When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.

I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.

It's the same thing as a primitive of Africans, Indians, nomads or whatever - when they start getting up and doing their ritual and doing the dance, it's just what's coming through. It's the spirit. Rock 'n' roll is still primitive.

Go up to the mountain, go up to the glen, where silence will touch you, and heartbreak will mend.

You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.

As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.