It’s another world in here,” says Bernard Butler, arriving at the North London flat of the Scottish acoustic-guitar legend Bert Jansch. “Whatever horrible things are going on in the evil music industry, you can always escape to Bert’s place.”

Beth Orton, who made friends with Jansch three years ago after a lifetime admiring him from afar, adds: “I’ve been coming here every week for a while now, ever since I first asked Bert to give me guitar lessons. He told me he would on one condition: that I promised to practise. I failed even to do that, but he let me come back anyway.”

It’s a hot, close morning in June, and we’re in the garden of the flat that Jansch shares with his wife Loren. Butler, who came to prominence in the early Nineties as the guitarist of the Britpop pioneers Suede, has taken time out from producing the young band Cajun Dance Party to be here.

Orton, who since her 1996 album Trailer Park has used the twin influences of the folk music of her childhood and the dance music of her teens to carve a niche as one of Britain’s most charismatic singer-songwriters, is having a brief break from looking after her baby daughter.

In less than a month Jansch, Orton and Butler are to perform concerts together at Manchester International Festival and Somerset House in London, and the three are talking about playing together.

“Performing with Bert keeps you on your toes,” says Butler. “Because he’s so used to playing on his own he has a tendency to alter songs as he goes along, which is the opposite of what most bands do because they have to stay in time. But I’m bored with playing in bands. When I play with Bert I really don’t know what’s going to happen. I just have to watch him and be ready.”

Jansch has always gone his own way. Emerging from the early Sixties British folk boom that also gave birth to the bohemian singer Anne Briggs and the maverick guitarist Davy Graham, Jansch quickly established himself as the rebel of the scene, outraging folk purists by bastardising traditional songs. He became an inspiration to guitar gods such as Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend through his combination of virtuosity and imagination.

Jansch’s career had faltered by the Eighties, but in the years that followed a new generation of musicians, Butler and Orton among them, discovered him. Jansch’s 2006 album The Black Swan, which features Orton duetting with the American singer Devendra Banhart on a sublime version of the traditional song Katie Cruel, is a modern classic.

Butler first met his hero during the filming of a documentary in 2000, but a year earlier Jansch had played a low-key gig at the King’s Head pub in Crouch End, North London, which happened to be Butler’s local.

“I went along with [fellow guitarist] Johnny Marr to see Bert, and we were too in awe of him to go up and say hello,” Butler recalls. “Johnny kept trying to push me into Bert so I’d be forced to make conversation, but I never did.”

By her own admission, Orton has been stalking Bert for years. They finally met three years ago after playing on the same bill, but Orton has made several thwarted attempts to meet him over the past decade.

“I turned up to one of his sound checks, went through the wrong door and ended up onstage by mistake. I was so freaked out that I just ran away,” she says. “All my life, Bert’s music been like David Bowie’s for me; just there. So when I finally got to meet him it was intimidating, but then we had a cup of tea together and it was fine.”

“Then you asked me for guitar lessons,” adds Jansch.

“Every time I have a lesson with Bert, I go away with three or four new ideas for songs,” Orton continues.

“That’s how I made my last record; the whole album was inspired by a few evenings round here with Bert and Loren.”

Orton – a star in her own right – will clearly do anything for Jansch. In December 2006 she made a guest spot at one of his club dates while heavily pregnant, then sang with him at the Roundhouse in London at the end of January 2007, having given birth four weeks earlier. “Playing with Bert is like going with the tide of a river,” she says. “It’s like trying to duet with water.”

Jansch has, without any effort on his part, become the centre of a loose musical community of people who owe a debt to traditional music but are not in thrall to it; who respect virtuosity and invention but not at the expense of spirit and feeling.

In the US, folk-tinged musicians such as Espers, Joanna Newsom and Banhart have forged links with Jansch. In the UK even Pete Doherty has made the journey down to Jansch’s sedate garden flat. For Butler, the appeal of collaborating with Jansch is the possibility of real freedom, a commodity that is surprisingly rare in rock music.

“If my only outlet for playing guitar [was] playing in a band, I’d be completely depressed,” he says. “For one thing, it seems a little undignified for a man of my age to be chasing after pop success. For another, you’d be amazed at how quickly it gets boring. But every few months I get to do something with Bert, and it’s such a pure experience.”

— Bert Jansch, Beth Orton and Bernard Butler play at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on July 13 and at Somerset House, London, on July 14

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