If it's January, it must be Glasgow.

For Michael McGoldrick, as with dozens of other musicians, Celtic Connections has been a hectic start to the year for almost as long as they can remember. "I know I launched my Fused album there in 2000," reckons McGoldrick in an accent that says "Manchester" as clearly as the music he plays (or at least most of the music he plays) speaks of Ireland.

"But the trouble with Celtic Connections is, you're so busy having a good time – playing, listening, socialising – that you lose all sense of what happened when. I might have played there before 2000, maybe with Capercaillie. I don't know."

A quick rifle through the brochures suggests McGoldrick actually made his Celtic Connections debut as a band leader in 1999, when he was referred to as an exciting young exponent of whistle, flute and uilleann pipes. Thirteen years on, he's still exciting audiences and critics alike. One observer last year was moved to describe him as "the Everyman of the festival", noting that McGoldrick's virtuosity slotted in easily wherever he was called into action, be it with the experimental beats of Celtronika, the meeting of Celtic and Indian traditions overseen by master percussionist Zakir Hussain or simultaneously repres-enting the Irish tradition and grooving with the Americana strains in the Transatlantic Sessions.

For McGoldrick, such versatility simply reflects his interests in different styles of music. He may have been brought up with the Irish tradition – his father was one of many of his generation who moved from Ireland, in his case County Galway, to find work digging roads around Manchester – but among his listening habits, especially in his teens, were AC/DC, jazz-rock pioneers Weather Report, French-Moroccan guitarist Pierre Bensusan and space cadets Gong. On his most recent album, Aurora, melodies borne on a G-funk groove sat with Irish reels, tunes drawn from the Breton tradition and tabla-driven rhythms.

"It's one of the great things about Celtic Connections," he says. "Apart from the fact all these musicians are getting work in a month when otherwise there would be no gigs, or at least few gigs, you can hear so many different kinds of music. And often they're mixing together. You see things that weren't actually meant to happen, like the time Dirk Powell, John Doyle and Bela Fleck just decided to get up to play together in the late-night club at three o'clock in the morning. Three different traditions but all great players: I felt really privileged to be there listening."

McGoldrick has also found himself looking around a Celtic Connections stage (and other stages around the world), suddenly becoming aware that he is surrounded by players and singers whose CDs he has at home and wondering how he came to be playing in such illustrious company. Even as he looks forward to his third world tour with former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler's current, folk-influenced band – they went straight into the studio at the end of last autumn's tour to record an album he's expecting to be promoting next year – he marvels at his escape from a job with a haulage company to play music for a living.

"I didn't hold down that job too long," he says. "I got a taste of playing music as a career move by going down to London with my first band, Toss The Feathers, and playing gigs every weekend. So the chance to turn professional was too good to miss. I'd never really thought I could play music for a living to begin with, because it was a social thing we did in our family. But even when I did turn professional, I never thought I'd be watching Bob Dylan doing soundchecks every day and going on to play before his band."

The Bob Dylan experience came on the recent tour that reunited Knopfler and his sometime album production client Dylan, and McGoldrick describes it as inspirational.

"Seeing this man who will be 71 on his birthday rehearsing on stage every day of the tour, constantly working on new ideas, new songs, new arrangements, keeping his music fresh, before he played that night's concert, was great to watch," he says. "By the end of the tour his whole dynamic had changed and I thought, wow, with everything he's done, he could so easily just go on and do the same set every night. But he didn't. I didn't get to hang out with him but I was well inspired by his work ethic and dedication to his art."

McGoldrick was seven or eight years old when he started to play music, beginning with the tin whistle. Having watched his older brothers playing at family gatherings and local music sessions within Manchester's Irish community, it was a natural step, he says. He began attending a weekly music class and as his father, Brendan, noticed his keenness to progress at home, he showed him tunes such as The Maid Behind The Bar, Sally Gardens and The Geese In The Bog. Many of the tunes his father taught him have now been committed to CD.

When he wasn't practising whistle, and presently flute – the uilleann pipes came at the relatively late age of 18 – or playing drums in a ceili band, the young Michael was borrowing his dad's album collection, playing along with the trailblazing Bothy Band and his great hero, Matt Molloy of The Chieftains, dreaming of being able to play as well as them.

In his teens McGoldrick and his fiddle playing pal Desi Donnelly busked around Manchester's Irish pubs on Sunday afternoons and then together they joined Toss The Feathers, whose raucous style gave way to a more thoughtful, considered approach when McGoldrick discovered that people were prepared to actually listen to traditional music as well as leap around at dances. After winning the BBC's Young Tradition Award in 1995 he joined fellow flautists Brian Finnegan and Sarah Allen in what would become Flook before, on one of his many trips to visit relatives in Ireland, he met up with fiddler Sean Smyth and uilleann piper John McSherry, with whom he formed Lunasa, regarded by many as the Bothy Band's natural successors.

One of his other discoveries as a teenager was Scottish Gaelic band Capercaillie, and when he was invited to join them in the late 1990s, he was already familiar with their repertoire. It was yet another example of him getting to play with his heroes, the thrill of which genuinely seems never to have left him despite his regular high- profile work over the past 10 years.

"Being asked to join Bela Fleck in the opening concert at Celtic Connections this year really excites me," he says. "I'm a huge fan of his and when it comes to playing the Transatlantic Sessions concerts later in the festival, I'll be playing with more people, guys like Bruce Molsky and Tim O'Brien who have become pals but who I'd happily go out and pay to listen to."

Over the 18 days of Celtic Connections he'll also be featuring in concert with his own quartet – with Gerry "Banjo" O'Connor, guitarist Tony Byrne and percussionist James Mackintosh – in collaboration with Malian singing sensation Fatoumata Diawara. He's also scheduled to guest with singer-banjoist Damien O'Kane and with Cathy Jordan of Irish folk band Dervish, and may well turn up elsewhere unannounced in spontaneous sessions.

"The gig with Fatoumata Diawara is typical of the sort of opportunity that Celtic Connections brings," he says. "The festival seems to thrive on the unusual, like the year Rory Campbell put together music for a band comprising 10 whistle players. That was a blast but the social aspect can be equally enjoyable.

"You get to spend time with people you might run into on the gig or festival circuit but never really get a chance to hang out with. Equally, you might get to hear musicians you play with regularly playing in a completely different context, and that can be interesting and inspiring, from the point of view of trying out new ideas with your own band, too."

What doesn't seem to be on the agenda is rest. And as soon as Celtic Connections finishes McGoldrick will be off on the Transatlantic Sessions UK tour, followed by a Scottish tour with guitarist John Doyle and fiddler John McCusker. As the sadly departed Warren Zevon used to sing, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead -

Michael McGoldrick appears with Bela Fleck at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Thursday; with Fatoumata Diawara at St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow on January 26; and in Transatlantic Sessions at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on February 2 and 5.