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

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.

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

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.

A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.