While Hirta Songs is only ten years old, it is maybe not that well known to many as you won’t find the album on Bandcamp or streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, but there are some CD copies still available (on Discogs and Amazon).
Released in 2013 on Stone Tape Recordings, Hirta Songs was a collaboration between Alasdair Roberts and Scottish poet Robin Robertson. It was a concept album of sorts that was inspired by the people, landscape and history of the remote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda, the most remote part of the British Isles. The album featured special guests, including Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band on Hardanger fiddle and Corrina Hewat on harp.
For those who don’t know the history of St Kilda, it was continuously inhabited for two millennia or more, from the Bronze Age to the 20th century. In 1930, St Kilda was evacuated; illnesses brought by increased external contacts through tourism and the upheaval of Word War One are cited as the main reason for the evacuation.
According to the National Records of Scotland, at the start of 1930, the St Kilda community was in a precarious state. Only 36 islanders remained: thirteen men, ten women, eight girls and five boys. Only two resident families included more than two children, and among the adults, there were six widows and three or four widowers. They formed 10 households, leaving unoccupied 6 of the 16 cottages that they rented from the landowner.
A film by Chris Mylne, telling the story of St Kilda, from the accounts of early visitors through to its preservation by the National Trust for Scotland…
The seed of this album lies in Robertson’s 2007 visit to the islands; upon returning back in the Hebrides, he wrote two poems inspired by St Kilda, The Well of Youth and Leaving St Kilda, but he knew that the islands weren’t finished with him and, 6 years later, Hirta Songs was the result. Robin on the album:
“I travelled to St Kilda with my partner, Karin Altenberg. She has a doctorate in archaeology and heard about relatively recent excavations on the archipelago, which prompted her initial interest. She had done a lot of research, particularly into the Church of Scotland minister, Neil MacKenzie, and his young wife, Lizzie, who were sent to the islands in the 1830s and had decided to try and write a novel based on their story.
“Being an archaeologist, she needed first-hand experience of St Kilda, so we decided to spend a fortnight in the Outer Hebrides and to book a passage with Tim Pickering, on his boat 58 Degrees North, due to sail west from the Sound of Harris in early August 2007.
“That trip was an incredible – and very productive – experience for both of us. She wrote Island of Wings, a novel that was published in the UK, America and Canada and was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and I wrote a long poem Leaving St Kilda and then, years later, the words to these Hirta Songs.”
Those of you that know Alasdair Roberts will know his love for collaboration. In an interview, he told us:
“Yes, I like collaboration. At its best, something alchemical happens in collaboration where whatever elements the individuals involved bring to the process merge to create something exciting and surprising, something of which an individual working alone would not be capable. Well, it’s not a given that all Scottish musicians or writers are particularly interested in Scottish traditional music and culture, or Scottish folklore and history, or Scottish poetry and the Scottish oral tradition. But I am one of those Scottish musicians who is interested in those things, and Robin is one of those Scottish writers who is interested in those things too. So in some ways, it could be said that we have some similar artistic preoccupations or a shared, or at least overlapping, sensibility. Although I’m interested in those things and drawn to the past, I’m also concerned with the future and creating new work, work which is original but nevertheless rooted in and part of some kind of Scottish cultural continuum – and I believe that Robin is, at times, very interested in doing this too! So with that in mind, I felt that Robin and I could work well together – as we had done once before a few years ago when we wrote just one song collaboratively for Chemikal Underground’s Ballads Of The Book project, which teamed various Scottish writers with various Scottish musicians. As that process had borne fruit, and as through that process I had come to form a friendship with Robin in addition to our working partnership, I felt that if were to collaborate again in the future, it could yield some satisfying results.”
Below, you can hear an album track and two stripped-back demo tracks from the album. The album versions are quite magical, as you can hear on Leaving St Kilda; there was quite a cast involved:
They are Tom Crossley (drums, flute, voice), Rafe Fitzpatrick (fiddle, voice), Corrina Hewat (harp), Stevie Jones (upright bass), and Robin Williamson (Hardanger fiddle).
