I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

His sound was stunning -- it was the blues, it was R&B, it was gospel, it was swing -- it was all the stuff I was listening to before that but rolled into one amazing, soulful thing.

When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.