It’s a bit of a shock to reach the end of 2024 and realise I’ve not written a single song this year. The last song I managed to finish was This is the Start, released in January 2024 but recorded back in the summer of 2023. At the time it felt like a step towards something new but I don’t know now. It’d be a funny title for the last song I ever released if that was what it turned out to be.
I did learn a couple of lessons with This is the Start which I wish I’d learned earlier. The first was that if you call a song This is the Start then DJs will play it right at the start of their show. In this case, Roddy Hart and Tom Robinson both did, with Tom giving the song one of the loveliest, most enthusiastic endorsements I’ve had on BBC 6 Music. The other thing I learned – which really I knew already but was in denial about – was that pop songs tend to work best if they’re explicitly about being young. I now wish I’d spent less time, when I was younger, trying hard to sound older and cleverer when I would probably have been better off leaning into my youth and naivety, both of which might have been more relatable.
I suspect that part of the reason I haven’t written anything new since 2023 is that the other three songs I wrote that year – Lights Out, The Stages and Do Your Worst – felt like a lyrical cul-de-sac, overly melancholy reflections on mortality and identity that I apparently needed to get off my chest as I turned 50. If you can relate to that, great, and they’re all available as rough sketches on Bandcamp, but increasingly I was feeling like I should write about something else and also make music in a different way. Other than This is the Start though, I’ve still not figured out what that looks like over a year later.
It’s a bit ironic then that in 2023 and 2024 I’ve spent more time than ever in the company of other songwriters.
In July 2023 I began hosting a Songwriters Circle for An Lanntair as part of my job running the venue’s artist support programme. Every month I host a free gathering where Hebridean songwriters can share things they’ve been working on, often in an unfinished state, with no audience and no pressure to ‘perform’. We talk a lot about music we like and why we like it. In two years of doing this I’ve only shared one of my own songs a couple of times, and in each case it’s been something old. I keep hoping these get togethers will prompt me to write new music but they never do.
What they have done, though, is remind me that the songs we hear on the radio, YouTube or TikTok mostly aren’t getting that exposure because they’re better, melodically or lyrically, than the songs we mostly don’t hear. That exposure is the result of various elements coming together that often have nothing to do with the song itself. I’ve heard dozens of songs at our Songwriters Circle over the past couple of years that could get lots of national or international airplay in the right circumstances – the right producer, the right radio plugger, the right music video, or perhaps just the right singer, of the right age and background, wearing the right clothes, at the right moment in time.
Our circle has a few regulars in addition to the various people who drop in and out. Here they are with me below – (left to right) Matthew Newsome, Martin Flett, Michael Winder, Richy McKendrick and Iain Smith – at Martin’s album launch in October 2024. I want to write about each of them in turn, because I’m currently more excited about their music than my own.
The one I’ve worked with most is Martin Flett. Martin is a competitive powerlifter who began writing songs during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, has now written over 100, and just released his debut album at the age of 68. He’s an example to anyone who ever thought they’ve left it too late to be an artist.
Martin has a gift for writing songs that sound like they’ve been popular for 40 or 50 years, not just here but in the USA (one review described it as “the point where the Outer Hebrides meet Monument Valley”). When Martin plays them in Stornoway pubs, people are frequently shocked to realise that he wrote them because they sound so much like old favourites by Neil Young or Roy Orbison.
I mentored Martin through the artist support programme, which involved helping him to choose ten or 11 of his strongest songs to put on an album, deciding on a running order, and working on musical arrangements, all of which are among my favourite things to do. We recorded the album at Wee Studio with a band that included both established professional musicians like Colin Macleod (on drums) and studio first timers like Mary Suckling who Martin had heard singing in a pub.
The album, aptly titled When The Introverts Come Out, is on sale now via Martin’s website. The music evokes a different time and so does the sales pitch. You can’t actually stream the whole thing online – Martin refused to put it on Spotify and there isn’t even an embedded player on his website, just written descriptions of the songs – which means you have to buy it the old fashioned way, taking a gamble on 40 minutes of music based on a song you heard on the radio. Hardly anyone listens to music that way now so it’s been a hard sell but I admire him for being so uncompromising. Also he’s right. Spotify has been catastrophic for working musicians. Everybody knows this and just pretends it isn’t a problem. But if you claim to want to support music, then actually do it. Spend a tenner on Martin’s album instead of a pint and a half of lager.
Iain Smith is like a Hebridean Gordon McIntyre, with moments that remind me of Jarvis Cocker or Sparks (or Helen Love if you enjoy more obscure references). Or Billy Bragg when he (Billy, not Iain) is being funny rather than a self-righteous bore. Iain writes witty, observational songs with titles the Pet Shop Boys might come up with if they lived in the Isle of Lewis – The Last Gaelic Speaker on Earth, Crofter Girl and The Existentialist Islander. In an alternate universe – probably one in which he doesn’t live in Stornoway – he’s the frontman of the kind of beloved cult indie band that Melody Maker or the NME used to write long, adoring articles about. John Peel would have loved him. I hear that Peat and Diesel are currently wrestling with their difficult third album, having already said everything they have to say. I think they should hire Iain to write their songs instead.
