CARA Dillon is no stranger to Surrey. She has played in venues all over the local area, including Farnham Maltings and Guildford Civic.

"The Maltings was a beautiful gig - it was just such a lovely venue," she said. "The crowd were lovely and the acoustics were wonderful."

On Sunday, October 3, she will play The Anvil in Basingstoke. She has played there before but only in the foyer and she's now looking forward to playing the main concert hall.

Cara Dillon's childhood was immersed in a rich and inescapable culture of traditional Irish folk music.

So much so, in fact, that when asked what has inspired her musically, she cites the whole experience of growing up as being as influential as anything she heard when buying records in her teens.

She can remember singing along with folk musicians in pubs since she was knee high and counts herself very lucky to have emerged from such a wealth of local talented singers and musicians with such notable success.

"The town where I'm from in County Derry has a very big tradition of music and dancing and song so you will find that lots of musicians from all over the country will come at different times of the year for festivals there.

"There will be street sessions and lots of fantastic singers, and when I was a child the singers would teach the youngsters the traditional songs of the time. I was very, very lucky.

"There was no escaping the music really. As well as that, the town was so full of traditional songs - lots of them were written about the beautiful river that ran through it. Even now that I am starting to record my third album, I am still going back to draw upon the influences of the town where I'm from."

When Cara was 16 she and two of her friends formed a folk band and travelled around Europe together during summer holidays, playing gigs where they could for pocket money.

"One year we even got as far as Israel," Cara recalls. "It was just a bit of fun really, but I was lucky that I enjoyed travelling so much as it went hand in hand with the music. Later, when I was 19, I was lucky enough to get a record deal."

Although the folk melodies of County Derry still resonate through her music, Cara has come to draw on a number of other more well-known artists in producing a sound that she says "has a lot of things going on in it now".

"When I was around 16 or 17 I suddenly found I had a bit of money and began buying records by people like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac. Retro 70s folk music then became a major influence on me."

Nowadays, Cara seeks to add a more modern edge to folk music. She sees artists like David Gray and Norah Jones as being responsible for giving a kind of revival to a more acoustic, folky sound in recent years, and hopes that she is part of that trend.

Being signed to the Rough Trade record label, which also deals with super-hip bands, The Strokes and The Libertines, has afforded Cara Dillon's music a unique position in the world of folk music.

"Certain folk artists will be able to define a folk crowd and might play to a similar audience each week. Being signed to Rough Trade puts us in a special situation where we are able to attract a younger and more diverse audience. Loads of different people seem to come and enjoy our music now - which is great."

Cara recently toured in Japan and China and was surprised by how knowingly the crowd responded to the music. "They had a great connection with us," she said. "We have a huge Japanese fan base now and we'll definitely be going back there."

Today, Cara Dillon's music fuses many of the very old and traditional facets of Irish folk music with a lot of more contemporary influences.

She mixes songs that she had written and recorded in recent years with others that are hundreds of years old.

While much of her music is rooted in the history and tradition of Ireland, though, Cara has tried to avoid the historical associations that folk music has had with politics.

"Folk music does have political roots. In the old times, people would use it as a medium for getting together and sharing the things they had to talk about. They'd use music as a means of getting their points across.

"Being from Northern Ireland and growing up with the situation out there - in the 70s when things were really, really bad - it was fine to sing about all that. I think nowadays, though, we don't need to do it any more.

"I don't think music should be used as a way of putting across one point of view. I prefer to use it as a way of promoting peace."

Despite these feelings, Cara recently recorded the heartbreaking narrative about the troubles in Northern Ireland, There Were Roses. The song was nominated for the best song in the 2003 BBC Folk Awards and was used in the recent Billy Connolly programme for BBC 1 in which the comedian toured England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

"People may have been surprised because I have never done anything political before, but I feel so strongly about peace and agree with the essence of that song so much that I felt confident about committing to it," said Cara.

She is currently recording her third album and says that she is looking forward to a future of playing folk music, touring and meeting "wonderful people". Michael Wylie-Harris