The voice knocked Kathryn Williams off her feet. Buoyed in the mid-Atlantic, its Boston drawl tempered by English intonation, full of personality: Williams hadn’t expected it at all. “It was really deep and sonorous, but also warm and wry.” She cocks her head sweetly. “It’s funny isn’t it? When you write melancholically, or have ideas to do with the darker sides of life, people think that that’s the only thing you have.”
The voice belonged to Sylvia Plath, recorded in 1962 by the British Council’s Peter Orr, as part of a series of interviews with eminent poets. Williams came across it on YouTube while doing research for a commission from the Arts Council’s New Writing North programme, for which her brief was remarkably open: write some songs inspired by Plath. There were no more specific pointers than that. “At first I was like, ‘Oh, much better to have an open-ended commission, that’s brilliant.’ And then” – Williams rolls her eyes dramatically – “it was just weeks of hell.”
This isn’t the first time singer-songwriter Williams has embarked on an interesting collaboration, but it is the first time, she says drolly, that her collaborator “has been dead”. She’s one for drollery, is Kath, swearing frequently and loudly in the fancy basement restaurant of north London venue JW3, where later she will play Hypoxia – the album resulting from the commission – for the first time.
But for the past 15 years, Williams has been known for another tone: quietness. Her singing voice is gentle like water, soft like clouds of launderette soap, but precise too, weighed perfectly, making each lyric stand tall. She has released nine solo albums, drifting between folk and pop, each of them intimate, tender, and curious, including 2000’s Mercury-nominated Little Black Numbers, but has also collaborated widely: with Ewan MacColl’s son Neill (on 2008’s Two), Newcastle punk Anna Spencer (their band for kids, the Crayonettes, released Songs for Children and Robots in 2010) and Portishead’s Adrian Utley (on 2011 project The Pond).
Hypoxia also saw Williams getting saved by Ed Harcourt, or rather Ed Harcourt’s bath, in which she wrote her new album’s devastating central song, Cuckoo. But before we get there, we have to return to the girl who first read The Bell Jar as a teenager, and who would become a woman helping another escape the space she occupies in popular culture.
Born in Liverpool in 1974, Williams always loved books. “I was one of those really annoying Morrissey teenagers, taking myself off to the graveyard to read all the books teenagers read.” She remembers enjoying The Bell Jar, but forgot about its power in the intervening years. “You end up just having an idea of it, because [Plath] became this strange sort of icon and persona, because of killing herself, because of Ted Hughes, and because she was beautiful.” The pre-gig dinner arrives; Williams clasps her fork like a sword. “It’s like she’s become this shorthand of those three things. Here’s the sexy, depressing writer poster girl! And that’s crazy… she’s still so underrated in terms of the content of what she did.”
Commissioned after earlier work she had done for New Writing North, Williams first immersed herself in Plath’s Ariel poems, and was amazed by the writing. “It was so meaty and visceral and muscular.” She decided that putting music to the poems would be crass, so she turned to Plath’s only novel instead. The Bell Jar tells the story of young, Boston-born Esther Greenwood, whose life bears close, fuggy parallels to Plath’s own. She interns at a women’s magazine, Ladies’ Day, as Plath did for the American fashion title Mademoiselle, and takes an overdose, hiding herself in the cellar walls of her parents’ house, as Plath did in 1953.
Second time round, Williams was floored by the book’s boldness. “I found it amazing that it was from the early 60s, in terms of the things that women say and do.” Take the food poisoning suffered by the girls after Ladies’ Day holds a banquet, she says, and the graphic accounts of Esther and friend Betsy vomiting in cabs and lifts. “Remember the film Bridesmaids a few years ago that everyone went mad about? It was so postmodern and so feminist to have this blockbuster where women shit themselves in wedding dresses.” Her hammy voice is hilarious. “My God, Sylvia did it back then!”
Williams decided to take The Bell Jar’s characters and themes as her material, and got to work on the nine songs that would make up Hypoxia while touring her last album, 2013’s lush and poppy Crown Electric. It was not a happy time. “To be in Travelodges on the side of the A1 on a day off, with only a Little Chef for sanctuary, thinking about obsession and depression…” She sighs. “Christ…” Williams also knew she had to “be brave” with tough lyrics if she was going to address the book’s subject matter, including a rape attempt on Esther and a failed suicide, properly. She does so on two Travelodge compositions: Tango With Marco (“if I shout out in pain/ You call it a good fuck”) and Beating Heart (“the ways I tried to stop my heart… every time the body pulled apart”).
