Jersey born songwriter Nerina Pallot aced a solo gig last week at The Old Bakery Studios in Truro to launch her sixth album Stay Lucky.

It’s her most personal, most warmly emotional album yet.

The Packet asked superfan James Tregunna from St Mawes to interview her.

Nerina has played Penzance and the Minack several times so he asked her about what keeps drawing her back to Cornwall.

She said: “It’s another country. I’m not saying that to appease Kernow separatists, it has that Jersey thing which is it’s sort of the UK but it’s not really and it has a really defined characteristic. I think it’s because it’s on the edge of something. Windswept places on the edge of land are always the really interesting places to me. It’s mystical.

“The whole tie in with Brittany, it’s really familiar to me. I go to Cornwall and I feel like I’m at home. I immediately feel like OK, this is like the road to Jersey, you know as you go round those windy lanes and you come round to a sweep of an incredible bay.

“There’s a real sense of it’s a different land.”

So much so that in a long career of international tours, it’s a Cornish venue that tops her favourites.

“The Minack has got to be high up there, It’s so special. The whole way it was built, the nutty lady that put it together, God bless her, it’s sort of a temple to English eccentricity.”

Nerina wrote Stay Lucky, played guitar, piano, synths and percussion on it, she produced it and has released it on her own label.

Last week’s intimate Truro gig was packed with fans keen to hear her acoustic set, which is typically difficult to categorise.

She explains: “I’m a songwriter first, then the sound of my songs is based on what I’ve written. I’m more interested in what are these songs doing, then what do they tell me the sound should be and then that dictates it. So I’m a songwriter but I try and stay away from genre because I like so many different genres, I want to try different things.”

On the ubiquitous scone debate, Nerina is single minded. “There’s only one way. You need to have butter, then you have the jam then you put the clotted cream on top. There’s no other way. And it’s got to be strawberry or raspberry jam. Some people put blackcurrant and some, wait for it, put marmalade on it. It’s just wrong.”

The brilliant Stay Lucky is out now.

Nerina Pallot. Photograph Tommy Reynolds Nerina Pallot. Photograph Tommy Reynolds

Photo: Tommy Reynolds