Stephen McAll wrote his first album when he was 15 years old. The songs are long lost, not just to the proverbial mists of time, but in McAll's memory. A serious assault in his teenage years left him paralysed, traumatised and with no recollection of his life before the attack.

'I went from being top of the class in most subjects to not being able to do anything and that led to a depression that meant music was of no interest to me,' says McAll. 'I tried to cope with life like my friends were trying to cope with life, but I was so damaged that I couldn't really integrate, and it led to me trying to cope with other things like taking drugs and drinking.'

McAll, who now records as Constant Follower and fronts the four-piece band of the same name, is a good 20 years clear of the initial trauma and can speak with matter-of-fact calm about his experiences. But his recovery was by no means assured until his family intervened and packed him off to his childhood bolthole on the Cowal Peninsula. 'It's right on the sea and the wind would be sideways in my face,' he recalls. 'But I'd feel so alive and there was nobody around to distract me. My body had healed but my mind was still broken and it was only through spending loads of time in nature that I was able to make sense of things.'

Inspired by Norman MacCaig's poetry, McAll began to write and then put his words to music. The second song he wrote became the first track on Constant Follower's outstanding, fully-formed debut album Neither Is, Nor Ever Was (a full-album film directed by Sean Hall is below) a gorgeous act of rehabilitation, produced to perfection by veteran Shimmy-Disc supremo Kramer. 'What it's saying to me is even when things are going quite wrong, there's still hope and beauty around you,' says McAll. 'I used to have this scary recurring dream when I was standing in the middle of a huge room. A lot of the songs are this feeling of things becoming too big but pulling it back and telling myself that things are going to be alright.'

McAll is now based in Stirling, where he promotes concerts and forges links between local creatives, many of whom played on the album or contributed to an accompanying film. McAll may have never regained his lost childhood memories but he has managed to reconstruct the past using old photographs, family cinefilms and stories gathered from friends. 'I think a lot of my memories are in that cinefilm colour bleed where the colours are all very warm. So that's where my childhood memories are; they are all things that people have told me. You know it happened, but you don't remember it.'

Constant Follower play Stereo, Glasgow, Wednesday 2 March; Neither Is, Nor Ever Was is out now on Shimmy-Disc.