Patrick Dennis has always blurred the line between song and paint, between survival and expression. He was the music obsessed kid who’d rather hand in a drawing than an essay, the teenager writing poems in class instead of answers to turn into songs at band practice. That instinct carried him to painting studies in Stockport and Salford on the edges of Manchester, just before Oasis and the Britpop storm. He even won a place at university to study painting, but left to become a father — soon trading canvases for chords, clubs, and making a living as a musician.