Stornoway on film, 2009 to now

The homemade era

Stornoway’s first videos were made the way everything else about the band was made in those years: by the people in it, with help from friends, for nothing.

The one that mattered was Zorbing. The single failed to chart. The video, made with a friend called Hilary O’Hare, passed a million views on YouTube in October 2012 and is, by a distance, the reason most people found this band at all. In 2009 a million views for an unsigned British act was not an ordinary number.

The three below are on the label’s channel or the band’s own, and open there rather than here: I Saw You Blink (4AD), Watching Birds (4AD), and Marco Polo, the first single from Beyonder.

I Saw You Blink and Watching Birds followed in the same spirit. After the band appeared on Later… with Jools Holland in November 2009 — the first unsigned act ever to do it — those homemade clips picked up tens of thousands of views in a matter of days.

The sessions

The session recordings are, in several cases, better than the studio versions. The End of the Movie recorded at Maida Vale for BBC Introducing is the clearest example: the room gives the three-part harmony space that the album take tightens.

The band also filmed an unplugged session for 4AD in August 2010 at the Rotunda, an abandoned doll’s house museum in Iffley Village on the edge of Oxford, and a short film about how the 4AD Session EP artwork was made — the only entry in the band’s own video listing that is not a performance.

That habit never went away. In April 2026 they filmed an acoustic session with Folk On Foot across the Gower Peninsula, and a live broadcast from Maida Vale for Radio 2 that same month put them among the handful of artists to have done both a Live Lounge and a Sofa Session.

After the return

The videos since the reunion have been more deliberate, and more clearly of a piece with everything else the band does. “It’s Not Up To You” premiered on 28 July 2023 inside a live interview with Robert Macfarlane, who writes about landscape and language for a living.

“Excelsior”, the Christmas single with a Welsh male voice choir, has a video assembled from fans filming themselves singing in front of ash trees around the country — the song is about ash dieback, so the footage is the argument.

“Marco Polo”, the first single from Beyonder, was directed by Susie Attwood, who has played violin with the band since 2010, and premiered on 22 April 2026 — Earth Day — in a question-and-answer session hosted by David Oakes.

Where to watch them

Not here. This page documents what exists, when it appeared and who made it; the films themselves live on the band’s own channels, linked from the header of every page on this site.

That is a deliberate limit. An archive that embedded everything would be a mirror of somebody else’s work rather than a record of it, and the record is the part that goes missing.