As roadies bustle along the corridors of Belfast’s Ulster Hall and musicians arrive for sound checks, Cara Dillon is in a backstage dressing room quietly contemplating the day ahead. The Derry singer is in town with Sam Lakeman — her producer, long-term musical collaborator and husband — to perform at a gala event celebrating the best in Northern Irish music. If Dillon has any pre-show jitters she does not show them although, considering events in her life over the past six years, she would have every right to be nervous.
Instead, the serene 36-year-old says she is happier than ever. Dillon is particularly relieved to be free from the shackles of record labels, who buffeted her from post to post for more than 10 years. Her family life has also reached a state of harmony after a spell of hardship.
Everything changed for the folk singer in 2006 when After the Morning, her third album for the British label Rough Trade, flopped. In November of that year, Dillon went into labour while on stage in Swindon Arts Centre; her twins were born the next day at only 26 weeks old. For the next three months, the only time she sang was to her sons in their hospital incubators.
When the twins turned a year old, Dillon was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. “That changed my life unbelievably,” she says. ”I knew nothing about diabetes; I hadn’t a clue what it was like to inject insulin. I had to rethink the way I did everything. Touring, even recording — it affects every part of your life. We don’t just hop in a car to go on tour. My backstage rider has to include certain things suited to my dietary needs. It was a big shock to the system.”
Dillon was terrified diabetes would end her career. “It makes you feel tired and naturally your voice gets croaky and you feel quite sleepy. I remember crying my heart out one day, thinking, ‘The one thing I am absolutely passionate about is singing. I just can’t believe this is happening to me — it’s going to affect me to the point where I’m not going to do concerts any more.’”
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The singer has learnt to live with her illness — and without record labels. Her most recent album, 2009’s Hill of Thieves, was self-financed and self-produced, and it has been her biggest-selling release to date. She will be performing this evening with the Ulster Orchestra at the Grand Opera House, and recently collaborated with Disney on a children’s film. If anything, her experiences inform her music. Dillon, often portrayed in soft-focus on her album covers, was always drawn to dark lyrical themes and haunting melodies. Such was the case with There Were Roses, a song about sectarian mindlessness, which featured in a Billy Connolly documentary about Belfast, or her frequent preoccupation with songs about emigration.
“It’s mainly because of where I’m from,” she explains. “I’m from Dungiven. Derry harbour was a place lots of people sailed away from; broken hearts and all that. In my own family, some of my great uncles emigrated. Stories passed down have obviously affected me. It’s in my genes; the blood flowing through my veins. Why, out of all the genres of music, am I singing something like The Emigrant’s Farewell, or The Maid of Culmore? They’re just a part of me.”
Dillon is renowned for her ability to reinterpret traditional folk songs, whether Black Is the Colour, The Parting Glass, or She Moves Through the Fair. “Traditional music keeps evolving. It would be a sad state of affairs if the Chieftains, for example, did a version of a song and that was it put to bed. If you love a song, breathe new life into it. Keep interpreting it, and let young people hear it in a different light.”
Many of these songs were ingrained in her youth. She sang in fleadhs and the back rooms of pubs in Dungiven from a young age. At 15, she formed the folk group Óige with two friends and toured during her school holidays, even playing in Israel. The experience made her yearn for a life of making music. “I was so green and naive then,” she says. “I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the crazy world of the music industry. The sharks you meet; the incredibly talented musicians, songwriters and producers; and the highs and lows of being a signed artist.”
In 1995, she joined Equation, a UK-based folk group made up of Lakeman and his brothers. The band made a video and performed on MTV, but Warner shelved their album. Dillon and Lakeman became unhappy and signed with a Warner subsidiary, Blanco y Negro. They were plunged into five years of development hell, experimenting with genres ranging from rock to pop to downbeat trip-hop. They recorded albums with top producers, but none of it made the cut.
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“When I signed our first record deal, all my friends were going to university,” Dillon says. “I was hopefully going to Queen’s. This whole record label thing came along — I thought, ‘Let’s give it a go.’ Suddenly, I found myself three or four years down the line, getting calls from my friends saying, ‘I’m graduating this week, are you coming to the party? What are you doing?’ ‘I’m not really doing anything.’ It was quite depressing at times, to be honest.”
Dillon and Lakeman expressed their frustrations to the Blanco y Negro boss, Geoff Travis, who offered to sign them to his label, Rough Trade. While their stable-mates in Blanco y Negro included Dinosaur Jr and the Jesus and Mary Chain, their Rough Trade roster had the Strokes and the Libertines. Dillon, an unrepentant folk singer, was the odd one out, although she says Travis always had her best interests at heart. The singer was given creative freedom across her three albums with Rough Trade — Cara Dillon (2001), Sweet Liberty (2003), and After the Morning — but there were always commercial pressures.
Dillon was never afraid to experiment — she guested on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells III and collaborated with the DJ Judge Jules — and her first two albums were commercial successes. But she felt out of place. Lakeman pitches in: “Let’s be fair, they were a [subsidiary] indie label, and we were the only folk act they ever had. They didn’t really know how to handle us. We got a lot of kudos for being associated with Rough Trade at the start, but then we were doing all the work. ”
When their contract with Rough Trade ended, Dillon and Lakeman decided to go it alone. They set up Charcoal Records, and recorded Hill of Thieves in their home studio in Somerset. The album, which channels classic 1970s-era folk such as Planxty and the Bothy Band, was not only a critical and commercial success, it also proved cost-effective. Now Dillon is aghast at how major labels squandered money and resources during their heyday.
The couple invested profits from Hill of Thieves into signing folk duo Winter Mountain to their label. Lakeman is producing the band’s debut album and landed them support tours with his brother, Seth Lakeman, and Rosanne Cash. Dillon and Lakeman hope to learn from major-label mistakes.
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“If we were just selfish producers, we would have signed Winter Mountain for a production deal, developed a single, farmed it out to a major label and then wiped our hands of them,” says Lakeman. “We’ve signed them for multiple albums.” Dillon adds: “We tell them all our experiences and say, ‘You really are lucky because you’re not with a major label.’”
Dillon is now collecting songs for her next album. She has emerged from these years of transience and turmoil into a creative awakening.
“Complete freedom,” she enthuses. “There is absolutely no way now that I would do anything I didn’t want to. There’s no contract. We’re self-sufficient. When you’re happy — and you know what you’re about — it all seems to roll along beautifully. It’s whenever you’re confused and under the weather, because other people are telling you what to do, suddenly everything becomes muddled. Now there is clarity.”
Cara Dillon and the Ulster Orchestra play tonight in the Grand Opera House, Belfast