"Yeah, free, really free. Excuse me, I've been smoking, you know," explains Finley Quaye when asked about his on-stage musical approach and the way his songs evaporated rather than ended during his West Coast debut the previous night, March 3, 1998, at San Francisco's Bimbo's 365 Club. Given the brilliant polish and attention to detail on Maverick A Strike, his first album and, without doubt, one of the all-time most impressive recordings from a new artist, Quaye's carefree attitude to live work is surprising.

Perhaps he was just coasting on his reputation; perhaps his happy demeanour, already so widely noted in the press, was beginning to crack under the pressures of touring and interviewing; perhaps he's a temperamental artist; perhaps he's just a natural born rebel. Bob Marley is Quaye's defining touchstone. Speaking of Marley, Quaye says, "He displays gems and jewels, precious rare things. He talks about certain things, certain feelings that are natural and human and that are required and always sought after but are often suppressed."

But Marley's influence is not so much stylistic as attitudinal. For sure, it's the rebel in him - and the happy-go-lucky lover - rather than just the one drop beat. However, Quaye prominently featured a couple of Marley songs, "Kinky Reggae" and "Slavedriver," both at the Bimbo's show and in an earlier in-store acoustic set at the Virgin Megastore. He claims his two favourite Marley tunes to be "Caution" and "Don't Rock The Boat." Significantly, all four are from Marley's formative period, when he was truly struggling to be heard and still a long way from being the international superstar and icon of Third-World liberation that he eventually became.

And, despite all the initial press acclaim and raving delirium from the musical cognoscenti over Maverick A Strike, Quaye may yet face his own years of struggle to break through the high racial and cultural barriers of America. He's already fighting. Asked if the musicians on stage are the same as those on the album, he answers that they mostly are and that he intends to continue working with them in the future. However, he quickly adds, "I have to fight tooth and nail to preserve that. A lot of people, TV stations, radio stations as well as my own people at the record company, would like to see me with an all-white or mixed race line-up, definitely not too extremely rasta. I just have to fight and stand my ground all the time."

Whatever else it is, Quaye's music is quite definitely not reggae. Although it's easy to hear how it's steeped in Jamaican influence both in its sonic manipulations and vocal and lyrical stylings, it's considerably less of a reggae sound than, say, such a commercially successful outfit as UB40 has ever had. In fact, part of what's so damn refreshing about Maverick A Strike is that, even with its wide range of influences, it sounds like nothing else. However, the fact of the matter is that all but one of the members of Quaye's eight-piece band are black, although by the standards of most touring reggae bands, it would be hard to call them "too extremely rasta." They're just your regular working musicians from Britain. But, given the marketing strategies of major American record labels, the realities of race consciousness in this grand republic, and the rigid musical tastes of so many of its citizens, it might be hard for Quaye to find a ready acceptance in the American mass market for his music, particularly so if his live shows continue to be as languid as the Bimbo's date.

That would really be too bad and a loss for all. Quaye himself doesn't have a name for his style beyond "good music." For once, that cliche is appropriate but he almost bristled when told that his music wasn't reggae, paradoxically exclaiming that "I like to make it out to be reggae." Shards of Caribbean and African sounds are mixed in with today's electronic techniques (and remember that reggae in particular has always been a leader in the use of electronics to manipulate sounds) and solid band playing, all together producing a soulful, almost innocently happy but still directed feel that also owes something to rock music made long before the twenty-three-year-old Quaye came into the world. His listening of choice while on tour included Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits; "Maggie May" reminds him of drinking whisky with his grandmother in Edinburgh.

When reached by phone the day after the Bimbo's show he was busy shopping in a Los Angeles thrift shop, excitedly buying Grateful Dead T-shirts, and enthusiastically talked about replacing his lost Rolling Stones, Keith Moon, and Doors albums! Alongside those influences, he reeled off a few names from reggae's golden early-seventies period, "Dennis Alcapone, Sir Coxsone Dodd, Johnny Clarke, and particularly Keith Hudson," names that any serious aficionado of reggae will recognize as among the heaviest around, although perhaps not the best known to casual listeners.

