Badly Drawn Boy, Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham-by-Sea

What/Why:

Has it really been a decade? It feels a lot longer. It feels like yesterday. It was June 2000 when the Mercury-winning, seminal The Hour of the Bewilderbeast, announced the arrival of the badly drawn genius of Damon Gough. It’s been a curious, wonderful, inimitable, unpredictable decade of major prizes and minor incidents, all possibilities and pissing in the wind, at the end of which we find Gough starting the new decade as he did the last… at a creative peak, and back on his own label.

“It feels like a new beginning in a lot of ways,” nods a refreshed and revitalised Gough over a pint in a Manchester beer garden, “it definitely feels like I’m on a roll.”

Being back on his own label, and working closer again with longtime collaborator Andy Votel, has also reenergised Gough. “It feels like everything has reconnected to what I’m doing.” Having originally made his name on Twisted Nerve, the label he founded in the late 90s with Votel, there feels a certain synchronicity with Gough, having spent much of the decade on major labels, being back on his own label. “I don’t want to slag off major labels,” he stresses, but with the industry going through a period of flux, “things have almost by default come back to my way of thinking.”

A rare opportunity to see Badly Drawn Boy – don’t miss it.