You play from 8 in the evening until 2 or 3 in the morning, and on the weekends you’d play from lunchtime until 2 or 3 in the morning — but we were 18. There were girls and it was brilliant. I was straight out of boarding school; I thought I’d gone to heaven.

In those days bands played two 45-minute spots, that’s how it was — the opening act — generally us — would go on, then the big band would do their 45, then us, then the big band would do their 45 again. So we had an hour-and-a-half, maybe two-hour repertoire, and when you do those German things, two hours isn’t going to last you. So you’ve got to learn tons and tons of things. Were we writing songs? No, we really weren’t there yet — all covers, nearly everyone did. But we were trying to start writing our own songs. But we had a repertoire of hundreds of soul and pop songs.

Nick Lowe til  Salon.com