‘If the album is a hit I’ll buy more sheep’

Colin Macleod on the lure of crofting on Lewis and gigs with legends Robert Plant and Van Morrison

JOHN NEIL MUNRO

WHEN singersongwriter Colin Macleod takes to the stage in front of tens of thousands of music lovers this year to support rock royalty like Roger Waters, Robert Plant and Van Morrison, he’ll be a world away from his day-to-day life on Lewis.

Long considered to be one of the most promising, original talents on the Scots music scene, Macleod these days balances his musical endeavours with another great passion: crofting, and caring for a flock of blackface and Cheviot sheep in his home village of Swordale.

This week sees the release of Bloodlines, Macleod’s debut album under his own name, and later in the summer things step up a gear on the concert front. Now under the wings of leading London agent Rod MacSween, Macleod is on the bill for Roger Waters’ gig in Hyde Park in July and is the sole support to Robert Plant and Van Morrison at their Blues Fest gigs in London and Dublin this October. Throw in a couple of major festivals and some concerts with Sheryl Crow and it’s plain that his profile is about to take off big time.

Macleod came to music late and only started writing his own material when he was 19. As a boy, he played in a hard-rock covers band battling to be heard in the pubs and dance halls of Stornoway on a Saturday night. His talents were always going to take him further afield, though, and after leaving the Nicolson Institute he flitted back and forth from the island to the mainland, including six months playing with bands in Glasgow and three years in London.

However, the lure of island life was always tempting him to return home. “I went to London with the purpose of making music, and I loved my time there, but I always knew I’d end up back on Lewis eventually. All the time I was trying to find a balance… a way to have a career in music and live on the island.”

Performing as The Boy Who Trapped the Sun, Macleod released the album Fireplace in 2010 to good reviews but disappointing sales. He still looks back on those years fondly, though. “It was a development deal with Universal that meant I got a little money, a new guitar and went to studios every day to effectively learn how to write songs. It was like a songwriting university, an amazing thing to get the opportunity to do. I also loved being in the studio and got to learn first-hand how to engineer and produce records.

“I got to go to some amazing places like Abbey Road and Olympic Studios. Had I not been tied so strongly to my home, I might have stayed in London forever.”

In 2011 he returned to Lewis permanently. He enjoys the isolation of island life, surfing, fly-fishing (he still occasionally works as a ghillie) and crofting. This is no passing affectation, he is deadly serious about caring for his flock of sheep, often out at dawn with his dog Sparky to check on the welfare of lambs, administer feed and medicines and mend fences.

“When I was younger, crofting wasn’t something I was really interested in. I used to try and sneak away on a Saturday before someone came around to ask me to help getting the sheep in! As I’ve gotten older it’s become more important to me. After I moved home I wanted to have my own croft and start living a simpler life… grow my own food, raise my own animals.

“It’s a difficult thing to explain really as it’s not quite a hobby but not really a job either, it’s deeper than that. It feels a little like a responsibility, a link to the past and something of an older way of life I want to cling onto and try and preserve. It’s a lifestyle that really appeals to me; the photos of the old boys with big hands working on their crofts, I like that.

“Lambing this year was a bit challenging – we had some late sheep and some casualties – but it seems to have been the same story across the board. It was a hard winter for the animals.

“I live beside my dad Callum and our crofts are connected. He has Cheviots and I have a flock of blackface but, because he works offshore and I travel often, we keep them all together so that there’s always someone home to look out for them. It works out well, it’s very rarely that neither of us is here… and when that happens we have nice neighbours that help out. It’s a communal thing really, everyone looks out for everyone else’s animals.

“I was very lucky to grow up on Lewis; there is so much support here. When you’re from a place that is really beautiful, you struggle to be anywhere else. There is a Gaelic phrase, ‘A Lewisman would be homesick in heaven,’ and it’s true. But growing up in Lewis, I was so far away from everything I never really thought you could make a career out of being a musician. I thought it was one or the other – musician or islander. The older I got, the more I realised the two are inseparable.”

LIFE on the island is also inspirational for songwriting, with many of the beautiful, wistful tracks on Bloodlines reflecting his new-found contentment with life and his rekindled interest in the island’s history, folklore and characters.

Macleod pays tribute to producer Ethan Johns for developing the “bigger”

I’m not looking for fame and fortune, so whatever comes my way – good or bad – is fine