Strathclyde Suite, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, 28 January 2008

Dick Gaughan, 1984 (photo - www.dickgaughan.co.uk)

THE SECRET of a good party is too many people in a smallish room, said (if memory serves) Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm. Dick Gaughan’s 60th Birthday Party ticks all the boxes. Although his birthday isn’t in fact till May, as the Man himself says, what’s good for Lizzie Windsor is good enough for him. Had Gaughan been born on the other side of the Atlantic, he would be a hero of the stature of Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan and this party would be taking place in a humungous football stadium, but luckily for us, he’s pure homegrown.

Proceedings are opened by the masterful Michael McGoldrick Trio; John McCusker on fiddle, mandolin and whistle, Michael McGoldrick on a dizzying array of flutes and whistles, and John Doyle, guitar supremo and vocalist. The audience is already in party mood and the applause for the first number is as warm as many an act hope to work towards.

McCusker explains that the Trio got together last year at Celtic Connections and threw together a tour which began in Newcastle (a success) and ended six months ago in Cheltenham (a disaster). An exquisite rendering of his ‘Leaving Friday Harbour’ from the ‘Goodnight Ginger’ album follows, with Doyle creating some beautiful dynamics under the flute and fiddle, finding previously unimaginable spaces and shapes in the music.’The False Lady’ follows, an old ballad brought bang up to date by its funky, loping guitar underpinning.

After a pause for Doyle to change a guitar string in the face of some relentlessly good humoured banter – “Are you quite sure we’re not too slick for you?”, McCusker asks the audience – two Fred Morrison tunes show off the effortlessly beautiful liquid silver warbling of McGoldrick’s playing, and Doyle sings one of the few Irish love songs to have a happy ending, ‘Apprentice Boy’. A support act rarely receives wild cheers and rapturous applause but this is no ordinary support act. Let’s hope they are sufficiently encouraged to go out on tour again.

After a brief interval, the Man in Black and Blue Denim takes the stage, pausing briefly to acknowledge his own cheers. It is often the case that visual artists experience an explosion of dynamic creativity in later life, finding the maturity and confidence to experiment with new directions. Something similar seems to be happening to Gaughan.

From flamenco-like speed and passion to laidback bluesiness the driving force is passionate soul, soul, soul all the way. He introduces with Ian Paisley’s valedictory “He was a wee bit of an extremist” a song about infamous “Pastor” Jack Glass, mourns, as an ex-apprentice papermaker, the Thatcher legacy of college courses instead of apprenticeships and tunes his guitar on the fly mid-song. His fingers seem to have a mind of their own as they dance on the strings in completely different rhythm from his vocal lines – try it sometime… .

Then, as in all good parties, the guests start arriving. The Fisher Family, sans Archie who can’t be there because he “has horses” – an intriguing insight into the lifestyle of the average traditional musician – kick off with a sultry, Monroe-like rendering of ‘Happy Birthday’, and launch into an a capella rendering of fishing ballad ‘Yarmouth Quay’.

Longtime collaborator and suddenly ex-RSAMD tutor Brian MacNeill comes on to play mandolin with an overwhelming, early Led Zeppelin intensity, followed by some equally intense fiddle. Songs about pioneering environmentalist John Muir and the early 20th Century War of the Crofts substantiate Gaughan’s claim to have learned all the Scots history he knows from songs.

Then clarsach players Pasty Seddon and Mary MacMaster perform a”rather pathetic Gaelic love song” (their words) in which the heroine, disappointed in love, cries for a year and a half, before Gaughan and MacNeill join them to recreate an early nineties partnership. McGoldrick, McCusker and Doyle return for the rousing finale, ‘Both Sides the Tweed’, and the first standing ovation of the evening; the second follows the encore, ‘Geronimo’, but, as Gaughan reminds us, the hardworking Concert Hall staff have had a long day and need to get to their beds.

The rest of us should probably follow suit but many, intoxicated by the music, are off to the Festival Club where the Rooney Family and GiveWay will be entertaining well into the small hours.

Yes, Glasgow is just hoaching with music tonight. Not only have there been seven top notch musicians on stage here, but Donnie Munro is knocking it out in the Main Auditorium downstairs and elsewhere there is an array of musicians of the calibre of Mary Ann Kennedy, Bruce Molsky, Christine Hanson, Ishbel MacAskill and Anne-Bjorg Lien. A bill any festival promoter would be proud of; it’s just one night in the increasingly impressive life of Celtic Connections.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

• Celtic Connections