Tapping into The Real ‘antique beat’

For just a minute, the question that springs to mind to ask Stephen Coates, who performs under the nom d’art The Real Tuesday Weld, is who the heck is Tuesday Weld? But, like most modern dilemmas, a quick Googling answers that. Oh, that Tuesday Weld: American actress, original teenage wild child, and the pretty face on the cover of Matthew Sweet’s lauded “Girlfriend” album. But why name check Tuesday Weld?

“I had a very strong dream about her. I surrendered myself to a Jungian process of doing what my dreams tell me to do,” says the 38-year-old singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist,  speaking from his home in Clerkenwell, in the eastern part of London. “I do admire her. As a kid I saw ‘The Cincinnati Kid’ with her and Steve McQueen. It must have lodged and popped out in a dream.”

And the “Real” bit? “It’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, to distinguish myself from her … And also from the rather strange fan mail I started to get that was aimed at her.”

Coates adopted this colorful name almost 10 years ago. After attending London’s prestigious and competitive Royal College of Art, he switched from painting to making music that had — by accident, rather than design — a retro, hazy sound. Coates, who counts his influences as British jazz and French pop, calls it “antique beat.”

“I really like the sound of music in the next room, when you can’t quite hear what’s going on. Slightly otherworldly.”

Dreamlike? “Yes,” he agrees. “I remain influenced by dreams.”

His seventh record, “The End of the World,” is a wonderfully dreamlike jazzy noir, recorded as a pseudo-live album, by Coates’ “alter-ego in a Clerkenwell club on Valentine’s Day, the night before the apocalypse.”

“I do like the idea of having a story and have songs exist within that,” he explains softly. “I love to create a sense of a story going on.” Such is the artistic bent, to create a world for the mind to wander into, away from the corporate-created commercial one.

“That’s what I like in other musicians and even painters. You get the sense that they are inhabiting their own world, which is maybe separate from the craziness.”

The Real Tuesday Weld
with Ad Frank
Tonight, 8:30
Johnny D’s
17 Holland St., Somerville
MBTA: Red Line to Davis
$10, 21+, 617-776-2004
www.johnnyds.com