Now, I'm going to tell you a story. Let's go back, way back, back into time. Remember the distant spectre of the last century? Well, that was when the first sightings of the supposedly extinct being the Badly Drawn Boy were first witnessed.
At the time, small gatherings of rock'n'roll explorers with the inherent suss and initiative required to sense and capture such unholy beasts caught rare glimpses of BDB, aka Damonus Goughugus, roaming dingy London music halls, with a ferocious but bittersweet glint in his eye. Intermittently, he was seen, a banana in his mouth or perhaps a miniature glitter ball manacled to his leg, doing his remarkable 'thing'. Remember, this is a true story.
Sometime later and the boy, becoming ever more humanised, yet still basking in a paradoxically virile wilderness of untamed musical wonder, dropped his first spawn, the appropriately christened 'Hour Of The Bewilderbeast'. An organic, sprawling jungle of sonic verve and veracity, all government-appointed anthropologists nodded heads and agreed, this was certainly some creation. Indeed, the boy was unusually special.
Some months later, a 'radical' body of scientists, thinkers and seriously clever groovers bestowed the finest honour in their field to BDB, which he accepted, now fully ingrained into our torrid world and ingratiated at every turn, despite his ongoing persona as a 21st century elephant man. Quickly, arduous, pretentious exhibitions of self-perpetuating myth-making and effusive public love-trumpeting followed. We were worried.
And now children, we are here. A new century. Indeed, the back-end of 2002, and, my how things have changed. That thirst for wilful carnage and wild experimentation on all manner of landscapes has been crushed, beaten-out of our messianic idol. Where once there was skronky lo-fi, shuffling, distant vocal howls, mangled guitars, random percussive rattles, even unpredictable electronic beats and the occasional explosion, now there is Hollywood. Where once the bark was of Beck, we have - and this hurts - Wings.
And there are strings. Lots of them, sickly and claustrophobic, as if generated by a focus group. And, once again there is love. Waves of it, so that where the beast was previously stitched together by this maddening romance, he's now bursting from his skin with such overbearing talk of this 'mate' and their two tiny beings. Agreed, we looked on with tears in our eyes as our hero was co-opted into the mainstream once before, to embrace the greedy glitterati -that populist figure of damnation, Hugh Grant - with the 'About A Boy' deviation. And yet, nothing on this certainly touching, yet painfully unchallenging incarnation, even comes close to the breathless passion of 'Silent Sigh' or the dazzling 'Donna & Blitzon', the finale of that collection.
Indeed, what is this talk of "working on my American accent" and the opening proclamation, which finds a stranger from that ugly, developed land of insular beliefs and violent righteousness telling us of a cloud formation that looks very much like our very own "Badly Drawn Boy". But we no longer recognise this being, despite the staple rag-and-bone man aura. How did this happen? Where is 'he'? Well, my friends, it is with great sadness that I must impart this news and I am as mortified as you by our loss.
But, if the hat fits…
