Skipinnish: Norrie MacIver on the 10 things that changed his life

1. Becoming a dad

I AM a father of four amazing young boys aged five and under.

We had our first one in 2018, another wee Norrie, and then Kenny John, Ruaraidh and Hughie, who is nine months old. Being a dad just changes your entire outlook on life.

Workwise it makes me want to succeed a lot more because I want to provide for them and make sure they have the best possible life. It’s changed my life for the best and opened me up to new things.

I have always been mature for my age but matured a lot more when I became a dad, that’s for sure. It’s a much busier lifestyle but it is one I love.

2. Meeting my wife

I MET my beautiful wife, Catriona, at Barra Live, a festival I have played at over the years which is sadly no longer going.

My wife and her parents are all from the Isle of Barra. It was actually my birthday when we got chatting and the rest is history, as they say.

We met a few times on the mainland afterwards as I was living in Glasgow and she lived in Fife.

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We met in 2012 and got married in 2017. We were both sure we wanted to have kids as soon as we could and to try and have them close together as well.

I come from a big family and we are all very close in age and all grew up together. I couldn’t do what I do without all of Catriona’s love and support.

3. Leaving home

I WAS 15 when I left Lewis to go to the National Centre for Excellence in Music in Plockton.

I was never homesick as I was very lucky that I had a great group of friends around me and we were all in the same position and living in the hostel. I also had some cousins near Plockton so I could go to them at weekends.

Going there started this whole journey for me in terms of my musical career but it is hard to think now that I have been away from home for more than half my life. It is not something I ever thought would happen but you fall in love and you start a family, and for work, I am in the best place I can be right now which is in the Central Belt.

Hopefully one day I will move back home to Lewis but right now I have the best of both worlds.

4. Runrig

MY entire inspiration for my musical career has been the band Runrig.

By the time I was about eight or nine I was singing and playing instruments at the Mòd festival and it was around then that I was given a Runrig VHS tape from one of their concerts.

I remember watching it and pretending to be Donnie Munro with an air guitar.

Later on, when I was about 18, I saw Runrig perform at HebCelt and this is when I realised that what I wanted to do for the rest of my life was perform music.

I was just about to start my first year in Glasgow at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) but I was kind of swithering. My dad was a joiner and I always wanted to be a joiner growing up.

5. Playing at HebCelt

THAT is my local festival in Lewis and I will never forget being able to be part of the festival for the first time.

The band I was in at the time, Bodega, played at the local art festival in Stornoway and in the space of a year, we were promoted from playing the smaller art centre to about 250 people to 5500 people.

HebCelt is great at promoting young talent.

I remember walking onto that stage in front of all my friends and family and the people I knew and grew up with. I think I was only 19 or 20 at that time so it was amazing to play that big a stage. I enjoyed it so much, I knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. 

The band had met in Plockton and most of us went down to Glasgow to the RSAMD and went on to win the Radio 2 Folk Awards which gave us a huge platform. Bodega stopped around 2010.

I then became a founding member of Manran and left after five years of that to join Skipinnish.

6. Joining Skipinnish

THAT was in 2016. I had played with them before but I was never an official member of the band. Then they asked me to be their new singer and I thought it was too good an offer to turn down.

To me, they are very much how Runrig was. Thankfully I said yes because eight years later I am still with them and it has been great.

I had been playing music with other bands before that and travelled all over the world but I can really connect to the songs that Angus (MacPhail) writes because we both come from the islands and he writes about what Scotland means to him.

7. Growing up in Carloway

ALTHOUGH I have not lived in Lewis for almost 20 years now, Carloway is and always will be my home. I get up there as much as I can and I feel like there has been no greater upbringing than being part of a community like Carloway. All my friends and family were there and it was a great place to be.

We are all Gaelic speakers and we all went through Gaelic Medium Education (GME).

To be part of a community like that is unbelievable. The support I get from folk back home is wonderful and they keep me grounded.

I love that I can take my boys and wife there. It is full of tradition, there are some great Gaelic singers and I just love the whole island life.

8. Gaelic

MY father and his whole family are all Gaelic speakers. It is their first language and when we went to school, I could not write or read English until I was eight years old, although I could speak it as my mother is from Dumfries and her first language is English. 

A lot of people see Gaelic as a step back and a disadvantage but it’s not. My friends and I have all gone on to do amazing things with Gaelic.

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I have travelled the world singing in Gaelic and during the Covid pandemic, I kept myself busy teaching Gaelic. At one point, I had 145 students from all over the world learning Gaelic online.

I have since done Gaelic singing lessons online and it has been a great experience to be able to share that.

I teach Gaelic in schools as well, at three schools in Falkirk, and I speak Gaelic to my boys every day.

My oldest, Norrie, sings a few Gaelic songs which is brilliant. We live in Fife which doesn’t offer GME but I just have to do my bit to keep it going for them.

9. My granny

THERE is no way I can talk about my life and how it has turned out without talking about my granny. She sadly died a few years ago when she was 92.

She was a registrar on the west side of Lewis so everyone knew my family because they came to register deaths, births and marriages with her. She was a huge supporter of what I did and my Gaelic.

After she died, we found this big brown envelope full of news clippings of me from when I was a very young boy. Any time I was in a local or national paper she cut it out and kept it. It was lovely to see that.

We would always sing Gaelic songs together when I was home. She was an amazing woman.

10. Irn-Bru

ANYONE who knows me, knows that I am a very fond lover of our other national drink, Irn-Bru.

On my very first tour of America in 2008, we had been out for three weeks and I was getting withdrawal symptoms from not being on the Irn Bru but on the very last weekend of the tour we were at a festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I saw an old man walking through the crowd holding a bottle.

We were moving through the site on a golf buggy with all our stuff but I jumped off when it was still moving to ask where he had got it. He told me there was a stall round the corner selling it. I went to find it and felt I was back in Scotland as the entire stall was selling Irn-Bru, Scotch pies with HP sauce and shortbread.

With no word of a lie that was where I went the next few days for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

When we were playing I told the crowd that if there was one thing they should do that day, it was to buy a bottle of this drink from Scotland and they would not regret it. The band were not so happy as I was supposed to promote our CD. That night I went back to get another bottle and the guy told me they had sold more than they ever had. For the rest of the weekend, I didn’t have to pay for any of my Irn-Bru and was given an

Irn-Bru t-shirt which I still have. Everyone used to joke that Irn-Bru would lower my sperm count but it hasn’t for me obviously.

Skipinnish top this year’s HebCelt bill on Thursday, July 18.