Being tough has got a lot to do with it

If you get on the wrong side of Kathryn Williams, that's a day you'll rue. The 26-year-old singer-song-writer is the woman who has turned around the perception of folk as being a generally "weak" music for overly sensitive people. Her narrative songs might sound like whispers in a grapevine, but there's a force to them that shares similarities with Bob Dylan at his most cruel - and Ani DiFranco at her most assertive.

"I don't equate strength with volume," stresses Williams. "Someone like John Lennon and the work he did with Plastic Ono Band, where he was singing about his dead mother, is a prime example. For someone who was in the most famous band in the world to come out with songs about losing his mother was incredible. Being brave enough to not conform to other people's expectations is tough - that's when folk music, any music, is strong."

Williams is busy these days with writing and recording. Six years ago she finished a degree in painting at the University of Northumbria ("it used to be called the Polytechnic; it's gone all posh now"). From Liverpool, but now residing in Newcastle, she soon realised a career in painting wasn't for her. Kathryn then did what most people would never dream of: she distanced herself from the world, tucked into bed for two years, played guitar and wrote and sang songs for her friends and relatives. On the dole and freezing from the lack of heating in her flat, those days took her to a place where she knew she had to do something positive - or else wallow in desperation until the bailiffs came to her door.

The process from despair to salvation was, she says, a strange one. Too nervous to book a gig for herself, a friend helped her to make her public debut in a tiny venue in Newcastle. Coming off stage, sweating and nervous, Kathyrn Williams decided that singing in front of people who weren't family and friends was too traumatic an experience, but a local promoter asked her to do more gigs and she quickly became a local celebrity.

Record companies then began to sniff around, but in a laudable show of independence Williams was having none of them. A mini-album, Toocan, soon sold out at her gigs, whilst in 1999 Williams released Dog Leap Stairs on her own Caw label, a cottage industry that quickly drew even more interest from record companies. But still she didn't bite. Last year's Little Black Numbers, however, changed all that. A Mercury Prize Award nominee, the album eventually lost out to Badly Drawn Boy's The Hour Of The Bewilderbeast. "When the Mercury nomination happened, there was seven weeks of madness. By the end of it, all I wanted was to get away and have a quiet time by myself. On the night it was really exciting to pick up my nomination and to be involved, but I was a bit pissed by the end of the night and I knew if I won I'd have to get up on stage. When Badly Drawn Boy won I was genuinely happy for him.

"And all of a sudden it was over, like the end of a party. People were patting me on the back, commiserating, but I was really quite pleased it was over. I sat back and thought not winning it was quite good, because now I've got something to aim for. I started writing again, and I think if I had won it might not have kept me going in the same creative flow. I want to keep achieving. I don't want to feel that I've created something perfect, and then just stop."

The seeds for wider recognition had been sown, however. Still retaining her independence, Williams sifted through offers of licensing deals from record companies (whereby the artist holds the copyright in their work, but gains a higher profile through using the company's better-financed resources for distribution and promotion), and eventually selected Warner offshoot, EastWest. Was the move good for her financially? "Oh yeah," is the response. "No more beans on toast for me!" Since signing to EastWest, Williams has continued to write and record material for a new album which should see the light of day some time next year. She has also been thrust into the public eye yet again, re-promoting Little Black Numbers, a record suffused with an elegance rarely heard in the folk genre. Playing with narratives is one of the primary concerns behind her songs, she says.

"I never write songs for a certain audience or the charts. I just write songs that touch me and hopefully will touch other people. My narratives have a positive and negative sense to them, so they feel like stories but ones that have many avenues to go down. They're kind of like those books where you make up your own adventure. For me it's like painting. I write in the same way I paint - I have a gut feeling or a really solid sense of nostalgia, like a strong smell that can make you recall something like your gran's house. Then I build that into a personal story. My main reason for writing is I don't know how else to express myself. Even if I'm not making records I'm still writing songs. I don't want to make it into a grand art statement - writing songs is just something I do."

Family influences abound in Kathryn's work: the many stories she listened to as a child, and the music of Bob Dylan introduced to her by her father, of Janis Joplin and Simon & Garfunkel by her mother, and of Nina Simone by her grandmother. The nice thing about music, she says, is that even old, classic albums are new if you have only listened to them for the first time. "I aspire to a classic record.

"That's the biggest thing you could ever wish for with an album - to have some kind of timeless quality. Albums you go back to years after they were released, that don't feel as if they're stuck in a time warp. That's my main goal."

Williams is aware that folk singers associated with the current New Acoustic Movement such as Tom McRae, Kings of Convenience, Turin Brakes, Ed Harcourt, Ireland's David Kitt and Gemma Hayes - are, effectively, flavour of the month. Her reaction is simple: "Songwriters are always going to be around; it's the media that picks up on it and turns it into a movement. I've been writing melancholic, acoustic songs when it was really, really unpopular, so I'm not going to start bending either way now.

"As for the general perception of folk music being too sensitive for its own good," she continues, "I don't judge music on it being too this or that. My main prerequisites are that it's not lazy musically or lyrically, and that it's genuine and heartfelt. If it's a happy song or a melancholic song, then it makes no difference to me, as long as it has what I want in it. Toughness, for want of a better word, has little to do with it."

But you've been through some tough times yourself. Surely a resilience to life's problems has helped? "Let me put it this way," she says. "I'm tough enough to have got here by myself. And if you get on the wrong side of me I can be an absolute bitch."

Little Black Numbers is on the EastWest label