Oli Steadman, the reply to the advert

The one reply

Briggs and Ouin advertised for a bass player in Oxford and got exactly one response. It came from Oli Steadman, born in Johannesburg in November 1987 and then still a teenager, who brought his younger brother Rob along to audition on drums. Both got in, and a band that might have stayed two people with guitars became a four-piece.

It is worth pausing on how close that was to not happening. Every record on the shelf rests on one person seeing a notice and writing back.

The playing

Steadman’s bass does something specific in this band: it holds the floor while everything above it changes instrument. On songs where the arrangement swaps guitar for trumpet for glockenspiel for bowed saw, the bass is what keeps the piece recognisable as a song rather than an exercise.

He also sings, and has since the start, which matters more here than in most rhythm sections. Stornoway’s sound is built on three voices, not one with decoration, and that particular blend is why the a cappella passages work.

Since 2015 he has been endorsed by Aria, touring with a pair of their basses and recording with a Fender Jazz he has strung with flatwounds since 2009 — a small detail that explains a good deal about the warm, unclicky bass tone across the later records.

The South African thread

In 2013 Steadman founded Count Drachma, a group built to bring the isicathamiya and mbaqanga traditions of South Africa to British audiences. It played festivals from WOMAD to Wood to Festival N°6, co-headlined London’s Southbank Centre with the Mahotella Queens, and had a documentary filmed about it by The Guardian’s education channel.

Thirteen years later that thread arrives in Stornoway proper: the band’s 2026 collaboration with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, recorded in Durban and funded through the Music Export Growth Scheme, alongside the Maskandi artists Qadasi & Maqhinga. Projects that look like side interests sometimes turn out to be the long way round to the main road.

365 Days of Folk

In 2024 Steadman started recording a traditional song every day, a spin-off of Jon Boden’s A Folk Song a Day. He completed the year and kept going: by April 2026 the count had passed 460, and the project now appears at major folk events in its own right, including the Manchester Folk Festival.

It is the same instinct visible everywhere else in his work — take a tradition, learn it properly, and put it in front of an audience that has not met it.

Everything else

He hosts the band’s Conservation Conversations podcast, whose guests have included Angeline Morrison, Bella Hardy, Rachel Sermanni, Jim Moray, David Ford, Chris Leslie, Yijia Tu and Arthur Jeffes. He is a patron of Sam Lee’s Singing With Nightingales and raises money for conservation projects including work around the Great North Wood.

In 2014 he founded the music-technology company Tigmus with Thomas Hodgson, the band’s touring trumpet player. He has produced for other artists, worked as composer and musical director at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, and managed a number of acts.

And it was Steadman who, at WOMAD in 2022, took the other two to watch Yijia Tu sing — the introduction that put her on Dig the Mountain! and on the tour that followed.