Interview with DZAL MARTIN

November 2024

One may wonder how to pronounce Dzal Martin’s name – yet this wonderment is rooted in his name’s presence on many a prominent album. If lesser mortals would lay their claim to fame on an Eric Clapton piece where that name graces the title, “Diesel And Peaches” providing a clue to the pronunciation, Martin prefers to do so in the field of guitar-playing. After all, his performative prowess made Dzal an accompanist of choice for a lot of artists, there’s "Drawing Horses" from 2017 to show the British veteran’s ability to surprise the audience, first and foremost the listeners who followed his progress since the ’70s, when Dzal was a member of NO DICE, through the ’80s, when he starred in BOX OF FROGS, and beyond, to the present. A storyteller par excellence, Martin touched on multiple points of his career during our conversations – and, of course, we started from the name.

– I’m going to be not too original, but I have to ask about it. everybody refers to you as Diesel, although you misspell it in writing, and I assume people even address you as such, instead of David…

They do, yeah, most of the time. Only if I’m in trouble do they call me David.

…but you became Dzal only towards the end of the Seventies, because on NO DICE records you’re credited under your given name. So how did this nickname come about?

It’s not that interesting, the real story. I did make up a story, which I can’t tell you here – you have to be in a bar, because it’s the best time to tell people, after a few drinks. (Laughs.) But the real story is, when I was in NO DICE, we had a lot of friends called David or Dave – there were about four or five of us – and someone just said, “We’ll call you D!” And then someone lengthened it. Hey, here’s Dzal! And I don’t know why, but it’s stuck, and so it became Dzal, for no sensible reason.

– Nothing technical about it?

Nothing. I’ve had all the jokes, believe me, but I thought it was more unusual to use than David, which is a nice name.

– What about the spelling, though? I didn’t realize, for a long time, that “Dzal” is pronounced “Diesel” and I learned about it only when I read that Eric Clapton’s “Diesel And Peaches” referred to you.

It’s my fault! I was a silly boy. I was a young guitarist in 1973, when I first joined THE EQUALS, a pop-beat group from the Sixties who had big hits, “Baby Come Back” and everything. I’d auditioned and got working for the first time, playing good gigs five nights a week and getting paid. They were populara in England and Europe, especially in Germany, and we would have to sign autographs. They had what they called “autograph cards” – a picture which you must sign this for the fans – and there was a lot of fans after a gig, so I thought, “I can’t be bothered to write ‘D-i-s-e-l!’ What’s the shortest way of doing this? ‘D-z-a-l’! I can write that really quickly!” I thought of it phonetically, but I didn’t think to put a hyphen or exclamation mark – I just wrote it all in one word. Of course, people think I’m from Russia, but I’m stuck with it now. (Laughs.) So it’s Dzal, and there’s a lot of Daves and Davids in the business anyway.

– Tell it to STRAWBS who had three Daves: Cousins, Lambert and Bainbridge!

I didn’t know that, but I bump into their bass player, Chas Cronk, occasionally.

– And you started out with another bassist, Mark Clarke, in ST. JAMES INFIRMARY in Liverpool, right? Did that band record anything?

Liverpool is not where I’m from, but that’s where I first started playing properly. We were mostly a live band – we played around town – and we made a little demo on an acetate, old-fashioned way, around 1970. We did “Walk In My Shadow” by FREE after we’d seen them, and a couple of other songs, but nothing was released commercially.

– It was a trio, ST. JAMES INFIRMARY, and you got nowhere to hide in a three-piece band. Was it challenging?

