WHEN the band Tide Lines first headlined the Barrowland Ballroom in 2019, lead singer and guitarist Robert Robertson quietly admits to shedding a tear.
When the four members got together three years before, they struggled to imagine much beyond landing a gig at the local railway club in Fort William. Since then, their mix of traditional Scottish folk music and more modern influences has taken them to some of the most iconic venues and festivals all over the UK and beyond.
It’s a journey that reaches another peak in a few weeks when they headline the Hydro to celebrate their 10th anniversary, another huge step up for the band.
“We’re four Scottish lads, so we don’t talk among ourselves about great grand ambitions,” says Robertson. “We wanted to start something musically that we were proud of, and to see it grow into something that’s a Hydro act, an arena band, is just amazing. It’s probably the most excited we have ever been for a gig.”
That first Barrowland headlining appearance was a milestone in their early years and they went on to be inducted into the venue’s hall of fame during three successive sold-out nights in 2024, an honour Robertson has described as a massive “pinch me” moment.
He recalls: “Regular Music’s Mark Mackie sat us down and told us the history of the place. He took me back right away before World War Two and how the market was started and how the McIver family built it up. We’re just standing there going, ‘we are a very small part of this storied history’. I am not an emotional person in any way, and that’s probably the only time after a gig that I shed a very quick tear that I then had to wipe it away in the most Scottish way.
“You know, it’s a kind of daunting thing to do to start a band when you’re young and leave university and say ‘No, I’m not going to get a job. I’m just going to start a band’. So when you get to the point three years later that you sell out the Barrowland, I think you could afford yourself a bit of a moment of reflection.”
Tide Lines’ rise to Hydro status has been achieved without abandoning their roots in traditional music. Robertson, keyboard player Ross Wilson and guitarist and bagpipe player Alasdair Turner are from the Highlands, with drummer Fergus Munro coming from Glasgow. Growing up near Fort William, Robertson saw no real distinction between traditional and more modern music.
“I think folk music in general will always have a relevance throughout the world because it’s music for the people,” he says. “But it seems to have sort of latched on down here more over the last 10 or 20 years.
“I came from a town in the Highlands where it was not unusual to be a Gaelic singer when you were a teenager. To see it growing here is amazing. To think a band like us can put a show on in the Hydro is kind of mind blowing.
“I always wanted to incorporate a bit more of American folk, American rock and roll. When I was growing up, I had quite an old-fashioned music taste. I listened to a lot of my dad’s records, like Bob Dylan, and I am a big Bruce Springsteen fan, so I wanted to go down that route.
“And also, bands that were in the charts at the time, like the Killers, like Coldplay and Chvrches, who were a big Scottish band at the time we were starting up. We wanted to use electronics, synthesizers, electric guitars and big drum sounds and incorporate that into the folk music that we loved and were brought up with.”
The songs that Robertson writes share the anthemic qualities of those artists he loves. “When we write a song, I’m always thinking, how do we get the chorus to being the big point of the song? When we go into the studio, Ross kind of produces the songs, and he knows we need to make the chorus hit. That’s like an obsession of ours.”
The Scottish bands he loves seem to share that obsession with anthems. “Quite often when I’m writing a song, I’ll write verse upon verse upon verse very easily, and I’m struggling to get the chorus, and I’ll just go and listen to all those bands and remind myself of how it feels when the chorus of The Whole Of The Moon by The Waterboys comes together.”
Robertson’s own songs reflect both his experience of a childhood growing up in the Highlands with his love of the city. “I really struggle when I write a song to know kind of where it’s coming from,” he says. “But it’s always just your lived experience. I think I can see it more clearly now when I look back at our albums. I mean, the first album [Dreams We Never Lost, in 2017] for me is very obviously from when I had been down in Glasgow for maybe four years, and I was a Highland boy, and I was thinking about this is this new existence in the city which felt, even at that point, a bit foreign to me.
“To this day, I find the idea of a city in general just so exciting and vibrant … the scale of it, and the lights and the people. Probably because 17 years living in the Highlands leaves you with that excitement of getting to somewhere massive.
“But equally, I think if I’d gone away and stayed somewhere like London, I would have been incredibly homesick for the Highlands. Glasgow allows you not to be because there’s Highland element here as well. I think throughout university, I had a good bridge between those two worlds of being a student and doing the student unions, going up Sauchiehall Street, but also going to the Park Bar and hearing an accordion play in the corner.
“That situation of being in the city and being from the Highlands … I don’t think that’s ever really left me. I hesitate to say this in case it comes over as if I’m comparing myself to Springsteen, clearly I’m not. But you could listen to a number of Springsteen albums and identify that’s him being a boy from Freehold New Jersey who is wanting to get out and see the world.
“And I think to an extent that’s probably a common theme [with my songs] because our first album has that Glasgow/Highland thing.
“We have an album, An Ocean Full of Islands [2023], which we wrote in Mull, and that’s very much inspired by the natural environment now and our fourth album is Glasgow Love Story [2025], which is a point in time where I think I was more comfortable writing about Glasgow as a hometown, almost. I was trying to capture the perspective of someone from a rural community living in Glasgow.
“I’ve heard people say about that album that it wasn’t the Glasgow they see. It’s not supposed to be … it’s supposed to be the Glasgow I see. And I’ve also had a lot of people from similar parts of the world to me, and also people that have been born and brought up in Glasgow, saying, ‘Oh, that’s amazing! It really spoke to me about Glasgow’.
“For instance, Cherry Blossom Sunset is a song I wrote sitting in Kelvingrove Park one night and just looking at the red tenements and the sun just catching them and that beautiful pink glow. And it’s like a kind of uniquely Glasgow thing because of the sandstone.
“I still love Glasgow as much as I did then. But equally, I love back home as well. I always refer to Lochaber as going back home.”
After the Hydro, the future beckons. Exciting plans for more shows are in the pipeline and Tide Lines are continuing to grow their success. But whatever happens, Robertson stresses they won’t be losing touch with their Highland roots.
“In the same way that The Rolling Stones’ narrative is the blues, our narrative is Gaelic folk. We’re not a Gaelic folk band, but we’re something that has sprung from that. The Gaelic thing is the baseline of everything we do.
“Some of our albums have expanded on that and gone in one direction, and some of them have stayed fairly true to it, but it’s always there. And it’s always going to be there. But it’s not going to be there all the time. We probably feature maybe one Gaelic song in an hour and a half set but it’s there to say, ‘look, this is where it comes from’. It’s who we are, and it’s an anchor, I think, for people’s understanding of us. Without that, we wouldn’t really have a narrative.”
Tide Lines play the Hydro in Glasgow on Saturday, September 19
