Ready to Play: 10 years of Black Bay Studio on the Isle of Lewis

“I always wanted to have a residential studio by the sea – it’s the dream.”

When Pete Fletcher told his friends in Nottingham of his plans to open a residential recording studio at the edge of the world, aka the Isle of Lewis, they thought he was mad. It also caused some mild confusion amongst some locals on the island in the Outer Hebrides. “I remember speaking to someone about the studio, they said, ‘Oh, another one! I heard that Paul McCartney is building a studio... I'm pretty sure that I was Paul, and the story had gotten a little out of hand on the grapevine,” Pete tells us.

As well as causing a bit of excitement for others on the island, it was a bit of a sticky subject at first. “While everyone we met when we moved up was friendly and welcoming, there was some resistance," Pete explains, talking about his plans to convert a former crab sorting facility into Black Bay Studio, which has now been operating on the island for a decade. "It was completely understandable, having an outsider setting up shop in a place that really belongs to people that have lived and worked here for many generations.

“I think a lot of people moving up have big plans and little respect for the island way of life. Really, I just wanted to make records, and keep out of anyone else’s business,” he tells us. “I hope we've been good for the island, creating new life and opportunities. I hope that people locally are glad we're here now. It's an incredible place to live and work and we owe so much to the island and the people here.”

Having spent a very privileged long weekend at Black Bay myself, I can confirm that it is an incredible place. But so too was the journey there, watching the landscape slowly change the further away from Edinburgh and closer to the studio you got, the thrill as the digital radio signal started to twitch as the landscape became more rugged and unpredictable. Once off the ferry and on the island, the drive from Stornoway to the studio on Great Bernera offers up occasional signs of human life – the odd solitary house nestled in the picturesque landscape, the famous Callanish stone circle, the Forage at Croft 22 honesty box shed packed with treats, the countless psychedelic sheep, marked by human hands for future plans.

“I think the journey's part of it as well,” Pete agrees. “I do think it’s like a pilgrimage of leaving everything behind, you know, losing your phone signal and then arriving... A pilgrimage makes it feel like it's something you might want to do,” he laughs across a plentiful dining table spread – deep pots of beautifully spiced homemade curry, homemade flatbreads, chutneys and free-flowing rice.

Image courtesy of Black Bay Studio.

“When Pete was interviewing me, he asked, ‘you can cook, right?' And I was like, ‘yeah!’, even though I definitely couldn’t cook,” laughs in-house engineer Cal Roden, whose dad, it turns out, is a professional chef. “As soon as I got the job, I was like, ‘Eh Dad, I need you to help sort me out with some recipes cause I’m gubbed.'”

Pete admits that he hadn’t anticipated cooking being such a big part of the job. “We're kind of running a hotel, really, as much as a studio,” he notes. Over the course of a week alongside curry night, artists can also expect evening meals themed around burgers, sausage and mash, pasta, risotto – “the classics,” Pete says. Or there'll be nights that centre around ‘granny soup’, a recipe Pete learned on the island. After our meal tonight we're treated to chilled affogatos – Kahlua coffee liqueur with ice cream, lads!

Watching Pete and Cal prepare dinner offers a little insight into what a band can expect during a stay. They've not long finished tidying the studio, wrapping cables and turning over bedrooms following the departure of a band earlier that day, and the two buzz around each other in the kitchen, I note, like a married couple. “I did think that when I was telling you, ‘Oh yeah, mind when we were really into those ice creams,'” laughs Cal.

The very nature of the residential studio means that in the four years since Cal joined Pete, the pair have become very close. On arrival there’s a friendliness and familiarity from them (and Pete's family dog Cosmo, aka the studio's official artist liaison) that feels like catching up with old pals, when prior to our arrival, we’d only spoken very briefly over email.

“That's a really big part of it,” says Pete, “that people feel comfortable and can relax, enjoy the time, and have all the things they need, which they definitely didn't when we first opened; I didn't have beds or lampshades or curtains. It was like an airbed and bring a sleeping bag, because we were completely and utterly broke by the time the studio opened.”

