AUDIENCES can enjoy listening to music in the moment with singer Eddi Reader.

The Scottish singer will be performing at Salisbury Arts Centre on Friday, 8pm, and Reader admits that she will be seeing where the evening takes her and audiences.

“I am a very spontaneous artist so I just decide when I’m there what suits and what people want to hear.

“I just go with the flow of what the conversation is and where the conversation leads me.

“I’m the type of person that is interested in what my larynx and my brain is going to want to sing next.”

“Most of the journey I have had through song and the best moments have been spontaneous.”

She says her music is very much played “in the moment”.

It was Fairground Attraction that brought Reader into the limelight and to the attention of a much wider audience.

The single Perfect and parent album First of a Million Kisses both topped the British charts.

However, it was her subsequent albums which signalled her increasing ability to assimilate different musical styles and make them all very much her own.

Reader, now 56, has been singing from an early age as she explains: “I remember singing at a very early age, singing in front of the class at primary school. I was not a confident child but I could do that very well and could do that naturally. This was as natural to me as breathing but certainly making a living out of it , whether I did or not, I still was a musician.”

She recalls a moment when she was about seven – getting some change from a neighbour who had heard her voice echoing in the tenement building where she lived while she was washing the stairs.

She continued to hone her musical skills busking and singing harmonies on records and tapes.

“I would never have considered in any way that there was any kind of job in what I did musically,” she says. “Music was much more precious than simply a job it was a companion and a state of being where I felt comforted and surrounded by joy and potential.”

It has been a busy time for Reader who has performed in Tokyo and across the UK. She most recently returned from performing in Ireland.

Describing her music she says: “I’m always looking for positive expression and deeply touching expression through music or words and I think in poetry as well when I have been attracted to anything that has been written down it is always something that makes the ordinary extraordinary and the joy in the mundane.

“I always see the beauty in what someone would maybe overlook.”

Reader will be supported by folk singer Maz O’Connor who makes a welcome return to the Arts Centre having played at a Live Lunch in February this year.

The performance starts at 8pm and the bar will be open from 7.15pm.

Tickets are £22 and £20 for concessions.

For tickets or more information call the box office on 01722 321744 or go to salisburyartscentre.co.uk.