Five hundred and fifty years ago next month, the king of Norway lost a deposit he had put down to settle a debt: more than a hundred wild, treeless islands in the sub-arctic North Sea. The Scottish king, James III, had wanted Rhenish florins, but he had to settle for Shetland instead.
The archipelago eventually became part of the UK and has since developed a diverse, distinctive musical culture. This weekend, at the annual Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, the Shetland 550 concerts will celebrate it, bringing together experimental composers, jazz performers, poets and players of traditional tunes. The series is co-curated by the award-winning fiddler Chris Stout, who was born in the three-mile-long Fair Isle (population: 68) before moving to the Mainland at eight (population: 18,765). “Although, even there, you’re still only ever three miles from the sea,” he says.
The Scottish influence on Shetland “was a very slow thing to happen”, he says; the English language didn’t make an impact until the late 18th century. “And when I say English, a very, very Scots tongue would have been used then.” To come from such a place often affords “an amazing feeling. It’s so small; you know your history so well because, for a large part of it, nobody moved on or out.” Its bare, craggy landscape is also very beautiful, with “mirrie dancers” (northern lights) through the winter and summer skies that never go dark. “But it’s not for the fainthearted,” he warns. “There’s nowhere to run and there’s nowhere to hide. If you try, you’ll probably fall off a cliff.”
The intensity of being a Shetlander is a factor, he believes, in its passionate music. This includes the 340-tune Shetland fiddle repertoire, strong on shimmering resonance and layers of tones, like Norwegian fiddle music, but with danceable rhythms from Scottish pipe tunes. “It’s quite a cacophony, yet there’s a space in it that allows you to lean into it and feel your own emotion. It says a lot about who we are.”
The popularity of fiddle music also shows how the islands absorb and adore influences from overseas. The fiddle was not indigenous, but introduced to islanders in the 18th century by Hanseatic sea-traders from northern Germany who played tunes to pass dreary hours on the waves. Through the centuries, Shetland has been an international trade hub for whaling, fishing and more recently oil, so ideas from other cultures have always travelled in. Nowadays, the National Trust, renewable energy, satellite-launch research (on Unst), tourism and online home working bring employment and curious outsiders.
Born from that mix, music “has been part of everyday life for Shetlanders for ever”, says Inge Thomson, who used to play accordion tunes every day growing up on Fair Isle with her lighthouse-keeper father. A seasoned collaborator with Karine Polwart and the folklore collective Modern Fairies, she loves “trowie tunes” – troll tunes – from the tiny island of Fetlar, comparing their short, repetitive passages to music from Scandinavia.
At Shetland 550, she will premiere her piece Myrkabrod Mynta, a work commissioned in 2019 by the KLF’s Bill Drummond as part of a series of compositions in the dead languages of Britain. It is written in Norn, the language spoken in Shetland before Scots and later English took hold, which is derived from Old Norse and still peppers Shetland dialect – the title translates as The Hill Mist Endeavours to Form Shape.
Using the old language with music to try to describe the land has been fascinating, Thomson says. She regularly experiments with electronics to try to replicate the sounds of Shetland. “Growing up on Fair Isle, I like the sound of static, the whirl of windmills, the shimmery top-end sound of shingle, the sub-bass of a stormy sea. Living in those islands, you can’t not hear the elements. They become musical, too.”
Other unique musicians have thrived on Shetland. They include the late “Peerie” (Little) Willie Johnson, a guitarist from the Yell who developed his own style of folk and jazz fusion, influenced by western swing and Gypsy tunes that he first heard on the radio, then taught himself by ear. Today, the jazz saxophonist Norman Willmore improvises around Shetland tunes in cross-genre collaborations – even trying to bend and shape his breaths to echo different techniques on string instruments.
He was born on a kitchen floor in Shetland and spent his childhood not liking Scottish folk tunes “at all”, leaving home at 18 to study jazz. Hundreds of miles away in Wales, he realised the uniqueness of his home culture; he would get into “massive jams” after school “with people of all generations, which I know now was unusual”. The biggest lesson he learned in early adulthood was that “music brings so much community to ordinary people” – something that is also strengthened by people who leave the islands to gather ideas, Stout adds, before they return.
There are other bands to shout about: the rockabilly group Isaac Webb Trio have signed to Wild Records in Los Angeles; the four-piece female close-harmony group Herkja recently reinvented Wicked Game as a spooky piece of subtle indie; and the beloved party band the Revellers cut up folk with the clamour of metal and the rough edges of punk.
Stout credits their shared, dramatic birthplace as something that has helped them all along. “If you know where you come from, you can have a [musical] idea, look out into the world with security, and it’s fantastic. That’s what Shetland has given so many of us: a solid platform to leap off from.”
Celtic Connections festival begins 20 January in Glasgow. Shetland-focused concerts are Norn Voices, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 22 January; and A Peerie Foy, Old Fruitmarket, 23 January. Both are filmed for the festival digital programme, available 26 January.
