CityLife

Return of Willie the outlaw

WILLIE Nelson is not just one of popular music's great survivors, but also one of its great characters, and anyone who's ever met him can inevitably regale you with hilarious anecdotes, often involving his prodigious, Marley-like intake of cannabis.

A popular misconception, though, is that he's 'just' a country artist, when even the most casual glance through Willie's massive back-catalogue will reveal albums of jazz, swing, blues, the great American songbook, and even reggae, alongside his many, many country albums.

One of his most notorious escapades came after the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) handed Nelson a bill for $16.7m in back taxes in 1990 and seized most of his assets to help pay the charges.

He promptly released The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories? as a double album, with all profits going straight to the IRS.

Many of his assets were auctioned and purchased by friends, who gave his possessions back to him or rented them at a nominal fee, and his debts were paid by 1993.

More recently he's supported Kinky Friedman's campaign to become Governor of Texas, released a post-Brokeback Mountain, gay cowboy song called Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond Of Each Other, and questioned the official version of the 9/11 events, arguing that the Twin Towers were imploded.

"I saw one fall and it was just so symmetrical, I said 'wait a minute, I just saw that last week at the casino in Las Vegas!' You see these implosions all the time and the next one fell and I said hell there's another one - and they're trying to tell me that an airplane did it? I can't go along with that," he told Fox News, although perhaps just in a mischievous effort to rile the right-wing news service.

One thing's for sure, he'll always be an outlaw.

Support at the Apollo comes from James Hunter.

Willie Nelson plays the Apollo on Sunday, May 11. £30-£37.50. Click here to book.