This kind of music was just hitting England, so we were getting this following in clubs in Birmingham just cause we were trying to do something different.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We didn't really expect to achieve anything outside of the UK, and it just went crazy. It's just crazy that people know our music. We're just humbled by it.
You know Manchester is always a bit of a hard place for people coming from London, just with all the history. Manchester has this immensely huge and healthy history musically.
Then we did what we called basically I suppose a club tour in England, which was the time I think that our second album came out, we club toured around the whole country where the venues were hold to five hundreds upwards to that sort of thing you know.
At the art college in Edinburgh someone arranged for some London groups to come up and play. I was in a supporting band, with Bernie Green I think. Derek Bailey was one of the visiting musicians. He seemed to like my playing and asked me to come down to London.
It's like Liverpool. Everybody went for the music. All the young musicians seemed to gravitate to Asbury Park.
But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.
I haven't heard any music on the BBC World Service in a long time. Maybe I'm listening at the wrong times. But not one single piece of music.
When you're playing music through the streets of London at 2 o'clock in the morning, there's something so cool and magical about that. It takes you to a special place very quickly.
At the time, we thought it was a nice way to say something unique about the group to make us different from all the other bands kicking around in London.
I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.