Listening to a voice of reason

'I've been stuck away in studios and in people's houses writing songs with them for five years," says Cara Dillon, exhausted …

'I've been stuck away in studios and in people's houses writing songs with them for five years," says Cara Dillon, exhausted from a frenzy of gigs and radio sessions, as well as an endless round of explaining her career to journalists. "So to finally get out and start to do gigs is incredible. It's been a heavy schedule recently, but I'm not complaining one bit. I love it and I'm so glad to be out doing the work again. It's what I've been waiting for."

Born and raised in Dungiven, Co Derry, Dillon last month released a self-titled album on Rough Trade, the record label founded by Geoff Travis, a long-time champion. It will be the first time many people will have heard her voice - and once heard, it won't be forgotten.

In loosely similar territory to that of the Brennan sisters and with a gentle hint of a Northern lilt, as well as a beautiful, natural quality that eschews any need for studio soft-focus trickery, it is the kind of voice one could imagine luring doomed wayfarers to the land of faerie, never to return.

Dillon herself is the embodiment of words such as "elfin" and "sylphlike". But if she is superficially delicate, she also brims with the measured self-confidence and belief that are crucial to weathering the music business, and that come only with experience.

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Of that, Dillon has plenty. Like David Gray, who made four albums before the world beyond Ireland even noticed, Dillon (25) was touring Europe and fronting records from 1990 to 1995 - during school holidays of course - with ╙ige, the part-time traditional group. After that, she was drafted in to front Equation, a band signed to an offshoot of a major label and based around the brothers Sam, Seth and Seβn Lakeman.

A career in music seemed ready-made, but for a backlash from the English folk community against an act perceived to be a vacuous pop-folk marketing ploy - let alone those time-honoured "musical differences".

"When I joined Equation it was really exiting," says Dillon. "We were all young - I was only 19 at the time - and we were all totally blown away by the amount of publicity we were getting before we'd even done anything. And the money that was being spent on us . . . We went to Real World Studios Peter Gabriel's complex near Bath, and the album Turn To Me was recorded there though, given Dillon's decision to leave shortly after, never released. There was a single release, there were videos made, we were on the music channel VH1 - everything was going incredibly well.

"But the problem was there were seven of us in the band, each person incredibly talented and with a lot of ideas. From the very onset, Sam Lakeman and myself found we had the same taste in music, same interests, same musical direction. We thought: 'we're not going to be able to pull this off, because we're not being true to ourselves - let's go off and try it ourselves, do what we really want to do.' "

Dillon and Lakeman left the band, but relations are civil. "Because there was such a long build-up to it, our leaving wasn't a big deal at the end." There is a possibility that Rough Trade will license and belatedly release her "lost" album with the group, an idea she feels relaxed about. "It'll show the development of where we're all at today."

A version of Equation is still going, trying to crack the United States, but within the past four months, Lakeman's brother Seth

has also left the family band and joined the two defectors. Should Seβn do likewise, there remains the bizarre prospect of Dillon once again fronting Equation in all but name.

Compared to the "missing years" of 1996-2000, however, the Equation experience was but a picnic. Dillon and Lakeman, who are engaged to be married as well as being musical partners, were still signed to the major label, and Dillon was now "in development" as a solo artist.

Enough demos to fill a couple of boxed sets - even a finished album, made over four months in San Francisco - were recorded and rejected. Nothing was to be released. "In the end, Sam and myself just decided: 'we're never going to give the label the album they want.' Every time we had a song we were happy with, they'd say, 'right, back to the drawing board, try and do something more commercial,' or they'd introduce us to a producer who'd take the one part of the song we really loved and say, 'right, we'll drop that bit and fiddle about with the music a bit.' "

Inevitably, the string of people Dillon and Lakeman were teamed up with would identify a vaguely similar successful act - such as The Corrs, The Cranberries or The Sundays - and try to mould the pair's sound in its image.

"It was fantastic that we were getting all this attention and that they had so much faith that we were able to do it, but it was a hell of a lot of pressure - to go to a meeting and play a song and then to have someone say, 'we love it, we love it . . . but come back in a couple of weeks with a more jazzed-up version.'

"And we, of course, would have thought that we'd already done the perfect version, got it absolutely right. It was just frustration. I'm sure the record company must have realised at some point that it was never really going to happen.

"In the end we asked ourselves: 'what do we really want to do?' And we wanted to do an album with folk songs and maybe a couple of our own on it, and we wanted to do it ourselves." They retreated to the Lakeman family studio in Devon, where Sam Lakeman largely arranged, produced and engineered Dillon's album of mostly traditional songs. Her friend John Reynolds, who plays with and has produced SinΘad O'Connor, finished it off with a stunningly fresh, airy mix.

Dillon sanguinely acknowledges that the major-label process was not time wasted but was necessary to steel and refine her for a solo career, and for what the real-life, out-there-doing-it music game can throw at someone. Though happy to be seen as a folk singer and to bring the traditional songs she loves to a potential mass audience, her musical tastes - Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian, Talk Talk, Nick Drake - have a breadth and inquisitiveness generally unusual among young musicians involved in the folk scenes of Ireland or England, where she remains based.

Refreshingly, Dillon is part of no clique or scene, real or imagined, be it the English "folk babes", such as Kate Rusby and Eliza Carthy, or the incestuous world of professional Irish trad.

David Kitt is remixing two album tracks for a possible single release and, having tested the water with successful appearances at the Witnness and Cambridge Folk festivals, Dillon will next month give her first big Dublin gig, at HQ on September 13th. Two days later, she'll be performing at the Portglenone Festival, near Dungiven. Welcome home.