Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy, had to walk away from a new album last year. Luckily, he found another one around the corner.
By Mikael Wood
Damon Gough has had it good since 2000, when the one-man band won England’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize for his debut album as Badly Drawn Boy, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, a ramshackle tapestry of homemade pop that sounded like Burt Bacharach as produced by Beck. His two follow-ups have won him an increasingly devoted audience, and the soundtrack he wrote and recorded for 2002’s Hugh Grant vehicle About a Boy introduced him to Hollywood, as (potentially) lucrative a companion as a musician could hope to meet.
Yet when Gough began work on a new album last year with producer Stephen Street (a veteran of classic British pop records by Blur and the Smiths), he found that his good fortune had run out. “I’d just kind of lost focus and felt that it wasn’t really going the way I intended it,” Gough says of the Street sessions. “And I couldn’t find an easy answer as to how to turn the songs into something I liked. The only thing I could do was walk away from it, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
After your work with Stephen Street ended disappointingly, you wrote a whole new record,
Born in the U.K., and began recording it with Nick Franglen of the English electropop act Lemon Jelly. Was it difficult to get motivated a second time? It wasn’t, really. I can’t explain why [the Street-produced material] didn’t happen or why it didn’t work out. The songs were sounding good but not great. I couldn’t fathom what to do next. And I felt tarnished by the experience of trying to get it right, so the last thing I wanted to do was go back to those songs. So I just kind of kicked myself and decided to go into the recording studio near where I live and just force myself to record something brand-new every day.
Did it work? Yeah, I ended up managing to get a new song in half-decent shape by the end of each day. I was waking up, coming up with an idea on the guitar, going in the studio, and recording it. I think because of the failure, because of something not working out, I was trying to prove a point — like, “I can do this in my sleep; I can write a song a day.” And that’s what I ended up doing.
Did you enjoy the feeling of working under the gun? I don’t know whether I’d say I enjoyed it. But there’s something to be said for having a disciplined approach. The problem with being an artist is the rock-and-roll ethic — you don’t really want to work hard. You already worked hard to get yourself where you are, and you don’t want to work hard anymore. You just want to be lazy. But because I was thinking I had to prove myself, it became fairly reckless. I had no focus; I was just recklessly recording new songs every day without any reasons for it and with no real direction.
Did Nick provide that direction? Well, by the time I got to
Christmas, I had so many ideas to choose from that I didn’t know where to start. So in January, I just kind of started recording songs one by one with Nick and probably recorded far too many songs again. Eventually, we ended up finalizing the album with 12 main songs on it.
What was different about working with Nick? The main difference in the process was that I just went back to how I’ve always done things — putting down the bass and the drums and my guitar or piano, and then building up the instruments over the top of that. That’s basically how I’ve always made music; that’s the process I can understand. And that’s where things can get interesting: Stuff can happen without your realizing it, without your planning it. You can chance upon things just by overdubbing and improvising ideas on top of the template you’ve put down.
Your records have always suggested that you’re a creature of the studio. My background is in recording rather than in performing — not that I ever got good at being a sound engineer. But when I was 18, I worked in studios, and that’s all I wanted to be. It’s only by accident that I became the person in front of the camera rather than behind it.