'Have You Fed The Fish?' by Badly Drawn Boy

It’s funny how sometimes an album changes your view of an artist for reasons that turn out to be somewhat unjustified when they’re properly thought through. ‘Have You Fed The Fish?’ is one of those albums. I followed the career of Badly Drawn Boy not from the very beginning, but certainly from album number one. I enjoyed the debut, in spite of his lack of coherence, and I thought his ‘About A Boy Soundtrack’ was very strong, so I had high hopes for this, his third. In some ways, those hopes were met. In other ways, not nearly so much.

The instrumental beginning is a chirpily confident start, but the title track which follows is emblematic of all the album’s problems. There’s a good idea buried away within it, but it’s overblown, rambling, and full of lyrical strings that appear to have no meaning. The next few tracks are better – ‘Born Again’ has a real punch to it, ‘All Possibilities’ retains its sense of fun despite the best efforts of Comet’s advertising department. ’40 Days 40 Fights’ is an interesting one. It’s a good listen, but it’s also the track which put me off Badly Drawn Boy to an extent I’ve never quite recovered from. Not because of the album version, but because of the horrible leaden version he and his backing band of the time plodded out on Later as part of the album’s promotion. The pairing of ‘I Was Wrong’ and ‘You Were Right’ works well enough, though the latter hovers dangerously close to outstaying its welcome. The problem is compounded by the fact that the lyrics are reused later in ‘Tickets To What You Need’ which (almost) finishes the album in an unfortunate ‘will this do?’ fashion.

Elsewhere, ‘Counterpane’ is a nice instrumental which would have sat happily on ‘About A Boy’. ‘How?’ mixes gentle acoustics with stirring orchestrations quite nicely and ‘The Further I Slide’ and ‘Imaginary Lines’ have a playfulness which Badly Drawn Boy had seemed to excel at so well up to this point. ‘Using Our Feet’ does to, in a sense, though less successfully. ‘What Is It Now?’ is a perfectly competent, though unremarkable closer.

So all in all, ‘Have You Fed The Fish’ is by no means a terrible album, it just manages to be somehow far less than the sum of its parts, and I’m not sure why. The side effect of this is that although I own a copy of the follow up, I’ve barely listened to it over the years. If I ever reach ‘O’, I’ll give it a go.