In lesser hands, Maverick A Strike could have become some kind of a retro nightmare with modern twitterings and bash-your- head-in bass. Thankfully, Quaye has a musical and lyrical intelligence that transcends such quagmires. Maverick A Strike is, in fact, an astonishingly accomplished and mostly self-produced album, full of "sonic fruits," as Quaye calls them in the mystical "Even After All," whilst railing against "wicked gravity" in the purposeful "The Way Of The Explosive." It's also a tightly woven album; the last words you'll hear are once again "wicked gravity" in the concluding title song. The phrase also pops up in other tunes, while "sonic" appears again elsewhere attached to other nouns such as "glory."

There's a deeply felt emotional quality with an element of autobiography to be found in lines about children without fathers; Quaye was brought up in a fractured family in the north of England and Scotland. Overall, Quaye aims for an imagistic approach, saying that he wants "to tell stories with pictures and make pictures with little bits of stories." Much of his delivery has a shamanistic channeling quality, not making literal sense but drawing out a meaning from fragmented and repeated chants of verbiage much as a film is made from a series of stills flickering in projected light.

Quaye met with rapid and immense success in the United Kingdom, where ears are undeniably more open. "Sunday Shining," his first "official" single after an appearance on a track from A Guy Called Gerald and an EP release of what were basically demo tracks, reached Number 16 on the English charts, while his second single, "Even After All," entered at Number 10. Maverick A Strike, the album, entered the charts at Number 3, and went gold with sales of 100,000 in three weeks and has now sold over 1,000,000 copies. Quaye won the Brit Awards just before his American visit for Best British Male Solo Artist. For a while, he could do no wrong.

But the backlash in Britain's notoriously fickle music press has already started. Featured on the cover of the August issue of The Face, Quaye is portrayed as an out-of control, finicky, egotistical maniac, repeatedly cancelling interviews and screaming at his manager over trivial problems. Even his PR man, Jules Beech, is quoted as saying, "Finley is as high maintenance as an artist gets. He's the moodiest, most unpredictable guy I've ever worked with." Shortly after his San Francisco appearance, Quaye fired his guitarist - one of those guys he was fighting the music industry to keep!

On the other hand, in San Francisco, he spent hours after the show talking individually to fans and was open and welcoming to this writer. Our phone conversation, however, might well be considered fragmentary and spaced out in the extreme. Quaye obviously has a pretty high opinion of himself and his thoughts, but frankly some of what he had to say was complete bloody rubbish. As he shopped, he found a pair of cowboy boots that tickled his fancy. In the story in The Face, he was quoted as wearing his "first pair of cowboy boots," claiming, "You put 'em on and suddenly you understand how the West was won." As any student of American history knows, the cowboy myth is more of a romantic Hollywood version than how settlement really proceeded in winning the West from its original inhabitants. Besides, that's a pretty incongruous sentiment to hear from a disciple of Marley, surely one of the more forthright defenders of the rights of oppressed and native peoples; indeed, Marley was a man who constantly stood for the liberation of those dominated by colonialism, such as the First Nations peoples of North America.

Given this conflicting evidence, it seems too early to tell if Quaye will develop into a serious ongoing musical and cultural artist. He may yet be a shallow trickster, dazzled by his English success and defeated by poor commercial response to his work in the United States. He may yet squander his talent and fall by the wayside. On the other hand, he's not the sort of person you can imagine doing anything else. He's already had his share of day jobs and they sound like the usual series of unmitigated disasters that so many musicians endure before they find their niche. In the recording studio, he does what he does so well that you really have to root for him. On stage, he remains a terminally relaxed guy, seemingly not too worried about the effect he produces. Asked what he was smoking almost continuously throughout the Bimbo's show, he comfortably chuckles, "Ahh, good stuff!"