The Stornoway band members: the line-up from Briggs to the trio

The Stornoway band members, assembled by advert

The first Stornoway band members were two students in Oxford who liked the same records. Brian Briggs and Jon Ouin met during their first week at university in 2005, kept playing together after the point at which most such arrangements quietly stop, and reached the obvious conclusion that two people with guitars are not a band.

So they advertised for a bass player. One person replied: Oli Steadman, then seventeen. His younger brother Rob came along to audition on drums and got the job, which meant that the line-up behind three albums and a decade of touring was assembled out of exactly one response to one advert.

The four-piece line-up, 2006 to 2017

That foursome — Briggs on vocals and guitar, Ouin on keyboards and anything with strings, Oli on bass, Rob on drums, with three of the four singing — is the band most people mean by Stornoway. It made Beachcomber’s Windowsill, Tales from Terra Firma and Bonxie, played Glastonbury repeatedly, and finished at the New Theatre in Oxford on 12 March 2017.

What kept it interesting was that nobody stayed in their lane. The records are full of instruments a four-piece has no business carrying: trumpet, glockenspiel, bowed saw, an axe used as percussion, cutlery, and on at least one occasion Welsh gravel. That is a band of multi-instrumentalists rather than a rhythm section with a singer in front of it.

The trio, 2022 onward

The Stornoway line-up that came back is three of the original four. That makes the current Stornoway band members a smaller group than the one most people picture, and the difference is audible on the records made since.

When Briggs, Ouin and Oli Steadman agreed to play Truck Festival and WOMAD Charlton Park in July 2022, it was three of the four. Rob did not come back, and the band has not replaced him as a member so much as opened the drum stool to a regular collaborator: Felix Higginbottom has held it since.

The formal line-up is therefore a trio, and has been for every release since — Dig the Mountain!, the Christmas single with Côr Meibion Gwalia, Best of Unplucked, and Beyonder.

The people on stage with them

The touring Stornoway line-up has always been larger than the Stornoway band members on paper, and several of the musicians below have been with the band longer than some of its records.

Stornoway live has never been just the members. Adam Briggs, Brian’s brother, has played trumpet and percussion with the band since 2006. Thomas Hodgson joined on trumpet in 2013 and returned in 2024. Susie Attwood has played violin since 2010 and also directs the band’s videos, including the one for “Marco Polo”. Charlotte Glasson came in on violin after the reunion, and Rahul Satija played violin in the earlier years.

Guests have gone well beyond that: the Oxford Millennium Orchestra at the Sheldonian, the North Sea Radio Orchestra at Somerset House, Yijia Tu since the reunion, Fyfe Dangerfield and Sam Lee on the comeback tour, a Welsh male voice choir on a Christmas single about ash dieback, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in Durban in 2026.

What Briggs and the others do when the band stops

The five-year gap is easier to understand once you know that none of them was waiting around. Briggs is an ornithologist by training and by profession, and said plainly at the time of the split that he wanted to spend his time on nature work rather than on a touring schedule.

Oli Steadman runs several things at once: the band’s Conservation Conversations podcast, the daily folk-recording project 365 Days of Folk, the South African-influenced group Count Drachma, and a music-technology company founded with the band’s touring trumpet player.

The conservation work is not a sideline either. The band are informally tied to BBOWT, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, the RSPB, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, the British Trust for Ornithology and the Woodland Trust, and have released their music on recycled materials in sustainable packaging since the reissues.