It’s stuffed full of instruments and recording equipment, old and new but mainly old: vintage gear hoovered up by the former Orange Juice frontman over the years, firstly via myriad contacts forged over almost five decades in the music industry and more latterly via eBay.
“It’s not about the money,” says Maxwell, 66, as we talk in the residential studio’s adjacent accommodation, 110 steps up the hill from the couple’s home at the bottom of the field, a sturdy stone cottage that’s been in Collins’s family for generations.
“Back when the words came easily/ I had the answer to everything/ Revelling in a smart aleck comeback,” sings Collins in that distinctive voice familiar the world over from his 1995 global smash “A Girl Like You”, a jukebox, airplay and film/TV staple that has made him financially comfortable to this day.
Twenty years ago this week, at home in Kilburn, with Antiques Roadshow on the telly and a pan of potatoes boiling on the cooker, Edwyn Collins suffered a cerebral haemorrhage.
And beyond the town’s thin, built-up strip, the North Sea: another kind of sparkler on this sunny day, its horizon marked by the whirring sentries of the Moray windfarms, their turbines turning and glinting 14 miles offshore.
