Artists can find musical inspiration from a number of different places. For Eddi Reader, it was in a room full of drunks in her childhood Glaswegian home.

“My parents and my grandparents always had great wild drunken parties,” she says. “They’d always be singing songs – Hollywood songs – that made me travel in my head to wherever they were singing.

“None of these people were professional musicians, but they knew music. They taught me that human beings know music just like they know how to breath.”

Having moved down to London as an 18-year-old to realise her musical dream, Reader rose to fame during her short time in eighties acoustic-pop band Fairground Attraction. She has since established herself as a hugely successful solo songwriter, picking up three Brit Awards and topping both the British single and album charts.

The poetic songstress is now coming the Union Chapel this Wednesday to play new material, including her latest single Baby’s Boat, which takes lyrics from a lullaby written by Alice Riley in 1898. It is inspired by her family life back up in Glasgow.

“Part of the whole energy is that you’re saying to your kids, cheerio, go off, either in lullaby or physically when they grow up. Alice Riley had intended it as a lullaby for little kids, but I wanted to use it as a sending off to my kids as they stepped out, like I did when I was 18.”

Eddi Reader plays the Union Chapel tonight. For more info and tickets, visit unionchapel.org.uk