A quick tally of the highs would include playing inside the Scottish Parliament, the first gig ever held inside the institution. Performing on London’s Millennium Wheel – alongside Damon Albarn and the Royal Shakespeare Company – as part of Flight 5065, to raise awareness of fair trade issues pertaining to Africa. Having an unreleased song used prominently on the soundtrack to teen-spy flick Stormbreaker. Touring theatres in his native Scotland, re-orchestrating his 3-album-deep back catalogue with some of the country’s finest Celtic and classical musicians (With Strings Attached). Co-writing a treatment for a Badly Drawn Boy video (the one with the piano in the car). Soundtracking the adventures of some Beach Boys-esque penguins in the Hollywood film Surf’s Up. Hanging out with Tony Benn and asking the political legend and great socialist battler for peace to flex his inner rock-vocalist…

A quick tally of his recording output so far confirms MacIntyre, under the MHS pseudonym, has released & toured worldwide 3 critically acclaimed albums: Loss (2001), Us (2003) & This Is Hope (2004), and he has achieved 4 UK Top 40 Chart hits and 2 Top 20 UK Chart albums. Colin has also been named Scotland’s Top Creative Talent at the Glenfiddoch Spirit Of Scotland Awards.

Another high? That could be the decision to revert to his own name after 6 years writing, performing and recording under the MHS appellation. Even when he had a ‘band’ name, MacIntyre did everything himself anyway. Coming out as Colin was just a simple realigning of the stars and does not reflect any creative changes for Colin. “Now the actual MHS can have their name back” says MacIntyre. They could get back to organising informative walks around the titular island off the west coast of Scotland – whence MacIntyre hails – without fear of being asked if they were the same MHS who wrote pithy, punchy, soaring, heartfelt, narratively-deft songs about people, places, society and the inhabitants of Tobermory Zoo.

‘The first album was nearly released under my name,’ says MacIntyre, ‘but I’d already written the song Mull Historical Society, and I wanted something to hide behind.’ Maybe this is what comes of growing up on an island where the 2000 inhabitants are outnumbered by livestock and no traffic lights prevail. ‘But I don’t really need to hide any more,’ he adds.

And the struggles? They might be the journey, and the lows along the way, to make his 4th album, set up his own record label – Future Gods Recordings – find investors for said label and, Christ-on-a-laptop, write 3 novels.

‘At times it was frustrating,’ the singer/songwriter/one-man-band admits. ‘I was thinking: will this album ever be finished? I got as close as I ever felt to being a 192 operator again! But there was something great about that as well – it made me feel that this was almost like my first album again. This album has been a journey. At times I thought I was going to fall over trying to pull it all together, with what I had in my head. I wondered if it could happen. But it has been realised.”

Actually, scratch that: those lows were actually highs too. The effort was mighty but the rewards are mightier still: The Water is a great, uplifting, positive album, a torrent of bold ideas, mighty tunes and big fat guitar riffs. It oozes with venom at the vacuity of the media-driven, war warmongering Britain of today.

Even the Tobermory schoolgirls’ choir (on Pay Attention To The Human) are wearing ten league boots. Crucially, these beautifully honed songs – once again seeing MacIntyre play the majority of the album’s instrumentation – from the rollicking satire, Andy Warhol-referencing, and infectious biting pop nugget Famous For Being Famous and the ‘supermodel pop’ of opener You’re A Star, sneering ‘TV hosts write their own epitaphs’, to the zither-led, harmonium-spun and achingly voiced title track, via the suitably deranged, slashing rock’n’roll of first single/E.P., Stalker, and the Celtic melancholy of I Have Been Burned – are also beautifully homespun. Which is what comes of working in intimate recording environments over an 18-month period in West Sussex, Glasgow & London. ‘The Water’ represents MacIntyre’s most remarkable and fully realised album to date.

For his 4th album MacIntyre worked with a producer for the first time: Nick Franglen of Lemon Jelly. “It was always a great creative join between us.” MacIntyre used to do all the production himself, and the sleeve design. But this time he’s ‘out-sourced’ the latter too, to a fansite member and accomplished graphic artist Jo Burton; she sent him her alternative cover designs for his first release, 2000’s epic NME single of the year, Barcode Bypass. The results are a striking two-tone look, which draws on art-nouveau and such visual inspirations as Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’.

Working with Franglen, he says, was ‘like jumping off a creativity cliff, a leap of faith’. But it helped everything become ‘more defined… Everything’s been captured – vocally, performance, instrumentation. I don’t think I’ve been through that process before.”

