"Costello listened to me, " Earle says, "and told me I was f***ing crazy. He has known me a long time; I believe he was genuinely concerned for my safety." Also present at this meeting was Bobby Muller . . . the President of Veterans of America . . . in whose support both musicians had been performing the previous evening.

"I regard Bobby, " Earle says, "as the most brilliant activist of modern times. He told me I was f***ing crazy too."

Earle had told them he was planning to write a song from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, an American detainee at Guantanamo Bay. A 20-year-old Muslim, Lindh had been filmed duct-taped to a stretcher: halfnaked, malnourished and trembling. This degrading footage was repeatedly screened by Fox News and CNN. The finished song refers to the US as "the land of the infidel" and has a hauntingly beautiful chorus in Arabic, which translates: "There is no god but Allah."

'John Walker's Blues' was released in 2002, at the height of America's vertiginous optimism over the War On Terror.

"I couldn't not write it. I'd almost died from drugs 10 years earlier. Literally. I believe I was spared for a reason."

Earle, 52, has been sober for 13 years, but over two decades of using heroin and other drugs have left their mark . . . the young man who was once well-placed in Playgirl's Top 10 Most Desirable Musicians appears, with age, to be heading for a look more reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg.

After he left Costello and Muller in Stockholm, he travelled to Malmo. "I checked into a hotel, sat up all night and wrote a song designed to piss some very important people off. But the main reason I did it was to humanise a young man that everybody seemed determined to villify. As I was writing it, I can remember thinking: 'well, they'll both be safely up in the air by now.

Costello's flying back to Dublin.

Muller's on a plane to the States.'

All I could think of was them going: 'He has really f***ing done it this time.'" His song for Lindh (currently incarcerated in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of May 2019) was not greeted with universal approval.

"When it came out, I got this call from my mother. She was freaking out, because she was watching CNN and they said: 'Let's hope that Steve Earle has good bodyguards.'" The New York Post ran a front page that read: "Twisted ballad honors Tali-Rat."

One CNN commentator remarked: "If Steve Earle had written that song about a Muslim country, he'd have had his tongue cut out, " the implication being Sharia law might have something to teach us after all.

'John Walker's Blues' appeared on his 2002 masterpiece, Jerusalem. Like his virulently antiwar CD, The Revolution Starts Now, released two years later, it was quintessential Earle: humane, articulate, effortlessly poetic and driven by an instinct for fullblooded subversion. (The singer has, by his own account, been arrested "only 50 or 60 times" . ) The Revolution Starts Now was the last album in a body of work that qualifies him as one of America's greatest living songwriters. It's been a very long wait for his next album.

Part of the trouble, Earle explains, was the time he's devoted to his first novel, which will be published next year.

"The New Yorker said it's going to sound like rap. Actually, nobody has heard much of it. I'd describe it as very folky."

Earle is one of the very few popular musicians who can hold his own debating in any company.

Most of his greatest songs, like 'Fort Worth Blues' . . . his mournful eulogy to his mentor and fellow hedonist, the late Townes Van Zandt . . . are not overtly political.

That said, Earle's 1990 classic 'Billy Austin' manages, in six minutes, to be as effective a condemnation of the death penalty as a lifetime's worth of documentaries. "Capital punishment, " in Earle's words, "means never having to say you're sorry."

Earle has of course been particularly vocal about Iraq, but not just the US population's policy towards it.

"When Europeans start criticising Americans over Iraq, I have to say that I think Tony Blair was about the most dangerous thing you can possibly imagine.

Without Bill Clinton, Blair was not possible. Without Blair, George W Bush was not possible. As soon as you perceive Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown, or Bill Clinton or his f***ing wife to be to the left of anything, you are in trouble. . ."

What's interesting is that Earle himself said he resembles Bush in many ways. . .

"Absolutely. I was with some people, and they were all asking about Bush. 'Why is he the way he is? Why does he keep repeating his mistakes?' I told them: Bush, like me, is a recovering addict. And George W Bush. . ." Earle stops himself. "I can't say what I was going to say, because it would be busting his anonymity."

There is the hint of a pause.

"But f*** him. I can't stand the motherf***er. George W Bush went to AA meetings when he was governor of Texas. I know people who. . . he was seen in meetings all the time he was governor, in Austin. . . the reason this is important is that now, as President of the United States, going to Twelve-Step meetings is impossible. There are rules about that and the CIA writes those rules. The guy who established Alcoholics Anonymous took the principles from something called the Oxford Group, which was totally Anglican, then made a system that worked for anybody . . .

even if they were agnostic."

So AA meetings tempered Bush's instincts?

"From the moment he took office, the Christian rhetoric started to ratchet up. In his life, he replaced the Twelve-Step Programme with fundamentalist Christianity. I really believe that."

Friends say that Earle, despite his sometimes confrontational manner, is not an arrogant man.

"When we look back on the poisoned reign of Junior, " Elvis Costello said, "we will see Steve Earle as one of the less selfregarding members of the cultural resistance."

Brought up mainly in San Antonio, Texas, he was slow, given his precocious talent, to get a recording contract. He made two classic albums . . . Copperhead Road and Guitar Town . . . before his addictions temporarily extinguished his professional life.

"I lost five years, from 35 to 40, " he says. "My drug habit got to the point I couldn't leave the source. I was homeless in Nashville, slept under bridges."

In this period, which ended at the beginning of 1995, he dedicated himself full-time to smoking crack and injecting heroin. Most of his supplies were procured in Lewis Street, a project housing area commemorated in his song 'South Nashville Blues'. The song is characteristic of his guitar technique . . . mesmerising yet totally unflashy. Earle exudes the qualities of any virtuoso . . .

effortless grace, and the sense that he may possibly be in touch with another reality. Within weeks of becoming sober, in 1995, he had played on recordings for Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams.

