Head to church in Steve Winwood’s neck of the woods in rural Gloucestershire and you might be treated to the Grammy-winning legend tickling the ivories.

The former leader of Traffic, guitarist in supergroup Blind Faith and big-selling solo artist might be a superstar with his name in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, but the Brummie has lost none of his everyman charm.

“The local church has a regular organist but sometimes when he can’t do it I go and play the organ,” he says, speaking before a new tour to pick out favourites from his 50-year career.

“Sometimes I sing tenor in the choir,” he adds, “but then sometimes the alto section is not very big so I go and help out with them.

“I suppose I do odd jobs down there, a sort of community service.”

He’s always been broad-minded. He left school at 15 to join the beat quartet The Spencer Davis Group and helped to pen Keep On Running and I’m A Man. His formal education never happened so he taught himself from books.

“There is a natural hunger for know-ledge, particularly about music. Music is such a vast subject: the more you seem to learn, the more mysterious it gets.”

So he’s always on the lookout for new music, which is how he ended up in church.

“The choirmaster is an expert in plainsong, which is a wonderful form of music dating back to the 6th and 7th century. It started with monks chanting but a lot of it was written down and it can be very melodic, so I am very interested in that.”

He loves that the many different elements in a good piece of music make it impossible to formalise. Traditional forms of music which are integral to culture, be it African, Irish, Brazilian, are another fascination.

“I’m a bit of an amateur musicologist as well,” he jokes.

His happiest moment in music was in the band he co-founded in 1967, Traffic. John Barleycorn Must Die, the record Winwood reformed the group to make after he’d left for Blind Faith with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker a year earlier, showed his diverse tastes early on.

Despite fusing folk rock with jazz, R’n’B, even classical elements and ethnic music,which could have been hard for the mainstream to palate,, the record sat in the US Billboard chart for weeks.

Different quest

“Traffic was a turning point,” he explains. “It was quirky because we made the effort to combine different types of music. Ever since then, I have continued that quest to make something that is peculiar to now.

He says his son is really interested in drum and bass and is a filter for him.

“He will say, ‘Dad you won’t like this, but here is some other stuff you will quite like’. I am discovering relationships between the drum and bass and Cuban and Brazilian rhythms.”

Whether his son still asks about the things his old man got up to with the greats is another matter.

Back in 1968, Winwood laid down some blues guitar for Jimi Hendrix.

“He was a great guy and I liked him a lot. We also had a rapport musically because we had both come through the ranks.

“I had to learn to play 1930s and 1940s dance music with my dad. He was in backing bands on a talent show and so was Jimi.”

They had much in common – they could both do magical things with music and tackle any style – and identified with each other.

“When I played Voodoo Child it was a very simple phone call, he said, ‘Hey man will you come down and play something, we are at Record Plant in New York’. I walked in and asked, ‘What key is it?’ “He said D, roughly explained it and we did one take. We did another take and he broke a string. There were no guitar techs in those days so we hung out. Next he wound another string on and tuned it up. We did take three and that was the one they used.”

When Winwood went solo he scored two Grammy-winning albums, Back In The High Life and Roll With It.

A track from his third solo album, Talking Back To The Night, saw him have a resurgence in the early 2000s and find a new generation of fans.

When Eric Prydz sampled 1982 single Valerie in 2004 for the house-pop anthem Call On Me, Winwood was so impressed he re-recorded the vocals for the Swedish DJ.

“I like it very much when people rework my tracks. I’m not saying I like all the results. I thought that was good, and Christina Aguilera did a great version of a Traffic track, Glad.”

And how was that?

“I played on it and I was involved in writing and played gospel organ on it. It was great,” he jokes. “She certainly had a lot going on.”