Third Degree Burns; Eddi Reader has come home. After years of finding

SOMEWHERE between an all-in wrestler and a rare butterfly, Eddi Reader is hard to pin down. A weird mix of tough and tender, she has raised two children as a single mother while simultaneously battling to maintain a foothold in a music business that likes its women blandly pretty and compliant, neither of which she is. And yet at the same time she gives off an air of such vulnerability and sincerity bordering on naivete (she delivers the hippy-dippy line "I totally believe in people taking responsibility for their vibe" with a remarkably straight face) that it's hard to believe that she has spent 43 years on this planet, some of them pretty damn hard.

During the two decades she lived in London, Reader would tell people that whenever she returned to Scotland it "immediately felt like I was very near an electrical power supply of some kind, that zonks me in the bottom of my spine and works up through my fingers to my brain." She used to say that her hair actually became curlier when back in her native Glasgow.

Meeting her today in her flat in the Woodlands area of the city, her home since she moved up from London shortly before Christmas, Reader seems neither frizzy nor amped. She is recovering from a nasty bout of bronchitis, the scourge of singers, and is so fresh from the bath that her hair is still wet, light from the bay window bouncing off the chandelier and shining on her pale skin. In a black V-neck and flared cords, her bare feet tucked up beneath her on the couch, two guitars propped against a wall, Reader epitomises singer- songwriter chic. Only the vinyl copy of The Clash's London Calling, facing out from a stack of LPs, banishes the weird feeling that I am somehow inside the cover photo of Carole King's Tapestry.

Reader, of course, was the voice of Fairground Attraction, the 'neo-skiffle' group whose 1988 number one Perfect has endured as an advertising staple and karaoke classic, a sort of I Will Survive for people who prefer shadowy jazz clubs to neon-soaked discos. There was also a hit album, The First Of A Million Kisses, which sold in gigantic amounts and serves as their epitaph as the band split, amid much bad feeling between Reader and songwriter Mark Nevin, in 1989. "I think it must be hard for people to work with me who want to be seen as the puppet-master," she says with a bitterness that seems freshly minted rather than almost 14 years old.

Since the split, she has been a solo artist and despite winning a Brit Award for Best Female Artist in 1995, her five albums have been more artistically rewarding than commercially successful. Cut adrift from Nevin, she has been somewhat becalmed, and the financial struggle of making albums sours the whole process for her. She is toying with other career options - revisiting acting (she appeared in a terrific stage production of The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, and on telly in John Byrne's Your Cheatin' Heart) or working with singers at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. However, I think she should consider some kind of writing as, despite her protestations, she is hugely articulate and a great storyteller.

Right now, she is telling me about Robert Burns, her current obsession. This Friday, the eve of Burns Night, Reader will perform a selection of his songs at the Royal Concert Hall. To make this work, she has teamed up with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and a carefully chosen band of musicians she admires and trusts; it's a serious Burns unit.

"What I have been feeling for Burns has been like a haunting," she says. "I felt I was being guided toward tunes. They fell into my lap. The page would open and there would be Ye Jacobites By Name.

"Although I knew it from the Corries singing it, I was never attracted to it as a song. But when I sat with the piano and did it really gently, it became an anti-war song, which is really appropriate for now. One of the lines is: 'You're haunting a parent's life wi' bloody war, bloody war.' And I just think, God, that's so now: about what it's like being pawns in other people's war games."

After her last album Simple Soul, with its confessional lyrics, one might think covering Burns songs was a step back from intimate terrain. But Reader insists that words written by a man born 200 years before she was have much personal resonance. "Incredibly personal. It always has to be for me. I always get confused with those terms because I'm sure that when Patsy Cline sang I Fall To Pieces or Edith Piaf sang L'accordeoniste there was no way they weren't ripping their own hearts open."

Cline and Piaf are Reader's twin goddesses, I think partly because their early deaths allow her to romanticise their lives all the more. You get the feeling that living in 2002, the age of Pop Rivals and Geri Haliwell, does not sit well with her. "I detest the fact that I can't go to the Cimarron Ballroom in Tulsa, where Patsy Cline played in 1961, because it's been turned into a parking lot," she says, stretching out the last word with maximum disdain. "I'm romantic about stuff like that. I walk around Anderston to see if I can see anything of my own past, because I was born down there."

