If a stifled adolescence is the key to a great record, Stephen Fretwell’s career is pretty much taken care of. Having grown up in “the shithole” of Scunthorpe, the young Fretwell made good his escape to the spiritual home of New Order, The Smiths et al. as early as he could.

“I escaped when I was about 18, me and three friends enrolled into the University of Manchester,” he recalls. “There was that small town paranoia buzz in Scunthorpe, where you try anything to get out. If you say in Scunthorpe, ‘I want to be a painter, a writer or a musician,’ they’d just laugh at you. The local press rip me to shreds. In Manchester, you say you wanna be an artist and they’re like, ‘Fucking hell, go for it, we’ll help you out’."
Having decided not to succumb to a fate of “playing in Del Amitri cover bands” in his hometown, Fretwell found that his romantic notion of a post-Hacienda Manc music community was in fact a reality.
“People like Elbow, Doves and I Am Kloot have been really helpful,” he admits. “It was nice to be taken in as one of their own. Everyone goes to London and deals with that bullshit, and you come back here and you’re told to behave. It’s dead healthy. The funny thing about Manchester is that everyone makes serious dowdy music but then everyone is funny as fuck.”
Although his debut album Magpie invites comparison to the anthemic likes of Snow Patrol and Coldplay, Fretwell is hell-bent on “keeping it real”.
“I’m immensely flattered being compared to them, but at the same time worried that there’s a lot to live up to,” he explains. “I don’t want to be the Great White Hope and then have people say, ‘He fucked it up’. I just want to keep doing music as a way of life.”
So he’s in no rush to find himself an A-list actress wife like Chris Martin did, then?
“Ah, the A-lister would be alright as long as I didn’t have to do the red carpet thing,” he laughs. “I suppose though she could go out to those things on her own. Seriously though, I’d be crap at celebrity. I’d open up the paper one day and read that I had 20 illegitimate children!”
As the newest addition to Universal’s Fiction label (home also to Snow Patrol), Fretwell is adamant that there’s little pressure on him – internal or otherwise – to scale the heights of commercial success just yet.
“I think a lot of bands are jealous of me ‘cos there’s no pressure on me to break, it seems,” he muses. “I didn’t make an expensive record. They’re like, ‘Fucking Fretwell… why do we have to get our hair cut and he doesn’t?’ Actually, they probably will put pressure on me with the next album. I’ll probably be swanning around enjoying myself, next thing they’ll make me go into Toni & Guy, where I’ll be sat next to Tom Baxter.”

Magpie is out now on Fiction.