WHEN are two bands in fact one? The answer can be discovered at Fibbers in York on St Valentine’s Day when Danny And The Champions Of The World play their own set then back headliner Fionn Regan, as they will throughout a winter tour that begins in Glasgow tomorrow.

“None of them played on my new album but my record label [Heavenly Recordings] put us all in touch with each other,” says Fionn. “They had the vision for it and they were right.

“We started working together three months ago, and we did a November tour together having met in London. We all got on; they understand the songs, and they’re bringing colour to them, and the songs seem to light up with them.”

Danny George Wilson, the Australian-born, south London-based leader of The Champions Of The World, is enjoying the liaison, too.

“Jeff Barrett at Heavenly, who’s putting out Fionn’s album, has put the two acts together in Mickey Most-style, and that means we’ll be four or five Champs rather than the full congregation on tour, so it’ll be the nuts and bolts, but having done about ten shows already, we know it works.”

Both Fionn and Danny will be plugging new recordings: Regan’s second album, The Shadow Of The Empire, was released earlier this week, on the January heels of the Champs’ second instalment of soulful country-folk, Streets Of Our Time.

Both songwriters have experienced soul-searching moments en route.

Fionn first: “I came off the road in 2008 and went to make a record with a producer called Ethan Johns, and we made the record but let’s say it ended up clamped on the docks and the duty became too high to pay,” he says.

“It’s in the vaults now but whose vaults I don’t know. I just knew I had to reverse out of there and it’s been a remarkably quick turnaround.

“It’s water under the bridge. It gets to the point where it’s like, these are the hoops that you’re required to jump through and you make the decision what you’re going to do.”

Extricating himself from a “load of trip wire”, Fionn has ended up handling production duties on his follow-up to the Mercury-nominated The End Of History after parting company with Lost Highway.

He bought himself a desk and a tape machine and improvised a studio in a small, disused factory space in County Wicklow to make the album without interference.

And so The Shadow Of An Empire was born: another Regan album with an imposing title.

“I see shadows as both a positive and negative thing,” he says. “It could be the shadow of war or it could be a winged shadow. If you have a fair complexion, a shadow can be a good thing.

“But I definitely steer clear of trying to nail things down: experience has taught me not to try to trap a bird in concrete.”

Shadows have been present in Danny’s life, too: the shadow of doubt over whether he should continue to pursue his career in music after his long stretch with both Grand Drive and now the Champs.

His thoughts are crystallised in Henry The Van, the opening road song on Streets Of Our Time: a lament for a busted tour bus that muses upon the romance of the road and the hard-won wisdoms to be learned from occasional detours to the kerbside.

“It’s most probably the key track; it’s where the album started, on the side of the road at Aberdeen, where the van was broken down and I was thinking, ‘Is this the end of it all?’, so it was a great analogy for a song,” says Danny.

“The van was ******, I had no money, and I didn’t want to go home like that. I was saying to myself, ‘Am I following my dream or am I being a selfish b***ard?’, but I decided ‘I’m not going to pull the plug’.

“I know we can’t live on kisses; I’ve done this since school, some would say spectacularly unsuccessfully, but it’s not something I’m prepared to give up. I’m not ready to do that.

“Sometimes I just go heedlessly at it as I love playing songs and I don’t have those sensible parts that say ‘How much is this going to cost me?’, but I decided I had to just make some changes.”

That decision at his career crossroads has paid off. “There seem to be more shows than ever, so they must have been changes for the better,” he says. “I couldn’t be happier… most of the time.”

•Fionn Regan and Danny And The Champions Of The World play Fibbers, York, on Sunday and Leeds Brudenell Social Club on Tuesday.