THE cancelled 2018 Platform Festival may never have arrived at Pocklington's Old Station this summer, but nevertheless Beth Orton will still be arriving at Pock after all.

The 47-year-old BRIT Award-winning Norfolk singer-songwriter will perform at Pocklington Arts Centre tomorrow, the night before she appears at the Kaleidoscope Festival in London.

Contrary to first reports, Beth will not be accompanied by a full band. "No, I'm playing in a duo with the guy that I've been working with since my 2016 record Kidsticks, [guitarist and electronics player] Grey McMurray," she says.

"We've been touring together, with Grey bringing quite a lot of diversity to the songs, working with loops through his guitar and his voice too. It's quite complex, allowing us to build an atmosphere to re-create the last album, bringing it to a coherent form that's intimate yet expansive.

"For this summer's shows, we're taking favourites from Kidsticks and combining them with favourites across all my old records, making them into a cohesive collection where it's exciting to put them together, looking for the interplay between various songs, like Sweetest Decline and Call Me The Breeze, so they all evoke something together."

Beth has been doing "lots of songwriting" with a view to releasing a new album some time next year. Might we hear a new song in Pock tomorrow? "You might," she says, without committing to playing one.

She does not set herself timetables for making her next record. They emerge when they do. "I just love writing songs; I'm quite compulsive and the older I get, the more I write," she says. "I've always wanted to write; I've always written things down in notebooks since I was young and turned them into songs, and I still find it interesting, doing that in different ways.

"It's constantly shifting; for the last album I explored working around the sound, starting with that, and right now for the new songs, I'm starting with the lyrics and song structure.

"I think Trailer Park [Beth's debut solo album from l996 after earlier working with William Orbit and Red Snapper] was when I found my voice, and I feel like, in a weird way, that's what's happening again now.

"Maybe someone like Ray Davies is haunted by his past success and his great songs, whereas I can keep exploring with no expectations to make anything like I've made before."

The fundamentals of Beth's songwriting remain love and loss and an exploration of "some kind of truth and honesty". "What changes as you get older is that life gets richer and time allows a richness of perspective," she says.

Meanwhile, Beth has released a collaboration with electronic powerhouse duo The Chemical Brothers: a cover version of Tim Buckley’s I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain that has its roots in the late 1990s.

This forms the first fruits of her plan to release unearthed Orton recordings from the past 25 years on her own newly launched label, Lost Leaves.

"During the process of making my last record, Kidsticks, I felt a liberation around how I made music and how I looked at the music of my past," she says. "With that same spirit of adventure, I'm taking a last look over my shoulder at what got lost along the way."

Recalling recording I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, Beth says: "We must have recorded it around the same time as I made Central Reservation; The Chemical Brothers would have just released Dig Your Own Hole.

"Sometime in 1998 possibly. I imagine the track got put to one side, slotted into that book that I told myself I’d read someday and never did and the track got forgotten."

The recording was found by chance during a house move last year and now emerges at last as an homage to the memory and brilliance of Buckley.

Beth Orton plays Pocklington Arts Centre, tomorrow (July 20), 8pm. Tickets update: still available at £25 on 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk