Newton Faulkner divided critics with his debut album, which leapfrogged Amy Winehouse's album to the number one slot.

For some, Hand Built By Robots is a brilliant exposition of virtuoso guitar playing, dappled with sunny charm and laidback lyrics.

With his handmade guitar and russet dreadlocks he has been portrayed as the Cornish surf scene's answer to Jack Johnson.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that he's from Surrey and he cannot surf, there is something of Johnson's beach-swept homeliness about him.

He takes his shoes off for concerts in order to relax and his relationship with his guitar seems almost spiritual.

"I love when it's close to your stomach and you can feel the notes you're playing. It's a good feeling," he once said.

Other reviewers have been less than enthusiastic, finding the gentle folkiness a little too middle of the road.

As Maddy Costa signed off her twostar album review in the Guardian: "This is very much the work of amiable 22-year-old from Surrey: laidback, insipid, lacking the bite to make it exciting."

Still, that hasn't stopped him from selling out most of the dates on his UK tour this month, or from achieving platinum sales.

He may have been marketed for the masses, albeit only after Faulkner, shifted 3,000 copies of his first EP through word of mouth alone, but his guitar skills set him apart from the herd.

He employs a percussive style called tapping - prodding the strings really hard with the picking hand.

Faulkner explained: "You can have stuff coming from both sides of the strings. There are certain frets which work really well - you get two notes and they harmonise with themselves. It sounds like there's more than there actually is."

He developed his technique at the Academy Of Contemporary Music in Guildford, where he studied under innovative guitarist Eric Roche.

While his classmates were playing at being rock gods, Faulkner performed in an outfit called Half Guy.

He said: "Everyone else was playing angry metal in church halls so we thought we'd be perverse and be the happiest band in town."

After that he went solo and was soon noticed by SonyBMG subsidiary Ugly Truth.

He spent the summer doing the festival circuit, playing everywhere from petrolhead convention Truckfest to Glastonbury to the tiny Secret Garden Party.

He has kept going ever since, his record label announcing a spring tour before the current one had even begun, so it is probably just as well he writes best while on the move.

"Everything makes more sense on the road,' he said. "When you're not gigging you write stuff that's for you in a way that you don't when out doing gigs in pubs.

"If you're doing gigs whilst writing you know what you need, you have a clear understanding of what people like and want - which I can't seem to remember when I'm at home.

"Which is really stupid, but it's just how it is."

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