How Skerryvore turned a student side hustle into ten albums

The eight-piece ensemble is the unlikely result of two pairs of teenagers from very different Scottish backgrounds finding each other. What began with four teenagers would gradually expand into an eight-piece band, but the story starts with vocalist and guitarist Alec Dalglish.As a young teen raised in West Lothian, Dalglish was from a relatively ordinary family. While his dad had a guitar he would strum upon, alongside the occasional singing moment, for the most part it was a standard 80s Scottish upbringing. But Dalglish was different. Traditional music wasn't an absence from his life, exactly, but it wasn't its defining soundtrack either."I remember being in primary school and being the only boy who was in the choir at school," he laughs, now in his early forties. “I just remember the joy that you could get from singing. I just loved it.” As he entered his teens, that's when guitar came into his life. From here on, Dalglish knew he wanted music to be the future, and given he was known as the music kid at school, it was preordained: "That's all I really put my time and effort into. With the guitar and singing, I was like, I'd love to do this as a job."At 17, through playing music...