There was also a ‘congregation’ that included some of those above, as well as Luke Fowler, Lewis Island-native Mairi Morrison, Howie Reeve, Hanna Tuulikki and Ewan Walker.
Leaving St Kilda
Robin Robertson: This poem describes an anti-clockwise circumnavigation of Hirta, then Soay, followed by a clockwise turn around Boreray. It is largely a litany of place-names, in a mixture of Norse, Gaelic and Scots, written after my own leaving of St Kilda.
Demo: The Drum of Time
St Kildans were often stranded in BOreray by bad weather, which allowed time for reflection. After Christianity was established on St Kilda, all ‘paganism’ was proscribed, including music, dance and song; the pipes, fiddle and drum were suppressed. The ùrlar is the ground of the piobaireachd (pibroch): a slow movement which presents the first statement of the theme. The melody of the song is based on that of the Gaelic walking song ‘Hè Mandu.’
Demo: A Fall of Sleet
The islanders’ diet was based on seabirds, and this song describes St Kildans rowing the four miles to Boreray and the largest gannet colony in Britain. Gannets plummet-diver vertically from heights of up to 130 feet to catch fish. The song’s melody is based on that of the Gaelic song ‘Latha Inbhir Lòchaidh’ (The Battle of Inverlochy).
Extract from our Album Review: It’s worth spending a little time looking at the story of St. Kilda and even Alasdair admits that he has learnt a deal more since embarking on this project, but the songs and poetry do a great job of getting to the heart of the human history of the islands, whilst also offering a sense of the drama and the challenges of their imposing geography. At the heart of the record is a kind of mystic invocation of a forgotten life filled with simple needs and desires. There are superstitions in The White Handled Knife, the use of herbs and natural plants for medicine in Plain Of Spells, memories of a lifestyle suppressed by the church in The Drum Time and even the mythical promise of the Well Of Youth, delivered here as a short and poignant spoken poem. But there are also the birds and the need for food that they satisfy in A Fall Of Sleet or the tragedy of when the hunt goes wrong in Farwell To The Fowler. Then, of course, there is the final fate of the islanders and Exodus.
Balancing these human concerns is the dramatic long poem, read by Robin, his Leaving Of St. Kilda. This too has a mystical quality, almost like a litany in supplication to dramatic volcanic rocks thrust by incredible forces through the broiling ocean. It’s a dramatic piece made strangely beautiful by the improvised harp from Corrina Hewat, which somehow seems to invoke the jagged rock, churning sea and freewheeling birds in the magnificent remoteness that Robin describes.
Alasdair Roberts on the band
(extract from our 2013 interview)
Tom Crossley played drums and flute and did some singing. I’ve known Tom since about 1996 or so. We both moved to Glasgow at about the same time. Back then, he had just started his group International Airport (I think he’s currently in the middle of making the next International Airport album)… and was also playing in The Pastels (who have just put out a new album and, I believe, have just been touring in Europe). He played with me when I was still using the name Appendix Out, in the late nineties and early 2000s (including the second Appendix Out album ‘Daylight Saving’ which was recorded entirely in Tom’s flat in the west end of Glasgow!), and has played on a bunch of the recordings that have been released under my own name (but which nevertheless feature other musicians). I love Tom’s approach to playing the drums and to playing flute, and I love his singing voice… I sense his personality coming through in everything he does, every sound he generates by whatever means, and it’s a personality of which I am very fond. So I approached Tom to see whether he’d like to play on this Hirta Songs session.
