Kate Rusby sings songs of lives lived and loves lost - that's what folk singers do, she tells Siobhán Long.
Her music's been beamed in to us from a distance for far too long now. Although she's from Barnsley, she might as well be from Kandahar or Baku. We've seen so little of Kate Rusby around these parts that she's attained cult status by virtue of her elusiveness. And yet, her albums can be found lurking in the unlikeliest of music collections, wedged in between dog-eared copies of The Grateful Dead and shiny new Thrills or over-played vintage Planxty albums.
Kate Rusby's enigmatic status has gone unchallenged for too long. It's time we got to know a little bit more about this folk singer whose songs reek of medieval England, replete with kind sirs, fair maids and hoary old chestnuts such as "true love". Could it be that Rusby lights a fire in her belly by unearthing lyrically complex stories rather than tales of the monosyllabic variety?
"The songs I sing, regardless of where they have come from, are stories about people - who they love, who they have lost, life in general - and this is a common thread throughout folk music," she says. "I write songs in a similar vein because folk music is what I am influenced by, but as for the language I use, you only have to have a trip to Barnsley or Sheffield to realise that we still talk like that around here. We still say 'thee' and 'thou' and 'over yonder'; it is very much part of the accent local to me and I love it, so it doesn't surprise me at all that it appears in my own songs."
The rarity of Rusby's live performances in Ireland suggests she is either an artist who shuns the stage in favour of the studio, or a performer with an aversion to crossing the Irish Sea. Rusby is quick to dismiss both.
"I love doing live gigs, and I love being in the studio too. Live gigs are great because you have an audience to interact with and someone to actually sing to, but the beauty of being in the studio is you get to be creative, which of course is so important because if you didn't get the time to be creative you would be playing the same songs tour after tour which would make the gigs so boring."
Like a lot of folk artists, Rusby's songs are fuelled by enough blood and guts to fill a war epic of Cecil B. de Mille proportions, regardless of whether she's interpreting age-old songs or inventing her own. Surely she can't be pilfering all of her ideas from everyday life in Barnsley? If she is, it must be one hell of a town.
"I really couldn't tell you," she offers casually. "I'm not one of these writers that can sit in a room and write all day, I only write every now and again and it's only late at night, and only if I'm on my own in the house. I just pick up my guitar and have a play, and sometimes a song will start to form in my head, and sometimes it won't. But still, the old songs are my first love."
RUSBY'S APPROACH TO songwriting and song interpretation is far from the blithe process she might suggest. Across her recent albums, from her most recent, the sublime Underneath The Stars, to the pristine collections that were 10 and Little Lights, and back as far as her 1999 Mercury-nominated Sleepless, she's married old stories with new tunes and new stories with old tunes with an agility that speaks of a folkie who's well-rooted in both the past and the present.
Songs of the calibre of The Blind Harper and Bring Me A Boat may have diverging provenance, but somehow they sit cosily alongside one another, as if hewn from the same felled tree.
"I learnt words and melody for The Blind Harper from the singing of Nic Jones, my hero. Bring Me A Boat came about because a friend of mine called Phil Cunningham sung me a melody that he'd written, and it was so beautiful, so I made him give it to me and I set out to find it some words. After searching high and low through all my books, I took a song from the north-east called The Waters Of The Tyne, and I re-wrote them to fit Phil's melody.
"It's not usual for me to work that way round, because it's the words and the stories in them that attract me to songs, so I'm much more likely to find the words for a song first and go from there really."
Rusby's natural urge is to trawl for suitable melodies, and her undeniable bibliophile instincts go some small way towards helping that process along.
"There are hundreds of undiscovered songs hidden away in old ballad books," she notes. "I started collecting them years ago; if I had a bit of spare time on tour I would find the local second-hand book shops and head straight for the furthest, dustiest corner and there I would find them. I have so many of them now that they are taking over my house so I've stopped buying them for a bit."
"Folk singer" is a much-maligned moniker - but Rusby insists it's a description that aptly describes what she is and does.
"I am so very proud to be called a folk singer, and that's exactly what I am," she insists. "I don't understand this thing of calling yourself an acoustic singer or whatever other name they invent just so you avoid being called a folk singer. You can't trick people into liking your music, whatever music you play. Some people will like it and some won't. It has nothing to do with what label you give yourself. And of course it goes without saying that we should stop being ashamed of our tradition over here.
"Lots of people say they don't like folk music and they haven't even heard it. I swear we have people at my gigs who don't even realise they're at a folk music concert! I am proud of our music tradition and love being called a folk singer."
KATE RUSBY'S PARTNER in life as well as in music is the renowned multi-instrumentalist and producer, John McCusker. She's quick to credit him with playing a hugely significant role in her musical identity, which she acknowledges is a continuously evolving process.
"Like any other working relationship, it has its ups and downs," she says. "The bonuses are that we have a very very similar ear in music so we have the same idea of what a song should sound like when we are in the studio. I can't read music, but John can so it makes it so much easier when we work with string quartets or the brass players we work with. He is a fantastic producer - a good producer has to be able to put musicians at ease and get the best performances out of them, and he is a master of it.
"The down side is, of course, if we fall out in the studio, we don't leave it at work - it comes home!"
Kate Rusby plays The Lyric Theatre, Stranmillis as part of Belfast's Open House Festival tomorrow, the Dunamaise Theatre, Portlaoise on Monday, October 26th and The Village, Dublin on October 27th. www.katerusby.com