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for artists and people started to comment on my playing. Suddenly people were saying, wow, you're
pretty good at that. Comments that I haven't seen anyone play like that since the 60s. I haven’t seen
anyone since Jo-Ann Kelly play like that.

And I wasn't that aware of it at the time. It was happening around me. Then at that place, at that art
centre in Bracknell, I met Mike Cooper. Mike and I started playing together and I went out and did
gigs with Mike. Now, Mike was a well-known acoustic blues player, and he knew all the people,
Jo-Ann Kelly, Dave Kelly, Tony McPhee and all the players at that time, and I got introduced to them
via him and to the media via him. Suddenly people were writing about me in folk magazines and
starting to talk about what I was doing. Then it goes from there, basically. Is that a clear potted
history?

BiTS: Was that the moment when you became a professional musician or was there something
more, what's the word I'm looking for? Was there something more sudden than that? When did you
consider yourself to be a professional musician?

MM: Well, I was doing gigs and had jobs and then I decided I wanted to make a record. I knew I
wanted to make an album and I was creating, I was writing. I was arranging. I was pulling music
together. I was playing with a few people, and I thought, I need to make a record. I made some demos
just myself at home and I started putting it around record companies. I got signed by a guy who had
just left a major label and started his own record company, and he didn't give me a budget to make
a record, but he said if you make a record, I'll get behind. So I did that in the recording studio in
Bracknell, in fact, at the arts centre.
It was around that time I gave up work and I had enough coming in from gigs to survive, basically
and made my album and it took off pretty quick. That first album was called “Diving Duck”. He was
an old school music business person and had been working for a major label. He pushed it straight
into the right end of what was going on. I mean, I was being interviewed on Radio One. I was featured
in magazines, it got me established. Soon after that, I made another album “Slidedance”, and that
was in 89. It was released in 1990. We did one more album. We did the “Rhythm Oil” album in 91,
and that was with my friend Terry Clarke, who sadly died three years ago, and from Texas, the guitar
player Jesse ‘Guitar’ Taylor also passed away.

BiTS: “Rhythm Oil” is the one that Johnny Cash endorsed, no lesser.

MM: That's correct. That's absolutely correct. That was the last one we made for that label. My
brother Alan, who's a close friend of the Cash family. John and June were very close friends of his,
almost family. They were very supportive of what I was doing. When we recorded “Rhythm Oil”,
there was a buzz around the album. And there wasn't much of a buzz coming from the record
company and I guess the record company was financially struggling, which at the time, I didn't really
take in.

We were all buzzing on making this album that we thought was really going to take off. I think my
brother Alan, if I remember correctly, it's now quite a long time ago. We're talking about 33 years
ago. My brother Alan maybe asked John if he would. I think he played in the album is what happened,
and John offered to write those liner notes. That's how it came about, and it was an amazing thing.
He'd never done it before. Well, he had. He'd done it for Bob Dylan on “Nashville Skyline”. Those
are the only other liner notes he ever wrote.

BiTS: Now I want to move on to the new album in just a moment, but before we do, tell me something
about how you became attracted by, let's call it alternative music. I mean, the Hindustani music and
all that kind of thing.

MM: [Laughing] Well, in the early 80s, around that time, the world music thing started to take off.
I was working at that art centre in Bracknell and some of the early WoMac festivals were held there.