(Excerpt) Between Earth and Paradise
What follows is an excerpt from a profile of musician, surfer, crofter and fisherman Colin Macleod. It’s something I’ve worked on periodically over the past year and is due to be published in The Surfer’s Journal around August or September.
Writing it gave me the ideal excuse to make a couple of trips to one of my favourite places in the world, the Isle of Lewis, where Colin lives. He makes easy company and it was a great reminder of island time for a while, sharing waves, laughs and drams.
What began as a straight profile of Colin and an investigation into two aspects of his life that seem impossibly disparate - crofter and touring musician - became more a question of whether the perfect life really exists.
Check out Colin on Spotify or Instagram.
Excerpt from Between Earth and Paradise…
I wander over to the bus one evening, carrying a whisky bottle in the twilight. Sparky comes to meet me, trotting alongside like an escort. A beat-up truck I don’t recognize is parked askew on the grass, along with Colin’s van. Halfway up the bus steps I give a hesitant hello, suddenly uncertain in the gathering darkness. Colin is seated with beer in hand, but gives a muted greeting. Another man is between us, a ghillie with an earthy robustness and hard looking hands, leaning so that he is only half turned towards me. I’m not introduced. The conversation is punctuated by long periods of silence. We fixate on salmon jumping in the deep pool that splices sea and river. I imagine Colin and this man are used to the silence of each other’s company, and here I am, interloper, non-islander, trapped halfway up the steps of the bus. I sense the conflict, Colin’s embarrassment at the collision of two worlds. What’s he supposed to say? “This is Jamie, and he’s here to write about me.” There’s no room for hubris in this place, no weight in celebrity.
Eventually, Colin’s friend says I “might as well sit down”, warms a bit, then leaves shortly after. The inside of the bus is basic. A camping stove is used to heat water that comes from a white plastic container. There is a portable gas heater that does a job. A section at the back has been partitioned with thin wooden sheeting where some bedding materials are strewn. Sparky slinks by at some point before disappearing into the dark recess and not coming out again.
We sit watching moonlight glance on leaping fish. I can barely see Colin anymore, even though he’s just five feet away. It feels strikingly peaceful. It’s easy to see how Colin wrote an entire album here alone. Whether it’s the darkness or the place, or both, he opens up about the origins of his music career.
In the brazenness of youth he never considered that he wouldn’t make it, despite the million to one shot of emerging from this place. He was signed to Universal Publishing when he was just 20, part of a core group of new artists on the label that included Adele and were charged with high expectations. Except Colin never realized this, or recognized the pressures that might come with it. He moved to London overnight, staying for three years before coming home to Lewis. Burnt out by the scene, he didn’t pick up a guitar for two years. Ironically, this distance led to a more successful reiteration of his music career. Today he has a manager, an agent (who signed Black Sabbath and is still responsible for Led Zeppelin, Lenny Kravitz, and Rage Against the Machine), people who handle radio requests and TV commitments, and a social media team. Yet he’s still sitting in an old bus with his dog, watching salmon.
“I bet Lenny Kravitz isn’t doing this”, he says, laughing quietly.
Maybe he’s found something in the dark contemplation of this bus, watching the seasons and the life cycles of fish, learning the value in periodic isolation, or in silence. He’s tuned into the ebb and flow of nature in a way most of us never stop long enough to get close to.
He sits back and puts his hands behind his head, tilting it toward the blackness of the roof.
“I haven’t talked about any of that in years. In fact, I haven’t really thought about it.”