More prosaically, I had a ‘nice big Les Paul, which I’d never played before, and Nick’s bag of tricks for me to explore’. Suitably inspired MacIntyre re-recorded the guitar parts on the versions of the new songs he’d been working on in the months leading up to he and Franglen’s collaboration. ‘I think it gave my sound a bit more balls, a bit more rock.’

The beginning of he and Franglen’s working relationship coincided with MacIntyre finally securing financing for his own label. His post-major label aspirations finally had lift-off. ‘The timing was just kinda magical,’ he notes, adding that things have recently got more magical still: always possessed of a devoted international fanbase, he’s had licensing queries from labels around the world, keen to ripple out The Water in their ‘territories’. Major label BMG have just secured MacIntyre for their Japanese division.

Partly as a result, MacIntyre found his creativity bursting out all over the place. He’d already written 3 unpublished novels, and during the making of The Water – literally, while he was in the studio – he wrote a 4th. ‘This thing just poured out of me, I became possessed with telling the story’ he says. Notes To An Unborn Child is about a man who believes he’s 62 and after years of living in London, goes back to the small Scottish island he comes from, “and he uncovers secrets from his past.” It has been a revelatory experience learning to find my voice on a page.” (MacIntyre’s website has a bookclub, to which both he and his fanbase contribute).

MacIntyre has also made another album this year, an acoustic set recorded in a 2-week burst in the An Tobar arts centre back home on Mull. MacIntyre wrote the songs during a 6-week summer stay in New York, just him and a toy acoustic guitar. The songs were then recorded including cello and pedal steel accompaniment. It could be the 2nd release on his label, and 2 of these acoustic versions appear on the 4-track Stalker E.P., now available for download. “I feel that my creativity has really gained power from working to a more striped-back format. It’s been a fulfilling year.”

But before all that… In terms of his ‘day job’ and The Water, all of this creative energy led to an emboldened MacIntyre reaching deep inside his personal well of soulfulness, as well as up to the stars.

Be My Saviour, with an ‘unsettling narrative’ about two people stuck in a web’, drives along at a furious pace, but not just headlessly: the song’s ‘ebb and flow’ was secured by ‘mechanical table tennis players, which were sampled in the studio’. The pell-mell but time signature-tricksy Stalker, ‘is ‘about anything from ID cards to kids filming each other on mobile phones, and technology’s affect on our personal space, and ownership of your own personal information.’ In it MacIntyre cuts a sinister persona.

A stand-out is the title track. ‘I’m really pleased with my vocal performance. It was a definite turning point.’ The vocals were recorded in Franglen’s toilet, after MacIntyre realised the sonics were perfect. ‘The song really moved me. It’s in three-time, which sounds and feels weird, unsettling. It felt almost like a sea-shanty. I used a cheese grater and car keys and cardboard boxes for percussion. It felt like a song that had come from somewhere else, maybe from a campfire with all sorts of people joining in.’ There is also an appearance from Glasgow Philharmonic Male Voice Choir.

Finally, closing number Pay Attention To The Human is an impassioned plea for peace, warning against the ‘death of a nation’. (The sleeve notes for the album include the quote ‘There never was a good war or a bad peace’ by Benjamin Franklin from 11th Sept 1783). The track features the contribution from Tony Benn. MacIntyre emailed the veteran politician’s publisher; would Mr Benn like to appear on an album? The next day Benn’s distinctively gritty voice was on the phone.

MacIntyre asked him for his thoughts on the proposition: ‘what does pay attention to the human mean to you?’

A week later, Benn emailed a poem. MacIntyre went to his west London house and recorded him. ‘I have gone from being a fan – I read Tony Benn’s diaries when I was a political student in Glasgow – and to now find myself appearing in his new volume (More Time For Politics, Diaries 2001-2007) is a great honor, and slightly surreal.” Says MacIntyre, who once penned his own poem about the great man when a student.

‘We have the power to end the world,’ intones Benn over the album’s runout grooves, ‘we have the power to save the world/the choice is ours: it is a moral choice/to work together in both peace and love/we must break free and be ourselves/there lies the hope for all the human race.’

A fitting close to The Water, an inventive and warm and human collection of songs, a powerfully positive and celebratory album.

“It feels a bit to me now like I felt before my first album ‘Loss’ came out – you just need the world to hear it,” comments MacIntyre.

This album sees MacIntyre put himself centre stage, and he seems all the better for it. A reinvigorated piece, his most accomplished yet, keen to put the world to rights without forgetting its roots, “The Water” is refreshingly cool and deep.