World famous Martial Arts actor Steven Seagal explains to Viv Hardwick how he comes to be on a world tour as a blues musician and signer which takes in Newcastle next month. But more movies, and millions of dollars, are about to be spend on the career of a man wno is said to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist Lama.

STEVEN Seagal remains inscrutably soft-spoken when offered the chance to discuss his move into playing the blues on tour. Set against the excitement of the news that the 55-year-old and his aptly-named band Thunderbox are to play The Journal Tyne Theatre, Newcastle, on January 17, Seagal is as cucumber cool as all the action heroes he plays in movies... until asked how he rates himself as a musician.

"I'm not into rating myself, the music speaks for itself. Let them (the critics) rate me, I'm just somebody who loves music and been lucky enough to play with people from BB King to Albert King and all the Muddy Waters people. I've been raised by those guys. If I was a piece of **** they'd probably have thrown me off the stage a long time ago. So I get by," he responds.

So what made him decide to go out on tour?

"I think that's a large part of what any musician does, it's something we all consider part of the life of a musican. It would be like a fireman never getting the chance to go put out a fire."

Having conquered Martial arts - he's a 7th-dan aikido black belt who is invited to teach all over the world - and movies, as star, director, producer and writer, you can only express astonishment that the world famous star has time to release two albums let alone tour.

He responds: "I would just like to say that music has been my first love and is something that I started doing when I was about five or six years old and I when I came back from Asia in 1985 I was so inundated with the other things that people wanted me to do that I never really got a chance to do music as much as I wanted. So now I've decided, at this stage of my life, that I'd like to perform music as much as possible because it's what I enjoy most."

Does he have any concerns that the majority of the Newcastle audience may be buying tickets on the strength of seeing a US movie legend in the flesh on stage, possibly putting that ahead of his musical ability?

"I think that the one thing I've always said is that the music speaks for itself. I've played all around the world for 20-something years and never had a bad experience yet, knock on wood, and I think that if it was Keanu Reeves or Kevin Bacon or Bruce Willis, then those are guys that I know who were actors first and liked music and tended to do that thing later (perform in a band). I'm documentably someone who grew up playing with many, many delta legends and listen to the album, Mojo Priest, it speaks for itself."

HE admits taking his time over his first album, Songs From the Crystal Cave, which was released last year, but put together the follow-up release, which came out in the US in April, in about three months. The man with Hollywood's most famous ponytail wrote all but three tracks on Mojo Priest and dedicated the classic tracks of Little Red Rooster, Dust My Broom and Hoochie Coochie Man to the memory of Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Willie Dixon and Howlin' Wolf. He recruited performers like Ruth Brown and Hubert Sumlin to create an authentic blues-sounding album.

According to his own press release, Seagal is quoted as saying he owns several hundred guitars including ones once belonging to Freddy King, Muddy Waters, BB King and Jimi Hendrix. But, now, he says: "I don't know about a number of guitars, I own important guitars. The Hendrix guitar is the least of the ones that I'm crazy about. I love Jimi but he's not a blues legend... to me Muddy Waters meant a lot more."

During his prolific film career, Seagal has seen movies like Hard To Kill and Under Siege make millions but others have been hit and miss commercially leading the actor to put later work straight to DVD and VHS. Asked to comment he says: "We have a lot of offers which are guaranteed threatrical and like everybody else I've had my ups and my downs and sometimes you want to get into something, do it quickly, and move onto something else. At this point we do have a few movies that we're planning that might even get into Oscar campaigns and things that have a lot more prestige."

Seagal quickly distances himself from claims that he's just finished a movie called Flight of Fury and comments: "Sometimes you get in with people who say they have $30m to make a movie and they steal $25m and give you $5m to make the movie. And that's why you see movies that are just **** because the financiers have stolen everything. I don't know that title unfortunately. I'm making a movie right now and as soon as I'm finished I'm on tour about a cop's son who gets murdered. They're calling it Once Upon A Time In The Hood which is as dumb as the original (title)." He confirms it is true that a tentative project next year is Prince Of Pistols which is intended to bring some badly-needed cash to the New Orleans' economy. "This film is fully lit and ready to go and it's a black (based on truth) story about a white racist who was very powerful and stealing all the land that belonged to black people. He went into the hall or records and falsified documents and he would kill and do whatever he had to do to keep people out of his way. He was supposed to have had a secret concentration camp in Louisiana and he really existed and it's a story of black triumph over racism," Seagal says.

He goes on to argue with the official figure that his films have made £600m in profits worldwide. "Well, forgive me for being rude, but it's more like $6 billion. It was more than $2 billion when I left Warner Brothers and that was ten years ago," he corrects me.

One of the legends surrounding the three times married actor is that he uses his multi-million fortune to fund charity work including his own Save A Million Lives organisation helping Aids orphans worldwide.

He comments: "I have one charity in Africa with the Royal family of Ghana and we sponsor orphans and try to give them medicine, food, clothing and education. But I do that all around the world and with children with cancer."

Seagal is slightly more subdued on Buddhist fans claiming that he is the reincarnated Lama Terton Chungdrag Dorje. "Everyone is a reincarnation of somebody according to Buddhist philosophy and I am a Buddhist so I do believe in reincarnation. I have no idea if it's true (that he's a Lama) but I do believe in what my teachers tell me and if my teachers say that then I believe them."

Even more intriguing is that father of six Seagal is currently the guardian to a Tibetan youngster called Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo, the only child of the 10th Panchen Lama. "There was a point where we wanted to get her out of China and I got involved in that and tried to take care of her and to this day she still calls me her guardian. She lived with me for years and now she's back in the orient but I'm not going to say where," he comments, indicating that it might take 200 years for Tibet to regain it's independence from China.

And as for his reputation of being the good guy in so many movies he says: "In my life I haven't had anyone try to disrespect me, I've been very lucky in person. People love to do those sort of things in print by making up vicious lies about people so they can feel better about themselves or score points with the boss of a publication." Seagal claims not to think about his celebrity status. "I just think about what I can do to bring people joy and sort of put one foot in front of the other," he says.

* Steven Seagal & Thunderbox play The Journal Tyne Theatre, Newcastle, on January 17. Box Office: 0870-1451200.