SMOKE Fairies will feel at home at The Duchess, in York, tomorrow night.

“The low ceiling and dark walls make it intense, which suits our music,” says Katherine Blamire, one half of a duo that blends English folk with humid Deep South blues and Appalachian ballads.

“Our music has an intensity from a playing perspective and from an audience point of view, where they drop into silence – and you have to make sure you don’t feel unnerved by what’s coming back at you!

“Our songs have an uneasiness to them, a restlessness, and maybe that’s what draws people to them.”

Best friends since the age of 11 or12 in rural, restrained mid-Nineties’ England, one-time choir girls Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies vowed to escape their home town of Chichester, at the outset of a musical journey that has led them to working with White Stripes’ Jack White and Sheffield romantic Richard Hawley.

“I love the idea of fairytales and being told tales as children that scare you but while childhood was great in my case, there’s this idea that it’s a carefree time, when actually it’s closing in on you, this dark, evil world. Childhood is not this blissful world that people say it is,” says Katherine. “Things don’t have to have a happy ending.”

Growing up in Chichester had a big impact on Katherine and Jessica. “It’s very easy to be absorbed in all that history of ancient trees, the old harbour and the ancient churches. We spent a lot of time walking. Where other teenagers were going off the rails and partying, we were thinking of getting out of there and just started playing music together,” says Katherine.

To broaden their horizons and their education, they studied at Tulane University in New Orleans for a year. “We read American history – we did a course on the history of jazz and the blues – and you could go to the gigs in Bourbon Street,” recalls Katherine. “There was a café that let us play regularly, and the city had a real feeling of creativity there.”

Itchy feet upon their return home led to more travels, this time to Vancouver, Canada. “We spent a year there doing lots of odd jobs, with the emphasis on the odd. I was a dog walker for a day-care centre for dogs,” reveals Katherine.

“Jessica worked for a coffee shop for a while, but for some reason we found it hard to get jobs. I got fired from a waitress job for general despondency!”

General despondency, eh? The songs on Smoke Fairies’ debut album, 2010’s Through Low Light And Trees, are not the happiest, as titles such as Summer Fades, Storm Song and Feeling Is Turning Blue would indicate.

Nevertheless, the mood may be changing for their next album. “Now we live in South East London, which is very intense but it feels like our home now. You start to find inspiration in the turmoil and chaos. Rather than birds and trees, or mountains in Vancouver, now the view out the back is a car park, but when the sun sets behind this huge tower block, you feel this is a different kind of beauty,” says Katherine.

“We’re both hoping the new album moves us on. I saw Through Low Light And Trees as quite an indulgent path into loneliness; it’s very atmospheric, it’s a sun-going-down kind of album, an album to listen to with a glass of wine in winter.

“A lot of the songs were drawn from the experience of travelling around and leaving, or feeling distant and out of place, and the heartache that comes from looking back and longing…but we’re in a different state of mind, more positive and the next album will have a brighter feel and not be afraid of being poppier.”

That said, the one new song that Smoke Fairies will play in York is not the cheeriest of new starts. “Somebody Speaks was kind of inspired by when we were touring America with Laura Marling last year,” says Katherine. “We were all in this large van, driving long distances, driving across Kansas, where it was all the same, and I hadn’t really been on a trip like that before.

“There were these isolated communities with small farms, and for the song we imagined what it was like out there living in those communities and then projected our own feelings on to that. It’s got kind of a desolate feeling to it.”

Smoke Fairies’ songs will retain their combination of the ancient and modern. “I suppose you always run the risk, when you’re playing music reminiscent of times past, that it reminds people of music they bought before, so it’s important to be affected by the time you’re in, creating something timeless, rather than just reflecting the past,” says Katherine.

“I think we’ve moved on from being initially influenced by records from the Seventies – Jessica’s mum’s records – to making music that’s more original.”

Smoke Fairies play The Duchess, York, tomorrow night, supported by Mechanical Bride. Doors open at 7.30pm; box office, 0844 477 1000.

Did you know?

Smoke Fairies take their name from the summer mist that collects in the hedgerows of Sussex’s narrow country lanes.

Did you know too?

Jack White produced Smoke Fairies’ fourth seven-inch single, featuring Gastown and River Song, on his Third Man label at his Nashville studio. In typical White fashion, the session lasted only 36 hours, during which he also drummed and played “a mad guitar solo” on River Song with his Raconteurs/ Dead Weather cohort Jack Lawrence on bass.

Did you know, furthermore?

Last year, Katherine and Jessica added angelic backing vocals to the sea shanty Shallow Brown on Richard Hawley’s False Lights From The Land EP.