In February 2005, with most of this album already in the can (and incidentally shortly after complaining of feeling unwell during a radio interview), Edwyn Collins was rushed to hospital. Having suffered not one but two cerebral haemorrhages, he was so close to death that his wife was advised to gather his loved ones. Somehow he pulled through.

Although in physical rehabilitation – he can’t yet play his guitar – he can operate a mixing desk, and this understandably overdue, almost posthumous album is the result.

If the worst had happened you can be reasonably sure that Home Again would have been released in some form, doubtless billed as the last work of one of the nation’s quietly influential talents. Collins has often been too smart to succeed. He started by leading the genuinely original Orange Juice, the band that kick-started Glasgow’s fecund music scene and that pioneered a sound only properly assimilatd by the main-stream two decades later. Then there was a patchy, sometimes glorious, solo career. (Even his one huge smash, A Girl Like You, in 1994 seems to reward the close listener with a hidden chant of “it’s a hit!”.) So the 48-year old Collins has effectively reedited his own obituary, and just in time.

It would have been a fine parting shot, though. The opener, One is a Lonely Number, is a perfect example of the bass-heavy white soul that Collins mastered as long ago as What Presence?, Orange Juice’s 1984 classic non-hit single (a recurring theme, that). The first single, You’ll Never Know, is even better – yet another attempt to pay respects to soul greats such as Al Green and Curtis Mayfield, a quixotic task that goes all the way back to Orange Juice’s endearingly sincere version of Green’s L.O.V.E., another great miss.

The bluesy 7th Son, displaying some gorgeous slide guitar, and the amusing Liberteenage Rag (very 2005, that title) typify Collins’s offhand wit, while the light rockabilly of Superstar and the jaunty, catchy One Track Mind are not a million miles from that other classy middle-aged crooner and skilled guitarist Richard Hawley.

But the interest lies in songs such as the title track, a homage to his Highland family background, the lovely, weary ballad Written in Stone and the foreboding, folky Leviathan. Inescapably, they now seem touched with premonition and prove genuinely touching. But this is a fine record on any terms, and a reminder not to take what we have for granted. Buy it. And call your mother.

(Heavenly)

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