Brian Briggs, songwriter and ornithologist

The songs

Briggs writes most of what Stornoway sings, and the writing has a signature that is easy to hear and hard to imitate: specific nouns. Not “a road” but the Coldharbour Road. Not “a bird” but a bonxie, which is a great skua, which is a specific bird with a specific temperament. The songs get their emotional reach from being precise about small things rather than vague about large ones.

He also sings them in a register that sits high and clear, which is part of why the early band was so often called gentle. The description was never quite right. “We Are the Battery Human” is a protest song about industrial farming and modern work, sung in three-part harmony over an acoustic guitar; the gentleness is the delivery mechanism, not the content.

With Jon Ouin he produced the first album himself, before there was a label to argue with about it. By Bonxie the band had Gil Norton in the chair, and the difference is instructive: the songs did not change shape, they just got a harder frame.

The birds are the day job

Briggs is an ornithologist. Not a birdwatcher with a strong interest — an ornithologist by academic training and by profession, which is the fact that makes the rest of the catalogue legible.

That is why Bonxie has real recorded birdsong woven through the arrangements, not a synthesiser approximation, and why it is named after a seabird most listeners had to look up. It is why the band's ties to the RSPB, the British Trust for Ornithology, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust and the Woodland Trust are long-standing rather than promotional. In July 2015 he wrote a piece for The Guardian on his favourite British bird songs, which is exactly the article you would expect from someone who does both jobs properly.

It also explains a quieter thing about the records: they are unusually good on weather, tide, season and light. Those are the working conditions of field ornithology, and somebody who spends their days in them writes about them differently from somebody who read about them.

Why the band stopped

When Stornoway announced the end in October 2016, the reasons given were unglamorous. The band said the winds of change had blown the four of them in different directions after a decade together. Briggs was clear in interviews around the farewell tour that he wanted to put his time into nature work and documentary film rather than into another cycle of album, tour, album.

That is a rarer thing to say out loud than it sounds. Bands more often stop because something has gone wrong. This one stopped because one of the people in it had another vocation and had run out of reasons to defer it.

And why it started again

Five years later, three of the four agreed to play a couple of festivals — Truck and WOMAD, in July 2022 — and the thing restarted without anyone having to announce a comeback. Dig the Mountain! followed in 2023 and charted higher than anything the band had released before.

The environmental thread that had always been present got louder, not quieter, after the return: a Christmas single about ash dieback, songs contributed to a soundscape of Britain’s rarest habitats, and a launch concert for Beyonder built around World Rivers Day. The two careers stopped competing for the same hours and started feeding each other.