The Island Tapes

This DVD is dual format and should be playable on any machine supporting either PAL or NTSC format

The Island Tapes features the full soundtrack as an audio CD and all six "Island Tapes" films with soundtrack on the DVD, plus extra features including interviews, live concert footage and tour blog. 'The Island Tapes' was premiered at Celtic Connections Festival in January 2006

Since then "The Island Tapes" has toured Germany, played at film festivals in Estonia and Inverness, as well as performances in the United States, France and across the UK. "The Island Tapes" with recorded soundtrack has played as a feature in cinemas including the Glasgow Film Theatre and the project is now available as a combined CD-DVD release.

The combined talents of acclaimed composer and musician David Allison, musicians Allan Neave and Ian Melrose, and Lewis' very own Gaelic songstress Alyth McCormack, deliver a wonderfully produced and polished CD of tunes and songs inspired or brought to mind by viewing the six archive films selected to appear in 'The Island Tapes' performance.

The films are:
CROFTING IN SKYE, 1939
Prize-winning film at the sixth Scottish Amateur Film Festival, 1939. We see how crofters eik out a living from the land and the sea from their small holdings. There's salmon netting and the long walk into town to sell the fish. There's the life of a shepherd rescuing sheep from rocky crags....

HOLIDAYING IN HARRIS
Date: 1938
We visit Tarbert seeing some of the old houses. Cows are milked, lambs are fed, and clothes are washed in a burn. There's peat gathering and tweed making as the mood in the music changes...

HANDBA' AT KIRKWALL, ORKNEY,1939
Winner of the Scottish Prize, The Andrew Buchanan Cup at Scottish Amateur Film Festival, 1940. This was the last handba' festival to be held until the end of the second world war. The film starts off with scenes of Kirkwall in the snow. It all looks rather peaceful, but not for long...

ST. KILDA - BRITAIN'S LONELIEST ISLE
Date: 1923 / 1928
This film is made up from two separate movies about St Kilda, most of it a travelogue made in 1928 two years before the islanders made the painful decision to abandon their homes. So the film is an important record of how things were on this remote place forty miles west of Lewis.

DA MAKKIN O' A KESHIE
Date: 1932
Director: Jenny Brown
This is one of a number of films made by Jenny Brown and bought by the GPO Film Library in the 1930s. It's shows Gideon cutting corn and then working it into a keshie, a basket traditionally used in Shetland for carrying peat.

A NEW WAY TO A NEW WORLD Date: 1936
Date: 1936
This travelogue follows on from the St Kilda film which describes the experience of having to abandon the lonely Atlantic islands. Using archive audio clips of Scots who sought a new life in the United States, our soundtrack explores the theme of emigration " A New Way to a New World" is a fifteen minute film telling the story of a sea voyage from Glasgow to NewYork in the early thirties.