Lest we jump to conclusions about the life of a major label recording artist, Seth Lakeman’s older brother Sean suggests a guided tour of “the studio”. In an outhouse, yards from his Dartmoor cottage, is a barely-lit room, bedecked with pieces of old carpet and cotton throws. Their purpose here is acoustic rather than decorative — as are the sheets of packing foam taped to the wall. We sit crosslegged beside half a drum kit. I call it “homely”. Sean, who plays guitar in his brother’s band, smiles. “You mean ‘musty’, don’t you?”

I can’t help but be impressed that this is where the latest signing to Relentless — the label that gave us KT Tunstall and Joss Stone — has elected to record his forthcoming album. No room at Peter Gabriel’s inn, then? Montserrat all booked up? Hair still glistening from his morning run, Lakeman laughs at the notion that he might change his modus operandi, just to spend some of the cash generated by other people’s album sales. “Do you want to know why we’re recording the next album here?”

Lakeman opens up the violin case that holds his fiddle and notebook — or, as he calls it, his “hard drive”. The page he’s looking for contains The Black Prince, a new song based on a 250-year-old Cornish tale about the survivor of a Danish shipwreck. Then, between the opening thwack of Sean’s guitar and the song’s chorus, something extraordinary happens. The magnetic force of the narrative drains you of all sense of self. You forget yourself and you most certainly forget the room, “homely” or otherwise.

Eighteen months ago, at the 2005 Mercury Music Prize nominations, Seth Lakeman pulled off a similar trick before a gathered press corps who didn’t have a clue who he was. No matter that, in the Mercurys, “the folk one” never wins — when the footage of him playing Kitty Jay was shown on the news that night, you could almost hear the pencil scrawl of odds being shortened across Britain.

Now ensconced in his local pub, Lakeman reflects upon the events of that week. He was sitting in his broken-down car on the hard shoulder of the motorway when his friend and publicist Harriet Simms told him — for reasons she couldn’t yet divulge — that he had to be in London the next morning. “Every artist has a moment in their career when everything changes for them — and that was mine. I was signing on when I was writing Kitty Jay. I remember I had written on my jobseeker’s form that, ideally, I’d like to have a fiddle job — perhaps teaching violin to kids or something. After a few weeks, they got in touch and told me that they had found me the perfect job, in a theme bar just down the road in Plymouth. I had to dress up as a leprechaun on weekends, and serenade punters. At that point, I signed off straight away. In Plymouth, you get beaten up for doing that.”

Self-releasing Kitty Jay was, says Lakeman, just a way of generating extra income after shows. “I was playing the back rooms of pubs or, at best, arts centres,” he recalls. “Sometimes I was doing my own material. On other occasions, it was a matter of doing covers by bands such as Counting Crows and Crowded House.” Simms, a longtime supporter of Lakeman, really started to take notice of Lakeman’s work when he played her some of his own songs four years ago. “He’s always had this gift for adding gusto and a sense of movement to an idiom that sometimes lacks it,” she says. “There’s also a journalistic quality, which is the bed-rock of what he does.”

Indeed, much of Lakeman’s delivery on his second album, Freedom Fields, verged on a sort of reportage, in which the rawness of his playing accentuates the eeriness of the stories. On Childe the Hunter, the protagonist crawls inside a dead horse in a bid to save himself from dying of exposure. Better still was a brace of wartime laments — 1643 and The Riflemen of War— in which Lakeman effortlessly inhabits dramas that unfolded more than 300 years previously.

Where does he get it from? Just a hunch here, but for many years Lakeman’s father worked for The Mirror as their Devon correspondent. In his spare time, he ran a folk club. Could there be something in this? Perhaps Lakeman is being disingenuous when the suggestion appears to surprise him. “If that’s the case,” he ponders, “it isn’t conscious. But there’s definitely a focus, if you like, on making the story the star of the song.”

Lakeman had already sold 20,000 copies of Freedom Fields when he handed the record over to Relentless. As it was self-released, it’s likely to have given him as much revenue as 200,000 major-label sales would have done. His reasons, then, can't have been financial. “Absolutely not,” he concurs. “It’s a chance to preach to the unconverted. Playing at something like the V Festival and seeing those people go mad for this stuff — that’s exactly what I was hoping might happen.”

That Seth Lakeman has managed to do it without changing his music or sparking a grass-roots backlash is testament to his unwavering musical focus. When he turns up to play at the Radio Two Folk Awards on Monday, he’ll be the only one of 20-odd nominees signed to a major label. He’s warded off the dreaded leprechaun costume once — and that was before he became the best known young folk musician in Britain. If the worst comes to the worst, he’s pretty confident he can resist it again. “I mean, if I have to, I will. But if building the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks pays even half as well, I know which I’d choose.”

Seth Lakeman’s single King & Country is out Feb 5 (Relentless). His UK tour starts Feb 19 (www.sethlakeman.co.uk)

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