'Welcome to the bus," William Storrar says with an almost beatific smile.

It's an overcast weekday morning in the car park of Falkirk High train station but the compere of the Bus Party 2014 is in ebullient mood. He shakes my hand warmly: "Come aboard". Beside him the slight figure of writer Neal Ascheron breaks into a verse from Hugh MacDiarmiad.

There are already over 1000 miles on the Bus Party clock by the time I clamber onto the grey minibus, lifting an unopened bottle of red wine and a box of leaflets off the nearest free seat.

The Bus Party's modus operandi is simple: engage voters in the referendum not by arguing the toss over Yes or No, but through music, prose and poetry. Rather than the bright lights of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the aptly named "Listening Lugs" tour has hit the byroads, performing to audiences from Stromness in Orkney to Lochgelly in Fife as part of an eight-day, 16-date tour.

The Bus Party is not a novel idea. In 1997, Ascherson, inspired by German novelist Gunter Grass's "Citizen's Initiatives" and enervated by a lifeless devolution referendum, convinced artists including William McIlvanney to embark on a similar journey around Scotland campaigning for a "yes/yes".

Like a reformed stadium rock outfit, many of the faces from the previous tour are back, including hirsute, bespectacled preacher-cum-poet-cum-bus driver Jock Stein and William Storrar, then a Kirk minister and now director of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton University. But this time around the Bus Party is trying to facilitate debate, not encourage people to vote aye or naw.

"The question we are asking is not if you're going to be 57 pence better off, or 36 pence worse off, whether we will be in the EU or have the pound, it's what kind of Scotland do you want," explains Storrar as we walk to the first stop of the day: Waterstones in Falkirk.

The bookshop is cramped and the mid-morning crowd is thin. Ascherson has forgotten to bring a copy of Stone Voices, his memorable account of the 1997 expedition. Like a star-struck roadie, I lend him my own dog-eared copy.

Ascherson and novelist James Robertson read against a backdrop of ringing tills and a tartan-filled mural of the Battle of Falkirk.

The numbers may be small, but those who are present clap heartily at the close. "It was very stimulating," says Archie Menzies, a pensioner from Callander. Menzies and wife, Rena, are undecided about how they will vote in September.

"All you're getting from politicians is 'you're going to be £1000 richer in 20 years time, or you're not going to be'. I think that turns a lot of people off. This kind of activity is more meaningful," he says.

Artists from the tour hand out copies of a pamphlet entitled The Day After The Referendum to the occasional curious passer-by. The cover features a Sandy Moffat drawing; inside is an essay by James Robertson.

"How many countries have the opportunity to have this kind discussion about their future?" says Robertson, author of And The Land Lay Still. "I think that's a fantastic thing that we can show to the world. We can have this conversation and the day after we can still get along whatever the outcome."

Next stop is Livingston, and another Waterstones. This incarnation is more recent - all glass and steel - and upstairs, in the café, sits a man who more than anyone provided the intellectual ballast for Scottish nationalism, Tom Nairn.

"By 2030 there will be more nationality politics, not less," says the man who coined the phrase The Break-Up Of Britain. "In that sense the Scots are getting in on the act, instead of being dragged along in the rear.'

Glasgow-based Turkish writer Defne Cizakca reads a story set in fin de siècle Istanbul. Afterwards, performers chat amiably with their audience, who are invited to write their hopes for Scotland on a large screed of wallpaper bought, as William Storrar delights in saying, at Homebase in Wick, where the tour began.

As afternoon turns to evening, we set off for the day's final rendezvous: Coatbridge.

By far the largest crowd of the day waits in the comfortable surroundings of Coatbridge's Conforti centre. The performance closes with a rousing version of Hamish Henderson's Freedom Come-All-Ye ,delivered on Hamish Moore's pipes. The ­discussion afterwards is lively. A man in a turban wants "a Scotland where everyone's difference is respected". A man in a Jewish kippah cap says: "Wealth is not riches." People clap. Storrar smiles.

In the audience are students past and present from Saint Roch's secondary school from Royston, probably the most culturally diverse area in Scotland.

"The more I hear people talk like this, the more I think that we are going to get a fair Scotland, non-judgmental, accepting others with less racism," says Temitope Oyedepo, 17, who was born in Nigeria.

"This is our future they are talking about," says her friend, Fredlina Thompson-Clewry, 18. "The Scotland that we create is the Scotland that we youth are going to be living in so they have to include us."

As the bus party draws to a close for another night, playwright David Greig says: "In order to create a dramatic scene you need a proposal and a choice, but it has to be a difficult choice, and you need the pressure of time.

"We are all sat here and we've all got proposal, choice and it's a difficult choice and there is the pressure of time. In a very literal sense this is the character of Scotland; it's not afterwards that we'll find out, it's now," he says. "And of course how it ends will be the drama."