Adam Buxton talks going from podfather to pop star, and the podcast we should all be listening to

Adam Buxton is the podfather. 2026 marks his 20-year anniversary in the world of podcasting.

Long before the popular The Adam Buxton Podcast began in 2015, the radio shows he made with now-film-director Joe Cornish on XFM and BBC 6 Music were chopped up into charming podcast episodes. The very terrain of podcasting has been influenced by his output.

On September 12th, though, Buxton enters a new era. After years of creating jingles and his iconic Song Wars tracks, he has an album coming out.

Buckle Up is a real album, pressed onto real vinyl, coming out from the very real Decca records. And it’s produced by Metronomy’s Joe Mount. He’s real too.

Adam Buxton even played a secret set at the End of the Road festival. Joe Mount and other Metronomy members made up his backing band, while Buxton’s son had a cameo on guitar.

Is this a new career? A mid-life crisis moment? We sat down with Dr. Buckles on the morning after his first day on the job as a rock star at End of the Road to find out what’s going on.

ShortList: It’s around two weeks until you officially become a pop star. How does that feel?

Adam Buxton: Well, it feels weird. It's very odd in the modern music-making environment, because a record like mine is unlikely to bother the charts. I'm not going to seek out any reviews, and I'm really hoping people don't shove them under my nose.

So I think, like most things I do, it'll just kind of not be a life-changing moment. In a way, the life changing stuff has happened already. Like playing last night was amazing, and definitely feels like a fantasy.

I saw Stewart Lee earlier on. He said he saw it, and he said, [incoming Stewart Lee impersonation] “you got that out of your system now, or is this what you're going to start doing?”

I was like, 'well, I think I'd like to do a bit more. I think it'd be fun to do some theatre venues.' That's my environment, where you have a bit more control.

I found it very overwhelming being on the stage and having that all the noise coming at you. Never done that before. I've only ever done comedy on a festival stage, but you have just a wash of bass coming at you. It’s totally distorted.

I was looking around, going: guys, do we have a problem here? Or what? Afterwards, Joe Mount said, oh, yeah, I should have warned you. That's what it sounds like, unless you've got your in-ear monitors.

SL: So you didn’t have any of that stuff?

AB: No. But because I'm a trooper and incredibly professional, I just styled it out and hoped that it sounded okay. I couldn't hear why I was singing or anything.

Then there was a lady in the front row who had a Thermos flask, and she kept on waving at me, going, 'Adam, Adam,' like it was something important. So I looked down, and then she would present her Thermos flask to me and flip the lid open and show me it.

And what, what am I supposed to what? And she kept on doing it like, 'look, look, Huh, look,' while I was singing the song, up to the point I was like: 'What are you doing? Do you hate me?

'This is already stressful. I don't understand why you're showing me the Thermos flask.'

And then she tracked down one of my sons afterwards and explained it was an in-joke. She was saying, 'look the Thermos, the lid of the Thermos flask, with the weird shape opening, looks like a fleshlight. Do you know what a fleshlight is?'

SL: Yeah

AB: And that was not a joke I was in on at all.

Adam Buxton - Doing It Wrong (Official Video) - YouTube

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SL: It didn't come across from far back in the crowd, so don't worry.

AB: Normally that kind of thing would have slightly freaked me out and made me want to drink myself into oblivion afterwards. But actually, [the gig] was really fun. It's quite nice to be a bit older and just don't really have that much to prove.

SL: How did you get together with Joe Mount for this project?

AB: We were sort of match-made, really. I bumped into him once or twice. I don't know him that well. I'd interviewed him a couple of times, and always liked his stuff. I’m a Metronomy fan.

I liked him well enough to think of him when [the record company] were talking about producers. And so I thought, yeah, give him a go.

Metronomy - The Look (Official Video) - YouTube

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Originally I went to meet James Ford, the big producer guy that does Arctic Monkeys. He was up for it, but then I think he got busy, and the whole thing took so long from the time I agreed to do it: six years.

The biggest piece of the puzzle is does that person want to work with me? Joe was into it, and he's very encouraging, and it was exactly what I needed to get beyond my insecurities.

SL: You’ve downplayed the album a little bit, but it’s a big step up from Song Wars.

AB: It doesn't feel like that to me. Honestly, it really doesn't.

It feels like it feels like a logical extension. It feels like exactly what you would expect me to do. And originally I was really trying hard to second guess, to do something really unexpected. And have people say "wow, he's come out with this pretty serious record.”

Actually, Joe [Mount] was good at steering me back and saying, let's just do this. You can do that later.

