key of X.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, I know that. I know that project.

• 38:04Adam Buxton?

  Erwin Chusid, I think.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm familiar with some of those artists, some of those musicians.

• 38:09Adam Buxton?

  Like Shuby Taylor was one I always really liked. Do you know him?

• 38:12Speaker 02

  No, I don't know that one.

• 38:13Adam Buxton?

  He's a scat singer.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 38:15Adam Buxton?

  Or at least he was. He's no longer with us. But African American postman, maybe? But he wanted to be a scat singer and would sing over cassettes of other people's music, sometimes quite unlikely choices of kind of country and western songs and things like that. And he would scat, but his scat lexicon was very eccentric. Have you never heard Shuby Taylor?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  No, I'm gonna have to look him up.

• 38:42Adam Buxton?

  Well, I can't resist playing you a tiny bit.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:46Adam Buxton?

  Do you mind?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  No, go ahead.

• 38:53Adam Buxton?

  Because the first time I heard Shuby, speaking of things that cheer you up.

• 39:02Adam Buxton?

  This is not Shuby, this is an advert for EasyJet.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  I know this song too.

• 39:07Adam Buxton?

  Oh yeah, what was that song?

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Some Italian guy, Andreas something or other, uh, he did a song singing in nonsense that was his version of what English sounded like.

• 39:20Adam Buxton?

  Oh yes, I think I've heard that.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  It's complete nonsense, well, there's an occasional word you recognise where he goes, "Alright", but most of it is complete gibberish, but it's gibberish of what English sounds like to an Italian.

• 39:35Adam Buxton?

  That's right, it's such a good idea, isn't it?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:38Adam Buxton?

  Because, because of our sort of western Anglo-centric brains, I suppose, we're so used to doing imitations of how other languages work phonetically.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:48Adam Buxton?

  It's very strange to hear it the other way around, isn't it?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:52Adam Buxton?

  What's his name again?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I think it's Andreas something or other, I don't know his last name.

• 39:57Adam Buxton?

  Okay, so this is Shuby. Let's learn to love and respect each other. Shuby Taylor.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  He sticks to the melody.

• 40:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Or his melody, he's not just riffing, he's got a structure there.

• 40:53Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, good, well, that's, uh, I'm delighted that I've introduced you to Shuby Taylor.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  I'm gonna have to listen to some more.

• 41:02Adam Buxton?

  Have you ever incorporated any of those kinds of approaches to music into things you've done consciously, or does that not work?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Sometimes if I've got some music but not a, no words yet written, I'll do a kind of scat vocal, figure out a melody, or start scatting and discover a melody, and then I'll record that, could just be a phone recording, but I'll record it. And then I'll try and find words that fit the kind of phonetic.

• 41:38Adam Buxton?

  Scansion, is that what it is?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Something like that, yeah, I'll fit the, try and fit the phonetic stuff that I was doing. Like, is this a hard syllable here? Does it end with a consonant, begin with this? Does it an u or an ah or vla or vlu or vlim? Yeah, when I'm just not singing words, my assumption is I'm really kind of being attentive to where the melody wants to go and what kind of syllables might be more, filled with more emotion. So I'll try and find words that match that, and then I'll keep doing that, and sometimes that means it can be a long process of finding the words and then finding ones that actually make sense doing that. Because I don't want them to be just complete nonsense.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  So that can be a whole process, but it starts with that same, not what should we tailor, but a similar kind of thing.

• 42:33Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. So, for example, the lyrics on this new album, as you said, they're more storytelling-y, they have a beginning, middle and an end. So the actual sound of the words is, I mean, it's still important, but perhaps it's less important than the story you're wanting to tell?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  It depends.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yes, that's, that might be true, although the ones where the words came first, I'll try and discover a melody that emphasizes the word you want to emphasize. If you're, and sometimes that means going up to a high note, or a higher note for that word, and that will have the effect of emphasizing that word and making it more important in the storytelling. But there are other ones that were done the other way, the way I described.

• 43:25Adam Buxton?

  Just sounds first.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, like this one, "Everybody laughs", that was, started off as just sounds. And then I realized that, oh, I could do "everybody, everybody", I could do that, and if I repeated that but just changed the things that everybody does, or that happened to everybody, I can keep this repetitive thing going.

• 43:46Adam Buxton?

  Got you. I remember listening to an outtake with you and Eno panned left and right, and you're both taking a run at just improvising sounds over a backing track. So you've got his go in one ear, and then you've got your go, presumably recorded totally separately in the other ear.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 44:06Adam Buxton?

  "Dancing for money"?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Oh, that could be, yeah, yeah, yes. Never did get all the words to that one.

• 44:13Adam Buxton?

  And you're both going totally different places and imagining a different thing to do rhythmically, but then you come together for the refrain, which is, "Dancing for money", and you both, both suddenly come together.

• 44:29Adam Buxton?

  It's quite good, though, to have, like, two people with totally different ideas in left and right. It was very interesting insight.

• 44:44Adam Buxton?

  Did you do a lot of that kind of thing in those days?

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yes, in those days, and occasionally if, if, when appropriate, I, I know that that's, that's a technique that I can

• 44:54Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  go to if needed.

