Tim Hughes has a chat with the man being dubbed the British Jack Johnson.

A laidback surf dude, who played his first gig on a beach, Ruarri Joseph is never more at home than when plucking his guitar among the dunes of his seaside home.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the adopted Cornishman has been dubbed the British Jack Johnson. And it’s also no surprise that it is a label which irritates him.

“People have accused me of being the British Jack Johnson, but I am really not,” the self-styled ‘indie-folk’ artist laughs in mock indignation at the oft-repeated comparison with the US soft-rocker. “It is so not true.”

While Johnson is easy-listening incarnate, Joseph has more depth, colour and bite to his music. While Johnson is a smooth product of the Hawaiian good life, Joseph’s music is forged from the battered granite cliffs of our wild west coast. And it’s all the more interesting for it.

“That kind of stuff is all about selling a dream,” says the 28-year-old father of three, talking to me from his home in Perranporth, on the north Cornish coast. “It’s all about sitting on beaches in the sunshine. But it’s really not like that here. I live in a surf town, and there’s nothing dreamlike about it. It’s cold, wet, windy and territorial. And while I enjoy it, I can’t even surf that well!”

If we are products of our upbringing, then it’s no wonder Ruarri is more open-minded than most. The son of a white witch, he left his native Scotland while he was young to live in Cornwall – the first step in an extraordinary childhood journey.

When he was a teenager, the family upped sticks, to get away from Ruarri’s alcoholic father, going as far as it is possible to get – the wilds of New Zealand.

There, in the remote country beyond Dannevirke, North Island, he amused himself hunting possums, learning to drive at 14, and experimenting with explosives (“blowing up water troughs was a favourite pastime”, he recalls.

It was the pull of music which took him back to Cornwall. He played his first gig close to where he ended up – in an intimate bar in tiny Porthtowan. “It was also there that I met my future wife,” he recalls. “I was only 17.”

Children followed – as did the dawning realisation that he was going to have to get what is depressingly known as ‘a proper job’.

“I was just playing as a hobby. But when the kids went to school I started playing again properly – and it all came together,” he says.

It was there he began playing with a jazz cabaret band, before falling into a career as a soloist.

It wasn’t long until he was spotted, landing a recording contract and blagging his way onto tours. “Supporting can be brilliant, but you have to remember that the people coming are only there to see the main act. The reality is, you play to a noisy room full of people not really listening to you.”

Which is why he has now taken charge of his career, effectively running his own label.

His new album Shoulder to the Wheel is on its way to becoming a classic. It is a heartfelt effort charting the experiences of an artist destined to become one of our best singer-song writers.

* Ruarri Joseph plays Oxford’s Glee Club on Sunday. Tickets are £7, online at glee.co.uk Album Shoulder to the Wheel is out now