Few can view the vagaries of the record industry with more of a sense of irony than Kathryn Williams. Seven years ago she was a timid Newcastle-based singer songwriter from Liverpool trying to put together enough money to self-release her second album. When she did, that finished album Little Black Numbers caused a minor sensation.

As head (and sole employee) of her record label Caw, she was invited to the announcement of the 2001 Mercury Music Prize nominations and, happening to be in London at the time, decided to pop into the ceremony for her lunch. When the shortlist was read out and her name was on it, they had to pick her off the floor. Another shock awaited at the Mercury finals later that year when East West Records offered her a major record deal.

Yet, by her own admission, she was a wreck at the time, suffering from agoraphobia and practically suffering a nervous breakdown every time she had to step in front of an audience. She went on to release three albums for East West - all of them going gold or thereabouts - but it was a fraught time.

"Being inside a major label is not good for your mental health," she says in the chummy manner of one passing cooking recipes to her neighbour over the garden wall. "People are always around you saying 'it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen ... oh it didn't happen!' It's all about throwing money at this and that and it really makes you look inward and view your music as a product because you have to go through all these marketing ideas about how you can change and how the market is changing. The whole time I was there I was thinking it was ridiculous you had to go through this for music. It's commercialism at its most concentrated and if you go inside the machine it whips you into a frenzy of feeling inadequate.

"it was a licensing deal and I handed them the finished record and they would either put it out or not put it out but they put out three records. I think it changed me musically because I was in the environment of thinking about where things were going. I had a terrible time emotionally and mentally but I'm proud of the records. I had stage fright for six years, I had agoraphobia, I was in all sorts. I was a wreck. I used to faint on stage, throw up, had the shakes, everything. Now I look forward to going on tour."

Not that it was all bad. "They were good to me. I earned money from them and the publishers which has meant I've been able to put out my own records ever since. So thank you very much...and goodbye."

Post-major record deal, life for Kathryn Williams has been good. She's now the adoring mother of a two-¬year-old son Louis, she no longer gets stage fright (she believes the two things are related - "when I was pregnant I felt invincible") and she's teamed up with guitarist/singer/producer Neill MacColl and is making the best music of her life. That's the consensus of opinion anyway about her and MacColl's first album together Two, rammed with beautiful melodies, heartfelt lyrics, spare arrangements and the sort of intimacy usually only found in the snug of bars after hours.

"It's the realisation of a dream for me," says MacColl. "I've been working for such a long time as a guitarist and side man and put my own thing on hold while the kids grew up and it's great now to be doing this with Kathryn. Her whole method of working is that it's got to happen immediately or it doesn't happen. There's no wasted space."

Williams and MacColl met at the Daughters Of Albion show at Cork Opera House put together by Kate St John in 2005. Kath sang a Vashti Bunyan song Winter Is Blue ("when I introduced it I called her Vashti Onion as a joke, which was a bit embarrassing when she heard a recording of it") and Neill played guitar in the house band. They hit it off immediately and, with plenty of downtime to share ideas, talked vaguely of putting a project together. When the show transferred to London's Barbican the following year, Kath came up with the slightly impudent idea of performing First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the iconic love song reputedly written in 20 minutes by Neill's father Ewan MacColl in London and taught over the phone to Neill's mum Peggy Seeger

Kath came up with the slightly impudent idea of performing First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the iconic love song reputedly written in 20 minutes by Neill's father Ewan MacColl in London and taught over the phone to Neill's mum Peggy Seeger

"it was a bit daunting for me to sing it with Neill," laughs Kathryn, not sounding remotely daunted. "I thought it would be nice to do it because every time you hear the song it's always really histrionic and ridiculous. I was really pregnant at the time - it was about two weeks before I had Louis- so I was thinking about the baby when I sang it."

Neill MacColl, familiar with hearing First Time emoted within an inch of its life- one E. Presley springs to mind - was bowled over by Kathryn's interpretation. "She whispers it in your ear like a lover rather than shouting it in a gale, Heathcliff style." It is also, he reminds you gleefully, the only time it has been sung to the accompaniment of a musical saw!

When they played it at the Barbican it was so successful that Kathryn and Neill pursued the vague promise they'd made in Cork to try and do more work together. Kath sent him a CD of ideas for songs, Neill went up to Newcastle to stay with Kathryn and her husband to work on them. A couple of hours in Kath's garage-cum-studio and they knew it they were working on an album together. All the demos Kath had originally sent Neill were ultimately jettisoned - "it was kind of folkie, sea shanty type stuff" - but such was the musical chemistry between they wrote 22 songs together in six days.

"It was alchemy really," says Kath. "I write stuff down in books all the time and we used those for the basis of the lyrics. Neill would play some stuff on guitar and it would form between us. Whereas I can hold my guitar in front of me and know maybe seven or eight chords, Neill can really play the guitar and make a chord progress. Which makes it really interesting when you're writing songs. I don't really know anything about music and I'll sing a melody and it goes somewhere, but Neill knows exactly how to get it there. We talked quite a lot about the story of the songs so we were both completely in the same frame of mind when it came to putting them together."

She certainly credits Neill with saving the gorgeous single Come With Me Darling from an early grave. "We'd just had dinner and quite a few glasses of wine so we were hammered and went in to do some stuff for an hour. I started to do it but I felt stupid singing the word darling and I was all for giving up with it but Neill said no, it's fine, so we carried on. If he hadn't said that, the song would never have been written."

After years of being a sidekick to the likes of David Gray, Boo Hewerdine (in The Bible) and Eddie Reader's band, Neill credits Kathryn with giving him the confidence to step into the front line and start singing again.

After years of being a sidekick to the likes of David Gray, Boo Hewerdine (in The Bible) and Eddie Reader's band, Neill credits Kathryn with giving him the confidence to step into the front line and start singing again.

But warming up his chords to sing backing vocals with Kathryn one day he went into Innocent When You Dream, the Tom Waits song from Frank's Wild Years that has also been covered by Spiers & Boden. She instantly ushered him into the studio, added her own subtle backing vocal and with very little else done to it, the track was ready to appear on Two and Neill MacColl was a lead singer again.

They collaborated again to potent effect on Grey Goes, perhaps the most unusual track on the album, with its slightly off-kilter melody. 'When I write I like to amuse myself playing with words and I was trying to bring to life the images of colours of someone who felt there was no colour in their life," says Kathryn of the track. "it just all came together with the instrumentation."

Without a major label marketing department constantly in her ear, Kathryn says she has no idea how her new music fits into the current scene, what it should be called or whether anyone bothers about categories any more anyway.
"It's not genre specific any more and I think that's a really good thing. People find it hard to label music not geared to a certain market and it does music a disservice if you don't let the songs be what they naturally are. I've never shunned folk music or pop music but folk people think I'm pop and pop think I'm folk. See, the making of music is a very different thing to the cataloguing of it. The only way you can be true to the music is as a servant of the song and that's what dictates it for you. If people want to label it folk or whatever that's up to them, but we make songs in a pure form."

Neill: "Everyone has a different idea of what folk is anyway. If you went to Cambridge Folk Festival and watched for the whole three days you'd be mystified what folk is - and that's fine. We just play acoustic music. Come With Me Darling is a classic Burt Bacharach construction. Acoustic pop music." A light goes on in Kathryn's head. "Maybe it's one on from folk. What comes after F? G? Okay, let's call it Golk music!"

Written by Colin Irwin

This interview was reproduced here with the permission of Properganda, a bi-monthly magazine produced by Proper Music Distribution, the UK's largest independent distributor.