Credit: Sam Seager

A special guest at Music Towers’ solo artist showcase at North London’s famed Boogaloo, Eugene McGuinness joins us for a cup of tea to ponder his debut mini-album The Early Learnings of Eugene McGuinness.

Eugene and I are eating bread and jam off Carnaby Street as fat spots of rain plop into our tea cups.

The 21-year-old is brilliant company; he wants to know about Formula One drivers, Frank Sinatra DVDs and Elvis Presley’s twin traits of generosity and promiscuity.

But when the conversation turns to how he came to be here, days away from the release of album on 5 August, he is momentarily stumped.

He lays down his jam-smeared slice, flicks back his thick fringe and shrugs; “I haven’t really got a story.

“I always read interviews where someone has got over an amazing turmoil or has an incredible tale, something very cinematic, but I’ve just written songs for a long time and I really, really like music.

“I was going to go to art college. My Dad’s a proper artist and I wanted to be like him, until music started to take over. I was quite shocked by my decision.

“I started playing the guitar when I was 14, strummed it once, decided it was too difficult and went back to my Playstation.

“A year later I picked it up again and second time around it wasn’t so bad, I knew what I was in for.”

That’s the start of the tale then, and the story goes as follows; McGuinness packed his suitcases, left Leytonstone, and headed up north to the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.

He met The Wombats there, oh, and Paul McCartney, who gave a couple of his songs the revered Macca thumbs-up. McGuinness suspects the Beatle was secretly bored, but, as befits a knight of the realm, unerringly polite.

Inspired by the honest Liverpool sound ala The Las, The Coral, The Stands, and peers like The Wombats and Hot Club de Paris, McGuinness created a clutch a songs of his own.

Songs like Bold Street and High Score that come threaded with English sympathies as they undulate through swirling melodies, or the hiccupping folk-pop of Monsters Under the Bed and A Child Lost in Tesco,