Interview: Ally McErlaine, musician

Bit of a slap in the face, he admits, for his wife, Shelly Poole, who had been by his bedside every day of the ordeal, but a landmark moment in a remarkable recovery all the same.

Talking to McErlaine now, you could scarcely credit that just over two years ago, in September 2009, he suffered a potentially devastating aneurysm – more serious even, he says with a slight edge of playful competition, than that which hit Edwyn Collins – through which he was not expected to live, let alone get back on his feet. But not only has he returned to his day job, as lead guitarist of Texas, he also has a second band on the go.

Prior to falling ill, with Texas still on hiatus, McErlaine had been working on a new project called Red Sky July with Poole, formerly of Alisha’s Attic and now a jobbing songwriter with credits including Westlife, Will Young and Sophie Ellis Bextor. The couple wanted to indulge their shared taste for country music and recruited their friend Charity Hair of The Alice Band to sing harmony on some gentle, reflective songs they had written.

Plans were made to record an album. They met producer Rory Carlile only a couple of days before McErlaine was struck down and, in his words, “out the game for about a year”.

In fact, the trio’s self-titled album was recorded less than a year later. “We ended up just going back as if it had never happened, the same plan, the same studio and the same producer,” says McErlaine. “It was just an interruption really.”

That’s quite some understatement. McErlaine was unconscious in a London hospital for three months. Initially, Poole and his parents were told it was unlikely he would make it through the night. Then, that if he did wake up, he could be in a vegetative state or, at best, severely physically and mentally impaired.

The first sign of life was movement in his pinkie finger. Next, he opened his eyes. Then those two little words. Even so, there was precious little cognition.

“I was completely mental,” is how McErlaine puts it. “They said I had a four or five-second memory. I didn’t remember anything about the past. I didn’t even know what a guitar was, never mind how to play one. I was convinced for a while I was in Scotland. I thought they’d taken me back in the middle of the night. I can only liken it to if you wake up from a really deep dream and you’re a bit disorientated. It was like that, but it went on for months.”

Eventually, he was moved to a rehabilitation unit for physiotherapy, where his treatment involved a daily battle to withstand pain and reverse the wastage from months of lying in a hospital bed. He took up running to regain muscle strength. Thai yoga massage provided some pain relief.

“In my own head, I did think ‘I shouldn’t be here and I don’t want to be here so I’m going to get out of this’, and I never had any doubt that I would get out of it.”

Like Collins, whose startling recovery has been more public but not as complete as McErlaine’s, music has played a big part in his rehabilitation. Relearning to play guitar was “a chore” but also a spur – being just a passable player was not an option for a respected guitarist like McErlaine. In the end, he clawed back his skills by going back to work. Red Sky July had an album to record and studio time looming.

“I had to do it because it was all booked,” claims McErlaine. “I kept saying I was fine but I really wasn’t. There was quite a pain barrier to go through to physically record it.”

Sharleen Spiteri reckons that McErlaine has prevailed through sheer stubbornness. You can see her point.

“It’s almost like a curse, you’ve got to do it,” he explains. “What else can I do? I’m unemployable at anything else.”

And pain was not the only barrier he had to surmount either. “We’ve made this whole album with a really low budget,” he says, “the sort of money that Texas would spend on a photographer.

“There’s no free smarties at our gigs!” he laughs. “There are a lot of constraints but in a way that’s better because it’s more creative. You have to figure out a way to do it yourself and that’s what we’ve done.”

Now that the album has been completed, McErlaine can find a new resonance in some of the material, particularly a song called White Feather, inspired by a trip to Rome.

“Shelley and I went to the Pantheon and we saw a white feather coming down from the roof through a shaft of light. Shelley’s dad had told her that was lucky if you caught it, so she caught it, and that’s what that song’s about. It’s supposed to be lucky and it wasn’t. Caught the feather, had an aneurysm…

“I can’t believe it happened to me, because I’m totally normal now,” he continues. “The thing I’m really sorry for is all the hassle I caused everybody.”

This is typical of McErlaine’s modest stoicism. When Texas played their comeback show at Barrowland in June this year, he didn’t want any fuss. But there was a palpable air of anticipation and then of celebration in the venue. Even he is prepared to admit it was “quite emotional”.

He will also admit to being “a bit tortured” about his other great artistic passion: photography. Following his stroke, he didn’t have the physical strength to lift his camera and recapturing his eye for a good picture has been more of a struggle than re-learning to play guitar. “With photography you have to be really aware of everything round about you,” he says. “It was harder for me to see things in an interesting way conceptually.”

McErlaine has no wish for what he has been through to overshadow the unveiling of his new band but at the same time he recognises that things have changed irrevocably for him and Shelley.

“You lose that indestructible feeling, when you think ‘that’s never going to happen to me’. Now I know I’m a bit fragile,” he reflects. “But the thing is, I’m not scared of anything now. The other day we were on a plane with really bad turbulence. Shelley was freaking out and I was saying, ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t as bad as all that.’ When I was lying in hospital I would have given anything to be on a turbulent flight. So it puts thing into perspective.”

• Red Sky July is released by Proper Records on 31 October. Red Sky July play King Tut’s, Glasgow, 13 November; Electric Circus, Edinburgh, 14 November; Mad Hatters, Inverness, 16 November, Café Drummond, Aberdeen, 17 November