Adam Buxton records his first music album

Hear the first track here

Adam Buxton is to release his debut music album, Buckle Up, this autumn, with the first single, Pizza Time out today.

To create the 15 tracks, the comedian and podcaster has collaborated with Metronomy’s Joe Mount – making this a different Adam & Joe collaboration – and producer Pete Robertson, who has worked with the likes of Jane’s Addiction.

Buxton joked: ‘I don’t actually consider this actual music. One of the album titles I considered was Adjacent To Music, because every single bit of music that I’ve listened to, in my mind, is better qualified to be considered music than this.

‘The more music I listen to, the more I strongly feel that I have no right to be near a record contract, especially when there are so many talented people who would love to have one.’

The comic admits he is a ‘master of self-deluded over-complication’ and told the record label Decca he wanted ‘Berlin-period Bowie and Eno going for lunch with Radiohead and Nina Simone at Brian Wilson’s beach brasserie.’ He also told them he wanted a Bulgarian choir, but he never got one.

He added: ‘You don’t want to be tortured by what Phillip Pullman called the Phase Space - the spectrum of possibilities available to you when you begin a project. It’s very easy to be paralysed by that – in life, too. But it’s hard to shut down the imposter syndrome completely.’

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has described Buxton’s lyrics, as inhabiting ‘the uncanny valley between funny and sincere’ – though it’s unclear whether he meant that as a compliment or not. After Buxton sent the guitarist the demo for Pizza Time, he said: ‘I think you’re hamstrung by your limitations on the guitar.’

Buxton put the album together at Mount’s Kent studios, visiting every few months in 2023 to build up demos or reconstruct ideas.

The comic said: ‘I did my best to listen to Joe when he resisted my more unrealistically ambitious ideas. I have collaborated successfully so seldomly, I really tried hard to be led by him.’

According to the record label ‘Mount would provide instrumentation, and occasionally Buxton would add incompetent instrumentation of his own’.

Songs on the album include Skip This Track, a country ditty about not sharing the same musical taste as your partner, Tea Towel, a 1970s bossa nova number about the absorbency, or lack of, in modern dishcloths and My Feelings, an ironic Hunky Dory-inspired track exploring Buxton’s worries about ‘prioritising my emotions in a way my parents’ generation would have disapproved of’.

Decca say there is ‘a strong flavour of jingles on the album too’, such as I Grated My Thumb (‘I grated my thumb while zesting lime for lunch today’), while Have U Seen My Phone Charge and Betjeman Notes, were inspired by Buxton’s late father Nigel, a travel writer known as BaaadDad to viewers of Channel 4’s The Adam and Joe Show.

Mount said: "‘I loved making this record with Adam and am very proud of my involvement in it. We chatted about artists like Ween, The Rutles, Eric Idle and Harry Nilsson while recording and I would often think to myself "what would a car full of teenagers enjoy hearing?". Hopefully we’ve made something a car full of teenagers will enjoy.’

The album will be released on vinyl and digital on Friday September 12.

Here’s Pizza Time, a hymn to Buxton’s teenage son Nat, whom he’d often find standing in a bathrobe next to the oven watching a pizza cook at 11am and described as ‘a coming-of-age song – and a getting old song – of wondrous economy’