Irishman has eye on the prize - and on reaching new audience

AT THE launch of the Mercury Prize shortlist last week, Irish multi-instrumentalist Conor O'Brien - aka Villagers - demonstrated how to silence a room of jaded industry types with an intense acoustic interpretation of the title track of his debut album, Becoming a Jackal.

With his severe monk's haircut and an unnerving stare, this diminutive man is 27 but looks 12. It was like being serenaded by the kid from The Sixth Sense.

Thumping the body of his guitar and at times singing in his quivering, dramatic voice without any accompaniment, he offered a remarkably prescient summing-up of the day's events in the song's lyrics: "So before you take this song as truth/You should wonder what I'm taking from you/How I benefit from you being here/Lending me your ears while I'm selling you my fears."

In his home country, the public are clamouring for those fears, snapping up an album O'Brien says was influenced by Neil Young and Hermann Hesse. Becoming a Jackal went to number one in Ireland when it was released in May on Domino Records, home of past Mercury winners Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand. It's also hotly tipped to win the Irish equivalent of the Mercury, the Choice Music Prize.

The Irish had a head start on O'Brien, though, having already fallen for his previous band, The Immediate. These instrument-swapping indie rockers, schoolfriends from Malahide near Dublin, fell victims to their own hype and split up after just one album in 2007. "They're still my best friends but we weren't into what we were doing any more," he tells me. "Ending it was the best thing we could have done for our own sanity."

Over here the Mercury nod will shine a welcome spotlight on one of the more distinctive singer-songwriters to emerge in recent years. As one of the judges I'm not allowed to tip O'Brien to win (we won't be deciding until 7 September, anyway), but I can say he thoroughly deserves his place among the 12 nominees.

O'Brien says he is happy to stand alongside the token jazz act as the token Irishman (past nominees from over the water include Snow Patrol, Fionn Regan and even U2 for Achtung Baby) and is hoping for a win for his labelmates Wild Beasts if he fails himself. The bookies are currently placing him behind his friends but ahead of the more famous Paul Weller, Dizzee Rascal and Corinne Bailey Rae at 10/1.

He's also excited about the 20,000 prize pot ("I've only just found out there's money involved") but is mainly proud that the award is purely about the album. "It's especially pleasing that it's a prize for the album as a full body of work because that's how I want it to be experienced."

Something of a control freak, O'Brien played every instrument on Becoming a Jackal apart from the French horn and the strings that give it such a richness. As if that weren't enough, he also drew the album's striking sleeve and animated his own artwork for a video for the standout ballad, The Meaning of the Ritual. "In my old band there wasn't really a frontman. Being the focal point now took a bit of getting used to, but it's actually a lot easier," he says.

The project has been a labour of love since the day after The Immediate split, when he wrote his first Villagers song early in the morning with a splitting hangover. During two years spent as the touring guitarist in Dublin singer Cathy Davey's band, he wrote and recorded in every spare moment he had.

The attention to detail is telling. O'Brien has created an entire world here, a darkly theatrical, extremely beautiful collection about ghosts and saints, heaven and hell, tigers and buses. Singing like a choirboy or howling like a wolf, even when he sings "I'm spitting words but there's no meaning" it all makes a strange kind of sense.

l Villagers play Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, on 6 August, as part of the Edge festival. www.theedgefestival.com