“Me and Bobby McGee” improbably grew out of a parallel moment of despair in Fellini’s La Strada, and the scene when Anthony Quinn realises that Giulietta Massina is dead. “He goes off and he gets drunk and he ends up on the beach howling at the stars and he was free but he was the most lonely son of a bitch in the world So it showed the two sides of freedom. Freedom” – and this may as well be his career motto – “is just another word for nothing left to lose.”Out of curiosity, I ring up Henry Cooper and ask him if he recalls an American amateur sparring at the Thomas a Becket in the late 1950s, and whether he knew what became of him Apologetically, Cooper dredges up a vague memory. His employers didn’t like that, or his drinking, and fired him. His first-born, meanwhile, was in hospital with a birth defect that needed $10,000 worth of treatment, and he faced jail for falling behind on child support.This was the first of the trademark Kristofferson slumps that he seems to find oddly improving, even inspiring. A first marriage came and went while he worked as a helicopter pilot ferrying workers to the Gulf of Mexico oil-fields and commuted up to Nashville to sell songs. I guess Paul figured with the PR possibilities of a Yank boxing at Oxford and that everything else in music at the time was bullshit he might as well do this one, too.”Back in the States, and after a stint in the army, Kristofferson “decided to start at the bottom and work my way up”.

Kristofferson’s own youth was comfortable but peripatetic, his father being high up in the Air Force. A Rhodes scholarship brought him to Merton College, Oxford, where he got a degree in English, “which means you’re qualified for absolutely nothing”, and boxed for the university.He spins a good boxing yarn, including one about his little-known association with Henry Cooper “He worked in a place called the Thomas a Becket They let me work out at the gym up there I got to watch Henry spar with his brother He was a good man. In fact, I ran into him once in a street in Soho when Paul Lincoln and I were coming out. Paul says, ‘Goddamn, where’s the camera right now?’ “Lincoln was Tommy Steele’s manager, who had placed an ad in the Daily Mirror seeking musical talent.

Kristofferson, who wrote his first song at the age of 11 – “an imitation country song” called “I Hate Your Ugly Face” – answered it. He’d already recorded a song or two in the States, so changed his name in London to Kris Carson The results, produced by Tony Hatch, “were awful I just wasn’t up to it. I have a real happy family life that I would never have predicted I could ever enjoy.”Five years ago, he moved his third family from Los Angeles – “like raising kids in a war-zone” – to Hawaii. And, fortunately for me and the world, the life is better now.

But by the time he got to the Mean Fiddler last weekend he was still having a ball. The highlight came not with one of the many old, much-covered standards – “Help Me Make It through the Night”, “Sunday Morning Coming Down”, “For the Good Times” – but a new one called “The Promise”, a growly dirge about love and learning and how at his time of life this father of eight is beyond improvement.So what brought about the depoliticising of his songwriting? “My albums have been a reflection of whatever is going on in my life at the time. I feel a great sense of gratitude,” he adds, “that at my age whatever obstacles there were between the time of Heaven’s Gate and now are not, that someone’s willing to take a chance.”To push the album, he has just finished a month-long European tour with no nights off, and that raggedy, groaning voice is shot to bits (“How can you tell?” as Willie Nelson once quipped to him; when he started out, Kristofferson wasn’t even allowed to sing on his own demos). When Sinead O’Connor was booed offstage at Madison Square Gardens during the Dylan tribute in 1993, it was Kristofferson, ever the underdog’s friend, who publicly roped a comforting arm round her. By then he didn’t have a recording contract to call his own.Then last year he made an album with Don Was, and a movie with John Sayles. Lone Star opens in the States this week, and finds Kristofferson playing “a racist sheriff in a Texas border town who is particularly murderous against blacks and chicanos My wife said it wasn’t a real stretch. He was trying to make a real piece of art, and he was fightin’ the philistines the whole fuckin’ way.”Professionally, there wasn’t much solace in the early 1990s either, when he cut an album called Third World Warrior to get off his chest views on Iraq, Cuba, Nicaragua and other popular American holiday locations.