• 44:56Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. So here's the inevitable AI question. Are you using AI? Are you exploring AI to make music at the moment?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  No, I haven't. I haven't done that.

• 45:08Adam Buxton?

  Would you be opposed to doing so on principle or?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  I would be opposed to using AI that had kind of scraped other people's songs.

• 45:20Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  In one way or another, and it was meant to respond to a prompt like.

• 45:27Adam Buxton?

  Write a David Byrne song.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Write a David Byrne song. Oh, that's that's good. I'll I'll take it. I mean, I think that's entirely possible that that could could be done.

• 45:38Adam Buxton?

  I've heard rumours, believable rumours, that quite well-known artists have already done that.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Where they just say, do a song that sounds like me.

• 45:47Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, do a song in the style of me, Jimmy Sparkles.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:51Adam Buxton?

  And they will use that as the basis. They won't just pass it off as their own. They'll use it as the base and they'll build on it and they'll redo the vocal and but they will use that as the structure for their song.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Wow, wow, wow, wow.

• 46:04Adam Buxton?

  I mean, that's a sort of valid way to go, isn't it?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  One would assume that that it's, the algorithm is responding to what it has learned based on scraping that artist's their own songs.

• 46:18Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  One would assume.

• 46:20Adam Buxton?

  I mean, it's cannibalistic and weird.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 46:25Adam Buxton?

  Auto cannibalism.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:28Adam Buxton?

  But, I mean, when you're making a piece of art, does it matter how it's made?

• 46:38Speaker 02

  I don't know. That's a good question. I guess what I'm maybe concerned is that you're kind of on some level, and I haven't really experimented with it. If the actual building blocks are taken from other people's records.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  The actual sounds or phrases or melodies or whatever else are starting to be taken from other people's records, which seems entirely possible. That seems like it's going into crossing some sort of line.

• 47:07Adam Buxton?

  Is that not what you're doing anyway as a person who is in the world, who is influenced by music that's around you and some of those influences may go into the music that you write yourself?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  That's a good point and I think that's true, that you can't help, you're not writing in isolation, you're writing based on everything you've ever heard and kind of processing it through your own sensibilities.

• 47:58Adam Buxton?

  The song on the new record, "The Avant-Garde", made me laugh. And that's definitely one of yours where you're playing around, I suppose, with a character or a shifting perspective that we're not entirely supposed to take as gospel.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot, there's a bit of me in there, there's a bit of me in there.

• 48:22Adam Buxton?

  To quote from the lyrics, "The avant-garde, it's deceptively weighty, it's profoundly absurd, it's whatever fits, it's the avant-garde, it doesn't mean shit, it's the avant-garde."

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Well, yes, it sounds like it's a scathing-

• 48:37Adam Buxton?

  When I read it out like that.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  It sounds like a scathing criticism, but then there's another part of the song that goes, "I want to go there, I want to go there, I'll take you with me, I want to, I want to go there." It's, yeah, so that's what the song is trying to balance, which is true for me too.

• 48:53Adam Buxton?

  Right, okay.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  I often go to performances by kind of experimental groups or whatever it might be, not knowing what it's going to be, not knowing whether it's going to be good or bad or whatever, and I'm happy to do that. I feel like that's been really- Inspirational to me when I see something that's completely unexpected. And I had no idea what it was going to be and it's ends up being really unusual and inspiring in some way. But just as often, I've seen things go, that was complete crap. Or how, how, what did they think they were doing there? So I feel like it's both, it is both.

• 49:33Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, because that's your background really, isn't it? I mean, ever since you were at art school, I suppose you were immersed in that world.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yes, and to some extent I still am. Although maybe this song will put me on the outs.

• 49:47Adam Buxton?

  You'll be ejected. I've heard that song. You're not welcome here. Get out if you're not prepared to take this seriously. Well, how old were you when you went to art school?

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Uh, what would I be? Eighteen, nineteen, somewhere in there, started going around then.

• 50:05Adam Buxton?

  And at that point, you wanted to be a fine artist, right?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely, that was my ambition. I loved making music with friends, making music myself. But I never thought that I had uh the chops, the avail, the skills to make a living doing that. I thought, oh, that's just something I do for fun. But the art stuff, I'm gonna, I'm gonna focus on that.

• 50:32Adam Buxton?

  What kind of work were you making?

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Well, let's see. At one point, I did a series of questionnaires and mailed them out and handed them out to people. And one asked people's opinions about UFOs, pretty straightforward. Another one asked them their opinions about states, like the states in the United States. But some of the questions didn't have a real rational response, like which state has the best shape?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Uh, I think there was another series of fake UFO Polaroids in keeping with the UFO stuff and then I faked evidence of UFO landings.

• 51:20Adam Buxton?

  That's very forward thinking of you.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Very forward, but yes, maybe a little bit too much because I

• 51:27Adam Buxton?

  Fake news.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  I had dropped out of art school and I tried to get back in because I my the jobs that I was getting after I dropped out were real menial work. I mean, I was getting strong, physically strong from lifting things.

• 51:43Adam Buxton?

  What were you doing?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Well, you know, lifting bags of sand, loading them onto trucks or whatever. And yeah, you build up some some muscles, but you don't get much in the way of pay. So I thought, oh, maybe I should go back and see if I can graduate. So I showed, but I had been making this work in the meantime. So I showed them to one of the instructors and I said, we don't teach this kind of stuff.

