The thing is, Eddi Reader admits, this is all as much a surprise to her as it is to everyone else. It’s been more than 30 years after all. Three and a half decades, in fact, since Fairground Attraction, the band that made her famous, burned brightly but briefly before flickering out, were last onstage together.

For a moment at the end of the 1980s the four-piece that featured Reader, songwriter Mark Nevin, drummer Roy Dodds and guitarron player Simon Edwards were huge; racking up a platinum-selling album in The First of a Million Kisses, a number one single with the ubiquitous Perfect and two Brit awards. Then they fell out and went their separate ways.

Reader eventually returned to Glasgow to live. Nevin started working with Kirsty McColl and Morrissey.

“I haven’t seen Mark for nearly 35 years,” Reader admits. Here’s where the story ends.

Or it was. But now they are back together again with a new album, Beautiful Happening, an upcoming UK tour and a sense of completing unfinished business.

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This is a story about time. How it passes, how it changes people, how, maybe, it heals. And it’s a story that needed theatre and Covid to bring about.

First thing on a Thursday morning Reader is telling me that story. She’s at home in Glasgow talking about the past and the present, the person she was and the person she is.

Last year Reader was in London, performing in the West End in the musical adaptation of Brokeback Mountain. She hadn’t lived in the city since 2001.

“The whole play really affected me,” Reader admits. “It was about regret and passion and wishing you could repair things.”

Coincidentally, she heard that Fairground Attraction’s drummer Dodds was in hospital with Covid. “I think it hit him really badly,” Reader says. The news opened up a door long closed.

"I just had a sense of life disappearing and me not wanting to get through this life without paying my respects to the band and what they gave me. Also, if one of us wasn’t here that would be gone forever.”

So, she reached out to Nevin and from that everything followed. They met, Reader spent time with Nevin’s family, and they began to talk.

Although they’ve never really washed their dirty linen in public it seems fair to say that the first incarnation of Fairground Attraction did not end well. So I have to ask, Eddi, what was that first conversation with Nevin after all those years like?

The new album is out nowThe new album is out now (Image: free)“Well, the first conversation with Mark was, ‘Roy is in trouble. I think we need to go and see him in hospital.’”

“And I just loved being in his company,” she says of Nevin. “He made me laugh. He analysed things about us and the past. Some of the theories were a bit far-fetched, but it was OK to hear him. It’s nice to hear somebody had thought about it.

“Roy, we found out, recovered quite quickly and we all decided to meet. We had this year of socialising in a nice way. Everyone seems to have stopped drinking.”

Coincidentally, Reader had been approached to play a couple of gigs in Japan. She suggested the four of them could go and play the gigs as Fairground Attraction.

The Japanese promoters were understandably delighted.

A Fairground Attraction EP was suggested. Instead, a whole album was recorded. Actually “17 songs in a week,” Reader points out.

There’s still a sense of unreality about the whole thing. And maybe some repair.

“There’s a distance between us that’s not just about time,” Reader suggests. “Psychologically we’re different and I think me coming up and chapping their door and saying, ‘Do you fancy doing this?’ I think they all had the same idea that we would heal an old relationship.

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“And there were some exciting new songs. I really like Learning to Swim and Beautiful Happening.”

Maybe it helps that Reader feels comfortable in her own skin these days. Knows that she has built her own musical career in the years since Fairground Attraction fell apart. That has allowed her to cede control to Nevin.

“I just left it to him. I said, ‘Well, look Mark you run with it. It’s my gift to you.’

“He has lots of great ideas, but maybe in the past those control issues would have killed us, whereas now the attitude from me is, ‘Let’s see if it can fly and do something that satisfies us all.’

“So, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy being this human being who gets to sing some of those First of a Million songs. I’ve been doing that anyway, but doing it with them will be kind of authentic for me.

“I’m excited. It feels like it’s new.”

There does seem to have been some joy in the process too. “Someone told me the most miraculous things happen when you cure an old grievance. If you find your way to pouring love over something that used to be full of anger and upset then you get all this benefit out of it and I’m feeling that.”

That said, she adds, “some part of me thinks that they still see me as a 27-year-old scatterbrained idjit. There’s a bit of mansplaining sometimes.”

Who was that young woman back then, Eddi?

“I was kind of buoyant. I think a lot of people thought I was insane, people who were organised and straighter if you like. I was smoking and drinking. I was up all night. I was encouraging sessions. I think that’s how Jools Holland ended up being such good pals because he loved that too.”

Fairground Attraction: Picture: Genevieve StevensonFairground Attraction: Picture: Genevieve Stevenson (Image: free)Reader was already successful, singing backing vocals for Alison Moyet, The Eurythmics, The Waterboys and The Gang of Four. What she needed was a songwriter because she didn’t really have the confidence in her own songs. (That would come).

“When Mark played me what he had been working on I was just blown away,” she admits. They began playing in pubs and clubs and Reader’s contacts gave them an in with the record companies.

When they came to sign Reader had a clear idea of how she wanted the band to be seen. “I was adamant that we wouldn’t be selling ourselves as the big frontwoman lying on a bed in lingerie,” she says, laughing.

“There was a kind of bidding war. I’ll actually tell you the truth. I really wanted to go and sort out things with my errant French boyfriend who had quite a few girlfriends. And when I was away on tour those girlfriends stepped into my place. And I discovered it. So I was going over to sort him out, show him all my tears and see if he would bend to my will. I said to Mark, ‘Here you take the demos. I can’t be arsed with it.’”

He did and soon there was a record deal and a number one album on the horizon.

“And, of course, I got pregnant and we had just done the album. I know that put a bit of a spanner in the works for them for playing all over the world.”

Fairground’s Attraction’s time together was hugely successful. They won two Brits in the infamously chaotic show fronted by Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood. When Phil Collins and Julian Lennon announced the band had won the Best Single award Fairground Attraction were nowhere to be seen.

What was going on, Eddi? “ I was backstage drinking as much of the free champagne as possible. Somebody shouted, ‘You’re onstage now.’ ‘What? Mark is over the other side of the room.’

"I didn’t meet Sam Fox or Mick Fleetwood. I would have loved to have met Mick because I loved Rumours. I was just backstage with all the chaos. It wasn’t really chaos, it was just a big party.”

The Fairground Attractions party itself was short-lived. The band were finished by 1990

Time passes. Time heals. Here we are 35 years later and Reader is about to go on a UK tour with Fairground Attraction. Everyone is asking them about why they split up in the first place. The more interesting question might be did they talk about the split themselves or did it now feel irrelevant?

“It had to be irrelevant. As much as there were questions unanswered, it had to be irrelevant. Sometimes with grievance you have to say that was the past and it doesn’t exist anymore. “The miracle for me is that Mark has already written a song called Miracles Start in The Heart. It’s almost like the universe is saying, ‘Eddi, forget the past, go and love those people again.

“This isn’t about high ambition or pop stardom, this is about friendships being nurtured.”

That’s a good place to end. Or begin.

Fairground Attraction's new album Beautiful Happening is out now. The band play Perth Concert Hall on October 14, Music Hall, Aberdeen, October 16, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, October 17 and Usher Hall, Edinburgh, October 18