MUSIC

After a life-and-death struggle in intensive care, former Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins has returned with heartfelt new album ‘Losing Sleep’ – and a national tour which pitches up at the Fleece this week. Tom Phillips finds him on fine form.

When Edwyn Collins suffered two strokes in 2005, the odds on him performing again seemed slight. In fact, the odds on him even surviving seemed slight. Thanks to two catastrophic haemorrhages, the 45-year-old musician who fashioned arch, artful pop with early-80s Scottish post-punkers Orange Juice and then scored a massive solo hit with 1994’s meaty, beaty ‘A Girl Like You’ lost his memory and his powers of speech and movement. He could barely remember who he was, let alone that he’d made four albums with Orange Juice and another five on his own, run a highly successful recording studio, produced numerous other artists and written conspicuously literate, leftfield tunes like ‘Falling and Laughing’, ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘What Presence?!’ (all of which, incidentally, are newly gathered on a whopping girt seven-disc Orange Juice retrospective, ‘Coals to Newcastle’, just released by Domino).

Fast forward five years, however, and despite a dire initial prognosis, Collins has made the mother of all comebacks. As well as finishing sixth solo album ‘Home Again’ (most of it recorded before his illness), he’s performed 40-odd gigs, including a showstopping Glasto set, exhibited his finely honed ornithological drawings and written and recorded gloriously on-form seventh album ‘Losing Sleep’, which he’s now promoting with a national tour. Collins’s recovery is not complete by any means – he can no longer play guitar and, as he told clashmusic.com, “Because of my stroke I find it difficult to communicate. Language is difficult to communicate. Especially in the lyrics department” – but a combination of intensive, often arduous therapy and good old-fashioned stubbornness has got him to a point nobody would have dared predict back in 2005.

Not that Collins’s pre-stroke career was entirely straightforward. Although when they first emerged as part of Postcard Records’ self-proclaimed Sound of Young Scotland alongside Josef K and Aztec Camera, Orange Juice were hailed as torchbearers of what would eventually get branded as ‘indie’, they rarely did more than goose the outer reaches of mainstream success. 1983’s ‘Rip It Up’ scored a moment of ‘Top of the Pops’ glory and their knowing discoid/punkish shtick (Collins himself once described Orange Juice, not inaccurately, as “Chic meets the Velvet Underground”) earned them critical plaudits, but by the time everyone and his jingly-jangly, cardigan-sporting wife were claiming them as an influence, they’d disappeared from view.

For the next half-decade or so, Collins’s solo trajectory was equally erratic, and it was only with that 1994 single that prospects brightened. Recorded with the likes of ex-Pistol Paul Cook and Subway Sect’s Vic Godard, ‘A Girl Like You’ was, Collins admits, “a life-changing single”, and over the course of two years, it and subsequent album ‘Gorgeous George’ transformed him from spiky outsider into internationally touring pop troubadour. It also gave him the means to potter away in his studio making the music he wanted to make at the (fairly modest) pace at which he wanted to make it. Then he fell ill.

The story of what followed – hospitalisation, therapy, relearning to read and write, his first hesitant return to music – was told by Collins’s partner Grace Maxwell in last year’s robustly unsentimental and eminently readable book ‘Falling and Laughing: The Restoration of...’, but it’s on the new album that the man himself gives his version, not so much of events, as of what it means to be ‘Edwyn Collins’ now.

Given the circumstances, it’s a remarkably upbeat and open-hearted record, 12 tracks which run the gamut from the Motown bounce of title track ‘Losing Sleep’ to poignant slow-burner ‘In Your Eyes’ and reflective strum ‘Searching for the Truth’. Ever self-deprecating, Collins told Scotland on Sunday that these were “Just simple songs. They’re a bit Northern Soul, a bit punk. But very simple” – which is true enough. Up to a point. But they also approach subjects like fear, love, dignity and “that awkward sense of being alive” with an emotional directness that he’s previously shied away from. What’s more, with a mighty roster of collaborators involved (Johnny Marr, Alex Kaprianos, Roddy Frame, Paul Cook, Romeo Stodart et al), his patent blend of soul drive and punk clatter sounds... well, positively boisterous at times, like Orange Juice with the handbrake off. ‘Come Tomorrow, Come Today’ even boasts a gospel-y tinge while next single ‘Do It Again’ (aka The One With Half Of Franz Ferdinand, out 6 Dec) careers along like someone running down a hill backwards.

As Collins tells Maxwell in her book: “Bit by bit, I am back in the world. I’m getting better. And more or less I’m getting on with it for the rest of my life.” No doubt there’ll be more than a few ‘ulps’ in the crowd when he walks out on stage at the Fleece.

EDWYN COLLINS PLAYED THE FLEECE, BRISTOL ON SUN 14 NOV. SEE REVIEW HERE.
 

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