This is a story with a happy ending. But first, the unhappy beginning.Picture the scene. Although not too clearly ‘cause it might make you cry.
A bloke is slumped at a piano on the top floor of an old toffee factory in Stockport. He’s been in this space, now a recording studio, for five ‘intensive’ weeks. He’s barely seen his missus and kids. Spring has turned to summer. Twenty rough’n’ready songs, played live by a band, have not turned to album-worthy gold. Many Marlboro Lights have been held in trembling fingers. Things ain’t good. It is last year.
‘I think I lost grip on what I was actually trying to do,’ says Damon Gough, softly. ‘I had this goal in my head of putting out five albums in five years, from The Hour Of The Bewilderbeast in 2000. That was my big mistake. That was stupid. In a way I rushed it. At the end of those five weeks I didn’t feel it was going in a direction I liked. And I just walked away from it and left those songs alone.’
The next Badly Drawn Boy album was abandoned. The producer was told the bad news – not an easy call for Gough to make, especially when that producer was Stephen Street, esteemed studio whiz for everyone from The Smiths to Blur to Kaiser Chiefs. ‘Stephen was brilliant, and it’s kinda inexplicable how it didn’t work. It’s like the stars weren’t aligned or something. I blame myself. At the time I was devastated. I had to phone him and say, “I’m not sure I can continue with this material.” I just wasn’t feeling where it was going.’
Damon Gough sparks up another fag. Now it looks like he might cry. Little wonder. This was not how things were meant to go. Since winning the Mercury Prize for his 2000 debut The hour Of Bewilderbeast, the Mancunian songwriter had led a charmed creative life. The good stuff had poured out of him, a torrent of heartfelt, homespun, charming, sublimely melodic songs, from the soundtrack About A Boy to Have You Fed The Fish? to 2004’s One Plus One Is One.
The latter album had seen him fulfill his contractual obligations to XL. He had used the opportunity, this last throw of the indie dice, to write an album that was deeply personal and almost painfully intimate: One Plus One Is One was a tribute to the bits of Cheshire that spawned and shaped him, to his young family, to a dead friend, and to his grandfather, bayoneted during the Normandy landings. It was more a Damon Gough album than a Badly Drawn Boy one. Partly for those reasons, and partly to get himself ‘out of people’s faces’, Gough opted to barely tour or promote the record.
Protection - we do a lot of it these days. Sun cream for our skin, sunglasses for our eyes, condoms for you know where - but do you remember to protect your hearing?
Click to find all the information you need to look after your hearing now so you can enjoy music for years to come
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