Eric allen bell producers edge

I can't help but be influenced by all those old bluesmen. They were true pioneers. I don't often do that finger picking style, but it's such a great track I thought I'd give it a go. I'm a huge fan of early Elvis so he gets one of the two covers on the album. Relationships are fertile ground for blues songs and like many others, this one is a true story.

It's about a time when Thin Lizzy were touring in Europe. Our last gig was cancelled so I came home a day early and she told me she was sleeping with the guy upstairs. Keith Richards once said: "The thing about being a songwriter is, even if you've been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. This happened in the early 70s and it's taken all this time to come out in a song.

Sometimes I just have to get the crap out of my head. The song is about Irish working class navvies coming to London and promising to send money home but ending up drinking it. It's also about being homesick, about being in a strange country and wanting to be home. It's a bit autobiographical I suppose - being in a band is he musical equivalent of digging roads.

Eric allen bell producers edge

It almost like therapy to get it out. It's influenced by traditional Irish laments, it's got that traditional tempo - I can't help that heritage creeping in. It all fizzled out after a year and a half, and I went back to Belfast. I joined a blues group called Shades of Blue after their guitarist had left. A young man called Gary Moore. John was going to be the singer with a new young modern Irish Showband called The Dreams.

He said I should go to Dublin and audition for the guitar slot. I took the chance and got it. After a year and a few months, I left The Dreams and decided to form a group. For the first time Eric discloses the struggles in the years that followed and recounts more staggering stories of life on the road in the USA with Jimi Hendrix's bassist Noel Redding.

Eric pulls no punches on telling the truth about the good and the bad times. This emotionally charged and absorbing autobiography is a true and moving testimony of a giant amongst guitarists. Starting with his early life, details of which few people have ever had access to, this moving autobiography reveals Eric's discovery of music and chronicles the influences that were responsible for his enduring love of the guitar.

His journey culminated in the the creation of one of the most loved and successful rock bands in history.