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record what we did on the tape so we could always tell what we did. And ‘Maggie
     May’ was one of the first tracks I ever recorded, and lots of other experiments. We'd

     heard of this guy, Les Paul, and we knew about guitars and things, and we'd heard
     some of his stuff and how he would play music slowly and then speed the tape up.
     We used to do all sorts of things like that, mucking around with things like that, and
     I guess round about that time is when I suddenly discovered the blues.


     BiTS:  Well, tell me how that was. Who were the artists that you heard, first of all?

                                                        NS:  Well, working backwards, I guess it was

                                                        Led  Zeppelin  the  first  time  I  realised  that
                                                        there was a thing called a 12-bar blues. And
                                                        Jimmy Page was playing stuff that was just out

                                                        of this world. It was a complete world away
                                                        from what I even thought was possible. He
                                                        was  just  making  the  guitar  sound  like  an

                                                        animal. He was fantastic. Then, interestingly
                                                        enough, I picked up on Carlos Santana, Richie
                                                        Blackmore,  anybody  that  had  a  guitarist  of

                                                        note in them, and I was listening to them all.
                                                        So the early “Abraxas” album, “Deep Purple In
                                                        Rock”, “Led Zeppelin I” and “II”, definitely at

                                                        that time. Those were the albums that I was
     listening to. I was so fortunate because my dad had a record player that would play
     at various speeds. You know, everybody's got 45 and 33 rpm. This would also do 16

     and 78. Now the beauty of 16, of course, if you put a guitar solo on an album on 16,
     it's an octave down and half the speed. So it's easy to follow.

     BiTS:  So I guess, like many of your contemporaries, you learned to play by playing

     along with the records. Is that right?

     NS:  That's right, and I was lucky because the records were half speed [chuckles].

     BiTS:  I had one of those multi-speed record players as well.


     NS:  I think it's called a Goldring. Goldring, or something like that.

     BiTS:  Yes, something like that. How good did you get? I mean, what made you decide
     that you wanted to perform in public, for example?


     NS:  Do you know what, I don't know? I think it just felt like that was what we did.
     When I was at school, as we were getting older into the 17s and sixth form, I met
     another guy, Colin Smith was still with me. We were still doing bits and pieces and

     a guy called Chris Godfrey came to the school. He'd been somewhere else for his first
     five years or whatever it is, but then he came to the sixth form. Chris came along and

     I was introduced to him because somebody said, oh, Chris plays a guitar. So that was
     another friendship that we struck up, and I had probably more musically in common
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