In a trendy East London pub, where the young and arty clientele make it their business to stick out like sore thumbs, Seasick Steve is putting their attempts to shame – and without any need for a gravity-defying haircut. Instead, the hobo-turned-blues musician is simply pounding away on his ragged old guitar, his white beard dancing as he is filmed for a video. He could out-perform a Duracell bunny, but he looks more like Father Christmas, in a room full of people barely old enough to shave.

Yet being among the young is where this bluesman of indeterminate age feels most at home – and as if to prove the point, Lily Allen promptly walks in and embraces Steve like her best mate. She first met Seasick, real name Steve Wold, when he stole the stage at Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and won the audience vote for most popular act – not bad for an unknown pitted against the biggest names of the year.

He is a rogue success story, a tramp who became a session musician, then a producer, and now an artist in his own right, helped to solo success by the patronage of the British radio DJs Charlie Gillet and Andy Kershaw. His intense, rhythmic, hilarious and heart-wrenching one-man show is set to be the alternative star attraction at many British festivals this summer, including the Big Chill and Glastonbury.

Today he has been shooting a video around London, though the Tube proved a troublesome location. For a start, he was reluctant to return to his former busking ways – “like scratching an open wound”, he says. But he soon saw the humour in the situation when he found himself in the unfamiliar position of having to ask strangers to stop throwing him money.

Steve lived rough all over America “before the word homeless was invented”, having left home at 14 when his mum took up with a volatile sort. Among other things, he turned to migrant farm work. “You followed the picking seasons,” he explains. “At the end of the summer you went up to Washington to pick apples up in Wenatchee, then you did tomatoes down in California, or grapes, artichokes, or you went out to the Midwest to chuck corn.”

He was a hobo, travelling around by jumping rides on freight trains. When there was nothing to eat he would head to a Christian mission and be forced to sit through a sermon before being granted sustenance. Inevitably, he turned to drink, his poison of choice being a cheap and nasty potion called Thunderbird. “The first half of the bottle tastes real bad,” he declares, before chuckling and explaining that “the second half soon starts tasting better”.

As for that famous Jools Holland appearance, he says he had no idea while playing that he was causing such a stir. “All the other acts got a stage but they just made me sit in the middle of the floor – but as soon as I stopped playing I heard clapping and screaming and everybody came running. All the young bands like the Kooks and the Zutons were coming up to me saying I was the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

So Steve was befriended by Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen. He says that Allen was the best live performer there and very funny (“We talked a lot about how she had made her own dress. It was kind of like a tent”). He met the artist Peter Blake (“Somebody said you got to come and meet the man who made the Sgt Pepper cover – and I go: ‘Aren’t you the old dude I met out in the hallway when I needed to pee?’ ”), but he wasn’t too sure about schmoozing with the stars.

“Afterwards there were hundreds of people at this party upstairs, and six or seven Scots Guards guys playing the bagpipes – they was rocking, man. I just hung out with them!”

Raconteur he may be, but there are stories that Steve is not so keen on telling. They involve his more professional past, producing albums for Modest Mouse and his session work with the Beach Boys. “That’s what I think is wrong with old rock and blues musicians – they are like, ‘Well, I played with him and him and I did this.’ It’s just something for middle-aged people to pat themselves on the back. And the kids is yawning.”

Yawning kids are something Steve wants to see none of. “I get these e-mails from young people all over saying, ‘Oh, man, I hated the blues until I heard you,’ and that is an honour. I’m not interested in playing blues for a bunch of old men; I don’t care about being put under S in the library of blues.”

He claims he was a late starter with the blues, not getting into it “until the 1960s”, which makes you wonder quite how much older than his fans he is. His heroes are Lightning Hopkins, Fred McDowell, Blind Lemon and Charlie Patton, and he’s particularly interested in seeing younger bands unearth the work of the Delta bluesmen for themselves.

“Without the blues there would be no rock music, no soul, no nothing, but most people don’t like the blues because it’s so boring. And it is boring – until the White Stripes put out a record with a Son House song on there, and all of a sudden, everybody’s going, ‘Who’s Son House?’

“The White Stripes have done more for the blues in five minutes than all of those blues magazines put together.”

What you might not expect is that Steve is also in a long and happy marriage to a Norwegian woman, and that they now live in her home country. Unwilling to let his own age get the better of him, Steve celebrated his last birthday by jumping a train, “just to see if I could still do it”. And indeed he could – despite being in recovery from a heart attack. So he didn’t incur any major injuries? “No, no major nothing,” he laughs, “just major boredom!”

It’s just as well for us – he will have to keep getting his kicks by electrifying the stage instead.

— The It’s All Good EP is out on June 16 on Bronzerat. Seasick Steve plays Liverpool Academy tonight and Birmingham Mac tomorrow. www.seasicksteve.com

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