Jesse Malin is telling us a story. At 11, he says, he was obsessed with having sex with his babysitters. When he got $40 for his 15th birthday, he decided it was time to discover the sexual world and headed down to 52nd Street to get himself a prostitute. Two fellas leapt out of the shadows and promised the kid some women. So they go up a dark alley and the guys tell Jesse that if he hands over his money, knife, leather gloves and jacket, the women will come. Half an hour later, the poor kid realises he's been robbed. "But I'd like to thank those fellas," he laughs all these years later. "If it weren't for them I'd be much more fucked up than I am now."

Malin is full of stories like these, many of them on his brilliant debut, The Fine Art of Self-Destruction, which documents his time in New York and his journey from street-corner punk to failed romantic to singer-songwriter whom Ryan Adams calls a "genius". Adams, who produced and played on Malin's album, invited the New Yorker to open on this tour. Malin returns the favour by dedicating a song to "Woody Allen, Frank Sinatra and Ryan Adams" - although Adams may not have expected his protege to make quite such an impression on his own audience.

In T-shirt and jeans, alone with a guitar - "my drummer's sick and my dog is at the border" - Malin has the timeless outsider look of the young Johnny Thunders. He delivers his craft while telling of his parents' divorce and growing up with "the Ramones, the Clash and, er, Kiss". As the spell is cast, he cuts the chatter and bashes out tunes with titles like Brooklyn and Queen of the Underworld; they manage to breathe punk spirit into the effortless-sounding classicism of Neil Young and Springsteen. They contain brilliantly evocative lines such as, "We started out with nothing but lonely days/ You couldn't live with me so you moved away," delivered in a voice that can take the Young whine from fury to wistfulness in half a second. By Riding on the Subway, the entire venue is clapping along and shrieking. It will be a major surprise if the wider world doesn't follow suit.

· Supporting Ryan Adams at Waterfront Hall, Belfast, tonight. Box office: 028-9027 0229. Then touring until December 14.