The first Boo Hewerdine solo album, Ignorance, was released in 1992, followed by Baptist Hospital in 1996 and Thanksgiving in 1998, both made with Nick Drake producer John Wood, and by Anon in 2002. In between, in 1994, The Bible briefly reformed though the album they then recorded wouldn’t appear until released as Dodo at the end of the decade. That same year five songs Boo had written or co-written appeared on Eddi Reader’s Eddi Reader, triggering a parallel career with her that continues to this day. (In 2003 he produced the acclaimed Eddi Reader Sings The Songs Of Robert Burns.) Over the past decade Boo has not only regularly played and written together with Reader, but has also enjoyed composing songs for her under her instructions: “Writing for Eddi, I’m forced to write from a woman’s point of view a lot of the time. She sets me homework. One song she asked me to write, which I nearly did a version of on Harmonograph, is called ‘Forgive The Boy’ – she said, ‘I’m a single mother and I’ve got two teenage sons and I want you to write a song about how women should sometimes forgive the way that men behave’. I like doing that.”

For many years Boo had been writing with and for other artists – in 1989 he released a whole album, Evidence, in collaboration with the American country singer Darden Smith – but towards the end of the Nineties he also began to write songs for and with pop artists, something he considers a complete separate endeavour. “I don’t think of myself in that world at all,” he explains. “It’s just I quite enjoy the Brill Building aspect. I enjoy it because it’s not what I do.” Amongst the many artists he has written for in this way are Natalie Imbruglia, Mel C and Alex Parks.

Meanwhile, other songs had their own adventures. Baptist Hospital’s “Last Cigarette”, for instance, was covered by k d lang (as “My Last Cigarette”) on her smoking-themed album Drag. And in 2004 Boo was asked to re-record Thanksgiving’s “Bell, Book And Candle” for a climactic, award-winning death scene on the TV soap Emmerdale.