JOE HICKLIN: Free wasn't my first love in music, “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen was the first song I loved. I remember hearing it when my Mum was cutting my toenails when I was five, and for a good few years the only thing I listened to was Queen's Greatest Hits Volume 1 on cassette.

Me and my dad were going to see Queen in Hyde Park and Paul Rodgers was singing with them. I said to my Dad I didn’t know who Paul Rodgers was and he told me he was the singer in a band called Free that my Dad and my uncle loved. They burnt me a few CDs from some Free vinyl, I was 13 or 14 and I fell in love with blues rock. I thought Paul Rodgers was the best singer ever, and by the time went to the Queen gig, I was there more to see Paul Rodgers.

Years later, my Dad got me the Live at The Isle of Wight album, and I love it, the version of “Mr Big” has a bit more grit, and to this day I think that Free are one of the great, underrated rock bands.

BEST FIT: Why this song in particular? Free are known for “All Right Now”.

It’s not even one of their better songs. Paul Rodgers got all the flowers really, but Paul Kossoff, who died when he was 25, was a great melodic guitarist, Simon Kirke was underrated rock drummer, the bass player Andy Fraser was 15 when he joined Free, doing that solo in “Mr Big”. I love Free to this day. I grew out classic rock, but bands like Free and Led Zeppelin I can go back to anytime.

The lineup for the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 was incredible, there was 600,000 people there and the bill included Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and The Who.

I think Free played at 10am, there's a video and people are just sitting there. They were a great live band, but it should be the thing of two halves. When people say a band is better live, I think they should better live, because you're introducing another bunch of senses for the audience. It's not just someone listening, it’s about someone in a room with other like-minded people, loving the band. If your album is better than your live show, then you’re doing something wrong.

This is links to the song that’s after this, it was written by Blind Willie Johnson

It’s funny, I forgot about that until I was looking the list, because I’ve got Blind Willie Johnson next, but Nina Simone is one of my favorites. When I was kid, there was a yoghurt advert on TV, and it had a remix of “I Got Life.” I remember liking the song from the advert and then Nina Simone's Greatest Hits came out and I got that, and it's still one of my favourite albums, that's probably my most listened to album ever.

With “Nobody’s Fault but Mine”, when you've got someone sitting at the piano like that, it's strips away everything else. It’s another one of those old spiritual songs that I just love. I grew up a bit religious, I'm not now, but I came to love religious imagery in music, even if a person's not religious you can love it for its passion. Talking about God can be such a broad thing, but with that old spiritual music it was people's only way of letting out any sort of passion from the situations they we're in, so it takes the form of God.

I love gospel music, and I’ve always loved the sound of pain in someone, it's them being honest, and at that age, I assumed whoever was playing the music wrote the music. She's sitting there singing this song about her Mum, “it’s nobody’s fault but mine,” it's quite simple, and maybe she let her down. I love and it's probably my favourite piano playing ever.

Even if she covers a song, she owns it, you know it’s her voice within seconds

If someone else sounded like her, they’d have to change their voice, because you wouldn't be able to get away with it.

This was from my Mum’s side, she didn't play loads of music around the house, but if she did, it was Soul compilations, which connected to the folk and blues music I like as well. It was always pleading music that I loved, where someone had to plead to have a reason to do the song. It was never music that was ‘let’s go and have a nice time.’

Nine Simone is sitting there saying, “I had a mother who could pray. I had a mother who could sing.’ Whoever's doing that needed to do that, and I felt that from soul music.

I was mainly getting music from copied CDs or tapes, or looking for videos on YouTube, which is where I got into Dylan. My girlfriend at the time was a singer and guitar player, and through that I started gigging. I was 17 and a good friend of mine called Johnny did gigs around Birmingham, they’d put bands on if they liked their music and they did it all for free, with free entry to give people gigs.

I started doing gigs for them and he lent me The Times They Are A-Changin' on CD - I say he lent it to me; this was 15 years ago, and I've still got it! I was obsessed with that album, from everything I learned from the blues, when I got to this album it was this mixture of stories about other people's hardship and personal stuff as well.

“Restless Farewell” is at the end of the album, and I’d play it on repeat. There was something about the quiet, humble mournfulness of it, it was like he was sitting in a pub with his mates, thinking about his life. And that’s what stayed with me, the multitudes of those simple moments, where he's self-reflecting in the song about himself in this moment. And there's so much good poetry in it, it’s so beautiful to me.

I was trying to write lyrical acoustic stuff at that point and that was when I first sat down with a Dylan album. “Restless Farewell” is still probably my favourite song of his. It made me think of lyricism, there's not much of a rhythm to it, it’s like a poem with an acoustic guitar.

