A heartlifting song in dismal time
For Robert Robertson, singer with the Glasgow-based Highland band Tide Lines, singing from home is becoming a habit. Here he performs a solo acoustic version of Innocent and Beautiful, the band’s single from their new album, Eye of the Storm, while battened down against the virus in his family home in Fort William.
Just at the start of the lockdown, however, he was still in his flat in Glasgow’s Partick when he went live on Facebook, singing from the album and taking requests. His sofa session raised some £6500 for the homeless charity Simon Community Scotland.
“It’s all very well us complaining about having to selfisolate,” he says, “but homeless people don’t have anywhere to self-isolate, so I just wanted to help in some way.”
Robertson, a 2013 Mòd gold medallist, also features in a brief but engaging video in which, mindful of the lockdown balcony serenades emanating from the continent, he starts singing a Gaelic song out his flat window. Immediately, further down the street, a tenement window opens and a woman starts singing the song back to him, the Partick Gaeltacht interacting with gusto.
Robertson’s Scotsman Session choice, Innocent and Beautiful, is a suitably heartlifting number for these dismal times.
He says: “We were originally going to choose another song to release as a single but we changed it because we thought Innocent and Beautiful was the one that would cheer people up.”
Tide Lines’ exuberant guitar and drum-driven folkrock has won them a wide fol
lowing, with sell-out gigs at Barrowland and elsewhere. Their debut single, Far Side of the World, entered the UK download charts less than 24 hours after the band’s launch in 2016.
The songs on Eye of the Storm are largely written by Robertson and in English, although a powerful rendering of a Gaelic classic, Cànan nan Gàidheal, acknowledges their Highland roots.