As the comedian, actor and podcaster adds recording artist to his CV, Adam Buxton talks Best Fit through the songs that have soundtracked his life.
2025’s been a big year for Adam Buxton, with the release of his second memoir I Love You, Byeee, and a bona fide album Buckle Up, which dropped this month and sees him consolidate the musical talent that’s underpinned so much of his fantastic comedy.
At this year’s End of the Road Festival, the accomplished Buxton also gave a lot of the music he’s created its first public airing, with an unannounced late night set alongside members of Metronomy – including the record’s producer Joe Mount. It was a baffling spectacle as the audience watched Mount set up, I tell Buxton, with many thinking they were about to see a secret Metronomy set.
“It was a little bit about managing expectations," he says, "but that was one where I just felt like I really had to let go of my usual anxieties about that kind of thing... Because I really did think that if I was in that crowd and I was a Metronomy fan, I would really not want to see me coming out and singing a bunch of my songs – but it was fine!”
Buxton was also joined by his sons for a song: “When I said ‘I’ve got a couple of special guests’, I think people thought I was going to bring out Louis Theroux out or something,” he laughs. “You just assume some people are going to think it's the worst thing they've ever seen, but other people are going to enjoy it and take it in the right spirit, [but] it was like a dream come true. I've said it a few times, but I think that I feel like a competition winner really – I'm a kind of Make A Wish Foundation guy who's found out that he's only got a couple of years left, and it's my dream to sing my songs with a band on stage and it's come true.”
Working with Mount on Buckle Up has resulted in a tight and deeply funny record that lands on the right side of comedic songwriting, channelling the fast, silly punk spirit of Devo and the Ramones. It must be lovely as a music fan, I say, to finally hold a record you've made in your hands?
"I haven't actually seen it yet," he shrugs. "We live in Norfolk, in the countryside, and for whatever reason it's apparently impossible to find our house, and so we just don't really get stuff delivered to us. Half the things that are supposed to be delivered to us just don't turn up – and that includes the record. I only I have other people's word for it, that it actually exists!"
“Mississippi Mud” by The Muppets
ADAM BUXTON: I think The Muppet Show started in the mid '70s – like 75 or 76 – so I would have been about six or seven and watching it on TV in Wales where we lived at the time.
It was a kind of isolated farmhouse, my dad was writing a lot in those days and would be travelling, so he was very seldom home. It was just my mum looking after us there, and she didn't really like living in Wales because it was pretty cold a lot of the time, and we'd get snowed in. I think she was having her own private Shining moment - like being in charge of the Overlook Hotel – and was going a bit crazy. The only thing that made her laugh was The Muppet Show and I loved it for that reason.
It was so spectacular in every conceivable way – I hadn't seen anything like it before. The puppets were funny and up to that point in time I think most puppets were quite bad really – you’d see Punch and Judy shows, these things are horrible and grotesque and depressing, but the Muppets were so much the opposite.
Everything that's best about Americans and their sense of humour – and their music – was such a central part of that show. Jim Henson and his gang were such massive music nerds. We had the cassette of The Muppet Show album which had “Mississippi Mud” on it, and it was one of the first cassettes that I was ever into.
I just thought that was very good music, and I liked fast, mad music. That’s why I liked punk… The Ramones were like the Muppets with leather jackets as far as I was concerned. I really liked that it was just fast and silly, and it took me ages to appreciate music that was slower and groovier and had more soul.
BEST FIT: I wonder if one of the reasons the music worked so well on there is because they had such an on-the-nose understanding of the genres that they were aping in the songs; surely that’s something that comedic music lives or dies by
I think there’s a lot a frustrated musicians in the comedy world. You mentioned Tim Heidecker and Fred Armisen [previous Nine Songs interviewees] when we were talking earlier and they're perfect examples – music is so central in their lives and they’re reverential in one respect, but in another way they can puncture all the pompousness of it all, which doesn't happen too much.
Authenticity and seriousness is revered in the music world, and taking the piss out of it seems kind of…. what's the word I'm looking for? Something that isn't sacrosanct! The opposite of that!
“Baroque Hoedown” by Perrey and Kingsley
BEST FIT: I think one of these guys wrote “Popcorn”, right?
