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all that stuff. I did that for about five, six years and by then I was in my early twenties and then I
realised it's too much discipline playing classical. You have to stick to the score. You can't
improvise, and I wanted to write my stuff, and then I like improvising, so I'm glad I learned the
basics of how to play classical guitar, but I still use it nowadays. It still helps me a lot now, these

days and it's good to understand music anyway. Then I joined a kind of blues-folk band, a guy from
Belgium was living in Switzerland and so I used to play electric guitar with the band. He was a guy
from Belgium, so we played a lot in Belgium in the early 80s.

BiTS: How did you find the blues then, I mean obviously through that band but when did you

become a blues enthusiast?

CB: Blues music is something you've heard of without knowing it's blues music. It's easy music to
understand, so you hear that. The very first I would say, I'm not sure if it's really blues, but the
first track that was kind of a blues tune that I really liked was a song by Creedence Clearwater
Revival, a song called ‘I Can See the Light’, or
something like that. [Singing] Put a candle in

the window. It was a kind of a blues tune, and I
liked blues music yeah, but I'm not a huge blues
aficionado, if you like. Obviously, if you play the
guitar you always end up playing the blues
somewhere and then I was playing quite a few

blues tunes and we also played Bob Dylan tunes
and kind of Americana stuff and so I ended up
learning the blues, well my take on the blues,
with them. I always liked mixing up stuff. I like
all kinds of music. It can be classical. I really
like Spanish music. I like Spanish guitarists a
lot, so I think they are the best. I like mixing up

different music, different styles of music. A bit
of Spanish, a bit of classical, a bit of blues and at
the end of the day all the music is made of the
same notes, so it's kind of easy to mix all these
things together because there's only 12 notes.

Andrés Segovia
BiTS: You're a very lucky man to be able to play
in a number of different styles. I remember
many years ago reading an interview with Andrés Segovia, who said that he really wanted to play
jazz, but he didn't have that kind of rhythm.

CB: Yeah, I mean like Segovia was really good at what he did, obviously, but if you play jazz music,
I'm not sure Segovia was really good at improvising, so I'm not sure he would have been really
good at it. People like Julian Bream, he had a take on jazz. He was quite good at it.

BiTS: What decided you, Claude, all those years ago, to move to the UK?

CB: The food and the weather.