But when I meet him in a Thamesside beer garden, he’s catty, chatty and as nice as pie. For almost a minute. Then he goes funny. “Oh, no. You’re not writing about where I live,” he stammers in response to my innocuous icebreaker: “It’s nice round here, isn’t it?��� “Nah, mate,” he says crossly. “You can’t muck about with people’s lives like that. The record company thinks it’s cool for you to know where I live, that I’m successful. But my ground is sacred ground. That’s some Hebrew wisdom, man. There’s no regard for my security. I’m not saying I’m Tom Cruise or Madonna. But in a way, I am. I’m a celebrity. I don’t need any fool entering my place.”
And this is the crux of it. Finley Quaye — 1990s pop phenomenon and fallen idol — hasn’t just moved house, he’s also moved on. He used to live on Heat-tastic Primrose Hill, a neighbour of Jude, Kate, Liam and Ewan. There, his house was a party zone. But he’s trying to forget about all that now.
Quaye arrived on the music scene perfectly formed, a proper pop star from the off. When his record company released his debut album, Maverick a Strike, in 1997, they congratulated themselves that they’d hit pay dirt. The half Scottish/half Ghanaian singer-songwriter with a Force 10 personality was a gift: a pot-toking clown who was credible enough for the cover of Dazed & Confused, but commercial enough to charm the kids on The O-Zone. He was shaping up to be the reggae Robbie Williams. Indeed, he beat Robbie, Elton John and Paul Weller to the Best Male Artist Brit award in 1998 (“I should think so, too,” he says. “Elton John? My God, what a strain. And Robbie’s a second-rate Elton John.”) Unfortunately, he turned out to be like Robbie in other ways, too. The minute the money started rolling in, Quaye, then 24, started rolling out the barrel. He filled his flat with pricey gadgets (laptops, DVD players), filled his drive with expensive motors (one Porsche, one BMW, £25,000 each: he couldn’t drive) and filled his head with drink and drugs.
After he apparently started turning up to meetings with white powder round his nose, accusing the press department at his record label of racism and running up huge bills hiring baby grands for studios he’d never visit, he began to look a lot less cuddly. His A&R man was less than impressed to find that the first people mentioned in the credits on Quaye’s album sleeve were Rolf Harris and David Attenborough. His own name was at the bottom, below Haile Selassie. Quaye was making enemies, but he was just getting started.
Although Cool Britannia was dying, he managed to catch the party just in time to become a regular falling out of the Met Bar and to cop a black eye from Goldie’s “people” after competing for the affections of Gail Porter. Following that, he stopped washing. You could find him on the streets of Camden, staggering about in a stained shell suit.
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Inevitably, Quaye wound up in The Priory. But he wasn’t there for long. They threw him out. “It was full of shit,” he says today. He did manage to make one friend while he was there: Paula Yates, whom he dated for a few months. The two of them whooped it up on a diet of ecstasy and Viagra. Unsurprisingly, his second album, Vanguard — on which he attempted to “go rock” — was patchy. That year, the only award Quaye picked up was Pot Smoker of the Year.
But that’s all vodka under the bridge now. Because today he’s back. And his forthcoming album, Much More Than Much Love, is a return to form that even the most reckless bookie wouldn’t have entertained. Zipping between joyful reggae lite, pop and West Coast country-rock, it’s got more hooks than a Peter Pan convention and a quite lovely lead-off single, Dice, with Beth Orton and William Orbit. The lyrics still come with a Finley-sized pinch of quasi-Rastafarian mumbo jumbo, but his heart’s back in it. When his people say it’s “a new chapter” for Quaye, they’re not kidding.
So perhaps it’s not too surprising that he doesn’t want any temptations knocking on his door. “There’s less distractions here,” he says with his big, toothy grin. “Primrose Hill is like Beverly Hills. It’s being down the Met Bar with the f***ing Spice Girls and all that. I’ve seen every celebrity there is to see. Now I’m just down to my guitars and songwriting.”
Does he regret his earlier fame? Did he have too much too young? “No! The bad stuff is all the press want to print about a black man. But I don’t like boozers any more. When I see people taking cocaine on a Friday night, they’re just trying to be me. Trying to live some kind of legacy. I’ve done all that.”
So, he’s trying to stay out of trouble. But it’s hard. This May, he pleaded guilty to common assault, after he attacked his former girlfriend in front of their young son. When his mobile phone went off as he stood in the dock, he was threatened with jail for contempt of court. He’s now attending a domestic-violence programme and sporadic meetings at Narcotics Anonymous, and seeing a therapist (“my coach”). “I don’t think I’ve had it worse than anybody else, problems-wise,” he says. “Or occupational hazards-wise.”
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When Quaye tucks himself up in his bed in his house in the part of London that’s to remain a secret, he has a recurring dream. It goes like this. “I’m that guy Rik from Pop Idol, and I’m in a huge birdcage surrounded by cream cakes and jam doughnuts,” he says. “And I can only get my arm out just enough to skim the cream off the top of one of them.” He chortles at the very thought of it. “Whatever I do,” he says, “I can’t quite reach the cakes.”
Finley Quaye’s single, Dice, is out on September 15. His album, Much More Than Much Love, is out on September 29