As a child, Colin MacIntyre would spend hours every week staring from the window of his grandad’s living room, peering up Tobermory High Street, lost in his thoughts. Whatever the boy’s dilly-dallys were, the notion one day he’d be back in the same spot decades later, in another life, would have been too fanciful for even a child’s imagination. Yet later this month, the singer-songwriter and author will release a new music and literary project that has returned him to the very source of his creative life.

“The room I recorded the album in is in my grandparents’ old flat above what was the Clydesdale Bank in Tobermory High Street,” says MacIntyre, speaking to me from his man-cave in the garden of his home somewhere west of London.

“My grandfather was, and still is, known as the ‘Bard of Mull’. He was the bank manager, and they say the recession wouldn’t have come through Mull had he still been there. But he was a real polymath and I used to sit at his feet, which was better than going to school. He had such knowledge.”

The Bard of Mull, or Angus to his family, was a magnetic character whose home became a rich source of formative creative exposure for Angus’s grandson.

“There were lots of writers there. I distinctly remember sitting with Robert Wagner, the Hollywood actor. People would just come to visit when passing through. They’d come and have a dram, and my grandmother would feed them sandwiches. They’d leave with a poem in their pocket and an overdraft they hadn’t asked for. He was an eccentric character. He’d come up at lunch time for a sleep and to read some Burns. You never quite knew when he was banking or writing poetry.”

Forty-odd years later, Macintrye found himself working in the same room after the flat was bought and converted into a recording studio by Gordon Maclean, former director of An Tobar arts centre on MacIntyre’s childhood home of Mull.

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He said: “Gordon asked me to be the first to come up and record in it. I had the idea to contact some of my favourite writers to explain I was getting this opportunity to make an album in a significant room to me and asking them if they would write 30 or 40 lines about a room significant to them.”

Nick Hornby was the first to commit with a reverie on adolescence, sitting on an asphalt roof smoking fags with his mates where the cat would bring birds, in a piece MacIntyre has entitled Panicked Feathers.

“He came back the next day saying: ‘How could I not be part of something like this?’ So I asked Ian Rankin and Alan Warner, who actually had some of my grandad’s poetry. The first time I ever saw a copy of Fever Pitch was in the bank flat, when one of my uncles brought it and said I should read it.”

The result is In My Mind There’s A Room, a new album from MacIntyre’s songwriting alter-ego Mull Historical Society. When I tell him that I’m sitting in what was my teenage bedroom, on a visit to my mother’s, interviewing him from the very spot where I once read Hornby’s Fever Pitch as a teenager, he’s tickled by the coincidence.

“A lot of things have fitted that I wasn’t even aware of,” he says. “Ian Rankin talks about his bedroom as his ‘worldwide hit’: music posters, scribbles in jotters.’”

The album, out next month, includes a piece from Liz Lochhead entitled 1952, which is released as the project’s first single. The former Makar also reads a poem of her own on the record – as does the late Angus MacIntyre, who recorded some of his poetry on cassette. The template for the project was not only inspired by the root of his lyrical awakening, but also the work of Elton John and songwriting partner Bernie Taupin.

He said: “I was really curious to see what it would be like to sit at the piano and just start with those words. It’s been great to stand at the turret window as I was writing these songs. I finished it in Abbey Road Studio 2, which is a studio I used to dream about, because I loved the Beatles phenomenon. So I’m delighted with how it has turned out.”

MacIntyre will also release the next edition of his crime novel series, When The Needle Drops, featuring the character Ivor Punch, later this year, and a recently released retrospective of Mull Historical Society’s back-catalogue keeps with the mode of looking back while moving forward.

It is, MacIntyre says, all part of his approach to ‘standing on the cliff edge of creativity'.

“You have to be willing to expose yourself creatively, otherwise what’s the point?” he says. “I lost my dad really suddenly and that was the reason for the Mull Historical Society album Loss (2001). But the more I was writing during lockdown, the more I realised I maybe hadn’t dealt with some of it. That probably means everything else I do from now on is going to be about trying to make sense of some of these things.”

Colin MacIntyre will be interviewed by Val McDermid at Borders Book Festival on June 17, performing songs from In My Mind There’s a Room. MHS Archaeology: The Complete Recordings 2000-2004 is out now. When The Needle Drops is out this summer.