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play original music and I'm only going to play the music that I really, really want to make. So blues
flows very naturally out of me and it's a sort of a byproduct of being obsessed with guitar. It's not
something that I sort of realised I was doing almost when I was younger, until somebody said to
me, oh, you know, you have a really bluesy playing style, and I thought, I guess I do. I hadn't really
thought about it in those terms at that time of my life, but when I was a teen, I was obsessed with
John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. You know, all these, kind of like,
amazing blues guitar players and Clapton as well is another. I guess it all comes out, doesn’t it? So
yeah, it's difficult. I never set out to necessarily be labelled as a blues player, but it is just naturally
what comes out of me.
BiTS: How do you describe your music to other people then? I mean, what do you say about what I
play is…?
GG: Well, I generally say it's a sort of a hybrid of blues rock, indie, but I do have these kind of two
very distinct ways of playing because I have a three-piece band – Gozer Goodspeed and the Neon
Gamblers. That's the live band and when we
play, that's very much high energy, very
rocky. If you think of a band like Cream, that
kind of three-piece but with a lot of jamming
that goes on on stage because they're
absolutely superb musicians, so it's a pleasure.
We never really do the same song the same
way twice. We always have a little bit of extra
fun on stage and then I play solo and when I
play solo, I play with an acoustic, and I use the
loop pedal and I sort of layer things up and
that allows me to play a lot of lead guitar as a
solo player as well. So somewhere between
those two poles, I guess, is where you would
describe my music [laughs].
BiTS: Tell me something about the band that
you work with. Who are they?
GG: Well, they’re Bill Birks and Charlie
Bishop. Bill Birks is a formidably good multi-instrumentalist and he has had a couple of record deals
in his life. His music was praised by Robert Plant at one point. He's got that in print. And he used to
be part of, amongst many others, John Martyn’s touring band.
BiTS: Ah, now that's interesting. I saw John Martyn in Plymouth in fact, god, it must be 30 years
ago now, something like that, and he did that kind of multi-layered stuff then?
GG: Yes. Well, that depending on when it was, that may well have been, Bill, you saw playing in his
band, yeah.
BiTS: No, he was by himself.
GG: Oh, was he? Was he? Well, Bill has got a very long and storied history. Bill was actually at
Woodstock when he was 15-years-old.
BiTS: Wow.