Philip King's passion has swayed Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and U2. The new generation are next in his sights, writes Shane Hegarty

A couple of years ago, one scene in Philip King's Freedom Highway captured much of what he is about, what his films are about and what, for him, music is about.

"Tom Waits walked into the room with the barn door and he threw it onto the ground and he threw a chair on it and he sat up on it," King recalls. "And the door creaked and the chair creaked and he threw that tambourine into the door and he put his foot on it and a banjo in his hand and he said: 'I'm ready'. I knew he was ready, but I wasn't ready. Because his voice was like a whirlwind that just blew me across the room when he started to sing. He was consumed by the act of doing what he was doing.

"It's at those times that you feel the five-year wait is worth it. The 117 phone calls were worth it. The cajoling, the knocking on the door, the inevitable rejection, which is a constant part of this work, is worth it.

"Sometimes it's very difficult. Sometimes you can hit the floor so hard that it's very difficult to get up and do it again. You have to be naïve, you have to believe. You have to believe absolutely and love the thing you're doing. When you do that there is a possibility that it might happen."

As he tells that story you get a sense of why it is he so regularly persuades the likes of Waits, Emmylou Harris, Daniel Lanois, Elvis Costello and U2 to perform in his films.

It's 13 years since Bringing It All Back Home, which followed the journey of Irish music to the US. Since then, there have been some exquisite films on Daniel Lanois, Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, Christy Moore and Seamus Heaney. His series The Raw Bar has revitalised the playing of traditional music on television, and Other Voices is developing an unparalleled archive of contemporary Irish rock.

He has been on a crusade to "capture what is about to disappear and celebrate what is about to appear". He's currently writing a soundtrack for John Boorman's film about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

He's getting ready to welcome 39 acts to "the edge of the world" (as he describes his home of west Kerry) for a new series of RTÉ 2's Other Voices: Songs From A Room and he excitedly relates his plans to expand across various new media. He's working on a film about 19th-century poet and songwriter Thomas Moore, finishing another on John McGahern, planning a programme of events for Cork's year as European Capital of Culture.

There will be more series of Sé Mo Laoch on TG4 - including an upcoming film on music archivist Davey Hammond - and The Raw Bar. He also finds time to work with the Údarás na Gaeltachta-assisted production company Sibéal Teo and he is a member of the Arts Council. This Sunday he will be at the helm when The Frames are broadcast live from Dublin's Mansion House. And, when we talk, he's getting ready to head out the door to play with The Scullions, the remnants of his old group Scullion.

"I'm still playing and I'm writing." How much? "Not enough. I really miss it." He finds some time to breathe every now and again, when his passion for music is forceful, evangelical. "My ears were opened to music at a very early age and it is the prism through which I see the world," he says. "With music, because it is both harmonious and dissonant in turn, you can see so many things at one time. It's a layered experience. There is much going on at the same time. And I think it's complex - it's a high art.

"My way into the world has been through music, and I have found that to hold a musical mirror up to the world, it gives you a very accurate picture. It tells you something that a historian can't tell you. A historian will tell you how many people died at Verdun and argue a point of view as to why it happened. If you want to know what it felt like to be on the barbed wire at Verdun you ask a singer. And I think that a musical way into the world is a way in which we can understand ourselves on an emotional level. It's like a secret history. It's seeing ourselves. The music doesn't come from nowhere."

In Thomas Moore's adventurous 19th-century life he sees an opportunity to use one man's story to get a wider view on Irish history at the time.