ADAM BUXTON: Ah, that makes sense, I really loved “Popcorn” as well – I could easily have put that on the list. The version by Hot Butter was on an album of children's hits from the 70s we had – and most of it wasn’t necessarily children's music… it was more like music that children might like, which is always the best kind of children's music. Actually, I think that’s maybe my favourite genre.
I didn’t know who Perrey and Kingsley were until the Internet age, and I was able to Google them. But my first exposure to “Baroque Hoedown” was at Disneyland. Growing up in England in the '70s, even in a very comfortable, cosy, middle class environment, things were pretty grey – so going to America and to Disneyland at the end of the '70s, and being confronted with that level of explosive colour and excitement and humour and inventiveness.
It was like peak USA – everything, they're firing on all cylinders. You've got so much incredible creativity and positivity and warmth, and it's all embodied in Disneyland of the late '70s. The reason I mention Disneyland is because they played “Baroque Hoedown” for the electric light parade that would happen every night when the sun went down. Usually we were back in bed by that time, but on a couple of occasions, we stayed in the park quite late, until 10pm or something, and we saw the electric light parade, which plays out to the to “Baroque Hoedown” on a loop.
Just the feeling of being up late, seeing this: all these characters who were like real celebrities: like oh shit, that's fucking Mickey Mouse right there! And that is Goofy! And I can't believe I'm actually seeing them, but they are there. I knew, on some level, that it’s obviously a guy in a suit, but on another level, I was like, I don't care if it's a guy in a suit, that is Mickey Mouse. He's right there. And this music is incredible, like so nutty and fast and robotic. I loved robots and Sci-fi.
A few years later, I remember a friend of mine showed me a copy of a book by Ralph Steadman, the cartoonist, and I really liked the pictures – they’re very mad and extreme. But then there was a section where Steadman had done a load of pictures about Disneyland, and for him it symbolised everything that was horrible and sinister and cynical about the USA.
I remember feeling really offended and defensive on behalf of Disneyland. I remember thinking: you just don't get it, Ralph Steadman, which I think is true. Disneyland is not for Ralph Steadman. As a side note, I spoke to Brix Smith at one point, and her ex Mark E. Smith wrote a whole song about Disneyland, because they went there and they were having a great time, until some weird stuff happened – like there was an accident on one of the rides while they were at the park. And he thought the place was weird – but up until that point, they were having a cool time in Disneyland.
So that always cheers me up: the thought of Mark E. Smith and Brix Smith wandering around Disneyland.
“Da Da Da” by Trio
ADAM BUXTON: That was another one from the early '80s and by that time I'd started watching Top of the Pops, and I was really addicted to the Top 40. I knew every single song in the Top 40 for a couple of years, I think, and it was so exciting to listen to the countdown on a Sunday night and see where all my favourite tracks were and hear all the new entries.
I also used to buy Smash Hits – or maybe in those days I didn't even buy it but people I knew always had it, so it'd get passed around. I would read all the lyrics they used to have in there. I guess you just Google that now if you want to know the words to a song, but back then it was symbolic of the relationship that me and my friends had with that music.
It was like you were into the whole package. You're into the people who were doing it and the way they looked, as well all the lyrics, and I remember finding it really amazing to actually read what they were saying. A lot of the time it was like finding a secret code and going: Oh, that's what he's saying?!
Anyway, “Da, Da, Da” was obviously different, because half of it was in German, but we had the English language version of it. But even then there’s a lot of German bits, and I had no clue what they were. It was just noises but I loved the sound of it.
And also there was a guy at school that had one of the Casio VL-Tones that they used on Top of the Pops… and it was so exciting to piss around with it and play with the arpeggiator and all the presets that enabled someone like me – with no other musical talent whatsoever – to be able to actually make some sounds that sounded a bit musical.
I watched the video the other day on YouTube – there’s an uncut version of the video they used to show on Top of the Pops, which is a really weird, a really odd video. I guess the band were sort of performance artists, at least in part, and I think there was a kind of art element to what they were doing, and the video is fucking strange.
They're in a bar, a boozy kind of German drinking bar schlager-type atmosphere, I think it's called. One of the guys from the band is eyeing up a waitress, and he smacks her on the ass at one point, and that was in the video. I remember in the BBC version that they showed, he smacks her on the ass, then she spins around and smacks him across the face, but in the uncut version, he chucks it at her, and it sticks in her back, and there's blood streaming down the back of her shirt!
