Even Here, Even Now: Why it's crucial to recognise the impact of Scotland's island artists

Saoirse Ronan in the big screen adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s Shetland-set novel, The Outrun

Even Here, Even Now, a new “manifesto for change” written by artists living in Shetland, Orkney and the Outer Hebrides, argues that “it is crucial to recognise the impact of island artists”. If that impact is not recognised and supported, it says, “communities are at risk of losing their cultural richness”.

A striking recent example of this is the phenomenal success of Peat & Diesel, a band who have rapidly gone from Stornoway pubs to Glastonbury, Glasgow Barrowland, and selling out their own 10,000 capacity festival, Black Isle Belter. In January they will be the first band to play Glasgow’s 4,500-capacity Emirates Arena. And all of this can be traced back to a mere £2,000 investment in one Isle of Lewis musician almost two decades ago.

Back in the 1990s, Keith Morrison left the island where he had grown up to work in the south of England, having realised it was almost impossible to make a full-time living out of music in Lewis. “There was no-one anyone knew that could buy a house or raise a family on music,” he recalls, “unless you were teaching, but that was never my passion.”

Lots of young island artists have made similar decisions, often not returning until much later in life. Morrison, though, “lasted a year. I realised what was important to me. I don’t want to spend my life on a dual carriageway into London.”

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And so he returned home, and by 2007 had built up enough part-time music work to “take a running jump off a cliff” and quit his job as an IT technician. Thanks to a £1,000 Prince’s Trust grant he was able to buy a laptop, “my best money to income ratio ever”, and set up a recording studio in a spare bedroom in his parents’ house. After winning a further £1,000 award for his fledgling business, he moved Wee Studio, as he’d decided to call it, to a small industrial unit in town.

“That £2,000 over two years was make or break,” Morrison recalls. “It turned it from something you’re doing in your bedroom to a viable business. Before I knew it I was doing live sound for HebCelt, the Mod, and recording all week long.”

In 2017, Morrison turned Wee Studio into a record label, at the suggestion of singer-songwriter Colin Macleod. “The main motivation was to fill a financial gap,” he says. “No band can walk into a bank and go ‘can I have £10k to make an album?’” One of Wee Studio Records’ first signings was Peat & Diesel, a band made up of friends he had known for years. The result: an entirely homegrown success story, with a band whose lyrics, famously, are full of very specific Lewis references, from marag dhubh to the Cabarfeidh Hotel.

“We thought the local thing was going to be the biggest hindrance,” admits Morrison. “Who’s going to know a random hotel on the outskirts of Stornoway? But it turned into a puzzle for fans to figure out, a sort of lore. Even though people don’t know specifically what he’s talking about, everyone knows the type of person and place he’s talking about.”

What Peat & Diesel’s success demonstrates, above all, is the extraordinary potential of a distinctly island-based aesthetic, when combined with a sense of community and even quite modest financial support. While there is still a tendency for young, island-raised artists to leave to expand their horizons, those who stay – and, crucially, are supported to be creative – have a cultural confidence and a clear sense of identity. The Even Here, Even Now manifesto sums this up well: “The richness and wealth of creative talent within the island groups offers skills and heritage not found elsewhere.”

“For me, growing up in Lewis shaped every part of me, including how I see and how I respond to what I see,” says artist Christine Davidson, “and I appreciated that more having lived and studied in Glasgow.” Davidson, whose daughter Iona is a Gaelic singer and launches her debut EP at An Lanntair in Stornoway this month, describes Hebridean identity as “a kind of reassurance. It’s a firm knowledge of who you are and where you came from, which in the past manifested mainly in poetry and song.”

Shetland writer Chris Tait agrees. “When I come home I can feel the valley welcoming me. It’s a comfort, going back to the ruins I played in as a child. It’s the one place that I feel really safe.”

Unlike Davidson and Morrison, Tait has lived on the mainland for much of her adult life, but her Shetland identity is inseparable from her writing, which is deeply rooted in the islands’ history and language. “I think it was only after I left that I began to realise I had a distinct Shetland voice, and to properly begin to appreciate it and explore it,” she says. “I missed it when I was a student so that’s when I tapped into it. It came to be like treasure.”

This seems to be a recurring pattern in the lives of island-raised artists. It is the process of leaving that awakens them to how much they have been shaped by their island childhoods. Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, adapted for both stage and screen this year, is a recent example of the healing power of acknowledging and returning to your island roots.

“I would love it if artists felt they could actually live and make work here on the islands,” says Kathryn Gordon of Shetland Arts, who led on the creation of Even Here, Even Now. “If this can result in a wider recognition of the quality of island artists and creative practitioners that live here, it could help them to sustain themselves creatively without such a need for them to promote themselves - or even move - elsewhere, which we often find happening. Though neither of these things are inherently negative and we still want promotion of island-based artists beyond their shores, we also want to promote them here in their homelands and be able to help them sustain creative livelihoods.”

Find out more about the Even Here, Even Now manifesto and campaign via Shetland Arts, An Lanntair, Pier Arts Centre, or Taigh Chearsabhagh, or just search for #EvenHereEvenNow online.