I’m meant to be chatting to Adam Karayiannis about his music but we get distracted by yoga.

“It helps me to stay mentally sane,” admits the Chingford singer, who took up the discipline six-years-ago.

“I just started doing online YouTube videos because I read it helped with anxiety. I’m quite an anxious person, well I was, especially at uni. The lifestyle was quite hedonistic with drinking and you can get quite depressed after that.”

The more we chat the clearer it becomes that his growing love of the ancient art is inextricably linked with his musical journey.

The former Chase Side Primary School pupil, who grew up listening to Cat Stevens, Elvis and Greek music on his parents’ record player and dreamed of being a pop star from the age of six, admits he got sucked into the fame game as a young man, trying too hard to be cool and make music that would sell.

After leaving Rush Croft secondary school he did a perfoming arts course with Chickenshed Theatre in north London and then headed to The Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford to study music production, sure he would soon see his name in lights.

He groans when I bring up an article from 2009 in which he is described as showing up there ‘harbouring serious delusions of grandeur’ and spending his first couple of years staying up until 9am getting ‘twatted’.

“Oh god, that bloody article always comes back to haunt me.”

But fast forward to the present day and he works part-time in a yoga centre and is about to release his debut single Sorrow under the name Adam, Hear the Sea, with all profits going to a cause extremely close to his heart – the charity set up by his ten-year-old cousin Nikki Christou.

The Winchmore Hill young resident suffers from a rare condition called AVM which causes the arteries and veins in part of her head to enlarge and rupture, causing bleeds from her eyes, nose and mouth.

There is no cure and so she and her parents set up The Butterfly AVM Charity and have so far raised £200,000 to fund research while Nikki has been presented with the Well Child Award for bravery from Prince Harry and the Diana Award for inspirational children.

“She’s really inspirational,” says Adam.

“She can’t be a normal child and do exercise or go swimming, so it affects her a lot but she gets on with it and is more focussed than any adult I know. She has set up her own YouTube channel, which I sometimes help her with and has 4,000 subscribers. She does makeup videos and tasting and cooking videos and people love her. I think they like to see someone who has problems just getting on with life.”

Enfield Independent:

Adam with his cousin Nikki 

He adds: “I didn’t write the song for Nikki but it does fit because it is a song of hope with the lyrics ‘everything will be alright’ but of course I do feel sorrow about her condition.

“It’s horrible to see someone you love in pain and you feel almost helpless.”

He hopes the single will be part of his debut album which he is still writing and says: “It was inspired by a feeling of needing to sit with your sorrow sometimes.

“Every human has their issues and goes through moments of darkness. I don’t think it’s good to sit and wallow but it’s good to sit and say ‘OK I feel s**t and that’s OK and there’s a reason for it and it will pass’.”

His new outlook on life is aided by starting most days filling three A4 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing to help declutter his mind along with regular meditatation and yoga sessions.

“There’s lots of little things I do to try and stay afloat, I think I have quite a busy mind,” explains the 31-year-old.

He originally channeled his energy into musical project The Adamski Kid, getting airplay on Radio 1 and performing his leftfield electronica at festivals such as South by Southwest in Texas but says: “Musically it was not where I wanted to be anymore.

“It was quite hard to give it up, having had that bit of success, but I always follow my insitincts and it had reached its zenith.

“It was quite erractric and chaotic and I wanted to do something more relaxed that fcussed on my singing and melodies.”

He has also given up his stressful day job on the Apple genius bar.

“I don’t particularly like shopping centres, I’m quite sensitive to those kind of environments, so I just wanted to get the hell out of there. Then literally I found a job in a yoga centre two days afterwards, like it was meant to be.”

His new outlook means he has taken the pressure off himself to make a chart-topping record and has vowed to only make music that feels authentic.

“I’m not working to a timescale , I’m trying to be a bit more chilled out about it.”

Sorrow is out on June 1.

Details: www.facebook.com/adamhearthesea