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LP: Good question. I was exposed to a lot of different genres of music through my drum lessons,
even though I wasn’t necessarily listening to good music outside of my lessons, if that makes sense.
With my drum teacher, we did ‘Come Together’ by the Beatles, for example, and we were covering
the great kind of rock songs, I guess. I’d rather quote drummers from my 20s onwards because I
was just absorbing. I wasn’t like obsessed with anyone at that really young age. It was only as I’ve
got older do I know who my inspirations are.
BiTS: What happened when you were in your 20s then? Who were you listening to then?
Clyde Stubblefield LP: Yes, coming into contact with some of those
funk greats like Clyde Stubblefield, James Brown’s
drummer, Bernard Purdie, who has played on over
4,000 albums, including Aretha Franklin and Steely
Dan, people like that. Al Jackson, the Stax
drummer—love his playing. I think Ringo Starr is
great.
BiTS: At some stage, Lucy, you started going to
Mississippi with your dad, specifically to Clarksdale
and, I guess, other places as well, and you started
to play in clubs over there in jams, I guess you
would call them.
LP: Yes, so a life-changing trip was in 2116, going
out just with dad. A father-daughter trip from the
classic Memphis to New Orleans, but we spent a
whole week out of the two and a half in Clarksdale because we just were making so many great
contacts and creative friends. The first night that we got there, and this was key, it was jam night
at Ground Zero, Morgan Freeman’s club and I’d already had contact with a drummer over there in
Clarksdale who basically we met up with, had a drink with and he enabled us to get up on stage. I
think I performed with dad that first night we were in Clarksdale and because there were a lot of
people there that night and obviously lots of locals and musicians, we very quickly both got
attention for being able to actually play the genre and because there’s music there every night of
the week, albeit in different venues. You go to a different venue the next night and you see people
that you’ve just seen at the jam night and really quickly you make friends, musical connections. If
you’re in the room and someone knows you can play, especially at that point, dad and I were a bit
of a freak, not necessarily a freak show, but the father-daughter duo that could both play from
England and white middle-class. We weren’t your average tourists that were out there, we were
also musicians that loved the genre. With drumming, it’s different, but with guitar and singing,
people are going to be way more judgy, aren’t they? If dad went up and was really cringy or
something, then he may never have got asked up with anyone else for the rest of that week that we
were there, but because they could see he was coming from a good place and people knew I was his
daughter and he’d obviously shown me the way, we kind of got accepted very quickly. Made friends
very quickly, and yeah, literally wherever you walked into, not instantly, but at some point, they’d
say, “hey, do you want to get up and do a couple?”. And it just went from there. Every time you
were playing to different audiences and with different musicians and very addictive.
BiTS: I think that since that time you’ve been back to Clarksdale on a number of occasions as well,
is that true?