"I'VE lost track of the number of times people have said 'passed away'," he says. "The word 'death' has become too blunt a thing to say, so people who would not think of themselves as given to euphemism lapse into that. 'Pass away' sounds to me like the sort of thing you do when you flush the lavatory. It's not great."

Before we get to the gay sex, before we get to the drugs, before we get to Jimmy Somerville, I find myself discussing with the Reverend Richard Coles – Anglican priest, broadcaster, one-time pop star – how we deal with our inevitable ending.

This is one way to begin.

It is the last knockings of September and Northamptonshire is shining. We are sitting together, the reverend and me, in the vicarage he shares with David, his civil partner and fellow Anglican priest. There's a piano in the corner, a gold disc on the wall and books theological, historical and criminal (the latter in the fictional sense) in the bookcase.

It is a room as well upholstered as Coles is (middle age comes to us all) in a parish that can trace its history back to the days of Edward the Confessor. The morning wears on. Time ticks away, tucks out the time we have left. In every sense.

It is bracing. A reminder that all flesh is grass. Death is part of the daily round if you're a vicar. The rest of us rather struggle with it.

"I think it doesn't compute," suggests Coles. "The irony is, in a culture where we're all about the confessional and sharing pain and all that kind of thing, the one fate we all share is the thing that even people who pride themselves on engaging with tough realities shy away from."

It's salutary to be reminded of those tough realities because, from the outside, as he is well aware, there is a danger that Coles's life in this deep furrow of deep England is some kind of Richard Curtis sitcom in the making. We know him for his cosy Radio 4 programme Saturday Live and turning up on Chris Evans's show on Radio 2. It would be easy to forget that his day job is about ministering the sick and the dying, offering solace and comfort and preaching the mystery of faith.

"If you're a vicar in a parish like this and you also happen to have a programme on Radio 4 you can get lost in a sea of whimsy," he admits. "There is something about it that is kind of Bake Off in a way. It is reassuring and familiar. And I like that. But it's also real and you engage with people in circumstances that can sometimes be unimaginably difficult or strange."

That said, of course, a celebrity priest is also a celebrity. That's why he gets invites to appear on Celebrity MasterChef and gets commissioned to write books. He has a new one out, Bringing in the Sheaves, a follow-up to his memoir Fathomless Riches, although not really a sequel.

The memoir was a gloriously candid account of his younger years (it opens with a quick bout of festive dogging), encompassing homosexuality, radical Trotskyism, membership of the Communards, copious drug-taking and the shadow of Aids. The new book not so much.

"Full disclosure was the watchword," he tells me of the first book. "And, of course, I can't do that now. After ordination disclosure is a completely different matter because you have other people's stuff to carry."

Instead, Bringing in the Sheaves is an entertaining mix of the sacred and the secular, the gossipy and ritualistic grandeur that attempts to give the reader a feel of the texture of the life of a vicar.

Of course it's a vision of contemporary Anglicanism as seen through a particular, perhaps slightly glitterballed perspective. I enjoyed it even though I am an atheist.

Actually, that's not the whole truth, I tell him. Reading a line like "Mass for Ascension Day, me as thurifer, and I managed to cense the faithful in so violently flamboyant a way they flinch", I found myself tutting at all this smoke and ritual and so realising that I'm not just an atheist, I'm a Presbyterian atheist.

Why do we believe what we believe? It's a question Coles asks near the end of the book. To some degree, it's what we carry from childhood, isn't it? "Yes and I think we cleave to that or you fight that. That's true for me too. My family background was gritty, tough, chapel people who in the 19th century got rich in manufacturing and then graduated to the Church of England and the Conservative party, having been non-conformist liberals before. But I know there is something of that non-conformist grit in me.

"But then Anglicanism is a personality disorder. It's Catholic and it's reformed. It's high, it's low. It's a right mixture."

