As for the rest of 2023, maybe you could rush out your 40 LP nine years early, get your own back on Adele, get in there first while she’s swanning around in Las Vegas. The legend has been ascribed to several different counties, but the song settles on Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire. On 18 October 2010, the British government announced that Wylfa was one of the eight sites it considered suitable for future nuclear power stations.

I know, you’re busy …’ It’s kind of such a small thing, compared to his world, but he accepted and just did it, and it was so lovely, it really worked.It was only in the first 10 years of touring, talking to people as we toured around Christmas time, saying, ‘Do you know this version of ‘While My Shepherds Watched’?

A similar period atmosphere (with almost a Slavic air) enfolds the traditional, echoey-sung, ‘Lu Lay’, better known as either ‘The Wexford Carol’ or ‘The Coventry Carol’, while ‘Celestial Hearts’ (“ We’ll tune our hearts and raise our voice”) is a Yorkshire variant (Worrall and Oughtibridge to be exact) of ‘New Celestial’, sparklingly arranged by Rusby and O’Kane. I’ve played that for years and really love going back, and we’re doing an ‘and friends’ gig at the end of this 30 celebration, so there will be lots of people playing with us, including Jason Manford. And it just went like that – every gig I was doing, somebody else would say, ’Do you fancy doing a slot at our folk club? Yeah, I grew up going to those carol singing sessions, because my parents took us as kids, and we’d be just sat with the other kids, colouring, eating crisps, drinking pop, you know, in the tap room while all the adults were crammed in, singing away. Disc 1: 1 - Salute the Morn, 2 - Christmas Is Merry, 3 - The Holly King, 4 - Hippo for Christmas, 5 - Yorkshire Three Ships, 6 - Lu LayDisc 2: 1 - While Shepherds Watched, 2 - The Mistletoe Bough, 3 - Bleak Midwinter (Yorkshire), 4 - Celestial Hearts, 5 - I Am Christmas, 6 - B.A five-album deal is like so many years, and they were laying all that stuff on thick that I’ve never believed, being brought up in Barnsley. I think this time around, when the girls go back to school in January, we’ll carry on with the new Christmas album we’re working on. It was so fabulous to get some of them songs, make them our own, Rusby-fy them, and now we have the brass quintet with us as well. Until September 2009, Holyhead's main industry was the massive aluminium smelter on the outskirts of the town, operated by Anglesey Aluminium, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto.

I chatted this time last year to fellow Mercury Prize nominee and BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards winner Seth Lakeman, and wondered if you felt those days were as much an apprenticeship for you as him? You suggest a fellowship of friendship between musicians, and that’s something I put recently to Dave Pegg, of Fairport Convention fame, someone who’s worked with many friends and on ex-bandmates’ solo records and so on, playing or producing. I’d begged mum and dad for a piano, and dad bought it from this pub – it absolutely stank of cigarettes and booze, mum like, ‘No, that has to stay in the garage,’ but I loved it in there, because the reverb was brilliant.Following the Brexit withdrawal agreement, freight traffic from Ireland fell by 50% in January 2021. Well, there’s over 30 different versions of While Shepherds Watched that get sung in the pubs here in South Yorkshire, so I’ve still got a lot to go at! I had a list of 200 songs in the first instance, possibilities, but wanted to make sure we had ideas for the songs we ultimately chose, to make them a little, make them our own, but hopefully not upset the people who wrote or performed them, or the people that love listening to the original versions. Holyhead railway station is the terminus of the North Wales Coast Line and is currently served by Avanti West Coast and Transport for Wales services.