Peter Cat
Nice N Sleazys, Glasgow

PETER CAT, aka Graham Gillespie, doesn't want to reveal what his day job is. But his “work clothes” — he's come straight from his shift to the gig — are the most glamorous I've ever seen and surely entirely unsuited to his vocation.

Tall and slender and dressed in an electric-blue, pin-striped suit and a snazzy open-necked shirt, he looks like the Thin White Duke on holiday in Majorca.

Gillespie isn’t afraid to stand out in a world filled with drab office wear and his alter ego certainly isn’t too shy to make a statement onstage. In an indie-pop scene dominated by black jeans and aloof guitar-playing, there's something refreshing about seeing the stage occupied by a solo multi-instrumentalist performer, dressed up and dapper, who isn’t afraid to dance.

The music is good too. Opener Keeping Up With Jacob is a jaunty, light-hearted trip through the familiarly twinned emotions of admiration and envy. Densely lyrical and laden with Pulpesque and character-heavy observations — “devoid of all noise, except the sound of his particular mind ... he might win the Turner Prize ... keeping up with Jacob is such a chore” — it's sung at such a speed and with barely a pause for breath that's reminiscent of early Scott Walker.

The influence of 1960s crooners such as Walker on Cat’s song-writing is apparent in new single Hand Through Hair which manages to be absurdly catchy as well as containing opaque, poetic phrases such as “through a haze of raw tobacco, I can see you sifting sensually/through the folds of his Venetian hair.”

But Cat also casts a lyrical eye on everyday contemporary habits. If You Can’t Live Without Me sees a narrator scrolling through his DMs to work out whether a former lover still holds the keys to his contentment. Turns out they don’t — a brief, clever nod to the digitalised methods we use to understand ourselves and our relationships.

“If you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead yet?’ deadpans the chorus, a gentle mockery of pop music's idealistic sentimentalism and Hand Through Hair demonstrates a similar sort of self-awareness. “How did I let love fall away? Was it the irritating way I begged to stay or that I put the whole thing down into a song?”

Cat may sing like Sinatra, but there’s a candidness to these numbers that saves the velvety vocals and lush arrangements from feeling too smooth. The simplicity of The Day After The Funeral, in which the narrator “eats breakfast as usual,” is genuinely touching.

There’s a good bit of soul in that slick suit.

Touring until December, details: petercat.co.uk