Michael Marra Arrest This Moment serial starts today.

The start of an exclusive four-part Courier serialisation of the first biography on Dundee’s famous son, by celebrated Scottish writer James Robertson

Michael and I spent a lot of hours sitting on either side of the kitchen table, talking. He could make a cup of black coffee last a very long time. I wish now I could remember all the things he told me across that table. I can’t but I do remember a lot.

During the summer of 2016, I worked my way through a box of photographs, theatre programmes, scrapbooks and other miscellanea amassed by his wife Peggy, as I tried to find a way into telling Michael’s story.

I had been trying for a while. To begin at the beginning and follow a chronological line from there might have been the obvious route but it didn’t seem to fit with the kind of man he was. “Obvious” isn’t the first word that comes to mind to describe Michael. Clear, coherent, audible, unmistakable, distinctive – all of those, yes. But Michael Marra, obvious? I don’t think so.

So I began to wonder how he would do it. Where would he start, if it was down to him to make sense of that accumulation of memories?

Possibly by saying it was not a project that interested him, that he had better, more important things to do with his time than tell his own story. Then I might reply “But it’s not your time, Michael, it’s mine”.

And he would stop and consider that. Thinking of it as somebody else’s project, he would want to make some observations, even offer some help. Because he was that kind of man: considering, considerate, thoughtful, observant, helpful. He would want the thing to work, for the other person.

I was also, for reasons largely beyond my control, way behind schedule. Michael would have understood. Running late? He could easily have advised slowing down, or even stopping and going back a few stages. He had a good appreciation of effort and attention to detail. He understood that some jobs take more time than you thought was available. “The apple will fall when the tree is ready”, he said once, when asked when the next album was coming out.

He always wanted to get things right. More than once he told me: “If it’s easy, it’s probably not worth doing.” Which is a sentence containing reassurance and discouragement in equal measure: the sort of formula Dundonians pride themselves on. And Michael, to the marrow, was a Dundonian.

The writer and journalist Neal Ascherson likes to quote the following dark joke: “I hit bottom. But then I heard somebody tapping underneath.”

Ascherson declares this to be a Polish saying but I can’t help thinking how Dundee it is. Maybe it was exported a few centuries ago, when the Scots were migrating to Poland in great numbers, as soldiers, merchants and craftsmen. And maybe, like a homing pigeon, the joke found its way back again.

Michael said in an interview: “For any artist, Dundee is just the perfect place to look at the rest of the world. Charles Mingus had a book called Beneath the Underdog. I always thought they should put that under Dundee on the sign outside the city.”

I remembered how he came to write the song Muggie Sha. It was inspired by photographs from a book circulated by the Dundee police round the city’s pubs in Edwardian times. Michael had got hold of copies of some of the pages of this book.

On each page were two photographs, one facing the camera, one in profile, of an individual barred from all of Dundee’s pubs. These were folk who were down on their luck. They were troubled and troublesome people and in terms of social strata they were some distance below the meanest underdog.

And Michael admired them – especially the women – and he admired their achievement in earning themselves a city-wide drinking ban. I could hear his voice: “I wanted to celebrate these magnificent women.”

Which he did. From their point of view. And what did he have them say? “Eh’m no as bad as Muggie Sha’.” Who but you, Michael, could have homed in on that place of intense, black-humoured empathy?

So already I found I was talking to him and he was talking to me and not for the first time since he left us. When he was alive, the prelude to such a conversation would be a phone call.

“Hello, James?” The unmistakable gravel of his voice. “It’s Michael.” As if it could be anybody else. “Are you working?” (He expected you to be.) “Do you have time for a chat? Good. I’ll come round.” By the time I’d made the coffee, round he would have come.

And we would go from there.