“Bob Dylan says that he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t famous, and I know exactly what he means,” said Gough. “Obviously, he’s been famous since the sixties and we’re talking about a completely different level of fame. But the past four years of my life have been so intense that I can’t remember what it felt like to be me before all this started.”

Four years ago, Badly Drawn Boy was just getting his start in the music world, having released a couple of EPs on his own record label. Word of his wacky and long – sometimes three hours at a go – live shows soon spread around Britain. Before long, the critics were sitting up and paying attention to this relative unknown.

In 2000, Badly Drawn Boy’s debut album, The Hour Of The Bewilderbeast, was released. A few months later, he was standing onstage, accepting the coveted Mercury Music Prize, beating out Richard Ashcroft, Coldplay, Death In Vegas, the Delgados, and the Doves.

Badly Drawn Boy’s second album is a marked deviation from the usual path of recording. He was tapped by writer Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”) to do the soundtrack for the movie of Hornby’s third novel, “About A Boy.”

While the film directors asked Gough to write two or three songs, after a two-week recording session, he ended up with more than 70 pieces of music, including the 10 songs and seven instrumentals that appear on the finished soundtrack. In fact, the whole album was composed by him.

Now, Badly Drawn Boy is taking time off from the studio to tour. Starting in September, he tackles Europe, and then crosses the pond to play North American theatres in October and part of November.

Badly Drawn Boy wraps the year with three weeks of shows in the U.K.