"They don't want frills in the way," said Richard Thompson on the release of his new album.

"They want to hear the squeaks of fingers on strings, and, dare I say, the cock-ups. So that's what they're gonna get."

It's been 37 years since this folk-rock legend recorded his first album with Fairport Convention, and 33 since the release of his first solo set, Henry The Human Fly, which gained the dubious distinction of having been Warner Brothers' worst-selling album of all time.

Yet his latest record, Front Parlour Ballads is, surprisingly, Thomson's first-ever solo acoustic album of alloriginal songs. Spurring this unplugged tour, for which he will be joined on stage by acclaimed acoustic bassist Danny Thompson, it is a treasure trove of brooding laments and lilting love songs. Although recorded by Thompson in the studio he constructed at his home in Los Angeles, it is as British as the Thames-side walks and pewter skies which colour its lyrics.

Still a teenager when he co-founded the electric-folk group Fairport Convention in the late Sixties, Thompson has now been in the business for nearly 40 years, and the quality of his songwriting has proved as consistent as the presence of that old black beret.

On Monday he will be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, where he will also perform in a reunion of the Fairport Convention line-up which recorded the classic LP Liege And Lief, ranked Most Influential Folk Album Of All Time in a public vote.

"The folk-music establishment was our most vociferous opposition," he says of his time with the band.

"We were taking the music out of the museum and tampering with it. But we wanted to breathe life into these ballads. Before the gramophone, you heard about the murder down the road because it was sung as a ballad. That oral tradition has been replaced by media, but it's worth keeping that tradition alive."

Liege And Lief's great achievement was to deeply root contemporary songs in traditional genres, and Thompson's solo material, with its oddball humour and idiosyncratic imagery, has shown him to be consistently adept at framing modern sentiments and stories within time-served folk idioms.

Alhough his Seventies collaborations with then-wife Linda Thompson marked the peak of his popularity, some have called his new collection, with its mix of quirkiness and bitterness, bleakness and beauty, Thompson's most interesting yet.

"It's just a drive," he says of his prolific career, now further extended by a very active web presence. "If you haven't written a song for a couple of weeks, you get itchy, you start twitching. You have to get it out there, whatever it is.

"I've been twitching for 40 years which is great. I still guiltily look over my shoulder sometimes, thinking, 'This is too much fun'."

Support comes from singer-songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols, whose reflective, sweetly-crooned songs have seen him compared to the likes of Hank Williams and Al Green.

Starts at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £20/£17.50, call 01273 709709.