Emily Portman interview: “Living in the world, I feel like we just need a bit of magic... and the creative process is about finding that magic”

There are a fair few dates crowding into Emily Portman’s calendar. She’s just released a new album of mainly traditional songs, Time Was Away, with long-time friend and English concertina player Rob Harbron; and they’ve just toured the UK as a duo with plans for more dates in February. She’s also been on the road throughout Europe and the UK with The Furrow Collective, an Anglo-Scottish quartet of outstanding solo artists who come together to instil new life into songs of the folk tradition; they will soon begin a new moon- and darkness-themed album set to drop later in 2023. She’s writing new songs, too. “For a long time, I didn’t have time for songwriting, so I’m really happy to be getting back to that again, returning to traditional stories but finding new meanings in them.”

Portman’s own songs, drawn from the folk tradition, fairy tales and mythology, share the weight and depth of the ballads she fell in love with when she first encountered them as a teenager. In 2010 she released her debut, The Glamoury (which she defines as “an enchantment that may reveal beauty where before there was none”). Her own songs, which she calls “new songs with old bones, old stories with new skins,” sat alongside great ballads like ‘Two Sisters’, while 2012’s Hatchling won her a 2013 BBC Folk Award for Best Original Song for the Greek myth-inspired ‘Hatchlings’, and 2015’s Coracle was her first set of wholly original songs, with the likes of Lucy Farrell, Rachel Newton and Sam Sweeney lending musical support. Songs of new motherhood (‘Borrowed and Blue’) sat beside songs inspired by the Neolithic burial chamber in Gap Cave (‘Darkening Bell’) and the magical potions of ‘Tam Lin’ (‘Eye of Tree’).

Emily Portman & Rob Harbron (photo: Camilla Greenwell)

Running parallel to her solo career is her work within The Furrow Collective. Featuring Portman, Lucy Farrell, Rachel Newton and Alasdair Roberts, their material is almost all drawn from the folk tradition, and their three albums, released between 2014 and 2018, are essential to any library of contemporary British folk. “I’ve played with Lucy and Rachel for years,” she says, and it was while living in Newcastle, studying in the second year of the then-new degree course created by Folkworks that she first saw Roberts perform at the Star and Shadow cinema. “We were on the same bill,” she says, “and I recall he sang ‘The Cruel Mother’, and I was just blown away.” Not long after, they assembled to record the Furrows’ debut, At Our Next Meeting. “Since then it has flowed with us,” she says. “It’s like there’s just a bit of magic there. It feels so easy to play with them all – we’re all just in love with this stuff, and it’s great to have the chance to sing them together. We’ve found we go for music and songs that are best suited to after dark,” she adds.

Folkworks was a significant stepping stone for Portman. It’s where she first met Rob Harbron (the person who had inspired Alistair Anderson to set up the course in the first place), learned with the likes of Lou Kellen and Frankie Armstrong, and embarked on her first professional gigs as part of Waterson:Carthy for their Frost and Fire tours. But she already had songwriting under her belt, long before Folkworks.

“I started writing when I was six,” she reveals. “I’d make up songs about fairies, and my dad gave me a keyboard sampler, which was really fun to play with, and showed me how to record myself on a tape recorder. So there are tapes from when I was seven.” She laughs. “Some of the compositions are structurally sound! And, in some ways, I haven’t drifted too far away… I’m still singing about magic and stuff.”

While Time Was Away draws more on the tradition’s social rather than magical songs, the magical touch lingers on ‘Down in the Meadow’, which comes complete with a field recording of diggers uprooting that very magic near to where Portman lives. “You see themes developing,” she says of the process of making the album. “First it was an edgeland theme – songs that are set in edgelands, meadows, and by the sides of roads and in woods. The landscape seemed to come through in the songs, but in the stories that unfold there is a real sense of hardship and resilience… Take ‘Oakham Poachers’, it’s very specific, about poachers being hung and imprisoned, but at the same time it has larger underlying themes about hunger that feel – sadly – just as pertinent today.”

They’re songs that she’s lived with for years before putting them to record. “It’s funny, choosing songs for different outlets,” she says. “Rob and I have known each other for years. We played gigs years ago, but we were just too busy to get together. But we were both looking to try something new, and it came to that point where we started this exchange. Then I brought these songs along, some of which we’d played years ago, and most of them hadn’t found an outlet for one reason or another. So they found a home here, with me and Rob. He’s such a sensitive, subtle accompanist, and it was a great experience to develop these… The songs are very central here, there’s a bit of a stillness in it, there’s a lot of room in a duo for the songs to expand.”

That sense of expansion, through the inhabitation of these centuries-old structures in song is, for Portman, central to the folk experience. For her, these songs are “multiple voices telling a host of contradictory stories. They are a real insight and window into our history, that help us make sense of where we are now. I shy away from this sense of timelessness,” she adds, “the idea of ‘timeless themes,’ but on the other hand when we make connections and find parallels and start to overlay our own landscapes onto the ballads, you start to see them take place in your own locality, so they become part of your life, and part of the fabric of your everyday.

“Living in the world, I feel like we just need a bit of magic,” she adds. “And the creative process, for me, is about finding that magic, entering into a state of curiosity, leaving that mundane everydayness and going somewhere else, where everything and anything might be possible.”

That sense of a magic lying dormant in the everyday is the fuel for so many of the ballads in her repertoire. “There are plenty in which magical characters suddenly pop up in an otherwise mundane landscape,” she says. “There’s a real fluidity between the magical and the mundane in these old stories. And you can turn over an old story as a curiosity, but it’s when you feel that personal connection, and you start to overlay your own experience – that’s when the magic happens. The ballads are so rich and have so many layers to peel back. That’s a big reason for finding myself going back to them, there is so much to find and keep discovering.”

Read the the review: Time Was Away

This interview originally appeared in the January/February 2023 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today