Mixed Media: Dick Gaughan: Exmouth Arms, London (2013)

Dick Gaughan in concert.

The Mixed Media column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dick Gaughan, the singer-songwriter, recently played at The Cellar Upstairs folk club at the Exmouth Arms, Euston in London. Gaughan, of Irish descent was brought up in the musical traditions and culture of the Gaels; the Scots and Irish in the port of Leith near Edinburgh.

Gaughan began his recording career in 1972 in the Scots-Irish celtic band, The Boys of the Lough, played with Brian McNeill, fiddle player with The Battlefield Band, recorded a tribute album to Ewan MacColl, recorded a tribute album with Bert Jansch to Woody Guthrie, duetted with Billy Bragg on The Red Flag on the album The Internationale, and worked with 7:84, the 'left wing agit prop' theatre group.

Gaughan interspersed his set with anecdotes of his life in music and slices of Scottish radical, nationalist and Irish socialist history. He tells the audience that somebody said he was an 'unreconstructed socialist'. His website lists Karl Marx, Lenin, John Lennon and Groucho Marx as influences, and he supports the Morning Star newspaper. His song Ballad of '84 describes the 1984-85 Miners Strike and salutes Miners leaders Arthur Scargill, Peter Heathfield, and Mick McGahey.

Gaughan performed The Yew Tree by Brian McNeill which describes the 1513 battle of Flodden, and also Calvinist John Knox. He performed Now Westlin Winds by the Scots bard Robert Burns and another Brian McNeill song No Gods (and Precious Few Heroes) which describes the defeat at Culloden. The song Thomas Muir of Huntershill by Adam McNaughton is about the Scots political radical Thomas Muir, supporter of the French Revolution, friend of Tom Paine, and who in 1794 was sentenced to 14 years transportation to Australia for high treason.

Gaughan performed the elegiac Song for Ireland by Phil & June Colclough, and then speaks of the James Connolly, 'Big Jim' Larkin and the 1913 Dublin Lock-Out which involved 25,000 workers and lasted five months. Connolly was a Scot of Irish descent like Gaughan, for a while a socialist in the Scottish Socialist Federation and later the Socialist Labour Party. Stephen Coleman wrote that Connolly's impossibilist ideas (socialism is impossible until the working class understands what socialism means) were an influence, among others, upon Jack Fitzgerald, a founding member of the SPGB in 1904. Connolly later abandoned this socialism and took up Irish nationalism and the armed struggle in the 1916 Easter Rising for which he was executed by the British.

Gaughan concluded his set with Geronimo's Cadillac by Michael Martin Murphey which describes how Indian land was taken by the White Man and the Indian people given capitalism in return.

Steve Clayton

Paying the Piper (1989)

From the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

As an addition to background music we play a subliminal message in a store, a message which you can't consciously hear, but which is going to be subconsciously received. We are in a sense an improvement in that we can focus more specifically on what we're trying to achieve with the pro-active system than you can with background music. We are trying to create a subtle effect, for instance using it for theft prevention. We've had systems in for two and a half years now and our results have ranged anywhere from 20 per cent reductions on theft to 90 per cent reductions on theft
(David Tyler. President of Pro-active Systems Inc., interviewed on Omnibus. BBC TV. 16 July 1984.)

The system described in this quotation — appropriately enough in the year 1984 — includes the words “I do not steal. I do not steal. I am honest . . . " repeated in a whisper which cannot be consciously heard as it follows the sound level in the supermarket. Policing the workforce has certainly come on a long way since the days of the Bow Street Runners. Rediffusion now exports the sedative effects of "Muzak" to 135.000 large subscribers in over 30 countries, from Africa to New Zealand and Japan. But the power of music has long been recognised by those in power. In Ancient China there was the Foundation Tone, a "sacred" pitch believed to guard against disorder. In Ancient Greece, music was legally regulated as a potential force for good or evil. In the nineteenth century, the emotive quality of music was shamelessly prostituted to enhance many nationalist movements, despite its intrinsically global appeal. In the 1920s. Catholic missionaries introduced brass bands into Papua to "subdue the dangerous energy" of native headhunters. And when the BBC lengthened the last pip of the radio time-signal after the Second World War, a number of angry listeners complained about unwarranted interference with the true and proper order of things.

Music and songs can, of course, be great forces for change, although recent cases where this has been claimed are in fact nothing but shams. Take the boom in musical charity projects which began a few years ago with Bandaid. Liveaid and the We Are The World record. The fine sentiments of global unity and compassion fizzled out in the old holy trinity of "faith, hope and charity"; the attempt to redistribute poverty failed utterly. Even Bob Geldof himself now freely admits that it solved nothing and changed nothing. Some still say "Well, we know it's not the answer, but . . . " in a defeatist tone which accepts that this society of insane contradictions will just have to do for the time being.

