Even today, skiffle is a defining part of my music. If I get the opportunity to just have a jam, skiffle is what I love to play.
When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.
You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.
I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can’t see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars.
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.
When the spirit moves me, I can do many wondrous things.
In the gentle evening freeze, by the whispering shady trees I will find sanctuary in the Lord.
Sartre said that hell is other people, I believe that most of them are.
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is. It’s up to you, the way you think.
If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dreams, where immobile steel rims crack and the ditch in the back roads stop. Could you find me?
Going down the old mine with a transistor radio.
A famous person to themselves, they don’t get up in the morning and think, I’m famous. I’m not famous to me. Famous is a perception.
I never, ever said that I was a nice guy.
Did you ever hear about the rock and roll singer who got 3 or 4 Cadillacs, saying power to the people, dance to the music, wants you to pat him on the back.
Love of the simple is all that I need, I’ve no time for schism or lovers of greed.
Let me purify my thoughts and words and deeds that I may be a vehicle for thee.
I’m a dweller of the threshold and I’m waiting at the door, and I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more.
Become enraptured by the sights and sounds in intrigue of nature and beauty, come along with me and take it all in. Come here my love.
It will make you feel good, and it will make you feel whole, when the spirit moves you and it fills you through and through.
If you get into introspective blues or something where you’re stretching out a bit, large audiences don’t respond to this, so you have to give them what they want, basically.
If my heart could do my thinking, and my head begin to feel, I would look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.