Artist description "Bob Dylan says that he can't remember a time when he wasn't famous, and I know exactly what he means." says Damon Gough. "Obviously, he's been famous since the Sixties, and we're talking about a completely different level of fame, but the past four years of my life have been so intense that I can't remember what it felt like to be me before all this started." Gough is reflecting on a time when he was better known by the name he was christened with rather than as his woolly-hatted alter ego, BADLY DRAWN BOY. Four years ago, Gough had released just two EPs on his own record label, Twisted Nerve, but was gaining an increasingly widespread reputation for his unique songwriting perspective and his flamboyant live shows. Back then, Gough’s ambition was simply to record "a classic piece of work", which is exactly what he achieved with his debut album, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast released in 2000. Later that year the album won England's most prestigious music award, the Technics Mercury Music Prize. Gough responded in his typical fashion: "Good things don't normally happen to good people," he said, wiping a tear from his eye and sounding genuinely humble as he launched into a mammoth seven-minute acceptance speech, before promptly losing the �20,000 prize-winning check during the subsequent celebrations. The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is a magnificent 64-minute song cycle, which charts a semi-imaginary relationship from the triumphant, brass-laden beginning of "The Shining" to the faded David Lynch-style birdsong of the closing "Epitaph." Its 18 songs are a series of “little movies for the ears”, as Tom Waits might have it, all adding up to an epic soundtrack centered around the redemptive power of love. Among the people who fell in love with Badly Drawn Boy was the writer Nick Hornby, who thought that Gough would be the perfect songwriter to score the soundtrack for the movie of his third novel, About A Boy, a big budget production starring Hugh Grant. "What I like about Damon’s music is that it is recognizably English without all the irritations that implies," says Hornby. "It’s got soul, it’s literate without being pretentious, the quiet bits aren't wimpy. It's not boorish... Who else is there?" The Hour Of Bewilderbeast’s cinematic quality also appealed to the directors of About A Boy, Chris and Paul Weitz, who asked Gough if he would like to write two or three songs for the soundtrack. They cited The Graduate as the perfect example of what they were looking for, but Gough was thinking more along the lines of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man or Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly and was determined to keep the score as original as possible. “It was always a long shot for them to think that I could do the soundtrack, but I immediately understood why they’d asked me,” he says. “It’s less about the music that I write and more about the way that I approach it.” After reading Hornby’s novel, Gough wrote four songs, including the desperately beautiful “Silent Sigh” and the irresistibly poppy “Something To Talk About.” He then took the songs to LA, where he hooked up with the Manchester-born, West Coast-based producer Tom Rothrock, whose credits include Beck, Elliott Smith and RL Burnside. During the course of two six-week sessions, Gough recorded more than 70 pieces of music, including the ten songs and seven instrumentals which appear on the finished soundtrack. “Doing 'About A Boy' has definitely affected what I’m going to put on the next album,” he says. “Every record you make is a reaction to the last thing that you did and so my second album will inevitably be different to what it would have been if I hadn’t made the soundtrack. Basically, it’s opened up my songwriting into all possibilities, which is what the next record is going to be called.” All Possibilities is also being recorded in LA, this time in Cello Studio, on Sunset Strip, in the same room where the Beach Boys made Pet Sounds. Again, Gough is recording with Tom Rothrock, who has coined the working motto “faith in the process." More than ever before, Gough is open to wherever his songs will take him, both musically and lyrically. “The core songs that are going to be on the record are all tackling issues that are relevant to now,” he says. “I couldn’t continue to write about relationships failing — although I still touch on the intricacies of relationships — but I wanted to write more about the bizarre things that happen when you get to be in my position.” Whereas Gough’s fame could once be reflected by fellow Mancunian luminaries such as Johnny Marr, Mark E Smith and the Gallagher Brothers, these days, he is attracting an international crowd. Bono, Meg Ryan and Alan Rickman are all proud to call themselves fans, while at least one of Pop Idols has looked to him for career advice (“Don’t do it,” advised Gough) and Joan Collins is happy to cuddle up to him in his videos (“I love his music,” she says. “He is a very talented young man.”) The highs and lows of Gough’s escalating fame are the subject of a new song called “How,” which will form the centerpiece of his next album when it is released in September. “In my head, ‘How’ is potentially huge,” he says. “It moves from a little country-folk part to a Jesus Christ Superstar-style symphony back to a rock bit. There’s a line in it that goes, ‘How can I give you the answers you need/When all I possess is a melody?’ It’s basically asking myself, what the hell am I supposed to give to people, and how am I going to make my life work in all the areas that I want it to work in.” Dealing with fame is, of course, part of Gough’s ongoing journey. “I like to think that if success continues, I’ll carry on making music that is more challenging to me and, hopefully, the audience,” he says. “I’d like to become a bit more diverse — I don’t mean I want to turn into some avant-garde saxophonist, like Kenny G, I’d just like to step outside the realm of what people might expect from me.” All Possibilities is for later. For now, the soundtrack to a mainstream movie probably isn’t what most Badly Drawn Boy fans are expecting from their Jack Daniel’s-swigging, seven-inch single-loving hero. A fact which isn’t lost on Gough. “I did wonder what my fans might think of me doing 'About A Boy,'” he muses. “I’m sure a lot of people will question it, but hopefully most of them will see it as a huge video promo for my music — even better, a giant promo that I didn’t have to pay for.”

Albums About A Boy

Location Manchester, England - United Kingdom

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