It looks like the morning after the night before. Jack Allsopp yawns, nibbles some toast and slouches in a comfy armchair. On a couch, his late-twenty- and early-thirtysomething chums read the tabloids and reach for croissants, glancing up when things on The Jeremy Kyle Show get heated. All enviable jeans and box-fresh trainers, it’s like walking in on the cast of an advert for trendy credit cards, eco-friendly cars or a slightly aspirational lager.

The location, though, is backstage at ITV’s London studios, “Just Jack” Allsopp’s friends doubling as his backing band. Soon, they’re running through the wistful funk-pop of No Time for the This Morning cameras, Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton nodding along approvingly. The pair cluck around him once the final notes fade, and he grins awkwardly and scratches his close-cropped head. The lines etched around his eyes, a Terry-Thomas gap in the teeth and a pair of prominent lugholes all help lend him the look of a D.C. Thomson cartoon character rather than a prefab popster. And this is sort of the point. Since hitting number two at the start of the year with Starz in Their Eyes, a cautionary, catchy message to would-be Fame Academy graduates, the 32-year-old from Camden Town, London, has been almost honour-bound to show how you can go about chart success in an oddly normal, unassuming way. So far, he’s doing rather well.

“I’ve got a plaque commemorating more than 10,000 plays on British radio,” he starts, quickly adding that it’s his only indulgence in wall-mounted memorabilia. There may be a shiny disc for Overtones, this year’s Top Ten breakthrough album, kicking around somewhere. He isn’t sure. By now, we’re inching up Camden High Street in the back of a silver Mercedes, heading towards his mum and dad’s house and his cramped cellar studio.

“Starz… came from me thinking about these people who have dreams of being a pop star, and who practise little dance routines in their bedroom and then go to the local karaoke bar,” he explains in an elastic norf London accent. “Maybe they enter a competition on TV, and by some amazing chance they win it. In their heads, they must think they’ve made it. But then a month later, no one cares. No one cares because it’s just a TV programme.”

He’s being sympathetic, rather than snobbish. It was the cruel case of Michelle McManus, the full-figured Pop Idol winner subsequently mocked in celebrity magazines for her weight, that prompted him to put pen to paper. Elsewhere, Overtones addresses the clubbing casualties who don’t know when the party’s over (Disco Friends), the City boys who fetishise their Audis and designer furniture (Lost) and the gradual goodbye to a footloose, fancy-free youth (“Probably be a dad soon/sitting in my front room/with my kid’s Play-Doh moulds,” Allsopp ponders quietly on Hold On). Hip-hop and house music tinged, it’s the work of someone starting to find his hangovers last a good deal longer than those of Jamie T, Lily Allen or Kate Nash, all at least a decade his junior.

“In the same way that they’re all ‘representing their youth’ and showing ‘what it means to be a suburban youth today’, I wanted to write about being a twentysomething or thirtysomething coming out of that stage,” he says. We’re now in the cellar studio of his mum and dad’s terraced house, a room where keyboards and computer equipment compete for space with a workbench and DIY paraphernalia. Allsopp and his girlfriend live up the road, but he still records here, he explains. It’s an arrangement that suits him, though it can be annoying when an obligation to take tea with a visiting aunt cuts short a crafty joint, he sighs.

Before long, he’s theorising about our current glut of young, street-smart, observational pop singers.

“The connection is that they’ve all grown up listening to really lyrical hip-hop,” he enthuses. “Arctic Monkeys? Blatantly hip-hop fans. The minute I heard them, I thought they sounded like rappers. You could rap out his [Alex Turner’s] verses and it would sound like hip-hop.”

But what took Allsopp himself so long to start singing and writing songs (he went on his first music and production workshop at a comparatively stately 25)? Does it, you wonder, have anything to do with school? For all their mangled vowels and guttersnipe stylings, almost all of the young singers he discusses have spent time at small private or performance schools, places where a stated ambition of pop success won’t land you much grief. Allsopp, however, went to Haverstock Comprehensive in North London.

“And it’s a proper comprehensive,” he stresses. “I would have literally got ripped apart if I’d made out I was some kind of singer or rapper. In my school, you blended in or you got f***ed. But I know that a couple of the people on the list [of young singers] definitely wanted to be pop stars from a young age.” Instead Allsopp, who describes his architect dad and lecturer mum as “middle-class grafters”, slipped past the capital’s doormen and into London’s club scene at 15.

“I remember sitting at a bus stop with some friends, the morning after our first proper club experience,” he says, grinning. “We just thought, right, that’s it, let’s leave school, get jobs and just go out clubbing all the time. Fortunately, that’s not what we did, but it was an amazing time. It was the beginning of bedroom production, where you didn’t need a big label behind you to make music.”

After drifting through a degree in furniture design, jobs from waiter to TV runner were held down as he began to realise that is musical ambition went beyond the occasional DJ gig. Lyrics and melodies started to come, which, with the aid of some basic recording gear, were set to acetate, his half-spoken, half-sung delivery pitched somewhere between a drowsy Jay Kay and less acerbic Mike Skinner. It was enough to earn him a deal with RGR Records, which released his 2002 debut, The Outer Maker, only to go bust within a year.

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