Well, yes. And isn't that its problem? It is ever betwixt and between. "Which is its great strength and great frustration too," Coles says. "I opted out of Anglicanism in my thirties and did 10 years as a Roman Catholic in the quest for clarity and rigour and structure and all that kind of thing. But then I discovered that I really was an Anglican and the things that annoyed me about the Church of England were the things that became irresistible in the end.

"I think if we do one thing, if we have one thing to offer it is an honest attempt to hold together irreconcilable difference, with all the aggro that comes with that."

Revisit his memoir and he seems unlikely priestly material. In its pages you discover a portrait of a young man who wanted attention, who wanted success, who, in his own words, "ached for glory". The young Coles was ambitious and competitive. Are those good or bad qualities, I wonder?

"I think they're tricky qualities," he suggests. "I think everyone has them. One of the great things for someone who was hugely ambitious is to have early success. Being in a successful pop band slightly inoculated me from the worst aspects of ambition. So I think of myself as mildly well-disposed.

"And then we have the inter-church quiz night – which is next week – and all of a sudden this rampant, competitive arsehole comes raging out. It's terrible."

Actually, he says, he can see lots of interconnections between who he was and who he is. "I think people often think of my life is a story of radical shifts. But, of course, it feels to me like a continuity. The older I get the more interested I get in where I come from, so I have a clearer sense about how A connects to B to L to Z. Well, not Z yet. But it doesn't feel haphazard or incomprehensible to me."

Coles's pop stardom was a rather accidental affair, he'd be the first to admit. It's just that he was friendly with Jimmy Somerville when the latter left the band Bronski Beat. It was a matter of proximity.

"That's the great mystery of my early life. How I ended up in a pop band. I look at videos now and it's so obviously a vicar struggling to get out. I was just very lucky that I stood next to someone who was very good at it."

Too good at it for Coles's liking at times. Time and again in Fathomless Riches he writes about his jealousy over the attention everyone paid towards Somerville (the band's singer after all). Now, though, he can stand back and recognise that he was lucky to have been bound up with a man with natural musical gifts, while not overlooking Somerville's own ego.

"He had a spectacular talent, extraordinary charisma, a degree of self-possession, fearless, undaunted, could be a f****** nightmare, especially with some vodka inside him.

"I was sort of dazzled by him. But he was also high maintenance."

It's worth remembering quite how huge the Communards were back in the middle of the 1980s. Their cover of the Philly classic Don't Leave Me This Way was the biggest selling record of 1986 and has been a mainstay at wedding receptions ever since.

It's success meant Coles was a pop star with a No1 hit. Here was the glory he'd always sought. Or fame at least. What did it taste like, smell like, feel like?

"Well, not enough, I think, is the truthful answer. I was so looking forward to it and then when it came along it was not quite on the terms that I expected; the world recognising my unique genius. It was the world acknowledging Jimmy Somerville's unique genius and me standing next to him.

"If you were looking for the transforming effects of fame to fill some void in yourself or switch a light on, it doesn't. It's nice but it's not like the fantasy that somehow your life is now a triumph. It doesn't work that way."

Is there anything he misses from that period? "The royalties. That's the thing I really miss."

They must still trickle in, surely? "Yes, but I'd rather a flood."

Actually, no, he adds. There's something else. What he's proud of, he says, is that the band was out and proud at a time when many others were still hiding away in pop's closet; out and proud at a time when being gay was condemned by a homophobic media and the then Tory government. When being gay could be a death sentence because of HIV and Aids.

"With death I had a sort of intense induction into it because I was a gay man in London in the 1980s so death came to visit me and my kind then," he says. "It was so awful, so unthinkable. Lots of us went mad, I think. It's no coincidence that the thing that came along right after that was ecstasy. Lots of people who were hit by that did go to a nightclub to take a pill and feel fantastic. That's why ecstasy became so big on the gay scene."

He was reckless, he admits, "especially when I was taking a lot of drugs". But at some point, he says, a sense of self-preservation kicked in.

