TO those people who think that life in a moderately successful rock band is an undisguised blessing, let them hear a salutary tale from Nick Kelly. Nick used to be lead singer and songwriter in an Anglo Irish band called The Fat Lady Sings. Formed in the mid 1980s, the band immediately found favour with fans of strong, melodic rock music and articulate, literary based lyrics. They maintained that they were folk musicians with guitars rather than rock stars; but stardom seemed to beckon too, when they signed to East West, a major offshoot of Warner Records.

Kelly seemed to be firing on all his creative cylinders. He has always been one of the most poetic lyric writers around and his songs have been, at best, lucid and enlightening. At worst they have been a jumble sale of loose ideas and stray thoughts.

"Lyric writing is tricking your body into work," he says. "It's a visceral thing to do. What I always have is a tune and a song title. Phrases, words, couplets, or even four rhyming lines come later."

In 1991 the band released their debut album, Twist, which was followed by Johnson two years later. Then, shortly after Johnson was released, and when he seemed on the cusp of international success, Nick split up the band.

Nick had come face to face with a problem that proved insurmountable. "It was something that had been brewing in me for quite a while," he begins tentatively, somewhat wary of an interview process that he once used to enjoy. "Things go on in the back of your head, and then very clearly you say, `this has got to stop.'"

While from an outsider's perspective, everything seemed rosy in the garden of The Fat Lady Sings, in truth, Nick was having a miserable time. "I had grown to hate the way it was working for me. It might be a male characteristic, and it could well be a driven person's characteristic, but you don't attend to realising that you are unhappy. You could be working hard, and saying to yourself that things will be better next week, but suddenly you know you hate what it is `that you're doing.'"

"I'd put a lot of myself into Johnson, emotionally, and in much more practical ways than is normal for people in bands. I felt that the ball was getting dropped in many ways, and I wasn't prepared to let that happen again. But eventually I felt that no matter what I did for Johnson, it would never be enough to make the album happen. Something in me just went. I realised that if the industry structure isn't right, it doesn't matter how hard you work. I have low expectations of other people, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, so I wouldn't assume that someone in record companies would do this or that right. So I would check on them, again, not a bad thing, but it brought it home to me that you can't do this by yourself. Everything is a meeting, and everyone is sucked into these ridiculous record company loops by people, who are afraid of losing their jobs. After a while you can't even work out whether you believe yourself."

Nick's problem was not with the people befriending him and working with and for him, but with the working methods of the music business itself, a nebulous yet all consuming process that he thinks will ultimately be destructive for the industry. "All this stunts the creative process," he contends. "Johnson was a really good record but the thing that became stunted was me. Along the way, I realised, quite suddenly but very profoundly, that I couldn't go through the same process again without literally, making myself sick or mad. And I wouldn't use those words lightly."

Periods of recuperative time were spent in London Dublin and Brussels, engaging in therapeutic bouts of short story writing, enforced makeshift poetry and jerky lounge core dancing. Very much interested in the way in which the artist is regularly perceived as a mirror image of his work as opposed to his real self Nick slowly evolved a sense of well being when he discovered that people wanted to know him for what he was, and not for what he did.

"I felt a much more attractive person after a while. You carry out very funny experiments on yourself. I went to an evening drama group in London, and didn't talk to anyone until they talked to me, which is not how it would be for me normally. I wanted to see how people reacted to me when I was not, effectively, doing anything. No one had to like me, or to be forced at the point of a gun into thinking I was talented or good.

"I did a few other things like that, and at the end of them I felt much more secure than I'd ever felt before. That type of feeling is in lots of people who are artistic. It's cancer of the ego, because otherwise why would anyone, go around and grab people by the lapels, and say, `look at me, I'm great'. Everybody wants to be loved a bit, but artists want to be, loved more than just a bit. If a deviant thing is normal amongst a particular community, then I think that's defining of artists. I've always had that thing, even before I was in a band - my default setting was to assume that people didn't like me. It's nice to think that people reckon you're OK. It's corny, but it's true."

Nick's debut solo album, Between Trapezes is a lyrical plea for a place as a valuable, respecting member of the real world. Financed in part by Nick and over 250 fans who subscribed to his philosophy of self permission, artistic self approval, and creative self generation, the record is available either by mail order (PO Box 5442, Dublin 4) or through HMV shops around Ireland. "To do this was important and powerful and right for someone like me," he affirms. "If you can once make a record like this, and in this way, then it can be done again."

The son of deceased Fine Gael politician and Attorney General John Kelly has landed squarely on his feet, and has become rooted in the idea of unencumbered practical possibilities. Presumably, his father would be proud of him if he were still alive? "I tend not to talk about him at all," says Nick, retreating ever so slightly from the topic. "Funnily enough, this is one way in which he influenced me! We grew up in a situation where there was a lot of press attention paid to him. I was always tremendously grateful that he never, ever attempted to bring his family into the picture. This allowed me the freedom to be whatever person I needed to be."