It�s two and a half years since a double stroke nearly killed Scotland�s post-punk hero. A remarkable journey of rehabilitation has brought him to a place where he�s ready to perform again, gurgling laugh and all. By Craig McLean

INalivingroominKilburnin northwest London, Edwyn Collins is singing to me. Trying to sing to me. His right hand is curled into a fist in his lap. "I've never met a girl like you before," goes that fruity, distinctive voice. "You've made me acknowledge the devil in me/I hope to God I'm talking metaphorically/Hope that I'm talking allegorically " He finishes with only the smallest of slips and smiles a satisfied smile. Mastering that "metaphorically/allegorically" tongue-twister rhyme took some doing. But he does it. Which means A Girl Like You - the international smash from 1994 that bought the house in which we are now sitting - can join the ranks of the small bunch of his own songs that Collins is still able to sing.

Rip It Up proves trickier. It's the biggest hit his old band, Orange Juice, ever had, reaching number eight in 1983. "When I next saw you my heart " Collins begins. He stammers and stutters. The words are just not coming. Then, finally, in fits and starts, they do. "If I could have held you I would have held you/Rip it up and start again " Rip It Up still needs some work.

Sitting on the floor beside us is Collins's wife (and manager), Grace Maxwell. "That's what it's like when he starts on a new song," she explains. "It's a process. He has to start at the beginning, study the lyrics as they're written down - which you can do now," she adds, addressing Collins. Previously, he wasn't able to read. "And we don't rush it," Maxwell continues. "Just sit and work slowly. He needs to home in on a song and actually practise it stupid. And they come. He diligently goes at it till he gets the flow together."

"I'm learning One Is A Lonely Number," says Collins. "I'm practising every day." His speaking voice is hesitant and scattershot and sometimes slurred. But his singing voice, when it gets going, is almost as strong as it ever was.

It is two-and-a-half years since Edwyn Collins suffered a stroke. Two strokes, in fact. He nearly died. Then, in the wake of the operation to replace the panel of skull bone that had been removed to allow the neurosurgeons to operate, he also contracted MRSA. He spent six months in hospital. He has been undergoing daily, arduous rehabilitation therapy ever since.

"The part of Edwyn's brain that controls speech andlanguagewasverybadlyhurt,"explains Maxwell. He couldn't speak, read, write. Nor, initially, could he sit up. Nor walk. He lost movement in his right side. He couldn't feed himself. He couldn't do anything, really."

You might say, reading all that, that in any meaningful sense of the term, Collins also lost his life. But he didn't. He fought. He and Maxwell, and their 17-year-old son William, fought together. Now, 30 months on from almost dying, he is back. Back, living and working and singing. Next month, 47-year-old Collins releases his sixth solo album. It's called Home Again, it opens with the beautiful One Is A Lonely Number, and it's brilliant. He recorded it before his illness, but has only recently felt well enough to return to his own studio, West Heath, and mix it.

On his living room sofa, he starts singing again. "I'm searching for the truth/I'm searching for the truth/Somesweetdaywe'llgetthereinthe end/Some sweet day we'll get there in the end." It's a new song, the first complete one he has written since his illness.

"He must be using another part of his brain to do this now," says Maxwell as we both watch him do his stuff. "Everything he's ever known is stored all over the shop."

Collins gets up to fetch his sketchpad. He shuffles and clumps over the wooden floor, the right side of his body still visibly underpowered. A gifted artist and nature-lover, right-handed Collins has relearned how to draw using his left hand. His sketches of a spotted woodpecker, roe deer and shelduck are staggeringly accomplished. Somehow, he has transferred his skills to the other side of his body.

"If this wasn't so shit," says Maxwell, "it would honestly be the most fascinating thing!" As she will often do over the course of the hours I spend in the couple's company, she laughs loudly. Collins joins her, his distinctive "heurgh heurgh heurgh" chuckle still heart-warmingly intact. "Well," she continues, "it is the most fascinating thing." Then she grows quiet. "But we would really rather not be learning all this."

Collins remembers nothing about the events of Sunday February 20, 2005. "No. I don't remember at all. And thank God I don't. Hazy." Even now his memory, generally, is random. "One month ago, I can vaguely remember." But as for the preceding months: "I'm hazy at the moment."

