Sounds From The Junkshop #65 - Badly Drawn Boy

 

"And I remember doing nothing on the night Sinatra died...and the night Jeff Buckley died...and the night Kurt Cobain died...and the night John Lennon died..." - Badly Drawn Boy - You Were Right

It's weird to think now that there was a period of a few years just after the turn of the millennium when Badly Drawn Boy aka Damon Gough was pretty much absolutely everywhere, the darling of the "indie" press, a Mercury Music Prize winner and seemingly unable to put a foot wrong in the wake of his 2000 debut The Hour Of Bewilderbeast. I'll admit it - I liked that album. I mean, I know by this point I was pretty much turning my back on what the NME were desperately trying to throw at me quite rapidly (the rise of the Strokes, a classic case of all hype and very little substance, the following year pretty much sealed that deal) but there was something about the simple heartfelt honesty in that album that kept it as a regular presence on my CD player through those days.

Gough's rise to fame was pretty rapid - he'd come to prominence after doing guest vocals on James Lavelle's UNKLE project in the late '90s and Bewilderbeast, helped by a string of highly acclaimed live sets on the festival circuit that year, picked up glowing reviews across the board. I think it was Disillusion, his first Top 40 hit, which brought him on to my radar when I received a promo copy at my radio show on KUBE. I remember playing it with the guy I sometimes did a joint show with in the studio and his response was "That was alright. It sounded like Paul Weller only...not shit."

Listening back to Bewilderbeast now, it's aged much better than I thought it would and sounds like an echo of a happier and simpler time when I was in my final year at Uni with my only cares being a few hours of studying a week in between doing my radio show, playing football and drinking with my mates (back when beer and cigs were something you just did for fun rather than to actively help you function), going to rock nights and even inviting the odd gorgeous goth girl back to the pad for a 3am nightcap occasionally. Before the grind of the nine to five world made us all cynical, before 9/11 brought what had generally been a fairly peaceful time after the Northern Irish ceasefire to a bloody and violent close and the Iraq War pretty much irretrievably tarnished the already faltering reputation of the Labour government we'd had such high hopes for a few years before and made us realise that the lines we'd thought were firmly drawn in the sand to identify our enemies were getting washed away by the tide. As the Lords of the New Church sang "They'll scare us all with threats of war so we forget just how bad things are/They disappear when you're all alone/They're gonna get you when you're on your own". I know everyone looks back at their late teens and early twenties with rose-tinted glasses a bit but my leaving Uni in 2001 and encountering the harsh truth that a degree in history is pretty much useless if you're not planning on going into teaching coincided with a lot of the cosy climate of the '90s rapidly falling apart as the military-industrial complex in the US and UK started to engineer wars to stop itself becoming irrelevant, as we were irrevocably confronted with the harsh truth that far from being any sort of change, most of "New" Labour were just Tories in cooler clothes, as I found myself swept into a wasteland of alternating between minimum wage jobs and unemployment, of living in low rent accommodation rotting away from the inside in Kirkstall and Armley and Sheepscar, of seeking solace in heavy drinking, hash and speed. "Rent a flat above a shop, cut your hair and get a job, smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend ya never went to school...watch your life slide out of view, dance and drink and screw because there's nothing else to do" as Jarvis sang before those lyrics went from being the sound of the indie dancefloor filling up in my teenage years to being a scary reflection of life as the real world beckoned five years later.

It's maybe not a surprise that Badly Drawn Boy's elevation to the toast of the meeja luvvies seemed to blunt his endearingly rough edges a bit as well - the warning signs were arguably there when he appeared in the video for Pissing In The Wind (renamed Spitting In The Wind so Radio 1 would play it) clad in a tux alongside Joan Collins and when he ended up doing the soundtrack to the film version of the Nick Hornby middle-class hand-wringer novel About A Boy it really felt as if we'd lost him to the metro-liberal Tony Blair apologist Guardian readership. The resultant single Silent Sigh sounded like INXS at their blandest and I wandered off.

So it was a bit of a surprise when he then came back with arguably his best moment and what turned out to be his biggest hit, You Were Right which briefly brought me back into the fold. A brutally honest five minute confessional about love and loss, it seemed to sum up a lot of those relationships I'd essentially fucked up through my own stupidity in my early twenties ("I was busy finding answers while you just got on with real life/I always hoped you'd be my wife/But I never found the time for the question to arise/I just disguised it in a song") as well as some humourous digs about his sudden celebrity which suggested he wasn't really as comfortable with it as he'd led us to think. I still love that song now - definitely one of the best of the era.

I bought the parent album Have You Fed The Fish? the week it came out and unfortunately this was where BDB started losing fire a little bit - there were still some good moments but it did feel a little bit less focused than Bewilderbeast. It still sold respectably but the album after it One Plus One Is One wasn't as well received (deservedly unfortunately - no two ways about it, it was a mess) and disappeared from the charts a lot quicker than its predecessors. Gough started to fall into a vicious circle of decreasing sales and chart positions, being dropped by one record label after another, albums which seemed to lack the spark he once so effortlessly possessed and basically being written off as "I Remember The Early Noughties" fodder. It all culminated with him having a nervous breakdown onstage in Los Angeles while touring the It's What I'm Thinking album (which I went back and listened to while researching this article - it's a pleasant enough selection of mostly acoustic based lo-fi songs but a bit underwhelming compared to his imperial years stuff) and he'd end up largely retreating from the public gaze for the next decade.

Gough would finally return in 2020 with a surprisingly good effort, Banana Skin Shoes, certainly his most tuneful album for many years and maybe his best since Have You Fed The Fish? as well with some upbeat pop melodies and surprisingly funky grooves and nice introspective moments blending well to create something pretty good. I suppose for better or worse, Badly Drawn Boy will always be remembered for his early noughties stuff and to be brutally honest, there's a good reason for that but Banana Skin Shoes at least suggests that he's got his mojo back a bit after the trials and tribulations of the last 15 years and it's good to have the guy back again. Hopefully it'll be less than a decade before his next release but either way, he'll still have my eternal respect for You Were Right which remains a classic all these years later.