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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