Edwyn Collins: ‘If I come across awkwardly – so what?’

The former Orange Juice frontman talks to Craig McLean about his new album, the Keir Starmer connection, the aphasia he experiences after his double stroke, and his unfailing optimism

Turning point: 20 February marks the 20th anniversary of Edwyn Collins’s stroke (Fenella Lorimar)

The landscape surrounding Edywn Collins’s Clashnarrow Studio is a winter wonderland. The field sloping down to the road, visible through eyeline-flooding picture windows, is covered in snow, a crisp, sparkling, white blanket reflecting the pure blue brilliance of the January sky.

Beyond the road, the northern edges of the small, east coast town of Helmsdale, a 100-minute drive north of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands and 51 miles south of John O’Groats, the northernmost tip of mainland Britain. And beyond the town’s thin, built-up strip, the North Sea: another kind of sparkler on this sunny day, its horizon marked by the whirring sentries of the Moray windfarms, their turbines turning and glinting 14 miles offshore.

If the world outside Collins’s hillside studio is a glorious place, the space inside gives it a run for its money. It’s stuffed full of instruments and recording equipment, old and new but mainly old: vintage gear hoovered up by the former Orange Juice frontman over the years, firstly via myriad contacts forged over almost five decades in the music industry and more latterly via eBay. The 65-year-old’s faith in the wonder of old-fashioned, non-hi-tech equipment is reflected in the pithy, in-joke name of his record label, AED – it stands for Analogue Enhanced Digital.

Does he still spend a lot of time on the internet looking for gear?

“No – Grace has advised me to stop,” the Edinburgh-born musician replies, referring to his wife (and manager) Grace Maxwell. Was he wasting too much money?

“It’s not about the money,” says Maxwell, 66, as we talk in the residential studio’s adjacent accommodation, 110 steps up the hill from the couple’s home at the bottom of the field, a sturdy stone cottage that’s been in Collins’s family for generations. “It’s the stuff. I’m not perfect, ’cause I’m messy.” The Glaswegian mentions their son William, 34. He’s based in their home in Kilburn, northwest London, but frequently travels north to engineer or produce one of the young artists the family welcome to record, gratis, in Clashnarrow. “Will walks in and goes: ‘No offence, you two, but I think you might be turning into those hoarder folk.’”

As they often do the couple – their professional and personal relationship 40 years deep – laugh: her a hearty chuckle, him a burbling gurgle.

Still, old habits die hard. Hanging over the magic-making clutter of 1970s mixing consoles, mid-century microphones and guitars by the dozen is another eBay find, a 60 quid bargain: a talk-back speaker rescued from a radio studio. On the inlaid wood cover is inscribed “Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation”. It’s the motto of the BBC World Service. It’s also the name of the musician’s new solo album.

Onwards and upwards: a post-Orange Juice Collins plays a miners’ benefit concert in London’s Brixton Academy in 1985 (Getty)

The title song is a simple plea for communication in divided times (“If I can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to me/ How shall nation speak unto nation?”). And it’s a poignant reflection on times – and a life – past. “Back when the words came easily/ I had the answer to everything/ Revelling in a smart aleck comeback,” sings Collins in that distinctive voice familiar the world over from his 1995 global smash “A Girl Like You”, a jukebox, airplay and film/TV staple that has made him financially comfortable to this day. “Now I’m alone with my memories/ Far from the place that I want to be…”

“It’s talking about my stroke,” Collins is telling me as we sit on comfy sofas by a roaring wood burner. He’s tramped up those 110, snow-covered steps from home to studio, walking stick in hand, part of his constant, ongoing, defiant physical and mental therapy. “It’s talking about me, I guess. I think I was an intellectual, let’s say.”

“You were,” I say. I’ve been interviewing Edwyn Collins for as long as he’s been releasing solo albums. There have been 10 of those since he split Orange Juice, his revered Glasgow indie band, after the release of 1984’s self-titled third album, in the wake of their biggest success, 1983’s Top 10 single “Rip It Up”. In our many conversations over the years – which happened across Scotland, in Madrid, in Los Angeles, at the couple’s home in London – he was always whip-smart and caustically funny. And, yes, an intellectual. “And now I’m a moron, haha!” More laughs come in a torrent. “Only kidding!”

Close calls: the musician suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 20 February 2005, and a second while in intensive care (Fenella Lorimar)

Twenty years ago this week, at home in Kilburn, with Antiques Roadshow on the telly and a pan of potatoes boiling on the cooker, Edwyn Collins suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. Five days later, while in intensive care in the Royal Free Hospital in north London, he suffered another. The two catastrophic bleeds on his brain required the removal of a panel of skull bone – after which he contracted the superbug MRSA.

