IT WAS a knock-out introduction. Their eyes met across the room. He asked her to dance. She accepted and he proceeded to show her his best moves. He spun her round vigorously in his efforts to impress and … her head smashed into a marble pillar.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, which involved Cara Robinson coming round as she was being given a fireman’s lift by her new suitor, the couple are making sweet music together in duo that visits Scotland this weekend. The “typical caveman tactics” have long since been forgiven and nine years on from their meeting at Castlebar Blues Festival in County Mayo, Bangor-born Robinson is an Australian citizen and doing something she never dreamed she would be doing, playing drums.

“It was a case of play the drums or get out of my band,” says Robinson, suggesting that her husband, Hat Fitz’s direct approach is still at work.

Before she joined Fitz, who may or may not be descended from an Irish stonemason called Robert Fitzpatrick, sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay for stealing a duck, Robinson was a singer. She has sung back-up for Rihanna, toured with Jamiroquai and Corinne Bailey-Rae and supported Beverley Knight.

Her own musical preferences lie closer to her fellow County Down native, the great Ottilie Patterson, who sang in a bruised, blues style with her then husband, Chris Barber’s band at the height of the Trad Jazz boom and won admirers including Blind Boy Fuller. It was in this style that Robinson was singing when Fitz, a figure of long-standing on the Australian blues scene, heard her singing and playing cajon in Castlebar.

Robinson had heard Fitz’s duo – Fitz & Itchy – too and impressed by the latter’s drumming had gone home after the gig, thinking she might trade in her cajon (a box-shaped percussion instrument from Peru that can look like a stereo speaker) for a drum kit.

She got lucky. A friend of her mother’s turned out to have a drum kit in the attic that she was only too happy to pass on.

“I’d played drums very, very briefly at college,” she says. “I think I had one lesson and the teacher told me I had a good, natural sense of rhythm, but I was more interested in singing then.”

She started to practise and had been teaching herself the rudiments for three months when Fitz invited her to visit him in Queensland.

“I went over for a month, fell in love with the place and fell in love with the man – although I’m not going to tell him that! – and we ended up going on a four-month tour together as a duo,” she says.

This baptism of fire she survived through her instinctive approach to the drums. There was no alternative as, apart from the “play drums or get out of the band” ultimatum, Fitz isn’t the sort of blues player who is going to be seen dead with a cajon in the band. A washboard is a different matter, of course, and after concentrating on playing drums for quite a long time and leaving the singing to Fitz, Robinson was persuaded – gently – to try singing and drumming as well as singing to her own washboard accompaniment.

“Singing and playing drums isn’t such an easy knack to acquire,” she says, adding her admiration for great masters of the art such as the late Levon Helm and Sheila E(scovedo). “It’s like tapping your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time and I had to find a way of playing so that I could do it and switch off that part of my brain while concentrating on singing.”

With Fitz playing mandolin and guitar, the most important consideration for Robinson is letting the music breathe. She’s a big fan of jazz drummers and the techniques they bring to their playing but knows that’s not what Hat Fitz & Cara’s raw, rootsy style needs.

“Fitz and I mostly agree on what way a song should go,” she says. “There have been times when I’ve had to eat humble pie after trying something I’ve suggested for half an hour and realised that, if it works in a certain way, you can’t deny it. You have to accept it and go with what sounds natural.”

The pair’s onstage style involves, she says, a lot of contact with the audience and despite the impression she’s given of Fitz, who’s been driving all the time she’s been chatting on her mobile, of being some sort of bluesy curmudgeon, audiences can expect to be entertained.

“We have a few laughs,” she says. “People tend to come into our shows like mice and leave like lions. If they come in thinking of work or some other problems, we’ll take that away from them and if we make them feel something in the music, make them feel better, we’re doing our job.”

Hat Fitz & Cara play Birnam Arts Centre on Saturday, May 13; Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine, Sunday, May 14; and Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Monday, May 15.