Contemporary culture is a cruel beast, puffing up stars, watching them swallow the hero-worship, then scything them down to earth and taking pleasure in their fall. So it is good to note that occasionally people in the entertainment business get on with the job without making headlines, and that we appreciate someone for the uncomplicated feelgood pleasure that they bring, and for their lack of ego.

Enter Shakin' Stevens, the 60-year-old Welsh Elvis, still playing unreconstructed rock'n'roll after 40 years, and now in the line-up at this year's Glastonbury Festival. As the organisers recognise, his presence alongside such luminaries as Jay-Z and Massive Attack will be something of a curve ball. But when people talk about ironic reverence for Stevens, what they really mean is that they're fond of him; they're just not sure it's cool to say so. He did after all make Guinness World Records as the biggest-selling male UK singles artist of the 1980s; he has had 39 hit singles, including This Ole House, and his 1985 single, Merry Christmas Everyone, is the seventh most performed Christmas song in Britain. It was due for release in 1984 but rescheduled so that it didn't clash with the Band Aid single.

Such information is catalogued in his website's biography, a curious document that, through its endearing use of Eeyoreish negatives, gives you a flavour of the man. It doesn't tell you that his real name is Michael Barratt, and that he is the youngest of 12 children born to a Cardiff miner, or that he acquired his nickname, Shaky, because of his uncertain stance at the wicket as a schoolboy cricketer. Neither will you learn that when he married in 1967 he was still a milkman. It doesn't even tell you the name of the Elvis musical in which he found success in the 1970s.

Instead it chronicles the formation of his band Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets in 1968, and how they evaded fame. “Stevens was hardly an overnight success,” it notes. Months after an album was cut in 1978, the record company went into liquidation. Three singles were then produced “without any real success”. Many years later, having paid his dues, another album was released: “Stevens was not totally happy with the final ourtcome of this album.” He does mention a performance at the launch of the Welsh Assembly and a millennium concert in Cardiff, but the biog comes to an abrupt halt before he won the TV comeback show, Hit Me Baby One More Time, which returned him to the UK charts.

If this wasn't so genuine, it would be funny, as the fictional Alan Partridge recognised when he invented a Stevens endorsement (“lovely stuff”) for his book, Bouncing Back. That's what Stevens embodies, the archetypal survivor, and that's why people like him. He doesn't do charisma or humour; not intentionally, anyway.

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