Earle is relatively cautious when talking about the instability of his earlier life. Which makes it all the more remarkable that, in 2002, he allowed the writer Lauren St John to publish Hardcore Troubadour, a biography drawing on interviews with his friends and family.

"I've never read it, " he says. "I did it because Lauren is a friend."

Relatives read it, notably his younger sister, singer Stacey Earle. "Some of them said things they regret. I told them, 'you say it, they print it'. That's how it works."

Without Hardcore Troubadour, which is well-written and thoroughly researched, we may never have known how he practised his golf swing through the sliding windows of his bedroom at the Marriott Marquee in Atlanta, gradually narrowing the gap to make misjudged drives more emphatic.

And how many can say they drove a car through a wall into their own living room?

"That wasn't me, " says Earle.

"That was two friends of mine. It was a new Camero. They drove in through the French doors. I was watching Saturday Night Live when they arrived."

He pauses. "I don't enjoy talking about some of this shit. At the same time I'm aware that it is relevant to my life. I am also very grateful for still being here. At some point, I was lucky enough to grow up."

Earle was born in Fort Monroe, Virginia, but raised in Schertz, outside San Antonio. His father was an air-traffic controller; his mother was subject to clinical depression precipitated, Earle says, by the fact he and his younger siblings, Mark, Kelly and Stacey, arrived within less than five years of each other.

"My mother was horribly depressed. She'd been a model parent when I was young . . . but when I was 12 or 13, she began just laying on the couch, and sleeping.

She'd go off to hospital for shock treatment, then come back and sleep some more. She recovered after I moved to Nashville when I was 19."

As a boy, he was strongly influenced by his mother's halfbrother, Nick Fain, a drug addict who lived with them and, being five years older, was essentially an older brother. Earle was using hypodermics at an age when some of his schoolfriends had not yet ignited a cigarette. "The first time I took cocaine, I shot it." He was 13, "doing what Nick did."

"Nick lives on the street now, or with the Salvation Army. Last I heard he was in Austin. To look at him, he could be 80."

When researching the life of someone who's been married more than once it helps to divide their history according to spouses, just as English historians do with monarchs. This doesn't work too well with Earle. . . because he's had seven.

"And one of them I married twice, " says Earle. He has been widely credited with the definition of marriage as a process whereby "every five years you find a woman that hates you, and buy her a house"; he says he heard that from Glen Campbell, also on his seventh matrimonial excursion.

"The thing you have to remember, " Earle says, "is that my marriage to Allison [in November 2005] is the first I've ever entered into sober."

Yet despite such excess, before his lost five years Earle had managed to hold things together.

"Ambition helped. I was smart enough to realise that I shouldn't hang around with Townes all the time and copy every move he made. [A chronic alcoholic, depressive and gambler, Van Zandt pulled the trigger three times during a solo experiment with Russian roulette. He eventually succumbed to a heart attack in 1997, aged 52. ] "I did things without thinking what the consequences were. The biggest lie all addicts believe is: 'I am not hurting anybody but myself.' I was kind of a bad motherf***er, you know?" In 1994 he received a visit from a concerned-looking Van Zandt. " I must be in trouble, " Earle said, "if they're sending you."

His 2001 collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses, is really an autobiographical treatment of the unbridled depravity of this period.

Harold Mills, his main dealer in South Nashville, appears under his own name. So how did he stop?

"I encountered the immovable object. I went to jail [on a charge related to possession of heroin] where I was physically restrained from taking drugs. It takes a while to figure out how to get heroin in jail."

His mother wrote him a letter which said: "Steve: I think you know what you have to do."

He went into the Twelve-Step Programme and emerged, sober, at the end of 1994. The time and energy he had dissipated went into his work as a musician, writer and activist. The musical record of his epiphany is El Corazon, an album he wrote mainly in Galway following the death of Van Zandt in early 1997. It was there, staring out at Galway Bay, that he composed 'Fort Worth Blues' and 'Christmas in Washington', his epic tribute to Woody Guthrie.

There had been perhaps only one consistent enthusiasm in Earle's life that could not be viewed as a sin: since the 1980s he had pursued his opposition to the death penalty by writing letters to inmates on Death Row. For 10 years Earle had been corresponding with Jonathan Nobles . . . a methamphetamine user convicted of the murder of two young women. In prison, Nobles had become a lay preacher.

He was one of 246 executions sanctioned by George W Bush in less than six years as Texas governor. Earle visited Nobles on each of the 10 days leading up to his execution by lethal injection, in 1998.

"Steve, " Nobles said to Earle as he was being wheeled into the execution room, "I can't believe I had to go through all this to see you dressed in a suit." Nobles died reciting 'Silent Night'.

"It isn't the brutality of the method that makes me opposed to the death penalty, " Earle says.

"What I object to is that my government is supposed to represent me. I don't want their blood on my hands. In that sense, I'm not trying to stop anyone going to Death Row. I'm trying to stop me from going to hell."

Earle's sister Stacey often says he looks scared, yet nothing about him does.

"I'm scared of a number of things, but Stacey doesn't have any idea what they are. I have stood as close as this, " the musician indicates a few yards, "while the state of Texas killed a man. I held his mother's hand while he was being executed.

Death is not something I am afraid of. I am more acquainted with it than most. I pray. But I pray because it's good for me. It doesn't matter whether I pray or not; there's still going to be a God."

Steve Earle's new album is released in September