• 52:12Adam Buxton?

  Fake UFO photos. What are you doing, Vern?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:16Adam Buxton?

  This isn't art.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  But they gave me good advice. They said, you should just go to New York and try your luck.

• 52:22Adam Buxton?

  Oh, that's what they said?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:25Adam Buxton?

  So this was at?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Uh, this is a nice school in Rhode Island.

• 52:28Adam Buxton?

  Oh, there you are, Rhode Island.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Uh, and

• 52:31Adam Buxton?

  Try your luck. What, and they thought you were going to play music there, did they?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  No, they thought I was going to

• 52:37Adam Buxton?

  Do more art?

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Do more art and and kind of attempt to get it shown in galleries there.

• 52:43Adam Buxton?

  Okay. What would you be showing though? Your questionnaires or your fake UFO photos?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, something like that.

• 52:50Adam Buxton?

  Were you doing, I know you did a bit of performance as well, right?

• 52:54Speaker 02

  I did a little bit. I, yeah, yeah, I did a little bit.

• 52:58Adam Buxton?

  Was that the idea though, that you would do more of that kind of thing and be part of that world, the performance art world?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  No, I think that was kind of a fun thing, although a friend and I formed a little group, a two-person group, and we would be busking on the streets, not in New York, but in a bit in Baltimore and out west and San Francisco and places like that. I played violin and ukulele and he played accordion. We tend to do older songs and there was a little bit of a performance thing involved where sometimes I I wouldn't.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Maybe stand on one leg and I would look to the audience like, aren't you amazed that I'm doing this and playing the ukulele? Give me some love, come on.

• 53:45Adam Buxton?

  And you had, you were wearing a sort of straight expression, were you?

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, wearing a straight expression like, I'm going to show you something really amazing.

• 53:52Adam Buxton?

  I'm multi-talented.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, multi-talented, yes, I can stand on one leg.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Actually, we did quite well.

• 54:00Adam Buxton?

  Did you?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  We'd gather a crowd, I was dressed in like an old, you know, vintage shop suit. I remember one time a little kid came up to me and go, hey mister, hey mister, are you one of those guys that won't ride in cars?

• 54:14Adam Buxton?

  What does that mean?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  He thought it was an Amish guy.

• 54:17Adam Buxton?

  Oh, okay.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 54:19Adam Buxton?

  Not a hobo.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 54:22Adam Buxton?

  Was that around the time where you shaved half your beard off?

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Yes, I did, yeah, yeah. I mean, the beard helped, was probably helped convince this kid that I was.

• 54:32Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Uh, Amish, but then I shaved it off.

• 54:36Adam Buxton?

  And that, and as a performance?

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but you know, you can only do that once.

• 54:41Adam Buxton?

  Sure.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Or you'd have to be long wait between performances.

• 54:48Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. And did you like that world though? Did you like the people? I'm, I was at art school and I did like it, but I was suspicious of some of the more pretentious people there, or I felt like I just couldn't in good conscience, get on board with it and do it properly. I, I always was slightly taking the piss.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yourself?

• 55:09Adam Buxton?

  Me, yeah, yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  But was every, everybody at some point was expected to do a performance?

• 55:15Adam Buxton?

  Uh, not really, you didn't have to, but there was a lot of people who were.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Who were doing it, yeah.

• 55:19Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. I did a sculpture degree and so there was very little sculpting of wood and stone. It was mainly, I did a lot of videos, a lot of other people were doing performances. I remember someone, their performance was, they built a, a big chair out of their clothes and then they sprinkled it with icing sugar and then they sat on the chair and they ate doughnuts for an hour. So there was a lot of that kind of thing.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:49Adam Buxton?

  I didn't really have, I didn't have anything like that to offer.

• 55:54Adam Buxton?

  But were you on board with that kind of thing, or were you friends with all those folks?

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Let's see, I probably knew some of them, I probably knew some of them, not all, but some. I think I was more attracted to the, I guess, the fringe theatre groups in New York at that point. This is when I first moved to New York. They at least, I have to say, were very rigorous about what they did. They rehearsed, they would adjust things and whatever. So there was a, a real, to some extent, professional sensibility behind what they were doing, even if it was very out there. Whereas I think what you're describing is some of the artists who decided that they would do a performance didn't, didn't do it rigorously.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  They wouldn't rehearse or couldn't think in theatrical terms of, okay, what's going to look right? How does this appear? What does this mean? All that kind of thing. They were sometimes really unusual, but I really liked them.

• 56:57Adam Buxton?

  Were you doing stuff with video back then?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  I did a little bit, but not much, yeah.

• 57:02Adam Buxton?

  Presume, did you meet Tony Basil around that time?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  That was a little later, that was in, probably around 1980, somewhere around there.

• 57:09Adam Buxton?

  Okay. She'd already been working with Bruce Connor and people like that.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  She'd been working with Bruce Connor. She introduced me to Bruce Connor, who did a couple of videos for the Bush of Ghost record a little bit after that. But Brian Eno and I were working on that record in Los Angeles for a little while. And maybe she'd reached out to us, or he'd talked to her, or whatever. But she worked with this dance group called The Lockers. They were on Soul Train occasionally, we'd seen them, and...

