He must have made some kind of subliminal impression on me. A tall, long-haired soldier, leaning on his rifle with arms tightly folded against the cold, singing his heart out into the darkness. His face a little too authentically haggard but transformed suddenly into wry sidelong laughter by some soldiers' joke with his comrades.

Something certainly triggered this memory when I began to wonder what folk music might be all about. Yes, someone said, that Hagman fellow in the Sharpe series, he's a proper folk singer. Or he was, haven't heard much of him recently. John Tams. The folk music books didn't have much to say either. My mild curiosity continued as I explored the "Folk" section of our local music library, then was suddenly fired by the discovery of a CD of the music from Sharpe. I can even remember the precise track that did it; it's called "Johnny Is Gone For A Soldier" but became known in our house as "Butternut Hill." The voice was as I remembered: seductive, rich and emotional but with a hard northern edge (now say "Butternut" again) that stopped it cloying. I was hooked.

A little more than eighteen months later I was sat in a pub in south Nottinghamshire waiting to meet the man fRoots magazine had described as "the enigmatic John Tams." In the same article it was claimed that he had been in the thick of the folk movement, pivotal even, for the past thirty years or so. Putting these two facts together I suspected that it was no accident I had been unable to track down much information about him; perhaps he wanted it that way. And here I was, by dint of an embarrassingly admiring website and a phenomenally cheeky bit of name dropping, daring to "interview" him. I have to admit my motivation was a little mixed. Sure, there seemed to be a shortage of information about the man on the Internet; I had some questions that needed answering (both my own and from other fans, who had contacted me via the website.) But I also wanted to find out more about what made him tick, the secret of the offbeat charisma that had ensnared not just me. In the same way, the website had been a way of sharing the information it had taken me hours to glean from search engines, but also I just liked talking about him! I didn't want to pry into whatever he wanted to keep private, but he was so obviously passionate about certain issues the enigma was just begging to be unwrapped a little. No black holes materialised to swallow me up, much as I wished they would, so I got on with it.

He was physically familiar from the times I'd seen him in concert. Tall, very thin, magnificently moustached, slightly eccentrically dressed and chaperoned by his wife Sally, who had been instrumental in setting up the meeting in the first place. Photographs portray him as serious, owlish even, in life the eyes behind the glasses are sharp and curious. Another quirk you wouldn't know from photos is his socks, which are invariably red. A sign of his socialist views? "No, I think red's cheerful. I used to wear red shoes as well; I was working on the actor's theory that if you get the feet right in a part the rest of the character will follow. So I may be dressed all in black but at least I've got cheerful ankles!"

He is famously deadpan, for example in his quasi-morose onstage rambling. I remember him best of all at Fylde Folk Festival, lamenting the perils of wooden harmonicas. "They'd start off all right, but they'd swell up during the evening... they'd be like this big... and your mouth... your mouth would bleed... and then you'd go to take a long run up them and your moustache would get caught in the end, like this"; demonstrating with a perfect expression of surprised agony. The audience never roars, but there is an increasingly hysterical giggle from them until he can't resist and joins in with a short bark of laughter and a swift smile, strumming gently all the while at an electric guitar with the sound turned down. He will go on between songs like this for ages; the pauses speak volumes. I mentioned this to him, asking if he takes as long to rev himself up in the recording studio. "Well I certainly don't do it in the theatre, which is why I indulge myself, perhaps over indulge myself, on the bandstand. I like to put a song in context." Sometimes even the band will think he is about to start, but no, and their hands fall resignedly back from their instruments.

The band was another thing I wanted to ask him about. He had hinted in other interviews that the age range of the musicians was something that had a very positive effect on the work he was doing. He affirmed this as we spoke. "We could have made it up with contemporary veterans but it wouldn't have been as good. I'm properly flattered for them to want to associate with me." I was wondering if this diverse age structure was a phenomenon that was fairly recent, but as he pointed out, 'I did an album a long time ago, an instrumental album. The two men who were playing at the front of it were in their seventies, and I'd be in my late twenties at the time. One was Bob Cann, a melodeon player, and the other was Jimmy Cooper, who was a Scottish hammered dulcimer player. And they'd not met before so putting them together was a great opportunity, and then putting a kind of rock 'n' roll rhythm section behind them, you know, they just got younger and we got a little older." (This album was Kickin' Up The Sawdust.) He spoke further about one of the younger members of his current band, the drummer Keith Angel. "Keith's a really gentle and generous man and Angel is a very appropriate surname for him. I love him very dearly, he's a great discovery for me just as a human being let alone as a fantastic player."

He said a similar thing about Sally, "a wonderful, generous hearted woman." I felt here I was beginning to get at something very important to John Tams: he loves people. Friends are enormously important to him and I think you can tell a lot about someone from the qualities they admire in others. In his business, rivalries could easily become feuds, and perhaps fans like to exaggerate this. But he refuses to play along. His manner hardened as he said, "people have tried to drive a wedge between me and Ashley (Hutchings), and (Bill) Caddick too, come to that. But it didn't work and it won't work." Point put across, he relaxed a little again, "I'm very lucky, I've got a lot of friends. Enemies? I can count on one finger how many enemies I've got. Can't remember his name now, either." He does seem to inspire tremendous loyalty; as Sue Johnstone said at the BBC2 Folk Awards, "his heart is huge.'

Despite the dour demeanour, these flashes of a vast humanity shine through. I remember, again from Fylde, how a toddler at the back of the hall fell over and howled. Instantly John's whole attention was focused on this little incident, audience and band forgotten until he was satisfied that small knees had been rubbed better. And as we discussed the kit he had kept from his days filming Sharpe, he mentioned a forage cap that had belonged to his character, "I gave it to a little boy who was... going through a bit of a state." I didn't ask the precise nature of the "state." It was important enough to him. Now maybe I am prying too far. But he has hinted at this stance of his when talking about his partner of Albion Band and Home Service days, Bill Caddick. "Bill writes songs about heroes, and I write songs about victims." Miners, refugees, sheep farmers and casualties of World War One all fall into this category. He told me about a screenplay he"s been commissioned to write, about a black slave uprooted to Derbyshire at the end of the Naploeonic Wars. "It's about the superclass, the underclass and then the slave. Everyone kicks the slave."

More prosaically, the enigma may be due to the way he will immerse himself in working with other artists. He has been credited with "discovering" Kate Rusby, was instrumental in coaxing Lal Waterson back to recording before her untimely death in 1998, and has collaborated in numerous plays and films; this work largely goes unnoticed by the average observer. As he told me about the various projects he was currently involved in, I mentioned the phrase "burning the candle at both ends." He smiled a little sheepishly. "I work a lot steadier than I used to." No wonder John Kirkpatrick (another ex-Albion Band colleague) said to me, "Tam's made a career of looking unwell..." No wonder his own solo work gets put on the back burner a little when a cause fires him up. I came away from the meeting with the impression of a gentle, humble man; I dearly hope he realises how well loved he is, and that we are treated to a little more of that incomparable voice soon.

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