Back where he belongs

Published on Tuesday 29 April 2008 13:19

HE IS clearly nervous, the pop star returning to his home town for this comeback gig.

Backstage as the other band members trade jokes and pre-match hugs he struggles to remember if he has played here before, another time, when he was a different person. His wife helps out by filling in the gaps. His son, not born when he led a Scottish pop revolution, chides him for not having his worldwide hit as the gig's last number. In the tiny backstage room fragments of his past life, clues, can be found everywhere. The fellow traveller who also had his time in the spotlight now just happy to be here supporting his friend, the black and white photographs sent backstage from an anonymous admirer in the audience showing him in another era – quiff, bootlace tie, sharp jacket, his unfeasibly sharp eyebrows arched for pre-requisite ironic pose. A young man with plenty of time and acres of talent. Well wishers drift by, a face familiar from an album sleeve, but the singer is now focusing himself on the task ahead. I'm nervous, he whispers to his wife. You can almost imagine him thinking: What if these people, some of whom remember so much more about parts of my life than me, end up wishing I'd stayed in retirement? Perhaps frozen forever in that black and white photograph is not such a bad place to be.

Two minutes to go says the stage hand. The saxophonist toots a few practice notes, the guitarist questions the running order, on the TV monitor a pall of dry ice is filling the venue. The singer's minder comes over to his chair and helps lift him from his seat. His left hand grasps for his walking stick, his right, which used to strum the most exquisite of tunes, is clenched and useless at his chest. He shuffles forward slowly, dragging his right foot behind him.

In the audience the silence is palpable; the entrance music has jammed in the machine as if to heighten the drama. Faces strain for a view as the singer shuffles centre stage to sit on the amp ready to hold court. He will stay seated for the entire show. A few nervous cheers ring out. He stares into the mid-distance and says, "It's good to be back. Here we go with Falling and Laughing." A roar comes from the hall. It's going to be all right.

In 2005 you would have got very long odds indeed on Edwyn Collins taking the stage at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh in 2008. Few would have taken your money that he would still be alive. That terrible year had begun with the singer amid what you might call one of his many fallow periods. More than two decades had passed since his band Orange Juice and their legendary Glasgow-based record label Postcard had injected a much needed dose of intelligence, humour and Velvet Underground-inspired jingle-jangle pop into a moribund scene. It was 20 years ago that Edwyn, his fringe "like Roger McQuinn's" and occasionally the wearer of the campest of shorts, had infuriated rock's establishment, and risked the odd pasting from punks, with his gobby irreverence and wind-up tactics backed by a magpie collection of music nicked from everywhere but melded into a unique chaotic life-affirming sound. For many young males, put off by the machismo of punk, Orange Juice proved pop music could be witty, clever, soulful and achingly hip. Goodbye and good riddance to spitting, gurning for cameras and giving the finger, even though it was the punk revolution that allowed Postcard and Orange Juice to slip through the music industry front door. Rip it up and start again, they sang, and they were right.

This isn't the NME so a long appraisal of this son of an art lecturer's pop career can be found elsewhere. Save to say what has endeared Edwyn to many of the fans who have stayed with him for years is his seemingly endless capacity to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. He remains one of pop's outsiders, but typically for Edwyn it was another one of those, Stephen Patrick Morrissey and his band The Smiths, who ran off with the back bedroom boys audience that should rightfully have been the Scot's.

Even his massive chance hit in 1995, Girl Like You, which went top 20 in the US, could not be built upon, and at times as he moved through his thirties and into his forties, financially sound thanks to Girl, he considered quitting. And yet throughout this time he recorded a succession of solo albums which have given him a back catalogue to die for. White soul, country and western, thrash metal, bittersweet ballads and good old jingle jangle are all there in a body of work that makes him one of Scotland's greatest pop stars. No wonder Franz Ferdinand and a host of other indie bands now name check Orange Juice as an inspiration.

The headaches had been going on for a while but he just took a couple of paracetamol and got on with it. Even a couple of days beforehand he put his illness down to food poisoning. But it wasn't. Edwyn's blood pressure had been building and in February 2005 he suffered a massive double cerebral haemorrhage. The stroke left him paralysed down the right side. Memory, speech and movement had all been wiped away. As his life hung in the balance an operation to fit a plate in his skull led him to contract MRSA. The doctors told his wife Grace to expect the worst. She asked his fans to keep posting good luck messages on his website. And they did in their hundreds. People from around the world told how his music had moved them. The Edwyn Collins sleepers had been activated. It had taken a tragedy to prove that he was an artist of repute.

With the love and care of Grace, a strong, remarkable woman, and his son William just 16 at the time, Collins pulled through. But with recovery came paralysis and aphasia: a loss of the ability to produce or comprehend language. So little is still known about the latter, but what the Collins family did know was that Edwyn was a different person, unable to read and write and with much of his anecdote-laden memory gone, his brain rewired as if by a cowboy electrician. This sharpest of minds, capable of lyrics and quotes that could cut to the quick, had been attacked at its core. It would be a long way back, full of painful physiotherapy and frustrating mind exercises trying to unlock the intact intelligence inside. Trips to his cottage by the sea in Helmsdale, Sutherland, helped. And early on, through the dense fog, was a memory, a feeling that he wanted back. Those of us who have never stood before hundreds of people and moved them, made them feel better about life for two hours, felt the love and adoration coming back cannot comprehend this. For Edwyn it was the greatest of motivations.

