TIME WAS when he used to make like Magilla Gorilla, all flailing limbs and popping eyes as he scaled the trunked balconies of the Olympia after the witching hour. Then, just like Magilla, he disappeared into thin air, resurfacing every now and again in a plethora of incarnations, depending on his mood, the music and heck, probably even the weather. Then again, with a name straight out of Vegas, he could hardly go wrong. We'd have had to invent Frankie Lane if he hadn't been born.

Achieving fame and infamy as the schizoid lobe of The Fleadh Cowboys, an outfit that turned on, tuned in and belatedly dropped out of the country/bluegrass fusion era, Frankie Lane wrenched at the imagination of the collective gig-going public from under the brim of a particularly tasty 10 gallon hat that'd have done Hoss proud in the headiest days of Bonanza. In actual fact, Hoss wouldn't have held a candle to him in the sartorial stakes. Lane walked it like he talked it - fast, furious and fantasmagorical.

Then the cowboys rode off into the sunset, not quite sure whether to grin or groan at the fact that they'd come this close to the big time. Lane toyed around with sounds, strings and dance partners in search of an alternative fix.

"Basically," he reports, "I went into hibernation. When I left The Fleadhs I knew that I wanted to do something new. I could feel it coming on but I didn't know exactly what it was. I just knew I wanted to get away from the loud bang syndrome for a while. I felt that being on a big stage was a bit inhibiting as regards developing musically."

A strange concept surely, given the erratic and unpredictable nature of a Fleadhs gig. Hank Williams was positively spinning in his grave in delight at the blasphemy of it all and the crowds were repeatedly wowed by Lane's gravity-defying antics on stage. Inhibition is the last thing that springs to mind when it comes to recollections of how things used to be with the Cowboys.

"Yeah," he sighs, "but we found ourselves going out night after night, doing the same type of songs, the same routine, coming up with new gimmicks, but a lot of the time we weren't doing anything radically different. And I felt it was time for a change. We all did actually. We could all feel it coming on.

"The Fleadhs didn't expand out beyond the country,: he continues. "Except maybe in England to some extent, but the opportunities didn't come from abroad properly so rather than just continue ploughing around the same circuit, we thought it was time to call it quits."

And what does a Fleadh Cowboy turn into when there are no more fleadhs around? Just a plain downhome cowboy, that's what. Frankie Lane's seen more incarnations than the most hi-tech schizophrenics since their demise. Whether it's playing sessions in Hughes' in Chancery Street with possessed fiddler Paul Kelly or swopping melodies with accordionist Dermot Byrne, the masks appear and disintegrate with enviable ease. Why the constant personality swops though?

"It's called survival," he laughs, evidently too long in the tooth to dress it up in finery. "Alternatively you could call it 'creativity out of necessity'."

From whence the recent release of Frankie (or Frank to his mentors in Gael Linn, chaps) Lane's debut solo album, disconcertingly titled and fada'd Dóbró (sic). an entirely instrumental affair, it marks the official coming out on the traditional scene of a delightful debutante of impeccable lineage, and already it's looking like her dance card is full. We speak of course of the belated arrival of the dobro, or national steel guitar to our humble rambling house.

Introductions were taken care of by the late lamented multi-instrumentalist and original cornerstone of The Voice Squad, Brian Leahy, a man well-versed in the fine potential of this exotic piece of craftsmanship that shone in the sunlight and echoed in the dark. Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms paid homage to the dobro on its cover, sending it floating on a heavenly bed of cool blue into the bedsits and boudoirs of millions of innocents, most of whom were (and are) blissfully ignorant of what this strangely decorated pear-shaped thing really is.

Jerry Douglas fans are long acquainted though. The master has guested with his baby on countless country, bluegrass and sundry other releases, stretching and wrapping the dobro round countless tunes that cried out for a steely but soft backbone.

Lane's dobro is different though. Stepping right into the limelight, it's not coy about its charms. Lane wanted to display the full breadth of the dobro's sound spectrum from the comfort of the front seat, a driver of the melody instead of contenting himself with the more usual role of back seat passenger.

He explains its genesis. "The album was supposed to be a dobro and vocals one originally, with original songs, but gradually I just came across the notion of doing an all-instrumental album for the dobro."

Already hawking his Hawaiian wares under the guise of his occasional band, The Honolulas, Lane has shown a strong affinity for the music of Steve McGarret's hometown. Tidal waves and grass skirts swaying in the breeze; intoxicated rhythms and strings flowing instead of thrashing midstream - the sound of the Pacific seems to have permeated Lane's consciousness even though he hasn't ever touched down west of the Atlantic, and shows little interest in doing so either.

"When it came to doing the album," he explains, "I didn't have a whole repertoire of original tunes suitable for the dobro. There were a lot of tunes just lurking around in the back of my head and the instrument dictated which tunes were suited to it. I wanted the entire album to be quite smooth because of the very nature of the dobro, being a slide instrument.

"Hawaiian and Mexican music have a certain romance about them which I love. It's like country music for me. I've never been to America and perhaps I never want to go. I like to hold on to the image that I have in my head, the one I grew up with, innocent and all as it is. The image is full of nice things, rather than evil, filthy, dirty things, which I'm sure America is full of. Most countries are. I like to live with that image and use it in the music."

