For someone who has always forged a very different musical path to her peers, the Wayward Band is a very appropriate name for Eliza Carthy's backing group.

The name actually comes from a biography written about one of the country's brightest folk musicians but it sits well for lots of reasons.

Firstly just arranging to have a touring 12-piece band on the current folk circuit is pretty wayward.

"It's something I'd always wanted to do," she tells me. "the band started in 2013 to promote a best of compilation and celebrate 21 years of being in music and originally I did as a collaboration project with Jim Moray. We had a lot in common with each other, in particular the way we both like to push the envelope in terms of how we approach traditional music. Giving it a more modern approach, looking at it with a broader palette, and one of those elements was providing a larger soundscape. Both of us had done that on our albums and we wanted to re-produce that live.

"Obviously the biggest problem with that is financial and so Jim and I pooled our resources and took it out on the road, which was very exciting for the both of us."

But while Jim went on to work on other projects, Eliza liked the idea of the Wayward Band so much, she decided to continue with it.

"Everyone loved it," she continues, "as did I and thanks to a very kind patron of ours, we've managed to keep it going. Thanks to them we recorded a single and then a video, and eventually they said 'look why don't you go and make an album'.

"When we started this, I thought just performing would be a major issue, so making an album was a proper dream come true."

And what an album it is.

Big Machine was released on February 3 to huge critical and public acclaim picking up four and five star reviews across the national and music press. Eliza calls it her best work to date, which bearing in mind her two Mercury Music Prize nominated albums, Red Rice in 1998, and Anglicana in 2003, is high praise indeed.

"The first thing I did was to employ a producer," she says. "I just couldn't cope with the mental spaghetti of assembling such a big sound for the record. I knew Jon Sutherland, who has worked with the likes of Robert Plant and he was fantastic at pulling it all together. His own band is a 37-piece, so I knew he was the guy for the job.

"I really do believe we've ended up with the best work I've ever produced and I'm immensely proud of it."

Highlights on the album include Hug You Like A Mountain, which was written by the uniquely talented troubadour, Rory McLeod and on which Eliza is accompanied on her version by Teddy Thompson, who like Eliza herself, has followed in the footsteps of his folk musician parents.

"We were in New York working on a different project," she reveals, "and we spent a morning at the Museum of the American Gangster which is housed in an old Speakeasy. As we were walking around I started wandering whether there was anything else we could do together and so I told him about the song.

"I was really worried because we have been friends for a long time and I thought if I send this song to him and he hates it, I'll be crushed. I was so relieved when he agreed to do it and the song is one of my favourites on there."

Now Eliza is taking the album out on the road, which means The Wayward Band's first ever solo tour.

Eliza adds: "We've done summer festivals and the odd date in Europe but this is our first time touring the country. It's a huge challenge for me physically but also mentally because it will be the first time I've been away from my children for a while."

Born in Scarborough in 1975, Eliza is the daughter of singer Norma Waterson and singer/songwriter Martin Carthy. Her children are aged seven and nine, and so I ask whether they're also following in the family folk tradition.

"They are just beginning but they both have lessons," she says. "They want me to teach them and I've done it a couple of times, which has gone rather well.

"I'm self-taught. At the age of 11 I had a violin teacher and they gave up on me because they said I wasn't interested in it. They were right, I was more interested in being Bob Dylan so I took up the mandolin instead. It wasn't until years later that I rediscovered the violin and taught myself to play it.

"Then I met Nancy Kerr who had purple hair, wore Doc Martins and could play with a Ceilidh Band for two hours and that was it - I've been in the music business ever since.

"I'm really looking forward to coming back to Colchester. The Colchester Folk Club was one of the first to really give me a stage and I have lots of happy memories performing there. I remember Nancy and I playing there and our friend Sam unicycling around the audience. It's been a part of my touring circuit since I was a teenager so it was very important I took the band there."

Eliza Carthy and The Wayward Band play the Colchester Arts Centre on Friday, December 15.

With support from Duotine, doors open at 7.30pm. Tickets are £20, available from the box office on 01206 500900 or online at colchesterartscentre.com