POP / All mouth and trousers: Dwight Yoakam, the man who mistook his life for a hat, is in London. Jasper Rees watched and listened

Wherever Dwight Yoakam lays his hat, that's his head. Big, buckety, broad-brimmed, with lots of freshly washed brown hair cascading behind, it shields the top half of an elegantly tapering face that seems designed to draw the focus of the looker to the perma-puckered lips.

Except on this occasion, when we meet during the tour to promote the new album This Time, the hat's not at home. In the iconography of pop, Yoakam and his American (it's not a Stetson) are as inseparable as Larry Blackmon and his codpiece. So this is truly unexpected. But far less shocking than the sight of a well-worn bald patch where the hat should have been - for this has long been rumoured - is the way his face has broadened.

The hat usually dwarfs the head, and without it the full glory of the cheek-bones emerges. Yoakam is a racial pot-pourri from the Appalachian foothills of Kentucky, with Anglo-Celtic roots, but his name is an Americanisation of Joachim. 'From what I can glean, they've traced it in the States to sixteen-seventy something; to a Dutch immigrant who had emigrated from Germany to Holland.' His face suddenly fits his Aryan ancestry.

The baldness is apt, because Yoakam is the undisputed egghead of country music. Invited to define the New Country wave on which he eventually rode to success in the mid-1980s, he describes the label as 'an oxymoron'. Usually, only one half of this word applies to the Nashville pin-ups who've crooned their way to crossover stardom.

'If you define it as country music it's like a 'sorta country' category. It's dangerous to start categorisations because you have to sub- categorise everything two or three times.' In the course of three conversations we have - the last of them when he assiduously rings back to clarify a point about the tightness of his trousers being in some way incompatible with the intelligence of his utterances - the polysyllable count runs way above the Nashville average. To resolve the contradiction between the expansive tongue and the restrictive trousers, he cites the words of 'The Pilgrim' by Kris Kristofferson: 'He's a walking contradiction / Partly truth, partly fiction', saying, 'I think we all are. To be absolute and singular in terms of personality can have a safer feeling accompanying it, but I don't know if it's interesting.'

At the Hammersmith Apollo this week, Yoakam gave a demonstration of his brand of 'sorta country' that he has been hawking round Europe for two weeks. 'It's basically hillbilly dance music,' he says, expressing disappointment that the Stalinist seating regulations of the venue allow only occasional sorties from fans of all ages armed with cameras. 'Formal seating does that to a situation anywhere in the world. It just puts a blanket of inhibition on the audience, and it's fun to have reciprocal response to the music.'

Beforehand, Yoakam does a meet 'n' greet 'n' grin session backstage with Country Music Television types and industry flunkies. He pumps paws and talks about breaking through in Scandinavia and reaching target audiences and all those issues that country megastars have to confront in this unreceptive continent of ours.

As he talks, he stands there almost femininely, with hands clasped and cupped before him, shielding that region of his lower half that most visibly bucks against the trousers. Onstage his legs twirl and strike poses through a two-hour set, and there's a chance to get to know as much about him as his ex, Sharon Stone, does. These trousers are so tight they'd probably fit under his top layer of skin. 'Those are lambskin and they're not uncomfortable at all,' he says the next day, surprised that anyone should still want to dwell on a tired old issue that no one ever bothers Prince with. 'It's become a peripheral, secondary and distractive kind of conversation.'

During the course of the main set, Yoakam addresses the audience only once, and then like a businessman making a presentation. But then for the encore he comes on alone and, with meticulous, informative introductions for each of them, delivered the three acoustic songs which were the highlight of the show: Warren Zevon's 'Carmelita', 'I Sang Dixie' and 'Miner's Prayer'.

For the main body of the show, he hugs and caresses his acoustic guitar protectively, while behind him the band chunter professionally through the back catalogue. Pete Anderson, Yoakam's perennial sidekick, spends a lot of time doing jukejoint licks on the bottom two strings of his guitar. The best song from the new album is 'Two Doors Down', a state-of-the-art self-pitying country ballad: 'Two doors down there's a barstool / That knows me by name / And we sit there together / And wait for you.' Choking stuff.

We shunt straight into 'Honky Tonk Man', the rousing Yoakam anthem, followed by the acoustic encore and a version of 'Suspicious Minds' whose beat sounds prosaic and thudding after all the mountain music that has gone before. It's the only time in the night when the music isn't wearing a hat.

Back at the record label offices, the hat sits on the table next to a bowl of succulent fruits, beside which it looks a tad tatty. Unlike the artfully ripped jeans Yoakam is often seen in, this hat has earned the right to look lived in. It's been with its owner for 15 years, when he was driving airfreight trucks and moving furniture for a living. At the end of the interview he surrenders the battered blue-collar icon for inspection. One day this bit of cloth will sell for thousands of dollars at an auction of pop memorabilia, alongside Larry Blackmon's codpiece.

(Photograph omitted)