Ellis Hooks, Dingwalls/BBC Radio 3, London

A new soul man bucks the clichés

The first day of the new year is not noted for being a particularly auspicious one in the live-music calendar. But the European concert debut of Ellis Hooks, an incendiary, 28-year-old soul singer songwriter from Mobile, Alabama, departed from this sleepy tradition.

The final act of a string of shows on Radio 3's World Music Day, Hooks bounds on to the stage in skin-tight, zebra-striped trousers and strikes into the gorgeous, aching title track from his album, Undeniable. At first, it's hard to believe that he's for real – having been lampooned to the point of tedium, the soul-man archetype now seems, all too often, to be a refuge for either washed-out old-timers or karaoke-bar regulars.

But Hooks gives the lie to accepted record-industry wisdom with his irrepressible performance, his emotionally exacting songs and his heartfelt tributes to his forebears.

The conviction of his unabashed, heart-on-the-sleeve performance is rooted in a remarkable past. The son of a Cherokee mother and an African American father, Hooks was the third youngest in a family of 16. He didn't own a pair of shoes until he was eight years old, and he spent his early years sharecropping. Raised in a strict Baptist family, he sang in church and found an easy affinity with the late, great Sam Cooke and Otis Redding.

Cast out of the family home when secular, rather than Gospel, music became his obsession, Hooks busked across America and was spotted playing in Central Park, New York, by Diana Ross. Feeling that he wasn't ready to record, Ellis passed on Ross's offer of free studio time. A few years later, however, he was introduced to the producer Jon Tiven – by a lapdancer.

Even then, a major label takeover left his first album in still-unreleased limbo, and it took the small British independent Zane to bring Hooks' music to the world. But the songs he played on New Year's Day proved that the Deep South soul he draws on is, in the right hands, as potent as ever.

With a band that includes Tiven (now his songwriting partner and manager) and Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, Hooks shimmies and gyrates across the stage and into the audience, putting in a show that shames his contemporaries. His set includes spirited cover tributes to Cooke, Redding and – on the 50th anniversary of his death – Alabama homeboy Hank Williams. But on "Blaze Up the Town", "I Been There" and the brand-new "Slide the Gun", Hooks' ability to mine his own past is as electrifying as his presentation.

"A star is born," announced the evening's MC, Andy Kershaw, when the sweat-drenched Hooks took his final bow. For once, the old showbiz cliché seemed entirely fitting.