A supergroup of English female folk singers are on their way to Cork to celebrate some shared musical roots, they tell Siobhán Long

'All you need are a pair of ears and a heart." June Tabor, one of England's finest singers of both folk and contemporary song, is in no doubt about the sublime capacity of a song to still the most flustered of cardiac muscles. For her, the words are all-powerful, the melody secondary. Songs are only as good as their lyric, rising and falling on their own story, their life force embedded within.

Tabor, along with Norma Waterson, Eliza Carthy, Kathryn Williams and Thea Gilmore, is coming to Cork as one of The Daughters of Albion on Friday, in the European Capital of Culture's Music Migrations Series. The musicians are an eclectic gathering, drawn together from the world of folk, pop, contemporary and traditional music, whose focus will be on English songs reflecting the female experience.

Kate St John is the musical director of this world premiere, and Philip King has curated the concert series, along with the senior programmer at London's Barbican Centre, Bryn Ormrod. King hopes the gathering will give long- overdue expression to a tide that has turned from one of emigration to one that buoys and welcomes travellers back home.

"I had this notion of 'why don't we take people back up the river?'," he says, explaining the impetus behind the latest in his series of Cork 2005 concerts. "Why don't we offer an invitation to people to bring their music back? A lot of us went to England, and we share a common ballad tradition. They are our nearest neighbour, and when I was growing up I began to hear their songs on Irish records. Sweet Thames Flow Softly appeared on a Planxty record; Little Musgrave, one of the great big English ballads, appeared there too.

"Gay and Terry Woods joined with Ashley Hutchings, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior to form Steeleye Span and began to explore that common ballad tradition. That flowered in England in Fairport Convention, and in particular in the voice of Sandy Denny, and later in the emergence of a great voice in June Tabor. English music and song is part and parcel of our musical landscape. Celebrating the English voice in Cork will indicate that we have developed as a nation to a point where we can celebrate the music, the language and the hugely rich song tradition of our nearest neighbour. There's a huge canon of song there, and wherever singers sit down to sing there is a recognition that there is something primal about the greatest of instruments, and that is the voice."

King and Ormrod were lucky enough to discover that a project was brewing which dovetailed seamlessly with their plans for an Anglo-Irish coalition. In London, Harriet Simms, of Free Will Productions, had been quietly percolating her own idea about drawing the strands of English singing together.

"Principally, the idea for this concert developed after, some years ago, I stumbled across a magical, lyrical album called Once in a Blue Moon, by a singer-songwriter called Lal Waterson," Simms explains. "I didn't grow up around traditional music, and frankly, although a Londoner, English folk music seemed to me the most foreign of all sounds. Lal's album was a revelation, especially when I understood it was filed under 'folk'.

"At the time, English folk didn't seem to have anything like the easy appeal of Irish, Scots or what I thought of then as the perennially cool American folk music. This perception has radically changed in very recent times. English women collectors, singers and performers have all played their part for centuries in helping to define a quintessentially English style, which can be heard around the globe and even in the urban, contemporary sounds of today."

Simms recognised the achievements of a rake of independent-minded, spirited women singers who in recent years have reignited a fire in the belly of English song. She felt that The Daughters of Albion would be one way of celebrating that achievement.

Norma Waterson is one of the stalwarts of English traditional singing, who, with her husband, Martin Carthy, has trawled the recesses of her own song tradition for nearly five decades. The prospect of joining four fellow female singers to celebrate the songs of her home place is one that she's relishing, particularly since there's such a wealth of material just waiting to be aired.

"If you look at what collectors like Cecil Sharp collected," Waterson offers, tantalisingly, "he did collect a lot of songs from men, but he collected nearly twice as much from women. There weren't so many women recorded because a lot of the collectors recorded in pubs where there weren't any women, but the amount of songs collected from women were enormous.

"I do think, though, that the difference between men writing and women writing is not so great. Women write songs about war, and men write songs about love. Billy Bragg, for example, writes the most beautiful love songs. So do Ray Davies and Richard Thompson."

While the gender gap might not be significant, Waterson despairs at the changing themes which have tended to dominate recent songwriting.

"With a few exceptions," she notes with regret, "most songwriters don't seem to be interested in politics any more. In folk music, there's a huge body of mining songs, union songs, weaving songs and so on. Unfortunately, people just seem to want to write about themselves these days. Mind you, I have heard a few very good songs written about immigrants and asylum seekers, so there are one or two getting through, but the pop world leads, and most of its songs are about love, nothing else."

Kathryn Williams is a contemporary singer-songwriter whose distinctly wry and low-key style promises to shed an entirely different light on The Daughters of Albion. Her Mercury Award- nominated album, Little Black Numbers, put her on the map and her current covers album, Relations, features an eclectic range of songwriters from Kurt Cobain to Lou Reed. Hardly a stalwart of the folk revival then?

"I'm not from a traditional folk background," she says, "so it's not been easy for me to get under the skin of some of the songs we'll be singing in this concert. Yet it's quite nice, because I find I'm quite touched by the stories in the songs themselves. My only criteria with any music is that it's got to come from the heart and it's got to say something new, and I love being part of something that forces me to broaden my horizons and expand what I thought I knew about music."

The Daughters of Albion isn't an entirely female affair. The House Band, led and arranged by Kate St John, features former Pogue and master multi-instrumentalist David Coulter, guitarist Neil MacColl and Van Morrison's drummer, Liam Bradley. June Tabor is unequivocal about what motivates her to engage in collaborations such as this.

"Everything starts with the words," she declares. "That is the starting point: the words of a song. Everything else is secondary to that - for me. The whole point of accompaniment and instrumentation is to underscore the strength of the words, not to conceal its inadequacies. So if you've got good, strong words to start with, your work is half done. The song itself will tell you which way to go, and it's up to you to fine-tune it."

In an age of excess, at a time when our senses are bombarded, Tabor welcomes the minimalism of a truly great song.

"The economy of lyric writing is a very important part of the constitution of a song," she notes. "To be able to say an awful lot in a very short time, like good short-story writing. For the duration of the song you are inside it, and when you get spat out the other end, you've been changed by it."

The Daughters of Albion play in Cork Opera House on May 6. Tickets: €25/€20. Bookings: 021-4270022 or www.corkoperahouse.ie