One of the things I wrote around then was a song called The View From The Top, which is a very sad song. “But the illness didn’t stop me and, in fact, I started writing very soon. And I was looking very, very deeply into my psyche of who I was… and that spiritual exploration began in the hospital.
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“And so this was a chance for me to break free of the image and to kind of find myself. And I’d been kept in my tuxedos, if you like, by the business and the agencies around me at the time. I mean, up to that point, I’d been living kind of a shell of a life. “Getting sick completely changed the course of my life. But the way I did it was kind of unique and that’s why I suppose it works in my songs.” Life-changing illness “I mean, even today, I’m shy of playing in front of someone like Paul Simon because I never learned anything properly. I never really learnt the intricacies of fingerpicking properly. You’re on a chord, it’s a simple thing, you’ve got the shape right but now you can make it sing in a different way. And that’s where fingerstyle does the job. “As you experiment with chords, it starts to get boring when you can only do simple strumming. And that’s where fingerstyle does the job I couldn’t do that.Īs you experiment with chords, it starts to get boring when you can only do simple strumming. So I tended to write on an acoustic and I was always more of a rhythm guitarist than a solo player. The problem was I never had an electric guitar, so it was always acoustic. But, of course, The Beatles were absolutely dominating everything for me: the skill of the writing. “Early on, I was impressed by the Bert Jansch clique: John Renbourn, Davey Graham… I remember that everybody could play Anji and I loved that kind of folk thing. (Image credit: Maymanah Islam) Developing a voice on guitar So you can imagine that the trajectory that I was on was just like ‘Zap! Boom!’ – and suddenly I was there.” I could have died – but I had to go through with it. “Because after cutting my teeth in the folk clubs and just doing quietly, occasionally taking the mic and doing a little song, the next big step was being seen by about three million people on television, live on Simon Dee’s show. The challenge was enormous, so I hated it. There are so many faces looking at you, expecting you to be great and you have to be great at that moment. And to actually stand up and do this thing in front of other people – and be as good as you are when you’re all alone – is not that easy to achieve. “Basically, like most artists, I was kind of an introvert. And the Hagström sounded loud, which was great.” Coping with fame Those kind of early blues-folk songs were also relatively easy to learn as well. I loved 12-strings because I was always a fan of Lead Belly. And I bought myself a Hagström 12-string. “A bulb flashed above his head and he said, ‘Hang on, this sounds good.’ And so he convinced my father to lay out 80 quid.