I was like: Wow, what the fuck is going on here? Anyway, she's fine and I'm happy to say I don't know why she needed to get stabbed in the back by the guy, but it's a strange artefact from a different time.
“Carnival Eyes” by David Byrne
ADAM BUXTON: I was already a huge Talking Heads fan by the time this came out, and I really loved every single thing they did. I went to see Jonathan Demme’s film Something Wild – and obviously Jonathan Demme also did Stop Making Sense, which I loved.
Something Wild was a film with Ray Liotta and Melanie Griffith – a kind of mad thriller – and Jeff Daniels was in it as well. I really liked that film, and on the soundtrack it had this track from David Byrne called “Loco De Amor”. It was a totally different style than I'd heard from him before because Naked hadn't come out then – this was 1986 – and I really loved it. I think that was the song that encouraged him to want to do more similar things in it with Latin American music and different styles.
When Talking Heads broke up, he did this album Rei Momo and I rushed out and I got it, and I loved it. It was the soundtrack to a kind of weird year of having left school and being a bartender, not getting into college because my exam results were too shit, and falling in love with a woman who was a bit older than me. She was a raver, an E head, and kept on saying to me: We’ve got to take E, we've got to take E!. And I said, Okay, but I really didn't want to! We went to The Mud Club, I took an E and I had an absolutely terrible time, because I couldn't relax. I was too uptight!
“Carnvial Eyes” is my favourite track on Rei Momo – and I love every single song on that record; I think it’s one of my favourite records ever. But it's so emotional, that song, and it's funny, because you tend to think of David Byrne as a bit robotic and while Talking Heads’ music was very stirring, it wasn't necessarily directly emotional in the same way.
But “Carnival Eyes” is like, my god, heartbreaking. I didn't even realise that it was quite a political song at the time. It was about all the disappeared in places like Guatemala and about political violence.
That’s a whole other conversation on how effective political songs are – if someone like me has no fucking clue that that's what it's about, until you actually Google it years later! But knowing that now, I guess, makes it even more powerful.
"The Apple Stretching” by Grace Jones
ADAM BUXTON: That song was definitely from the night after The Mud Club when I took an E and I'd had a terrible time, and my girlfriend was too wasted to be able to look after me. She was having a good time: Oh, just relax. It'll be fine! I was like: I can't relax. I think I'm going to have a heart attack. And so she found some bloke to look after me. Everyone was on E; everyone was like, Hey, I love you! And so she said to this guy: Well, you look after my boyfriend. He's having a bad time.
So I sat down with this guy who worked for the GLC, and he was just lovely to me, and we chatted about dolphins or something. He asked, What would you like to do? I was like, I'd like to swim with dolphins, something like that! And then eventually we got back to my girlfriend's place, and by that time I'd come down a little bit, but I was left with the residual euphoric hang over a little bit, and that felt quite good.
That's been my experience with a lot of drugs, actually – I hate them until the comedown, immediately after it plateaus. That's the best bit: when I know I'm not going to die or go crazy, and then everything starts calming down a little bit and it gets really, really good.
At that point – when we got back from the club, it was four in the morning and the sun was coming up, but we still weren't sleepy – she put on Living My Life by Grace Jones, which I didn't know other than a couple of tracks, and we just had it on repeat. And I really loved “The Apple Stretching” and hearing it when the sun was coming up in Newington Green after that night, which had been really quite freaky for me, but then feeling safe, and being with my girlfriend, who was by that point, being a bit more affectionate.
So it's a really fantastic memory but it's a great track as well, especially for a seven minute song – and I always listen to the whole thing.
“I Want To Live On An Abstract Plain” by Frank Black
BEST FIT: Seeing Black Frank rebranded as Frank Black for the first time on the cover of Teenager of the Year – with that cover where he’s got a little crown and the flowers – was a very surreal moment for me personally as an adolescent.
ADAM BUXTON: I know, it’s a funny cover. It’s so goofy, especially after all those Vaughan Oliver Pixies covers that are so mysterious and dark, and to just to see him standing there with a big cheesy grin and a bunch of flowers… but I think subliminally, that was one of the things that made me think, 'Okay, now I really love you.' I always felt like the Pixies – if I ever met them – would probably beat me up with bicycle chains. But when I saw that Teenager of the Year cover… he’s friendly!
