Dick Gaughan deserves every moment of his newly restored reputation

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

'I'd heard of people doing that before,' Barbara said on Anna Massie's BBC Radio Scotland programme, Travelling Folk, 'but I couldn't believe my eyes.' The man who was so intent on watching Gaughan's renowned guitar technique, was, she added, 'a real geek, obviously a Dick Gaughan fanboy'.
And whoever he was, he was far from being the last person to be bewitched by Gaughan's outstanding work on the acoustic guitar.
Dick, now 77, is one of Scotland's most renowned musicians. The power of his live performances has long been recognised. As the Glasgow Herald remarked, back in 1989: 'It is impossible to listen to Dick Gaughan and remain unaffected by his work; he is a performer of such unremitting force, such devastating persuasiveness, and an orator of considerable weight … In everything he says, in every song he sings, Gaughan preaches humanitarianism.'
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A few years later, a Guardian review noted that Gaughan took no prisoners: 'his songs of the dispossessed were delivered with the electrifying passion of a zealot, cutting through any Aran-sweatered Celtic twilight mist like a Stanley knife at a rave … Those who welcomed a return to social realism in pop with Bruce Springsteen's depressive The Ghost of Tom Joad, should seek out Gaughan's blast-furnace performances to hear how music from the gut really sounds.'
When he was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame Gaughan was described as Scotland's 'most passionate troubadour, a singer and guitarist whose performances both burn with a fierce conviction and smoulder with equally heartfelt compassion and invigorate audiences across the world with eloquently expressed conviction'.
He has inspired such people as Kate Rusby, Karine Polwart and Billy Bragg. To Kathryn Tickell, the feted exponent of the Northumbrian pipes, he is one of the absolute greats of the folk music world.
Dick suffered a stroke in 2016. Today, he is legally blind, and can no longer play guitar. His name and his work, however, are being widely championed.
A sum of £92,000, raised by a Kickstarter campaign, led to a substantial amount being given to him to pay for his living costs. The balance is being used to finance R/evolution: 1969­-83, a comprehensive seven-CD, one-DVD boxset of his recorded work, which will likely be released in November or early December, distributed by Last Night from Glasgow.
At the same time, a GoFundMe appeal launched at Dick's behest has so far raised most than £32,000 to raise legal fees 'to test the claims by an entity called Celtic Music to the rights to a tranche of [his] recorded works – music recorded between 53 and 30 years ago'. The fund's target is £35,000.
The albums in question are No More Forever (Melody Maker's Folk Album of the Year in 1972), Kist O' Gold (1977), Songs of Ewan MacColl (1978, with Tony Capstick and Dave Burland), Live in Edinburgh (1985), and Call It Freedom (1988). Also covered are one album he made with Boys of the Lough in 1973, and one he made in the mid-nineties with another group, Clan Alba. Dick fervently hopes that his legal process will be a bridgehead for other artists of his generation, or their heirs, whose 1970s recordings are effectively 'locked up' by the same entity.
Dick Gaughan was born in Glasgow in May 1948, the eldest of three children to Dick and Frances Gaughan, from Leith. His family were all musicians; his grandfather played the fiddle and his father played the fiddle and guitar, and his mother was a Gaelic singer.
Dick picked up his first guitar at the age of seven and at length began to develop his own style of singing and playing.
He was in his late teens when in 1966 he landed his first paid gig, in a folk club in Bathgate's Rendezvous Roadhouse. For his pains he received £2.
'In those days it was all word of mouth and very informal and anarchic, and clubs were generally run by dedicated and pretty fanatical amateurs', he told JP Bean, author of an oral history of British folk clubs, more than a decade ago. 'As I got more work, I just kind of drifted into earning my living exclusively from playing, finally giving up other jobs in January 1970.'
He released his first solo album, No More Forever, the following year. In June 1972 he joined Boys of the Lough for eight months, after which he returned to solo work, before, in June 1975, joining the electric folk band Five Hand Reel, with whom he made three albums.
Handful of Earth, released in 1981, came to be regarded as classic solo Gaughan, its potent blend of traditional and contemporary folk songs underpinned by his intricate guitar work. It was his considered reaction to the 'extreme right-wing government' that had come to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Its power quite undimmed by the passing of the years, Handful of Earth was voted Album of the Decade in Folk Roots magazine's poll in 1989.
Alighting upon that opportunity to reassess the record, Mark Cooper, writing in Q magazine, observed: 'Despite the sense of outrage that lurks behind most of the material on Handful Of Earth, the overall mood is of a kind of gruff sorrow. Perhaps Gaughan still saw himself more as a reporter than a revolutionary and certainly the two ballads at the album's heart, 'The Snows They Melt The Soonest' and 'Lough Erne', are mournful, measured laments whose power is all the greater for their restraint.
