Funny title for a music site eh?
By way of explanation my wife Theresa and I retired in 2001. She had been a G.P. in London, and I had been running a business as a forensic and occupational psychologist.

Since retiring we have spent six months of each year in South Africa enjoying the sunshine and being compulsive do-gooders, helping to empower some of the less fortunate locals. We began by loaning money to a variety of people starting businesses (and being repaid only once!) We then ventured into trying (and failing) to get various U.S. government grants to help in the fight against AIDS.

We thought it might help if we had a website to demonstrate to the U.S. government that we were serious punters. So drsmcgurk.com began life as site about how we were a bunch of ex U.K. professionals with experience in the combating AIDS business. We didn’t get any money from the U.S. government, it seems that just about all of it goes to academics. Anyway we failed so I pondered further about our do-gooding.

I have been a semi-pro musician for 50 years and I had spent many hours over the decades happily making recordings of various kinds with all manner of groups I had been in. As many of the locals are musical without access or funds to make recordings I thought I’d start a small recording studio. I bought some equipment and word got around that this was a free service. Things hotted up when the local newspaper ran an article about the studio called ‘New resident will record your C.D’. I was inundated with requests to make C.D.s. Most of the people were black or coloured (mixed race) from the local townships. Some were white. They had one thing in common. They all wanted people to hear their music.

So we thought we’d turn our AIDS related website into a music site giving the world a taste of some of the local talent in and around Oudtshoorn, where we live in South Africa.

There is a second section to the site. These are recordings I made over the previous decades in the U.K. that friends and relatives might like to hear. Those of you particularly interested in memorabilia regarding the town where I was brought up, Hartlepool, and local groups from the 60's can go to a site dedicated to this - www.stanlaundon.com.

You can listen to these recordings but can’t download them. If you want any of the C.D.s made in South Africa get in touch by e-mail or directly by telephone using the numbers given for them on the site. The artists sell them for around R60 - R80 each (about five pounds). For some of these artists CD sales are their only source of income.