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VL: I know, well he passed a couple of years ago now, two or three years ago. I did get to meet James
a couple of times and watch him play, and the guys in my band, they did a tour with him in the UK

as well before. It was his last UK tour.

BiTS: Now, when you first started, did you learn the guitar? You said you started as a drummer.
Were you a guitarist in that band?

VL: Yeah, well, I always had a guitar. Even when I was 11 years old, I got a guitar and I sort of inspired
other people to pick up the guitar, I suppose as a youngster. I was thinking, oh, we could do with the
drummer, so I just switched to the drums quite early on and played drums all through my school
years, really. But I always played the guitar a little bit. I just was kind of musical, so I played a bit of
bass and a bit of singing and a bit of keyboards and just anything I could get my hands on really.

BiTS: When you left school, did you start a job? Did you have a job of work?

VL: Yeah, yeah, as I said, I used to be a gardener on the Barbican on the Hoe. I did that for a few
years and that's where I used to listen to a lot of music on my headphones.

BiTS: . Vince please tell me something about the Big Combo. How did that come about?

VL: Well, that was a bit later on, I guess. I started that in 96, it's still a long time ago [chuckles]. I'd
been doing just like a straightforward kind of a blues band for about eight years, like a sort of a
Chicago-based kind of thing with a harmonica player and there were two guitarists in that band.

BiTS: The thing about the Big Combo is it's not actually a big combo, is it? It’s usually about three
or four.
VL: It's only the three of us. I'd been in a band before. It was a bigger band and I wanted to size it
down a bit, but also, I wanted to expand musically what we were doing. I didn't want to just stick in
the kind of like shuffles and swing thing of the Chicago sort of style. I wanted to move on to other
material because I was getting into Louis Jordan and the sort of like jump blues stuff and all that
kind of thing. So I was slipping away from it a bit, and becoming more guitar orientated and, to be
honest with you, a trio worked better for me because it gave me a lot of room to have a lot of
command over it. It just allowed me to play like a wider range of material, I think.

BiTS: How many instruments do you play, Vince? Reading your website I think you've got maybe
half a dozen types of instrument that you play.

VL: Yes, it's a few. I mean, I'm a guitar player first and foremost and singer, obviously, but I'll mess
around with anything with strings on it, really. Obviously, percussion is pretty good for me as well