Rob Steadman, drums on the first three

The audition that came with the bass player

When Oli Steadman answered the advert that Briggs and Ouin had put out for a bass player, he brought his younger brother along. Rob auditioned on drums and got the job, and the band was complete — assembled, in effect, from a single reply.

He was in from late 2005, before the first radio play, and stayed for the whole of the band’s first life: the self-released EPs, the signing to 4AD, three albums, seven or so Glastonburys, and the farewell tour that ended at the New Theatre in Oxford on 12 March 2017.

What the drums actually do in this band

Drumming in a group like this is a question of restraint, and the restraint is the skill. Stornoway’s songs are built on close vocal harmony and acoustic detail; a drummer who plays them the way a rock drummer would play them destroys the thing that makes them work.

So the parts sit back, mark the shape and get out of the way. Listen to how little the kit does through the first half of “Zorbing”, and how much difference it makes when it arrives. On Tales from Terra Firma, where several songs move through distinct sections across five or six minutes, the drums are the thing that tells a listener which section they are in.

He also took on the band’s appetite for improvised percussion. The instrument list across those records runs to cutlery, a bowed saw, an axe and gravel, and somebody had to make those land as rhythm rather than as a joke.

From around 2007 he sang backing vocals as well, making three of the four members singers.

The records he is on

All three albums of the first era: Beachcomber’s Windowsill in 2010, Tales from Terra Firma in 2013 and Bonxie in 2015, the last of them with Gil Norton producing. Add the three self-released EPs that came before the band had a label, the iTunes Festival and 4AD Session EPs, and the 2013 outtakes mini-album You Don’t Know Anything.

That is the entire catalogue up to the split, and it is a decade of work.

After 2017

When the band announced the end in October 2016, the statement said the winds of change had blown the four of them in different directions. That turned out to be literally true: when three of them drifted back together at Truck Festival and WOMAD in July 2022, the fourth did not.

Stornoway has not appointed a replacement member. Felix Higginbottom has drummed with the band since the reunion, and the formal line-up is now the trio of Briggs, Ouin and Oli Steadman. The first decade of recordings, though, is Rob Steadman’s work as much as anyone’s, and it is the decade most listeners still mean when they talk about this band.