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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