Laura Marling

“Hi there!” a cheery London accent comes down the phone to greet me. It’s British singer-songwriter Laura Marling, and “I’m just making some toast, if you don’t mind,” she says. It’s about 8am her time, and the 27-year-old is happily enjoying a quiet morning before she jets off to the US for a month-long tour to promote her latest album Semper Femina. It’s a long tour, she admits, but packing for such a time doesn’t daunt her: “I tend to go vintage shopping when I’m on tour, so I don’t actually pack a lot,” she says. “I will take an enormous bag but not pack very much in it.” The record gets its name from part of a phrase penned by the ancient Roman poet Virgil in the epic Aeneid. It’s also a phrase she has tattooed on her upper thigh, a decision she made when she was 21. It means ‘always woman', and it’s an abbreviated version of the full verse "varium et mutabile semper femina" which translates to: “Woman is always fickle and changeable”. So with six years between her tattoo and this latest release, why has she chosen to to write a record fitting to the phrase now? “You know how concepts and ideas work themselves into you quite slowly? I think, at 21, it was the age I felt at the beginning of my independence, and having my own thoughts and ideas about things,” she says. “I think the ideas of womanhood and sisterhood had just occurred to me then, and it took me a long time to get my head around what that meant. That phrase is such a perfect expression of that, without being explicit.”