AT only 19, Luke Saxton already has recorded 24 albums and an estimated 400 songs in his York bedroom since he started writing at the age of seven, inspired by Simon & Garfunkel’s America and Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’.

Luke’s first official album, Sunny Sadness, will be released on Monday by the York music enterprises Bad Paintings and The Inkwell, as the result of an in-store performance on this year’s Record Store Day in April at The Inkwell shop in Gillygate.

“After experiencing Luke playing live in my shop, I had to help Bad Paintings get his music out in to the world,” says The Inkwell owner, Paul Lowman.

Growing up in York, Luke dreamed neither of football stardom nor X Factor fantasies.

Instead, he was dreaming of The Beatles, Brian Wilson and Harry Nilsson’s swooning orchestrated pop and Frank Sinatra’s bossa nova collaborations with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Luke’s aspiration was to make the perfect late-Sixties sunshine pop album. Just maybe he has found his nirvana in Sunny Sadness, written and made entirely by Luke at 17 at his family home and inspired, in the classic pop tradition, by “loneliness and the breakdown of a relationship”.

This beautifully arranged song-cycle of melancholic, sunshine singer-songwriter pop was recorded into basic audio software, Luke playing everything on the record from guitars, drums and piano through to bouzouki, jingle bells and African drums.

Musicologists will detect influences ranging from Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson and Serge Gainsbourg’s Vu De L’exterieur to Fleetwood Mac, Shuggie Otis and Graham Nash, allied to a commitment to songcraft and nuanced, subtle production.

Bad Paintings, meanwhile, detected a future for Luke mined from the past, having discovered Sunny Sadness on Soundcloud. “It felt more like digging up a long-lost record by a reclusive unsung Seventies’ cult hero than finding something new on the blogosphere,” they say.

So, on Monday, the album surfaces anew, made and now marketed in York, where it will be preceded by a launch night this Saturday at 8pmat the Woolpack Inn in Fawcett Stree. Luke will play a set, so will support act Aled Haywood; admission is free.

Already Luke has been featured in the NME; expectations are growing of BBC Radio One airplay soon; and word has it that the Island/Universal and Heavenly record labels are showing an interest. Sad or not, the sun is rising.