Not just a pretty face - Laura Marling interview

THE BBC's White City satellite dish at the end of Laura Marling's street is so big that presumably the discarded TV set in the garden next to hers never needed a plug. It dwarfs everything here, including the elfin 18-year-old folk singer who answers the door in silver pumps, and you imagine she must find its constant communications throb more intimidating than most. She doesn't like talking about her music, even less about herself. At least this is what I've read.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" she says, as flatmates disperse from a room filled with her instruments: guitars, banjo, accordion, dulcimer. One – a tall lad still in his dressing-gown – returns with Indian tea and pretends to be her slave. "Thank you, Kit," she chuckles, which is a promising start to the interview. Then Marling – heart-shaped face, pale blue eyes, blonde hair in clasps and gaping holes in the knees of her jeans – reveals how she's learned to accept that descriptions like the one just there need not be viewed as a threat to her artistic integrity.

"When my album came out (the Mercury-nominated Alas, I Cannot Swim] I refused to do photo-shoots because I thought they glamorised women in music, and onstage I wouldn't wear make-up," she says. "I didn't want it to be about my looks. That was my stance and I was proud of having adopted it." In the past, folk performers never felt compromised in this way. But then they were often bearded, sang with a finger jammed in one ear and rarely counted as young and attractive like Marling and Seth Lakeman, the Matt Damon body double who's her male equivalent in Britain's nu-folk revolution.

"The Mercury was a bit of a turning point," she continues. "I was convinced that winning it would have been disastrous for my career. But on the night, 10 seconds before the winner was announced, the blood rushed to my legs. I couldn't have walked up to that podium and thankfully my services weren't required. I suddenly thought: 'This attitude of mine isn't making my life very easy.'

"I'm more comfortable with the whole image thing now. I feel a bit sad about that but, on the plus side, I get on with people better." She's also realised that permitting herself a bit of slap isn't like signing up to advertise Lancome.

Marling's careful reconciling of the business element of showbiz belies her tender years and you could say the same about her songs of sexual tension, misplaced faith and choppy water. She was six when she first picked up a guitar, the youngest of three sisters in a middle-class Reading household which always thrummed with music.

Her father Charlie ran the Woodcray Manor Farm recording studio and Marling's earliest memory is of crawling around in cabling behind the speakers – before he was forced to sell up. By then, thanks to the old man, she was already in thrall to Joni Mitchell. "Dad wrote songs as a hobby and he taught me the importance of melody," she says. Neither he nor Marling's mother Judy was exactly thrilled when she flunked school but they supported her when at 16 she announced her intention to seek fame in London. "At first it was tough," she says, then corrects herself. "No, I had it bloody easy – these friends gave me a room in Kew." A key moment here came when someone put on a Bonnie "Prince" Billy record; up until that point Marling had envisaged a career in rock.

She's now close to clocking up her 150th gig as a folkie, and, although she still suffers from pre-show nerves, is gaining more confidence in this department too – thanks to "prayer-hugs" with her band. She's just back from her first American tour, the high point of her amazing year. "It was me and 14 blokes sharing a cheapo campervan for three weeks. That environment forces you to be more feminine, so I took up knitting and by the end I was even wearing dresses!"

Although that was billed as the British Folk Reclamation Tour, Marling is well aware this is not yet a full-blown revival – she winces as she recalls a performance on a US chat show after which an "Applaud!" board had to be waved at the audience. But she dreams she'll make enough to be able to buy her dad's old studios and re-open them.

Her home town needs another local hero, I suggest – it's a long time since Reading produced Mike "Tubular Bells" Oldfield. Marling is a MySpace discovery schooled in the age of analogue; nevertheless, her response is hardly surprising: "Who's he?"

• Laura Marling plays Ayr Town Hall on Friday, and Glasgow School of Art on Saturday

• www.myspace.com/lauramarling