Calvin Harris interview: Leap of faith

WE ARE riding the lift to the star's dressing room and Calvin Harris stands tall, almost bursting through the hatch in the ceiling, almost in the room already. As well he might, because at 6 foot 5 and three-quarter inches he's the tallest Scot ever to top the singles chart.

Admittedly the competition isn't great: that wee bauchle Lulu; the Bay City Rollers, who always looked short on account of their shrunken tartan breeks; the aptly named Midge Ure; Wet Wet Wet, who were fond of kikicking in the gutters; and Simple Minds featuring the always crouching Jim Kerr. Who, then, is Harris most looking forward to meeting at the sadly only mythical All-Scottish No1s Private Members' Club? "All of them," he says. "Respect to all of them – Andy Stewart, too. I'm very proud."

This giant of Caledonian dance culture – just don't call him the Hen Broon of retro-electro – is relaxing before a sold-out show at Glasgow's Òran Mór, his first on home turf since his success with 'I'm Not Alone'. Although Harris has shared a No1 before – 'Dance Wiv Me', last summer's collaboration with Dizzee Rascal, or as Jeremy Paxman prefers, Mr Rascal – this is the first under his own name. Now he's thinking back to the time, alone with a keyboard in his bedroom in Dumfries, when he dreamed about pop fame.

"I was well into the charts as a boy but in all honesty I didn't think that being No1 was something completely unattainable," says the 25-year-old former lettuce stacker for Marks & Spencer. "Right from a young age I had a cockiness that I kept hidden. I'd hear a hit record and think, I can do that. Sometimes I thought, I can do better. So when I finally got signed I wasn't blown away. My attitude was: 'About bloody time.'"

He would lose that teenage arrogance later. And if, after his first hit, he thought he'd made it, he was quickly disabused of that notion as well. "I've never worked so hard in my life," he says of the two years since his breakthrough. "If I was to add up everything I'd done until that point – school, the fish factory, Safeway, M&S – then it doesn't compare." He adds, jokingly I hope, that he's been so run down recently he thought he had swine flu.

Dressed in leather jacket, skinny jeans and swooshy and doubtless highly covetable trainers, Harris is friendly, funny, considered – nothing like as dumb as his music can make him seem, and always only ever five seconds away from a knowing smirk at, a) his good fortune, and b) the sometimes fatuous nature of pop.

He's just moved, with some reluctance, to London. "There's a dodgy part of Islington and a nice bit and I'm kind of in the middle. The place is pretty pokey. Being tall, I like high ceilings. Coming from where I do, I like trees and lots of open space. But I've got to be in London for the time being if I'm serious about this, and I am."

Previously he lived in Glasgow, close to tonight's venue, and close enough to Dumfries not to have to clear out his old room completely. But that ceremony has now been performed; amid some poignancy, too. "It was a tip," he says. "My mother wanted it as a guest bedroom, although as mums always do, she's told me I can have it back any time." Harris's Dumfries years were all spent in the same house, so the room was his whole world, with orange-painted walls.

"I found my old football tops. I was big into football before I got into music and collected Liverpool shirts. Ieven had the ecru one, which was a controversial magnolia." Was he any good at football? "Everyone expected me to be brilliant at headers but they always hurt me." Strapping on headphones and losing himself in his beats seemed to cause less trauma.

"I also came across my old folder – on the front I'd scrawled 'Music' with my Sharpie – and that was where I kept all the rejection letters I got from labels. From the age of 14 I fired off loads of demos from that orange room so, it was quite symbolic being back there for the last time – just before my mum had it re-painted something much less offensive."

Harris burst on to the scene with 'Acceptable In The 80s', the first of a run of catchy, goofy stompers that continued with 'The Girls' and 'Merrymaking At My Place'. He called his debut album I Created Disco but not everyone got his irony, or his music.

"There were some one-star reviews; in the worst of them I only got half a star," he admits. "I'm not making excuses, but that album was made at home on a crappy little Amiga for my own entertainment." In Dumfries, the reaction was "Who's this galoot?", or words to that effect.

"Nobody in the town knew who I was – for eight years I hardly ever went out. The old boys at M&S were made up for me but my peers, guys my age, weren't loving the music – it wasn't getting any admiration at all. Maybe there was some jealousy, and I can understand that. If I was in a little local indie band pouring my heart into songs in the traditional manner but not getting anywhere, I'd be raging the first time I heard a big arse singing 'I get all the girls, I get all the girls.'"

He got Kylie Minogue. That is, they enjoyed a fruitful musical partnership, Harris penning a couple of songs for her. Two days before they teamed up in the studio, a tabloid claimed they were already lovers. "It's still the funniest story I've read about myself," he says, before adding: "I think her people planted it." He's kept the cutting, and maybe it should now be inserted in that dug-up file marked 'Music'. He's been with the same girlfriend since he was an unknown, even in Dumfries.

For the rest of 2007, Harris was permanently on tour. With no follow-up to I Created Disco last year, some wondered if he was starting to bump into Mylo in far-flung airports and hotels: two groovers inspired by the bubblegum classic 'Popcorn' by Hot Butter who were permanently DJ-ing and partying and having too much fun to get round to that difficult second album. Harris smiles when the Skye man's name comes up. "Funnily enough, I did meet him at Rockness. He told me his album was coming along fine; it's taken him a while but I'm sure it'll be brilliant. My one will definitely be out this year."

Over the two years, he says he's amassed "a million tracks – all right, 189". The euphoric, trancey sound of 'I'm Not Alone' – which was, of course, acceptable in the 90s – hints at a different direction for album No2, but Harris wants to keep everyone guessing. That, by the way, is a number about being too old for clubbing, and Harris reckons he started to feel past it by 19. "After the thrill of getting into a club at 15 with a fake ID, every experience is a more and more watered-down version."

During those eight years in an orange room, the future role Harris envisaged for himself was that of producer; he was a reluctant pop star at first, and is still trying to make sense of it all. "In these two years everything has been taken to the next level. There's more fun – maybe too much, and now I don't drink at all – but there's also more pressure and more paranoia. I've been to some beautiful places and met some outrageous divas. And the best thing is I've done everything in the company of two Dumfries boys in the band, Sean McCole and Mark Irving, who always make sure I get home safely."

Home for Harris may no longer be Dumfries, but his pals still live there. "Apparently folk really like the new song." A local hero at last then. "That's fantastic," he beams.

• The single I'm Not Alone is out now, Sony BMG. Calvin Harris plays T in the Park, July 11