SIMPLE PLEASURE

He s done it, then. Following a string of brilliant, if somewhat scattergun and eclectic, singles which set London s A&R in a froth and expectations almost insurmountably high last year, Badly Drawn Boy has delivered one of the most diverse, enchanting and unpredictable records of recent, and not-so-recent, memory in The Hour Of Bewilderbeast. A sprawling sun-dappled collage of innocence, experience and warm summer weather, full of joy and quirks and ambition, it is one of those rare records that actually does that horribly cliched thing: it makes you that tiny bit happier than usual to, well, be alive. Yikes.

What a relief, then, to discover when speaking to the Boy, aka Damon Gough, that at least one of us is a highly normal person with their feet on the ground. Gough is almost unbelievably modest, not only about his music but about Twisted Nerve (the almost immediately seminal record label he founded with Andy Votel), about his indebtedness to collaborators Doves, Alfie and Fridge, and about his collection of enthralled celebrity fans, not the least of whom is Johnny Marr.
He spends a lot of our chat insisting that the reason he has become such a mysterious cult figure is because there s nothing too fascinating about him in the first place; and he doesn t consider himself to have any natural musical ability. Sorry??
I wasn t born with a talent, really. I think it s something I nurtured myself I think I forced it out, because I wanted it so much. It was my dream to have a record out, I just wanted to hold it and look at it. Before that I used to cut out labels and stick them on other records, and turn the sound of the record player down and play one of my tapes, and just watch the record and imagine it was mine.
Er, okay, change that to slightly less normal than we thought .
Yeah, I was that sad. But even when I was 21 and I d sort of started to play the guitar, I was like, I can t do it. And then, subtlely, over the years, I just started to write songs by accident, and found out I was fairly good at it, and just the hunger overtook me and I eventually got better. But I think even the day I headline Glastonbury or something, I ll still be that person who says to the audience, it could be you doing this, cos I m just some idiot .
So add overly generous to that description of Badly Drawn Boy: if anything, his debut contains more effortless inventiveness than most bands are possessed of in an entire career. For a start, everything from French horns to theremins to a New Orleans-style brass band gets a look in. And then there s the songwriting, which has had critics namedropping everyone worth mentioning from Lennon to Nick Drake to Elliott Smith. Funnily enough, Damon says he didn t grow up listening to Important Music ( I wasn t really musically aware, for a long time ) and was totally bypassed by the Madchester movement of his native city as well. Instead, we discover he has a fascination bordering on the pathological with that often-cited indie touchstone of cool, er, Bruce Springsteen (seen him 18 times), and was probably first musically inspired, at a very young age, by the ability of simple radio pop to capture fleeting moments of happiness and transcendence. He tells us about one early summer in particular.
I ve never honestly spoken about it in this way before, but the summer of 76 was the hot summer in England, I was six, seven years old, and I just remember loads of things from that summer, in that daft rose-tinted looking-back-at-something way. That period as well, if I look back to it, was where I really sort of developed a love for music, but only in a fun way. I used to go to school, and my mum would tape the radio for me, and I d have a new compilation every night of what was on the radio. If there s anything that I ve taken from all that, it s like a lust for life, and a wanting for better things, and a not settling for the mundane. Or, if life is mundane, then I try to reflect an other-worldliness that perhaps isn t really your world, but is something that you really want, because you really get dragged down with so much bullshit, the older you get.
Apparently, music writers and an increasingly large and fervent legion of fans aren t the only ones who have reacted to the record s curious combination of guileless innocence and complexity.
My auntie bought the album this week, Damon says, and rang up my mum to say she was really moved by it, because she remembered some of the things I m singing about, and I was only like 3 or 4. She said she just really related to the imagery of it.
So, in a way I think I ve done a better job than I first thought in capturing little moments that people ignore or forget about. It s something I really care about doing, describing a moment: like what something was like on a particular day, like the sounds of someone s feet on gravel, and you could go further than that and describe it in a way that is poignant as well. It s just about capturing simple moments and giving them more importance than most people give them because they re things that are too simple, and subtle. That s what I try to do, really.
Sure enough, as seen through the strange, fascinated eyes of Badly Drawn Boy, the world becomes that wee bit more simple, and rare and beautiful, a place.
The Hour Of Bewilderbeast [Twisted Nerve/XL Recordings] is out now.