Laurels can sometimes become a noose rather than a garland, subliminally encouraging the recipient to cruise on autopilot. Scottish guitarist Tony McManus has had all manner of laurels cast in his path. Christened "the best guitarist in the world" by John Renbourn, he has been lauded as a musician's musician by acoustic guitar legend Stephan Grossman and by French Algerian virtuoso Pierre Bensusan.

McManus could surely afford to cruise along for a while, but he is made of sterner stuff. Also, his appetite for taking risks constantly brings him into uncharted territory. He has only been playing professionally since the mid 1990s, but already his penchant for varieties of world music, including Scottish, Irish, Breton, Galician, QuΘbecois, Cape Breton and Eastern European, has made him a musical magpie, the Magnus Pyke of acoustic guitar. His playing is as fired with emotion as it is with intellectual vigour, as his disparate musical activities prove time and again.

McManus's voice cackles mischievously down the telephone line from the Irish World Music Centre in the University of Limerick, where he is squeezing in a few days' teaching before embarking on a 12-night non-stop odyssey across the country, on the ESB Music Network Best Of Irish tour.

"I'm teaching on the Masters in Traditional Music Performance for a couple of days," he says . "In the last few years, academic institutions have taken on board the fact that there's so much happening in traditional music, and I've fallen into teaching almost by accident. There's a BA in traditional Scottish music in Glasgow and I've been involved in that too. The teaching element is becoming more and more important."

McManus's reputation for intricate fingerwork has led him to produce teaching videos too, providing fodder for an audience that's as geographically disparate as it is culturally diverse.

"There's a lot of Celtic finger style guitar which just concentrates on slow airs and Carolan tunes and nothing else," he says. "So on these videos, I've been playing a fair ol' whack of jigs and reels, and tunes that you'd hear in a session. I'm trying to bridge a gap between the finger style guitar world and the trad music world, because they're not necessarily in step.

"A lot of traditional musicians just see the guitar as a backing instrument and I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case," he continues, "and a lot of finger style guitarists see Celtic music as being this kind of misty-eyed new-age Celtic-twilight thing, which it certainly isn't."

Born and reared in Paisley, with a name like McManus he had to have a strong Irish lineage. His paternal grandfather emigrated from the Fermanagh/Tyrone area, so the soundtrack to his childhood hosted more Joe Heaney and P.J. Hayes than The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

His early exposure as a player was to the fiddle, but this proved to be a less than joyous experience.

"I started with the fiddle at seven," he recalls, "and I was atrocious. I still am, in fact. People just run in terror when they see me taking it up. But I was always interested in chords. I remember I would always play the fiddle on my lap, and I wanted to play all four strings at once. I wanted to play chords so I got a mandolin and that almost worked, but it wasn't until I was 10 that I got the guitar."

The equation of guitar playing with traditional music doesn't seem inevitable, particularly a quarter of a century ago when guitars and bouzoukis were considered instruments of the devil in purist trad circles. But McManus had been utterly seduced, following a concert that he had the good taste and better fortune to attend.

"I managed to see the Bothy Band live when I was 10," he remarks; "It's the rock 'n' roll equivalent of having been at Woodstock. I saw them with Tommy Peoples and I couldn't speak for days. It had such a profound impact on me. I was just a babbling wreck, and I knew then that this was a very important part of my life."

McManus admits that he has never had even one guitar lesson, though it's only in the last 10 years that he finally succumbed to the prospect of pursuing a career in music. For better or worse, he missed a career in academia by a whisker.

"I was half way through a Ph.D. in Maths which wasn't going very well. In fact, if you had spoken to my tutor, he'd have said it was going really appallingly," he laughs. "For some reason I decided to go to a session for a bit of an escape and it was such an uplifting experience that within a few months the academia was fading and I was getting more and more into playing. But then again, I've never regarded music simply as a hobby, even before it became my career. It was always an obsession."

McManus's creative U-turn happened as recently as 1992, and it was as much a voyage of discovery for him as it was for his audience.

"Once I decided to do it (pursue a career in music), I went at it with a vengeance," he says. "I moved back to Scotland and rediscovered Scottish music. I discovered that things had moved on a lot in Scotland in my absence. They hadn't even consulted me! And it was great. Scotland had become a much more confident place, with more of a grip on our culture, which is something that Ireland achieved a long time ago, I think. When I was a kid, Scottish music belonged in the music halls, and the only place you would see Lowland Scots, the dialect, was in comics. It was a parody, a ridiculed thing. Well, then I saw that Scotland had found its own voice again, so I was bound to plug into that straight away."

With two solo albums under his belt, (his eponymously titled dΘbut and 1998's Pourquoi QuΘbec), as well as his 1999 joint release with Alisdair Fraser, Return To Kintail, and guest appearances on no less than 50 other albums (from Kate Rusby to Deaf Shepherd), McManus still manages to add his particular tincture of spice to jazz recordings, alongside the likes of Martin Taylor and Alain Genty.

For now though, he's back to root out those Irish connections, in the eminent company of Belfast piper John McSherry, Louth fiddler D≤nal O'Connor and Fermanagh singer Gabriel McArdle.

"We go on the road as individuals and whatever collaborations arise, arise," he says. "I'm looking forward to it immensely. It's a chance to play in all kinds of unlikely places, which wouldn't be an economically viable proposition without sponsorship. We're all familiar with Clare and Donegal, but to play in parts of the country that aren't so readily associated with traditional music - like Mullingar and Virginia - is going to be interesting too."

Best of Irish ESB/Music Network Tour (with funding from the Arts Council) continues nationwide: tonight, Carrigallen, Leitrim (Cornmill Theatre & Arts Centre, 8.30 p.m.); tomorrow, May 23rd, Dublin (Coach House, Dublin Castle, 8 p.m.); Thursday, May 24th, Virginia (Ramor Theatre, 8.30 p.m.); Friday, May 25th, Mullingar (Belvedere House, 8.30 p.m.)