Tom Morton
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Tom Morton (born December 31, 1955) is a Scottish writer, broadcaster and musician who lives and works in the Shetland Islands.
He currently (2007) has a BBC Radio Scotland music show, broadcast on the station each weekday afternoon. The author of numerous books, including a bestselling biography of the Gaelic rock band Runrig, a whisky travelogue and several novels, he worked for many years as a print journalist, including spells as a columnist with the Daily and Sunday Express, Scotland on Sunday, The Big Issue in Scotland, The Shetland Times and as a staff reporter with national newspaper The Scotsman.
Born in Carlisle, England, but brought up by his Scottish family in Glasgow and Troon, Ayrshire, Morton's early years were characterised by committed evangelical Christianity, a subject later dealt with in his writing, notably the novel Red Guitars in Heaven. Heavily involved in religious music during the 1970s and early 80s, he released several albums and toured as a full-time evangelical singer.
The evangelical period of Morton's life ended in 1984, something alluded to, sometimes in excruciatingly personal detail, in several of his books. His subsequent career spanned reviewing for the defunct rock weekly Melody Maker, TV presenting and production, and extensive print journalism, before a move to Shetland in 1987, and a job as news editor of the local paper there.
He has continued to work sporadically in television. Parts of the TV version of Spirit of Adventure, a 1993 trip around Scotland's whisky distilleries, can be seen at the new Scotland on TV website set up by STV. His radio work began in 1992 on BBC Radio Scotland and has continued ever since. In 2006 he released a CD of original musical material, mainly self-consciously witty meditations on the perils of being an ageing rock'n'roll fan. He blogs regularly and has web pages on both myspace and the BBC Scotland website. Recently, he has begun writing once more about whisky.
Morton pioneered the use of ISDN digital telephone technology to broadcast nationally from his home in the Shetland Islands, and his radio show now comes mostly from The Radiocroft, an ISDN-equipped crofthouse in the remote north of Shetland's mainland.
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Categories: 1955 births | Biographers | Living people | People from Cumbria | Scottish bloggers | Scottish Christians | Scottish columnists | Scottish journalists | Scottish musicians | Scottish newspaper editors | Scottish novelists | Scottish radio personalities | Scottish television presenters | Scottish travel writers
