Graham Fellows: My icy, windswept island paradise

No," Graham Fellows says. "Not there. Because it is forlorn and it smells of pilchards." He's explaining why he doesn't want to talk to me at his flat in north London, which is a few minutes' walk from where I live. I suggest a local pub. There's a pause. "It could get a bit loud in there, don't you think?" Our phone conversation continues like this, for quite a while. I propose a nearby café. "Why there?" Fellows asks. "I don't know," I tell him. "I go there a lot; it's not too busy; they look after you."

"I think I would dislike it," he says, with just a hint of playfulness in his voice, "for precisely the reasons you mention."

And so it is that, following a brief meeting at a garden centre near Alexandra Palace, we find ourselves here, on board the ferry from Tingwall, Orkney, to the remote Scottish island of Rousay. By local standards it's a rather lovely October afternoon: steady drizzle, a sky the colour of bruises, and enough wind to raise a light swell in the North Sea.

"Don't you feel free?" Fellows asks, as we make our slow and, in my case, mildly queasy progress north. "Can't you feel the endorphins kicking in? Isn't this great? Aren't you glad you came? Hot chocolate?" He starts feeding coins into a vending machine.

We met earlier this morning at Kirkwall Airport. Graham has travelled up with Derek, his father; the main purpose of their three-day visit is to tie down the performer's caravan, which he's parked next to a disused 19th-century church. He recently purchased the building with a view to converting it into what he describes as "a recording studio and artists' refuge". If he doesn't secure the caravan before winter, locals have warned, it will blow into the sea. None of us is entirely confident of having anywhere to stay: the Taversoe, the one hotel on Rousay (pop: 222) is full, and Fellows admits that he can't be certain that the caravan, where he and Derek aim to sleep, is not already in the ocean. I have to choose between pitching a tent in the church – inadvisable, Fellows told me, because of the dead seabirds on the floor – and the island's hostel, which is reportedly deserted but unlocked. Our only ' form of transport is a folding bicycle that my interviewee bought on eBay; I'm welcome to borrow it, he says, so long as I understand that it lacks certain accessories, such as brakes.

Graham Fellows has been described as "rather argumentative" and (his words) "a shy bully". I can't identify any of these qualities in him; from the moment we meet he is generous, expansive and engaging. His father, despite being plagued by a compulsion to clean and repair mechanical objects whether they belong to him or not, exudes a kind of Buddhist calm. Derek, a former professional photographer, is 80, but has a natural candour and gentle curiosity towards others that makes him strangely ageless. He has been diagnosed as suffering from Asperger's syndrome, the only symptom of which is the occasional eccentricity in his conversation. I can't imagine any other artist of Fellows' stature allowing a stranger to join a family excursion of this kind. That said, as we split up by the jetty, and I walk off alone to look for the hostel, I can't help giving an envious glance towards the people boarding the ferry, returning to the intoxicating urban bustle of Kirkwall. "Too late now," says Fellows.

If fame evolved in direct proportion to talent, Graham Fellows should be getting pestered for autographs – even here, in the shadow of Rousay's Pier Restaurant. As it is, even the islanders who have got to know him since he bought the church seem to have little idea of what he does.

Fellows, 49, first became famous as Jilted John, whose eponymous single reached number four in the UK charts in 1978, at which time he was still a drama student at Manchester Polytechnic. The song, currently featured in television advertisements for Dairylea, included the line: "Gordon is a moron." This last phrase has passed belatedly into the language, having enjoyed a renaissance, led by headline-writers, following the appointment of our current prime minister. Last year, author Vernon Coleman published a critical analysis of Mr Brown's decade as chancellor, under the same title.

You're more likely to know Graham Fellows as his alter ego John Shuttleworth, self-proclaimed "versatile singer-songwriter from Sheffield, South Yorkshire". Shuttleworth, after years of touring and starring in various series on Radio 4, has become as central a part of Fellows' life as Alan Partridge is to Steve Coogan's, or Inspector Clouseau was to Peter Sellers' – with all the feelings of ambivalence that a hugely popular character tends to generate in its creator.

Like Tintin or Popeye, Shuttleworth has only one outfit: red turtleneck jumper, 1970s-style brown leather jacket, fawn slacks and NHS glasses. Decades of disappointment have failed to dent his belief in his chart potential: Shuttleworth, 57, performs alone, on his Yamaha organ, his subject material largely drawn from life with his wife Mary and daughter Karen, and his obsessions with DIY and confectionery. All of the characters in Shuttleworth's world, including his tyrannical manager and next-door neighbour Ken Worthington, are voiced by Fellows himself.

