when badly drawn boy, known to his parents as Damon Gough, won the Technics Mercury Music Prize in September for his debut album The Hour of Bewilderbeast, it was his performance at the ceremony which attracted most attention. Earlier in the evening he had delivered a shambolic acoustic performance-starting at least four songs without reaching the end of any of them. After receiving the award, he explained his lack of preparation by saying: "I assumed I was never going to win it because good things don't happen to good people normally."
Gough is not a pop-rock musician in the conventional sense-his live gigs rarely feature a song in its entirety because he either forgets the lyrics or breaks off halfway to fumble distractedly with his equipment. The Hour of Bewilderbeast itself-far more competent in sound than the image of Badly Drawn Boy would suggest-is based around a walk by a river. The 18 pastoral tracks feature Gough musing on an imaginary love affair-at one point he actually falls in the river and you hear the splash. Gough's appeal lies in the way he refuses to elevate himself above his public: his performances are technically awful, and we are charmed by them, as we are by his sweet and scruffy songs.
Gough's humility and winning air of hopelessness might appear radical to those still believing that pop-rock is all about the Britpop swagger of Oasis and Blur. But his reticence is indicative of a new trend in contemporary pop music; as much in evidence in the mainstream as it is in the underground. Compare 2000 to 1995, when the battle between Oasis and Blur to reach the No 1 singles slot made the nine o'clock news. "Cool Britannia" was at its coolest and most confident, strikingly present at every level of culture without yet suffering the ignominy of being branded as such. Two years later, that cultural optimism received its political expression in Labour's landslide victory of 1997.
Today, Britain's biggest guitar bands include Travis, who last year won acclaim not by declaring themselves invincible and publicly warring with another band, but by showing something like the opposite qualities-they began their set at Glastonbury with the song Why Does It Always Rain On Me? at the same moment as the heavens opened. A capacity crowd also turned out this year at Glastonbury to sing along to Coldplay, Britain's other favourite guitar band of the moment. Coldplay's debut album Parachutes, also nominated for this year's Mercury Prize, shares Badly Drawn Boy's romantic concern with idealised love and has the same innocence-the band's recent hit single Yellow contains the lines: "Look at the stars/Look how they shine for you." Five years ago, the popular songs of the day either celebrated hedonism (Oasis's Champagne Supernova) or felt in some way as though they were embracing a greater cause (Blur's Country House, Oasis's Don't Look Back In Anger). Today the most popular songs in Britain are songs about little dreams, forlorn failures and the rain.
As we enter the 21st century, some of our most popular and experimental musicians are responding by retreating into small personal worlds-mapping out territories of regression and innocence. The sleeve notes of the debut album of the band Looper recount in storybook language how the band members Stuart David and his wife Karn first met, while the songs themselves describe walks along beaches and childhood activities such as burning flies, to the tune of simple keyboard melodies, and the sound of children laughing. Its sound is intimate, small-budget, a record made by two people for those two people alone. Hull-based band Fonda 500 consciously reject high budget production values on their debut album, calling it Eight Track Sound System, and using cheap Casio keyboards, glockenspiels, and random bleeps to create melodies which are more scribbles than songs. Their faux-naïf image is taken even further on their new release The Autumn: Winter Collection, which consists of tracks inspired by nursery rhymes sung in childlike falsettos by band members Simon 500 and Nick 500. Salako, also from Hull, have a similar lyrical na?ty, using images of birds and snow to express love and sadness.
While these bands have a feyness redolent of the folk tradition-or the hippie movement-of the 1960s and 1970s, what sets them apart is their self-conscious regressiveness. There is no politics or pain; instead, their experimentalism seeks freedom through childhood. None of the above three bands is currently selling many records-despite the fact that they have all been critically applauded-largely because the idea of publicity is anathema to all of them. Their albums, however, are only a more explicit expression of that which currently defines the mainstream. Music has never been so small in vision, so humble in feel, and so anti-progress in spirit. Naïvety is the new rock and roll.
