I’ve done this before and what I said to Simon halfway through was ‘you know what? I’ve got this idea, while we’re trying to do this album, every, whenever we get a break, let’s do a Robert Johnson song. Just for fun, just to see, because maybe, you know, it’ll take the strain off of what we’re really trying to do.’ And sure enough when the time came we wrote as much as we could. And we got some ideas together. Then we brought the band into the studio, and that’s the way we did it. We’d start out with one of these ideas that we’ve roughed up. I had a couple of words maybe but we grind to a halt, because we haven’t got a middle eight, or we hadn’t put the whole arrangement together and run out of steam. Then I’d say, ‘well, let’s get everyone in the control room, listen to this, and I’d play a track off of the King Of The Delta Blues.’ And I’d say, ‘we’re gonna do that. I don’t want anyone to learn anything. Just listen to it a few times and play it the way you feel it.’

And of course, I had some amazing players; I had Andy Fairweather Low, Billy Preston, Doyle Bramhall, Steve Gadd, all with very different different musical backgrounds but possessing incredible listening capabilities. So they would go back out on the floor, and we’d do versions, and that album got finished. The Robert Johnson thing was a done deal, and I kind of thought, I knew this was gonna happen. As we talk right now, I’m in the other room, still working on the other album, a year later. And it will be another year, I’m sure, before that’s completed. So I mean, I know from myself that this means that this stuff comes from, from the heart.

You know, a lot of what I do normally will be a mixture of the heart and the head, and the head is very slow. But the Robert Johnson stuff has come from the heart and has been very, very simple and very intuitive, and as an album, I’m very proud of it.

That method of working goes as far back as I know - as Layla, right? ‘Cause that’s what you did then.

We would do exactly the same thing on Layla. We’d be halfway through writing something and I’d do, ‘let’s just have a rest.’ But of course, you don’t rest. I mean, someone brings in some tea or something, the guitar is there or the guitar is still in your hands and you start to play, and it’s like something primal comes out. Or something from your core, something from your past. On Layla, we were doing Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out, Key To The Highway, things that go way back for me. And if I wrote an agenda, what I wanted to do, they wouldn’t be on it. You know, they would come up when there’s a gap, you know, when you relax and you shut down the head.

And what you were saying before about the head taking a little longer, that’s exactly what happened with your last couple of records, too, wasn’t it? It’s the same thing with Reptile where it took you a while to realize you, about your uncle? You know, same thing…

Yeah, I have real trouble with my head, you know. I know when I’m recording anything that when I apply this too much it all kind of grinds to a halt. I mean, you can make a song, or you can arrange a song and keep going, listen to it, and go ‘oh, it needs that put, that there…’ and it all just starts to kind of glue up…

It has to come up from the heart…

Yeah, and you know, there are times when the lads and I work really quick, because they know that the way to get it best is if I pick up the guitar and they turn it on and, the first thing I play was usually the best that it’s gonna be … And the minute you apply that kind of reflection or analysis or whatever it is it, it immediately starts to die.

And part of the problem with that is people are so tempted to use the technology that’s there today, because you can just slide a switch… Now Robert Johnson wrote, that we know of, 29 songs, right? And on this record there are 14 of them. What was the criteria for choosing the songs?

Well, there are groups of songs that Robert Johnson did, which pretty much fit into, uh, like, a character or a style. Crossroads, Milk Cow Blues, Stones In My Passway, Terraplane, for instance come under one heading for me which is that there’s a riff, and it’s a certain style. And then there are others like Got A Good Friend, Rambling On My Mind, Kind Hearted Woman… What I was trying to do was pick out a song that represented each of those kind of categories or a certain style that he played. I was very much motivated by the power of his versions. I wanted to do the most powerful songs that I thought he’d done, like Kind Hearted Woman, I think, is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. And Milk Cow Blues, I’ve always wanted to do that. I mean it’s a standard now. It’s a hillbilly rock and roll song… I wasn’t daunted by the fact that the Stones had done Love In Vain. I just thought that was a classic version of that particular style of blues, with the melody and the content. So I really wanted to pick the ones that I thought were the most significant for me, from my listening point of view.

And some of the choices you had are just flat out fun, like They’re Red Hot…

I never knew it was called They’re Red Hot, I always thought it was called Hot Tomatos… I heard this is one of those songs where I thought he probably had a small repertoire of songs of that nature which we’ll never know about. I heard a rumor that he did things like Blue Moon…

Yes, he did. How about the album title?

The album title was always a bit difficult for me. I think it was probably inspired by Me And Mrs. Jones, you know, so just kind of seemed to be a bit like a spoof really. It actually came with a whole art concept as well where it would be me sitting in the same pose with a guitar in a suit with a picture of Robert Johnson in a frame on a table. But, you know, really what it reflects is the fact that he’s been here. I mean he’s affected my entire life. It’s bizarre to think that all of my musical choices have had him somewhere in the equation, and I would always kind of half consider what if he was alive, what he would think about what I do. There’s an element of obsession involved in it and so I kind of have to refer to that in the in the title of the album.

The thing I like is it shows respect. I mean calling him Mr. Johnson instead of Me And Robert. How many different guitarists and guitars would you use during the recording ?

When we were making the album I used two different Martin acoustics, in addition to a Fender Strat that I normally use, just to give it a slightly pre war kind of feeling. I was using an old Gibson acoustic, jazz guitars and amplified jazz guitars. L5s with pickups, and they’re quite difficult to play if you’re trying to bend the strings and stuff, but I just found it had that more of a earthy sound, you know.

It does. It’s the way some of the guitars blend on some of the tracks, it’s just amazing. At first, you there was one acoustic that I swore I thought was electric at first. Did you need to go out and get any new guitars or were all these already available?

No we didn’t. I go back to what we were saying earlier about the way we were making the record when we were actually making another record. It’s us having fun. So the equipment we had on the floor was really all there to help us make another kind of record. And then when we would take a break and say ‘oh, let’s do a Robert Johnson song,’ we just used whatever we had that was being used on the other song. So a lot of it was really by default, except in situations where Andy would say, ‘I think this needs a mandolin,’ then we now and then go out and get stuff. Of course the one thing that I forgot to mention which really was on the agenda for Robert was to have the harmonica, you know, to have Jerry Portnoy, who I think is one of the great blues harmonica players who came over to play. That would not have normally have been on the list, to have him come and play on, on a normal kind of rock album. So, I must have had it in my mind that we were going to take this fairly seriously. But sometimes I do that stuff, little unconsciously, you know…