Stuart Cosgrove: "I can be quite bull-headed when I think something's right"

But given the choice between James McFadden and Marvin Gaye, frankly Faddy isn't going to get a look in. "I've got this feeling that there's a self-limiting side to Scottish football," Cosgrove admits almost as soon as we sit down to talk in the august surroundings of the Blythswood Hotel in Glasgow. "It's not something that's going to be globally important."

No doubt there will be Celtic, Rangers and Scotland fans already looking out their green (and blue) ink right now. To put it in context, though, Cosgrove is explaining why he has written a book about the city of Detroit in 1967, the politics of the place, the rise of radical rock in the form of the MC5 and, most importantly, the story of Motown Records, the rise and rise of The Supremes and why in passing James Brown is, in Cosgrove's words, a bit of a "s***". All of which is more important - to me, at any rate - than the ins and outs of the SPL. Then again, I am a Spurs fan.

We'll pick the bones out of all of this in a moment but let us first set the scene. Stuart Cosgrove is waiting for me when I arrive, dressed in a camouflage shirt and carrying a man bag out of which he extracts a couple of copies of Detroit 67. He's on a bit of a sabbatical from Channel 4 at the moment to promote the book, drink lattes and josh with our waiter about the cost of said lattes (the high side of eight quid since you ask).

In person he is much as he is on the radio. Welcoming, chatty, outspoken, not short of a word or five. Over the next hour we will talk about music and masculinity, fatherhood and, yes, football.

It starts, as everything does for Cosgrove, with the music. Detroit 67 - at some 600 pages even he admits it's a bit of a "monster" - is something of a labour of love; a culmination of his passion for American soul music and American political history. He's publishing it himself after six years of research.

"Not six years full time because I'm still at Channel 4 and I'm working and it's a busy job."

Still, over the last six years he has been taking holidays in Detroit, burying himself away in the libraries of the University of Michigan and Wayne State University reading old newspapers, old Motown papers and the papers of the American labour movement and the anti-war movement. What has emerged is a thrilling, dense infodump of a book.

It's also a reminder, for some of us at least, that the first time we encountered Cosgrove was back in the ink-smeary pages of the music press in the mid-1980s, when he was working at the NME extolling the virtues of hip hop in the face of Morrissey mania and, as he himself admits, something of a "bad boy".

It might be difficult now to recall quite how important the music press was back then. And how divisive. I might have read the Melody Maker and Smash Hits but it was the NME that was my bible. And the writers at the time believed in their own authority, Cosgrove as much as anyone.

"I look back on it with quite mixed feelings. I'm passionately proud of the role that I played in being a voice for black music and dance music and what then became the rave scene and things like that being taken seriously at the paper. But if I'm honest - and this isn't a mea culpa thing - I wish I'd handled it differently. Maybe, just maybe, I was a wee bit cruel in my condemnation of things that people believed in.

"I remember there was one furious argument where I couldn't understand - and still to this day can't understand - why a feature I'd written about Public Enemy wasn't going on the cover and the band that was were a band called Grab Grab the Haddock.

"At one level it was righteous anger and fury but within that righteous anger there is a little bit of lack of respect and lack of self-awareness because I had no idea whether Grab Grab the Haddock were the new Smiths or just a so-what indie band."

As it turned out they weren't the new Smiths. But even so he fears his desire to "fight the power" may have crossed the line now and then. "The single biggest weakness in my mind is that I can be quite bull-headed when I think something's right. Then I argue it to the point of boredom. Two of my best friends said to me, 'Enough referendum, Stuart. I think we've got the f****** message.' I had exactly that with the demise of Rangers and their tax problems. People would say, 'Not Rangers again.'"

What form did his eighties righteous fury take? "Shouting. Screaming. Calling people dicks and laughing at people. Just, you know, behaviour that I don't actually like in myself. And therefore offering up easy stereotypes."

He recalls a conversation he had with his fellow NME journalist Sean O'Hagan from Northern Ireland. "He said, 'You know what they think? We're f****** wild Celts who can't control their emotions.' And he was sensing that we were painting ourselves into a corner which was quite easy to stereotype."

He still stands by his musical judgments. "I was one of the 'hip hop Hitlers' as they were called but my argument was that in the wider scheme of things hip hop was a much more disruptive paradigm shift in music than any amount of jangly four-piece boys' pop."

Even so, he accepts he didn't approach things in a particularly grown-up manner. "I think I didn't understand the value of building consensus. I am normally very relaxed and co-operative at work now. It's a big lesson learned."

That was nearly 30 years ago, of course, when Cosgrove was still just about a young man. He's 62 now, a newish father of a three-year-old boy called Jack. Another form of education. How is it? "It's great. It's full-on. It's not Michael Douglas. I think he's in his eighties. But it's getting in that direction.

"I'm a young 62, we're comfortable financially and all of those things. My father died when I was a wee boy in a car crash, but my mother lived until she was 90 and she was still a decent old soul then. I think, well, if I can get to his graduation day at 80, f*** it, who cares? My wife's a bit younger than me anyway.

"We'd gone through trying and trying and not having success and then when you have success it's just glorious. And he's such a glamorous wee guy as well. Every day I look at him and think, 'Are you really ...?' It's quite extraordinary."

