MOJO RISING
WHEN KATHERINE Priddy released her first EP, Wolf, in 2018, she quickly gained one very auspicious fan. “She has a really pretty, expressive voice, and her songs are engaging – borderline poetry in the lyrics, so it isn’t all revealed at once,” Richard Thompson told MOJO, as he picked Priddy as the best thing he’d heard that year. “I love the echoes of the British tradition, and indeed the folk rock tradition.”
In the six years between that first EP and her new second album, The Pendulum Swing, Priddy has built an impressive reputation and following for those accomplished, original folk songs and her pure, beautiful voice. Thompson asked her to join him on tour. So did Vashti Bunyan, The Chieftains and Martin Carthy.
“That gig with Martin Carthy was really special,” says Priddy. “The first time I told my mum I wanted to be a musician was when I was eight or nine and I’d gone to watch Waterson Carthy play. I saw Eliza Carthy on-stage being just a real badass and I said to mum, I want to do that.” That night she got Eliza to sign her ticket. “And when I opened for Martin Carthy a decade later I got him to sign the same ticket.”
Priddy was in her mid-teens when she started writing songs in her bedroom. At 16 her music teacher persuaded her to enter a songwriting contest, which she came very close to winning. But rather than see it as a step towards a music career, it made her drop the idea. “I was very uncomfortable singing in front of people at that stage. I really enjoyed playing music but I did it for myself really. What I wanted to do was go to uni.”
She studied literature. “Books and stories have always been a big part of my life,” she says. “For me, lyrics are very, very important. Writing lyrics is the bit I enjoy the most.” As for the music, “I’m not really fixed on one genre, I just like good music that has something to say.” There was always music on in the family home – Steeleye Span, Joni Mitchell, John Renbourn, Nick Drake (Pridd
