History tells us that life as a rock star is far from a bowl of cherries. The only rock stars who seem to survive with their minds relatively intact are those who deflect fame’s pressures by hiding behind a cartoonish public persona: David Bowie pretending to be from outer space, Marilyn Manson claiming to be in contact with Satan, Paul McCartney doing that thumbs-up thing and acting as if he is a perfectly regular guy.
In his own quiet way, that is precisely what Damon Gough, better known as Badly Drawn Boy, has done. He emerged from Bolton in northern England in the late 1990s, a unique singer-songwriter one-man band with a penchant for muffled home recordings, an affectingly personal line in love lyrics and an ability to hop between musical genres. But as his debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, became a success, Gough began constructing a slightly affected public image as a kind of semi-professional singing dustman. He started appearing in public wearing a uniform: straggly beard, denims and woolly hat. One magazine interviewed Gough by a Los Angeles swimming pool. The temperature was 30ºC, yet the woolly hat was in place.
His live appearances became increasingly shambolic and rambling. It became apparent that being shambolic and rambling was their sole raison d’être. A gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall went on for three hours and 20 minutes. During another three-hour marathon in Seattle, a female audience member told him to get on with it.
The great danger of an artist like Gough developing a mannered persona is that his music will become mannered to match. That seems to be the case with his third album, Have You Fed the Fish? (Sheer). The Hour of Bewilderbeast was wildly eclectic and eccentric, but it was also winningly natural and spontaneous. Here, from the zany title onwards, the eccentricity seems grafted on at the last minute.
Have You Fed the Fish? eschews the serpentine variations of his debut in favour of more straightforward rock. This confident sound is awkwardly matched to deliberately bathetic lyrics. Sometimes it works, yielding a song like You Were Right, packed with affecting lines. ‘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,” sings Gough. The next line is not a pronouncement on posthumous fame, but an inexplicably poignant anti-climax: ‘I remember I stayed up to watch the news with everyone.”
You Were Right may hit the target, but others miss completely. The title track tries to deflate its portentous musical backing of crashing cymbals and thunderous pianos with daft lyrics about an eiderdown and binoculars. It sounds self-consciously wacky. Tickets to What You Need is similarly underwhelming, a trad-jazz pastiche that smacks less of ragtime than university rag week. These songs knock themselves out trying to charm the listener.
The album may be flawed, but it’s certainly not bad. When Gough drops the oddball shtick, he comes up with something genuinely original. How? is a lovely song that slips deftly from gently plucked guitar to propulsive Strokes-ish jangle to orchestral overload and back again, never losing its melodic footing.
But Gough set the bar high with his first two albums. The Hour of Bewilderbeast was one of the most striking and original debuts of recent years. His soundtrack to the film About a Boy was a low-key delight. Gough described the latter as a ‘parenthetical” record, because the music had to support a film; the focus was not directly on him. On Have You Fed the Fish?, the spotlight has returned to Gough. The sense that he is hamming it up a bit is difficult to shake off. —