‘Sometimes I overshare’: Adam Buxton on worry, enjoyable, finance – and falling out with mates | Adam Buxton

On a muggy summer time day, Adam Buxton is speaking me by means of the songs on his debut album, Buckle Up. “There’s one on there called Standing Still,” he says, “which was written when I was feeling absolutely bleak and lost and is about opening a packet of pasta when all the pasta spills. I thought: ‘You can get a joke in there about being a fusilli billy and maybe that will distract a bit from the more earnest and pain-laden lyrics about how, every morning, I drink a cup of tea and it helps me with all the thoughts I have to smother.’”

What are these ideas? “I get overwhelmed by the world and, the worse the news gets, the harder it bites,” he says. “I get existential fear and I think I should go and join Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and work with them. But then, is that really the best use of my talents? My wife is like: ‘Please don’t join MSF. It’s really helpful to have you around here. And, also, I think you’re good at doing your podcast and that helps people.’”

Buxton, 56, cuts a pensive determine as he strokes his grey-streaked beard. He has travelled to the Guardian’s London workplaces from his house in Norfolk, the place he lives with Sarah, their three kids and their canine Rosie, who usually options on his podcast. The Adam Buxton Show started in 2015, the yr that his longstanding comedy accomplice, Joe Cornish, went off to make motion pictures. During Covid, at a time when folks had been extra remoted and atomised than ever, Buxton’s mild, affable chat received an enormous and dependable fanbase.

Conversation is vital to Buxton. He was raised in west London by his journalist father, Nigel, who was journey editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and Chilean mom, Valerie. He has described his dad as “gruff, pompous, conservative and harshly critical of nearly everything I enjoyed as a youngster and beyond”, whereas his mum was his “ally”, somebody who squared as much as his father and inspired Buxton’s love of music and eventual TV and comedy profession.

“Watching my parents, the problem was they didn’t talk enough,” he says. “Stubbornness, pride and hurt feelings prevented them. It’s probably why I feel it’s ultimately a good thing to talk more rather than less … Sometimes I feel I overshare and sometimes I can hear my dad or even my mum going, ‘It’s too much – say less.’”

Buxton’s readiness to speak about his personal life encourages his podcast company to let their guard down. His good friend Louis Theroux opened up about his ingesting issues, admitting that in the course of the pandemic he would usually be parenting his three sons hungover. “I did sometimes wonder if you could do the job drunk,” he instructed Buxton. “Maybe that’s controversial, but I’m going to say yes.” Singer Pauline Black talked about performing in entrance of skinheads who had been on velocity within the Nineteen Seventies and continuously fearing racist violence. Zadie Smith mirrored on the “death terror” that evokes her. How does Buxton method such a variety of company? “I’m always just looking for a moment of genuine connection,” he says.

The company aren’t all celebrities. The Syrian refugee Hassan Akkad described being detained and tortured by the police for attending a protest, then paying smugglers to take him on a dinghy from Turkey to Greece. Once the overfilled boat started to sink, he swam for seven hours to make it to Lesbos.

“It’s valuable for people to be able to talk to each other about complicated things,” Buxton says. “I grew up in a house with parents who I didn’t agree with politically, but that didn’t stop me loving them. The problem now is that people are very prepared to think the worst of anyone. That seems to be the default position, to read the most bad-faith version of whatever’s going on in the situation.”

Over the previous few years, for the primary time, he’s had some everlasting fallings out with mates over politics. “It was really shocking when it happened, because I sat down with them and tried to get past it,” he says. “‘Surely we can talk about it?’ I said. ‘We’ve got too much in common.’ And it was so upsetting and frightening when it was apparent that we couldn’t. It completely threw me for a loop for a while.”

He has written two memoirs: Ramble Book, printed in 2020, about his life within the Eighties and the loss of life of his father in 2015; and 2025’s I Love You, Byeee, which covers his TV profession within the Nineteen Nineties and the loss of life of his mom in 2020. He spent 9 months caring for his father after he was identified with most cancers. “Before he moved in, I’d imagined conversations filled with tender reminiscences, confessions and closure,” he writes. “In the end, we were just two uptight men who found it easier to be on our own.”

