Jon Ouin, Stornoway's keyboards and strings

Where it started

Ouin and Brian Briggs met in their first week as students in Oxford in 2005 and bonded over a shared record collection, which is how a great many bands begin and how very few of them continue. This one continued. The pair wrote and played together long enough to conclude that they needed a rhythm section, put out an advert, and got the Steadman brothers.

He has been in every version of the band since: the four-piece that made three albums, the farewell tour, and the trio that came back in 2022.

The arrangements

If you want to know what Ouin does, listen to what is happening underneath the vocal on any Stornoway song and count the instruments. There will be more than you expect, and they will be doing different things.

His nominal instrument is keyboards. In practice he covers strings, harmonium, glockenspiel and whatever else a song turns out to want, which is what makes the band’s stated instrument list read like a junk shop inventory: trumpet, bowed saw, an axe used as percussion, cutlery, Welsh gravel. A four-piece can only sound like an orchestra if at least one member treats the studio as an instrument in itself.

The clearest demonstration is Tales from Terra Firma, where the songs run past five and six minutes and move through distinct movements. That is arrangement work, not songwriting alone. The same instinct shows in the band’s appetite for orchestral collaborators — the Oxford Millennium Orchestra at the Sheldonian, the North Sea Radio Orchestra at Somerset House, a Welsh male voice choir on a Christmas single, a scratch choir for the Beyonder launch.

He sings too. Stornoway’s harmony is a three-voice arrangement, and removing any one of the three would change the band’s sound more than swapping an instrument would.

Producing the debut

Before 4AD, the band produced themselves, and Beachcomber’s Windowsill credits Briggs and Ouin as producers. For a first album made without a label that is a considerable piece of work: the record is dense, cleanly balanced, and sounds nothing like a demo.

Ouin also wrote a weekly column for the national press through the band’s breakthrough festival season in 2009, which is an unusual line on a keyboard player’s CV and a useful contemporaneous record of what that summer was actually like from the inside.

About the name

It is Ouin — O, U, I, N. Written as Jon Ouin, occasionally Jonathan Ouin.

“Jonathan Quin”, with the U and the first vowel transposed, turns up across a surprising number of websites, including on earlier versions of this one. It is worth stating plainly because that is how errors of this kind survive: one page gets it wrong, the next page copies it, and after a decade the misspelling has more search results than the name.