‘Growing up on Uist was one of the biggest influences on what I do now with my music’
My connection with Uist is t hrough my mother Kate Ann, who is from North Uist. Our family has lived on the island for 300 years, so our roots go very deep. My mother moved to the mainland to work in the hotel trade and met my father, Gordon, in his hometown of Pitlochry when she, along with some girls from Uist, were working in a hotel there. After my parents married, they decided to move to Uist, where they ran Langass Lodge, an old shooting lodge that had been turned into a small hotel with five bedrooms. It belonged to the estate, but my parents ran it for several years.
So my formative years were spent growing up in the lodge. It was always quite a busy place and my strongest memories are just being surrounded by family, like cousins and grandparents, guests and the other visitors who came to stay. Although it was quite a few miles from anywhere, my sister and I never felt alone.
You don’t really question these things when you’re younger, but looking back we did have a lot of freedom. We’d be able to go play up in the hills. Now that I’m a mother of two girls, I realise that now, more than ever. I remember what my sister and I used to do and I think, ‘Oh my goodness, I’d never let them do that’. I guess it’s just maybe a different world we live in now – I’m not sure that it’s any more dangerous, but I guess there’s a sense of it not being quite as carefree perhaps. Or maybe it’s just because I’m a mother now.
But, looking back, it was certainly a carefree childhood. Like any children growing up in a rural area, we made our own fun. We spent a lot of time outdoors, whether it was up the hills in the heather or climbing on the standing stones or playing down on the beach with our cousins. You make your own adventures outside, which is a great thing for the imagination. Now we live near Inverness, I’m glad that my two girls have that aspect of rural life as well because to me it’s essential to connect to the landscape that surrounds you.
Growing up on Uist was one of the biggest influences on what I do now with my music. I try not to look back on my time on the island with rose-tinted spectacles because we had as much modern and mainstream music as we did traditional and Gaelic music. We weren’t in a bubble of traditional culture – we were