"EVERY concert I play is knock me down dead good. Everywhere I play, or have played recently the last two months in America have had a standing ovation at the end of every concert. Except for a couple where I had a standing ovation in the middle of the concert as well. You only get them up on their feet when you touch them, when you do something extraordinary." And the great man smiles behind his dark glasses.

If you are James Galway, one of the world's top virtuosi, you are entitled perhaps to toot your own flute. Everything about this man shouts success: from his glistening rainbow silk tie, chronometre gold watch and gold pen to his matching (hidden) gold flute, as we sit in this discreet Chelsea hotel.

"Modesty" is not a word in this man's vocabulary, except in reference to his background ("you would never believe it if you saw where I grew up"), though "defensive" certainly is.

Born in working class, Protestant Belfast in 1939, Galway left Ireland when he was 16 with a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. Flute playing ran in the family - both his father and his grandfather had played with the Belfast Opera, though at first young Jimmy had opted for the violin. "I wanted to play the violin but mine had the greatest collection of Irish wood worm in it that you ever came across and it fell to bits, so I took up the flute."

After 10 years climbing the ladder of metropolitan success playing with all the big London orchestras, at the age of 29 Galway was talent spotted by Herbert von Karajan (Anne Sophie Mutter was another of his finds) and Galway spent the next six years as principal flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic.

To anyone else the Berlin Phil, arguably the greatest orchestra of its day, would have been the pinnacle of a musical career. To James Galway from Lagan it was only a stepping stone to the real thing. "I had to join orchestras to get known," he says. But what he wanted was "for people to hear".

Unlike the violin, or the piano, there is very little written for the flute so life for a soloist is hard going. Crossover popular or non classical music through which Galway metamorphosed from performer to showman was a necessary part of the game plan.

It started with a programme on the BBC. "My management convinced them they should have this young flute player playing Annie's Song," which had recently been a chart topper for the country and western star John Denver. With his classical credentials and virtuosity firmly showcased on Flight of The Bumble Bee, the silver tongued, golden fluted young Irishman was soon everybody's darling. More importantly as he says, "they bought the records".

They still do. Since the 1980s, Galway's crossover output has increasingly focused on Irish music. Last year he collaborated with The Chieftains. This month his latest album of Irish music, Legends, with Phil Coulter, is released and no doubt will be a resounding success. Not only does it include Riverdance, Galway style, but Danny Boy which Galway claims will reduce anybody to tears.

"It's like a prayer to music. I have a friend who is an Arab and he never goes to concerts but he went to one `Jimmy,' he said, `I don't understand. This tune you played, this Irish tune, the tears were rolling down my face. The woman beside me was having some sort of breakdown.' This is a very level headed businessman."

JAMES Galway is well aware of the debt he owes to Ireland. "But how to repay it is a difficult question. I don't know if you can ever begin to repay a culture that you're born into." What about investing in young people?

"Helping young people is a difficult thing to do. I personally can't help these kids individually." As for endowing bursaries or competitions, Galway will have none of it. "No. I don't do that because they're all so crooked. It's very, very rare that a child will win something without the help or the push of a teacher here and there, without a bit of business going on. I know this. This is why I won't even sit on juries."

James Galway has also been at the receiving end. When Czechoslovakia was still communist, Galway took part in a festival competition there. The first thing they did was give him a duff accompanist, he says, who they replaced only after he complained. "It's against the rules to applaud. We played a Prokofiev sonata and the whole house applauded immediately." Not an accolade accorded to the Russian contestant who nonetheless went on to win. "But these things didn't disappear with the communists, they exist today in capitalist society too. That's why I don't do any of these things, because I just can't be bothered to start arguing and haggling with these people and to have phone calls from somebody saying `Jimmy, next week one of my kids is going to be playing such and such a piece. You should have a special listen'. I don't want to be bothered with all this sort of stuff, the whole hoo-hah that goes on. So what I do is here and there I have given people flutes. Real flutes, gold ones. I didn't actually give them to them, you know. I say you can borrow this or you can have this for a certain period and then I'll collect it back. Things like that I do because there is nobody else judging. Only me."

In Switzerland where he now lives with his third wife, Jeanne Cinnante, who also plays the flute, Galway does have classes ("for 35, but 100 turn up. They're just listening"). But for the next two years he is giving up all teaching it is just too draining. "You don't get the circle of energy back from these people. I am talking about a teenager who has left home, who bates her parents and thinks I am going to be the next Christ in her life." He does take on professionals individually. "And I like it if they're married so I don't have to put up with any of their private lives." He needs time and space for himself. "I don't have time sometimes to read the Bible or even to bless myself during the day because there are so many things going on. When I say I'm fighting for every minute of my life, it really is a crusade on my part to get every minute I can for this guy here to find some sort of inner peace, so that I can play when I walk onto the platform without thinking about all these things that I should be doing and looking out there and seeing this little anklebiter who is learning the flute with me and all that stuff."

