ROBIN Hood's Bay folk pioneer Eliza Carthy will release her new album with The Wayward Band, Big Machine, on October 28 on Topic Records.

Eliza first assembled the 12-piece band in 2013 to explore and celebrate her long and varied career in folk music: "the last truly underground music scene".

Together they set out on the road to promote Eliza's 2012 album Wayward Daughter, The Best Of Eliza Carthy, a retrospective that coincided with an official biography of the same name by Sophie Parkes.

Since then, The Wayward Band have become a festival favourite, while Eliza has been awarded the MBE for services to English folk music. They so enjoyed playing together, it seemed natural, inevitable and characteristically ambitious that they would make an album. Early in 2016 they did just that, recording Big Machine at Real World and Rockfield Studios.

The diverse material includes a trio of contemporary songs, led by Eliza's own You Know Me, where she addresses the migrant crisis and notions of hospitality, in the company of MC Dizraeli. She then covers Ewan MacColl's radio ballad The Fitter's Song and reworks Rory MacLeod's Hug You Like A Mountain, re-imagined here as a duet with Teddy Thompson.

Several examples of the Broadside ballad collections housed in Chetham's Library in Manchester are given a new twist with music by Eliza and the band, in the wake of Eliza's programme for BBC Radio 4 about the Manchester Ballads last year. This led to her recording songs about such subjects as domestic abuse in Devil In The Woman and Fade And Fall (Love Not) and the seafaring life in The Sea.

Then add a couple of searing instrumentals, a song about dying from custard poisoning and a heartbreaking traditional ballad, I Wish That The Wars Were All Over, recorded with Irish singer Damien Dempsey.

Eliza Carthy & The Wayward Band will bring their infectious joy and irreverence to the summer festival circuit, followed by a 13-date November tour. Yorkshire shows will be at Hull Freedom Festival, on the Hull Marina main stage, on September 4 and Whitby Pavilion on November 20. Box office: Hull, freedomfestival.co.uk/; Whitby, whitbypavilion.co.uk