It's up to Maxwell to fill in the blanks. The story of Collins's catastrophic illness is horrific, but sometimes funny and, ultimately, hopeful too. She talks, and he chips in occasionally, repeating something she has just said or offering an alternative word or phrase. As if he is still trying out these new sounds. Or reminding himself that he can say them too. Sometimes he just laughs his gurgling laugh. They are quite a double act.

Collins had been suffering from headaches for a while, but he and Maxwell thought they were just to do with his drinking. "Because he had a drink about three times a week and he was always a bit of a lightweight!" she laughs. "But he was perfectly hale and hearty. He hadn't been to the doctor in 10 years."

OnMondayFebruary14, Maxwell received a phone call from Seb Lewsley, Collins's long-standing right-hand man at West Heath Studios. Collins was vomiting and dizzy, could Grace come and collect him? At first, theythoughthehadfood poisoning from an undercooked chicken."Byhalfwaythrough the next day you were saying you were feeling a lot better. But you did say you still felt a bit dizzy."

By the weekend, he was feeling fine again. On the Sunday evening, Collins - always happier in the kitchen than Maxwell - was making the dinner. Maxwell popped out on an errand. When she got back, 20 minutes later, the potatoes had boiled dry. There was no sign of Collins. She called up the stairs to him. "And for some reason I just stopped and thought, hang on, something's not right "

She thinks William, who had been on the top floor of their three-storey house watching TV, must have had a similar sense of foreboding. "Because normally, he would ignore us totally. But he rolled down the stairs and got there seconds before me."

Collins was lying on the floor of the upstairs living room. He was semiconscious. Maxwell could see that his right side "wasn't working" and that he couldn't speak. She instantly thought: stroke. It was around 7.30pm.

Within an hour, specialists at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, a regional neurosurgical centre, were telling Maxwell that her partner of 21 years had suffered a "very serious haemorrhage" in the middle of his brain. "There was a lot of pressure inside his brain," she recounts. "That was, in a sense, containing the bleeding, but there was a chance that it would "

" ... burst out all over again," finishes Collins.

Maxwell was told by doctors that they would have to wait three days to administer drugs to reduce the pressure. "If he survives," they added. "Things don't look good for him. If there's anybody who needs to be here you really need to get in touch with them now."

Maxwell gives a dry chuckle. "We'd gone from Antiques Roadshow and the tatties on for the dinner to being told the chances were that Edwyn's " She stops. "Yeah. That quick."

I ask Collins if it is painful for him to hear all this.

"No. No. It's amazing to me."

That Friday, after he had suffered a second stroke and slipped into a coma, surgeons decided to operate to stop the bleeding and reduce the swelling on his brain. Two days later, on the Sunday, they lifted Collins out of his heavily sedated state. Maxwell was advised that he may have suffered severe brain damage.

Already a tidal wave of messages of support and encouragement had begun flooding in. Fans from all over the world emailed and wrote and sent flowers. Maxwell, looking for coping mechanisms wherever she could find them and keen to let the fans know their best wishes were thoroughly appreciated, wrote progress reports on Collins's website. A host of music pals, reflecting the range of people that Collins had touched over the years, also made contact: his old mucker and fellow Postcard Records alumni Roddy Frame; Matt Johnson of The The; Franz Ferdinand; even Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet (Collins thinks they might have been on Top Of The Pops together sometime in the 1980s).

After five weeks, the tracheotomytubehehadbeen breathingthroughwas removed from his neck. He could - theoretically - speak again, but it became apparent that the brain damage he had suffered had caused aphasia, an inability to use orunderstandlanguage.The road to recovery was going to be long, bumpy and gruelling. When he returned home to Kilburn in September 2005, the only words Edwyn Collins could say were "Grace", "Maxwell", "yes" and "no".

Maxwell admits it was hard for William to see his father so frail. "But it seems to me that William is fierce in himself - He's still my dad and he is my hero'. The weird thing is, he was totally not interested in what Edwyn did up until that time. Didn't know his music, didn't play an instrument himself. But since Edwyn's been ill, he's become lost in music."

"Absorbed," adds Collins.

