Page 20 - BiTS_07_JULY_2025_Neat

AS: I suppose, like so many people who grew up in the 60s, I was at school and very
much aware of the music that was going on, and a little band called The Rolling
Stones appeared on the scene. Their very first LP, In 1963, I think it was, contained

a lot of blues numbers and it was the first time I'd heard a lot of that music, and like
so many people, it made me want to investigate a bit further. So I bought albums, I
think they were Marble Arch albums, one of these budget labels that used to do
things. They’d do, collections of John Lee Hooker and collections of Muddy Waters,

things like that. Through that, I then started, I mean The Kinks did an excellent album
full of blues, which I thoroughly
enjoyed. I guess, it gradually grew

on me.

It's funny, I was talking to my wife
the other day, we were playing

some Taj Mahal in the car, and
‘Statesboro Blues’ came on. That
is one of the very early tracks that
I remember even though I think

that was from the late 60s. It's one
of the very early tracks that I
remember listening to which

wasn't, if you like, The Rolling
Stones or the old men of the blues,
the people like Muddy Waters and

so on and so forth. It still gets me
going now, ‘Statesboro Blues’. I
love it and I love Taj Mahal as well.

BiTS: I saw Taj Mahal at a club in Texas 20 plus years ago, and it was one of the best
gigs I've ever been to.

AS: Really. Yeah. Yeah.

BiTS: Now, I gather at some stage you move to Essex, Billericay, I think. Is that right?

AS: Yeah. I mean, after my parents moved to Surrey, Surrey was home for quite a
long time and then in 1988, I got divorced from my first wife and moved to Essex,
basically because that's the only place I could afford to live because I was still
working in London, so I needed to be within commuting distance of the City of

London. Yeah, I moved to Essex and there I was living on my own. I didn’t know
many people and like so many divorcees, when you get divorced, you tend to lose
an awful lot of friends. I got involved with our hospital radio station, Orsett Hospital

Radio, and that was the start of my what I thought was only a flirtation but actually
turned out to be quite a long term relationship with doing radio. In 1988 I started
there. We actually had proper training by a guy who was a former British Forces

Broadcasting service presenter and I got involved with that initially, helping out on