Johnny Dowd didn't release his debut album, Wrong Side of Memphis, until he was 48, and everything about him announces that he is a man who makes his own rules. He was born in Texas and grew up in Oklahoma, and his dry Okie accent is the perfect vehicle for his graveyard humour and sardonic observations. "I don't see myself as the future of rock'n'roll or anything like that," Dowd has said, but some of his fans would beg to differ. "You're a fuckin' sex machine, man!" yelled one (male) heckler. Dowd nearly smiled.

He has evidently led a fairly demanding life, including divorce, a stint in the army and plenty of manual labour, although allegedly he now runs a trucking company in upstate New York when he is not performing.

But his biography pales alongside the fictional lives he weaves through his songs. Accompanied by drums, a second guitar and the childlike keyboard doodlings of his mysterious accomplice Kim Sherwood-Caso, Dowd flays blood-curdling licks from his guitar as he roars out songs about drink, drugs, lust and horrific car wrecks. In The Pawnbroker's Wife, the combo concoct an essay in putrid funk, then lurch from the jagged rumba of I Got a Worried Mind to the ramshackle raunch of Lost Avenue. Dowd flags his musicians to a halt before launching into a stark spoken narrative about a guy who spent most of his life on Death Row after he murdered his gal. "I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, I'm gonna die here in Memphis, Tennessee," he concludes, sending a chilly breath of mortality through the room.

But there is a sly undercurrent of wit too. Before he launched into the slow, worn-out blues of I Hope That You Don't Mind, he spun out a deadpan yarn about how he knew his woman had found another man when he found a set of golf clubs in the closet. "It made me decide..." pondered Dowd, "... to give up golf?" shouted somebody at the back of the room. Dowd could give doom a good name.