Which is where he is today, temporarily holed up en route to singing three songs opening the San Remo festival, along the coast in Italy. Despite having to give an interview and dine with Italian record company execs, tonight counts as a night off in the current push to promote his second album, It's Time. Buble, however, is in no mood for the larks and over-indulgence that apparently attended the success of his first, Come Fly With Me.

As he sips tea in the hotel lobby, he is in confessional mood. ``I don't like alcohol much,'' he says firmly, in tones that would make many of his heroes, notably the late Dean Martin, shudder. ``I like to smoke what you call a spliff. If it was up to me, I'd walk through life in a haze. But I had to stop all of that because it kills your voice. Three hundred shows in a year, man, and sometimes I'd show up and be half as good as I should have been. I felt bad about that.''

He felt bad too about all the young women he temporarily befriended. ``I was never sleazy. I was never mean to a girl. I was always very upfront.'' His voice tails off. ``But I'm a regular guy. I am a lad, and I did enjoy the temptations.''

Buble is such an appealingly open character you wonder whether he might supply more details. Instead, he re-counts a sobering conversation with his girlfriend of seven years, now his fiancee, Debbie.

``She didn't get mad. She said, `I understand what you're going through. And you must understand how embarrassing it is for me.' Which made me feel like crap, you know, like `Is it worth it?'''

He proposed to Debbie over the phone before Christmas and earnestly hopes that he has put his womanizing behind him. ``It had better be behind me, man, or I won't be engaged for very long.''

Other aspects of becoming famous have been less troublesome. Buble loved being able to phone fellow ``new'' jazzer Jamie Cullum - ``a great guy'' whom he had never met - and get together with him two hours later in a restaurant. They now sit in on each other's shows.

For a compulsive communicator who chats amiably to anybody who will listen, Buble has found the perfect niche. ``At the very least, fame means that you'll always get somebody wanting to talk to you at a party.''

You suspect that his immaculate grasp of the music of the 1940s and 50s might have had its origins in an unusual, cloistered adolescence, and so it did. Sort of. While Buble's friends spent their summer holidays getting off on Nirvana, he was stuck on his own in a skiff off the coast of Vancouver, helping his father, a commercial fisherman, catch salmon. ``I'd sit on the bow of the boat, watch the porpoises and listen to tapes of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing duets for hours on end.''

These tapes were made for him not by his father, an ardent Bruce Springsteen fan, but by his Italian-born grandfather. On fishing days, which normally began at 4.30am and ended at 11pm, with intense interludes of ``deadly physical work,'' Buble devoured the music of his ancestors with a scholarly passion.

``I stole from everybody, man. I loved the way Sinatra was very clean with his vowels, so everybody could always understand what he sang. I loved Ella Fitzgerald's controlled and sweet vibrato, and the color and depth of Sarah Vaughn's voice.''

He goes on to praise Mel Torme, Bobby Darin, and Engelbert Humperdinck. ``I could listen to his voice all night, it's really silky,'' he says. Buble concludes his paean to these we have loved with a word of advice he received from Tony Bennett. ``He told me, `If you steal from one, you're a thief. If you steal from everyone, it's research.'''

Though he is routinely dubbed ``the new Sinatra,'' Buble's vocal timbre actually reminds me more of George Michael. He likes hearing this. ``Hey thanks, man! He has such a beautiful, dulcet tone. And that Faith record had a big impact on me. I thought pop in the 1980s was pretty good actually. It was melodic, it was harmonic. It was the 90s stuff that turned me off, with all that techno and hardcore rap.''

He quite liked grunge, though, because, he says, ``Nirvana had strong melodies.'' More surprisingly, he considers Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam ``a modern-day crooner, a lot like George Michael.''

Buble is as disarmingly honest about his music as he is about his past misdemeanors. He thinks his first album was slightly anonymous and dominated by the anxieties of his producer David Foster. ``David's balls were on the line. Two million dollars had been spent and he told me, `I can't afford to let you make this record. You'll have to trust me. I'm going to make it safe and marketable.' And it worked. He introduced a nobody to the world.''

The new album, It's Time, features more of his input, he says, even though he wrote only one of the songs (Home, the single), having dropped three other compositions of his own.

Buble is keen to allay any suspicion that he might be contemplating moving into more contemporary pop fields. ``We lost Sinatra, we lost Dean Martin, Al Martino. All the great old singers have gone now, and people miss them. The world has got a lot scarier in the past 10 years, and I think people are on a search for something to take them away from that.''

Ponderous assessments of The Michael Buble Phenomenon not being his style, he swiftly backtracks. ``But I don't know, maybe it's just a fluke.''