A visionary creative artist and cultural force, Griogair commands stages and screens with a voice that transcends time. From Outlander to international concert halls, his performances command attention: a bold, living voice for an ancient tradition.
Origins & Roots
Born into the Labhruidh (Lawrie/Lowrie) family of North Argyll — a lineage that produced composers like Pipe Major William Lawrie of Ballachulish — Griogair grew up steeped in Highland music. His father, Gordon, being a pipe major, composer, and teacher; his mother’s MacFhiachair/Ross line from Argyll and Skye carrying its own wealth of song, story, and piping tradition. His grandfather, a celebrated piper, once gave an impromptu bagpipe lesson to the great Louis Armstrong — a meeting that hinted at the kind of cross-cultural bridges Griogair would later cross in his own music.
Raised on the shores of Loch Lomond, he trained with piping legends such as John D. Burgess, yet his curiosity reached far beyond tradition and at University, while studying guitar, he immersed himself in jazz. Discovering John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, he heard the same spiritual heartbeat that pulsed through Gaelic ceòl mòr and West African music.
Gaelic song soon claimed his deepest allegiance, guided by two of Gaeldom’s most influential culture-bearers — Alan MacDonald of Glenuig along with the poet, wit, and storyteller Norman MacLean — who helped school him in the depths of the language, poetry, song, history, and story.
An ancestral pull drew him back to Ballachulish, where he learned from some of the last native speakers of the local Gaelic dialect. Elders recognised in him a fierce will to carry their knowledge forward. From these bonds grew a rare fluency in an old register of Gaelic, rarely heard today, and a lifelong duty to safeguard it — not as a relic, but as a living link to the people, places, and voices that shaped him.
Artistic Journey
Griogair’s debut album Dail-Riata (2007) announced a voice of striking power and depth, capable of holding audiences from Highland village halls to European festival stages. National TV appearances — including a live BBC Two broadcast from Celtic Connections — confirmed him as one of the most compelling new presences in Gaelic music.
A brief but influential spell with Gaelic supergroup Dàimh coincided with Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, where he delivered a defiant Gaelic rap live on the BBC during the Commonwealth Games — asserting the language’s contemporary power at a pivotal point in the nation’s history. Around this time, a performance of the 18th-century nature poem Moladh Beinn Dobhrain with a beatboxer revealed a natural kinship between Gaelic metre and hip-hop, sparking a creative transformation.
Living off-grid in the Highlands, he powered his studio by a stream-fed turbine and immersed himself in production, drawing inspiration from DJ Premier, J Dilla, and Pete Rock. Afro-Gaelic experiments caught the ear of Simon Emmerson, founder of the multi-platinum Afro Celt Sound System. As a core creative voice on The Source (2016), he brought the cadence and emotional weight of Scottish Gaelic tradition into the band’s cross-cultural sound, touring internationally, performing at Glastonbury, the Royal Albert Hall, and beyond.
During this fertile period, his voice reached Emmy-winning composer Bear McCreary, who invited him to work on the hit TV series Outlander, where the nuance and the depth of his artistry reached millions worldwide. This led to performances with leading orchestras — from the BBC Scottish Symphony and London’s Philharmonia to the Atlanta Pops Orchestra — carrying the bardic tradition from television screens to some of the world’s most prestigious stages.
The Deeper Ethos
For Griogair, music is more than performance — it is an act of cultural resistance, renewal, and remembrance. Rooted in the language, cosmology, and cadence of Gaelic tradition, his work honours the ancestral voices that shaped him while opening them to conversations that cross continents.
He stands in the lineage of the Highland bard: a keeper of memory, a voice between worlds — a bridge between the stillness of the Highlands and the restless charge of a wider, global culture. His art lives at the meeting point of tradition and innovation — where the deep soul of the Gael meets the textures of hip-hop, West African rhythms, and intercultural collaboration.
His forthcoming self-produced album Solace is the culminates years of creative pilgrimage, forged in solitary Highland nights, city studios, and sessions with prominent artists from across the globe. This is music born of exile and homecoming, of rage turned to rhythm, sorrow to prayer, and joy to defiance — an offering to those who came before and those yet to come.
Every performance is an invitation: to stand in the presence of living tradition, to feel its heartbeat, and to carry it forward together.
Follow the Journey
Be part of the story as it’s being written…
With Solace poised for release and an ambitious live show in motion, the next chapter is unfolding. This is your invitation to witness new work as it emerges, step inside the creative process, and share in moments that will never happen twice.