When I joined them, they were a six-piece band, with two horns and keyboards, but we slimmed down to a trio and I enjoyed it. I felt they were all better players than me because I was a bit younger, so I thought, “This is a good place to learn, and I have to up my game here!” We wanted to be like CREAM – that was the idea to have lots of room – and I think we did a couple of CREAM tracks; we might play “Crossroads” but I can’t remember for sure. Mark is a very melodic player – he knew his way around even then – and a good singer, so I did only a few backing vocals at the time. And then we moved to London, the three of us, and tried to start a career there, to become stars, but unfortunately, the drummer, Pete Rooney, and I were in a serious car crash after six months. I had a broken wrist and had to go back to Liverpool, back to my mother’s house, and it took me about three months to recover. During that time Mark stayed in London and got to know COLOSSEUM, so when I could play again we supported them in Liverpool, at the Philharmonic Hall – I think that was the last gig we did. About that time Tony Reeves left, and Mark got asked to join them, so ST. JAMES INFIRMARY split up. Pete stayed up in Liverpool, but I moved back to London on my own just to find a new band.

– You must have been quite self-assured. But then, you started playing very early.

Yes, my father taught me to start playing when I was about seven. He asked me and my brother, “Who wants to learn guitar?” My brother said “No!” and I said “Yes!” at the same time. So without my father starting me off, I would probably not have a career, and I always thanked him for that. He died, unfortunately, when I was thirteen, but I was in my first group when I was fourteen, when we moved up north, to Chester, which is near Liverpool. My mother knew what I was doing, and even when I had to leave home to go to London, which must have really worried her, she supported me all the way. She said, “If that’s what you want to do, then do the best you can!” I didn’t really think I’m going to be a professional musician, it just sort of happened to me. I just thought, “I like doing this!” I was at art school, that’s the only other thing I did, but I didn’t particularly want to be an artist. I like painting and drawing a bit, but I love music. That’s why I went back to London after the car crash – I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

I wasn’t even interested in anything else. And after about a couple of months I finally joined a band called MARCH HARE. We tried to get off the ground for two to three years – we toured, we supported THE KINKS, we even were managed by Ray Davies for about three weeks, because the other guitarist in the band was their nephew, Phil Palmer – but not much happened, nothing developed. We did some demos in [Davies’] Konk Studios, and we got a deal with MAM Records and Mike Cotton, a jazz trumpeter, produced some tracks for us: we had a single out called “Gypsy Rose Lee” with “Lay Me Down” on the B-side. It was terrible, and we decided to fold. That’s when I started looking through adverts to find another band.

– So there are quite a few rare bits and pieces from your past. Did you ever think about doing a Dzal Martin anthology?

I suppose I might have. There’s so much that I did because I’ve had such a checkered career. But I didn’t know it was that important that people would want to know about the things I’ve done.

– What people know about is your part in NO DICE. The two albums you recorded with them are very enjoyable. What was the idea behind the band – to be like THE FACES and THE ROLLING STONES and do this rock ‘n’ roll shuffle?

Just like you summed it up – that was what we wanted, as we just loved that music. I only wrote a little bit, but I had met Gary Strange, who was in MARCH HARE as well, and he had these good songs, so we became the beginning of NO DICE. I had meanwhile joined THE EQUALS, but Gary phoned me up once and said, “I found this singer. He sounds like Rod Stewart. He’s great!” So we did that as a sideline until we had a full band, and I had to leave THE EQUALS after a couple of years to further the NO DICE career. Gary wrote I’m not saying better songs, but maybe more melodic songs, which we played in that ROLLING STONES and FACES fashion to give it a bit of oomph. And the shuffle came through my influences, the people I listened to: I loved Peter Green, I loved Jeff Beck, I loved Mick Taylor. I liked THE SHADOWS when I was very young, but then I discovered a very well known album called “Rhythm & Blues All Stars” and I’d seen these guys on telly – Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Buddy Guy – and it just changed my life. I thought, “What is this sound?” and I wanted to make the same noise as they did. That led me to the BLUES BREAKERS album with Eric Clapton and all that incredible playing. Lightnin’ Hopkins was the most influential – he was so primeval and raw! – but with Clapton it was the English version of blues, and I did like the way the British players polished it up a bit. You could hear Freddie King and B.B. King’s influence, but it was just a bit more exciting for me, that I liked.

– It’s this shuffle that makes NO DICE’s “Fooling” exciting in my years.

That was a FREE influence. I wanted to do a song like that, and I remember walking home from a club one night when I got that drum beat in my head, and I thought, “Oh, we could have this!”

