A Strat was a thing of wonder .. when I was 14 or 15, the Shadows were a big influence, and they had the first Strats that came to England. I like to play all kinds of guitars, but I wasn't getting the sound I really wanted until I got a Stratocaster

My playing is fairly straightforward, really, and everything's pretty much standard no frills or special effects.

Well, I was born in Scotland and spent the first six years of my life there. Then I went to Newcastle-On-Tyne in northeast England, close to Scotland.

I bad a piano long before I bad a guitar, and the practice I got just playing those three chords in a basic 12-bar blues song was very important.

There's so many different worlds, so many different suns. And we have just one world, but we live in different ones.

My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.

The music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up.