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AS: I'm 77.

BiTS: Okay, so you've been having a bit of relaxation since you left, I guess?

AS: I don't know, I still manage to find plenty to do [laughs]. It's the age-old thing

about retirement, isn't it? The classic comment is, I don't know how I
found the time to do any work. I mean I still spend a lot of time, not
just producing the shows, but promoting them for various

broadcasts somewhere in the world every day of the week. So
every day of the week, there's some publicity to do about it and
something I'm very keen to do is to make sure that the shows
are publicised, and equally to let the people whose music I'm
Kaz Hawkins
playing know that I'm playing their music. So I send an email out
Hawkinsawk
every week to all the people, just to warn them.

BiTS: Let's move on to a fundamental question for both of us,
what is your opinion of the state of blues music in the UK at the
moment, and where do you see it going?

Kyla Brox
AS: Yeah, I wish I could answer that. I think that for me there's
some very good proper blues being played and there's an awful
lot of music masquerading as blues, or that is being self-described as blues, but

is really rock. I mean, I'm not precious about the term blues. I play, as anybody who
listens to the shows knows, I play music which by a long chalk could well not be
described as blues and it has become more and more as I do it. I tend to play a lot
more of music that I love or like, rather than saying, is it blues? It could be that you

could say it's digital blues and roots music or something of that sort.

But the Digital Blues is one that's established and has been around for 25 years and

so I don't really want to mess about with it. I hope that perhaps through playing a
broad range of music which I feel has a taste of blues within it, or a sprinkle of blues
within it, or maybe a straight ahead blues, I hope that I'm introducing people to

music that they wouldn't otherwise hear. Certainly a lot of the feedback that I get
from people, they contact me and say, oh, I love that track you played by so and so.
I've never heard them before. Or there's a lady who's a regular listener in Australia,
for example, and she was playing ‘Call Me The Breeze’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd, it is, I

think, and she was saying what a great song that is. I said, oh, have you heard the JJ
Cale original of it? And so I sent her a link to a YouTube thing, and she came back,
wow, she said, what I love about listening to you guys is the fact that you introduce

me to new music all the time. Whether it's new songs or just other songs done by
different artists. That actually meant a lot to me, because that's really what I want
to try and do.

BiTS: That's wonderful. I guess actually that's the purpose of us doing what we do,
that you want to try and catch a few more people who think that, as somebody once
said to Buddy Guy, it's all sad music, and he said it's not, and he's quite right.