The songs are my perfect type of music: art-pop, very tuneful, and also very fast and stupid and silly and short. It's me in a nutshell. I really like short songs. I love the fact that some of the Pixies songs were only like 70 seconds – "Alison" is 78 seconds.
There's a song called “Thalassocracy“ on Teenager of the Year which is pretty amazing. It’s like a bomb going off, one of the best bits of music ever… but “I Want To Live On An Abstract Plain” is a bit more conventional in some ways, but it's the perfect song.
I think I've listened to that album probably more than any other record that I own and it never gets boring. It soundtracked so many different sections of my life, but I got into it when I was at art school and then I listened to it on my honeymoon while we were driving down Route 66, and I've listened to it while I've been making TV shows and making toy movies and building sets out of cardboard.
I guess thematically, it's sort of an escape song. I don't know what it's about, but it seems like a kind of “grass is greener” song – like everything would be better if I could just escape… an escape fantasy song.
I think that's a genre that I respond to. Not that I necessarily want to escape, because I'm very grateful for my life, but every now and again you do want to escape!
“Reservoir” by Metronomy
ADAM BUXTON: I wasn't on top of them right from the get go, but when I was doing the show Bug, we showed music videos and we showed the video for “A Thing For Me”, which was really good and I remember thinking: I like the video more than the song.
It a bit too jerky, and angular for me, I think. I like jerky and angular things, but it was a bit too mad. I liked Love Letters when it came out; there's an instrumental called "On The Motorway" which is absolutely magnificent.
Love Letters was a lot more melodic, and "Reservoir" is the perfect song as far as I'm concerned - the length of it, the structure, all the bits that you really like happen the right number of times. Sometimes you get songs where you're like, I love that bit, and then they only do it once, or they squander it somehow. You think: now do more of that bit; you should come back and do that. On "Reservoir", all the bits that you like happen the right number of times.
I love all the actual sounds too: the burbling, arpeggiated synth that fades in during the chorus is really great. And the actual lead line, which I've tried for so long to try and replicate, going through every single setting on Logic since and buying all these other synthesisers trying to find out, what the fuck is that noise? It sounds so basic! It almost sounds like the sound you get when you haven't done a preset. It's like blank sound beep - a tone burst, almost, but it's not, it's something he's got something more musical out of it, and I still haven't exactly established what it is, and he won't tell me, so that's quite annoying.
BEST FIT: Was it a real fanboy moment to work with Joe on Buckle Up?
It was! I definitely wanted him to just do a Metronomy album that I would write lyrics for! That was my idea of how this would go well, but I thought: You’re good with the music… he’s great with lyrics too, but I felt like, I can write some stupid, funny lyrics, but you do the music.
In the the end, he wanted to hear what I got and build on that. And then some of the things that I had, he didn't really do much to, other than tidy them up, and others he completely reconstructed – and those are the ones that I like best on the album.
Songs like “Tea Towel”, which he reconstructed and embellished, and I really love the way that sounds. I think that's probably the closest to a Metronomy song in some ways, although ”Dancing in the Middle” was another one that we completely took apart and rebuilt, and that also sounds quite Metronomy-ish, although it's Metronomy doing Devo as well, which was definitely intentional.
So, it was a thrill. He works, in many ways, the opposite of how I work. I take ages and ages and I over-screwdriver everything, as Brian Eno calls it – but Joe doesn't do that at all.
“Hidden Place” by Björk
ADAM BUXTON: I think she is the queen of constructing these womb-like sonic spaces, these comforting spaces. Sometimes it's very austere and strange, but she's brilliant when she's in that mode of creating a little glowing, fairy-lit space that you can shelter in.
And she does that on Debut - on that track “Come to Me” which I love. But “Hidden Place” is like that as well. And I guess she was working with Matmos on that album, and they were recording all these natural sounds – microscopic sounds, like she wanted to record the sound of buds bursting on a branch. They raided sound libraries and also did some of their own recordings to create all these tiny little clicks and micro-movement sounds, which act as percussion throughout the whole record.
On that track it sounds like you're in a grotto or a cave, and you’re hiding out, or maybe you're meeting someone you're having an affair with – some illicit meeting is taking place in the hidden place, but it's a sanctuary, and it's safe, and there's moss growing.
