The Scottish Banner speaks to Skerryvore’s Alec Dalglish
Scotland’s Skerryvore are bringing their reinvented traditional Scottish sounds and high energy performances to audiences across the world. Lead singer Alec Dalglish took time to speak to the Scottish Banner about the bands 20th anniversary celebrations, the importance of live performance and Scottish traditional music.
For those that do not know can we begin by you telling us what Skerryvore means?
AD: Skerryvore is a famous lighthouse, which is a few miles off the coast of the Isle of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Tiree is where two of our band members are from, the brothers Daniel and Martin Gillespie. The band started with the four of us, the two Gillespie brothers, me and Fraser West the drummer. And that is kind of what we’re known as, two of us are from Livingston in West Lothian and two from Tiree. Tiree is a very beautiful and interesting place to be from, and Livingston’s not quite as interesting a place to be from, so we are kind of known as being a Tiree band.
To be honest we had been a band kind of casually, and doing it for fun for a while and then we started to get a bit more serious and we were getting ready to release our first album We literally needed to call ourselves something because we were going to have an album and we really honestly couldn’t think of anything until another friend of ours suggested, why not Skerryvore? It is a really majestic and interesting name that really links us to Tiree. So, we went ahead and chose Skerryvore, and that has worked well for us. However few people really know what we’re saying when we say it, which is part of the mystic of the name.
Skerryvore has won 3 times Scotland’s Live Act of the Year award. For those who have yet to see the band live what can they expect at your shows?
AD: Our music’s kind of a fusion of a few things. We obviously have the traditional Scottish element that’s kind of there in the sense that we do some sets which are completely instrumental with bagpipes, fiddles, accordions and whistles and stuff like that, which is fused with a more contemporary pop/rock sound.
At the same time, our songs are essentially a kind of pop or rock sound which incorporate an element of the Scottish sound through them as well. These are the kinds of things we try to fuse together in a sort of stylistic sense and our live shows certainly showcase that.
Skerryvore have grown from their early, four-piece, ceilidh band origins and now perform as an eight-piece outfit. Can you tell us how traditional Scottish music has played a part in the Skerryvore story?
AD: That’s how we started. We were a ceilidh band to begin with, so we played all music from the repertoire of traditional music. We didn’t even write our own tunes at that point and that definitely sort of forged what we’re like as a band.
We always said that we as a band would keep our roots and we might do things that are more pop sounding because we like pop music, but we will always have that West Coast of Scotland ceilidh band as part of our DNA. That’s what we really are and how we started, and that traditional sound is definitely really important to us.
The band’s song Take My Hand was featured during the finale of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in 2024, how did that make you feel to have your music incorporated into one of Scotland’s most iconic live events?
AD: We were incredibly proud and as the songwriter, I was just chuffed to bits that our music was being put on such a huge platform. It’s a really big deal, people all over the world that know something about Scotland seem to know that there’s this big thing called the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. It is
such an event and such a spectacle, and it attracts people from all over the world. So, we were really proud to have our music featured and be a part of such a incredible Scottish global production.
Trad music is incredibly popular today around the world. What is it about incorporating traditional instruments and rhythms to your modern sound that you feel has found so much appeal?
AD: I kind of wonder that sometimes myself, because it does seem to be true that our Scottish traditional music and Irish traditional music, really does capture people. I think if someone brought certain types of other native music it just wouldn’t be quite as popular. Like English folk music, for example, is not necessarily anywhere near as popular as the Irish and Scottish stuff is. I think partly it is the rhythmic sound about Celtic music because it was all originally to be danced to. It’s literally in the rhythm of the tune for you to be able to dance to it, which is always appealing to humans, I suppose.
And on a really specific musical sense, it’s almost always pentatonic the scale made-up with five notes, and really that that sort of scale is ingrained into people. It is a really primal sort of scale and most of our tunes are made up of that, so it is really easily musically accessible to most people’s ears. Traditional songs also tell a great story and there’s loads of songs that tell a really interesting history about Scotland and Ireland. All the horrible things that have happened to people, people can understand the heartache through the music.
2025 is the bands 20th anniversary and you have a special concert lined up at Floors Castle in the Scottish Borders. This will be your biggest show to date, can you tell us more about this milestone performance?
AD: We are really excited for it. We did a similar thing, a special a one-off event for our 10th anniversary and that really sort of shocked us as to how big it gets and it kind of grew arms and legs. We thought we were going to manage to get a couple of thousand people there and ended up with five or six thousand. We are really excited to do something like that again and make it even bigger. We have grown through the years and to be able to make this happen is special for us. I think we are also just kind of shocked that the time has gone by so quickly and I can’t believe that we’re all old enough to have been in a band for 20 years as adults-it doesn’t seem quite right! We are incredibly grateful to have fans that have supported us for that long and kept the whole thing going. And it’s an exciting prospect to do our own show to that scale and on home ground.
The early days of Skerryvore had the band working out whether the west coast ferries could actually deliver them from one island to another in time for the next gig. Today the band travel across the UK and Europe and are regular visitors to North America and are now returning to Australia. How important is touring for the band and how much do you enjoy connecting with your international fans?
AD: The touring part is a major part of us as a band. We have made albums, but we really are mostly a touring band. That is where we feel like we can get things across the best, we have always really struggled, especially stylistically, with what we do to capture that energy on an album. So, I think it’s really important for us to be a touring band and get to connect with Scottish communities all over the world and it is amazing just how homesick Scottish people get abroad and how proud they are to be a part of our shows.
Our congratulations to you Alec as you won Composer of the Year at the recent MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards. What does it mean to you to be recognised at Scotland’s most prestigious night of traditional music calendar?
AD: I was delighted and surprised, to be honest. I am so used to being part of the band, and that’s usually where all the success is, it’s all about Skerryvore. It’s not usually about individuals, so it was nice to have something that was in my own name that I’d been given an award for. The Scots Trad Music Awards is a really special night that is important to the Scottish music community. It’s not really just like a wee token, it’s kind of a big deal for those who are part of it, I have always written our music by myself, and I am chuffed to have been recognised in this way.
Skerryvore are touring Australia now and the US in March & April. For full details see: www.skerryvore.com/tour
Main photo: Skerryvore at Floors Castle. Photo: Kevin Kerr.