HAVING taken time out from a successful career which saw her work with the likes of Bob Dylan and Robert Plant, Sally Barker saw herself become an overnight sensation when she reached the final of The Voice back in 2014.

Now the singer whose voice made mentor Tom Jones cry is on the road and heading to Oswaldtwistle with award-winning guitarist Vicki Genfan.

“We met in the early 2000s and were basically forced to play together very quickly and we formed a bond,” said Sally.

“Vicky’s style is quite different to mine but her sense of humour is very similar - even though she is an American! We just clicked.”

But it was not until recently that the pair recorded together. Their album In the Shadow of a Small Mountain was released earlier this year.

“It was my idea,” said Sally. “I said we should make an album together as we it was something we hadn’t done even though we’d been working together on and off for over 15 years.”

Last summer Sally travelled to North Carolina and wrote together and recorded in a cabin owned by Vicki.

“Initially we said let’s record something even if it’s just cover versions,” said Sally. “The way she plays and I sing knits neatly together on stage and we wanted to try and record that. I certainly wasn’t expecting us to put together as many songs as we did.”

In the five-day session the pair penned 12 songs, eight of which are featured on the album. A ninth track was a song which Sally had already written but which fitted in well with the others.

“The fact we’d been friends for a long time meant we were pretty much on the same wavelength for a lot of things,” said Sally.

“It wasn’t like going into a room with someone for the first time and trying to write a song with them where you don’t know who they are or what drives them.

“We knew we could say something and it wouldn’t upset the other and we could move on quickly.”

TV viewers will only know Sally through The Voice but she has a distinguished musical career being a founder member of the group The Poozies. Vicki too is a hugely well respected musician, having previously won Guitar Player magazine’s Guitar Superstar competition.

“I’d never recorded a whole album and then gone out and gigged it before as we have with this, so that was a very different experience,” said Sally.

“Songs do change. We did a tour in March in Germany when album came out there and you notice that the songs do start to creep away from what they were like. But I don't think they have but not crept that far as it’s still just the two of us on stage.

“I think the big difference live is that songs generally do tend to get faster but I like that organic thing about songs in that they can morph and changed.”

It was as a songwriter that Sally auditioned for The Voice prompted by her children.

“It wouldn’t have been something I would have thought to have done under my own steam,” she admits, “but my kids wanted to see me do something and I hadn’t really been successful for a while so I thought I’d got nothing to lose and they loved it.

“And surprisingly I enjoyed it as well but then I had Tom Jones looking after me the whole time.”

On the show Sally’s vocal talents shone through, although not in the way that the show’s producers may have intended.

“One of my prerequisites was that I didn’t want the song to sound just like a recording somebody else had done,” she said. “I wanted to make it my own every time. I’d always change it; either change the key or the tempo and I’d make suggestions to the musical director.

“Not everybody had the confidence to say that in the programme. There were some people who weren’t happy with their song choice but didn’t want to rock the boat whereas I wasn’t bothered.

“For me it wasn’t about winning it. It was just about exposure and I wasn’t going to just do what they told me to do.”

Sally has no regrets about being on the show nor about her decision not to release a covers album immediately afterwards.

“The thing is you have to seize the moment and if you don’t do that you have to accept that the moment has passed," she said, “and that’s what I had to accept.

“If I didn’t take what was offered to me I couldn’t blame anybody else. It’s about taking responsibility. I did that, the decision was mine and I didn’t feel it represented me and I didn’t go with it. I have no regrets.”

Since the show Sally has released her own solo album, Ghost Girl, and has supported with Fairport Convention and toured with Fotheringay.

Sally Barker and Vicki Genfan, Oswaldtwistle Civic Arts Centre, Friday, November 10. Details from 01254 398319