Ivor Cutler talks to Frances Welch

The Scottish poet and humorist Ivor Cutler first acquired a cult following on the Home Service in the late Fifties. Now aged 73, he is recording poems on the same record label as Oasis. One of his enduring single-sentence poems runs thus: "A fly crouching in a sandwich cannot comprehend why it has become more than ordinarily vulnerable".

Cutler says he writes using his unconscious as though he were a "werrrm" underground, occasionally popping his head up to see how he is doing.

He does not regard his muse as anything to do with God, yet he hesitates to call himself atheist or agnostic. "I recently read a quote from Rebecca West where she said religion is irrelevant to my life. I liked that. But then Ted Harrison [The Radio Four Religious Affairs Correspondent] once said I was profoundly spiritual. He knew my views."

"What did you say?" I ask.

"I said, ‘Thanks very much.’"

He admits breezily that a prayer to God once saved his life. "I was stuck on the side of a mountain in Scotland. I was looking down on emptiness. I lay on my back and looked around in panic. I prayed to God and relaxed. I realised if I turned carefully on my front I could see bits of grass to hold on to."

"But you don’t look upon this as a religious experience?" I ask.

"Who else could I pray to – my MP?"

Cutler finds the idea of God endlessly accepting praise particularly unappealing. "If I was Him I’d be fed up with people telling me what a great guy I am. I don’t think I could cope with God’s role. Mind you, someone said recently that if I’d been born 3000 years ago in India I would have been a religion.

Cutler is wearing a Chinese sailor’s hat – "anything to keep something in my head". His soft Scottish accent with its rolling "r"s enhances a winning combination of propriety and a desire not so much to shock as to trip up. Recently he had a heart attack and was admitted to hospital. He made a set of teeth for himself out of a piece of orange peel. "The professor was not amused. I got my money’s worth and then took the peel out."

He reads out with relish the printed labels which he composes and distributes, with evangelical zeal, to passers-by in the street. "Add 15inches to your stride and save 41 per cent of insects." He particularly likes cheering up cross bus conductors. "I watch their faces change like creases."

Cutler grew up in Glasgow, the descendant of Eastern European Jews who arrived in Scotland three generations before him. His grandfather was a pedlar of working men’s caps and his father branched out into furniture and cutlery. "My parents were orthodox Jews. My father moved from the orthodox to the progressive synagogue. He had been able to read Hebrew but wasn’t understanding the traditional service. For me the language was then exposed as boring. I liked the incomprehensible noise of foreign words.

"My barmitzvah was the only party I’ve ever had in my life. I put thin slices of carbolic soap in the Swiss roll. I received three watches and two fountain pens."

When he was 15 he heard a speaker for the Rationalist Society giving a talk on a soapbox in the street. "They said religion was stuff out of the jungle. I went to our minister and said, ‘Can you prove the existence of God? He must have been in a bad mood as he just said ‘no’. I never went to synagogue again."

In his twenties he looked into other religions, visiting various churches on Sundays. "I wanted to see if I fancied any. I found one Unitarian church that I liked best. But when the Unitarian minister saw me – a strange face – he ran up and wanted to engage me in conversation. I had to act as quickly as possible and left immediately.

But when his marriage broke up in the early Sixties, he visited a church near Trafalgar Square to get a bit of peace and quiet.

In one poem, A Pain In The Neck, from his latest collection, A Wet Handle, Cutler depicts himself in the afterlife. He arrives in Heaven but finds it dreary, so elects to go to Hell. God, in a surprising move, elects to come too: "Just to refresh his memory, he says. Here he comes. ‘All right Ivor, let’s go’. Exeunt Omnes".

"Nothing tragic happens to me," says Cutler, with melancholy. "I shall live another 20 years. I don’t want to live that long. I don’t like noise. In fact one of the reasons I don’t like church ministers is because they’re uptight and make these special noises when they speak . . . One of my brothers is dead, the other has Alzheimers. I’m queueing up."