He blamed it for everything - he never wrote a word there in 10 years I didn't know what to say about it. Eventually I came up with '1961?', 'cos I know a bit about houses. And he said," - and here Ocean takes on Larkin's famously lugubrious tone - "'No, 1959. But I know what you mean.'" Larkin wanted to know all about McCartney, and they talked about jazz. Ocean liked Roland Kirk and Larkin preferred Pee Wee Russell, but they got on anyway "He had these Tannoy speakers ... Tannoys! The south London dub speaker of choice!" Did he like the portrait? "I think he did, yes.

He turned to Monica and said, 'And in this house, too!'"For the last year, Ocean has been artist-in-residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the fruits of his labours can be seen in an invigorating and entirely lovable exhibition entitled "how's my driving". (Significantly, no number is provided enabling us to register a complaint.) The show is so called because the artist's route to work has provided him with much of the material: a couple of south London's most Larkinesque houses and office blocks have experienced the Ocean breeze, and the treatment has given them a charm that will make those who live on the dreary edges of a metropolis wonder why the heart doesn't sing every time they walk to the newsagent's. You know those horrible 1960s green-and-glass office blocks? Well, it turns out they're not horrible after all. It turns out that we should treasure them.The show takes the form of a witty, bright conversation with Dulwich's surprisingly classy permanent collection. There are sketches of paintings by Teniers and Brouwer, and an answer to Gainsborough's portrait The Linley Sisters, with Ocean's two extremely contemporary-looking daughters sitting in for the original models. And the Teniers, a winter scene, also inspired the four-painting sequence of buildings, one for each season.

"We used to talk at art school about how you didn't get it together as a painter until you were 40 It made us rather morose when we were 19 Well, I think I've got it together now I'm 50. This show is my New Boots ...."It's a very helpful description, and not only because "how's my driving" has the feel of an album - a couple of cover versions, some light, quick, filler interludes (a series of drawings from Ocean's Dot Book), and a central sequence, the four seasonal paintings, that the record company would want to release as singles. One also gets the feeling that Ian Dury would have loved this show, and his influence is palpable. This is hardly surprising - Dury was, after all, Ocean's tutor - but it is not Dury the teacher one can feel, but Dury the exemplar of a certain sort of late-20th-century art-school Englishness. The collection demonstrates a love for the past, but it isn't afraid of the present either; it's allusive and accessible and it's got soul. The Sixties art-school bunch didn't seem to think it was clever to pretend they knew nothing."There are lots of other houses in the area I could have painted," Ocean says of Autumn, which depicts a twilit and defiantly suburban home. "But none of them were as funny as this one." And though it's true that there is a mournful comedy in there, the picture tugs at the heart, too.