Perry Blake, says the press release, has only ever read one novel from cover to cover - The Outsider by Albert Camus. In his home town of Sligo, the 28-yearold singer-songwriter has always felt like a maverick, and his soft, barely-audible speaking voice is laced with sharp, sometimes misplaced vitriol for his birthplace. When he left Sligo in search of new horizons, Blake didn't follow The Sawdoctors' route down the N17, and he didn't join the ex-pats of London and New York in eulogising the auld sod with raucous, rock'n'roll drinking songs. Instead, he immersed himself in European and African culture, moving from Morocco to Prague to Paris, and developing his primitive, architectural style of Gothic trip-hop, but couldn't let go of his bitterness towards Sligo.
Blake is now based in London and signed to Polydor Records; his self-titled debut album is a moody, evocative collection of songs, a portrait of the young artist as a musical outsider, and a lyrical story of someone in love with language. Songs like Genevieve, Anoushka and The Hunchback Of San Francisco conjure up vistas of ancient cities and crumbling stone, exotic images far removed from the narrow streets of Sligo. Whenever the 28-year-old Blake returns to his home town, however, he still feels the stifling pull of the past.
"Sligo is very much a garrison town - it can be quite nasty," says Blake, sitting in the comfortable, faux-classical setting of the Central Hotel in Exchequer Street. "People are sharp-witted but they don't really let you develop. You know, payback time came a couple of nights ago when I was in a hotel with a load of other people my age - some had already got the mortgage and the beer belly - this English guy came over and said `are you Perry Blake?' asked me for my autograph, and it all went downhill from there. The others just told me to get off my pedestal. Now, I've only sold a few f--king records, and I don't go out looking for attention, but at the same time I'm not going to be rude and refuse an autograph. But they're just not able to deal with it."
On the video for Genevieve Blake stalks through the shadows of Prague, passing through colonnades, flitting behind columns and skulking beneath parapets, in search of something elusive, intangible, possibly even unattainable. Echoes of Ultravox's Vienna ring through the sepia-tinted scenes, but Blake baulks at the suggestion of a New Romantic influence in his music.
"Some people say it has a certain 1980s thing. Certainly growing up I wasn't listening to 1980s music, it wasn't my thing. David Sylvian, I suppose, was an 1980s artist, and Japan at least had a more intelligent slant, but I always seem to mistake them for that other band from Sheffield, The Human League, and the Thompson Twins and all that dreadful shite. Japan were deeply pretentious but the good thing about pretension is that if you become pretentious young enough you can grow into that and actually develop a personality, which is probably where I came in."
Perry Blake was wearing cravats by the age of six, when most of the other boys were still in ganseys and short trousers. And while the other boys were listening to U2 and Thin Lizzy, Blake was tuning in too a wider bandwave. "I have no Irish influences," declares Blake in his soft-spoken, measured tone. "I don't respect any of the Republic's bands. I respect a few of the Northern artists. People come up to me in Dublin, and as if to pay me a compliment, slap me on the back, and go: `ah, y'know, it's good stuff, a bit like Gav, you know, Gav Friday'. That's a compliment to Gavin."
The meat 'n' potatoes fare of the home-grown rock scene proved too bland for Blake's palette, and he found the Oasis/ Verve style of lumpen rock'n'roll a little hard to stomach, which is why he takes the route of the musical gastronome. He says he likes intelligent, articulate pop which isn't afraid to be clever, and he has no time for bands who trot out the same superficial cliches in a desperate search for mass acceptance.
Breaking free of what he felt was a parochial past meant changing his name from plain, old Kieran Gorman and adopting his current nom de plume, then moving to Dublin where he got regular gigs in Mr Pussy's club in Suffolk Street, performing with only an accordion as accompaniment. But though he found a sort of constituency among the misfits and weirdos who frequented Mr Pussy's, he still found the capital disconcertingly conservative.
"There are not a lot of instigators here, let's put it like that," he says. "There are a lot of people who jump on your coat tails all the time, wandering around like cows looking over a fence. The reason I don't live in Ireland any more is because I don't want to be surrounded by white Catholics. I want to live in a genuinely multi-cultural society, with opportunities that would involve something more than stilted, half-formed opinions and reactionary behaviour."
Blake has lately joined the travelling classes, and he feels more at home in hotel rooms and airport lounges. "I travel all the time. I like travelling, I like staying in hotels. Sadly, I've used up all my record company advance so I can't afford to do it at the moment until I get another advance. I travel mostly alone, and a lot of the lyrics for the songs were written in different places. And I like that - I like charting and documenting. It's maybe not very interesting to other people, but it is to me. I'll just sit down with my notebook and write down a stream of consciousness. I always do that everywhere I go. And I will do that in Sligo as well, you know, just sitting there with a `hang sangwich'."
Blake's debut album distils the details of his experiences abroad into a series of postcards from the edge of a peripheral vision. It is, he says, music for cultural minorities, pop for people on the periphery of normal, everyday life. Comparisons with The Divine Comedy are not altogether misplaced - both Blake and Neil Hannon have a similar eye for the ironic and the classical. "I have listened to some of his stuff and I think the arrangements are astonishing. Just the nature of the way he does things - it's a bit too pop."
Blake says he is not particularly interested in chart success, but he probably wouldn't object to a bit of cult status. "It's probably a better way to go about things," he suggests. "It's a bit more sensible for an artist to operate in that world than one in which you are hassled and chased. I love anonymity. I had mild arguments with Polydor in terms of control, but they don't interfere, they let it grow, let it chill out. There were slight scuffles in the art department - because I don't have a hump on my back they wanted to put me on the covers, you know. "I don't need front covers. I do need this exposure right now, and it's great, there's a certain little thrill the first time you open a magazine and see yourself. I would be lying if I said I didn't like that; of course there's a huge buzz and a surge of energy from it. But if it was every magazine and suddenly you are in Richard Aschroft's wardrobe, it's a different thing. "All that adulation is not very good for you. I like the diversity of life - one of my friends in England is a builder from Peckham and the other is a Viscount. That's the nature of my life and I want it to continue that way. When you cocoon yourself and become a pop icon, you're suddenly surrounded by like-minded people, so it seems perfectly acceptable to fly around the world three times on a coke and vodka binge. That's not my life."
