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Johnny and I said he's offered me the label, the company and Gill, not unsurprisingly to me, said well I
hope you said yes, and that was that.

BiTS: Did you physically have to transport all of the CDs that he'd got to Scotland or wherever you were
working from then?

Gary: Yes. There was a few trips backwards and forwards to Vienna as we sort of discussed how all of
this could be done and after leaving Johnny's lawyers office in Vienna shortly after that, we went about
the task of packing up 175,000 CDs and having done that and
listed it all and done a stock take with it all and all the rest of
it, they actually closed one of the roads off, one of the streets

off in the middle of Vienna while this huge—the biggest
pantechnicon in the world—arrived and parked up and I think
it took a full morning with a chain of people involved heaving
boxes. Well actually onto pallets and they were palletising
them out in the street and then they lifted them up onto the
truck and at the end of that, I waved goodbye to the driver and
said, see you Scotland, and he drove off into the distance and

I shoved off to Vienna airport and came back home. As I flew
back home, I sat there on the plane thinking “what have we
done?” But we were very happy and very excited about the
whole thing.

BiTS: You've told me where your interest emanates from, can
I ask Gillian where her interest comes from as well?

Gillian: Well, I had rather a difficult childhood and that's an
understatement, so I was able to lose myself in music, mostly
I suppose the British kind of pop chart but I began to really
like soul music and then when I was quite young we went to

somebody's house to groom this donkey, sounds a bit mad,
doesn't it, but we did and the brother of these people who had
the house, knew that I liked music and he gave me an EP
bizarrely. I think I'd be about eight and it was ‘Democrat Man’
by John Lee Hooker. That really wasn't like The Swinging Blue

Jeans, but nevertheless, I liked it and that sort of set me off
really, well I like all sorts of music, to be honest with you but I am obviously very fond of blues.

BiTS: You do delve into some of the early jazz, much of which was done with blues musicians anyway,
are you still gathering that sort of material together?

Gillian: It's quite interesting you should ask us about that because I think when I met Gary, he knew a
great deal about blues and I'm going to say male country blues and the Chicago scene and all that and
neither of us knew very much about early recordings. I mean we knew a bit, but there's tons of it as
well on Document, especially all the female blues singers as I'm sure you actually know. However, over
the last few years, four or five years, we've become fascinated with all this, reading more and more

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