I’ve been playing with Stevie Jones for about five or six years now. He’s also played with Arab Strap and the guys from those bands in their solo projects, among many other things, in his illustrious career. He also does a lot of theatre sound design work. When we play together, he mostly plays upright bass while I sing and play guitar… although, like Tom, he’s a great multi-instrumentalist who can also play piano and guitar and probably anything else that comes his way. He’s also a very great recording engineer – we mixed this session together on his studio set-up in Glasgow (while playing chess, Stevie invariably winning!) and, while he didn’t engineer the session, it was his suggestion that we record it at Chamber Studios in Edinburgh with Graeme Young at the desk. It was a studio that he’d enjoyed working in before with his old band El Hombre Trajeado, and it seems to be one of the few studios left which offers recording in the analogue domain. So we recorded the session to two-inch reel-to-reel tape, then bounced the session down to Protools for mixing and some overdubbing.
Rafe Fitzpatrick plays the fiddle on Hirta Songs, and we’ve been playing together for about three or four years now. He’s a Welshman living in Glasgow – he also played on and contributed a Welsh rap to the last record to come out under the name Alasdair Roberts & Friends, A Wonder Working Stone. I love Rafe’s touch on the fiddle – he has a great sensitivity and a very developed improvisatory sensibility also… I mean, even when not out-and-out improvising, as on this session.
Basically, how it worked was I let these fellows Stevie, Rafe and Tom know the chords and the structures of the songs; we rehearsed them in Glasgow for a couple of days, and the fellows came up with their own parts. Then we took them into the studio and recorded them in another couple of days. It was all pretty quick.
I had been a fan of the Incredible String Band for a while – one of the more important and interesting bands to emerge from Scotland in the latter half of the 20th century; all amazing musicians and, later, when it was the core of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, both gentlemen capable of writing some wonderful and beautiful songs! I like what Robin has gone on to do, for instance, on an album such as ‘The Iron Stone’ – seems like he’s had a serious immersion in ‘the mysteries of Britain’ – that Celtic lore, the ancient Fenian lays of Ulster, Alba and Dalriada and the Cymric wonder-tales for one thing (I suppose some things which interest me also, and things in which I am sure that Robin Robertson is also pretty well-versed), in his development towards full-flung bardism… but also seems just a very inquisitive and open-minded musician all-round, open to ideas and to working with different kinds of players.
I had approached Robin Williamson about the idea of touring together when I was working on a piece of puppet theatre with my friend Shane Connolly – the idea of us doing our ‘Galoshins’ Scottish folk play piece with Robin doing his bardic thing – singing, storytelling, guitar playing, harping. That didn’t happen, but nevertheless, I met with Robin one winter’s day in Cardiff when I was on tour and during our conversation, it emerged that he was a keen player of the Hardanger fiddle. Robin Robertson had previously expressed an interest in having some Hardanger fiddling on this session – as something capable of conjuring a sound which is somehow perhaps slightly similar to the drone and skirl of the Highland bagpipes, yet more capable of being easily integrated into the musical setting with which we were working… and also something which echoes the Norse history and connections of the islands of St Kilda. So anyway, it ended up that Robin Williamson recorded Hardanger fiddle for two of the songs in Cardiff and emailed them up to us in Glasgow!
I had worked with Corrina Hewat before – I did a gig along with her and Karine Polwart in London a few years ago. Robin Robertson had also expressed an interest in having some instrumental sections to the work to act as a sort of connective tissue for the songs. The tunes around which Corrina improvises are based on tunes published in a collection of songs from St Kilda. Again, she recorded these parts at home and sent them to us to add to the mix.
Live Dates
Alasdair Roberts has a solo tour scheduled for the Autumn.
- August 17th, Glasgow, UK
- September 22nd, Edinburgh, UK
- September 23rd, Queensferry, UK
- September 27th, London, UK
- September 28th, Ilkley, UK
- September 29th, Sheffield, UK
- September 30th, Todmorden, UK
- October 1st, Manchester, UK
More details on his live page here
Find out more about Robin Robertson and his poetry here: https://robinrobertson.co.uk/
Read more: Stories from St Kilda (National Records of Scotland)