Fighting back from brain haemorrhages and MRSA, Edwyn Collins returns to Glasgow to play Celtic Connections... and wander down memory lane.

IT'S late afternoon in Glasgow, on a dull winter's day. Edwyn Collins leans on a silver-topped cane and peers through the rain at the second-floor windows of a west end tenement flat. There's not a lot to see, but for Collins there is a good deal to try to remember. This is 185 West Princes Street, an ordinary enough address today but, 30 years ago, home to Alan Horne and to Postcard, the record company he founded. It flared only briefly, but so brightly that three decades on, and many years after it folded, Postcard remains Scotland's most influential label.

Collins is the reason. It was Horne who dreamed up the phrase that became Postcard's slogan - "The sound of young Scotland" - but it was Collins and his band Orange Juice who made the appropriate noises. Orange Juice were Postcard's first signing and their 1980 debut single, Falling And Laughing, its first release. Collins was 20 at the time. Later, Orange Juice were joined on the label by Aztec Camera, Edinburgh's Josef K and by Australian band The Go-Betweens, whose single, I Need Two Heads, was recorded here at West Princes Street.

So we stand in the rain in West Princes Street - me, Collins, and his wife and manager Grace Maxwell. We peer at the names on the intercom buzzers, and I wonder if there's a once-mint-now-melted Postcard original still stuck down the back of a radiator up there. Oh, for a coathanger and a door key.

"I remember the wardrobe," Collins muses. "The singles were there. That was where Alan kept the stock. He used the bedroom as an office and the phone was in the hall. People would phone to arrange to collect the singles and the artwork and all of that."

The furniture was dowdy and old, and the only heating came from a two-bar electric fire. Beyond a mannequin dressed in a blonde wig and beret, the decoration was sparse.

Collins, who was born in Edinburgh and moved to Glasgow in his teens, lived in nearby Holyrood Quadrant with two female colleagues from his job with the Glasgow parks department. But he spent most of his time at Postcard HQ, drinking tea and dossing on the sofa when he couldn't be bothered going home. Sometimes he practised here with the other original members of Orange Juice: Steven Daly, James Kirk and David McClymont. Daly and Kirk had also featured in Collins's earlier band, The Nu-Sonics, along with Collins's old school-friend Alan Duncan.

"It was a dingy flat," Collins adds, still looking up at the windows. "And cold, I think."

That "think" is important because, for Edwyn Collins, the past no longer unspools with the ease it once did. Now when he speaks, the words have to be collected carefully and pre-assembled before delivery. His infectious laugh is still the same - Honk! Honk! Honk! - but there's a fog over his memories that time may or may not disperse. That fog is the result of two brain haemorrhages in 2005 which left him perilously close to death. He was operated on but later contracted MRSA and was subsequently hospitalised for six months. He recovered, but the stroke has left him partially paralysed on his right side. He can't strum a guitar. He walks slowly and with a stick.

Collins taught himself to read again with the aid of Ladybird books and recently managed George Orwell's 1984. He can draw now, too, though he has had to learn to do it with his left hand. Always a keen naturalist, his preferred subject is birds. He recently exhibited a collection of his work in a London gallery, and comparing his efforts from 2006 with the far more accomplished sketches from last year reveals the progress he has made.

In the current issue of free New York-based hipster magazine Vice, there is a Q&A interview with him about these drawings. It's an eccentric piece: Collins talks about paper, pencils, ducks. But it's the editorial introduction that I particularly like. "Edwyn Collins is that cool Scottish guy who was the singer in Orange Juice," it goes. "They were one of the best and most original British pop bands ever." It's an unlikely place to find a testimony to a Scottish band that split up nearly 25 years ago, but it's absolutely on the money.

All this makes our trip around Glasgow doubly poignant. We're here to revisit the old haunts, take a look at the places that matter in Collins's early musical journey. We're delving back in time even if we can't always reach the goodies. Perhaps more evocative than anywhere else is the place we start our tour - Glasgow School of Art's Victoria Cafe. It was here, on April 20 1979, that Orange Juice played their first proper gig. Grace Maxwell still has the ticket, stuck in her Orange Juice scrapbook.

