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While we’re not suggesting there’s anything very good about having seizures, sometimes they can produce some spectacular side-effects. Some critics believe, for instance, that several of Alice’s experiences in Wonderland were inspired by the symptons suffered by epileptic author Lewis Carroll, while great works by Van Gogh and Dostoevsky, not to mention the divine visions experienced by Joan of Arc, are also attributed to seizures.

For Gemma Williams, they were indirectly responsible for the birth of a musical alter-ego, Woodpecker Wooliams (a name which gives our good friend Florian Lunaire a bit of trouble in our latest podcast). With her life turned upside-down by the sudden attacks, she relocated to a cottage cut into a Devonshire hill and chanced upon a “shop hiring out harps for pennies”. Playing and singing seemed to help her health, and Woodpecker Wooliams was born.

Initially her music dwelt, quite naturally considering the nature of her chosen instrument, on folk, but the lo-fi, scattershot nature of her early compositions suggested Dame Darcy or early CocoRosie as much as Joanna Newsom. Now, however, she’s changed tack. Though still a one-woman outfit, her sound has expanded in terms of both instrumentation and lyrical scope, with new album “The Bird School Of Being Human” covering a whole gamut of issues from gender roles to passivity and violence, gloriously summed up in a recent press release as “a self-destructive hermaphrodite punching itself in the face”.

Lead single “Sparrow” showcases her new sound perfectly, all drum machines, digital claw marks and crazed keyboards within which Williams’ plaintive vocals comfortably nest. It’s a stormer, and if the rest of the album is as good then, once again, someone else’s suffering of seizures will have gifted the world a fine piece of art.