• 57:43Adam Buxton?

  Right, so sort of early body popping.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bit like that. The Lockers were a little bit different. And then she said, oh, I'm working with another group of street dancers. They were called the Electric Boogaloo's. And they were doing a lot of popping and robot kind of stuff and all those kinds of moves. And we just fell in love with that and just thought, oh. That's really amazing. That's what they're doing. We're super inventive and kind of a whole new way of thinking about the body and how you can dance and that kind of thing. So I kind of commissioned her to do one for a Talking Heads song.

• 58:18Adam Buxton?

  Cross-eyed and painless.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I wasn't in the video, which might have hurt it getting airplay, but yeah.

• 58:27Adam Buxton?

  So that was before you did Once in a Lifetime together?

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yeah.

• 58:31Adam Buxton?

  And am I right in thinking that you literally sort of just went into an office and did it over a few hours?

• 58:38Speaker 02

  It took a little bit longer than that.

• 58:41Adam Buxton?

  It sounded very DIY when I read about it.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  It actually, like I was saying about some of the theater groups, it took a lot of rehearsal.

• 58:48Adam Buxton?

  Right, okay.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Uh, Toni was very good about that. In that one, we kind of, I think it was, I was doing the choreography, her day job as a choreographer, and she would be the director. So we kind of storyboarded it out, like what move do I make during these lyrics, what to this, what to do, da, da, da. And then she said, I want you to learn how to do it top to bottom, as if you're on stage and you're gonna go do this move and then do this one, then do that one, do bend over backwards and do all this and that. And so we'd go every few days into a rehearsal studio and she'd put me through my paces. And the movement came out of movements

• 59:30Speaker 02

  that I invented or that seemed to me related to kind of ecstatic, uh, religious traditions. And I'd mix those together with my own movements. And then she would help shape it and go, oh, that's really good, but keep your legs more aligned. She knew what was gonna work for the camera. Yeah.

• 59:52Adam Buxton?

  And you shot the thing against blue screen?

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Parts of it were shot against blue screen.

• 59:57Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:59Adam Buxton?

  So who edited that, for example?

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  I think we edited it together. It was all storyboarded. So it was just like, this shot goes here, this one goes here, and this one goes here.

• 1:00:08Adam Buxton?

  And you knew you would have like multiple versions of yourself?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was in the storyboards as well.

• 1:00:13Adam Buxton?

  Right. And was that, that was like one of the first videos that got played on MTV, wasn't it?

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, lucky, lucky for me, uh, lucky for us that they were desperate for content.

• 1:00:25Adam Buxton?

  Did you know that MTV was a thing when you made it? Or did you make it on spec and then suddenly MTV started?

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Uh, MTV had, I think, already started, but just.

• 1:00:34Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Um, they, they had just like a handful of videos and those would get played over and over and over again because there weren't enough. And so I kind of knew that there's a good chance if I do something and it works, they'll start playing it. And they did. Which was a good thing because in the US anyway, radio wouldn't play that song.

• 1:00:56Adam Buxton?

  Why not?

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  The radio in the US is fairly segregated, still is, I think. And the rock stations thought it was a little too funky. And the black stations thought it was a little too white.

• 1:01:08Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  It fell in the middle somewhere. And so they all avoided it, but it was getting a lot of play on this video channel.

• 1:01:20Adam Buxton?

  And were you aware of people copying the moves and dancing around? Did you see people doing that?

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  No, no, I didn't see that.

• 1:01:26Adam Buxton?

  We all did that. When we were, especially after we saw Stop Making Sense, I suppose. Then it was a gift to people like me who aren't naturally physically confident on a dance floor. But suddenly we had this arsenal of moves that we saw you doing. And it was fun to do them. It was fun to do the, the swing, wobbly one. And anything that made a virtue of our awkwardness, you know? And, and, and the, the running man as well is a good one that we did a lot. So I thank you for that.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 1:02:00Adam Buxton?

  Thank you. Um, you make videos still though, right? It's still something you enjoy.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  I haven't directed one in a while, but I, I worked with a guy named Gabe on one for this new song. I've kind of sketched out some ideas for another one.

• 1:02:16Adam Buxton?

  I mean, it's a lovely medium, isn't it?

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty nice.

• 1:02:19Adam Buxton?

  What are some of your favorites over the years? Not necessarily by you, or you can include ones by you if you want.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Wow, I remember the one for Sinead O'Connor doing the Prince song. I think it was mainly just a close up of her face. Possibly I might be misremembering that, or maybe it just felt like that at the time, that all the emotion was just coming from her face. And you didn't need to see anything else.

• 1:02:46Adam Buxton?

  At the end of the day, though, that's the stuff that cuts through, isn't it? I always think that about special effects and all those kinds of things. It's all good fun, but that is the stuff that stays with you is.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Well, it did for me.

• 1:02:58Adam Buxton?

  That shot of someone like that. And it's so powerful, isn't it? And she starts to cry and it's devastating. It's amazing. Plus, good song.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's a good one. Did you ever, did you used to like Michel Gondry when he was firing on all cylinders?

