Ken Sweeney rarely looks at you when he's talking. It's almost as if he's afraid that you'll question his honesty, eyeball him up and suggest to him that both he and his songs are contrived and dis-honest and silly and trite. They're not, Ken, see, just lacks all the confidence in the world. And now he's about to put out his first album of wonderful love songs. It's almost as if he's about to have his revenge on anyone who's ever sniggered or made fun of his shyness.

"You need to get a long way from Dublin to find out exactly who you are and what you really want to do", he says. "People in Dublin are very good at reminding you of what you did when you were 16. They're unwilling to accept you in any other way."

Brian is Ken Sweeney, Ken used to hang around with one of Dublin's best ever bands, The Blades, and named his band after their bass-player. His songs are, ..erm "understated", like a very subtle acoustic mish-mash of all the best Go-Betweens and Stars Of Heaven bits. And the fact that he's about to put out a record is well, quite unusual. "Brian" is not a career thing and it was never meant to be a career thing. I never had any ambition to put out a record and I came to London, basically, to get away from Dublin and get a proper job and I realised that there were lots of people I was never going to see again. The record "Understand" is about and for the people I've left behind. "Understand" is eight warm songs, recorded dead cheaply, songs that mention the word "Understand" quite a bit and have titles that give you all sorts of clues-"Big Green Eyes" "You Don't Want A Boyfriend" and "Don't Leave Me Behind". "This record is not coming from a desire to get status, from a desire to shag women. It's just a very human record, something that means quite alot to me."

Someone, somewhere, you know, might think that this is the best thing they've ever heard.