The songs
The Stornoway songs of the debut, track by track, with meanings
The Stornoway songs of the debut, eleven tracks with a page each. No lyrics — the words belong to the people who wrote them.
| No. | Song | Length | Released as |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Zorbing | 3:30 | Single |
| 02 | I Saw You Blink | 3:50 | Single |
| 03 | Fuel Up | 4:20 | Album track |
| 04 | The Coldharbour Road | 4:28 | Album track |
| 05 | Boats and Trains | 4:19 | Album track |
| 06 | We Are the Battery Human | 4:01 | Album track |
| 07 | Here Comes the Blackout...! | 2:03 | Album track |
| 08 | Watching Birds | 3:23 | Album track |
| 09 | On the Rocks | 4:49 | Album track |
| 10 | The End of the Movie | 4:20 | Album track |
| 11 | Long-Distance Lullaby | 4:17 | Album track |
Why the Stornoway songs from the debut get a page each
The eleven Stornoway songs on the debut each carry a page here, in the order the record plays them.
Because the band’s own website documented it that way. On the band’s own website, each track on Beachcomber’s Windowsill had its own page, numbered in album order, and those pages are the part of the old site that people linked to most.
Rebuilding that structure is the point of this section. The pages are not what they were — they carried the lyrics, and these do not — but the shape of the thing is preserved, one song at a time, in the order the record plays.
The singles
Two of the eleven came out as singles. Zorbing went first, self-released in July 2009 with a video the band made themselves, and failed to chart before being re-released properly the following year and reaching 74 in the UK, 11 in Belgium and 4 on the independent chart.
I Saw You Blink followed on 22 March 2010, the first Stornoway single to reach the UK top 150. It is also the song whose demo got a BBC Oxford presenter suspended in 2006 for playing an hour of the band’s material in one sitting.
A word about lyrics, and about meaning
These pages do not reproduce the words. Where a song has a documented origin, the Stornoway song meanings written here come from what the band said about it at the time rather than from a reading of the lyric, and where no such account exists the page says so instead of inventing a meaning. Stornoway song meanings are the one thing an archive should be slowest to assert.
The original song pages carried the full lyrics. These do not, and the omission is deliberate: the words are the property of the people who wrote them, and reproducing them is not this archive’s to do.
What these pages carry instead is everything around the song — the recording, the release, the arrangement, the live history, the place in the sequence. That is the part that gets lost when a band’s website comes down, and it is the part worth keeping.
The later records
The three albums that followed are covered on their own pages rather than track by track: Tales from Terra Firma, Bonxie and Dig the Mountain!, with Beyonder arriving on 25 September 2026.
Each of those pages carries the full track listing with running times, along with the recording and release detail.
FAQ
What was Stornoway’s first single?
“Zorbing”, self-released in July 2009. It failed to chart, but the homemade video passed a million views and is how most people found the band.
What is the best-known Stornoway song?
Zorbing, by some distance, with “I Saw You Blink” behind it. Both open the debut album and both were singles.
Do you publish the lyrics?
No. The words belong to the people who wrote them. These pages describe the songs, their recording and their place in the catalogue instead.
Which Stornoway song is about battery farming?
“We Are the Battery Human”, track six on the debut. It is a protest song delivered in three-part harmony, which is a fair description of the band’s method generally.
Are all the songs here from the same album?
At the moment yes — the eleven tracks of Beachcomber’s Windowsill, which is the set the band’s own site documented song by song. The later records are covered on their album pages.