Badly Drawn Boy


We spoke to Badly Drawn Boy, AKA Damon Gough, backstage at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre for our article on him on page 59 of Issue 4 of Under the Radar. Below are some selected excerpts of our interview with Gough that didn’t make it into that article. Gough seemed weary when we spoke to him. He admitted that it had been one of the hardest tours he’d ever done in his life because of various problems and also related how much he missed his wife and young children back in the UK, all of which is contained in the Issue 4 article. If you haven’t read that print article yet then we urge you to do so before reading below. Either way, there are some interesting quotes below that didn’t fit in the article. Also found here are more pictures from our photo shoot with him that day. We photographed Gough both in the balcony of the Wiltern Theatre and across the street on a subway station platform. We didn’t exactly have official permission to shoot on the platform, so we all had to make a fast getaway when subway cops approached, but Gough was a great sport and ended up bring the bouquet of flowers we gave him on stage with him that night. Unfortunately, by the end of the night the flowers were scattered across the stage, left broken and trampled on. Fame and Success Makes Life Harder Mark Redfern (M): Like in what ways, how has your life gotten harder? Damon Gough (D): Well it’s just that my time is taken up a lot and I’m also away a lot from the people that I love the girlfriend, the kids. Just success generally brings with it a lot more to deal with, I’m sure it is an even bigger level when it gets to like U2 standard. You know it’s like everything costs more. Your time flies quicker. That’s one of the prices of it really; you’re constantly on the move. I’ve very rarely had time to stop in the last two years to really reflect on anything too much, which in some ways it is good because I'm not a very decisive person. If I was given more time to reflect I might make wrong decisions or make no decisions. So I don't mind being kind of busy all the time, although sometimes you do need a bit of respite. Making this album I didn’t have the luxury of a reflection period to say what I really wanted to do with it. It was just pretty much as spontaneous as it gets, even though a lot of the songs took a while to reveal themselves and to be what I would consider finished the end came and the album took a lot longer than the actual initializing of any particular song. The finishing of it and the compiling all of it was really difficult, probably because of that lack of reflection. I was a bit confused. But I knew I didn't want to wait, I wanted the challenge of putting something out under that kind of pressure, see if it world work. That was part of the issue really: just put myself under the pressure to get a record made. M: Are you happy with it, do you feel like it worked? D: Yeah I think so. I think usually there's a million ways you could go on making a record so if I had decided to say take a break go ‘well I'll wait until next year, I’ll sit on these songs.’ I knew it would have been dangerous to do that because I probably would’ve started writing different songs if I had of waited. Cancelled all the touring and waited up to Christmas and carried on writing songs. I would’ve probably had three albums worth of material and it would’ve got even more confusing, so it just made sense to go with what was there. Because I like songs individually I just find it hard to make a way of making them fit. Which is why I started to put lyrics in certain songs that are in other songs. And when it got to a certain point with songs like ‘Have You Fed the Fish’ and ‘You Were Right’ and how the themes of the album started to emerge is what it was sort of trying to be about, nothing too specific but just about what I’ve just said really. The pulling and pushing to and from home to do this work and where it takes you, the way you got treated differently as a person than you did before and where are all those girls before all this happened, how come they suddenly all like me? It's like all those mixed feelings that you get being who I am I suppose and people like me, people such as me, like whoever else you write about, probably goes through similar things but perhaps don't like about it. I mean I wasn't consciously trying to make an effort to address these issues, they were just issues that naturally came to the surface when it came to writing the songs on this album, I suppose. There were certain other songs that didn't really make the cut because they were too silly or not to the point or distracted from the main core of the album, which is obviously they’re like three or four songs that make the core. I think in a lot of ways it's more of a concise record than the first album. I’ve still got a fondness for the first record. I think in its compiling and flow the first album is probably pretty much unbeatable, but I think what this record does, is it’s more like a record that other people make. It's not over fussy I think. Because I was in danger at one point of making a double album and I sort of shied away from it under Tom Rothrock’s guidance because he was convinced that, even though he loved all the songs, he was like convinced that most double albums that were ever made would’ve made a better single album so I always kept that in mind. And it was, it was difficult to listen to when there were twenty-five songs on it. It was difficult to hear down in one go cause it was like ‘surely it's got to stop now.’ Even though I liked song by song, it was fine, it just didn't seem to, I couldn’t find a way of making them all work together so I wanted to make a classic length, a sort of as near to a forty-five minute record that had a lot of information in it. Pressure to Follow Up Hour of the Bewilderbeast M: Did you feel a huge amount of pressure doing this album since Hour of the Bewilderbeast was so beloved or was that pressure kind of offset by doing the About a Boy soundtrack? D: It was definitely offset and it made me, because of spending so much time on the soundtrack and knowing that I had personal ideas ready to go which I didn't, the two things were total separate issues. The making of the sound track the songs were apparent for that project and not likely to be left over. Whenever anyone asks me about ‘oh will the outtakes be used for the next record?’ It’ll never be that way I don't think because it is all about the feeling during the time you're making it, that’s why it’s called a record, because it’s the record of that time that you did it. So those other songs just won’t feel like anything when I do the next album. Because it took me away from my own music to do a soundtrack for such a long time, like nine months or something, it made me really eager and made me forget about the pressure really. It was still there on a daily basis, like you want to make a good record, but it didn’t make me bite my fingernails and worry about what I was going to do. It just really made me want to press on. And the songs were coming quite quickly anyway. As I said the hardest bit was just finishing. I knew I had a good record, perhaps with a reshuffle, the odd song swapped with the other one it could be just slightly better a better record, but you know we arrived at a decision together me and Tom. We spent hours and hours trying to compile the best version. It sort of did itself in a lot of ways, it sort of didn't make sense in certain ways and then the ones that did make sense it was just an obvious choice. It takes a long time to see that sometimes. It takes a lot of refocusing after you've been living in the world of these songs for so long looking at the meticulous detail of a guitar solo or the sound of the drum. So it’s distracting in itself to spend that much time on detail to then step back and go right, you’ve heard that song a thousand times before you put the record out. It’s always difficult but yeah like you said the pressure was slightly alleviated by the fact I’d had a soundtrack to make. And that established me as capable of a different role too, so it was slightly diluted, the pressure. Never Met Madonna M: So I wanted to ask you: have you ever actually met Madonna since you reference her a lot on the album? D: I’ve not actually met her no. I don't know whether she’s actually heard the song or anything, ‘You Were Right’ especially. She gets mentioned again in ‘Tickets to What You Need.’ No funnily enough I haven’t. Maybe one day, I mean I’m not striving to although I think she's brilliant. She got only mentioned ‘cause I think she's good. She obviously, to turn her down shows how powerful you are. M: Shows resilience. D: Yeah. M: Yeah, I used to be a big Madonna fan back in the ‘80s. D: She's still beautiful, I mean I fancy her; she’s a heart breaker. But, you know, it’s just I'd be intrigued to see what she thought of that if she's heard it at all. M: I’m sure somebody must’ve brought it to her attention. D: You would’ve thought so yeah. Go top ten in England, that song. M: That’s where she’s living now. D: Yeah you would of thought. I think it’s my cheap shot at trying to get to meet her. Whistling and Dreaming For the Next Twenty Years M: The whistling that you do on the album, did that take you awhile to get that right? D: There’s only one, on “You Were Right?” M: Yeah, on “You Were Right,” at the end. D: Why do you ask? M: I don’t know? Because well I heard you on the radio today and it’s obviously never gonna sound the same as on record and it’s kind of hard to whistle on cue, so I was wondering if it took you awhile to actually do that? D: That’s a good question (laughs), but yeah whistling on a microphone is really, really a tricky thing to get right, ‘cause you get all the breath too. So you gotta mic it in a certain way and the notes just don’t come out. Yeah it was hard actually. It took a few take. I could never do it on a gig, like tonight you, I know for a fact that when it comes to the whistle solo you just won't hear it. It’s the same as playing a harmonica. If the band’s playing too loud I’m just not gonna hear the harmonica so, it’s all about dynamic when you play live and we're trying to learn, but our drummer’s so loud some times that you can't turn him down. M: I guess two last questions I often ask people. One of them is: how would you like to be remembered in twenty years, like in terms of fans and music critics, and just musical history in general? D: Somebody that did it their way and is still doing it their way, you know, in twenty years time and still important. Or if I’m not still doing it, just somebody that all the crap gets forgotten and you just remember that it was somebody that tried to contribute something valid to the world of music. But maybe I don't care what people think in twenty years time. I just hope that the records I make will still be records that people will deem valuable and might end up upon lists of records of all times perhaps, but who knows. They might be bargain bin fonder, I don't think so but they could be. M: I don’t think so. Last question. I always ask this kind of strange question and some people have nothing to say and some people have really interesting things to say, but do you have any recurring dreams or nightmares? D: Yeah, they vary. I've hade some really, really scarily close to reality dreams, like almost lucid dreams wher I lay in my bed and I’m actually dreaming about the room I’m actually in and I touch the wall to test if it is actually real and the wall wobbles so that’s pretty, not to many of those, but I've had them over the years. The most common recurring theme is generally a pursuit of some kind, which I think any psychologist would, I mean some of the psychologists analysis of dreams I find hilariously obvious. Maybe it’s true. I could forgive them for saying that my recurring dream, being pursued all the time by, sometimes its like in an Aliens kind of film where it’s sci-fi and it’s really scary and you’re fighting for your life, and you survive like in warfare. I often dream about planes going down as well, you know, like in really weird places. M: Are you on the plane when it happens? D: No, usually I’m just witnessing it from somewhere. Even before September 11 th , and God forbid anyone that had to see that for real, but I have dreams about that too. Madonna’s mentioned and I've dreamed about Madonna. I do have a lot of, not saucy dreams, but there are a lot of famous people that crop up in my dreams, like musicians. Like I was knocking around with Oasis in one dream and Beck in another dream, like living on the same street like The Beatles used to do. God knows what they mean. I suppose it’s whatever you've been doing all that day; I think gets reflected in the dream. www.badlydrawnboy.co.uk