Page 33 - BiTS_05_MAY_2025

THE BiTS INTERVIEW: Paul Long

Paul Long is a musician and outstanding audio engineer. He

is the presenter at Blues And Roots Connections, on Blues

Radio UK. He is a Board Member of the UK Blues Federation

and Chair of the UK Independent Blues Broadcasters
Association (IBBA). He is a former live music producer at the

BBC.

Paul was the keyboards player & vocalist with the band Catfish

which was fronted by his son Matt who passed away after a

battle with cancer in October 2024.

PL: Hello.
L.R. Phoenix
BiTS: Paul, it's Ian McKenzie.

PL: Yeah. Hi Ian. Hi.

BiTS: Okay, let's make a start. We're going to be talking

about the new album that you've produced,
which is called “Time To Fly”, and tell me
where you want to start from.

PL: Oh, I don't know. I guess it starts
when Matt died in October, really. I
couldn't feel I could listen to any

of the music or do any music.
Then in the New Year, that’s sort
of slowly changed and I found

myself listening to what we
had, and there were quite a
few unfinished tracks and

unreleased stuff. Most of the
things we had, we had about
five studio tracks that we

had been working on, all
of which were just guide

parts for Matt really, guide
guitar and guide vocal. So that's what we had to use, but they were very good parts.
He liked to do things again, sometimes even when it wasn't really necessary. There
was some very fine playing on it. And so there's that, and then we found two songs

on Matt's computer that he’d demoed. Another song which Sam, his partner, found
in a voice note on his mobile, and so sort of constructed a song from that because