I always felt that there was a point you could reach, and then you couldn’t go any further. You could be a British white interpreter of the blues—and I suppose the pinnacle of that would have been Peter Green, in the ’60s—but then how does someone like Peter Green compare to B.B. King? How does someone like that compare to Hubert Sumlin? I always felt some dimension was missing.
For me, bands like the Yardbirds became much more interesting when they began to write their own songs. That’s when their Britishness inserted itself into the sort of general R&B milieu, and you started to hear some original ideas. That was also true when the Kinks started writing. The music became something quite different. Cream is a great example, as well. They became an interesting band when they started doing their own material. When they were doing Robert Johnson songs, I didn’t hear anything especially interesting. But when they came up with “White Room” and songs like that, I thought, “This is great stuff.” [From Issue 102, June 2007]