Badly Drawn Boy
By Mark Boudreau 18 Oct 2002
For those of you who don’t know who Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough) is, find your favorite MP3 service and download these three songs: Once Around the Block, Stone on the Water, and Pissing in the Wind which all appeared on BDB’s first album, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast. Those songs will give you a good idea about what BDB is all about. He’s a songwriter. He writes pop rock music, although when I use the word pop, I mean it like how Paul McCartney writes pop songs, not pop in the way you’d use it to describe ‘Nsync.
<p>Well, the whole reason I bring this up is because <span class="caps">BDB</span> played at the 9:30 club last night and I was in attendence. I guess you could call it a concert, but many times during the opening show of his new US tour, it seemed more like a dress rehearsal. He has a new album coming out on Nov. 5, which is great, but also unfortunate, because all the new songs he played were unfamiliar to the crowd, which, Damon noted, made it tough for everyone. During the first 45 minutes of the show, the band wasn’t very comfortable for various reasons (A bad harmonica, songs that had never been played live, songs that Damon decided to experiment with on stage, etc). The last hour and a half of the two plus hour set, however, saw the band start to come together and saw the more recognizable <span class="caps">BDB</span> songs surface, which ended up making everyone happy. I’d be really interested to see <span class="caps">BDB</span> again at the tail end of this tour, to see how they refine the songs over a good bit of touring. Overall though, he was engaging and the songs were great, though many of the layers that you find in his recorded music get lost in a noisy club, but the essence of the songs stayed true and made it all worthwhile.</p> Tags: badly drawn boy