'Yet this collection is full of songs which trace the diaspora of the Irish and the Scots as poverty drove their poor towards America. Landlords, bailiffs and beagles pursue the emigre of 'Craigie Hill' just as the hunters pursue the birds in 'Now Westlin Winds'.
'Despite the straightforward power of Leon Rosselson's 'World Turned Upside Down' (since popularised by Billy Bragg) and Ed Pickford's 'Worker's Song', it is the juxtaposition of these contemporary songs with the haunting traditional material which makes this both a poetical and a polemical collection with the poetical holding the balance.'
In the mid-eighties in Belfast, a city where Gaughan often played, his music was discovered by a university student by the name of Colin Harper. Today, Colin is, amongst other things, a music writer and curator, author of an excellent biography of Dick's fellow Scot, Bert Jansch ­- and creator of the very Kickstarter campaign that has marked such a resurgence of interest in Gaughan.
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'Handful of Earth is a masterpiece,' he said earlier this week. 'As a young listener …I was drawn in by the power and charisma of his stage performances, and the magic guitar playing on things like 'Erin-Go-Bragh' and 'The Snows'. But the deeper magic reveals itself in the more subdued songs, especially 'Craigie Hill' and 'Both Sides the Tweed'.
'Compiling a box-set of live and BBC material as we speak, I know now the other songs in his repertoire in 1980/81 that he might have recorded for Handful of Earth but I can see why he didn't - the mood of it would have changed.
'He got the contents of it exactly right. It's frustrating that much of Dick's 1972-88 commercially recorded work is currently inaccessible. Handful of Earth is the only album from that period that's been physically available ever since. But by happy chance, it's the best of them all!'
Handful of Earth would later be described by Billy Bragg as one of his all-time favourite albums. 'World Turned Upside Down', he said, saw Gaughan grabbing the song "by the scruff of the neck and [chucking] it into the twentieth century where it lands at my feet and I think 'f———' hell, that is an incredible song. 'Both Sides Of The Tweed',' he added, 'is probably the best song you could ever imagine about English and Scottish thoughts of independence'.
The comedian Stewart Lee accorded Handful of Earth a similar accolade, taking the view that it was 'a great album of Scottish nationalist songs and really old Highland ballads, with this fantastic intricate guitar playing'.
It is all happening for Dick Gaughan now: the forthcoming boxset (there will be roughly 500 copies on sale to the general public), plus limited-edition releases of Live at the BBC (on vinyl), a CD, Live in Belfast 1979-82, and a twin CD collection, Live in the 70s.
More is on the way. 'Next year', adds Colin, 'we hope to release an expanded True And Bold: Songs of the Scottish Miners [originally out in 1986, long out of print], a 2-CD Andy Kershaw Sessions Plus: 1984-2005 - Dick's six Andy Kershaw Radio 1 sessions plus the best of his other BBC recordings from the 'second phase' of his career - and Collaborations, an exciting album of the best of his studio recordings gifted to themed albums/tribute albums and vocal guest performances with other artists, all from 2000-2015. And from Topic, a new vinyl remaster is in the works.'
Dick Gaughan deserves every last moment of his newly restored reputation, having paid his dues in more ways than one. Criss-crossing the country, driving long distances at uncongenial hours and playing in venues that frequently erred on the wrong side of glamorous, was not for everyone. But he persisted, because he was a musician, and because he was very good at it.
'By the time I knock off all the costs of doing my job,' he reflected to JP Bean for his book, Singing from the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs, 'I probably end up keeping about 15 per cent of what I earn and my taxable income over a year is roughly what I'd earn stacking shelves in Tesco.
'Being on the road isn't a career - it's a way of life. Anyone who gets that the wrong way round isn't going to hack it for long. After a decade they're going to be completely burned out and bitterly disappointed unless they get lucky and hit commercial success outside the folk world … It's just the way of life I chose and it's the price you pay if you decide to do something outside the accepted mainstream.'
* The GoFundMe page can be found at https://www.gofundme.com/f/aatux2; Dick Gaughan Live at the BBC 1972-79 (vinyl) is available for pre-ordering from Last Night From Glasgow: https://shop.lastnightfromglasgow.com/?srsltid=AfmBOopFlK1TGEUFxolJcldRECoEqN_-oIB_709eBy8wRse52qQ7VPZt ; details of the forthcoming R/evolution boxset can be found at dickgaughan.com