HE'S A seriously multi-talented fellow is Kentucky cow-punker Sid Griffin. Exiled from his native land of Hope and Crosby these past five years, London-domiciled Sid has been piloting the wittily-named Coal Porters along a country-rock route similar to the one that he first trod in the mid-eighties with his best-known band to date, the much-missed Long Ryders.

In addition, Sid has become part of Q magazine's regular album-review squad, also penning features for Mojo and some of London's more up-market daily newspapers. ''Having stumbled into music journalism by accident, I write when I'm called,'' says Sid self-deprecatingly. ''If ever they want someone to write about the Byrds or racism in jazz . . .''

Sid's first real foray into

the printed word took the form of his lauded biography of Gram Parsons. The experience was as painful as it was pleasurable, however. ''That book's become a sore point as there's still money owed me on it. I sign the book when people bring copies along to gigs and I look upon it as having done its job in shining some light on Gram Parsons, having helped make him more of a cult figure.''

Seventeen years into his own career as a musician, Sid has opted to make an open bid for serious-artist status with the release of his dandy first solo album, Little Victories, selections from which will be aired in Glasgow on Monday night when Sid visits King Tut's. The LP's pun-free title signals its creator's intentions.

For hitherto Sid has garlanded his discs with such names as Rebels Without Applause and the aforementioned Land Of Hope And Crosby. There was also the memorably monickered Metallic BO, an ironic riposte to the Stooges' Metallic KO. But you can only do funny for so long before folk assume you're a bit of a joke.

''The Coal Porters have made the tactical error of having given their two albums so far cartoon covers and amusing, somewhat self-indulgent titles. It then recently dawned on me that you're not taken seriously as an artist if you're not seen to take yourself seriously.''

Yet while Sid's keen to establish himself as a Cole Porter for the Unplugged generation, there's to be no farewell to the Coal Porters. ''This solo folky thing of mine doesn't mean the end of the Coal Porters. In fact, we're working furiously, painstakingly, on an album right now, using a bigger recording budget, too.''

Further albums will be emerging forthwith on Sid's Prima label, run in hands-on fashion from the London home he shares with his Anglo wife, Kate St John, once of the Dream Academy and more recently a vocal accomplice of Van Morrison. As well as Little Victories, Prima is home to the Coal Porters plus sundry artefacts from the Long Ryders' back-catalogue.

On the Long Ryder front, Polygram/Mercury are soon due to release a two-CD anthology that Sid has compiled, utilising his extensive collection of out-takes and live tracks. As spearheads of the so-called Paisley underground all-American indie guitar-band movement at the same time as REM first emerged, the Long Ryders were both influential and educational. Not least upon Sid Griffin, whose commendable degree of left-wing political insight - ''I have a gig on May 1 in Cambridge hopefully, by then we'll have a Labour government, and we'll stage a working-class Bacchanal'' - derives from his early years on the road.

''As a student I'd been broadly interested in current affairs, and then I learned a lot more through touring the States with Long Ryders. We visited all bar three of the 52 states of the Union. I did get to the frozen wastes of Alaska, but somehow missed Hawaii, North Carolina, and Montana.

''Almost inevitably, every indie club is in the poor part of town, and so I opted to see the native American reservation, or explore the black ghetto or the Jewish ghetto, and I began to realise that I was seeing the 18% of the US that isn't part of the American Dream, which is still a pretty good percentage relative to Albania. But when it comes to growing up and witnessing inequality anywhere, either you ignore it, or you absorb the facts.''

And then try to do something to redress the balance. ''When I've been living in California I've worked for the Democratic party as a local canvasser. I campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1992. I was the wake-'em-up-and-make-'em-vote guy for my little ward.''

Living in London has woken Sid up to new perspectives on his homeland. ''As reflected in stories about the States that appear in the English quality papers, it's thrown into relief what's good and bad about the US. I'm either reading untruths about the States, or things that are impossible for Americans to speak about because they're so horrible or so embarrassing.

''But while there are huge amounts of column inches in English newspaper articles about racial inequality in the US, there's nothing about financial inequality. And racism wasn't a US invention. It's a world invention caused by increased travel. And racism is founded on economic inequality.''

When Sid isn't trying to make sense of the world, he's bidding to make sense of his life.

''In my leisure time I'm writing a funny pop autobiography, kind of a second cousin to Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. There's a phrase that maybe gives you a better idea of the book's approach. The phrase came from Handsome Dick Manitoba, one-time lead singer with the Dictators. A friend of mine met him recently when he jumped into a New York cab and Handsome Dick was driving it.

'' 'How'd you end up here?' my friend said. And Handsome Dick's reply was along the lines of 'Unless you make it big like U2 or REM, there's no money. So drive a cab, wait on tables, like resting actors do and treat rock'n'roll like a hobby'. That's the phrase for me. Rock'n'roll is a hobby that pays real well sometimes, but you're nuts if you think it's lucrative.''

This home truth will govern Sid's future modus operandi.

''If Little Victories goes well, I'll be able to continue to play places I haven't been before. See, if I had a brain I'd be concentrating on playing the corporate media-capitals, and goosing their rear-ends. But I'd rather do what I did last year when I went on a tour of the Highlands with Billy Bragg and had the time of my life in tiny places I'd only ever dreamed of seeing.

''Like, I was flown recently to play country and western in a little bar in Hong Kong, and all the other performers were complaining, and I'm going: 'There's history being made here shut up and watch it.'''

Sid Griffin at King Tut's? Some honest human discourse going on. Get along and watch and hear Sid doing it.

As an artist you must be seen to take yourself seriously