MICHAEL John McCarthy (“MJ” to everyone working in Scottish theatre) was once a member of Glasgow band Zoey van Goey, whose records were produced by Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian and Paul Savage of The Delgados and their Chemikal Underground label. Their two fine albums now lie several years in the past however, and the Glasgow-based Irishman has more recently been a persistent ingredient in some of the best Scottish theatre. His composition, sound design and musicianship has graced the stages of the Lyceum, Citizens, Traverse and Tron, been a regular ingredient of productions by the National Theatre of Scotland, and contributed to the success of the revivals of both The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil and Trainspotting.

Although he has often been seen on stage behind an instrument (he is adept on those with either strings or a keyboard), McCarthy will be making his solo performance debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next month, when a show he devised with writer Martin O’Connor, designer Rachel O’Neill, and producer Alice McGrath for work in the community premieres in its “performative version” at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. And it is all the fault of his Aunt Kitty.

Turntable may well be seen in the context of the Fringe as a celebration of vinyl and the resurgence of interest in old- fashioned 45s and long-players that need a record player to be heard, but for McCarthy it is a show about listening, as the story of its beginnings makes clear.

Although both McCarthy and his playwright wife Lynda Radley recently found themselves working together in their native Ireland, where Radley’s Futureproof has just finished a run in Dublin and he is musical director of Graham McLaren’s touring Abbey adaptation of the Ken Loach film Jimmy’s Hall, he was already settled in Glasgow when he visited Kathleen McCarthy in London. Aunt Kitty was his glamorous relative, who had travelled the world and he saw her as more exotic and outward-looking than other members of the family back in Cork.

In fact, and distinct from his own “soft immigration” to Scotland, Kitty had been an economic migrant, who had left Ireland at 18 to do a secretarial course in London before a job with the coal board took her to Uganda. She had retired to London, having spent three-quarters of her life outside Ireland, but remained a socially conservative devout Catholic woman, with views that, McCarthy says, he had little in common. The pair bonded, however, over music after she mentioned a country and western song she had loved, Are You Mine?, which she thought might have been by Johnny Cash.

Via a Golden Oldies music catalogue, McCarthy tracked down the track, actually a hit for George Jones and Margie Singleton, and playing it to her again unleashed a torrent of memories and stories from Kitty’s early 20s. The pair had frank discussions about sex education, refugees and immigration, unlocked by the common affinity they found in music.

“We came to a deeper understanding of each other’s point of view,” says McCarthy, “and that track was the connection. And that was the genesis of the show.”

The sessions listening to old records with Great Aunt Kitty inspired work that McCarthy began in the Stirling area in partnership with Alice McGrath with a group of older people at a dancing class the Macrobert Arts Centre and with music production students at the Raploch campus of Forth Valley College. He recalls bringing the two groups together and listening in as a 17-year-old student and a woman in her 70s discovered common ground in John Lennon’s Imagine being a favourite song.

“In minutes, they found that their preconceptions about each other just didn’t hold up,” he says.

There were Turntable events at the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival in 2015 and what McCarthy calls “a series of workshops and pop-ups with people who need human interaction and communication.” He is wary about describing the show as therapy – “I am not a therapist, I don’t have the rigour” – but concedes the Turntable experience may by therapeutic.

Now its benefits are to be shared with a paying audience, after a successful application to Creative Scotland’s Made in Scotland funding scheme that produces a showcase of quality indigenous work at the Fringe with the intention that it will be seen by international producers and tour elsewhere.

Even at this stage, however, it was not in McCarthy’s mind that it would be his solo performance debut.

“While I have not been lurking in the wings waiting for the spotlight, I’m not being dragged kicking and screaming to the front of the stage either. There is a certain tightening of the stomach-muscles at the thought, but it has evolved fairly naturally out of the project. I didn’t see myself as performing it, and I don’t think it was inevitable that it would be me, but at some point Alice said: ‘You should tell the story.’”

It is a story that will begin with Aunt Kitty and tell of others Turntable has encountered along the way, and the business of playing vinyl platters on old record players will be central to the tale.

“It has to be vinyl because the objects are so evocative,” says McCarthy. “We have Kitty’s record case and audience members will be asked to choose something from her collection.

“I know the whole vinyl thing can get a bit ridiculous – people buying records who don’t actually have record players – but I like the character of the sound of records. And, like real books, they are for sharing; I can own it and then give it to you.”

The intention is that the music will be a spur to memories the audience will want to share. McCarthy plans to invite a few special guests to the performances during the run, so that fellow musicians or other artists to make their own choice of music at the Turntable salon.

“Each show will be different, a little like a live album that has a set list but with room for improvisation.”

Turntable is the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh from August 14 to 20 at 5.30pm.