The subversive rebel music of the fifties and sixties — the tradition of sticking two fingers up at the establishment — found its seventies expression in punk rock. Once again, there is a long history of such musical defiance, with jazz in its day having enjoyed a similar reputation, even if it did not embody the punk idea of participation and access to the music for anyone. In 1928, W.H. Hadow wrote that "the jazz band . . .  puts itself outside the pale of music by the coarseness and vulgarity of its utterances" and four years later Arthur Bliss pronounced that jazz was "a subject for the pathologist rather than the musician". These fearful reactions continue today, particularly among the "moral majority" in the American South where an MCA executive refused to produce an album by the punk group Black Flag on the grounds that it was “anti-family”.

The ways in which such music has been accommodated into the mainstream have been well documented. Speaking of the punk album Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, the Virgin Records Press Officer, Al Clarke, said: "The LP was released eleven days ago. It brought in £250.000 before it was even released and went straight to Number 1 in the charts". Once Castro was in power in Cuba he used the tradition of subversive music, La Trova Cubana to consolidate the new régime, with an official festival in Havana in 1967 called a "Protest Song Get Together". Likewise, reggae has been used in Jamaica by the state as a means of controlling dissent; it is perhaps significant that Bob Marley's first record was called Simmer Down. And in Britain, the idea of using apparently rebellious music as a means of control came readily to ex-teachers like Sting when he was singing with his old group The Police. In an interview he spoke of controlling the crowd and leading them to oblivion, and concluded "There isn't much difference between rock'n'roll and teaching, mind you. It's the same job. You're entertaining delinquents for an hour”.

The limitations of protest music were well summed up by the folk singer, Dick Gaughan in Folk Roots, September 1986:

 You can say what a bunch of villains the ruling class really are, what a nasty bunch of war-mongermg bastards they are. Bob Dylan made a fortune out of doing that in the '60s. Nothing wrong with that. But as soon as you go over the edge and take the step of saying the solution to the problem is ordinary working class people who are actually not just going to say the world is a terrible place, but are going to take the power off you and stuff it up your arse . . .  say that we are actually going to lake control . . . at that point you have gone too far. You can say anything you like except suggest a change of power into the hands of the working class. You can argue for socialism as long as you don't define what you mean by socialism. 

This safety has been well noted and acted on by some of the commercially promoted and quite successful artists who form the eighties equivalent of protest music, the (mostly pro-Labour) ‘agitprop” bands and singers affiliated to campaigns like Red Wedge.

Whereas an earlier generation of protest singers like Dylan sang the poetry of dissent without campaigning for presidents or prime ministers, the present wave have been recruited into British party politics by the ogre of Thatcherism rather than the capitalist system itself. In some cases artistic popularity has been used to sell stale and second-hand ideas for an alternative brand of "people's capitalism”.

During 1985. Billy Bragg performed 50 concerts as part of the "Jobs For Youth" campaign in conjunction with the Labour Party, and that tour led directly to the founding of Red Wedge, a coalition of performers which declared itself "committed to a Labour victory at the next election'. Billy Bragg himself was quoted as saying of the earlier protest singers that “All that generation came to nought. They thought that if they joined hands and sang Imagine the world would change" (Sunday Times, 26 January 1986). But this eighties "realism" is not all it seems, and John Lennon's plea for people to “imagine — no possessions" will prove to have been more challenging than Bragg's badge of slavery in Between The Wars: “I'll give my consent, to any government that does not deny a man a Living Wage . . . " In the same article, Andy McSmith. Labour's Jobs and Industry campaign co-ordinator said “Billy is worth his weight in gold to us”, and Eric Heffer commented “it is a good thing that an ordinary working-class lad like Billy should identify himself with the Labour movement". The Red Wedge manifesto itself strengthened the myth that mass unemployment was invented in 1979 and could be cured by “Government and council spending", and on the subject of war only promises more of the same:

The Russians are making clear their commitment to world peace . . .  under Labour we would see a move to real defence . . .  This does not mean, as the Tories claim, that the country would be defenceless. It means strengthening and modernising our conventional defences, which are dangerously run down.

Which brings us full circle to the Ancient Chinese Foundation Tone, humming the monotonous tune of the present order, with its international rivalry and bombs, its poverty and despair. But there are far brighter things to sing about. The world and all its resources, including communication and entertainment, are still waiting to be taken into the hands of the world community, to be used by and for us all.

Clifford Slapper

To be continued next month with a look at how the music industry makes its profits.

Email to a singer/songwriter (2004)

From the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a habit of mine to write to all sorts of people including those odd people who are called celebrities. Sometimes they even reply. Gorbachov didn't when I asked for his definition of socialism. The same question to Tony Benn elicited an advertisement for his books. Neil Kinnock, dealing with the same question, sent me a brochure that he obviously thought had something to do with socialism. Dennis Skinner telephoned me and agreed that the Party he represented in parliament had nothing to do with socialism. Prominent Trotskyites and Gerry Adams never replied and Mitterrand, then President of France thanked me for putting the question to him but did not offer an answer.

