Harper – King of the Beach End when he was mobile, an 
enthusiastic proponent of blunt speaking now that he isn’t – highlights their lack of a relationship: “It’s my belief Willie doesn’t have a friend in the world. He walks about the town like a lone soul.

“When he was a team-mate I’d have run over broken glass for him, but I wouldn’t have gone for a drink with him at night. I think that’s the best way to sum it up. We’ll never be friends. We speak, we say hello, but he’d never stop and have a five-minute conversation with me, and, to be fair, neither would I.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been standing in the wee reception area at Pittodrie, talking to the girls, and he’ll go straight past me and up the stairs. That doesn’t bother me, though. In many respects, I feel the same about Willie as I do about Fergie. The fact is I couldn’t give a s*** about either of them.”

It’s five years ago this month that Joe Harper began to think with such singularity. At the time, he’d suffered a stroke at an after-dinner speaking engagement in Fife. A few days later, his two daughters, Laura and Joanna, and former wife Fiona, visited him in hospital. Just then, his son Ross 
telephoned him from France. The nurse asked Harper if she should bring the phone to his bed.

The response was typical. No, he would rise and travel by zimmer frame. When he reached the phone after an epic struggle, he heard his son crying. So he began crying, and the girls joined in. Right then, Harper made a conscious decision to take a grip of a situation that was spiralling out of emotional control. That stroke perhaps made him the man he is today. An unrepentant man.

We shall return to his acidic 
association with Sir Alex Ferguson
much later. Right now, at our meeting in an Aberdeen hotel, the past makes way for the present: football is replete with absurdities and anomalies, and Aberdeen FC apparently have a share of the freehold on these. At this troubled club, still forlornly attempting to escape the shadow of Ferguson, Miller (558 appearances) is the Director
of Football and paid £160,000 a year for that honour, while Harper (205 goals) is a match-day host and remunerated in comparative buttons to entertain the punters.

“Meeters and greeters” are a reluctant breed when talking on the record about club matters, especially the deficiencies of their paymasters. Harper is the exception. Just over two weeks ago he described the Aberdeen players as “bottlers” for their abject surrender to Dundee in the Co-Operative Insurance Cup, and despatched arrows towards chairman Stewart Milne and Miller. Those arrows were not autographed by Cupid.

I suggest that the club might have pointed him towards the exit door for what might have been interpreted as an excessive outburst, but then remember this is the wee tough guy from Greenock whose prison cells were always empty. Was he intimidated by Neanderthal centre-halves? Was he ever! He’d slap their testicles, stand on toes and break noses if the mood took him.

While I’m considering the tricks of this violent trade, his pugnacity re-emerges. “It wouldn’t have been a very clever thing for them to do, would it? Can you imagine what they would have done in the paper? ‘Aberdeen legend gets sacked for saying his piece.’ Not, mind, that it would worry me. I mean, they don’t pay me enough to worry about that sort of thing. I know I could go somewhere else on a Saturday that would pay me a lot more. And that’s with a Highland League club!

“I don’t do it for the money, though. I do it because I like Aberdeen. I love entertaining people in my lounge. I was always wanting to score goals and entertain. I know a lot of times I wisnae the best player. For instance, Davie Robb worked his socks off many times and probably deserved the bonus more than I did. But I would be the one who’d stick it in the net with a minute to go to get us that bonus.”

Certainly, entertainment was forever Harper’s forte. Still is. A small boy recently told him his hero was Darren Mackie. Harper replied that it was right to have heroes. “Are you as good as Darren Mackie?” the lad asked. “I think so, son,” teased Joey, “but you’ve got to remember I’m 61!’”

We’re back with his evangelistic streak: “That’s where you get this hero status from, and I’ve carried that on all my life, even when football gave up on me and I gave up on football. I’ve always spoken to people. When sitting in restaurants, I’ve put my fork and knife down and signed autographs, given them five or 10 minutes of my time and left them happy. There are other people in this game, and you probably know who I’m talking about, who are the exact opposite. They can’t be bothered.”

Is this, you wonder, a reference to Miller? Harper responds with silence and a non-committal smile. But it’s a warm smile, unlike the one captured the other week when a showdown meeting between the men was scrambled at Pittodrie. The meeting was expertly monitored by the local paper, the Evening Express, for which they are both columnists, but was seen by more objective elements as an attempt to mollify Harper before he crucified the club and its panjandrum any further. As if…

In the event, these heroes in red posed almost nose to nose for the photographer. This stunted act of accord was significantly absent a year previously at a fans’ forum organised by the same newspaper. Friction erupted between the two when Harper asked , fairly logically, if Miller should not start knocking on the doors of oil company executives in order to bring in some much-needed revenue to an impoverished club.

With Miller claiming it wasn’t his job to chap doors, this led to a tense exchange of semantics. The event was filmed and fed to YouTube. What viewers didn’t see was the aftermath when their confrontation allegedly became almost too silly for semantics. Harper rejoins the story.

“Willie said: ‘Why don’t you tell the fans about the time you stole the sand lorry?’ In fact, we [Harper, Ernie McGarr and Derek Mackay] didn’t steal it but commandeered it while we were bladdered. We ended up throwing a bit of sand over cars. Details were in my autobiography* last year. I said to him: ‘What’s that got to do with it?’”

