'I'm Living in a Council House in the Middle of Edinburgh and the Reason Is I Don't Earn Enough' Alan Taylor Talks to Scottish Folk Legend Dick Gaughan

Summary

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IT was, as Don McLean plangently put it in American Pie, "the day the music died". When a plane carrying the 22-year-old Buddy Holly fell from the Iowa sky on February 3, 1959, killing all on board, it prompted a cataract of grief. Far away, in Leith, a 10-year-old boy was so profoundly affected by Holly's death that he couldn't sing. "And I never sang again until I was 17, " says Dick Gaughan. "I carried on playing. I kept playing guitar, but I never sang." To this day he cannot fathom why this was so. "I haven't a clue. I think it would take somebody better trained in psychology than me to figure that one out. Obviously, it just had a big effect on me because I was heartbroken."

Gaughan, now 58, is not given much to looking backwards. Sitting in his modest home in one of Edinburgh's more soulless estates, albeit a stone's throw from the Holyrood parliament with a view of Arthur's Seat, he has the air of a survivor. He wears a leather waistcoat and his hair in a pony tail, smokes continually and drinks industrial strength coffee from a mug the size of a jug.

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'I'm Living in a Council House in the Middle of Edinburgh and the Reason Is I Don't Earn Enough' Alan Taylor Talks to Scottish Folk Legend Dick Gaughan

In Gaughan's book, what's done is done. For him, it's the future that matters, not the songs he has sung but the songs he will sing, the music he will compose, the gigs he will play. "I'm much more interested in what I'm going to do tomorrow than what I was doing yesterday, " he says. "I'm not interested in doing what I know how to do already. I'm interested in learning what I don't know how to do." Having said that, with a bit of gentle nudging he indulges me and reminisces for a moment, recalling life on the open roa...

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