Sometimes it's the truly personal things which prove the most universal.

So it is with Josh Pyke's current single Middle Of The Hill, in which the Sydney singer-songwriter reminisces in detail about the house in which he grew up.

Topped off with a jaunty tune, it's been a massive hit in Australia, and is currently raising his profile over here.

"Middle Of The Hill is absolutely my most personal and literal song,"

says Pyke, "but what's funny is it seems to be the one which most people have connected to on some personal level.

The thing is, it's a totally true story about growing up, my sisters, my family, which just flowed out in a stream-ofconsciousness style. When people say, Ah, you're singing about my life!' I think, really? Was there really a girl up your road whose dog had its voice box chopped out with an axe?"

Middle Of The Hill also references Pyke's earliest memory when, at the age of four, his sister dragged him away from two men in a white van who were trying to lure him into a phone box they claimed was full of money. It's the one strange and sinister moment on his debut album, Memories And Dust, which also deals with familiar stories of lovelorn phonecalls, not wanting to wake up alone and, on the more than usually rueful Beg Your Pardon, the insubstantiality of old photos.

"When I was 13 I wrote a song called My Baby Don't Love Me No More,"

says Pyke, who would later join the Aussie rock group An Empty Flight before going solo. "It was an awful 12-bar blues song.

I didn't have a girl that had loved me at all yet, let alone one that didn't love me no more."

Since then, Pyke has made the radiofriendly move of setting his observations to a notably bouncy brand of acoustica.

But the romantic in him remains.

"I'm a bit sentimental," he admits.

"I've always said that I want to be a successful human more than I want to be a successful musician."