A great response to last year’s 30th anniversary tour sees the tour extending into their 31st year for Kathryn Roberts & Sean Lakeman.

Dates include The Con Club, Lewes on March 25; and the Hanger Farm Arts Centre, Southampton on March 26.

Their Grayshott Folk Club date is the first gig on the extra leg of a tour which will see them travelling across the UK during March, April and May.

Kathryn said: “It was really lovely. We enjoyed the tour so much last year, just marking the fact that we have been together for so long. We got to reinvent songs from long ago and we included the first song that Sean ever heard me sing and the first song that we did together. We had some lovely feedback from audiences and even met some people who were at our very first gig.”

Sean said: “We met at Sidmouth Folk Festival back in 1993. It was at a time when there were not lots and lots of young people in folk or so it seemed to us. Places like Sidmouth were the only places where there were congregations of young, eager, enthusiastic folk musicians who would come together and share our geeky passions. Kathryn and Kate Rusby were booked to perform and I was there with my brothers. We were playing as a trio at that point and we just hung out throughout the week and attended lots of ceilidhs!”

Kathryn added: “I do remember that summer we bumped into each other a lot. We were playing at other folk festivals and we just gravitated towards each other.”

And then Kathryn and Kate were invited to perform in Portugal: “And Kate just said ‘We've got a bunch of new friends that are amazing musicians and wouldn’t it be fantastic if the five of us went’, the three Lakeman brothers and myself and Kate Rusby and that was the first time we really made music together.”

For Sean and Kathryn, it is a combination that really works, as Sean explains: “Like any good relationship she does all the things superbly that I am not so good at and vice versa! She's an exceptional lyricist. She is much more calm and she looks at the bigger picture very, very well and she's a great arranger.”

Kathryn agrees: “I'm good at the general things while Sean has a very laser focus. He's very skilled at honing things and making them sound perfect. He has got golden ears. When it comes to making music he puts on his producer cap as well as his musician cap. He can really hear things. I'm not thin-skinned, and he can really make suggestions that take something from the first level to the tenth level. Also he is my technical whizzkid!

“We do counterbalance each other, and being in a personal relationship as well means that we know each other so well. We can anticipate what the other person is going to do, and when we're on the road, it is just a wonderful joyous adventure. It is all about the shared experiences and that's so much better when you're together rather than one of you having the great experiences and then phoning home to tell the other one about it! We both feel really fortunate to do something that we love with the person that we love. We get to spend a lot of time together and you get to remember the bigger picture which is having a joyous life and having as much fun as we can and making everyone as happy as we can as well.”