The least exotic thing about tragi-comic pop artist Liz Green is her name. No Alela here - according to family lore the twenty-eight year old Green is descended from a Liverpool line that includes executioners and rag and bone men. It’s at least certain that she carries on an ancestral tradition of storytelling, as her debut album O, Devotion! will testify when released by Play It Again Sam on 14 November.

Whatever took her so long? It’s now four years since Green’s first single, the critically adored, now sought-after ‘Bad Medicine’, appeared, and she won the Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition to find herself entertaining the main field from on high. Tipped everywhere from Mojo to The Sun, her uniquely lyrical blend of chanson, jazz and the starkest a capella, a distinct fingerpicking style more cable-knit than filigree and an idiosyncratic vocal style nodding to saints (or maybe martyrs) Judy Garland, Billie Holiday and Karen Dalton (Liz bashfully adds at this juncture “There’s a few more lives to be led and a few more hearts to be broken before I ever sing with as much soul as those ladies”) seemed set to conquer all. Yet a wonderful ‘Back in the U.S.S.R’ Beatles cover on a covermount CD aside, she had seemingly dropped out of sight.

Except she hadn’t. Green has toured consistently, here and abroad, and overcome her dread of the recording studio with aplomb. Sequestered in Hackney’s legendary Toerag under the aegis of Liam Watson (White Stripes, everyone else) and subsisting on the local diet of ackee and saltfish, she finally relaxed enough to enjoy the process, so different from the instant gratification provided by an audience.