Tony Cummings quizzed UK Christendom's most popular female singer, PHILIPPA HANNA

Philippa: I'll be heading out on the road with Marti Pellow next week, doing theatres around the UK so we're squashing that in before we go to Nashville. It's nine or 10 dates. Kind of a quick tour but it's gonna be great. I'm really excited.

(photo by Ian Fairbrother)

Tony: You've done several tours with big, big headliners. Does it put you off sometimes that most of the audience at the particular gig have never heard of you?

Philippa: I think when I first started doing mainstream tours it definitely daunted me but I've got used to it and once you realize that your job is to warm up the room, to be a new friend, someone they don't know, if you kind of resign yourself to that and get your rhythm with that it kind of becomes a good thing to do. As an artist, for me I've got an audience that thankfully is growing but it's still relatively small, I'm kind of used to being unknown. I've developed a narrative around it, if you like.

Tony: I understand you are playing the E O Youth Day in Holland in June.

Philippa: That's right. It's an enormous youth festival. It's been going for a fair few years now. They have some very big Christian acts there. Also on the line up this year are people like Rend Collective, so it's gonna be fantastic. It's amazing actually to get that opportunity. I've been building my connections with the Netherlands for a while. It is just so nice to have people behind you and believing in you and ready to give you that slot because it's an honour, it's a privilege to have an hour to play music and speak into the lives of 25,000 young people.

Tony: I also understand that you're planning to make a Christmas recording.

Philippa: We are working on some Christmas material, yes. So when I go out to Nashville I'm gonna be doing some of that. I did a Christian single, "The King Has Come", in 2016 and I loved that. It was so spur of the moment. It came out of nowhere. CBN said do you have a Christmas song we could use for our ad campaign and I didn't have anything lying around so I wrote the song for them and it turned out well. We were so pleased with it we wanted to do a release. It gave me the bug for Christmas music. It's such an amazing time of year to have a song or a product or a recording that you can share with people. It's another really unifying thing. Christmas is a great window into the Church and so it's good to provide something good.

Tony: I listen to lots of Christmas music every year and sometimes I think if I hear one more arrangement of one more carol, I'll go crazy.

Philippa: It's kind of easy to do that. I wouldn't say it was lazy but it's very, very easy to turn out a Christmas product of reworked songs. So, we don't want to do that. We might do some reworking to some carols but we definitely want to write some original material. We need to have new Christian songs. And yet my inspiration really was Graham Kendrick because I've done a couple of tours with him around Christmas and his Christmas songs are just so fresh and full of amazing theology, full of amazing story. He really goes in, he goes deep. I learned things from Graham's Christmas songs. So he was my reference when I was thinking about what kind of song would I want to write for Christmas.

Tony: And will you be writing some sort of dancing around the Christmas tree type songs as well?

Philippa: I'll give it a go. I can't promise it'll turn out good.

Tony: I think you've got an American manager now, haven't you?

Philippa: Yeah. The last trip we did to America that was pretty much what we set out to do. We thought if we're going to do this - these are all things we've been working on behind the scenes - we wanted to be responsible as well. We felt that we wanted to go to America. We didn't just want to uproot our life, leave everything behind and go to nothing. So we started praying and said we really could do with some people, some boots on the ground. And we met the guys from Proper Management who are the Casting Crown's managers; they've managed some incredible forerunners in Christian music. So Nick Barre and Bryan Ward at Proper are now our American management team.