STORNOWAY - A LOT MORE GOING ON THAN THE AVERAGE FOLKY BAND

THEIR foundation was based on a lie, they inherited a “wanted” van from a fugitive stalker and their musical background ranges from Zulu singing to traditional choirboy.
Not your average young folky band you might say.



Stornoway may be one of the most intelligent bands in the UK (PhD in Ornithology, MA in Russian Lit, doctor, chemist), and claim to be “timid” but these guys are anything but dull.
Six years junior to founder members Brian Briggs and Jonathan Ouin, who met at a freshers’ fair at Oxford Uni, bassist Ollie Steadman conned his way into an audition.

He said: “There was an ad for a bassist for an Oxford band. I replied by lying about my age which felt really silly in retrospect. It was a lie that took two years to kind of fade out. It was a gradual realisation, I never came clean with the truth. It’s a topic we never discuss because it basically means my first encounter with them was based on a lie and they will never trust me again.”

A while later, his younger brother drummer Rob followed, wowing the band with his adept knowledge of their songs – he’d been secretly eavesdropping when Ollie practiced at home.
Stornoway, tipped as next big indie nu-folk band, play Mencap ‘s Little Noise Sessions at Islington’s Union Chapel alongside Ellie Goulding and Tinashe (Nov 20).
The acclaimed set of gigs running from Nov 15 – 20 also features Tom Jones, Hurts, The Kooks, Paolo Nutini and Example.
Ollie said: “We really like that they limit the gig to 85 decibels. Our whole philosophy is to play as close to unplugged as possible.”
The same calm reigns on tour: “Everyone’s really cordial, we’ve never put face paint on someone who’s sleeping or be noisy. It’s all very polite. We’re all basically timid and don’t want to anger each other because in the past we used to be a bit more crazy.”

Ollie and Rob moved to England from South Africa when Ollie was 15. They grew up listening to traditional Zulu songs, and Afrikaans, classical and US chart music.
So Ollie had a lot of catching up to do when he moved over.
He said: “My friends started saying what about Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd? I’d never heard music by any of those. Seven years later I’m still catching up.”

He owes his affection for bass to an Oxford phenomenon, which has entered local legend status: “Rob’s drum teacher suddenly said “I don’t like drums anymore, buy yourself a bass or don’t turn up to the next lesson”. He bought the bass and it was lying around at home so I decided to pick it up. Two years later I joined Stornoway.
“We discovered the teacher said the same to all kids having drum lessons at the time. There’s a brief generation of kids in all the big Oxford bands who have the same story about how they started bass.”

The boys can be spotted driving around Oxford in a dodgy-looking van, that has attracted the attention of the police: “We have this van that was given to us by this strange man who slightly stalked us and fled the country to go to Saudi Arabia. It’s got tiger seat covers and strange markings inside as in maybe he was a criminal and the van was a cover–up, an accessory to a crime and maybe he wanted to get rid of it.”
Naturally they’ve been pulled over and it was impounded by the police for some time.

So anymore plans to educate yourself Mr Steadman? “I just finished my chemistry degree and that was four years of wasted time because it was time not spent on music. That’s my attitude to life, if I’m awake and not touching an instrument then I feel really quite empty. I basically depend on music and nothing else. I crave music all the time.”
• Info and tickets for Mencap Little Noise Sessions from www.littlenoisesessions.org.uk