Dick Gaughan has featured numerous times on KLOF Mag over the years (see the 26 Mixtapes at the end of this article), so we’re naturally very excited about this Kickstarter Campaign to release – Dick Gaughan: R/evolution 1969-84, an 8-disc box set featuring over 9 hours of music and around 90 minutes of film that aims to preserve and celebrate Dick’s legacy as well as remunerate him fairly and squarely for that work.
When Neil McFadyen reviewed The Harvard Tapes, a Dick Gaughan live album released in 2019, he highlighted a few features that make a Gaughan gig: “the virtuoso guitar playing, the informative, often comical, asides during the seemingly absent-minded tuning, and his habit of never playing to a setlist.”
And not forgetting “Political song, just as important as traditional in Gaughan’s music.” On that live album, he covered Tommy Sands’ Your Daughters and Your Sons, a song for hope, freedom, justice and equality; John Brown’s song for peace, Upon The Road, a rendition of Leon Russelson’s anthem to land rights and radicalism, The World Turned Upside Down, “quite possibly the most requested song at a Dick Gaughan gig;” Ed Pickford’s The Worker’s Song and Hamish Henderson’s call for internationalism, The Freedom Come All Ye.
In that review, Neil also reminded us that in 2016 an MRI scan confirmed Dick had suffered a stroke, and had to forego live performance as part of a lengthy recovery. Since then, we have learned, through this campaign, that Dick Gaughan can no longer play guitar and is legally blind. As this new Kickstarter campaign, led by Colin Harper, reveals, he lives totally ‘off the grid’ in terms of internet presence and together with very little activity around his back catalogue, there is a danger that the memory of Dick Gaughan – and the music of Dick Gaughan – is fading from view, his pre-90s career of 20 years boiled down to periodic reissues of one album, Handful of Earth (1981).
Colin Harper, author of six well-regarded music books, including biographies of Bert Jansch and John McLaughlin and a history of uilleann piping, decided something needed to be done about this. He decided to use his skills and his contacts to create a product that would draw attention to Gaughan once again, to retrieve his artistry from Gaughan’s reissue ‘dead zone’ of the 70s, to allow old fans to engage anew with his artistry and to allow new people to maybe hear something about him – and hear something by him – for the first time. Crucially, it would also allow Dick – if he was willing to let the idea proceed – to make some money.
While Dick was in favour of the project, Colin’s record industry contacts were not interested. Colin honed down the set to its essentials, started putting the costs together and decided “we’d do it ourselves.”
Dick Gaughan: R/evolution 1969-84, is an 8-disc box set featuring over 9 hours of music and around 90 minutes of film that aims to preserve and celebrate Dick’s legacy as well as remunerate him fairly and squarely for that work.
It’s being created by a crack team of professionals: Colin Harper (audio/film research, compiling, project managing); Graeme Thomson (booklet author); Cormac O’Kane (audio mastering); Eroc (film restoration/mastering); Mark Case (design); and cheerleading from trad torchbearers Karine Polwart, Barbara Dickson, Steve Byrne and Robin Dransfield.
Watch the campiagn video below.
Read more and get behind this campaign here: http://kck.st/4izsxbT
The Project:
· A 7CD + DVD set with two extensive illustrated booklets: a new 10,000-word essay by Graeme Thomson in one; vintage interview features by Ian A. Anderson and the late Colin Irwin in the other.
· 126 audio tracks (9 hours) and 30 video tracks (2 hours, spanning 1970–91) from five broadcasters and two amateur documentarists
· 83 audio tracks are unreleased (43 BBC session/concert recordings & 40 club/concert recordings) including many songs and tunes never commercially recorded by Dick. All video performances are unreleased (including two otherwise unrecorded Gaughan originals).
· 2 albums in full: Gaughan (1972) and A Different Kind of Love Song (1983), both remastered for the first time
· 2 albums cherry-picked: Coppers & Brass (1977) and Parallel Lines (1982), the selections being, again, remastered for the first time
· 9 stray studio tracks from five various-artists albums (1975–81)
· Dick’s first-ever concert in the USA (Berkeley, CA, 1981) almost in full
· maximised variety of repertoire (over 100 distinct songs or tune sets)
· rare and unpublished photos from Ian A. Anderson, Dave Peabody, Frank Scott, Tom Steenbergen, Doc Rowe and others
The 1969–83 period of focus is chosen for two reasons: (1) Dick’s career entered a distinctive new phase after his 1983 album A Different Kind of Love Song; (2) the size / expense to purchasers of the box set – 8 discs can still allow fantastic value while gathering together a fabulous body of work as a service to history and a celebration of Dick’s artistry.
Alongside the Boxset, there is also the option to back the Boxset plus an additional signed 200-only Live in Belfast 1979-82 extra that draws on three performances at Geoff Harden’s Sunflower Folk Club in the city: 1979, 1980, 1982. This is mastered by Cormac O’Kane and with a booklet note by Tommy Sands. Each copy is signed on a blank panel of the digipak by Dick Gaughan.
Read more and get behind this campaign here: http://kck.st/4izsxbT
Dick Gaughan in the Mix
If you’re unfamiliar with Dick Gaughan’s music, or need a fix, he has featured in many of our Mixtapes over the years, including these 26:
- Folk Show (Episode 151)
- Folk Show (Episode 138)
- Folk Show (Episode 137)
- Folk Show (Episode 117)
- Folk Show (Episode 109)
- Folk Show (Episode 98)
- Folk Show Special (2020)
- Folk Show (Episode 89)
- Folk Show (Episode 78)
- Folk Show (Episode 70)
- Folk Show (Episode 62)
- Folk Show (Episode 58)
- Folk Show (Episode 44) including a track from True and Bold – Songs of the Scottish Miners (1986 – image below)
- Folk Show (Episode 43) – as a member of Boys of the Lough
- Folk Show (Episode 40)
- Folk Show (Episode 35)
- Folk Show (Episode 34)
- Folk Show (Episode 32)
- Folk Show (Episode 14)
- Folk Show (Episode 8)
- Folk Show (Episode 3)
- Folk Show (Episode 1)
- Lost in Transmission (Episode 14) as a member of Boys of the Lough
- Weaving the Land
- The Tradition (Part 2)
- Guest Mixtape: High Old Times on Fiddler’s Green – Songwriting in the British Folk Revival 1963-81
