I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

I must have been heavily schizophrenic all my life. The me who hears what the other me can't play is the dominant one.

Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.

Once you became associated with a children's show, you're finished.

The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.

In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.