NORMALLY, Ian Broudie tells me, he doesn't really go in for the whole Hogmanay thing. A nice meal with a few friends, a couple of drinks and a toast at the bells and that will usually do him.

This year might be a bit different. It's his first Hogmanay in Edinburgh for a start. Oh, and then there's the fact that he's performing too.

Broudie, once upon a time a proper pop star (that time being the 1990s), has been asked – by the Hogmanay headliner Paolo Nutini no less – to bring his band The Lightning Seeds to the Scottish capital to perform. "Which is really lovely," Brodie says. "That was one of the reasons we decided to do it actually. That he wanted us to be on there."

Nutini isn't the only one who's had a hankering to listen to Broudie and his band of late. The Hogmanay gig caps off a year that has seen the Lightning Seeds – basically, Broudie and passing mates and fellow travellers – play festivals, tour, and generally remind everyone why back in the 1990s they were much loved in the first place.

"It's almost like there's a big cycle and you go around on this big wheel," Broudie suggests, applying Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy to pop music. "There's a lot of love at the moment. It's fun playing and people seem to be rediscovering what we did. So it's a brilliant time."

"What they did" amounted to 13 top 40 hits between 1989 and 1999. Or 14 if you include the 1998 reissue of England football tune Three Lions that, like the 1996 original, went to number one. (He'll not be playing that one in Edinburgh by the way. Probably for the best).

All those hits – they included Sense and Life of Riley – combined Broudie's wispy vocals, his ear for a pop melody and lyrics that rub melancholy up against sherbet fizz tunes. Pure pop in other words. One was even called Pure.

Broudie sits right at the heart of Liverpool's rock family tree (pace Pete Frame). He was in legendary cult outfit Big in Japan alongside the likes of Bill Drummond, Jayne Casey and Holly Johnson. He knew Pete Burns and produced the first two albums of Echo and the Bunnymen (a fact that, let's face it, would be enough for some people to dine out on forever). And then, at the end of 1990s, when he got a bit fed up with the whole album and tour routine for a while, he retreated to Liverpool and found a couple of unsigned bands to nurture. They were called The Zutons and The Coral.

Not bad for someone who tells me he was both a reluctant producer and a reluctant front man. "Well, I am not a front man, am I?" he tells me. "I was a reluctant singer. I reluctantly sang."

The story of Broudie is the story of the music-mad kid who found himself in the middle of the Liverpool scene that developed around Mathew Street (home to Eric's) at the end of the 1970s. "It was a very tough city at that time, I think. I remember it in black and white rather than colour, in a funny way. Still a lot of bombed-out bits, disused warehouses and unemployment.

"And that sort of situation breeds creativity in a fantastic way. I went into town and I discovered an old warehouse called The Liverpool School of Music, Dream, Art and Punk. That's what it said on the wall and I thought 'I've got to go in there.' It wasn't any of those things. It was a place where you could have a cup of tea. But it was probably the beginning of now for me because it's where I met a lot of the people who shaped my career and my life."

Punk was to be an inspiration for Broudie. "I think the lesson I learnt at that time was if you have a good idea and you're not great at doing it, it's always a great idea. And if you don't have a great idea no matter how good you are at perfecting what you're doing, if you don't have a great idea there's no point. I've always viewed it like that really."

After Big in Japan, he had his arm twisted to produce the Bunnymen's debut and sophomore album, under a pseudonym. But really he wanted to be in a band like the Bunnymen himself. "They were such a fabulous group and I wanted to be in a group like that where the chemistry was fantastic. And I was just never in that group. So eventually it felt like, 'well, if I'm going to do this I've got to stop waiting for these other people to turn up and just do it myself,' which is what I did."

Although he rather pre-dated the Britpop boom, The Lightning Seeds ended up being thrown in with that movement. "I don't think the records sound like that. At the time they seemed to sound similar and now you listen and you think 'nothing like a Shed Seven record or a Cast record.'

"My biggest influence at that time was De La Soul's album Three Feet High and Rising. When I heard how they could do things sampling beats and stuff it felt a way of doing it without sounding clinical. It just seemed like a door opening for me."

Cue a decade of Top of the Pops appearances and glossy videos in which he never took off his sunglasses. (If you watch Marvellous on YouTube you can even spot a young Keeley Hawes. Broudie doesn't know who she is, though, when I bring her name up.)

After his retreat from pop's front line, life took a bite out of him. The noughties saw a divorce and the death of his parents. Then his sister died unexpectedly and his older brother committed suicide. You can hear him deal with all of that on his 2009 album Four Winds.

But now he has new songs in his head and he can't wait to get them out of there. "I haven't felt like I've been even 70% for a long, long time," he admits, "and I think this year I've started to play a few more festivals and I really love being in the band and that's led me to doing more writing. Writing properly. Doing the best that I can do. I hate saying the new stuff is really good. Who knows, but in the world of me I think I'm at a high point."

What does this Hogmanay represent to Ian Broudie? A new beginning perhaps.

The Lightning Seeds play Edinburgh's Concert in the Gardens tomorrow.