IN June 2004, Bob Dylan played the Glasgow Barrowland, watched by an ecstatic audience that included Eddi Reader and her husband John Douglas. Outside, the gig over, she was leaning on a lamppost, waiting for Douglas to catch up with her, digesting the magic she had just witnessed. “And some Glaswegian guy,” she says, “came by me and said, ‘There you go, hen – that’s how it’s done!’”

She laughs. “I thought, I’m so in love with this city. I love that whole idea that people are experts in their own mind, in their own kingdom.”

Reader, 57, has been a familiar figure in her native city since 2001, when she returned here permanently from London. At least a couple of heads turn during our interview in the café at the Riverside Transport Museum. “Is that Eddi Reader?” one thirtysomething at a nearby table asks her friend. She is certainly hard to miss.

She rarely stands still, either. A recent mini-tour of Ireland was followed by a string of dates in Australia. This week she embarks on a spring tour of Britain, starting at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre on Thursday and winding up with a couple of festival appearances, in Orkney and Inveraray Castle. She went back into a recording studio in January and recorded 15 songs (her last album, Vagabond, came out just over three years ago). And she is highly active on Twitter, having posted no fewer than 126,000 tweets on all manner of subjects (more of which later).

Reader was born, the first of seven children, in Glasgow’s Anderston district, not far from where we are sitting now. Her father was a welder. “I have a very early memory of [Anderston], and then we moved to Arden, and we spent 10 years there, and my mum fought for a new house, and we got one in Irvine.” She remembers honing her singing voice at an early age in Arden, signing in “reverb-filled stairwells” while washing the close stairs.

As for Irvine, “it just opened my mind about music. At that time I would maybe be 15. So 15, 16, 17, was that transition period”. Her gaze falls on a photograph on the inside cover of her superb Best Of album, a 30-year career retrospective. It shows a young Reader with heavily kohl’d eyes.

The album prompts Reader to look back over her time in music. “That’s me at 18, it was taken in Kilmarnock," she says of the photograph. "I was going to go off to London, go to folk festivals. My da was like, ‘What are you liking this folk stuff for?’, but I liked folk music. It seemed a place where you could be unpretentious. You didn’t have to be the best-looking or have the most fashionable gear on – you could just express yourself. I tried a bit of writing, and people taught me songs that were better than the ones I knew – people like Dylan, Joni Mitchell”.

She had already, in her mid-teens, returned to live with her grandmother in Glasgow while studying for her Highers, and it was in Sauchiehall Street that she made her first forays into busking. As she once recalled: “I used to do really well and for some reason I wasn't nervous although I was a shy, nail-biting little Catholic lassie from the social experiment that was the council estates of early 1960s Glasgow. I had found this way of surviving.''

Reader left Glasgow in 1978 to seek her fortune in London. In the early 1980s, she travelled around Europe with circus and performance artists before making her name as a session vocalist for, amongst other acts, the post-punk outfit Gang Of Four (on YouTube there’s footage from 1982 of her with the band on The Old Grey Whistle Test).

In 1987 she became part of Fairground Attraction, a sadly short-lived band that is still remembered today for its 1988 debut album, First Of A Million Kisses, and its joyous, infectious lead single, Perfect, both of which topped the UK charts and won their respective categories at the 1989 Brit awards. To general surprise, however, the band broke up before their second album, Ay Fond Kiss, could be released. But there was at least one bright moment in all of this. She came to the attention of playwright John Byrne, who liked what he heard and gave her the role of Jolene Jowett in his 1990 BBC TV country-and-western noir, Your Cheatin’ Heart. In a Herald interview in 2013, Reader recalled: "It was a rather special time in my life, actually, and I wished I'd had the wherewithal at the time to appreciate it, but I was just coming out of a band, and didn't know where the hell I was. I was doing this acting thing, which I had no experience of. I asked John why he'd picked me for Jolene Jowett; he said he'd heard me on Woman's Hour, chatting away, and he decided he'd write this character! The fact Jolene was a self-centred wee bitch from hell – I thought, 'S***, what am I coming across like?'"

In her musical career, though, Reader had already proved she was an excellent singer, a talented songwriter and a fine interpreter of other people’s songs. Her first solo album was Mirmana, in 1992, and others followed over the next nine years: Eddi Reader, Candyfloss & Medicine, Angels & Electricity and Simple Soul. The groundbreaking Burns album, recorded in Glasgow, came out in 2003.

In interview Reader is open and candid – character traits you can glimpse daily on her Twitter account. Not for her the odd, carefully-modulated tweet that gives nothing away. She has engaged in arguments with people on Brexit (she is strongly against) and Scottish independence (she is strongly in favour, but is not an SNP voter, though she says she’s open to examining their policies). She is particularly outspoken on injustice, on ill-treatment of people who most need protection. Last Saturday, her eye caught by the story of the 17-year-old asylum seeker who was beaten unconscious in London in a suspected hate crime, she tweeted her loathing of Nigel Farage, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, describing them as “ugly manipulators” who had “this child’s life on your hands”. It’s fair to say that not everyone in the public eye would be so outspoken.

“I’m a bit too much [active] on it,” she acknowledges now. “You know what the problem is with me? I like communicating. I think everybody is my family. If I see somebody being rude, I want to kind of go, ‘Hang on, you’re letting yourself down here. Come on’.

“I like people. I feel sorry for people sometimes. I feel when people are trying to hurt others – some people are past caring about, but there’s one follower of mine, Kombat, who is always slagging me off. I’ve got used to seeing him. It’s like, if he doesn’t say something to me, I’ll think, maybe he’s sad somewhere, or he feels hurt or wounded by something I’ve said.

