Adam Buxton: ‘Craft? Expertise? Not that I can see’

Photographs by Paul Stuart

The reason for our encounter, ostensibly, is to talk about Buxton’s (spoiler: excellent) new book, I Love You, Byeee, the follow-up to his 2020 memoir, Ramble Book. The original focused mainly on his relationship with his late father, Nigel Buxton, who had late-life TV fame as “BaaadDad”, and his reflections on 1980s pop culture, notably a lifelong obsession with David Bowie. This one tracks forward to the 1990s and 2000s, when Buxton’s career took off. It details the origins of his cult Channel 4 show with Joe Cornish, The Adam and Joe Show, then moves on to Buxton making music videos with Radiohead and Travis, and becoming an OG of the podcast scene. It also weaves in the life of his mother, who died in 2020 while he was writing it. I Love You, Byeee is poignant and properly funny; a bracing dip into nostalgia, but self-aware, too.

Not that Buxton sees it that way. “Sometimes I get interviewed by people and I feel obliged to explain my career,” says Buxton, who today wears a black Lacoste polo shirt, shorts and a tea-cosy hat, “or answer the question: ‘Well, why would someone want to buy this book?’ Because usually you’ve got a story about the big film that you were in that everyone knows. Or that time in your life when you had the crisis that was in the papers. But I don’t have any of those things in my career, really. Instead, I’ve got: ‘I scratched Thom Yorke’s nose once when it was itchy and he told me not to.’ That’s the big story in the book! That’s the big celebrity reveal!”

Buxton’s exaggerating, but only a little: there’s also an aside about briefly being at boarding school with Guy Ritchie, where pre-teen Guy taught him to play cards. (Buxton met the director later in life and Ritchie claimed to have no recollection of ever crossing paths.) “As far as having a craft, or any expertise, that’s always been significantly missing in my life and it’s been a source of anxiety,” he goes on. “Like, the only thing I could give a TED talk about would be…” He pauses, his brow furrows. “Making jingles? And adverts for my podcast. That’s the only thing I feel like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m pretty good at that.’”

We’re sitting in a café in King’s Cross, having a cup of tea. Buxton, who lives in the countryside outside Norwich with his wife Sarah – “my wiiiiffee” to regular listeners – and three children, is in London doing what you would have to call his day job: the Adam Buxton Podcast. He’s just come from interviewing the hip-hop musician Loyle Carner. “I’m all loved up, because he’s the nicest, most thoughtful guy, and not a twit,” Buxton says. “He got all emotional a few times, I got emotional. We’re a couple of guys who get emotional, wanting to connect.

“And my daughter came down from Norwich to meet him and get her photo taken,” he continues. “She’s got exams, she did her English Lit GCSE this morning, gets on the train, picture with Loyle Carner, home. Exam tomorrow. That’s Loyle-power.” Buxton smiles, one of his superior dad jokes incoming: “She’s a Loyle-ist.”

Buxton started his solo podcast in 2015, having previously collaborated with Cornish on ones for Xfm and BBC 6 Music. He has proven to be an engaging and gently probing interviewer, often lulling his subjects – who have included Sir Paul McCartney, Zadie Smith and, serial returnees, Cornish and Louis Theroux, whom he met as a teenager when they were all at Westminster School in the 1980s and with whom he has joking-not-joking rivalries with – into unpredictable and revealing conversations.

Surely, I suggest, Buxton has to acknowledge some expertise in podcasting? “Yeah, no, that does cheer me up,” he accepts, slightly reluctantly. “That’s as close as I’ve got to doing something that works more often than it doesn’t. Even though, in dark moments, I think, ‘Well, that’s because of the guests. They’re who people want to hear.’ And when you look at the numbers, it’s very brutal about who works and who doesn’t. But I’ll take that. I love doing it and I have been able to carry on doing it. How about that?”

Like many podcasters, Buxton started reaching new audiences during the Covid lockdowns. “We were one of the few industries that did quite well out of it, along with Zoom and the PPE industry,” he says. “It was boom time.”

At the heart of these new engagements was the parasocial relationship: the one-sided connections listeners develop with media personalities they don’t know personally, which podcasts are particularly adept at fostering. Buxton knows well the power of these interactions; it was mainlining WTF from the American podcaster Marc Maron, that inspired the format for his own show. “When I meet listeners out and about, they sometimes go, ‘God, it’s weird talking to you, because I don’t really know you,’” says Buxton. “And I say, ‘Well, I think you do. I mean, you don’t know everything. You probably know the best bits, because it’s all heavily edited, and it’s a very one-way relationship. But it is a real relationship I think.’”

That said, Buxton is not especially interested in making these connections fully reciprocal. “I don’t do social media,” he says. “I don’t want the two-way intimacy. That’s too much. I want to invite people in, but there’s a whole other layer of commitment that I think is better spent on the actual thing. Trying to get that bit as good as possible.”

