For a man whose musical demeanour comes across as rough-hewn with a potency that's barely contained, Richard Dawson in person is gentle with a soft smile and opinions that are precisely worded though almost tentatively shared. He admits to a high level of everyday anxiety, yet has left a mark on contemporary folk music in England that testifies to an innate confidence in his musical vision. His albums (notably Nothing Important of 2014 and Peasant in 2017), as well as being critically...

Growing up in Wolverhampton, Steph Phillips was a quiet girl, shy to the point of wanting to vanish during social occasions and conscious that as a black teenage female she was, anyway, invisible to most of society. These days, she's found her voice in a space where she can be what she describes as her "full self'" - she's the guitarist and lead singer with the black feminist punk band Big Joanie. In a lineage of music-making with attitude that can be traced back through Riot Grrrl to the...

An intimate portrait of Kurt Wagner, singer and creative force behind American indie band Lambchop. Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, Kurt Wagner's artistic aspirations were inclined towards the visual arts rather than the city's all-pervasive country music scene. But hanging around friends, exchanging school cello for garage guitar, he found that he became - by default - the singer. No-one else wanted the role. So began Lambchop, an indie rock band that Kurt mischievously publicised as...

An intimate portrait of Alison Goldfrapp, an innovative artist and electronic dance music performer (with Goldfrapp) whose voice is inflected with folk, opera and cabaret styles. Recorded overnight on a walk through woods in Hampshire during the summer solstice and at her home in east London, this evocation of one of Britain's most versatile singers touches on Alison's childhood and the impact of being educated by nuns, her adventures across experimental art forms, the joy of a thumping...

During the last ten years, The Unthanks have redefined what might be expected of English folk music. Their sequence of albums has reimagined traditional material in vivid new arrangements and reached into surprising new sources - for example, the songs of Molly Drake. But at the core of the group are the voices of Rachel and Becky, sisters born seven years apart. Rachel and Becky share their sense of belonging to the landscape of the north-east, their inevitable attraction to melancholy and...

Growing up in upstate New York, it wasn't a surprise that Claron McFadden wanted to be a singer - she was immersed in gospel music at church, soul and pop at home. That she aspired to be a classical soprano was, as she describes it, no choice at all. Her voice led her there. Having lived in Amsterdam for over thirty years - a place she instantly recognised as home - she now inhabits a space somewhere between America and Europe, just as her voice is at home in music across stylistic...

An intimate portrait of singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Hannah Peel. Hannah Peel inhabits many different worlds. She can, blithely, be described as a singer-songwriter, known for stripped back renditions of 80s pop songs, accompanying herself with a hand-turned music box. But then she's also composed an epic concept album for brass band and electronics and provided the music for a theatrical re-imagining of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, as well as being a session musician as a...

Sharon Van Etten has been described as having an elegant voice "wrapped in enough rasp and sorrow to keep from sounding too pure or confident". It can suggest folk traditions and Americana with layered harmonies, as well as an edgier, more confrontational sound rooted in urban drones reminiscent of John Cale or PJ Harvey. After a decade or more of songwriting and recording - on albums such as Because I Was In Love, epic, Tramp and Are We There - she's now migrated into acting via a...

The Norwegian singer Ane Brun talks about her life in music. Ane Brun has lived and worked in Stockholm for most of her professional life. Much of her music is sung in English - collaborating with British and American artists such as Peter Gabriel and Ron Sexsmith, or re-imagining songs by Beyonce and the music of Monteverdi and Purcell. It's as if she spends her life in a kind of musical translation, between artists and languages, cultures and history. But her solo albums - including A...

Robert Wyatt has been recognised as a prog-rock drummer, jazz composer, avant-garde cornet player, artist and activist in a wheelchair. But, above all else, he has been known by one of the most instantly recognisable and distinctive voices of the last fifty years. Forever associated with Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello's song written in reaction to the Falklands War, Wyatt's voice and the causes he gives voice to are intricately entwined. This intimate radio portrait, in his own words, traces...

Countertenor Christopher Robson reflects on his life in music - from playing in a Salvation Army band, via the stage of the Coliseum singing Handel, to working with Damon Albarn. Christopher Robson found his voice by chance during a singing lesson as a teenager. Up to that point he had proved himself a musical child, playing cornet in a Salvation Army band and singing during services, sometimes reluctantly and often with his brother Nigel. But from the moment he discovered falsetto - the...

An intimate portrait of the songwriter, singer and frontman of the new wave rock band XTC, Andy Partridge. Brought up on a council estate in Swindon, Andy Partridge's escape from the poverty of his working class upbringing followed a classic path - art and music. At 15, he enrolled in what he calls the 'art floor' of the local college - Swindon didn't boast an actual art college. Then, he discovered the magnetic power of carrying around his Dad's old guitar. He didn't even have to play it to...

An intimate portrait of the iconic but elusive English folksinger Annie Briggs. Annie Briggs was a leading figure in the English folk revival of the early 1960's, inspiring Bert Jansch (famously, in Blackwater Side), Sandy Denny, The Watersons and many more. But she was a restless spirit, travelling through the British Isles and Ireland, finding songs and living close to the earth. As Sandy Denny depicted her in The Pond and the Stream: Annie wanders on the land. She loves the freedom of...

The voice of Marta Sebestyen is closely associated with the folk traditions of Hungary and its neighbouring regions. Through her work with the band Muzsikas, she helped revive the cultural phenomenon of Tanchaz, dance house, which preserved music and dance traditions and, during the Soviet era, provided a beacon for national identity - perhaps most vividly in the dissenters' song The Unwelcome Guest. Her mother had studied with the folklorist and composer Zoltan Kodaly and Marta inherited...

A portrait of the English lyric tenor Ian Partridge, in his own words and recordings. It's not difficult to identify something classically, characteristically English about the lyric tenor Ian Partridge - his reticence and modesty, his boy chorister background and acclaimed performances of composers such as Roger Quilter, Benjamin Britten and Prince Albert. He still lives in the same part of south London where he was born nearly 80 years ago and he spent over fifty years in a musical...

Elly Stone is a modest 87 year old New Yorker ("born and dragged up"), whose sublime voice will forever be associated with the songs of Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel. In My Childhood, Song for Old Lovers, The Old Folks and Carousel she brings a new perspective to Brel's familiar emotional intensity and piercing social commentary. Twenty years after her retirement from the stage, she offers a rare insight into her life and what music has meant to her - in a quiet New York studio, out on the...