Celtic Connections: Martha Wainwright on Linda Thompson; Emma Pollock on Fiona Apple; Jesca Hoop on Kate Bush. Women artists choose their favourite women artists

Kate Bush is the choice of American singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop and Scottish Say Award winner, pianist Kathryn Joseph, who performed in the celebration of Kate Bush's songs at Aberdeen's True North Festival last September.

Jesca Hoop: When I was 16 one of my first ever friends introduced me to Kate Bush. I've been singing since I was a child and I was going through a strange medical thing with my voice and really struggling.

My mom was trying to teach me that there was only one way to sing and I was pushing back against her because I was in a rebellious stage. My friend introduced me to Kate Bush to defy the logic that my mother was teaching me at the time. So I started to listen to Kate Bush for guidance instead.

She sings from this emotional place. I've heard other singers say it as well: that you find the feeling first and then you sing from that place. She was the first person to show me that example.

As a performer who we get to see live in the flesh, she's like a super-moon. She has only come out twice in my lifetime. I did get to see her in London in 2014 and of course I was just a schoolgirl sitting there.

There were some girls talking in front of me and I leaned forward and said: "I'm only going to get to see this woman once in my lifetime – please be quiet." They were chatting through the first 15 minutes of the show, which was a regular band performance and Kate was in mortal form.

“But as soon as I asked them to be quiet that's when all of the theatre came into play and the room shifted into another realm.”

And I'll just take credit for that. All we needed was those girls to stop talking.

Kathryn Joseph: It was in my 20s that I became quite obsessed with her. The Sensual World [her sixth album, released in 1989], was the one that I listened to over and over again. Her voice has always been just a beautiful noise to me. Joanna Newsom [the American harpist, pianist and vocalist], has a voice that I found difficult; a voice I didn't understand. And it took me a long time to end up loving her. But I never felt that with Kate Bush.

It's really only having to learn the songs that you realise how technically difficult what she's doing is. Never Be Mine is still my favourite track of all of hers. I can remember listening to it in the car. And when things are not so great it's like a comforting thing for me. Rachel Sermanni did a cover of it at the tribute show we did in Aberdeen. Her version was so perfect.

If you play the piano you're going to be compared to Kate Bush. I think that's always going to happen. And that's the biggest compliment in the world.

Jesca Hoop and Kathryn Joseph will be part of the Roaming Roots Revue at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, January, 28. Jesca Hoop's new album Memories Are Now is out on Sub Pop on February 10.

EMMA POLLOCK ON FIONA APPLE

The American singer-songwriter is the choice of former Delgado Emma Pollock.

One of the first times I heard Fiona Apple's voice was on a soundtrack. She did a cover of Beatles song Across The Universe, and it was used on a soundtrack of Pleasantville, one of my favourite films. And my God, what a version.

Her voice is arresting in the most extreme sense. I am utterly gobsmacked by how much richness there is in it. She can sing a word and make it sound like the first time you've heard the word.

She is erring towards a jazz singer but with a contemporary pop sensibility, which for me is the best combination. She's got the richness and control of a jazz singer. She dips a toe in there, but just enough to pull out everything about jazz that I really love. The edges aren't too smooth. There's something raw there, something really honest.

And what a piano player and composer. For me she's one of the contemporary greats. Her lyrics are very honest. She suffers a lot from depression and anxiety, I believe, and you can hear it all over her music.

Why isn't she better known in Britain? She hasn't toured. She's not a constantly working artist, because that's not her life. She's not necessarily the artist who's self-disciplined enough or even wants to be that jobbing working musician.

I read her saying she doesn't tend to read reviews. And that's wonderful because she doesn't come across as conceited. It just comes across as self-assured.

Emma Pollock will be part of the Roaming Roots Revue at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, January 28.

EDDI READER ON JEAN READER

Scotland's Eddi Reader chooses her own mother.

I've got many, many female inspirations but I would boil it right down to my mother Jean. There were beautiful voices everywhere, but nobody could top her. I actually suspect she has perfect pitch.

Every party we went to, my mother was the star attraction. She was very nervous and very shy. It took her half an hour to sing a song at a party and you had to coax her.

We were all born to this woman who would just sing about the house when she was happy. There were nine of us eventually. We lived in a very tiny house in Arden, Glasgow. We had a radiogram, but mostly singing was what we did. At parties we listened to the adults all singing. Adults singing in happiness was one of the best states to be in; an environment where everybody is working for the next wee penny. That to me represented happiness and joy and familial comfort.

She wasn't a showbiz ma. I had my own drive and ambition. Her business was childcare and the house. She was hands-off but I did notice that when I was about 14, 15 and started really learning songs on guitar and joining bands, she started paying attention a wee bit more.

