UNTROUBLED: LIVE IN BELFAST 1979-82

This album was conceived as a Kickstarter ‘extra’, strictly limited to 500 copies, signed by Dick Gaughan. All were sold during the March/April 2025 box set campaign. The text below is from the booklet. Although the CD is sold out, the audio and a PDF of the booklet will be made available via a Dick Gaughan Bandcamp page towards the end of 2025, which this page will link to. Potentially, some further Gaughan concerts may be released (suitably edited and mastered) in download form via that Bandcamp page in the fullness of time.

A thing about Dick Gaughan

There is a thing about Truth, apart from the imply of piety. It is Energy. That’s what came to my mind as Dick Gaughan lowered his bottom E string to a low D and a powerful harmony drone leapt out from between his fingers. It was a sense of that truth and the searching for it that had driven him onward through the miles and miles of music and the more recent kilos of Danish motorways to another soundcheck – this time it was the Tønder Festival. 

His songs bore the scars of hard work on building sites, sounds of struggles and quests for fairness as he journeyed on, guitarwards. 

He had been with many bands down the years and was now ready to be alone again. That combination of aloneness and companionship always kept him fresh. He would be joining us for a song maybe. At one time I thought it was his Irish and Highland background that kindled our kinship but now I knew, it was much more. Everyone was riveted by the truth in his voice. Even people who understood hardly a word. There was a truth within the sounds that surpassed the sentries at the brain to travel straight to the heart and impact in ways that are not forgotten.

When he joined us onstage, the Sands Family had already expanded to a mighty gathering – Pete and Tao Seeger, Iain Mackintosh, Rod McKuen and many more. We felt it couldn’t be any better. Then Dick arrived and it was, and the large, packed marquee rose to greet him. There were many wonderful moments. But suddenly now it was quiet. Geoff Harden had asked me to say a few words of introduction. We were in the small, intimate Sunflower Folk Club in Belfast, which was such a welcome, calming contrast to the ‘Troubles’ prowling around outside. The silence was feeding me so many memories to recall. His songs would be love songs of a different kind. The crowd knew it. And I knew, in truth, that I needed but such a very few words... ‘Dick Gaughan!’

Down the years as we listened to his songs recalled and renewed, and some songs sung perhaps for the first and only time, we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a mighty thing to hear some of those sung again?’ Well now we can, and it is – Mighty!

Tommy Sands, March 2025

Dick Gaughan in Ireland

Dick Gaughan became a frequent visitor to Belfast, though it took a while for the city to host an advertised solo gig. Beginning his performing life in Edinburgh and Fife, and swiftly building a word-of-mouth reputation in his homeland, Dick turned professional in 1970. But he spent a few years juggling solo gigs with band memberships, duo partnerships and two dark periods during that first decade in the business – rethinking the touring lifestyle and his place in music in early ’74 (resolved after a watershed solo performance at Cambridge Folk Festival that August) and spending months at home after his daughter was involved in a road accident in October ’78.

From May 1972 until February 1973, Dick was a member of Scots/Irish trad quartet the Boys of the Lough with Aly Bain, Robin Morton and Cathal McConnell. While he recalls visiting Belfast previously, on Robin Morton’s advice, and playing at a meeting of the Ulster Folk Song Society in 1967, his first newspaper advertised gig in the city was with the Boys – a concert at the McMordie Hall, at Queen’s University Students’ Union in November 1972 under the umbrella of the Belfast Festival, tentatively re-establishing itself after two years in abeyance given the Troubles. The Boys recorded at least two half-hour programmes – certainly, two survive at source – for BBC Radio 4 while in Belfast that November and had earlier that year undertaken a tour in the USA. The prospect of more such tours informed Dick’s decision to leave, although occasional duo gigs with Aly Bain continued into late ’73.

In June 1975, Dick joined Five Hand Reel, an electric folk band focused on Scottish traditional music with a distinctive trait for military drumming rhythms. The band was booked to play Queen’s University’s Whitla Hall during the Belfast Festival in November ’76 but it wasn’t to be – Dick had collapsed from exhaustion after a heavy European tour and that was one of two gigs cancelled… before everyone got back in the van for a full tour of mainland Great Britain. A year later, on 15 November 1977, a Five Hand Reel show finally went ahead in Belfast, a double bill with John Martyn at the Whitla Hall – same venue, same festival. (Dick would reappear solo at the Belfast Festival in 1986.)

