In his 50-plus-year career, Barry Blue has reaped success as a one-time pop artist, a producer, and a hitmaker. Songs from his vast catalogue have been covered or sampled by the likes of Andrea Bocelli, Diana Ross and Celine Dion. But for decades he’s harboured a burning wish: to return to and record his favourite, most personal, songs.

Now approaching his 70th birthday this December, Blue (born Barry Green) has fulfilled his goal, with his new album Songs From the Heart Book. “They’re my legacy songs. They were all very personal and I didn’t want to leave them in the past,” he explains. “I listened to them and thought, ‘that’s not the way I wanted them to be produced or sung’. So I collected all those songs and said, ‘this is the way I want them to sound’. I’m pleased that those songs have got another life, the way I originally heard them. It’s always been my mountain I’ve wanted to climb and it’s taken me over 25 years.”

You only have to listen to Songs From the Heart Book to witness the importance of family to Blue — his wife Lynda and their three children. Take the emotive Call My Name, written for his eldest daughter.

“We had a lot of trouble having children,” he says. “When our daughter was born, I used to watch her for hours on end, in her cot, and just watch her breathing, poke her a little bit, make sure she was comfortable. I wanted to tell her that I would always be there for her.” The song is made more poignant by the addition of spoken word by his granddaughter, who approached him as he was working on the song to say how much she loved it; Blue suggested she talked over it. He also sang it at his second daughter’s wedding.

“It did bring a tear to everyone’s eye,” he says. “It’s a very special song. Nearly all the songs on the album have a meaning.”

Lost for Words was inspired by seeing his wife for the first time after the couple married, and is a favoured choice for him to sing at barmitzvahs and weddings. “It’s a song that no-one has recorded before because I wouldn’t let it out. It’s too personal.” Meanwhile, Boy in the Moon was written for his son as “a guardian angel song. It was to say, however you’re feeling, there is always someone looking out for you.”

Songs from the Heart Book includes Escaping, which reached number three in the charts for Dina Carroll in 1996, which despite being sparked by something as impersonal as the escape key on a Qwerty keyboard, was about his 15-year-old self’s need to escape. “I was escaping loneliness,” he recalls. “I was a fairly lonely kid. And I thought that was a great catalyst to writing the song: how do you escape loneliness?”

He grew up in a flat in Maida Vale with his mother and older half sister; his father passed away when he was three. His mother made a living through gambling. “My mother was an enigma,” he says with an affectionate laugh. “I used to be parked outside various gambling clubs in London. It was a strange existence, I was kind of a latchkey kid growing up. I was always left to my own devices, which made me insular, but also made me realise what I wanted to do in life, which was to write songs, and perform.”

Acquiring his mother and sister’s love of rock and roll — Johnnie Ray, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley — Blue knew by the age of ten that he wanted to go into music. He had learnt guitar aged eight or nine, introduced by his sister’s future husband — a singer songwriter who worked at the legendary 2i’s Coffee Bar and later wrote hits with Blue.

What also shaped his career plans were Friday night dinners at his uncles’ and grandfather’s homes, where the young Blue would sing for everyone. “I was quite a cocky kid. I always used to sing the songs of the day, and get a laugh. I liked at that time being the centre of attention.”

He took on three jobs — paper rounds, cleaning windows and then cars — to save up for his first guitar. His school band The Dark Knights followed, with whom he stirred trouble for appearing on a children’s talent show on Granada TV during school hours. It led to his first signing, aged 14, with record producer Norrie Paramor, whose assistant was Tim Rice. By the time he was 16, and had left school, he was working in London guitar shops by day and playing gigs in a band by night.

While he now writes and records in his studio at the back of his Hertfordshire garden, built in a Second World War concrete bunker, Blue has always carved out a sacred space for writing. In his childhood bedroom, he had a coffee table bought from the market especially. “I had a corner of my bedroom that nothing else was allowed to go on,” he recalls. “I put everything in that I needed — my plectrums, my strings, my pen and paper, a cassette recorder. So soon as I had an idea, I knew where I could write. It’s been like that ever since. For me, a songwriter needs a man cave — your writing zone.”

With 40 million record sales worldwide, Blue’s success as a producer and songwriter spans the decades through to more recent work with The Saturdays, The Wanted and Pixie Lott.

Songwriting was always his intention rather than performing. “But I got pushed into performing because no one else wanted to record my songs,” he says. “The only way I could actually get the songs out was to sing them myself.”

In his early days writing with Lynsey de Paul, the late singer-songwriter was trying to place the demo of their song Sugar Me but the likes of Herman’s Hermits repeatedly turned it down.

“We were both very keen on just sticking to the background and being songwriters. But the songs we were writing just weren’t being accepted. She found a manager who said, ‘why don’t you just put it out yourself?’”

De Paul followed the advice, and the song became a Top 10 hit that earned Blue his first UK chart songwriting credit in 1973, and was covered by Nancy Sinatra. That year, Blue’s Dancing (on a Saturday Night) became the writer’s first chart success as a singer.

Achieving his first hit felt “very odd”, he says, recalling the occasion he went into a record shop to buy a Deep Purple vinyl only to hear the woman in front requesting “‘the new single by a guy called Barry Blue’. Of course, I felt really chuffed.”

He returned to the role of performer before the lockdown, playing weddings and his local Bushey synagogue — a show he enjoyed so much that more gigs were in the pipeline. “The congregation was quite full, actually. They seemed to appreciate it, and I thought, ‘Oh, I like this. Maybe we’ll do some more of this after the album’s finished’, but obviously situations have changed now…”

Blue’s songs have soundtracked milestones in people’s lives, from weddings to funerals, no more so than Always and Forever which he produced for the soul band Heatwave.

“I feel very proud and privileged,” he says. “I’m extremely lucky. I’ve been doing a job I love and I will be doing it until... It’s not something you retire from.”

The box set ‘Chapter and Verse... 50 Years On’ by Barry Blue is released this week