Eddi Reader: Some like it Scots

Tomorrow is Burns Night. Who better than Eddi Reader to present a concert of Burns's songs with a modern twist? The Scottish vocalist talks to James McNairabout her obsession with the Ploughman Poet

Pop music has always liked its bards. Ask Bob Dylan. Ask Eminem, who was recently described as "the bard of the destruction of the all-American family". But the bard who's currently interesting the 43-year-old chanteuse Eddi Reader precedes Dylan and Eminem by about 200 years. "Robert Burns is so good," she says, "that you almost can't see him. He's like Dylan in that respect; unless you really investigate him you get the Rock Circus wax model."

Reader's affection for the Scots poet and songwriter is long-standing; she's been singing "Ae Fond Kiss" for years, and last year she sang "Auld Lang Syne" and "Green Grow the Rashes" at a Burns festival in Ayrshire. Now, though, she is about to perform a whole set of Burns's songs with her band and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Funding permitting, a tie-in album and tour will follow.

We are chatting about this in a café in St George's Road, Glasgow. Reader recently returned to her home city after two decades living in Battersea in London. A single mother with two young sons, she looks prettier now than when she fronted Fairground Attraction (you'll remember their insidious, 1988 chart-topper "Perfect"). Her trademark thick-framed glasses have gone, revealing her strong cheekbones. But her hair is still flame-coloured, emblematic of her warmth and spark.

Reader says she's "haunted" by Burns; that she feels as though she's "in company" when leafing through his songs. And then there was the odd encounter she had in Canberra, Australia in March last year.

"This beautiful young girl came up to me, and because I was Scottish and a musician, she told me that her great-great-grandmother had slept with Burns. It freaked me out, because now I was in his company genetically, too. Her relative's name was Ellison Begsby, and later on I discovered that Ellison Begsby was one of Burns's muses. He wrote her one of his first love songs."

In some ways, Reader has been here before. She took a previous obsession with Edith Piaf to extremes, making a pilgrimage to her grave and learning all the French legend's songs phonetically. Reader is driven, then, and like Piaf she is opinionated and defiant. Those last traits hardly made her ideal major-label fodder, so it's easy to see why the solo career she began after Fairground Attraction's acrimonious split has seen more critical acclaim than sales. "If I'd gone with the air-brushing," she tells me, "the Celine Dion route was probably there. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. It would have meant singing trite songs that I had no relationship with."

Reader certainly has a relationship with the work of Robert Burns. She sits with a biography of the bard to hand, its well-thumbed pages festooned with annotated Post-It notes. She says that, as she and Burns were both born in '59, albeit two centuries apart, it's easy for her to see how her life-journey maps on to his. She's thrilled and inspired by "the emotional gold" at the heart of Burns's work, and her desire to communicate this is evident.

Chatting to her at length, however, one senses a further motivation, one partly informed by a kind of harmless, ghostly romance. Would she be attracted to Burns if he were still alive? "I think he would fancy me and he'd probably get me with his eyes. Sir Walter Scott said there was something about Burns's eyes that the Alexander Nasmyth painting missed; something sparkly and intense. Everybody goes on about this cartoon-like character who liked shagging women – well, what's wrong with that? I don't think he was a user and he certainly wasn't a hypocrite. He was just this passionate guy who loved life."

The members of the band Reader will be performing with include her long-term collaborator Boo Hewerdine, the Larnark-based fiddler John McCusker and the Yorkshireman Ian Carr on guitar. Between them, she says, they've turned "Charlie is My Darlin'" into a Tom Waits-esque stomp, which reminded her Canadian cellist Christine Hanson of a brothel band.

The musical approach isn't slavishly traditional then, but where Burns's lyrics are concerned, Reader is treading carefully. She's worried, for example, that when she translates the Auld Scots word "leal" to "loyal", in order to make it easier to sing, the more staid Burns scholars will take offence. And as she'll be presenting "Ye Jaco- bites by Name" as a timely anti-war song "sung from a mother's perspective", she's been careful to explore the tune's historical context with her son's history teacher.

"It's the humanitarian rather than the political aspect of the song that interests me," she explains. "There's a great line in there where he talks about parents' lives being haunted by bloody war, and he says, 'Then let your schemes alone, in the state, in the state.' He was aware that people were being encouraged to fight a war they didn't have the arms to win. He was saying, 'What's this all about? Just forget it.'"

Towards the end of the interview we discuss Reader's earlier career as a four-octave voice for hire. She chats about how Annie Lennox of The Eurythmics would despair at her "grunge chic" dress sense, and offers the opinion that her (stunning) contribution to The Waterboys' "The Big Music" now sounds overwrought. Her 1995 Brit Award for Best Female Artist, she says, is in a shoebox with a handwritten letter she received from Diana, Princess of Wales after a Prince's Trust performance. What did the letter say? "Just that she got the emotion of the performance. She never said, 'Come round for a cup of tea and I'll give you a nice dress!'"

When I mention Reader's work with the former Associates singer Billy McKenzie – he committed suicide in January 1997 – our conversation turns full circle. "Now there's a guy I imagine Burns would have been like," she says. "He'd look at me with his beautiful blue eyes and his dimply chin. I'd be talking to him seriously about the music, and he go, 'You've got your mother's eyes, haven't you?' He'd just take you away like that, and you'd go [coyly] 'Shut up, ya shagger!' I remember asking him why he got me to sing on "Best of You", and he said, 'Well, you're the best, aren't you?' I was on the dole at the time, no record company interest. Billy gave me confidence."

Eddi Reader plays Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall tonight (sold out) as part of the Celtic Connections festival. An extra show has been added on Sunday 2 Feb (0141-353 8000)