Nick was standing outside the Coffee Society in Ranelagh with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other. He seemed preoccupied from a distance but when I approached him I could see why.

“Minding dogs, are you?” I asked. He turned around.

“Yes, I’m just looking after these dogs”

“Whose are they?”

“I don’t know, I’m just waiting for anybody to come and take them.”

Before long some musician came by and they started talking. Shortly after another friend of Nick’s passed by. This was all over the course of about three minutes. He stood there on the street while people and cars buzzed by with his coffee and cigarette in hand like a true Parisian. Eventually some girl came and took her dog.

“Okay,” Nick said, stubbing out his cigarette in his empty foam cup, “time to go teach music to the kids.”

“Spread the music, spread the love,” I shouted as we parted. “By the way, that video will be out this week.”

“Yeah,” he grinned, about to cross the road, “I heard that one before.”

Nick is a mysterious kind of guy, the kind you don’t expect to find that often in 2013. There’s no Facebook page for his music and no Twitter. You don’t seek him out, you just come across him at gigs or on the street.

Knowing Nick and knowing his music usually go hand-in-hand. If you don’t meet the man first or hear his tunes at parties or gigs then you see him at a gig and chat to him after. We had the former introduction, and once we heard him sing Gypsy Soul we knew we wanted a video.

He was kind enough to grant us entry to his home to shoot a performance of Let It Rain and when we entered the house we felt that we had stumbled into some kind of musician’s oasis in the middle of Ranelagh. An old upright piano sat in the hallway and his bedroom was packed with guitars and harmonicas. The whole place had a cosy cottage feel to it.

It was a cold Sunday at the beginning of November and we were trying to figure out our shots for the video.

“Hey,” Nick calls out from his seat, that grin of his struggling not to break through too early, “are you going to wait ’til it’s dark to start shooting? Do you want me to direct this video?”

Typical difficult Frenchman. Mischievous and impatient. We shot the video in two takes in the intimate setting of his back garden and hummed the song in our heads for the rest of the day.