Fionn Regan's literary span and way with words have brought him to the attention of those it does concern. He tells Jim Carroll how he got here

AT this stage, Fionn Regan is getting used to quesions about Francis Fukuyama. The Irish singer and the American political and economic commentator have become intertwined thanks to the common currency of a title.

In his 1992 tome The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama argues that the battle of ideologies has been won by political and economic democracy. In the post-Cold War era, Fukuyama claims, democracies have trumped dictatorships and everyone will live happily ever after. Many, however, disagree vehemently with this point of view and ideological thumps have been exchanged.

On his debut album The End of History, Regan stays clear of such robust discourse on hegemonies to concentrate instead on songs which veer from cosy folk to sea-salted romance. Over haunting scrapes and wisps of sound, Regan piles on lines that are bursting at the seams with arcane, literary nuances and allusions.

Few other albums of this ilk will reference Paul Auster and Saul Bellow in the same song. Even fewer artists will be as ambitious and as assured as Regan to get away with it.

Regan admits that Fukuyama's tome has not featured on his reading list and he has no plans to change this. "Because people kept bringing it up, I've read a little bit about it, which I didn't fully understand."

His own use of the title comes from a much more personal quest. "The end of history for me is about the good and the bad in the journey which has got you to this point, the station that I have reached which is hopefully not the last stop on the line."

Regan's journey is unlikely to end at this juncture, especially given the response to The End of History since its release in Britain during the summer on the Bella Union label. Reviewer after reviewer has drawn attention to the effortless grace and outlandish imagery of his songs and style.

Regan's routing to date has been a colourful one, leading him down a couple of cul-de-sacs in the process. During his teenage years in Bray, Co Wicklow he played with various bands who were going nowhere. "We used to rehearse for a big gig that didn't exist. Looking back now, I know it was all just part of learning and development."

When he was 17, Regan struck out for the bright lights of London town. "I wanted to have a crack at the hit parade, so I played guitars with various bands." The "hit parade" ignored his efforts and, a year later, he was back in Ireland.

Regan sat the Leaving Cert ("which I had never done in the first place") and decided to go back to basics. Dublin gig after gig followed before a hook-up with a manager took him back across the Irish Sea to Brighton. Two EPs eventually appeared below the radar before Regan decided it was time to go back to Dublin and get his act together yet again.

This involved finally deciding to play to his strengths. "When I started, I wanted to go in a completely different direction to what came naturally," Regan explains. "My basic way of writing and performing is with an acoustic guitar by myself. But I wanted to explore other areas of music first, hence the electric guitar and playing with bands. Eventually I came back to the acoustic guitar and accepted that this was for me."

For him, it was a form of mild-mannered rebellion. "I grew up around folk and traditional music, so it was like the love-hate relationship you have with your home town. At a certain age, you want to leave, you don't want to hang around. The same with learning guitar, I wanted to distance myself from the acoustic thing for a while."

Another change which Regan instigated, and which has paid dividends, was to go micro. "I had a big infrastructure behind me and then I made the decision that I wanted to make the record in my own time and space.

"Of course, there are a lot of limitations with that, even keeping a roof over your head can be difficult, but having limitations can also be a positive thing. It made me realise that if I'm going to play a guitar and sing songs, I have to have something really worthwhile to put down on record."

There were other reasons too for his determined self-sufficiency. "You figure out pretty quickly if you can do things via committee or if you're better off on your own," he says. "Sometimes, you can have great, supportive committees and sometimes, the committee turns out to be crooked. I think it was 50/50 with me so I had to cut loose on my own."

Once he had made that decision to proceed alone, Regan began to feel more and more protective about what he was doing. "The most important thing in my life became the record and everything had to be right with that. It's my property, so to speak, and if people start to arrive onto the field and try to make changes, I'm tempted to get the rifle out. Eventually, that's what happened and I had to run some people off the farm."

Once the trespassers had scarpered from the scene, Regan worked fast. "The songs came very quickly, I didn't agonise over any of them," he recalls. "Some of the songs that didn't make it are perhaps the ones I thought about too much."

He takes praise for the album's literary span and beautiful way with words in his stride. "Chances are if you have an interesting life then you will have interesting words and views at your disposal. The journey on record is like the journey you take in life."

When it comes to competing with the other singer-songwriters doing the rounds, Regan has put his faith in the songs. "It's like a huge population of people trying to get into the one phonebox," he says of his peers.

"There's only a certain amount of media attention available and everyone is competing for the same thing and so it's harder to get attention.

"I know I am competing against people with huge budgets and brown envelopes, a million different things. I'm up against the likes of James Morrison. But the punters who come down to your show or pick up your record don't really know or care about that stuff. They've heard the music and that does it for them."

And those live shows? As Regan explains, he has a large floating cast of musicians to choose from and the live experience depends hugely on who turns up on the night.

"The live shows at the moment are like one of those orange nets of nuts you get at Hallowe'en," he says. "When you break open the shell, you don't know how many nuts are inside. That's the way it is. Some of the band can make the shows and some won't be there. It's great to have it that open and not know who is going to turn up from gig to gig."

The End of History is released on October 6th on Heffa Records. Fionn Regan plays Crawdaddy, Dublin on October 15th and returns for a tour in November