That Tommy Reilly was a prodigiously talented ­Canadian who made the harmonica a respected classical

music instrument. He settled in England, where he died in the year 2000. He is quite unrelated to the young man from Torrance, outside Glasgow, who so impressed Lauren Laverne and Blur bassist Alex James, when they were judging the televised Orange Unsigned Act talent show, with his cover of The Killers’ song Mr Brightside.

In fact, the younger Tommy Reilly, still just 19, had loads of songs of his own, which he had been squirreling away since he was 10. Many of them – the hit single Gimme A Call, Jackets and I Don’t Like Coffee among them – have since leaked into the public consciousness. But when it came time to put him in the studio, naturally his new label reached for the phone and called Bernard Butler.

The former Suede guitarist is the studio wizard de nos jours, credited with having made a star of Duffy (although he can’t be held entirely to blame for that) and also recently seen behind the desk for Cajun Dance Party, Black Kids, Sharleen Spiteri, Florence And The Machine, Tricky, 1990s, Duke Special and many others.

Butler likes to work in the studio Edwyn Collins built, West Heath Yard in North West London, so that’s where the pair went and where this album was made. Like the other Tommy Reilly, but much more like his hero Bob Dylan, young Reilly plays harmonica. He also plays guitar, piano and drums, and Butler has recorded him doing all of these things.

Both the recording and the playing are well done if never startling. What is startling is Reilly’s voice. It’s startlingly flat. Not in pitch, at least not all the time, but in its tone. Butler has failed to coax any sort of emotional performance out of his young charge, and at the same time has recorded his high tenor voice so that it sounds like that of distracted choir-boy.

Perhaps Reilly likes what Butler has done. There are some nice sonic touches in the production of tracks like Mind On Other Things and the better (probably newer) songs play about with conventional structure interestingly; but the lad’s lovelorn lyrics might as well be a recitation of the Torrance Chinese takeaway menu for all the effect they have by the time they fight their way through the mix.

Or perhaps the truth is that, like Dylan, young Reilly should have been confined to the modern equivalent of the Brill building, writing songs for other people to perform. Manfred Mann, where are you when we need you?