Badly Drawn Boy

According to Damon Gough (a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy), the music industry thinks he’s over the hill. After recording music for seven years and releasing four albums in four years, the 34-year-old Gough says the music industry sees him as an “elder statesman.” He also says this is “bollocks.”

Gough’s new album, One Plus One Is One, may have a more mellow, acoustic sound, but the artist insists this doesn’t reflect a new musical direction. “Nothing I do is really that new to me,” Gough muses. With this latest recording, Gough left his usual Bacharachian orchestrations behind, yielding a more stripped-down sound. Folksy elements blend with traditional songwriting to give a softer, more easy-listening sound. A few of the tracks incorporate a flute—and it would have been more than a few if long-time Badly Drawn Boy associate Andy Votel hadn’t persuaded Gough to lay off the wind instruments.

While there’s no danger of Badly Drawn Boy going smooth jazz on us, One has an autumn-of-your-life feel—Gough describes it as “kind of greeny-brown.” But there’s another reason for this coloring that has nothing to do with Gough settling down: He lost an old friend during the making of the album.

“He [recently] gave me a photograph of himself up a tree when he was little,” Gough says. “Once I’d been given that photograph … he died two days later. It just made me think everything’s got to suit that aesthetic of when I look at that picture of him.” Badly Drawn Boy’s name may be known in every English town, but he’s never received the U.K. radio play given contemporaries like Coldplay, or even Travis. So instead of the endless radio and television promotional battles, he took a more underground approach to getting his music heard.

“We thought I’d just go straight to grassroots and do this pub tour, make it free,” he says. In the manner of the “All Possibilities” video from Have You Fed the Fish?—which features Badly Drawn Boy busking in the streets of London—Gough and his band put themselves in a tenuous situation and hoped for the best.

Despite the worries of doing something so unusual (the actual location of each gig would only be announced 24 hours in advance), the risk paid off. “It’s kind of refreshing to do it that way, not plan it too much,” Gough says of the experience. “I didn’t even know the venue till we got there, which is usually the case; I don’t really care where I’m playing, I just turn up and play.”

And playing such small venues—all of which sold out—took a lot of the weight off the group’s shoulders. “To not have the pressure of having to fill out a gig or having to please an audience—inevitably, I think me and the band played better because of that. I think it was better than any shows I’d done. [Everyone in the audience] went away feeling that they’d seen something special.”

Things have changed drastically since Gough was making tapes in his bedroom, jamming with countless bands in Manchester and arguing with Votel over song titles in a club. His first album, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, was mostly done in “this shitty little studio that no one else could ever have made a record in apart from me.” And that album ended up taking home the 2000 Mercury Music Prize. Now he finds himself branching out to more areas to get his music heard.

“You’ve got to be more creative in what you do these days, ’cause the record industry is not what it was,” he says. “It’s kind of aided and hampered at the same time by technology, and most people don’t know how to deal with the record sales suffering.”

But these are not the idle complaints of an indie innovator who’s given up.

“If you are positive and use that well, there’s ways of making that work and I think combating it by doing little tours like that is exactly the right thing to do because it reminds people that real music will never be replaced by anything else, technology or otherwise. You just get on with it and do it, and people seem to appreciate it. People still have got brains left … you’ve just got to keep going at it and keep reminding people that there is a different way of doing things, a more honest way of doing things and hopefully it pays off, eventually.”

Gough pauses, contemplating his last words before adding, “If it doesn’t, then at least you’ve died trying.”