Badly Drawn Boy: About a Boy

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

Many (but not me) gushed heavily about Badly Drawn Boy - aka woolly-hatted English singer-songwriter Damon Gough - and his Mercury Prize-winning debut The Hour of Bewilderbeast two years ago. Which makes it curious that instead of delivering the follow-up, he's diverted to scoring the next movie from the pages of Nick Hornby.

Music buff Hornby apparently approved Gough's recruitment to scoring the film, which stars Hugh Grant as a man drawn to dating single mothers.

Quite how you set the eternally foppish Grant trying to play someone other than himself to song is a mystery. But Gough has a lot of fun trying with this 16-track collection ranging from some gorgeous tunes - the plaintive surefire hit Silent Sigh, and the pastoral jazzpop of River-Sea-Ocean especially - to some colourful, Bacharachesque incidental music.

You can hear some heavy cues from the characters in the lyrics of Above You, Below Me and elsewhere. But while its ties to the big screen render it less than cohesive, it's a pleasurable reminder of Gough's colourful pop imagination. Just the sort of thing best listened to while reading a good book.

Label: XL Recordings