Michaela’s dramatic and haunting cinematic folk music has emerged from years of songwriting, theatre work, and perfecting her sound as a session singer and pianist. As well as recording two albums with art-pop band Theghostorchestra, she was the main vocalist on the feature film Slipstream and once taught Gina McKee to play the piano for BBC drama Mothertime.

Born in Antwerp, and raised i...
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Michaela’s dramatic and haunting cinematic folk music has emerged from years of songwriting, theatre work, and perfecting her sound as a session singer and pianist. As well as recording two albums with art-pop band Theghostorchestra, she was the main vocalist on the feature film Slipstream and once taught Gina McKee to play the piano for BBC drama Mothertime.

Born in Antwerp, and raised in a rambling house in Yorkshire, Michaela was the daughter of travelling folk musicians. Her father David F Betts was a singer/songwriter and TV composer while her Swedish mother’s stepdad was the writer Bengt Nerman, and his father the journalist Ture Nerman, a famous Swedish socialist who met Lenin in 1917.

The isolation and freedom of living in the middle of nowhere shaped Michaela and her writing growing up. The harshness and beauty of nature, and resisting but needing change, are recurring themes. In 2020 she took up Transcendental Meditation which had a huge impact on her state of mind and outlook.

Michaela lives with her partner and children in a rented farm workers cottage in Surrey. She records in a converted shipping container in the garden. ‘The house is small, so the container was brought down from Norfolk on a truck, and hoisted over the fence,’ she says. ‘My partner kitted it out with a live room and recording studio. We’re not the kind of people to have extravagant holidays, instead we spend what money we have on studio gear!’
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