IASK Collins if he remembers it. "Yeah, vaguely," he says, looking around from his vantage point on a sofa by the door. "I remember a lot of spitting and swearing. There was an innocence, I think, and energy and excitement to it."

There's still a stage, which could have been the one Orange Juice stood on. But none of the punters in here today would even have been born when the band were belting out songs like Falling And Laughing or Blue Boy, their second single.

There are other memories, too. Nearby is the site of Shuffles, a favourite Northern Soul club. Collins would turn up there wearing Oxford bags and a white shirt. He also tells me where he bought his first guitar - a Burns Sonic, £20 from a shop near the Barras - and recalls that his second, a Gretsch Black Hawk, was bought "out in the sticks" from a man who had advertised it in the Evening Times. It cost £100, a lot of money at the time.

He also mentions the Glasgow Apollo, site of his first fateful meeting with Alan Horne. That was at a David Bowie gig some time in the mid-1970s. "What's that John Boy Walton look you're going for?" was Horne's opening shot, a reference to Collins's outfit of motorcycle boots, jeans and a plaid shirt, assembled for pennies from charity shops and stalls at Paddy's Market. The look, partly an homage to 1960s bands like The Byrds, was also an expression of the eccentricity and non-conformity that would come to define the Orange Juice look and sound.

"I did like plaid shirts back then," Collins confesses. "I liked jeans and boots. I did look unusual but so did James and Stephen and David."

At the time there wasn't much of a music scene in Glasgow and there was certainly nothing like the vibrant community of musicians that exists today. Collins tried unsuccessfuly to get gigs for first Nu-Sonics and then Orange Juice at venues such as the Third Eye Centre and the Queen Margaret Union (QMU). Maxwell thinks she might have been QMU social secretary at the time, and the story is aired with much laughter and with the slickness of a well-honed comedy routine.

Instead it was to places like Maryhill Town Hall that Collins turned, though even there the sound of young Scotland fell on cloth ears: at one gig the band was met with an audience banging pool cues on the stage and chanting "Showaddywaddy! Showaddywaddy!". Afterwards, there was a riot. "They used to get a lot of neds at the gigs shouting Poofs! Poofs!'," says Maxwell helpfully. "A lot of what they did to camp it up was as a direct challenge to that. It was a wind-up."

You certainly did have a reputation for being wimpy, I venture. Not so, says Collins. "The Pastels are wimpy; Orange Juice were never wimpy. Blue Boy, for instance, wasn't wimpy at all. It's kind of exciting. It had a raw energy to it."

TODAY the sound of young Scotland comes from bands like Franz Ferdinand. They have made no secret of their admiration for the Postcard bands, in particular Orange Juice. And it's that "raw energy" that they particularly like. When Collins made a triumphant appearance at Glastonbury last year, Franz Ferdinand singer Alex Kapranos was there. "It was a dingy day," Maxwell recalls, "and as I was watching Edwyn from the side of the stage, someone in a big orange cape came and stood next to me. That was Alex."

That critical re-evaluation continues. A few months after the Glastonbury appearance, Collins was in Glasgow to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Tartan Clefs Music Awards. It reunited him with Daly, McClymont and Kirk for the first time in a quarter of a century.

"Steven's losing his hair, of course," says Collins archly.

"So are you!" chips in Maxwell.

"Yes, I know," he says.

With that historic meeting under their belts, is there any chance of Orange Juice reforming? "No thanks," he hoots. In truth, it seems unlikely: Daly is a successful journalist in New York and McClymont lives in Melbourne. Only Kirk is still in Scotland.

Edwyn Collins's appearances at Celtic Connections this week will be no less of an event than his Glastonbury show. On Friday, the stage is his. He'll be joined by much-loved Glasgow band The Bluebells, who are re-forming for the night, and by his old friend and former Aztec Camera frontman, Roddy Frame. Frame performed with Collins at Glastonbury and at the two shows he played in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2007. Two days later, on Sunday, Collins guests on a Jamaican Burns Night bill. It features roots reggae legends Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the rhythm machine which drove The Mighty Diamonds. Also appearing is Glasgow musician Sushil K Dade, who will perform dub versions of Orange Juice songs.

Collins's Celtic Connections appearance will be much more than just an exercise in 1980s nostalgia, however. Although he finds performing live both daunting and difficult, Collins also finds it exhilarating. To that end he has recently been writing and recording again. He started two months ago, working predominantly with Ryan Jarman from English band The Cribs.

"I have a new song I'm learning called I'm Losing Sleep," he says. He sings me a snatch of it: "I'm losing sleep/I'm losing dignity/Everything I owe/Is right in front of me/And it's getting me down ..." Heads turn in the Victoria Cafe as he belts it out, but he doesn't care. He's enjoying the sound of his voice too much.

There are plans for a new album too. "Finally, it's coming together. It's coming together in waves," he says. "Finally, I'm improving bit by bit and month by month, and I'm glad of that."

And is he really losing sleep? "No," he laughs as if to say: "Don't be stupid." From the other side of the sofa, his wife gives a loud guffaw. "He sleeps like a bloody baby," she shouts. "It's artistic license."

"Steady on, Grace," he says. And then he laughs. Honk! Honk! Honk!

Edwyn Collins and The Bluebells play the ABC, Glasgow on Friday; Edwyn Collins guests at the Jamaican Burns Night at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow on January 25. The Sunday Herald is media partner of Celtic Connections, www.celticconnections.comOrange Juice: Five crucial hits


Blue Boy (1980)
Scratchy, fast, quirky and defiantly lo-fi, this was Orange Juice's second single on Postcard Records and captures perfectly the raw energy of their live shows. Film director David Mackenzie used it as the opening title music for his 2007 film Hallam Foe, to which celebrity Orange Juice fans Franz Ferdinand also contributed. Catch it in all its noisy glory on The Glasgow School, a compilation of Postcard-era songs, released by Franz Ferdinand's label Domino.
Album: The Glasgow School

Consolation Prize (1982)

A great live favourite, this song encapsulates Collins's persona as the sensitive lover who wants to step in to save the girl. "I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn's," he croons in the second verse, "I wore it hoping to impress, so frightfully camp it made you laugh - tomorrow I'll buy myself a dress." Oddly, it was never released as a single, Polydor instead preferring Felicity, Wan Light, Intuition Told Me and the Al Green cover L.O.V.E Love instead. Pure genius.
Album: You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

Felicity (1982)

Two minutes and 31 seconds of "Woa-woahs", whistles and driving guitar whose frenzied attack was imitated by dozens of other bands. It's fair to say the seeds of the short-lived C86 movement were sown here and The Wedding Present later worked a much-loved cover version into their live set. One of the few songs written by original Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk, it was released as a double A-side with In A Nutshell in 1982, but only reached number 63 in the charts.
Album: You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

Rip It Up (1983)
The band's only serious hit, Rip It Up reached number eight in the singles charts in 1983. Former Josef K mainstay Malcolm Ross plays guitar and can be heard picking out the intro to the Buzzcocks song Boredom as Collins - a huge Buzzcocks fan in the late 1970s - sings "You know the scene, it's very humdrum, and my favourite song's entitled Boredom". On drums now is Zeke Manyika, but listen out too for the squelchy bass sounds from the band's Roland TB-303 synthesiser. Pop nerds take note: a staple in the creation of acid house, this is the first time the "instrument" featured on a UK top 10 hit.
Album: Rip It Up

What Presence?! (1984)
Featuring the greatest guitar lick Johnny Marr never wrote, this was Orange Juice's penultimate single. By this point, the band was reduced to a duo consisting of Collins and Manyika - Ross had quit to join Roddy Frame in Aztec Camera - and the album was produced by reggae guitarist Dennis Bovell. This single came with a free tape featuring a live recording of Dying Day, another live favourite. Collins introduces it with the words: "This is a very sad song about the day my hamster died "
Album: Orange Juice (the third album)