She got annoyed at me because I bought Joni Mitchell and after a month of playing her 1975 album, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, to death she noticed me mimicking her and she shouted out the window, "Edna," – she called me Edna – "Edna, watch what you're doing. You're starting to sound like that lassie."

It wasn't like my mother or father had this grand plan. They just let me do it and I think I love them for that more than anything. They let me make my mistakes and let me figure it out and worried from the sidelines.

I know she was just a musical child who didn't have the landscape where it would have been possible for her to leave tenement Glasgow and sing. But what she did was make the land fertile for me.

Eddi Reader plays The Transatlantic Sessions at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on February 3 and February 5.

KARINE POLWART ON JONI MITCHELL

The Scottish folk singer chooses the first lady of Laurel Canyon.

Last year I did a show about Joni Mitchell, which meant I spent four months just listening to Joni Mitchell records and I've come away from that with a proper renewed sense of how amazing she is as a musician and a pretty uncompromising artist.

I've loved her since I was in my teens, but then I only had an awareness of her more folksy stuff. What I've really gotten into now is the stuff that's more circular and trippy. I absolutely love her 1976 album, Hejira; I think that's now my favourite. And it wasn't even close until I listened to it 50 times. They're not conventional song structures and I love that.

I think she's an immense musician and incredibly influential as a guitar player and hardly anybody ever talks about that. The guitar has such machismo in music-making but sonically she just had it all going on. And so many of her songs are completely embedded in the tunings she wrote them in. All the harmonic landscape is wedded to those tunings.

So I think she's pretty extraordinary and I also think she doesn't give a f*** about anybody and that's so rare among women artists that it's quite refreshing.

Karine Polwart will be performing her show Wind Resistance at the Tron Theatre from January 25 to January 28.

RACHEL SERMANNI ON KARINE POLWART

Polwart is herself the choice of Carrbridge singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni.

IF I look back at who influenced me when I was younger it was local hero Karine Polwart. It's funny because now I get to speak to her.

Her album Scribbled In Chalk accompanied us on so many drives across Scotland when I was younger and totally swallowed me up and intrigued me. I was about 14, maybe a wee bit younger. It was just a woman singing. I didn't know who she was, but I was just really drawn in and inspired by all the crazy noises and all the words. I almost think of Karine as being more of my subconscious than she'll ever know, or I'll ever know to an extent.

When we listened to that album it was a really important and transformative time for me and my family. We lost a beautiful human being, a cousin about my age, very close and dear to the whole family, so the weight of her words also became engrained in another way.

She doesn't know this, but she has a big place in my psyche and in my memories and in my heart because of all that surrounded me at the time. The song kind of helped. It gave something quite desolate a great beauty.

I'll have to give her a big hug when I see her.

Rachel Sermanni performs with Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton on January 28 at the Mackintosh Church.

ROSE MCDOWALL ON KAREN CARPENTER

Karen Carpenter, the singer with easy-listening giants the Carpenters, who died in 1983 as a consequence of her anorexia, is the choice of Strawberry Switchblade's Rose McDowall.

I remember hearing Karen Carpenter in the 1970s. I always thought she sang so effortlessly. She's got a voice that sounds like caramel, but it is so tragic. She could move anyone to tears and that's a gift.

The record companies didn't know how to market the Carpenters at all. They were marketed really cheesily. But there was much more to the Carpenters. The talent shone through.

At the time as a kid I had no idea what she was going through, but in retrospect you can hear that pain. She was a real troubled soul. But there are a lot of troubled souls in this world and it's amazing that somebody can make something so beautiful out of tragedy and also share that tragedy with other people. I'm sure it touched a lot of people.

Rose McDowall plays The Hug And Pint on January 21.

MARTHA WAINWRIGHT ON LINDA THOMPSON

Folk singer Linda Thompson, raised in Glasgow, came to prominence working with her husband Richard Thompson before becoming a solo artist after the couple separated. She's the choice of Canadian-American folk-rock singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright.

Linda puts into balance perfectly two things: a vulnerability, femininity and beauty that everyone is attracted to, but also a great strength and power. And she plays off those two.

I think the first time I saw her she was on a Harry Smith tribute that my mum [Canadian folk singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle] and my aunt [Anna McGarrigle] and [brother] Rufus were on in 1998 or something. And then I started to see her on these arty Hal Wilner shows. She did Leonard Cohen with us in Sydney. We've seen each other on that circuit and then of course I know her son and her daughter and have sung with them.

