“There are three types of artist,” Thierry Noir tells me, “difficult, very difficult and impossible.” Which one is he? “I do not want to know.” The unassuming French artist is in London for the opening of his first ever solo show at the Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch, and has been working flat out for two weeks to get everything finished. As well as 15 large canvases which are going on display (alongside rarely seen photographs and films), Thierry has been busy painting various walls around east London and likes the combination of gallery and al fresco work; street painting he says gives him “a different type of energy.” It’s fair to say that Thierry Noir has some experience in this.

Rewind 32 years. Having dropped out of university and been fired from a series of jobs, he needed a change. “I knew that if I continued like that I would be stuck in a dead end. I realised a lot of people were talking about Berlin and most of the music I liked was being made in Berlin, so I went there.”

A woman he met at a New Year’s Eve party said he’d be able to stay with her best friend, so after 21 hours on a train he headed to his flat. “I realised after about five minutes the man knew this woman but not very well. After two days he just kicked me out on the street!”

Left to his own devices in Kreuzberg and unable to speak a word of German, he remembered the Lou Reed lyrics: “In Berlin, by the wall/you were five foot 10 inches tall/It was very nice/candlelight and Dubonnet on ice.” So Thierry decided to follow the wall, and after just a few minutes he came across a house he knew he was meant to live in. He stayed there 20 years, although he later discovered Reed had never been to Berlin when he wrote those lyrics on which he’d placed such significance.