A few weeks ago, in a small café in Manchester, an ancient, striped and irredeemably smelly woollen hat was stolen. The alarm was immediately raised. The story made the news. With pictures.

Bizarre? Not at all. Firstly, this hat belonged to one Damon Gough, aka Badly Drawn Boy, aka the hottest new artist in Britain right now. Secondly, this hat was no mere accoutrement, no mere heater to the head. It was, in fact, the defining characteristic of this artist. He is hatted, therefore he is Damon Gough. QED.

Fortunately, the headgear was soon returned. But more crises were looming. Gough had agreed to auction his titfer for his local charity, Manchester Aid For Kosovo. He expected to pay about £100 to get his prized possession back. Sweating, he finally reclaimed it for £1500. Not bad going for a hat that his girlfriend first bought in a car boot sale.

Today, the aforementioned teacosy sits plump and proud atop the Gough head as he emerges from one of the rooms inside the RTE Television Centre. Diamanté jewels have been added to the sides, presumably to bespeak its newly-heightened value.

He shrinks back behind his management team, before giving up and shyly proffering his hand. Although the interview was meant to take place in the RTE canteen, Gough has vetoed such plans. This is the first night of his European tour and he’s nervous. He wants a pint of Guinness before he goes to the Olympia Theatre for his soundcheck.

We get into a car driven by Jay from Vital Distribution. As we roll along Nutley Lane and out onto Merrion Road, Jay’s mobile phone rings. It’s Darragh Purcell, onetime TV3 music presenter and currently band booker for MCD. Jay talks to him for a few minutes, then holds the phone against his chest. “He’s a really big fan of yours,” he tells Gough. “Will you speak to him for a moment?” The singer nods. “His name’s Darragh.”

Gough picks up the phone and cautiously says hello. He thanks Purcell for booking the gig and says that he’ll try and do his best for him tonight. He laughs, adding worriedly, “none of this shambolic nonsense people have been talking about. Thanks, Des. Thanks.”

Over the past year, Gough has had to get used to critics extolling the virtues of his Mercury Award-winning debut album, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, while simultaneously slamming his live performances. Although British scribes are keen to denounce the persona-led professionalism of acts such as Eminem and Marilyn Manson, they are no happier with Gough’s essentially style-less style.

“Shambolic. Ramshackle. Unprofessional. Cheating the audience has even been an accusation,” he says unhappily. He nurses his Guinness, lights up the first of many Marlboro Lights and begins to ramble. At length.

After a while, something tangible emerges through the dense fog of contradictions, half-hearted explanations and suddenly broken-off sentences he specialises in. His bad press really troubles him because he’s worried that the doubters just might have a point. He gradually admits that he’s “terrified, really,” before every performance. The terror, he says, “comes from an indefinable thing. It’s usually just that I want it to be the best gig that anyone’s ever seen.

“But it’s too big a goal to give yourself,” he continues. “That’s what I’m trying for, but maybe the pressure of it makes me nervous. I want every gig to be unique and different. We only write down some of the songs that we’re going to play five minutes before we go on and then we don’t know how we’re going to start the gig. I don’t really give myself too many safety nets.”

Gough’s meandering shows often run to over three hours in length. He will exasperatedly try to tune his guitar, take on different personalities, joke with the audience and, in between, cram in some of the songs he thinks they might like to hear.

He has played gigs where, of the three hundred people who came to see him, thirty have remained at the end. And he has played gigs which display traces of the haunting brilliance of his debut album – gigs which remind people of exactly why Gough has emerged as one of the brightest lights of the British music scene.

His honesty as a performer ensures that every polemic description of his act is at once valid and yet not quite fully correct. For good or bad, his shows exactly mirror his own approach to life: hopeless false starts, pointless meanderings and finally, moments truly shot through with genius.

Growing up in the northern industrial town of Bolton, music was an accompaniment to Damon Gough’s life, rather than something out of which he planned to make a career. Still, even as a junior he managed to spend plenty of time “sitting in front of the telly with a little Casio keyboard, annoying everyone with horrible beats and crap little bass lines.”

