Follow the Hebridean psychedelic singer-songwriter, accompanied by his full-band, on a whirlwind tour of Scotland’s hidden gem venues… Findhorn’s Universal Hall being one of them
A strange, unpredictable, sardonic and yet deeply personal record, Island Family is the fifth and most recent album from Isle of Eigg dwelling electro-acoustic psych-pop wonder Pictish Trail, AKA Johnny Lynch. It offers his contrarian view of arcadia; a search for the euphoric in the bucolic, bound up in sometimes conflicting ideas and feelings around nature and environment, sincerity and artifice, escapism and belonging. It’s an album about how no man can remain an island, however hard he might try.
Pictish Trail’s critically acclaimed first pair of albums Secret Soundz Vols. 1 & 2 released in 2008 and 2013 respectively were gloriously eclectic slices of lo-fi folk-pop, later revived as a deluxe double-vinyl in 2014 by Moshi Moshi.
His third album Future Echoes was released to further critical acclaim in September 2016, and went on to be shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award by popular vote, before being re-issued by Fire Records in the summer of 2018. Thumb World was released on Fire Records in February 2020. Pictish Trail has toured the world both as a headliner in his own right, and as support for artists such as Belle & Sebastian, Sea Power, Slow Club and KT Tunstall.
He has performed at festivals including Glastonbury, Field Day, Bestival, Deer Shed, Celtic Connections, the Edinburgh Fringe and – for an extraordinary and surely record-breaking 19 consecutive years* (*if you count a remote livestreamed show in 2020) – Green Man in Wales, Pictish Trail’s psychedelic spiritual home-from-home.
“The psychedelic sound of the Inner Hebrides…absolutely love it!”
Lauren Laverne, BBC Radio 6Music
“Island Family is wild, rangy and dramatic, as befits its staggering landscapes and characters through Eigg’s darker history”
The Observer
“Endlessly inventive” ★★★★
Uncut