Buckle Up by Adam Buxton review – proof that comedy really does belong in music

Tasked with doing a personal ad for one of his sponsors, Adam Buxton could have just phoned it in like all the other podcasters. Instead, the English comedian, actor and DIY musician penned web-building platform Squarespace a deliriously catchy 30-second power-pop jingle far funnier than a song about website templates and signing up for a free trial has any right to be.

It’s the cowbell that always kills me. It only kicks in for the last five seconds, but something about how completely over-the-top it is always makes me laugh. I suppose cowbells are just funnys, aren’t they? (See the legendary Saturday Night Live Blue Öyster Cult “More Cowbell” sketch with Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell for ultimate proof).

Mixed in among all of Buxton’s other equally entertaining self-made sonic skits and promotional ditties – including unpaid jingles for charities he supports such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – the Squarespace song feels like reason alone to tune into the podcast. And how many podcasts can you say that about?

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Podcast adverts people don’t skip but actually enjoy represent potentially lucrative new ground broken, and Buxton has marketing industry experts marvelling at his work. But if you, like me, grew up with The Adam and Joe Show – the late 1990s Channel 4 lo-fi comedy series Buxton made with Joe Cornish, featuring among other things stop-motion animated Star Wars toys doing degenerate remakes of film and TV classics – then further evidence of the man’s mad genius should come as no surprise.

It’s since been poured into everything from radio shows and music videos for Buxton’s pals Radiohead to books and, as of 2015, his multi-award-winning podcast featuring wonderfully frank and intelligent rambling chats with everyone from Tom Hanks to Paul McCartney, Miriam Margolyes and a doctor from MSF. Now comes his debut album Buckle Up – “a mixtape of extended jingles” as Buxton describes it, themed not around his sponsors but his own life and feelings.

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Produced by Joe Mount of indie-electronic group Metronomy, it’s full of zippy, funny little songs about things like spiders and tea towels and getting things wrong, in styles from new wave to electro-pop, bossa nova and country. But it wouldn’t be Buxton if there weren’t pathos among the laughs (in the words of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Buxton inhabits “the uncanny valley between funny and sincere”).

A song about his teenage son lazily eating pizza in his filthy room is really about fatherly neurosis and whether or not to let a kid live happily in his bubble before adulthood bursts it. Another number called Standing Still is about a packet of spilled pasta, a near nervous breakdown, and drinking copious tea to drown out “all the thoughts I have to smother”.

I suspect I am not alone in feeling increasingly drawn to music that makes me laugh as I get older. If my younger, much more serious self, caught me saying that he’d cringe. Has the world changed or have I changed? Probably a bit of both. Amid the exhausting growing pains of impending middle age, and humanity’s hopeless obsession with trying to push us to pick sides about basically everything (Buxton’s got a song about that as it happens, called “Dancing in the Middle”), I guess some emotions just become more dependable than others.

From Flight of the Concordes to The Mighty Boosh, Matt Berry and Tim Heidecker, the lines between comedy and music have often blurred in recent years, and pickings have been rich. I love it most when an artist comes principally from a position of romantic sincerity, but with the power to sideswipe you at any second with a laugh-out-loud lyric. Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman is one of the modern maestros of this. His latest album Songs for Other People’s Weddings, released on Secretly Canadian, is all about his true-life travails side-hustling as a wedding singer to try and stay solvent in financially pinched times for indie troubadours. It’s got songs about watching two men in a comedy double tuxedo try to pee at a urinal, and the tragicomic loneliness of permanently being sat at the singles table. It’s a joy.

If about 70% of all the songs ever written are about love, and another 25% are about death, that leaves laughter awfully underrepresented. This is despite it being one of the first emotional responses many people, especially kids, have to picking up and fooling around with an instrument for the first time. The slippery glissando of a hand run down the frets of a guitar. The farty wet squelch of a synthesiser. The obnoxiously loud metallic clank of a cowbell. Sometimes music is just funny in of itself.

Buxton knows it better than most and uses music to enrich everything he does, momentarily pulling you into the happy, if not uncomplicated little comedy universe he’s built up lovingly over so many years, showering your brain with the endorphins they so badly crave in a world of worry and division. To quote the legendary music producer Bruce Dickinson, or more accurately Christopher Walken: “I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.”

Adam Buxton’s debut album Buckle Up is out now on Decca Records; the Adam Buxton Band play live at Norwich Arts Centre, 13-14 October.

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