The very day that Five Hand were reeling at the Whitla Hall, Neil Johnston could tell readers of his man-about-town column in the Belfast Telegraph that ‘Encouraging news has reached us about plans to set up a folk club in Belfast’.

Geoff Harden, whom Johnston later dubbed ‘an impresario, wit and Englishman’, had enjoyed five years’ experience of running a club on the typical English model (pub room, floor singers, guest artist, raffle) in Kent earlier in the decade and had gathered some like-minded souls around him to try the same thing in Belfast, at a rather grim premises in Corporation Street, the Sunflower Bar. A trial evening was run in October, with 70 people turning up to see Dublin guitar/vocalist Barry Moore (later to become Luka Bloom), followed by another evening with pure Ulster traditional singers Len Graham and Joe Holmes. As Johnston reported, ‘the response has, we’re pleased to say, been excellent… And now the folk behind the folk have decided there’s enough interest to sustain a club.’

Corporation Street was a pretty dismal thoroughfare leading out of the city centre towards the docks. The Sunflower Bar’s chief claim to notoriety before its upper room played host to a folk club was for a pair of fatal bombings in November 1973 and October 1974 – front-page news in the region’s papers. A UVF member confessed to the former incident in 1988. One imagines Geoff was given a competitive rate for suggesting he could bring people into the place every Friday.

Having taken four months off the road, and left the incessantly travelling Five Hand Reel, in the wake of his daughter’s accident, Dick was in positive form when interviewed by Colin Irwin for Melody Maker’s 24 February 1979 edition, reportedly ‘full of energy and enthusiasm for the [folk] scene’: 

‘It’s so nice to sit in pubs and talk to people again,’ he said. ‘I’m developing quite a serene attitude to life. I’m happy, I’m enjoying music and I’m managing to pay the rent, so what’s the point in worrying? I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m a musician, and I hope that what I’m doing for the rest of my life is concerned with music. I certainly can’t see myself going back to being a plumber, because the first day the gaffer told me what to do I’d tell him to stick his spanner up his arse.’

Dick’s first gigs back on the scene, and back to being a fully committed solo artist, were – as far as one can reconstruct at this remove – as follows:

Friday 2 February
Barley Mow Folk Club, Stapenhill, Staffs

Monday 5 February  
The Half Moon, Putney 

Tuesday 6 February
The Three Horseshoes, Hampstead

Friday 9 February
Old Ship Hotel, Newbiggin, Northumberland

Tuesday 13 February
Marquis of Granby, Durham

Wednesday 14 February
Studio Theatre, University of Stirling

Thursday 15 February  
Rotherham Arts Centre, Yorkshire

And then, on 9 March, the Sunflower Bar, Belfast – seemingly his first advertised solo gig on the island of Ireland. The Sunflower show had been heralded a few weeks earlier in a local paper as happening on 2 March, with a gig at Armagh Rugby Club slated for 22 February. Possibly, a plan had been to arrange further gigs in between. But as the Sunflower show definitely occurred the following week, it seems likely the Armagh show didn’t happen. 

The only other Irish show known on the trip was a barely publicised appearance at the Ardmore Hotel in Newry (destroyed by an IRA bomb four months later) on Tuesday 13 March, known only because an outraged enthusiast on the staff of the Newry Reporter happened to mention, a couple of days later, that ‘Such an artist deserves all the support and publicity one can give him. This guy alone would pack any hall in Scotland or England. Hope he gets a chance next time to come around these parts.’

The Sunflower gig had, however, been well publicised, with several paragraphs in the Belfast News Letter on the morning of the show with the writer, Ken Reid, noting that Gaughan’s ‘repertoire includes songs of mostly Scots and Ulster origin’ and lauding him as ‘one of the most accomplished performers of the folk revival’. He did, though, concede that while ‘Gaughan’s stature as a singer has reached high proportions … his somewhat rugged voice could hardly be described as soothing’.

