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BiTS INTERVIEW: Matt Long

Matt Long has carved himself a reputation as a stellar front man of multi award-winning British

Blues band Catfish. Alongside playing with Catfish, Matt is now also on the road with his own
band, Matt Long and the Revenant Ones, with powerful new riff-influenced original rock material.
Ian McKenzie spoke to him on the telephone at his home.

BiTS: HI Matt, tell me something about your upbringing and where you first became aware of
music, that sort of thing.

ML: I was starting out as a
piano player actually when I
was about five or six years old
and I didn't really get on with it
as much as I wanted to. I loved

the instrument, I just never
could play it very well myself,
so I asked my parents if I could play
guitar instead because we had an old guitar
lying around the house with broken tuning
pegs and missing strings and a whole bunch of
other things, so it didn't make any desirable

noises, but it made noises and it was a lot of fun.

BiTS: I'll make a bet that it had a very high action as
well. They all do.

ML: Yes, exactly [chuckling]. I didn't even know what an action was at the time. This is strange to
say, but I enjoyed just whacking it and having a whole bunch of silly noises come out of it. It was a

lot of fun. Later on, I asked them if I could get a slightly better guitar and some guitar lessons, and
they very graciously said yes. I was about six at the time when that happened. I'm 26 now, so 20
years later, here I am doing what I do.

BiTS: With your father being a músic and television producer, there must have been a lot of music
in the house, I would guess.

ML: Yeah, he was definitely my earliest inspiration with regards to all that and he made me want
to pick up music at a very early age. He got me into a lot of blues music and just music in general
because he's a producer, so I'd always hear him working on stuff and he'd always be showing me
things and I always remember being very interested in all of that. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Dad was
definitely a huge influence on me and probably my first influence.

BiTS: Although six is a little young, what music did you start listening to? You mentioned blues

just then. What about blues and rock musicians that you were listening to then?

ML: People like B.B. King were probably some of the first people that my dad showed me. Buddy
Guy, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, a lot of the kind of big guys and I just loved all of it. It was great.