What is your interpretation of Robert’s music, and how you can deal with it changed from the very beginnings when you were trying to play his music to the present day?

I think my present day interpretation of him is much more involved with my attempts to do it more than it was then because I think when I first heard Robert Johnson as a kid. I was probably caught up as much with the myth as I was with actually what he was doing. A lot of what he was doing was so on the surface of it, so impossible for me to achieve that I just didn’t even try to go there. I think the first time we did any of his stuff, I found the simplest one to adapt was From Forward Too Late, because it was almost just like a folk standard in a way. There wasn’t too much to worry about in terms of the technique and the song. But because there was this incredible virtuosity going on, I think that I was happier, really, just to identify with the legend. The whole notion of the Black arts and selling his soul and becoming a genius overnight and all of that was really attractive to me as a kid. And as the years went by that became less and less of an issue, and I would concentrate more and more on listening to the nuance and the finesse of what he did.

It’s amazing that even though I don’t know how those things were recorded (what equipment was used and how sophisticated it was), it’s incredible how much you can hear and the tone of the guitar, and it really is one of the finest musical experiences there is, to listen to that, and to that original record.

And you were talking about bringing it into bands and stuff, so the John Mayall, Bluesbreakers Rambling On My Mind, that wasn’t you or was, or was it a combination of you and John or …

I think that was John actually. Rambling On My Mind was another one I think I could probably assimilate to a certain extent without really feeling threatened by Robert’s version. And I remember John Mayall saying, ‘you know, you got a window here. Why don’t you make use of it, you know what I mean?’ And acknowledging his faith me, God bless him, when I didn’t think I could sing, I didn’t really think it was appropriate for me to attempt anything as massive as that. Looking back on it, I’m surprised I did because it is quite a hefty, quite a tall order to do a song like that. But it’s the flush of youth, you know?

I guess as a youth we have a lot more daring and I think that as you grow older, perhaps, what happens is you go for the essence and the truth of what his music is. Do you think that’s accurate?

Yeah, I think the whole notion that I could have grasped what he was, what he was trying to do, as a kid was impossible. I don’t know how old he was when he made those, maybe in his mid-20s but I was still only like 18 when I was trying to figure out what he was doing. And there was no way. On the face of it, actually, it’s interesting, because I had always been interested in the music of older people. I had never really totally identify with what would have been teeny bop in those days. It was all my heroes were either dead or very old, you know? It makes sense that I’d really come to understand it in my later years.

Yeah, I mean, you walked out of bands because they were going in that pop direction…

Well, it seemed to be going backwards to me. I was for instance in The Yardbirds. When I joined the band we were playing music by Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, etc., etc. and then ended up trying to perform songs written by someone who was gonna be into 10CC… And to me, that was an incredibly retrograde progression. But there you are…

Let’s get to the present time, where you came with the idea of, ‘I wanna do a whole album of Robert’s music.’ I mean, give me the thought process that went into that thing and then actually doing it.

Well, last year, we’re talking about 2003, I was conscious of the fact that it was time to make an album and my partner, Simon Climie, and I had been talking about how we’d go about it and what we had in mind for it. We’d done a couple of things over the last few years where we stepped into different areas, and we did an album that we really loved making together called Pilgrim, where we just holed up in the studio and did most of it without any help from anybody, no musicians at all. It was all machines and just making fabrics and ideas out of nothing and then I went and did the BB King album. And I did Reptile and in the making of these albums we put together some pretty amazing bands and I wanted to do that again. But I wanted to somehow mingle it with the kind of mental attitude we had for Pilgrim. So we started to write in the spring of 2003 and I would go around to Simon’s house. And any time I got to write from not having attempted to do anything before, I’d always go to a blues sensibility. I start to pick out something that comes from my own past or from my past tastes. And as this was starting to ferment and spend about two hours a day with Simon at his house which we did for about two or three weeks. I started thinking about that and it was almost like I was using Robert as a cop out clause, because I was facing the dilemma of having to come up with original compositions and start from scratch on an album that would be all original. I started to look a way of getting out of it.