Alexis HK owes his big career break to Olaf Hund, the enterprising young director of Musiques Hybrides, who discovered him in 1997 when he was a budding 22-year-old talent. Since then Alexis has gone on to prove his musical worth, performing countless gigs throughout Paris and the provinces and selling 500 copies of his first demo CD. In 2000 Alexis formed a new group and he and his five backing musicians went on to perform at increasingly big-name venues such as Glaz'art, Divan du Monde, Nouveau Casino and Le Sentier des Halles. Audiences warmed to the young singer's vocal style and at the same time Alexis HK proved he had a particular gift for creative and inventive songwriting.

In the spring of 2002 Alexis made a more significant impact on the French music scene with the release of his second CD, Belle Ville (considered as his first album proper). The young singer-songwriter's eccentric universe was reinforced by the image on the album cover showing Alexis and his five accomplices sitting at a doll's house table, looking for all the world like effigies from the French waxworks museum. The cover might lead one to expect the most surreal, dream-like sounds but, in fact, Belle Ville revolves around a traditional and carefully-crafted mix of accordion, flutes, double bass, guitar, mandolin and various percussion instruments.

"When you're working with just a simple guitar and you don't really know how to score music properly," says Alexis, "you depend on your musicians a lot. I'm lucky in that the guys I work with tend to understand what I'm driving at without me having to spell it out for them. But I'm always nervous about presenting my rough drafts to them, you know. I watch their faces while I'm playing and I don't seem to be able to string two bars together without making a mistake. It's a disaster! But I have to say I'm never too surprised by their reactions.There's no mystery attached to songwriting. You know immediately when you've got a good one! There's a whole variety of songs in my repertoire ranging from those I've laboured intensively over and others which just seemed to come naturally, like Gaspard's song, for instance."

That's Gaspard as in Gaspard the flying dwarf whose song stands alongside that of Mitch the wrestler or Jean Lefèvre who found himself locked in a cupboard… In the weird and wonderful universe of Alexis HK everything is possible. God can sack the Devil, bicycles can get sledge-hammered to death and a drunken dreamer can rally the censors to his cause! In short, Alexis HK has established himself as the Sherezade of French songwriting.

"My mission in life is to tell stories," declares Alexis, "to conjure up strange tales that waver on the border of fantasy and reality… One of the things I love best about songwriting is coming up with different characters. They're not always credible, of course. There's always a fair amount of caricature and poetic licence involved!" With his songs avoiding use of the first person and his penchant for playing his characters on stage, one might wonder whether Alexis HK suffers from a chronic case of self-effacing modesty? "No, not at all," he retorts, "I think it's mainly because I don't think I'm that interesting really. My Parisian lifestyle's not exactly fascinating - and, frankly, I'm not interested in churning out traditional bourgeois songs about 'Oh, today I bumped into so-and-so and we hung out and got frightfully bored together!' I don't think it's a question of modesty or anything. It's true that to some extent I hide behind my characters, but at the end of the day it's still me that comes across through them."

Alexis has developed a particularly striking vocal style since the beginning of his career, crooning his songs in deep, velvet tones. "I see crooning as a tradition!" he says, "I've always dreamt of becoming a crooner, in fact. I love old-style crooners like Frank Sinatra, for instance. With crooners there's this sort of paradoxical mix of the dandy and the common man. I know there's this whole superficial, show-off thing with dandies, but it's all a bit of an act really. Dandies and crooning aside, I realise I've got a voice that's completely out of keeping with my physique… I'm pretty thin and people have this preconceived idea that singers with big voices have got to be fatter and older… But I think it's time to drop that rubbish once and for all! There are plenty of very thin people with very big voices - some of the skinniest singers can belt out a tune that will completely blow your head off!" And to prove his point Alexis throws his head back and laughs, undercutting the playful mix of seriousness and irony he wields so well. Skinny he may be, but chronically self-effacing he is certainly not!