Damon Gough grew up in Farnworth, near Bolton, and ended up in Trafford. He called himself Badly Drawn Boy after a character in the Peanuts comic strip, wore a woolly hat at all times, and made an album that won the Mercury Prize in 2000. The Hour of Bewilderbeast was a shambling, beautiful mess — 18 tracks of lo-fi folk-pop that sounded like someone had emptied their entire record collection into a blender and come out with something tender and odd.
Once Around the Block was the single that introduced most people to him. Disillusion, The Shining — the songs were melodic and rambling in equal measure. He was on Andy Votel’s Twisted Nerve label out of Manchester, which put out records with a distinctive aesthetic: hand-drawn artwork, limited pressings, a deliberate distance from the mainstream.
He soundtracked About a Boy, the Hugh Grant film based on the Nick Hornby novel. Something to Talk About from that soundtrack became his most commercially successful moment. Have You Fed the Fish? followed in 2002. Then things got complicated — more albums came, but the momentum faded. Live shows became unpredictable. Gough was open about struggling with the demands of being a public figure when he clearly preferred just making music in his own time.
He’s still around, still plays occasional shows in Manchester. Night and Day Cafe in the Northern Quarter was the kind of venue where you might have caught him in the early days. The woolly hat remains. Badly Drawn Boy was never going to be a stadium act — he was too idiosyncratic, too resistant to polish. But The Hour of Bewilderbeast is a record that sounds like Greater Manchester: unglamorous, honest, full of unexpected warmth.