Male singers with eye make-up were unlikely to cause a stir in the late 1990s. When Nick Sanderson, frontman for insurrectionary glam-rock band Earl Brutus, first took to the stage with blue glitter on his eyelids he was pushing 40. That people were shocked said plenty about the fiercely charismatic singer and the applecarts he enjoyed upsetting. He was never a spectator, and always willing to do or say things that sat uneasily in the liberal world of pop.

Born in Sheffield, the youngest of four boys, his father Henry worked in rail freight, which fed an obsession with trains and rail travel. The family moved around the country, to Amersham (where he becoming a Chesham United fan) and Bristol, bringing him closer to his hero Brunel. He was 11 when David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album came out: this provided another lifelong love, glam rock. His tastes would soon run to Genesis, Wagner, and the Clockwork Orange soundtrack, and, always one to spurn fashion, he would expound on his taste for progressive rock through the punk and Britpop eras.

Inspired by Phil Collins, John Bonham and Keith Moon, he became a drummer, first with a bunch of friends in Bristol called The Crazy Dads, then with Sheffield group Clock DVA. In 1987 he joined the pioneering American rock band The Gun Club, led by the wayward Jeffery Lee Pierce. Sanderson recorded three albums, Mother Juno and Pastoral Hide And Seek, and the live Divinity set. with the band and met his future wife, Romi Mori, who was their guitarist.

Though in demand, Sanderson always turned down offers of session work to play for people he liked. By the turn of the 1990s he was with another Sheffield group, World Of Twist, his tough drumming adding meat to their amalgam of northern soul and Joe Meek-styled electronica. He had been friends with their guitarist Gordon King and photographer Jamie Fry for a while, and when the group fell apart in 1992 it wasn’t long before they formed a new one called Earl Brutus.

Always very thorough, Sanderson never drank in the studio or on stage though he was a great connoisseur of pub life; Earl Brutus gave him the opportunity to really let go. Along with contemporaries Denim and Pulp, they had a peculiar strain of Englishness and a tendency to draw on 1970s culture which unwittingly laid the groundwork for the Britpop boom of the 1990s. After a couple of singles in 1993 and 1994 they were signed to Steve Lamacq’s Deceptive label where they released their first album Your Majesty We Are Here (1996). Stomping glitter band-rhythms, melancholic electronica and fractured, dark humour created a unique social commentary on modern day suburban Britain — “two nights in and one night out . . . take me to your Harvester”. Q magazine voted it best debut album of the year.

Genuinely unpredictable, Earl Brutus shows tended to be short, dramatic and special. One was reviewed as “a bit like a fight in a pub on a council estate, but with a very tight soundtrack”. Auxiliary members of the group would flank Sanderson and Fry at the front of the stage, just drinking, while a garage forecourt sign was spinning to the side, its fluorescent yellow lettering spelling out “music” on one side, “chips” on the other. Island Records released their second album, Tonight You Are The Special One, in 1998. It included probably their best loved song, The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It, whose cut-up lyrics are possibly the group’s defining statement: “Tudor-bethan mansion, hair design by Nicky Clarke . . . you are your own reaction.”

While Sanderson was a magnetic personality, Earl Brutus’s raison d’etre was to polarise people, which unsurprisingly led to a small fanatical following but a need to supplement income. Sanderson simultaneously played with The Jesus And Mary Chain and, later, their splinter group Free Heat. Earl Brutus’s last show was a typically theatrical and chaotic event at Hammersmith Working Men’s Club in 2004, in support of Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign.

Like George Orwell, Sanderson was middle class but wanted to get his hands dirty, and his inquisitive nature meant that he was always going to be a railwayman at some point. In 2004 he became a train driver, working out of Victoria on the Dorking and Caterham lines.

Always competitive, he decided he was going to drive a bullet train in the way a pilot would have had an ambition to fly Concorde. He lived on his nerves and found train driving “strangely addictive”.

His ambition was thwarted when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in August last year and, though he always had great faith in science, he never made a full recovery. His wife Romi and four-year old son, Syd, survive him.

Nick Sanderson, singer and drummer, was born on April 2, 1961. He died on June 8, 2008, aged 47