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British singer-songwriter Andy J Gallagher first hit London’s intimate music venues with punky Avant-Britpop band The Shopkeeper Appeared. Fame beckoned with plays on BBC Radio One and a gig supporting Radiohead, but Gallagher, ever hungry for new creative experiences, headed for steamy Asia and played in Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia. New York followed in a collaborative run-in with the city’s alternative rock scene.

Once back in the UK, crucial changes in Gallagher’s personal life prompted an outpouring of lyrical emotion and his most inspired writing to date. A man of potent visceral emotion, Gallagher’s lyrics almost always express his own sardonic view of urban man antics, sometimes cutting, sometimes tongue-in-cheek.

Roman Jugg, ex-member of seminal punk band The Damned, heard Gallagher’s demo and after declaring him, “a lyrical genius”, insisted on producing his first solo EP, the critically acclaimed Crocodiles & Prostitutes, as well as the subsequent debut album, Helicopter Dolphin Submarine, due for release in the second half of 2009. Charged with raw, living energy and peopled by real world characters, the album has perfectly pinned down the zeitgeist of modern urbanites living in a wayward generation.

Gallagher’s long-term musical influences are drawn from American East Coast punk-rock of the mid seventies to talents as divergent as David Bowie, The Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls. They flavour his sound with a distinctly punky edge, but what makes it exceptional is his ability, like so many of the world’s great musicians, to transform profound personal emotion into dazzling lyrics and songs.