Tom Morton

Tom Morton (born December 31, 1955) is a Scottish writer, broadcaster, and musician. He lives and works mainly in the Shetland Islands. Since December 2011 he has edited the monthly magazine Shetland Life.

Morton currently (2012) presents a BBC Radio Scotland show, broadcast each weekday afternoon. It features contemporary rock and pop music, with a Scottish accent, and has of late become more centred on Morton's conversations with listeners using email, Twitter and Facebook, as well as interviews and other spoken word features. The show is to end in March 2013, with Morton scheduled to present three late-night weekend music shows per week on BBC Radio Scotland.

He has written several books, including a biography of the Gaelic rock band Runrig, a whisky travelogue called Spirit of Adventure, and several critically acclaimed novels. A spy novel called Serpentine was published in the UK in 2009 and in the US and Canada the following year. For many years, he worked as a print journalist, 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. He was the first non-DC Thomson employee to script the legendary Sunday Post cartoon strips The Broons and Oor Wullie - something he did for 12 months in 2005-2006.

Born in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, but brought up by his Scottish family in Glasgow and Troon, Ayrshire, Morton's early years were characterised by committed evangelical Christianity which he alluded to in 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: a change referenced in several of his books.

His subsequent career included writing reviews and features for the defunct rock weekly Melody Maker, and working as a producer and presenter in religious TV. A move to the Shetland Islands in 1987 saw his appointment as news editor of The Shetland Times, and the subsequent formation of the islands' first freelance news agency. Appointment as Highlands and Islands Reporter with The Scotsman led to four years with the paper before a return to Shetland and more freelance work. He has continued to work sporadically in television, with the Discovery Home and Leisure series Village Green, about ecological housing, and three series of the STV motoring programme Wheelnuts. He wrote and presented the ITV network productions The Rock that Doesn't Roll and The Rock That Rolled Away, and the international golf feature, available on DVD, The Old Course. He has written scripts for some TV and many radio programmes.

His radio work began in 1992 on BBC Radio Scotland. In 2006, he released a CD of original musical material, mainly self-conscious meditations on the perils of being an ageing rock'n'roll fan. He blogs regularly.

Morton pioneered the use of ISDN digital telephone technology to broadcast nationally from his home in the Shetland Islands. For several years his radio show came mostly from The Radiocroft, an ISDN-equipped crofthouse in the remote north of Shetland's mainland. However, in December 2008, after months of unreliability, the local exchange was struck by lightning during a broadcast and the Tom Morton show went off air. A decision was taken to move the show to the BBC studios in Lerwick, at local radio station BBC Radio Shetland. During frequent visits to the UK mainland, the show has come from BBC studios in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Oban, Inverness, Wick, Ayr, Tunbridge Wells, Stranraer and other temporary ISDN linked studios.

Morton has returned to live performance with the Malt and Barley Revue a musical show about whisky. He has a blog about alcohol called Drinking for Scotland. The full-length thriller Serpentine, set in Palestine, Scotland and Northern Ireland, was published in June 2009 by Mainstream Publishing. He has written about whisky for several publications and co-wrote the privately published (2009) book Journey's Blend, about a charity motorcycle trip around Scotland's most geographically extreme distilleries.

Most recently, Morton has been working on a sequel to Serpentine called Monsterville, the one-man show about religion My Bad Gospel and several TV formats and documentaries. He has also set up a specialist communications company called Fairly.Committed

For much of 2011, Morton provided public relations services and advice on developing a communications strategy to Shetland Islands Council. He also provided copywriting for the acclaimed 'Shetland - the brand' campaign. In December 2011 he took over from Malachy Tallack as editor of the magazine Shetland Life.