'I Thought You Could Buy Cocaine In Bags From The Supermarket Freezer'

The first time Eddi Reader came to Australia she was 26, yet to embark on a solo career and singing back-ups for Alison Moyet, and her trip became instantly memorable. "We were out on Sydney Harbour on a boat with Tony Bennett," recounts Reader, now 57. "My family loved The [Great] American Songbook, and Tony Bennett was one of their big heroes. I couldn't believe it."

Reader "never made it" back to Australia fronting Fairground Attraction, who had a number one single here with 1988's Perfect and then famously broke up while making their second LP. But beginning in the early naughties she became a regular visitor; her first-ever Australian solo show was at Melbourne's Cornish Arms, where she was asked by the venue to take a mid-set break "because no one was buying any drinks. They were all just sitting still, listening to me sing songs and talk about Scotland".

Reader was born in Glasgow, but her family were relocated from their tenement — "they called them slums, but to me they weren't slums, they were castles" — in the mid-'70s, moving to the tiny seaside town of Irvine. It was a culture-shock ("Irvine had two streets in it: Bank Street and High Street"), but it was there Reader discovered "Scottish cultural music" and started playing in folk clubs. After school she set off to see the world, first hitching to London then busking her way through France, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany. "I learnt to sing in the street, all these different songs to play: Loudon Wainwright, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Paul Brady, The Chieftains."

Returning home she ended up working a factory job. "I was driven demented," Reader recounts. "I felt like I was a woman of the world by then. I was 20, and here I was stuck knitting jumpers for golfers in a factory. I didn't want to kowtow to the norm, which was, in Irvine, getting married at 21 and having a shitload of kids."

Plotting her escape, she started answering singer-wanted adverts from London music mags. Her first gig was singing back-up vocals for Gang Of Four on a US tour. "They took the piss out of me something awful. I was so naive, I thought you could buy cocaine in bags from the supermarket freezer."

After singing for Moyet and Eurythmics, Reader found fame with Fairground Attraction and her eponymous 1994 LP marked the beginning of solo success. But 2003's Sings The Songs Of Robert Burns is her most notable record, reconnecting Reader with the Scottish tunes she cut her teeth on. "I'm leaning on ancient texts and I'm leaning on ancient ideas, but... I don't want it to be like going to a museum; I want it to be like putting on a Harry Nilsson record. Every musician leans on these song-forms that've been around forever; you can't just play a minor chord and call it your own. Olivia Newton-John did Banks Of The Ohio [in 1973]. With me, it's just more obvious, because in the case of Robert Burns' songs, the writer has been 200 years dead."