Last year, on August 28, Doug Walker rose sometime before five in the morning and quietly let himself out of his friend’s house in Ealing, West London. Groggy from not nearly enough kip, he walked to the Tube station. By six, he’d arrived at Great Portland Street in central London and was walking towards Yalding House, home of BBC Radio 1. Picking a spot on the pavement outside, he yawned, stomped his feet and waited until a small group of BBC staff lead by a large figure made their way towards the building’s entrance. As they approached, Walker gave them a smile and reached into his bag.

“I just said, ‘Morning, guys, can I give you a CD? I’m releasing my single, The Mystery, as a digital download. I hope you enjoy it,’” he remembers. “And that was it.”

Of the 50 CDs Walker had brought with him, the very first one he parted with was, by fluke, given to Chris Moyles, the motormouth Radio 1 DJ whose weekday breakfast show would soon be on air. At 7.20am, while Walker still stood doling out CDs to anyone entering the building, Moyles rode roughshod over the strict caste system of primetime radio playlists and played The Mystery to his seven million-plus listeners. Walker was following the show on his headphones. After hearing the opening “Nah nah nahs” of his own swirling, piano-led single, he walked in a daze towards Oxford Street with the vague notion of finding breakfast, having reached the end of ten years’ worth of trying and trying and getting nowhere. Around mid-morning, a call from a friend pulled him from his reverie: where was he, they demanded? Moyles had played his song again, and then again, and was asking the nation a simple question: does anyone know where Doug Walker is?

Today, Walker is in his adopted home city of Manchester. Funnily enough, he’s still angling to get on the radio, only now, furnished with a manager and deal with Warner Brothers Records, the mountain has come to Muhammad, as producers and station managers from across the North West gather in a swish quayside restaurant to hear him play. After running through four songs, each a potentially airwave-swamping mix of James Blunt’s doe-eyed balladry and Keane or Coldplay’s earnest verve, he works the room with the chummy, if quietly manic confidence of a Christian Union rep at a university fresher’s fair; lots of eye contact when speaking, lots of nodding, lots of “mate”; a Nice Guy, but one with something big to sell.

“But any musician in the world would love people to hear their songs on the radio,” he says afterwards. “It’s not an ego thing, you just want them to be heard… even if some people would have you believe they’re happy to play to their mums and mates in the pub.”

Eleven years in Manchester haven’t dented the Surrey native’s accent. When he arrived in the city in 1997 after three years with an itinerant “drama in education” troupe, it wasn’t just his vowels that marked him as an outsider. The city’s bustling indie scene closed ranks and shut out the guy trying to play songs on a piano that had about as much in common with Joy Division or the Smiths as Remember You’re a Womble. It stung, though he admits to being more music enthusiast than geek, a card-carrying member of the “I know what I like and I like what I know” school. If you wanted, you could pick up albums by any of his stated influences (ELO, Jeff Buckley, Sting, U2) at a decent motorway service station.

“I never tried to pretend it was anything other than pop though,” he insists, as a cab is flagged down to take us to his home. “I didn’t start wearing trendy clothes or trying to play it cool either.”

To a degree, this unwillingness to change his tune and follow musical fashion explains why he still lives where he does. Benchill is seven miles or so south of central Manchester, and is part of the sprawling Wythenshawe area. He explains how, in 2000, it was named the country’s most deprived council ward, and while things are “generally getting better”, it’s still a dense, grey shadow to the sparkling glass and steel of the regenerated city centre. It was here Walker started out as a youth worker, taking his keyboard to the community centre so that local girls could harmonise to Backstreet Boys songs, and helped set up jungle and drum’n’bass nights (“Not my thing, but the kids enjoyed them”). “I’ve been spat on, had eggs thrown at me and been punched in the face,” he explains as we walk to a local playground. He points out a now-shut convenience store where, one New Year’s Eve, a teenager he’d worked with put what only later turned out to be a replica gun to his head for 15 minutes. It was working in Benchill that Walker met his wife, a fellow youth worker whom he “convinced I could do DIY” and married in 1999.

We hitch a lift back to the city centre in the back of his tour manager’s van. Though a middle-class boy from Camberley, his father, a household cleaning product salesman, walked out when Walker was 13, and by 16 he’d left school with three GCSEs. So when he gave up youth work to focus on his music, he jobbed as a bin man, barman and TV extra between playing hotel bars and covers gigs and staying up writing at his keyboard until 3am every night.

Arriving at tonight’s gig venue, the Night and Day Café, Walker and his tour manager jump out of the van to soundcheck. Inside the compact bar, he’s greeted warmly by other musicians and jokes with the staff before running through a version of Kim Wilde’s Kids in America with his backing band. Afterwards, he suggests we head back to the van “where it’s quiet”, to finish up. It’s dark and chilly inside, and for the first time, he looks diminished, tired and reflective.

“I used to sit up at night researching who I could send demos to,” he says. “Labels, A&R people, everybody imaginable. But after sending out I don’t know how many thousand CDs, spending hundreds of hours trying to get hold of people in the industry but never getting a response, spending thousands of pounds going to London to play gigs… all that effort and getting nowhere? It’s bound to get you down.”

How down? “Very heavy depression. A lot of your identity can be tied up in people’s reaction to your craft. So if you’re a painter, and no one likes your paintings, you’re going to… get down. Plus, I think people started to feel sorry for me, or thought that I was deluded. You know, last year, I earned £3,500? I had close friends saying, ‘Look, what’s the plan B, mate?’” He brightens up a little and grins. “If you want proof I’m not in this for the money, then there you go.”

Even before he arrived outside Radio 1 that morning, he admits his faith and enthusiasm were at their lowest ebb. In fact, he nearly didn’t arrive at all. “I got ten feet from the door and thought, what am I doing? I almost turned around and went to find a coffee,” he says, wincing. “Now, people see it as some genius plan, but it’s the most clumsy, badly thought-out thing I’ve done. I suppose I was banking on finding a radio plugger to promote my independent single, or a cleaning lady who would give it to a radio producer she might know, or at least one of the CDs not getting thrown in the bin. It just happened the first one I gave out was to the ever gracious Chris Moyles.”

Now Doug has a gig to play. His wife calls him to ask if she’s on the guestlist, and he assures her that, yes, she is. By now, a proper release of his debut single The Mystery will be in the shops and an album, Fear Together, will shortly follow. “Moylesy’s been hinting on the radio that, if the album does well, he wants a Ferrari,” he grins.

But what if… after all this, the album and single flop? Will you be OK? Is there a contingency plan or anything? He just smiles.

“I’d love people to embrace the songs and come to my gigs and sing along, like I would with my favourite bands, but it may not happen. If not, I have no idea. There is no plan B,” he says. “I’ve only ever wanted to do this.”

Doug Walker’s album, Fear Together, is released on April 7

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