Reader was born in Anderston in 1959. Her father Danny was a welder, a shop steward and an Elvis nut; her mother Jean, who could sing like Doris Day, gave birth to seven children, Eddi - whose full name is Sadenia Edna Eddi Reader - being the eldest. She started singing while washing the stairs in their close, belting out Are You Lonesome Tonight and Crying In The Chapel, encouraged by the odd penny the neighbours would chuck her way. Now, whenever she's thinking of buying a new house, she sings in it, always listening out for that tenement echo.

When Reader was 14, the family moved to a new housing scheme in Irvine. "We were the Glasgow scum, the overspill," she recalls. "Ayrshire was as foreign to me as LA or Las Vegas. In fact, I'd probably have felt more comfortable in those places." At Bellarmine Secondary she picked up on an air of aggression and claims to have defused any potentially violent confrontations by pulling out a guitar and singing Long Haired Lover From Liverpool.

Singing in pubs from the age of 15, she developed a taste, nay, a need for public performance which has never left her. "When it goes well, there's nothing else happening in the world except that moment. There's no history, there's no future, it's just there. I suppose that's a purpose I've discovered. It feels like my purpose to get myself into that state as many times as I can before I die."

After a period performing at folk clubs, travelling with a circus troupe, busking around Europe (the wineheads of St Michel told her which Paris restaurants offered the best deals) and finally providing backing vocals on tour with The Gang Of Four and Eurythmics, Reader met Mark Nevin and formed Fairground Attraction. They played cabaret- style gigs in the back rooms of pubs, performing between sets by alternative comedians including the then unknown Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.

Then just as Fairground Attraction seemed to be going places, Reader learned she was pregnant with her first son, Charlie. "Yeah, it was just when we were recording the album, and I did the pregnancy test. We were finishing the album and it was our last dinner and I looked at my boyfriend Milou and sort of went, 'It's positive!'" She mouths these last two words rather than saying them out loud. "We didn't tell anybody and we were really scared. I phoned my mother and she passed me on to my dad. Everybody was a bit upset because I was this big wanderer going 'I'm gonnae do something with ma life, I'm not gonnae be stuck in Irvine on the council estate, working at the factory; I'm gonnae go travelling, I'm gonnae conquer the planet, I'm gonnae sing to everybody and everybody's gonnae love me.' Then just when we got a record deal, I got pregnant, and everybody was like 'Oooooh nooooooo!'

"But it was Charlie, and he was brilliant, and thank God for him. I reckon if I hadn't had children I'd have been off on endless relationships, endless problems, maybe indulging in too many chemicals or drinking too much. I'd just have been a bit of a hedonist, I think, and I wouldn't have quit until my body had run out."

It is often written that Reader becoming a mother meant the premature end of Fairground Attraction, but in fact that seems to have been only one factor in her clash with Nevin. "I rely so much on the spontaneous and instinctive," she says. "I would tend to get up and go 'I wanna do this today' and I'd get into a row for deciding what song to sing next, or I'd get into a row for liking a song; I'd get into a row for wanting to write, I'd get into a row for having my boyfriend with me, I'd get into a row for getting pregnant, I'd get into a row for wearing the wrong clothes.

"All that stuff I never got into a row for prior to getting a record deal, so it seemed to me that it all worked until we got successful, and then Mark was trying to be seen as operating me from behind. Not only was it insulting to my intelligence, it was disrespectful."

She has always loathed the idea of sex being used to promote female singers. That's why, when Fairground Attraction were at their height, she hid herself behind oversized glasses and flamboyant frocks. She has always felt asexual, completely ungendered. "It's important to understand that not every singer wants to be a dolly bird," she says. "We do actually want to communicate something." Recently, she has been watching Pop Rivals, and was dismayed to see one of Girls Aloud looking "completely uncomfortable with trying to be sexy".

How would she have coped on that show? "With me as a 17-year-old, I would have gone there and sung my socks off. I would probably have wowed them with my vocal dexterity, with my four octaves, with my I- can-sing-anything-higher-than-anybody, and I was lanky, tall, thin, although I didn't have a chest but I suppose that could have been helped. But I think I would have drawn the line at pouting at the camera and using the microphone as an imitation penis.

"It's true that sex sells but it's limited. Edith Piaf was a minger. She totally didnae wash. She knitted this black dress for her performances, and she only finished one sleeve, so when she went on stage she tried to hide her arm behind her back so it wouldn't look so bad.

"Piaf definitely picked up a couple of tricks, but like Patsy Cline, she wasn't overtly selling sex. They were selling an image of female sexuality, definitely, but that didn't seem to overtake the thing that they actually did, which was communicate by song. I'd really like to see a few more lassies do that. I'd really like it if wee lassies were able to sing without feeling that they have to turn people on."

