Review of Badly Drawn Boy

Badly Drawn Boy The Village, Dublin

Damon Gough might be back; he might even have 100 record company grunts peering at him from the balcony, but he just can't resist lapsing into his infantile tantrums - although the difference these days is that even he manages to see how ridiculous they are, and apologises before the night is out.

With his Springsteen ode, Born In The UK, on the verge of release, Badly Drawn Boy arrives on stage with guns blazing, careening through Journey From A to B, Degrees Of Separation and the new CD's title track, and whispering - just whispering - that the Boy is back - with the tightest band on the planet.

These days, Gough is at his best when he plays loud and fast. Even Born In The UK struggles to ignite until he and his band up the amp to 11 and the pace to lightning speed. With his unashamedly limited vocal range, Gough is reliant on the quality of the lyric and the inventiveness of the arrangements to buoy the new material. He manages to squeeze in some particularly smart segues (Madonna's Like A Virgin, Taja Sevelle's Love Is Contagious and The Lotus Eaters' The First Picture Of You were just three that mustered a wry grin), but truth be told, Badly Drawn Boy needed to raid the archives before he could put a safe distance between himself and all else.

Pissing In The Wind, Stone On The Water and The Shining are still crystalline gems, their perfection completed by Gough's idiosyncratic phrasing and refreshingly free-flowing guitar lines. In between, there were pristine pop keyboards and genteel lead guitar, but when Gough recedes into the darkest recesses, he risks mutating into a worrisome cross between Justin Hayward and Monserrat Caballé. If he could only hang on to the intensity but bury the diva in him, he'd be king - at least for a day.