Marti Pellow is packing up his panto baddie outfit and heading out on tour

MARTI Pellow found worldwide fame with Wet Wet Wet and followed it up with a successful career in musical theatre but he’s never forgotten his roots.

Pellow, 51, says he still regularly visits Clydebank despite the deaths of his mother and father and was back in Glasgow to star as Abanazar in panto, having earned rave reviews for the same role in Birmingham, the previous Christmas.

“I came up early and went over because the ABC cinema is being pulled down. I wanted to see its innards. It’s Art Deco, which I love. I needed to see the heart of it. I watched The Three Stooges and Flash Gordon there and later I watched A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand. I spent so much time there. It was great escapism and I loved seeing this starry world,” he says.

But he's off on his travels again in March with a tour that takes in York and Gateshead, supporting the release of a new album.

Pellow’s journey has been incredible. He was selected by his Clydebank schoolmates to form a band because he looked right and was cheeky. Then they realised he could sing more than the pants off a song. But he wasn’t the confident boy the band members thought he was and he became addicted to heroin.Truth was he lacked self-belief.

Was this why he would often shy away from interviews, even having drummer Tommy Cunningham pretended to be him for US radio? “I’m a singer-songwriter. I’m a writer. All writers have that built-in insecurity,” he says.

He was never content. Always looking around. Never quite of any one plan, any one place. One minute he’d buy a mansion in Helensburgh (in the Argyll and Bute area, the next he was off to New York.

“That’s the thing about fame. Once the gates open you’re holding on for dear life, and then at times you think: ‘Helensburgh. Ice-cream.’”

He’s never been the complete pop star, that’s for sure. Which is why the former apprentice painter and decorator slept in the servants’ quarters and painted his Helensburgh home himself. “I still do that sort of stuff,” he says. “There were boys doing a job for me recently and I was at the window, and I wasn’t sure if they were doing it right so I got in among it. That’s because my family were in the building trade. I love working out what makes things work. I love doing practical puzzle solving.”

Family was a central pillar of his life, but following the deaths of his mother Margaret, father John and brother John Pellow now has no immediate family.

“Yes, but I remember all the good stuff. I was super close to my mum, and my father, and we really grew into each other. But they are still with me. I still wear them. I can smell something and I remember them, and I flash back to journeys with them. I really miss the words ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. I miss the chance to say those words out loud. So I do it. I speak to them sometimes. I need to. Why not?”

Once, life was about Ferraris and mansions and having curries flown across to the US, but reality has dawned.

“Touring in musical theatre has opened my eyes,” he says. “You go to places like Rotherham or Hull for a week, out of the London bubble, and you realise a lot of communities are struggling.”

The man who grew up a council house appreciates Scotland is struggling. “I look at the shipyards, I look at our history. But do I want nationalism? I really don’t know. I just want what’s best for my country. I love Scotland. I carry it with me. But I’m not knowledgeable enough to peel back the layers of what they [the politicians] tell me. Yet I was scared to realise when I came back from US we were out of Europe. Wow!”

Pellow lives between leafy Berkshire and the US. “I take long leases in homes in America. I had a loft in Los Angeles recently and moved into an arts commune. There was a wee pool area and it was great because no-one knew me. I just said I was a songwriter.”

And when he played them a few songs? “It was, ‘Ah, you’ve done that before’. The songs I played them I had written with the Tower of Power horns and Quincy Jones boys, guys who wrote Boogie Wonderland.”

What about Pellow’s personal life? Is (former model) Eileen Catterson still part of it?

“I love her to bits, and she’s so supportive of the projects I work on,” he says. Will he marry her? “We are happy,” he says. “If we get married you’ll be the first to know.”

Tour dates: March 21, The Barbican, York. March 24, The Sage, Gateshead