You may be familiar with Shuttleworth classics such as "Life is Like a Salad Bar (You Only Get One Visit)" or "I Can't Go Back to Savoury Now". This last song was inspired after Mary offered her husband the remnants of the main course, after he had embarked on a treacle pudding. ("The shepherd's pie was stunning/ But I'm halfway through my puddin'/ My tastebuds would go crazy/ And I can't go back to savoury now.")

Fellows' ability to identify the absurd in the banal minutiae of suburban life has led some to compare him to Alan Bennett and Mike Leigh, although his work lacks the patronising tone of some of the latter writer's plays. Disillusion with the rudeness of southerners is a recurring theme in Shuttleworth's lyrics; "Shopkeepers in the North are Nice", for instance, chronicles his culture shock on a rare visit to London. ("My 'How do you do?' in the chip shop queue was received in total silence/ My 'Take care, cock!' in the butcher's shop was met with a look of violence.")

The perception that people become incrementally kinder, the further north you travel inspired Fellows' 2006 masterpiece It's Nice Up North, a film shot by the distinguished photographer Martin Parr. Fellows travelled to the Shetlands, mingling with locals in the character of Shuttleworth, and it was this experience that began his obsession with the bleak northern landscape. He is currently editing a sequel, filmed mainly in Jersey, called Southern Softies.

It's not easy to convey quite how gifted a performer Fellows is, especially in his live appearances as Shuttleworth. A couple of years ago, one of our most talented young actors told me that she retired from performing live comedy after she listened to Woody Allen's Nightclub Years and realised she could never reach such a consistent level of excellence. Without stretching the comparison with the director of Annie Hall too far, I can't imagine Fellows – with his wit, his timing and his rigid perfectionism – ever being deterred by such a thought. He is, to borrow the reviewer's cliché, that good.

After I've dropped my bags at the youth hostel, where I find there are not only no individually wrapped Belgian chocolates on my pillow, but no pillow, or indeed any other bedding, I meet Fellows for a drink at the Pier Restaurant. Derek is down at the church, half a mile away, fixing a padlock on the caravan door: a precaution, Fellows says, that has already enervated other residents, who never lock their houses.

Graham Fellows looks nothing like his most famous comic invention; there's something about the animation in his eyes that's vaguely reminiscent of David Bowie. Even when relaxed, his facial expression suggests that he is no stranger to anxiety. The Shuttleworth character, I suggest, is a little more complex than you might imagine from the knockabout vaudeville of songs such as "Two Margarines on the Go (It's a Nightmare Scenario)". Shuttleworth may inadvertently trigger the Yamaha's "fun rhythm" function while performing "My Wife Died in 1970", but there are some memorable tunes in his repertoire, and the occasional moment of real poignancy.

"Like that song..." I begin.

"About the farm on the M62."

"Yes." ("I feel like the man who lives/ On that farm that sits in the middle of the M62/ I thought it would be all right/ Now I can't sleep at night/ Some things you cannot undo.")

It's a composition that refers to Stott Hall in Calderdale, a once-idyllic 18th-century property now marooned between motorway carriageways. As a metaphor for the creeping erosion of beauty and ambition, it's magnificent. John Shuttleworth, like Alan Partridge, just occasionally gets it right.

And perhaps there's a part of all of us that struggles to hang on to childhood memories, in the way that Shuttleworth repeatedly laments the removal of the cardboard strip from the Bounty bar ("It happened over 10 years ago," he complains. "But I've been too angry to talk about it until now.")

His fundamental conservatism is combined with a desperate resolve to keep pace with shifts in fashion.

"Take the fleece," Shuttleworth says, on his live CD One Foot in the Gravy. "A few years ago, none of us had one. We didn't know what they were. Now, we've all got about four. But that's progress. The nectarine overtook the peach. At the time, we didn't like it. But it happened, and we accept it now. Just like the caffiteeairy overtook the campachino. Or did it?"

Graham Fellows, as he talks, tends to slip in and out of the voice of his best-known character. "I had a conversation with Steve Coogan about this," says Fellows (whose occasional career as a television actor, which began in Coronation Street, included an appearance in the 1995 series Coogan's Run). "He told me people used to come up and say, 'Oh, you're sounding just like Alan Partridge.' And he said, the thing is that there's a bit of me that is Partridge. It's the same with me and John."

