Matthew Jay: The lure of Matthew's passion

One of the peculiar things that happens as you get older is that you can find yourself listening to Virgin Radio. You might say: "Oh, it's just when I'm driving" or "It's just when I'm washing up," but the fact is that you do it, and you know it's wrong. What a station. Sure, they play The Clash but only "Rock the Casbah". Yes, they play Bowie, though nothing before "Ashes to Ashes". But I heard "Always Crashing in the Same Car" on Radio 2 the other day. Radio 2! Personally, I only listen to Virgin in the car or when I'm washing up. But if I hadn't then I might never have heard Matthew Jay's yearning, wistful song "Please Don't Send Me Away", and then I wouldn't be recommending to you his very fine début album Draw, and so you'd probably go out this weekend and do something really daft, like buy the new Travis LP.

Hearing Matthew Jay for the first time was a special moment. The song was so good, I pulled the car over. All right, it wasn't that good, but I definitely lifted my foot off the gas. (It's not a driving song, it's a drifting song.) It has a fantastic, meandering quality. A tentatively strummed guitar leads you along for a minute and you think "Where are we off to, then?" and it all seems a bit wishy-washy, until you stumble upon this divine, ethereal chorus that's not a million miles from "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago – which I appreciate won't be a recommendation for everyone – and suddenly it all makes sense. Running through the song's margins are these burnished doodles of noise – something that sounds like distant slow-motion helicopter blades, like in Morrissey's "Jack the Ripper", and curls of backwards guitar effects purloined from Revolver. The really good news is that the rest of Draw takes these experiments and runs with them.

Jay, who is, dreadfully, only 22, turns out to be rather a well-kept secret, even at his own record company. When I tell the press officer that I'm calling about Matthew Jay, there is genuine relief in his voice. Has anyone written about him yet? "No, they haven't," is the forlorn reply, the subtext being "but they bloody well should have by now". Jay thinks this is funny. "I'm so underground," he coos. We are sitting in his cramped tour bus, which has proper tinted windows but not much room for rock'n'roll debauchery, though Jay owns up to a touch of foundation, possibly because I have been silently admiring the powdery orange surface of his cheeks. "I don't usually wear it," he explains, "but we did Top of the Pops earlier on." We are parked outside the Monarch, a north London pub where he will shortly be playing to a packed house. How packed? The tour manager has to beg a ticket from the keyboard player just to get me in – that's how packed.

"It's so arrogant if you think about it," Jay muses. "I get to stand on stage and tell everyone what I think about life, then they clap afterwards." You can understand where this humility, this whiff of anxiety, comes from. From the time he penned his first song at the age of 15, Jay's songwriting was conducted alone in his room with an acoustic guitar. "I wrote because I wanted to. Always have done. It's the source of my happiness. I like to see how well I can express what's in my head."

As a teenager in Abergavenny he devoured everything he could get his hands on, which wasn't much. "I was into whatever I could buy at Woolworth's. They never had anything, you always had to order it. You have to remember that Abergavenny is a place where the music scene amounts to one room with sawdust on the floor, where they play 'Wonderwall' at the end of every night."

He lived for the Beatles, The Who, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye – all the usual suspects. He couldn't tolerate dance music until he moved to Nottingham; now he can't get enough of it. That's where he found hip-hop too. If you've only heard the single, or only read the front of the album, which announces consumer-friendly comparisons with other superficially similar singer-songwriters, then you may be surprised to learn that Jay is less impressed by Badly Drawn Boy than by the badly behaved boys of modern music. Indeed, in the course of our conversation, he is never as animated as when he is discussing rap and hip-hop.

"I feel very resentful that I didn't get into hip-hop sooner. It's the most amazing music. Rappers can be funny, they can take risks, say the things that make you giggle in a nervous way. What's really interesting is they're playing characters. It's pure theatre – Slim Shady is just a character like Bowie's Thin White Duke. I think it's brilliant. I could never get away with that."

If Jay envies the stylistic freedom of rap and hip-hop, then at least he's doing something about challenging the boundaries of his own chosen genre, and quickly, before he gets stereotyped as another Sensitive Young Man With Acoustic Guitar. "I'm not using the acoustic so much now. It's more like an abacus for me: it was a starting point. I might refer back to it, but I've moved on. And I've always loved messing around with my voice, even when I was writing stuff in my bedroom – putting distortion on it, making myself sound not like me." You can discern this restlessness on Draw, where you will find the impudent bolshiness of "Four Minute Rebellion", which actually lasts just under two minutes ("We wanted the album to fit on one side of a C90," he offers helpfully), resting just a stone's throw from the dense, luxurious strings of "Meteorology" and the harder textures of "Remember This Feeling". It augurs very well for the next album.

"I've already written some new stuff. Some of the songs are a bit hip-hop, some are proper rock songs. I'm going to insist that I'm left alone for a few months to live a bit and get it all together." That's as much of the future as he seems prepared to predict. "I want to sell enough records to be able to make another one. I don't really want fame. I feel awkward with people looking at me."

You would be hard pressed to detect any awkwardness when he takes the stage. He's a model of confidence, and very deft with the self-deprecating touches. "You've got to make this go Top 75 at least, or else I'll get dropped," he urges the audience before "Please Don't Send Me Away".

He's even brassy enough to have a pop at those horrid music journalists who suddenly become interested in him. "Sorry I'm not talking much tonight," he apologises to the crowd. "It's all I've been doing all day. 'So, Matthew, how did you get started in music?' 'Well, I have musical parents and – oh, piss off!' " Savage. But like the man says: it wasn't me.

'Draw' is out now on Parlophone. The single 'Please Don't Send Me Away' is out this week