Badly Drawn Boy Moves on to U.S.

November 24 -- British singer-songwriter Damon Gough knows he's the buzz boy of pop at the moment. Performing under the moniker Badly Drawn Boy, he enjoyed favorable reviews and a growing audience cultivated by some early EPs of lushly crafted pop songs, as well as lengthy, unpredictable shows that have found him handing roses to women in the audience and calling time-outs so he can eat bananas onstage. But when his first album, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, won Britain's coveted Mercury Music Prize earlier this year, his status as a comer was cemented.

"It was pretty surreal, to be honest," Gough, 30, says of the award. "I basically expected just a great night out. I was pleased and proud I'd been nominated and went down there to hang out with the other nominees, people who I've been good friends with for five years or so, like Coldplay and the Delgados. And they were all sort of jokingly saying, before the prize was announced, that I was definitely going to win it. Everybody seemed pretty much on my side, for some reason. I felt humbled by the whole thing, at the end of the night. I was a little bit embarrassed I had to be the winner. But I was pretty chuffed as well."

The songwriter seeks to keep the momentum rolling into the United States, as he tours the country with his epic sets. Having one of his tunes — "The Shining" — appear on a commercial for the Gap doesn't hurt for getting the word out, either.

Hailing from Bolton, England, Gough studied classical and jazz at Leeds College of Music, then moved to Manchester four years ago, where he co-founded the Twisted Nerve record label with Andy Vogel, a graphic designer, and DJ Gough — who took the Badly Drawn Boy name from a TV cartoon — released two EPs, then had one of his songs, "Tumbleweed," covered by the British group the Fall after he gave its leader, Mark. E. Smith, a ride.

Another Gough track, "Nursery Rhyme," showed up on the UNKLE album Psyence Fiction, and Badly Drawn Boy subsequently signed to XL, Prodigy's label in the United Kingdom. The resulting Bewilderbeast combines fully realized songs with melodic snippets to present a conceptual piece that loosely tracks a relationship from start ("The Shining") to finish ("Epitaph") — though Gough says the experiences are drawn from a number of romances in his life.