Music interview: Fiona Shepherd talks to Glasgow singer-songwriter Siobhan Wilson

Siobhan Wilson is quite the musical alchemist, creating an entrancing, intimate atmosphere with an enigmatic combination of her pure voice, mesmeric guitar playing, trembling cello, beguiling harmonics, French lyrics and some old mattresses.

The latter provided crucial sound absorption when she was recording her new album, There Are No Saints, in the childhood bedroom of her collaborator Chris McCrory, of Glasgow indie band Catholic Action. But the ravishing results belie its lo-fi roots – although the album was recorded in a matter of days at the turn of the year, Wilson had taken a number of years to work up the songs and the sound.

“It wasn’t supposed to last that long, but I need an album to mean something,” she says. “I don’t need to wait for something bad to happen, but it really needs to feel important, like this is a statement.”

However, something bad did happen – an “epic love fail” as Wilson puts it, inspiring a writing surge and the urgent need to capture a moment.

“The theme is not really heartbreak, it’s meant to be just moving on,” she says. “The other theme is depression. The first single, Whatever Helps, is about that. I’ve got severe depression and I was never brave enough to talk about it before because I was always a bit ashamed of it. I was scared it would come across as attention seeking. Now I feel really good having addressed a bit of that in an album which is linked with everything that was going on at the time. The producer called it ‘the end of the world album’, but for me it’s really positive.”

Wilson, who originally hails from Elgin, is a bilingual multi-instrumentalist with a background in classical music and French jazz. Had she been around in the age of Jane Austen, she would have been described as “an accomplished young lady”. Wilson loves a bit of classic fiction, and draws much of her musical inspiration from abiding divas Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and Edith Piaf, giving her music an otherworldly, timeless quality.

Apart from being a distant relation to folk singer (and erstwhile Generation Game co-host) Isla St Clair, Wilson has uncovered no musical background in her family, yet she was drawn elementally as a child to the sound of her next door neighbour playing cello in her back garden, and pestered her parents to let her play too.

“I thought it sounded like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard,” she says. “That’s all I did for my childhood, except for sometimes hanging out with my friends and doing homework.

“Very early on I remember thinking this is what life’s supposed to be about, that whatever I do I can do this for the rest of my life. It’s human expression in a more abstract form and for whatever reason that really attracted me.”

School summer holidays were taken up with touring in youth orchestras, including the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. “For me it just felt like a social event,” she says. “It was like being in a band with a hundred people.”

At 16, Wilson won a scholarship to study cello, piano and guitar in Edinburgh, mixing with pupils who had been hothoused since the age of four. “The one thing we all had in common was that we were completely obsessed and your concentration doesn’t falter after four hours – or it does, but not in the same way as my friends in Elgin who thought I was nuts,” she says. “If you’re really into sport or art or science, you would have to be obsessed by it to become an expert.”

For all the intensity of her musical practise, Wilson didn’t really start exploring her singing voice until she left school and decided to try a gap year in Paris. “It was this whole new world of being free. I was 18, I’d been an adult for a few weeks and I was like ‘see you later mum and dad, I’m going to France’. Left my cello behind, just took my guitar and hung about with a few people who played jazz and they pushed me to start singing with them.”

Wilson started singing at open mic nights and was signed to a French label. That gap year became five years, in which she became fluent in French and immersed herself in Gallic song tradition, so much so that her own French language material feels very natural and nimble in the understated style of Françoise Hardy and Jane Birkin.

“There’s something about French singers,” she says. “They just look really badass. They’ve got this way of cutting about and being cool and it makes it feel like a more authentic performance. Probably I do that a little bit out of the habit of watching people like that on stage but maybe now that I’m in Glasgow, drinking beer in Bloc, I’ve got a bit more rough.” Since returning to Scotland, and basing herself in Glasgow, Wilson has followed up her debut album, Songs, with the self-released Glorified Demons EP, gigged extensively, captivating new audiences as she goes, and signed to Edinburgh indie label Song, By Toad, who release There Are No Saints next month.

Energised, Wilson is already planning her next move – to work with a drummer and bassist on an electric album “to be a bit like the Jesus & Mary Chain”.

She has also returned to classical music, teaching beginners’ piano, songwriting and theory, while also studying contemporary classical composition part-time at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, as a way of expanding her musical horizons. “Now I’m an adult learner!” she laughs. “I’ve always looked to the past for inspiration and now I want to know what’s really new. I want to get old and always be that weirdo that’s hanging around with younger folk, asking about their music. But most of them listen to Justin Bieber.”

Siobhan Wilson plays The Glad Café, Glasgow, 30 June. There Are No Saints is released by Song, By Toad on 14 July