Modern-day Soho is almost entirely sanitised: a cosy little enclave of digital media startups, selvage denim labs and mochaccino bars. But as darkness falls, its seedy underbelly begins to protrude, and the area just about lives up to its reputation as a den of colourful debauchery, a place where current affairs presenters clumsily grope their colleagues outside insalubrious late-night dive bars as the unmistakable tang of amyl nitrate fills the air.
This is the Soho that has forged characters like Gabriel Bruce, a former antiquarian bookseller, born in west London to a half-American, half-Brazilian father, and about to take the country by storm with his gothic disco; think Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man or Nick Cave with a drum machine, his blood-soaked vignettes served up with lashings of gallows humour.
We find Gabriel lolling by the piano in Private Eye's favourite watering hole The Coach & Horses. With his hurriedly slicked-back hair and heavy Hasidic frock coat, he looks older than his 23 years. "I've spent my whole life up to now trying not to feel young," he grins. "I think I might have finally got there." Even his suit has a history. "I've always liked tailored clothes but they're obviously very expensive, so I had to wait for someone my size to die. This suit has the name JC Young stitched into the waistband; I like to pretend it belonged to the young Jesus Christ."
Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
Gabriel's debut album Love In Arms finds him trying on a number of different outfits for size. He's a ribald provocateur on Dark Lights, Shine Loud, a Gainsbourg-style sleazebag on Zoe, a scarred ex-lover sobbing eloquently into a bloody tissue on All That I Have. "I write a song and then I cast the character to sing it," he admits frankly, shrugging off accusations of inauthenticity. "I still feel like I'm being honest because there are different parts to me. Whenever anyone sings, they're adopting a character."
After grabbing a satisfyingly doughy pork bun from the Kowloon bakery and eating it in the doorway ("No wonder I rarely get a second date"), we move on to heavy metal bar Garlic & Shots and order a round of "bloodshots" – vodka, tomato juice, garlic and raw chilli. Gabriel, who's celebrated every birthday here since his 16th, seems remarkably desensitised to the drink's fiery throttle. "My friends once bet me I couldn't drink 16 of these in a row," he boasts. "I went home with £300 in my pocket. Obviously I threw up on the nightbus."
As Motörhead assail our eardrums, Gabriel muses that "the great thing about metal is that it's very emotionally brazen. It might be two-dimensional and juvenile, but rarely in other types of music do you get such an honest outpouring of anger, sadness and pain." His previous band, Loverman, weren't metal exactly, although he admits they did get rather bogged down in the anger, sadness and pain side of things. The schlocky art-rock outfit toiled energetically but unproductively around London for a couple of years, with the knockout blow delivered when their drummer left to join the Kooks. Gabriel took this betrayal badly, erecting a tent in the middle of his rehearsal space and crawling inside with a bottle of gin every day until the rest of the band eventually slunk off, too.
'It's kind of a stupid, pretentious thing to have a human spine on the record, but then did Scott Walker really need to punch a dead pig? It becomes part of the richness of the recording'
His saviour in this dark period was an old Farfisa organ that became his musical crutch as he began to write the songs that would define his rebirth as a solo artist. If there is a certain restiveness to his album, a sense of privacy invaded, that's because Gabriel – having been turfed out of his old digs around the time of the gin tent debacle – wrote them on the floor of an overcrowded bedsit he shared with an amorous couple.
You can still hear the Farfisa buzzing away throughout the record, although the original seedy demos have been fleshed out with flourishes of orchestration and atmospheric found-sound percussion, such as the noise of Gabriel bashing away on a human spine acquired from his local taxidermist. "It's kind of a stupid, pretentious thing to have a human spine on the record," he admits, "but then did Scott Walker really need to punch a dead pig? It becomes part of the history, the richness of the recording."
Gabriel is a keen student of rock mythology. He almost moved to Berlin last year, inspired by the decadent 70s despatches of Bowie and Iggy Pop, before deciding that he didn't much care for the German language. "One of the few German words I remember is brustwarze, which means nipple," he explains, over G&Ts in Trisha's speakeasy. "A nipple is such a beautiful thing but the Germans choose to call it a breast wart. And do you know the German for pubic hair? Schamhaar, literally 'shame hair'. Which isn't much solace for a girl going through puberty."
We conclude our Soho crawl in Bar Italia, another local institution. "It's important that places like this can endure and become part of the landscape," he enthuses. "Everything's so transient these days, which isn't healthy." He takes a bite of his cannoli before continuing his diatribe against the internet age. "Artefacts that exist in the physical world are so important. You need to hold on to something to know that you're alive. The more that gets taken away from us by the internet … it's terrifying, because how can we validate our own existence? We have to touch people, physically touch people, to remind ourselves that we exist."
Suddenly Gabriel remembers which postcode we're in. "I don't mean in that way! But then, groping is important as well. You need to have a good grope every now and then." It's a sentiment that any tipsy TV newsmen stumbling past would surely endorse.
Perfect Weather by Gabriel Bruce is released 29 Oct on Luv Luv Luv. His album is due later this year
