writing – music and words by Andrew Eaton Lewis

Rupachitta Robertson interviews a different Uig artist each month for community newspaper Uig News. A few weeks ago it was me, and we talked for about an hour about lots of different things, most of which the newspaper didn’t have room for. With Rupa’s permission I’m posting a longer version here, since it’s a good introduction to the thinking behind the new album, AIRD.

“I grew up in Cumbria. Living on the border of things has shaped me in a lot of ways. I had an English father and a Scottish mother. I was interested in music and creativity from when I was very young and started writing and recording songs when I was about 14. Hundreds, mostly terrible. There was a vibrant music scene in the North of England in the 1980s that had a big formative influence on me. Electronic pop type stuff. Human League, Pet Shop Boys, ABC, New Order and Factory Records. But I was also drawn to Scotland.

“I knew I wanted to make music but for a long time I didn’t really know how to do it. Then, when I was in my late twenties, I met Hamish Brown. We both had loads of unreleased home recorded music, and we joined forces as Swimmer One. Our friend Laura (later my wife) later joined the line-up and we were active for about ten years. We released two albums, The Regional Variations and Dead Orchestras, played some festivals, had a song in a film, and worked on a big theatre show with many well known Scottish musicians. Hamish has mastered my new album, AIRD.

“I know that in Lewis a lot of islanders go off to the mainland, do something and then feel drawn back by the pull of home and community. That’s not something I ever felt about Carlisle. But I was drawn to Lewis, for reasons that I didn’t fully understand until I got here. I later released that Aird Uig reminds me of a two particular places in my childhood.

“The first, Hadrian’s camp, was near the village where I grew up, an ex-military base with a history going back thousands of years which was at that point abandoned. It felt like a huge space, with abandoned buildings, overgrown places where you could make dens, and roads where there was no traffic. You could ride your bike and explore and I loved having that freedom as a kid to roam around. It felt like a really safe place and that’s the kind of freedom that I feel my children have here. To be able to roam safely in a place that’s a bit unusual and has these really interesting old buildings and structures. There’s a strange sort of paradox in an ex-military base being a safe place.

“It makes me really happy seeing my kids collecting stones and shells which end up on our doorstep here. It also reminds me of summer holidays in Arran when I was a child. We would roam free, climb mountains, walk beaches and every time we went back to Carlisle I’d have a big box full of stones and shells, treasures that I’d found. I’ve tried to recreate some of what I liked most about my childhood here for my kids. And so I have that sense of coming home that I never felt about Carlisle.

“Derek Jarman was one of my favourite filmmakers. He famously created a home called Prospect Cottage and a garden next to a nuclear power station at Dungeness. Aird makes me think of Prospect Cottage and one of my new songs is named after that. There are a couple of really nice gardens here in Aird. It’s a hard place to grow anything, the weather is challenging, but gardening in a place like this feels like a good metaphor for building a life for yourself, and struggle in general.

“When we first moved up here in 2018, friends in the city thought we’d gone a bit mad. Why were we going to this place on the edge of the world that seems so far away from all the things in the city that people think they need? During lockdown the decision seemed a lot less mad. The opening song on this album, Everyone Is Here, is about how Lewis is only ‘the edge of the world’ from a certain perspective. For the Vikings it was a key central point between Norway and Ireland and Iceland.

“I’ve never thought of myself as a poet. The words I write are intended to be for pieces of music and I wouldn’t regard them as poems. I’m aware that there is a Gaelic tradition of village bards, people who document the life of a community as a kind of social history and preserve the traditions and the stories of their community. I’m an incomer, I don’t speak Gaelic, I’ve only been here eight years, so I don’t regard myself as qualified to call myself a village bard, but I am writing about village life. The song You Wouldn’t Want Me As Your Village Bard expresses my conflict around that. I don’t feel the entitlement to speak for my community, they can all speak for themselves. A lot of them are artists and express themselves in all kinds of interesting ways.

