Chris T-T

New biography, October 2005:

Chris T-T is not a man to keep his opinions to himself. And when he voices them, it most often results in someone being offended, outraged or otherwise aghast. His carefully crafted songs about suicide bombers, serial killers, sellotape and sex often get members of his audience riled, and though there have been a few frightening threats, he's never yet been punched.

As The Guardian says, "The genius of Chris T-T's songwriting is his ability to humanise even the most outlandish conceits. They seem instead like brilliant ideas that no-one else could've come up with."

T-T's gift is to tackle life's grand themes, such as war, money, love, sex, and death, and transform them into highly personal, and highly emotional, songs. "I'm an overweight, middle class, white, comfortable, English songwriter," he says. "I've never felt any of these things through personal experience. I've never been bombed, I've never had an Israeli tank driven over me. The only way one can do it is to get into the mindset of individuals."

The press, meanwhile, can’t stop raving about T-T. The Sunday Times chose his fourth album, London Is Sinking, as Album of the Year, calling it a "Fantastically intricate masterpiece... utterly indispensable" and compared him to William Blake, while The Independent called him "some hybrid of Bragg and Cocker", the Big Issue said, "Decidedly off-kilter and all the better for it, eccentrics like Chris T-T should be heartily saluted" and the NME raved, “Capital-centric folk wonder… A record that’s funny, touching and smart enough that even people whose telephone number doesn’t start with 020 will treasure it.”

His new songs have already earned him an earful from angry old ladies in hunting villages, indie crowds in Essex and a few outraged liberals at the Leftfield stage during Glastonbury Festival. With two tours scheduled for this autumn – one supporting Brighton indie super-group Brakes, followed by his own headline tour in November – he would do well to practice dodging punches and hurled beer bottles if he wants to continue his never-been-hit roll.

Should he return home unscathed, then T-T plans to finally record the third piece of the London trilogy, Capital. "In my head I was finishing off by destroying London. In my fantasy version there's the army on the streets and curfew at 6pm and you've got thousands of civilian deaths." Of course, after two attacks on London, that's not at all how things have turned out. "That's my job now," he says "to pull back my flights of fancy into something real for the final London record".