Kathryn Williams + Lee Maddison

We are delighted to welcome Kathryn Williams to LeftFieldDurham not just because Kathryn is a woman of the left and took part in the 2016 People Powered Concerts For Corbyn but also because she is a brilliant singer/songwriter.

Kathryn began her career in 1999 with the release of Dog Leap Stairs, a set of low-key folk songs that drew comparisons to the hushed musings of Nick Drake. A native of Liverpool, Williams relocated to Newcastle to pursue a fine arts degree from which she emerged with a promising musical career when her second album, Little Black Numbers, was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize. With her newly raised profile, Williams began writing her third album and collaborating with folk legends like Bert Jansch and John Martyn.

In 2004 she released an album called Relations which was a collection of covers of some of her favourite songs. Fiercely independent in attitude and appealingly understated in song, Williams then resumed recording new material at a prolific pace, delivering 2005's Over Fly Over and 2006's Leave to Remain which was described by the now defunct Word magazine as ‘emotional stealth bombing at its most devastating’. In 2008, she worked with British singer/songwriter Neill MacColl (son of folk icons Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger) on the collaborative album Two. That same year, she also contributed vocals to Bombay Bicycle Club's debut single, ‘Evening/Morning.’

Resuming her own solo career later that year, she signed with London-based label One Little Indian and continued releasing high-quality albums at a fairly brisk rate by modern industry standards. Issued in 2010, The Quickening was followed by The Pond in 2012. Crown Electric arrived a year later as Williams embarked on her biggest U.K. tour yet. Her 2015 album, Hypoxia, a lyrically and sonically ambitious set of songs inspired by Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, was co-produced by Ed Harcourt to critical acclaim. 2016 saw the release of Resonator, a set of jazz standards recorded with vibraphone player Anthony Kerr and her latest, a collaboration with author Laura Barnett featuring songs based on Barnett's second novel, 'Greatest Hits' was released on 16th June 2017.

While Kathryn is widely known as a Nick Drake fan, her own songs draw from a wide range of influences and she began writing long before she had heard of Nick Drake. Kathryn is eager to point out that, despite being happy to be associated with the English singer-songwriter tradition, she has strong roots in American song too: ‘That’s more what I grew up with than the English tradition. I was listening to Dylan and Joni Mitchell… I also love The Velvets and grungy New York stuff. The things that influence you aren’t necessarily gonna come out in obvious ways, unless you’re trying to copy. I don’t sound like Lou Reed or Tom Waits. But when I listen to them, I learn.’

‘Williams is the laureate of the tiny moment - of glances, breaths, little intimacies only two people can share; small things on which the world turns’ – The Guardian

‘Williams delivers deep, cutting insights with an occasional giggle’ – The Independent