A VOCIFEROUS promoter of the culture of contemporary black people and an iconic figure in music since topping the charts, first with The Equals back in the Sixties, then in the Eighties as a solo artist, Eddy Grant has spent much of his long career making music on his own terms and pushing that of others.

For the past 20-odd years, though, he has avoided performing live. So it will be an especially great privilege to see him play alongside UB40 at Plymouth Pavilions on December 15.

Having made the decision, just last year, to hit the road again, he came back with several incredible live performances, providing one of the absolute highlights of Glastonbury 2008.

"That was pure euphoria," says Eddy of his Glasto set.

"Glastonbury has this reputation for being damp and muddy, but this was one of the few years that was different. Sunny, dry, peaceful, it was a halcyon moment. It was the first time I'd played there, but we're talking about doing it again next year."

He explains that his return to the stage was just about the time feeling right. It was so long since he had toured that he realised some people only knew him from recordings like best-selling singles Electric Avenue, I Don't Wanna Dance and Living On The Front Line from his solo career, and Baby Come Back and Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys from his time with The Equals.

Live, of course, he performs with a band, but his solo albums have always been very much private personal affairs – he plays every instrument, sings every harmony and produces the songs himself.

"I do and I don't work alone," he says. "When I produce other artists' work obviously it's a collaboration. But everything since writing for The Equals has been done completely on my own – it's just my preferred mode of work. There are no egos to deal with or extraneous issues, I can just get on with the business."

Inspired by his father, his work ethic is admirable.

"My dad was a phenomenal musician, a player of many instruments who inculcated in me the need to hone one's talent to a fine point so that playing becomes easy. Over the years that has been my mantra – I practice a lot."

Eddy's father had relocated the family from native Guyana to post-war London in 1948, when Eddy was just 12.

"Dad, like so many others, was looking for a better existence – we'd come from raw jungle country with heaps of freedom to living in a cold basement in a smoggy city where Dad established himself as a mechanic.

"But what I lost was made up for by what I gained in new experiences of this Pandora's box.

"My biggest delight was being introduced to Chuck Berry at a show in Finsbury Park. I fell into his music like a duck into water.

"Here was this black artist playing to a white audience and they were loving him, not treating him like they treated black people on the street in those days. This guy, with a few songs, transformed the audience into a raging mass of rockers."

The experience was a life-changing one for Eddy who, a few years later, went on to form The Equals which combined his own ethnic influences with commercial pop, creating the first multi-racial pop/rock group to achieve international acclaim.

The pressures of success took their toll, however, and following a heart attack he bowed out of the group and set up Britain's first black-owned studio, Coach House Studios, to record and promote young British black artists.

He emerged once more in the Eighties to his big-selling heyday and became a global star, but again retreated, this time to Barbados in 1982, where he again focused his attention on producing other musicians and set about creating a new Caribbean youth culture – Ringbang.

"We're all taught about how to love one another, but this is all about learning to love oneself and having self-respect – the music follows…"

Of course Eddy's own albums have been forthcoming over the years and it's no coincidence that his past couple of offerings both contain the word Reparation in their title as a means of raising awareness of the political issue that for him is paramount. So does he believe that music can actually effect change?

"I don't know, but it's like with my song Gimme Hope Jo'anna, I'm not sure whether it actually had any effect on the freeing of South Africa or aiding the release of Mandela, but I know that South Africans think it did…"

As it happens, one of Eddy's other live shows in 2008, besides Glastonbury, was also pretty special – a performance for Nelson Mandela on his 90th birthday.

"He came back after 27 years of incarceration with such a positive approach to finding another way forward that he won over not only his supporters but also his detractors. When someone does something of that magnitude it requires general applause to say we approve."

Tickets for UB40 and Eddy Grant are available from the Pavilions box office on 0845 1461460.