Bonxie— Stornoway's third album

Named after a seabird, and not gently

A bonxie is a great skua. It is a heavy, dark, piratical bird that makes its living by harassing other birds until they drop what they are carrying, and it will happily dive at a human who walks too near its nest. Naming a record after it is not a soft gesture, whatever the band’s reputation suggested.

The music matches. Gil Norton — the producer behind Doolittle, among other things — gives the album a hard, bright edge that the first two records do not have, and the songs are built to carry across a field rather than a room. “Get Low” and “Man On Wire” would have sounded out of place on the debut.

Paid for by the people who wanted it

In June 2014 the band opened a PledgeMusic campaign. It hit 222 per cent of its target within four days and finished at 513 per cent, which is a useful measure of how large the audience had quietly become in the four years since the first album.

The rewards were in character. Backers could buy a day out with the band, going zorbing — a callback to the first single — or birdwatching. The campaign closed with two sold-out nights at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra, five years to the season after the band had first played there. Gideon Mendel, the documentary photographer, shot the release imagery, and went on to work with the band again on soundtracks for his conservation exhibitions.

The birds are not a metaphor

Birdsong runs through the record as actual recorded material, not as an effect. That is a straightforward consequence of who wrote it: Briggs is an ornithologist by training and by trade, and the album treats bird sound as part of the arrangement rather than as ambience laid over the top. He wrote about his favourite British bird songs for The Guardian a few months after release.

It is also the point at which the band’s two lives stopped being separate things. The conservation work, the ties to the RSPB, the Woodland Trust, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust and the British Trust for Ornithology, the recycled and sustainably packaged releases — all of it is legible in this record in a way it had only been hinted at before.

Reception

The strongest press of the band’s career to that point. A Metacritic score of 85. Dave Simpson in The Guardian gave it five stars and called it “big music, which deserves the largest stage”. Paul Mardles in The Observer wrote that it showed the band’s future lay beyond jaunty folk-pop. Q, Mojo and Uncut all ran positive reviews; AllMusic gave four out of five.

It entered the chart at 20, and the band toured the UK from 21 April including two sold-out nights at Islington Assembly Hall. Eighteen months later they announced they were stopping — see the stories for how that went, and Dig the Mountain! for what happened after it.

Track listing