There is a trinity of artists in the all-time pantheon of popular music: Elvis, The Beatles and the man playing the Brighton Centre on Saturday night.

Trying to calculate Bob Dylan's impact in a 40-year career requires reaching for the superlatives but he remains the prototype confessional songwriter.

Literary, witty and passionate, he is the architect of folk, psychedelic, acid and country rock and a political troubadour who has inspired numerous artists from The Beatles and Rolling Stones to Johnny Cash and U2 to Starsailor and Dido.

At the start of his career, Dylan invented his stage persona by creating a new background, claiming his parents were dead and changing his name from Zimmerman.

The "Dylan Goes Electric" headlines following his concert at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 marked another transition as did his shift from rock to country following a motorbike accident at Woodstock, NY, in 1966.

He is also one of the first artists to secure the release of an innocent man from prison with his anthem The Hurricane about boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongly jailed for murder.

Dylan's latest album, Love And Theft, is his 43rd and has him won critical acclaim and praise from the wider public in equal measure and has been hailed as a return to form following 1997's darker Time Out Of Mind which won him his first Album of the Year Grammy.

He said: "Is it like Time Out Of Mind or Oh Mercy or Blood On The Tracks? Probably not. I think of it more as a greatest hits album - without the hits. Not yet anyway."

Some of the strongest moments on the album, which is his most eclectic in years, are Lonesome Day Blues, Summer Days and Sugar Baby.

This latest return to form coincides with his teaming up with Daniel Lanois in the studio and a punishing four-year tour playing some 450 gigs.

The tour has also enabled him to assemble yet another a formidable band which includes Tex-Mex keyboard player Augie Meyers.

The Grammy was followed by the Best Song Academy Award and Golden Globe for Things Have Changed from Wonder Boys last year.

Many put this burst of activity in a man who will be 62 later this month down to a serious illness that struck him in 1997 and, one assumes, caused him to reflect on his mortality.

Ever the iconoclast, especially, it seems, when it comes to himself, he said: "It didn't. I wish I could say I put the time to good use or, you know, got highly educated in something or had some revelations.

"But I just laid around and then had to wait for my strength to come back."

For a closer brush with the Dylan enigma, call the Brighton Centre box office on 0870 900100.