At a pub table around the corner from the London flat he has recently moved into, Matt Abbott celebrates the elevation of his new single, Red Lipstick, to the Radio 1 B-list with a pint of lager. The sun is shining, the performance poet from Wakefield looks like he has a hit on his hands; all is well with the world, you would think. But what the front man with the new duo called Skint & Demoralised admits is a lifelong habit of opting for complexity over simplicity, of succumbing to doubt rather than soaring with confidence, is again gnawing away at him.

“I’m very much skint and demoralised at the moment,” the 20-year-old says with a mirthless chuckle. “People say ‘You’re on the B list’, But it’s not as easy as that, is it?

It’s like being in the FA Cup — I won the semi-final yesterday, but getting onto the A list? It’s like doing the high jump. I’m not complaining, but it’s a stressful game to be in.”

For the moment, Abbott has the wind in his sails: Skint & Demoralised’s spoken-word-meets-northern soul is snappy, dapper and a natural fit for radio, and his image — part little boy lost, part likely, lairy lad beneath 1970s- footballer hair — is both up to the minute and modishly retro. Still, Abbott frets. But such anxiety has its benefits, and is the writer’s way — putting more effort into capturing the moment than actually living in it. Abbott’s biggest fear, he says, is that he’ll be judged on a set of songs that are, as he puts it, “a snapshot of me two or three years ago, the diary of an 18-year-old pisshead, basically”; and that the big changes in his life since then, which he is currently wrestling with and writing about, are not reflected on his debut album, Love, and Other Catastrophes (due for release in October).

“There are people,” he says, “who go ‘His voice is annoying and his lyrics are shit’, or mention the Streets and Just Jack, but you just have to put that aside. I don’t think I’ll ever be truly satisfied by a review, and if you need a review to validate what you’re doing, you’re f***ed. It’s always like, ‘Catchy tunes, cheeky chappie’. No, it’s not, it’s so much more than that. Obviously, there’s that element, and that’s how we’re going to reach people. But I don’t want to just reach people. I want to touch them. I want kids to listen to these songs in their bedrooms, sing their hearts out and think, ‘That’s what I’m feeling.’ Like I used to do with Arctic Monkeys and the Jam.”

Abbott began writing poetry as a teenager. His first passion was for politics, and he remains a vocal opponent of the BNP, regularly reciting his poem Nazis on the Doorstep at his shows and lending his voice to the Love Music Hate Racism campaign. He recently took part in a press conference about racism at the House of Commons.

“Kids watching the news, they’re not interested in politicians,” he says. “I may not have the political knowledge, but it’s not really a political issue, is it? It’s a social one. And people my age are more likely to listen to someone like me, stood on stage in skinny jeans, with stupid hair, than to someone knocking on their door in a suit.”

On Love, and Other Catastrophes, poems about romantic mania, drink, depression, loneliness and Leeds United interleave songs with titles such as Failing to See the Attraction, You Probably Don’t Even Realise When You Do the Things I Love the Most and Only Lust Ignores Violence Involving Ambulances. Tracks such as Red Lipstick and The Thrill of Thirty Seconds are the commercial bankers, but the melancholy that suffuses Withdrawal Symptoms, Let’s Get Lost and A Few Quiet Drinks is more representative of Abbott’s instinctive poet’s reaction to life, and the album as a whole is a much more intriguing and haunting affair than the chorus of his new single might suggest.

“She likes red lipstick, fish and chips, orange juice and trips to the seaside” is set to, yes, a catchy tune, and Abbott does, in truth, deliver it like a cheeky chappie (though he can hold a tune with ease, he insists he’s no singer). But his natural writerly demeanour is more hangdog. He seems only too aware of the song’s potential to become an albatross, even as it smooths the band’s passage into the charts. “But to get heard,” Abbott argues, “you need something that’s going to smash through the door. I was sat in a pub in Leeds, and I’d looked at my girlfriend’s MySpace, and that’s what she listed as her likes. I changed red nail varnish to lipstick, but other­wise that’s what it said. But it’s not like I sat there and thought, ‘Right, we need a hit.’”

His other half in the duo is the Sheffield music-scene veteran David Gledhill, who heard Abbott’s poems on MySpace and contacted him with the suggestion that he set them to music. Much has been made of the presence on the album of the Brooklyn soul band the Dap Kings (who have backed Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson, among others), but the outcome of the sessions was a mixed bag. “It was intimidating,” Abbott recalls. “Here are these amazing musicians, who have played soul music all their lives, and I’m this poncy little English kid walking in with my Diesel T-shirt, perched in the corner — you know, ‘Yeah, this song’s about fish and chips.’ It was a long, torrid and sometimes frustrating journey. But the album is something I’m immensely proud of. We got there in the end.”

He describes the day he and Gledhill signed their major-label deal as “overwhelming. I was stood outside this pub having a fag, and I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. You suddenly realise the scale of it all. I’m extremely paranoid as a person: having a deal and being on the radio means that every minute of the day, I’m analysed. I love London, but it is also the loneliest place I’ve ever been in my life. You disappear here”. All that will give him something to write about, surely? “Oh, yes,” Abbott agrees, cheering up. “And ripping your heart out and putting it on the page is the best feeling in the world. Poetry is the most exciting thing in my life. It is language in its best suit. It’s so powerful.” I look up and there’s not a trace of doubt in Abbott’s eyes.

Red Lipstick is released tomorrow on Mercury

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