When she entered the pop pantheon earlier this year with the insanely catchy anti-poll tax stomp ‘Rise Up’, there were those questioning whether a 23-year-old girl could possibly have written so musically complex a song herself (answer: yes, she could and did). Her father, she tells me, is a well-known front man on the folk-music scene and it’s clear that she must have inherited from him that swaggering charisma that borders on magnetic; her godfather is the session musician Donald Bain, a trusty pair of hands on any album and the man she credits with her musical education. But Clio Campbell belongs firmly in the here and now, not hidden amid the beards and jumpers at the back of a dusty old folk-music club. ‘Rise Up’ caught the mood of a nation, charting at number two and dancing angrily in and out of the top forty ever since, but Campbell’s rise to stardom was not the conventional one. She had written the song to be sung by the masses at anti-poll tax meetings in Glasgow; she began to perform it onstage at rallies, and as her stages got ever bigger she was spotted and brought down to the big smoke.

‘Like a tractor beam pulling me here. Like I’m an astronaut – travelling so far from my native habitat I don’t know if I’ll be the same again when I go back. Maybe I’ll just stay here, floating in space, eh?’

She is here for good now, it seems. EMI signed her up for a three-album deal and she’s spent the months since Rising Up working on new material. Her next single, ‘Can’t, Won’t’, nods towards the still-brewing political debate that made her name, but its lyrics are tamer. Dare I say, I ask, that it lacks ‘Rise Up’s bite?

‘Aye, the record company asked me to slow down a bit! Not my choice, right enough. They said they wanted me to focus on the music for this one. If I keep making the tunes, I’ll still have chances like this to make sure the issues I care about are getting heard, anyway.’

She sets down her pint of snakebite, the glass rimmed with red lip-prints, and fixes those eyes on mine. Then, in that chiming, soaring voice, she lists off a series of things that worry her about the way the country is being run – the government chief amongst them – with the truly earnest passion only a young, beautiful woman can get away with. I could listen to her all day. Clio Campbell, it seems, is ready to fight.

‘Can’t, Won’t’ by Clio Campbell is out on 1 June.

RUTH

Kilbarchan, 22 January 2018