Page 11 - BiTS_07_JULY_2025_Neat

AD: Yes. So the Palladium Club is a little music venue, which is literally down the
road from me. In my opinion, not to shout it out, but it is the best grass roots venue
in the country, having seen quite a few of them myself. But they basically had a jam

night and I switched guitar teachers when I was about 14, and he took me down to
that jam night and got me up with him and that was kind of where I probably started
to get up and play with people rather than just get up and play songs, if that make

sense? And that was very much a case of either you choose some songs, you jam it
out, or you just pick an idea and you go with it and see what happened. And that
was quite a formative moment, I'll be

honest with you.

BiTS: Were you singing at that time?

AD: I was. Yeah, I will confess, though,

I was a 14-year-old kid going through
puberty. My voice wasn't exactly spot
on, shall we say, but that was kind of

when I started to. Again, I wouldn't say
it was particularly good at that
moment, but then that's something

that only comes from practice. I think
more than anything it was about
getting over that kind of, I'm live on

stage; I can sing and do this, and it is
something which I'm able to do
comfortably.

BiTS: And what sort of music were
you actually listening to at that time?

AD: At that time, I was actually getting
back into things like Robert Johnson, B.B. King, all of the sort of older blues stuff,
which, well, I say older blues stuff, it was all the stuff that inspired people like Eric
Clapton, people like Jimi Hendrix, people like Stevie Ray Vaughan. They were my

stance of what I wanted to be, and so I went back and listened to the things that they
used to listen to and that was kind of my logic. What they did then maybe I’d get

there, who knows?

BiTS: Okay, so when did you have your first band or when did you first play in the
band then? Let's put it like that.

AD: My first band, okay, I'm going to be completely honest. I don’t think I've told

this story many times. It was awful. It was something called Brave The Elements and
this was back when I was 16, I think, and I finally convinced some of my other friends

to learn musical instruments and come and play. It was just dire. I still have the
recordings from one of our concerts somewhere, and every time I look at it, I start