That idea of going mad, I say. Could that explain his decision at one point to pretend to his friends that he himself was HIV-positive? "Yes. It was a completely irrational, desperate thing to do, which I would not describe as my finest hour. I allowed it to happen and then I actively compounded it.

"Then the moment arrived when I had to say, 'Actually I am not HIV-positive at all.' The reality check of that – going around trying to claim combatants' honours – was humiliating and rightly so. I went through very difficult times around that. I got some … not great reviews."

Some – including Somerville – responded uncensoriously. Others were indignant. "I looked a complete twat and I was a complete twat," he admits. "I hate talking about it, but it's on the record."

Well, yes, because he put it in his memoir. How did his parishioners react to its publication? Did anyone look askance at his candour over his druggy, oversexed history? "No, not really."

I wonder, I suggest, if you can draw a line between the excesses of the past – the sex, the drugs – with the religious calling of the present. There's a desire for some form of transformation in them all.

"Transcendence, ecstasy. That's a powerful thing," he agrees. "And Christianity is very good at that. It's about that capturing the intense experience of the present moment, the sense of transcendent access. I think that was something I was kind of seeking in pop music and in taking ecstasy. That's a powerful notion for some people.

"Not so much now. I'm a kind of administrator of transcendence now. It's like being the host of a party. To make sure everyone has a nice time you have to be in the kitchen doing stuff."

He came back to the church in 1990 and, Roman Catholic decade apart, has been loyal to it ever since. After serving in Lincolnshire and Knightsbridge, he arrived here in Northamptonshire. A homecoming of sorts for a Northamptonshire boy.

But does it feel like home? This is a church, after all, that struggles with gay sexuality. Now and again he will get requests from gay couples to marry in the church and he has to turn them down. His own civil partnership happened outwith the church he and his partner serve. How does he navigate that?

"In the hope and expectation that it will all be fine in the end. It might just take a while to get there and it might get rocky. But I think I really do believe that all manner of things shall be well in the end."

Someone must have asked him how he can belong to an organisation that hates gay men and women. "Of course. But it doesn't hate us. Some people in it do. But it's a more diverse picture than that."

The Church's position is pretty clear when it comes to clerical celibacy if you happen to be gay though. Was that not an issue for him? He says not. Celibacy, he suggests, wasn't an issue he had to take on.

"It just came anyway. I was fortunate in the damping down of the pitiful flame of my own desire happened conveniently. It wasn't always the case but it is now so technically David and I live our lives in accordance with the bishop's guidelines.

"I'm also conscious that those are passing compromises and I'm not so much worried about the bishop's guidelines as I am about being in a good relationship with God."

Ah yes, the God thing. We live in a world where liberal secular values are increasingly lined up against fundamentalism. They would appear to be on a frightening collision course.

"I think they've already collided," he says. "I think we're in the crash."

But life is not binary, he insists. He is friends with Richard Dawkins on social media, and admires Dawkins's desire to take on fundamentalist Christian forces in America. But that's not the whole picture. The Dawkins he knows is also a man who goes to Evensong and likes choirs.

Complexity, mystery. These are Coles's maxims when it comes to what he believes.

We wander over to the church to take some pictures. He chats about his love of Scotland and how he'd like to retire here if given the chance ("Him indoors would find January, February, March hard to take").

Inside the handsome and airy building there are soup cans and sachets piled up on a table. It's a reminder that in the end churches are not just about the clash of ideologies. "We had harvest festival this morning. We had the schoolchildren in and we sang some hymns and collected tins of baked beans to take to the food bank in Wellingborough. It's not the Crusades.

"I don't want to pretend that religion is all marvellous. Of course it isn't. But the kind of religion I'm interested in is the kind that on the one hand captures faith with integrity but also on a good day organises goodness in practical ways so the sick get visited and the homeless get housed and the hungry get fed."

Helping the living in other words. Which is not where we came in.

Bringing in the Sheaves by the Reverend Richard Coles is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson, priced £20.