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You might not have seen Joe Cornish's face on television for some time now (which is just as well because it's recently been ridden with shingles!), but you may have heard his voice. Joe and his comedy partner of 14 years, Adam Buxton, have been presenting their award-winning radio show on BBC 6 Music for just under a year now and one of their stand-out features is the somewhat charming Song Wars where Adam and Joe pit their musical talents against one another.
The audience reaction to Song Wars has been so great that they've released Song Wars Volume One as a 24-track album exclusively available on iTunes. We caught up with Joe as he arrived back from L.A recovering from illness, but on a high from working with Edgar Wright, Marvel and meeting Quentin Tarantino, albeit in odd circumstances...
First off, why weren’t you at Glastonbury with Adam?
Because of the shingles! We had a couple of weeks off the radio show and I went to Los Angeles to do some work on a script I’m working on and I contracted this stupid shingles thing on the plane. After about a week I looked like Bruce Willis at the end of Planet Terror. The right side of my face was horribly swollen. I felt like I dipped my head in a bucket of bees and been hit on the head with a baseball bat, but luckily I was staying in Beverly Hills in a nice hotel. It was a nice place to be ill – top of the range doctors, very weak dollar and room service. I won’t go through the details of the circumstances, but we were around a place were Quentin Tarantino was, who I’ve met before. He was on his way to the AFI Warren Beattie tribute and he didn’t know I had shingles, and he was wearing this beautiful suit and went to hug me and very nearly pushed my horrible postulant shingles into the chest of his suit, so I had to push him away at the last moment, going, “No! No! No!” And then, not in a very tactful way, he went, “Man! What the fuck is the matter with your face!” I would have been very proud if he turned up on TV at the Warren Beattie AFI tribute with my shingles on his suit.
More importantly, why weren’t you invited to play Glastonbury with a set derived from your Song Wars Volume One album?
You know what, you’re absolutely right. I can assume that it was because the album was released the week of Glastonbury and they didn’t have the time to raise the money to afford us because obviously we’d be very expensive. That is something I’d like to do one day – form some sort of a band, but I don’t know how Adam feels about it, but I’d like some sort of an idiotic performance, it’s be pretty fun. If Shakin’ Stevens can make it to Glastonbury, then it’s a bit of an insult that we weren’t invited.
Can you explain what Song Wars is all about for those poor Channel 4 Comedy Online readers who have no idea?
We have a show on BB6 Music on Saturday mornings between 9am and 12pm. We choose a theme every other week and we both write songs on that theme. We go into our respective hovels and houses and sit on our Macintosh computers and use Garageband and just cobble together a stupid song. It started off when we were first on 6 Music last summer and the songs were quite crap and short, but we’re quite competitive, Adam and I, and we really want to see each other die and beat each other and so it’s escalating into an overwrought nuclear arms race of who can do the most elaborately produced stupid song. Before we knew we found ourselves with 33 of these songs, so we release 24 of them on an iTunes only album and miraculously people seem to like them and be paying £6.32 for them.
Do you program the music yourselves or do you get friends to help out?
We do the music ourselves like we did with our old Channel 4 show back in the day.
Is Zac Sandler (who helped with the music on the Channel 4 show) involved?
You know what, he isn’t involved. He’s got a real band – a proper band called Astroman who gig around London. I think he might turn his nose up at Song Wars. The process is so ill-disciplined that even to arrange for Zac to come round would be too organized for us. We have considered bringing friends in, but we’re competitive that the parameters have to be strict and at the moment they’re just Garageband and yourself. Adam keeps wanting to bring in one of his indie-rock chums to play along – Johnny Greenwood or something – but I keep stopping him because I don’t want him to win and I’m jealous. Maybe one day we’ll do collaborations or something, that would be fun.
A lot of songs are under a minute in length, why is this?
We just don’t want to drive our listeners to suicide. Some of the songs are alright, but some of the songs that haven’t made it to the album are quite shit. You don’t want them to outstay their welcome really. Comedy songs are a difficult proposition, you want them to be as funny as possible, but the longer they go on the more chance there is for them to be shit.
How long does it usually take you to compose a Song Wars ditty?
It depends, it’s really varied. It’s like the weather. It depends what mood you’re in, what’s been going on in the week. Like sometimes I’ll have spent all week preparing some elaborate masterpiece and Adam will just dash one out the night before and he’ll win, sometimes vice-versa. It’ll take between a minimum of five hours and a maximum of every day, all day for five days. It can be a nightmare if you’ve got a busy working week, then the last thing you want is to think, “Oh fuck, I’ve got the radio show in the morning! Oh fuck, I’ve got to write a song about peanuts.” It can be a bit of a burden, but then it can also be great fun and people really seem to dig them, so that’s the best thing really.
A lot of your songs usually have more of an electro slant than Adam’s, is that where your influences lie?
I am a hip-hop, soul and R&B fanatic, so I like a bit of rhythm and Adam’s more of a jingly, indie, pop guy. Plus, I’ve got kind of a choirboy, falsetto-y, Jamiroquai, Paul McCartney type voice… that’s too self-aggrandizing, let’s re-think that… Aled Jones-y, Tin Tin… well, I’ve got more of a pathetic voice… actually, fuck this self-aggrandizing; I’ve got an amazing voice! Adam’s motivated, generally, by anger, so he likes to shout and be annoyed and I’m a bit more wistful, maybe.
Is Song Wars away of letting the repressed Adam & Joe rockstar escape?
Oh definitely, yeah. I don’t think I would have dared let anybody hear my singing voice before we came up with this idea. Fleetingly, last week when the Adam and Joe Song Wars album was released on iTunes, because the iTunes chart updates several times a day, it’s super responsive, and fleetingly our album was at number 17 in the national album chart above Usher and Madonna. It was only there for about three hours, but those three hours were the best three hours of my life.
Were you in any bands when you were younger?
I certainly was, yes. Adam was in a band called Shady People who did awful Talking Heads rip-offs. He wore a white tuxedo and they did Talking Heads covers. They played a concert in the school hall and he got so drunk before it he refused to go on and the poor drummer guy who formed the band was very upset, so that was a bit of a failure. I forget what my band was called, but we did a cover of ‘What Presence’ by Orange Juice and another school thing and I decided it would be good to do a cowbell solo and hit the cowbell too hard and it fell over and I had to pick it up and everyone laughed at me. The best band at our school were called Viscous Piss and the Hormones. One of them, Mark Keds, went on to be in a real band called The Senseless Things. Quite a lot of musicians came from Westminster: Thomas Dolby, Shane Mcgowan, Sir Andrew Llyod-Webber. If you put all those three in a blender, remove their brains, you would have us.
What with yourselves, Flight of the Conchords, and the Mighty Boosh it seems we’re currently riding on a nu-wave of novelty song mania. Do you think there’s any particular reason for this?
I think it’s probably to do with technology. There’s absolutely nothing to do stop you from using the same technology that professionals use – the same with video and telly. The line between professional and amateur has blurred. Maybe modern pop’s a bit humourless as well and takes itself a bit seriously and people like to laugh and hear tunes, so why not combine them?
