IT'S been an amazing first decade for highly-rated Scottish band Skerryvore - and now they are looking forward to the next.

Since forming on the island of Tiree in 2005, Skerryvore have released a series of albums, have toured incessantly at home and abroad, and built up an exceptionally loyal following - all through a high-energy music they describe as "folk, rock, trad, funk, nu-folk."

To mark their first 10 years together, the band is staging a special concert on May 30.

Of the 6,000 tickets for Skerryvore: Decade, an outdoor bash at Oban's Mossfield Stadium, only a few hundred remain.

The line-up also includes Dougie MacLean, Red Hot Chilli Pipers, Sharon Shannon, Skipinnish, Scott Wood Band, Trail West and such guests as Jill Jackson, Mary Ann Kennedy and Stuart Cassells. Shannon, incidentally, has just collaborated with Skerryvore on their new single, Happy To Be Home.

It topped the iTunes world music chart on the day of its release. Part of the video for the single was shot at Glasgow's Park Bar.

Skerryvore got together on Tiree, when two local brothers, Martin and Daniel Gillespie, bonded with holidaymaker Fraser West and his mate Alec Dalglish, over a shared love of music.

"We met through Fraser going on holiday up to Tiree," recalls Alec, who lives in Glasgow, when asked about the initial influences that went into Skerryvore.

"He's been going there with his family for years and years. I was at school with him. It started with the four of us. It really was like the two boys from Tiree played west-coast ceilidh music and me and Fraser played popular music - rock, pop, jazz or blues or whatever.

"The only thing either of us really knew about west-coast ceilidh music was, well, Fraser had heard it up there on Tiree, and I'd heard what everybody hears on the radio in the central belt. The real dance-band ceilidh stuff was all I knew about that kind of music.

"When other members were later brought in, they were through us being at uni and doing music there. Again, they were the popular music side of things and just learned the ways of the west coast, the teuchter stuff..."

Skerryvore's debut album, West Coast Life, came out in 2005. Subsequent albums have all sold well: On The Road, Skerryvore, World Of Chances, and last year's Chasing The Sun (inspired, the band says, by sun-filled summers spent on Tiree that were the springboard for the band forming).

Total sales figures are currently around 50,000, with downloads and streams at 310,000. In 2011 the band won Record of the Year at the Scottish New Music Awards and Live Act of the Year at the Scottish Trad Music Awards.

The current line-up is Alec (vocals/guitar), Daniel (accordion), Martin (bagpipes, whistles), Craig Espie (fiddle), Fraser West (drums), Jodie Bremaneson (bass) and Alan Scobie (keyboards).

Skerryvore have toured relentlessly. They've played festivals in the US, Denmark, Spain and France (as well as our own T in the Park and Celtic Connections) and they have gigged in some glamorous international cities: Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai, Madrid, Munich and New York.

"Everybody in the band loves going to the States," says Dalglish. "There's this thing about America - when you're a band, you're making it big if you go to America. The first time we got to do that was a real exciting highlight of the band's career."

"The first trip to the US was the Ryder Cup at Valhalla [in Louisville, Kentucky], to go and play at that," adds Daniel, who lives in Milngavie.

"The scenes at the Fourth Street Live venue were wild. It was like everything we'd hoped America would be. All the US tours have been great. The scale of everything there really hits you, and it's not just the food or things like that. It's the festivals too.

"Going out to Milwaukee and Dublin, Ohio - they're all bigger than T in the Park. There's 130,000 people at them. You go onto the sites and there are 13 stages there."

Alec mentions the Live Act accolade at the Trad Music Awards. "That was quite a big deal, because we sometimes feel that we're not really fully in the trad scene like some of the [other] bands are.

"We know loads of the guys and we're friends with loads of different people on the scene but we're still on the outskirts of it, a wee bit, more than some of the trad and folk acts. So to win that award was a brilliant achievement."

Daniel, for his part, remembers last year's performance at Denmark's Tønder Festival. "We got an incredible reception. We outsold every act, including the likes of Runrig, in terms of merchandise and CDs, and the gigs were absolutely electric. That's one of the best festival performances we've ever had."

As for the future, Skerryvore's relentless itinerary includes more festivals in Germany and Switzerland.

"We're doing quite a lot of shows in Germany," says Daniel. "It's been a really good country for us in the last few years. We're going back to the US in June and August, and we're playing Cropredy [Fairport's annual convention] in August, for the first time. That's been on the radar for a while."

Germany and the US having opened up for Skerryvore, they're delighted that they're starting to get more opportunities to play festivals in England. "It's great that there's another market there, potentially, for us now," Daniel adds. "It's amazing, the interest in us down there."

He reveals that a 10th-anniversary album will be released at Oban. "Anyone who attends the gig will have the first chance of getting it, and then it will come out. That's what we've been working away at, behind the scenes, for the last few weeks. It's a lot of new recordings - live from Tønder, live from the Old Fruitmarket at Celtic Connections."

Alec chips in: "New acoustic versions of older songs that you might not have expected to be done that way - things that we thought people might find interesting."

Skerryvore: Decade is on May 30 at Mossfield Stadium, Oban. For ticket details, see http://skerryvoredecade.com