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writing on the first couple of pages. I found that really powerful. All these strange sounds. There are so many differ- ent sounds and noises and twists in lan- guage. And accents too. My mother’s fami- ly have really strong Hampshire accents. It’s fascinating to see where all these odd sounds come from as abstract noises.”


S


“You can find really old references in place names too. Did you ever see that book London’s Lost Rivers? Lovely little book. It’s got the River Effra in it. There’s a road in Streatham called Effra Road and I always thought what a weird name that is for a road but it’s supposed to come from a really old Celtic word for water or some- thing. Place names and some surnames hold all this mystery. The Shipping Song came out of that fascination.”


he’s away now… “I love being near the sea and I love the ship- ping forecast. I imagine these lovely boats out on the water. They’re probably having an hor- rendous time in the gales but there’s something almost lullaby-ish about those names. Gerry and I were jamming one day and he just grabbed the autoharp and started hitting it with the beater and played a couple of chords and I started singing the shipping forecast over it. It just came out. And then I went off and wrote the middle bit and surfed the net for little noises and found some amazing bits of American army recordings from under the sea in the ’60s. Creatures. Sub- marine sounds. Just funny little noises. So we programmed that into it.”


You’ll have already noted that Lisa


Knapp isn’t your conventional singer- songwriter. Or your conventional ballad singer. Or your conventional anything.


She didn’t study traditional music in Newcastle and nor did she once sing in a rock band. But she was always an avid music lover. All manner of music. There was the early jazz she loved listening to her grandad play on piano when she was a small child; the hymns she sang at school; the classical music she learned to play on violin; the various pop and rock stars she adored as a teenager; the sense of rebellion fuelled by hip hop; dancing Saturday nights away at dodgy raves, and all the other eclectic stuff readily accessi- ble to any musically-inclined kid growing up in South London.


She wasn’t seriously drawn to folk music until she hit 20, chanced upon some old gems from Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, The Waterboys and Shirley Collins while trawling through her friend’s parents’ record collection and rescued her old violin from the loft. And then, shock horror, she cut her teeth on folk song in the old-fashioned way, learning in front of an audience at her local folk club, the Court Sessions in South London and play- ing floor spots wherever she could.


Once smitten, she threw herself into the music with a rare passion, spending endless happy hours researching songs at Cecil Sharp House, scouring secondhand shops for old records, lapping up the dis- tinctive singing of greats like Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs, playing the ses- sion scene in Irish pubs and devouring advice and tuition from luminaries like Pete Cooper and Chris Wood.


Her calling card was the traditional


classic, Blacksmith, a familiar enough song, but not in the pained, sorrowful way she did it. Originally recorded for Gerry Diver’s


solo album Diversions, it sprouted new wings after a beaty Youth re-mix for a compilation album unwittily titled What The Folk and, with her reputation further enhanced by a stint with the Memory Band, she was on her way.


All of a sudden she was everywhere.


Tribute concerts to Lal Waterson and Sandy Denny (where she was accompanied by Dave Swarbrick), the Daughters of Albion shows, Bellowhead’s infamous New Year’s Eve extravaganza on the South Bank, BBC4’s Alternative Christmas Session show, commemorative concerts for Bert Lloyd (at which she duetted with Sam Lee) and Vaughan Williams at Cecil Sharp House; and, perhaps most tellingly, the high profile concert at London’s Royal Fes- tival Hall in 2008, which climaxed a festival curated by one of her primary influences, Shirley Collins. In front of an expectant full house where you feared her rarefied, indi- vidual style might wither in the shadow of the bigger names on display, she put in an immense performance, showing the opposing extremes of her make-up with a display of immaculately pure traditional singing before diving into the deep end of her frantic imagination with the splendid- ly oddball and Björk-esque There U R. The audience was enthralled.


Her debut album Wild & Undaunted – not merely the name of a fiercely impas- sioned title track driven by Gerry Diver’s fiddle but an appropriate description of her singing – was festooned with acco- lades. It was Mojo magazine’s folk album of the year in 2007, while Blacksmith was nominated for best traditional track and she was shortlisted as best newcomer at the 2008 BBC Folk Awards. She was a rare talent who’d immersed herself in the tra- dition, admired by some of the grandees of the movement like Shirley Collins, yet was very much the product of a modern era, hailed at the forefront of the sup- posed nu-folk revolution. Such allusions, however, scarcely acknowledged her indi- viduality, paradoxically both as a singer of exquisite beauty and stirring rawness, who also had a restless, inventive approach to challenging and sometimes bizarre arrangements.


We couldn’t wait to hear what she was going to do next. And then what hap- pened? Well, life really.


“All in good time,” she sweetly replied to the plethora of enquiries about the progress of her second album and


then, all of a sudden, five or six years had passed. “That long, is it?” she laughs over an impossibly frothy coffee in a Wimble- don café. “I suppose that in record compa- ny speak it’s a long time, but it doesn’t seem that long to me.”


After the post-Wild & Undaunted bout of gigging, she took time out to con- centrate on daughter Bonnie and then, as Gerry Diver’s Speech Project started to take shape, she became heavily embroiled in that. She also undertook one of the strangest tours in recent times, teaming up with experimental electronic artist Leaf- cutter John in 2009 on a narrow boat canal tour from London to Birmingham using a variety of strange instruments, including an underwater hydrophone.


“Oh that was fantastic,” she says. “John and I ended up writing a whole 45- minute set. God knows why we didn’t get around to recording it. All these abstract ideas came up – it was such a fun thing to do. I’d love to do more collaborative stuff. I’d like you to put that in – I’d love to col- laborate more.”


Inspired by meeting other songwriters


on the Lal Waterson shows, she also decid- ed that she should plunge seriously into composition for her second album. “I’ve always doodled but to actually finish a song is a big thing for me. I have a patho- logical resistance or something and it took longer than I thought.”


The Hidden Seam song and album title comes from a Bert Lloyd quote. “I was really fascinated by Bert Lloyd because I found out he was born in the road parallel to where I grew up. What an amazing man. I went to the library at Cecil Sharp House and asked Malcolm Taylor about him and he said ‘Watch this’ and he showed me this brilliant docu- mentary which I think must have been made in the 1980s and there was some footage of him. There was a real gentle- ness and romanticism about him which is unusual for an academic, and he said this lovely thing that – I think in relation to recording a lot of folk songs abroad – he believed there was a hidden seam, a secret stream with cultures doing similar things in different ways. I thought that was a really beautiful thing. Hidden seam, secret stream…it sounds so magi- cal. So that phrase came from him and I guess that song is about the notion of how culture bleeds over political borders. And he was also a seaman.”


The track is perhaps the most extreme and left field of her new material, climax- ing with a mad cacophony of noise and shrieking vocals.


“We were recording it and Gerry said ‘Make some noise at the end’. I said ‘what do you mean?’ and he said ‘I can really hear a percussive thing there’. So I said ‘OK’ and started going through the alpha- bet and found some other noises and then Gerry added a thing that sounds like some- thing out of Star Trek. I’ll be in proper trouble trying to do that live.”


She wrote much of the album, J K Rowling style, in Café Nero at Tooting Bec between school runs, the memory of which sets her off on a slightly surreal stream of consciousness.


“I like writing in cafés. All the bustle. And I really got into watching YouTube clips of Japanese noh theatre. It’s utterly spellbinding. I can’t understand what they’re saying but I love the sound of it and the way the instruments work with


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