The One Man Band is back!

Leo Sayer, according to those arbiters of all things stylish at Sky Magazine, is the last pop star in the world ever likely to become 'cool' again.

But the Seventies, it would appear, are back - and with them Mr Sayer.

Leo - he of the big curly hair, baggy trousers and platform shoes - is about to embark upon his first British theatre tour for more than a decade. "Previously my biggest UK appearances were in Sainsbury's," he says.

His re-emergence comes on the back of a campaign by the Sun newspaper and others to re-instate him as one of the greats of British rock music.

His credentials are indeed excellent. Between 1973 and the end of the decade he had no fewer than ten Top Twenty singles, six Top Ten albums and his own TV series.

Songs like You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and The Show Must Go On became anthems to the stack-heeled, disco dancing generation.

"I'd like to think it was the songs that got people interested this time around," says Sayer; "not a desire to poke fun at the last person in the world ever likely to be hip again.

"So I'm going out on tour with a big band, playing theatres and concert halls, and there's a really good feeling about the whole thing."

It has not always been so. Sayer has been beset by management and financial problems. Interest in him, for many years, was non-existent.

"I started to disappear off the face of the earth," he says. "Partly it was because I concentrated on America and Australia instead of the UK. I lived in America for a while, and as a result I had some hit records over there - but I wasn't available when I was offered plumb jobs in England."

Sayer's problems were compounded when he parted company with Adam Faith, his original manager.

"I was left with a string of managers who weren't as imaginative as Adam and who didn't understand me. I was just a piece of business for them to make some money out of.

"And I suffered from millions of 'good ideas' from record companies, agents and promoters. I ended up playing Las Vegas, doing entirely the wrong kind of show.

"Then I had terrible financial problems. That's the legacy of bad management. The last situation was very ugly and it's still in the throes of getting sorted out even now."

Nevertheless, Sayer considers himself lucky. "Maybe not in business, with certainly with the public," he says.

His comeback ("yes, I admit - it is a comeback," he says) comes in his 50th year - a time of life at which many would have packed in showbusiness. "But I'm determined to fight my way back."

It won't be the first time. Sayer's entertainment career began in the late Sixties not as a singer but as a designer of album covers. "Like many of my generation, I was an art school kid," he says.

"He started busking, too - but by the end of the decade, overworked and under-fulfilled, he had a nervous breakdown and returned home from London to Shoreham-on-Sea, Sussex. "In those days," he says, "art came first, showbusiness second."

His plans now include more records. "You'll see me appearing with some hip young artistes," he says. "I've got loads of new songs and I'm dying to do them."

His baggy trousers, though, have been left behind in the Seventies.

"I went into a shop the other day and tried on some flares and built-up boots, but then I thought - nah."

The Leo Sayer bandwagon reaches West Yorkshire on March 8, with a one-night appearance at the Grand Theatre, Leeds. Box office: 0113 222 6222.

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