"Don't forget my wages." "Jimmy, what in your view caused all this to happen?" "Personally speaking, I've been wanting to work with Robert for a long time." "In the past, it had just been in dribs and drabs on certain record projects." "Playing on Robert's album and he sang on one of mine." "And then Live Aid and this sort of thing." "The time was right and we discussed a lot of areas of how we could get things together." "We both agreed that we would have to do something that was within a new light." "Maybe if we did the old numbers, then it would be like possibly set the same picture but within a different frame." "A good way of putting it." "That comes onto the next question." "In this new territory that you talked about, there is an awful lot of old material." "Did you find that much of the old landscape resonated anew for you, so to speak?" "Since I've Been Loving You, for instance, does that mean something new?" "I think it was one of our more successful songs live, that we ever pulled off." "It's a great feeling to try and get near it again for the sake of it being once upon a time magnificent." "It's a great sort of marriage for the two of us to phrase against each other vocally and guitar wise." "This is something that, if you like... it puts us back in one of the very familiar roles that we play." "It's quite consoling, cos l was worried about that being a cliché but when you're doing it, it's great and it can be different every night." "What were the criteria for choosing old songs to redo?" "Well, we had so many songs that we could work on." "I think black Dog and those sort of numbers from way back in the past, as most of them are, didn't give us your media stimulus to rework them, whereas things like Friends certainly did." "If you're going to do that again, it's either got to be tongue in cheek or subtle." "What made appropriate ones appropriate?" "The fact that we could fashion a lot of them into a new, more interesting form than what might have been expected." "And by bringing in Nigel Eaton on the hurdy-gurdy and Paul Thompson." "He came in from a very refreshing and supportive angle." "So just the fact that we could actually take Gallow's Pole or Battle Of Evermore and really bring real new, sharp, bright focus to it." "No matter what we did actually get our teeth into, we really thought about it and I think that tells." "What did you expect to find in Marrakech first of all?" "Well, a couple of articles of clothing I'd left behind three weeks before at the hotel." "The whole Moroccan, North African adventure musically has been a great sort of helter-skelter of hopeful opportunity and failure because originally we wanted to work with a very famous orchestra out of Rabat and rework a couple of Zeppelin songs that way." "And that fell on its face, didn't it?" "Morocco is a land of a million contradictions." "One of the contradictions that we came across was, "Yes, that's fine."" "Then you get there and there's nobody there." "It's a Moroccan joke." "We've experienced it for 20 years. "Everything you want."" "Then you get there and there is nothing there." "There's nobody there." "You make every single fax, every point of logical liaison and they don't work." "So we went on a wing and a prayer and a phone call to meet the Gnawa." "And that was so much more natural and we wrote songs with them, which was amazing." "Their music is very trance-like and also they have the facility and the capability of healing within their music." "And they play for hours and hours and hours and hours and it's a therapy." "They also make cassettes that you can buy for 15 dirham." "The Gnawa are true black Africans, whereas the Moroccans are a mixture of Arab and Berber and a lot of the civilisation movements that went along north Africa and along the Mediterranean generally." "So the Gnawa has something much more of a root with Mississippi than it would do with Damascus and with Egypt and Cairo and the whole Arab thing." "So, yeah, I think that the sound of the gimbri and the drum... it's definitely like that sort of field chant stuff from northern Mississippi that Alan Lomax recorded years ago for the Library of Congress." "They were just so honest and their music was just a truth and you couldn't help but be touched." "Then you went to Wales." "We spend so much time in Wales." "I live not far from the Welsh border." "Just to be away in an area where you know there's been some activity that isn't easily explained nowadays." "You know, tribal stuff, cultural stuff." "The poetry of the Welsh, the Welsh triads, Taliesin, the whole thing is there." "If you have the eye for it, it's still there." "When we started working together again, we were working with tape loops." "Martin Messonnier made them up for us." "And when we worked with Messonnier's loops originally, within a couple of days, we got ideas." "We got four or five ideas in a couple of afternoons." "And the slant was, with the Arab drum loops that we'd cut and the cross rhythm playing that Jimmy was applying and my vocals on the top, we'd already got completed songs." "We've moved on from the loops and worked with Michael and Charlie as a four piece and we got about another seven songs out of that." "And it's developing into something that's got quite a blue, exotic edge to it." "You know?" "That's outside of what we're dealing with now." "That's stuff that we can go and work on next week." "That's really encouraging." "Last night, I saw a rush of Kashmir and there was a cIose-up of the solo violin in the middle of Kashmir and the man's face, he was so proud." "You know?" "And it's great to work with musicians who are so proud of their roots and they're normally not in a position to extend it into this." "Therefore their pride is so much food for us." "It's great. lt's really positive." "Having those Egyptian musicians playing the counter rhythms and to have that mood on stage, where the English orchestra, when they're not playing, they were in a frenzy, just moving along with it themselves." "That means it's working beyond anything I could have wished for really." "You could get shivers. I was getting shivers listening to the Egyptians playing." "The whole texture of what was going on." "As I say, we know that we've achieved that and yet there's so much more we can do."