"Here, I’m known as Phamie’s owner, and Georgia’s dad," he says, happily. No word of being the frontman for one of the biggest Scottish bands of the late 1980s, Deacon Blue. No word of platinum discs, football stadium gigs and six million albums sold. He smiles: "I’m not famous anymore."

These days, Ross has a modest career as a singer-songwriter, though his name appears often as a writer on the recordings of others, such as Ronan Keating and James Blunt. Even at home, he is increasingly upstaged by his wife, the other distinctive voice of Deacon Blue, Lorraine McIntosh, who is now an actress in River City.

"If she was in here," he says, looking around the cafe where we’ve stopped for a cuppa. The sentence tails off and he just shakes his head. "It’s all teenagers who watch soaps. It’s unbelievable. People who haven’t been famous say it must be great, but it’s not. There are a few nice things about it."

Ross, on the other hand, doesn’t get stopped in the street anymore. "I mean occasionally you get people who know you, who are fans, but the most they’ll ever do is say something really nice and go away."

Many wouldn’t recognise him. The floppy hair of the 1980s is cropped short, the chiselled chin and cheekbones fuzzed by greying stubble. When not singing, his distinctive voice becomes gravelly and Scottish.

When Deacon Blue split in 1994, Ross, the band’s main songwriter, struck out alone only to find his solo career on the rocks when he was ditched by Sony even before his first album was released. He and Lorraine went from being A-list celebrities to being ordinary parents. Ross now has four children, Caitlin, now 17, from his first marriage, and Emer, 12, Georgia, 10, and Seamus, four, with McIntosh.

Recent Deacon Blue concerts (the band reformed in 1999 for an album and tour and have played together intermittently ever since) gave Emer and Georgia their first taste of mum and dad’s pop career. "We were tenpin bowling the other day, and Georgia said to me: ‘Dad, that’s Dignity on the PA System’. It was Real Gone Kid. They don’t know the difference between one song and another, they just know it’s one of ours!

"I don’t think they mind it. It means we’ve been around a lot for them and that’s good. It’s strangest for Seamus, who has grown up with his mum on the telly.

"Lorraine doesn’t let him see it very much. If she’s upset on the telly, he doesn’t like that - and she’s always upset, her character’s always being put through the mill!"

Ross’s fourth solo album, Pale Rider, out today, is mature and mellow. The title, with its overtones of mortality, was influenced by the death of Deacon Blue guitarist Graeme Kelling last June after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer. "That was a big backdrop to the whole time of making the album. Graeme was 47 when he died, I’m 47 now. I guess it’s about facing mortality, brushing against it, which is what most of us do.

"When I made my last album (This Is The Life) I wanted to write songs to give to people. This time round, I didn’t have that luxury. A song never came round for Graeme. I suppose I didn’t want to write a song which made it look like I was aware that he was dying, because part of the thing when someone is really ill like that is that you have hope, that’s what you hold onto. You wait until there’s a pause in events, but events keep catching up. I guess the first pause came after Graeme died, which was when the song got written."

That’s not to say the album is morbid in any way, it ripples with the warmth and tunefulness of early Deacon Blue, in a pared-down acoustic style. "People expect of singer-songwriters that their lives are harrowed and tortured and suicidal. The Nick Drake industry, for example, that’s been a blueprint for the singer-songwriter, but you can’t expect everyone to fit into that."

However, he believes that his song-writing is getting sharper with age. "It’s only in the last three years that I’ve done my apprenticeship in song-writing, when I sat down and said I’m going to concentrate on writing songs for other people. It’s quite a steep learning curve. You can be terribly sloppy. I look back at early songs, and I could never imagine writing some of them now, there are so many loose bits."

Talking about his life, Ross sounds so utterly content that you wonder if he wouldn’t have preferred this all along. Certainly this is the life he seemed to be destined for before he got catapulted into the big league. He grew up in Dundee in a strict brethren family where pop music was frowned upon - but music was not. "My parents would have lots of young people from the church back to the house to gather round the piano and sing. There was a lot of music, and the notion of making your own music was quite a strong idea."

It was only when a cousin moved in, with his copy of Abbey Road that Ross got his first taste of pop. He moved on from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. On leaving school, he did a teaching degree and worked as a church youth worker in Dundee city centre. "It was an amazing time in my life, probably the most formative and exciting time in my life."

All this time, he was in and out of bands. More often out than in. "I would join bands and then leave. I always hated being in bands, but I loved songwriting. I kept doing it, I don’t know why, playing the odd gig here and there, just piano, vocals, the kind of thing I’m doing now."

In the early 1980s he left Dundee for Glasgow, hoping to get work as a songwriter. In 1985, he met Dougie Vipond (Deacon Blue bassist, now a TV presenter) and the band started to form. It was a time when Scottish pop was all the rage - Del Amitri, Simple Minds, Aztec Camera, Wet Wet Wet - all the big record companies had an eye on Glasgow.

Deacon Blue signed to Sony in 1986, launching their debut single, Dignity, and album, Raintown, the following year. In 1989, When The World Knows Your Name entered the album charts at No 1, knocking Madonna’s Like A Prayer off the top spot. Later this year, Sony will release a re-mastered Raintown to mark their 20th anniversary, and a live DVD is in the pipeline.

Ross has no regrets. That would be "stupid". "But I think in different circumstances, my life might have gone in a different direction, I might have gone into what I’m doing now much earlier. I wish I had actually, I really like it. But, as it happened, I went down a different road and ended up being an artist more than a writer."

Now he has returned to song writing, "a different world, with its own pecking order, and I’m somewhere down about there!" indicating a low point in the air. A previous career in a chart-topping band makes no difference? "No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. It’s who you’ve worked with, what your cuts are, what you’ve done." As if on cue, Oasis’ Don’t Look Back In Anger comes on the cafe stereo. "That’s one of the worst songs ever! It’s quite a nice tune, but such meaningless doggerel!"

The song-writing hierarchy is based, quite simply, on writing the best songs for the biggest acts. Ross writes for Ronan Keating, who covered his song from Pale Rider, She Gets Me Inside, on his last album. He has also written for up-and-coming star James Blunt and says he’d like to work for Will Young.

"A lot of manufactured pop is brilliant. Manufactured pop gave us the Monkees, Frank Sinatra. It’s got a bad name with bands like Westlife because they take a fairly tawdry No 1 hit from about seven years ago and do a very bland version of that. But Girls Aloud do it well, and the Backstreet Boys, I wish I’d written some of that stuff. I did a writing session with one of the writers for S Club 7. They’re my heroes. It’s like what I thought it would be like meeting Bob Dylan. It’s a very high art form in my humble opinion!"

It’s a thrill, he says, to write for young artists whose careers are just taking off. "It’s great to see that, to have a stake in that. And also, to see them traipsing off doing loads of promotion, and I can think: ‘I’m so glad it’s not me!’" No, he’d rather be in the park, walking his dog. Susan Mansfield