BILLED as “probably” Peggy Seeger’s final solo album, First Farewell has plenty of the elements her fans love: humour that is wry but never unkind, sweetly crafted tunes that sound fresh and ancient and songs that could be lullaby and lament in one.

It is her 24th solo album in an unbroken 68-year career. It’s a tad mindblowing that this vivacious woman will be 85 in June.
 
Seeger prides herself on producing songs that are diverse. She owes the ability to write in a number of different styles to her late husband, folk artist Ewan MacColl.

With him, she founded The Critics Group for young singers to perform traditional songs or compose new ones using traditional song structures.

“In the Critics Group, we worked out a way of giving concerts so that you don’t put the people to sleep, or incite them to a controlled riot,” she tells me. “You don’t just follow your comfort zone.

“No-one would confuse a Beatles song, or a Leonard Cohen song, for anybody else’s. But if you give a two-hour concert, you have to chop and change the style. I could send you songs that you would not believe I had written at all. They’re violently different!”
 
At 85, she’s aware that she only has a certain number of years left. So she sings and plays every day: “I have to, my hands are deformed by arthritis.”
 
With the album’s recording interrupted by lockdown and a 26-date tour postponed, her co-creators grabbed every chance they could to finish the project. The team includes children Calum and Neill MacColl, her sons by MacColl and musicians and songwriters in their own right and her daughter-in-law, the multi-talented musician Kate St John.

 “The album came about because since lockdown, and since I’ve become so blooming old, my children are trying to keep me going — it’s heartwarming, actually.”
 
A stand-out track is Invisible Woman, with the lines: “I strolled down the high street on Sunday, in clown shoes and lace underwear. Did they notice my dance? Not one single glance. So I guess that I can’t have been there.”

There is foreboding in her warning that this “ghost army is coming for you,” the older contingent of a monstrous regiment that will be heard: “We may not have a choice but we still have a voice, The invisible gals love a fight!

“We are an invisible army and it makes us hugely important,” she declares. “We can be under the wire, over the wire, we can cut the wire!”

And she means it. This is a woman who keeps a piece of barbed wire from Greenham Common from the times she visited the women’s peace camp there. She’s a storyteller who has grabbed the very real challenges of generations and rendered them in anthemic melodies. If anyone listens to Carry Greenham Home with their soul unstirred, check their pulse.

The new album is a rare collaboration: “I’d never written with my son Neill,” she reveals, “and I bullied him, really. He’s 62 now, and he said he felt like he’d disappeared. I said: ‘Try being a woman of 85’.”

Based on the words of two Filipino women cleaners, she wrote Lullabies for Strangers with her daughter-in-law Kate and on first hearing it seems a melancholy ballad of women far from home, missing their own children while caring for those of others.

But its genesis is in Seeger the reporter, bearing witness and producing a piece which is both unique and universal.

Seeger has referred to the folk song as “an endangered cultural species” and the notion of being a so-called protest singer is one that she can take or leave. “I’m an activist singer, ”she asserts. “I’m part of a campaign here [in Iffley, Oxfordshire], to save the last two green fields we have.”
 
And on that note, the song How I long for Peace is a cry for an end to the destruction of the one planet we have. But there’s a call to action too. For Seeger, doing nothing is not an option. She doesn’t have the time to waste and neither does the Earth.
 
“The Earth can wait no longer for political permission. Sit down. Disrupt. Do anything, to make the whole word listen.”

Along with ageism, she’s forensically eloquent when it comes to the current battles against women’s sex-based oppression. “I’m more bothered for other people and how they feel about it,” she says, “because I had my window of being visible. And when I go out, I’m just like another old lady tottering along.

“It gives me an independence that I didn’t have when I was a young woman. From the time I was 15, until I was about 60, I was ‘meat’. Even when I was 60, I had men of 70 and 80 running after me and by then I had a female partner, so — ha-ha!”

Recent events such as the vigil and protests after Sarah Everard’s murder are a preoccupation too and I ask her what she feels about the insistent refrain that “not all men are like that.”

“It’s a get-out, which releases men from having to do anything about it,” she says. “Nothing will change until men talk to each other about this. Every man who’s done it is somebody’s son, somebody’s brother.”

It sometimes seems that Seeger is one of those women who has lived many lives in one. Her Wikipedia entry cannot quite keep pace with the twists and turns of her life. Did she have her US passport taken when she visited Communist China in the 1950s? Well, no. But were the US authorities happy that she went?
 
This elicits a full-on guffaw: “They threatened us with jail, fines, keeping any of our family members from ever going abroad again. We went anyway. They wouldn’t want us coming back [to the US] saying how great China was.”
 
With the end of lockdown in sight, Seeger is concerned about the future for performers: “People have no idea of the plight that musicians are in now, and we’re not being cared for by the government,” she says.

 “One of the problems is that there’ll be a lot more musicians than venues and we’ll have lost a lot of the experts we need to make those venues work... it’s a nightmare for all those people.”
 
For this one musician, though, there’s the prospect of two gigs in one day, at London’s Cecil Sharp House on May 27.
 
“I can’t wait. I’m going to explode with joy. And I can still cross my fingers — with the arthritis — look!”
 
First Farewell is released on April 9 via Red Grape Music.