A Minute With: Folk musician Nancy Kerr weds old with new

By Claire Milhench LONDON (Reuters) - The songs of English folk musician Nancy Kerr may be steeped in tradition and imagery but her subject matter is taken straight from today's headlines. Her first solo album, "Sweet Visitor", featured a song about the West's exploitation of cheap Asian labour, written after the collapse of the Rana Plaza clothing factory in Bangladesh, and another one about the transformation of London's East End, her birthplace, for the 2012 Olympics. But fiddle-player and songwriter Kerr, born in 1975, employs a lyrical folk vernacular and song structures that recall traditional ballads and broadsides. It's a distinctive style, rich with allusions and symbols, which has led to comparisons with English painter and poet William Blake. "Folk song is there for everyone and the language is very democratic," Kerr told Reuters by phone from a cottage near the Brecon Beacons, a mountainous region of Wales, where she has just finished recording a double album, "Murmurs". "I got a bit of flak for using what people said was archaic language, but I don't think folk music is from the past, I think it links the past to now. A lot of people want to hear contemporary songs in contemporary language, but the reason the folk forms are still around is because they work." Kerr describes the opening song on "Sweet Visitor" -- "Never Ever Lay Them Down" -- as a song about city life and love in an age of austerity: "I take the rural imagery of folk song and more recent industrial imagery. I love to talk about factories and furnaces and stony gardens, but that still fits into folk song." On the upcoming album she collaborates with two other folk musicians, guitarist and songwriter Martin Simpson and melodeon player and composer Andy Cutting. Due out in June, it runs the gamut from spooky ballads to Memphis swing, Kerr said. Q. What else can we expect from the new album? A. There are new songs from me and Martin, and also lesser known versions of songs such as "The Cruel Mother". That's one of the darkest ballads - it's got a very mesmerising vibe. We've also got a Northumbrian tune that I've known since I was born, but we play it like an it's an old-time Cajun tune. Q. You come from a musical family - your mother Sandra Kerr wrote a lot of the music for "Bagpuss", the 1970s BBC children's TV programme, and was the voice of Madeleine the rag doll in the series. How influential was that sort of upbringing? A. Yes, she knew Oliver Postgate (one of the creators of "Bagpuss"), and with John Faulkner, her husband at the time, they wrote all the songs. I think it was a lot of children's first experience of folk music. They had a wonderful time in this old cowshed and I just thought everyone's mum was on telly. But if it's the family business, you see it done and it opens a door in your mind that you can do that for a living. Q. What else do you have planned for 2015? Will there be more from The Full English (a folk "supergroup" commissioned to produce an album of traditional songs to mark the online publication of the folk collections at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society)? A. We're doing one more tour in May and there has been talk that we'll do more recording. We have quite a lot of material that isn't on the album that we play live but we're all so busy! (Editing by Michael Roddy and Susan Fenton)