Few records last month made such a spectacular impression on the Fresh Deer Meat editorial team as Tandy Hard's delightfully bittersweet self-titled debut. Sounding in parts like the missing link between Scott Walker and Edwyn Collins, Tandy Hard's (aka Andrew Willis's) passion seemed fuelled by the classic songwriters of our age. FDM opted to sit down with the shadowy singer/songwriter earlier this week and unearth precisely what made this man and his music so utterly enthralling...

FDM: You were a one-time member of Brighton guitar-band The Customers - why the sudden urge to leave band-life behind and set out on your own?

TH: I had done several solo shows while I was in The Customers. We never actually split, but being a group of such extreme individuals, priorities changed somewhat. Joseph (Mount) is doing very well with Metronomy, and Gregg is also often away with live arts group Lone Twin. So we decided to have a break. That was two and a half years ago. I'm very proud of what The Customers achieved and I learned a huge amount from being among them.

Personally, I am in the process of collecting some friends around the songs - talented friends with good taste and no agenda. We're trying lots of interesting arrangements - at best sounding like a Rolling Thunder Review had Stephen Malkmus put it together, with Les Dawson on piano. It needs working on, but it's a very exciting journey.

FDM: How does solo work differ from that of a band? Is it creatively easier or do you occasionally long to have that sounding board to bounce ideas off?

TH: In The Customers, there were three singer-writers, approaching it from entirely different angles, and we each sung the songs we wrote. That invites a huge amount of conflict, but that is what made it unique, and ultimately completely unmarketable. Playing on my own is in turn frustrating and extremely satisfying. It can be frustrating not being able to bring so much chaos and noise, or layering. On the other hand it is satisfying in that you can gauge in performance from one moment to the next in which direction to take a song - You can get away with slowing a song right down, make it more intimate, stretch out chords and little inflections, having a song directed by mood and moments. Of course Bruce Springsteen has spent his career perfecting this with the E Street Band - and that's why he's playing Emirates Stadium and I'm playing in a wine bar in Chipping Norton.

FDM: Tell us about the inception of Tandy Hard. What's the story about its formation and the name?

TH : Well... a name is a name, and band names are usually of little consequence. My favourite band name is by Bon Jovi tribute band from Torquay called 'By Jovi". I suppose it boils down to my general lack of confidence that prevents me from using my birth name, and if I were in a band called 'The Slim Filters' playing chippy little songs about Saturday nights then no one would ever ask. As it happens, I was reading a book called 'Winesburg, Ohio' which is a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson from 1919 that centres on a small town and the local newspaper reporter.

In a particular story, Tom Hard and his daughter (whose name we never find out) bump into a travelling alcoholic who begins a rant about his need to give up drink. As he rants, his story becomes sadder when he realised it's not drink he needs to give up, but the search for his perfect woman. He has no name for this woman so calls her Tandy. The daughter adopts this name, thus becoming Tandy Hard. It seemed appropriate for me given that the over-riding theme of the album is of loving women, and also that names are generally unimportant. Having said that, I do have an ambition to form a band called The Jackpots, and having an offshoot band called The Rollovers.

FDM: When reviewing your self-titled debut album our critic called you the 'southern Richard Hawley'. Do you agree with the description? Do you see it as a positive?

TH: Very positive. I like Richard Hawley very much. He seems to know exactly what he's doing, what he's capable of - I could listen to him singing instructions for a flat-pack and be transported. He has a deadpan understatement that I like and that's where we are most similar, I think.

FDM: Tell us a little about the recording of the album. What did you want to achieve with the record?

TH : Initially, I wanted to make a low-key acoustic record and contacted my oldest friend Chris Davis, the drummer in Six By Seven and Spotlight Kid, to use his studio in Nottingham to record some drum parts. I turned up and began plucking away. We were in shoe-gaze bands when we were kids and I think we just got carried away - 15 songs in 2 days.

From there, I brought the drum tracks back to my studio and built them up - Jane Bartholomew is an incredible talent, a wonderful writer with a beautiful voice - I had done some work with her previously, including a slowed down version of Meat Loaf's 'Dead Ringer For Love'. I also borrowed her violinist, Ashley, before he went travelling. Johny on bass, from Thirty Pounds of Bone and Cottonmouth Rocks, is another very old friend from when I lived in Devon - and we've played together in different guises for a long time. Various ex-Customers also appear. Ultimately, everyone was allowed to do exactly what they wanted on it - that's why I asked who I did.

FDM: Your sound kind of sits outsight the limitations of 'fashion'. Was this intentional or did you just find salvation in such a warm and evocative sound?

TH : I'll take that as a compliment. More than anything, that decision to move away from a more traditional singer/songwriter template toward a pop record came from our desire to create the kind of record that I would love to listen to, almost like a compilation tape, rather than what I thought I should be making. It would probably sound even more like a compilation if it didn't have my foghorn voice all over it.

The music that I listen to is generally very old - ragtime, western swing, a lot of English folk and seventies country - I have just been switched on to Dion, and I love the Velvet Underground of course. I find it difficult to sit and listen to an acoustic album all the way through. I realised through recording that the most effective songs for me are those that understand melancholy, but have that uplift that gives hope. Bacharach and David are the best examples of this - enormous strings and huge choruses telling the saddest stories you will ever here in song.

FDM: Of all the songwriters you've been compared with which are you most proud of and which made you scratch your head in confusion?

TH: I'm still trying to get a listen to Palace of Light - also I wasn't so familiar with Edwyn Collins before I was compared to him, but I really enjoyed his song 'Home Again'. I think I get compared to Leonard Cohen and Dylan simple because I try to approach my writing with an element of craftsmanship, but that's a long, long road. In fact, I'm much more interested in their more recent output than their sixties heydays. I get compared to Jarvis Cocker occasionally too. I like that. He has a great balance of humour and melodrama - the same with Nick Cave.

FDM: Tell us a little about your relationship with Drift Records and the role you think a label of that quality plays in UK music?

TH : As you probably gathered, I don't really keep my ear to the ground; and that is partly down to the way the industry is run - it seemed for a long time that if you wanted to hear your song on the radio, you'd need 'a team'. If you want to get in a paper, you need 'a team'. The doors seem so impenetrable - so it's remarkable and gratifying that a label like Drift is making steady little inlets based on nothing more than team spirit and fucking good records. They recently put out a record by Matt Eaton, which is one of the most genuinely lovely records I've heard in years, and the Drift Compilation is a rollercoaster of oddness.

'Tandy Hard' was released on Monday, 1st September through Drift Records.

http://www.myspace.com/driftwillis