A CARDROSS musician and singer has spoken about how “forgotten people” were the inspiration to her hotly-anticipated new album.

Ainsley Hamill is one of the UK’s leading and most diverse singers, shortlisted for awards including the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year, and Gaelic Singer of the Year.

She represented Scotland at the 2019 Eurovision Choir Contest in Gothenburg, and has appeared at festivals all over the world.

The singer-songwriter’s new album, “Not Just Ship Land”, out this Wednesday, is inspired by people who have come from Govan, on Glasgow’s south side. It has already been chosen as The Guardian’s folk album of the month for March, and Ainsley was recently interviewed on BBC Scotland’s Janice Forsyth Show.

Ainsley told the Reporter: “The whole album is written about forgotten people.

“I was commissioned to write songs with orchestra about Govan, and panic set in when I was asked to do that. But then I met with the Govan Reminiscence Group, who are a bunch of extremely nice Govanites who spoke every Tuesday for a couple of hours.

“They give me inspiration and information on incredible people from there who were incredibly humble but achieved incredible things, like becoming Olympic gold medallists and Antarctic explorers.”

Ainsley worked alongside BBC composer Malcolm Lindsay on the musical arrangements for the album, and is now working with visual artist Ela Orleans to create a visual piece to accompany the album using archive footage from Govan.

Ainsley continued: “Hopefully in the not too distant future we can get some sort of live gig going with a film playing in the background.

“It really brings the characters to life.”