SINGER songwriter Charlie Dore is returned to Ludlow Assembly Rooms on Thursday, November 27.

One of the UK’s most respected singer-songwriters, Charlie, whose 1994 track Pilot of the Airwaves is a perennial radio favourite, recalls the start of her musical career: “I first started writing songs when I was about 13 or 1. There was a lot of music in my life because my mum and both my grannies played the piano – my mum played in a dance band called The Tetherdown Night Owls – but she died when I was 15, and I often wonder what she would have thought.”

Charlie not only writes for herself, but for other artists, including Celine Dion, Hayley Westenra and Lisa Stansfield, not to mention Jimmy Nail with whom she wrote the chart-topping Ain’t No Doubt.

“There are three routes to getting songs recorded by others, she explains. “There’s the old fashioned route where a songwriter’s publisher pitches a song to an artist - that’s happened on a few occasions.

“The second is where you actually write specifically to a brief, which will involve the publisher asking for something that’s like Beyonce meets Justin Timberlake meets Gotye

“The last is when you write with an artist and they are in the room with you – it has to sound like it’s from them and personal. Ain’t No Doubt was like that.

Then there’s Pilot of the Airwaves. “The song is a blessing and a curse,” says Charlie. “I still like the song - my only complaint is when people only listen to that song and don’t listen to the new stuff.”

'A clever songwriter with a dream of a voice that glides from folk and country to jazzy cabaret’ - The Daily Telegraph

Her songs have been covered by the great and the good, including George Harrison and Tina Turner, but she has only one ambition: “All I want from this,” she says, “is to be able to make a living at it and carry on until I fall over!”

Charlie Dore is at Ludlow Assembly Rooms on Thursday, November 27 at 7.30pm. To book, call the box office on 01584 878141 or visit ludlowassemblyrooms.co.uk