Now Westlin Winds - Robert Burns
For Yasmine Zarrouk, my father, Dick Gaughan & Alastair’s dog Sampson

I’ve loved the music and uncompromising spirit of Dick Gaughan since first hearing snippets as a teenager, and some years ago when we first met, he provided me with a deep sense of affirmation and indeed inspiration with one characteristically blunt comment. I had just played an opening set for him at Bath Folk Club and we were outside smoking in the set-break. He’d been deeply impressed that I’d sung a reggae song at a folk club and everyone had loved it. I mentioned that tuning my guitar mostly in DADGAD, I’d often have guitarists coming up to me saying that tuning in such a way is “cheating” as it makes picking tunes easier. Before I could get in my punchline, Dick chirped in saying, “I hope you tell them to fuck off!”, which ranks amongst the greatest compliments I’ve ever received”

His seminal arrangement of Robert Burns’ Now Westlin’Winds has echoed in my head for many years, but it wasn’t until very recently that I ever thought to sing it. Returning from Alastair Caplin’s wedding to all-round powerhouse, Leonie, where we’d been positively bathed in Burns; the congregation consisting largely of the cast and crew of Band of Burns who’d recently been touring to great acclaim, I was caught in a hideous rainstorm somewhere in the Cairngorms, pulled over and whilst trying to tune the radio, caught a brief weather report which told me that though the east was driech, the west coast of Scotland was looking forward to a glorious sunny spell. Having spent the year so far driving furiously from Kent to Cornwall, Scotland to Germany and back to Scotland again, I was blessed with a couple of days with no schedule, so about-turned, and headed west to the considerably longer but far more rewarding way south.

I spent a couple of days exploring a bit of Glen Nevis and Glencoe, where I found a sunny place to park and learned the song perched on the step of the van, from the antique copy of Burns’ Poetical Works Yasmine had bought me years before at a Ramsgate street fair, balanced on my knee, and ruffled most distractingly by the very same westlin winds. Since then it’s pretty much the first song I think to play when picking up my guitar. Deepest thanks to the gentlemen of the orchestra for their breathtaking subtlety.

Published in 1786, it remains one of the most perfectly seductive love songs, and an invaluable guide to the birds and bushes of the British countryside.