SOUL queen Beverley Knight will back up next month’s release of her seventh studio album, Soul UK, with an 11-date autumn tour.

The 38-year-old singer from Wolverhampton will play York Barbican on Friday, November 18, a bigger venue than for her last visit to York in April 2010, when her Grand Opera House show did not sell out.

Beverley will celebrate home-grown soul music on her forthcoming album, issued by Hurricane Records on July 4, as her way of “paying respect back to her forebears – and reminding the new generation just who paved their way”.

Produced by Grammy-winning Martin Terefe and fashionable London production duo Future Cut, Soul UK features Beverley’s takes on Junior’s Mama Used To Say, Roachford’s Cuddly Toy, Loose Ends’ Don’t Be A Fool, Jamiroquai’s When You Gonna Learn and George Michael’s One More Try.

She also brings something of the Knight to Princess’s Say I’m Your Number One, from 1985, Lewis Taylor’s Damn, from 1996, and Soul II Soul’s Fairplay, which reached number 63 in 1986. “That track, from Club Classics Vol One, was absolutely rinsed in all the clubs and on pirate radio,” recalls Beverley. “It made me wish I looked old enough to sneak past the doormen! I didn’t want to touch Soul II Soul’s biggest hits as they are sacred in my mind, but this was just as brilliant and deserved to be as well known.”

Songs by Omar, Freez, Young Disciples, Heatwave and Jaki Graham are covered too.

“Some of these artists have had enormously successful careers, others have had glimpses of success, and others have never really been given due attention and respect,” says Beverley, explaining the album’s raison d’etre.

“When I was putting together the whole Soul UK concept, it just struck me that British soul music was never celebrated.

“At the time it got a little bit of love, but certainly now it’s almost completely forgotten and no one as far as I know has been giving respect to the guys that enabled me to be here.

“So it’s just the perfect way of saying ‘Thanks guys, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have a career’.”

Beverley believes the “Britishness” of these soul songs, particularly those from the mid- 1980s to mid-1990s, is defined by the sound.

“It’s a lot less saturated and formulaic than today’s more R&B sound,” she says.

“You’ll hear a lot of fantastic bass lines on the record because the cultural emphasis that plays a big part in the music came direct from Africa, from the West Indies, and those sounds and rhythms played a huge part in the soul that we were doing, or that I was listening to.

“There’s a certain kind of attitude that I took into the studio with me that I haven’t taken in on previous records where I wrote all the songs. With this album I was aware that I was almost putting my little feet into the footprints of some real soul giants.”

It is not easy to fill those shoes, Beverley stresses. “So my vocal interpretation and the approach to the production of every single track were crucial.

“I’m holding somebody else’s baby and I wanted to absolutely feed it, clothe it, get it right, and treat it with the respect it deserves,” she says.

The first single to be lifted from Soul UK will be Mama Used To Say, out on Monday.

“Junior’s Mama Used To Say, I can remember that as clear as a bell.

“Hearing that on radio and not realising that it had come from my own country, but loving it, loving it, loving it,” says Beverley.

“I remember seeing the video. I was thinking, ‘That kind of looks a bit like me with the thick glasses and everything’.

“It was so easy to sing; it had the sheen of a kind of late-Seventies Stevie Wonder track, and, you know, his high register, the way he sings.

“It has an energy that even then as a child I gravitated towards, but now, as an adult, it still has a fantastic energy, it’s still played on radio and it’s still so loved. It evokes the summertime for me; what better track to come straight out of the box with than Mama Used To Say.”

Tickets for November 18 cost £19.50 to £25 on 0844 854 2757. Doors open at 7pm