BLUES veteran Seasick Steve opens his first British tour for four years on Wednesday on the back of the spring release of his seventh and most ambitious album to date, Sonic Soul Surfer.

Steve, who turns 74 this year, had not foreseen his longevity in the spotlight after becoming an overnight sensation with his appearance on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny on BBC2 on New Year’s Eve 2006.

“After that show I thought, maybe I’ve got a job for a year or two, y’know? That was eight years ago, and I still play the biggest festivals in the world, and sold out the Albert Hall again,” he says, ahead of his similarly sold-out York Barbican gig on April 24.

Three albums of his homespun wisdom and home-built guitars, gritty guitar boogies and sage ballads, went top five in Britain as Seasick Steve – born Steven Gene Wold in Oakland, California, in 1941 – ignited the festival circuit. However, he found he had saddled himself with the image of his colourful past, as much through his interviews as his tendency to sing of his early life doing casual work.

“It made it sound like I was living under a bridge just before I went on the Jools Holland programme, negating 30 or 40 years of my life raising children,” he says. “Ever since then I’ve been trying to say, ‘Hey, I was just a normal guy’, y’know? Working normal jobs, just being a dad and a grandad.”

Now, Sonic Soul Surfer takes him into previously uncharted territory. Released on the wonderfully named There’s A Dead Skunk label, its storytelling songs newly add thoughtful rumination on time past and time passing to Steve’s familiar celebrations of wanderlust and good-time boogie behaviour.

Heart Full Of Scars, for example, acknowledges how, the older you grow, the more emotional baggage you carry. “Your life builds up with this stuff,” he says. “I guess I was reaching for how much peace you can have; to be okay with whatever it is, and just try to reach some peace. One thing’s for sure: this is how it all ends for everybody, so it’s just a matter of how wide awake and peaceful you can be about it.”

Steve is not so likely to indulge his wanderlust these days, although We Be Moving recounts how he has lived in 60 different homes since he took up with his wife 32 years ago. Each time he moves, it becomes harder. “The moving has slowed down a lot; it’s real painful now,” he says.

Sonic Soul Surfer was recorded in his front room at his latest home, a little farm. “The whole record is just me and Dan [drummer Dan Magnusson] sitting there drinking and playing. There ain’t a whole lot of producing going on, but I know what I’m doing, and I know what I want. To me, it’s more like peeling the apple; I try to figure how little I can do and get away with it.

“It’s trying to be as minimal as possible, yet give people their money’s worth, that’s how I feel about it: don’t get too fancy, but try to make it listenable. I got really good, old equipment – all the stuff I use is from the 1950s and 1960s, old valve equipment and tape machines. If you know how to use it, it’s very easy to use. It’s a real organic kinda process, it’s how old records were made, and I don’t know how to make a record any other way.”

As is Steve’s wont, Sonic Soul Surfer adds to his armoury of homemade instruments. This time in the shape of a guitar made out of the air filter from a ‘73 Ford, while Roy’s Gang brandishes the rasping sound of a one-string washboard, recorded in one take.

“I fitted a banjo neck to a washboard and put one string on it,” he says. “It’s a diddley-wash, or a wash-bow! I use a thimble on my finger, so I’m scratching that across the grated surface, and tapping with my thimble as I’m playing.”

Sonic Soul Surfer finally disproves the notion that Seasick Steve is only a bluesman.

“I’m an old country folkie from way back, but back then, there weren’t so many different categories. Blues and country and folk were all sort of intertwined a bit more.

“I swear, till I came over to Europe, I never thought of myself as a blues musician. And no one else ever told me I was one, either. Well, no one told me I was anything, really. I never reflected on it much, because when no-one’s asking what you do, you don’t need to have an answer. You just play, and you don’t think about what kind of music it is.”

Now, whenever he makes a record, Steve tries not to exclude things.

“I just want to put on it what I feel like. I don’t think about what other people think I should do, ‘cos I don’t have time for that bull,” he says. “If a country song can sit next to a blues song, next to a bluegrass or a rock song, they all gotta go together in one collage, ‘cos I don’t have enough time to make all them records separately.”

Seasick Steve’s latest “collage”, Sonic Soul Surfer, is surfing the crest of a wave once more. Last weekend it entered the charts at number four.