So he does what he can. "But I don't get involved with all these James Galway competitions. Do you think I want to get into a ratbag like that? When it comes to judging competitions, everybody suddenly is an expert but the real expert never gets heard."

Crossover may have made Galway's name and fortune bout it plays no part in his concert schedule. I have just spent two months in America and I didn't play one crossover piece ever. All these crossover records I make, I never play this music in public. I prefer to play classical music because that's what I'm really good at."

In the 1970s it was different. "It was a job, I was just a musician doing things. I wasn't going to say no to playing Annie's Song on TV if they were paying me £200 when the Royal Philharmonic were paying me £20 for a whole day's work."

It angers him that people see him as a crossover artist. "I just make these records so that BMG, my record company, is happy. So that when I turn up and say `Hey guys, I want to record a Boulez sonatina', they don't look at me like I have just come out of a looney bin. They say `When?'."

The paucity of repertoire for the flute has led Galway into the realm of commissioning. His choice of composers is eclectic, dependent solely on whether he likes their existing work. Most have never written for the flute before. An exception is Lowell Liebermann who has written two pieces for Galway. "Lowell doesn't even play the flute himself but I had heard a work for flute and piano and I thought this is a great piece, so I commissioned him to write a flute concerto. It was really difficult but it took off like you can't imagine; went straight into the repertoire and people play it all the time."

James Galway is nothing if not a pragmatist. "Later on I got him to do another one. I told him I go around playing the flute and harp concerto by Mozart and they are always asking me what else to do. And there is nothing else really good for flute and harp, so I told him it would be a handy thing to do he did and it's great. A very spiritual piece." It too went straight into the repertoire.

Galway always tries to include new work in his concerts. There's no discussion. The promoters just have to accept his programme, he says "otherwise I just won't do the gig". With the existing repertoire pitifully small, Galway's programme inevitably includes what he calls old war horses. The problem is not the music, he says, it's the performers. "They say `okay listen, you know the string sonata from Beethoven, well so do I. So we don't need to rehearse it too much. Just this little bit here.' So they work it out like that. It's a couple of strangers standing there playing, one of them thinking I wonder if I'm going to make the plane at nine in the morning. The other one wishing he wasn't there at all but at the movies."

It's different, for instance, with Philip Moll who he played with in the US and has known for 22 years. "We get together sometimes a week before a recital and we play every day, all these pieces, and we play them all through. And because we're getting older, there is no `old war horse' feeling about them. The `old war horses' are groomed, they are polished."

SINCE 1977, when Galway went through a life changing experience, he has dedicated each concert to God. "Somebody ran over me with a product of the Yamaha corporation - and it wasn't a flute." In fact, it was a 750cc motorbike. He spent a long time in hospital. "Maybe God thought I ought to stop and take stock because life was certainly going at a 100 mph just in the flow lane. When you're young you have the energy to do this stuff. When you get a bit older, you don't want to do that anymore because you want to give better performances." He can speak, he says, only for himself "because I don't know any other musicians".

He muses: "How do you define friendship? Are we talking about somebody you sat with in an orchestra for five years but if you had to add up the words you spoke together might only come to 2,000 `hello' and `is that your ham sandwich', and `yea'." Friends for Galway are his neighbours in Switzerland. For the last 30 years he has lived in the hills above Lucerne, home of his second wife. His children live there and all three wives and four children are friends. "Take Bertha, a farmer the other day she came over with a beautiful cauliflower and Jeannie and I had that for dinner. These are people I think about all the time and they think about me.

In Switzerland he feels he keeps a hold on the ordinary things of life. The idea of living in a city, any city, fills him with horror. "To listen to this traffic and these aeroplanes, I couldn't do it." He clearly sees himself as an ambassador for Ireland, but his busy schedule means his visits here are infrequent. He did play the inaugural concert at Belfast's £32 million Waterfront hall earlier this year and last year he was one of the "distinguished Irish people" who featured in the series on Ireland's railways, Off The Beaten Track, for BBC Northern Ireland and RTE. Next week he returns to Dublin for a 100th anniversary concert for the Eye and Ear Hospital. He himself suffers from a congenital eye condition called nistagnus which makes it difficult to focus on fixed objects.

Would he ever think of moving back to Ireland? "No, not really. I would like to but it's not practical. But, like St Paul, you know, I could always change.