Music
25 Oct 02

Have You Fed The Fish

BDB’s characteristic ramshackle guitar and endearingly imprecise vocal are this time combined with full string and horn arrangements, creating a kind of folksy motown feel, Detroit crossed with Devon

Damon Gough is having a ball. That much is clear after the first 15 seconds of Have You Fed The Fish, in which an airline pilot draws his passengers’ attention to a cloud to starboard “that looks exactly like... Badly Drawn Boy” and the opener, a Blurry circus-pop instrumental, bounds out of the speakers like a hyperactive puppy.

Not that The Hour of Bewilderbeast was po-faced either, but where the debut was a hit-and-miss morass of musical inventiveness, ...Fish is equal parts method and madness.

The title track has Damon in mock-earnest (or earnest-mock) mode, urging the world that “you’ve got to rewind to go forward/There’s some good times around the corner.” This is pretty much the concept of this concept album: optimism through multiple viewpoints.

The album sounds wonderful. BDB’s characteristic ramshackle guitar and endearingly imprecise vocal are this time combined with full string and horn arrangements, creating a kind of folksy motown feel, Detroit crossed with Devon. This reaches a peak on ‘The Further I Slide’ which, on first listen, is a barefaced rip-off of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’. But you absolutely cannot stay mad at the song, especially after the gorgeous Talking Heads synth break.

As said, this is assuredly a concept album, with satisfying internal structure. ‘I Was Wrong’ precedes ‘You Were Right,’ which in turn precedes a kind of intermission track at the halfway point, the rubbery lounge shuffle ‘CentrePeace.’ Lyrical conceits like “tickets to what you need” are reprised and expanded over several songs.

The quirkiness occasionally fails to hit the bullseye, as on ‘40 Days 40 Fights,’ a duet better in theory than practice, and from time to time Gough’s sloppy singing shifts from endearing to frustrating. But let’s be reasonable: anyone with this much musical imagination, having this much fun, must surely be pardoned for such technical peccadillos.

Badly Drawn Boy is one sui generis geezer. “Maybe there’s a reason why I’m born again/There’s something rare going on under my skies,” he croons on ‘Born Again.’ And isn’t he the generous fellow to share that something with us?