Which of the following statements is true? A) Badly Drawn Boy made his fifth album with Smiths, Kaiser Chiefs and Blur producer Stephen Street. B) Badly Drawn Boy made his fifth studio album with wobbly, wobbly Lemon Jelly fruitster, Nick Fraglen. C) Badly Drawn Boy is still not sure whether or not he has actually made his fifth studio album yet. With anybody.
The answer, it seems, is all of these. Damon Gough ditched the 25 or so tracks completed with Street in an intense five week stint at an old toffee factory in Stockport, fearing that the output had been rushed to fulfill an old, poorly sketched fantasy to release five Badly Drawn albums in five years. Understandably he wasn’t happy with the result and understandably, he called Street to apologize for the oversight. That difficult fifth album syndrome? Well apparently. Compounded, perhaps, by Gough’s shift from XL Recordings over to the burly EMI. One minute he’s spitting dust and eating gruel with maverick, indie cultsters and the next he’s sitting in the lap of luxury with the likes of Robbie Williams and Pink Floyd, expected to make the kind of career defining album that puts bums on millions of seats, that shifts the kind of platinum usually reserved for arse-wiggling ex-Take Thatters. Of course he’d be anxious. Anybody would be.
To make matters worse, Gough is now on record as saying he’s unsure which of the two productions makes for the better album. He’s listened back to the Street sessions and, this time he likes what he hears. With the pressure off, he’s relaxed with the songs and even one of those songs, the pretty and ’Shining-esque’, ‘The Time of Times’ – re-recorded under Fraglen, makes it onto the album. ‘Born in the UK’ is thus an album with its head poised nervously between two extremes: it is at once the simple, homespun recording he clearly labored toward initially and the classic, far-reaching affair he’s tentatively making steps toward here. What you get is a record that moves and breathes like Bacharach, scratches like a dog and creaks like an old piano. It’s the concerns of a provincial Northerner grasped by the heart of a poet. And there’s some luvvully, luvvully stuff on it: ‘A Journey From A To B’, ‘Nothings Gonna Change Your Mind’, ‘The Way Things Used To Be’, ‘The Long Way Round’ and ‘One Last Dance’ are all beautifully paced studies of simple, timorous uncertainty and fondness; the sound of a man hovering nervously between the safe, protected joy of the past and the vulnerable possibilities of the future. Not so much a record as a rights of passage, but no less wonderful because of it.
Sweet, concise and perfectly weighted for the last move and the next. Taking stock of one’s life has rarely sounded this charming.