For a trio who took their name from the reviled excisemen whose job it was to crack down on illicit distilling, The Gaugers dispensed a heady distillate of 100 per cent proof North-East spirit. So fundamental was their commitment to the rich yet underexploited hairst of song from Buchan and wider Aberdeenshire, that one of them, Arthur Watson, once declared in an interview that “anything from south of Stonehaven would be considered ‘World Music’. Broadmindedness has always been our enemy”.
The Gaugers’ definitive trio of three strong singers – Tom Spiers who also played fiddle, Arthur who played whistle and industrious tune collector and concertina player Peter Hall – was formed on New Year’s Day 1974, with their first booking being at Inverness Folk Festival at Easter of that year, an earlier version, with Hall and Spiers accompanied by guitar, harmonica and banjo, having emerged out of Aberdeen Folk club in the mid-Sixties. Under the aegis of North-East journalist, broadcaster and tireless folk music activist Arthur Argo, the club’s young audiences were exposed to a potent mixture of traditional song and incoming blues and spirituals, with visiting “names” such as Ewan McColl and Tom Paxton essentially counterbalanced by such great north-east tradition bearers as Jeannie Robertson, Jimmy McBeath and Davie Stewart.
Spiers, a long-serving organiser of the Aberdeen club, had first learned violin at school and would become one of the few British folk singers who accompany themselves on fiddle. As he became steeped in local folksong, he purchased his fiddle from Isaac Higgins, Jeannie Robertson’s brother-in-law. Peter Hall’s early musical interest lay with jazz and the trumpet but became a pivotal Scottish folk revivalist and song collector, while Arthur Watson, today a leading contemporary artist whose work is informed by tradition, tempered early experience of singing in cathedral choirs and a later enthusiasm for Irish whistle players with the realisation that he had iconic tradition bearers such as Jeannie Robertson and Lizzie Higgins virtually on his doorstep.
For an area with such a spectacularly abundant store of traditional song, into which eminent early collectors such as Gavin Greig and Peter Buchan had delved so industriously, there were surprisingly few revival singers tapping into it. The Gaugers would change all that. As they established their style, instrumental elements were largely shed in favour of song-centred performance, with accompaniments – when used – being confined to fiddle, concertina and whistles, instruments which tended not to rhythmically constrain the song as much as the ubiquitous guitar.
To quote Hall in his introduction to the indispensible songbook he co-edited with Norman Buchan, The Scottish Folksinger. “Experimentation is to be encouraged, always providing it is remembered that the song is the important thing and the accompaniment secondary.”
An MC once introduced them at Aberdeen Folk festival in a glowing example of Scots reductivism,: “They’re nae a’body’s cup o’ tea, but you might like them …”
And audiences liked them very much indeed, for their palpable affection for their repertoire and their attention to projection and phrasing. Their first album, memorably titled Beware of the Aberdonian, was released in 1976, to wide acclaim. As well as championing local repertoire, they came up with the idea of “themed” performances, hence two further albums were titled The Fighting Scot and Awa Wi the Rovin Sailor.
Since Peter Hall’s untimely death in 1996, the remaining members, Spiers and Watson have continued to champion the repertoire of the North-East, but not as The Gaugers. As the title of their fourth and last album, assembled in 2000 from recorded live performances and practice sessions before Hall’s death, suggested: “No More for Ever”.