The celebration of an artist’s seminal album has recently become a well-oiled money machine for the industry’s most established. From the reunion tours to the over-priced deluxe boxsets and the subsequent knee-jerk critical praise that follows every Britpop, grunge, rock and pop anniversary; what happened once can now happen all over again, only slightly saggier and probably with a couple of remastered B-sides thrown in.
But as I sat deleting emails about the 10th anniversary of the Bravery’s 12th single from my inbox, a press release arrived that genuinely gave me reason to be excited. The Dunstable-born, Bolton-dwelling, cottage-industry artist Badly Drawn Boy will be touring his debut album, the Hour of Bewilderbeast, this summer – news that may not be seismic to many, but matters greatly to me. You see, I worried this album might get left behind, his sensitive, meticulously created songs forgotten underneath all of the pomp and party poppers of the bigger boys’ birthdays.
The Hour of Bewilderbeast arrived in June 2000, an odd junction in rock music: Britpop had become bloated, rich and lazy, and as it reluctantly handed the baton over to the shambolic indie-pop stars and garage-rock revivalists – the Strokes and the Libertines – who skulked on the horizon, there was a new acoustic movement gently sweeping the UK. Turin Brakes, David Gray, Coldplay, Elbow, Keane and Travis arrived with their acoustic guitars, introversion and introspection, like the soft Muzak before the chaos and cultural revolution of indie rock blasted back into the mainstream.
Although far more experimental than the rest of the artists involved in this scene, you could regard Damon Gough’s Mercury Prize win in 2000, which saw the singer beat the likes of Leftfield and MJ Cole, as the apex of the new acoustic movement. Oddly enough, The Hour of Bewilderbeast was released on the exact same day as Parachutes, but what Coldplay lacked in terms of Mercury recognition they made up for with a frontman who had globe-straddling ambition. All Gough had ever wanted, on the other hand, was to be a sound engineer, which is why we a) never got a Badly Drawn Boy duet with Rihanna, and b) his music is such a spectrum of odd sonic textures and tones.
Apparently whittled down from 100 songs to its still sprawling 18, like many debuts, the songs sound like the culmination of someone’s life up to that point. Ideas shift in and out of consciousness and, like lost tapes, it sounds dusty and distorted, oddly intimate and at times unfinished. It begins soft and sun-dappled, like the start of a summer’s morning, with The Shining, before it slowly descends into the strange and tangential, from Fall in a River’s fade in, to the Beck-like Body Rap. It is bolstered by its confident singles, the Dissolution, Pissing in the Wind and Once Around the Block (a song which transports me back to the day I pulled a sicky from school so I could see if my 120-minute playlist made it on to MTV2. It didn’t. I still feel guilty when I hear it).
This album – and later his success with the About a Boy soundtrack – became a bit of an obstacle for the notoriously shy singer, whose later gentle, reflective albums were overshadowed by his initial success. In fact, I watched him do an acoustic session when he was promoting his deeply personal album It’s What I’m Thinking Pt.1 – Photographing Snowflakes and saw a part of him die when a member of the audience jubilantly shouted “About a Boy!” after he’d just nevously spilled his inner-most anxieties out during a rendition of a song called In Safe Hands.
His vulnerability has always been an alluring trait, and I imagine for someone like Gough, who is the very antithesis of the Gallaghers’ northern swagger, the prospect of fame was probably always a little frightening. “I still struggle with it to this day,” he told Paul Morley back in 2009, talking about the spectre of the album’s release. “People have a fondness for the beginnings; there’s something about the start of something that people buy into. I think it set a weird precedent.”
With most artists who return after a hiatus, there’s a sense that they never really went away; the solo projects, the Twitter fights, the rambling blogposts and media appearances. For Gough, this “classic album” tour is to be celebrated; not just because it resurrects the beauty of this quiet, precious record, but because it embraces the creation that once loomed across his career like an albatross. Hopefully this time around, he might enjoy it.
