It’s been nearly three years since we caught up with Jane Taylor. She’d just stepped up from the open mic circuit onto the paying one, and was already garnering great notices for intimate, confessional lyrics, innate melodicism and a voice that could move from breathy to tornado-force in a bar. Since then she’s toured to all corners of the UK, been twice round the Irish Republic, the same in Germany (playing to crowds of two thousand), won an international song writing competition, and featured on the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack. Most importantly, we suspect, to many a reader – given that she sells out gigs far more frequently than most – her debut album is, finally, ready for the launching. So let us take a moment to give thanks for that most unlikely of musical influences: teletext.

“I do remember, very early on, recording the music from Ceefax after the late-night programmes,” says Taylor by way of explanation. “In the morning I’d wake up, press play on the video recorder, and sit there and write words to this tune. That’s how desperate I was to write a song! Any opportunity I had to write something, I would take.”

Not that those early musical cravings led to an instant voyage into the aforesaid open mic land. First there was a period of “being lost for ten years or so trying to get out into the world and do something sensible. It’s about finding out who you are, and that the thing that you’ve always done is the thing that you should carry on doing. But if it’s always been with you since you were very little, you don’t recognise it as a career, you just take it for granted – it’s part of you. So it was weird to finally announce to myself: ‘I’m a songwriter’. Basically, I came from my bedroom with a guitar, out into the world and tried to find out what it was all about.”

Exactly what it could potentially all be about began to come clear a couple of years back. Taylor was playing London’s Kashmir Klub with KT Tunstall, and “after the gig a gentleman wearing a long, thick grey coat came and shook my hand, gave me his card and said ‘Call me.’  His name turned out to be Johnny Stirling, once director of Warner International Publishing.” Advising her to skip immediately approaching a label and instead develop her own sound free of interference, Stirling became a background mentor.

“Finally I got the money together to do an album and then he was interested in getting involved – I think he wanted to see how far I was prepared to invest and, after being as successful as he’s been, to check that he was working with someone on the same level. He asked what I needed, and I told him ‘A piano, a big room to record in, and a producer’. He went off and found Bill Lovelady, a composer for orchestras and who had a number one hit in Norway for about 50 years, and he had the idea to record in the barn last November.”  Which, all things considered, was quite the experience. “It was really cold, quite stony, and filled with haystacks.” Still, the roomy acoustics were perfect and, accompanied by her rather fine band, she set to work. “We put a carpet in there, a futon, and there was a gallery opposite where we did our cooking. It was like sitting in a fridge, so we’d have to stop every so often to warm our fingers on the radiators. And there were cockerels, loads of planes going overhead, and a squeaky wheelbarrow. The people on the farm used to creep around us - occasionally you’d hear them talking outside, and we’d have to stop, and they’d whisper ‘sorry, sorry’. It was a proper farmyard environment.”

The result was ‘Montpelier’, the new album. Of the song writing process that lays behind it, she says: “Very often you write something and think, after it’s written, it’s not my song anymore. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s not conscious - if you start to analyse and question where it comes from it becomes too contrived. But if you don’t know too much about jazz, or blues, or whatever, you can play in that style without being concerned about whether you’re doing it justice. There’s a wealth of history, people who have done amazing things, but if you’re not overly aware of them you can stop worrying about it and let the music in enough to do your own thing with it.

“It’s been tough not having any cash, but I just think of all those wonderful artists in the past who survived on absolutely nothing. When you’re promoting yourself, writing and playing something quite personal, you’re putting a lot out there and getting very little back. You have your moments of feeling glory and loving what you’re doing, but they are just moments, and a lot of the time it’s just graft, graft, graft. You just have to tell yourself, ‘I’m gonna get there, I’m gonna get there’.”