So we are backstage at the Queen's Hall. It's the second night of his comeback tour in the city of his birth. Edwyn answers questions slowly, refusing to abandon the big words he was always fond of using but occasionally mangling them, his adenoidal accent still distinctly Scottish despite decades of London living. There are big gaps between words and you sense the massive effort he has to put in just to communicate. It must be incredibly frustrating and tiring.

"It's a fantastic experience to be back, I'm enjoying it. It's my inspiration and my life," he says. In the hall the chords of Girl Like You filter through as William takes vocals for rehearsal, sounding uncannily like his dad.

"Last night when I played Don't Shilly Shally the crowd went mad, whooping and hollering. I was so pleased. I never thought I'd be back touring. But I worked slowly and I'm dedicated and now I am loving the attention.

"I am pleased with the way my voice is going, it is returning once more. It is often difficult at times but I am getting there."

He doesn't remember that much of his previous touring days, though he recalls playing Later... with Jools Holland when his voice and guitar playing were "perfect" .The ego is returning.

But is he conscious that a lot of his audience are coming tonight with trepidation, worrying that it will be too sad to see? "Yes I guess so. Before I couldn't talk at all but I'm slowly getting the words back now," he says as if to reassure himself and me. "People are kind to me, they're compassionate."

The stroke has forced 48-year-old Edwyn to re-evaluate his life. His days as a drunken pop star are over, just two beers now after the show, he says. Gone too is the bitchiness which occasionally used to take over from the irony and cynicism that was his trade mark. He won't have to ring up many music hacks nowadays to ask them to tone down his waspish comments about other musicians as he had to in the past. His grasp on life is now tight, there's no time for bitterness.

As we speak Grace is busying herself with pre-gig arrangements, but peels off to agree that Edwyn's illness and recovery have become a big story but that does not worry them too much. "As Edwyn says, it's good for business". Literary agents have been on to her about writing a book. She could tell a great story.

Meanwhile Edwyn has been drawn to a class picture of a group of seven year-olds from the Demonstration School in Dundee left by another member of the audience. In the picture is a young Edwyn who had moved to Dundee from Edinburgh when his father took a job there. While he often struggles to remember a particular word or event, now he rattles off the names of almost every pupil including top left "always the naughty one". Such is the mystery of aphasia.

Nine o'clock is drawing near, so for the last remaining minutes before the gig he turns to his recent re-establishment in Scottish pop's hierarchy. A BBC documentary on "Caledonian pop" even had him responsible for the emergence of Franz Ferdinand and more bizarrely Wet Wet Wet. "It's weird but I'll take everything I can get."

"Last night was great, you just felt this huge wave of love for Edwyn coming across," says Roddy Frame, frontman of Aztec Camera and former Postcarder himself, but here in a selfless support role for his mate. "Sure Edwyn is the story because of the stroke but I think the band is good. The music has got to be right. It is genuinely a good gig and that is important."

Roddy didn't hesitate to come on board when asked to tour again with Edwyn. There is no clash of the egos. "Edwyn kind of founded Postcard with Alan Horne and was about four years older then me. I always kind of looked up to him. I learned from him. He was the first to put a record out, the first to go to London, to be in the NME and all that, so I'm used to that. I feel like I'm back there again."

He remembers clearly when he heard the news of Edwyn's illness. "It was shock and confusion because like a lot of people I didn't know what a stroke was. You hear of strokes in older people but it's the sort of thing you never thought would happen to you or anyone around you. When he had his second haemorrhage I remember thinking that sounds really bad. Everyone was a bit guarded. When I did get to see him I was pleasantly surprised that he was actually talking."

But is Edwyn different from the Edwyn he knew before? "I think his personality's very much the same. If anything he is more positive in his spirit. He realises we've just got today and we've got to get on with it. Who knows what the future holds? The clock's ticking a wee bit louder."

Inside the Queen's Hall something amazing is happening. The band is terrific as Frame had promised but it is Edwyn who has been transformed. Freed from the mountain he has to climb to communicate he is connecting in the way he does best, through his songs. It's as if the stroke has stripped away any other distraction and focused him purely on the performance. He has worked so hard to get here nothing is going to stop him now. He has the lyrics of his songs printed out, but rarely needs to refer to them, his mouth-full-of-marbles voice is virtually undamaged, sounding just like it did back when his fringe covered his eyes. The band give it their all and those early compositions stand up superbly. It's a glorious gallop through a songwriting career of breadth and distinction. And he is enjoying himself. He used to be a pretty good guitarist himself, but now with his right arm out of action he has to call in Grace or William to help with the strumming. Tonight he takes a beaming pleasure in Frame's virtuoso performance, with no sign of regret that he cannot join in. And there is a new post-stroke song, I'm Searching. It's simple and heartfelt and feels like the work of a different brain. "It's corny and crap basically but it's my crap and I'm enjoying singing it," he tells me earlier in case I run away with the notion that all of the old Edwyn has been stripped away. The other songs sound like new because, well for Edwyn they kind of are. The inter-song banter, once a big part of his performance, is necessarily sparse and when he stumbles you can feel the crowd willing him on. They have come through relief and are on their way to ecstasy, pleased to have bit parts in this genuinely inspirational and, definitely not corny, story. After one encore he shuffles off very slowly. Whether it's the stroke or the pop star ego is difficult to say.

Backstage the band are picking over the performance, beer and Champagne is poured, guests and fans mingle. In the middle of it all sits Edwyn, slightly detached but right back where he belongs.

For more about Edwyn Collins visit www.edwyncollins.com For more about aphasia, visit www.aphasianow.org