Kathryn Williams

Kathryn Williams will be live in-store at Rough Trade Bristol performing a special acoustic set, celebrating the release of her new collection 'Anthology', released 30th August on One Little Indian.

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This event is FREE ENTRY, with the option to pre-order an Anthology album + ticket, and we will have your guaranteed album ready and waiting to collect on the day of this in-store.
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1.30pm | Doors + Album/ Ticket collection

2.00pm | Live unplugged acoustic set

2.45pm | Album signing

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In this new musical world when we talk about an artist’s body of work, we tend to think of a handful of records stretched out across of a handful of years, if we’re lucky. Changing industry and a focus on immediacy have done little to alter such notions, which makes Kathryn Williams something of an anomaly - releasing eleven full-length albums under her own name (and more with various side-projects) since her debut album Dog Leap Stairs, was released in 1999 via her own CAW Records label.

As impressive a stat as that might be, it does little to capture the true magic of Williams work; the enchanting craft that has grown and expanded as she’s moved from one project to the next, from the breakthrough success of her Mercury Prize-nominated Little Black Numbers all the way to her Sylvia Plath tribute project and 2017’s Greatest Hits collection - not a greatest hits at all, in fact, rather an imagined retrospective for a fictional artist and an inspired soundtrack to Laura Barnett’s novel of the same name.

While her best-known work is characterized by rich and honest song-writing, inspired by the greats - from Nick Drake to Joni Mitchell and beyond - Williams has continually been able to evolve as an artist because she’s always looked outside of such genre boundaries. “The things that influence you aren’t necessarily going to come out in obvious ways unless you’re trying to copy,” she said in a 2007 interview. “I don’t sound like Lou Reed or Tom Waits. But when I listen to them, I learn.”

The Anthology Boxset contains ten studio albums, each with an accompanying bonus disc featuring demos, live performances and unheard tracks from each era. There are also two booklets featuring lyrics, photos, and information relating to each album. All the artwork used was by Kathryn herself.

Williams is an artist that continues to listen and learn from the greats while, at the same time, undoubtedly becoming one herself; approaching her twentieth anniversary with a fiery spirit and a sense of adventure that has never once wilted.