On tour with Kathryn Williams

I am very excited to announce that I’ll be on tour with the legendary singer-songwriter Kathryn Wiliams for a month-long UK adventure in September and October 2023.

All tickets are available here: www.linktr.ee/bigskytour

The Big Sky Tour kicks off in Glasgow on 16 September and finishes in Reading on 15 October. See you there!

Sat 16 Sept GLASGOW Glad Cafe
Sun 17 Sept DURHAM Old Cinema Launderette
Mon 18 Sept LEEDS Hyde Park Book Club
Tue 19 Sept POCKLINGTON Pocklington Arts Centre     
Thur 21 Sept DEEPDALE, NORFOLK Deepdale Festival
Fri 22 Sept CAMBRIDGE Portland Arms
Sat 23 Sept WOLVERHAMPTON Newhampton Arts    
Thur 28 Sept LONDON St Matthius Church
Fri 29 Sept HENLEY Christchurch
Sat 30 Sept LEAMINGTON SPA Temperance
Sun 1 Oct CHESHIRE Thornton Hough
Tue 3 Oct MANCHESTER Gulliver’s
Wed 4 Oct HEBDEN BRIDGE Trades Club
Thu 5 Oct GALASHIELS Mac Arts
Fri 6 Oct NEWCASTLE Common Room
Wed 11 Oct BIRMINGHAM Kitchen Garden Café
Thu 12 Oct NEWPORT Le Pub
Fri 13 Oct TOTNES Ashburton Arts Centre
Sat 14 Oct WESTON-SUPER-MARE Loves Café
Sun 15 Oct READING South Street Arts

All tickets are available here: www.linktr.ee/bigskytour

As labels buddies on One Little Independent Records, Kath and I met on a songwriting retreat. We have written songs together and tutored songwriting courses at Arvon Foundation. Our friendship developed and strengthened, supporting each other over lockdown. Being fans of each other’s work, it seemed a foregone conclusion that we would get on the road at some point. Finally after many years of talking about our Thelma and Louise tour dreams (hopefully without the killing or the cliff) we have pulled together a beautiful intimate month-long tour up and down the country, both playing headline solo sets and also coming together for a few songs together. Lucky audiences will get two concerts for the price of one.

Kathryn Williams is a Liverpool-born, Mercury Music Prize nominated singer-songwriter with 16 albums under her belt. Before her last release, Night Drives (which entered the official folk album charts straight to number 2), the label OLI celebrated her career thus far with a 20 CD two book box set anthology strewn with her art. She has written a novel “The Ormering Tide” which debuted to critical acclaim, and was listed in The Bookseller as a bestseller for the north and she hosts her own popular podcast “before the light goes out” which was put in the top ten best music podcasts by The Guardian. Kathryn tutors at Arvon, Moniack Mhor, and The Writing Squad and writes songs with many diverse artists around the world including Paul Weller, Ed Harcourt, Beth Neillson Chapman and Michele Stodart.

“Sombre, majestic, extravagant” – Uncut Magazine
kathrynwilliams.co.uk

My shed-recorded debut Scissors In My Pocket received international critical acclaim upon its 2004 release by One Little Independent. I toured the USA, supported Bob Dylan, Jamie Cullum, Divine Comedy and Marianne Faithfull and played Glastonbury. In 2012, I founded Wild Sound, now an OLI folk imprint, and signed nine artists. I completed my PhD in 2020, which informed my eighth album Invisible Music — folk songs that influenced Angela Carter (**** The Guardian) and my academic book on the same subject (Bloomsbury, 2022). I tutor for Arvon, Cambridge and ICMP. My ninth and tenth albums The Pivot Upon Which the World Turns (2022) and its sister When Violent Hot Pitch Words Hurt (2023) were released to critical acclaim; I am now working on a collaboration with double bassist Jon Thorne exploring relationships between song and prose.

“complete, pure and personal” – MOJO Magazine
pollypaulusma.com

Book ‘Invisible Music’ is now published by Bloomsbury

My academic book about Angela Carter’s folk singing and how it influenced her writing style is now published by Bloomsbury.

Here’s the book cover blurb —

From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriter-scholar, Polly Paulusma examines the influences of Carter’s 1960s folk singing, unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention has focused on Carter’s relationship with folk/fairy tales, but this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter’s folk song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it reimagines Carter’s prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and reveals a writing style imbued with ‘songfulness’ informed by her singing praxis.

Reading Carter’s texts through songs she knew and sang, this book shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape, thematic focus, imagery, ‘voice’ and ‘breath’, how Carter steeped her writing with folk song’s features to produce ‘canorography’: song-infused prose. Concluding with a discussion of Carter’s profound influence on songwriters, focusing on the author’s interview with Emily Portman, this book invites us to reimagine Carter’s prose as audial event, dissolving boundaries between prose and song, between text and reader, between word and sound, in an ever-renewing act of sympathetic resonance.

Polly Paulusma is an independent scholar and professional musician based in the UK.

More info here:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/angela-carter-and-folk-music-9781350296299