Badly Drawn Boy – Once Around The Block

I know that my Step-Mum reads the stuff I put up on here but has said that she skips any of my posts about music and so I try to keep those to, if not a minimum, then at least in proportion to other posts. Tonight I was actually going to write about the Whopper Virgins, which I didn’t hear about till today, but it seems that I’m very much behind the news on that one, so instead I’ve had to turn to YouTube for inspiration. Sorry Val!

When Badly Drawn Boy’s (rather bizarrely named) debut album The Hour Of Bewilderbeast came out back at the turn of the century (I know, sounds weird doesn’t it?) it took all the plaudits going, including the Mercury Music Prize. However, like a number of other Mercury winners who won the prize with their first releases, Badly Drawn Boy has often seemed to struggle to match that early promise. And whilst I actually think that his Simon & Garfunkel-esque soundtrack to About A Boy was better than Bewilderbeast (in the same way that About A Boy is a better Hugh Grant film than the more famous Four Weddings) I’m not sure he’s ever topped the perfection of Once Around The Block.

The song consists of little more than a lovely guitar hook, a weird looping organ line and Damon Gough, aka Badly Drawn Boy, singing rather lovely lyrics before going “do be doo be da” whilst someone bops away at a xylophone in the background. It’s basically a formula that’s as old as popular music but you’re unlikely to ever hear it done better.

Badly Drawn Boy, man of a thousand tea-cosy hats (and tea-cosy hat jokes): we salute you.

One comment

  1. Yeah, what happened to BDB… Last I heard was a cover of C’Mon Eileen, which is one of the most irritating tunes ever.

    About the Boy or Four Weddings – so difficult, would have to say it is a tie.

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