Music > Live Reviews
Badly Drawn Boy
The Adrian Flux Waterfront
24/03/25
From the spine-tingling opening restrains of The Shining, on guitar tonight (instead of a cello on the original recording), you just know that tonight is going to be a good night, and it soon becomes an incredibly special one at that. It’s already sounding utterly amazing, just beautiful.
The band are some fifteen minutes late starting the performance for the scheduled time much to the confusion initially to those of us able to see Gough and his band mates standing at the side of the stage, behind the monitors. He explains that they didn’t want any late comers to miss the start of the performance that tonight see’s The Hour of the Bewilderbeast played in sequential order, on this its 25th year anniversary! What a gent!
As Badly Drawn Boy aka Damon Gough frequently reminds us much to the delight of those old enough to know what a DISCO is, its indie DISCO night at the waterfront later tonight hence the early start to proceedings for his show.
They are on fire and feeling good, regularly smiling at us lot, and nodding at each other in approval that things, are sounding good and going well, very clearly there is a great camaraderie in the camp. Gough is in fine voice, very chatty too and it feels like they are having as good a time as we are.
It’s all sounding note perfect. Perfectly executed with such intricacy, so delicate and played with such precision and great enthusiasm too. It’s a magical experience, one that is an absolute pleasure to witness. A quite seamless performance.
Show highlights for me were The Shining, Bewilderbeast, Stone on The Water and Magic in The Air, while Pissing in The Wind sees a wonderful audience sing along ensue, the hips also get a good shaking to Disillusion.
He does take umbrage eventually, to the loud voices coming out from the bar area, asking the said ‘ignorant twat’ to shut up! We and Gough are not amused, and he receives full backing from the crowd in support of his regular requests for some respect to be shown. The calling out of the said person(s) earns us all some respite for a little while! Eventually he admits to needing to give up on the group of noise terrorists!
The evening is wrapped up during the second set with some more A sides and rarities and more thoroughly charming stories from his career, none more so than when he first met Manchester music legend Tony Wilson, this leads us into Tony Wilson Said.
It’s been an absolute pleasure to be in the room tonight to have witnessed a classic album being played out in the flesh.
I wonder if Damon made it to the DISCO