PUNK ROCK RENAISSANCE

How a drummer’s haunting photographs of abandoned crofts sparked a remarkable Highland housing revolution

‘His pictures are dark, melancholic even, and tell of a fight for survival’

THE images are stark, haunting, the sense of abandonment tangible in each one. Deserted croft houses, their broken windows staring out on a bleak Hebridean landscape. Inside, a sitting room with the roof caved in, a television still propped on its stand.

In one room a 1997 calendar hangs. In another, a clock on the kitchen wall, permanently stuck at 3.44. And on a fireplace, cracked from decades of peat fires and cold winters, sit framed pictures of a dog and a cat, both long gone, along with their owners.

Yet remarkably, the genesis for this photography project, which has sparked a small housing revolution in the Western Isles, was formed not on these chilly, wind-battered islands, but thousands of miles away and four decades ago on the streets of New York.

For it was there, in 1979, that John Maher, the drummer of British punk band Buzzcocks, started taking pictures.

‘I remember coming out of the airport and straight away I got my little camera out and took a picture of a yellow checker cab,’ he says. ‘I had never seen one before. Little did I realise that five minutes away there would be millions of them.’

At the time Buzzcocks, a North of England band known for bald, angry lyrics that provided a voice for disaffected youth at the tail-end of the 1970s, were riding high in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and embarking excitedly on their first US tour.

They had opened for the Sex Pistols and had one of their songs banned by the BBC.

‘We were going literally from one side of America across to the other,’ Maher recalls. ‘It was like a road trip with a bit of rock and roll.’

As the tour progressed

Maher snapped pictures of old cars, fire hydrants, the everyday ephemera of American life that caught his eye.

IT would set the tone for the photography he would produce almost 40 years later, under the inky black skies of the Outer Hebrides.

Today Maher resides on the windswept Isle of Harris, near the village of Leverburgh. It’s where he and his wife Helen have lived for the past 20 years, and while he still performs occasionally (any thought of being famous on the island was swiftly punctured when a woman said she thought he had been in Bucks Fizz) he mostly spends his days with his head under a car bonnet, restoring old VWs.

At night however, Maher takes pictures. But his photographs are far from the usual idyllic scenes most people associate with the Hebrides, with their white beaches, towering mountains and endless blue skies. His pictures are darker, melancholic even, and tell a story of a rural community fighting for survival.

‘That particular style of photography, the traditional beautiful shots of the beaches and the landscape, the picture postcard style, never really appealed to me,’ he says. Instead, inspired by the work of Troy Paiva, an American photographer who would take long exposure pictures of abandoned places in the desert at night, Maher started experimenting.

‘I developed an obsession with going out in the middle of the night, taking pictures of derelict houses. But it got a little bit frustrating because that style of picture is very dependent on a cloudless sky and a full moon, so opportunities are few and far between.

‘Then one night I actually went inside one of the houses that I was photographing and noticed all these belongings

that had been left. I was quite intrigued by that and thought I’d come back in the daylight to see it properly, and that’s when I started shooting.’

MAHER’S resulting pictures became an exhibition entitled, appropriately, Nobody’s Home, and the haunting images soon went viral. Many were horrified that so many houses had been left empty. Others were struck by the intimacy of the items left behind, saddened at the notion that people’s entire worldly possessions had been abandoned to the elements.

Their reactions mirrored Maher’s own. ‘It was completely alien to me, as a Manchester lad. You would just never see a property like that, that’s been left alone for years and years, particularly with the clothing and the ornaments and the furniture still in the house after all those years, left untouched.’

One house in particular moved Maher. ‘I was in the kitchen and there were pots and pans in the cupboard and cutlery in the drawers, and taps on the sink. I recognised the taps instantly because they were exactly the same model of tap that my Mum and Dad had in Old Trafford.

‘There’s a familiarity with what you’re looking at. And when there’s so much of this stuff lying around a house, it conveys a real sense of the people who were there.’

The reasons that these old properties, mostly on Lewis and Harris but occasionally on other Hebridean islands, were abandoned, are many and varied.

Perhaps the croft’s final resident moved away for work, never to return home. In some, the owner simply died.

Sometimes, the croft is inherited by relatives living on the mainland who never quite managed to get round to restoring the old family place.

And so Maher’s pictures spoke of a larger truth, of a waning population whose properties were slowly, quietly rotting, along with the lifeblood of the islands themselves.

As the images started to receive more exposure, so people became more interested in Maher, too.

In 2016, much to his surprise, he was invited to give a keynote speech at a housing conference in Edinburgh hosted by the homelessness charity Shelter and the Scottish Government.

Not long afterwards the Western Isles Council alongside the Scotland Empty Homes Partnership, inspired by Maher’s work, appointed its first empty homes officer for the Western Isles, dedicated to trying to revive some of the abandoned properties in Maher’s images.

NOW, it has been revealed that the service launched in the Western Isles has already brought 163 homes back into use, with more being renovated. It is an extraordinary achievement.

Maher, however, a softly spoken Mancunian at the best of times, is typically modest about the remarkable response.

‘I almost feel like a bit of a fraud, really. All I did was go out and take some pictures of these houses, and then this thing has built up around it,’ he says. ‘If it helps, that’s fantastic. I took some pictures, so if they can use them to good effect then it’s great.

‘But I was literally just doing this because it fascinated me.’

It’s all a long way from the days when Maher toured with Buzzcocks and played alongside bands such as the Sex Pistols and Joy Division in sweaty, smokefilled nightclubs.

But you get the sense that Maher, now 61, has never been happier. He has a music studio at his home on Harris ‘just to indulge myself’ and still plays the drums in order to get the creative juices flowing.

The rest of the time however, he spends restoring old cars, taking photographs, and quietly changing the starkly beautiful islands where he has made his home for the better.

Never mind the Buzzcocks, indeed.