With his political charged songs Dick Gaughan has inspired generations of Left activists, Kevin Brannigan caught up with the Veteran Scottish folk singer during his spring tour of Ireland.
“I haven’t heard such pretentious shite in a while.” Dick Gaughan’s response to one of our questions when we met up with him before the Dublin leg of his exhausting Irish tour, in Whelan’s on the eve of May Day.
It was a fair enough response. Gaughan has been hearing the same line for a few decades now. It’s a line those on the left regularly encounter. “You’ll grow out of it when you’re older”. It’s a line Dick feels helped create New Labour, the need to seem centrist and faux mature.
At the age of 64 Gaughan hasn’t “grown out of it”. Born into a family of Irish republicans and Scottish nationalists in the Port of Leith, his life has been spent immersed in music and politics, even though it took him a while to realise what those politics were about.
Whilst living in London and earning a meagre living busking in the London Underground, thousands of miles away another singer was being brutally executed by Augusto Pinochet’s henchmen in Chile. This event coupled with the growing climate of militancy in Britain was to have a profound effect on the young Hibs supporting folk singer.
“I was drunk most of the time, having a ball. While I was to the left and working class I hadn’t really thought about it much, it was part of what I did. Then there was a coup in Chile in 1973 which pushed me into being solidly political. The coup and the murder of the singer Victor Jara.
I thought, hang on he’s a fucking singer just like me and they’re killing him, for what? And then that was when the journey into much more detailed politics came about. You didn’t kill musicians for singing and all of a sudden it was Victor Jara arrested and murdered and fucking brutally murdered.”
“It took me a few years to think my way think my way through it but between the murder of Victor Jara in ‘73 and the election of Thatcher that period was spent educating myself. When the Thatcher Government was elected in ‘79 I though ok, this is open warfare there’s no fence to sit on; its one side or the other.” Gaughan thinks many on the folk scene chose to sit on a fence. Preferring to sing songs not related to the struggle and open class warfare they were living through.
As the ‘70’s rolled on the protest songs of the 60’s gave way to the scream of Punk. Gaughan can see some crossover in the pop-up approach of both genres but argues that that’s where the similarities stop. Folk was delivering a message and sometimes a solution, Punk was preaching nihilism.
“I played in a band in the late 70’s and we played punk venues all the time because the folkies hated us, but the punk thing didn’t have any clear political agenda, it was nihilistic. The folk venues themselves were anarchic but the actual music and the political agenda wasn’t anarchic at all it was very clearly socialist.”
When Punk exploded through the airwaves in the late 1970’s the media frenzy helped attract thousands to the scene. A similar media reaction to folk had helped popularise it in the early days of the so called “folk revival”.
“They called it the folk revival for some reason and the media latched onto it with people like Donovan, Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. There was a great folk scare back in the 60’s and newspapers particularly the News of the World wrote a series of articles of how it was a Communist plot.
“Folk music tended to take a progressive line – there was the Vietnam War and by the mid 60’s people were getting sick of this and there was a huge international movement against it and folk gave a voice to that movement.”
“In Scotland there were the campaigns against the Faslane submarines in the Clyde and that gave a huge boost to a lot of song writers with a lot of old songs being revived again. It had always been there ticking away below the surface but it really exploded in the mid 1960’s because the media latched onto it – it was presenting an alternative to pop music. It was an alternative structure altogether, it was anarchic it was small scale but it was small scale on a huge platform. By the early 1970’s in England alone there were 2,000 folk clubs and there was just people getting together saying let’s run a folk club so they’d grab a room in a pub
somewhere. It was anarchic, completely amateur.”
Scoffing down a burger and gulping liberally from an energy drink Gaughan is the classic traveling troubadour. Living out of his van he tries to remember all the dates he’s done so far on this tour. The answer is many. His website lists both Groucho and Karl Marx as inspirations while a certain Vladimir Lenin also gets a nod. His politics aren’t a great help when trying to get a visa to tour in the United States while they’re also not popular with record company executives
“People like myself will always be a minority interest because when you stand and present an evening which contains a very large amount of left wing noise as part of it you’re never going to be rich and famous, because the mass market doesn’t want to know, which suits me fine.”
One other Leither who has helped shape the narrative of modern Scotland is Irvine Welsh though Gaughan has his issues.
“Irvine Welsh is not a Leither ,he’s from a place called Pilton which is not in Leith.”
“The only thing of his I read was Trainspotting and I read it the whole way through until I got to the last chapter and I thought Irvine Welsh you bastard! You’ve copped out you don’t know how tae fucking end this. So what you end up with is a work of journalism not a work of fiction or a novel. He raised all these questions and the only thing he could do at the end is tae get the guy to fuck off outa there. The guy runs off – you can’t do that!
“He doesn’t give any hint that there is any possibility of solving any of these issues, to me the job of an artist is not to report, the job of an artist is to raise questions and raise the possibility of a solution to those questions not to necessarily give the solution but to raise the possibility that it is possible to resolve these things. So if you raise a load of questions surrounding drug culture and the condition of the working class in Leith you’ve got to at least allow for the possibility that change is possible and Welsh didn’t do that the only thing he could do is take his character up and out of the story altogether.”
The Scotland painted by Welsh is a grim place struggling to find its identity and battling, along with much of the rest of the island of Britain, to find its feet again having been knocked out by Thatcher.
An infamous scene in Trainspotting saw Renton rail against the postcard image of the Scotland of misty loughs and rolling mountains. While Gaughan doesn’t think it’s shite being Scottish he does think it’s shite being ruled from London while he also thinks the prospect of being ruled by the Scottish Nationalist Party is equally shite. He’s pushing for a Yes vote in the in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum but also pushing for a Scotland that won’t follow the mistakes of post “Independence” Ireland.
If it’s a No vote he says he’s moving to Mayo. A prospect which may just help unite Scottish loyalists and Irish leftists.
