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with Chris than I did Colin, although we formed a band, and we were called Captain
     Galapagos and the Sea Lizards. Don't ask me why.

     BiTS:  I saw that name on the website that you've got, Captain Galapagos and the

     Sea Lizards, and I thought it was a wonderful name.

     NS:  Yes, I know, that was it. That was the only thing wonderful about that band.
     Everything else was a bit rubbish. Chris introduced me to rock and roll in the 12-bar

     kind of way because he was heavily into Status Quo, which I quite liked because I
     loved the stuff that they were doing. I just never tried to play it. I was too busy doing
     my Zeppelin and Deep Purple

     impersonations.  Not  that  I
     was anywhere close to being
     good enough. If I played you

     my version, you wouldn't have
     recognised  it,  I  suspect
     [laughing]. But we formed this

     band, and we came up with a
     whole  collection  of  bits  and
     pieces  of  songs  that  we  did,

     ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ by
     Led Zeppelin. We did ‘Samba
     Pa Ti’ – no, ‘Oye Como Va’ by

     Santana  because  we  didn't
     have to sing, which was quite
     good. I can't remember all the

     other  ones.  I  think  we  did  a
     track called ‘Washing Machine

     Blues’,  which  Chris  had
     written [laughs], and I can still
     remember the words for that one, because I think he just took them off the back
     pages of the Financial Times, or something like that.


     BiTS:  Oh, well, there's a thing.

     NS:  Whether to pay off the mortgage or let things stay as they are is a question

     which crops up each time building society rates are increased, and there is no clear
     cut answer, and you can turn that into a 12-bar if you want to. And anyway we did
     that. It was quite fun. We did our first gig at what was then the Methodist Youth
     Club, the Methodist Church Youth Club in a place called Wokingham in Berkshire.


     BiTS:  What sort of guitar were you playing then?

     NS:  An acoustic guitar, stuffed with bed sheets with a pickup across the sound hole,

     an old Broadway pickup played into Colin’s Grundig tape recorder to give me the
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