AN abstract album which imagines Dylan Thomas on those boozy American tours picking up the echoes of Brill Building pop, street-corner doowop and louche Miles Davis jazz lines is due out in the autumn.

Walk Like A King, the latest disc from Llanelli-based singer songwriter Terry Clarke, also homes in on the poets penchant for pinball and Mickey Spillane novels, and it spies on him shucking oysters in San Francisco harbour while reminiscing about Oystermouth and home.

Some of the tracks will be aired on The ITV Wales Show on Thursday as part of their report on The Hay Festival, along with readings from Swansea poet Peter Thabit Jones, who helped initiate the record.

Peter himself has just headed out on another poetry reading stint in New York, and he is working on a DVD of a Dylan Thomas walking tour of Greenwich Village, which will feature some of Terry's music. The singer says he is delighted to be working with Peter on his DVD.

"One of the reasons this album has come about is that Peter, who is as attuned to the value of rock and roll as he is to poetry, heard me sing some of the early songs on gigs and he suggested they should be pulled together into a full project," said Terry.

"Peter is always as likely to quote John Lennon and Bob Dylan in conversation as he is to quote Edward Thomas or RS Thomas, which is one the things that makes him such an interesting man and a great writer. And it is something that makes him a brother-in-words and in attitude to Dylan Thomas, I think."

The 11th album in a career which has dipped into Texas swing, traditional rock and roll, ska and narrative balladry, the singer has always been happy to pay homage to his heroes in words and music, with Laura Nyro, Johnny Cash, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette and Maria Callas all moving Terry to verse in the past.

And he says his interest in looking beyond the image and the hyperbole of stardom, as well as his desire to wrest Dylan the man back from the airless halls of academia for a while, is what will give the album its fizz

"I first paid tribute to Dylan Thomas in the sleeve notes to my album The Shelly River back in 1991, and he has always been an influence," he said.

"But, in my mind, he sits alongside Elvis and Johnnie Ray as much as he does alongside Yeats and Ted Hughes.

"And getting to Dylan the man was the most important part of this project — the man who loved pulp fiction and who would get his driver to pull up at the kerb if he saw the lights of a pinball machine through a bar window when he was on his way to a posh reading in front of these eminent academics in New York because he became addicted to the game."

And Walk Like A King has given Terry free rein to tap into the sense of wonder Dylan must have felt as a visitor to those gleaming American cities from a blitz-damaged Swansea.

"When you think of what was happening in New York in the 1950s, Dylan must have thought he had landed on another planet," he said.

"And I have approached the album like a Bruce Chatwin novel or a Nic Roeg film — where timelines get blurred and there are collisions of events.

"The Drifters' Drip Drop and Ruby Baby were in the charts in 1953, Dion was running the streets with a flick knife in the Fordham Road gang before he cut The Wanderer, and Phil Spector's Spanish Harlem and Lou Reed's New York demi-monde were only a whisper away.

"As a writer, I'd like to think its conceivable that Dylan was walking along the street there or taking a taxi, and he would have heard Miles Davis or Clyde McPhatter and been excited by them."

With all of those elements brought into play, the album isn't a polite, acoustic affair, but it embraces dirty rock numbers, heart-sore country blues, pop and jazz, and some Tex Mex and flamenco input from Wes McGhee.

Walk Like a King will be out in the autumn on Terrapin Records, Proper distribution.