Hamish Garrity: A Big Voice, a Scottish Accent, and Absolutely No Explanation for “Flickter”

The first thing Hamish Garrity had to explain to me wasn't opera. It was a car park. He mentioned singing in one during a TikTok live, and I had a perfectly reasonable American question: Car park? What the hell is that?

Apparently, the cars weren't enjoying a recreational afternoon. He meant a place to park them. Hamish got a good laugh out of my confusion, and I got another reminder that sharing a language with the British does not necessarily mean we understand each other.

I've always had a fascination with Scotland. My family left there more than a century and a half ago, but the history, the accents, and the distinctive character of its people still pull at me. Add a lifetime fascination with Star Trek and Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott and his Scottish accent. That curiosity helped bring me to Hamish's corner of TikTok. His voice kept me there, and his willingness to laugh with a slightly confused American made it feel like somewhere I belonged.

When we sat down for a conversation, I wanted to meet the person behind that voice. We talked about childhood choirs, opera, street performances, the realities of earning a living through music, and his plans for Australia. We also wandered considerably, which is what happens when I conduct an interview. Somewhere in those 97 minutes, we probably answered questions neither of us knew we had.

A teacher heard something

Hamish's musical story began with a primary-school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He was around six or seven when a teacher heard him sing, liked what she heard, and encouraged him to join the school choir. Singing lessons followed, along with involvement in the National Youth Choir of Scotland.

That early encouragement mattered. There was a voice worth developing, and someone took the trouble to tell him so. By about twelve, he was performing as one of the three spirits in Scottish Opera's production of The Magic Flute, meeting professional singers and discovering how much he enjoyed their world.

Of course, a boy's singing voice comes with an impending complication called puberty. His changed, and he had to learn how to work with a lower instrument—keep it clean you freaks. I’m talking about a singing voice!

He also studied violin and piano, while music remained the school subject he actually looked forward to. Another encouraging teacher helped strengthen his interest as he approached the end of school.

Getting into further training wasn't automatic. Hamish told me he was unsuccessful on his first attempt to enter the prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. He auditioned again the following year and got in. Later came a scholarship for master's study in Manchester, although the pandemic had already supplied a particularly uninspiring chapter of his education: singing lessons over Zoom.

Anyone who has struggled through an ordinary video meeting can imagine the appeal of trying to develop an operatic voice that way. Hamish described the difficulty of staying motivated while learning from home, but he kept going.

Years after his childhood appearance in The Magic Flute, he returned to the opera in Berlin, this time playing Papageno. The comic character had appealed to him as a boy, and performing the role with a full orchestra brought that early experience around again. When he described it, his face lit up.

“Those sort of characters in opera I love playing,” he told me, “the ones where you don't have to take yourself too seriously.” That was easy to believe. We had already demonstrated a remarkable ability to abandon seriousness without assistance.

The street doesn't owe you an audience

The 26-year old said Manchester brought friendships as well as training. Through football and fellow musicians, Hamish became part of a circle of singers who performed together, made videos, and encouraged one another onto TikTok. Some of their group performances appeared under the name Northern Voices, before distance and individual projects made regular collaboration more difficult.

Those friendships also helped get him onto the street to sing. Street singers are called busking in Britain. It sounds simple enough when someone else is doing it: choose a spot, set up, open your mouth. Then you remember that every passerby is free to ignore you, judge you, or keep walking before you reach your best note.

Hamish admitted that his first experiences were intensely nerve-racking, sometimes more frightening than stepping onto a stage. “Singing is quite a vulnerable thing,” he said. A theater gives you people who have deliberately come to hear a performance. On the street, you have to persuade someone carrying shopping bags that you're worth stopping for.

Eventually, it became more comfortable. Busking helped cover living expenses, and people sometimes approached about weddings or other performances. It offered a way to earn money doing the thing he was training to do, although Scottish weather could cancel the working day with very little notice.

He also learned a lesson that applies well beyond singing: not everyone will like your work. You still have to stand there and do it. Waiting until the entire public approves is an excellent strategy for never leaving the house.

