PERFORMING, GRIEF AND SPRINGSTEEN: AN UNGUARDED CHAT WITH BADLY DRAWN BOY’S DAMON GOUGH
If you ever get a chance to sit down with Damon Gough, the humble mastermind behind Badly Drawn Boy, take it immediately. The singer-songwriter has had a healthy amount of guest and festival spots in the past few years, namely supporting Squeeze and Belle and Sebastian, and is now gearing up to wind down for the year.
With his last few shows celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Mercury Prize winning record The Hour of the Bewilderbeast on the horizon – making a stop at Sheffield’s Foundry on December 19th – and I was lucky enough to listen to him reflect on his prolific career, what’s next and join him in what was eventually a Bruce Springsteen fangirl session.
Father of four children, aged four to twenty-five, Damon said “Trying to fit music in is the hardest thing, especially writing and recording music, when I’m busy with life. It’s kind of like intense moments of busyness. I don’t know what it’s like for other artists, I just feel like I’m always trying to fit my career in, in the gaps I get at the minute.”
Despite the self-described ease of solo gigging, the recent band-accompanied shows have shown him the true brilliance of the stage, and working with other musicians to celebrate The Hour of the Bewilderbeast.
“I’ve not had a band for five years, and I had a new band put together at the start of the year, and they rehearsed without me, and then I joined in a week before the tour in March, and it was brilliant to play with other people again. I did the Bewilderbeast shows in March and April and then I just felt like I really owe it to myself, the fans and the band to maybe do another little clutch of shows to finish the year because it won’t be the 25th anniversary ever again. I can’t predict whether it will ever be done again and I just want to let people know not to miss it, because it might be the last time it happens that I do a live version of Bewilderbeast.”
Despite having over ten different backing bands over the years, including a stint with The Doves and two years with the late, great Andy Rourke, he said “the shows in March and April were some of the best gigs I’ve done with a band”. He’s missing a few beloved members this time round, notably guitarist Ellie and drummer Aurora due to the odd scheduling issue, but has reunited with Alex Thomas on drums, making for a very wholesome dynamic on tour.
Twenty odd years into the career, he’s fallen in comfort with the stage, especially in a time where music is starting to feel a little at war with robots. Damon said:
“The reason why I like playing live is because for a long time I didn’t really appreciate and enjoy it as much as I should. I never felt I was good enough for a long time, or that it was what I was meant to do. I fell into it by accident, I wanted to be like a lo-fi bedroom artist when I started in the nineties, and I kind of just played shows because people kept asking me. I did it unwillingly, and it took me a long time to realize I was good enough to do it.
“I’m actually pretty good at who I am on stage. I’m not trying to hide behind trying to be anyone else and it keeps alive the notion that this is worth doing because of the connection you get with real people in an audience. Even when I’m not playing or feeling my best, I rely on the crowd to remind me that it’s actually working for them.
“It’s the one thing that can’t be diluted in any way or challenged by things like AI. I don’t care what people say about AI and where it’s going to end up. You can’t replace real people in a room together.”
Coming up on four-tracks in the 90s, AI produced music is the furthest thing from Badly Drawn Boy’s ‘ethos’, so to speak. Whilst he can enjoy, like the majority of us, the convenience of streaming services, Damon has seen first hand the damage its doing to the industry,
“I can’t believe we’re still in a world where Spotify generates however much billion per year and an artist gets relatively nothing from it. It’s like taking, and doesn’t reward people in all sorts of lines of work and it’s just disappointing.
“But when I was a teenager getting into music, it was a lot tougher to find things, you’d search it out and wait for it to be in the shop because they weren’t as easy to get hold of. I’m quite impressed with a lot of the younger generation. Oscar in particular, my eldest, loves buying vinyl.
“I think both should be able to coexist pretty nicely but we need to fight back against some of that progression of AI. It’s soulless, you know, it really is.”
Whilst the world and the music industry has seen drastic changes since his 2020 record, Gough himself has faced some particularly unimaginable hardships.
“Obviously Covid happened and so I started to write again just for something to do and then my brother passed away, Simon died. He was the eldest of four of us, so that was unexpected. He had cancer, but he was in hospital on his own and it was like it was just really devastating. I gave myself a break after that, thinking I’m not going to rush anything”
Three years older than Damon, Simon had a massive influence on the singer-songwriter. He was a huge Smiths fan, seeing them a whopping 25 times live, which often ignited some competition between the brothers.
Fondly remembering, Damon said:
“I was only thirteen and Simon went to see them and I didn’t. When the next Smiths single came out, I wanted to beat him to it so I’d get on the bus to town to get the single before him, just to just to piss him off. We were really close, especially as we got older, and trying to write a song since then has made me have this horrible notion that he’ll never hear it, even though you have to believe that somehow he, you know, his spirit is amongst us.
“I’ve experienced enough in the last five years to warrant releasing something that’s got a tone to it that reflects how I’m feeling, even if I can’t be literal about things like my brother or other stuff that’s gone on. I feel like I might be in a different place than I’ve been before, to make a record that’s got a certain quality of tone to it, something beautiful and meaningful again”.
Wandering around his Chorlton home, hiding from the window cleaner, he explained: “When I don’t understand the world and what it does to people and the horrors of the world and injustices, my default setting is to lurch for the guitar or piano. I feel like I can offer something with that, and even just to make myself feel better and hope that I can write an idea that makes someone else feel. That’s the thing about the arts, the coming together of people. All of that stuff that’s culture and arts makes you feel alive, or makes you feel like it’s worthwhile being alive.”
