The music I write and perform is often a part of my roots – where I come from, who my ancestors where, the events that have taken place in the area I was born and brought up in. I'd always been led to believe that I was descended from people who worked on the land but I have a fascination with the sea and have written several songs about the Hull whaling industry. It came as a surprise when a cousin, who has been researching the ancestry of one side of my family, informed me that they had a long nautical traditio; several were Hull whalers and one was lost in the Greenland fisheries.

Maybe there's something in the blood as well as in the music. For me, this is what folk music is all about - a personal as well as a regional thing.