THE iconic beanie hat is very much in place, but now the hair that falls from underneath it is silver-grey. Can it really be 25 years of Badly Drawn Boy?

This is the first visit by indie troubadour Damon Gough to Carlisle, and in the warmth of a late summer evening, the Old Fire Station is pretty well packed out for this solo show.

Titled Something to Tour About, it spans a musical career which began aeons ago in a UK which was post-Britpop, pre-Iraq, when living was cheaper and things felt like they were on the up.

Following support from Scottish songwriter Craig John Davidson, Gough, almost impossibly unassuming, takes to the stage.

Things start with the stoned, lo-fi Shake the Rollercoaster from his first EP, released in 1997, which is a jumping off point for a quick exploration of these early EPs. But the set doesn't stay sequential - pretty soon he's flitting between those early days and his latest album, 2020's Banana Skin Shoes, apparently making up the set list on the hoof as the mood takes him.

This freewheeling approach works well because firstly, there's a sense that this evening is unique - a number of the tracks he's playing here are for the 'first time in ages' - and also because it showcases how well this suite of songs coheres.

Gough, taking a quick puff on an e-cig between songs, is a drily witty compere of his own career, sprinkling the set with candid anecdotes from the last quarter of a century, which range from the streets of Manchester to the beaches of California.

His 2006 album Born in the UK is well represented, and there's also lovely performances of In Safe Hands (written about his sister's divorce) and What Is It Now?

Once Around the Block, from his debut album The Hour of Bewilderbeast, takes me right back to 2000, and first hearing those wikki-wikki opening chords, and seeing the music video on MTV, with the two geeks who kiss and whose braces get locked together, joining them at the mouth.

"You quiver like a candle on fire... I'm putting you out."

Does it contain the most melancholy scat singing of any pop song?

His other release which has perhaps connected the most to people, aside from Bewilderbeast, is his twinkly soundtrack to the Hugh Grant film About a Boy, which elevated a half-decent Brit comedy to something approaching a minor classic of the genre. If you haven't seen the film, it's probably on ITV4 tonight, as it is every night.

He does Something to Talk About, of course, as well as the Dylanesque Minor Incident, both from the film's soundtrack.

The Old Fire Station is a good venue for this kind of intimate gig, though it may be preferable, on less sweltering nights, to block off the chattier bar area using one of the screen doors.

Things end on the piano, with a rendition of Silent Sigh from About a Boy (artfully paired with Madonna's Like a Virgin). Then there's time for one final track. Gough's brother Simon passed away from cancer in 2021, and family visits to the hospital were cruelly limited by this country's Covid protocols.

Simon was a longtime Strokes fan (who in turn are mutual admirers of Badly Drawn Boy).

So in tribute, we finish with an emotional, pared back cover of Someday from 2001's Is This It? - taking us back one last time to that happier past.