Nolberto Solano regularly spends spare afternoons coaching Newcastle United's Under-11 squad. Sometimes he decides a short walk is in order and takes the boys on a tour of the club's adjacent first-team training facilities.

"Children need to dream and they see things which give them a lot of dreams," says the former Newcastle, Aston Villa and Peru right-winger, now enjoying cult status down the road at Hartlepool United. "They stare at the nice cars in the car park and say they want to become professionals too but then I explain it's not as easy as it looks. It helps them realise there's a lot of work ahead and a long way to go."

Solano has been on quite a journey since his boyhood as the youngest of seven siblings growing up in an unforgiving Lima shanty town. His evenings were devoted to practising playing his prized possession, a trumpet, but any daylight hours not eaten up by school were spent kicking tin cans and cardboard boxes around the local streets.

"It helped my first touch," says the 36-year-old, whose arrival at League One Hartlepool has not only boosted season ticket sales but inspired an unlikely promotion push. "The street is where I got all my skills. The problem for English boys is that they've got so many other things to do they can become lazy about football practice."

Not that Solano entirely subscribes to the view that modern affluence is the enemy of youthful talent. "I'm sure children are getting cleverer – I think using computers is making them brighter," he argues. "If you talk to my Newcastle boys about tactics their understanding is amazing. I couldn't have grasped the same ideas at their age. Managing so much new technology sharpens their football brains."

Fame has a habit of insidiously changing players irrevocably but, despite his long-standing label as Peru's David Beckham, Solano is refreshingly devoid of the precious streak so many peers succumb to. Aware a knee operation means I am unable to drive, he readily agrees to meet at my mother's home in Newcastle, turns up precisely on time and proves politeness personified. It all rather chimes with the insight offered by a friend working at a nearby branch of Asda who reports that Solano ranks as a rare member of their football clientele prepared to pack his own bags at the checkout.

"I like to live a normal life," he says with a shrug. "My Mum used to say: 'You're good at football and maybe you'll be a success but that doesn't mean your personality has got to change.' Whether you're an architect or an engineer or a footballer or a teacher we're all the same," he says. "Maybe some players nowadays need to be more sensitive in some ways; as Sir Bobby Robson used to tell us at Newcastle, everyone deserves the same respect."

Hiding behind minders, electronic gates and blacked-out car windows would, in any case, have interfered with Solano's musical persona. These days he plays the trumpet in a Salsa band called the Geordie Latinos, which performs regular live gigs across the region, yet even at the height of his Premier League celebrity he felt the need to "socialise normally and play Salsa together with my friends in small bars".

Word of his off-field gift spread to exalted circles. Sitting in Newcastle's dressing room following a Champions League fixture against Juventus in Turin, Solano was "shocked" when a familiar figure burst through the door and made a beeline for him. "It was Sting," he recalls. "He said 'Hi Nobby' in Spanish and we chatted. It was a great shock that Sting wanted to talk to me but I'd always loved The Police so it was a very nice experience."

Suitably inspired, he dallied briefly with the idea of becoming a professional musician. "It's not easy, though, a full-time trumpet player practises six or seven hours a day," acknowledges Solano. "I enjoy doing a few gigs but playing every night would be hard. I love music and, on bad days, it lifts my soul but I have more passion for football."

This abiding fixation explains why a creator once described as "my favourite player" and "the Little Master" by his former Boca Juniors team-mate and good friend Diego Maradona can be found converting classy free-kicks for Hartlepool. "The knees are feeling it more and more but football is my life, I'm enjoying League One and Mick Wadsworth is a great manager," says the man whose crosses conjured countless chances for Alan "he owes me many hundreds of goals" Shearer.

Now in charge at Victoria Park, Wadsworth first met the Peruvian during his time as Robson's assistant at Newcastle. "I was with Hull last season but I wasn't playing, I got bored and gained weight," reveals Solano. "I'd decided I wanted to manage eventually and I also hoped to be able to live in Newcastle again so I spoke to Mick. He said: 'Join Hartlepool, I'll help you with your coaching badges and you enjoy yourself playing as much football as you want for us.' At the moment things are going well, it's all looking very good. We're in a very tight division but, while getting promoted will be difficult, it's not impossible."

Television viewers can assess Hartlepool's potential when the cameras capture their game at Notts County on Sunday. It is the sort of journey Newcastle would automatically make by air but Solano is sanguine about the impending four-hour each way bus trip.

"We go everywhere, even Bournemouth, by coach. We sometimes travel for six, seven or eight hours; when you finally get home it's a big moment," he says. "Because I enjoy playing so much it's no big bother and my team-mates are great boys but it's very different from before. At Newcastle we flew everywhere; if the lads went on a coach for even three hours they'd go mad."

Whenever Hartlepool commitments permit, Solano heads to St James' Park on match days. "I've been to watch the lads a few times," he says. "It's different from playing there but being back still feels great. I see Fabricio Coloccini and Jonás Gutiérrez [Newcastle's Argentinian duo] socially and I think the team's got a real chance of doing well. It will be tougher when winter comes but Alan Pardew encourages intelligent football – he's doing a good job."

Solano might be talking about his home-town club and, in a sense, he is. An occasionally complicated private life may have ensured that things on Tyneside have not always been straightforward but the good times have easily outweighed the bad. So much so that the boy from Lima is now very much an adopted Geordie. "Newcastle's where I want to be," he says. "It's a beautiful, welcoming city; I feel comfortable here."

He smiles at a suggestion that he sounds like a St James' manager in waiting. "It's easy to say but very hard to do," Solano says with a laugh. "I learnt a lot about the difficulties playing for Ruud Gullit at Newcastle. He was a fantastic coach but too young to be a manager; he wasn't experienced enough to handle big dressing-room personalities like John Barnes, Robert Lee, Duncan Ferguson and Alan Shearer. So I want to go slowly at first, be a coach then an assistant. After that, we'll see but, for now, I want my Under-11s to enjoy themselves, express themselves, play intelligent football – and dream."