Edwyn Collins: 'Home Again'

Edwyn Collins, the one-time brilliantly quiffed frontman of Scottish white soul trailblazers Orange Juice (Franz Ferdinand owe them an awful lot) and writer of irresistible monster ’90s hit ‘A Girl Like You’, shouldn’t be here.

In 2005, he suffered two cataclysmic strokes, contracted MRSA during recovery and had to learn to walk and talk again. ‘Home Again’ was recorded mostly before the illness but carries heartbreaking, prescient shades of its shocking, brutal effects – lyrically on the slow country hum of ‘One Is A Lonely Number’, on the distant rumble of ‘Leviathan’ and on the honey-coated Richard Hawley-like title track.

This is a record that zips in and out of the styles that Collins mastered throughout his career, and by existing at all it celebrates an indomitable spirit and a huge old talent that had been largely forgotten and took near death to remember. Do not ignore this.

Paul McNamee