I thought I had kicked the habit but, when someone who knows how much I like Dick Gaughan, the Scottish singer/songwriter, sent me his website address, I found the challenge irresistible. Gaughan writes and sings working class songs in a most evocative way and claimed to be a socialist. Word was that he had politically regressed to Scottish nationalism but, whatever he was, he has talents that I think could serve socialism so I decided to drop him an email which is set out hereunder.

Sent:
December 16, 2003 9.57PM
Subject: Revolutionary Change at the Base of Society

Hello Dick,

I have just now learned of your interesting website. What I know about you is that you made a tape with others, when poor Arthur Scargill was playing Canute against the background of the inevitable logic of capitalism. I liked that tape; I played it over and over and I wept for those who were suffering the brutalities of the system, the women especially, making their sad stand against the inhuman rationale of the market system. I liked your singing and your songs because you were trying to apply salve to the hurt and indignity that some members of my class were enduring. Your heart was, and probably still is, in the right place; so many hearts are but, unfortunately, that is not true of so many heads.

In a rational world we would have been trying to close down coal mining because men should not be unnecessarily exposed to the hard and dangerous conditions that coal mining involves and because, like all fossil fuels, coal is a major pollutant. But, in a rational world, closing mines would be a progressive move in the interests of miners and society as a whole and there would be no victims.

Like all of the other social problems that affect our class, mere want and destitution, the economic murder of millions of people by price-fixing starvation, wars, violence and crime, the miner's problems arose out of capitalism. I think you will agree that is a system of social organisation driven by the expectation of profit and based on the exploitation of the working class whose labour is the source of all social wealth.

The core question here must be is there a viable alternative to capitalism. If there is, why does the working class, the overwhelming majority of the population, armed with the franchise and the power of its numbers, not end that system and institute this alternative form of social organisation? Obviously these questions assume that that capitalism, in spite of its wars, its built-in necessity for scarcity within the world of potential abundance it has created, and all its other gross contradictions, is accepted by the working class who vote for it and fight for it and without whose support it could not exist. If this assumption is right, and I challenge contradiction, then the problem must lie in the fact that the working class deliberately rejects the socialist alternative to capitalism or is largely ignorant of the fact that such an alternative exists.

Of course we know that the very small minority of capitalists who control our lives through there monopoly of the means of life also own the means of opinion formation which they operate by economic bribery and which is the conditioning medium in the lives of our class. A more indirect weapon of the capitalists are the churches, teaching a class-based morality, and the money oriented political industry that is capitalism's nearest approach to democracy.

What have we in our arsenal? We have the enlightening logic of the material conditions of capitalism which inexorably demonstrates that meaningful social change within that system is impossible. That a system based on our exploitation, never did, does not and can not function in our interests. Additionally, we have socialism on offer, the vision of a world-wide society of common ownership and production solely for use in a community of free access democracy.

Given this, what is the strategy of the Left? Historically, it has given us Kautsky and Bernstein, Keir Hardie and the Fabians, Lenin and Trotsky. They have offered us for socialism the idea that capitalism can be run in our interests, which is like suggesting that the slaughterhouse can be run in the interests of the cattle; they have given us totalitarian state capitalism with its absolute colossus of brutality; they have given us Blair and "the stakeholder society"; they have established the justification for capitalism's "philosophers" to assert that we have reached the end of history and that henceforth there can be no hope of a revolutionary change at the base of society.

And the "Old Left"? It, in its internecine diversity, still defends the old forms, still defends the old concepts and blames failure on the myriad of people who, over the decades, it nominated to "lead" the working class.'Forward to the Past' is its slogan as it strives for new ideas to have its people running capitalism. They are all socialists, of course, but none of them are prepared to say what they mean by socialism or communism, both of which terms were used interchangeably by the pioneers of the socialist movement.

Capitalism has gained immeasurably from the confusion of the working class; from the nationalism and patriotic bullshit indulged by the Left; by the promoted notion that we can have capitalism without exploitation and its kindred evils. That confusion has largely been the gift of well-intentioned Left reformers chasing the multitude of separate issues that capitalism throws up, like a mad dog chasing leaves in a November forest.

I believe that the liberal arts, poetry, music, song, the play, the film, can all be used to create a cultural ambience which helps people to question the values of capitalism and build an appetite for real social change. I believe that you are among those who have a talent for such work. Go on! Tell the workers that they are wasting their time when they struggle to make some aspect of capitalism better, to make capitalism more acceptable! Use your undoubted talent to define real socialism in ways that may move those who would disdain a political tract.

I hope that you will consider such a course or, alternatively, that you will accept my challenge to show the flaws in my argument. Especially, I hope that you will not be offended by my remarks; if giving offence was my purpose I would do so in different language and, anyway, I have insulted many who deem themselves a lot more important than you or me!

Thanks for 'listening'.

Socialist Regards

Richard Montague