All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.

The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players.

In the '90s, guitar solos were dead.

When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.

I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.

I wrote all these heavy, tuned-down guitar riffs and I asked him if he wanted to play the guitar solo on it, and he was pumped to do it, ... That was the first time I appeared on a record with Dime, and now this. I just wish this wasn't the way it had to happen.