Seeing Edwyn Collins now, following his stroke in 2005, is quite a shock. In 1981, two years before his group Orange Juice made the Top 10 with the cute white funk of Rip It Up, he was the prototype thin, fey indie boy, subverting the persona even as he invented it, well ahead of Morrissey. Between the dour, austere postpunk era and the brightly subversive New Pop of 1982, the insidiously influential Scottish musician had a permanent smirk, playing atop a gorgeous pout that suggested all manner of gently coruscating put-downs would be forthcoming, a foppish, floppy fringe and an ability to make the wearing of shorts, socks and sandals seem like the most radical gesture imaginable.

Today, August 23, 2007, Collins turns 48, and debunking rock stereotypes is way down on his list of priorities. First, he must raise himself off his bed, negotiate the stairs of his Kilburn home and do an interview, all with the help of his manager and wife of 23 years, Grace Maxwell. None of these activities is easy for Collins, who, on February 20, 2005, suffered a brain haemorrhage, with a second striking five days later. The doctors at the Royal Free hospital, in London, didn’t expect him to survive, let alone recover. Then it got worse: after a high-risk operation, he contracted MRSA. He spent six months in hospital and the ensuing two years learning to talk and walk again. He struggles daily with both. Yet he refuses to be downcast. In fact, the whole dreadful experience has given him a new lease of life. “When I think about my stroke, I realise I’m very lucky to be alive,” he says. “I was brought back to reality.”

“Edwyn’s recovery has defied all expectations,” confirms Maxwell, who sits on the wooden floor beside him. “He’s not conforming to how someone with a brain haemorrhage should be operating. The speech and language people are particularly fascinated by him. What happened to Edwyn was terrible, but good things are coming out of it. There’s nothing diminished in him intellectually. He really loves to be alive, in a way that he didn’t before.”

“I have a problem finding the words,” explains Collins, who has been undergoing intensive speech therapy to combat dysphasia, a neurological side effect that hinders his ability to communicate. “My speech is improving day by day. Maybe my thinking is ahead of my talking. But it’s getting easier to express myself with emotions and language.” Language was as important to Orange Juice as it later would be to the Smiths. They used the language of romance and courtship (song titles such as Simply Thrilled Honey; lyrics such as “Goodness gracious, you’re so audacious”) to reject the conventions of rock’n’roll. “Irony was the thing,” says Collins, who relished the insults hurled at him on stage by local bootboys. “They would come to our gigs and chant, ‘Poofs, poofs!’ I liked all that. It encouraged me to camp it up even more.” Orange Juice could do silly as well as sublime, ramshackle as well as tender. When, all around them, bands were making an angular racket, their ambition was to make fabulous funk and divine disco, only with jangly guitars. With their singles on the Postcard label, they set the template for indie pop in the 1980s and 1990s.

When Orange Juice split up in 1985, after four albums, he recorded a couple of singles for Elevation, a subsidiary of WEA. But it was only in 1994, with the multimillion-selling rock’n’soul homage A Girl Like You, taken from his third solo album, Gorgeous George, that Collins finally matched critical respect with commercial success. Although neither of his subsequent albums (1997’s I’m Not Following You and 2002’s Dr Syntax) fared as well, they consolidated his position as a maverick purveyor of blue-eyed funk and country-inflected rock. By the time he began writing and recording Home Again, his sixth solo long-player, in the autumn of 2004, he was being heralded by a new generation of indie kids, including Franz Ferdinand. Then he had his stroke. Chillingly, Collins could see it coming.

“The songs on the album are full of frustration,” he says of his latest collection. “They’re almost like a foreboding of my stroke. The record is about looking back at my life, because that’s what I was doing in 2004 – reflecting. There was a change going on, and I felt that. I knew something was about to go wrong. I had a sense of my own doom.”

“When I listen to the record now, so much of it seems to predict what was going to happen to him,” says Maxwell, who recalls a series of confrontations with her husband, prior to the stroke, that were sparked by his feelings of dislocation and unease. “He would say things to me in arguments like, ‘You have no idea about me!’ He wouldn’t expand on it. I’d just think, ‘Ah, tortured artist.’ I remember saying to him, ‘You can choose happiness. Why choose misery?’”

It took the stroke to curb Collins’s unhealthy lifestyle and cheer him up. “I was drunk constantly,” he says. “Now, one beer is more than enough.” His wife agrees. “He was a scary drunk, because he’d say things he’d regret.”

Ironically, it was his trip to the dark side that made Collins lighten up. “I was in the twilight zone for a while,” he says, breaking into a verse from Don Williams’s I’m Just a Country Boy, something he has been wont to do since discovering that singing comes easier these days than speaking. “That sort of thing [referring to the song] makes me cry constantly, and I can be emotional. But I’m hopeful. I don’t know how much I will recover, but I want to keep trying; I want to improve. And I intend to write about it on my next album: about my stroke, and what I hope to achieve. When you’re at death’s door, it’s possible to clear the way to seeing the future. You see what is important. I’m happy now. In fact, I’m walking on air.”

Home Again is released on Heavenly tomorrow

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