Digging the music of the past

"It was great fun, although Celtic Connections seriously hampered my dissertation," she laughs. "I was hanging out with lots of musicians instead. I didn't do too much performing in Glasgow at first, but a friend moved here and forced me to be in band, so I ended up doing a bit. Becky and I were a duo, we used to practise together on the phone and she'd come up and visit me. There's a lot of crossover in the music, too. Growing up we listened to a lot of Scottish and Irish music, it's always been a big influence."

A keen sense of roots and family lies dead centre of The Unthanks' music. Between 2004 and 2009 the two sisters sang together as part of Rachel Unthank & the Winterset, but more recently the clan has expanded. For their 2009 album, Here's the Tender Coming, the band changed their name to The Unthanks, acknowledging a line-up reshuffle with brought in multi-instrumentalist, chief songwriter and arranger Adrian McNally. Just to seal the deal, McNally is married to Rachel. The pair have two young sons, George and Arthur, who are already becoming tour-hardened pros.

Little wonder, then, that the making of their rapturous new record, Mount the Air, was a decidedly home-spun affair. "We were very lucky," says Rachel. "In the little hamlet where me and Adrian live, some neighbours of ours have outbuildings which we were able to convert into a studio. We could record just down the lane, which was really convenient. I could push Arthur down the lane and he'd be asleep by the time I got there. I'd sing a bit, and when he woke up I could go home again.

"It had a big effect on me. Some of my fears about recording, and getting quite hung up about that, just vanished. It's not that I cared any less, but I just had to get on with it, because I had this narrow window of time. That suits my personality. I'm better at working when I have to."

These domestic preoccupations fed directly into the record. Mount the Air is an album which moves almost conceptually between the joys and heartache of love and motherhood. As many of the song titles suggest - Foundling, Died for Love, Last Lullaby - it does not always explore the sunnier side of these themes. "As a parent you carry fear around, and folk music is full of very strong songs about women and those fears. I've got a three-year-old, and Arthur, who has just turned one, was born during that time. So yes, those things were very much present in our thoughts and in our reality. We don't really start with a theme, but obviously if you're in a certain place in your life then you're attracted to certain subjects."

The songwriting process became part personal inspiration, part archaeological dig. "We went to look for songs, and talked to local singers," says Rachel. "Becky went to Cecil Sharp House and explored the library there. We talked to the Foundling Museum in London, and Adrian ended up writing a song about that. I wrote a lullaby. It was accumulation of lots of bits and pieces, and from that something definite emerges."

This 'gathering' process, as well as the album's brooding nature, anchor The Unthanks firmly in the folk lineage. Their father, George, was a noted Northumberland singer, while their close-knit harmonies, sung in the warm local vernacular, are rooted in traditional music. But not so fast with that pigeonhole; of late their music has roamed all over the musical firmament. On recent albums The Unthanks have tackled the songs of King Crimson, Robert Wyatt and Antony Johnson, and Mount the Air is more ambitious and eclectic than ever.

"When people say, what kind of music do you make?, I find it quite hard to answer," says Rachel. "Me and Becky, our roots are totally in folk and traditional music, and I'm not ashamed of that. I'm proud and happy to have that labelled attached to me, but pretty obviously it doesn't describe our sound or the kind of music we play. We're all music lovers who have been influenced by lots of different things. Adrian grew up in a different background, so it's a big melting pot. Our music grows out of all our influences."

The title track of the new album exemplifies the manner in which the band now use traditional sources as a launch-pad for something far less easy to define. Inspired by a brief snippet of an old Dorset Song - "I'll mount the air / on swallow's wings" - unearthed by Becky, it mutated into a ten-minute epic, with huge orchestral sweeps, a touch of prog-rock grandiosity, and echoes of Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain.

"Originally it was just two lines," says Rachel. "Becky took it home and showed it to me and Adrian, and he became obsessed by it. He changed the tune and composed a b-part, and we wrote some more words, and it became this big beast of a thing. So you never know when those diverse influences are going to emerge and fuse, or where they're going to take you. We didn't actually set out for the album to be like that. Originally we were going to scale back and use less musicians, but we got carried away! Before we knew it we're back on stage with a 10-piece band again. We've got string quartet, brass, drums, bass, piano - which is fabulous. It's a real pleasure to play like that."

Not everyone is happy with this more eclectic approach. Among a string of exultant album reviews, one critic pleaded for more sisterly singing, suggesting that the group were abandoning their roots. Rachel sighs. "If you set out to please other people then that's not really the path to choose. We please yourselves! Me and Becky love singing together in harmony, that's the core of our sound, but there's only so much we can do with two voices on our own, so to embrace this big musical palette is really exciting. Adrian always tries to let the music serve the song, or tell the story. That's still at the heart of what we so, it's just bigger."

Following three albums with EMI, Mount the Air has been released on the band's own label. In practice, however, little has changed. "EMI left us to it," says Rachel. "They didn't get involved in the creative process, and I couldn't imagine working any other way." The only problem is knowing what to do with all this freedom. "We have loads of ideas for different albums," she says. "Too many! We want to take lots of different paths, but right now we're enjoying this one."

Mount the Air is out now on Rabble Rouser. The Unthanks play Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, on March 20.