Badly Drawn Boy Makes Good on Promise

There was the air of an arrival among the packed crowd at the Knitting Factory Hollywood on Friday for the Los Angeles debut of Badly Drawn Boy--a.k.a. Manchester musician Damon Gough, whose “The Hour of Bewilderbeast” won this year’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize for the U.K.’s best album.

But it was hard to top the sense of occasion projected from the stage. Gough early on let it be known that he certainly viewed this as a momentous event.

“You can tell your grandchildren you saw Badly Drawn Boy in a small club,” warbled Gough, crooning an improvised ditty over jazzy backing by his four-man band. “It’s like those weirdos that say they saw Woodstock.”

Those at this show will recall a performance marked by self-indulgence, lack of focus and a sense of entitlement. But they’ll also remember it as sweet and charming, never smug or cynical. And yes, as the arrival of a distinct and notable talent.

The show fleshed out the album’s highly personal tone, but it kept the artistic lines nicely fuzzy--think perhaps of an Anglo-hippie Beck. Fuzzing it up even more, he often took 10 or more minutes between songs, gabbing with the audience, noodling on guitar or keyboard, stabbing at tunes he didn’t know.

In one digression he gushed about ending his tour near the Roxy, where his hero Bruce Springsteen once played--in honor of which he offered a rough, extemporaneous version of “Thunder Road.” Save its nearly three-hour length, there wasn’t much overtly Springsteenian in the show, but there was a common sense of heart. It was on Gough’s sleeve in a joyous version of the Left Banke’s ‘60s hit “Walk Away Renee” and in several of his own gracefully soaring songs that closed the performance. For that alone, it was a night worth remembering.