Olympia Theatre
Could he be the missing link between Liam Gallagher and Peter Green? With his scraggly facial hair, sloppy denims and slouchy manner, Damon Gough cuts a singularly unpopstar-like figure. He seemed bemused and bewildered by the capacity crowd which greeted him at the Olympia on Thursday.
Gough's album, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, won the Mercury Music Prize last year, but watching him muddle through songs like Another Pearl, Fall In The River, Shake The Rollercoaster and Camping Next To Water, it's not immediately apparent what the Mercury judges found appealing about this ungainly, hirsute young man from Manchester, for whom the word "shambolic" was plainly invented.
Imagine having a stash of half-baked ideas and half-completed songs, putting them on a CD, and finding out to your astonishment that everyone loved it. No wonder the boy looked bemused. True to his live reputation, Gough performed with ramshackle abandon, rambling down musical cul-de-sacs then backing out again, stopping and starting songs, lighting up cigarettes and sipping cans of lager. He sang like a cement-mixer and moved around the stage like a hod-carrier, climbing up onto the speakers and teetering on the edge of the stage with only his trademark wool hat to protect his head. Through it all, however, Gough was nothing less than entertaining, and though he's no Clapton or McCartney, he can still play that guitar and tinkle those keyboards with grace. The backing band rolled with it, but the whole still resembled a musical building site.
"I'm gonna finish this gig if it f***ing kills me," announced Gough, lurching through The Shining, Magic In The Air, Everybody's Stalking and Disillusion. There goes the illusion - hats off to the boy for letting us down gently.