Maybe you can sit on the moss and you've got a few candles, and the light of the candles is glittering, and throwing shadows against the walls, and you can hear the clicks of the insects in there. It’s very cinematic – it’s like an art installation. So rather than being like a whole movie or something, it’s a single space that she constructs in absolutely perfect, microscopic detail, and then adds it maximum emotion to it as well.
I don't know anyone else who does that as well as she does. She's just in a totally different league.
“Pyramids” by Frank Ocean
ADAM BUXTON: It took me a while to get into Frank Ocean and I remember Channel Orange was recommended to me by Emmy the Great. She’d been on a radio show that I did, then she came to a party we had out here when we first moved into our place in Norfolk, and she played some songs at the party.
She’s quite a bit younger than I am and I remember being like a real granddad saying: what's good at the moment? Tell me what to listen to! And she said: Oh you should listen to Channel Orange, which I think had just come out at that point. So I did listen to it, and I thought, yes, this is good, but… I’ve just never really known that much about hip hop. It's not my natural genre to be enthusiastic about.
There's not too many hip hop songs that are really fast and stupid, which is my preferred sound, but this seeped in and “Pyramids” was the one that really got its hooks into me. I like those songs with different sections that are a bit of a journey – I always loved "Paranoid Android" and things like that, where you're really on a ride.
I really like the pounding club section too, but maybe I like it because none of it overstays its welcome. He keeps things moving and he keeps it very dramatic. You're sort of aware of him telling some story about comparing the Cleopatra of old to a woman dancing in a club. And you're like: Okay, I think I understand, but I'm not completely sure… but it's very it's very visual and woozy, and then the whole thing moves towards that amazing section of her dancing in the club, and all those queasy synths, very warm washes of synth burbling underneath, and it reminded me of Blade Runner.
That was another very formative musical experience, seeing Blade Runner and responding to that music and those synth sounds on that soundtrack by Vangelis, and I hear that… some of those scenes in Blade Runner, where there's evening light shining through, and everything's very dreamlike and strange, and and you've got Vangelis burbling away. And it's sci fi, and it's maybe robots, and all my favourite things is what that song sounds like to me.
BEST FIT: What are you listening to at the moment?
The other day I was watching a lot of Aldous Harding stuff and I really like everything about her. She's really very odd, and I really like the way she moves and how she looks in her videos. And the songs are great – I love “The Barrel”. I also really like the Panda Bear album. That's probably one of the ones I've listened to most this year.
I never really got into his stuff before, and I was never a big Animal Collective person. It was a bit too clattery for me. But now he’s come around to exactly the place that I really like, which is a bit like Deerhunter; the Fading Frontier album by Deerhunter is another one that’s a big deal for me. That was the year that my dad died, and then Bowie died soon afterwards, and that's what I was listening to.
How is your relationship with Bowie’s music these days? I’ve been having a bit of a love affair with the '90s stuff, trying to reassess those three or four records that I really hated growing up
I wouldn't say that I'm fully there yet, but I know exactly what you mean. I wrote a whole chapter about Bowie in the '90s for my book, and then I got cold feet and took it out of the actual physical copy, because I thought it was too ‘inside baseball’.
I thought I'd talked enough about Bowie, really. But then I put it in the audio book, and John Ronson, who is a friend of mine, said, Oh, that was the best chapter. But that was all about me trying to go back and revisit Outside and, as you say, reassess some of that stuff, which initially I didn't get on with at all.
It’s still a tough sell though: a concept album about an art crime detective...
Yes, it really is. I read a book by Miranda Sawyer about Brit Pop recently - Uncommon People – and she’s got a chapter about Tricky and there's a bit where she reminded me of this thing Bowie wrote for Q magazine.
He imagined spending the evening with Tricky and it’s the most ridiculous, pretentious bullshit that I've ever read in my life. And it reminded me why I checked out of Bowie, because it was all about that in the mid-'90s.
He was just piling way too much on everything… but then I read it back, and I remember why it wound me up, but I also remember why I love him, and why he was so interesting and fun.
He was just going for it and I think he did care when people didn't like what he was doing, but at the same time, it didn't stop him.
Buckle Up is out now via Decca Records
Sign up to Best Fit's Substack for regular dispatches from the world of pop culture