WOMAD

Kathryn Williams

From United Kingdom

2001 BiographySometimes the recipe for a successful career in music seems so simple. Write some great songs, perform them with honesty and passion, record them simply and faithfully, release them on your own label and then just surf the ensuing success. The question is, why isn’t everyone doing it? The young English singer and songwriter, Kathryn Williams, is well placed to provide an answer to this nutty question because…well…she’s been there and done it. Her first record, ‘Dog Leap Stairs’, complete with great songs, honesty and passion etc etc, was recorded for a mere 80 quid and released in 1999 on her own Caw Records label. The follow up, ‘Little Black Numbers’, also on Caw, was a high-rolling no-holds-barred mega production with an utterly unreasonable spendthrift budget of £3,000, a sum that might just cover the cost of 3 seconds of a Britney Spears video. The album went on to be nominated for the Mercury Prize and sell truckloads. Kathryn’s lyrical and defiantly melancholy tales of life on the dole are rooted in personal experiences of bedsit frustration and art-school angst which prompted her to pick up the guitar at the tender age of 19 and write songs. Her music is not so much folksy as just simple and direct, with a poetic imagination worthy of Joni Mitchell, Beth Orton and Nick Drake. Success has always surprised Kathryn who claims she never went looking for it and consistently refused the kind of image makeover that is de rigeur in poptasticland. "I wasn’t much good at guitar, I’m still not," she claims. "Even now, with two records out, I feel a bit of a charlatan because I know nothing about music." Pull the other one, Kathryn. Biography by Andy Morgan, June 2001