IN his neat little black suit, he could be any other small-framed Falls Road man, heading down to the Cumann Chluain Ard for his nightly pint. With his black pony-tail and his dreamy green eyes, he could be a "volunteer", straight off the set of Some Mother's Son. But his neat little lapel bears no fainne, no Pioneer pin, and no green ribbon. It bears a red ribbon, in support of HIV sufferers.

In any case, the black patent shoes give the game away: Brian Kennedy has deliberately refused the role models offered to him as a boy born to a Lower Falls Road family in 1966.

"Our street was the whole world when I was growing up and singing did separate me. I wasn't included in all the gangs, because it was considered effeminate. But it also saved me."

Having a voice has long been the best way to get out of a ghetto, and Brian Kennedy has made full use of his magnificent high tenor, which curls itself over notes like melting chocolate. He is thankful that he avoided the cage-like male role which has developed in Troubles-torn, working-class Belfast: "There's a lot of suppressed anger about unemployment, and when education is taken away from you, you can't even express yourself. Then men, from Gerry Adams to whoever, were targets and were arrested without question if they were over 16. I couldn't stay the way I was and stay there I would have had to get an awful lot harder. You couldn't be interested in being emotional and expressive, it challenged too much. In a ghetto, you have to have cast-iron values, because you're too scared to think. For people like me our colour was just too bright and we had to leave."

By "people like me", he clarifies, he means men who want to connect emotionally with other people: "In that situation, men only touch each other at a fight, or a funeral or a football match. Football doesn't appeal to me, and don't go to many funerals, thank God, and fights don't appeal to me. And I have a craving for emotional attachment. whether it be with a man or a woman, it doesn't matter."

Although the title track and Life. Love and Happiness have been the Top 10 singles from Kennedy's No. 1 album, A Better Man, the slow, plaintive numbers, seemingly custom-made for a first snog on the dance-floor, are surely the best. And they express a huge emotional hunger. Won't You Take Me Home? written with Andy Hill, sends Kennedy's voice soaring and then breaking artfully on the lines: "Give me just one night/ For all I own/I'm so alone/ Oh won't you take me home."

His wonderful voice was an obvious expression of this emotional longing, and marked Kennedy as different as surely as if he had had a stamp on his forehead. He discovered his voice early: "Some kids are into kicking footballs or climbing trees, but I was into harmonising with the radio - or with an ambulance siren, whatever."

Having a high voice was bad enough, without taking an obvious interest in singing, which Kennedy quickly did: "I was walking home from playing in the park one day, and I met my Dad with his friend from running, whose son was in St John's Folk Choir. I was filthy, I had muck all down my front, but he took me along that night, and I sang away, quietly at first. It developed from there. I got a name for myself as a singer and began to be asked to do weddings. There isn't anything else I do nearly as well."

He wasn't yet 20 when he packed up his voice and went off to see the world, which meant London: `I got two weeks' dole and bought a single ticket to London. I had £10 change, and a phone number. When I got to London, I phoned the number and was told what tube station to get off at. The tube ride was longer than the flight, and I thought London was a planet."

It took him several years to attract the attention of the record company BMG, and his first two albums The Great War Of Words (which made it to No 1 in Ireland) and Goodbye To Song Town (made with ex-Fairground Attractions member, Mark Nevin) are now deleted. BMG has been restructured and has a new MD; the first two albums may be re-released next year. But A Better Man was bound to get a whole different level of attention anyway, because of Kennedy's role as canary to Van Morrison's crow. His voice is a beautiful shimmer behind the melody in Van's two most recent albums, A Night In San Francisco and Days Like This, particularly on tracks like No Religion and Ancient Highway.

"What I mostly share with him is a passion about singing and not being able to do anything else," says Kennedy. Although the two men had met some time before at an awards ceremony - and Kennedy "got a nice feeling from him" - their professional collaboration began when Morrison heard Kennedy sing one of his songs as part of an effort to put together a peace album, which was never made. They discovered a mutual love of blues stars like Sam Cooke and Nat King Cole, and took it from there: "I felt I was being stretched. I felt my voice was occupying more of my body," says Kennedy. "The most generous thing he did was create a space for me where it was up to me to do what I liked.

stuff. Often we'd have the stuff thrown down in front of us in the studio, to see how we'd react, like in Ancient Highway. He's interested in us reacting from the heart, not the head." Kennedy has done a lot of singing for Morrison's next album, provisionally called The Healing Game.

Kennedy didn't" listen much to Van when he was growing up; Kate Bush was his great love, along with Joni Mitchell and Tony Bennett: "I came from a poor family, and for a long time I didn't listen to anything," he adds, however. He doesn't have a background in traditional music .either, but he has made fabulous forays into that territory, singing As I Roved Out on Donal Lunny's Common Ground album, and collaborating with Niamh Parsons.

"Eist, the Maire Brennan song which opened TnaG, is his first recording in Irish.

When I suggest that the most dominant indigenous music of the moment, from that of Morrison, to Christy Moore, Daniel O'Donnell, to the Black sisters, is folk with its roots in traditional, he agrees. "Van is essentially a blues singer, but definitely you can hear something traditional in it. A sense of longing, loss."

Carrickfergus is a song which always makes him cry: "Because of the nature of our oppression as a race, expression became sacred because it was forbidden. And in order for that song to exist so beautifully now, there must be all that in it, and I connect with it. He had a boundary in his head at first, he says, thinking he could not sing traditional songs as he didn't have that background, "but when I open my mouth to sing this stuff, it comes out. I'm, very, very intrigued to do more.

A Count John McCormack de nos jours, his high, pure tenor seems to rise above the constraint of the Hesh, the constraint of gender, to give expression to anyone who wants it. In his personal life, he refuses the constraint of gender roles too, which has led to loud speculation about his sexual orientation.

"Honestly. in my heart of hearts, if I was to proclaim myself as gay, I would not be honest, and if I was to proclaim myself as heterosexual, I would not be honest. And I'm not currently having sex with anybody. I'm honestly saying these labels don't describe my mind, my heart, my sex drive, they are someone else's narrow definition.

"I represent myself, no other community, from one week to the next," he adds cheerfully, "I don't know which end of me's up."