Cheer up, it may never happen

Tom McRae is wearing a tiny badge on his coat that reads "I'm a mess". "My girlfriend gave it to me," he explains rather sheepishly, and rests forward on his elbows so that I can't see it anymore.

Tom McRae is wearing a tiny badge on his coat that reads "I'm a mess". "My girlfriend gave it to me," he explains rather sheepishly, and rests forward on his elbows so that I can't see it anymore.

We are sitting is a Fifties-style diner, just behind Piccadilly Circus in London. When one of the waiters slaps him on the back and asks him when they are going to get the signed photograph, McRae visibly reddens. Asked how he is coping with all the attention, he says: "I don't really like talking about myself. That's the bit that makes you make music and that's the way you want it to be expressed. You feel quite stupid when you have to put it into words."

Bedsit angst may be all the rage these days, but do we really need another wounded soul with an acoustic guitar? After all, Badly Drawn Boy, the crown prince of self-deprecation, has already bagged the Mercury Prize and Kathryn Williams has finally sold some records. And after years of plying his trade to a largely unmoved audience, even David Gray has managed to convince us that yodelling needn't be confined to Swiss (or in his case Welsh) mountain tops.

But when it comes to McRae, we should make some room. His self-titled album is a work of stunning and sinister beauty. The opening track, "You Cut Her Hair" is a devastatingly miasmic tale of betrayal and disappointment ("Time has coloured in the black and white of your sin"), full of jagged string and piano arrangements and punctuated by cruel silences. A sense of dislocation pervades each of his songs, from the escapist aspirations of "2nd Law" to the rancorous "The Boy With The Bubblegum". Apart from the over-cooked "Bloodless", McRae holds back on the tortured histrionics, too. On the whole, his songs are more subtle than that, the bile gently inferred rather than explicit. Simple arrangements allow his haunting melodies to take flight, though it's McRae's lyrics that really take your breath away.

His age - 26 - seems to have been a cause of consternation among the music press, although, as McRae points out: "I don't know if there is an optimum age where people attain wisdom and are suddenly able talk on everyone's level." The praise surrounding his live shows has so far been nothing short of rapturous. It is both to McRae's delight and fear that comparisons have already been made with such luminaries as Paul Simon and Nick Drake. "I get worried about that because it alters people's expectations. I mean, those people are geniuses at what they do. You've got to look back at a career that has lasted at least a decade before you can say anything like that."

Contrary to popular notions of the tormented singer-songwriter, McRae does laugh now and again. "I don't sit there reading my Camus novel and reaching for a bottle of pills, if that's what you mean," he smiles. "But it is in my nature to perceive life in a slightly melancholy way and I'm not going to apologise for it."

Despite the constant plaudits, McRae has had to endure a certain amount of suspicion, too. His earnest rage has on occasion been mistaken for arrogance - one critic accused him of hectoring. But the accusations are unfounded. Though he is given to the odd surge of sentimentality ("you can't do anything but follow your heart" etc), he is articulate and sweetly self-effacing. Criticism, McRae says, is par for the course when you're working by yourself. "When you're solo, you find yourself ranged in opposition to four or five people in a room, all of whom are trying to persuade you that they are right and you are wrong. You have to learn to stand your ground. People are always going to patronise you and misrepresent you and misunderstand you."

McRae was born in Suffolk and is the son of two vicars. His parents split up when he was eight, and he went to live with his mother and his two older sisters. He holds his parents' occupation partly responsible for his early feelings of isolation.

"Religion was actively rammed down my throat as a child," he says. "It got to the point where I wouldn't get out of bed on a Sunday morning because I couldn't face going to church three times. I was asking questions that no one around me seemed to be able to answer. I could see a lot of damage that religion was doing both to my family and to the world in general." He says he spent his teenage years largely on his own, "retreating into his imagination" and eventually moved to London six years ago to study politics at university. He joined several college bands along the way, before he and his guitar decided to go it alone.

How would he explain our sudden enthusiasm for men (and it usually is men) with guitars? "I think perhaps people have got a little detached from the nature of performance in recent years. There's a lot of gloss in modern music - and I don't mean just with the overtly commercial acts. Even the bands with credibility are very carefully controlled. For a singer-songwriter to just stand up on stage with a guitar, with a few simple songs and nothing to hide behind - well, people react very strongly to that."

'Tom McRae' is out on Monday on db records