Synopsis

Mike Harding presents an hour of the very best in folk, roots and acoustic music, including an interview with one of British folk's brightest stars: Kate Rusby.

Kate's tenth album Make The Light is released this month and she joins Mike to tell him all about it. The record is Kate's first since becoming a mother, and her first to consist of entirely original material, something she did at the suggestion of one Jennifer Saunders, who had commissioned Kate to perform the title music to BBC comedy Jam and Jerusalem.

That programme was one of several milestones to have marked Kate Rusby's rise to crossover success. She has four BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards to her name, and in 1999 her second solo album, Sleepless, earned her a Mercury Music Prize nomination and introduced her to a legion of new fans.

Collaborations with Ronan Keating, Eddi Reader, Idlewild's Roddy Woomble and Blur's Graham Coxon followed; she's appeared on Top Of The Tops and Later With Jools Holland, toured widely and pulled in the punters at many great festivals.

Yet she's done all of this quietly and in her own sweet time. She early on decided not to sign to another record label, preferring instead to establish her own, in partnership with her family. She is still based in the South Yorkshire countryside, where she writes and records with, amongst others, her musician husband Damien O'Kane and her producer brother Joe Rusby.

In this edition of the Mike Harding Show, Kate Rusby looks back on fifteen years of cutting her own path through folk music and introduces tracks from her new album.