[3] It was at this time that Walker became drawn to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and gained a scholarship to study choral conducting in France under Arthur Oldham.
[1] Her early career was as a musician, but she migrated to marketing and publicity in the early 1980s, working for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow, being involved in the RSNO's Music Nova (New Music) festival and editing the orchestra's journal, SNOscene.
Together, the couple wrote music programmes for the Barbican Centre, Wigmore Hall and other concert venues.
For about a decade, until the programme was dropped in 1998, she was a contributor to (and for its last two years presenter) of the BBC Radio 4 arts magazine Kaleidoscope.
By 2000 she was a more regular contributor to The Independent, responsible for the newspaper's coverage of theatre events at the Edinburgh Festival, feature articles and arts criticism[2] with an emphasis on the north of England.