Pete continues: “When we bought the building, I thought, ‘I can move my gear in, then I'll get a band in and then bit by bit I can build, get some money and then start doing it up, but then quickly discovered that I couldn't have anyone sleep here legally unless it was heated, and then if it was heated, I had to meet building regs, it was basically impossible. So I had to scale up our plans massively. We got some European funding, and some HIE (Highlands & Islands Enterprise) funding. I sold the previous studio we were at, our house and, you know, everything else.”

Black Bay Studio is the very definition of a risk that paid off. The residential studio can now comfortably sleep up to ten people, with the bedrooms bordering the creative heart of the operation – the control room and their exceptional live room. While no recording takes place during our visit, it's hard to put into words how calm the live room feels, as all outside noise dissipates like a huge sigh of relief. A mismatch of rugs break up its wooden floorboards, an upright lamp with a tasselled shade stands tall in one corner of the room, while the opposite corner boasts a huge window framing the bay outside where fishermen dive daily for scallops while others empty baskets of crabs and lobster. Enter at the right time of day and you're met with the most gorgeous light, stretching its warmth along the ceiling's wooden beams and out across an impressive array of instruments and amps collected over a decade.

Image: Tallah Brash.

“I think it’s quite different here to a lot of studios. I like to have lots of stuff ready to play, and that's what the space is for,” Pete says. “I hate going to a studio and everything's in cupboards and you have to work out what you're going to bring out, put it on a trolley and, you know, get it wired up.” At Black Bay, you could arrive and be playing a gorgeous guitar, grand piano, analogue organ, congas, glockenspiel and more mere moments into your stay.

Since starting out ten years ago, Black Bay Studio has welcomed countless artists through its doors, from the first artist to record here, Jessica Danz, to more recently Teenage Fanclub, Brògeal, Silver Moth, Hen Hoose, Scott C. Park, Kathryn Joseph, Lucia & The Best Boys and Penelope Isles. It’s a space for those looking to write and work on new material away from everyday distractions; a place to create an entire album from scratch; somewhere to transform demos into an artist's next magnum opus.

“I think of it as a time to harvest fruit,” Pete says of the recording process, and alongside Cal, the pair are there to help artists get the best from their crop. “Making a record is quite an indulgence for a musician,” Pete says. “It should be the time that you're able to actually just really be an artist and properly engage with your music, with your bandmates or peers and, you know, do the very best work you can, because that record is going to be the record you made at that moment for the rest of forever... I think it's important to have that focus and that's what we try to offer, a place to just indulge in the art. And it's a nice place to be. It's different from everywhere (unless you live on a remote Scottish Island), and so it puts you in a different head space. It’s an experience.”

Celebrating their tenth year, Pete has grand plans for the studio to release their own album, created by a supergroup of artists who have recorded at Black Bay over the years. They’re gearing up to release their own digital plugin too, meaning that soon the sound of their impressive live room can be harnessed from anywhere. But what about the next ten years? 

“It’s a funny situation for me personally. I had this thing I wanted to do with my life and now I've been doing it for ten years,” Pete says. “I guess I’m always striving to make a better record, you know, like a bigger, better record – it's just an obsession that seems not to die... If we’re still here in another ten years, that would be a great achievement.”

In its ten-year existence, from Stornoway to the USA, Black Bay Studio has welcomed bands, musicians, producers and engineers from all over the world to lay down their next great idea. You could put it all down to the draw of the location, the island's breathtaking landscapes, the journey to get there, or the studio's unreal live room, but what truly makes Black Bay special is Pete and Cal (and Cosmo, of course) who go above and beyond every step of the way. Listening to them talk about their work, they ooze passion and ambition; they've been the calm in many a recording storm and it's what makes them tick. And of course, as we discovered first-hand, they can also cook a mean spread. Sir Paul McCartney could never.