THE singer who performed at the reopening of the Scottish Parliament has urged older Scots to back Yes parties this time around.

Sheena Wellington’s rendition of A Man’s A Man For A’ That was one of the defining moments of the opening ceremony in July 1999.

The Dundee woman’s rendition of the Robert Burns standard was ­televised live and broadcast around the world.

As the latest Holyrood session draws to an end, she’s spoken out about her concerns over older voters and media narratives around what constitutional change could mean for them.

Wellington, who supports independence, appeared on Independence Live’s TNT Show (The Nation Talks) this week where she recounted exchanges with her fellow over-70s who take much of their news from pro-Union newspapers.

“You try to tell them the facts about the pension, you try to tell them the facts about the export potential, the actual exports, and all the rest of it and they say, ‘aye, yeah, but that’s not what the paper says’,” she stated.

“We have to a lot of work on social media,” she said on strategies for maximising the Yes vote on May 6. “We have to talk to our friends and family.

“We really do have to try to ­counter the propaganda that is getting ­battered at us from all directions. I dinnae expect newspapers like the Daily Depressed to tell a story the right way anyway. It’s when you get organs of the media that should be telling the story correctly and they still manage to distort it. They still manage to twist it.”

Wellington, who was entered into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame in 2009, revealed how she’s been supporting shielding and vulnerable people in the Dundee area over the pandemic by taking in donations for the Dundee Thegither food bank. “This came as such a shock,” she said. “People weren’t really prepared.”

When asked how she’ll cast her votes, Wellington expressed some support for the Greens but said she’d be backing the SNP.

“There are some other pro-independence parties that have got ­policies I would agree with but I think I’ll just wait for them until we’ve got independence and then we’ll dae it,” she went on. “I’m not sure if we can risk it.”

In conversation with host John Drummond, she set out her attitude towards one of the biggest debates around voting in six weeks – where Yes advocates should place their cross in the list contest.

“There are places where they might not get the constituency so therefore voting SNP for your second vote is absolutely essential,” Wellington said. “There are places where the vote looks pretty solid and therefore you can afford to do something else but the great danger is splitting the independence vote.

“It’s one thing voting for the Greens or one of the other parties if everybody does it, it’s quite another if the vote splits four or five ways and then we get Murdo Fraser.”

Calling on independence-supporters to be “single-minded”, she went on to say that “I don’t care whether you like anybody or you don’t like anybody, if you like this one, or even if you dinnae like the person that you’re going out to vote for, that is not the point.

“We really need to get the majority. We need to get the vote out and we need to get an SNP majority.”

Wellington, a republican who says she’d like to get her 100th birthday telegram “from the president of the Scottish republic”, was speaking before Alex Salmond’s Alba Party launch on Friday.

That move takes the number of new pro-change parties running to four.

Commenting on the prospects for pro-Union parties, she said: “It must seem to them that the future is ­actually quite hopeless because it doesn’t look like they’ll be able to form a government after May. It must be depressing.”