I love listening to albums, I love going to gigs, but there is something about the acoustic singer/songwriter' night that makes me despair - even though my mp3 player features a fair amount of the stuff. So often, they are just so earnest and so, well, boring.

So it is heartening to find that Nick Harper - an acoustic singer/songwriter by trade - is spending his afternoon nursing his battered instrument after some particularly lively gigs.

"I'm stitching up my guitar. It has got so much abuse over the years that bits fall off every now and then," says Nick, who plays the Half Moon, Putney, this week - venue he has been frequenting for about 20 years. "I have weird little banjo pegs which are delicate, so just a little bash hear and there and you have to call in the doctor.

"I tend to get right into the heart of what the song is. If it is angry or prercussive I will push it as far as I can with enough energy, so sometimes the guitar will suffer. It is a tool, not a work of art for the wall."

Nick is the son of legendary folk/blues musician Roy Harper, and grew up in the company of the likes of Keith Moon and Jimmy Page. His new album, Miracles For Beginners, is, he says, one of his simplest for a long time: "It is return a to my acoustic roots, I get carried away in studio and have all sorts of paraphenalia and extraenous noises.

"My last one had a George Bush speech, a poem, some spoken stuff, it was all over the place, whereas this feels like a whole."

The electric guitar was banned outright from the studio as well, which means that his extraordinary acoustic guitar playing gets a showcase. And that voice of his - which is nearly as soaring and vast in range as Rufus Wainwright - is to the fore as well.

Another distinction that must be made between Nick and your average acoustic fayre is his range of reference - despite how homogenous his new album is. He has dropped into his set covers of Frank Zappa, Jeff Buckley, The Prodigy, Elvis, Led Zepellin and Public Enemy.

And last month he turned his virtuoso hand to a Nepalese folk song for a concert in Kathmandu. The gig was part of a trek arranged for cancer charity Love Hope Strength Foundation (LHSF), and it struck a chord with Nick as his mother died of cancer and received the call from LHSF on her birthday.

"We played to about 20,000 people apparently, in Durbar Sqaure in Kathmandu. It was the first time Westerners had played there. I learnt a famous Nepalese song that I learned from the sherpas and the reaction at the gig was fantastic.

"We also did a gig at Mount Everest base camp to 27 sherpas, and about 30 people who had heard about the gig on the way up. It wasn't just a bunch of egos, we were there to raise money, and a lot of people on the trek were affected by cancer, so it was an intense, emotional experience.

"I think that gig is going into the Guinness Book of Records for the highest ever gig."

Nick Harper; Half Moon pub, 93 Lower Richmond Rd, SW15; Friday, November 23, 8pm, £10, 020 8780 9383, halfmoon.co.uk