Luke-Sital Singh has been compared to the deepest singer-songwriters and Tim Hughes finds his muse is melancholy, too

Ethereal, passionate and moody. Luke Sital Singh’s voice is a thing of pure beauty. Already being talked off in the same breath as Bon Iver, Jeff Buckley and Neil Young, the 26-year-old Londoner is conquering hearts and minds with rousing and intense tunes fraught with heartache and candour, which carry the listener on an emotional roller coaster.

It’s fragile, downtempo, and some might even say, gloomy.

“I’m melancholy but not miserable,” he says.

“There’s a melancholy to my music, but lyrically I try to be relatively hopeful. My songs have a clear message — and are written to give myself a bit of advice. They are saying ‘I should be better at that’ or ‘I should remember that’.

“When I’m trying to write a song that fits my repertoire, I find it hard to do anything upbeat. I don’t want to be chipper or to tell people to ‘cheer up’. That’s not why I listen to music. Music that tries to make people feel happy is annoying. I never want it to sound happy in a ‘skip along the road’ kind of way. When I write, I am saying ‘it’s all right to feel like that’. You’ve got to be true to your emotions.”

Best known for his 2012 debut Fail For You, Luke has gone on to charm with follow-up EPs Old Flint and Tornadoes and this year’s single Greatest Lovers.

The launch of his debut album, The Fire Inside, last month, has only served to propelled this hitherto-cult artist to an even greater international audience.

It follows a great year of touring and festival-going — including sets at Latitude, Greenbelt, Barn on the Farm, Dot to Dot, Liverpool Sound City, the 6 Music Festival and Oxfordshire’s own Wood festival, near Wallingford.

His tour of duty continues tomorrow with a date at the O2 Academy Oxford — after hot-footing it from his biggest show to date at London’s Scala, last night. It will be followed by a relentless schedule of dates in Britain and mainland Europe.

“It’s been a crazy year, but things are good,” he says.

The big achievement, though, was the completion and release of that acclaimed album on Parlophone, produced by Jake Bugg collaborator Iain Archer.

“It’s been a good project and not too painful,” he says of the process. “I ‘felt’ everything that went into it, so can’t listen objectively. It’s been the culmination not just of the year it took to make, but of the 10 years I’ve been writing songs. It has all been leading up to this. It’s exciting to have it all done and it’ll be nice to see what life is like post-album.”

So has he got plans for a follow-up? He laughs. “It took my whole life to make the first one and I’ve got two months to make the second one!”

Ten years? “Well, no,” he admits. “That would have been awful. I didn’t really go back that far — thankfully for everyone.”

The one that everyone wants to hear, he admits, is 2012’s Fail For You. “It feels there’s a lot of love for that,” he says. “I wrote it in a very pure way, writing in my bedroom for the love of it, not for an audience. In fact there wasn’t an audience.

“The best songs come from that place,” he goes on. “But it’s hard to go back to that. It’s not easy to write for the sheer love of it.”

But he insists he does not want to be associated with any single tune. “When I go to gigs where the band are known for only one song, and people have only come to hear that song, I feel uncomfortable. I’m an album track person. I rarely like singles from my favourite bands. They always sound like they are trying too hard — and trying too hard to please me by hitting the final note.”

Probably the strongest tune on the album is its last — Benediction. “I prefer final tracks,” he says. “I had my album written and didn’t have a final track.

“But I like any that end up heartbreaking and leave you down. But this is also hopeful. I don’t think it’s up itself or whingey. I can listen to music to be broken or to admit I’m already broken. And it’s nice to have a friend saying ‘we’re all messed up’. It’s therapeutic. I feel I’m exorcising some demons in writing, and not just expressing my own boring feelings as there’s enough of that already.

“There’s so much music in the world that to write something and ask people to listen, you’ve got to give them something original and valuable. And it’s good to hear from people who say it has helped them through something. That’s an incentive to write even better lyrics.

“Lyrically I’m trying to write things that mean something, so I steer away from love songs. There has always got to be an angle to it.”

Take his song Greatest Lovers — with a video featuring two gas mask-clad armed raiders terrorising shopkeepers — and Luke himself as a terrified hostage.

“I was married last year and it’s about that,” he says. “It’s a foolishly naive thing to promise ridiculous things when you get married.

“But I didn’t want to play into the ‘lovers’ thing, as it could easily have been two people on a beach, hugging, and that would have been cheesy.

“So I came up with the idea of bank robbers in love and how love changes when you get older.

“It’s an interesting take on what it means to be in love — and it was nice to sing with a shotgun in the face!”

Luke Sital-Singh
O2 Academy, Oxford
Tomorrow (Friday)
Tickets £9 from ticketweb.co.uk