We then took a shortened version of what we'd been doing in the pubs, with the best gags and things like that, out to cabaret clubs and things in the north of England for six weeks. And we became a big success.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode.
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.
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.
So we used to look for funny songs, and learn them and play them. And we used to play them in pubs.
After school I moved to London to get involved in music. I took the whole thing very seriously.
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.
We played in bars and other such establishments and anywhere where people would listen. Sometimes they did, and sometimes not. The outfits we wore were classics of the 50's.
You bet I arrived overnight. Over a few hundred nights in the Catskills, in vaudeville, in clubs and on Broadway.
I left Edinburgh to follow the London punk scene in 1978, singing and playing guitar in various bands. My income was sporadic, so I did anything to eke out some kind of subsistence - laying down slabs, working as a kitchen porter.
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.