I shouldn’t have favourites, but at the moment everything Michael Winder writes blows me away. Mike was raised in Carlisle like me, which may explain the bias. He gave me a CD a while ago of songs he’s recorded dating back to the 1980s and it’s like a journey through time. In less than an hour you go from something that could have been on Bowie’s Let’s Dance to something that could be by the KLF or the Shamen. Back in the 1980s he was part of the Manchester music scene. One of his friends, Ged Duffy, was the frontman of Stockholm Monsters and Mike is name-checked in Factory Fairytales, a memoir Ged recently published which has introductions by Peter Hook from New Order and Mani from the Stone Roses. Mike’s own band almost supported New Order but fell apart days before the gig.
Like Ged, Mike never quite had his moment in the spotlight, but moving to the Hebrides seems to have been transformative for his songwriting. The songs he’s writing now all hit a sweet spot between hilariously funny and emotionally raw. There’s one called Relix which is particularly beautiful: “The loch is so still here, a floating painting of faraway suns, but behind me the crash of the waves says the ocean will not stay still for anyone.” He has a much older song called Delirious Dreams that originally sounded like Furniture (of Brilliant Mind fame) but which he’s now reinvented as something much simpler and acoustic. I really want to play piano on it. Last month Mike recorded two songs at Wee Studio and invited all the Songwriters Circle regulars to come in for an hour each to contribute anything we wanted on the condition that he was allowed to be brutal with the edit. I’ve heard the results and they’re great. Mike mostly makes music for himself these days but I’m hoping to persuade him to release the recordings next year.
Richy McKendrick is completely different from all of the above. It’s odd hearing him sing each month with just an acoustic guitar because he has the kind of voice that’s better suited to belting out songs with a full band – think Liam Gallagher with a bit of Chris Cornell. Every time we do the Songwriters Circle I worry that the people in the cinema next door will be able to hear him even over the noise of the film. It’s a voice that suits either the swagger of Oasis or the existential howl of Soundgarden. Except that Richy doesn’t really do either of those things because he’s too humble and nice. Instead he writes songs that are deeply thoughtful and emotionally vulnerable, that frequently start with simple pop hooks before veering away from them into something more surprising and adventurous. It’s a strange combination of elements in some ways, and I think Richy may share my habit of writing counterintuitively rather than leaning into the most obvious use of whatever gifts we may have, just because it’s a more interesting challenge. Like Martin, Richy has been supported by An Lanntair’s artist mentoring programme, with Willie Campbell generously providing not just guidance but access to his home studio. Richy and Willie recently recorded a great new song which I’m hoping will see the light of day in 2025.
The fifth regular attendee, Matthew Newsome, is completely different again. He shares new songs less regularly than the others because 1. he’s a perfectionist and 2. he writes complex, ambitious prog rock material that takes him a long time to finish and is occasionally beyond his musical abilities as he readily admits (I should point out here that Matthew is a better musician than any of us, he just has a habit of making things harder for himself).
Matthew tends to play us fragments rather than anything finished, frequently stopping half way through to explain why a particular bit still needs more work, but the fragments are always interesting – they often remind me of David Sylvian – and it’s been fascinating to watch him trying to write in a simpler way, despite a strong instinct to do the opposite, so that he can share things with us on an acoustic guitar rather than just playing finished recordings to us on his phone like he did when he joined the group for the first time.
I relate to Matthew’s tendency to overthink things because I do that too, something I’ve written a lot about in this blog. My latest example is the title of a Bandcamp only compilation that I decided to put together last month, bringing together some of the music I’ve made under my own name from 2019 until now. Retreat! has several meanings, all obscure. The most obvious one is that it refers to the reverse chronological track-listing (beginning with This is the Start from 2023, ending with The Song That Says They’re Gone from 2019), an idea I borrowed from Countdown 1992-1983 by Pulp. Retreat! is also a reference to my gradual retreat from songwriting, as well as being a wry joke about how non-islanders tend to think of the Hebrides – as a ‘retreat’, a place of peace and quiet and tranquility rather than somewhere anyone actually lives, let alone making the kind of music I make. The final, most obscure reference point is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I say Retreat! in my head, it’s in the voice of King Arthur and his knights as they flee from French people throwing things at them from a castle. Except that in the film they say ‘Run away’ so nobody would ever make the connection.
Anyway, I was probably far too pleased with myself for coming up that title, given that I spent considerably more time thinking about it than thinking about how to promote Retreat!, which slipped out into the world without anyone noticing. My retreat from songwriting has happened in much the same way. I’m currently thinking more deeply about songwriting than I have in years, I’m just putting very little of that mental energy into actually being a songwriter or trying to promote myself as such.
I’ve been here before, so maybe I’ll feel differently in 2025. Laura clearly thinks so even if I don’t, because she bought me a new piece of tech for Christmas that will enable me to set up a home studio for the first time in my life. But in the meantime I’m happy with my circle and more interested in talking up their music than mine.
music and words by Andrew Eaton Lewis 