Wainwright woos Cambridge crowd

Martha Wainwright performing with her band at the Cambridge Folk Festival (Photo: Bob Carter)

by Nic Rigby
BBC News, Cambridge Folk Festival

Singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright bounded onto the stage in a black dress and pink stockings to woo the crowd at the 2008 Cambridge Folk Festival.

The festival has been part of the Canadian-American singer's life since childhood, she told the BBC before her set.

Wainwright used to accompany her mother and aunt - internationally acclaimed folk singers Kate and Anna McGarrigle - to the event, while her father is comic songwriter Loudon Wainwright III.

Her brother is award-winning sing-songwriter Rufus Wainwright.

Martha sang the 1930s classic Stormy Weather as an encore at Cambridge

And Wainwright has certainly lived her life in lyrics - in her own songs and her family's.

It is something, she insists, she has no regrets about.

"I think it's a privilege. It made me write songs in such a way that they are an extension of myself," she says.

Wainwright has always known her future lay in music. While she was good at mathematics at school, she never harboured ambitions of being an accountant.

When she was 14, she says, her maths teacher got a little angry with her for being lazy.

"She said to me 'What do you want to do? Do you want to sing and dance your whole life?' And I said: 'Yep'."

At Cambridge she gave a powerful, passionate performance, focusing on her acclaimed new album, You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too.

Amongst her own songs, the record includes a version of Pink Floyd's See Emily Play, written by Cambridge hero Syd Barrett, which the festival crowd lapped up.

Martha is a fan of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding's The Might Boosh

"Kate [her mother] came up with the arrangement which brought something new to it," she says.

"It was refreshing for my album to have a song where the lyrics are so English, so free and psychedelic," she says.

Wainwright also performed her father's devastating cry against narrow-mindedness, Pretty Good Day.

And for an encore she performed a rousing version of the 1930s classic Stormy Weather. Many have played the song before it, but on Saturday night in Cambridge she owned it.

Wainwright's latest album has won her new fans, and many of her lyrics stand up as poetry in their own right.

Bleeding All Over You includes the lines: "You've got a girlfriend / And I can only talk about her for so long / Then my mind turns into my heart / And whispers into that dark cave I've been wronged / My heart was made for bleeding over you..."

When Martha was young she and her brother Rufus would sing at festivals

"The power of poetry is stronger than anything," she says.

"As a young person I wrote poetry and read poetry and once won a public speaking contest with the poem The Explosion by Philip Larkin. I was very moved by that poem."

Wainwright worked with a number of producers on her album.

"I think that was very useful," she explains. "It was a way to retain control. I did not want one man to take over and have too much control."

One of the most moving songs is In the Middle of the Night, which Wainwright wrote when her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

"I did not want to sing about the details but certainly everybody in the family was affected by the fear of death," she says.

"When someone in your family gets cancer you also see how many people this affects - everyone knows someone or has a relative."

Many her lyrics are tinged with a dark humour and it is no surprise she is a huge fan of BBC Three comedy The Mighty Boosh (created by Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding), and recently appeared in a documentary about the show.

Would she like to collaborate with them in the future?

"I'd love too," she says. "Could you tell them, please?

"I've been trying to get Julian on the phone, but they're very busy," she adds with a smile.