Dick Gaughan – Live at the BBC 1972-79

14/11/2025

A spin-off from the 7CD+DVD box set-in-progress ‘R/evolution: 1969-83’, this single-vinyl ‘Live at the BBC: 1972-79’ will be released in a limited edition in November/December via Last Night From Glasgow distribution. I’ll post a link in the comments. Below is the back cover text and tracks list.

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Dick Gaughan was professionally active from 1970–2016, retiring on health grounds and living now quietly in Edinburgh. While Handful of Earth (1981) remains his most lauded single body of work, it marked, for the artist himself, the end of an era – the absolute best that he could do within traditional music. From that point on, contemporary songwriting, often in service to social commentary, became more prominent. For reasons most easily described as the vicissitudes of rights ownership and the consequent absence from the marketplace of several early albums, ready access to the ‘first phase’ of Dick’s career – the ten years preceding Handful of Earth – has long been difficult.

This album – and its parent set, the 7CD/DVD R/evolution: 1969–83 – retrieves that ‘lost era’ in abundance, revealing the magnificence of Dick Gaughan’s early music for the twenty-first century listener. An insert contains a new appreciation of Dick Gaughan in the 70s written by fellow folk legend Martin Simpson along with period photos and a rare 1974 Gaughan interview from Folk Review.

Dick was periodically on the national airwaves of the BBC in the 70s. His first two of nine Radio 1 studio sessions for John Peel – who declared him in print in 1977 as ‘one of the five or six great voices of our time’ – were as a member of the Boys of the Lough, followed by three solo sessions and four with his electric band Five Hand Reel. On Radio 2, Folkweave broadcast extracts from four solo concerts between 1973–79, another was featured on Folk ’79 and there was a live-on-air session for Wally Whyton in 1977.

This collection of highlights from the surviving master-source BBC recordings of Dick Gaughan, exquisitely mastered by Eroc, begins with two 1972 performances from an hour of Boys of the Lough material recorded at Broadcasting House in Belfast for two regional ‘opt out’ programmes in Radio 4’s national schedule. ‘Rigs o’ Rye’ would appear on Dick’s second album, Kist O’ Gold (1977); ‘Floo’ers o’ the Forest’ would appear on Parallel Lines in 1982.

Four songs from Dick’s third solo session for John Peel, in 1977, follow. An especially well-recorded session, produced by Malcolm Brown and engineered by Nick Gomm, it features a stunning and unique guitar-accompanied arrangement of ‘Rashy Moor’, otherwise only recorded by Dick acapella on an obscure various-artists LP. Alongside it are surely definitive versions of three songs from albums scattered across his 70s discography – ‘Farewell to Whisky’ (The Boys of the Lough, 1973), ‘Freedom Come All Ye’ (Five Hand Reel’s Earl O’ Moray, 1978) and ‘My Donald’ (Gaughan, 1978).
Side 2 presents four concert recordings of core Gaughan repertoire from the decade. ‘Fair Flower o’ Northumberland’ was a debut album song and perhaps his ‘calling card’ number of that era, a role that ‘Now Westlin Winds’ would assume from the release of Handful of Earth (1981) onwards.

‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’ had been recorded for that first album, No More Forever (1972), with accompaniment, but it swiftly became an acapella (or sean-nós) tour de force in performance.
The songs on this album are, by chance only, skewed towards Scottish origin, but songs from Ireland (Ulster especially) were always a significant part of Dick’s repertoire. ‘Raglan Road’, written in the 1940s and recorded for Kist O’ Gold (1977), illustrates that connection with Ireland – soulful, unhurried, richly resonant. ‘Willie O’ Winsbury’, from Gaughan (1978), is a Scottish ballad of many variants, yet the first field recording was made in Ulster, in 1961. In 1977, it was seven and a half minutes of BBC airtime well spent. Let us be thankful that the BBC allowed this sort of thing back in the day – and that enough of it has survived to allow us to say, yes, Dick Gaughan really was one of the greats.

SIDE A: In Session
1. Floo’ers o’ the Forest (trad arr Aly Bain, Cathal McConnell, Dick Gaughan, Robin Morton) 3:52
2. Rigs o’ Rye (trad arr Aly Bain, Cathal McConnell, Dick Gaughan, Robin Morton) 4:03
3. Farewell to Whisky (trad arr Dick Gaughan) 3:46
4. Freedom Come All Ye (Hamish Henderson) 2:34
5. My Donald (Owen Hand) 4:10
6. Rashy Moor (trad arr Dick Gaughan) 3:33

SIDE B: In Concert
1. Raglan Road (Patrick Kavanagh) 4:37
2. Fair Flower o’ Northumberland (trad arr Dick Gaughan) 4:30
3. Willie o’ Winsbury (trad arr Dick Gaughan) 7:25
4. MacCrimmon’s Lament (trad arr Dick Gaughan) 3:50

Sources:
Side A track 1 Listen Here Awhile, Radio 4, recorded at Broadcasting House, Belfast 16/11/72; track 2 Listen Here Awhile, Radio 4, recorded at Broadcasting House, Belfast 29/12/72; tracks 3–6 John Peel, Radio 1, recorded 27/7/77, broadcast 2/8/77, produced by Malcolm Brown and engineered by Nick Gomm,
Side B track 1 Folkweave, Radio 2, recorded live at the Caledonian Hotel, Inverness 13/7/77, broadcast 23/3/78, produced by Peter Pilbeam; tracks 2–3 Folkweave, Radio 2, recorded at the Festival Club, Edinburgh 23/8/79, broadcast 15/11/79, produced by Peter Pilbeam; track 4 Folkweave, Radio 2, recorded at Broadcasting House, Edinburgh 7/12/73, broadcast date probably 10/1/74, produced by Peter Pilbeam.

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