HAD F Scott Fitzgerald decided that there were no second acts in Scottish lives rather than American ones, then there could be no firmer rebuttal than the life of Scott Fraser. Born and bred in East Kilbride and Glasgow but now resident in London, Fraser, who these days runs a couple of club nights and a couple of labels as well as releasing records for a host of respected house imprints, is in the midst of a very distinct and fruitful second act of his musical life. Known as an aficionado of Chicago house, Fraser started his clubbing life at Slam’s Tin Pan Alley nights and the nascent Sub Club in the late 1980s.

He says he had actually been buying early house records even before that, and the experience of going to these places soon led him to buy a set of decks and begin DJing, though he laughingly explains that this initially meant playing in pubs and having to introduce each record on a microphone as it faded in. “Pretty early on I met a couple of guys with synths,” he tells me, “and they introduced me to the production side of things. We began the group Bios together, putting out stuff for Andrew Weatherall and for a few American labels.” Things went well for a while, but by the late 1990s he felt that Bios “was going down a different road from where I wanted it to, so I just gave it up eventually.”

Fraser’s hiatus from music stretched out to a full 14 years, from 1998 to 2012. “We got robbed, which didn’t help,” he explains, “and then we moved the studio to my house, which just doesn’t work for me – I’ve always needed to have somewhere else to go to do music.” Having somewhere to go to do music when he relocated to London eight years ago seems to have been crucial in bringing Fraser back into the fray, as well as in forging many of the connections that have shaped this new era in his career. The place was a room at Andrew Weatherall’s storied Rotters Golf Club studio complex in Shoreditch, where Fraser suddenly found himself taking tea breaks with Death In Vegas’s Richard Fearless, Daniel Avery, Weatherall collaborator Timothy J Fairplay and Weatherall himself.

“I’ve maintained a friendship with Andrew since meeting him at the Sub Club in the late 80s,” he says, “and I think getting that place alongside those people, and being exposed to the incredibly diverse stuff Andrew listens to, was really important. I really enjoyed working on my own too – when I first came down to London I basically spent a year in there learning how to engineer stuff and make it sound good, so I can now take care of the whole recording process from beginning to end without needing anyone else’s help.”

Fraser has certainly been making up for lost time in the last four years, putting out around a dozen EPs for respected imprints such as Joe Hart and Andy Blake’s World Unknown, Weatherall’s Bird Scarer, Astro Lab, Horn Wax, and his and Fairplay’s own Crimes Of The Future. The connection with Fairplay has spawned Fraser’s strongest current connection to Glasgow: the pair’s quarterly Crimes Of The Future night at the Berkeley Suite. That, plus the celebrated monthly London night Body Hammer he puts on with World Unknown’s Joe Hart, have cemented Fraser’s resurgence as a DJ as well as a producer.

“The two nights are pretty different,” he explains. “Body Hammer is like an old Chicago house party modelled along the lines of Ron Hardy’s Music Box. We play lots of vocal, jacky house, there are lots of young people there and it has a real party atmosphere. With Crimes there are some similarities but Tim doesn’t play much of the sort of vocal Chicago house I’ll play, and we do it record-about all night so there’s usually a lot of push and pull. Crimes is still pretty upbeat music but it’s usually a bit darker, a bit more heads-down.” Both nights have been hugely successful in any case, with Body Hammer a nailed-on highlight of London’s clubbing calendar and Crimes taking him and Fairplay around Europe and the US, as well as helping to maintain a connection with his hometown.

Much though Fraser has taken to London as his home, it’s clear that his ties to Glasgow are as strong as ever. “I love doing Crimes there and I feel like being away has improved my relationship with the place in a lot of ways,” he says. “I keep in touch with Martin at (legendary Glasgow record shop) Rubadub, and with (Subculture’s) Harri and Domenic and Optimo and a lot of other people. I feel like I get the best of Glasgow when I come up now, and I always look forward to coming back again.”

Now 48, Fraser is part of a generation of DJs and producers who are finding – as long as their talent isn’t in question – that age is no impediment to continued relevance on the dance floors and record shelves of the UK, Europe and beyond. His forthcoming album under the Aquariun alias will be his first full-length LP. It actually came out as an ultra-limited self-released cassette tape last year, but unless you’re someone who would choose “Scott Fraser” as their specialist subject on Mastermind, the London label Berceuse Heroique’s imminent reissue of the album on vinyl is likely to be your best chance yet of hearing it.

“I actually didn’t set out to make an album at all,” Fraser says. “But I found a while ago that I had a load of good stuff that touched on electro, hip hop, Detroit techno and such. I wanted to put them together rather than split them up and give them to labels individually, so Martin and Richard Chater at Rubadub helped me do the cassette release. Martin’s influence is all over the record actually – throughout the 90s I was buying all sorts of stuff from him that came from Germany or Holland or France or whatever, and you can easily draw a line from those records to what I’ve done here.” Further insight into the records Fraser is referring to can be found on an excellent “Influences” mix (bit.ly/2cQBmy6) that he recently compiled, featuring the likes of Porter Ricks, Unit Moebius, Moritz von Oswald and µ-Ziq.

“Berceuse Heroique offering to release it on vinyl was the final piece of the jigsaw,” he concludes. “The tracks are being remastered, it’s being pressed at the best plant in Germany, and the artwork looks great. So for a first stab at an album, it’s all come together nicely.” The same could very well be said of a career that from here looks like a great advert for taking a quick 14 years off and then plunging right back into things.

Berceuse Heroique will release Aquariun’s Eden And After in the autumn. The next edition of Crimes Of The Future is at The Berkeley Suite on October 22, 11pm to 3am, £5.