A three-times divorced alcoholic, a father on the redundancy scrapheap, a tear-stained flu victim. On first inspection, the inhabitants of Thirst for Romance, the captivating debut album by Cherry Ghost, aren’t having a great time of it.

But listen closely and there are chinks of light. The divorcée is walking down the aisle for a fourth time, blushing like a teenager. The dad is down but not out. And the sickly soul urges his lover to “replace the Night Nurse that sits at my bedside” with memories of sunnier times, when he had “two heroic arms that twisted lids from jars”.

“You’ve got to put a bit of hope in there, even if it’s false hope. If you don’t you’re just kind of moaning,” insists Simon Aldred, Cherry Ghost’s jaded yet chirpy singer and songwriter. We are sipping mugs of tea in a break from the band’s rehearsals at a converted chocolate factory in Stockport, over the far side of Manchester from Aldred’s home town of Bolton.

Bruised hope is Aldred’s speciality: glamour in the gloom, ambition defying disappointment, a sense of adventure surviving the grind. Thirst for Romance combines Lambchop’s soul-country dramatics and Morrissey’s maudlin lyrical élan with the cerebral heartbreak of Wilco, whose song, Theologians, gave Cherry Ghost their name. And it stands up against all three.

A key inspiration were the working-class areas in and around Bolton, with their ruined industrial grandeur and ageing population, dank underpasses and “hard-faced queens of misadventure”. Aldred offers a creased smile: “Bolton’s a little bit on the skids. But there’s a level of integrity and pride and immense defiance that comes from that older generation.”

Indeed, Bolton has proved such a fertile ground for songwriting that he is paranoid that leaving will stunt his creativity, especially if he decamps to Chorlton or one of the other nearby musicians’ enclaves. “As a songwriter your duty is to be observational,” he explains. “If everyone drags themselves to the same part of town, they will be writing about the same things. If you want to be an adventurer . . .”

He tails off as one of his bandmates pops in. “I feel like a bit of a knob talking about myself.” Such winning diffidence (he even laughs off my ill-judged comparison of his voice with Neil Diamond’s), allied to a waspish wit, helps to steer the album away from proletarian worthiness. As does Aldred’s refusal to scrimp on the hooks: “I’m a kid of the 1980s: Nik Kershaw, Duran Duran, Culture Club. Big choruses and melodies were the call of the day.”

What he is determined not to become is a self-appointed preacher in the Richard Ashcroft mould. “He’s highly privileged and away from the thing he’s writing about; I’m living smack bang in the middle of it. Not that that gives me any more right or reason to write about it, but it’s not some kind of phoney philanthropy. I’m not doing it to drag this merry band of people along with me like the Pied Piper.”

Indeed, Aldred was for many years reluctant to enter the fray at all: “I wasn’t into showing off about music. When I first got a guitar I used to get my best mate to carry it to school so people would think it was him who played and not me.” The first time he played live was in church. He sounds slightly embarrassed: “Where I’m from, to get into a school where kids are not sniffing glue on the bus, you have to go to a church school.”

He spent the next 15-odd years doing stints in various bands in and around Manchester, none of which met with conspicuous success. Finally, Aldred went it alone, recording a demo that began circulating on MP3 and ended up in some influential hands. Everything changed when he played a solo acoustic gig at a Mexican restaurant in Glasgow, “without actually telling anyone – and about four record companies turned up”. The offers started coming in the next day: “It was f****** nuts.”

So, Aldred was a relatively advanced 31 when he assembled his four-piece band and got into a studio to record Thirst for Romance. It’s a delay for which he is grateful. “I could have made an album when I was 25, and it would probably have been s***,” he reasons. “I was never a good young person anyway. If I’d been out getting twatted on pills and being completely hedonistic, which is what you’re meant to do when you’re a teenager, then I’d have probably made a half-decent rock’n’roll album. But I was always thinking too much and being neurotic and paranoid.”

An unexpected tonic was mathematics, which he studied at Leeds University. “Given that I had such a messy brain in terms of over-analysing things, it tidies your thinking up a bit.” The album’s closing song – Mathematics– is about “being shackled by your own paranoid logic. I don’t think people are ever truly themselves – you always question and analyse and dissect.”

Surely the self-flagellation is on the wane now? At the time of speaking, Thirst for Romance was at number four in the midweek album chart.

“My goal isn’t to get to number four in the midweeks,” he insists. “It’s to write tunes as good as [Glen Campbell’s bittersweet country anthem] Wichita Lineman. I’ll get there in the next couple of albums.”

Legion are the singers who claim it’s about the music, man, not the fame. But you believe it coming from Aldred: “I see the nuts and bolts of the music industry, the mythology and the romance, and I’ve got no great respect for it. I was born in Bolton: I have a radar that goes off every time I’m surrounded by bulls***.” That, and a mother who is the bane of careless sound engineers. “I’ve seen sound technicians staring at their shoes as my mum’s been ticking them off because the vocals at a gig aren’t loud enough.”

His goal now is to approach music like his beloved Wilco. “Jeff Tweedy [the alt.country rockers’ lead singer and songwriter] said that for him, rock’n’roll was about being brave enough to stand up on a stage and sing about things you shouldn’t really be telling your best mate.” Already in the can are an album’s worth of songs to follow Thirst for Romance, which he describes as “infinitely better” than his debut. If that’s the case, Mr Tweedy should be looking over his shoulder.

Thirst for Romance is out now on Heavenly. Cherry Ghost play the Belladrum Festival, Invernesss, Aug 11; Summer Sundae, Leicester, Aug 12; and V Festival, Aug 18 & 19

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010