The misunderstood artist is a figure almost as old as art itself. Just as history shines an eternal light on the occasional McCartney or Shakespeare, Yesterday or Hamlet, so it buries forever the names and works of thousands more. Not long forgotten, just never known in the first place. Honest souls who diligently toiled away at their craft, but were ultimately destined to live embittered lives of ever-growing cynicism as their genius remained forever unrecognised by the cruel world beyond their four walls.
Yet among these thousands, few, you suspect, have been quite so comprehensively misunderstood as Stephen Jones. Certainly none whose misunderstanding afforded quite such spectacular results. Jones, after all, is the Sheffield man who wrote a corruscating song about the exploitation of women, only to see it snapped up by eager young couples planning the perfect first dance for their wedding day. Dancing couples whose parents' proud smiles weren't soundtracked by talk of how, "Suddenly life has new meaning to me," or "You're the best thing that ever happened," but: "You took me to your rented motorcar and filmed me on the bonnet." And while a sharp-eared maiden aunt hears the words of the desperate young model and reaches for her smelling salts in the corner, the remainder of the room are lost in the chorus: "You're gorgeous," they bellow, parroting the words of the lecherous photographer. "I'd do anything for you."
The song's enormous success apart, I wonder whether there was a tiny part of Jones thinking, "No, you misunderstand my art!" "No!" he insists. "It was great. It was 17 weeks in the chart and, without that, I'd have stayed underground forever." So, to recap: You're Gorgeous began hitting charts around the world in October 1996. Between July 1995 and the following March, Jones had released a series of four lo-fi long players on the Chrysalis label. Though critically acclaimed, the print run of 1,000 copies per album was always going to leave him flat broke.
Then came The Hit, "a song that was written in probably 30 minutes, never intended to be heard by anyone [it was released at the behest of Echo Records, a subsidiary of Chrysalis, who offered him his first major label deal]. It threw everything out of proportion. I was living in Manchester and had to move down to London because I was having that song shouted at me wherever I went. "It was quite chronic; chronic and nice at the same time. But it kind of destroyed that early history of starting and doing something unusual - we released those first albums ourselves, because literally no one was interested," he said.
It wasn't only the early work, opines Jones, that was overshadowed. "We did have nine Top 40 hits - which I hate to boast about! - but I think it's good for people to know there were other singles, because it's a good example of how one massive single can make that almost invisible." The other hits weren't the only things to largely escape public notice. He also penned two novels, staked a side career in composing film soundtracks, released three more Babybird albums plus a "best of" anthology, and generally amassed over "1,000 pieces of music, ready for 90 new albums".
First out of the blocks was Ex-Maniac, a new album released earlier this year. Like You're Gorgeous, it reveals that Jones remains keen to avoid the cultural group hug of The Everyman Love Song; happier instead to dissect life's minutiae and then wrap it all up in what the half- listening listener could still term "toe-tapping pop". "There's nothing really profound in pop music anymore," he laments. "But you want to be profound without seeming poncy - it's got to hit you where it hurts."
To that end, the album opens with Like Them, its bleak vision cut through with the kind of big guitaring chorus that Foo Fighters haul around the world's enormo-dome gigging circuit. Throughout, Jones pitches his narrative voice in outsider territory, albeit with a yearning to be somewhere more intimate. As he sings on Unloveable, "You can't love me, I'm unloveable, but baby you could try / I can't love you, but you're so loveable, but baby let me try". So much simpler when there's nothing to go wrong, such as this line from For The Rest Of Our Lives: "If you died tomorrow, I would love you for the rest of my life."
Dark-edged though they might be, Jones insists that every track on the album is a love song. Others aren't so sure. "It's only now, doing interviews, that I've begun to realise that maybe it's a lot to take in," he admits. He's right: the story of a couple meeting in a place called "Failed Suicide Club" sounds at some remove from, say, Close To You. On the other hand, if you believe that true love is all about engaging at the deepest levels of mutual understanding, it could scarcely be more romantic.
Jones appears relieved to hear The National's interpretation of the song. "Ah, lovely. I need people to tell me that sort of thing. That was the intention. I'm trying to get to the ultimate extreme of love, really, and how much someone can love someone else. I just don't want to write the usual sanitised pop music that's in most songs." Such as? "There's so much. Rihanna and people like that singing about how bad their men have been, but they're in the videos half naked as a man would like them to be seen. Bit of a strange one ?"
Still, Jones remains unshakeably loyal to his chosen form. "Everyone, secretly, no matter what music they make, would like to make that perfect three-minute popular song," he insists. "Essentially music is for escape, isn't it? It's to make people happy, so you have to work within that." He professes his admiration for contemporaries such as Morrissey and Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, acute lyricists working within the pop format. "Their work isn't 'intelligent', it's just real to me."
If Jones feels that "it's hard competing with the monsters of this world, the Lady Gagas", then he can at least boast one particularly fine looking ace up his sleeve. "I've known Johnny Depp for seven or eight years," he explains. "His manager phoned me up - I was hoping it wasn't a hoax! - and said 'Johnny would like to meet you'. So I came and met him, and he's a huge music fan. He was in bands when he was 17, 18, playing with a guy called Bruce Witkin who produced the new album; Johnny was responsible for me working with him. Wherever he goes he has his guitar and his laptop and plays music - it's his first love. And he happened to like Babybird, which is fantastic."
Fantastic indeed. Depp not only partly funded the recording of the album, but played guitar on, and directed the video for, the first single, Unloveable. Until fears about security intervened, he was even planning to join the band on stage during a recent run of gigs in the UK. "It would have been madness," says Jones. "He genuinely wanted to come and play on the tour, but logistically it was just impossible."
Nevertheless, the sense of indebtedness Jones feels towards the Hollywood A-Lister is clear. "Without him, I don't know what I'd be doing, to be honest. " Because your profile wouldn't have been as high? "Because I wouldn't be making music at all. I'd been with a manager for 15 years and, like a marriage, it was coming to a point where we had to stop. When I got rid of him, Johnny suggested I work with Bruce, and if that hadn't come along I doubt I'd be doing any more. I think Babybird will always be undervalued - I write scary lyrics and, unless I start sanitising it, it's always going to be tricky. But I do have a positive belief that things come along."