Gig review: Dick Gaughan, Glasgow

NO SET list, just typically Gaughan-esque balladry as the big man, having sung his heart and soul out for four decades, continues to tweak our consciences and exorcise complacency in no uncertain manner over that urgently thrumming guitar.

Cottiers

****

There were few surprises here but, going by the enthusiastic reception he received, no shortage of old favourites. Having set the mood with his long-standing anthem of Si Khan’s It’s not What Your Born With, he jolted the lapsed protest generation with Whatever Happened, suggested we were all going to hell in a handcart while singing hallelujah in Lemmings, and reprised Shipwreck, his delectable fable of a marooned billionaire stripped of all wealth and power.

Very occasionally, lyrics risked being crunched up in that Gaughan growl, but by and large the message came over loud and bitingly clear, with the Scottish condition still pithily deconstructed in Brian McNeill’s No Gods and Precious Few Heroes, while there was his eloquent call for independence from and fraternity with England in Both Sides of Tweed.

Also in mellower mood, he effectively silenced a still assembling second-half audience with Burns’s gentle but still accusatory Westlin’ Winds, while Muir and the Master Builder – Calvinism cured by environmentalism – dispensed the kind of history we were never taught at school. As Gaughan put it: “Thank God for folk songs.”