"If Burns was alive today," says Eddi Reader, "I think he would've been excited about the prospect of writing a song for KT Tunstall or collaborating with Madonna. He was so full of joy and vitality. If only he hadn't been hijacked to the shortbread tin."

As integral to our idea of Scottish heritage as rolling hills and haggis, Robert Burns was minimal and memorable, emotional without being weepy, humanistic but no one's fool - in other words, the ultimate folk poet.

Reader, meanwhile, is one of popular music's most admired vocalists, specialising in towering romanticism but with an earthy line in humour.

So it was unsurprising, in 2003, to hear that the one-time Fairground Attraction frontwoman had recorded an album of songs by the 18th Century poet - a record which moves from tragedy and protest to lust and romance, proving anew that old Rabbie Burns wrote a top lyric.

Now Reader is performing The Songs Of Robert Burns, along with her own material, on a special tour which reaches Brighton on the eve of Burns night. But, she says, "I wasn't always a fan."

"I had my issues with him because I come from a very working class, council estate background," she explains.

"Doing Burns at school was very much like an English lassie dealing with Shakespeare - you just wanted to be somewhere else, kissing boys.

"In Victorian times they put Burns on a pedestal that alienated a lot of the lower classes - his own people - so it seemed to be something that bank managers were interested in. In our house Elvis was god."

But Reader always had a soft spot for folk songs. Even when she was in the Eurythmics or working with Gang Of Four she would get out her guitar and sing some old 17th-Century ditty. Yet it wasn't until she actually started work on the album that she discovered the real Burns - a poor young farmer's son who was "as exciting as Sid Vicious", a self-taught prodigy who "took the p***

out of every establishment figure that thought they were above us and floored the intelligentsia of Edinburgh with his intellect".

"I'd lived in London since '85, had my number ones, done my seven solo albums, got my Brit awards, and I was coming home to Glasgow," Reader recalls. "I was kind of falling in love with and looking for my culture again.

"At first it was just gonna be a traditional Scottish album but when I started singing the Burns songs I just got haunted.

"I started to go to Oxfam shops looking for books about him and the pages would magically open at songs I was interested in. I realised I had a ghost with me and that it was him, saying 'sing this' and 'try that'. I thought, 'I'm really gonna have to concentrate here or I'll get sucked into the telly screen or something'."

From a slowed down version of Charlie Is My Darling to an Auld Lang Syne sung to an unfamiliar tune ("that's the most amazing thing in the world - to write a verse that makes people hold each other and love each other"), the songs will be performed with Reader's band and a nine-piece string section.

"I'm not a folk singer," she says, "I'm just an interpreter of good ideas. When I sing Red Red Rose I'm not doing it to try and uphold a tradition or be a classical person, I'm in love with whoever I'm singing it to. Those words make my heart overflow."