Five people still count

The confidence viewers see on TikTok didn't arrive fully assembled, either. Hamish remembered going live with only a handful of people watching. He kept showing up, sought advice from friends, and became more consistent about posting and streaming. At the time of our conversation, he said he had already spent nearly 110 hours live that month.

That is a substantial amount of work to squeeze into something people casually describe as being on your phone. Hamish had little patience for the idea that everyone doing well had simply been lucky. “You have to treat it like any other job,” he said. “You have to study it and you have to work at it.”

But what interested me most was how he talked about the people returning to his streams. He noticed viewers who initially stayed quiet, then gradually felt comfortable enough to join the conversation. Regulars developed their own jokes. Moderators helped keep things friendly. On a day when he wasn't particularly in the mood to perform, the people watching could make him laugh and change the experience.

“It's like a big family,” he said. That explains something a follower count cannot: why someone returns tomorrow when there are thousands of other singers available with a swipe.

Which brings us, inevitably, to flickter.

A word with no qualifications whatsoever

Hamish's friend and fellow trained singer, Stian Jebsen, once sang “Stars” from Les Misérables for me in Norwegian. It was stunningly beautiful. I don't speak Norwegian, but that didn't prevent me from appreciating it—or from becoming thoroughly distracted by one word that sounded like “flickter.”

Is that what he actually sang? I don't know. Is it even a word? My qualifications for answering that question remain nonexistent. Nevertheless, I requested that Hamish sing “Stars” with a Scottish accent, and include flickter. He was confused, but accommodated. Then I told him the story and we laughed live on Tik Tok.

I have since expanded my requests to English and Welsh singers on Tik Tok—each a personal friend of Hamish. I am sure they do not yet appreciate the joke, but it still draws a belly laugh from Hamish every time I do it. Apparently I cannot leave a perfectly good song alone.

The joke acquired a life of its own. Some people understood it. Most clearly didn't. Hamish did, and we kept laughing about it. There is something wonderfully satisfying about watching a seriously trained singer accommodate an utterly unserious request without making the person who asked feel foolish.

It also says something about his relationship with an audience. He can talk about technique and the discipline of practicing, then happily participate in a joke whose central vocabulary may not exist. He doesn't need to pontificate about why music matters when he's busy making it enjoyable to share.

A career still taking shape

For all the laughter, Hamish was candid about the uncertainties ahead. He loves opera, but he is thinking carefully about the practical demands of building a life around contracts and auditions. He is also learning guitar and exploring songwriting, with friends encouraging him to keep writing rather than expect the first attempt to be brilliant.

When we spoke, he and his partner were preparing to travel through Malaysia to Australia, with Melbourne as a planned base. He wanted to see more of the world while exploring what his musical future might look like. Finding a singing teacher there was part of the plan, as was continuing TikTok. He wasn't treating his training as something completed and filed away.

He had also recently stepped away from John's Boys, the Welsh choir he said he had sung with for roughly two and a half years, because of the trip. He specifically wanted listeners to know about his opening solo on the choir's recording of “Before You Go.” It was a reminder that the man making jokes on a livestream has a musical life beyond the screen.

The move brought nerves as well as anticipation. Earlier, he had described watching his parents leave after helping him settle into Manchester and realizing he was on his own. Now he was contemplating a destination on the other side of the world.

“I'm pretty scared. I'm pretty nervous, but I'm also pretty excited,” he said. I liked that answer. It sounded like someone telling the truth about a big decision, with no rehearsed speech about fearlessness required.

By the end of our conversation, I had a better understanding of the work behind Hamish's voice and the person willing to share it. He has ambition, questions about where to take it, and enough humor to make the uncertainty bearable. Watching him work out the next chapter should be worth sticking around for.

Hamish is a true soul with enormous talent. Find Hamish Garrity on TikTok, listen for a while, and say hello. If you request “Stars,” you might consider leaving the lyrics intact. Then again, Hamish already knows what happens when I show up.