Interview: Badly Drawn Boy

Last month Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough) played a gig at the Rescue Rooms in support of Oxjam. This is a month-long series of gigs and club nights that will be rocking Nottingham venues throughout October (as well as the rest of the country) all in aid of charity. We managed to grab a few words with Damon, in between soundchecks and phone calls from the States…

At the gig you were donating a pound from every ticket sold to Oxfam. How important do you think it is for people to get involved in Oxjam?
I think what Oxfam has done over the years is excellent. People have always got a bit of disposable cash and they don’t always know where to put it, or whether it’s trustworthy to give it to someone in the street shaking a box. At least Oxfam historically has always been a trustworthy charity that sets its goals and achieves them. All simple ideas it’s represented like getting clean water to people that need it. It’s all a very simple, basic premise, but it keeps people alive. I think for at least that reason everyone can afford to give a pound at a gig I put on, because they are always going to spend twenty quid on beer. If people can be made more aware of it being as simple and effective as that, that is the reason why I’ve always been involved.

Your new album, Born In The UK, is out in mid-October. Describe it to me in five words?
Hardest thing I’ve ever done!

What are your favourite songs off the new album?
The favourites keep fluctuating really, especially as you start playing the songs live. You can never predict which songs are going to feel good or sound good live, or what the audience will react to, so that is when you start testing them out. The first real single off the album, Nothing’s Going To Change Your Mind, was always my favourite song I wrote within this period of time. It was a pivotal song in the making of the record, it just made me feel like we were getting somewhere when we wrote it, it was a bit of a breakthrough. I wrote so many songs for this album, and the twelve that made the album I think make it a more concise and rounded piece of work than I’ve done before. It’s slightly more commercial in a sense that I think a wider audience might understand it and enjoy it, without alienating the people that already like what I do.

When you go to write a song, do you have a particular subject in mind that you want to write about or do you just see what comes to you?
On this album, I spent three months before Christmas in a studio in Stockport just making up ideas. So nearly most of the songs were written in less than a day, apart from finishing the lyrics, which I’m always, slow at. I set myself the task of writing a song in the morning, going into the studio to record it and then having something to take home at the end of the night, so they were always pretty quick to write musically. The lyrics took months to finish but that is always the case. I just sit playing guitar all of the time and record stuff into my Dictaphone, but if we are in the studio then I record decent demos. I started recording this album properly in January with Nick Franglen from Lemon Jelly. So we spent January to July recording and we recorded about three times more stuff than we needed, but I always tend to do that.

Do you have a favourite place to write songs?
It tends to be mainly my back yard or the kitchen. At the back of the house is the kitchen where I like to watch TV at night. I sit at the kitchen table with my guitar or have a fag in the back yard and just play my guitar, so that tends to be my favourite spot.

How did winning The Mercury Music Prize in 2000 affect you?
I don’t know… I think it gave The Hour of Bewilderbeast a certain kudos from people that may not have wanted to embrace it at the time. The album was already doing quite well because it had come out in the summer, so it had been out a few months. The Mercury just kind of vindicated the interest that it had already created. It didn’t feel a massive ‘whoosh’ that things changed over night. I think times have changed in the last three or four years that winning the Mercury Music Prize does potentially make a difference. Everybody has their opinion about why give it the Arctic Monkeys because they don’t really need the leg up, give it to someone else. I know what everyone means by that but it’s not fair. I think what the Mercury’s try to do is to genuinely try to pick out the album that stood out that year. The Arctic Monkeys album did because they did something different on their own terms. I think it was a fair result.

Are you reading any good books at the moment?
I’m three quarters through about four or five books. I always get to a certain point then get interrupted and struggle to pick it up again, like with Bob Dylan’s, Chronicles.

I read that last year...
I got about three quarters in then I started a different book. I started a different book by Bernard Shlick called The Reader, but yet again I only got three quarters of the way through it. I like reading a lot of factual stuff to be honest, rather then fiction. I get more inspired reading them. I have various Springsteen books that fans have given me, I like reading that kind of thing a lot as it inspires me to believe in what I am doing.

Do you still uncover new things about Bruce Springsteen?
There’s not much left for me to uncover about him. But I’m just constantly inspired. Everyone seems so focused on age in this industry, like you’ve got to be a young band to get on. But all these old acts that are established have kept their audiences interested.

When was the last time you went dancing?
I didn’t!

Oxjam festival is a series of gigs taking place across Nottingham venues in October 2006.