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Never worked with him, but yeah, those videos he did were great, really great. I invited him to see my last tour.

• 1:03:23Adam Buxton?

  And American Utopia.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. He should come to see that. He didn't know anything about it. He told me afterwards, I came there and then the curtain opens and it's you sitting at a table on an empty stage and you start singing and holding a brain. And he thought to himself, oh no, this is what the whole show is going to be.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  This is going to be this incredibly indulgent thing that David's doing.

• 1:03:57Adam Buxton?

  Avant-garde.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Yes, he's going to sit at that table for an hour.

• 1:04:06Adam Buxton?

  Well, you can do that next time. How come Spike Lee ended up being attached to that then and directing that? Was he someone that you knew already?

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  He's someone, Spike was someone I knew already. He'd shot, uh, performance things before. And I thought, okay, he knows the technical problems of capturing something live. So I talked to him and said, you want to do it? You want to do it? Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Said, yes, let's find the money and see if we can do this.

• 1:04:35Adam Buxton?

  I loved it. Was it a composite in the same way that Stop Making Sense was?

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was shot, uh, it was mainly one performance, but there were elements of like the previous night and then some close-ups and pick-up shots the day after.

• 1:04:53Adam Buxton?

  Right. And it sounded so good. Is that, do you do overdubs on a thing like that?

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  No, no overdubs on that one. Good sound mixer.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Yes, please.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:19Adam Buxton?

  I read on your website that you got asked to write the theme tune for Mad Men.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did a demo of a song, but I guess they didn't like it. So.

• 1:05:36Adam Buxton?

  What kind of thing was it?

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Well, there's an image, I think it was an animated image at the beginning of the show of a guy falling.

• 1:05:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  So I did a whole thing about, it was kind of lyrics about falling and.

• 1:05:53Adam Buxton?

  For a job like that then, do you do a whole song or do you just do a sort of 40 second mini?

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  About 40 seconds, yeah.

• 1:05:59Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I thought, well, we can repeat the verse. But if need be, if you wanted a longer one, but for an opening credit, yes, you'll, but 40 seconds is plenty.

• 1:06:12Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. In the end, I think they just used an instrumental, right? With slight hip-hoppy flourishes.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. I think so.

• 1:06:19Adam Buxton?

  Something like that. But you've done, obviously you did music for, you have done music for films, you've done music for The Last Emperor, you did also music for Big Love.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:06:31Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Which was a great show. The one season of a, yeah, TV series called Big Love that took place in Mormon communities.

• 1:06:39Adam Buxton?

  That's right. Um. It was a brilliant program. I loved it. Did you watch it?

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Yes, I've certainly watched that that season.

• 1:06:46Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Um. I had a grand idea when I first started working on that. I thought I wanted the audience to feel the kind of spiritual background or religious background behind their community. That was the basis of their community and their actions and their kind of marrying multiple wives and all that. So I looked up the titles of Mormon hymns and wrote a bunch of music, just based on the titles, for strings and brass players. It would sound very kind of like a local band playing from the hymnal.

• 1:07:30Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Well, they didn't like you much. They didn't like much of that.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  It didn't really work for a TV show. They wanted things that were kind of more, give us something that's a little more a darker mood.

• 1:07:46Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  More something more ominous and.

• 1:07:49Adam Buxton?

  Something they can use underneath the scene.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, underneath the scene, it would be more like that. So I learned something there.

• 1:07:55Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  But they, in the end, they were happy with what they got. Yeah.

• 1:07:59Adam Buxton?

  Do you find that music affects you differently as you get older?

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Hmm. It's possible that, having had some experience making music and performing it, that I hear it a little bit differently. I can hear kind of more of what's going on internally in the music and in the production and those kinds of things that I might not have been aware of before. But at the same time, I think a lot of those responses are kind of visceral. And even if you don't know technically. How they're done, and I still don't know technically how a lot of it's done. You kind of respond intuitively.

• 1:08:36Adam Buxton?

  And how about your emotional response to music? I'm asking because the older I get, the more it seems like there's a slight element of danger to listening to things that I haven't heard for a while, you know what I mean? Because the emotional response will be quite overwhelming. You're being patched back in to really deep memories and emotional memories. And music has a way of doing that, I think, more than any other medium, like in a more intense and powerful way.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree, music can do that. Music kind of bypasses a lot of the maybe more analytical parts of our, our brain goes, can go right straight for the emotional part. It doesn't have to be older stuff that I'm familiar with. Maybe it can be something new by myself or a newer artist. Yeah.

• 1:09:27Adam Buxton?

  But you don't have to sort of tread gingerly before you put a record on, otherwise you'll be reduced to a puddle of.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  No, I love that feeling. I love that feeling. If it's just me, I'll sometimes do it intentionally. Yeah. Put on something that's going to kind of move me to tears.

• 1:09:44Adam Buxton?

  Something that'll shred you. Do you feel that way about photographs? Family photos or snaps of old friends who maybe aren't around anymore or that kind of thing?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't look at those very often. Um, I hope they're all archived, but I don't look at them very often. I remember when my dad was getting really old and kind of had dementia, I could pull out a photo album of his family when he was younger and his brother and various relatives and whatever. And suddenly he'd kind of snap out of it and talk, start talking about them.

