Keeping the modern world outside

Laura Marling admits she was not made for these times – she won’t wear make-up on TV, and she won’t play the promo game – but with both her albums nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, she’s the perfect antidote to the Auto-Tuned pop stars of today. As she heads to Dingle for Other Voices, the reluctant folk diva talks to Brian Boyd

THE SNOW is heaped high in Edinburgh and Laura Marling looks disconsolate.

Word has come in that all roads north out of the city are blocked. “That means we can’t do the Aberdeen show tonight,” she says glumly. But the roads south of the city are open. “It’s going to be a long, long drive back to London but what can you do?” she says flatly, as if imparting the worst news she has ever heard.

“I hope it’s OK for Ireland next week,” she says with all the enthusiasm of a telephone answering machine. Is everything OK, Laura? “Oh, I’m fine” she says. “It’s just touring and snow don’t mix.” It’s clear from the get-go that Laura Marling is no Florence, no Lily, no Adele. Showbiz and all its trimmings aren’t her bag; her personality reflects her music: earnest, softly mannered, introspective and a bit otherworldly.

Still only 20, Marling holds a unique record bybeing the only artist whose every album has been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Listen closely to her intricate, sublimely executed analogue neo-folk musings and sometimes you find yourself with no option but to compare her favourably with true greats such as Sandy Denny. She’s that good.

The woman who got critics ventilating when she released the inchoate Alas I Cannot Swimaged just 17 may be unconventional – but only by today's image-burnishing, promo air-brushing ways. Her label looked at her aghast when she politely informed them she wouldn't be do photo-shoots for promo purposes. "It's because I thought those sort of photo shoots glamorised women in music and I didn't want it to be about my looks." As good as her word, she's still the talk of the make-up department of Later With Jools Holland: Marling is the only performer on the show, male or female, to flatly refuse any make-up before she faced the cameras.

So much is different about her – from describing her songwriting style (“It’s stream of consciousness stuff, I suppose. Sitting down with a guitar and vomiting emotion onto a melody”) to her ideal venue (“Somewhere in the highlands of Scotland, not some ‘academy’ in a big city”), to what success means to her (“There was a brief spell of confidence when I signed my record deal at 16, but that hasn’t returned since”).

By not showboating, not "digging deep" and not being emotionally hyperactive, there is an anachronism about her – both in speech and song. "I'm happiest in that Jane Austen/Brontë sisters world," she says. "It does sound silly but there was always this feeling of not really belonging to this era and that became even more heightened when I was a typically intense teenager. At school no one liked the music I was doing at all – it was all 'yeah, folk music, whatever – not interested'. But then I suppose it is a bit unusual to be a very young girl and to learn basic guitar picking principles from Neil Young's The Needle And The Damage Done."

She clearly remembers two pivotal moments in her musical development. "I was only six, but it's stuck with me all this time. A friend of the family was staying and was playing a classical piece on the piano. It all just seemed to make sense when I heard that. And then when I had left home at 16 and was living in London, a flatmate played me Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See A Darknessalbum and that was like a shock to the system. I almost felt guilty at listening in to such intense emotions."

She was brought up in a village setting in Hampshire; her father was an amateur singer-songwriter who also ran a recording studio. “My music now is a reflection on what I was brought up on,” she says. “My parents had a lot of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young records. Joni Mitchell really ignited a spark – there was something about her voice, about the way it resonated. It wasn’t a female thing that drew me to her, it was how she used her vocals. I started playing the guitar when I was very young and my parents made us listen to ‘real’ music.

When her MySpace page began to pick up a bit of attention, she dropped out of school at 16 and moved to London. She's grateful for the musical education her parents gave her and when a song on her first album, Tap At My Window, which was by inspired by Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse(popularly known as "They fuck you up, your mum and dad") contained the line "I cannot forgive you for bringing me up this way", she had to sit her parents down and explain to them that the song wasn't as it seemed.

