​The Wee Studio that’s proved a big success

As the proud owner of Wee Studio and Wee Studio Records, frontman of Face the West and manager of Peat and Diesel, Keith Morrison will not need much introduction to many Gazette readers.

Keith has built a state-of-the-art studio in South Dell. Even on a grey day in January, it is impressive. A call centre in its previous life, inside the 300 metre square building is an open plan studio space, including isolation booths, a fortune’s worth of technical recording equipment and instruments, and carefully constructed panelled walls, ceilings and flooring for great acoustics.

It has a calm atmosphere with leather couches, rugs and deeply-coloured walls and the full-length windows out to the Atlantic are the finishing touch.

The set-up is a world away from the jamming sessions that Keith would have as a teenager at his home in Benside with best pal Alasdair White, recording themselves on his dad’s old Tascam eight-track. “You could say that was the beginnings of Wee Studio,” said Keith.

One of five children of Fiona and Dolan Morrison, the stage was set early on for Keith to become a musician. His mum was a singer and his dad a guitarist with Island Express, who did “Runrig-esque tours of village halls” and they also performed together as Fiona and Dolan.

“I was playing before my memories started,” said Keith. Even in primary one, he remembers “being the first to put my hand up to sing along” when his teacher asked someone to accompany her while she played piano. By 12, Keith was getting piano lessons from Andy Yearly.

“I was just so inspired by him and he was such a good teacher and it was so much fun that I just became obsessed with keyboards and pianos and got really good really quickly.”

Although he can play “a lot of instruments well enough to get by, during a concert or a gig”, Keith’s main instrument was always piano and his pal Alasdair played fiddle.

The pair would go on to become founding members of Face the West and Keith credits Alasdair and the other early bandmates, who also included Innes Scott of Peat and Diesel, as setting him up for success. Alasdair would become so good at the fiddle that he was snapped up by the Battlefield Band almost as soon as Face the West’s first album came out, and he left to tour America.

“When I was growing up, I was comparing myself to my peers, to kids older than me who’d been at it longer. I think my band Face the West is a really good example.

“I was kind of the baby of the band, keeping up and learning as fast as I could but there were lots of incredible musicians even back then. So I was surrounded by all these people that were better than me. And by the time we grew up and recorded some stuff and entered the larger music scene on the mainland, we were much more talented than we’d ever thought. We were up there and we had no idea.

“We thought we were just doing well for kids that were practising in Plasterfield. But we obsessed over it and inspired each other and just spent so much time getting good at it that by the time I turned 15, we were in a recording studio in Ardgour called Watercolour and we made an album.”

That first album was released when Keith was just 16. “It was an inspiring few years then to get good enough quickly to make music you were really proud of. But also that meant it was a business.

“We were playing in pubs way younger than we should have been allowed to. We were playing at weddings. We were playing at summer festivals in Barra and places like that and village halls and we were making good money, which was the start of the studio really because every single penny I made, I would buy more equipment or I would upgrade things or I would start sticking things to walls to make them sound better or buying a van to carry it all in.

“Everything was funnelled back into my passion project. And I’m not sure if I have to buy things for my business or if I’m just obsessed and needed to create a business to hide my problem of buying things. But it seems to be working, so I’m not going to question it too much.”

Two early Face the West gigs stand out in Keith’s memory. Their very first show was out of a tiny trailer at the back of Plasterfield, on Bonfire Night, and open to the elements.

“Our first gig was dangerous actually. It was torrential rain and I couldn’t even see the screen of my keyboard because of the rain on it. That could have been our last gig and our first gig, but nothing was going to stop us playing music. The thing could have gone on fire. We would have carried on.”

Then came a performance in Ness the night before going off to record their album. It was in a marquee outside the Ness social club and they had a full PA system and a big stage for the first time.

They were playing before the main act. “We played and the place went mental, and then the proper band from Ireland went on after us and then when they finished the crowd were chanting our name and so then we went back on again, for like the afterparty.

“But that was the first time we were like, ‘Oh, do people like us? Is this a thing?’”

It was a strange sensation for the young band who some viewed as “a bit of an oddity” because they played traditional instruments which were “heavily out of fashion” at that time.