He finished school in the late eighties and went to work in his parents’ printworks. Soon, he began playing keyboards for a friend’s band, The Engine Shed. When the young Gough was asked to contribute music or lyrics, though, he demurred.

“I didn’t have that many songs and I did sort of sense around the corner that there was something… bigger about to happen,” he says. “I just wanted to keep myself free from any restrictions, like suiting other people’s needs or compromising. It sounds like a control freak thing. But at that point I wasn’t singing. Someone else would have been singing my songs and that wouldn’t have felt right.”

After ditching the job in the printworks to spend six months being horribly broke studying music at Leeds College, Gough decided that the classical muso way of life wasn’t for him, either.

“Leeds College was mainly an excuse for me to stop working because I just knew there was something else I should be doing,” he recalls. “But I found the climate in the college more stifling than opening the world up. I still had a passion for pop music and I found that the whole thing just totally pooh-poohed pop music – just snobbery. It really made me start to not like pop music and as soon as that happened I turned away and thought, ‘I do like it, I love it, it’s where I’m from’.

“But it was a good learning process,” he adds. “I learnt that my own music was as important as anyone else’s. I can’t even fathom how Beethoven or Chopin or Debussy did what they did. But it’s as important for me to do what I’m doing now as it was for them to do what they did.”

This realisation was hard won. When Gough says later that his family were “the first to say they didn’t think it [his success] was going to happen,” it’s easy to see that artistic insecurities prey on his mind.

Unsure of himself as he is, though, he remains veryz aware that it is his job in these interviews to advertise his talents. This means that at times, his speech resembles a kind of schizophrenic Socratic dialogue – the wonderful Badly Drawn Boy trying to get himself promoted versus the unassuming Damon Gough who couldn’t get himself arrested.

Badly Drawn Boy first began to emerge when Gough moved to Manchester. There, he joined forces with DJ/producer Andy Votel to create the Twisted Nerve record label.

“Initially me and Andy didn’t know what Twisted Nerve was going to become,” he relates. “I just wanted to put a single out and Andy wanted to start a label so we just thought, ‘let’s do it together and we’ll co-fund it’.

“Then after two EPs,” he continues, “the interest was growing so big, at such a rate, from other record companies that I had to make a decision whether to stick it out. I signed with XL who were quite happy to include Twisted Nerve as a name and a link. They loved what I was doing and what Andy was doing. So, I sort of achieved the best of all worlds in the space of a few months and two EPs.”

XL signed Gough for a sum larger even than that of his new label-mates, The Prodigy. Was it the money that made him agree to move?

“If I’d been working on my own music as a label-owner I’d obviously have given myself precedence over the bands, so that would have been a conflict,” he offers candidly. “The money also gave me the funding to keep Twisted Nerve afloat for the first two years.”

Around this time, the scale of Badly Drawn Boy’s ambition was becoming ever more difficult to accommodate within Damon Gough’s modestly hippie ethic.

When Mark E. Smith, lead singer of the Fall, leapt into Gough’s car one night, convinced that it was a minicab, the artist acquiesced to driving him home on the condition that he agree to record a Badly Drawn Boy track, ‘Tumbleweed’.

However, Gough was still the type of man that, when supposed to be flying to San Francisco to help produce UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction album, decided that he’d be better off staying at home to help his friends win the pub quiz down the local in Chorlton.

These anomalies are best summed up by the evening that he met his life-long hero, Bruce Springsteen.

Gough has been a fan since he first witnessed the Boss in concert for the ‘Born in the USA’ tour at St. James Park, Newcastle, 1985. Since then, he’s seen Springsteen seventeen more times and claims to own 60 bootlegs of ‘Thunder Road’. Next to the diamanté jewels on his teacosy, he sports a Springsteen ‘Born to Run’ badge.

