THE poet, humorist, illustrator and composer Ivor Cutler possessed a disconcerting talent and a singular ability to view the world from an oblique perspective. His admirers spanned the generations, from those who had become fascinated by his doleful Scottish tones in the late 1950s to members of the modern pop generation. His recordings were championed by John Peel on Radio 1 over many years, and in 1997, at the age of 74, he was signed up by the record label Creation, the home of Oasis.

Fame first came to the Glaswegian schoolteacher when he submitted his idiosyncratic poems and stories to the BBC Home Service, and he became a regular contributor to the programme Monday Night at Home. Frequently he performed to the accompaniment of a bronchitic, pedal-driven harmonium in a depressive minor key. Cutler quickly acquired a huge following of people who despised him. His fans, however, proved more enduring and included Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who asked the BBC for Cutler’s phone number. Cutler found himself playing a cameo role in the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour.

Cutler was born into a Jewish middle-class family of Eastern European descent who had lived in Scotland for three generations. He was born close to Ibrox Stadium, Glasgow, and traced what he described as the lifelong neurosis which shaped him to the birth of his younger brother: “He took my place as the centre of the Universe. Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am and therefore as creative. Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull, I think.”

He was evacuated during the war and in 1940 became an apprentice fitter with Rolls-Royce, helping to assemble engines for Spitfires. He trained to become an RAF navigator but found it hard to concentrate. He recalled: “Just after I wrote home that I was now Sergeant Cutler, I was called into the CO’s office and told I was a menace and that my plots were dreadful and I was too dreamy and absent-minded.”

He found reading Kafka particularly liberating and then, while training to be a teacher at Jordanhill College in Glasgow, he had what he described as an enormous artistic breakthrough. “I was asked to do a drawing which involved transport. I drew some jagged lines to represent Scottish mountains. Then I thought I would put a bus in the picture. I realised that if the bus was to be the right size in relation to the real world it would be all but invisible. So I decided to make the bus bigger. I then had the idea to bend the bus so that it could go over the tops of mountains and down the other side and suddenly I felt that I was in charge of the painting.”

He began teaching at A. S Neill’s Summerhill, the “school with no rules”, and continued teaching for more than 30 years. From 1961 to 1970 he taught music, African drumming, poetry and drama to primary school children, his freeform lessons usually proving far more popular with pupils than with parents.

Over the years he produced a steady stream of extraordinary work. This included recordings, books, illustrations and radio series with such Cutleresque titles as Cockadoodle Don’t, Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Volume 2, Many Flies Have Feathers, Jammy Smears and Gruts. His favoured means of working was to jot ideas into a small notebook the moment they came into his mind.

Cutler’s work and performances remained on the wavelength of the children that shared his days, whom he credited for his inspiration. “I used them,” he said. “But they used me. It was a mutual thing.

“Those who come to my gigs probably see life as a child would. It’s those who are busy making themselves into grown-ups, avoiding being a child — they’re the ones who don’t enjoy it.” This wilful naivety was often loosely and misleadingly labelled “alternative”, yet as Laurie Taylor said in 1994: “He’s been alternative so long that it is impossible to specify the reality from which he originally departed.”

Cutler dressed in a distinctive style, often favouring plus-fours and colourful hats covered in badges. His favoured means of transport was the bicycle and his preferred means of communication the sticky label. His labels, which he had specially printed, consisted of short pithy Cutlerisms, and he attached them to his correspondence. “Never knowingly understood” was one which both his detractors and supporters could deploy with equal satisfaction. “Kindly disregard” was reserved for official correspondence, and “to remove this label take it off” was designed to confuse pedants.

His poetry and music were written via a process of “bypassing the intellect”, in the manner of a child. He recalled how, in an art class, “one boy drew an ass that didn’t have four legs, but 14. I asked him why and he said it looked better that way. I wanted to lift him out of his cage and put my arms around him, but my intellect told me not to, which was lucky, because I probably would have been sent to prison.”

After months of trying to sell his songs to known artists, he decided in 1957 to try singing them himself and there found some success. The BBC Home Service took him to its bosom, and he reached a peak of activity between 1959 and 1963. He released his first EP, Of Y’Hup in 1959 and his first album, Who Tore Your Trousers?, in 1961.

In 1973 Cutler appeared on Robert Wyatt’s album Rock Bottom, laying harmonium and recitation over Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road and Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road. He turned out 12 albums, the latest, A Flat Man, for the indie flagbearer Creation in 1998. He was awarded a Pye Radio Award for Humour in 1980, the year he retired from teaching.

Throughout his career Cutler remained the grit in the oyster of respectability. He did not dispute the description once given to him that he was a rather stupid genius. Such genius derived from his ability to view life from the opposite direction to that taken by society, and his ability to empathise with the implications of that viewpoint, as in his one-sentence poem: “A fly crouching in a sandwich cannot comprehend why it has become more than ordinarily vulnerable.”

Cutler’s last performance was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in February 2004. There he performed songs and read from what would be his final book of poems, Scots Wa’ Straw. He also contributed to the Radio 1 tribute to Peel.

Cutler, an active member of the Noise Abatement Society, had a keen dislike for popular music that was never mutual: last April Alex Kapranos, of the band Franz Ferdinand, attested that Cutler had been a huge influence on him, writing in The Guardian that: “Cutler’s determination not to become mired in intellectualism is one of the main principles of our band.”

Cutler had major heart surgery in the late 1990s. When told that he did not have long to live, he said: “When I do die I shall be glad to get away from loud pop music and motor cars, but I shall miss, insofar as when one is dead one can miss anything, the beautiful kindnesses of those people to whom courtesy comes naturally.”

He had two sons from a marriage which was dissolved.

Ivor Cutler, humorist, was born on January 15, 1923. He died on March 3, 2006, aged 83.