Except that Shuttleworth's life is broadly asexual, and notable for the kind of domestic stability commonly known as a rut. Fellows' emotional history has been anything but predictable. He recently separated from Kathryn, mother of his three children, after 15 years of living in Louth, ' Lincolnshire. The performer, who has a young son from another relationship, moved to London just over a year ago; his current partner is fellow actor Eve Webster. His situation, Fellows explains, is "complex".

"How's your hostel?" he asks, with a mischievous look.

"Deserted. No sheets."

"You're pining for Crouch End, aren't you? The fresh coriander; the espressos; the varnished floorboards and the central heating."

You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to see that, for Graham Fellows, the inhospitable terrain of the Northern Isles brings some perverse form of ease. He's long been preoccupied with the story of Donald Crowhurst, the British sailor who died in 1969 while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race; Crowhurst, who was heavily in debt, abandoned the race and reported false nautical positions before apparently jumping overboard, leaving behind notebooks containing bizarre observations on his perceived hierarchy of the universe. His journey is analysed in Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall's classic, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, published in 1970. "I tend to read it when I'm feeling lost," the performer says, "and I want to discover somebody who's even more lost." The subject of depression, which Shuttleworth addresses in songs such as "I'm Up and Down Like a Bride's Nightie", crops up more than once in Fellows' conversation.

"The whole idea about coming to Orkney came out of my obsession with Shetland, which developed when I was cutting It's Nice Up North. I was editing footage of desolate landscape for 18 months. That coincided with a period of depression, and my relationship with Kathryn falling apart."

"When you say depression..."

"Well, for instance, I had an Edinburgh show which I had to call off because I lost my memory. I just had this tumbleweed moment during one performance. I was doing my character Dave Tordoff. (A boorish laser-screeding contractor from Goole, Tordoff often opens the show for Shuttleworth.) "I found that, mentally, whole chunks of my script just sort of... went. That happened in 2006. After the show I came off and I just thought: no. That's it. I can't do this any more." He recovered, he says, with the help of hypnosis.

In the future, he explains, he plans to divide his time between London, Louth and Rousay.

"There is a spiritual quality on this island. I feel it immediately I get on the boat. Like I told you, I feel free."

We walk down to the church, where Derek is putting the finishing touches to the caravan's padlock, and is preparing to fix new brake blocks to the collapsible bicycle. Fellows shows me round the abandoned kirk. There's a hole in the roof, and the lectern is coated in seagull droppings. The windows are protected with thick polythene. He's planning to install a rainwater harvester, wind turbine and compost toilet.

There's another abandoned church on an adjoining plot; this one has a graveyard, and I get the sense that Fellows rather likes the fact that his own property overlooks a small cemetery. ("I wish to be buried with two muesli bars and an axe," he once said. "Just in case.")

When the studio is installed, he would like to make it available to other artists. "I see myself saying..." Fellows lapses into the hoarse Sheffield accent of John Shuttleworth: 'No, Badly Drawn Boy, you can't come and work here this week. Sting booked it, weeks ago.'"

The three of us sit around the table in the tiny caravan – a mid-1970s model with a bold interior colour scheme of brown and orange. Graham makes wholemeal pasta with bottled pesto, and we share a small bag of grapes. His father launches into a monologue debating the origins of the universe. "Graham said you used to be a naturist," I tell Derek, treacherously lowering the tone of conversation, while Fellows is off testing the bike. "He mentioned that you used to take him to nudist camps in the East Midlands." ("It wasn't much fun," Graham had told me. "It's not what you want to see at 16; all those willies waving about. But I didn't participate. Don't make too much of this, Robert.")

"I did do that," Derek says, "and I'm not ashamed of it. I used to enjoy it. There were lovely women around, but the great thing was that there was always something to mend; mainly cisterns."

Graham Fellows was born in Sheffield on 22 May 1959: the same day, coincidentally, as Morrissey. His pastiche of the former Smiths vocalist, "It's My Turn to be Poorly", is the best musical parody I have ever heard. ("It's my turn to be poorly/ She said, 'Get out of bed, you're better now, surely.'") The song is performed by another of Fellows' characters, Brian Appleton, musicologist and part-time lecturer in media studies at a college of further education in the Newcastle-under-Lyme area. Appleton once revealed that he had contemplated raising his artistic profile by ending his career in a rock'n'roll suicide crash, then remembered that he didn't own a car. ("I'd have had to borrow my mother's VW Polo. And that has quite a good safety record.")

