`Panchpuran" is a Hindi expression for "five spices". It is also the title of the flavoursome second album from English folk singer Bill (Belinda) Jones. Having thrown off her "best newcomer" tag for last year's Turn To Me, she is now moving gently towards the top table of cool English folk. Following the recent success of "folk babes" like Kate Rusby, this particular Staffordshire lass may well be the next one to watch.
Although she grew up studying classical piano and flute, the main musical passion in the Jones house was folk. Her father played fiddle in a barn-dance band specialising in English, Scottish and Irish tunes, and the young Bill played with him from an early age. She also remembers playing for Morris dancers - this perhaps rather more in keeping with the stereotyped folk image of dotty schoolteachers and other worthy-but-dull guardians of the quaint.
"Well, yes, to a large extent folk music is quite institutionalised, so I was lucky with my dad really," she says. "I think a lot of people get taught bits of folk music at school, but often the teachers are not at all passionate about it, or really know anything about it at all. So when you're six or seven years old, you get taught to sing Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron or whatever - it's not very promising. But poor old Morris dancers! They don't half get the rip taken out of them. Ant and Dec were really going on about them on Saturday morning. It's not fair. Other countries have dancers and they don't mock them the way we do in England."
As a teenager, Jones took to playing keyboards in various indie bands. The best of them, she recalls, was The Wise Wound, but even she sounds unconvinced about their glory days (she was studying in London at the time). These were fruitful years, however, perhaps most significant for the fact that she met a flute player who introduced her to the Irish seisiun scene. As a classical music student she had been a bit of a novelty - "occasionally they would wheel me out to play a few folk tunes and pat me on the head" - but in the middle of a London Irish seisiun, she suddenly found herself part of something very real.
"It was just marvellous," she says. "It was a social thing and it brought me back to playing tunes. But the other really influential thing was that I did a module called `British and European Folk Music' and up until then I hadn't really encountered songs, other than Danny Boy and Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron. So suddenly I was coming across songs sung by June Tabor, Sandy Denny and Maddy Prior, and it really opened by eyes. I knew that it was something I wanted to do, that it was where I belonged."
SHE had not really considered herself much of a singer, but people soon began to respond to the ease of her voice. There was none of that widespread affectation that distances so many from English folk singing and Jones was welcomed as someone who sang exactly as she spoke. To use adjudicator words, hers was a bright, clear and natural sound. Her first album, Turn To Me, was extremely well-reviewed and was particularly lauded for its restraint.
"It just doesn't really appeal to me," she says. "I'm just happy to sit around with friends and work things out that way. I'm quite into people like Capercaille and some of the synthesised sounds that they use, but on the whole it's not for me. But having said that, I don't concern myself with endless discussions of what sort of instruments you're meant to use. "I would use whatever instrument I felt like, and if I felt like using loops, I'd do that too. The reason I haven't done it is just that it's something I'm not into. And what is tradition anyway?"
Panchpuran suggests that Bill Jones has a fairly wide definition of her own. The album features her own compositions, modified traditional songs, traditional tunes, bits of jazz, a touch of classical, a colliery band and the closing song, Going Back, written by Goffin and King and once recorded by Dusty Springfield. Certainly there's nothing particularly revolutionary in such a broad approach, but it does suggest a confidence both in herself and in the improving English folk scene.
"There are a lot of clubs which were set up in the 1960s and they are still being run by the same people in the same style - and it's not a style that attracts young people," she says. "Some are good and really alive, but the vast majority of them are not. But the arts centres are good. People who just like singers and like music will come to see you, not just people who are into folk music and nothing else, people who think it is the only music. The festivals, too, are alive and kicking and you get a great cross-section of people there - loads of kids and teenagers - and that's brilliant."
Times are undoubtedly better for the English folkie. The continuing success of The Watersons, the cool appeal of the various "folk babes" and the rediscovery of singers such as Sandy Denny has given English folk a hip appeal even in the land of its birth. "It's funny because I wanted to play at a few world music festivals and got a very bemused response about how I wasn't world music, I was English music!" Jones says. "But I hope that's changing in England now, and I think it is."
Panchpuran by Bill Jones is on Brick Wall Records