John Maher, ex-drummer with legendary band Buzzcocks, now lives on the Isle of Harris, where he photographs his adopted home’s landscape and locals.
Linney Create’s writer and creative made the long trip to the island to capture stories and images of Royal Mail teams serving its isolated communities in the runup to Christmas. A Create team writes and designs Royal Mail’s internal magazine, Courier, which is distributed to around 140,000 colleagues.
They spent a day with postie Caroline MacDonald, whose rugged rural route takes in the north-west coast, where extreme weather makes it one of the UK’s wildest rounds. This is a bleak, but beautiful part of the UK and we needed a photographer who understood how to shoot the distinctive landscape. We tracked down John, who’s spent two decades capturing it on camera.
An action-packed day began at 6am as the island’s mail landed at Stornoway Airport. John then shadowed Caroline on her round, stopping at various local landmarks and meeting her customers to build a picture of Outer Hebridean life.
This was a fascinating journey. John knew many of the places we wanted to feature, so was a great source of knowledge. He was also a great source of stories from his life as a rock star. He kept us entertained with tales from Buzzcocks’ tours with the likes of The Clash, Blondie and the Sex Pistols.