Alejandro Escovedo: 'I'm always trying to create a new sound for myself'

Alejandro Escovedo's music might make you weep, says Garth Cartwright, but you just can't label it

You would be hard pushed to define the musical style of Alejandro Escovedo. In his 27 years in the industry he has done so much: he was there in the early days of punk, he's been hailed as an underground rocker and an alt.country godfather. But by tapping his Hispanic roots – he was born to migrant Mexican parents in Texas – and avoiding the mainstream he has become something of a legend. He finally reached the UK for last year's Beyond Nashville festival and grown men wept: Time Out magazine rightly awarded him Best Concert of 2002. Now he returns to London to close the South Bank's La Linea Festival in May.

Escovedo is an appropriate choice as La Linea is dedicated to showcasing progressive Latin sounds from as far afield as Spain, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil and Mexico – which Alejandro represents, albeit as part of the US's largest Latin minority.

The young Alejandro first made an impression when his punk band The Nuns were chosen to support The Sex Pistols on their last stand in San Francisco in January, 1978. But while Rotten and co imploded, Escovedo set about reinventing American music on a very personal level. Now 52, he possesses a matinee idol's rugged good looks and the kind of persona you might normally associate with characters from Sam Peckinpah films.

"I've been lucky in that I've been in the right place at the right time," he notes, "a little ahead of the curve. As far as not getting rich, well, the good stuff, the real deal, never gets recognised in its lifetime. The stuff that smooths things out, those who know how to sell it, they always make the money."

Escovedo records sparingly – songs dribble rather than flow out of him – for Bloodshot Records, a Chicago independent, so even finding his albums can be difficult. Yet his music possesses an emotional eloquence rare in today's scene. "What kind of love/ destroys a mother?" he sings of his wife's suicide on his most recent album, A Man Under The Influence (Bloodshot, 2001).

"I kind of tried to mask that song, said it was based on a folk song. But it is very much about that incident. I largely write songs for myself so it always surprises me when people say they relate to them. My father was a great storyteller and it's something that is strong in my culture so I try and tell a good story in a song."

In concert Escovedo's performance is as much about this story telling as it is about singing. As he spins yarns and reflects on experiences the listener is drawn into his picture of America. Appropriately, he's also written a theatre piece, By The Hand Of The Father, exploring the immigrant experience of a group of Mexican-Americans and their struggle to survive while maintaining a cultural identity. "It always gets a really strong response," he says. "We take it out on the road every year, two actors, seven musicians and a screen to project images of our families and stuff which relates to us."

Although too individual to label, Escovedo is often bracketed as "alt.country". Understandably, this annoys him, his sound being more loose limbed, drawing on everything from mariarchi music to Mott the Hoople – he even employs a cellist. "I'm always trying to create a new sound for myself, new textures, and the cello comes from listening to John Cale in The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed's Street Hassle where he used strings as aggressively as he would a guitar. As for the alt.country thing, I don't see it as a movement at all. I mean Ryan Adams prancing around pretending he's Elton John – what's that an alternative to?"

Living outside Austin, Texas, allows Escovedo to reflect on how he represents a meeting point of old and new West, Anglo and Hispanic cultures. Yet he still finds barriers are erected to stop Latin musicians who don't fit the Enrique Iglesias mold. "Radio programmers have rung my record company and said, 'We can't even pronounce his name – how do you expect us to play him?' That kind of everyday racism does hold people back and I notice it even now, how I never get filed under rock, instead I'm put in salsa or world beat. But it can be the same coming from my community – Mexicans shout out at concerts, 'Why don't you sing in Spanish?' Well, I do sing in Spanish but never just to appease those who expect me to. To be honest, I'm trying to get beyond race, just trying to be a better human being."

Escovedo's fellow Texan musicians The Dixie Chicks have been effectively blacklisted by US radio since they denounced George Bush from a London stage in March. Would Alejandro care to join them? "I totally support their right to express themselves and I've never, ever supported Bush. Music is the one thing that has a healing quality and I'm pleased I can offer it."

'Alejandro Escovedo': Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4201) 5 May