Any of those things could have killed Collins. But with Maxwell’s staunch, undying, unfailing, unwilling-to-accept-an-alternative-outcome support, Collins battled through six months in hospital – and onwards, outwards to a new life.

In the subsequent two decades, in which early on they relocated to the Highlands, the couple have learnt to live with the after-effects of his stroke: a right arm and leg that have been robbed of power, and the challenges to memory and speech caused by aphasia. And they’ve triumphed. He’s made five albums, toured several times, re-learnt to draw with his left hand (Collins, the son of a painter, is a gifted wildlife artist), and Maxwell has written an account of the couple’s fight to survive, Falling and Laughing: The Restoration of Edwyn Collins. It’s a fantastic book, titled after Orange Juice fans’ most widely beloved song. Read it and you'll be choking back the tears.

I’ve not met him yet but I’m flattered that Keir understands [our music]

Collins on the PM having chosen an Orange Juice track on 'Desert Island Discs'

And now, here they are. Smiling, always smiling. And not just surviving but thriving. Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, painstakingly written and recorded at Clashnarrow by Edwyn with the help of Grace, Will and a tight coterie of longstanding musician friends, is a tuneful, lyrical triumph. And, yes, whatever he might say, he’s still a sharp-eyed and sharp-eared intellectual of a songwriter, self-aware but never self-pitying. As he sings in the title track: “I know I’m dumb but people are dumber/ Talking in a loud, grating voice.”

I ask him: is it painful, that realisation of his situation, of the difficulty of expressing himself as freely and quickly as before?

“No. [But] I want to get better inside my own head. Grace helped me with the understanding. I was daft back in the hospital days. And Grace reassured me. And I was frightened in hospital. Grace reassured me that everything was great in the world.”

The song is, he says, optimistic about the state of the world. Is he still an optimist?

“Yes, I am, Craig. I want to get on with my music. Helmsdale, not in the wintertime, in the summertime, I’m up and out for a walk. It’s good for me. It’s therapy. And here, not in London, the air is so pure.”

‘I know I’m dumb but people are dumber/ Talking in a loud, grating voice’ (Fenella Lorimar)

Maxwell, who generally sits alongside Collins as he does interviews, explains that the idea of “If I can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to me/ How can nation speak unto nation?” is born of her husband’s need for communication. Rather than retreat inwards, which would be a painful but understandable outcome for a double stroke survivor, this is a song about reaching onwards. But she won’t put words into his mouth.

“When Edwyn’s struggling and presents me with a lyric that I think’s not very focused, I’ve not got to write the thing,” she clarifies. “I help him focus what he’s trying to say. If he’s struggling to get the meaning right, we’ll talk it through. ‘What are you trying to say here?’ And we’ll have a bit of an argument, to get him on a path. This is aphasia.”

“And Grace is swearing a lot!” chips in Collins.

“I swear a lot,” she concedes. “But you’ve always been, since the get-go – this is your personality – unashamed about your aphasia,” Maxwell says directly to Collins. “You have this communication issue, but you keep saying: ‘I need to communicate.’ So you will communicate, regardless of how difficult it is, or how it comes across.”

“Awkwardly?” says Collins. “So what.”

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“The awkwardness or difficulty of it, or how other people perceive it or react to it, that doesn’t really bother you. You don’t care about how you’re seen. He’s not ashamed of his aphasia,” Maxwell says, turning to me, “or embarrassed about it, are you?” she adds, turning back to him. “He’s quite happy to lay it bare. So that song’s about that – this communication stuff.”

It’s a subject the album’s first song, “Knowledge”, also leans into: “Knowledge is a friend of mine/ First was lost, now it’s found/ Knowledge is a friend of mine/ Still it’s hard to pin it down.” It’s Collins, grasping the thistle of his hourly, daily, 20-years-long battle to express his thoughts and feelings.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m talking about my situation. The struggle to find the words.”

It’s talking about my stroke. It’s talking about me, I guess. I think I was an intellectual, let’s say

Collins on his new song ‘Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation’

Still, he can remember even long-ago lyrics. He mentions 1980’s “Falling and Laughing”, the first single for both Orange Juice and Postcard Records, the cult Glasgow label founded by Alan Horne, that also gave us Aztec Camera and Josef K. Collins began writing the song aged 17. “I knew the lyrics – ‘You must think me very naive/ Taken as true/ I only see what I want to see’ – are good lyrics. Big-headed, of course.”

