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on stage with an acoustic guitar and did what
we know now was the first Vanguard album, you
John Hammond Jr
know, with all that ‘Maybelline’ and all that stuff
he was doing. I just remember, I'd never seen
anything like it. He wasn't a pop star; he wasn't
dressed for stage. He wasn't doing what I would
have expected to see at that time. You know, I
expected to see what I'd seen on TV, and that
wasn't it. He really did capture me.

BiTS: So that made you want to emulate him or
emulate the musician.

MM: No, but later it did. So as a young child, we
played pop music as brothers, and I grew up
and, in my teens, played rock music, Led
Zeppelin and all that kind of thing, and I had two
older brothers. One played drums, one played
guitar, and I was the youngest, so I ended up
playing bass because that was my job. And then
I kind of gave it up. Not gave it up, but I ended up after school getting a job and the music kind of
took the back seat for a while. Then in my early 20s, it was a calling, if there was such a thing without
sounding pretentious, it just came and got me, and I had to do it. I got very, very involved in listening
to, became fanatical about, early blues and it sort of went back quite quickly. Started off with Chicago
Blues and all that stuff and very quickly went back into all the early masters of that. Got myself a
Dobro guitar and started learning to do it.

BiTS: Did you teach yourself to play, Michael?

MM: I did, yes. I've never had a guitar lesson. I had one guitar lesson when I was a child, and that
was all. I taught myself to play. I had friends that played with me, but I didn't know anybody that
played slide guitar and blues guitar. I used to go and see at the Half Moon in Putney, I used to go and
see Sam Mitchell at one point quite regularly. This would be in the sort of mid to late 70s. I would
go there and see him. I can remember sort of going up and saying, can I look at your guitar, kind of
thing? So that was important for me, seeing Sam Mitchell, but I didn't know anybody that played
blues slide guitar.

BiTS: The reason why I asked that question is I'm a guitar
player myself. I'm slightly older than you, but the biggest
problem I had was I simply didn't realise that people were
playing in different tunings. I thought everything was done
in standard tuning. It was a long time before I discovered
open tunings.

MM: Oh, yeah. That took me a while too. It took me a while
Sam Mitchell and once I discovered it, it opened a massive door for me.
Of course it did because I didn't know that. I used to bunk
off school with my friends in the afternoons and go to the
guitar shop. So I'm now going back a bit further again. One day they had a very shiny silver Dobro
in this shop, and I asked the guy in the shop, “What is that and is it a normal guitar?” He said, “Yes,
it is, but most people play slide guitar with it”. “What do you mean? “ “Like Rory Gallagher”, he said.
And I said, “Oh, right. Of course”. I love Rory Gallagher. So he tuned it to open E and played a sort of
Elmore James thing on it. One of the reasons I was playing bass was because I couldn't do what some
of my friends could do, which was play fast lead guitar like Jimmy Page or that kind of thing. So when