GARY: It's mainly me but there are some collaborations and joint song writing. Usually, we get back together when we're out on tour. It's very difficult to say that you've written a song jointly. There are some people who believe that, if a band rehearses for a day on a song, then there should be a co-writer. But no, because you might work for a day on a song that was a Rolling Stones song, but you can't see them phoning up Keith Richards and Mick Jagger saying, “We're doing a version of your song, therefore it's a co-write”! If you think that, then let me tell you that you're going to get the answer of “No”! You have to work on songs to make them work, but that doesn't mean to say that you've written a song by trying to make it work. So, yes, we do occasionally write together, but that would be more on the road, when we've landed in hotel rooms.

LORRAINE: You got the band together originally to tour the United States?

GARY: That's right. What happened was I played a gig, an end of tour party for the road crew of the Rolling Stones. And that was something that, obviously, I really wanted to do, and I was playing that solo. I was doing my slide guitar, a Cockney John Lee Hooker type of thing, quite raunchy. I'd put a live microphone on the stage, and was playing solo, so I'd stomp with my boots on the stage with a live mic just on the stage with a bit of reverb on it. Quite ambient and quite live.

None of the Stones were actually at the party, because there was a party for the Stones going on at Ronnie Wood's house; but all the road crew were there, all the lighting engineers, all the make-up girls, and Pierre de Beaufort came down. Now, Pierre is Keith Richard's personal guitar technician, and he's also the Rolling Stones' pre-production man. They don't do anything in the studio without Pierre being there. And he's one of the few people that have actually been co-written into Stones song-writing. So Pierre de Beaufort comes up to me at the gig, and he goes, “You've got to go to America with that. They would go nuts for that in America. And I said, “Coming from someone who is close to the actual source of what I consider to be the essence of rock'n'roll, I'll take you up on that. Can you help me?” So he said, “Can you afford a ticket to the east coast?” I went, “Yes”. He went, “Come over to my studio in Massachusetts, and we'll see if we can get you a few gigs, and we'll take it from there. So I did! The thing was, he gave me his home number, he gave me his mobile, and he gave me the office number of Rolling Stones Records in New York. And I sat and just looked at those numbers for about a week, thinking, “Wow! What a mind-blast, having those numbers!” And the guy who booked me in for the gig at the Stones' end-of-tour party, the road crew party, he phoned me up, and he said, “I've just been talking to Pierre!” This about a week or ten days later, and I said, “Yes, I've got on really well with him”, and he said, “Yes, he gave you his telephone number didn't he? What did he give you? His home number?” I went, “Yes.” and he went, “And his mobile?” I went, “Yes”. “And the Rolling Stones number in New York?” I went, “Yes”. And he said, “You haven't phoned him up yet; I just spoke to him. It was over a week ago.” And I said, “Well, I didn't know whether he really meant it or not.” He went, “Don't be a prat! People like that don't give their numbers if they don't mean it. You want to get on to that straight away before the situation changes.”

So I considered what my mate had told me, the guy who got me in there, and I phoned up the next day and, sure enough, Pierre says, “I was wondering when you were going to call. Do you want to come out here?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What's the date when you want to come?” I said, “What’s convenient for you?” He said, “Listen, I've got the time off now. This is why I'm telling you to come now.” So I went out there, did some recording, did a few gigs, Pierre had helped out with a few gigs on the east coast, did a little bit of cable TV, and it went pretty well, and then I got an email. “Gary, we thought it was great, what you were doing. You need a band. Come back and do it on the west coast, and we've got to do it with a band.”

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I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .