Anyone who welcomed in 2007 watching Jools Holland and his annual Hootenanny on TV may have caught a little nugget of gold near the end.

In among the expected and largely forgettable sets from the likes of Lily Allen, Paul Weller and Amy Winehouse, was a man who looked like he had just been picked up from a prospectors' saloon in the Old West.

With a long grey beard heading the way of ZZ Top, a torn check shirt and denim workwear topped off with a battered baseball cap, Seasick Steve stood out from the well-tailored crowd even before he took the stage.

And the moment he unleashed his sound, based solely around a three-string guitar and an old wooden box, he pretty much ensured his tour of the UK would sell out this spring.

The same home-made feel continues on his new album Dog House Music, which was captured live on a one-track recorder.

"Everybody else is making all kinds of fancy records so that area's covered," he says. "There's not too many people just sitting with a guitar and making a record.

"I'm using one old microphone from the Thirties. I got one of them old stoves that's always warm, and I just sit there and open the stove up and I have coffee on there.

"I sat right there and recorded a whole album like that."

Steve is someone who has lived the blues life - a real American train-hopping jailbird, who has worked the carnivals, slept rough and survived a near-fatal heart attack.

He plays a three-stringed Trance Wonder guitar, featuring just an A string, G string and B string, which he bought from a man called Sherman Cooper for $75.

Since he got that guitar he has told the world how Sherman ripped him off, although he's proud of the one-stringed diddly-bo made for him by real-life Mississippi bluesman James "Super Chikan" Johnson.

Add to this musical arsenal his Mississippi Drum Machine - a small wooden box decorated with a Mississippi licence plate and a small piece of carpet, and you have virtually the full range of the backing instruments he uses on his new album.

  • Starts 8.30pm, tickets cost £10. Call 01273 647100.