Painting by numbers

By the time I meet Kilford the Music Painter, the London-based 34-year-old making a name for himself by painting live to the sound of artists ranging from the Black Eyed Peas to Paul Weller to Iggy Pop, I've already been called "babe" repeatedly on phone and text. So I expect a bit of a peacock — and Kilford is indeed all hair and glitter on first impressions, with long sweeping sideburns slicing up his cheeks like Wolverine.

There's something a little contrived but also wholly endearing about him. He talks excitedly about his passion — painting the colours he sees when he hears music — and it's easy to understand how Kilford is fast becoming a fixture at gigs, concerts and festivals as the messy man in the corner dramatically slinging paint across a canvas.

Growing up near Cambridge, he started painting at eight, but after studying computer science he ended up working in computers. His epiphany — and escape — came listening to a live electro-dance set in a bar one night: "I was totally sober, before you ask, but I started seeing colours around the musicians as they played. It was as if sound and sight had come together," he says, earnestly drawing our two lemonade glasses together on the table.

Somewhere on his website it says what Kilford experienced was "synesthesia" but he sounds hesitant when I mention this. "I don't know, babe, I like to think of it more as tasting something sweet and seeing strawberries."

Apparently, it takes some effort to get into the required state to "music paint". "It's like meditation, in that there has to be nothing going on up here," Kilford taps his head. "It feels like people are throwing music onto my back and I'm the passage through onto the canvas. When I'd just started I was painting to The Charlatans and I was preoccupied with thinking God, I hope they like it, I hope I like it! But now I just let go, apart from when I need to change my latex gloves for a new colour — there's clearly some thought process there."

Kilford's paintings may not be to everyone's taste but he makes up for any deficit in detail with his concepts and boundless character and currently counts 3,103 fans on Facebook, who spur him on with their energy and input. "Fans are all I need," he says. There's undoubtedly a good vibe surrounding him, which seeps through online. He certainly likes giving and believes in "Art for Everyone". His motif, "One Love", which represents "art and music as one", aside from being tattooed on his wrist, appears on stickers and little paintings which he bundles off, 300 each year, to his fans for free. He's an impressive one-man marketing machine; even I get a little neon pink painting when we meet, which I am now promoting from my bathroom.

Kilford's One Love gigs, to which he draws great bands to "paint" their music, take place in Soho on the third Monday of every month with the band, film crew, everyone working for free, and the door money going to the Sam Buxton Healing Trust for cancer.

And now Kilford is giving his fans money, too, in another unique twist. "If a fan's friend buys something online then the fan will get 15 per cent of the total bill, paid to them direct. I think I might be the first artist to make his fans the art dealer." Kilford is an online fanatic — "I live online, babe" — and makes most of his money through online commissions of his sketches, or "scribbles" as he dubs them, to songs he reels off with a black marker on A3. The original sketches go for £1,000 and the prints for £23. Kilford's online love doesn't extend to internet dating, though: "I tried that once on match.com babe and it was a horror show."

Kilford was at Sonisphere festival in Knebworth last weekend, painting alongside Skunk Anansie, Pendulum and Iggy & the Stooges. "It was incredible. Everyone was going mental on the grass but the stage was calm and professional until Iggy ran on. Then it was like throwing a rock in a pool as his energy hit the audience."

One of the Sonisphere organisers, Stuart Galbraith, is a Kilford fan and owner of a painting. He asked Kilford to design a Sonisphere T-shirt, of which the 100 made miraculously sold out in a day. Kilford had the inspired idea of numbering each T-shirt so that buyers felt they were investing in a piece of art — another example of his quirky entrepreneurism.