• 1:10:25Adam Buxton?

  So strange, isn't it? That it's all locked away. And famously, music is the same though as well, I think.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'd also put on music that he, I knew he'd listened to years ago.

• 1:10:38Adam Buxton?

  And you can remember all the words and it's all, it's all still there, isn't it?

• 1:10:44Adam Buxton?

  I was watching a documentary about Pee Wee Herman the other day. It starts off with him talking about his memories of being a child. He's got very clear memories of what his life was like and the way he saw the world. Do you have that?

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  Yes, but I think I've grown suspicious of my childhood memories.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Discovered over time that some of them are false. Some of them are things that never happened.

• 1:11:13Adam Buxton?

  Discovered from talking to other people about them?

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, talking to other people about them and they're, they'll look at the dates and go, David, that couldn't have happened.

• 1:11:22Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  The dates are all wrong.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  I think you're mistaken and I'll look at it and go, oh, yeah. But I already kind of incorporated it into my memory and my sense of who I am, what happened to me. Uh, and then I realized, oh no, that part of who I am doesn't exist. I just made it up, probably because it made a better story.

• 1:11:53Adam Buxton?

  Or it makes you feel better about?

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Yourself.

• 1:11:55Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:57Adam Buxton?

  Does finding that kind of thing out unsettle you?

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Oh, it's very unsettling.

• 1:12:02Adam Buxton?

  It is, isn't it?

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Very unsettling, not just for this one thing, but the implication is, how many other things that I think happened to me didn't happen?

• 1:12:14Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. I remember the first time I heard about the idea that your memories are just memories of memories. It's just a kind of palimpsest of recollections overriding the one underneath. And they're so, until eventually they're quite a long way.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  From what, how it began.

• 1:12:35Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  And it, yeah, along those lines, the more you remember something, the more it gets overwritten and revised. So the more you remember it, the further it gets from the truth.

• 1:12:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Adam Buxton?

  Do you keep a journal?

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  I used to keep a dream journal. I don't remember my dreams very often at all, but it must have been some kind of traumatic moment in my life or what was happening around me. And I was a period when I had a number of dreams.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  So I would keep a little journal and often it meant like doing little drawings because you can't always explain it. It's some nonsensical drawing.

• 1:13:23Adam Buxton?

  And do you ever go back to those and draw inspiration from them? Or was that sort of therapy for you?

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  It was meant to be therapy. Yes, although in retrospect now, if I look at it, I go, this is so obvious. This is so obvious. Things were going bad for you at that part, and so you dreamed of a giant turd.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Well, that's pretty clear. At the time, I was completely baffled.

• 1:13:53Adam Buxton?

  Why am I dreaming of turds?

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:13:58Adam Buxton?

  Might have been a gut issue.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it wasn't.

• 1:14:05Adam Buxton?

  I mean, do you feel sort of guilty watching stuff, trawling through the past too much?

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll watch enough to give my approval on something being released. But then I don't know. That's it. That's the end of it. Then it's like, I don't want to look at that anymore.

• 1:14:27Adam Buxton?

  When you do have to look back at things, sometimes journalists I've seen will sit you down in front of a piece of footage on the laptop and get you to watch it. Presumably, they okay that with you beforehand.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:40Adam Buxton?

  So you're okay to do it?

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, once in a while.

• 1:14:43Adam Buxton?

  I mean, that must be weird, right?

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's pretty weird sensation.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Not all of us have moments in our lives captured like that.

• 1:14:54Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  It's an odd thing.

• 1:14:57Adam Buxton?

  Do you think about what was going on in the, in your sort of internal life when you look at footage of you back in CBGBs or wherever it might be?

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Friends sometimes remind me, oh, do you remember that person you were going out with then? Something like that, but that's not what comes to mind. I, it's something like footage from an old performance. I only see the performance. I only see, oh, that's what we were doing then. Oh, that's, I see, I see. Wow, I, um, my singing sounds really different now. Or, you know, I just, I'll think of it in terms of.

• 1:15:34Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  The performance.

• 1:15:36Adam Buxton?

  I remember reading you saying that you couldn't quite relate to the person that wrote a lot of those early songs. You don't really remember how you got there. Is that right?

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, none of us are the same person that we were, you know, decades ago. Uh, and yeah, I'm no exception. And it feels like the person who wrote those songs forty, fifty years ago, whenever it was, yeah, it was a different person with different concerns. And I go, I couldn't write a song like some of those now, even if I wanted to.

• 1:16:17Adam Buxton?

  But you don't listen to those songs or when you hear them, you don't sort of go, oh, I remember what I was trying to do.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, you, oh, yes, absolutely. I can hear that and go, I remember what I was trying to do.

• 1:16:28Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  And sometimes, um, I, sometimes it comes across as being like, oh, you missed that by a bit, what you were trying to do.

• 1:16:42Adam Buxton?

  And then are there other times when it's the reverse, when you go, how did I do that?

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's certain things I'll hear, older things, and I go, oh, that's, you really had a kind of peculiar idea and you followed it through.

• 1:16:55Adam Buxton?

  Can you think of any examples of that kind of feeling?

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, there's, well, there's a song called The Good Thing on one of the early Talking Heads records. And I remember that was an attempt to write lyrics in the style of a bad translation of like Mao's Little Red Book or something like that.

