Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour Of Bewilderbeast

Released in May 2000 to widespread acclaim, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast beat other shortlisted nominees including Coldplay, Doves, Leftfield and Richard Ashcroft to that year's Mercury Music Prize. Like all great debuts, it captured the zeitgeist of the moment, managing that rare feat of sounding both completely of its time, and utterly timeless. The album went platinum and Damon was then asked to write the soundtrack the film of Nick Hornby's book 'About A Boy', which became a huge hit. He went on to release eight studio albums over 12 years, before taking a break over the last couple of years and now he's back with a fresh focus.

It's an album that shouldn't really work on paper, a bewildering assortment of leftfield folk ditties, poetic shanties, experimental passages and nocturnal piano ballads, some recorded in bedrooms, some in studios, with a myriad of different oddball production techniques, and numerous personnel playing most instruments known to man, and several not. However, underpinned by the genius songwriting of Damon Gough and his intuitive ear for melody, it worked beautifully, and charmed a generation of music critics and music lovers. Damon arrived fully formed yet badly drawn, an overnight success which had taken years, simultaneously a little shambolic and in possession of grand vision, somehow both cocksure and yet self-doubting, all of which only endured him to a public growing tired of the over-polished sheen of late 90s.