Katie Spencer: ‘I really enjoy trying to capture a bit of that landscape within my music’

The Edge of The Land, her sophomore LP, is a remarkably assured collection of self-penned songs that celebrate the East Yorkshire countryside in which she grew up, plus one cover, of Anne Briggs’s Go Your Own Way.

Spencer started playing the guitar aged 16. “I picked it up because both of my parents are huge music fans,” she says. “As a child, they took me around festivals and gigs all the time, but neither of them are musicians. My dad had a guitar in the house as an ornament...and I guess it was that accessibility, I just got into it in my own time and taught myself how to play.”

She started writing songs “in order to become better at guitar-playing” before “falling in love with it as its own thing”. Soon she found herself enjoying performing her own songs rather than those of others.

Her inspirations were mostly local musicians who she enjoyed watching live, but other notable musical influences include John Martyn who she “found really early on in (her) playing journey” – “He’s still a huge inspiration to me now,” she says.

“I found the whole late 60s folk revival stuff off my off bat through playing the guitar,” she adds. “I really wanted to play like Jackson C Frank and people like that initially.”

Through gigging Spencer became friends with Michael Chapman, the Leeds-born singer-songwriter and virtuoso guitarist who enjoyed a late career revival before his death in 2021 aged 80. “He was really supportive of my music and I found him really inspirational, so it was a treat to get to know him a little bit,” she says.

“I actually played one of his last concerts with him, we did a special livestream, it was all filmed in this beautiful place in York called the Merchant Adventurers Hall. I interviewed him at the end, it was lovely to get to know him a little bit through that as well and asking some of the things I always wanted to ask. He was a huge inspiration and still is, I listen to him every week at least.”

She sees Chapman’s career, that spanned more than 50 albums, as something she would like to emulate, explaining that on the day we speak she has been driving around south west Wales on tour “and getting out of the car and looking and beautiful places and thinking this is something I really want to do for as long as I can”.

“It’s a wonderful journey to be able to write music and share it with people, especially in a live setting,” she says. “I also have an excuse to visit all these wonderful places and meet all the wonderful people that I wouldn’t otherwise, so hopefully, that would be amazing.”

Spencer says it is only recently that she has realised how much the flatlands of East Yorkshire have shaped her “and probably a lot of friends and family who live there as well”.

“It’s just one of those special places,” she says. “If you talk to anyone who has lived by the sea at some point or especially on that East Coast, it’s every changing. People always want to get back there somehow.

“I read a book by Julian Green, it was a memoir of his time, he said something in that basically resonated with me which was when you move away from somewhere you can see the other place with a lot more clarity and I think that certainly happened to me and it made me realise how much that landscape shaped me as a person so naturally I guess it would shape me as a writer. I really enjoy trying to capture a bit of that landscape within my music and I feel like I’ll probably be trying to do that for a long time because it’s a magical place.”

The Edge of the Land was half written during lockdown. “The title track was a commission for BBC Introducing and a local festival in Hull called the Freedom Festival,” she says. “They asked me to write a song for the city which was then going to be filmed in a special location in Hull. That all came out of the pandemic because we weren’t able to meet up and celebrate the festival in person, so that was a direct product of being locked down.

“A lot of the songs are about me trying to capture moments in time around that weird period.”

Spencer had just relocated to near Bradford when the country locked down. She recalls walking to the top of the hill near her new home and looking down the valley. “I used to do that every day during the lockdown to clear my head and have a little think,” she says. “It was really important for me, so landscapes came into (my songwriting) again. I’d look down into the valley and think about all the different lives in all the houses that I could see. That was really nice.”

The song Shannon Road was drawn from “direct memories” of living in Hull. “When I lived on the coast I used to visit the street where my grandma used to live and I really wanted to celebrate my grandma but also the city through her,” she says. “I suppose these memories that I’ve got will capture a little bit of the character of that area.”

Spencer chose the Anne Briggs song Go Your Way because it was “one of those songs that really informed the direction” of her music at an early stage. “I was listening to it one day and playing around with it and I realised what she’s done in that song is very much how I would like to write songs,” she says. “Taking some fairly hefty emotions of hers and translating them through landscapes and the natural world. It just seems to sit really well with the theme that had begun to develop with my album.”

Although Briggs retired from music in the early 1970s after just three albums and has long refused to be coaxed back into a recording studio, she remains an influential figure in British folk, and Spencer sounds delighted that her rendition of Go Your Own Way got Briggs’s seal of approval. “Someone sent her a copy of my album and it was one of the most anxious times I’ve had because I was wondering what she would think, but she liked it,” she says.

Spencer’s album also features drummer Arran Ahmun and pianist Spencer Cozens, who played in John Martyn’s band. She says she was keen that the record had the same warmth and intimacy as Martyn’s recordings. “It’s one of my favourite aspects of John Martyn, that warm, intimate feeling, and I really strive to make it sound as though I’m hopefully in the same room singing the songs,” she says. “It was a treat to work with Spencer and Arrun and hear those stories about their time with John Martyn and of course have their amazing musicianship, it was a real treat.”

After completing her national tour, Spencer has several festivals lined up over the summer, including Magpies in York in August. She is also planning to play several gigs in Scotland in the autumn. “I’ll also start writing new music and hopefully get another album together,” she says.

The Edge of the Land is out now. Katie Spencer plays at Seven Arts in Chapel Allerton, Leeds on Saturday June 4. www.katiespencer.net