Kidday!

For the past two years, Colin Campbell aka Kidd Dynamo has, depending on his mood, been quietly turning up for gigs around Belfast, either on his own with a battered acoustic guitar, or backed up by his three noisier friends - Gavin Cole, Raymond McGratten and Phil Porter. Whatever the guise, these shows - packed as they are with moments of pure pop loveliness - have inevitably tended to throw into relief the more cocksure posturing of some of his contemporaries. As it stands, quite a few people are now talking about Colin in appropriately hushed tones. Speaking of him as an East Belfast Badly Drawn Boy. Trying to guess how he and his band-mates could fit into the new acoustic wigwam. Wondering if he's a singer-songwriter, a frontman, or (following his spell as drummer for Desert Hearts) a jobbing muso. They needn't bother. After all, if you're versatile enough to shine during support slots with both the folky-veteran Joan Armatrading, and bowl-headed indie siblings The Webb Brothers, then why worry about boxing yourself off.

"The Joan Armatrading thing was dead weird," says Colin. "It was in the main hall of the Waterfront and I'd never played anywhere even close to being that big before. The audience was made up of mum and dad types who didn't have a clue who I was. They were probably being polite, but I was doing a lot of my finger-picking, quiet songs and they seemed to like it. But I'd go anywhere where people are prepared to listen to me. As far as I'm concerned, I'm only interested in shaking things up, not doing something just because it's expected."

Hailing from Carryduff, Colin has been writing songs "since I learned how to play the guitar". It wasn't, though, until his final year at Art College in Dublin that, inspired by the progress of his friends back home, he decided to take things seriously.

"There really didn't seem to be that much going on in Dublin, and when I came up to Belfast or spoke to mates on the phone, they'd all be talking about the gigs their bands were playing in the city centre. They were all playing shows and lots of people were going to see them and it sounded dead exciting. I just felt that it was about time that I started to move in that direction. I knew that that was what I should have been doing. So, I just spent the last year in college counting the days down until I came back."

Since then progress has been impressive. High(ish) profile support slots like those mentioned above, a few wonderful sessions for Radio Ulster and Radio One, and a series of memorable gigs (including 'Ginger Night', a pre-Christmas show of solidarity for red-heads) have seen Kidd Dynamo become one of the few must-see acts in the city. Which is quite an achievement, given Colin's initial reluctance to go on stage.

"I used to hate playing live - get totally nervous and uncomfortable. But people that know me have been saying how much more confident I look now, and I think a lot of that is down to how much better we're getting and how much the songs are improving."

They may not have released a single yet, or managed to snag a record deal (although signs at the moment are promising), but Kidd Dynamo are a faith-restoring treat. For evidence, 'Closed The Shop', the song they finish their set with - a heartfelt ode to changing times that, in a town where most bands at the moment appear to be writing in a contextual vacuum, could well be one of the great Belfast songs of the new century.

"There used to be a corner shop in Carryduff called The Cascade and I'd go in with the pound my mum had given me for pocket money and buy my Beano, a 10p mix-up, computer magazines, stuff like that. Then one day it was closed, and to get anything I had to go to the fucking Spar up the road. Something that had been there for as long as I could remember, and all of a sudden it was gone. Like, what happened to the old couple that used to own it? An ex-girlfriend actually wrote a few lines of that with me, and it has that old break-up thing about it - things ending."

No, it's only just begun.