In that time they've also doubled their number. First, in 2006, fiddler Craig Espie and bassist Barry Caulfield joined to round out their ceilidh arsenal. Then, in 2010 – the same year they founded their own label, Tyree Records – Alan Scobie joined on keyboards, followed by Jodie Bremaneson filling the hole left after Caulfield in 2014. Finally, Scott Wood joined to give the Scottish trad element more presence with bagpipes and whistles.

The time between moving to Glasgow and now is a perfect example of something larger being at play. The fortuitous nature of the West family visiting the Hebrides, the four hitting it off and locking in, resulted in an Official Charts Number 1 Record award posted up behind Dalglish as I spoke with him.
Their success is the product of years of graft and an enormous body of work. When we discuss the band's forthcoming album, Dalglish isn't even sure which number it is.

When it came to making things official, a debut album was the first step. Released in 2005, West Coast Life drew on the traditional repertoire they'd already built up, but the band also felt it was time to try something original. "Which seems ridiculous to somebody who's in an indie band or whatever because of course, you're just going to write all your own songs," Daliglish chuckles at this disparity. "But when you're from our background, it was more of a novelty of being like somebody better have a go at writing a song."
Given he was the vocalist, that duty fell to Dalglish's feet. He had to find a way of writing a song that would fit into the world they found themselves in, while also reckoning with the idea of how do you actually write a song? “I wasn't a 14-year-old angsty teenager who always wrote poetry in his room. It was via actual necessity within a proper band.”

When he finally got a song down and heard it come together, Dalglish was elated. He phoned his bandmates to play them what he'd written. Their immediate support gave him the confidence to keep going, and his songwriting career was under way."I'm sure they would tell me if they didn't like something," he laughs. “But they've always been right from the start, really supportive of you know, the stuff that I've come forward with.”

Released on Skipinnish Records, West Coast Life offered the group a chance to properly start touring. While it was exclusively Scotland to begin with, it was a world away from bouncing around the party scene, playing to ceilidh crowds who expected a certain kind of evening versus performing shows and offering up your own material. It wasn't a clean break. For several years, the band had to balance the expectations of ceilidh crowds with the demands of touring and performing their own material. "We were a bit scared to fully go, 'Don't call us a ceilidh band anymore,'" Dalglish admits.

It's understandable. Their traditional roots had given them an audience, but those same roots threatened to define them. "From the very start, we've always tried to be the kind of band that gets to know our fans quite a lot," Dalglish says. “Nowadays, that's being online and talking to people, but then it was literally going out after the gigs and meeting people. We'd always go and meet fans, and a lot of our fans became friends. We've literally done it completely grassroots, old school, just bit by bit, word of mouth type thing.”

"Originally, it would have been people who loved the traditional thing, or who wanted to go to ceilidh or whatever, and then once we started to do our own ticketed gigs, they would come along because we won them over from years before by being this band," he says. “But it took a very long time before we got to the point where we developed a song that was known quite well across the whole of Scotland. It wasn't until we got to the point of writing like 'Take My Hand', which is probably still our biggest song at the moment, that we could see a rapid increase in the fan base.”

Giving that up and moving into new territory was a bold move. "We didn't want to lose that side of ourselves or lose the work that we had in the early days of being that kind of band," says Dalglish. “There was a back and forth a bit from the first album into the second one, where we eventually went, no, we're just going to say we're just a band. We don't need to be called a ceilidh band anymore.”

Skerryvore emerged from a Scottish traditional music scene that had already spent decades negotiating the line between preservation and reinvention. Bands from the 80s, such as Capercaillie, had already shown how Gaelic song and traditional instrumentation could sit alongside contemporary sounds, helping bring the music to new audiences. Skerryvore would find their own place in that ongoing conversation – not through some grand plan to modernise the tradition, but by following their instincts, moving beyond ceilidh gigs and discovering what happened when they began writing songs of their own.

It wouldn't be until 2023 that they'd properly get their flowers, with that chart-topping record, Tempus – the last release on their Tyree records, before signing with Cooking Vinyl in 2022. This was a "turning point", as Dalglish puts it. "It was a little bit fresher and poppier than what we'd done before," he admits. “I'm not saying we left any of the folk side or trad side of ourselves behind, but there was a little bit less of that influence, which perhaps gave us a bit more of a broader appeal than this niche sound that you have when you've got bagpipes in your band, which is about as niche a sound as you can get!”

Getting playlisted on BBC Radio 2 opened Skerryvore up to a wider audience, but in the back of their minds came the inevitable questioning of what direction they were heading in and what that meant for the fan base they'd diligently built up over 21 years.

"It was another scary moment. We care about the fans a lot. We're always worried that we might upset them because we've got such a good thing going," he admits. “But again, we've learned through the years that you've got to do what you think is the best for yourself, and that's all I'm ever trying to do.”

They've always been keenly aware that their appeal lies in this cultural blend. Their Scottish roots run deep, but they want to nurture those traditions without restricting themselves to being a purely traditional band, even if their evolution has drawn criticism from those who would prefer they stay closer to their roots.
"Eventually we learned to not really give a fuck because we're too old now to be bothered," he laughs. “We just do whatever we want.”

This mindset has carried them through nine albums. Now, their tenth, Beautiful Mistakes, marks another new dawn – perhaps their most expansive yet.
Beautiful Mistakes opens with the sonic equivalent of the morning fog clearing on a still sea, as the music swells, revealing a bountiful land. Hyperbolic, perhaps, but there's something ever so majestic about traditional Scottish instruments finding their cacophonous beauty harmonising with modern instrumentation. Skerryvore's charm shows no signs of stopping.