Following the demise of Fairground Attraction, Reader married her French-Algerian boyfriend Milou Louines. They split, she entered another relationship, then they got back together and had another son, Sam, before finally parting for good. Initially by agreement, the children went to live with their father in France, but a custody battle followed, and the boys were eventually returned to Reader and raised in Battersea.

"One time, I gave them to my mother and I would see them every weekend while I was touring. I tried it for a year and found myself getting clinically depressed. I found I was dancing on tables and singing and that it was it. It was so boring."

She suffered what the media have called a 'nervous breakdown'. Reader is more precise in her language; she calls it a 'break-up' because she felt her personality fragmenting. Friends such as Alison Moyet and Jools Holland helped her get through it, as did prayer and meditation. Raised a Catholic, Reader has always been extremely spiritual.

"I'd always dipped in and out," she says. "There was a time in 1984 where I got really interested in the Madonna visitations in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. Six children were seeing a vision of what they claimed was the mother of Christ. I got really into it, started collecting stuff about it. I started praying a lot; the traditional prayers that I had learned when I was growing up.

"And then I met this Ghanaian woman called Elizabeth Edwudzie. She was married to this Nigerian ambassador and lived in New York but she gave all that up to pray and fast and meditate. I found her extremely powerful. I remember feeling worried at the time that I was losing my children, and when my marriage broke up I was very frightened. She gave me Bibles to read, and I started reading passages, using it in meditation with candles and incense."

So how would she describe her beliefs? "I have a relationship with what I think is some sort of higher intelligence. It may be my own intelligence, within the skin and bones of what I am. I know that everybody shares it; I don't think it's particular to me. I think that every single thing that's living is part of it. It's kind of pantheist."

How does it relate to her Catholicism? "Well, only in that I do believe that whoever that guy Jesus was he was probably amazing. In the same way as Gandhi was. I'm not sure what that guy was about because I wasn't there, but I reckon that he worked wonders. Christian thought in its purest form - love thy enemy, be kind to everybody, love thyself, love everybody else - I just don't see how you can go wrong with that."

Reader certainly seems to be in a better place now, both literally and figuratively, than she has for years. Her children are more independent, she is in a relationship, and seems to have found a kind of peace. "I want to settle in here," she says. "And I want to have another child before it's too late." Will she marry again? "No, no, no. It'll be in sin," she laughs. "Out of wedlock."

Her current flat is rented and she is looking to buy, the move back from London prompted by a desire to raise her current and any future children in a safer environment. "It's beginning to sink in that Glasgow is not a scary place," she says. "I had brought the kids up in London myself, so I had made it my little home. The house, the garden, the street and the neighbours were fine, but two streets away someone got murdered, somebody was shot in the head at the police station, my son was coming back with tales of people being knifed on the school bus. "I toyed with the idea of private education, but that was something which would never have been considered in my family, and then I discovered that all the bad teachers from the state schools were going to the private schools. So it just seemed like I had to come away and save them. It seemed like this was the only option."

Happily, the move back to Scotland coincides with the high-water mark Reader's obsession with Burns. "I sang My Love's Like A Red Red Rose to a bunch of 'worse for the drink' people in a bar in Glasgow one cold January night," she explains, "and I felt something happening between me and the words and the people listening, something profoundly moving. After all my travels singing songs to people, I recognised this as being a vein of emotional gold as yet unmined. I began to be spooked by him and started on a journey to find him, Robert, the guy from Ayrshire that I would have drunk with, walked with and probably got into trouble with. I wanted to show him off to everyone." There are plans to follow the Royal Concert Hall performance with an album of Burns songs, but there is still some doubt over who will finance and distribute this. "I'd like someone in Scotland to put it out," says Reader. "I'd like Scottish money to do it. The Burns Society, for example, we have to pay them 500 quid to use a picture of Burns. And I just think that when you're promoting Burns everybody should work together."

In the end, the album may be financed by the record label Rough Trade, home of The Strokes, which is run by Geoff Travis, a long- time fan. "I know I've got a really big ally in Geoff. He thinks I'm Sandy Denny," says Reader, who has often been compared to the Fairport Convention singer, before adding with a gleam in her eye: "Little does he know, I'm actually Elvis Presley."u Eddi Reader plays the Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, on Friday night. The concert is part of Celtic Connections

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