In September 1999, he brought his girlfriend Claire along to see Springsteen at Manchester Arena. He hadn’t seen the Boss for a while. Because the night felt special, he decided to book a room in the plush Midland Hotel.

“I sort of had a sneaky feeling he’d be there,” he smiles, “but I assumed that when you orchestrate that to happen it’s not going to work. But lo and behold he turned up. Claire spotted him in the bar. I couldn’t believe it. I turned into a wreck.”

What happened next was typical of Gough’s nature. Although he couldn’t bear to approach his hero, he did manage to send for a cab to pick up some of his own recordings.

“I handed this CD with a little note to his security guard,” he says, “explaining that I’d been a big fan and that this was my music and that hopefully he’d be into it.”

But Gough still didn’t have the nerve to go up to Springsteen. “I was just happy to be sat there having a glass of champagne,” he says. “Bruce was sort of within earshot chatting with his band and his wife.”

Fortunately, fate (in the shape of the Boss) intervened to make Gough’s night still more special.

The artist’s pale blue eyes fairly glow with the memory. “As he got up to go to bed he wandered over and said, ‘are you the guy that gave the CD to me?’ I said, ‘yeah’, and we proceeded to chat for twenty minutes. And then Patti [Springsteen’s wife] dragged him off to bed.”

Has he heard from Springsteen since?

“Not a sausage,” he admits ruefully. “I’ve mentioned him so much now that I’m hoping that someone, somewhere along the line, like in his press department, will at least give me a little pat on the back for bringing his name back into credibility.”

He laughs. The humble Gough wants to say that he’s not worried, he doesn’t deserve to even exist in the same stratosphere, not to mind company, of such greatness.

Badly Drawn Boy, on the other hand, is wondering why the hell Bruce hasn’t got back yet.

Several months after meeting Springsteen, Damon Gough’s world changed completely. “Always around the corner, there had to be an album,” he recollects. “I didn’t rush it. I wasn’t under any record company pressure. I was allowed to bide my time. But the time obviously came when The Hour Of Bewilderbeast had to emerge.”

When, in June, 2000, the album finally did emerge, the critical reception was ecstatic.

Envisaged as a journey through an imaginary relationship, the record was, by the turgid standards of the British pop scene, little short of extraordinary. The promise that had had record companies reaching for their wallets after hearing Gough’s EPs had transmogrified into something greater; something even more important. Something like art.

Suddenly, every British music magazine wanted to know about this little bearded man. When he won the Mercury Prize followed in quick succession by Q magazine’s Best Newcomer Award, their desire for information accelerated.

Gough had to figure out quickly how to enter into the world of music media and return from the fray with his head and his teacosy intact. He had to learn how not to mind when reviewers criticised his live performances; how not to worry when they made jokes about his shabby appearance.

In short, he had to learn to cultivate an ego – the ego of Badly Drawn Boy.

“I’ve got a notion about myself,” he says now. “I feel that I’m an important artist. I don’t mean that in an arrogant, bigheaded way. I mean the amount of care I put into the music and the amount of attention I give to it.

“I just thought, ‘I’m not someone who looks at it lightly’. I want it to be special. It’s so easy to just record and not think about it – I had to inject a lot of myself and try to make it the right album.”

Does he think he made the right album?

“I’m not sure,” he says hesitantly. “It’s like, with every song you make, you try and find an X-factor – the indefinable thing that makes it worth listening to. If I like a dance record, it’s because somebody put something in there that makes your ears want to hear it. It’s the same with the way I write songs – I’ve got certain skills and I lack in other departments. I’m not…I’m not…I don’t think I’m quite that natural. I think I work at it a bit more because I have to.”

Is he very driven as an artist?

“I don’t really push myself that hard,” he says quickly. “I haven’t done to date anyway. I could have done much more with a lot of the songs – made quite a few more chord changes or bigger choruses or…”

He drifts into silence, stares into the cream of the pint he has barely touched. Mentally, he’s back inside The Hour Of Bewilderbeast. He’s picking out extra riffs, working on better lyrics. Then Badly Drawn Boy comes back fighting, ready to remind Gough of exactly how good an album he has already made, how talented and determined he really is.