Maxwell continues: "He's just started a big voyage of discovery about music - and especially your music. That Glasgow School on Domino Records the spring 2005 compilation of Orange Juice's Postcard-era recordings opened up his eyes to the fact that his dad used to be young and quite "

"Trendy, heurgh heurgh," interjects Collins Towards the end of last year, Collins finally felt up to revisiting the songs he had recorded in the months preceding his illness. A key backdrop to Home Again was Helmsdale. His family on his mother's side came from the Sutherland village. Before and after his illness, he and Maxwell visited often, staying in the home that has been in his family since 1820.

I ask him about Leviathan, an epic folk song on the album, which mentions Helmsdale's Whaligoe Steps: 365 steps cut into the cliff face. What was the inspiration behind the song?

"Helmsdale was the inspiration," he says. "Up north, Wick possibly, it was an inspiration of mine, that. The Whaligoe Steps. They're great. It's about leaving situations. It's about melody. It is about songs. And I'm thinking about the wind and cold up there, and all of that."

The album is a warm, semi-acoustic treasure brimful with Collins's rich voice and adroit guitar-playing. But it is suffused with a kind of melancholia, and a yearning for "home again". Why was he feeling that way in 2004? Had he, after more than two decades living in the Big Choke, had enough of London?

"No. London is great for me. Helmsdale is great also for me. Caithness and Sutherland is my home. I go up regularly. And I love it up there. When I go back to Helmsdale I'm lucky and relaxed. The stillness and the quietness."

Maxwell reminds him he recently said that, when writing those songs, he "felt that something bad was brewing "

"Yes."

So the shadow on the horizon was a shadow on his brain?

"Yeah, yeah."

And a sense of foreboding was coming out in these songs?

"It was. I have a stroke to deal with. But I'm feeling positive. And feeling relaxed, and generally focused on things. I'm relaxed and dreaming all the time. So my life is happy at the moment. I feel contented. I feel alive again.' I had, I admit, been worried about meeting Collins again. I thought of all the times I had enjoyed his music, and his company, over the years: on record, in concert, and in interviews. And I thought of him, this lively, quick-witted, towering figure - literally (he is a tall man) and figuratively - felled by sudden, out-of-the-blue, into-the-black illness. How would he look/be/act/sound?

Well, he is clearly still a little unsteady on his feet. His hair is thin down the left side of his skull where the bone was removed; his titanium plate now sets off airport alarms. His right hand and arm still require a lot of physiotherapy; on the guitar he can make chords with his left hand but can't strum with the right. With superhuman effort, he has learned to talk again, and he can read and write, albeit falteringly. He can laugh his big, gurgling-drain laugh. And Edwyn Collins can sing. That talent, and that spark of life, is still shining.

You can hear it on Home Again. The record many thought he would never finish - the record that, against the odds, he bloody well has. The record he has dedicated to his neurophysiotherapist and his speech and language therapist. Lord knows the pain and struggles he and Maxwell, and William, have had to endure over the past two-and-a-half-years. And still have to endure. A BBC Scotland documentary, filmed over the past year and to be broadcast this autumn, will be difficult to watch.

But Collins has been energised by resuming his life's work. It is pushing his rehab on. Complementing his therapy, and his yoga and Pilates sessions, he is about to start work with a physical trainertoo,for"morepower".Remarkably- brilliantly - he is even planning on playing a couple of shows this autumn. He won't be playing guitar. But he will be singing.

How has his illness affected his outlook on his life and work?

"I'm happy basically," he says, reaching for a fourth Tunnock's teacake. "But before my stroke, I wasn't really. I'm happy and contented with life. I'll get on with the therapy and the focus on life. And I am happy that I reflected what I believe in. I'm reflecting on life."

"I think you're a better-tempered person," says Maxwell, looking at him intently. "You cope. And you have patience. And you're not self-pitying at all. You're not even depressed. You don't get down on yourself. It's weird. I do sometimes. I have to admit I do sometimes rail against life's unfairness et cetera. But it's out of order to do that. Because he came through it. And through this we've met a lot of people, and we know it's a bloody vale of tears out there. We've got little to complain about. We've got so much to feel "

Collins chips in for one last time on this intense, moving, uplifting afternoon in a living room in northwest London.

" to feel grateful for," he says.

The album Home Again is released September 17 on Heavenly