Part of the fascination of listening to Buxton, though, is the chance to armchair-analyse his friendships with Theroux and especially Cornish. I Love You, Byeee goes deep on the latter dynamic: his creative differences and petty jealousies with Cornish while making The Adam and Joe Show; then his complex feelings when, after they separated, Cornish started directing movies (Attack the Block) and writing screenplays for “Steven fucking Spielberg” (2011’s The Adventures of Tintin).

Still, their relationship remains fond and, on the audiobook of I Love You, Byeee, Cornish is allowed his right to reply on how he is portrayed. “We had so many tense times, but we’ve both been through the same journey,” says Buxton, using a comic voice for that last word to undercut the earnestness. “It’s not like we’ve reached a plateau of total enlightenment, but I don’t think there are any stored-up resentments any more. He’s happy with his life. I’m happy with mine. We’re both doing what we want. We both stopped smoking weed and have found that it has been hugely beneficial with our general anxiety levels.”

The most tear-jerky parts of the book concern Buxton’s mother, Valerie, who was born and grew up in Chile, speaking Spanish and English, though you wouldn’t have known it to meet her in later life, in the fairytale Berkshire village of Sonning. “With her twinset and pearls… you’d probably come away thinking she was the whitest, most middle-class (sorry, Mum, upper middle-class British woman you’d ever met,” Buxton writes. Aged 20, she took a job as one of the first Chilean stewardesses for BOAC, which would later become British Airways. At an embassy bash in Tokyo in the early 1960s she met Nigel Buxton, a dashing travel journalist for the Sunday Telegraph.

The Buxtons never officially divorced, but they separated after a series of semi-comic, heartbreaking financial disasters that were laid out in Ramble Book. Valerie thought Buxton took Nigel’s side and didn’t wholly approve of him co-opting his father to become BaaadDad in The Adam and Joe Show. The new book is an attempt to redress the balance, an affectionate portrait of a fun, glamorous woman whom Buxton didn’t always agree with, namely on Brexit. When Valerie died in the early stages of the pandemic (though not from Covid), he set about cataloguing her life and her many thousands of photographs in an effort to understand her better.

Writing about his parents, and grief, has been the hardest part of the memoir process for Buxton – mainly because he knows they would hate those sections. “It’s a sort of extended therapy-as-entertainment exercise in a creative way that might hopefully be relatable,” he explains. “That’s how you justify it to yourself. Because in my head I hear the voices of my parents, who, I think, strongly believed that that was not a good thing to do, not a worthwhile thing to do, and actually a bit of an embarrassing thing to do. That those deep feelings were better dealt with yourself. That no one needs to hear them, that a lot of people would prefer not to hear them. So that voice is always loud in my head.”

Buxton crinkles his nose and sighs. “But I do, honestly, fundamentally disagree with that. I understand and I appreciate people who feel it’s too much and who feel wound up by it. But I would rather people did talk about this stuff, and I like it when other people do.”

As far as memoirs go, Buxton thinks he might be done now. “Well, when Rosie dies, that will be number three,” he says, of his beloved mutt and erstwhile companion on the podcast. “Never say never.”

Ever the polymath, Buxton’s next endeavour is a debut solo music album called Buckle Up, released in September. Like most of his projects, the gestation time has been considerable. He was first approached in 2019 by an executive from Decca who was a fan of a podcast. The label might have expected extended jingles and knockabout comedy songs, but underestimated they were dealing with “a master of self-deluded over-complication”.

When, eventually, Buxton had some demos, he sent one, called Pizza Time, to Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead. Greenwood seemed a bit bemused. “Lyrically [it] feels a bit like you’re in the uncanny valley between sincere and funny,” he wrote in an email that Buxton prints in I Love You, Byeee. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever made that work.”

Buxton and I have left the café now and are walking together to the station, Buxton pushing his Brompton. He took Greenwood’s notes and came back with 14 tracks that include a reworked Pizza Time, and also I Grated My Thumb and Skip This Track.

I ask Buxton if he feels positive about how the album has turned out. “What do you think?” he mock-shouts, like I’ve learned nothing from the past hour. Then he softens. “No, I feel good about it. I loved doing it. All of it. But the angst is like, ‘Fuck, there’s so many talented musicians who would love to release their music and have it recorded. And I’m recording mine? That feels a bit hard to justify.”

There, that abysmal self-promotion again.

As for the “uncanny valley” – where did Buxton land? “I ended up with a house fairly low down on the funny slope, but it was definitely in the valley,” he says, putting on a neon helmet, ready to speed off. “But it was a nice spot looking out over the sincere side.”

I Love You, Byeee: Rambles on DIY TV, Rockstars, Kids and Mums by Adam Buxton is published by Mudlark at £22