By David Cheal 12:00AM BST 09 Apr 2001
THIS was by far the oddest show I have ever witnessed. On the last night of an extensive European tour, Badly Drawn Boy - the Mancunian chap with the woolly hat who won last year's Mercury Prize for his debut album, The Hour of the Bewilderbeest - spent almost three-and-a-half hours on stage, coming close to equalling the record for longest live performance set by Bruce Springsteen. How did a man who has released only one album manage to keep a show going for so long?

Here's how. He dredged up some dodgy material from the formative years of his career. He stopped to natter, witter, chunter, digress - anything, in fact, except play another song. He went walkabout through the crowd with his guitar. He spent 15 minutes serenading two girls and a boy in the stalls with silly, impromptu ditties. And he paid frequent emotional tributes to his family (Mr and Mrs Drawn Boy and various siblings, aunts and uncles were in one of the boxes), his partner and his young daughter (whose photograph he gave to the crowd to pass around - and got back at the end).

The result was an evening that was, by turns, infuriating, beguiling, self-indulgent and bizarre. It began with a brief set from a team of waistcoated campanologists who gave a deadpan performance of tunes on their handbells, the only recognisable one of which was the title track from the Bewilderbeest album. Then on sauntered Badly himself, joined shortly thereafter by his band - bass, drums, guitar, keyboards - and so the epic began. As the show progressed, the crowd began to drift in and out (and sometimes just out) of the hall to refresh themselves; in front of me, I saw one punter tapping a desperate text message into his mobile about being "trapped in the Albert Hall".

When it was dull, this show was very dull indeed, especially when Badly dragged out some horrible punk-metal B-side from his early days. But when it was good, it was sublime. The music of Damon Gough (Badly's real name) is a genuinely different-sounding collage of styles - folk, classical, disco, rock and country - and here, when they got down to it, he and his band rendered it with fidelity and emotional honesty. And for all his self-indulgence, Gough is a likeable bloke with a disarmingly self-effacing streak. When the house lights came up at the end, he scanned the diminished crowd and said: "I didn't think there'd be so many of you still here."

Genres Seen

Alternative Rock, Britpop, Chamber Pop, Indie, Indie Folk, Indie Pop, Indie Rock, Pop Rock, Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Alternative, British, UK, Melancholia, and English.