LAST December he was touring Britain with Joe Bonamassa, Jason Bonham and Derek Sherinian in the rock supergroup Black Country Communion. Now vocalist and bass guitarist Glenn Hughes is playing 11 solo shows, visiting the Grand Opera House, York, on Monday.

“I’ve got a pretty good memory but I can’t remember ever playing in York,” says Glenn, who made his name in the bands Trapeze and Deep Purple.

“Trapeze played mainly in America, and with Purple, we moved to Los Angeles because the British taxes were so high, and I’m still here, in LA, flying the flag.

“When I came to LA for the first time in 1970, when Trapeze were opening for The Moody Blues, it smelled like home – though I’m a ‘northern’ boy who grew up in Black Country. But I just feel at home in LA, where the weather is great and you end up at the beach!”

Glenn’s formative musical influence was The Beatles, before he developed a liking in his schooldays for Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Next came Crosby, Stills and Nash, and his own music-making is similarly diverse.

“Coming from a band like Deep Purple and having that stamp, you have to be who you are, but I swim in different territories. I like acoustic shows but also singing with orchestras and doing funky rock music, and I think it was good for me to stretch and do other things in order to come back to hard rock, a place where it’s so natural for me to be,” says Glenn.

“So I really have that rock hat on again and you have to embrace it like an actor playing a role”

Hughes is on tour with Gothenburg drummer Pontus Engborg, Danish guitarist Soren Anderson and Swedish keyboard player Anders Olinder, playing songs from his extensive back catalogue, from Trapeze and Deep Purple to Hughes Thrall and his solo albums.

“I met the right guys at the right time for this band – as I did for Black Country Communion – and it just feels right to be coming back to this music,” he says. “It’s a really hard rock band with a funky groove, so it’s a groove thing going on and there’s more of a tip of the hat to playing songs by Purple, Trapeze as well as my solo career.

“A few years ago, I got tired of playing the same things over and over and I thought, ‘let’s switch this around by playing things I don’t normally play’, and I’m now choosing songs where there’s a back story, stuff that’s important to me.”

Glenn wants a shift of focus from his voice to his songs. “People will talk about my singing but the songs are more important and now I want people to talk about them, as I’m no longer up on roofs naked with the police chasing me!”

That said, soon you can read about the exploits of “a man with ten lives” in his autobiography, Glenn Hughes, Deep Purple And Beyond: Scenes From The Life Of A Rock Star. Published by Foruli, a deluxe edition is available from this month, followed by a paperback in October.

“The book has taken me five years to write and what I’ve learnt is the need for honesty. A lot of people already know about the bad stuff, the crazy stuff, but it took two years to get honest and I didn’t want any stone to be left unturned.

“I’ve lived a life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; some of us are dead, some of us are insane; some are half dead from the Seventies; and some of us are still alive having danced through a minefield. I should have been dead ten times over but I’m not!”

Glenn Hughes, Grand Opera House, York, on Monday at 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or grandoperahouseyork.org.uk