Pop music is aspirin and the blues are vitamins.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I love country music blues and punk and one day I might make those kinds of records.

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf Cream and Led Zeppelin but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

You know the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

The reflection of the world is blues that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.