Well, Sir Keir Starmer for one would agree about the song’s merits, the PM having picked the song on his Desert Island Discs appearance in 2020. “It captures those early years at uni and beyond,” he said of his time studying law at Leeds University. He’s talked publicly on other occasions about how Orange Juice are one of his favourite bands. How does Collins feel about that?

“Oh. William plays eight-a-side football with him. I’ve not met him yet. But I’m flattered that Keir understands.”

Maxwell: “He has dropped us a line or two.”

Collins: “Yeah, when he was a little bit drunk.”

“No, he wasn’t!” Maxwell admonishes her husband. “You’re surmising!” She explains that, around 2018, William messaged his parents about his new Sunday football game: “I’m playing with the guy – it’s his game, really – who’s the Labour Brexit spokesperson.” His mum replied: “You’re playing with Keir Starmer, Will? Bloody hell. I confidently predict he’ll become the prime minister in the not-too-distant future.”

Grace Maxwell and Collins together in 2014 (Getty)

Soon after that, Collins received a DM on Twitter. Maxwell wasn’t even aware that the politician and pop star were following each other on Twitter. “Anyway, Edwyn was in bed already, it was a Saturday night, right in the middle of all that Brexit shite. And I thought: ‘Bloody hell, he’s had a tough week, he’s had to read that 600-page document in a night.’ And [Sir Keir] goes: ‘After a long week, I’m doing what I do so often on a weekend night, I’m listening to your music as I have done for so many years, Edywn. And I’m loving it.’ Something like that. It was late at night, maybe he’s had a glass of red – why not? And I thought it was very sweet.”

Maxwell later found out that Starmer attended Collins’s 2016 gig at the Roundhouse in north London. Then, two years ago, his private office got in touch ahead of his 60th birthday. “They wanted to buy stuff from [our online] shop and get Edwyn to sign it. I said: ‘That’s great, I don’t think it breaks [parliamentary] rules, the [cash] amount it is.’ So I said: ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll send it to him.’ And then Edwyn did this [voice note] for him. Not a lot of people would know this song but he would.”

After a while Chris [Martin] said: ‘Do you mind me asking about something? How did you have your stroke?’ And I explained. He was very sympathetic

Maxwell pulls out her phone and plays the voice note: Collins singing the Rip It Up album track “Louise Louise”, but with the lyrics tweaked: “Have a wonderful birthday Keir/ Such a wonderful party Keir/ It only comes, what, once a year/ I’ll spoil your party with my punky sneer.” The couple duly got an appreciative note back, gratitude for a “funny treat for his 60th birthday”. In the hope of a deeper explanation for Sir Keir’s deep-seated OJ fandom, I contacted No 10 for a comment. The message came back that it was, “on this occasion”, a “polite decline”. Which I suppose is not unreasonable given the current, real-world, real-time need for nation to speak unto nation.

On this month’s 20th anniversary of the stroke, the family won’t be marking the occasion. They never do. Instead, as ever, they’re thinking and looking forward. Later this year, after the release of Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, Edwyn Collins will go back on tour. Grace Maxwell says that she’d love to retire but her indomitable husband is having none of it. He’s buoyed, still, by the thrill of making music. And, as an inveterate crate-digger – his Twitter/X feed is largely populated by links to YouTube performances or streaming links for vintage songs and cult classics he wants to re-champion – he still gets a buzz from others’ music. Even the biggest band in the world.

In summer 2022, booked to play Scotland’s national stadium, Hampden Park in Glasgow, Coldplay invited Collins to be that night’s guest, on a cover of “A Girl Like You”. Chris Martin, the politest man in pop, sought Maxwell’s permission to phone Collins directly to ask him to perform, which he then did. The couple agreed, even though the night in question was Collins’s birthday.

“Their hospitality was gorgeous,” says Maxwell. “They really looked after us. Their manners were incredible. And the camaraderie – their whole team love them, which gives you some indication.”

Collins released ‘A Girl Like You’ in 1994 – it’s made him financially comfortable to this day (Rex)

“In the room where I was staying,” says Collins of their hotel, organised and paid for by Coldplay, “there was a banner: ‘Happy birthday, Edwyn’.”

“They made a fuss of you,” says Maxwell. “And it was really, really fun. And you got a good reaction, didn’t you? The song helps, too, because it’s universally loved.”

“Then, after the show, Chris sat up and chatted,” says Collins. “After a while, he said: ‘Do you mind me asking about something? How did you have your stroke?’ And I explained. He was very sympathetic.”

What do they think of Martin as a songwriter?

“We’re not total Coldplay aficionados,” Maxwell admits. “But you know that he turns a tune.”

“Yeah,” nods Edwyn Collins, laughing again. “He’s all yellow!”

‘Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation’ is released on 14 March