Testing the waters. A contemporary radio ballad using primary network interviews

In 2025 I signed up for a short course in Gaelic at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig at a basic level, the UHI campus on the Isle of Skye. I spent a week in an immersive environment together with other students interested in learning the language there, I’ll be returning there in July this year to continue my studies at the next level. My hope is to improve my own understanding of the language to broaden my knowledge of the songs, culture and ideas of the Gaelic speaking world, in part to engage with this project on a deeper than surface value. I will continue recording there, travelling to Uist as well.

My intention is to build upon an existing network of Gaelic speaking friends and peers that I’m lucky enough to have connected with already from the highlands and islands, reaching out to those interested in sharing or discussing parts of their heritage and traditions. I also hope to bring my guitar and voice to share tunes and songs where appropriate in an informal pub session context, I will possibly be recording these interactions on location with the consent of any musicians participating and collecting interviews alongside this.

I’ll also be making a trip to Ireland this Spring, researching our own family roots with my mother in a trip to Donegal. The intention is to find out more about the place our ancestors grew up, perhaps collecting some of the songs they might have been exposed to or known in their lifetime, and ideally learning and practicing some Irish Gaelic on the way. This is in part a recreational trip, but I will be taking my field recorder and hoping to collect stories and songs on the way that may find their way into the final work too.

Considering my interview with Ceitidh Mac, consolidated by what I have read about the folk revival and the second more recently commissioned radio ballads from the BBC; I anticipate spending a great deal of time collecting, organising and editing these interviews and songs, to construct a narrative with the intention of telling people’s stories from these areas, not my own. I plan to develop the final project over the course of a year with this in mind, leaving time to review and mix it before sending it to any contributors wherever possible, for their approval before release.

Connections between Gaelic speaking communities and the natural world is an exciting theme to explore for me, this came up in conversation with Josie Duncan almost unprompted when I asked how she might think differently about some things in Gaelic. However, I will be taking lessons from Ceitidh Mac’s approach to her radio ballad, allowing interviewees space to draw their own conclusions and then continuing to work around the direction they take the narrative. For example, Josie’s interview has now inspired creating work in the style of David de la Haye’s radio ballad for aquatic lifeforms, as seen above. So, I hope to record sounds in nature whilst visiting Lewis over the next year, beginning with soil recordings using adapted contact pickups in areas with heather growing. These could provide an interesting sonic texture within the context of a creative piece.

Musically, continuing to collaborate with my peers in Cosys Ex collective will add a lot of value towards making this a sustainable project for me, rather than attempting to do it all by myself, losing perspective on the composition elements and ending up with something very far removed from the inspiration. We could make our own arrangements of some of the songs and tunes collected to accompany the original recordings, also writing some of our own material in response to interviews and found sounds including location recordings of the natural world.

For developing this work, I will hope to involve members from the wider Cosys Ex collective across the UK. But I will at least begin with the Newcastle based core trio laying the foundations of arrangements, for practical reasons. Here is a recently released tune set from us including original material written by our fiddle player Merle Harbron (inspired by Allendale), alongside popular traditional tunes from the Isle of Man and Harris.

Photo (top) of Cosys Ex trio, featuring regular Newcastle based collaborators; Merle Harbron and Diji Solanke. Image credit: Ellen Dixon