One thing that hasn’t changed is the smile, but nowadays he flashes it with more discretion. These days, it is all short hair and professorial glasses. Pellow is wearing a paisley shirt and a pair of loose-fitting tartan slacks that could double as pyjamas. There is a vintage four-poster bed in the background and a few guitars dotted around the room. Today, Pellow is speaking from the spare bedroom of the house in Windsor he shares with his long-term partner, Eileen Catterson, a former Miss Scotland. And talk he can – Pellow is smart, informed, funny, obsessed with music and full of stories. He preferred talking about his solo albums, his performances in West End and Broadway musicals and his blessed life.

He would smile his famous smile, admit he had had a rough old time of it and hurdle the tricky stuff. But he always liked to accentuate the positive. After being outed by the tabloids in 1999, he never denied his problems. Of all the pop stars, Pellow seemed such an unlikely addict – so clean-cut, bouncy and upbeat. Sure, he rejoined in 2003, and they spent another 14 years together, but they never enjoyed the same success again. It did pretty much do for him, as far as the band was concerned. By then, he had also developed a dual addiction to alcohol and heroin that could easily have done for him. By the time he left Wet Wet Wet for the first time in 1998, three of their five studio albums had topped the UK charts (with the others peaking at No 2) and they had had 26 Top 40 hits. Pellow went on to become the frontman of Wet Wet Wet, the blue-eyed soul band whose version of Love Is All Around, as featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral, topped the charts for 15 weeks and is still the UK’s biggest-selling love song. It gave me a wee bit more confidence to ask a girl to dance it made me feel larger than life.”

“I’d ask an adult to buy me a couple of cans of lager. It made me feel light.” By the time he was 12, he would go to dances with his friends and alcohol would give him dutch courage. “I knew as soon as I had my first drink that it made me feel different,” he says. He was a young boy, about 11, and he sneaked a can of beer from his father. Marti Pellow remembers his introduction to booze clearly.

Oblivion the antipodean hammer