AWARD-winning folk artist Siobhan Miller will be making a welcome return to Mellor Brook Community Centre next week.

The last time she played the venue she was touring as one half of a duo with singer Jeanna Leslie.

“I don’t even want to think how many years ago that was,” she laughed.

Having spent several years on the road as a duo, Siobhan and Jeanna have both gone their own, very successful ways.

“Even though we are making different music now we are still great friends and supportive of each others’ music” said Siobhan, who will be returning to East Lancashire with her band.

As a solo artist, she has had tremendous success including receiving the Best Traditional Track at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and being nominated for Folk Singer of the Year. Last week she released her third solo album, Mercury.

“It is lovely to be recognised and all those things like that really help but the most important things to me are the shows and doing as good a job as I can,” she said. “I do appreciate it when people come to gigs - they have made the effort to hear you live. I’m always delighted by that.

“We’ve been having a great tour so far with some brilliant audiences.”

For next week’s show, fans can expect to hear a number of tracks of the new album but Siobhan’s earlier songs will not be forgotten.

“We will be playing lot of new material,” she said. “But we have some songs from my two previous solo albums from Strata and Flight of Time. I love doing a mixture of my own stuff and traditional stuff. I enjoy working out what’s right for a particularly venue or show.”

Mercury is the first album of her own compositions.

“On the first record there were only a couple of my own songs I’d worked on with James Grant from Love and Money who produced also the album,” she said. “That album was more about exploring the writing of other songwriters that I liked. I have learned a lot from singing other people’s songs over the years.

“When I moved on to making Strata, that was a collection of my favourite traditional songs. I felt that I had to make that album at that time to be able to give me the head space to focus on writing my own songs. They were songs which I’d grown up with or had taught to me and I just needed to record them all to free me up to write.”

Many of the songs on Mercury were written with husband Euan who is also in her band.

“I really enjoyed the writing process,” she said. “It helped because I wasn’t in a rush.”

The album also has a different sound compared to her earlier work.

“I wanted to keep that folk element so the acoustic guitar very much underpins everything but I also wanted to bring in sounds from more contemporary indie music that I love listening to so we have keyboards and drums featuring heavily on the record.”

Siobhan Miller, Mellor Brook Community Centre, Thursday, November 15. Support from Caffrey, McGurk & Madge. Details from www.mellorbrook.org. Tickets available from Britannia Gallery, Branch Road, Mellor Brook or Janet on 07377 788 716