Glenn Thompson has a gaping hole in the shoulder of his jacket and corduroy trousers so bald, they look like jeans. The veteran drummer, now turned singer with his own band, Beachfield, at least has an excuse for scruffy attire. He is in London, thousands of miles from his home in Sydney, and a trip that was supposed to last a week has stretched to over a month. I bet he wishes he had brought more clothes.

“Ah, but I did bring all my clothes,” Thompson says. “My plan was to scour your charity shops for a new wardrobe, but our producer always beats me to them. He arrives at the studio every day with a big bag of cool suits he’s found for a fiver. By the time I get there, all that’s left is flowery shirts and flares.”

At 42, and a self-confessed, unrock’n’roll family man, Thompson is having to adjust to a future standing centre stage. Previously drummer with the adored, award-winning Aussie bands Custard and the Go-Betweens, last year he finally decided to strike out solo.

“I have been writing sort of in secret for seven years,” admits Thompson, a laid-back, curly-haired, casually handsome chap.

“I started because I was trying to teach myself how to produce. We moved to a house with a spare bedroom, so I built a little studio in there and made some demos. I was still recording with other bands, but they were a closed shop when it came to songwriting. There’s something about being a drummer with ideas that puts other musicians off. Whenever I suggested we try one of my songs, the room would suddenly empty.”

Thompson persevered at home, initially not only singing and producing, but playing every instrument on all of the 11 tracks that make up Beachfield’s beguiling debut, Brighton Bothways. When the album was snapped up for release in Europe before an Australian deal was even signed – it comes out there next year – he brought in a bassist and a pedal-steel guitarist, and even put his 19-year-old daughter, Nellie, on backing vocals.

One listen to Brighton Bothways – named after its cover art, a shadowy snapshot taken from below Brighton’s promenade by Thompson while on tour – and you wonder why it took him so long. Awash with pretty melodies, adorned by witty, observational lyrics, and so effortlessly easy on the ear, it prompted even the youth-obsessed NME to describe it as “almost perfect”, it shares a dreaminess and attention to detail with the Go-Betweens’ best, but replaces their literary references with tales of trips to discount stores and, on Wintertime Again, climbing trees to stick leaves back on bare branches. On one song, Mandy, Thompson recalls having an affair – but that, he insists, was just a daydream.

“I’ll just be sat at home, having a cup of coffee, when everyone else is out, and random lines pop into my mind,” says Thompson. “Usually, they are about whatever has happened to me that week, or something I’ve seen out the window. For example, the first track on the album, Coles to Newcastle, is a play on social-economic levels. Coles is a downmarket Australian department store where you go to get cheap groceries.”

The youngest of seven children – six of them boys, all of them musical – Thompson first drummed at the age of five, with his mother’s knitting needles and biscuit tins. When he asked for a real kit the following Christmas, his parents had no hesitation. “My dad asked for a drum kit as a kid, and my grandfather bought him a xylophone instead,” Thompson laughs. “My dad’s dream was to be a drummer, and he regrets never having tried. My mum adored me drumming. We had hugely annoying neighbours, so she would send me upstairs, open all the windows and tell me to go and practise as loudly as possible.”

By 13, Thompson was playing drums in his brother’s covers band. It was not until the final years of Custard, who split in 2000, that he got a taste for singing. “Custard were crazy on stage,” he recalls. “Sometimes, the singer and I would swap places. But we were art-rock – we were allowed to be daft.”

Thompson has two musical children of his own – Nellie and a 23-year-old son, Wintah, who plays in the Brisbane-based band the Little Lovers. “It’s not what I had hoped for him,” Thompson says, only half joking. “Nellie is more sensible. She has an incredible voice, but wants a real job.”

On the side, Thompson himself has a real job, working in one of Australia’s biggest art galleries. A few weeks ago, Elton John came to an opening in his tracksuit and spent £100,000. “The art world is mad at the moment,” Thompson says. “We don’t sell paintings, it’s all projections – $20,000 for a seven-minute video on a loop. It’s more rock’n’roll than the music business. But the best bit is, they like me being scruffy. I make the artists feel at home.”

Brighton Bothways is out now on Lo-Max records

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