Rodriguez is a bit of an underground legend. With the raspy drawl of Dylan and looking like an Hispanic Roy Orbison, he has an easy, familiar charm, dropping ‘man’ and ‘you know’ into every other sentence.

Having recorded only two albums in the early ‘70s (although there has been a spate of compilations and live recording released in the past two decades), he disappeared from the music scene in the early ‘80s following his albums’ failure to make an impact on the American market.

His absence prompted a slew of rumours, from being dead of a heroin overdose, to being in jail for murdering his wife, while in truth he had just gone back to a normal life. “Nothing beats reality man,” he laughs. “When the company folded I went back to work you know. I did demolition and renovation and pretty much went back to the working class.”

However, unbeknownst to Rodriguez, an album called Rodriguez: At His Best had gone platinum in South Africa. It’s a compilation of songs from his albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality (also known as After The Fact ), as well as unreleased and rare tracks. Because of it, he’d become somewhat of an icon of revolution amongst the nation’s soldiers.

“One soldier came up out of the audience and he told me, ‘We made love to your music and we made war to your music,’ and that pretty much blew me away,” he tells me. “You know this is a big guy, one guy was so big he almost broke my glasses when he hugged me. These guys were sweethearts, man. They all had conscription and they had to be there, you know, and to them I helped. That really made an impact.”

Despite this, Rodriguez is still largely unknown amongst people of his era, as his audience is made up mostly of those who inherited the records from their parents. “My audience is very young, a lot of young blood in my audience. The thing is the music scene is always changing and reinventing itself, and at the moment I can feel that my sort of music has returned and been rediscovered as well.”

And it’s a good thing he has been. Rodriguez represents some strange hybrid of the blues and folk troubadours with the spaced-out rockers and shiny popsters of the time, all tied up with insightful lyrics rooted in the urban environment of his home Detroit.

“You know the country mouse and the city mouse?” he asks. “Well I consider myself an urban mouse. That’s pretty much my environment. Lots of cement, a lot of concrete…any industrial city you know, like London or Liverpool. They’ve always inspired me. You know what I mean – just look at singers like John Denver with Rocky Mountain High. I think we sing our environment, and I think Cold Fact was a reflection of the urban environment of the time.”

You don’t have to look further than the lyrics of This Is Not A Song It’s An Outburst to see what he means: “The mayor hides the crime rate / council woman hesitates / Public gets irate but forget the vote date.”

“Detroit is the only city in America with no view,” he exclaims, with a laugh of resignation. “Still, Detroit has a history, it has a homicide rate of 800, which has now gone down, but it’s still pretty bad.

“I mean, yesterday I was waiting for the bus and it was taking a real long time. I waited and waited. Eventually I went back over to my house and called up the bus company and asked them what was going on. It turns out some guy on the bus had shot another guy and he was in hospital. So that’s the environment over here, I mean it’s crazy, I was waiting for that bus.

“Our Mayor is a crook as well,” he continues. “No seriously, he has nine felony charges laid against him and he’s just handed over office to the interim Mayor.”

I tell him about being introduced to his music through a friends’ mother, who used to smoke joints with us listening to Cold Fact on vinyl, and for the first time a hint of seriousness enters his voice. “I think marijuana is less harmful that alcohol, I think it makes you relax and the other makes you angry. But I’m for people taking it easy, not overindulging; you know what I mean man.”

We talked a lot longer and I could go on and on, but in the end all I need to say is he’s Rodriguez. With mainstream appeal alongside cynical and progressive lyrics, Rodriguez is a man who, like his immigrant parents and blue-collar colleagues, deserves more than he gets. Cold Fact.

Rodriguez’s Cold Fact is out now on Light In The Attic through Inertia.