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The BiTS Interview: Mick Clarke

Mick Clarke (born 12 July 1950) is a British blues-rock and pop-rock guitarist and
songwriter based in Surrey, England. He is a founding member of the British band Killing

Floor. He also co-founded SALT in 1975 and The Mick Clarke Band in the early 1980s.
Clarke began his professional music career in 1968 and has released 22 solo albums as

well as four studio albums with Killing Floor on various record labels.

(Wikipedia)

MC: Let’s go.

BiTS: Tell me about how you first got into music. Was there a lot of music in your house when
you were a kid?

MC: Well, we can go a long way back when I was a little kid and a family friend gave us a wind-
up gramophone with a pile of 78s, and it was records like ‘The Laughing Policemen’, ‘A Four-
Legged Friend’, ‘The
Runaway Train’, ‘The
Skater’s Waltz’ was in
there and foxtrots.
They were from the
30s and 40s, I suppose
and I absolutely loved
it. So I lapped that up.
Then I mean, I’m giving
you my whole life story
since you’ve asked.
Then my mum started
buying show tune
albums like “My Fair
Lady”, and I lapped all
that up and

“Oklahoma”. Learned
all of that by heart.
Then my elder brother
started bringing home Elvis Presley records and, well, all the pop records of the day, but
Lonnie Donegan and they’d get an Elvis thing because it had some horrible pop song on the
front, but I’d enjoy the B side which was quite often some sort of 12-bar with a bit of twangy
guitar and same with Lonnie Donegan because they’d bring in ‘The Battle of New Orleans’ and
on the back of that is a wild bit of kind of bluegrass rock and roll called ‘Darlin’ Corey’, which I
loved.

BiTS: That’s one of my favourite songs as well, believe it or not.

MC: Is it really? That’s interesting. I love that. I’ve just done a version of that, but I don’t know
if I’ll ever put it out because it just doesn’t compare with Donegan’s. It came out kind of
similar, but really, his is so good that unless I can do something different, then I probably
won’t ever, or I’ll slip it out somewhere.