“Part of me likes to think the [Mercury] panel’s reason for picking me as a winner was that for once they saw an artist that isn’t a flash in the pan,” he continues. “I think a lot of bands are in it for the ride. They enjoy themselves, go on tour, see the world and make a few albums. They probably make enough money to sustain themselves for a number of years and that’s it.

“But with me, before I even thought about becoming what I am, I was still playing guitar and documenting ideas onto a Dictaphone. That was always going to be the case.

“I want the next album to keep proving to people that it wasn’t a fluke. I just know that the first album wasn’t the best I could offer, it was just what I could do at that point. I don’t really have the foggiest idea of what the next album’s going to be, but I know that I work with integrity and I know that I’m going to endeavour to make it the best album of all time…in my eyes.”

We are interrupted by the arrival of one of Gough’s management team. He looks first at his watch and then in horror at the singer’s almost untouched pint. We’ve already been here way too long. Gough has to get to his soundcheck and the time is drawing perilously close to rush hour. Five minutes, he mouths to me anxiously and walks back over to the other side of the bar.

Earlier, when we were waiting for Gough to emerge from the Television Centre, the same man kindly gave me a tip for the interview. “If you don’t want to hear about his new child for the entire conversation, don’t ask him about it first,” he laughed. “Damon will talk about her forever.”

Five minutes. I turn to Gough, who is lighting another cigarette, waiting for the next question. At the mention of his daughter’s name, Edie, his whole face takes on an almost beatific glow. He pulls out a picture of her from inside his wallet. I swear I see his eyes grow moist.

“It’s an honour,” he says. “It’s quite surreal. When we found out Claire was pregnant I just immediately felt a little different about life in general. Just thinking like, ‘this embryo’s growing and she’s going to be there now for as long as we are’. It’s just all those powerful things. It’s a new life and it’s really, really special and she’s unique.”

Was he at the birth?

“Yeah, I sort of locked heads with Claire just to tell her to push. It was brilliant, it was everything you’d expect, but it’s a personal thing as well. I knew it was going to hit me in my own way. I didn’t know if I was going to laugh or cry. I ended up… I did have a bit of a cry when she… ’cause it was so big a thing to witness and, you know, we’ve been talking about this baby for nine months.”

Does he think the timing was right?

“It’ll sort of never be right and it’ll always be right as long as you accept it,” he says reflectively. “Once we both got our heads around it – it wasn’t a planned thing – we started to get excited about it. I was just worried for Claire ‘cause she had to go through it.

“As a bloke you don’t have to do much except to try and be supportive, but with the schedule this year I didn’t feel I was giving as much support as I should. Every thing you do seems a little bit tokenistic. You might buy a bunch of flowers but it’s not really enough, you’ve got to be there. So I was maybe uptight about even buying the flowers because I thought, ‘that’s just going to be deemed a token’.”

At this point in proceedings, the increasingly nervous management team indicates that it’s time to leave. Although Gough is visibly disappointed that his discussion about Edie and Claire has been interrupted, he gets up from the table politely and we make our way back out to the car.

Through the rush-hour Dublin traffic, he tells me that his family and friends are “totally buzzing” off his success. His parents still buy every single newspaper that contains articles about him and they go to as many gigs as they can. Although he hasn’t conquered America yet (60,000 sales of Bewilderbeast so far), he’s hopeful that his music “can fit with a lot of people there.”

Of course, every sentence he speaks is still laden down with diversions, dead ends and masses upon masses of contradictions. Gough sees every side of the picture and he’s willingly to puzzle over the angles endlessly.

Even so, you get the feeling that this might just be what makes Damon Gough special. He’s restless, searching, unsure of himself but willing to go to any lengths to achieve the goals he’s set out in his head.

He’s taking himself and his listeners on a journey. Already, the sights are pretty special.