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