John McEnroe famously alleged he had more talent in his little finger than Ivan Lendl had in his entire body. Lendl’s response to this contemptuous assessment was barely printable, but McEnroe had a point. Lendl was a product of the eastern European sociopathic approach to sporting competition, augmented subsequently by the money obsessed psychosis of the commercial tennis circuit. McEnroe, on the other hand – and stripping aside the petulant behaviour that tends to cloud his legacy – was a genuine talent. Whereas Lendl adopted an industrial strength, mechanical approach to his profession, McEnroe was a model of dexterity and variation, able to segue between the subtlety of touch and brutality of raw power in the flicker of an eye.

If the mainstream music industry is Ivan Lendl – factory designed, manufactured and tarted up and as two dimensional and inspiring as a piece of white cardboard – Johnny Casino is John McEnroe. Not in the behavioural context, that is – Casino is as pleasant and approachable as McEnroe never was – but in the artistic sense. Like McEnroe, Casino exhibits the deftness and flexibility of an artist who, given the ideal environment, can waltz around his rivals without batting an eyelid. To watch Johnny Casino on stage is to witness a master craftsman in absolute control of his situation; to hear Casino’s new album, I Am Who I Am Not Who You Want Me to Be, is to revel in an album of rarely paralleled quality, a testament to rock ’n’ roll from a man fuelled by the power of rock ’n’ roll.

Aided and abetted by his cast of thousands – members of the Hoodoo Gurus, M-16s, The Crusaders, Tiger by the Tail (RIP), the Eastern Dark and the Mess Makers amongst others, I Am Who I Am, Not Who You Want Me to Be, is, quite simply, a brutal display of rock ’n’ roll quality. When Casino is firing on all six, he’s a man possessed – from the opening salvo of the cover of The Real Kids’ Who Needs Ya that opens the record, to the anthemic self-indulgent attitude and bruising power chord attack of the title track (reprised later in the record in an electronic acid form), to the whisky and Chuck Berry-fuelled excitement Can’t Be Who You Want Me to Be – there’s enough muscle here to lift the truck of turgid commercial rock and hurl it into distant oblivion.

Or if it’s a good, honest pop song and a meaty riff you’re looking for, Casino has it in spades. Brother Grahame Says, quite possibly the best song Casino has so far committed to record, is a near utopian mix of country rock and power pop, of the variety long championed by Greg Cartwright. In a similar vein, From Lip to Lip is the ultimate American rock song – a blend of early MC5, Allman Brothers and Fun House-era Stooges – in its ideal antipodean guise, while on The Deaf Leading the Blind, Casino takes the fundamental riff of Lou Reed’s Vicious and gives it a country rock flavour.

But when the power’s stripped right back, and Casino eases out onto the highway and takes a gander at the countrified rock landscape, there’s beauty and goodness as far as the ear can hear. Whether it’s the sparse, rustic introspection of New Clothes, Old Shoes or I Can’t Find My Way Through the Door, the Music from Big Pink Americana sweetness and glory of Sunken Treasure, the emotional introspection of Someday You’ll Go, or the misty-eyed Far Away Eyes style romance of The Road to Ithaca, Casino – like McEnroe displaying the importance of touch – knows when to trade vigour for dexterity and subtlety.

At the risk of overdosing on hyperbole – but, what the hey – there’s more rock ’n’ roll talent in Johnny Casino’s little finger than the entire mainstream music industry smashed together. Johnny Casino is who he is – and he’s pretty fucking good at it, too.