To put this Bush Hall gig into context, this was a BBC4 double recording where just about all the invited audience apeared to be there for Loudon Wainwright III, the second half, which was transmitted some time ago.

It must have been very depressing for DG for this reason and also because the sound was quite dreadful. Front of house, it was poorly balanced, with Mary MacMaster's clarsach plinking away far too high in the mix, Martin's Simpson's slide almost inaudible and DG's vocals badly distorted. Stage monitors were on the blink, causing Mike McGoldrick to be uncharacteristically out of time and miss cues.

This, presumably, was why it's taken six months of remixing to achieve sound of broadcastable quality. Hearing the first few LW III renditions after the interval from the bar before legging it, the FOH sound quality was noticeably better and it was thus clear who the BBC considered to be the 'star' of the night.

Brian McNeill's 'No Gods And Precious Few Heroes' is a song which DG wishes he'd written himself. 'Scotland', he says, is largely a work of fiction and the song deals with some of them. Such as people who think the line 'plenty on the dole in the land of the leal' is outdated. True, they're not actually 'on the dole'. It's far worse than that. They are long consigned to a scrapheap with no hope of work again. It's called 'incapacity benefit' and the numbers don't feature in the unemployment figures.

A song he did write (admittedly not a particularly good one) is 'No Cause For Alarm', produced when some people started to dismiss Socialism as being out-of-date:

'They're trying to say our time is past
Hell, it hasn't even started'.

DG is an angry young man who has grown up into a bad-tempered middle-aged bastard, according to Brian McNeill. To me, he's still an outlaw and a dreamer, a crucial link in the chain and long may he continue to be.