10 things you need to know about Karine Polwart

Mar 14 2008 by Karen Price, Western Mail

1. Award-winning Scottish Borders songwriter Karine Polwart has released two new albums in recent months, a bittersweet collection of her own songs, This Earthly Spell, and a set of Scottish traditional songs Fairest Floo'er. Not bad for someone who gave birth to her first child last summer!

2. The first song she ever performed in public, at the age of nine, was Dolly Parton's Jolene.

3. She used to be a relief cleaner at Tayside Police Headquarters in Dundee and was once offered a post as a turnkey in the city's overnight cells (which she turned down).

4. Polwart has a first class honours degree in philosophy and used to teach the subject in primary schools and pub sessions in Glasgow.

5. She has been nominated three times for Best Original Song at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and has won the award twice.

6. Her first radio appearance was on Radio Clyde in 1977, when she won a red vinyl Pointers Sisters album for “telling jokes you couldn't tell nowadays” at a roadshow on Ayr Beach.

7. The opening track of her new album is a collaboration with Scotland's national poet laureate Edwin Morgan, which she recorded originally for an album called Ballads Of The Book, put together by Roddy Woomble of Idlewild.

8. A former Children's Rights Worker for domestic abuse charity Scottish Women's Aid, Polwart didn't got her first paying gig until nine years ago at the age of 28.

9. Her song I'm Gonna Do It All has become something of a schools anthem in Scotland and has been performed and recorded by children as far afield as Oxford, Tokyo and rural Uganda.

10. Polwart is performing her latest gig in Wales as part of the Rhondda Cynon Taf Where Good Music Matters season, which aims to bring the very best in music across the genres to Welsh audiences.

Karine Polwart plays the Muni Arts Centre in Pontypridd tonight at 8pm