“It's not like that now. It’s completely changed." But he recalled people being “kind of intrigued” that they were “trying to modernise” traditional music and make it their own. “I think our first few gigs we were getting laughed at. ‘Look at these wee boys playing traditional instruments. Isn’t that funny?’”

Big influences included Wolfstone and the late Martyn Bennett, who Keith will never forget seeing at HebCelt. “That was the first time I ever felt bass. I was right at the front and I was like ‘what is going on?’ It was just a euphoric cosmic experience to feel music and that was the first time ever because no band on the island had subwoofers during gigs, and it just blew my mind. I remember that day going, ‘let's see if I can get up there. That’s what I want to do.’”

From then on, he was single-minded, and Face the West gave him that training ground. “You can only get good by doing it. And we were doing it earlier than anyone and doing it so often.”

Scant attention was paid at school, although Keith did get a computing degree at Lews Castle College and moved away briefly to work as a computer programmer for a Laser Tag company in Guildford. He missed home, though, and his life in music.

He returned, found work in the Trading Post and then as an IT technician at the college, and spent three years “gigging flat out” and saving all his money to build a studio.

In February 2008, he launched Wee Studio out of his sister’s old bedroom. “I threw out all the furniture, threw in some old warped bendy tables with computers and keyboards and racks, and that’s where I recorded.”

When his brother moved out, he took over his bedroom too, knocked a hole through the wall for running cables, and told his parents it was “all your fault” anyway, because they made him that way.

“It got to a point where I had too many clients to fit into the hours between them finishing work and my parents going to bed.” After another three years he moved into the building on Rigs Road and that would be home to Wee Studio for 13 years.

Covid brought a time of crisis, though. Gigs were getting cancelled and social distancing was impacting everything else. Business was effectively over and Keith wondered whether he should “play it safe”, once the world opened up again, and find a more reliable line of work.

“I thought, ‘let's gamble everything. Let’s just absolutely go for it. And if it ends, it ends. I’ll just end up back where I was.’”

He had considered building a bigger studio on his croft in Coll until rising building costs put an end to that idea. Then the South Dell building came up. He thought, “if this place became a studio, it would be one of the biggest studios I've ever been in.” Eight months later, in March 2022, he had the keys.

The studio is “as good as any” on the planet, Keith believes. It balances enough size with cosy creativity. It is also a “hybrid studio” which means it has a mix of old equipment, for that “lovely old romantic sound”, and new technology, for ease of maintenance and lower running costs.

It has self-catering accommodation too, so musicians can immerse themselves in their work.

Many local musicians were given a step up by Wee Studio in the days of the Creative Scotland Demo Fund, where Keith would access the funding that allowed them to get studio time at a discounted rate and come away with proper demos. They included Sean Harrison, The Sea Atlas, Mischa MacPhersonen, Josie Duncan, Eleanor Nicolson and Spanish.

But eventually that fund dried up and Keith noticed fewer local musicians were coming through. That was when friend Colin Macleod suggested that he start a record label of his own.

The first act he took on was The Tumbling Souls in 2017 and Keith devised an arrangement where Wee Studio would do all the recording and production and cover all costs up front. After the record was making money and the costs had been repaid, profits would be split between the act and the label.

Keith was now in the “privileged position” of being able to scout people he loved. The masterstroke, of course, was signing Peat and Diesel.

Boydie had been coming into the studio “every now and again when he had enough money” and when he started posting his early videos on Facebook, Keith noticed the reaction they were getting.

“Do you want a record deal?” he asked, and told him how it worked. “By the time the deal was signed, they were a three-piece,” and that was just days after their first gig together at EDF.

“There’s three reasons I would sign people. One of them is if it does well financially for both of us. Another one is if it’s culturally important. And the third one is, are they just amazing fun to be around? And they had all three.

“It just had to be done. I'm not silly. I knew it would be an adventure and a half but life’s for living and I’m never scared of grafting and hard work.”

Keith has always been happy to break new ground. “We’re showing it over and over and it can be done at lots of different levels… and just have one look at Peat and Diesel if you think that the young people in your family can’t make a job out of this. They absolutely can.”