Mike Davies has a workout with Ocean Colour Scene's Simon Fowler...

Following on from the current chart success of Free My Name, next week sees the release of A Hyperactive Workout For The Flying Squad, the seventh studio album from Birmingham's Ocean Colour Scene.

However, were it not for a chilling twist of fate, it might well have been a posthumous release for singer Simon Fowler.

As recently revealed, last September it could have been Fowler and not 50-year-old banker Denis Finnegan who was stabbed to death in Richmond Park by John Barrett, a paranoid schizophrenic recently released from a secure unit.

Fowler, who now lives in London, was walking his dog in the park when the man he later learned to be Barrett walked past him and said “stay lucky”.

“I was stopped by the police as I was leaving park,” recalls Fowler. “And as soon as I saw them I knew who they were looking for because he just seemed weird. I told them he’d spoken to me and I gave a description. When I came home that night the park was closed off. I went into a shop on Richmond Hill and heard them saying on the radio that it was closed due a murder at 10 o’clock that morning.

“That’s when I realised the significance of my meeting with this guy at 10.15, right after he’d just killed the poor sod on the bike.”

It’s a sobering experience, one which Fowler admits has left him with very mixed feelings about his narrow brush with death.

“I was lucky but now every time I think about it I feel guilty for feeling lucky,” he says slowly.

“And I feel terrible because of the guy who died. I’m certain that if he hadn’t killed that guy at Ching Gate, he’d have killed me without a shadow of a doubt. That’s what he was letting me know really.

“At the time, I just thought ‘that’s a weird thing to say’. I keep thinking about it, but what can you take from that. You can’t start thinking ‘well now I’ll live every day as if it were my last,’ because who knows I might get knocked down by a bus tomorrow.”

I ask if there’s maybe a song in it. There’s a silence before he says, “I really hope not, I think that would be a bit cheap really.” The mood needs lightening up and we are, after all, supposed to be talking about the new album.

The meaningless title apparently stemming from a plummy BBC presenter’s comment on a late night Radio 3 jazz programme it’s quite easily their best since the million selling Moseley Shoals and their first studio release since the departure of original bassist Damon Minchella and the band’s rejigging into a five piece.

Ironically though, neither of the new members, bassist Dan Sealey and guitarist Andy Bennett, actually figure on the recordings which were done in Scotland last March, although they were very much featured on last year’s One For The Road live album. A bizarre way of going about things you might think.

“It was the record company’s idea,” says Fowler. “We thought why not, we’d never done a live album and a lot of people think of us as a live band first and foremost. It seemed a decent idea.”

It also provided a perfect illustration of how well the new guys fitted in. However, as Simon points out, it’s not like they were exactly strangers to the band.