The desire of songwriters to sing their own songs, as opposed to giving them away at a price for others to sing, is something that Mark E. Nevin could not resist. Nevin has just released his debut solo album, Insensitive Songwriter, on his own label, Raresongs, but it's a safe bet to say that, unless you're the type of person who scans CD sleeves for songwriter, production and Thank You credits, you probably won't recognise the name.
Yet, for most of the 1990s, Nevin has rarely been out of the charts and off the radio playlists through material of his that other artists have recorded. Brian Kennedy, Mary Coughlan, Morrissey, Kirsty MacColl and Ringo Starr - to name but several - have all benefited from singing his fine songs.
It was with a band called Fairground Attraction that Nevin first came to notice. After a semi-serious career as songwriter for the likes of Jane Aire and the Belvederes and Sandie Shaw (along with Morrissey, he was closely involved with the shoeless one's mid-1980s comeback), Nevin teamed up with Scottish singer Eddi Reader. Previously a backing singer for The Gang of Four, Alison Moyet and Eurythmics, Reader found in Nevin a kindred, closet-folk spirit.
They duly formed Fairground Attraction. The band was a vaguely bohemian bunch of misfits, but their songs were excellent examples of pop/folk with a hint of resigned, remorseful romanticism. Their time was 1988-1989 and, following the immense success of the band's debut single, Perfect, and debut album, The First Of A Million Kisses, Fairground Attraction split up.
Immediately after, Reader went solo and Nevin formed Sweetmouth with a very young and relatively unknown Brian Kennedy. As both were on the BMG label (BMG), it was thought the combination of Nevin's plaintive songs and Kennedy's pure vocals was a business and creative decision made in heaven. It wasn't to be, however, and soon Kennedy was taken under the fluttering wing of Van Morrison.
In the meantime, Nevin went on to write for and with the great (Morrissey), the good (Kirsty MacColl), the unpredictable (Mary Coughlan, whose version of his Leaf From A Tree is nigh on definitive) and the downright abysmal (Ringo Starr). And then he got married.
"About four years ago, I got divorced and everything went pear-shaped," says Nevin from his home in London. "That's where I began to start again. I decided to sing my own songs. I came to an understanding of what had gone wrong in my personal life. It was all part of the same complex issues of what I was doing in my work.
"If you're writing songs for somebody else and giving your story for someone else to tell, you're splitting yourself in half and only living in your mind. They're just having my mind in their body. This was a split that went through my whole life, and I decided to put my mind and body together.
"The only way forward for me in my personal life was to become integrated and sing my own songs. I had to face my worst fears, which included going on stage and being myself with nobody to hide behind, and singing, expressing the emotions that I had myself intellectualised in my songs."
IF it sounds as if the process of writing and recording songs for his album was an emotional exorcism, then that's exactly what it was. Nevin, the epitome of the literate, sensitive songwriter, has an air of general singer/songwriter despondency and doubt about him throughout our brief conversation. He is now gigging on his own. He has played support to the likes of Ron Sexsmith, Mike Oldfield and Marianne Faithfull. His band includes erstwhile members of Fairground Attraction, a fact that quite likely provides a performance-driven safety net.
"When I first started I always wanted to write songs for women," he says. "I always had a feeling that my parents wanted a girl when I was born - I had three brothers and two sisters and my parents wanted two equal amounts. So, I grew up feeling wrong, and when I started doing music, I just wanted to repair what I thought was wrong with me. It was a kind of musical transvestitism, you know.
"When my marriage went, I realised that I should put my voice, my words, my mind and myself into my body and sing them as I am and what I am, and like myself for what I am. That's the theme of the album - self-acceptance as opposed to wanting things to be perfect. The immature notion that things have to be perfect just doesn't happen. You're bound to be disappointed. That's what happened to me."
Mark doesn't expect Insensitive Songwriter to be a big commercial success, a feeling rooted more in practicalities than pessimism. Concomitantly, there is no hype or push behind it - he has deliberately avoided that route, despite offers from at least two major record labels.
"That's not what it's about," he says. "It's about fulfilling something personal for me. Some people have said - and possibly they're right - that I'm throwing away an amazing songwriting career to be what is never going to be a great career as a singer/songwriter. It doesn't seem to matter to me what they say. I think that whatever you gain you lose something, and vice versa. I was prepared to lose the earnings you get as a songwriter for other people, and do the hard work of being a performer."