SL: You know the folks from Radiohead. Did you send some of your stuff to those guys?

AB: Yes, I did. Jonny Greenwood listens to the podcast, and he knew I was making an album. And he said, send me some stuff. So I sent one of the first songs that I wrote on the guitar.

I got my guitar out of mothballs, having not played it for years and years.

I learned how to play Kooks by David Bowie for my wedding in 2001. Didn't play it very well, but it was a lovely, charming, romantic moment. And then I kind of carried on playing it a little bit for fun, but after a while — and I never got lessons — it just became embarrassing.

So I put it away, and then had fun on Garage Band and Logic and all those things. But when I was doing the album, I thought, come on, let's get the guitar out again. Let's do this properly. Let's write some songs.

I wrote a song called Pizza Time and sent it to Jonny. Didn't hear back, and felt really embarrassed that I'd sent it to him. I thought, 'well, it's his fault.' He did say I could, but then, of course, he didn't mean it. What are you doing?

Adam Buxton - Pizza Time (Official Visualiser) - YouTube

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But eventually he did come back, and he gave me some very constructive advice. It was quite critical, but in a very positive, constructive way. The main note that stuck with me was he felt the lyrics were in what he called the uncanny valley, between funny and sincere.

He said, 'I don't think anyone's ever made that work'. But actually, I do disagree with him about that. I think that my whole life has been in the uncanny valley between funny and sincere.

I suppose you could argue whether or not I've really made that work. I know what he means. I think he means find what you want to say, and say it. Don't just kind of hedge your bets being a little bit funny, a little bit vulnerable. But anyway, it was a useful note. And actually, I did change the lyrics after that, and I did nudge them a little bit more. I made them less cloying.

SL: But he’s still wrong.

AB: Yeah, maybe. Joe Mount, my producer, was quite indignant about that. He's like, 'I don't think that's a good bit of advice at all,' but actually, some of Jonny's other advice was useful, as well as technical stuff. So I was very grateful to him. It was really nice.

And afterwards he sent me an apologetic message, saying, 'Oh, it was such a pompous bit of advice, and I hope you ignored it.' But it wasn't. It was really nice, and I appreciate it.

SL: Do you think you’ll carry on doing stuff with the Metronomy chaps?

AB: I don't know. I hope so.

The show we did yesterday, and the few days of rehearsal that we've done leading up to this, have been really just to see what it was like. That's the model: you make an album and you play it live.

But honestly, it didn't really occur to me while we were making it that we would play it live, because I can't really play anything, you know, and I can't even sing really.

Normally I if I'm on my laptop, if I'm making music at home, either I'll auto tune it or I'll sing it as many times as I need to to make it sound okay. But actually standing on stage and singing it like, bang, there it is. I've never really done that before, so it's all an experiment to see.

But I think it would be fun to it would be fun to do a handful of theatre shows next year. My happy place, is doing 400 to 500 seaters.

SL: Moving back to the world of podcasts, how do you feel about them becoming a central pillar of all the weird right wing manosphere stuff these days? Not that you’re part of that scene, of course.

AB: Not yet. Give me a few more years. Wait till I get canceled. Then I'll get radicalised, and then I'll do my right wing manosphere anti-woke podcast.

Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? I mean, especially in the UK, I think the dominant perspective podcast-wise is still the territory that I occupy, which is centrist dad, pretty liberal. On the other hand, I don't really seek out the other ones.

The first waves of so-called woke culture, I think, were more extreme for a lot of Americans than it was for people in the UK. I think they got a more extreme backlash and more extreme pushback from particularly young men, who ended up drifting over. And they had Rogan to service them, and then they ended up voting for Trump.

So it all rolled on from there.

But I still think of it as, you know, we've got Ezra Klein on our side. I think he's fucking amazing.

Occasionally I'll listen to some heterodox stuff. Not Rogan so much as I've tried and I just don't find it that interesting. But I will listen to some stuff every now and that isn't absolutely straight down the line Guardian reader. But it's not as satisfying as The Ezra Klein Show. I just think he ticks all the boxes for me.

The more I listen to him, the more I just think, yeah, this is the guy. I agree with so much of what he says and I admire how he says it. He's so articulate and he's so thoughtful, and he resists the temptation to just say what's expected of him.

I don't always agree with everything he says, but he's, he's exactly the person I want to hear, saying things in a really intelligent way that doesn't just pander.

I think [The Ezra Klein Show] has suddenly got really, really good this year.

• Adam Buxton's Buckle Up album is out on September 12th, while this recent book I Love You, Byeee is available now.