Mick Jagger may have wooed and won Jerry Hall - but Bryan Ferry surely had the last laugh. Unlike the Stone in chief, the lead singer of Roxy Music has managed to create as big a name for himself in his solo career as with his group.

Two bites at the cherry have left Ferry, a suavely well preserved 57, no less hungry for success. Yet this is a man who, after Roxy's chart-topping Avalon album of 1982, made a conscious decision to turn his back on touring in favour of studio seclusion.

"When Jimmy Maelen - the percussionist who played on Avalon and Flesh And Blood - died, there was a benefit concert for his family in New York. If I hadn't been dragged out to do that I might never have played live again. Now I see it as part of my life. There's something about the energy you get back from a live audience that is very inspiring. I'd missed that."

He brings a 12-piece band to the Portsmouth Guildhall on Wednesday, March 12, a date that will be as eagerly anticipated by fans as the recent Roxy reunion showed. "We all had a fantastic time and enjoyed playing that music - it felt fresh, not at all like a dinosaur reunion."

But this time round his solo shows are deliberately staged in more intimate venues than the aircraft hangars Roxy sold out - "a nice change".

The parallel paths stem from Ferry releasing his first solo LP, These Foolish Things, back in 1973 when Roxy Music had only been around for two albums. "I felt I'd made some kind of statement, so I wanted to make a throwaway type of album to get away from the personal side of songwriting; something with a light-hearted feel that would have a totally different sound. I saw it as a kind of one-off... a sampler of my tastes in music."

Ferry's recently released Frantic follows solo tradition by majoring on cover versions. "I like writing my own songs and I like interpreting other people's. I don't see anything wrong with mixing the two." Having returned to the 1930s with 1999's nostalgic As Time Goes By, Frantic was deliberately different. "What I wanted to do this time around was a rock'n'roll record with plenty of electric guitars. It ended up becoming a bit more than that."

While Roxy Music brought out the peacock in Ferry, allowing him a dip or two into the make-up box, he's tended to dress and behave more formally when pushing his solo work. "With Roxy, we got carried away!" he now admits. "We didn't like to go on stage dressed as we were on the street, so got into the whole idea of trying out different looks and trying to amuse the audience."

Smart casual is the order of the day now - though, having just returned from playing in South America, Portsmouth's sea breezes may inspire a cardigan!

A driven character, Ferry puts everything into his music: "It's my life, I don't want to do anything else," he says. A well publicised separation from Lucy Helmore, who he met and married after splitting from Jerry Hall, recently earned him the kind of column inches he could do without, but he'll suffer for his art. "I try to keep out of the media eye as much as possible. Then, when I've got a new piece of work out, I cautiously raise my head above the battlements and wait to be shot at!"

When it comes to his concert repertoire, Bryan Ferry's happy to mix and match solo hits with Roxy classics, so the sold-out Guildhall can expect a cross-the-board treat. His new album, too, is astonishingly varied, combining songs from long-dead blues singer Leadbelly - "one of my childhood idols. I fell in love with that voice at ten years old" - with two co-written with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame and a medieval piece penned by none other than King Richard the Lionheart!

"We did it with old instruments," says Ferry, "to create this other-worldly feeling; a place full of unicorns and dragons... quite appropriate with all this Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings going on."

Few would have thought when Roxy Music burst onto the scene three decades ago that either they or their singer would still be creating memorable music in the current millennium. Ferry's survived both changing fashions and the passing years with seemingly equal ease. Harry Potter will do well to follow his example.

Bryan Ferry plays Portsmouth Guildhall on Wednesday. Box office: 023 9282 4355. Canadian singer-songwriter Martina Sorbara will be the support act.