INTERVIEW: Love almost killed him ... and led him to God. Thirty years later he's still in its thrall

BELIEVERS don't have to pay to see the legendary Al Green sing - not if they live in Memphis, Tennessee. The soul singer became an ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in the 1970s and has led a congregation in the city since 1976 (around the same time disco started getting funky with his record sales). Provided he's not touring, you can rock up at the church any given Sunday and listen to R&B's most righteous: drop a dime in the collection box, start hollering, wig out. Because of his day job, Green likes to be addressed as Reverend Green or Mr Green. The only person to call him Al, it seems, is Green himself, which is a little disconcerting. He says things like: "Al don't have no complaint with that"; "Al come from a poor family"; and, more endearingly, "Al just don't know".

No, Al is not schizophrenic. "I'm a poor guy, I don't have nothin'," he says. "Just 'cause I got all these gold and platinum records, that don't mean I'm rich. I come from Grand Rapids, Michigan "

Yes. But hold it. Green is in love. Or rather, Green is in love with how love makes him feel. If The O'Jays' Love Train ever rumbled through town, Green would surely be huffing over the engine, stoking the fire. His love light - a kind of green-blue hue that emanates from somewhere deep inside - is often blinding, and makes it difficult to argue with him: everything can be reduced to loving, being in love or the desire to be loved.

The big worry, when it was released in May, was that his latest record, Lay It Down, would be an unloveable runt: a 45-minute calamity that would eventually leak, drip by drip, over his early 1970s classics, I'm Still In Love With You (1972), Let's Stay Together (1972) and Call Me (1973). Turns out, it was the highest-debuting record of the 62-year-old's career to date, entering the Billboard Top 200 at number nine - Green's first Top 10 album since 1973. Its heavily grooved wheels roll past a chicken coop of harmonious squawking ... But wait, forget the chickens. "This record's a stallion and he's not going to settle for anything less than the best," says Green. "He's going to have to take the best mare in the stall. He won't accept anything less."

The tracks on the album feature Al, Mr Green, the Reverend, and a few choice witnesses. It was envisaged as a collaboration with singer-songwriters Corinne Bailey Rae, Anthony Hamilton and John Legend, all of whom feature as vocalists, with New York's Dap-King Horns on the brass. Green produced the album with hip-hop drummer Ahmir Thompson of The Roots and keyboard player James Poyser. The result is the kind of love-in you won't wake up from the next morning and regret. Online videos of the recording sessions in New York show Green and the musicians kicking it old-school, playing their instruments face to face, taking the original template marked out by Green and Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell, and stretching it to the here and now.

It is, says Green, "music for building a family, for building loving relationships", and his memories of its conception are sweet. "We were writing this stuff on the floor of the studio," he says. "Al didn't try to rewrite songs he did 20 years ago - he wrote these songs right out of his skull. On the first night alone we wrote eight songs so I guess the chemistry there was all right."

Ask Green how he's feeling these days, and he'll tell you to listen to his songs. Listen to his songs, and you can't believe anyone could feel that good or capture those feelings in music so spontaneously. Writing his first number one single, 1972's Let's Stay Together (later magpied by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction) took all of 10 minutes. "I asked Willie Mitchell what he was playing on the piano and he said he didn't know," Green remembers. "So Al sang Ah'm so in love with you ... whatever you want to do ... is coooool with me'. Willie said Why don't you make it all right with me'? So I said All right, that's all right with me, man'."

Even for an evangelist, Green seems to talk about God an awful lot. In fact, take "God", "cool", "man" and "love" from his lexicon and he'd probably stutter to a halt. But at one point (just after he sings a few impromptu bars of Otis Redding and screams "Yeeeehaaaa" with the abandon of a three-year-old) a comforting thought comes to mind: if God exists, and really made man in his image, that image may have been Al Green. Give me a God with Green's rhythm section, his wrinkled-like-a-walnut face, and and I'll die happy - the angels' harps can go hang.

The son of bass player in a travelling gospel band, Green formed a gospel quartet, the Green Brothers, with his siblings at the age of nine, but his father kicked him out of the group after he caught Green listening to Jackie Wilson. At 16, he formed an R&B group, Al Green & The Creations, with friends, but his family still didn't want him to sing pop music. As Green succinctly told Melody Maker in 1975: "They thought I was nuts."

