Friday 22 October 2010

badly drawn boy @ old fruitmarket, 20th october

"Not exactly playing the hits am I?" notes Badly Drawn Boy after airing tracks from 1997's EP1. That's not quite accurate - in tonight's mammoth set, a patchily-scattered Fruitmarket audience is trated to the Santana-cheese riff of Disillusion, Silent Sigh (given added guitar and oomph), and an opening run performed solo and acoustically which includes cuts both early (The Shining) and more recent (last year's Was There Nothing We Could Do).

Damon is on affable form, though the self-deprecating banter is in full flow (he introduces ex-ad track All Possibilities by apologising to "anyone who bought a shit product from Comet"). Later, he teases by alternating between intros for You Were Right and Once Around the Block but is forgiven since both get played eventually, while mixed-bag tracks from his recent seventh album are received politely. But while offerent value, his lengthy set could survive pruning - with an odd karaoke Thunder Road finale the first candidate for the shears.

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