Dick Gaughan

Richard Peter Gaughan (born 17 May 1948) is a Scottish musician, singer and songwriter, particularly of folk and social protest songs.

He is regarded as one of Scotland's leading singer-songwriters.

Gaughan was born in Glasgow's Royal Maternity Hospital while his father was working in Glasgow as an engine driver.

He spent the first year-and-a-half of his life in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire, after which the whole family moved to Leith, a port on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

The eldest of three children, Gaughan grew up surrounded by the music of both Scotland and Ireland.

His mother, a Highland Scot from Lochaber who spoke Gaelic, had as a child won a silver medal for singing at a Gaelic Mòd.

His father, a native of Leith, played guitar.

His Irish-born paternal grandfather (a native of Erris, County Mayo) played the fiddle and his paternal grandmother, a Glaswegian born to Irish parents, played button accordion and sang.

The family experienced considerable poverty, but the area they lived in possessed a strong community spirit and many of Gaughan's songs celebrate his working-class roots.

In his teens Gaughan served an apprenticeship at a local paper mill, but had wanted to be a musician since he first started playing guitar at the age of seven.

He got involved with the local folk music scene and, with two others, started a club called the Edinburgh Folk Centre.

He turned professional in early 1970 and moved to London.

Gaughan's first album, No More Forever, was recorded in 1971.

On it he sings and plays acoustic guitar, joined on some tracks by fiddler Aly Bain.

All the songs except one are traditional, the exception being Hamish Henderson's "The John Maclean March", a tribute to the Glasgow socialist John Maclean and a foretaste of the many politically committed songs that Gaughan would later record.

In 1972, before his album was released, Gaughan joined Bain, Cathal McConnell and Robin Morton, all of whom he had known from his Edinburgh Folk Centre days, in their group The Boys of the Lough.

He stayed with the group for about a year, during which he played and sang on their eponymous debut album.

He gave his reason for leaving the group as fear of flying, which was incompatible with the group's travelling commitments.

Gaughan resumed his solo career and on his next album, Kist O Gold (recorded in 1975), he sang mainly traditional songs, using only his guitar as accompaniment.

In that year he also recorded two tracks with The High Level Ranters on their album The Bonnie Pit Laddie.

He was, however, becoming frustrated with the folk club scene and keen to work with other musicians, so he joined the Celtic rock band Five Hand Reel.

He recorded four albums with Five Hand Reel (three under their own name and one in collaboration with the Danish folksinger Alan Klitgaard), as well as two solo ones: the all-instrumental Coppers and Brass (1975), and Gaughan (1978), on which he played both acoustic and electric guitars.

He also collaborated with Tony Capstick and Dave Burland in an album of songs by Ewan MacColl.

Gaughan loved playing with Five Hand Reel and is proud of its music, but as time went on he felt that the band was being pressurised into becoming more commercial.

Five Hand Reel was more popular in northern Europe than in the UK, so he had to spend a lot of time on the road away from his family, and an excessive consumption of alcohol and generally unhealthy lifestyle began to take their toll, both physically and mentally.

Between 1976 and 1978 the pace of Gaughan's life was hectic.

In November 1978 Gaughan's daughter was knocked down by a car and seriously injured while he was away.

This event precipitated a major crisis in Gaughan's life.

He left the band but found it difficult to get solo gigs and by the end of the decade he was only playing occasionally, supplementing his income by writing articles for the magazine Folk Review.

Gaughan resumed playing in 1980, collaborating with several other performers on the album Folk Friends 2 and with Andy Irvine on Parallel Lines (1982).

The Thatcher government of the 1980s galvanised Gaughan politically.

He had never hidden his strong socialist beliefs and all his albums had included songs by such writers as Hamish Henderson, Ewan MacColl, Dominic Behan, Ed Pickford and Leon Rosselson.

His next solo album, Handful of Earth (1981) became, he said, his most successful in terms of acclaim and sales.

It was Melody Maker's folk album of the year in 1981, and in 1989 was voted album of the decade by Folk Roots magazine (now fRoots) in both readers' and critics' polls.

The album contained a strong set of traditional and contemporary songs, including several which have remained part of Gaughan's core repertoire, such as Robert Burns's lyrical "Now Westlin Winds", the feisty "Erin Go Bragh", Phil & June Colclough's evocative "Song For Ireland" and his own reworking of the traditional "Both Sides The Tweed", which calls for Scottish independence without sacrificing friendship with the rest of the UK.

Now, however, he felt that "It was quite clearly time to stop reporting and start participating" and his next album, A Different Kind of Love Song (1983) was, he said, "a full-frontal onslaught, basically an anti Cold War polemic".

All of its songs, which were performed in a variety of styles ranging from acoustic folk to electric rock 'n' roll, exuded political commitment.

Gaughan also extended his political activism to areas other than singing.

He instigated the setting up of "Perform", an organisation which aimed to facilitate co-operation across the folk music world, he joined the agitprop theatre group 7:84 and during the UK miners' strike (1984–85) he was Chair of the Leith Miners' Support Group.

Gaughan recorded three solo albums over the next few years: Live in Edinburgh (1985) (his first solo gig following a 6-month lay-off due to losing his voice), True and Bold (1986), a collection of songs about mining and Call It Freedom (1988), which was similar in style and content to A Different Kind of Love Song.