INTERVIEW : 2006-02-09 Just call him the indie Rolf Harris (by The Telegraph)

On the eve of his first art exhibition, singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur tells Neil McCormick why painting is simply another way to let instinct take over

When I arrive at the tiny Vertigo Gallery in east London, Joseph Arthur is busy hanging an exhibition of his paintings. Well, hanging is not quite the right word. He is actually stapling huge, unframed canvases on to display boards not quite large enough to contain them, so that bits of the painting flop limply to either side.

The floor is littered with other canvases, which I have to walk over just to enter the room, an act of vandalism that does not seem to bother the artist.

"Do you think this one works here?" he says by way of greeting, firing staples from his industrial gun. suspect he is not overly concerned with my opinion, because he starts scrawling the title, She Packed Her Things, in thick marker on the wall while I am still contemplating it. "I'm a great believer in going with your first instinct," he explains, when I eventually get his complete attention.

"That's one thing where painting and music relate, it's kind of like awake dreaming. I let my intuition and unconscious guide me and then the mind comes in to tidy up. When you don't think, things turn out better... think."

He laughs at the self-contradiction and then says he is not sure about the title he has just scrawled on the wall. "I might have to paint over that. I see a dog in this."

He's on his own there. What I see is a vigorous, layered, expressionistic abstract sprawl, with a Basquiat-like, graffiti-esque urban edge and wild lashings of outsider primitivism. But then, I am a music critic. And Arthur is a musician.

It is Arthur's first exhibition. He is more acclaimed (if not hugely more successful) as a singer-songwriter. He has been making strikingly individual, intensely complex, emotionally vivid, multi-layered and deeply eccentric albums since he was discovered working as a guitar salesman by Peter Gabriel in 1996 and signed to his Real World label.

Critics around the world have hailed his talent, and in 1999 he was nominated for a Grammy - not for his music, but for his extraordinary album artwork. "Most everybody is an artist when they are young," he says. "I just never stopped."

He had no formal training but has been painting longer than he has been making music. "It is a release from music. I'm just trying to live the creative life. There's not much else that holds my interest."

Last year, Arthur's two artistic pursuits started to come together when he began painting while performing on stage. "I really thought the painting was going to service the music, but I found that my painting flourished. When your conscious brain is focusing on singing, your unconscious is freer to express itself. On stage, there's no time for problems. You have to solve them right there, instinctively. It gave me a different kind of energy, electric and live."

He is slightly perturbed by the sheer volume of work this is generating, a painting for every show. "I'm the indie Rolf Harris."

This 34-year-old from Akron, Ohio is a wonderful character, a pure bohemian, utterly wrapped up in his world of self-expression yet open and apparently unguarded, with an innocence that does not belie his evident intelligence. Loose-limbed and boss-eyed, he clearly doesn't worry too much about his appearance: his hair is greasy and lank, his clothes tatty and ill-fitting, his black boots (borrowed from photographer Anton Corbijn during a photo-shoot) spattered with paint.

He lives and works in an art-centric warehouse in the flourishing Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) area of New York, where he dates actress and fellow musician Juliette Lewis.

She is not his only famous admirer. Chris Martin of Coldplay has called Arthur's In the Sun "the greatest song ever written". Martin has recorded the song as a duet with REM's Michael Stipe, who says: "Joseph writes from a very deep, intuitive place." Available this week as an exclusive iTunes download, all proceeds go to aid New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"There is nothing I can say about it without sounding trite," says Arthur, uncomfortably, "but they've done a great job and I do feel really honoured."

Arthur's often dense, demanding oeuvre is not particularly easy to get into, but, once hooked, it is hard to get his songs out of your system. Peter Gabriel once told me that not persuading the wider world of Arthur's talents was his great regret. "Wow, I'd hate to be a man's biggest regret," Arthur responds, with apparently genuine alarm. "I will always be grateful to him, because he mentored me and invested a lot of himself in my music and me as a person, so I love him."

His fifth and latest album, Our Shadows Will Remain, came out in the UK last year from 14th Floor, a label that achieved success against the odds for the complex talents of David Gray and Damien Rice. They have their work cut out with Arthur.

Shadows is probably his least immediately accessible yet most beautiful album, rich with poetic imagery and bloody emotion. Arthur's voice rises ethereally through a densely layered production that is leavened by gorgeous melodies and infused with a sense of emotional distress and intense sadness.

"I was in a place that was darker when I was making that record," Arthur says cheerfully. "I didn't have a record deal, didn't really have any money, didn't have a place to live. I was staying with friends, everything seemed chaotic, probably drinking too much, so I was in a state. Maybe that's reflected in the process, but when I'm done with a record it's like somebody else did it. It's like when the snake sheds its skin, it's just not a part of you any more.

"Art is cathartic in the moment, but there's always something new to be cathartic about in the next moment. It's like the shark has to keep swimming." He grins. "I apologise for all the animal analogies. See, I really am Rolf Harris."