To the millions for whom classical music is a casually passing experience, Nigel Kennedy is that cheeky bloke in bovver boots who plays Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and sometimes crops up on daytime telly when he has something to promote. To those of us more deeply involved in the art form, he is a persistent enigma. He was the first classical musician (and is still the most successful) to be marketed on the same terms as rock musicians - on what he looked like and how he spoke, rather than simply on how and what he played. And how he spoke and what he looked like were completely, infamously, at odds with his middle-class background.

Nowadays, Kennedy is only a part-time resident of this country. Most of his time off the road is spent in Poland, where he lives with his Polish second wife and where he is artistic director of the Polish Chamber Orchestra, and works with his own jazz band. He’s intending to be here a little more often in future, however. In March, he played Elgar’s Violin Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic, his first appearance with a British orchestra for some time, and more high-profile appearances are planned.

When I meet him at his home in north London, he is in the middle of a photo shoot. “I got a good idea, man,” he says to the photographer - for the purposes of this interview, the expletives with which he riddles his speech will be deleted - and goes on to suggest that he wear an Aston Villa shirt. His new PR person, formerly Pavarotti’s, sighs deeply and says, a touch sternly: “Nigel, that’s not a good idea at all. You’re always doing that.” The protest falls on deaf ears. So, on goes the claret and blue shirt, and Kennedy stares aggressively at the camera, brandishing an electric violin and clenching his fist at the end of an outstretched arm. This is the man playing to the image. I hope the interview won’t go the same way.

It doesn’t. We get off to a good start because I like Kennedy’s latest recording, a coupling of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Mozart D major Concerto, K218, in which he directs the Polish Chamber Orchestra from the violin, and I tell him so. “Cheers, mate,” he says. We discuss his interpretation of the Beethoven, a piece I don’t always find the most compelling to listen to, but that here comes across as fresh, if not eccentric. “Yeah, the rhythmic aspect is, like, a lot more to the fore. Less rhapsodic. The four beats in the first movement is actually one of the important unifying concepts of the whole thing. You gotta have them four, and whenever it comes back, it should be a similar tempo. That keeps the whole movement as one, rather than it spreading into an endless rhapsodic thing.” He does indeed lay heavy stress on those four notes. I suspect that some critics might say it’s all too much. Not me.

I wonder, though, why he has refused the more traditional “endless rhapsodic thing” approach. Was his need to reinvent his interpretation a sign that perhaps he was getting bored with the piece? “Not really. But it’s very different working with a great conductor doing it, when the interpretation is half and half. Obviously, someone like Klaus Tennstedt” - who conducted his first recording of the work, back in 1992 - “took the interpretation in a slightly different direction than I would have by myself. But the interpretation you hear with all these masterworks is never finished. You’re never going to know everything about everything you play.”

He certainly likes his performances to be different, often causing eyebrows to be raised, whether at an eccentric diversion in The Four Seasons or at his dressing up, as he once did, as Dracula for a performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto. On his latest disc, he is courting critical outrage by playing a jazzy cadenza of his own devising in the Mozart concerto, on an electric violin. Frankly, I enjoy it so much that I almost regret it when he gets back, rather abruptly, to the printed score. And, if his approach makes us listen, makes an old work seem new, possible disapproval is perhaps a small price to pay. Performance, for him, is about immediacy, even in a studio recording. That’s partly why he gravitates towards jazz and improvisation.

Yet surely the most crucial point about Kennedy is that, unlike many classical musicians who have followed pop-style marketing approaches, he can actually play. He remains one of the most naturally gifted violinists on the planet. His sound is beautiful and his approach never less than intense. He still plays Bach first thing every day, whether he is in a classical period or in a phase when he is working with his jazz band. (He now divides his year into segments: three months for classical, four or five for jazz, the rest for family.) It’s important both for his technique and his soul, and the hard, repetitive grind of daily practice is something he never lets slip unless he is forced to, as he was in October 2006, when he broke his hand. He thoroughly enjoyed the time off, using it to drink deeply from London’s cultural life - going to the theatre, visiting galleries.

That’s something else about him that is easy to miss. Despite the swearing, despite the chaotic image, he is cultivated, well informed, socially liberal, deeply principled, gently self-mocking, sometimes even eloquent. He likes living in Poland, admires its work ethic tremendously. His orchestra don’t stop working when the clock ticks round to five, he says, but only when they feel what they are working on is good enough. He openly rails,however,against Radio Maryja, the notoriously antisemitic, homophobic Polish radio station, and was relieved when the country’s reactionary, right-wing prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, was ousted in last year’s general election. And, while he praises the tolerance and multiculturalism of London, he voices real concerns over what he sees as the steady erosion of our civil liberties. He is far from being just that bloke who plays The Four Seasons.

As for the image - the mockney accent and the bovver boots - it is probably harder to remove than a tattoo. Yet to those who wonder about the psychology behind it, there’s one possible answer that is rarely, if ever, considered. Quite simply, for him, it’s just fun. He enjoys the fact that people like me expend energy wondering about it.

I ask him, perhaps slightly too earnestly, if there’s a Nigel we don’t see behind this facade. He’s not greatly into psychoanalysis, he says, but adds, surprisingly thoughtfully: “Everyone needs a little bit of time on their own. Making music is a social thing. You’re surrounded by musicians or friends or audience, and it’s all very high-powered. I find it necessary to achieve balance by going off alone. Most of my writing I do in the mountains in Poland. That’s a solitary activity.” He looks hugely pleased by the thought.

Nigel Kennedy’s new album is released on EMI Classics on April 14

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