Fellows recalls a happy childhood in the company of his three sisters, the youngest of whom is married to the TV chef Ainsley Harriott. We have met, briefly, once or twice before, I tell him; he used to share a house with an acquaintance of mine, in Didsbury, south Manchester, in the early-1980s. "That time – which was the fallout from Jilted John – was not great for me," he says. "I tried to have more hits, and didn't. I wanted to be a Shakespearean actor, really. That didn't work either."

"You released an album under your own name in 1985, called Love at the Haçienda. But the way it's produced is so..."

"Syrupy. That's why I'm itching to get back into the studio – my own studio, here in Orkney. Maybe," Fellows says, "I'm not all that different from Shuttleworth: a frustrated songwriter, working miles from anywhere." His lowest point, he says, came when his mother died of liver cancer, in 1987. "I was playing my guitar and singing to her, when she died: 'Golden slumbers, kiss your eyes'."

Her death "precipitated a depression. I was in a destructive relationship. My mum died. My dog died. I became a milkman. I was already doing Shuttleworth by this point. But the acting work had dried up. My music career had stagnated. When I've been depressed, it's generally been related to work. But I'm over all that now. I'm out of it. And I'm really optimistic about the work. Right now, I operate as a cottage industry. I have nobody from EMI telling me what to do. If I want to put a CD out, I get it pressed then sell it at gigs, and online. It's a lovely way to work. It's just brilliant."

By nightfall, my bedding has arrived. The following morning, I find Fellows fixing his caravan to hooks anchored in concrete. Unusually for a creative artist, he's naturally drawn to such practical tasks: in the late-1980s, when he was based in London, Fellows noticed that all but two of the metal letters spelling out the name of Alexandra Park Library had been removed. He bought replacements, and put them up himself. "I didn't ask anyone's permission," he recalls.

The euphoria that gripped him the moment we left Kirkwall hasn't abated. While I find it hard to share Fellows' enthusiasm for the Orkney climate, I can understand what he sees in Rousay. There's one ambulance, based about 30 yards from his church, but, so far as I can work out, virtually no policing. This lack of surveillance and the harshness of the lifestyle serve to bond the residents: everybody we meet here is open, friendly and helpful, even if, as one islander warns: "This is the place of the three R's: rats, rabbits and rumours. Be careful what you appear to agree with."

We're invited to dinner with Jock, the island's dry-stone waller, and Karen, his partner. Their generosity is lavish, and typical. They invite us to stay the night, but Fellows is eager to visit the bar at the Taversoe Hotel. There, we spend a frankly surreal evening in the company of a young trawlerman called Ben, who introduces himself with the words: "Hello. I am ' the sex beast of the island," and a 60-year-old incomer from Hamburg, Volker Zielke. The German has an international reputation as a film producer; he edited the award-winning 2003 documentary The Need for Speed, which revealed the extent to which US pilots in Afghanistan relied on amphetamines. Five years ago, he chose to relocate to Rousay. People are drinking malt whisky, red wine and lager, served by landlady Carey who is, by a fairly impressive margin, the sanest and most coherent person on the premises.

Fellows sits back and observes this skewed vision of reality. I go to order a beer. "You need one of these," Zielke urges, pointing at a bottle labelled "Skullsplitter".

"Is it strong?"

"No. Quite mild... well... medium."

I glance at Carey: "8.5 per cent," she says.

"Maybe not," I tell him.

Zielke is in gregarious mood, and the conversation veers between Ben's observations on the challenges of deep-sea fishing, and the German's memories of the late chanteuse Nico. In the absence of police patrols, returning from the Taversoe is something of an adventure, especially for those travelling on two wheels. "Once," one resident recalled, "I followed one of the incomers after he left, because I was afraid he was too drunk to make it home on his bike. I lost sight of him. The next morning, one of my neighbours said that she'd been woken at three in the morning by noises downstairs. The guy had ridden into a ditch, then fallen asleep. It was cold, and pouring with rain. He'd woken up after a couple of hours, stripped down to his boxer shorts and staggered into her house. His teeth were chattering. She gave him blankets and hot tea. Once he could speak again, he told her: "I am a foolish incomer, forgive me."

The following morning, Fellows asks if coming to Orkney has changed me. "I can understand why you love the characters here. And the remoteness. But I think most people would prefer a hut on a Greek island, or somewhere else that might be... what's the word I'm looking for... warm. I can't understand the impulse that attracts a man to sleet."

"Well, that's because..." Fellows gives me an accusing glance. "You look as if you might have Italian blood in you."

"Weirdly enough, my ancestors came from the Orkneys."

