Singing a different tune to the music business

"No, I don't believe so and I would say to someone [if they couldn't]," she tells me as we sit in an upstairs window of the Glasgow Print Studio. "I feel you can either do it or you can't."

Rutkowski is one of those who can, it's fair to say. With her sister Deirdre she was signed to a major label at the age of 19 after being spotted singing backing vocals for Glasgow band Bourgie Bourgie back in the city's imperial pop phase.

And she is singing now at the age of 50 having earlier this year released an album, the first under her own name, entitled Diary of a Lost Girl. It saw her return to writing songs for the first time since the 1980s and is full of piano-led ballads and quiet melodrama. The latest gig in support of said album takes place where we're sitting later this month.

And when she's not singing she's teaching others to sing, something she only started in the last few years when she had returned to Glasgow after years in London. "I came to it late on," she admits. "I never had an interest in it and when I came back here I ended up going to college as a mature student. I did my HND in music performance. I'd never taught. I was very nervous about the whole thing. I still remember the first morning shaking in my boots but I did end up thinking 'I do like this.'"

And it's something she is now devoted to. "I don't believe people should teach to fill a hole in their income. That's dreadful. Unless you have a passion for what you're doing then don't go near it. And you definitely get a lot out of it yourself."

It ups your game, she says. "There's nothing like saying something to someone and thinking 'I don't do that', or 'I don't do that enough'. It tidies up a lot of things and it just inspires you because you want to be good for your students as well.

And just coming across great singers is just such a thrill. I've got a girl just now, she's very young but she writes and sings and is just fabulous, the wee, early stages of greatness. It's very exciting."

She could almost be talking about herself there. As a teenager in 1980s Glasgow, Rutkowski - the name is Polish - and her sister were managed by Elliott Davis, who would later go on to have huge success with Wet Wet Wet. The city was pop central at the time. Scouts were signing up everyone with a guitar and a voice.

"It was relatively easy," Rutkowski admits. The sisters were joined by multi-instrumentalist Ross Campbell and were signed to CBS under the name Sunset Gun in 1984, teaming up with veteran producer Pete Wingfield to make an album that in retrospect sounds like a dry run for the Wets debut Popped In, Souled Out three years later.

What was the 19-year-old Rutkowski like, I wonder? "Thinner," she laughs. "Naive, I would say as well. I don't see someone who knows her own mind at that point. Who does?"

In the end Sunset Gun turned out to be, at best, minor characters in Glasgow's musical story. Over the next few years Rutkowski would soldier on, trying to make it in the deep waters of the music industry.

There were some great highs ahead. By 1986, 4AD label boss Ivo Watts-Russell had signed Rutkowski and her sister up to be part of his fantasy band This Mortal Coil (whose most famous moment is probably the Cocteau Twins' take on Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren).

The sisters sang on the 1986 album Filigree & Shadow (taking the lead on another Tim Buckley track, Morning Glory) and were central to the 1991 follow-up Blood. "It's been such a positive thing that's never gone away. It's helped me just being associated with it."

Watts-Russell still sends her emails of encouragement. But her 4AD experience turned out to be the exception rather than the rule in Rutkowski's dealings with the record industry.

After making an album under the name The Kindness of Strangers with composer Craig Armstrong at the start of the 1990s she was ready to give up.

"I had a period where I considered finishing with music all together. I thought about going to university and studying art history."

What was the problem? "Square peg in a round hole. The last experience I had with [US label] Interscope, the Craig Armstrong project, really sealed it for me because I thought 'I'm not in the right place'."

It was the lack of control she bridled against, she says: "And just the sheer size of things. That's something I've got to understand as I've got older. I work best in small situations."

In the end she didn't become a mature student. Instead, she got a job for the Arts Council of England working with jazz and improv musicians, musicians with an inbuilt DIY mentality. It made her realise the mainstream record industry is not the only way to get your music out.

"That was a real revelation to me because I'd come up through being signed to a major label from an early age: 'Oh you've got to be fantastically successful to be anything as a creative person.' And I finally realised that's not true. I didn't even realise it with Ivo because I was too young in the head.

"I didn't really appreciate it until years later that there are other ways of doing things and that was so liberating. I was not and never would be a major label artist and I realised that that was okay."

The good thing is there are other options these days. She made her new album via Pledge Music, the online resource that sees fans commit to provide funding in advance. Perhaps it would be easier if she was a 19-year-old starting now, I suggest. "If you want to be a mainstream artist, no. You've really got to sell your soul, I think." She pauses, reconsiders. "But is that any different than how it's ever been?"

Rutkowski came back to Glasgow in 2005 to be near her ageing parents. The city had changed a little in the meantime. "I found more Poles in it, which I really liked. Just sitting on the bus and hearing Polish accents all around me." Not that she can speak her dad's language. "I've learned a few words here and there."

She also came home because she had realised if she was ever to start writing songs again - and she hadn't for a long time - she had to be here, had to feel totally at home. It was when she met collaborator Irvin Duguid that the songs began to come.

The obvious question is how autobiographical the album that resulted is. Was she ever a lost girl? "There was a bit of that woven in. I took the title from a Louise Brooks film but the diary thing came in because my mum died in 2007, a couple of years after we started working. And writing really helped me make sense of things again. So in that respect it did feel like a diary covering that grief process where you are a bit lost."

Growing older carries an inevitable weight with it. But that doesn't have to weigh you down. Louise Rutkowski is 50 now. Once that number would have horrified her. Yet the reality has turned out to be rather different.

"It's even better than I would have hoped for. I've always been somebody who refused to deal with age. Life really is for living and pushing yourself. Obviously I haven't married or had a family so it's a lot easier for me to say that. I don't have those pressures or constraints. But that's the way I've chosen to live. At the end of the day creativity is my life and my children."

Louise Rutkowski's story is one of dedication, of persistence. When she was 19 she seemed to be haring along. But it turned out she is one of life's tortoises. And that's okay.

Has her voice changed over the years? "Yes, I think I know what to do with it. I was listening to The Kindness of Strangers album recently because I had to do some things for a private party and I thought: 'Oh, I'd sing that much better now.'"

Louise Rutkowski plays Glasgow Print Studio on November 28.