Sir James McMillan performs in St Kilda (Picture: Decca Records)

An album of classical music once thought lost forever has shot straight to the top of the charts after its discovery.

The Lost Songs of St Kilda is a collection of music from the Scottish archipelago of St Kilda and recorded by Trevor Morrison, an elderly man living in a care home whose piano teacher was among the island’s last evacuees in 1930.

Trevor sadly died in 2012 but before he passed away he wrote a letter thanking staff who had helped him to record the tracks, writing that his wish would be ‘that these few tunes from the long-forgotten isles can be preserved and given a future’.



The album is now the fastest-selling posthumous artist debut in history.


Mercury Prize nominee Christopher Duncan, Rebecca Dale and Francis Macdonald (drummer of Teenage Fanclub) are among the leading composers who helped to reimagine the tracks for the album.

Sir James Macmillan, another composer who took part in the project, added: ‘Trevor Morrison’s playing of the old St Kilda songs are genuinely poignant and haunting.

‘He plays with a true musician’s sensitivity, and communicates the beauty and simplicity of this lost music. It was marvellous that so many Scottish musicians and composers from different genres have responded to the originals with their own unique perspectives.’

The Lost Songs of St Kilda is out now.

What is St Kilda? An isolated archipelago 64 kilometres off the coast of the Outer Hebrides, St Kilda is made up of four islands – Hirta, Dùn, Soay and Boreray. It is thought that the population never exceeded more than 180 in the two millennia that it was inhabited but by the Twenties the numbers had fallen to 37 after many of the young men had left the island to fight in World War One. The island was at the mercy of the weather and after several deaths of young people and a succession of crop failures, by 1930 the islanders made the collective decision to leave their home. Now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, it is one of Scotland’s six World Heritage Sites and is one of the few in the world to hold joint status for its natural and cultural qualities

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