The Dashing Mr D'Arcy

John D’Arcy approaches, and suddenly a noble lineage straightens up, squeezes together and shuffles around to give the new boy some space.

John O’Neill and Mickey Bradley trade knowing smiles, Tim Wheeler says hello, even the adolescent lead singer of Them gives a gruff nod of the head. It’s been a while since we’ve had a new applicant seeking acceptance to the North’s blue-blooded line of teenage pop laureates, but D’Arcy, two weeks shy of his A-Level results, couldn’t be better qualified if he tried.
Eigtheen years old, and fresh of face (“I still have trouble getting served at off-licences. But thankfully the government have now given me permission with a nice provisional licence”), D’Arcy certainly meets the age criteria. However, it isn’t just his date of birth that looks set to guarantee him membership of this most exclusive of clubs. No, it’s the wide-eyed lyricism of his song-writing – where bittersweet sentiments and big emotions are painted in vivid primary colours – that shows he’s cut from some quality cloth.
Take ‘Glasgow’, where he worries about waving goodbye to schoolmates preparing to leave for university; or, more properly, the title track of his debut release The Sarah EP – a lilting, look-no-hands, freewheel of a tune, where our heroine is encouraged to take heart, stand up straight, and face the world square on.
“Oh Sarah, whatchya do with your umbrella” he sings. “Is it stuck behind the door with all the art you draw/When everybody knows it should be up on the wall/Oh Sarah it’s not hard to see what a wonderful girl you’ll grow up to be/Oh Sarah the chippy ain’t paying you enough.”
We don’t know who this Sarah one is, but someone should tell her she could soon be hanging out with Gloria, Julie Ocean and a certain Girl From Mars.
“She’s a friend of my girlfriend,” D’Arcy grins. “And she also used to go out with my best friend. We’ve all messed about with one another for ages. She asked me to write a song about her and I did.”
And did your girlfriend mind?
“No, because the song I wrote abut her is much better. It’s called ‘Moneyreagh’ and it’s about one night, just after I passed my test, when I drove her home. You get in a car and you feel like Superman. I actually came up with the idea for it as I was driving back. Sang it into the answer phone on my mobile. I’d like to stress that the car was parked at the time. I wasn’t recording and driving at the same time.”
With another track called ‘Castle St’, it seems D’Arcy has a knack for ringing poignancy from the unlikeliest of sources. Nicknamed Nerd Rock at school (a result, he says, of his tendency to enthuse, unprompted, and at length on Weezer and The Pixies), it could be tempting to pigeon-hole him as a naïve savant; but there’s a clued-in and literate quality to both the song-writing and the sentiments that suggests D’Arcy is a much more durable prospect.
A result, you suspect, of some expert home-tutoring.
“My mum and dad are both huge music fans,” he reveals. “I can remember one day going on and on about Blink 182 and my Dad put his hand up, told me to hold on for a minute and then went off and dug out a Stiff Little Fingers CD. ‘That’s where they come from, son.’ My mum and dad are pretty amazing when it comes to music. They were both big punk fans – my dad was always in and out of Good Vibrations. So, they’re always suggesting things to me. At the minute it’s The Horslips – but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to go down that route just yet.”
At the moment D’Arcy is reading John Carey’s polemic What Good Are The Arts? (“I want to be an artist, and it has definitely made me think about my motivation and where I want to go”) while also trying to get his head around Jonathan Richman (“Stuart Bailie mentioned him in a review, so I thought I’d give him a listen”), but – once he’s found out if he’s passed Music or not – his short-term goal is clear.
“I actually don’t want to release an album yet,” he says. “I want to be like Frank Black: he’d written some of Bossanova before he’d even formed The Pixies. I’d like to do it that way – stockpile loads of songs on the quiet.”

John D’Arcy will be supporting John Martyn at The Rotterdam in Belfast on September 16.