Not many artists these days hold back their recorded music for long, and certainly there’s very few who wait until they’ve made five albums and retreated entirely before releasing the first one, but then Chris Sheehan has never been one for following the roadmap.

In 2003, his demos were doing the rounds of the labels – Island, V2, Atlantic, Mushroom: the usual post-millennium suspects. By 2008 his first album was somehow only just finished, but not before a host of events that sound like something from an Amazon Prime series had done their best to stop it: Whitfield Street Studio, where the album was being made on mates’ rates, going bust; and being held up at gunpoint in his own studio in Wood Green which he’d built to continue the album, while the assailants kicked the hard drives on their way out just as they were being backed up, losing a month’s recording that had eaten up the budget. There was the studio flood at 1am on a Sunday night, when a radiator pipe burst; the end of the relationship that had supported him all the way through to here; a lengthy management split and a private investor, who came forward to make the album, having to (wisely) step back during the financial crash.

It took so long to get it all back together that Chris accidentally co-wrote, recorded and released Around The House in 80 Days with British folk legend Matt Deighton, as The Bench Connection (4/5 – Q, 4/5 MOJO). That album featured a double page spread in the Sunday Times Culture section, when the journalist, (now author) Tom Cox, convinced thousands of fans on MySpace that they were a group from the ‘70s whose son was finishing his dead father’s album with his former songwriting partner, after finding tapes in the loft years after his mysterious death from driving off a motorway bridge.

Still having not released Goodbye Cruel Circus (I’m Off To Join The  World) – the title of which comes from the note Ronnie Lane left on the door of his caravan for the rest of the band when he quite Slim Chance – he then set about beginning his second solo album; moving straight on to completing an album with Mark E Brydon of Moloko as Moths. And then The Bench Connection was withdrawn when the label went bust, and so back to square one, and none of it was out…

All the while the anecdotes rolled in – playing guitar for Roger Daltrey at 3am in the luggage area of the Queen Mary 2; being surrounded by locals at 2am in the pouring, movie-like rain in New York City, having discovered his hotel didn’t exist and he had nowhere to go while they passed his bag around, with most of his best recording gear in, only to be saved by Norah Jones and Tracey Chapman guitarist, Adam Levy.

There was the five minutes of fame and a national hunt on live radio for a girl called Jenni in Finland; and writing or recording with a host of musical legends – Dennis Bovell, Steve Nieve, Yungblud, Marti Pellow, Chris Difford, Matt Deighton, Mark E Brydon, Chaz Jankel, Kathryn Williams, Charlie Wood, Jacqui Dankworth, Neill MacColl and Linda Thompson, among many others. And yet, as the stories and songs tumbled in, no releases tumbled out.

In 2011, Chris co-founded industry indie champions Karousel Music with fellow music and industry allies, including Longview’s Doug Morch, and then spent the next decade and a half assuming a new guise, helping other artists with shows, publishing, management, and releases, as well as setting up and hosting the music industry’s premier pop quiz, and working for music industry charity Help Musicians.

Now, 20 years on from where it all began, Karousel Buried Treasure finally begins to release an archive of songs and recordings from a songwriter who, while completely anonymous to the wider public, has consistently enjoyed the respect and friendship of his peers. The album features former Oasis/Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and Sheryl Crow keys player, Mikey Rowe; The Divine Comedy’s Tim Weller on drums; the late, great Mark Smith on bass, and former Yards guitarist, Chris Farrell, on electric guitar, as well as various guest appearances such as Squeeze’s Chris Difford on backing vocals.

The first record was clearly influenced by acts such as Del Amitri, Elbow and late Talk Talk, and some of the lyrics on Goodbye Cruel Circus feel as relevant now as then: “Everyone cares, but no one can help/they need all their cash to save an asteroid belt…” (‘Everyone Cares’) seems as poignant as ever in a post-Musk world of war, famine and Space X.

“Did you ever feel when you were treading water your lungs were filling up to drown/scratching at weeds at the top of the mountain, your feet were sliding down?/Well it’s not just you,” (‘Not Just You’) whispered of the quiet mental health crisis in both music and society as early as 2003; and there’s the aching melancholy of a person watching his relationship fail in public, powerless to change the ending while the real world around them descends into grey: “The arms of the typewriter are moving, like hands in a crowd in Weimar Germany/starving for a happy kind of ending/scared of what’s coming post-1933”. (‘The Projectionist’)

One wonders if there would have been a place for him, had things been different, among the swollen rolling river of singer-songwriters of the noughties; but perhaps it doesn’t matter… After all, now is the time in a world of global and digital fanbases for shining a light on what the rest of us missed the first time around.

Karousel Buried Treasure release a run of singles in November, leading up to the album, Goodbye Cruel Circus (I’m Off To Join The World), on December 6.