Badly Drawn Boy’s The Hour of the Bewilderbeast Revisited

Badly Drawn Boy’s Mercury Prize-winning The Hour of the Bewilderbeast turned its creator into an unlikely star. In the latest edition of Records Revisited, David and Juan return to this scrappy indie folk landmark to see how it holds up today.

David: Well. I don’t think I’ve listened to this record for at least two decades, and I was not expecting to have such a strong reaction to Damon Gough’s Mercury Prize-winning debut.

Having been an early supporter of Badly Drawn Boy, I wrote a gushing 9/10 review of The Hour of the Bewilderbeast on its release. One inane sample, and I could have chosen many, describes “a brilliant album, which almost shoots itself in the foot by having 18 quality tracks.” Hopefully, my writing improved in the ensuing quarter of a century. What hasn’t improved, however, is this record. In fact, it’s aged rather poorly.

Now, I’m a sucker for music that explores the intersection between indie folk and chamber pop. I love baroque embellishments, and I appreciate naivety and simplicity. Bewilderbeast checks all of these boxes and yet somehow it sounds both flat and wildly disjointed.

Juan: I actually had to look this up, but the first time I heard of Badly Drawn Boy was through a Gap—the mass-market clothing apparel—commercial after the album had already been released. With its sumptuous French horn lead, “The Shining” struck me as an absolutely lovely song.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people discovered Damon Gough the same way, especially since “Once Around the Block” sounded distinctly British to my ears and never seemed poised for the same kind of crossover success. It was similar to what happened to literate indie pop UK stalwarts The Clientele, who gained a bit of additional recognition in the US when one of their songs appeared in the largely forgettable romantic drama The Lake House.

The Hour of Bewilderbeast was one of the first albums I bought with my own money while working at a bookstore during college, so it’s possible that my opinion on the record is slightly partial. What floored me was how different it was from what I expected. I assumed I was getting some genre-bending eccentric à la Beck, but instead I found a baroque-folk semi-song cycle bursting with creativity.

Despite your overall feelings about Bewilderbeast, David, are there any songs on the album that you can appreciate on their own merits?

David: Well, “The Shining” was always my favourite song on the record and I’d say it probably still is, even if it sounds a little underdeveloped listening back. That mournful French horn is a wonderful inclusion, though. “Once Around The Block” is another favourite. I agree, it does sound very British—and especially Mancunian—but it’s still surprisingly fresh.

As the other end of the spectrum, I have to single out “Pissing in the Wind” as a low point. Gough’s early lyrics were never his strongest attribute, but this one extends beyond charming naivety into fully blown ridiculousness. How did a line “I chanced a foolish grin and dribbled on my chin” make the final cut?

I do think Gough’s songwriting has improved throughout his career, though. 2020’s Banana Skin Shoes was a lovely record, and even his mid-to-late 2000s output was better than people give him credit for. Bewilderbeast increasingly sounds like a messy debut from a talented artist still trying to find his way. It’s not a bad record by any stretch, but it certainly isn’t the stone-cold classic I remembered it being.

Juan: I think we’ve talked about this before, but Banana Skin Shoes was such a pleasant surprise. It’s almost a miracle that it exists. Much like his somewhat cursed career, though, it arrived at the worst possible time. The one album of his I think gets really slept on–and the one that’s become my personal favourite—is It’s What I’m Thinking: Photographing Snowflakes.

But back to Bewilderbeast: I do have more of an appreciation for the deep cuts that signalled at the kind of artist Gough eventually became. When I listen to songs like “Camping Next to Water,” I get the sense that he, in his heart of hearts, wanted to write more intimate songs that stayed true to his more sorrowful sensibilities. “Say It Again” is also such a fascinating outlier, sounding as if he wanted to write a post-Britpop song with a New Orleans-inspired, jazz-flecked groove. It doesn’t strike me as someone trying to diffuse the attention he’d received. After all, Have You Fed the Fish?, his follow-up, is arguably more ambitious.

Ultimately, I never got the sense that Gough deliberately wanted to lower his profile. He even branched out into composing for film soundtracks before burning out creatively in the 2010s, which brought in good money and some crossover attention, I’m sure. That said, I do wonder whether a degree of self-sabotage contributed to his decline, publicised personal struggles notwithstanding. But on Bewilderbeast, it really felt like he could do no wrong.

Records Revisited is a recurring No Ripcord feature exploring how albums evolve alongside the people who listen to them.