When your own father dies when you are eight you don't have a model for fatherhood. Where did he look to? "I bought a brilliant book, Fatherhood for the First Two Years, so I swotted up a bit."

But really, he wonders, what model could his own father have provided? Our ideas of masculinity have changed so much. "My mum told me a story of when I was born. My dad came to the maternity hospital in Perth with a bunch of flowers wrapped in two and tied up like they were fish and chips in a newspaper because men didn't carry flowers. Working-class men didn't walk about with flowers. She laughed about it. The stems were broken.

"The idea now that men wouldn't carry flowers or that men wouldn't consider going to the birth itself ... He went out on the piss and didn't come until two days later whereas I was in on the birth. I think maleness has changed and there's an equality of expectation."

Last week, he says, his wife Shirani was off in Venice for work so he was looking after Jack for five days, "and that's not unusual".

Does that leave Scottish football the last bastion of old-school maleness, I half-joke. He takes the idea seriously, "Yes, although I think that's fundamentally changing as well. I think it's under severe generational pressure. The people who have been squeezed out of Scottish football are ordinary working-class boys. They are almost an embarrassment.

"It's the last bastion of maleness but it's not even comfortable with the maleness it's the bastion of."

Cosgrove's dad was old school Labour, a union man. His son doesn't know how he'd begin to explain what has happened to Scotland in the years since his death. He might struggle to explain what has happened to him, too.

Shirani is a Sri Lankan Tamil from Jaffna in the north - "pretty much in the middle of the war zone" - who emigrated to Kent and ended up in south London. A TV producer. How did they meet? "She was in the indie band scene. She used to have the worst ever Asian punk band in the world ... by her own admission. I met her through [the journalist] Paolo Hewitt. I think she was going out with Paul Weller briefly at the time."

He lost touch when he moved back to Scotland to set up his own indie TV production company with Don Coutts at the end of the eighties. "And then when I was at Channel 4 I read that three girls were making a documentary on the jungle and dance music scene in London and I thought, 'That feels good for late night. I'll make a call and see if we can acquire the rights.'"

Shirani answered the phone. Channel 4 invested in the film. It went to the Amsterdam Film Festival. "We got off with each other at the film festival."

Cosgrove's track record at Channel 4 stretches a little further than finding a wife, it should be said. He helped bring us Friends and Frasier back in the nineties and managed Channel 4's coverage of the Paralympics (a high point, he says). And I'd actually forgotten that it was Cosgrove who introduced the infamous Red Light Zone (complete with little red triangle at the top of the screen) in 1995, which, though never quite as salacious as the title promised, still worked the tabloids into a pure froth at the time ("More Filth on Four" was the Daily Mail headline).

"It was actually historic in one odd way. It was the first ever themed event on television."

Did the tabloids monster him when it started? "Big time. Not only did they target me they targeted my Uncle Billy as well. I remember I was phoned at work. 'Stuart, Stuart.' I knew it was someone from Perth because of the way they said my name. 'It's Uncle Billy here.' And immediately you start thinking, 'Oh f***, has something happened to my auntie Nan?' And he said, 'There's two guys with cameras outside my house and they're asking questions.' And they were really sleazy questions like did he ever use porn. To an old man!

"They'd found out I was from Perth and the only Cosgrove in the phone book was my uncle Billy."

We talk a little about telly today. I tell him my half-baked theories. That formatting is killing creativity and that the working class has been consistently demonised on the small screen for the last 20 or 30 years. All those programmes with their clickbait titles that put a voyeuristic twist on working-class life.

He is with me on both, to a degree. "The thing about formatting is that in itself it's a form of creativity. But when formats become the norm they become by their nature hugely competitive and replicable and I think then that becomes the enemy of creativity because when the viewer already knows what's going to happen then the creativity is sucked out of the process."

The working-class thing is a bigger issue, of course. Naturally, Cosgrove defends his corner. He cites the current series Britain's Benefits Tenants. "You are invited to see the challenges of the small landlord and the buy-to-let market and it breaks with the old idea of landlord bad, tenant good. It's a study of complexity not simplicity."

That said, he will concede that representations of class are at least sometimes problematic. "I'm not a big fan of programmes that point the camera at sad, poor people who have no way of getting out of the predicament they're in, when things tip into that more voyeuristic sense of looking at people because they're drunk or chaotic or whatever. I think there has to be some sense of the potential of redemption for them to fight against the situation."

This won't be his problem for that much longer. Next year Jack will be going to primary school. It's time for Cosgrove to put down some roots. "I will be full time there for at least another year contractually but they know and I know that I may be looking to do less. I'm looking to move home permanently. I've got a house here and that's my first home. The flat in London will cease to be as important."

So the plan is move permanently to Glasgow and start writing. He has a contract with a publisher for something he can't talk about and then there's the sequel to Detroit 67, which is set in Memphis between the death of Otis Reading and the murder of Martin Luther King. The first book is already selling well on pre-order.

This - writing about music; the thing he used to do back in the day - is now his future. He's just a little more polite about it these days.

Detroit 67 is published by Clayton in hardback and paperback on Tuesday, priced £25 and £25 respectively.