After a few months the company went bankrupt, and she worked for several years as a nightclub and hotel pianist throughout Europe while also performing her own music at festivals.

[3] Matthews met Pat Shaw at a session at a local radio station and they formed a musical partnership, singing and playing together.

With a lack of progress of their own projects Shaw began a career in teaching and Julie joined the Albion Band and toured with them for three years.

Matthews and Shaw joined fellow south Yorkshire musicians Kathleen and Rosalie Deighton, Kate Rusby, and Kathryn Roberts for the album Intuition (1993).

[6] The album received critical acclaim, being nominated in the 'rising star' category of the Great British Country Music Awards; this led to the duo opening for Mary Chapin Carpenter at Her Majesty's Theatre in London in 1994.

[9] They released an EP, Blue Moon on the Rise (1995), with five jointly written tracks, including the since much recorded reworking of a traditional theme as ‘Young Man Cut Down in His Prime’.

One had been used by Fairport Convention as the title track of their 1995 album Jewel in the Crown, (the anti-imperial message of which led to accusations of being unpatriotic) and "Love me or Not" was covered by Frances Black.

Matthews contributed to five of the twelve tracks, but by this point she and While had decided to focus on their solo and joint work and left the band after the 1997 Cropredy Festival in August.

It included the Matthews-written "Class Reunion" which became a concert favourite; the collaboration "Even the Desert", and "Seven Years of Rust", which was based on her father's experiences.

[14] In the same year Matthews released her second solo album Slow, which showcased some of her down tempo songwriting and which received positive, if not effusive, reviews.

In 2008 While and Matthews released their sixth studio album Together Alone; Propaganda magazine described the duo as ‘dealing so very tenderly with simple universal truths, they achieve their impact by an astute economy of expression allied to warmly accessible melodies and arrangements’.

In December 2001, While and Matthews joined with Chris Leslie and David Hughes to form the Christmas project St Agnes Fountain, which combined original music, unique arrangements of classic seasonal songs, with a good deal of humour.

[19] This was a show featuring the music of Carole King and Joni Mitchell, which resulted in a subsequent release of Blue Tapestry Live (2003).