I 'n' Gigs 3: Badly Drawn Boy (Glasgow, 2000)

I was meant to be going to see Nick Cave and his merry bunch of Bad Seeds this week. Since I'm not, and gigs are something which I'm sure a lot of people are missing, I thought I'd write a little about 10 gigs I went to. Not my favourites per se, just memorable ones from down the years.

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs"  (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs)... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

In one respect I’ve found that most rock stars are, thankfully, not that rock’n’roll at all. And that is punctuality. One hears different things about the megastars, but, for 95% of the gigs I’ve ever been to, they have started pretty much on time, and ended on time.

However rebellious they are in their hearts, most performers are clearly not keen to annoy venues and promoters, not to mention their fans, by playing fast and loose with timekeeping.

So, you know where this is going …

We went through from St Andrews to Glasgow in October 2000 to see BDB, hot off his Mercury success, at Queen Margaret’s Union. It was a memorable gig.

It was wild.

I think we were aware it was going to be his shtick – the music papers were speculating how much it was for real and how much it was an act – I’ll get to that in more detail a little later.

He was drinking heavily throughout; perhaps aware of the likes of Dave Allen and Dean Martin who had pretended to drink through performances, I remember briefly wondering if that’s what BDB was doing … but it wasn’t.

He was late on, he got cross, he made jokes, he fell over, he started and stopped ‘Disillusion’ over and over again, he got a piggy back, he went on and on and on. I feel like the gig finished about 1.30 – maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I have never before or since seen an artist allowed to flout curfew laws so thoroughly.

It was, on balance, a great gig. He was properly funny and compelling, his best songs were brilliant, he was on the edge and knew how to pull through to victory.

I remember the next day, we went for the first time to Fopp on Byres Road and it was like being let loose in heaven, we’d never seen anything like it. So, a great expedition.

Badly Drawn Boy soundtracked that last year at Uni for me more than I care to remember. I still maintain ‘The Hour of Bewilderbeast’ is one of the very best British albums of the era.

What next for him? Maybe he never hit such heights again. Though I wouldn’t say that’s the whole story.

I saw him live again, in Edinburgh, in the summer of 2003, just before the release of his second full album ‘Have You Fed the Fish?’. In between there’d been the soundtrack to ‘About the Boy’ which was a pretty unambiguous success and there was every reason to think success would build on success. He seemed to have a capacity for hit records, for pop songs.

It wasn’t so good a gig as the one in Glasgow. It was fine. There were attempts to recreate the spontaneity and madness, but they felt a bit forced. Still, the songs sounded good.

He’d been recording the album in Olympic Studios, Barnes, and my friend Laura, who was at the gig, had been working there. So, rather splendidly, we were able to go backstage. Andy Rourke was in his band then, he was there, so was Andy Votel the producer. I must say BDB, and the rest of them, were altogether delightful, very nice, welcoming and funny. The hour or so we were there, nevertheless, still haunts me for a couple of dim, embarrassing things I said, but that’s just me!

But ‘Have You Fed the Fish’ was, though initially engaging, just not quite the album ‘Bewilderbeast’ was. His star started to fade. I remember seeing him playing on something like TOTP a couple of years later and I remember being struck by how static and scared he looked. It made me think of that first, wild, wonderful, well-watered gig in a different way.

By and large it’s been diminishing returns since then – there has been little buzz about any of the succeeding albums. I was listening to a couple of Apple Playlists of his songs while writing this, though, and there were a few startlingly moving songs from later on in his career I’d not paid much attention to before.

He has a new album next month, which I have, despite myself, a renewed excitement for. Not sure I’d see him live again, though.