• 1:17:18Adam Buxton?

  I will fight the fight with my heart.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Yes, something like, yeah, something like that. That came very stilted, badly translated, uh, English. And I thought, oh, I'll write something in that with that kind of language, which I did. In retrospect, I go, why did I do that?

• 1:17:40Adam Buxton?

  It works though, doesn't it?

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it does. It kind of works, but it's, yeah, it's a pretty odd idea.

• 1:17:46Adam Buxton?

  It is an odd idea, but it's a very bright upbeat song.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:51Adam Buxton?

  Like, it's really quite a happy song.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it's supposed to

• 1:17:55Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  rouse the masses.

• 1:17:59Adam Buxton?

  Exactly. That is quite a bright upbeat album, isn't it? I think of it like that anyway. Well, it's got The Big Country on it as well, doesn't it?

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:08Adam Buxton?

  And that's a funny song because you're looking out of the window of an aeroplane down at the land masses below and thinking about what the lives of the people you're looking down on might be like.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and in the end, I say to myself, for no apparent reason, uh, just say, no, not for me.

• 1:18:30Adam Buxton?

  Are you saying, no, not for me about the countryside?

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  No, I'm saying I wouldn't live like them. Yeah. But the description, everything you've heard is very objective and there's nothing wrong with it. I mean, there's nothing, nothing, nothing that's described is objectionable. So what's, what's with this guy who doesn't seem to like it at all?

• 1:19:20Adam Buxton?

  I was curious to know if you can still do a Scottish accent.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  I wouldn't want to test it on you, uh, test it in public, but I have done.

• 1:19:30Adam Buxton?

  Come on.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:19:31Adam Buxton?

  Cause you were, you were living in Scotland until you were eight, right?

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  No, no, I was younger, we moved to Canada.

• 1:19:39Adam Buxton?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Until I was eight and then, but my parents had strong accents and a Glasgow accents and that's what I heard. And then we'd go back every other summer or something like that. Uh, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do it. I'll, yeah. But it went for kind of hiking and walking and sky recently and got inspired. So I started immediately singing in a fake Scottish accent, these fake Scottish songs like, uh,

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Ach Jimmy, what are you doing? You cannae pee amongst the ruins. And there was a song about I sold my love to the fairies. Uh, they were all just made up stuff.

• 1:20:26Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  But close enough.

• 1:20:30Adam Buxton?

  I want to hear the end of Ach Jimmy, what are you doing? You cannae pee amongst the ruins.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Well, okay, no. Uh, I don't know what I'm gonna do with that stuff.

• 1:20:38Adam Buxton?

  Next album.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  Under a pseudonym.

• 1:20:43Adam Buxton?

  Are you not tempted to go up and play in Glasgow and just put a bit of a Scottish twang on some of your lyrics?

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:20:51Adam Buxton?

  You may ask yourself.

• 1:20:55Adam Buxton?

  How did I get here?

• 1:21:04Adam Buxton?

  Wait. This is an ad for Squarespace. Okay, we'll return to the AI apocalypse in just a wee wee moment, but first I wanted to talk about Squarespace. Do you know about Squarespace, Steve? Uh, yes, Monty. I think I might even be a little bit more tuned into modern tech, websites, et cetera, than you. I don't know, just guessing. Oh, Steve, I love this dynamic. I'm old and conservative and you're young and progressive and that's what makes the Newswind podcast such great listening. But yes, you're right. I must admit, I didn't know much about Squarespace, but because my new grumble book, Hell in a Handcart, is out this month. And I look forward to getting enraged by that. So I should hope. Em, um, em, um. Anyway, the publishers, Bluestar and Dogwhistle, made a beautiful website for the book using Squarespace. I know, I got the newsletter that you sent out using Squarespace and the website does look great.

• 1:21:47Adam Buxton?

  Videos of you airing your views, members' areas for your mad fans. You've even got a merch store, I see. That's right. The Union Jack top hat is a big seller, but they constructed it all so fast with Squarespace. They did most of it over one lunchtime, Steve. Well, you wouldn't want to spend much longer on it, would you? Shut up, Steve. But here's the thing, anyone listening to this can start a free trial right now at Squarespace.com/boxton and see how easy and versatile Squarespace is. And when they're ready to launch a new website or domain, they can save 10% off their first purchase by using the offer code BOXTON at checkout. Right, well, maybe I'll visit Squarespace.com/boxton and start a new website just to refute all the nonsense in your new book. Oh, don't do that, Steve. I will. Oh, shut up, Steve. Uh. Shut up. Now, back to more depressing matters on Newswind.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Continue. What time is it?

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  No time to look back.

• 1:22:46Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back, podcats. How was David Byrne? And I'm very grateful to him and his team for getting that meeting to happen. It was very exciting. I haven't listened to Louis' podcast with David yet, but I talked to Louis about it and actually it sounded like he had a really good conversation with him and got some good stuff out of him, which was probably a little bit more along the lines of what Talking Heads fans might want to hear. I don't know, haven't heard it. I'm sure it's very good. I will be checking it out. But I loved meeting David. A reminder that his album, Who Is The Sky?, is out on September the 5th. So check it out.

