Few people expected rapper Kanye West to join Twitter in the first place: on his blog he'd previously screamed: "Everything that Twitter offers I need less of." But when West did join in late July, still fewer predicted the first (and only) person he would "follow" would be unknown Coventry teenager Steve Holmes.

The pair began tweeting each other on July 31, after West posted a picture of his new diamond teeth. "Do you clean them with colgate [sic] or polish?" wondered Holmes, via his pseudonym @ste_101, and something struck a chord: within minutes, the 19-year-old Nottingham university student had become Kanye's one and only "followee". "Holy s*** bro thx for following," said Holmes. "You are the chosen one dun dun dun dun," Kanye tweeted back.

Before long, The Guardian's investigations team revealed that Holmes was suffering from Twitter anxiety. "I feel pressure to say amusing and witty tweets now," posted Holmes. "Tweet strong young man, tweet strong", came Kanye's response.

‘Surreal'

But this was just the beginning. What happened next was, according to Holmes, "surreal". The Twittersphere went ballistic and within days his nondescript feed had attracted 15,000 followers, a barrage of hate-mail from jealous West fans, as well as scores of interview requests from showbiz media all but one of which he turned down.

"I was just really overwhelmed," says Holmes, who broke his silence this month for an interview with the Guardian. "I had journalists outside of my house for two days in their car. I couldn't believe it."

Holmes says he's not a hermit, but he just didn't want to be famous for something so trivial. "I'm not a fame-whore," he explains. "It would be good if you have a talent but what talent do I have? A man clicked a button."

Holmes was so taken aback that he abandoned Twitter for a few days in early August, and considered leaving it entirely. "I got so much abuse," he says. "Really, really jealous people were saying, ‘You don't deserve it I deserve it, I'm his fan.' It was just so stupid."

Holmes's stance did attract the praise of West, who sent him two apologetic e-mails. "The first one, he invited me to his album launch in New York. And the second one was, ‘I'm really sorry this has happened I respect your position on it'."

Things did calm down. Two weeks later, West stopped following Holmes briefly opting instead for Justin Bieber while, five months on, Holmes himself doesn't even follow West. "Kanye has big rants," he says, "and it just blocks the stream up."

What's more, Holmes hasn't even listened to West's acclaimed new album, with his recent tweets perhaps suggesting a change in musical taste. "The prodigy [sic] make s*** days better," he posted recently.

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