Nine Songs: Adam Buxton

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.