"I suppose the crucial fact is, Robert, that I have got my own caravan, and you haven't."

"You could have a caravan in Greece."

"But listen to the cries of those seabirds."

"They have seabirds in Greece."

"In Greece," Fellows replies, testily, "they have... crickets."

By the time we return to Kirkwall, the light is fading. It's raining. Fellows has toothache; I'm developing what will turn into a truly horrible dose of flu. Even Derek's gone a bit quiet. We're wet, tired, and not quite as clean as we might be. We wait by an empty cab rank in front of the magnificent 12th-century cathedral. Fellows mutters to himself, then wanders off to the chemist. "I'll phone for a cab to pick us up here," I tell him.

Five minutes later, just as the taxi is turning into the street, Fellows spots a passing bus that's going to the airport. He waves it down. Meanwhile, the cab has pulled up. "You can't leave this driver here," I tell Fellows. "He's just come specially. He asked for us by name."

"I'm thinking," Graham replies, "about my carbon footprint." We're on opposite sides of the road: the cab driver, bus driver and Derek look on. "You take the cab if you want," Fellows shouts. "I'm going on the bus."

"That's just petty."

"OK," he says, letting the coach leave. "But you pay."

"You don't give a shit about your carbon footprint," I tell him, once we're in the taxi. "You were just born on the thrifty side of the Pennines."

"And you," Fellows replies, "are getting to be like an albatross around my neck."

By the time we've dried out and had a couple of brandies on the flight back to Aberdeen, normal civilities have been resumed. "We were bickering quite well back there," I tell Fellows. He laughs. "Almost like friends." When we land in Aberdeen, Graham and Derek set off to drive through the night, to Sheffield. I've arranged to stay here overnight. I am genuinely sorry to see them go. At some point in the night, I'm woken by a text alert.

"I withdraw albatross," the message reads.

We meet again in London; Fellows drops round to my house with some rough cuts from Southern Softies. There's a wonderful moment when the actor, disguised as Shuttleworth, approaches a Scotsman on Jersey. "Is it soft down south?" he asks. "Aye," his interviewee responds. "Very soft. The men down here; they're always trimming their eyebrows, and stuff. I'm hard, me. I smoke. I drink. Vodka. Neat vodka. Hard, you see? Not your soft Southern..." He hesitates, searching for the most withering noun to conclude this sentence. "...Comfort."

"This is how I like to work," Fellows says. "Organically. It is the opposite of Hollywood. Just set off, and see what happens; allow a situation to develop. Then take the finished film on tour. When we went round the country with It's Nice Up North, we went to a town, showed the film, chatted to people, had a few drinks, went back to the B&B, had a walk round town in the morning, then moved on. There is nothing more fulfilling than that. It's a delight to be able to work in that way. This is the way I want to work. This," he adds, "is the future for me."

Southern Softies will be released in the summer of 2009. In the meantime, Fellows is about to embark on a national tour as John Shuttleworth. Which means that, in a culture that's dominated by mediocrity posing as genius, you have a rare opportunity, over the next few weeks, to see a man attempting the same trick in reverse.

The John Shuttleworth tour starts on 6 November, see www.shuttleworths.co.uk for details

The many faces of Graham Fellows: One man and his alter-ego army

Jilted John

Fellows created his first comedy character as a drama student at Manchester Polytechnic. Jilted John released an eponymous – spoof – punk record about a bitter, spurned teenager. The single reached number four in the UK charts in 1978. Les Charlton In the early-1980s, Fellows switched to more conventional acting roles, including a two-month stint as Gail Potter's boyfriend on Coronation Street in 1982.

John Shuttleworth

The aspirational singer/songwriter from Sheffield started life as a touring stand-up in 1986, with just a Yamaha keyboard and a commitment to singing about the dreary details of suburban life. The character – and his entourage, including incompetent agent Ken Worthington – went on to star in several radio shows and has also been the subject of a TV series, 500 Bus Stops and mockumentary Europigeon, as well as the low-budget, cult-classic film, It's Nice Up North, in 2006. The follow up, Southern Softies, is due out in 2009.

Brian Appleton

A pedantic, monotonous rock musicologist and media studies lecturer prone to musical pastiches. Since he made his first appearance supporting Shuttleworth in 1998, Appleton has been on a number tours around the UK, as well as the spoof Radio 4 programme Brian Appleton's Lecture, in 2006.

Dave Tordoff

The newest member of the alter-ego stable is a venal builder with delusions of grandeur, an obsession with wealth and designs on becoming an after-dinner speaker. Adam Jacques