I get three of those guys and another piano player that I met in Crimbles music shop, and that was the band I went into the club with, that became known as Them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Them in 1965, with Van Morrison on vocals. Photograph: Dezo Hoffmann/Rex-Shutterstock

And it took off …

Well, the club took off. But then the situation became very complicated. There was a whole other thing – the involvement with the Solomon brothers and Decca Records (4), and I was underage, so my father had to sign a contract. It’s a whole, long involved story that would probably take a year to explain!

In 1998, you returned to the beginning, making a skiffle album [5] with Lonnie Donegan, recording Lead Belly songs.

I just wanted to go back toI think, to even think about approaching the thing unless Donegan was there, in the beginning.

Footnotes



1) Solly Lipsitz, who died in 2013, aged 92, was Northern Ireland’s Mr Jazz – as well as running a record shop, he owned a club, lectured at Belfast College of Art and Design and made music in his own right.

2) Showbands were a distinctly Irish phenomenon, popular from the 50s to the 80s, playing covers of contemporary hits in a variety of styles in ballrooms and dancehalls. By the mid-60s there were estimated to be around 700 showbands at work.

3) Them were one of the groups that kickstarted the garage rock boom across the Atlantic in the US. Their song Gloria became a garage punk standard (and was later covered by Patti