“Like me, a lot of the people in Aird Uig didn’t grow up here. It feels like a new place in some ways. Half of it is an old crofting village with its own long history, but half of it dates from the 1970s when people started making homes in the former RAF radar station.

“I’m very interested in the complexity of people’s motives for coming to live in a place like Aird. The album opens with the lines:

Some of us came to raise kids,
Some of us came to raise the dead
Some of us came to find ourselves
Some of us kept ourselves well hid.

“In a way, all of these things are me. I came here to raise kids. To raise the dead is a reference to wanting to revive old traditions, to reconnect with nature, to have a different kind of relationship with the world, to figure out who we are.

“Àird is Gaelic for ‘headland, height or promontory’. There are a few Airds in Scotland, high places that are vantage points. Aird Uig has been used as a vantage point for centuries, by the Vikings, by the RAF in the Second World War to look out for German ships, and then it was used to look out for the Russians. For me this place has become a sort of vantage point to look out on the world. I take my dog for walks up the hill. I look out at the ocean over the cliffs and I get a sense of clarity. It’s the place I go to think about my relationship with the world and all the political turmoil and all the scary stuff that’s happening in the world, as well as the scary stuff in my own life.

“The closing track, The Kids Are All That Matters, is about parental anxiety, about wanting my kids to be safe, not really wanting them to leave the village but knowing that they are starting to notice the outside world as a place that they’d really like to go to.

“When you become a teenager the things you aspire to, the freedoms you want, are different. They’re the things that cities offer and that’s happening for my children now, but at a time when the world seems really scary. We’ve got something that’s starting to look like fascism in America. We’ve got climate breakdown. The future looks genuinely terrifying in many ways.

“In 2021 I made an album at Wee Studio Records with the lovely Keith Morrison. I was new to the island, I still felt a bit like a tourist, but I was writing songs about the island, about crofting. I called the album Tourism as a kind of acknowledgement that I wasn’t quite a Hebridean musician yet. I was conscious of wanting to be respectful and not presumptuous. I’ve now been here for eight years so I’m becoming a little bit less cautious about that. I am making music that is of the island now, perhaps. I think I probably am a Hebridean artist at this point.”

Earlier this year my friend Mairi Gillies made an exhibition for An Lanntair that’s been stuck in my head for a while now. I wrote a song inspired by it, The Big Fire.

The exhibition was called Uaim an Òir and was inspired by an old story about a piper who goes into a cave and disappears. There are various versions of this story; the common theme is that, in Gaelic culture, caves represent a gateway to the ‘otherworld’. They were also somewhere musicians could secretly play an instrument that had been forbidden by church elders. In other words, they’re places of creativity, magic and rebellion. What’s not to like?

On a basic, instinctive level I loved Uaim an Òir. When it comes to art I’m generally much more excited about things that transform a whole space than things in frames, and this show felt like it was growing organically out of the walls. I also love caves – their look, texture and sound. In fact I’d just written a song about sea caves when I went to Mairi’s show.

If I’m honest though I also felt at an emotional distance from it. In the exhibition notes Mairi describes Uaim an Òir as “a meditation on how we are born and shaped by the landscapes we are rooted to, the places and spaces we inhabit, and the history and culture embedded in these”, from a Gaelic perspective. But I’ve always felt a bit rootless. I’m half English but repelled by most ideas of ‘Englishness’ (and, like a lot of people, disturbed by the current ‘patriotic’ revival of the English flag). I’m also half Scottish, but didn’t grow up in Scotland so don’t feel I can claim that part of my identity as my ‘roots’, especially when Scotland often seems to define itself by its difference from Englishness (ie: half of me). And Gaelic identity is a different thing from Scottish identity anyway. So I felt drawn to this exhibition in the same way that I’m drawn to Alastair McIntosh’s Soil & Soul (a book I love with which it shares some themes) but also on the outside of it.

