KIRSTY McGee describes herself as a “human scrapbook”.

She hitched her first ride aged 12 and went on to hitchhike around the country for years, braving long periods of homelessness and sleeping everywhere from friends’ sofas in Manchester to a beach hut in Cornwall.

But when she started to release music, she says it “legitimised” her wandering lifestyle. Her travels are incorporated into touring, as she plays gigs all over Europe.

She comes to the Hoy at Anchor in Leigh on Tuesday, where she’ll perform with the other half of her duo Mat Martin.

“We do an awful lots of miles, about 23,000 a year,” says Kirsty. “I’m still doing the same thing, but just legitimising it because I play music now.”

Kirsty says she always had a sense of wanderlust and explains: “I think I always did have it.

“It started after I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was 12, which was the first time I hitchhiked.

“I only went a couple of miles, but everyone hit the roof when they found out. I was running late and I just stuck out my thumb and went.

“I was really thrilled. I thought ‘great, I can get around’.”

The experience was to mark the start of Kirsty’s wanderings, which would eventually take her to Cornwall, where she found the inspiration to start making music seriously.

She says: “When I went to Cornwall I spent more time writing songs and began to get the confidence to begin performing more seriously on my own.”

Her first record was released in 2002. Since then, she’s teamed up with Mat Martin, as well as creating the Hobopop Collective, a term that encompasses a rolling band of musicians, as well as being the name of her record label.

“We coined the phrase Hobopop a few years ago,” she explains. “We set up our own record label and it became Hobopop Recordings.

“We wanted a word that described what we did, we weren’t folk music, and it wasn’t jazz, it had elements of all sorts of different things in it.

“The music was a bit like me, a little bit rootless, it didn’t really know where it belonged. It was music of no fixed abode.”

Kirsty uses her background of hitchhiking and homelessness to influence her music. It is also inspired by some of her political activities – she was heavily involved in protests against a second runway at Manchester Airport.

She’ll perform at the Hoy at Anchor Folk Club, upstairs at the Ship, New Road, Leigh, at 8pm on Tuesday. Tickets are £7.