He's spent his career on the road, but for Gerry O'Connor nothing can beat the permanency of the studio. So it's fortunate his new CD is so fine, writes Siobhán Long

The trouble with the speed of our world today is that it's so easy to be left behind. Whether you're a computer dynamo, a film director or a musician, you may be tempted to succumb to the pressure to conform - churn out the work, feed the demand. Otherwise, you reason, you'll languish in the back rows, where few publicity shots are taken or bonuses dispensed.

And yet a prolific output doesn't necessarily equate with quality. Sometimes, what's seldom is, indeed, wonderful. Gerry "Banjo" O'Connor has finally released his third solo album, after a six-year hiatus. Eight long years separated his first and second albums, released in 1991 and 1998. And yet, although he might crave just a touch more of the spotlight, O'Connor has never submitted to the gospel according to the heavy-rotation kings of the MTV generation.

It would have been nice to hear his music commandeer the airwaves a little more often, and of course the odd magazine cover wouldn't have gone astray, but it's the work that matters, not the gloss that attends it, he believes. And anyway, he's already got all manner of accolades winging their way to his front door. Because No Place Like Home is evidence of O'Connor on top form.

He has ratcheted up the road miles with a cacophony of bands, including Tipsy Sailor, Wild Geese, Arcady, The Furious Colour (the precursor to The Black Velvet Band) and, since 1993, Four Men and a Dog. Yet whatever highs are garnered when a band is soaring skywards on stage are ephemeral, says O'Connor: they will never define a musician's reputation.

"The studio performance is what matters," he says. "I think it's better to make good CDs, because they last long after your live work is finished. You can be drawn into a false sense of security with a good gig or a lively gig where you're soliciting applause from the audience. I think you're better off putting your energy into a really good body of recorded work, because when the audience buys the album that's what they take home."

No Place Like Home is a soulful tribute to the music of his own home place, Garrykennedy, near Nenagh in Co Tipperary, and his father's, Brosna in Co Kerry.

Borrowing tunes from the great Paddy O'Brien and Seán Ryan, and paying tribute to the blind Sliabh Luachra fiddler Tom Billy Murphy, O'Connor saddles up traditional tunes such as Thomond Bridge and The Cuckoo's First Call with a host of fascinating travelling companions, including three original tunes of his own and the divine bluegrass mutant that is The Temperance Reel.

This is a collection that reflects a musician who's comfortable enough with the old tunes to be able to fashion new ones out of their likeness yet never succumbs to the temptation to clone what's gone before. O'Connor's long years of session playing have helped hone his palate.

"I found out very early on that to survive at a time when there were very few commercial bands playing traditional music, like Stockton's Wing, De Danann, Moving Hearts and The Chieftains, I had to do session work. And to do that I had to become a session musician. I had to learn jazz, country, bluegrass in the studios here in Dublin, and I had to learn how to do it quick, because if you could learn fast you'd be called back for more work."

O'Connor has never been averse to diversification, harnessing his talents to publish a hugely successful banjo-tutor book and video (and subsequently working for the publishing company, which produced a long series of such books). He even turned his hand to running a café, when it was neither profitable nor popular, long before our palates became sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a Nescafé and an arabica-fuelled cappuccino, opening the late, lamented Onion Field in Ranelagh, where the character we now know as Luka Bloom was born.

"Myself and my wife, Marie, ran the Onion Field for four years," says O'Connor. "It was avant-garde, years before its time. We had to sell a lot of cups of coffee just to pay the rent. There weren't a lot of musicians with money floating around then, and Irish music wasn't as trendy then either. I played guitar and fiddle mostly then. In fact I didn't even own a banjo at that time. My wife found one for me later which was owned by a jazz musician who lived just down the road from us."

O'Connor's freewheeling fiddle style has flourished in the welcoming gabháil of Four Men and a Dog, but it's his banjo that occupies centre stage on all his albums. A late starter, he picked up a guitar only at the age of 14 and finally took up the fiddle at the grand old age of 21, on tour.

"I learned the fiddle in toilets in Germany," he says with glee. "My wife says it was the most excruciating time in our relationship. I was working in Düsseldorf as a student, and I discovered that I could make money busking there. The banjo got broken, so I started playing the fiddle. I suppose I kind of knew how to do it anyway, because I had grown up watching my father and his brothers and lots of other musicians playing, but I was banished to the loo to practise.

"There was a nice echo there, so you could hear yourself and know whether you were in tune. After that, when I came home, I took lessons with Nollaig Casey, and those lessons have stayed with me ever since."

The economics of being a musician are the ultimate determiner of how widely a player's reach is, says O'Connor. Since for every Madonna, J.Lo and Bill Whelan there are thousands of musicians grafting in the shadows, his approach has always been distinguished as much for its pragmatism as for its creative genius.

"Even though there was eight years between my first and second albums I did three books and three videos, so I still had a profile out there. If I could get a distributor to distribute my albums world-wide, like the books and the DVDs and technique videos, I'd be a rich man now. Unfortunately, though, they don't take CDs on the back of the books. It's so easy to make albums now, but it's simply impossible for shops to stock everything. My approach has always been to assume that nobody knows me, and that means that I don't overlook the small details, the things that are important when it comes to making CDs."

Experience is an indispensable advantage when it comes to gathering tunes and heading towards the recording studio, he says. "No Place Like Home is more focused than my last album, which was quite experimental. This time I relied a lot on [co-producer] Brendan O'Regan, and I just concentrated on the tunes. As Christy Moore has said, looking back at a body of work, it's the music that matters, not the musicians. With this album, yes, it's a Gerry O'Connor album, but it's not about technique or how fast I can play. It's just about the choice of music, which I think is more soulful. I'm not trying to prove anything on this album. It's the music that counts, nothing else."