“I just want people to know I’m a safe place for people to talk to about stuff. I want safe people to talk to, and so I’ll follow everybody who follows me. I feel like I want a community, and there’s something about Twitter that reminds me of when I was at school, and you used to go in and you’d all talk about what the film was last night. So, suddenly, I think there’s a community again. I don’t get too lost in [Twitter] … I just enjoy it.”

She’s good when it comes to calling out weakness in other people’s arguments on, say, independence. “I like to ask, what’s your take on it?, and to ask them to explain it to me. Because then, if you’re explaining it to me, you’re explaining it to yourself. Just saying ‘It’ll be sh**’ is not an argument. I want people to really know what they’re talking about, even if you don’t believe in it [independence]. I want to know what that is, because maybe you know something I don’t. I want your knowledge about it.”

Reader is a former Labour voter who swears she will never again vote for unionist parties that "ignore" Scotland. “As I get closer to choosing what I want to vote for I can’t define what it will be until the choice is in front of me – I'm open to choice. But I will never vote unionist again.” She was one of the many Scottish cultural figures who were active on the pro-independence side in the two years before the referendum. She remains an indefatigable supporter of the cause. With Nicola Sturgeon seeking a rerun but Theresa May asserting that “now is not the time” for a second poll, what does Reader think should happen now? How can the verdict be turned from a No into a Yes?

She pauses before replying. “We’ve got a lot of people who mix [independence] up with familial, social unity. And I agree: I do not like to think of a family being separated from one another, or broken up. But I don’t think that that is what this is.

“I think if we had non-biased helplines, where people can just go and talk about [independence issues], that would help. We’ve never, in all the decades I’ve been alive, had what I would call a WISE convention – we’ve never had the Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England conventions where we all sit down and ask whether, in today’s modern democracy, is [the current set-up] serving us well, to have one big country overwhelming everybody else? Is it sound? Does it still fit?

“Because we’ve not had these conversations, and we didn’t have them in 2014 – I went everywhere trying to find non-biased helplines, and you couldn’t. As soon as you spoke to somebody they were either Yes or No ... Whereas Ireland had that gay-marriage referendum two years ago, and they had non-biased helplines, which helped.

“If you said to my mother, ‘he’s splitting up the family’, she won’t want that. But if you say, ‘See if we have our own money, and our own responsibility for our own mistakes, our own progress through life’, then perhaps we can both sit at the table as equals and not have resentment and guilt.”

She is, though, enthused by Scotland’s new-found confidence and energy. The gulf between the Scotland of 1978, when she left for London, and the Scotland of 2017 is striking. “You couldn’t have made a record here, not properly, back then. You couldn’t have made movies or written books or painted pictures, or established yourself as an artist. I had to take the King’s shilling; it felt like there was nowhere else to go [but London].

“But now, there’s a confidence that wasn’t there when I left. As an empathetic character I’m picking up certain confidences that weren’t available to me back then … It’s to do with, say, Celtic Connections going strong for 23 years; something to do with the kids singing back to me songs that I was never taught in school; something about people learning about Gaelic culture; it seems to me that there’s something about the place that isn’t the downtrodden place of old, when I was busking in Sauchiehall Street.”

She has devoted much of the last few years to researching the life and times of her great uncle, Seamus Reader, a close associate of James Connolly, who became head of the Scottish Brigade of the old IRA when the Irish War of Independence broke out in 1919. She has put an enormous amount of work into transcribing his diary; she talks enthusiastically about how his words shed fascinating light on Glasgow’s social and political history and on the history of her own family. A book is to follow.

Reader has two sons, Sam and Charlie, from a previous marriage. Sam, 24, has been making music, she says with pride, and doing well; Charlie, four years older, “is amazing at administration, and he’s a beautiful singer, like Sam, but he won’t do it for money – he loves singing at the house and at parties”. Like any mother she is happy to see her boys making their own way in the world, even if she does feel the odd twinge of anxiety.

“When one of them went to the south of France for three weeks and didn’t phone me, I phoned my mother and said, ‘Mum, I don’t know where he is, what am I going to do?’ And she sang down the phone, ‘Welcome to my world …’ and then put the phone down on me! It’s karma, sure enough.”

Reader has achieved a lot in her time. The solo career, the tours, the fans, the acclaim, the high profile: the honorary doctorates, even a role in a Hollywood film (she played a chanteuse in Richard Linklater’s Me And Orson Welles). It would be interesting to know what that 18-year-old with the heavily kohl’d eyes would have made of her subsequent career. What does the present-day Reader make of it all, though?

She weighs up the question. “I feel like I’ve got adventure in me, still,” she says. “I’m really not sure what you measure achievement with. I was brought up with people who just thought you were all right, the way you were, and that was so valuable to me.

“Someone once asked me, ‘So, what’s the big grand plan?’ It was such a confusing question to me. You feel inadequate that you’ve not got a plan, but at the same time you feel grateful you’ve not got one, because there isn’t any pressure. So I don’t give myself pressure like that. I just like the fact that I’m alive and I get to see my kids, hopefully smiling and being in good health.

“Yesterday, I ran down to Irvine and made my ma some chicken soup. Or maybe a pal has a wean and she’ll bring it round to mine, and it’s five years old and I’m sitting with it at the piano. These are the best moments of my life. Everything else is just … it’s just events, really.”

For Eddi Reader’s tour dates visit www.eddireader.co.uk/gigs