And then there was the parallel of our families. My father [Loudon Wainwright III] and Richard were very close and they toured a lot together and obviously Teddy and Kami are from a broken family as I and Rufus are, so there was just a lot of comfort in that; that we're not completely weird. Although I like being weird, don't get me wrong. But there were some parallels that I recognised

I think what makes her unique has changed over the years. I think she was so intriguing at the beginning to look at and see the dynamic between her and Richard on stage. But now she's grown as an artist and a woman to find something that is uniquely her own.

She just doesn't do it like anyone else and that's maybe partly because she hardly does it at all. Maybe I like her because she's rare and you don't see her that often so when you do it's special.

Martha Wainwright plays the 02 ABC with Ed Harcourt on February 3.

KATE ST JOHN ON KATE MCCARRIGLE

The late Kate McGarrigle, mother of Martha and Rufus Wainwright, who died in 2010, is chosen by composer and musical arranger Kate St John.

Kate's been on my mind recently because I was playing with Chaim Tannenbaum, who was her side man forever. Me and my husband Neill MacColl just did a gig with him and we were singing a couple of her songs in the show, Talk To Me Of Mendicino and I Eat Dinner.

She talked about the real stuff from the point of view of a fully-fledged human being. She was in touch with her emotions and writing songs that get them across. I've always thought on every level she was an incredible role model.

And she was an all-round amazing human being. She raised two incredible children and you can't pigeonhole her, which I think is really a plus. She's absolutely unique.

In the song I Eat Dinner she talks about something really mundane. What other song has the words "leftovers" and "mashed potatoes" in it? But what it's really about is that lonely dinner with your daughter in the aftermath of a marriage break-up. And I have lived that. I have had the lonely dinner with my daughter after my marriage broke up, so for me it's a very personal thing.

In 2009 I was musical director of her last big shows at the Albert Hall, the Wainwright Family Christmas with Rufus and Martha and everybody. She died six weeks later.

She wrote this new song while we were organising it called Proserpina that Martha does quite regularly now. It's a kind of swan song about [the classical goddess] Proserpina seized by the God of the Underworld and taken away. I don't know if it was a metaphor for what was happening to her but it probably was I suspect.

We did Proserpina and she had all her friends coming on as a kind of choir to sing like a Greek chorus and half of them were crying during it and at the same time Martha had given birth to her first baby two months prematurely. The baby was in an incubator in the hospital so Martha kept having to rush off and Kate was very ill … So, yeah, it was something else.

Kate St John orchestrates Celtic Connections' opening night performance of Laura Marling with the Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on January 19.

ELIZA CARTHY ON NORMA WATERSON

The English folk singer Eliza Carthy chooses her mother, folk legend Norma Waterson.

I hope you don't mind me saying this but I want to talk about my mum.

She just is music, my mum. She sings all the time. We live together, my children and my parents all in one big house which is how she grew up with her grandmother and her aunties and uncles. Everyone either lived in the same house or just next door in the same street in Hull and there was always an extra bed for someone, there was always food on the stove and there was always music. And she's passing that one now to my children as well.

My mother worked very, very hard. A lot of people don't know she essentially gave up professional singing to raise me. And as a single mother myself, that decision is almost a daily one; whether or not you carry on or whether you decide to devote yourself to your family. And she devoted herself to me and her family. But she never lost the music.

My mam's very infirm now and even though she has trouble breathing she still sings wherever she goes: traditional music and the things that her grandmother loved to sing, daft music hall songs, bits of Motown – she's a big Smokey Robinson fan – bits of jazz, anything she can remember really.

She sings like she wants to hug the world, my mum. She really does. She flings open her arms wide and you're in those arms.

Eliza Carthy and the Wayward Band play the 02 ABC on February 2. Her new album Big Machine is out on February 3.

ANNA MEREDITH ON BJORK

The Icelandic superstar Bjork is the choice of composer and last year's Scottish Album of the Year winner Anna Meredith.

I have been a Bjork fan since I was a teenager. I've loved her commitment and originality. You just never know what she's going to do next. Each album she has made has its own incredible identity. To continue that reinvention for over 20 years at always such a high level and to be always so interested in the new, has always been totally inspiring to me.

People don't like her voice? What don't they like about it? That it's screechy? It's raw. It's not restrained. It's obviously trained and she is very careful with it. It's not just some feral thing.

I love the sound of it. I love the big yells. And even when I've watched her live you feel it's huge. It couldn't be further from my own voice, which is tiny, like a five-year-old boy's. This little woman makes an incredible, raw, natural sound.

Anna Meredith plays the CCA on February 4.

Celtic Connections runs from January 19 to February 5. For more information on all the events listed above visit www.celtic connections.com