The first track is ‘Born In The UK’, 160-seconds of rollicking rock’n’roll which details the events that have shaped his life since 1969. BDB-watchers will note the reference to Gough’s hero Bruce Springsteen. ‘Born In The UK’ will come out as a seven-inch single on Twisted Nerve, the boutique label Gough set up with DJ, producer and graphic designer Andy Votel in 1997, and on which the first Badly Drawn Boy singles were released.The lyrics were a ‘nightmare’ – he wanted to ‘capture something about being British or English. It didn’t want it to be just a list of events, but it had to be things that captured a version of events in my life. The fact that the Silver Jubilee meant more to me than the Sex Pistols ‘cause I was only seven years old, it’s not a diss on them. It’s just a fact of my ignorance.‘I want to stand up and say I’m proud to be English. And it seems that that right’s been taken away form us for some reason.’ He admits that he thinks ‘the song’s teetering on the edge of being jingoistic and being embarrassed about shouting your corner. But being proud of where you’re from is part of being a human being.’
He’s also particularly proud of ‘Nothing’s Going To Change Your Mind’. A swelling, intricate, ballad that, when he wrote it, it felt like a turning point. He feels it’s ‘tinged with Seventies-ness, with Bacharach-ness. I can imagine Pan’s People dancing to it. It’s part Bond theme too. That’s my experience of being a kid in the Seventies. “The Long Way Round” has a bit of that too, a three-minute Bacharach-tinged pop song.’
He acknowledges that a few of the songs are ‘reflective’, but counterpoints his nostalgic tendencies on ‘The Way Things Used To Be’ – ‘it’s having a go at myself, ‘cause I do tend to live in the past in my songwriting’. It’s a countrified epic, built round gorgeous pedal steel.
Bold uplift, meanwhile, comes in the shape of ‘Welcome to The Overground’, which Gough describes as ‘a euphoric burst of joy. I wanted it be like something from the soundtrack to Hair or Godspell.’ The sound of ‘Without A Kiss’ – a masterclass of shuffling, cascading, quietly funky beats that gently points to Franglen’s dayjob in Lemon Jelly – is equally ear-tickling, although Gough concedes that the lyrical subject matter supplies one of the album’s more sombre moments. ‘It’s about the futility of pursuing things that aren’t feeding your soul.’‘Time Of Times’ is one of two songs that survive – in a new incarnation – from the Stephen Street sessions. Gough likes its simplicity: chord-wise, it revisits ‘The Shining’, the first song on …Bewilderbeast. ‘It’s a three-cord blues song, in essence. It’s about feeling that time’s passing you by, maybe ‘cause you’re having too many nights out, waking up feeling like shit, thinking, “we’re victims of our own success”. People are affluent and part of that spills into the fact that you’re probably not making the best of the time you’ve got. You’re just pissing it all up a wall and having a hangover after it.’
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