In days gone by, if you’d asked Beth Jeans Houghton about her history she might have told you she was born in the umbra of a solar eclipse, or that she and her band The Hooves Of Destiny were raised by albino Transylvanian wolves. Now, on the eve of the debut album, “Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose”, she’s ready to get serious.

Beth’s been prone to rambling flights of fancy in the past (and baffling between-song stage banter to this day) but it’s only a small part of her personality, as we’ll find out. “I’m a complete realist. I don’t like unicorns.”

In reality, this 21 year-old performer is one tough cookie. Her mantra? Never, ever compromise. “My grandma always said, you can’t please everyone so please yourself, and that’s what I do,” she says.

Beth Jeans Houghton was born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1990. She wishes she’d been born in 1956, making glam rock in her 20s, bowing out of the ‘80s entirely to raise children, keeping her head down in the ‘90s and returning to the music world in the 2000s, but that’s a different matter.

Born with the rare condition synaesthesia, she views letters, numbers, words and even days of the week as a series of colours. It has other effects too: “There’s a bridge near my house which, if I look at the red tar on a hot Saturday, I can taste Safeway’s own brand ready salted crisps,” she says. The condition has benefits – she can see songs in patterns and colours – but it makes reading difficult, causing her to invent her own alphabet at the age of eight.

Her first encounters with music came via her graphic designer mother’s vinyl collection. “The first time I saw an LP I was fascinated by it because it was like a huge, black CD,” she says. “I still don’t get how they work. It’s insane.” She was listening to Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Frank Zappa at primary school. Beth spent much of her childhood happily solo, listening to music and making things, but not writing songs. “I never even thought about being a musician. I mean, I like food, but I’m not going to be a chef. It was a kind of a surprise when it happened.”

Beth and school didn’t get along. “I hate authority,” she states. She started skipping classes at 14 and quit altogether at 15, returning only to do her GCSEs. Around the same time, she took a chance buying a Fender Stratocaster with £500 of money hard earned in a hairdresser’s, despite not being able to play a note.

Her first gig was in December 2006, at Newcastle’s Head Of Steam. “I played 15 songs in 12 minutes, just rattling through them like a 33” played at 45,” she remembers. Performing solo, just a girl and a guitar, this was a folksy incarnation of Beth Jeans Houghton that doesn’t square with the transcendent performer we see today. “For at least two or three years it pissed me off when people said they liked my gigs because I knew it wasn’t how I wanted to do it.” she says.

Being a solo performer saw her lumped in with “all these other girls with guitars…” but the album shows the real Beth; it’s a thrilling ride through the looking glass, full of coded lyrics and musical twists and turns. Beth’s said that she wants her music to sound like she’s marching to war, and it frequently does. Like a psychedelic Boudica, she’s carried into battle by The Hooves Of Destiny, who are honoured by a hoof-print tattoo on her right wrist, a tattoo which each of the band members has somewhere on their person. If the sound has changed since those early days, one constant has been that incredible voice: flute-like at times, operatic at others, and totally unique.

Pivotal moments in Beth’s career have happened by a mix of receiving and making luck.

At 17, she attended Green man and was picked at random by Devendra Banhart to perform during his set and was subsequently lifted onto stage to perform ‘Milk Bottles’ in front of 10,000 people.

A year later, Houghton hooked up with Adem, who recorded her debut single Golden/ NightSwimmer after emailing him asking for advice. She presented a copy of her first EP to John Martyn just two weeks before he died. “I said, Listen to it, please.” she says. “He had kind eyes…”

In 2009, the Hot Toast EP, recorded with Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, came via a random meeting at a bar in London. “It’s just not as hard as people think it is to meet these people you want to meet,” she shrugs.

When it came to recording the album, she hooked up with producer Ben Hillier, known for his work with Elbow, Blur and Depeche Mode. “They’re obviously good records, but they’re nothing like my music, and I almost didn’t even go for a drink with him to talk about it because I was that stubborn,” she says. “But he said he just wanted to have fun, see what happens, play around with stuff, and that was my vibe – we became a great team”

The process was long and drawn out, beginning in 2008 and finally ready for release in January 2012. For Beth, this was a problem: “I write so many songs so quickly they were becoming irrelevant to me,” she says. “I’m getting better though. It used to be two weeks before I’d get bored of a song; now it’s a couple of months. I don’t know how bands can still play the same songs 40 years down the line. If it was me, I’d just tell people they should have come to see me back then.” That being said, one of the songs on the album, Veins, dates back to when Beth was just 16. It’s because of Hillier’s particular

knack: “He makes things sound the way they do in my head”, that the track even made the record.

Beth isn’t so much a reluctant pop star as a furiously creative dervish. She’s spoken about writing a novel. Now she’s talking about making a film. As a teenager she dreamed of being a fashion designer, accounting for the unique outfits she’s performed in over the years, including wigs, hot pants and decorated bras. “It’s just what I wear,” says the singer, today dressed in a relatively sober cardigan, white fur overcoat and huge, furry hat. “you dress up as a kid and I guess I just never stopped.”

Mostly, Beth is dreaming of travel. A recent trip to Los Angeles became a kind of pilgrimage. “I’ve always felt like I was constantly running from something, but I realised it was because I hadn’t been to California yet, I knew no one but somehow felt I was home” she says. She went on a road trip that included a night in the Joshua Tree Inn, in the very room in which Gram Parsons died. “I thought it might be ghoulish but it was really peaceful,” she says. “there was a feeling about that room as soon as you walk in.” Footage from the trip makes up the video for Dodecahedron.

So while her album’s not even released, Beth is planning her escape to her own promised land. She’s not your average pop star – “I don’t think fame does anyone any good,” she says – but she has made a brilliant album which, like it or not, make fame a reality. “It’s not some insane record hat only five guys in Germany are going to listen to,” she agrees. “Which is funny, because that’s the kind of thing that Mute usually go for.”

Wherever she ends up, the good news is we won’t have to wait so long before Beth makes the next one. “I’m terrified of dying before I do everything I want to do,” she says, somewhat perversely given her age. “It’s a race against my own time.”