Someone who’s been making people feel alive for generations is New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen. In light of Deliver Me from Nowhere, the new film about four-track created album Nebraska, and my personal admiration for the Boss, I asked about the influence Springsteen has had on Badly Drawn Boy – it was as if I’d just popped the cork on a shook-up bottle of champers.
“You should have asked me this question at the beginning, because I could talk for two hours about this now. I was invited to the premiere of the film, and I’ve met Bruce probably twenty times now. He’s always been the most gracious and every time I see him he makes me want to cry.
“When I was fifteen I went out and bought all these bootlegs at Bolton Town Hall, and I’d always fast forward to the version of ‘Thunder Road’ and they were all different to each other, different lyrics, different arrangements.”
Looking out his window, Damon starts, “Where I’m standing now, I can see the Manchester Cricket ground, Bruce played there in 2003 and me and my ex-partner just had our second and we called him Oscar Bruce. We met Bruce before the show and she told him and he laughed and said, ‘oh, that’s cool’, then halfway through the show, he said, ‘this song’s for Oscar Bruce’ and played ‘Thunder Road’, my favourite. Somebody sourced a bootleg of that show for me and sent it to me and I played it, and I heard Bruce say those words, it was unbelievable, I was in tears.”
Christmas 1984 was a transformative one for Damon, recording Springsteen’s Old Grey Whistle Test interview and Bob Geldof’s newsreel about Band Aid. “That Christmas was just astonishing for a fourteen year old. I was a Boomtown Rats fan, I remember ‘I Don’t Like Monday’s’ being at number one, and I cried when it was knocked off the number one spot.”
He had a run in, incredibly, with Geldof at the Deliver Me From Nowhere premiere, recounting, “I was saying to Bob Geldof, ‘I’m probably more excited about meeting you because I’ve met Bruce a few times’, and Bob was loving it. He was saying to Rob Brydon ‘Rob, have you heard this? Damon’s telling me he’s more excited about meeting me than Bruce’. I didn’t remember to say to Bob Geldof how much that combination of Band Aid and then discovering Bruce, sustained me.“
Springsteen was really the birth of this artist, along with old ad paper Loot. “In the early nineties, I was flicking through a Loot, probably looking for guitars probably. And, I wasn’t looking for it, but there was a Tascam Four track recorder for sale. I remembered reading the sleeve notes to Nebraska, and it was one hundred quid – I thought it was an omen and I had to buy it. I drove to this guy’s place somewhere in Derbyshire, bought the four-track and then that four track became my bedroom tool. My first few EPs were recorded on the same model that Bruce used for Nebraska, so I loved the film.
“‘Atlantic City’, like all songs on Nebraska, sounds like there’s so much more going on. There’s the guitar, the sound of that strumming, and the backing vocals do a lot of heavy lifting. ‘Used Cars’ is my other favourite because it’s just so beautiful.
“I saw [Bruce] for ten minutes before the screening and he was laughing, he couldn’t believe I got [a four-track] for one hundred quid. But I said, ‘how did you achieve that sound?’ And he said ‘I really don’t know. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, we were just trying it and you get lucky sometimes’, and I know what he means by that.”
Damon caught Springsteen at Sheffield’s own Brammal Lane on the 1988 Tunnel of Love Tour, saying “Sheffield’s got that vibe to it that a lot of the Northern places that Bruce likes coming back to Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle – there was a definite vibe at that gig. Sheffield, for me, has always been a place I go back to as well. I played the Leadmill a few times and it’s weird because it was one of those venues that I loved as a fan. When I had a girlfriend at the art college in Sheffield, we went to the Leadmill more or less every weekend. I saw so many good bands there in the early nineties. Guided By Voices played there once and that was one of my favourite ever shows, it was just a great venue to watch in.”
Aside from the last few Bewilderbeast shows, again put the Sheffield date in your calendar people, Damon is content with where he currently sits but wants to record more, possibly even explore the original sounds of his one hundred quid four track.
“I’ve got Pro Tools in my little home studio, and I always feel like there’s a barrier there because it’s going through the computer system, whereas with a four track you’ve got your headphones and you plug straight in.
“Sometimes it’s the limitations of a four-track that forces you to find what’s necessary to make a song live and breathe, and I think it’s inevitable that I’m going to go back to that at some point.
“I’ve only made nine albums in twenty years, not that it’s about that and quality is more important than quantity, but I know I’ve got so many ideas ready to go. I still reckon I’ve got another ten albums in me at least, but it’s just doing it. I’m happy to just be doing okay, making a decent living, connected to the fans, making my music in my own time and not feeling too pressured – the only pressure I ever feel is what I put on myself.
“None of us really know what arc or curve our life is going to take and when people say, where do you think you’ll be in five or ten years, I’m an optimist that life is long. I hate saying life’s too short because I love it. I don’t want life to be short for me or anyone else, the more you do, the longer life feels in some ways.”
Badly Drawn Boy’s final Hour of the Bewilderbeast 25th anniversary shows will take Liverpool, Cardiff, Sheffield and Edinburgh throughout December. And whether it’s the nostalgic tunes of his award winning debut album, or his clearly insightful and heart-warming commentary, he is not one to miss. Now, where’s that Nebraska record?
