Beth Orton: 'I was so unprepared to be famous, I handled it quite badly and seemed to piss everybody off'

The musician reflects on the early pressures of fame, being a married mother and her 'reinvention' with record Kidsticks

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"I just didn't know how to handle myself," maintains Beth Orton, sitting opposite me at a Hampstead chain restaurant and talking between mouthfuls of egg Florentine. "I was so unprepared to be famous, I really didn't see it coming, handled it quite badly and seemed to piss everybody off."

The 45-year-old singer-songwriter is reflecting on the mid-Nineties, when the folkie first emerged with 1996's excellent, Mercury-nominated Trailer Park (produced by Andrew Weatherall and featuring “She Cries Your Name”) and found it "unbearable" dealing with a "combative", mostly male music press. I was one of those "combative" journalists who interviewed her back then (at one point, during our 1996 exchange, Orton claimed: "Look at the music press for what they are: fucking crap") and I've always regretted our rather uncomfortable conversation.

The former "Comedown Queen" has had an extremely productive past four years. The Norfolk native released the sumptuous alt-folk record Sugaring Season in 2012 and this year reinvented herself with the playful, idiosyncratic Kidsticks, produced by Andrew Hung of psychedelic synth-experimentalists Fuck Buttons.

She's understandably proud of the album, which began when Hung visited Orton while she was living in Los Angeles. They started "messing around" and "experimenting" with sounds, quickly realising they were on to this very "sweet thing".

"I've always wanted to go that way and experiment, and with Kidsticks, I got the opportunity to do it," Orton enthuses. "I fulfilled a dream that I've had since I started in music and it was lovely to be at the helm of my own reimagining."

The dreamy, evocative single "1973" is a particularly catchy highlight on Kidsticks, one where she airily sings “Swimming in your mind / Swimming in my mind / Swimming in my mind with electric sky". What's the song about?

"Don't know," she bats back, before opening up. "When you try and sit there sober or outside of the writing process you can't exactly sum up what a song is or what it's about because something happens very fast when you're writing... you make connections that you wouldn't normally make," she explains. "I don't really know what the song is about; I know what the song is about on some instinctual level but it would sound ridiculous to even summarise it.

Over the course of the conversation, Orton fluctuates between chatty, enthusiastic, belligerent, self-deprecating and guarded. When asked, three questions in, why she moved from LA (where she was based for several years with her husband, American folk musician Sam Amidon, and her two children, Arthur and Nancy) to London she tersely maintains it's "no one's business".

Her new musical direction and her upcoming performance at year's Caught by the River festival, which debuts in London at Fulham Palace from 6-7 August, prove safer ground.

"The main responsibility with Caught by the River is to have a fucking good time," she admits.

The festival certainly has a terrific bill, featuring Super Furry Animals, Low, the Sun Ra Arkestra and Kate Tempest (who's also in conversation with Miranda Sawyer), and Orton promises a festival friendly set. During a concert at Union Chapel in 2012, Orton admitted to being "nervous" on several occasions. She, totally reasonably, gives this subject short shrift.

"I'd just had a baby when I did that gig," she maintains. "I think having a baby makes you pretty vulnerable, getting up on stage when you're still half-pregnant is a pretty intense thing to do."

Orton, who was raised in East Dereham, a market town near Norwich, witnessed her parents split up when she eight. Aged 11 her father died of a heart attack. Three years later she moved with her mother and two brothers to Dalston, in East London. Aged 19 she was orphaned when her mother died from breast cancer. She admits that solitude is something she has a "great deal of experience" of and that she's "been very alone at times", but now, thankfully, her "life is full" and "it's lovely to have people banging around in the house". In previous interviews, she's talked about children melting away your "artifice" and she's happy to talk about it today.

"You can't bullshit [with children]," she says. "You become the essence of who you are, there's a rawness and it's so fucking exhausting...

"I have this friend who said this brilliant thing,” she says, warming to the topic, “'If you're the stereo, your kids are the speakers'. I love that, not only are they a part of you but they just blurt out everything you really mean. Also, they are an extension of parts of you [that] you don't really want to acknowledge. Obviously, first and foremost they are people in their own right and they test you and it's really good, amazing, and really difficult to be that opened up. For me, it's made me braver. Like the record with Andy Hung, I just didn't care what anyone thought and I don't care now when I go out on stage."

She goes on to decry competitive parents (“So controlling and disrespectful”) and is appalled by the recent Brexit vote (“It's the summer of hate and some people have been given a voice for their worst instincts”), but creatively she’s in an excellent place. Orton was even asked to star in the unnerving and exquisitely shot British indie film, Light Years, directed by Esther May Campbell and due for release in September. In it she plays a damaged, ailing mother with three neglected children. It’s a challenging role. How did she get involved?

“They wrote to me and asked me if I'd like to do it and I read the script and I was really moved by the story,” she explains. “When I was younger I really wanted to do acting and I haven't really done it since I was a singer. I asked Esther why she contacted me and she said she wanted a singer or a dancer and someone who understood what it was like to lose control of your body. It was really intense.”

It is intense, and Orton is accomplished in it. As with everything she turns her hand to, whether it’s singing with the Chemical Brothers on “Where Do I Begin” or accompanying guitar maestro Bert Jansch on stage (“Just incredibly intimidating”). There’s a steely determination to Orton and she claims that she now gives herself “more of a break” than when she started out.

“In the 1990s, for my age I was pretty young,” she maintains. “You come on and off planes, you drink and it was a wild old time.

“I did a lot of stupid things and probably annoyed a lot of very nice people,” she admits. “I was just so out there and people would say, ‘what did you just say’? I always used to send out these little darts and they would always hit the mark.

“I've now really got a handle on it. I really enjoy making music. I love what I do and not concerning myself with the outcome. I still find interviews a little bit odd, but now I treat it more like a conversation.”

Our conversation is a vast improvement on 20 years ago and, after her artistic renaissance with Kidsticks, Caught by the River should prove a joyful experience.

Beth Orton performs at the Caught by the River festival at Fulham Palace, London SW6 on Saturday 6 August