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RC: I did have a career. Those were the days when you could leave school and go straight into a
job, and that's what I did in, when was it, July, August 1965? So I had a full-time job, but I was
doing music in my spare time, all the time.

BiTS: And the job was doing what, Raphael?

RC: Well, not very many people know this, but I was a journalist.

BiTS: Oh, really?
RC: Yeah, that was my full-time job as a journalist.

BiTS: Do you ever do any writing now?

RC: No. No I don’t.

BiTS: Apart from songs that is.

RC: Apart from songs. No, I'm glad to be out of it, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't a writer as
such, a reporter. I was a subeditor for most of that time, so I was in the office.

BiTS: Let's return to the music. On your website, there is the most huge list of names of people
that you've seen and heard and listened to, and all the rest of it. Do you have a favourite amongst
all those?
Blue Cee (Christine Purnell and Raphael
RC: I’ve got loads of
Callaghan)
favourites, but I mean,
Alexis, of course, and
probably my favourite
American blues artist is Skip
James. I mean seeing Skip
James and Son House and
Bukka White on the
American Folk Blues Festival
in 1967. That was life

changing that was, and
seeing them, well for me
anyway, I realised that I
couldn't be like them. I'm a
white boy from Seaforth in
Liverpool. I could never be
like them, but each of those
three individuals, they had
their own different styles,
and that's the path I wanted
to go down to get my own style.

BiTS: Right. Over the years, you've made a number of, I’m not sure how many, perhaps you know,
a number of records, any idea how many it is?

RC: Well, I don't really. I mean the official ones are the recordings that me and Jim James did for
the “I Asked for Water, But She Gave Me Gasoline” LP on Liberty in 1969. Then in 1977, I was in
a trio called Breakdown and we released our own LP called “Meet Me On The Highway”. That
was in 1977 and then my partner, Christine, we’d been together for 20 years and then she
suddenly brought herself a second-hand bass guitar, and for the next more than 20 years we