She may have launched her career with a soft rock ode to the DJ request line (Pilot of the Airwaves made it to number 13 on the US charts back in 1979) but today there's something thoroughly, pleasingly adult about Charlie Dore's songwriting.

At once big-hearted and clever, 2006's Cuckoo Hill showcased a range and subtlety few solo artists can muster. Meanwhile her current single, Some Kind of Love, is a funny yet truthful celebration of what she calls "dysfunctional love".

"A lot of people in dysfunctional relationships think they're abnormal but I think those disastrous, limping, pantomime-horse type partnerships are sort of normal actually," she says. "Most of the people I'm really close to, you look at their relationship and think, My God, how's that working?'

"I think there's a chromosome which makes you select someone, and no scientist can say why, except that there's an element of whimsy to it."

From the anti-capitalist ballad Captain of Industry to the rueful yet rollicking hillbilly of When Bill Hicks Died, Cuckoo Hill sees Charlie's band play everything from Indian harmoniums and harmonicas to tablas, bongos and vibraphones without ever detracting from the pastoral melodies or gentle Englishness of her voice.

"Imagine what might happen," commented one fan, "if you shut the McGarrigle Sisters in a room with Gillian Welch and made them listen to Lennon and McCartney all day".

The album takes its name from the street where Charlie grew up with her brother Rowan, the Argus reporter who died in 2005 and to whom she dedicates the song Looking for My Own Lone Ranger.

She has been writing songs since the age of 14 ("horrendously embarrassing blackmail material stuff - when you start writing, you're just so delighted to have written anything") but ended up at drama school in Newcastle, where she met her long-term musical partner Julian Littman.

This was the start of a dual career which has seen her improvise alongside Robin Williams, act with Eric Idle and star opposite Jonathan Pryce in the award-winning The Ploughman's Lunch.

She has also enjoyed great success writing professionally for others, including Tina Turner, Celine Dion, George Harrison, Lisa Stansfield, UB40, Jimmy Nail and Hayley Westenra. This pays the bills and is the explanation for the 13-year gap between her second and third albums.

"I don't dislike it, it's just a different part of the brain," she says. "And once you've done something which is very personal, like Cuckoo Hill, it's hard to go back - it's hard to do something which is just slick.

"I like looking at things through a slightly curved and dimpled glass, and sometimes in my jobbing songwriting I have to write a very straight love song because that's what they want. I'm always trying to slip a slightly curved ball in there."