Badly Drawn Boy

Ask the average person on the street to depict a pop star and chances are, unless they possess a twisted sense of humour, their fantasy figure will boast few of Badly Drawn Boy’s traits. Look at him: chain smoking, woolly hat wearing manc. Now glance at our pop idols: six-packs, sterile, bland. Yet judging by the reception he received at Glastonbury, Badly Drawn Boy is, to those who value passion over fashion, one of the few stars in 2002 deserving of applause.

No one else makes aching lo-fi folk sound quite so transcendental or, lyrically, renders the ordinary so extraordinary. Live, moreover, no one else combines sweet, tender songs with the wit and quirky banter of a stand-up comedian. Which is why no doubt his gigs attract everyone from film stars (Meg Ryan, Harvey Keitel, James Caan) to disaffected indie kids to clubbers who crave tunes, and why his new album is entitled ‘Have You Fed The Fish?’ “because it’s the question that gets asked the most at home”.

“The whole album is a reflection of real life versus the incongruous stupidity of the life I now lead as a minor celebrity,” he says. “So the statement that meant the most to me was ‘Have You Fed The Fish?’ The fish angle is symbolic of the fact that it’s the tiniest things that need the most looking after, as opposed to the jet set lifestyle that’s occurred because of my songs. I rub shoulders with people that I’ve long admired. And that’s the thing I’m trying to understand a bit more about and whether it means anything to me.”

He has been, as he puts it, a ‘minor celebrity’ ever since 2000’s long-awaited debut album, ‘The Hour Of Bewilderbeast’, won the highly-coveted Mercury Music Prize, thanks to its inimitable, winning combination of wit, vulnerability and glorious stripped down tunes. Its fans, of whom there were many, understandably, included one Nick Hornby and directors the Weitz brothers, whose film of Hornby’s ‘About A Boy’ Badly Drawn Boy scored. But though its sprightly, winsome songs were the subject of much praise, introducing him to a whole new audience, “it didn’t pull my heartstrings quite like ‘Have You Fed The Fish?’” Which is understandable: said album is superb.

Placing more emphasis on guitars than on ‘…Bewilderbeast’, it is unusual in so far as it combines maturity with ingenuity, resulting in an album that boasts few antecedents. On ‘You Were Right’, perhaps the finest song he’s yet produced, he attempts to comprehend his new-found lifestyle; (“This album was started in January, then I took a break for Oscar, my second child, to arrive in March and then returned to LA”) by flipping, unexpectedly, from humour to pathos, lamenting the deaths of Jeff Buckley, Frank Sinatra and Kurt Cobain. “I’m most pleased with that song ’cause it says everything that I want to say at this point,” he says. “It’s a bit of a message to yourself track. It’s a reminder of what’s important and not to lose your marbles. More than that, it’s a reflection of exactly how I feel about people who’ve died because of music.”

‘How’, is the sort of track that buskers will try to emulate and fail, oblivious to the fact that Badly Drawn Boy’s a one-off. ‘Fed The Fish’, for its part, begins like the soundtrack to a ’30s horror film before making its mark in more amorous terrain (‘The keys to your heart open the door to the world/You’ve got to give me two days and, woman, I’ll make you a girl’), while the nimble ‘Using Our Feet’ is ‘Young Americans’ era Bowie minus the cheekbones. “For me the key to staying in the game and remaining credible is to slightly expand your boundaries and think, ‘Well, I can do a song like this now. I can do a song with limited or massive instrumentation’,” he says. “They’re one and the same. The goal as a songwriter is to find the core. I want to evolve into someone who, ultimately, can write entirely acoustic albums, like a ‘Nebraska’ or ‘Freewheelin” by Bob Dylan’.”

Right now, in 2002, he has one prime concern: to convince those who casually label him ‘shambolic’, albeit affectionately, that it’s no longer apt. “There was only a short period – perhaps after I won the Mercury Music Prize – when that was applicable. I was never inept, but I wasn’t as professional as I might have been. But I don’t think it can be said again because I think there’s something about what I do that is valid in today’s climate. Being called shambolic is no longer appropriate.”

Being called a maestro, though, is appropriate. After all, that’s what he is. The Boy is back in town.
“Bob Dylan says that he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t famous, and I know exactly what he means.” says Damon Gough. “Obviously, he’s been famous since the Sixties, and we’re talking about a completely different level of fame, but the past four years of my life have been so intense that I can’t remember what it felt like to be me before all this started.”

