Lucy Spraggan: Beverley singer-songwriter heads to Settle, Barnsley and Holmfirth on latest tour

Intriguing, but obviously she won’t say too much. That’s fair enough – much of the Yorkshire-based musician’s life is lived in the public eye, including her recent marriage to wife Emilia Smith, or her almost six years of sobriety.

She is about to head out on tour for a run of acoustic shows alongside Josh Cana, who has performed with Spraggan for years, and the dates start at Settle Victoria Hall tomorrow night.

Stripped back performances could be nerve-wracking to some but after so long in the business, she is unfazed.

“I’m quite relaxed about it, really,” says Spraggan, 33. “Because these duo shows, they're smaller – they’re what PR people call ‘more intimate’. I mean, they are actually just that. There’s not as much pressure for me because I see these as a bit of a gig in a living room vibe, even though they’re like theatres or whatever. There’s no rigidity to these shows. They’re all really fun.”

Meanwhile her eighth album, which puts a contemporary spin on older songs from nearly two decades in the music industry, will be out this year. “The privilege is having such a big back catalogue but then, what’s the word? It’s not regret. You look at it and you’re like, I could’ve done that better,” she says.

“There are actually no rules. People think there are rules in the music industry and everyone’s trying to adhere to them all the time. And I was like, Oh, why don’t we just re-record them? And everyone’s like, ‘What do you mean?’ Well, we could just re-do them. You can make them more contemporary. It’s still the same song. You can do it favours. You can change the key, you can change the tone, you can change it instrumentally, and you can reimagine stuff, and I really like that.”

In recent years she has had the input of Simon Cowell.

“At the beginning, I was like, he's not going to know anything about music, he's a TV man,” admits Spraggan. “And then I sat in the studio with him and was like, actually, you're pretty good at this.

"Sonically, it's made a huge difference.”

The reworked tracks have allowed her to “take things from the past and breathe life into them, because why not? I wrote Tea and Toast when I was like 18, I think, and there’s a new version of that song on this. I’m 33 and for the song to be able to age with me is actually very cool.”

Her fans get to come along for the journey, too.

“It's crazy… people who came to my shows when they were 11 are now 25. The amount of living that people do, these songs mean things in certain times of their life and I think it's the same for me to reimagine them,” she says, adding that there’s “something really wholesome about it”.

Spraggan stopped drinking in 2019 and has been open about sobriety in the years since. “The first year is like Bambi on ice,” she says. “But it gets better and easier. Life opens up. I feel like the first year is planting a seed and patting the ground down and then the next few years after that, it’s like watching this tiny sprout grow. Then in a heartbeat, there’s just plants and flowers everywhere and you’re like, Oh, I’m so glad that I nurtured this.”

She adds: “In life, in general, if it doesn’t cost you something, it’s probably not worth it. All the things that make you the most uncomfortable are things that are going to really make you feel good in the long run.”

There are still days where she doesn’t feel great mentally but sobriety, she says, teaches you to “sit in a feeling and then move quickly away from it, deal with it, move on”.

Last year, she re-released her single Sober, this time featuring the guest vocals of Robbie Williams.

To accompany the re-release she made a new video with a split screen, showing the original video showing her crying and a newly made one in which she appears happy and hopeful.

“I love doing music videos because I can just pretend to be somebody else,” says Spraggan.

“I’ve been a boxer. I’ve been a circus thing. And for this one, I just came up with the concept that when I wrote that song, and when I did the first video and released it for the first time, I was so fearful of sobriety and what it was going to look like. I was full of shame and the video really represented that.

“And now, six years on nearly, I’m like, this is the best decision I ever made and it moved me into a really strong place, and I wanted to just visually reflect the difference between the two stages.”

She appears to be thriving in other areas of her personal life, too. Spraggan married Emilia Smith at Saltmarshe Hall in East Yorkshire in June last year, and the couple live in Beverley.

Cowell, in fact, gave Spraggan away during the ceremony.

A few years back, she signed to his publishing company and they have become close friends.

She has previously called him a “really thoughtful and really intelligent man” and the pair have become close in recent years.

“He’s not afraid,” she added.

“He has significantly more resources than I do but we have the same opinion – that you could do anything in this world.

“It is rare to find somebody who truly does believe that.

“I’m not scared of anything and he’s not really scared of anything. And it’s nice to work with somebody like that.”

Lucy Spraggan is at Settle Victoria Hall tomorrow; The Birdwell Venue in Barnsley on Friday, April 25; and Picturedrome in Holmfirth on Saturday, May 21. Tickets: lucyspraggan.com/tour