Bristol anti-folkers Poppy and Friends are off around the country to promote debut album‘Beautiful to Me’. Ben Welch grabs a word before the tour bus leaves town.

There’s no particular reason you should be familiar with Poppy and Friends, but you really should. The five-piece and their eponymous principal songwriter Poppy Pitt are about to head out on a UK-wide tour in support of their debut album ‘Beautiful To Me’. But more interesting than the facts is the sound: a playful and immediate folk with a wisdom to counterpart its vulnerability, a melancholy to accent its joyfulness. And while its lo-fi quality might have you thinking Poppy is singing right in your ear, influence has been drawn from all around. Country, blues, pop and punk all manage to assert themselves, subtly and naturally, at various points on the record. Poppy’s childhood sounds like the one you’d want her to have had - a little eccentric, perhaps, and very musical. “My parents used to take me to Glastonbury when we were kids,” she recalls. “I can remember sitting at the back and watching Joni Mitchell. It used to be our holiday. They had old ambulances that they’d convert into campers.”

She grew up in a house where, though formal musical education was not necessarily pushed, music was always around. She discovered her voice whilst singing in the car with her mother, picked up her first guitar after her dad left it lying around.

In her teens she and a few friends began putting on “little gigs around one another’s houses”, an attic space serving as stage. The intimacy and ease of these formative performances seems to have stayed with her, to animate her music. It’s most pronounced in her lyrics, mainly drawn from fragmentary recollections of real life, even quotidian experiences, related and studied in detail for the listener. But her analysis is, typically, more relaxed. “There is a big storytelling element to the way that I sing.

I just try to tell it in the best way.” Poppy Pitt became Poppy and Friends shortly after a Megabus trip from Bristol to London, where she met her first drummer. He introduced her to double bass player Zac Gregory, who has since become her “core member”. Other musicians soon followed, and today Poppy finds herself at the head of a fullyfledged touring folk troupe. But with this extended line-up has also come development of the songwriting. “It’s definitely harder working with other people,” Poppy explains. “You have to come up with a language, because I have no musical language. But it’s producing more interesting songs from me. Zac brings more structure to my songwriting, which tends to be very stream-of-consciousness. Now I’m thinking of the other instruments, the arrangements.”

‘Beautiful to Me’ was recorded last year at J & J’s, the studio of Portishead bassman Jim Barr. When Zac and Poppy talk of the record there seems a certain hesitancy, a disappointment even. It might have been the stress of recording 16 songs in three days. Or perhaps it’s the challenge, I wonder aloud, of capturing the spontaneity of the songs on record. “Maybe,” Poppy ponders. “But Jim said something really nice: ‘a recording is not the recording, it’s just a recording.’ It’s just one version, a snapshot of that time. You don’t have to feel that it is your statement forever. If you do, you’ll never be satisfied.” This is the essence of what makes Poppy’s songs sound the way that they do – the ease with which she conveys the here and now, the ephemeral.

On the road Poppy and Friends will be trying out some new songs, songs with “a bigger mix of things, more musicality”. Their enthusiasm for life on tour is palpable. When I foolishly ask them about the balance between work and play, about how they balance their personal and professional relationships, Zac frowns. “If it starts to feel like work,” he observes, “you’re probably in the wrong band.” Amen.

POPPY AND FRIENDS KICK OFF THEIR UK TOUR AT SWINDON’S BEEHIVE ON WED 10 MAR, AND PLAY MR WOLF’S, BRISTOL, ON THUR 25 MAR. SEE MUSIC DIARY FOR DETAILS. FFI: WWW.MYSPACE.COM/POPPYANDFRIENDS