Eliza Carthy: A new England

With her new album, Anglicana, Eliza Carthy is on a mission to restore English music. She explains its violence, strangeness and beauty to Tim Cummings

It's been a busy autumn for Eliza Carthy, the 26-year-old daughter of folk icons Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy. Now a star in her own right, she has brought vitality, experimentation, brightly coloured hair and interesting footwear to an increasingly crowded folk and roots music scene. This September the fourth Waterson:Carthy family album was released, the acclaimed A Dark Light. A family tour begins at the end of November, with plans for a live album next year. But for now Eliza Carthy is taking a rest from the road before resuming her own UK tour to support the release of Anglicana, her first album of traditional music since 1998's Red Rice.

Eliza started early in the music business. "I've been performing since I was six," she says, speaking from her Edinburgh home, "and I was getting paid for it when I was 12." At 14, she was singing with her auntie, mum and cousin under the name of the Waterdaughters. She was brought up on an old farm in North Yorkshire, with aunts and cousins – former members of the Watersons – just a few doors away, and an extended family of musicians more often than not camping out in the yard. By the time she was a teenager, a childhood steeped in music-making and band rehearsals that doubled as long, impromptu house parties became a way of life she felt nostalgic for "even before I was coming out of it. You kind of knew it was special." It's a personal and musical legacy of warmth, immediacy and the spirit of improvisation that she's taken with her as she's risen to prominence as a performer in her own right.

Classically trained in piano at school, she took up the violin when she was 14, learning some tricks of the trade from the fiddler Chris Wood, and at 17 she released the first of several albums with Nancy Kerr, Shape of Scrape, a raucous debut fuelled by a clutch of old dance tunes. In 1993 the Waterson:Carthy group – Norma, Martin, Eliza – made its debut at the Champagne Valley Festival in America, and the first Waterson:Carthy album appeared the next year. "I only went for a holiday," she explains, "and paid my airfare by doing this one concert. When we came back, Tony Engle – who runs Topic Records – said, do you want to make an album?" Waterson: Carthy was immediately hailed as a classic, voted the best folk album of the year, and helped to place Eliza centre stage as a member of folk's new generation.

Three more family albums have followed, with Eliza featuring prominently, especially on the aching ballads they do so well. Both mother and daughter have been nominated for the Mercury prize – Norma in 1996, and Eliza two years later for the folk-dance fusion of Red Rice, a double set pitching originals alongside traditional songs and instrumentals. Defined by a lean, experimental intelligence and superb playing, it ensured Eliza's rise to folk's front ranks.

The success of Red Rice attracted the attentions of Warner Brothers – a Major Label lumbering into view with horns and cloven feet in the eyes of many English folkies. Angels and Cigarettes, her first album of self-penned songs and a bold departure into pop, appeared in 2000. Touring the album in the US, where she shared stages with Beck and Elvis Costello, she seized the opportunity to combine pop music with traditional songs. Her intentions were clear: "I'll sign to the label, tour America, talk about traditional music, and put unaccompanied ballads either side of pop songs." It worked, at least in America, where "the press wanted to know all about English traditional music". But in Britain, despite good reviews, it more or less disappeared from view. Suspicion of anything smacking of "music industry" on the British folk/roots scene probably didn't help.

After one album and two tours, she and Warner Brothers parted company. "They didn't know what to do with me," she says, laughing. "It was a company in distress." Plans for a second album of original songs – Dreams of Breathing Underwater – have been put on hold. Instead, performing English folk music with the spirit of vitality rather than reverence – along with plans for her own label, Heroes of Edible Foods – have become full-time preoccupations. The first Edible Foods release is, appropriately, Dinner, with Eliza supporting the accordionist Martin Green on fiddle. "I feel like putting something back in," she says, "traditional music's a community thing."

And then there is Anglicana, her return to Topic Records after four years. Native English melodies are mixed with jazz basslines and touches of the kind of bone-machine percussion that suggests Tom Waits is in the building. The title's a word of her own invention, an expression of the arcane, mysterious power of English folk music, a call-and-response to the culture of Americana. If Anglicana represents the music and the heritage of ordinary people, rather than the heritage industry of the aristocracy, it continues her crusade to remould a tradition that is still relatively silent beside the craic of thriving Celtic traditions.

"It started around the second Waterson: Carthy album," she remembers, "we were all talking about it. We all had the same idea at the same time. It was the era of Riverdance, and we wanted to distance ourselves from Celticness. And English music was this beautiful, neglected thing. We're very fortunate being so visible on the folk scene," she adds, remarking on her and her family's standing, "we can choose to talk about things that matter." And the English tradition, is for her, the music that matters the most. "We do suffer from not having it. When people talk about the English in the past, it's always bad. There's so many stereotypes of Englishness in the world, and that's what drove us to make this kind of album. English people are casting around for a positive identity, and English traditional music can't hurt in that search."

A number of the songs on Anglicana came from Topic's 20-volume series The Music of the People, a magical trawl of material from all over the British Isles. Her own pickings include songs by Harry Cox and Joseph Taylor – the latter first recorded by Percy Grainger in 1908. The weird old England summoned up from these parlour recordings takes on new life with the wildly innovative band versions found on Anglicana. "A big creative element in doing traditional songs," says Eliza, "is that just seeing it on the page is only the beginning. The amount of freedom you have is incredible. You can make a racing car out of a cart horse. A lot of it is about intuition on a basic level, on a community, cultural level."

Recorded in six weeks, and with a roster of up to 20 musicians contributing everything from melodeon, guitars, brass, and piano, to violin, hammers, girders and accordion, this is one of the year's most distinctive albums. "I can't think in categories," she asserts, and neither should her audience, who will be hard-pressed to find songs as mysterious, violent and passionate as "Worcester City", or as haunting as the Harry Cox ballad "Just as The Tide Was Flowing", one of Eliza's finest vocal performances to date. Containing songs so strange, violent, tender and true that they are inexhaustible, Anglicana marks the return of an authentic English culture demanding to be heard on its own terms.

'Anglicana' is out on Topic. Eliza Carthy performs at the Purcell Room, London SE1 (020-7960 4242) on 11 November