Ed Harcourt: Ed goes hardcore

With his new album, Ed Harcourt is hoping to shake off the sensitive-troubadour image. Kevin Harley asks him why

Over a pre-gig dinner in Gloucester, the tousle-haired, chunkily featured and huge-handed Ed Harcourt is wondering what he makes of the singer-songwriter tag he's stuck with. "I suppose it makes some people grimace, although it's better than being a puppet. But, what, do people see me as this sensitive-troubadour type? Well," he says, stabbing a chunk of still- sizzling steak on his fork and leaning close, "do you know that I can be really aggressive as well? And quite intimidating? How about that? Are you going to write that?" In goes the steak. "No."

Crikey, this is Hardcourt. He's joking, but there are some prevalent misjudgements the prodigiously talented 24-year-old wants to crack. He came to public attention in 2000 with a perhaps unfortunately titled mini-album, Maplewood, which a few critics pitched between Coldplay-esque suffering sensitivity and tweedy easy-listening – like you could imagine it sitting snugly on a nice set of Ikea shelves. For his first album proper, 2001's Here Be Monsters, a nomination for the oft-reviled Mercury music prize probably didn't help, although the record's mix of baroque arrangements, breezy pop and dusky lyrical imaginings put a twist on any coffee-table preconceptions. Its just- released follow-up, From Every Sphere, adds more shades to his vigorous mix.

But the tread-softly charge still comes at him from some corners. "People may think I'm a bit traditionalist or conservative," Harcourt sighs, "but I don't feel compelled to be, like, cool and modern, with loops and breakbeats and samples. I'm into that stuff but it doesn't mean my music's going to sound like it. I enjoy sitting at a piano, bashing out tunes. I like the idea of the Brill Building, having to sit in one room writing songs for people to sing."

Harcourt's musical reference points do go back a bit. It's a point that'll compound his "fogeyness" to some, even as it endears him to others. He's been likened to a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith and can't shake off a roll-call of luminaries in his press: Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits.

The name of Waits haunts him most regularly, and he's not in denial: "Well, he's the Godfather." It figures, then, that Harcourt's co-producer on From Every Sphere should be Tchad Blake, the studio veteran who mixed Waits's howlingly marvellous 1992 album, Bone Machine. You can hear its influence on Harcourt's sophomore long-player, from the younger man's crepuscular storytelling to his marshalling of tensions between tunes and clattering discord. He's developing that Waitsian feel for instruments that sound like they need cranking up: wheezy pump organs, Omnichords.

But in his press, Harcourt's own eccentricities are in danger of being lost among the rush to rattle off his influences. He's building up a singular lyrical palette, partly hewn from dark fairy-tale musings and a fixation with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. He's got a flair for critter symbolism, too: not the nature imagery of English, Wind in the Willows whimsy but something ragged and surreal. "Humans are just long versions of pigs – we crackle in the sun. It's the little details that make you wonder, that open you up to something. Perhaps I should use animals on the songs – I could be the new Doctor Dolittle!

"And then there's my latent obsession with death," he deadpans. Many of his songs are written in his grandmother's big Sussex house. She died last July, just after the album was finished, and although he attributes its mortality metaphors to the break-up of a five-year relationship rather than her passing, its mustier corners are suggestive of an old, wilting sense of place.

Despite being dubbed the "Donnie Darko of the piano", he doesn't lapse into adolescent morbidity. Instead, there's a brassy clamour to his songs that sounds almost fit to be swept along in a musical. He's claimed The Wizard of Oz as an influence – "That was just a phase," he laughs now – and if there are contemporary comparisons to be made, Rufus Wainwright and the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt are near fits for their showtune dash and romanticism. "Oh, they're brilliant," he enthuses. "and I've got stuff more in that vein. There's a song called 'Angels on the Body'. The lyric's about how when you love someone, they have two angels on their shoulders rather than an angel and a devil. I'm proud of it but it didn't make the album."

There's a sense of restless ambition about Harcourt that has you believing he'll be around for a while. He certainly strains at the leash on stage that night; all bullish and frisky, flitting between guitar and keyboard. He looks forward to making the next album: "I want it to be a corker – louder, faster, intense, just 15 songs, bam bam bam. Not garage rock, that'd be stupid, but an album people aren't expecting. I don't have to tell people I've got other sides. They're there; they just haven't been released yet." Keep watching that man.