FOURTEEN years on from You’re Gorgeous, and Babybird’s Stephen Jones is still making beautifully miserable music, black of humour and dark of lyric, yet uplifting.

And still he is not satisfied, never mind that his new album – his tenth if you include his early lo-fi recordings in his Sheffield bedsit – is a triumph.

“I don’t think I’m ever happy really, though an album like Bugged [released in 2000], I can listen to a lot, but I’m never content as I’m trying to find the secret of life… though I know I’ll never find it,” he says.

“Sometimes I think I just want to sit in a beach hut looking out to sea, except that I’d soon get bored with that, too.”

The beach can wait. Stephen is on the road, playing at Fibbers in York tonight as he promotes Ex-Maniac, an album he made in Los Angeles last summer with the Grammy-nominated producers of Bruce Witkin and Ryan Dorn of Unison Music.

Stephen was introduced to them by a long-time fan, a certain Johnny Depp, who has gone on to make two significant contributions to the album, playing guitar on the single Unloveable, for which he has also directed the promo video.

“I first met him in London, when he was filming Finding Neverland. Very low key; well, as low key as he can be. He offered me hummus and carrots,” says Stephen.

Working under Depp’s direction was memorable.

“I had to act in the video as well as sing, and it was that classic thing that if you’re doing something wrong, he’ll have a word in your ear, but if you’re doing it right, it just moves on,” says Stephen.

“It was amazing to work with the cinematographer from the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies and Alice In Wonderland: a real learning curve.”

He found making the album in America similarly educational, and more fruitful than his previous recording sessions for his 2006 album Between My Ears There’s Nothing But Music.

“Just the whole process was different this time,” he says. “I used friends of Bruce Witkin’s for the band. He seemed to know everyone who would play for $150. Again it was a real education for me.

They seemed to know what to do with my songs better than I would.”

What did he learn? “Just that I’d like to do another album with them,” says Stephen, who retains his knack for combining melody and malady.

“I’m just very simplistic as I’m not trained, and I have a knack for writing a two-note tune and then layering it. But I’ve learned that maybe I could take a little longer over a song. Music needs to carry on beyond being finished. You kind of want to leave it open, especially with the lyrics.”

The misunderstood You’re Gorgeous brought Stephen Jones unexpected and unwanted fame in 1996. He prefers being an outsider once more: “I’ve never been very good at trying to cope with fame, but now I don’t have any fame, that’s fine.”