Williams suddenly felt something she had never felt before. “I was aware that she was a big shadow over my writing… and I wanted it to be good enough for her.” But as she wrote, she realised she had to work with that shadow, and fight to leave the sexy, depressed poster girl behind. “It was quite nice to just go, ‘I’m not getting involved in the Hello! version of the story. I’m just getting involved in the way she wrote this book.’” She nods. “This is just about her.”
Our chat tonight is interrupted: Williams needs to head backstage and prepare for the gig. Her stage chat is uproariously self-deprecating: “Ooh get me, I’ve read a book,” she begins. Before she starts singing Mirrors, about how Esther starts to not recognise herself in her own reflection, Williams quips: “I’m always interested that the mirror doesn’t show how fucking awesome I am!”
But there are moments of seriousness: “To be a woman in those times,” Williams says, in her preamble to When Nothing Meant Less, an exploration of depression, “was to have to choose between being a professional, or a mother and a wife, and there being nothing in between... We don’t have to do that any more.” Williams looks suddenly small on the stage. “And she had everything else going on too.”
A week later, we grab time on the phone between Williams’s other projects: writing an album in Sweden for actor and singer Peter Jöback, alongside singer-songwriter Tobias Fröberg, and planning a series of singer-songwriter residencies in Stroud. Dates to do the former changed at the last minute, so this week has been manic: it’s involved her driving from her home in Newcastle (where she has lived since studying art at university there) to her parents in Liverpool, to drop off sons Louis, nine, and Ted, five, while her husband, Neil, runs his cafe and bakery back home. When we speak, she’s at a National Trust playground, her sister supervising her sons in the background. “How do we [working mums] do it?” she laughs.
As Williams worked on Hypoxia, she became interested in Plath as a mother, looking after two small children on her own just before she died. “That’s when she was most creative, which is incredible, really.” Plath and Hughes separated in September 1962, after his affair with Assia Wevill was revealed; in October, Plath wrote most of the Ariel poems; in January 1963 she published The Bell Jar (under an alias, Victoria Lucas). At this point, Frieda was two and a half, Nicholas was just turning one. On 11 February, Plath killed herself.
“To have problems anyway, and to have that heightened with kids…” Williams cuts off. Her own sister had postpartum psychosis “out of nowhere”, while Williams is convinced she had undiagnosed postnatal depression after a very difficult first birth. “With children, you need to sort of step out and see the world outside to survive… to remember who you are, as well.”
Did writing about Plath affect her mentally? “Massively.” Williams also worried about the gulf between her status and Plath’s, but tried to hit a tone that came somewhere between them as women. Album opener Electric does this perfectly, reflecting Esther’s obsession with the execution of US spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (“the news is following me”), with a tone both gentle – very Kathryn, that – and oddly eerie.
Then there’s Cuckoo, created during a particularly tough time in the writing process. Imagined in the voice of Esther’s mother (“Oh my little girl’s gone mad/ ...Why couldn’t she go quietly?”), it could only be done with the help of friends, Williams felt. And so she came to write it one morning in Ed Harcourt’s bath. “Ed invited me to his house for three days, and we’d suddenly recorded eight songs. I needed that support, and that bath, and the loads of toast and Marmite.”
Why had things become so tough? Quietness on the line. “When you’re filtered so strongly into a project, it’s almost like things come from your subconscious by stealth.” As in, you reveal as much of yourself as Plath does? “Yes. And a lot of the harder bits of the album do feel autobiographical, because through the characters I have felt bits of me that I’m not necessarily comfortable with, and don’t necessarily want to have written about.” She ends there. “But, you know, that can help, too.”
Tackling the novel also clued Williams in to a more ordinary side of Plath, which was confirmed for her later on in the writing process, when she heard the British Council interview. In it, Plath talks warmly about how novels can give insight into real life. “Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline,” she says. “You’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! I’m a woman… I like trivia, and I find that in a novel I can get more of life. Perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life.”
That confirmed for Williams that she was doing the right thing with the Hypoxia project: attempting to reveal Plath as a real, complete person. “It made me realise that people get pushed almost on to the page, don’t they? They get flattened, without all those other sides of who they are.” And then Williams heard Plath laugh on the recording, and that was that. “To know I could help give something back to her. And to feel myself laughing with her – wow!”
Williams feels she has gained things from other parts of that interview too. “I love that she didn’t give a fuck about pleasing men, or making friends, or pleasing anyone.” That’s another reason Williams is proud to have put the Ted Hughes side of Plath’s story into the background, allowed Plath’s imaginative life to sing its own tune. “And I’ll try to take a lead from her as I go on.” On a summer’s afternoon, to the sound of her children playing, she sounds loud, brave and proud. “That shadow’s still there – and that’s OK by me.”
Hypoxia is released by One Little Indian on 15 June. Kathryn Williams’s tour continues