Fly caught up with him just before he flew out of his native Devon to Canada before dates in Belgium and Italy and asked him how it felt to have taken his music international.

“It really makes you appreciate where you come from when you come back,” he said. “I feel rooted here, I feel identity with this area.”

His music, he said, was similar: “It’s a celebration of where you’re from, and I want to give something back to the area. It’s such an amazing place to look at and be part of. I relate my songs to the area I’m part of, that’s where the energy comes from - it’s a bit hippy.”

“I relate my songs to the area I’m part of, that’s where the energy comes from - it’s a bit hippy.”

And for Lakeman it really is a bit hippy: he is one of the latest in a recent line of young folk musicians whose parents were very much at the heart of the folk revival, along with the other ‘folk babes’ Kate Rusby, Eliza Carthy and Nancy Kerr. “I was brought up in folk clubs, my parents ran a folk club, they met in one,’ he said.

So, as with the ‘folk babes’ he started off tagging along to festivals and on tours, created his own groups, first The Lakeman Brothers with brothers Sean and Sam, then with Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts as Equation and a spell working with Cara Dillon before going it alone.

Now somewhat folk’s golden boy he’s up for an impressive four awards at next week’s Radio Two Folk Awards and about to go into the studio to record his third solo album due for release later this year.

The last album Freedom Fields is clearly as rooted in Lakeman’s local Devon and Cornwall surroundings as he is (think ‘Lady of the Sea’ and ‘The Colliers’), so would the new album see him straying further from home?

The answer is a definite no and there is undisguised boyish interest in his voice as he recounts his plans for an album dominated by stories of shipwrecks and pirates.

“It definitely tells of a good time in this genre.”

“The old stories of the sea are still interesting,” he said. “It started off with a fascination and then I realised [2006] was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Penlee lifeboat accident [a sea disaster in which sixteen people lost their lives]. It’s such a big part of life here, it’s something I wanted to remember in a song”.

It’s not just a good time for Lakeman, folk as a form is flourishing: “I think it’s an exciting time for folk music, story telling, contemporary song, all acoustic types of music,” he said. “The branches go quite far now in terms of where people pigeonhole things, and I think it’s really important it stretches out.”

And stretching out is something Lakeman appears well able to do, with dates covering several countries, folk clubs and big venues alike as well as festival dates in 2007 including the rocky V Festival and Glastonbury. “It’s definitely tells of a good time in this genre,” he concluded.

Links:
Wikipedia page with information on the Penlee lifeboat accident.
Seth’s MySpace
Seth Lakeman’s website.