The Stornoway tour history: the shows, the venues, the archive

How this Stornoway tour history was built

This Stornoway tour history is reconstructed, not transcribed. The Stornoway shows below survive because the band listed them on their own website at the time, and the list is a floor, not a total.

Stornoway kept their own tour listings for years, one page per show. Those pages went when the site did. What survives is an irregular record of those listing pages between 2010 and 2016, and the addresses of ninety-nine individual show pages.

Cross-referencing the two gives 65 shows with a date, a venue and a city taken directly from what the band published. The remaining thirty-four are shows whose pages existed but whose dates did not survive with them. They are listed separately below instead of being guessed at.

The shows and venues that mattered

30 October 2009, the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. The end of the band’s first UK tour, accompanied by the Oxford Millennium Orchestra, and the first time a non-classical group had played the building in its three and a half centuries. Two tracks from that night came out on a 7-inch with early copies of the debut album.

25 June 2011, the Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury. Their third Glastonbury in three years, opening the main stage on the Saturday. By 2024 they had played the festival seven times.

9 July 2011, Somerset House, London. A homecoming of sorts, with orchestral backing from the North Sea Radio Orchestra, preceded by a secret warm-up show announced only in April.

February 2013, Oxford Town Hall, two nights. The hometown shows of the Tales from Terra Firma tour.

8 December 2013, the Barbican, London. Closing the tour behind the You Don’t Know Anything mini-album.

2014, the Sheldonian again, two sold-out nights. With the Oxford Millennium Orchestra once more, five years after the first time, closing the PledgeMusic campaign that funded Bonxie.

27 February to 12 March 2017, the farewell tour. Eleven UK dates, opening in Gateshead and finishing at the New Theatre in Oxford. That was supposed to be the end.

July 2022, Truck Festival and WOMAD Charlton Park. It was not the end.

30 March 2026, the Royal Albert Hall. Sold out, and the night the band announced Beyonder and played songs from it.

What is missing from the archive, and why

Any Stornoway tour history built this way inherits the gaps of the thing it was built from, and the Stornoway shows that fall into those gaps are listed nowhere at all.

Three gaps are structural, not accidental. The years before 2010 are barely represented because the band were playing small rooms that nobody was listing. The years from 2014 to 2016 are almost entirely absent because the listings were rebuilt in a form that stored them in a way nothing outside the page could read — what survives from that period is a single line of text.

And everything since the 2022 reunion is outside the scope of what was recovered here, because it postdates the listings this archive was built from. Current dates are on the band’s own site.

A Stornoway tour history is never finished. If you were at a show that is not here, the contacts page explains what to send.