In spite of this latest meeting, at which Miller reportedly showed signs of humility, the men are scarcely scheduling an exchange of Christmas cards. Harper’s questions remain unanswered: why was Mark McGhee brought in only to find his inheritance was tantamount to managerial pauperdom? Why were hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on the severance money for Jimmy Calderwood and co when it could have bought three or four good quality players? Why was Calderwood sacked at that juncture?

Maybe even more ­personally: how do Miller and those other highly paid subordinates of ­chairman Milne spend their days as the club totters from one fiasco to another? And when is the feel-good factor destined to return? Many club watchers are of the belief that Harper could be applying for his state pension before any answers are forthcoming.

“Listen, when we did that forum I wasn’t wanting to crucify Willie Miller. I was simply wanting answers. And one of the questions that had to be answered was ‘why doesn’t he go out and knock people’s doors?’ With respect, I would want Willie Miller the legend at my door, not a sales girl. So what does he do for 160 grand a year? Hey, he got a £100,000 bonus for the year they got to the last 32 of Europe and to two semi-finals. Now I don’t even class that as success.

“In fairness, I’ve always been the good cop in the newspaper, with Stewart McKimmie the bad one. But, to be honest, after the Dundee game I just couldn’t f****** put up with it any more. I just says to myself: ‘That’s it. I’d better have a go at these people and see if we get any reaction’.”

That reaction was a 0-0 draw at Rangers and then a 1-1 draw at Kilmarnock. But the festering sores will be paraded inside ­Pittodrie on Saturday, whether or not they are evident to the eye. As the club prepares to entertain Hearts, just imagine the factors involved. You can imagine directorial anger at Harper still lingering, and some players still sulking at one of their own turning on them so viscerally.

The fans, meanwhile, who won’t be party to this fascinating subtext, will doubtless be stumping up their 20 sovs to witness the kind of inexactitudes they could watch on local council playing fields.

Harper? You cannot imagine his beauty sleep will be in any way compromised by the thought of impending confrontation. “I don’t think any of the players would come up and abuse me. I don’t think any of them are brave enough. Obviously, my saying that they’re bottlers has got to them, but if that gets them doing what they did against Rangers, well… But, hey, don’t let anyone kid you on: the Rangers game was s****! Aberdeen were s****! They could still have got beaten four or five nil. All it did was cover the cracks.”

Now that he has recovered from his illness, Harper seems partially free of fissures, too. Fighting an on-going battle with his weight and also the fact that football has rendered his knees obsolete where strenuous exercise is concerned, he performs 150 sit-ups in the 
morning and another 150 in the evening. He swims, plays golf if he can find a buggy, drinks sparingly and shares a wonderful ­relationship with his second wife, Sheila. But, crucially, he is holding on to life. That life, he tells us with a smile, is Fergie-free. He and Ferguson became enemies almost as soon as the latter joined Aberdeen as manager in 1978. Harper believes jealousy was a contributory factor: the pair first met as players on a Scotland world tour, when the 17-year-old scored 10 goals in three games and had the media forgetting Fergie in order to salivate over his replacement.

Harper was not impressed with Ferguson’s playing ability. “He was all about wee steps and elbows. He didn’t have any skill. When he came to Pittodrie I’d scored 31 goals and 33 goals in those last two seasons, and yet he still kept saying to me: ‘You’ll no’ be here next season.’ He was desperate to get rid of me. As I says to him: ‘Listen, I didnae call myself The King. That was the fans.’ So when I see him now, I just ignore him. I have no interest in him and don’t care what he does with his life.

“Great football manager, yeah, but he’s not moved on as a person. He puts on a good show, like he comes up to Govan and does the Boys’ Brigade thing. But I do that every day of my life in Aberdeen. Things for charity, things for sick children. I’m starting a race tomorrow morning in aid of a heart foundation. Our great manager Eddie Turnbull brought us up that way when we were young guys. He insisted we always appreciate others.

“I often think of the kids in children’s hospitals who are probably going to die and did die on us. Bobby Clark, Davie Robb, Drew Jarvie and myself always went in on our way home and gave them programmes from the Saturday.

“There was this girl who was paralysed. The best way to put it was she was in one of those steam machines, with just her neck and head that showed. We bombarded her with scarves and programmes. One day she says: ‘Sorry, but I’ve got to tell you something… I’m no’ interested in fitba!’ So we asked her what she was interested in and she told us she loved Elvis Presley. We went away round the town and bought up everything concerning Elvis so that she could just look at her hero. That lassie died.”

Harper’s eyes are noticeably wet. “Then there was this young boy who appeared fine every time we went to see him. He was always cheery and a real Aberdeen fan. Then, one day we went in and he wasn’t there. One of the nurses said he was away home. ‘That’s great,’ we chorused. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘he’s away home to die.’ A fortnight later we got a letter from his mum and dad just thanking us. I mean, thanking us. What had it cost us? Half an hour of our time, that’s all.”

The “laundromat” must close. The 61-year-old who’s unafraid to wash dirty linen in public is leaving to prepare for his weekly radio show. Up Front with Joe Harper, as ever, promises to be a listening experience.

Joey Harper’s autobiography, King Joey: Up Front And Personal, is in all good bookshops.

Listen, when we did that forum I wasn’t wanting to crucify Willie Miller. I was simply wanting answers