As for the absence of those much-revered strangulated vocals, he laughs at the incongruity of such a marriage with Gael Linn: "They (Gael Linn) were put together to promote the Irish language and Irish culture. I could probably get away with a ticket for Irish culture but not with the Irish language! 'T for Texas' in Irish sounds very, eh, awkward!"

So indeed would 'Adios Muchachos' and 'Kalima Waltz' though it didn't stop him translating the latter into the cumbersome 'Valsa Kalima' on Dóbró. Still, the Irish connection is ably and justifiably aired on a handful of slides and reels firmly rooted in native rhythms and cadences, yet fertilised magically by the foreign seed of the steel guitar.

Was he at all apprehensive at the reaction he might meet from traditional aficionados with the melding of the dobro with the likes of the more usual instruments such as fiddle and accordion?

"I was, yeah," he admits, "but I annoyed a lot of traditional players with the sound of it in various places," and, "raised eyebrows at what Frankie does are nothing new! And they wouldn't stop him anyway, even if they were!"

From the traditional, Frankie hops, skips and jumps across borders and territories as though they were squares in a game of hopscotch. Mexico. Finland. Argentina. The Shetlands. It's heaps better than a globetrotter travel pass. You get to sample the sound and smell of a place without having to undertake its vaccination requirements or pay its departure taxes. Dóbró adds a whole new dimension to the notion of the armchair traveller or accidental tourist.

It's world music all right, but streets, even blocks away from what Karl Wallinger is doing. It's probably the kind of ticket Ry Cooder'd opt for should he decide to take flight again and curiously, it conjures sonic comparisons with Cooder's seminal 1976 Chicken Skin Music where Hawaiian tunes gathered themselves together with Tex-Mex, Roots, Bluegrass and Country and had one long warm get-together that never got too raucous but lingered on in the memory cells long after the hangovers had passed.

But why labour over comparisons when the papa of the whole shebang can put his own stamp of identity on it. It is his baby after all.

"It's difficult enough (to categorise it) and I'm pleased about that actually," he admits. "On the one hand you could define it as Easy Listening but yet it doesn't fit in that category. Still, to sit down and listen to it, it's very easy to listen to, so you can come up with a new meaning for Easy Listening."

Curiously, for a debut solo outing, Lane has remained very much part of the musical scheme, allowing the dobro to ebb and flow with the tunes, a surprisingly unselfish act considering the fact that it's his name that's on the cover. Was there any temptation to hog the biggest microphone during recording? Or was he under threat of death from the rest of the assembled virtuosos (Ciarán Tourish, Steve Cooney, Trevor Hutchinson et al.) if he did?

"I feel that if you're using other musicians they should be as much a part of it as you are," he says, though the presence of Paul Kelly gently tickling his right temple with a Colt 45 may have coloured his response a tad. "You can hear the dobro if you want to hear it but there's no sense on dominating the sound with it, and it becomes tedious anyway just to hear the same instrument going right through an instrumental album. I don't think it's very adventurous musically either."

It was the lyrical nature of many of the tunes tht decided their final instrumental layout according to Kane.

"It always fascinated me in Irish tunes, you'd have 'Once Around The Dresser' and 'Rakish Paddy', and you'd wonder: where on earth did they get these names for these tunes? So for example, on 'Jenny's Welcome To Charlie', the tune suggested what format could be put on the tune. In fact, the tune was written about Bonnie Prince Charles and this woman, Jenny. He had gone off and cheated on her and she had a welcome for him. So that's what I tried to convey on the record: a bit of the fiddle, a bit of the dobro, a call and answer effect with a bit of mayhem at the end!"

In the evolutionary scheme of things, Lane has a hazily defined idea of where the dobro might develop from here with regard to its relationship with traditional sounds.

"I think it certainly has higher possibilities," he says, "but nobody else does! It's difficult enough because there's no Irish Willie Nelson school or Jerry Douglas school of dobro in Miltown Malbay or any place like that. So it's very difficult to share and learn."

Are his own influences a helpful signpost for future ventures?

"The golden question," he smiles wryly. "One of the great loves of my life when I was young was Jimi Hendrix and it wasn't for the things he'd be playing on the guitar. It was just his approach to music. He played from the heart instead of playing things dead correct. But I listen to anything that's good, anything from country to the most sophisticated jazz, as long as it's played with soul and heart. It's like a good restaurant. If the chef likes what he's doing, people will come into the restaurant because he's put something personal into it."

And is this new-found gentle side merely a blip in the trajectory, a hiccup in the Magilla Gorilla strategy for world domination? Lane chuckles dangerously at the suggestion.

"The feeling of what I've learned from the album will move on into the next album and so on until it gets back to a real hard and nasty sound again! It's all really just about finding a new way of being nasty. Heh heh heh!" (And honest folks, he really does laugh in that spellable, Transylvanian way, straight out of the Christopher Lee school of method schmethod acting.)

As to how easily he'll be able to scale the heights of the Olympia's balconies with a dobro strapped to his belly, he's coolly philosophical:

"If Madonna can do it with a head piece I can do it with a dobro!! We have the technology!"