Bringing it all back home
Colin Macleod has returned to his own name and to his native Lewis, where reconnecting with island life and lore have inspired a different musical direction, finds Fiona Shepherd
Acouple of years ago, The Boy Who Trapped The Sun, purveyor of the confessional 2010 album, Fireplace, became the more elusive/official C. Macleod. But now he prefers to go for full disclosure as Colin Macleod, crofting native of the Isle of Lewis, who wrote his forthcoming album, Bloodlines, on the green gamekeeper’s bus which is parked on the machair every summer to keep watch over the salmon run.
“I can’t drag myself away from it. I’ll probably be back this summer. It’s such a good spot,” he says. Having lived in London during his suntrapping days, Macleod has lately come to an even greater appreciation of Lewis and its history, which has found musical expression in a set of songs steeped in the storytelling tradition of his home and delivered as engaging indie folk-flavoured productions.
“When I made the last album it was all about me,” he says. “That’s fine, that’s what a lot of people write about. But I got really into people like Bruce Springsteen writing almost his entire life about his hometown and its characters. It really appealed to me to not sing about myself, but to sing about things I’ve heard, and the obvious thing was home – it seemed silly to be writing about it from afar, so I made the plan to move back.”
But a couple of months off from music turned into a couple of years as Macleod returned to civilian life, married and got a proper island job.
“I’d never really found a way to directly connect how being at home inspired me and to apply it to my music – being a crofter and having sheep, and hanging out with all these old guys and being in amongst it all. In my head, it always seemed like the two worlds – indie music and stories from home – couldn’t meet, but then it started happening naturally, and it feels like I’ve stuck a hole in an oil well and the floodgates opened. People were telling me all these incredible, outrageous stories that were so great.”
The pacey, appropriately testifying Shake the Walls was inspired by tales of the Lewis revival of the late 1940s and early 1950s, while Homesick Daughter concerns the mass bereavement on Lewis following the Iolaire disaster on New Year’s Day 1919, when a boat bringing soldiers home from the First World War sank within sight of Stornoway harbour. Some 205 men of the estimated 284 on board died. “It was so raw that, all this time on, it still casts a shadow,” says Macleod. “There was only one village on the whole of Lewis which didn’t lose any men.”
He adds: “Most of the stories on the album, I’ve not particularly researched them, it’s just what I’ve been told, warts and all.”
Macleod’s principle source for these stories inspired a song himself.
“Most of the stories on the album, I’ve not researched, it’s what I’ve been told”
Old Fire is a thoughtful tribute to his elderly uncle, who died 18 months ago. “He was as strong as an ox and used to go poaching and get in trouble all the time. He had massive hands. All the old guys up here have over-developed hands and feet from working. We don’t have that anymore because we’re not shovelling shingle on the beach, filling tractor loads on our own. That was the last generation who didn’t have things to make their lives easier.”
But in digging deep into Hebridean heritage, Macleod hasn’t entirely written himself out of the picture. His recent single Kicks In is inspired by his own island experiences as a teenager discovering music and the restless pull of the wider world.
“We were at that age and generation that were rebelling against the traditional scene, so our thing was we wanted to play in bands and make a racket,” he says. “Everyone had a little shed or barn behind their house and