James Attlee interviewed one of the best songwriters of the past two decades BRUCE COCKBURN.

"For a couple of years I was into West African music and it influenced my guitar playing somewhat. There's some great playing - some really beautiful clean high guitar stuff that they do out there - I love that sound. I've never had the nerve to have a big enough band to allow me to really play like that - you can't do that and sing, so it's slightly frustrating for me that way.

'Other influences - there's a million of "em. I've always admired Bob Dylan - reggae music, a lot of rock and roll of the rootsier variety. I'm not much of a fan of heavy metal, but the simpler more energetic type of pop - it's usually whatever has good song-writing with lots of guitar on it."

You mentioned Bob Dylan - have you caught him live recently?

"Not recently, his latest album is the nicest for a long time, but it doesn't hit me as well as the old stuff. There's three or four of his albums that are 'classics' for me, the last of which is 'Blood On The Tracks', and two or three of his early rock period."

I wasn't too impressed with his last visit to Britain. What really worried me is that people seemingly will accept anything from the man - out of tune vocals, pathetic harmonica solos...

"At Dylan's level you're exposed to so many people and so much bad taste that people will accept almost anything. At the show I saw he was good but the sound was atrocious in a hall where it didn't need to be at all - laziness on someone's part. Then he played a guitar solo that was bad. All the things he's good at do not include playing lead guitar, but the audience went wild when he played this really garbage solo.

"Fans were clapping not only because they think it's good, because maybe they don't know the difference...and they're not necessarily blown away by how good a solo is, it's just the fact that he's doing something adventurous - showing he can do something other than what they know him for! It's easy to get kind of cheap when you get that kind of adulation, it makes me very uncomfortable."

Do you get that kind of adulation yourself?

"Not much, but some - and I don't like it. I like people to like what I do and I like to know they like it on the basis of some understanding of it, not on automatic acceptance of it because they imagine me to be something. When you're that important to somebody else, and its not somebody you live with, it can't be based on reality - they've invented a character and put your name on it and that's what they're worshipping and I don't like that."

This modesty and common sense seems typical of the man his British record company press release describe as "the caring Canadian" I leave him sitting in the bar, his fingernails drying and the next interviewer waiting in line.

He can rest easy - despite the excellence of his latest album mass adulation for Bruce doesn't seem about to break out on British streets just yet, although in certain sections of the Christian subculture his hagiography seems to be being prepared...I quote from advance publicity for this year's Greenbelt Festival: "Great Christian artists of history - critiques of writers, artists and composers whose Christian faith permeated their work. Seminars include Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Johann Sebastian Bach, Vincent Van Gogh and Bruce Cockburn..." In my mind's eye I can almost see him squirm.

If you're looking for a spiritual giant with all the answers, Bruce ain't your man. We all see through a glass darkly, and Cockburn's spiritual raybans can seem as foggy as anyone's...I'm sure he wouldn't put his work alongside the giants of literature either. Many would feel that his criticisms of the church are painted with brush strokes a touch too wide - after all, hasn't he shared a Greenbelt bill with radicals like Tony Campolo, John Smith and Jim Wallace whose record of concern for social justice can hardly be faulted? Surely what we need is new churches, not no churches. That said, if you like the sound of "good songwriting, with lots of guitar on it" from one of rock music's keenest observers of the human condition, and you haven't yet discovered the Caring Canadian, do your ears a favour. After all, he did his nails for you.