Unconventional Haig

UNTIL recently, Paul Haig had not performed on a Scottish stage for nearly 18 years, but he was persuaded to make a fleeting guest appearance two weeks ago with French band Nouvelle Vague at Dunfermline's Carnegie Hall. His classy vocal turn on Sorry For Laughing, originally by Haig's old band Josef K, was the highlight of the night.

"It was a nice opportunity and it would have been pretty silly to turn it down - mind you, a few years ago, I probably would have..." It's a few days after the gig, and Haig is reflecting on his nerve-wracking experience from the safety of the snug Edinburgh flat where he produces all his music, under the watchful eye of Catty the cat. "She was Billy's cat," says Haig - Billy being his best friend Billy Mackenzie, the ex-Associates frontman who committed suicide ten years ago.

It was in honour of Mackenzie that Haig was first coaxed out of gigging retirement a few months ago, to sing a couple of tracks at a tribute night in London. "That was hell beforehand," he says. "I was so nervous and I just wanted to run away. But I spoke to Billy inside my head and he said, 'Just get on and do it,' so that helped me through."

Haig is slowly starting to emerge from the shadows for the first time in years. After splitting Scotland's brightest young contenders Josef K in the early 1980s, he eschewed a solo pop career to work on low-key electronic projects on his own Rhythm of Life label, gradually retreating so totally into self-imposed anonymity that it comes as some surprise to discover he was still working at all.

"For a few years I wasn't overly full of the joys of spring," he says. "It's quite easy to hide away and get lost in making filmic soundtrack music. I was just getting through financially, and I just felt pretty depressed. I didn't want to be involved in the music business at that time, and I had some doubts about even carrying on with music. I'd never had that before."

Yet it was during this low period that he wrote a cathartic, surprisingly upbeat electro pop song called Reason, which is due to be released as a single on Monday, and forms the centrepiece of Electronik Audience, his first non-instrumental album in ten years.

The whole album came together in a four-month creative burst last year which has rejuvenated this attention-shy post-punk hero. Haig has rediscovered his voice (even if he does feed it through a vocoder on some tracks) and his enthusiasm for music at a time when a new generation of fans are being introduced to the music of his former band.

Fired up by the punk scene on both sides of the Atlantic, Haig formed Josef K (named after the protagonist in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial) with guitarist Malcolm Ross in Edinburgh in the late 1970s, and signed to Glasgow's Postcard Records, whose hip roster was famously dubbed The Sound Of Young Scotland by shrewd label boss Alan Horne.

That sound of urgent, jangling guitars and the do-it-yourself attitude was to prove enormously influential on subsequent generations of musicians. Josef K are commonly namechecked, along with their contemporaries Orange Juice and The Fire Engines, as the template for Scottish indie music even though (or because?) they released just one album, The Only Fun In Town, during their brief, two-year lifespan. "I think if you prematurely disband there is always an air of mystery, but we never planned it that way," says Haig.

"Everything was moving into the shiny pop era - ABC and all that - and I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Josef K in that field," he muses. "Probably we would have become a bit more polished, maybe had a hit record, and then nobody would want to listen to us now, that crappy pop band from the 1980s."

Shortly after the group's demise, Haig described Josef K as a "cockroach that needed to be squashed". "Well, it was a great reference to Kafka!" he says now. "It was a very sad thing to happen for all of us. It was such an intense way of life and for a while I was just wanting to get as far away from that as possible. But now I feel totally different. I'm very proud of Josef K. I can listen to us now and I'm amazed, it almost sounds like it could have been done today."

The enduring freshness of their sound has been a touchstone for their most famous fans, Franz Ferdinand, and a host of bands following in their wake, meaning that Josef K's stock has never been higher. When Franz's label, Domino Records, released the Josef K compilation Entomology last year, it was reviewed across the world - including, Haig notes with amusement, in Playboy. Meanwhile, their old muckers The Fire Engines have reformed to show the young pretenders how it's done.

"If you can play as well as that and as exciting as that, then why not?" says Haig. "But I personally wouldn't feel comfortable with it. Malcolm and I talk about Josef K sometimes, and just feel it would be embarrassing. It's because I've been a solo artist ever since Josef K that I don't want to go back to a band situation. If you're doing your own thing and are happy with it, you don't really want to visit old ground."

However, Haig is a member of a band of sorts, along with his friend Jeremy Thoms. Calling themselves The Cathode Ray, they have recorded an album which indulges their love of The Velvet Underground, Television and Wire.

"It's totally a return to roots - two guitars, bass and drums," says Haig. "There's a smattering of Josef K-type guitar but that's obviously going to happen when I'm playing guitar. But I said from the start it's just a bit of fun so it's just going to stay like that."

For the moment, Haig is concentrating his energies on Electronik Audience. "I think I've made an album that I'm actually pleased with, which is a rarity for me. I don't know exactly what's happened but I've just reinvented my ideas and found optimism. It's amazing how much can change when you adopt a positive mindset. Things start to come to you if you make the effort. It's like a new lease of life."

• Electronik Audience is released by Rhythm of Life on 11 June, preceded by the single Reason on 4 June