Page 9 - C:\Users\ikm\OneDrive\Documents\Flip PDF\BiTS_08_AUGUST_2020\

traditional folk music, so we called it the Folk and Blues Club. We had Doc Ross there. I’ve got a
record of every guest that we had and it’s like the who’s who of British folk in the ’70s and the
early ’80s. We had Jo—Anne Kelly, for example, and the likes of Dave Peabody, but we also had
some of the American guys, Cousin Joe
Pleasant from New Orleans, George

Jeep Jackson, Doctor Ross. We even had
Honeyboy Edwards. I don’t know
whether you know Honeyboy Edwards
at all.
BiTS: Absolutely. I went to a gig after
he was 90 or whatever age it was, a

year or so before he died, actually,
down here in Devon.
GS: Yes, we had Honeyboy Edwards,
probably in the early ’80s, and by then my interest was starting to become, I played with a
wonderful blues harmonica player, Jim Bullock in a duo and that emerged through the folk club
and the folk scene in the northeast but I then progressed to wanting a blues band. That happened

in the mid—eighties and that’s how the band really started to emerge.
BiTS: You kept it on the back burner in order to continue your teaching career, is that right?
GS: Yes, it wasn’t a deliberate thing to keep it on the back burner, it never occurred and to be
honest, I’ve always been my greatest critic and I’ve never really valued myself as a performer
until the last few years when you can’t ignore it when people who know what they’re talking
about say nice things about you, but I never ever thought I was good enough to do anything like

that.
BiTS: Well, let me tell you I think your music is magic and let’s talk a little bit about the music.
Your album, recently, it just appeared in the IBBA charts and you seem delighted about this.
GS: Well, the band got together in the late ’90s, and we brought an album out, ‘Got Blues if you
Want It’, and that came out very early. The band played together for about another five or six
years and then we didn’t fall out or anything, we just weren’t going anywhere. We restarted

around about 2013 and it was the same band, basically. We were starting to do okay and of
course, by that time, and this has been a huge, huge impact upon me, we had Facebook, but also
there was a blues scene or blues clubs. There were blues gigs and that hadn’t really been the
situation in the early noughties and suddenly there was a structure there.
There were blues festivals. There was something to aim at and we were doing very well. We
broke onto the festival circuit even though sadly it’s not what you know, it’s who you know on

the blues scene. It is sad because you would have thought that the people who are interested in
blues and the various sentiments that go with that, you would have thought they were beyond all
of that, but no. It’s still a question of who you know. You’ve got to be in with the right people.
You’ve got to be in with the agents and if you don’t get that, you don’t get the work. But, I was
quite poorly for a while and when I came out of that, we already had some songs that we wanted
to do, but everything was put on hold for a few months. Coming out of the illness, we went into

the studio, George Lamb, and myself. We developed these songs and that’s when we recorded
‘Nothing to Lose’. That was possibly, I think it might have been March 2018, it might have been
March 2017, but we were number one in the top forty.
The month it was released, we were number one in the IBBA top forty. The second month we
were number two and then that was it. I mean I do think that new albums on the blues scene