Credit: Richard Swift

What is Richard Swift trying to do to me?

Sent as Music Towers’ Friend of the Singer-Songwriter, to meet the American troubadour of growing repute at a London gig, I’d expected a languid fop, spinning lovelorn tales on his acoustic guitar and then a mumbled interview over cigarettes.

I really should learn to expect the unexpected.

Bouncing between piano and electric guitar, dressed in jacket and jeans, Swift belted out tracks from new album Dressed Up for the Letdown like a caged animal.

“I’m more concerned about how I can shut out the rest of the world when I’m on stage,” Swift later admits. “It’s an awkward, uncomfortable thing.”

His performance is anything but. With supreme confidence he weaved his smoky voice through the genre-defying bells and whistles of Dressed Up for the Letdown.

Swift is a musical kaleidoscope. Shake him up and he falls into nostalgic 1930s cocktail jazz. Shake him again and he patterns Randy Newman and 70s power-pop. Again and he fades into stripped down melodies and shuffled beats.

It is this eclectic individualism that sets Swift apart from his contemporaries – not that he would know.

“I grew up isolated from pop culture and pop music and so I don’t pay attention to what’s going on these days,” says Swift, who was 17 before he started buying records.

“I don’t see myself as trying to be a retro artist, but just because music has moved on since the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s doesn’t mean it is better.

“The album might sound old timey to some people but what I am supposed to do, come out and sound like Keane?

“I’m not trying to create a scene or be part of a scene. I have a bit of soul. And I don’t believe in having your day clothes and changing them to go play a gig.”

True to his word when I meet Swift the next day at the K West – crash pad of choice for today’s rock stars – he is wearing the same clothes as he did on stage, though he assures me he has changed “everything underneath”.