His mom’s loss of life felt extra sudden, regardless of her well being deteriorating over a lot of years. “The ones who really love you, you end up taking for granted,” he instructed Cornish in a podcast episode recorded a number of months later. “I just had it in my head that we were going to have another chapter and she would be with us. I was totally sideswiped by her death.”

Hearing him grapple along with his bereavement has helped me with my very own grief over the loss of life of my mom. At the top of I Love You, Byeee, he thanks his mom for loving him and apologises for not taking the time to speak to her extra about her life. It’s a remorse I’ve typically had myself, holding on to questions that can now by no means be answered, and there’s a consolation in listening to that expressed by another person. How is he coping now? “I feel as if I’ve really been in the hole with grief for ages, looking through photos, thinking about it, talking to relatives, maybe spending too much time there and not moving on sufficiently,” he says. “I really miss them and that doesn’t go away. I’m surprised how much that doesn’t go away.”

He continues to be haunted by one tune that reminds him of his mom, Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away. “I listened to that song the night after she died, since it’s one of her favourites, but this time I suddenly heard such darkness in it,” he says. “She sings, ‘I follow the night / Can’t stand the light / When will I begin / My life again?’ and it made me think of where my mum might be and I began to feel so fearful. There’s grief and then there’s fear and the fear is worse.”

Buxton went to the fee-paying Westminster faculty in London, which is the place he grew to become mates with Theroux and Cornish. It was whereas learning at Cheltenham College of Art that he started tinkering with the self-filmed sketches he despatched to the Channel 4 present Takeover TV, and which fashioned the idea for the Adam and Joe Show. This started in 1996, and included every part from a toy-themed recreation of The English Patient, to Buxton’s father being filmed as he explored the nightclubs of Ibiza. At a time when reveals akin to Spitting Image and Brass Eye had been skewering politicians and celebrities, Buxton and Cornish most well-liked to make enjoyable of themselves.

The present was axed after 4 collection, and the pair went on to work collectively on the radio. With the thirtieth anniversary of the Adam and Joe Show arising, does he suppose they’ll ever make one other TV collection?

“Never say never, but it would be quite weird,” he says. “Over the years, we’ve discovered the podcast is a good medium for us because we know how we fit together in that world. We do the Christmas podcast together every year and I don’t think that’s going to stop anytime soon.”

With a brand new celebrity-fronted interview podcast seemingly popping up each week, does he fear about the way forward for his present? “I don’t think about it really,” he says. “I’m not on social media, I don’t check numbers and I gauge it by whether I’m still getting sponsors. I do sometimes think, if the sponsors went away and it wasn’t financially worthwhile, would I still do it? And I think I would. It is fun. I’ll probably only stop when Rosie dies.”

From 2007 to 2009, he co-hosted a BBC Radio 6 Music present with Cornish, which included jokey radio jingles. He sees his album as a pure development for this musical tinkering – a choice of “proper music” with a humorous edge, written by him over 5 years and produced by Joe Mount of indie group Metronomy. The 15 tracks span every part, from fast-paced electropop about sitting on the ethical fence (Dancing within the Middle) to Nineteen Seventies Brazilian bossa about drying the dishes (Tea Towel), Dylanesque people singing about differing musical tastes (Skip This Track) and thundering jungle breakbeats for a love letter to sporting shorts (Shorts).

This solo challenge places him centre stage, however he’s nonetheless eager to work with others. “I like anything where it’s collegiate and you have an experience with people,” he says. “That’s why I always wanted to go into the [I’m A Celebrity] jungle. Now I do get offers to go in there but I think I’m too old. I don’t know if I could hack it physically.”

What in the event that they provided you 1,000,000 kilos? “It’s not about the money, man – it’s about the experience,” he laughs. “I’d do it for free if the right people were in there.”

He’s additionally eager to behave extra: in 2007, he was solid in Edgar Wright’s romp Hot Fuzz, the place he performed an area journalist who meets a grisly finish. “I’m hoping I might be entering my more castable years as an older man. It might be easier to slot me into a few creepy old guy roles. That’s the dream: get a part on a show that ends up doing really well. You just show up, you don’t have to write it and you don’t have to worry about it, just hang out with talented people. That would be really good.”