After being thrust into the limelight with the massive hit You’re Gorgeous, Stephen Jones, better known as Babybird, went back to doing his own thing – to the delight of his army of fans (including Hollywood star Johnny Depp). TIM HUGHES finds out more.

FOR a man who has had a 17-year career, sold more than two million records, earned a top three hit, and has Johnny Depp as a fan and collaborator, Stephen Jones might be expected to be fiercely ambitious.

But not a bit of it. The artist better known as Babybird is never happier than doing his own thing – whether anyone likes it or not.

“I never really wanted to be commercial. Lyric-wise some of my music is difficult to take,” he explains.

“I like to write about dark subjects. ‘I love you, you love me’ does not interest me. I prefer to take on big subjects like religion, marriage and other big institutions. I like reality rather than ‘my baby left me’.

So imagine his surprise when, in 1996, a typically moody song with dark lyrics became an overnight success. The single, You’re Gorgeous, was one of the year’s biggest hits, assured his reputation, and is still his greatest claim to fame.

“It just blew up,” he says, clearly still surprised at the attention. “People don’t believe it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to make a hit. I never expected it to be that big.”

And it has underscored his career ever since.

“It means I’ve been able to afford to carry on,” he says. “That one song has become my currency in music and the money it makes supports me and allows me to do exactly what I want.

“But while the band enjoyed it, the problem was the record company was pushing us to reproduce that.” He didn’t, of course. That, after all, is not what Babybird does. What followed was a return to form as a cult artist, with records, some released under his own name, aimed squarely at his real fans – though his track The F-Word later shot to fame as the theme tune to the Gordon Ramsay TV programme.

“I reacted against it,” he says.“I couldn’t go anywhere without people singing You’re Gorgeous at me. It was overwhelming.”

To escape the attention, he moved from London to rural Cheshire, in the heart of WAG territory.

“On stage I’m a bit of a lunatic, but in reality I’m a bit shy, so the next step was very dark and my music became very different.”

Then things took another strange turn when Hollywood star Depp, a long-term Babybird fan, made a cameo on the track Unloveable, from Jones’s Ex-Maniac album. The hearthrob also directed a hard-hitting video.

“It was a nice thing,” he says warmly.

“Johnny is fantastic. I’ve known him for nine years. He got in touch to say he loved all my music and arranged for me to go and meet him. It’s his dark sense of humour – and the fact he used to be a musician before he became an actor.

“A lot of people don’t know Johnny plays guitar. Movie stars playing instruments in bands have always been slated, but he is different as he did music first. And that’s why he likes us.”

Johnny also sings on the new album – The Pleasures of Self Destruction. The record is pure Jones – deeply engaging but with little concession to mass appeal or chart ambition. Which is just what fans, like Johnny, have come to expect.

Jones goes on the road to tour the album this month, with a show at the Oxford O2 Academy. Though sadly without Depp.

“I’m really excited about touring,” says Stephen. “It is, after all, the whole point of doing it for so long.

“I am nervous though; I always am when I have a new album out.”

It seems unfeasible that this most confidently self-assured of artists would still suffer nerves this far into his career.

“It’s true,” he says. “When you’re in the studio, the record is your own baby, but when it comes out you never know how it’s going to go.

“In terms of sales I’ve never been famous, but praise is still nice.”

He is being modest. Since starting out as part of an experimental theatre group in Sheffield, he has acquired a solid reputation as an artist’s artist; a man who does his own thing. True, that has often been at the expense of mass appeal, and the riches which come with it, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I don’t think people expect artists to go on this long,” he says. “People usually come and disappear, especially bands from the 90s. But I’ve always done this.

“My memory of ’96 is a blur now. There was so much going on then, now I have got room to breath and be more considered.” * Babybird plays the Oxford O2 Academy on Sunday, January 29, at 7pm. Tickets are £15 from ticketweb.co.uk New single Can’t Love You Any more is out, on Unison, on Monday.