AT the Radio 2 Folk Awards in London’s Royal Albert Hall earlier this month, Tony Blackburn, whose voice inaugurated Radio 1 in 1967, presented a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The reason he was there, he said, was that, back in the early sixties, he had been in a band, Tony Blackburn and the Swinging Bells, which was active in and around Bournemouth. The electric guitarist was “wonderful, except that he played so loud for an entire three or four years, it drowned out my voice totally”. Moments later he presented the award to that very same guitarist: Al Stewart.

Blackburn’s words reminded you that Glasgow-born Stewart has had a remarkable – and remarkably enduring – career. After gigging in Bournemouth, he arrived in London in 1965, aged 19, and became a noted figure on the thriving folk scene.

Within a couple of years he had recorded his debut album, Bedsitter Images. His subsequent albums – Love Chronicles (1969), Zero She Flies (1970), Orange (1972), Past, Present and Future (1974) and the following year’s Modern Times – established him as an elegant, literate songwriting, fluent in what has been called “historical folk-rock”. It was, however, the success of his next two albums, Year of the Cat (1976) and Time Passages (1978), that made him really famous. As his website puts it, these multi-million selling albums became staples of FM radio.

Not that he was content to carry on in the same vein. As Stewart said in a 1989 US interview, Arista Records president Clive Davis “wanted a clone of [hit single] Year of the Cat. I gave him two – Time Passages and Song on the Radio. Both were sort-of hits. And it occurred to me that I could probably do that forever … But I would have gone crazy. So I opted to become an eccentric, recording 24 Carrots and Indian Summer [both in the early 1980s]. And Clive said, ‘If you want to be an eccentric, do it on someone else’s label’.”

Some 36 years later, give or take, Stewart is still working. He’s 71, though he looks considerably younger, and he has resided in California for decades. Though it’s been a while since his last album, he continues to tour, his current dates pairing him up yet again with guitarists Tim Renwick and Dave Nachmanoff. It’s called the Back to the Bedsit tour, the very name recalling his early days in London, and that debut album. Did he, I ask, feel awed by the sheer size of the capital in those days?

“Not at all”, he says, speaking down the line from Cork. “Cities are all about access, so it just seemed to present lots of different opportunities. I’d actually gone to London pretty much to try to join a band, because I’d been playing in beat groups in Bournemouth. I auditioned for four and got accepted by two and turned down by two. Unfortunately, the two that I was interested in were the ones that weren’t interested in me. It’s always like that.

“But then a series of accidents happened, all at the beginning of 1965, that changed my life. I had a guitar and walked into a London coffee-bar, called Bunjees. It had a little folk cellar and they put on folk singers every day of the week. The owner saw my guitar case and said, ‘Are you a folk singer?’

“And without really missing a beat, because I smelt an opportunity” – he laughs at the memory – “I said yes. I knew about three Bob Dylan songs at the time. The owner said, 'Can you start on Friday?' For the next couple of years I played there every single Friday.” Stewart necessarily had to learn a lot of new songs.

He also landed a spot as compere at the leading folk club, Les Cousins. “And no sooner did I get that than Bob Dylan arrives, and does a concert at the Albert Hall. It’s very hard to explain to people now what that changed.

“I’d just seen the Beatles in Bournemouth and they played for 25 minutes, if that. And everything was package-shows: the main act would never play for more than half an hour, no matter how famous they were. On comes Dylan with an acoustic guitar and plays for two hours, and everyone was mesmerised. I didn’t know that was possible until I saw that happening.”

A change of direction was beckoning him, and just as Stewart was wonderinh: "How do you write songs?", a young American singer-songwriter named Paul Simon moved in next door. “And I thought,: 'Oh, that’s how you do it.’"

The first album was well-received but it was the follow-up, Love Chronicles, which has often been seen as his masterpiece. The guest musicians included Jimmy Page and several members of Fairport Convention, and the highlight was the astonishing, candid, 18-minute-long title track. Was a track of that length an unusual prospect back then?

It was not, Stewart says. “Everybody was experimenting. The sixties notoriously were trying to break the bounds of the three-minute pop song. I went both ways: I wrote one song that was 18 minutes and another, A Small Fruit Song, that was about 15 seconds. We were really just messing around to see what was possible. It was a great time of experimentation”.

The current tour setlist revisits many of Stewart’s finest songs, of course, but some of his fans have been wondering whether there might be a new album.

“I could definitely make an album, I could make an album anytime,” he says. “The reason I stopped making albums was that people stopped buying them. I mean, after the invention of electricity, if you had heavily invested in candlewax, for example, it wouldn’t have been a sensible thing to do. And we’re at that point whereby the technology is changing very rapidly and it hasn’t really settled on a format for selling music.

“I can’t make a record that sells 793 copies”, he adds, “because everybody would lose money, and everybody would be annoyed. So, if the music business re-establishes itself in some way so that people buy music again, I’m more than happy to make a record. I can’t make it in a vacuum,, but I can write songs, so that if it ever sorts itself out, I can make a record.”

Happily, Stewart is engaged on one song at the moment, and one that shows his abiding fascination with history. Its subject is Hemingway’s liberation of the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1944.

“It’s very funny – his idea of liberating the Ritz was mainly to liberate the wine cellar. He just missed the Germans by a matter of hours, and the reason was because they’d stopped at every single bar on the way there. It’s the day the Germans left Paris, and Hemingway arrived with this band of French resistance fighters he’d picked up along the way. They waltzed into the Ritz and it’s said they drank about 200 bottles of champagne that night.

“The song, if I finish it, is basically about the various things that happened in the Ritz. It was Goering’s headquarters, too. I’m looking at the people who went through the bar at the Ritz, including, obviously, people like Marcel Proust and Marlene Dietrich and all these others.

“And I thought, there has to be a song there. So, when I finish this tour, I’m hoping over to Paris and I’m going to have a glass of champagne in the Hotel Ritz and see if I can dredge up some inspiration”.

Al Stewart plays the Queens Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Monday.