A mock beer garden is set up at the side of the stage - complete with benches, umbrella and a round of drinks - when Damon Gough shuffles onstage with the immortal words, "I feel f**ked." Apparently he's feeling the effects of a night on the tiles with James Nesbitt, which hardly sounds like rock n roll Valhalla, but is enough to foul his temper anyway.
Tonight Gough will play the definitive game of two halves.
First up he opts to play recent album "One Plus One Is One" in it's A to Z entirety. This proves an interesting exercise for an artist who claims to hate restrictions (as he mentions more than once) and, even if it's hardly "Pet Sounds" (or even "The Hour Of Bewilderbeast" come to that) it's certainly undeserving of the almost unanimous critical mauling it received upon release.
During an uneasy set Gough proves himself a strangely belligerent performer - pitting himself as the people's champion and able to inspire buckets of affection but simmering beneath the surface with a kind of viciousness that belies the sentimentality of his best songs. As he directs band members with an impatient nod of the head you can imagine he doesn't suffer fools gladly.
At one point, when a guitar is not tuned quite to his liking, he simply skulks over to the darkness of the beer garden while a hapless roadie tries to fix it. It's quite funny as he smokes a fag like he was sitting in the corner of The Red Lion but not without a hint of genuine sourness.
(Recent comments that he hoped Saddam Hussein might rethink his evil ways if only listened to a Badly Drawn Boy album suggest either a charming naivety or a deluded ego bigger than Bolton.)
For the second set Gough promises to go off piste and, as a consequence, he sounds and acts like an infinitely happier individual. Jumping from B-sides ("Don't Ask Me, I'm Just The President") to a gorgeous string-laden rendition of "The Shining" and a clutch of Grade A classics including "Silent Sigh", "Once Around The Block", "Fall In A River" and "You Were Right" the crowd hold him to their collective bosom.
Now we're finally in the palm of his hand, he vows never to tie himself down again before breaking into a spontaneous and often hilarious ten-minute monologue set to PP Arnold's version of "First Cut Is The Deepest" which concludes in him declaring the winner of Big Brother.
So there we have it: chained and bound, the man is a surly curmudgeon; wild and free and he's up there with the best of the best. He's still a frustratingly enigmatic talent, but long may he roam.
