In a year when you can hardly step out of the house without stumbling over a tousle-haired, Irish singer-songwriter, there's something different about Paddy Casey. Having picked up a guitar at the age of 12 and played his first gigs soon afterwards, this young Dubliner doesn't hang around - he recorded his first album, Amen (So Be It), in eight days and scored an Irish Top 20. He's got the tousled hair - he looks like a shorter-haired version of Marc Bolan reincarnated as a street gang member.

His ambitions are hardly typical: appearing on The Simpsons and opening for Public Enemy. This isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds. As Casey blazes from the stage, his voice is a mixture of hope, despair and battery acid and sounds as if it has been attended to by Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad.

Casey can do that mainstream pop stuff in his sleep, but there's much more going on. He combines the revelatory rush of the Waterboys' Mike Scott with the jagged guitar heroics of 1981's spiky Postcard Records bands. His wit is wicked. "It's freezing up here," he fibs, sweating profusely. "Can someone turn on the fans? I don't mean turn on the audience!"

Equally mischeviously, Casey relocates entire lines such as "I want to hold your hand" from the Beatles. But often his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to pop's past delivers amazing results. One tune even fuses Prince's 1980s ballads with the hazy flutes of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. As the fervour builds, the sense that he is a rising star is inescapable. "It's too hot for this jacket, I normally wear a bra top," quips the singer, informing everyone that he's single. At the exact second he sings "Catch me when I fall", a bottle falls from its perch and smashes in front of him. Girls, boys, cross-dressers and telekinesis students should form an orderly queue.

· At Scala, London N1 (020-7833 2022), on Tuesday.