Tom Clelland can, though.

In the year since he took early retirement from his deputy head teacher’s post in Glasgow, as well as finally completing work on a Stevenson CD, From A Garden Of Songs, that he began in 2002, and singing a song about Lanarkshire’s once famous orchards to a former prominent member of the Conservative Party, the Clyde Valley-based singer-songwriter has also had one of his guitar picking patterns pinched, in the most flattering way, by Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn.

From A Garden Of Songs has just been released. The Portillo experience will be screened this month as part of BBC2’s Great Railway Journeys series, and the Renbourn ‘lift’ (“I played him it and he said, Sorry, you’ve just lost that,” says Clelland) could appear at any time, if it’s not already featuring in his concerts.

None of this seemed remotely likely when Clelland, seeking an escape from a busy, highly pressurised job in education, took his first serious steps in music as a late-starting near-50-year-old towards the turn of the new century.

“I’d been playing guitar since I was 18 or 19, learning by listening to records by country blues pickers like Mississippi John Hurt and Rev Gary Davis,” says Clelland. “I’d also written a few songs but when I compared them to my favourites – I grew up in the 1960s with the Byrds, the Beach Boys and Love – I realised that they really weren’t very interesting. Either that or I never got around to finishing them.”

With family commitments placing fewer demands on his time, he began to develop the songwriting craft, resolving to try to write songs that had something original and interesting to say. An admirer of the Texas songwriting school of Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt et al and with a liking also for traditional Scots ballads, he was looking to essentially tell stories –

and finish them this time.

Following a chance meeting, he let Francis Macdonald, of Radio Sweethearts and Shoeshine Records, hear some of his efforts and was given encouragement in return. Similarly,

fellow Lanarkshire singer-songwriter Robin Laing listened and suggested, as Macdonald had, getting out to play in public. This wasn’t easy advice for the shy Clelland to follow but he overcame his stage fright through playing regularly at Radio Sweethearts’ 13th Note sessions in Glasgow and getting onto the time-honoured first rung of folk club floor spots.

By 2002, Macdonald felt that Clelland had enough songs for an album and after being nursed through the recording experience by Pearlfisher Davie Scott in East Kilbride, Clelland presented Little Stories to the world. Well received at the time, it still attracts airplay and was followed in 2005 by a second collection, Life Goes On, on the label that Clelland formed with Laing and singer-songwriter-artist Peter Nardini, Whistleberry.

Clelland’s second career was up and running. He was getting support slots to leading American singer-songwriters and playing headlining dates in folk clubs and his songs were being picked up for compilations such as Edinburgh folk label Greentrax’s alternative Christmas album, Bah Humbug. Then voice problems, due to medication Clelland had been given for high blood pressure, struck in 2007, restricting Clelland’s musical activities to the occasional gig.

It was around this time that Clelland decided to reactivate a project that had stalled. A lover of Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing since childhood, he’d mentioned the song-like quality of Stevenson’s poetry to Robin Laing, another Stevenson fan, when they’d first met and they talked about the possibility of setting Clelland’s favourite book, From a Garden of Songs, to music.

“Robin was very aware that some poems become good songs but others simply don’t lend themselves to music,” he says. “But

Stevenson seemed to write poems with Scottish traditional tunes in mind. He also played the flageolet, or tin whistle, and had written a few airs, and through a doctor in Florida I actually tracked down one of the tunes he’d written, Aberlady Links, which appears on the album.”

Clelland and Laing’s enthusiasm for the project – they’d set half a dozen poems to music between them within a few weeks – turned out to be shared by the aforementioned Davie Scott, who adds a Brian Wilson-like touch to The Land of Counterpane, Duncan McCrone (of folk band the Clydesiders) and other writers, some of whom eventually found it too much of a challenge to turn enthusiasm into finished work. Hence, in part, the delay. Now released with a handsomely illustrated booklet featuring paintings by Peter Nardini, From A Garden Of Songs has seen Clelland turn from teacher to singer-songwriter to record producer and record company executive with one

eye nervously focused on the balance sheet.

“The idea,” says Clelland, “is that you read the poem, listen to what the songwriter and musicians have done with it, look at the paintings, think back and enjoy. I wanted the music, the art and the words to work together and I hope we’ve achieved that.”

From a Garden of Songs is released on Whistleberry Records.