Gough is reflecting on a time when he was better known by the name he was christened with rather than as his woolly-hatted alter ego, BADLY DRAWN BOY. Four years ago, Gough had released just two EPs on his own record label, Twisted Nerve, but was gaining an increasingly widespread reputation for his unique songwriting perspective and his flamboyant live shows. Back then, Gough’s ambition was simply to record “a classic piece of work”, which is exactly what he achieved with his debut album, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast released in 2000. Later that year the album won England’s most prestigious music award, the Technics Mercury Music Prize. Gough responded in his typical fashion: “Good things don’t normally happen to good people,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye and sounding genuinely humble as he launched into a mammoth seven-minute acceptance speech, before promptly losing the £20,000 prize-winning check during the subsequent celebrations.

The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is a magnificent 64-minute song cycle, which charts a semi-imaginary relationship from the triumphant, brass-laden beginning of “The Shining” to the faded David Lynch-style birdsong of the closing “Epitaph.” Its 18 songs are a series of “little movies for the ears”, as Tom Waits might have it, all adding up to an epic soundtrack centered around the redemptive power of love.

Among the people who fell in love with Badly Drawn Boy was the writer Nick Hornby, who thought that Gough would be the perfect songwriter to score the soundtrack for the movie of his third novel, About A Boy, a big budget production starring Hugh Grant. “What I like about Damon’s music is that it is recognizably English without all the irritations that implies,” says Hornby. “It’s got soul, it’s literate without being pretentious, the quiet bits aren’t wimpy. It’s not boorish… Who else is there?”

The Hour Of Bewilderbeast’s cinematic quality also appealed to the directors of About A Boy, Chris and Paul Weitz, who asked Gough if he would like to write two or three songs for the soundtrack. They cited The Graduate as the perfect example of what they were looking for, but Gough was thinking more along the lines of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man or Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly and was determined to keep the score as original as possible. “It was always a long shot for them to think that I could do the soundtrack, but I immediately understood why they’d asked me,” he says. “It’s less about the music that I write and more about the way that I approach it.”

After reading Hornby’s novel, Gough wrote four songs, including the desperately beautiful “Silent Sigh” and the irresistibly poppy “Something To Talk About.” He then took the songs to LA, where he hooked up with the Manchester-born, West Coast-based producer Tom Rothrock, whose credits include Beck, Elliott Smith and RL Burnside. During the course of two six-week sessions, Gough recorded more than 70 pieces of music, including the ten songs and seven instrumentals which appear on the finished soundtrack. “Doing ‘About A Boy’ has definitely affected what I’m going to put on the next album,” he says. “Every record you make is a reaction to the last thing that you did and so my second album will inevitably be different to what it would have been if I hadn’t made the soundtrack. Basically, it’s opened up my songwriting into all possibilities, which is what the next record is going to be called.”

All Possibilities is also being recorded in LA, this time in Cello Studio, on Sunset Strip, in the same room where the Beach Boys made Pet Sounds. Again, Gough is recording with Tom Rothrock, who has coined the working motto “faith in the process.” More than ever before, Gough is open to wherever his songs will take him, both musically and lyrically. “The core songs that are going to be on the record are all tackling issues that are relevant to now,” he says. “I couldn’t continue to write about relationships failing — although I still touch on the intricacies of relationships — but I wanted to write more about the bizarre things that happen when you get to be in my position.”

Whereas Gough’s fame could once be reflected by fellow Mancunian luminaries such as Johnny Marr, Mark E Smith and the Gallagher Brothers, these days, he is attracting an international crowd. Bono, Meg Ryan and Alan Rickman are all proud to call themselves fans, while at least one of Pop Idols has looked to him for career advice (“Don’t do it,” advised Gough) and Joan Collins is happy to cuddle up to him in his videos (“I love his music,” she says. “He is a very talented young man.”)

The highs and lows of Gough’s escalating fame are the subject of a new song called “How,” which will form the centerpiece of his next album when it is released in September. “In my head, ‘How’ is potentially huge,” he says. “It moves from a little country-folk part to a Jesus Christ Superstar-style symphony back to a rock bit. There’s a line in it that goes, ‘How can I give you the answers you need When all I possess is a melody?’ It’s basically asking myself, what the hell am I supposed to give to people, and how am I going to make my life work in all the areas that I want it to work in.”

Dealing with fame is, of course, part of Gough’s ongoing journey. “I like to think that if success continues, I’ll carry on making music that is more challenging to me and, hopefully, the audience,” he says. “I’d like to become a bit more diverse — I don’t mean I want to turn into some avant-garde saxophonist, like Kenny G, I’d just like to step outside the realm of what people might expect from me.”

All Possibilities is for later. For now, the soundtrack to a mainstream movie probably isn’t what most Badly Drawn Boy fans are expecting from their Jack Daniel’s-swigging, seven-inch single-loving hero. A fact which isn’t lost on Gough. “I did wonder what my fans might think of me doing ‘About A Boy,’” he muses. “I’m sure a lot of people will question it, but hopefully most of them will see it as a huge video promo for my music — even better, a giant promo that I didn’t have to pay for.”