'I'm not a looker, I know that. Plus, I'm not a kid, so in a pop-music climate I know I'm a tough sell. Quite frankly, were you to say to me something along the lines of, 'come on, we've got to go see this bald guy who plays an acoustic guitar and who yells at the audience', I don't know if I'd be following you to the gig.

"But the reality of my show is that, once you see it, I have a sneaking suspicion you'll enjoy it and maybe even come back and see me again."

Ed Hamell is talking to The Irish Times from a payphone in Cleveland, Ohio. He knows there are people queuing behind him to use the phone, mouthing put-downs, but something in his presence wards them away from confronting him.

Hamell, you see, looks like a refugee from a Quentin Tarantino film, the type of bullet-headed guy who wouldn't think twice about breaking your fingers while quoting scriptures and smiling sweetly.

The US-born son of an Irish woman - Ruth Murray, about whose background he knows little; "I wasn't at home a lot, and she was quite old when I was a teenager. There are things I wish I could have asked her" - 40-something Hamell has been tinkering around the fringes of commercial success for some time.

He first picked up a guitar to play in 1968, and has gravitated from pre-punk to UK punk to US hard core to where he is now: an anti-folk singer who combines lyrical wit and vitriol with an acoustic guitar-slinging style best described as unwholesome.

Sample song titles? Go Fuck Yourself and I Hate Your Kid. The Hollywood pitch? Warren Zevon as envisioned by The Stooges.

"Punk rock is the stuff that I gravitate back towards when I listen to music," says Hamell. "There are all different periods of rock 'n' roll I listen to - I love doo-wop, rockabilly from the 1950s, pop music from the 1960s. In the 1980s, there were Hⁿsker Dⁿ, Black Flag - I loved those bands.

"When I'm at home, though, I have a tendency to listen to 1970s punk rock - The Stooges, New York Dolls, Television, Patti Smith, Lou Reed. I still listen to stuff from that era and get goosebumps."

Once signed to Mercury Records in the United States, he has for the past four years been a lone player in the music industry, a square peg in a round hole, selling his wares under the name Hamell On Trial.

"I learned a lot being on a major label," he says. "My wife doesn't like it when I say this, because she thinks it's disparaging to my art, but the reality of it is that what I do is not dissimilar to being a brush salesman.

"I sell my little brushes from place to place - I'm proud of my brushes, but I'm building accounts. The major label was very good at getting my name around to places I or an independent label wouldn't have been able to get it to.

"But now I'm reaping the benefits of what those people sowed, without having to kowtow or change my art in any way, so for me it was really advantageous.

"Being dropped was the beginning of something good, or at least that's how I interpreted it."

Despite Hamell's forbidding presence, his songs have passionate centres - "insincerity? It incites me." He reckons an artist's forbidding veneer generally hides something more real and approachable.

His songs are not contrived, he says, merely reflective of what he responds to in other people's work. Alongside the love and hate in his songs is humour, again a reflection of the influence of comedians such as Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor.

"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," he reasons. "I'm trying for the balance. My feeling about the whole thing is, what kind of an act would I want to see? What would create an epiphany in me? Patti Smith did, Lou Reed did, John Lennon and The Clash.

"What was it about those acts that worked for me? There was a balance of humour and passion. Admittedly, there was a little rhetoric, but that was generally coupled with a bit of tongue-in-cheek.

"I tried to take those recipes so that people can come to my shows and enjoy them, but the reality is that I'm playing them for me."

Does it always succeed? "Well, the first person I'm pissed off at is myself, whereas some artists say the audience sucked. My attitude is, if you can't move an audience, there's something wrong. If a gig didn't go great, but I can look myself in the eye and know I played a great gig, then I don't care.

"The gigs that don't go great, and I internally blame myself, they're the ones I get mad at. But I've been doing it long enough to know that, for most of the time, I'm going to get it right."

If Hamell's live shows crackle with spite, spit and wisecracks, his records have a tendency to be a little bit more considered. While some songs might be termed sentimental, notably I'm Gonna Watch You Sleep from his third and best studio album, Choochtown, Hamell says he doesn't have a lot of tolerance for sentiment.

"Probably, I am more than I would ever have let on, but I'm very sceptical of sentiment when I see it in people. I'm curious as to what the ploy might be. Actually, I'm about as sentimental as John Lennon - I'm very cautious about the way that I am in that respect."

Is he a misanthrope, then? "I have a great love for humankind," he says, and you don't know whether there's a smirk on his face.

Twigging a cynical silence between questions, he quickly remarks: "I know people are sceptical of that, but if you listen to everything I say and sing at a gig, you might change your mind."

He's probably right, but the show of, at the very least, a consideration for the opinions of others might not have been so apparent if it hadn't been for a near-death accident Hamell experienced just over a year ago.

On his way to a show in Pittsburgh, he was run off the road, his car flipping over a couple of times, resulting in three broken vertebrae, a broken wrist and a head criss-crossed with more than 50 staples.

Strapped in a full body brace for four months, he started to walk again a couple of months later. Then came the slow pace of getting his life and career back together.

"In many respects it was a great leveller," says Hamell. "I always loved playing, but I really appreciate playing now. I was definitely making deals - don't take me now!

"My wife and I have been together for 15 years, but we're good buddies as well as lovers, and it made me appreciate that as well. She's pregnant now, so the whole thing has been kind of cool."

So there you have it: a bald guy with spidery staple marks on his skull, a singer-songwriter more influenced by punk rock than by Nick Drake, the writer of I Hate Your Kid - "my most universal song!" - and an impending father. Ed Hamell? He's probably the find of the year.

"I either don't fit in at all, or I do in a really big way," he says. "What I do could be very, very huge and people will identify with it, or I keep on doing what I'm doing and I weigh in underneath the radar beams. I don't think there'll be any middle ground.

"But hey, I'm really happy and proud of my art. I've built up my little business and I do very well. If it never gets any bigger than this, it'd still be great. It's a win-win situation."

Hamell On Trial plays Whelans, Dublin, on August 21st