IT'S Fringe time again, time to re-acquaint ourselves with Geoff and Ed and that would-be culture vulture, Madame. If you haven't yet had the pleasure, don't worry. Philip Jeays will introduce you to them.

Geoff, for instance, is the sort of bloke who has a big house, flash car, pots of dosh, and an attractive wife. He's so well provided for that people, Jeays included, want to kill him and move in on all his assets. Jeays introduced me to Geoff and the others, at least in song, on the Fringe last year and I was so tickled that I went back for more. And more.

With 60-odd other Fringe gigs to take in, people said I was mad. So I took them with me, or sent them, and they agreed: Jeays has the stuff.

A slight, wiry figure, Jeays doesn't just sing his songs, he performs them in the tradition of Edith Piaf, Yves Montand and Jacques Brel. In fact, people

tell him that he's just doing

what Brel did and he regards

it, not as an insult, but as the finest compliment.

''There's no point in denying it, that's exactly what I'm doing,'' says this child of the punk era who was ''blown away'' to see a video of Belgium's greatest musical export singing with an orchestra, but carrying the punk spirit, ''openly having a go but with a tender side, too''.

At the time of this revelation Jeays was living in France. He'd always liked David Bowie singing Brel's Amsterdam - he mistakenly thought that Bowie had written it - and wondered why, subsequently, Bowie had never written anything else in a similar vein.

Friends in France put him straight about Brel and when he returned to England in 1984, Jeays began keeping notebooks with ideas for songs.

It was to be some time before these songs were completed, let alone performed. Jeays works at a snail's pace, spending literally years letting songs evolve and then polishing them and agonising over them.

The wait is worth it. Brel may well be Jeays's unashamed primary influence (there's a touch of Hunk Dory-era Bowie in there, too) but one suspects there's more of himself in his writing than Jeays allows. Take his observations on Eastbourne - his home town, where bejewelled old dears stroll ''along the piers like walking chandeliers'' while a late husband lies buried, ''his epitaph: he went out without his scarf''. On the printed page and extracted from verses and choruses which

relentlessly and wickedly harry Jeays's prey, this may not have the desired impact.

Jeays really has to be seen to be appreciated and, not the most confident of individuals, the more the audience appreciates, the more he feeds off it. I watched him play to one smallish crowd last year who instantly picked up on his style - and showed it - and he was quite devastating.

''One thing Edinburgh taught me is that audiences might not respond the way they feel,'' he says. ''They might be embarrassed to, or feel intimidated if everyone else is just sitting there quietly. During my first Fringe, in 1996, my quietest audience bought the biggest number of tapes and I'd been almost at the point of saying: 'You're obviously hating this, let's just all go and have a drink instead'.

''But I do think the physical performance thing is very important,'' adds this singer-songwriter who has little time for the pseudo profundity of the singer-songwriter genre, which makes people analyse lyrics in search of hidden depth.

''I want to sing songs that people understand immediately. But I'm aware that, with me, it doesn't work if you just listen. You have to see the show first. I've given people - friends - tapes of songs and they've said: 'Yeah, very good', and I can tell they haven't got it.

''Then they come to see the show and they'll say: 'Now I understand', and they take away images with them and hopefully they'll keep finding things in the songs that they didn't notice the first time.''

But do these friends recognise themselves and are they still friendly, because Jeays's songs are all at least based on real incidents and real people?

''Oh yes, Geoff, for instance, is a very good friend. He wasn't even married at the time I wrote that song and I didn't know when I started writing where it would lead. But songwriting is like telling an anecdote, you distort the truth to make it more interesting. Without the fictional stuff, it would have been boring.''

Geoff, Ed, Madame, even Eastbourne boring? From Jeays's perspective, no chance.

n Philip Jeays: Here I Am is at the Cafe Royal from today until August 29.