Anyone who claims that pop music no longer boasts great characters needs to discover the music of Ben Esser, who records simply as Esser. A 23-year-old Essex boy brought up on UK garage but such a fan of legendary 60s producer Joe Meek that he’s planning to get Meek’s portrait tattooed on his chest, Esser makes music which is Reminiscent of the sunshine days when boys did cutting edge conceptual pop.

First single I Love You, three beguiling minutes of off-kilter loops and vocal samples pulled together with a dead-on pop sensibility and such wonky lyrical observations as “You bring me up then you tear me apart. Still, love is no excuse for bad art.” has already been described by NME as “playschool pirate pop”, while Popjustice.com acclaimed it as “weird but sort of brilliant”. Its video, in which he sings the lyrics into a camera while getting paint and food thrown over him, is, Ben says, a “pained artistic expression” partly influenced by the artist Martin Creed, who made a short film of a girl trying to be sick.

That’s just for starters. Released on the ultra-hip Merok label (Klaxons, Crystal Castles, Teenagers) as a limited edition of 500 7" singles, it will be released Stateside by Chocolate Industries as a 12" in an even more limited edition of 300 in letter-pressed jackets with an exclusive Prince Paul (De La Soul) remix on the B-side. I Love You will be followed up by by an album on Chocolate Industries, which gives Esser’s extraordinary imagination full rein. Produced by Lexxx (Crystal Castles), sidekick of the A-List mixer Mark ‘Spike’ Stent (U2, Madonna), Esser’s debut album “Braveface” will include songs of peculiar brilliance. There’s Headlock, which sounds like an inspired collaboration between Pharrell Williams and Jim Noir, and contains the surprising lyrical plea “Bury me in sand like a knackered stallion”. Leaving Town, a disillusioned ode to London, sees Esser reinventing trashy glam rock like young, lap-top packing Brian Eno. Stop Dancing, a moody, half-whispered, hip hop-inflected minimalist pop song, sees Esser lyrically exploring his experiences clubbing as a teenager: “It became a massive thing to get on the train from Chelmsford and go to a club in London and lose your mind”. All the songs bar one are around three minutes long. “I find it really pleasing to write something that’s concise and actually make really bold decisions about things,” he says, “because there are infinite possibilities about what something can sound like”.

Esser I Love You

Esser grew up in a house full of music – his father was, he says, “a jazzer” who used to teach at the Colchester Institute. “Family members would come over and play - there was always music happening. It was always something you’d do for fun, to get together, so that’s the attitude I grew up with.” Growing up, Esser listened to hip-hop like Slum Village and A Tribe Called Quest, but it was UK garage that made him realize it would be possible to make records himself. “At school, everyone seemed to have a friend was making a track in the studio so it was close to home, it felt like something was happening. I think I always knew that it was ridiculously cheesy and bad, but it was exciting to see what it might develop into.”

Esser started experimenting with loops and synthesizers, making “Ninja Tunes-type stuff” that he’d attempt to persuade his friends to rap on, then upon leaving school started playing drums in a covers band managed by one of Freddie and the Dreamers. “We played Mustang Sally, Beatles songs, Songs by James…” Many of their gigs were at holiday camps. “Some of them were really great because it was like classic English cabaret,” says Esser, “I remember playing in Skegness and that was amazing, this old guy who’d been an entertainers for years and years and dancers… real English holidays.” On the other hand, “Butlins on Christmas day was rough as fuck. There were massive fights between these guys who had been drinking all day and their kids were running riot – that was hell.” After almost two years, his affection for classic 60s pop “tainted by this dark memory of holiday camps and drunken women being really gross,” Esser left the covers outfit to play with two members of the “broken beat” DJ collective Bugz In The Attic, then spent another two years as the drummer in Ladyfuzz, an indie band in which at last he could play original material. He also enrolled in Music College. “Towards the second half of the last year of being in Ladyfuzz, that’s when I started to write songs. And then through that process I decided that I didn’t want to be in a band anymore, I wanted to do it on my own.”