“You got a studio?” asks our taxi driver. “Yeah mate,” says Vincent Frank, who, as Frankmusik, is bringing his meticulously assembled vision of pop excellence to a mainstream audience. “What do you sound like?” asks the driver. It’s a question that most musicians are too precious to answer with reference to other groups. But Frank barely hesitates: “I guess, maybe like a more electronic ABC, or a less annoying Calvin Harris.”

The middle-aged driver has heard of ABC, but couldn’t tell Calvin Harris from Ludwig Wittgenstein, less still how annoying he might be. But no matter. It’s enough small-talk to get us — myself, Harris and Chloe, who Frank met yesterday in Manchester and liked so much that he asked her to come back with him — to Frank’s studio.

Ten minutes down the road from Croydon town centre, it turns out that Frank’s studio is also the Thornton Heath home where he has lived, on and off, with his grandmother for most of his 23 years. Indeed, as Frank realises he can’t find his keys, it’s his grandmother who comes to the door, extending the same warm greeting to all three of us. While she returns to her downstairs flat, Chloe pads off to the shower. Frank shows me where his debut album, Complete Me, was created. A commercial shelving unit has a keyboard on each of its shelves. But there’s also the upright piano, where most of his songs begin life. Proudly displayed on its own shelf is the iconic Casio VL-1 mini-keyboard, as used on Trio’s faux-Kraftwerk 1982 hit Da Da Da.

Frank can take or leave the Beatles, but don’t get him started on late 1970s and 1980s pop. He inherited — “well, forgot to give back” — his mother’s old records and appears to have studied many of them like sacred texts. We know he likes the Stranglers’ Golden Brown because he has taken it apart, sliced it into digital morsels and recast it to fit the melody of his own When You’re Around. It’s perhaps not surprising that he’s flattered beyond reason that Erasure have asked him to remix one of their songs, while the raptures that a mere mention of E.L.O. elicit are borderline moving.

These, it seems, were the records that captured Frank’s imagination as he was sent off to boarding school — the first of the four from which he was expelled for “refusing to work”. It came to a head at his final school, Christ’s Hospital. “Someone set someone’s room on fire ... and [in the aftermath] they found what they called ‘cannabis paraphernalia’.”

To say that the incident made Frank put his wayward habits behind him is something of an understatement. He honed his beatboxing talents and, as Mr Mouth, made it to the final of the Brian Conley-presented talent show Let Me Entertain You. An LA-based producer, David Norland, paid for him to spend time in America with a view to securing a deal.

Frank presses a button on his computer and plays me a Justin Timberlake-style R&B number dating back to the time. So, it’s all him apart from the keyboards? “No, it’s all me. The whole lot.”

Along the way, he learnt to write the sort of high-density pop tunes you can hear on Complete Me — though he claims that, until recently, his record company saw him more as a writer-producer than an artist. Earlier he had been for a meeting with them where this very matter came up. This being Monday, Frank’s new single, Confusion Girl, has gone in at a mystifyingly low No 29. He feels compromised, claiming that the song is unrepresentative of the album. Coupled with a “s*** video” that ends with him snogging his former girlfriend, Holly Valance, he feels the whole thing has merely served to confuse his fanbase.

On the eve of Complete Me’s release, his consternation is understandable. But no real damage has been done, I suggest. Complete Me is getting excellent reviews. The audiences at the shows are getting bigger. We talk about the mayfly career that Valance had after 2002’s Kiss Kiss. It’s harder for men to get that recognition, because women stand a greater chance of getting on television. Whether they can sustain a career is another matter. More with shoulder-shrugging pragmatism than bitterness he says: “I can’t get any TV because I’m not Pixie f***ing Lott. She might be No 1, but I’d like to see her pack out a venue.” He exhales a bewildered cloud of cigarette smoke. “She comes across like a complete f***ing moron whenever I see her.”

Whatever happens with this album, Frank is already planning the next one. There are 77 versions of Confusion Girl on his computer, one of which was somehow chosen for the album. Next time, he’ll do the whole thing more quickly. “I want to capture a moment. That’s what life’s about.” In his Thornton Heath bedroom, Chloe lies on his bed reading a magazine. “She’s come down on the spur of the moment and that’s what life’s about,” says Frank. “That’s where the f***ing magic is.”

Name ...

The records that taught you most about about pop

Bread: If Two minutes and 31 seconds of lyrical brilliance. My mum used to have two goats in the garden. One of them died because she had a horn growing inside her skull. We buried her under a tree. At that time, I remember the song coming on in the car and bursting into tears.

Don McLean: Vincent I was named after that song — I’m happy about that.

E.L.O: The Diary of Horace Wimp It was such a bizarre subject, and put together so lovingly. Genius arrangement.

The Avalanches: Since I Left You This album is a work of obsessive genius and madness. I don’t think it’ll ever be repeated.

The shop without which your life would have been significantly worse

Ku Ku Kebab It’s a traditional Pakistani tandoori kebab shop. I’ve taken everyone from Tinchy Stryder to Holly Valance there and they all thought it was f***ing brilliant. They only serve about six dishes there. It’s the real deal.

Your cast-iron, never-fail dance tunes

Stardust: Music Sounds Better With You

Captain & Tennile: Love Will Keep Us Together Even when there’s no one on the dancefloor, I’ll still go crazy to that.

Whitney Houston: I Want to Dance With Somebody

Any famous people that you met and liked

Mathew Horne

Tosh from The Bill Before he died, obviously. I was eight and he was in the foyer at Fairfield Halls in Croydon. He stank of booze, but he was cool.

Brian Conley When I got to the final of Let Me Entertain You, he really championed me. He introduced me to Shane Ritchie and got me to play at his son’s birthday party in Blackpool. He put me up in a hotel and paid me exceptionally well. He’s an incredible bloke.

Three things that you could have been instead of a musician

Fence painter

Barman

College dropout

Some underrated things about your locale

Ku Ku Kebab (see above)

The Croydon flyover It allows you to get away as quickly as possible.

IKEA I like the cheap hotdogs.

Complete Me is out now on Island

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