By a simple twist of fate, the name John McLaughlin is weirdly common in the music industry. There was, for example, the John McLaughlin who played guitar with Miles Davis and had a track on Bitches Brew named in his honour. On the go, meanwhile, is one Jon McLaughlin, an American singer/songwriter. Then there was the New York-based musical parodist John McLaughlin who died in 1990.

John McLaughlin, then, may be something of a single transferable rock soubriquet, but it’s safe to say that no other John McLaughlin has quite the same musical portfolio sported by the John McLaughlin who runs his empire from Glasgow. Songwriter, producer, manager and svengali, McLaughlin, 43, is one of the most restless and ubiquitous figures in the British music industry.

You may not know the name, but you’ll know his songs, especially if you have had teenage daughters; songs written for such non-threatening dreamboats as Busted, 911, Westlife and 5ive. Some of those songs are being covered by the Jonas Brothers, perhaps the biggest musical phenomenon in America today. Having bored himself with the high-school stuff, McLaughlin has since moved on to rock music of the type that’s more to his own taste, producing Echo and the Bunnymen and Attic Lights, the hotly tipped Glasgow combo.

Never one to miss the main chance, though, McLaughlin has secured for the latter the chance to record the theme tune for the forthcoming Channel Five remake of Minder, starring Shane Richie. He has produced the forthcoming album by Teenage Fanclub. Another of his bands, Sugar Crisis, has just been signed to Island Records, while the German girl-group Queensberry are number one in their homeland, having won a television talent contest. “It keeps the wife in handbags,” says McLaughlin, of the latter enterprise.

His one-man hit factory, or two-man if you count his occasional songwriting partner Gordon Goudie, is largely without parallel in Scotland, because proximity to London has always been a non-negotiable tenet of the British music industry.

When Busted were at their zenith, with a string of top-three singles that continued until 2004, McLaughlin was based in Chiswick, west London. Now, though, he is among that leisured class who work from wherever they please, an eminence McLaughlin attributes in part to the apprenticeship he received from Simon Cowell.

“The man taught me how to make great pop records but he can drive you nuts,” says McLaughlin. “He had me rewrite a song 26 times and re-record the demo 50 times. Do as he asks, and you’re more or less guaranteed to get a number-one record, but you get frustrated. I wrote Queen of my Heart for Westlife because Simon wanted a record that was half-Scottish and half-Irish; he wanted Mull of Kintyre meets Fairytale of New York, and he wouldn’t rest until he got it. But I have nothing but respect for him; Simon got me a BMI award for a million radio plays, for a song that was written in a bedroom in Partick.”

Few of Cowell’s protégés would have commenced their careers playing drums they had borrowed from the local Orange Order, as McLaughlin did with the Glaswegian punk band Psychiatric Unit. Raised in Milton, an estate in the north of Glasgow, he was the classic disenfranchised teenager, with only football and punk rock to focus the aimlessness.

Then McLaughlin was in hospital for a year in his late teens with pneumonia. Adrift, with only Radio 1 for company, he found the period proved formative. “I was beginning to work out that I’d never get a record deal with the band,” he says. “But after a year of listening to the radio you begin to think that writing these types of songs can’t be that difficult. So Gordon and I got together in his kitchen, wrote five songs in a week and all of them were hits later for 911.”

“The secret we hit on was to deconstruct pop songs, then reconstruct them for different markets.”

It must have felt odd for a married father of two to write lyrics about crushes and Britney Spears (“Sweating all over your video, watching every single scene in slow mo/Tracking you down on the internet, cause I ain’t seen you naked yet”).

“It is strange,” says McLaughlin. “I almost had to gaffer-tape Gordon to the chair with the promise that we might make a few quid if we got lucky. I saw that Take That were beginning to wane and realised it was time to get methodical about songwriting.

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