HOLD onto your hats. Bellowhead is blasting into Yorkshire headlining Harrogate International Festival tomorrow night (Friday), as well as curating a platform for Young Musicians during the month-long festival. We spoke to cellist, fiddle player and the only female in the 11-strong band, Rachel McShane.

“We’ve a new album being released later in the year, which is a secret at the moment,” Rachel said, “so in Harrogate we’ll probably throw in some of those new songs.”

You heard it here first. The album will be called Revival.

“It’s still Bellowhead musically with traditional songs but it feels new as well,” Rachel said. “It’s exciting as we worked with a different producer on this album, Rupert Christie. It was great fun.”

Christie has worked with artists ranging from U2, Greenday, Coldplay, Lou Reed, Echo & The Bunnymen and Rebecca Ferguson as well as films from Mamma Mia to Control.

It tops a busy year for the band voted Best Live Group at the BBC Folk Awards a record five times.

Earlier this year, Faber Music produced a beautiful Bellowhead songbook to mark the 10th anniversary of the band’s formation, and the group have just performed sell-out gigs at the Royal Albert Hall and the Manchester Bridgewater Hall.

On stage Bellowhead remain dedicated to producing occasions full of drama and spectacle, and are veterans of the BBC Proms, Radio 2’s 2Day and Live in Hyde Park.

Reviewers lose their grip on their thesauruses when faced with Bellowhead. Perhaps because they can’t be confined by categorisation, playing a wealth of instruments from concertina to trombone, fusing folk, funk, rock, jazz, classical, music hall and world music.

‘Rumbustious pomp and verve’ with ‘Brechtian theatricality’ the ‘red-blooded Bellowhead’ are at once ‘rousing’,’ sonorous’, with ‘flamboyant bounce’, making their music ‘completely irresistible’.

So what’s it like being the only female band member in this musical maelstrom?

“The tour bus is big but there’s limited space with 11. I’m used to it,” Rachel said. “I’ve been doing it so long now, they’re quite good at clearing out of a room to let me get changed and I’m used to changing in the toilets at festivals.”

“You do come up with your own coping mechanisms being on tour, especially with that many people. All going to dinner together is impossible, it’s not just booking a table it’s all agreeing on what food we want, so we peel off in twos and threes, which is quite nice as there’s always someone to talk to. Everyone’s sort of like a big family, you know their little ways, and there’s always someone to cheer you up.”

No romance over the years then? Rachel laughed, “Not at all. Most people are paired up, there are about 14 kids now between us. It’s bonkers.”

Rachel has a down to earth northern charm, originally from Barnsley, she now lives in the North East with her partner, also a musician (they have to be kind to their neighbours). Outside of the band, she does a lot of workshops in schools and picks up the kids’ lingo. ‘Bonkers’ peppers her chat. It is, she said ‘bonkers’ that Bellowhead has been going ten years.

“I never thought we’d last ten years, we thought maybe we’re a year-long project when we first got together but we’re still here, we’re looking forward to the new album and tour.”

Rachel joined the band while studying for a degree in folk music at university in Newcastle. It was a ‘someone knew someone else who met someone looking for someone who could play a violin’ kind of formation.

“I went to university with Jon Boden’s (vocals, fiddle, tambourine) girlfriend Fay who found out they needed a cellist, possibly a fiddle player who was also a girl who could sing. I ticked all the boxes. The first time we met we did was a photo-shoot and recorded a demo then did a gig the same day. The photos are funny as we’d literally just met, we’d been booked to headline the Oxford Folk Festival even though nobody knew how good we were, I’m amazed it happened.”

Unlike other bands that often form from a collective identity, Bellowhead’s members are an eclectic bunch.

“It is a lot of people. Everyone is from different backgrounds with different ways of approaching music and life, but it’s what makes the band what it is. It’s bonkers, you can have a sax solo at one end of the stage and folk fiddle at the other, and it’s what makes the band what it is. Being in a band like that informs everything, everyone has changed over 10 years and appreciates other music.”

Rachel comes from a folk family, her dad played at Irish dances and she was brought up in festivals. Others in the band have backgrounds in classical, jazz and world music.

The sheer size of the band, Rachel feels, contributes to the live experience. Does she feel pressure to live up to the Awards being the ‘best live act in the country’ (according to The Independent)?

“Getting the Live Act awards feels very special to the band, we’re quite proud we worked towards improving all the time. We love live shows so much. The crowds are always up for it, dancing, it kind of takes care of itself. There’s that pressure to do a good show but that’s true of any band, any musician. I try not to believe the hype, we do what we do, people like it and we always have a great time which makes it great. Because there’s so many of us on stage, it’s always entertaining, there’s always someone doing something, which is great from an audience point of view and ours, I can catch a ridiculous dance and laugh from one end of the stage, that’s a big part of it “

The audience has such a good time they famously broke the dance-floor at one Festival.

“They broke it twice! Two years running,” Rachel laughed. “As soon as someone starts jumping up and down it’s infectious, everyone starts. And if you tell them to jump up and down, they will! And it’s not just the teenagers, I get emails saying, I really enjoyed your gig, but God my knees hurt now.”

One of her favourite songs on the Songbooks production is Captain Wedderburn, “It’s a bit of downtime and chilled out, a nice moment in the gig before cracking on with the raucous stuff.”

Being curators for Harrogate Festival's Young Musicians is something close to Rachel’s heart as a teacher. The platform taps into the Harrogate Festival legacy, which has long provided a showcase for up and coming classical artists, counting Lesley Garrett and Julian Lloyd Webber as past alumni before they found international fame. This is the first year the Festival is nurturing young folk acts. Rachel and fellow-band member John Spiers were previous judges for the Young Folk Award.

“What you’re looking for I suppose is a sparkle of something,” Rachel said. “It’s not polished performances but spotting potential. Although I’m amazed how professional and assured performances are from young people, it’s great to be involved in.”

It’s a far cry from The Voice, or the X-Factor.

“It’s not quite a rank as the Voice. I find those shows devalues everyone a little bit, they earn money then are dropped. I hate that, there’s no support it’s just making a TV show rather than the development of music. With folk, they stand a fighting chance of making a living as a musician, getting gigs and doing work and having a long career, rather than an Xmas record, then forgotten about the next year. Sorry, I’m cynical about that stuff.”

Jon Spiers puts Bellowhead’s popularity down to this backlash. “I think it’s probably a reaction to a decade of overwhelmingly manufactured pop music that we’re blasted with every day,” he said. “The healthy festival scene on the folk circuit has probably helped bring it more under the noses of people too. The long and short of it is that folk music is real music being played by real musicians - and they can do that even in a small back room of a pub as well as on the big stage.”

For Rachel it’s about making it the hard way. “We did a lot of traipsing about, driving ourselves around, doing everything ourselves. Everyone in the band in their own right has done that, played folk clubs for not much money and learnt the trade. That’s what separates folk from mainstream music.”

The Harrogate gig is at the majestic Royal Hall, one of the grandest venues in the UK.

“It is a beautiful venue,” Rachel recalls from their last Harrogate Festival appearance in 2012. She’s keen to stress it’s not all boisterous: “Audiences can expect lots of different music, it’s not all in your face, there are tender moments as well, but you’ll have a great time, a sing-along, and usually, even in seated venues there’s probably some dancing by the end.”

For tickets (from £22) to the show at the Royal Hall Harrogate tomorrow, Friday, at 8pm, call 01423 562 303, or go to www.harrogateinternationalfestivals.com.