His conversion to baptism in the 1970s came with a couple of violent jolts. Green's former girlfriend, Mary Woodson, broke into his Memphis home in October 1974 and poured boiling grits (a dried corn dish) over Green while he was bathing, causing third-degree burns on his back, stomach and arm. Afterwards, Woodson locked herself in the bedroom and killed herself with Green's gun. The singer reassessed his spiritual life while going through the agonising process of skin grafts.

Shortly after recovering, he fell from the stage during a live performance and injured himself. It was, he has said, God's way of hurrying him up, and he devoted himself to Christianity and gospel from that point on. He prospered musically, winning eight "soul gospel performance" Grammys between 1981 and 1989 (he won a ninth Grammy for his duet of Funny How Time Slips Away with country singer Lyle Lovett in 1994). But gospel or groovy, his message has always fundamentally been the same.

"I'm singing what God gave me," he says. "Love and happiness. You may start with love at the Holiday Inn or the Hilton - but if you personify it, and keep on with it ... well, that's God."

That's God? I'm confused.

"God is Love, son. Everybody that knows, that should know, will know what I'm talking about." I have no idea what he's talking about, but his fervour is impressive. "I didn't give me this voice," he insists. "I thought I was singing to the girls. But if God wants to take Al and the music and use them for his benefit, Al said Right on' - Al didn't have no complaint."

Despite his locked-down, silky smooth vocals, Green interjects his performances - and conversation - with wild moans and wails. That's just the way it is, he explains, the way it has always been. "You've got to have the emotion when you perform," he says. "Otis Redding can't be singing I've Been Loving You Too Long without some feeling in there - it's a moving, loving type feeling. You can't just stand up there and sing it plain."

Or, at least, Green can't. From the wrong chops, a line like "Sugar in my coffee/My cup of tea" might sound like a horribly sincere request to the teenager working a shift in Costa - but from Green's mouth it sounds meaningful, nay, sexy. There's a certain knack, he says, "but I can't tell you or I ain't going to have a job". It's a skill that serves him well. When coming through airport customs recently, he says, the security woman started singing Let's Stay Together. "She just let me go right on through," he says. "I mean, man, gee wizz, I had liquids in my bag and everything. The lady said Go on now, Al, just go. It's 7.30 in the morning and I know you ain't looked at what's in your bag'. I had a big bottle of lotion in there."

At his forthcoming Glasgow gig, Green will sing, among other classics, L-O-V-E (Love), For The Good Times, Tired Of Being Alone and Let's Stay Together. He has played Scotland twice before (it was "rockin' man") but can't remember when. Given the shortbread-soul vision he witnessed, it may have been around the time of the Highland Clearances. "There were some great big Scottish guys at the back with these kilts on, drinkin' Scotch and saying, Come on, Al, play it again'. I said Oh Hell, man, I just sung it'. But I thought They must weigh 240lbs - I ain't going to argue with them'."

Green's collaborators on Lay It Down openly declare themselves devotees of the Reverend, his music and his influence, and each jumped at the opportunity of recording with a singer who sits easily alongside his own fallen heroes: Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Wilson Pickett and Sam Cooke. But Green doesn't know what he has brought to the musical table in relation to those other artists.

"I don't know how to sum myself up," he says. "I can hear Otis Redding or Sam Cooke, but as far as Al's concerned, I'm deaf. I can't hear Al ... I can't hear how he sounds."

His future, he says, holds "whatever I can come up with and dream in my mind", which seems like a groovy, almost psychedelic, concept. In terms of musical inspiration at least, he won't stick. He likes Beyonce, Jimi Hendrix and Usher; he likes Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday and Mozart. In short, he likes a variety of music and wants to go on listening to it, writing his own songs, getting by.

"I was just a little kid that had some bright ideas and wrote them down," he says. "Turns out y'all liked them, and that's it ..." He falls as silent as a church mouse. Wait. That's it? "Well, I would like to tell the kids and all the people that read your magazine to go for the gusto and the goodness of life," he says. "Love life and embrace it. Love love and embrace it. Stick with the positive and weed out the negative - that's it." That's it, Reverend. Right on.

Lay It Down is available on Blue Note Records.

Al Green plays Glasgow's Clyde Auditorium on October 30