Page 34 - BiTS_03_MARCH_2024

So I got around and I loved the world music scene. I met and was around quite a lot of the big names
in that world. Indian slide guitar music came into my life around that time. Not from that event, but
I used to go a lot to Southall in London, which is an Indian suburb. It's a completely Indian community

and I used to like eating there. My partner, Sue, and I would go there three times a week for food
back then.

There was a record shop there, ABC Music. One day I'm in there having a look round and get talking
to the guy behind the counter and I'm telling him what I do, and he said, oh, do you know about Brij
Bhushan Kabra? And I said no, who is he? And he said, well, he invented Indian slide guitar playing.
I bought these records, and I bought a few others. Suddenly, my world had found out about Indian
slide guitar. There was a particular album called “Call Of The Valley”, which was a big record for
Indian music, which was a slide guitar trio of Indian musicians, and it was led by slide guitar and
one of my favourite records for the last 30 years. And I always thought if I could meet musicians like
this, I could play blues with these people because I understood what they were doing because they
were doing it on an instrument that I understood, if that makes sense, because they were playing it
on a slide guitar. You can't put an advert in the Melody Maker or anywhere else for Indian classical
musicians to play blues with you.

You have to wait for that moment to happen organically. I was in Mumbai in 2013, eleven years ago,
in fact, almost of the day, at a festival, playing in a festival with my band. Somebody suggested to me
I contact this guy. There's a guy called Manish Pingle in Mumbai. He plays Indian slide guitar. You
ought to get in touch with him because I'm sure he'd love to meet you. And that was about it, really.
So through Facebook, I messaged Manish, said “I'm going to be in Mumbai. Love to meet up”. So we
spoke when I was there, and he said come round for dinner one night to my flat and meet my wife.
So went over there, walked in. There were Indian slide guitars everywhere. Mohan Veenas they call
them.

They're basically Indian lap steel guitars. And before we could finish the first sentence, it just took
off from there. I just said you have to come to London and via a friend of his in London, Gurdain
Rayatt, the tabla player, and in my lounge at home, playing together and talking and we didn't know
we were going to play blues and Indian classical music together. Well, I kind of did, but Manish didn’t
[laughing]. I had this in my mind, and it was finding a way to make it work. Once I was with the
people I could do it with, it took some work to get it there. But once we found our formula, if you