It bothers me that this bothered me. Why should a show about Gaelic culture, by a Gaelic artist, have to pander to a non-Gael? And who wants to live in a monoculture where everyone can identify with everything anyway? I don’t, and there’s plenty of art that I love precisely because it’s a window into a world that’s unlike my own. But sometimes the small differences, the small experiences of outsider-dom, can register most strongly. To pick a random comparison, I love Rye Lane, a comedy about two Black twentysomething Londoners falling in love on a day-long caper around the city. The film is a fantastically vivid picture of a specific place and time and culture, and while I’m at a distance from it on numerous levels – I’m not Black, I’m not in my twenties, and I’ve never lived in London or the kinds of social circles the characters live in – this didn’t bother me at all. If anything I liked it all the more for that, and besides there are plenty of things in it – love, most obviously – that anyone can connect with emotionally. But for some reason my distance from Uaim an Òir does bother me.

I think I know what’s going on here. The first time I recorded an album in the Isle of Lewis I made a point of calling it Tourism. I wanted to acknowledge my outsider status and emphasise that, as an incomer, I wasn’t presuming to speak for an island and its culture. Seven years into Lewis life, though, the ‘tourist’ thing feels like a cop out. I’m a Hebridean artist now and I feel like I need to work out what that means and where I belong. And the fact is that Mairi, who didn’t grow up in Lewis either, is doing this better than me. She has embraced and explored Gaelic culture to the point where, despite being an incomer, she is increasingly regarded as a standard bearer for it. I, meanwhile, am still fumbling around, likening myself to a ‘tourist’, and feeling like I might need to do better.

Uaim an Òir was still on my mind when I wrote You Wouldn’t Want Me As Your Village Bard. The title refers to the old Gaelic tradition of village bard or village poet (bàrd-bhaile), who would – as I understand it – write in a traditional style about their community, preserving that tradition in the process. I certainly don’t feel qualified to do that, but I am the only songwriter in my village, so in that sense I am quite literally the village bard. Then again, maybe anyone with a social media account is a village bard now, representing their community in public in some way? So the song is me wondering how a specific old Gaelic tradition fits into the modern world, and what grants someone the right to speak for their community anyway. Is it a gift for storytelling, a deep understanding of the culture, the length of time you’ve lived there, or just who has the loudest voice? Maybe the real village bards are the local gossips who find power and status in knowing everyone’s business?

As a slightly solitary creature I’m nervous about writing in this way, and in two minds about whether to pursue it further, particularly given that I don’t speak Gaelic. I’ve heard it said that unless you speak Gaelic you will never fully understand Lewis and I’m sympathetic to this view (it’s true, for example, of the title of Mairi’s exhibition, a Gaelic play on words whose meaning will be completely lost on a non-Gaelic speaker). I feel on safer ground just singing about the landscape, like on The Stream, a song written in the early days of Covid-19 lockdown as I walked my dog up the hill above our village and realised that this small patch of land was mostly enough for me and that I had no desire to travel anywhere anyway (a position of incredible luck and privilege, I know, particularly back then).

I can also write about my children, who are Hebridean in a way that I may never be. I was fully formed by the time I got here but they are absorbing the culture without even thinking about it. The Kids Are All that Matters is a song about trying to keep your children safe at an increasingly frightening time in history, and about the vast gulf between the peace of a Hebridean village and a wider world of war, climate emergency, and authoritarianism. The connecting thread here is Donald Trump, the Isle of Lewis’s most infamous son. It’s very strange watching the impact he is having on the world from his old family home. My children’s friends include relatives of Trump – not that they have any contact with him – and there are ‘Shame On You, Donald John’ banners in windows across the island. In hindsight I wonder if I should have made that connection explicit in the song rather than just writing an oblique reference to ‘the mad men and their money’. Maybe that’s another song, or maybe that’s a job for a different kind of village bard.