This was a common theme at the time. A columnist in the Blyth News had said, ahead of the Newbiggin show, ‘You may not be able to understand everything he is singing about, but he sounds good all the same’. The anonymous reviewer of the Rotherham concert for the South Yorkshire Times outweighed the caveats with awe: ‘Dick Gaughan, unintelligible as ever, gave the sort of performance which reminds you why you ever started going to folk clubs in the first place. His guitar playing was phenomenal – fast but delightfully tasteful and accurate. And combined with those characteristic garbled Scottish songs, his performance was hugely enjoyable.’

The full March 1979 set at the Sunflower was as follows: Gipsy Laddies / Rigs of Rye / Three Shetland Reels / The Pound a Week Rise / Gillie Mor / Farewell to Whisky / Parcel o’ Rogues / Jock o’ Hazeldean / Reels: Miss Shepherd’s et al / Bonnie Jeannie o’ Bethelnie.

It was part of a pool of sturdy repertoire Dick was playing at this time – a show at John o’ Groats a couple of weeks later featuring, from review mentions, three of the same items and two others. In between, Dick was recorded in Edinburgh for BBC Radio 2’s Folkweave, with only one of the three items broadcast common to the Sunflower, and one of the others the rare ‘Erin the Green’ (the broadcast is included in R/evolution: 1969–83).

Dick’s more relaxed approach to life post Five Hand Reel included a month’s holiday in Ireland spanning July/August 1979, principally in County Sligo, ancestral home of the Gaughans. A booking at Beezie’s Loft in Sligo town on 2 August was the only advertised moment of the trip (bar one), but the Sligo Champion could report a week later that ‘Scotchman Dick Gaughan has been busking around Sligo for a few weeks now’. The sojourn was linked in Melody Maker to Gaughan pondering a permanent move to Ireland, but the pay-off for the holiday was two performances at the ambitious 3rd Boys of Ballisodare Festival, a four-day event boasting all of the key Irish folk/trad artists of the day and a very select cohort of foreign guests, among them Martin Carthy, Archie Fisher and Dick Gaughan.

Ironically, having been advertised in Sligo as being ‘formerly of the Boys of the Lough’, Dick returned to Britain and immediately signed up for another stint in that very ensemble, albeit temporarily – filling in for a departed Robin Morton on a Highlands & Islands tour in late August. He did so again for two weeks up the east coast of Scotland in late November/December, with the addition of Irish accordionist Máirtín O’Connor, the Boys still having found no permanent replacement for Morton.

By that point, Geoff Harden had launched Ulster Folk News (UFN), organ of a new federation of eight or nine clubs around Ulster that were promoting folk/trad music on a regular basis – in bars, rugby clubs, GAA clubs. His editorial in issue one (reproduced herein) acknowledged the differences with the cultural landscape in England but found common ground in the notions of music, drink and a welcome.

The UFN edition for May 1980 listed a solid week for Gaughan: Rostrevor FC (at the GAA Club) on 6 May; the Black Arthur FC at Heaney’s, Ballybofey on 7 May; Downpatrick FC on 8 May; Sunflower FC, Belfast on 9 May; Black Mountain Folk Festival, Belfast on 10 May – with Stockton’s Wing, the McPeakes, Len Graham, the Sands Family and others.

As always, Geoff recorded the Sunflower performance, which included ‘Magdalen Green’, a regular set-opener for Dick at this time, which never found its way on to a commercial release. One other ‘new’ song in the set pointed the way to his next album, his immortal setting of Burns’ ‘Now Westlin Winds’. This is likely its earliest extant recording – so new in the repertoire that Dick momentarily fluffs a line.

UFN carried a glowing review of that next album, Handful of Earth – a pinnacle among Dick’s recorded work – on its release in late 1981. In April ’82, UFN could excitedly confirm ‘Gaughan Visit On’ – the man having become ‘Britain’s number one folk performer’ since the last time he was in town, and clearly now with less space to play with in his diary. In Melody Maker’s ‘Folk Poll, published two months earlier, Dick had been voted top male artist and Handful of Earth top album.

