BURNING LIKE FIRE

Believe the hype. Bright Eyes - aka Conor Oberst - is making waves. A veteran at 24 - he released his first record at 15 - Oberst has refused to get into bed with the big corporations, preferring to release his own work through his own label. The George Bush-hating, Clear-Channel-loathing Nebraskan tells Brian Boyd the secret of his success

IT'S a coffee shop in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and a single spotlight picks out an under-nourished yet farouche looking young man with a guitar and a bag full of poetic tricks. It's not; it just feels that way.

In fact, it's a hideously ugly concrete bunker inside Manchester University and another folked-up wunderkind is singing "I know that it is freezing, but I think we have to walk/I keep waving at taxis; they keep turning their lights off/But Julie knows a party at some actor's west side loft/Supplies are endless in the evening; by the morning they'll be gone."

It would be safe to assume that the bespectacled, sensitive types who stand, rapt, in front of the stage tonight have not come directly from either Old Trafford or the City of Manchester stadium. It's so quiet you can hear a mobile phone drop. Problem is there's two people at the back who are wrecking the aphonic buzz by talking loudly. By the look of them, they have wandered into the wrong show - The Mars Volta are busy turning it up to 11 in the venue next door. As the singer continues, "I've got a flask inside my pocket we can share it on the train/If you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same/We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain", repeated attempts to get the pair to shut up just aren't working. The dispute is eventually resolved by means of a fistfight and the talkers are ejected, a bit bloodied and a lot bowed. Fans of Bright Eyes fight for their right to party in silence.

Later on, the show has to be stopped for a few moments. A young woman has to be lifted clear by the road crew. Not a stage-diving or mosh-pit incident, we're guessing - looks more like she's been overcome by the sheer onomatopoeia of the lyrics. It's that sort of gig.

A wide-eyed, indie gamin, Bright Eyes comes across like Mercury Rev's stoner younger brother. With his Joaquin Phoenix looks and his wounded man-child voice, he has arrived in Europe with some interesting baggage.

His real name is Conor Oberst. He comes from a place that is perhaps still best known as the title of a Bruce Springsteen album (Nebraska) and even the lost-it-a-long-time-ago Rolling Stone magazine has awoken from its slumber long enough to proclaim him as "rock's boy genius". Earlier this year, he released two albums on the same day (behaviour more usually associated with Guns 'n' Roses). One was the quite sublime, folk-doused I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning; the other was the beguiling lo-fi electronica of Digital Ash In A Digital Urn. They divided the critics only in that no one was quite sure just how many superlatives to fling at them.

Using the word "new" in relation to Conor Oberst is, though, a serious mistake. Still only 24, he has already released 10 albums, set up two record labels and fronted three bands. "Yeah, I hear the term 'child prodigy' a lot. An awful lot," he drawls. "But I've been putting out records since I was 15. It's just a case of scraping the money together somehow and selling them at local record shops and playing gigs wherever you can.

"Looking back now on some of those albums, they were a bit cheap and shitty - bad poetry and all of that - but I don't regret making them. At the time those records meant everything to me and I'm not going to take them back. But you know, you're 15 . . ."

While his previous "bad poetry" albums sold steadily enough to his devoted fan base, they were never going to lift him out of the nu-folk underground. An invitation by Bruce Springsteen and REM (both huge fans) onto last October's Vote For Change tour, (which played in key swing states in advance of the US presidential election), elevated his profile so much that by November he was occupying both the number one and number two slots on the Billboard singles chart with Lua from the acoustic album and Take It Easy from the electronica album. This feat was all the more remarkable for being accomplished on a tiny indie label which simply hadn't the resources to publicise the releases or help buy them into the charts.

Hence the anticipation for the albums proper when they were released in January. But why the Guns 'n' Roses route?

"It's not a big artistic statement at all," he says. "It's just that if you have your own label, you can do that sort of thing without anybody telling you why you shouldn't. We did I'm Wide Awake first and were really excited at the same time about Digital Ash, but I realised that if we didn't record Digital Ash immediately, we would have to tour I'm Wide Awake and then wait before doing Digital Ash, and I didn't want that to happen."

Although very different sounding records, both are unmistakably the sound of the same artist. "I think all our songs are kind of like folk songs," he says. "But you can dress up and decorate songs in different ways. Use different instruments or different recording techniques. Bright Eyes is actually a different bunch of people at different times. So it depends who is in the band at the time. Every tour is different."

As is the way with the music industry, there is now a lot of attention on Omaha, Nebraska (see panel) where Oberst's labelmates on the Saddle Creek label are being picked over as other potential next big things.

"It's at the stage now where reporters come and visit Omaha and get it totally wrong," he says. "The label is just full of people we've met along the way. It's reached this point where it's started to become surreal. Hard to understand. But I'm still proud of my friends there and the talent they have."

Despite being embraced by the mystifyingly popular US television show The OC - where his name is dropped in most every episode by the orange-skinned, angst-ridden brats - it would be a mistake to view Oberst as a fey folky who talks like a Beat poet and cultivates an enigmatic persona. At a gig in Texas last year, Oberst startled a sold-out audience by telling them: "I don't know if you know this, but I hate your fucking state. I'd put a fucking gun to my head before I'd live in your state." Adding that the people who had come to see him were obviously not "normal" Texans, he continued: "If you were a normal Texan, you'd probably be roping steers and raping Indians." The remark may or may not have been prompted by Oberst's profound dislike of Texan George W Bush. (His other profound dislike is the business practices of Clear Channel - he refuses to play in any of their venues.)

Somehow the belief has emerged, without any prompting on Oberst's part, that he is a spokesperson for the continuing anti-Iraq war protests.

Back to the Manchester show and listening as he works himself up into a rare lather while punching out what he would hate to hear called the anti-war anthem that is Land Locked Blues. On the album he is joined on vocals by the royalty that is Emmylou Harris, but here, solo, he sounds possessed as he sings: "But greed is a bottomless pit, and our freedom's a joke/We're just taking a piss and the whole world must watch the sad comic display/If you're still free start running away cause we're coming for you." And those lost five words are screamed out with a passion.

As a young veteran, Oberst seems to be coping. He laughs off all those silly "New Dylan" epithets; says he's still turning down all the multi-million dollar deals from the major labels and just wants to have a career like Neil Young or Tom Waits. "Just that sort of thing where you can put out records and do what you want to do," he says. "That would be totally rad." Believe the hype.

I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash In A Digital Urn are both on the Saddle Creek label.