She might rip-off Italo Calvino and quote Philip Larkin but Nadine Shah is happiest bantering.

She’s a bubbly Mackem – “you tack ’em, we mack ’em!” (a reference to Geordies and shipbuilding, apparently) – whose Pakistani father owns Curtain Superstore Blaydon.

“My dad is not so clever with words,” she honks, thick Sunderland accent thinned not a jot despite ten years exile in London. “I’d have called it Pull Yourself Together.”

She recorded her memorable debut album in her dad’s vast stock room with producer Ben Hillier. After the writing sessions for Love Your Dum And Mad at Hillier’s South London studio, Shah decided she wanted the songs to have a sinister feel.

The duo were stuck for cash, too, so drove up the M1 and bedded in at the giant fabric warehouse.

The staff kept popping in to listen. Soon the whole town knew about the Curtain Superstore sessions.

“They’ve had people coming into the shop giving CDs to pass on. One guy demanded they pass his CD on to me. It wasn’t very good and he came back in demanding his CD back and threatening the staff.”

Shah’s dad came to England in the 1970s. He met Shah’s Norwegian mother here. Her dual ancestry has an influence, though her mother’s is more obvious.

“I am tall. I like raw herring. I’m quite fond of Scandinavian design.”

Both parents travelled to better themselves. Shah did the same 12 years ago when she quit Sunderland and brought her husky vocals to the London jazz scene.

She lasted only a year and a half but played the one serious Pizza Express jazz club in the country, in Dean Street.

“I wasn’t satisfied creatively with jazz music. I had taken it as far as I could. I could have done really well as a traditional jazz singer who does an album of Cole Porter covers and all of a sudden becomes Prince Charles’s favourite artist.”

Seeing Jamie Cullum tackle Jeff Buckley’s Lover, You Should Have Come Over at the club made her disheartened with what she was doing – and not because of a failed relationship.

“It didn’t compel me to write and because I couldn’t play an instrument at the time, I wanted to be creative in another sense.”

She enrolled in fine art at Camberwell College but ended up doing photography and film. Her tutor told her to incorporate her singing. She tried, then quit.

“I felt like a fraud at art school. Maybe it was a Northern thing but I felt privileged to choose to be an artist and not have to get a real job. Everybody on the course was very wealthy and I thought, this isn’t how artists were meant to be made.”

Indecision took her back to the North East for two years, before she decided to focus on music. Three years ago she wrote her first song, though she’s quick to credit Hillier’s (Blur, The Horrors) contribution to the final sound.

Indeed, the eerie din of the textile warehouse adds to the melancholy of Dreary Town, which reflects on her hearing about the suicide of an ex-boyfriend she’d dated many years earlier.

“I think it was cathartic but I just kind of wanted to write an ode to my friend. I put it on YouTube and people liked it.”

Another friend who had committed suicide, Matthew Stephens-Scott, whose painting is the sleeve and title, influenced much of the album.

“I became increasingly aware of the social stigma present towards people suffering from these illnesses. When we were speaking about friends who had these illnesses, it wasn’t like talking about a friend who had cancer – ‘Oh, I’m going to go to see him in hospital’ or ‘Jon’s broken his leg. Send a get well card’.

“You wouldn’t talk about it,” she whispers. “‘He’s mental. He’s crazy. I’m not going to visit him in the loony bin.’ Things like that. People were scared about it. I really wanted to write about it.”

Speaking about the grinding dirge and claustrophobic black clouds which invite Nick Cave and PJ Harvey comparisons, Shah likes to quote Larkin.

“Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth.”

Vocally, there are traces of The Unthanks. The simple arrangements together with that powerful voice remind of Martha Wainwright. When the record lilts and slows in the middle, with All I Want, Used It All and Dreary Town, Antony And The Johnsons comes to mind.

Her press material throws in other influences – artists William Hogarth and Frida Kahlo. Shah, however, mentions Nina Simone as her “favourite human”.

“Hers was the first voice I heard that was different. Prior to her I didn’t have an extensive knowledge. Because I had a big voice, I was listening to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.

“But when I was 16, I heard Nina – who is almost ugly sounding in parts, not clean and perfect, but honest and brutal – and that really gripped me.”

Her songs might be grim but Shah certainly isn’t. The only problem you’ll have is stopping the chat.

“I’m sure Scott Walker isn’t a miserable b*****d in real life,” she says.