traditional songs, using only his guitar as accompaniment. In that year he also recorded two tracks with The High Level Ranters on their album The Bonnie Pit Laddie. He was, however, becoming frustrated with the folk club scene and keen to work with other musicians, so he joined the Celtic rock band Five Hand Reel. Between 1976 and 1978 the pace of Gaughan's life was hectic. He recorded four albums with Five Hand Reel (three under their own name and one in collaboration with the Danish folksinger Alan Klitgaard), as well as two solo ones: the all-instrumental Coppers and Brass (1975), and Gaughan (1978), on which he played both acoustic and electric guitars. He also collaborated with Tony Capstick and Dave Burland in an album of songs by Ewan MacColl. Gaughan loved playing with Five Hand Reel and is proud of its music, but as time went on he felt that the band was being pressurised into becoming more commercial. Five Hand Reel was more popular in northern Europe than in the UK, so he had to spend a lot of time on the road away from his family, and an excessive consumption of alcohol and generally unhealthy lifestyle began to take their toll, both physically and mentally. In November 1978 Gaughan's daughter was knocked down by a car and seriously injured while he was away. This event precipitated a major crisis in Gaughan's life. He left the band but found it difficult to get solo gigs and by the end of the decade he was only playing occasionally, supplementing his income by writing articles for the magazine Folk Review. 1980s Gaughan resumed playing in 1980, collaborating with several other performers on the album Folk Friends 2 and with Andy Irvine on Parallel Lines (1982). His next solo album, Handful of Earth (1981) became, he said, his most successful in terms of acclaim and sales. It was [[Melody Maker|Melody Maker'''s]] folk album of the year in 1981, and in 1989 was voted album of the decade by Folk Roots magazine (now fRoots) in both readers' and critics' polls. The album contained a strong set of traditional and contemporary songs, including several which have remained part of Gaughan's core repertoire, such as Robert Burns's lyrical "Now Westlin Winds", the feisty "Erin Go Bragh", Phil & June Colclough's evocative "Song For Ireland" and his own reworking of the traditional "Both Sides The