• 1:23:31Adam Buxton?

  The next big music release on the calendar this year, of course, is Buckle Up by Adam Buxton, out on Decca Records on the 12th of September. There's a link in the description if you would like to pre-order a vinyl copy, which comes with some beautiful, high-quality signed artwork. In the last couple of weeks, I have been rehearsing with the album's producer, Joe Mount, of Metronomy fame, as well as a couple of current and ex-Metronomy members, with a view to playing a handful of live shows this year, like fairly short sets, just to see how they go, see what they sound like.

• 1:24:15Adam Buxton?

  I mean, I always wished I could have been in a band at school. The closest I got, in fact, speaking of David Byrne, was being in The Shady People. And I write about it in Ramble Book, it was, and still is, a shameful memory of getting pissed before the gig. We were, one of the songs the band was playing was Cross-Eyed and Painless, Talking Heads cover, and I was doing the "facts are simple and facts are straight, facts are lazy and facts are late" rapping bit. But all the hard lads turned up to the music centre where the gig was happening, and I

• 1:24:59Adam Buxton?

  just got rapped-hold. They started going "Talking Heads, Talking Heads" in a sneery way, especially as I was wearing an oversized kind of waiter's jacket, which I fancied made me look a bit like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. Anyway. Oh dear, it's in my top 10 shameful memory bank. Anyway, I'm hoping that this year's live shows won't... Turn out like that, we're not covering Crossside and Painless. We're doing some very low-key ones here and there in the next few weeks, but I think the

• 1:25:38Adam Buxton?

  plan is to do a mini residency, or at least a couple of nights, at the Norwich Arts Centre later in the year. I'll let you know if and when that happens. And if you fancy a trip to Norwich, we can have some great music fun together. And if you'd like, I'll sign your copy of Buckle Up. The band, I think they're just called the Adam Buxton Band. We will be playing at the album launch at Rough Trade East on September the 15th, but that show is now sold out.

• 1:26:11Adam Buxton?

  I might see if some of the, some of the guys can come along to the show that I'm doing at the Royal Festival Hall on the 26th of October. That's mainly a book show, which starts at 7.30 and will last around 90 minutes with book signing afterwards, but I don't know, maybe we might be able to get a couple of songs in there too. And if you can't make the Royal Festival Hall, at the end of October, there's another book show a couple of weeks before, on Friday the 10th of October, as part of the Wimbledon Book Festival. I will be talking about and around I Love You By, reminiscing about DIY TV in the 90s,

• 1:26:53Adam Buxton?

  that kind of thing, with writer broadcaster, Star Trek nerd, and friend of the podcast, Samira Ahmed. Always good to talk to her, so I'm looking forward to that. That's at the new Wimbledon Theatre.

• 1:27:08Adam Buxton?

  Show starts at 8pm on the 10th of October, and again, that'll last around 90 minutes. Book signing afterwards, I think. Cultural recommendations? Well, recently, I've listened to quite a bit of Ezra Klein. I've always liked him. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. Incredibly intelligent, New York Times journalist, and very thoughtful, interesting, thought-provoking, unsettling conversations that he often has with people on his show. Recently, I listened to the episode that got a lot of coverage outside of his podcast

• 1:27:53Adam Buxton?

  with pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.

• 1:27:57Adam Buxton?

  Who was locked up by the US government. That is a good interview. And yes, it was very controversial for some people. There's a really good episode, if you're a subscriber to Ezra Klein's show, that you can listen to with him responding to some of the criticism he got after airing that episode. That was very interesting as well. The one though, that has dominated the last few weeks for me was with a human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who wrote a book called East West Street. Actually, Seamus, my podcast producer, bought it for me

• 1:28:40Adam Buxton?

  several years ago, I'm ashamed to admit. And I sort of started reading it and then got sidetracked. Anyway, I finished reading it now in the wake of listening to the podcast that he did with Ezra Klein, where they discuss the concept of genocide and the genesis of that term, which is really the basis of the incredible story, which is part biographical, part historical, told in East West Street. It's partly the story of the Holocaust during the Second World War, but then also the Nuremberg Trials

• 1:29:20Adam Buxton?

  and the attempts to prosecute for a new crime of genocide. Anyway, Ezra Klein and Philippe Sands talk about that with reference to what's happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza. And again, as you can imagine, there was a strong response to that podcast episode, which he also talks about in the follow-up episode. So, that's where I've been at, but I do recommend Ezra Klein and East West Street. Okay, that's it for this week. Oh my goodness. We've been on an epic journey together. I mean, you listened right to the end. Maybe some of you even listened to the whole intro as well.

• 1:30:06Adam Buxton?

  Thank you so much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his additional conversation editing and general production support. Much appreciated, Seamus. Thanks to Helen Green, she does the artwork for this podcast. She's the best. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard hooking me up with sponsors at Acast. But thanks, perhaps most of all, to you. There's a lot of podcasts out there and I appreciate you coming back for this one. Would it be appropriate to have a creepy hug? Come here, hey. Good to see you.

• 1:30:42Adam Buxton?

  Oh, lovely warm Norfolk wind. Oh, sorry about that. Until next time, please go carefully and for what it's worth, I love you. Bye.