In London she fell in with the burgeoning nu-folk scene (Mumford And Sons et al – see panel) but was too young to remember it being a “movement”.

“It’s difficult to see it from a wider perspective when you’re in the middle of it” she says. “It seemed like we were all ‘niche’ musicians, which really wasn’t the case, and there was a lot of lazy journalism. These sort of so-called revivals happen every few years in music so it’s no big deal. The only thing I’ve ever got angry about was a description of me which ran ‘pretty folk songs about boys’.”

At 17 she became the youngest-ever nominee for the Mercury Music Prize. “For some reason I thought it would be disastrous for my career if I had won, but I’m different now and when I got nominated again this year it was very different.” she says. “But at the same time releasing this album made me realise I was really opening myself to criticism – something I hadn’t felt with the first one because no one had heard of me.”

It sounds strange to describe I Speak Because I Canas a more mature work (given her age) but the album was written in the aftermath of her break-up with fellow folk musician, Noah and the Whale frontman Charlie Fink. For what it's worth, Marling is now "linked" with Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons. Lyrics such as "eye to eye, nose to nose, ripping off each other's clothes in the most peculiar way" are a new departure for her. "I have grown up, a lot has happened in the last three years and I think now I know a bit better where songs actually come from," she says.

One of the album's stand-out tracks, What He Wrote, was inspired by letters she read in a newspaper from a wife to her husband who was fighting in the second World War. "I wish I had kept that newspaper now because the letters were so beautiful," she says. "There was just something about them – how the sentences were structured and how black and white the emotions were. The way the wife was feeling reminded me a bit of how I used to be – unable to properly express myself and being fearful. It was the language used that really touched a chord with me."

The emotional intensity that spills out from her lyrics leads to interesting and protracted conversations with fans. “Sometimes we talk for hours after a show. I really like that because it’s a much better way to get to know someone. I find it amazing what people say about the songs – and sometimes they do get it spot-on. They certainly don’t hold back on asking personal questions but if something’s too personal, I find a way out. I prefer for people to have their own interpretation – it should be up to the listener as to how they relate to them.”

She describes music as "both my blessing and my curse", and there seems to be a tension there about how much more she is able to give before running away from the "madness" of the recording/touring/promotional life. She's not cut out for the TV chat show/ Heatmagazine/58-date US tour life and the ridiculous commercial demands foisted on today's music acts.

“I do love the music that I was brought up on, how that music is made, what it means to you and how you can use it in your own life, but writing and performing automatically makes me different from my peer group – and that’s alienating,” she says. “I’m very grateful for all of this but some normality would be nice .”

* Laura Marling plays St James’ Church in Dingle, Co Kerry tomorrow as part of the Other Voices mini-festival; the Pavilion in Cork on Sunday; The Black Box, Belfast on Monday and Vicar Street, Dublin on Tuesday

What the folk?

Call it what you want – folk, nu-folk, freak-folk, folk noir – but the analogue-sounding, predominantly acoustic rhythms of Laura Marling, Mumford and Sons, N oah and the Whale, Stornoway, Bellowhead, The Unthanks, Seth Lakemanand Johnny Flynnare all busy upholstering a traditionally rooted sound to no little acclaim. While the term "folk" used to be used in a pejorative way by the rock and pop world, erroneously conjuring up images of fingers stuck in ears and songs about dead sailors, the revival of the genre has been attributed to the "realness" of the music.

With an incontinent use of studio technology gimmicks such as Auto-Tune, and a generic swishy synthesiser sound making much of today's r'n'b and hip-hop sound stilted and stylised, there's an almost tangible feel about today's folk stylings. And the multi-million selling runaway success of Mumford & Son's Sigh No Morehas precipitated the usual rush in record company AR divisions to sign up anything sounding vaguely similar.

Next year will see a fresh glut of nu-folkers hit the stages and record shops as folk remains ever-so “on trend” and begins to cosy up to the mainstream. Caveat emptor: it’s open season in the folk world for bandwagon-jumpers.