"I have got a bit of a split personality. It's really Alan who sits in the studio all day writing the music. And then, when he's finished, he has a few drinks and turns into Jim Noir."

So says Alan Roberts, aka Jim Noir, a 23 year old from suburban Manchester who makes psychedelic pop drenched with so much sunshine one critic has declared "he may actually be Brian Wilson".

Now a name to be dropped in the coolest of circles, the whole Jim Noir thing started out as a joke, a silly pseudonym which Roberts adopted for the purposes of messing around on kiddie keyboards with his schoolmate.

The schoolmate went by the name of Batfink. The duo wowed a school assembly with their rendition of 808 State's In Yer Face and won a pair of Batman water pistols at a talent contest at a holiday camp in Newquay, before progressing to "mad electronica".

The latter, says Noir, is "the music I'm deadly into". The whole brilliantly melodic West Coast pop thing, that was also just a bit of a joke.

"The music I do with Batfink hasn't exactly got the biggest market," says Noir. "So I just thought, 'I wonder if I can get signed,' made four poppy tunes up and sent them off. A few days later I got a phone call. I thought, 'That was easy.'"

Soon Noir had sold out three limited edition 7 inches and last December they were re-released in the form of debut album Tower Of Love, an utterly joyful record which is sophisticated in its arrangement and childlike in its immediacy.

Ninety-nine per cent of it was recorded by Noir, alone, in his bedroom at his parents' house.

"It was tiny and smelly and the wallpaper was Man City blue," he says.

"I used to cut things out of magazines and glue them up everywhere, and I had an Orb poster. It was just a little tiny room full of clutter. I guess that's what the album's like."

The one thing missing in the Jim Noir story to date has been live shows but now he's borrowing labelmate Jack Cooper's band and heading out on the road in support of new single In The Key Of C, which he describes as "my best song yet", excepting the mad electronica, of course.

"I felt like a best-kept secret when I was about 17," Noir says, "and I'm still content I'm ahead of most people. Give it 20 years and this is what Manchester will sound like."

Starts at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £6, call 01273 647100