JERSEY BOY

From the streets that gave us Springsteen and the Sopranos come a new voice, Pete Yorn - an all-American rocker with the bellow of Bruce and the melody of Morrissey.

"Hands up all the Americans here tonight," commands Pete Yorn from the stage of the Garage in Highbury, north London. On cue, a small sea of Yankee arms climbs above the melee, and the 27-year-old singer-songwriter smiles wryly before launching his band into their anthemic stateside hit, "For Nancy ('Cos It Already Is)." Gratifyingly for Yorn, the song receives a lusty welcome from both the sizeable US contingent and the smaller home-grown section of the audience. To Yorn's countrymen he's a star already : his debut album, musicforthemorningafter, was released to great acclaim in the US early last year, and is closing in on half a million sales. To the rest of us, he might initially appear to be just another lovelorn troubadour with a battered guitar, a nice line in jean jackets and a voluminous head of hair. But such preconceptions are quickly dispelled at this London gig, Yorn's second after a tiny showcase last January. 

Yorn opens his set with the Smiths' "Panic," takes his leave with a punchy cover of Iggy Pop and David Bowie's "China Girl" and, in between, accommodates a quick burst of his fellow New Jersey-born rocker Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City." The rest of the show consists of songs from the album, each of which marks Yorn out as a young man with an acute - and tuneful - case of Anglophilia as well as a predilection for wearing his references on his sleeve.

To anyone with a copy of his CD, Yorn's jackdaw tendencies in concert will come as no surprise. Neatly blending bellicose Americana of the Springsteen variety with the maudlin introspection of the Smiths, and throwing in some hefty Peter Hook bass lines for good measure, musicforthemorningafter, finally released here in April, is as confident a calling card as any recent American rock debut, right up there with Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker and the Strokes' Is This It.

On the particular morning after the gig, the man is displaying exemplary recovery skills. The previous night he had returned to his hotel for a bout of late-night  carousing. Now, having had no sleep at all, he will pose for photos before grabbing pizza for lunch (American Hot, appropriately enough), appear on MTV and then catch a plane to Amsterdam for more of the same. "It is," he notes with typical understatement, "a lot of work."

A week or so later, back in London and still betraying no hint of tiredness, Yorn hooks up with GQ again, for a mid-afternoon pint in a pub just north of Oxford Street. "You drinking Guinness?" he grins. "Guess I'll join you, brother."

Yorn was born and raised in the small town of Montville, New Jersey, 40 minutes due west of New York City. The song of a dentist he had, he says, a traditional middle-class American childhood riding BMX bikes through the local woods, playing basketball, drinking beer, riding in cars with girls. His interest in music started young, thanks to his older brothers Kevin, now a successful LA entertainment lawyer, and Rick, a Hollywood talent manager. "All of their friends would come over and play Judas Priest and Iron Maiden covers in the basement," remembers Yorn. "I would just sit down there and watch them for hours. That's where I got my love for music. Just hearing it in the house."

By the age of nine, Yorn had learned to play drums from brother Rick and they then began to write songs. At this stage, their tastes had broadened to include many of the bands whose influence he carries today: REM, the Smiths, the Cure, the Clash and Joy Division, among others.

At 16, Yorn was the drummer in Cheese; later he formed his own band, which he called River Blindness "until I found out it was a horrible disease in Africa." He won a talent show at school, singing Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World." and took runner-up too, playing "Talent Show" by the Replacements - his first witty cover version. At Syracuse University Yorn honed his songwriting and played drums in yet another outfit with an ungainly name, Andy Says 15. By the time he graduated and moved west, aged 21, in the summer of 1996, Yorn was ready to rock and roll.

His first gig was at this place called Dragonfly, on Santa Monica Boulevard. "I was all like, 'We're gonna get a record deal!' I didn't know anything about the business. But it was great. We rocked it." Despite Rick and Kevin's connections, it took three years of gigging around LA before Yorn was signed by Columbia in June 1999. By then he had attracted a live following, but it wasn't all gravy: "There would be days when I would wake up and feel I was on the right path; but there were days I'd wake up and just be like, 'Maybe I should do something else.'"

Once he'd signed the contract, the work began in earnest. "Getting a record deal is just the first part of it," Yorn says. "It's like getting in your car to go on a trip and you've just put your seat belt on. You haven't even backed out the driveway yet. My brother was like, 'Dude, don't worry. Just make a fucking great record. Make the best record you know how to.' So that's what I did."

The result, musicforthemorningafter, recorded in the blistering heat of Van Nuys, California, and then later in Culver City, LA, quickly made him famous. "It doesn't feel overwhelming," he reflects on his new status. "I feel like I'm right where I wanna be. It's the kind of thing that's still in-the-know but not too small. It's a cool place to be." And the coolest thing of all? "Hearing 'For Nancy...' or 'Strange Condition' on the radio in between Limp Bizkit and an Incubus song," he says. "I feel we pulled one over their eyes. I think a lot of people who grew up with that prefab-anger rock and pop stuff are growing out of it. They're looking for something else." and that something else might just be what Yorn describes as "hopeful songs."

"I don't think they're whiny at all," he says. "There are a lot of end-of-relationship songs but they're not like, 'Oh baby, I want you back. Just give me another chance.' They're more like, 'Fuck it. All right then. Let's move on.' That's what it's all about for me, anyway."

What it's also all about is hard work. "It is tough," he says. "I've done a lot of radio interviews, flying to three cities in one day, just introducing myself to the industry, proving I'm serious and I can play. I pretty much couldn't say no to anything for a while. I just sucked it up."

"There were days," he continues, "when I'd play a gig, party all night, get on the bus, get woken at 6am, go and play on TV, then go to a radio station, then do an in-store show, then a sound check, play another gig, do the same and then meet all these people and end up drinking; and then you've got to drive again. It takes its toll on you."

The next day, we get to witness this promotional slog first-hand when Yorn plays a set at the launch of BBC's new digital radio station, 6 Music, in London. Mingling backstage with Lenny Kravitz and the Stereophonics, things don't seem to be taking too much of a toll on our man. Later that evening, we join him at his Mayfair hotel, where the band, their frontman and assorted GQ associates gather round the grand piano for a well-oiled singsong which lasts almost until those of us with day jobs are expected back at our desks. 

The following morning Yorn's on the phone, apologizing for ducking out of our plan to go shopping together. He's got more radio stuff to do and then he's off to Milan. "I had a break last month," he says. "I remember being moody the whole time and I didn't understand why. And then I realized that I hadn't been playing every night. Even though I was in the studio recording a lot of good stuff, it was the playing that I missed."

And with that he's gone, off to another city, plugging the album, telling the story. Sucking it up. "The great thing is the record seems to have legs," Yorn had said a few days earlier. "It seems to be steady - not too big, not too small. And it's enabled me to make another. "Look out for the follow-up. If he keeps going like this, Yorn's going to have quite a few more mornings after to soundtrack.