Devonte Hynes has been touring the UK “and a kid came up to me after one gig and said, ‘Hey man, I’m black, too!’ ” Dev wasn’t sure how to reply. “I mean, I know where he’s coming from, but . . .” And then there was the time he was in New York and somebody approached him on the subway “because he had read an article in The New York Times that called me a ‘blipster’ – a black hipster.”

There were also the people in Bristol who jeered at him for being a “coon”. Why such a fuss about his colour? Mainly because, under the name Lightspeed Champion, he makes music broadly classed as indie, which is still very much the white boy’s domain.

His recent album, Falling off the Lavender Bridge, is full of strummed guitars and laments about losing his virginity (I Could Have Done This Myself), about “feeling the nigger eyes staring” (Galaxy of the Lost) and about a young life spent bewildered by computers, crisps, crunk and creeping feelings – all delivered in a rather confident baritone. He made the record in Saddle Creek, Nebraska, the home of Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes and his folky Americana musician friends, who provided the glorious string section.

But even though Hynes writes songs about the Higgs boson particle collider, he doesn’t have any grand unified theories about himself, his music or his race – or the reason he dresses the way he does. Sitting in an East London rehearsal studio, his current look involves oversized spectacles and a huge, furry deerstalker hat. “I just don’t care. It’s probably a bad attitude, but I don’t really care about anything. Nothing I do has any hidden meaning, I am not that deep,” he says, smiling.

He is happy, if a bit bewildered and tired, having recently left a European tour early to recuperate from blood poisoning that left him stuck in bed with only the internet for company. Giving in to the self-Googling urge, he was alarmed to discover somebody claiming that his album sleeve was an inverse nod to “those really racist dolls – what are they called? Golliwogs! That’s it! But it was just my red cardigan from Brick Lane, on a blue background. It’s my only cardigan.”

Hynes was born in Houston, Texas, where his Guyanese mother trained as a nurse. They moved to Essex when he was 6. His father is from Sierra Leone, which Hynes has never visited. “My God, it’s an insane country. My dad’s pretty old now and he’s in Essex. But when we were younger, if you complained about a spider in your bedroom he’d be like, ‘Well I had to kill a snake in mine.’ ”

In his late teens, Hynes formed a noisy, frenetic cult band called Test Icicles, which people thought ironic, because they liked emo, and hardcore screaming and pink costumes – and let’s not even mention that name. “But irony is one of my most hated things. I don’t understand why you would pretend to like something. We would talk about the band Korn because a lot of the guitar pedals we used were Korn pedals, and me and Sam were inspired by them. People would think it was a joke, but I think they’d then forget how old we were. I’m only 22 now, so when I was 16 I wasn’t listening to Joy Division.”

As for his tastes now: “For any of these things, the looks or sounds I make, it’s because I think they’re cool. That’s the only reason I do anything – the only reason anyone does anything, I’d like to think.”

He might not mean style-magazine cool, but it’s clearly worked from that angle, too – Hynes and his friends have risen from Shoreditch shoddiness to be very cool indeed, their partying ways making it to the gossip columns. Klaxons have gone from sharing scruffy digs in Dalston with Hynes to winning the Mercury Prize, and then there’s the TV presenter Alexa Chung, the It Girl du jour. “I don’t watch much telly, but every time I see Alexa on it I give her a call, just to wind her up.”

Her boyfriend, Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, played in a short-lived group with Hynes. Now some older kids, Basement Jaxx, want in on the action, so they have had Hynes in the studio co-writing for their new album. “One of the two tracks we did together is a really pumping Basement Jaxx dance song with me rapping – ha ha – and the other is all Serge Gainsbourg, where I’m crooning my heart out in French . . . ”

So is it like Studio 54, hanging around with so many creative types?

Hynes laughs. “If anybody ever writes a book about all this it will be about the clubs White Heat and Trash, where so many of our bands were formed. But I don’t go out much any more, I’m always just watching Lost. That’s really all I want my music to be – to make people feel the same way as I do when I’m watching Lost.”

Falling off the Lavender Bridge is out now on Domino and Lightspeed Champion is currently touring. For dates, see myspace.com/lightspeedchampion

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