Kathryn Williams: Angry young woman

She has a gentle, wispy voice, and she still suffers from severe stage fright. But don't be fooled, says John Walsh, the eccentric British singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has a temper to match the intensity of her lyrics

A couple of weeks ago, I stood on a miniature island that bisects the Thames near Henley, and watched a concelebration of important musical and retail business figures sit on rickety chairs or perch on the grass to listen to a young woman of 28, with a voice of heartbreaking naïveté, singing about the trauma of not getting off with boys as a teenager. A cello and a Spanish guitar played a discreetly throbbing accompaniment. Every 30 seconds, a hearty regatta rower sculled past, glancing in surprise at the island concert, and huge Canadian geese cruised by in pairs, like B-52 bombers on a mission. It was romantic, but it was damned peculiar.

In the midst of it, Kathryn Williams played on, her face breaking into an incredulous grin that life could be going so well. Ms Williams sprang to public notice, if not exactly stardom, two years ago when her second CD, Little Black Numbers, was shortlisted for the Mercury music prize. Some dismissed her as the token folkie in the line-up. Some listened to her songs, and marvelled at their bittersweet sophistication, their deft minimalism, their controlled venom. The newspapers came and found a strongly independent woman, who started her own record label after too many run-ins with artists-and-repertoire suits, a woman who sounds like a hyperventilating schoolgirl, but swears like a Folkstone docker, and who insists on respect from foul men. Her third CD, Old Low Light, has just been released to critical acclaim and she's going on a 10-venue tour starting this week.

This is more of an ordeal for her than most performers, because she's a martyr to stage fright. It used to be so bad that she'd refuse to get on stage. Later it took the form of telling the audience anything that entered her head, including her desire to visit the lavatory. "Going to see bands has made it better," she says. "Being in the audience made me realise that people are much more well-wishing than I thought. I used to feel I was literally going to have a heart attack and die on stage." She can even play concerts in Europe without fainting. "I like the language gap. It's fun making little jokes in different languages. Especially with the Germans, because they're so sincere and earnest. I used to go on stage and say, in German, 'Hello, your lifejacket is under your seat.'"

She goes off into peals of giggles. Ms Williams is a world-class giggler. But she's serious about being taken seriously as an original talent. She is sick of being compared to people – Joni Mitchell, Beth Orton, Sandy Denny, Gemma Hayes, almost any female songwriter with a guitar and a wispy delivery. "It used to piss me off, because they seemed to be suggesting that I was trying to emulate someone. The one thing I do not do is try to emulate anyone. But now I feel that it's like writing a letter addressed to near Wrexham' or 'near Chester'. When you live in a little village, it isn't like Wrexham or Chester, but it's near. When they place those names next to mine, I think it's giving someone directions towards where I am."

Her songs are things of beauty, but they're not as frail as they first appear. Williams deals in real tunes, their inner rhythms slapped into life by percussive effects. "There's always a tension about wanting to go further," she says. "Sometimes I want to make punk records. I want to amp it up. It gets really intense on stage. We have to have one song that rocks out, to release the tension..."

Ms Williams' songs are filled with the iniquities of men. Several breeds of male bastard get their comeuppance in her lyrics - casual deflowerers, self-important ranters, players of mind-games. Is she naturally confrontational? "No, I'm not, though I'm getting better at being brave and saying how I feel. I can sing things, sweetly, that I'd never have the courage to say to people's faces."

What makes her angry? "Vanity," she says emphatically. "And stupidity. If men are taken in by women I don't respect, it really boils my piss."

Her current bête noire is Ryan Adams, the American singer, with whom she had a confrontation after one of his recent concerts. "I gave his manager my albums to give Ryan. The manager called him over, and he was like this little four-year-old boy, he wouldn't look at me. He just went off to talk to these bimbos. I suppose that's my vanity getting me angry. I was thinking, 'It's OK to chat to me, you know.'"

She got married a year ago, to Neil Le Flohic (who now runs her record company) and says, "I don't really fancy anyone apart from my husband." Their first anniversary coincides with a concert in Liverpool, where she will, unusually, depart from her own repertoire to do a cover version. "It's a special song for Neil. It's Paul Simon's 'I Do It For Your Love'." Why? "Because it starts, 'We were married on a rainy day', and we were, in Tynemouth, in an old hotel right on the edge of the sea. There was mist and sea spray..." She's immensely keen on Tynemouth – it features on the cover of Old Low Light. The three-year-old Kathryn is snapped at the seaside on her father's denim-clad knee.

It is, she grimly concedes, hellishly difficult to write songs about being happy. "It's like taking photographs in summer. It's always going to look like the top of a biscuit tin. The sunlight on the CD cover isn't the same as the sunlight you see today. It doesn't bleach like it does now. Same with happiness. I've tried to write happy songs, but if anyone heard them, they'd never give me another record deal. I don't feel happiness is a constant state at all. It comes in small doses. Anyone who says they're always happy is probably living a very sad life."

She grew up in Liverpool. Her jeans-clad father sang and ran a folk club, but gave it up when Kathryn's elder sister Emma was born. The two girls sang from the start. "I've got a tape of Emma and me, aged about two and four, at our gran's house. We'd pretend to be DJs, and talk and sing hymns." Did her sister envy her success? "She envies it, but she doesn't want to do the touring and singing," said Ms Williams, laughing. "But she always plays a few gigs with me on a tour, doing backing vocals. She tells everyone, 'I've got the voice, but Kath got all the breaks.'"

A licensing deal with EastWest Records freed the over-stretched Kathryn Williams from having to market and distribute her own music. But she's keeping on with the company she started (CAW), doing the accounts herself and signing up new artists, like one of the A&R men she used to despise. And in between touring she can update her website, with its little sketches and doodles and stories about a detective called Hercule Pepperpot, and its self-penned "Little Book of Boredom". You could call her whimsical, or you could come right out and say she's a total crackpot. "There's something really beautiful about English eccentricity," she says. "I think there's too many people trying to be American."

An unlikely success story at 28, the breathy but substantial Kathryn Williams is poised to take on America when her new manager Alan McGee takes her there next year. For now, she's content to bask in record-company pride. "The thing is," she says, "I don't feel like I'm desperate. I don't want to be desperate for fame, desperate for this career to last. And anyway," she smiles her huge, schoolgirl grin, "I've already sorted it out with my osteopath – that I can go and be an osteopath after my career goes down the toilet."

Romantic, you see, but damned peculiar.

'Old Low Light' is out now on CAW/EastWest; Kathryn Williams is touring to 29 October