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BiTS: As with many of us of our age, I’m not dissimilar to you, Lonnie Donegan was the route
into the blues, was it?

MC: Well, he was. Skiffle was a fantastic thing, wasn’t it? It was that blend of blues, folk,
bluegrass, rock and roll. I don’t know and it was wild, the way he did it, it was delivered with
such attitude and energy, so I loved it and I’ve caught up on a lot of his other stuff that I’d
missed. I actually went out and bought a double album of all his stuff and there’s more things
on there that I love as well. And then it’s interesting because you can trace them back and see
where they came from, the Kingston Trio and things, folk groups and Lead Belly and all kinds
of things. So they were my influences, and then, like yourself, perhaps I was a teenager as the
60s came in and got hit with the full force of Beatle mania and the beat groups, The Animals
and all the rest of it, which I absolutely loved right through to the blues, Alexis Korner and
John Mayall. It’s a well-told story, really.

BiTS: When did Killing Floor first come along then?

MC: Yes, Killing Floor about 1968 because I’d been in a band, I think they were called The
Loop, and we’d advertised for a singer and Bill [Bill Thorndycraft] turned up and we got on
alright, but we did one gig and it was horrible. So the band immediately, I don’t know, it was a
party. They all got drunk. Nobody could play a thing, but me and Bill got on well, so we said
shall we put something together? He
came up with the name Killing Floor,

which I think was pretty good and we
advertised for a bass [Stuart McDonald],
and he knew a drummer [Bazz Smith]
that he’d met in Germany when he’d
been touring and then later we put
another ad in, and we got Lou Martin on
the piano.

BiTS: I take it that Killing Floor was
from the Skip James song, yes?

MC: More from the Howlin’ Wolf, I think.
I don’t know if we knew the Skip James
that well at the time, but we were more
familiar with the Chicago blues stuff, so
probably thinking of Wolf at the time.

BiTS: You travelled all over the world with Killing Floor, playing at all kinds of places.

MC: Slight exaggeration. We travelled all over Britain, that’s for sure and we also went to
Germany and Switzerland. I’ve been other places since, but with Killing Floor, that was about
it. There wasn’t really a European scene at the time, but you could do these long residencies in

places, so we went off and did that. And we did the South of France as well for six weeks. That
was good.
BiTS: I’ve been reading on your website about your adventures with Freddie King, when you

accompanied him on stage. Tell me, what kind of a person was he?

MC: He was a very nice man. He was a very nice man, and he was a very straight guy because
you read a lot about, oh, “he had a drug problem” and all this and Keith Richard has said “oh,
he was basically a junkie”. Well, I don’t know, not when I knew him. He was dead straight. I
mean, I shared a hotel room with him one night and he didn’t even drink. In fact he didn’t