Songs of social consciousness had always been a part of his repertoire, like Hamish Henderson’s ‘John McLean March’, but Dick was heading more firmly in that direction now, with the likes of ‘Workers’ Song’ and ‘World Turned Upside Down’. A shifting in balance between traditional music and contemporary songs would emerge as the 80s went on, with Dick himself feeling that Handful of Earth was the absolute apex in what he could do with traditional material, so the time was right to explore other areas. 

The following week, Belfast Telegraph folk columnist Neil Johnson found himself with little to write about so instead gave posterity a delightful recollection in verse of Dick Gaughan at the Sunflower, reproduced herein.

The Sunflower Folk Club continued for a few more years but Gaughan had outgrown that upper room. He was back in Belfast at the Arts Theatre in May 1986 (recorded by sound engineer Nigel Martyn) and at the Belfast Festival in November that year (recorded by BBC Radio Ulster). Two years later, he was at the Belfast Folk Festival, run by the late, great Geoff Harden – which was, I think, the first Dick Gaughan performance I attended, and I can picture it vividly still. Further visits to Belfast would continue on into the 2010s. 

The three performances excerpted here from that bomb-damaged pub in Belfast are a time machine – a snapshot of the unassuming magic that Dick Gaughan was performing all around Britain as the ‘first phase’ of his career came to an end, and a snapshot of the network of clubs run by enthusiasts in licensed premises up and down the country, even, for a while, in a backwater like Ulster.

Colin Harper, May 2025

All recordings were made at the Sunflower Folk Club, Belfast by Geoff Harden. Tracks 1–4 and 15 from 9/3/79; tracks 5–9 from 9/5/80; tracks 10–14 from 30/4/82.

Produced by Gaughan Recordings. ℗ and © 2025 Dick Gaughan. 

Cat. No. GR002. All rights reserved. Unauthorised duplication is a violation of applicable laws.

Gaughan Recordings GR002

This was conceived as a limited-edition vinyl offering containing ten BBC performances from the 1970s, selected from the box set R/evolution: 1969–83. The mastering, however, by Eroc is specific for vinyl and exclusive to this release. An insert features an exclusive appreciation of Dick Gaughan by Martin Simpson, reproduction of a 1974 Folk Review interview with Dick and rare photos from the 70s. The album is currently available for pre-ordering from Last Night From Glasgow 

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.

Colin Harper, May 2025

Produced by Gaughan Recordings. 

All tracks ℗ 2025 BBC, © 2025 Dick Gaughan. Cat. No. GR004.

All rights reserved. Unauthorised duplication is a violation of applicable laws.

Gaughan Recordings GR004

500 copies of this 2CD set (a Kickstarter ‘extra’ during the box set campaign in March/April 2025) will be pressed. Around half were pre-sold during the Kickstarter campaign. The others will be available to order from Colin Harper’s Bandcamp page as soon as they are manufactured (probably late August/September 2025). The link will be on this page.

Two complete club performances, recorded by Geoff Harden (Dick Gaughan & Aly Bain in Kent) and Andrew Watson (Dick solo in St Andrews), 24-bit transferred from original reels by ‘Late-Night’ Tony Furnell and mastered by Cormac O’Kane at RedBox Recording, Belfast. Booklet essays by Robin Dransfield and Colin Harper. Limited edition of 500, signed by Dick Gaughan.

This album was funded by the Scottish TUC in 1986 (LP & cassette), reissued on CD in 1988. It has been unavailable since then. All being well, a remastered expanded reissue will happen in 2026 (along with further releases comprising unreleased and rare Gaughan recordings). If any existing record label reading this would like to pitch for releasing this album, or partnering in its release, get in touch.

The expanded album will feature superb live recordings selected from a performance at the Arts Theatre, Belfast a couple of weeks after the album was first released, recorded by legendary sound engineer and live music impresario Nigel Martyn. Among the live tracks are two that Dick never recorded commercially: his own ‘U.S. Cousins’ and Ian Walker’s ‘Hawks and Eagles’.