What do you call a room full of men wearing knit beanies? A Badly Drawn Boy concert.

The British rocker best known for his omnipresent knit cap and work on the “About a Boy” soundtrack played to a packed house last Wednesday at Park West. Fans paid homage to the petite rock star — born Damon Gough — with their slackeresque style of dress, which isn’t terribly different from that of your ordinary college student, except that it always requires a hat.

For the first half of the show, fans quietly bopped their heads to the sound of Gough playing alone, alternating between his acoustic guitar and keyboard.

Gough has a true talent for creating the fullest possible sound using only one instrument. Although on his studio albums several of his songs contain swirling, swelling orchestrations, Gough almost managed to make the audience forget what was missing with his extremely consistent and precise playing. Of course, they only forgot until the rest of the band came out — at which point they most likely thought to themselves, “Oh yeah, he’s not a folk singer.”

No, ladies and gentlemen, this is not Ryan Adams. That became clear when the band, which consisted of a bass player, a drummer and a tour manager/keyboardist dressed in a gaudy blue tuxedo, played a new song called “Holy Grail,” about wishing good fortune to your enemies. The song was wonderfully catchy for something the crowd had never heard before, and as the tempo got faster, the heads of the Badly Drawn Boy legion began to bop a bit faster. Once a disco ball was lowered and began to cast chartreuse green light on the entire room, some fans even danced.

There was a personal element to that show that is rare with most musicians today. At one point, Gough asked for the house lights to be turned on so that he could pass around a picture of his little boy, Oscar. Gough even confided in the audience about the difficulty in dealing with the recent suicide of Elliot Smith, his close friend and a musician he respected greatly. Smith was referred to throughout the concert, culminating with Gough playing “Waltz #2,” a classic Smith song.

Although the show lacked a bit of musical consistency — it was odd having the content be so drastically divided between rock and acoustic — the one thread that remained throughout the entire night was Gough’s sense of humor. He is witty and chose to remind the audience of this fact whenever possible. After opening the show with a cover of the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” he followed with two new songs, one of which he told the audience was entitled “This is that new song.”

The crowd chuckled at the quip until they realized half way through the refrain that it really was the name of the song. After a few more ditties, Gough lit another cigarette, inhaled, blew out a puff of smoke, and announced this was the best show on the tour so far. After much applause, he added, “Don’t worry, I say this every night.”

Such is the charm of Badly Drawn Boy. His lyrics walk the line between cheeky and just plain ridiculous. In “You Were Right,” he brags to his lover, “I’m turning Madonna down / I’m calling it my best move / I’ll get her tickets to what she needs,” yet he sings with such a sincere, echo-drenched voice you believe he may actually be telling the truth. Still, his bloated self-image doesn’t get the best of him. After nearly two and a half hours of music, Gough humbly took a bow alongside his band. He didn’t come out to perform an encore, but the no one in the audience seemed upset; they were already plenty content. A-