Why singing in a Scottish accent makes Findlay Napier an 'outsider'

The National

29-04-2025

Findlay Napier doesn't just want you to listen to his new songs. He wants you to read them as well. 'It's maybe like reading the Internet Movie Database when you're watching a film,' says the Highland folk singer of his album and book project.
'The idea is to pull people in a bit. They can read up on the background of the songs.' At 154 pages, Napier's book, accompanying his new album Outsider, is more a pictorial catalogue – the songwriter's equivalent of a user's manual. 'It has a full introduction to the record, including biographies of all the 'cast and crew', and then it's got a couple of deep dive essays,' he says.
'Jen Anderson, who runs the record label The Bothy Society, told me she thought it might be interesting to know a bit more about the songwriting process. She asked me for a paragraph or two. So, 10,000 words later . . .' Not quite. The book, part of a new strand by The Bothy Society, is as heavy on photographs as it is on verbosity. There are even guitar tabs for the ardent followers who want to learn these folky tunes themselves.
'I've written a whole thing about recording from the point of view of the singer,' he says. 'I spent most of my youth reading things like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, so I find it hard to take myself too seriously. The back of the book is a songbook-style thing, words with the chords above them. Years ago I had a Christy Moore songbook that I was obsessed with, and The Scottish Folk Singer was the other one.
'I used to love the idea that you could just pick it up and play along and it had the chords in it. It never had the fancy chord shapes. So I put in all the shapes for the one teenager who might listen to it and realise what the chord is.' The Arran-based singer has also been inspired by the writing of comedian Stewart Lee, in his recent book The Life and Near Death of a Stand Up Comedian.
'He has annotations all the way through. Sometimes it's half a page of script and half a page of annotations. I thought that was really funny. I learned a lot from that book and that was what I wanted to go for.' In reality, Napier's book is in part a reaction to the transience of releasing music in the digital age, when even major act album releases come and go without ever being held, opened, read, smelled. Vinyl revival or not, in 2025 most new music is digital vapour.
Napier, from Grantown on Spey, shares a quip from Jen Anderson about missing having something to read in her hands that isn't her phone when she puts a new album on, opens a bottle and sits down by the fire. 'People don't buy as much physical product any more,' he says. 'So this is in lieu of the album cover. There are a lot of people listening on Spotify who don't pay for it but many do and we do get a tiny percentage of that.'
Spotify says it paid £7.7 billion to artists last year, but for artists such as Napier, whose strong work ethic and diversity (he also teaches and runs music workshops) keep him afloat, it's a pittance. 'I'm making about £15 a month,' he says. 'Back in the day I would have been selling about 15 CDs at gigs and a bunch of merchandise too. That paid the mortgage or filled the car up.'
As for the demise of CDs, streaming services aren't the only ones to blame. Another culprit has four wheels. 'Musicians have been talking about this since 2007,' said Napier. 'The car industry started phasing out CD players because everyone had iPods then. The CD was dead if not dying. And people are realising even the CDRs you might have backed stuff up on in the 90s have started delaminating.'
Whether accessed by ears or eyes, the lyrics on Napier's new record flesh out the title of the album. 'All the songs are about people who perceive themselves to be outsiders yet who perhaps aren't outsiders at all. There's even one about a piece of audio equipment, Amberola Blue, a wax cylinder recorder which people don't use now, of course.
'At some point everybody thinks they're an outsider. I know I have. I've made some choices. I sing in a Scottish accent. Immediately that makes you an outsider, not going for an American or Mid Atlantic accent. But when I heard Ian Dury singing in his Essex accent I was overwhelmed by how real it sounded.
"Folk like John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Nick Lowe have never been about trying to fit into boxes either. So when you look around, you realise the idea of being 'in' is bullshit. Nobody's on the inside. Everybody's fighting to get in. Maybe if we were all a bit happier being ourselves then the world would be a better place.'
Outsider is out now. Visit thebothysociety.com for Album Books. Findlay Napier is at Orkney Folk Festival, May 22; Irvine Folk Club, May 28; King Tuts, Glasgow, June 23; Ely Folk Festival July 13 and Birnham Arts Centre, Dunkeld, November 7.
findlaynapier.com