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BiTS: I couldn’t help but notice, Russell, that when I was looking at your website, it says
something about ‘and occasional crooning’ [chuckles]. Do you do occasional crooning, still?

RK: I do it in the gruff style, I suppose. There’s a song on the live thing called ‘I Guess I Must
Say’, which is like a jazzy lounge thing which I suppose you could call crooning to a certain
degree. Lots of nice fills and piano and stuff. That’s about as far as my crooning goes [laughs].

BiTS: Were you badly affected by COVID when it was rampaging?

RK: Yes, because in my day job, I’m one of the lead singers in Slade and I play piano and stuff
with Dave Hill and we were doing loads of shows before COVID. In fact we were in Denmark
when it all started. We were supposed to do two gigs in Denmark. We only did one because
they cancelled the second one straight away and everything shut down in about 12 hours.

BiTS: Do I take it that this live album is a kind of early attempt to get back into the game
again?

RK: Well, it is for TBelly. I mean, Slade, we’ve started doing Slade shows already. We’ve been
doing Slade shows this year. But for TBelly, I’ve done two gigs with the band as it is now and it
is a bit like that saying hello, because I want to do some more shows. I’m going to do some solo
gigs, I think, because it’s cheaper for me to do solo gigs at the moment because I pay the band.
So having five or six members costs me quite a lot of money, which I don’t mind spending out,
but it becomes a little bit …., when it’s costing me money all the time. So I’m going to do some
solo things, but yes, just to say hello.

Remember us and push it out a little bit
more.

BiTS: I’m going to take you back in time
for a bit because you said when we first
started that you’d worked with what I’d
thought previously was nothing more or
less than a Scottish band, and you’re not
Scottish, are you?

RK: What, Lesley? No, no, no. I mean, I
wasn’t in the original band, obviously, but I
played in a lot of original bands in London
and one of the guys that I played with for
years and years and years got the gig with Les to go and do some shows in Germany and about
a year later they needed a keyboard player, so they asked me and because it was paid,
obviously, it was proper work, I jumped at it. So I did that for 16 years. We toured all over the
world.

BiTS: Did you?

RK: Yes, all over America, Japan, Australia. All over Europe, Canada. Yes, all over for years and

years and years.
BiTS: Any particularly outstanding gigs or places where you played at which you thought I
never thought I’d be playing here?

RK: There’s a couple, really. There’s one in Berlin. I can’t remember what it’s called now
[Berliner Waldbühne; Ed] , but I think Hitler used to do speeches at this place, apparently. It’s
a massive amphitheatre, it’s huge and it goes up. It holds about 25,000 people and we played
there one night. Not just on our own. I think Suzi Quatro might have been there. I can’t