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JH: I was about 15 when I played my first gig and I remember it was my dad's 50th birthday. He

said it would be great if you could play at my party and so that sort of scared me a little bit because
I didn't really want to do it on my own, so I sort of recruited a bunch of mates from school to get
together and do this birthday party which was actually at Turf Moor, at Burnley's football club
stadium, so yeah, it was a lot of fun to do that. We were actually terrible, of course. We'd had one
rehearsal and could barely play a song together, but it sort of ingrained something in me, I

absolutely loved being on stage despite the music not necessarily being the best. It was the thrill of
being on stage and performing for people,
and yeah, we stuck together and like a lot
of teenagers do, you sort of think that
you're going to go on and conquer the
world with your band. It didn't quite work
out like that, except it set the roots of what

I've done ever since. I've sort of done
different things and had different careers,
but always somehow come back to music,
so yeah, it was good.

BiTS: What sort of music were you
listening to then? What was the band based
around? What kind of stuff did you play?

JH: Well, at this point, a lot of bands were,
I guess, kind of into Britpop and that sort of
stuff, but we were trying to do Led Zeppelin

and we were doing covers of stuff from
"Exile on Main St." and Stones stuff that was not really getting played by younger bands at that
point. There's been a revival in terms of younger bands getting into that for the material ever
since, but yeah, we were trying to do covers of 'Ten Years Gone' from "Physical Graffiti" and things
like that which was a bit bonkers and I guess the thing that was interesting for me around that

whole period of about three years when I was in that band, was we really got into learning the
history of the music and that was part of the fun with it. We'd meet up every Saturday afternoon.
We'd play for about three hours and then we'd go and have a game of football afterwards and it
was something we did for three years, but we'd go and have a kick around in the field and then end
up sitting around chatting about Zeppelin and looking at who'd influenced Zep and who'd
influenced bands like Humble Pie, the Allman Brothers and that's where we started to trace the
lineage back to blues artists. That's where I really got into blues in my late teens.

BiTS: And then at some stage, I'm not sure what age you were, you moved to London to go to
college, is that right?

JH: Yes, I guess I was 21, 22 when I moved to London and there were two reasons really. One was

that I wanted to practice art. I wanted to get an art studio in London and make drawings and do
that side of things, but I also felt like I needed to move to London to really get a proper band
together and pursue my music career and it was interesting because a lot of the musicians I met
were through art college, so actually some fantastic players that were visual artists as well and