FOR anyone who loves a well written song, Steve Tilston is a man worth listening to.

In a career spanning well over 40 years, his blend of folk and pop with incisive and witty lyrics and sublime guitar work has made him something of a national treasure - and on Thursday night he’ll be playing live in Burnley.

His most recent solo album Truth to Tell earned both critical and fan acclaim and last year he also completed an album with Jez Lowe, The Janus Project.

Never one to remain idle for too long, Steve is already working on his next project.

“I want to look at some of my older songs, rearranging them and paring them back to just guitar and vocal,” he said.

“Songs do change through the playing but also with some of my older songs, even though I used to play them live, I would think that they were never quite finished or it had occurred to me I could do something to improve them

“When I was younger I used to think that once something was recorded it was somehow set in aspic and couldn’t be altered, but now time has lapsed I think maybe I can do a few tweaks here and there.”

The prospect of Steve revisiting his back catalogue is a mouthwatering one for his fans.

But for the man himself, it is also quite a daunting one, simply down to the number of songs he has to look at.

“I have got so many songs that it is hard to choose,” said Steve. “There are a couple that I want to look at and then there are the ones that my wife refers to as the ‘bin ends’.

“These are the songs which are on the back end of a CD. They are not necessarily inferior to the ones at beginning of a CD, it’s just that something has to go at the end.

“I suppose in a way I want to shine a light on some of those songs that got physically pushed to the back.”

Steve admits that with so many songs under his belt he cannot recall all of them.

“There have been periods in my life when I thought I was going to be sensible and write things down but then I let it slide - there are a lot of songs that fell by the wayside.

“BBC Six Music recently played an old recording I’d done for the Beeb in 1977 and I’d totally forgotten a couple of songs there. Once I heard them, they came back to me but they had just dropped off the radar, I don’t know why, they were really good songs.

“Usually I do remember them eventually but a couple of times I’ve heard a recording when I know it’s me singing but I cannot remember having written the song.”

Steve is a firm believer that songs can change.

“We’re not dealing with classical music where things are set down on five lines,” he said. “It all comes under the broad heading of folk music so it’s right there is certain amount of elasticity.”

Steve is also allowing himself the luxury of time to continually listen back to his reworkings.

“I’m not looking at releasing this for a couple of years so I’ll give my critical faculties time to process what I’m doing,” he said.

Steve Tilston, Burnley Mechanics, Thursday, March 23, details from 01282 664400