What I love is that the situation is simple, it’s a guy at the bar with his mates thinking about his life. When people talk about relatability and music, they think it needs to be a little thing that can be spread out really broad, whereas you can keep it to the little thing, because we've all had little moments. I think that song’s a really great example of that and it stayed with me

He reputedly wrote it after an interview he didn't like, where he was accused amongst other things of getting a student to write “Blowin’ in the Wind” for $1000.

That's crazy. I think it’s based on a traditional song. And through Dylan I got massively into traditional folk, American Appalachian music and English and Irish folk music, but again, I didn’t have enough room for them!

I had no clue about Tom Waits. I was at my Dad's house and there was a re-run of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Tom Waits was doing “Tom Traubert's Blues” a version of “Waltzing Matilda” and I fucking hated it, I thought it was terrible, at the time I was living on soul music and Paul Rodgers.

My first love was movies. There's a Tony Scott film called Domino, which is a really loose true story about a woman from a rich family, who was the daughter of the actor in The Manchurian Candidate, she was a model and a socialite and became a bounty hunter. Domino is a fictionalised action movie of that, Keira Knightley was in it and Mickey Rourke was as well.

I loved that film as a teenager, there's a bit where they’re in the desert, a car comes over the hill, and this song is playing, “Jesus Gonna Be Here” by Tom Waits. Again, it was this mournful, ghostly music as the car, the whole song is two notes on a double bass and one note on a slide guitar. Tom Waits is in that scene, he's the actor who comes over in the car.

I remember waiting to the end of the credits to see the song titles and artists. I went onto Myspace and there was this random Myspace page with a random selection of Tom Waits songs, it was his earlier jazzy stuff. There was “New Coat of Paint”, “Eggs And Sausage” and I love jazz, so I got straight into that because there's were these weird gospel blues in there. And then the next thing I heard was this almost fun, jazzy crooner stuff.

I got obsessed with the storytelling, it was combining everything I loved at that point about music and movies, it was such cinematic music. I dived into everything Tom Waits did and he’s become an absolute hero as a writer. The only thing I wish he did more of was the more personal stuff, but as a writer he’s talking about his personal stuff through the stories he tells. I wanted to be like Tom Waits, I loved him and he’s still my favourite to this day.

Is it the way he tells a story or his musical styles? I’ve always found his music very irreverent, he does exactly what he wants to do.

That's what it was, he’s the epitome of someone having fun making music, even if it is darker and sadder, it's someone who loves art and music, so you revel in it. It's like Quentin Tarantino making movies, you have people who talk about artists being self-indulgent, but if you write anything or make art, you're probably being self-indulgent. If he's going be self-indulgent, he might as well do it in his own music that he makes, that’s someone doing their thing.

And he's a nerd. He's a geek. He's a super fan. He wants to put in all this stuff that he loves into the things he makes. There's loads of Tom Waits songs I could have picked, but that was the first one, it was the moment that I liked him, and it’s still one of my favourites. My favorite album of his is Real Gone, which is the one album he did with no piano. It's got a song called “Hoist That Rag” that’s got the best guitar solo I’ve ever heard. Marc Ribot played guitar for Tom Waits and in his own right he’s a top artist, I love his guitar playing.

How did you get into Billy Woods?

I discovered Billy Woods in lockdown. He’s an abstract, experimental hip-hop artist, he's so unique in his imagery and how he speaks in a natural, truthful way. He puts across a dystopian, Gothic imagery of normal life and that's what I love, where we as people can only explain and talk about things that happen to us as people. But when you put that into music, you can do that any way in the world you want to.

I think Billy Woods has one of the best ways of doing that. Fifty percent of the time I don't know what he's on about, and that's fine, because I can think about what he’s saying, or it might make me think of something to do with me. Music's abstract anyway, so in the abstract, to have someone in rhythm and rhyme tell you a bunch of words that paints a picture is golden.

What impact did he have for you as an artist?

He sparked music again for me. I felt very bitter about music at the start of lockdown. I'd been trying for 13 years by that point, and I didn’t get anywhere, but finding Billy Woods got me back into listening to music.

Billy Woods is an artist who is doing his own thing, who puts his perspective down in the way that he wants to. It's up to you if you get what he's on about, but it doesn't matter if you don't, you can take something from it, even if it’s just the imagery or if it reminds you of something.

He's doing the job of a real artist, which is you just talk about yourself. That’s the history of humankind and art, banging on about ourselves and trying to make sense of it in some way. Art and industry crossed over many years ago, so it’s become a product as well, which is the way the world.

I think the only real job is to be honest about yourself, because we're all people. You can be as specific and narrow as you want to be, but if you're honest another human will relate to that. It doesn't have to be about holding hands and dancing, although I like doing that too!