– But your music tended towards pub rock and you looked like working-class guys onstage. Were you image-conscious?

Yeah, we were. Early on, we all had long hair, and our management – we had the big management by then – got an image consultant in to say, “No, you got to change!” They dressed us up in these suits that you’ve probably seen on the first album [1977’s “No Dice”], made us cut our hair and smarten up, like THE BEATLES, but we didn’t want to do it. But we were very unlucky in timing, because punk suddenly came along, and we were suddenly starting to be unfashionable. We still played the same music, though.

– Why do you think you didn’t become as big as, say, DR. FEELGOOD, who wore suits and played something similar.

I don’t think we classed ourselves in the same way. They had a slightly punky attitude and three-chord, brash stuff, but we were trying to aim higher than that in terms of musicality. We had a bit of a struggle on the first album because we had a great producer [Steve Smith], an American producer who let us off the reins a bit, and we were getting almost prog in some of the songs. The management was saying, “No, no, we’ve signed you up as a rock band, and you’re going off in a different direction!” – but that was what we liked to do, tracks like “Murder In The Rain” which is quite an extended piece of music rather than just a three-chord song, and I couldn’t imagine DR. FEELGOOD doing that, for instance.

– I couldn’t imagine them having Harry Robinson arrangements!

Exactly! We’d try anything – orchestras, Hammond organs – we tried that a lot, again just like THE BEATLES.

– Talking about THE BEATLES… Like them, you were signed to Dick James’ publishing company, DJM by then. How did that work out for you?

That was the very beginning of NO DICE, when we had some publishers who were trying to manage us and they meant well, and they got us to deal with DJM, but it didn’t take us anywhere. We went in their own studios down in in town, recorded three or four tracks there, and had a single out [1975’s “I Need Someone”], but they had another artist, Moon Williams, who they were simply throwing all their time and money at. We weren’t that interesting to them, so when we went looking for new management and found a company called EMKA, which was Steve O’Rourke and Robert Wace. EMKA managed PINK FLOYD all this big stuff, and they were interested in us, but they rang up DJM and DJM wouldn’t let us out of the contract, so EMKA said they couldn’t work with this contract and all they could do was hope that DJM wouldn’t take up the option after a year. DJM, strangely, just dropped us, and didn’t bother. so the new management took us up and we got a new deal with EMI and Capitol, and started recording, touring and getting serious.

– Again, given EMKA’s resources, they could make you big. Why didn’t you become the stars you could be with your very accessible music and attractive looks?

I agree, why didn’t we? (Laughs bitterly.) I found it very frustrating that we were unlucky. I thought we had something special and we did well – we toured America and Europe, and Britain. It was that whole fashion thing. The first album got good reviews, and it was looking promising, but we came back after three months in the US, and everything had changed in England – people were wearing razorblades and carving up their T-shirts – and we didn’t count. That’s why our second album [1979’s “2 Faced”] got some awful reviews, which wasn’t fair, because we had good songs and we played them well. When we did the reunion thirty years later, we weren’t really expecting anyone to even remember us or turn up. and when they did and we sold out the “Dingwalls” club, we were amazed – we didn’t know that many people cared and would remember about us, but they did. I just don’t think the business aspect of our record company and our agents could sell us in that climate. It was so anti people like us. We were small, I know, but they hated Rick Wakeman and YES, and all that old-fashioned stadium rock, and we were bracketed with that just because we weren’t being brash and noisy.

– Still, you’re lucky to have this surviving footage from “The Old Grey Whistle Test”! What do you remember about going on television?

We were on with BLONDIE, and I was excitedly nervous, because we hadn’t done it before. We’d had a single out three months earlier, “Come Dancing” – it crept into the bottom sixties of the charts, and we almost got on “Top Of The Pops” – but it went down two places, and they didn’t use the film, so we hadn’t really done TV. We went on tour with STATUS QUO in Europe and we were finishing it near Munich, when we got the phone call: “There’s a room on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test!’ We can get you back tomorrow morning. You’re on the telly!” We got flown back to England – I can’t even remember how the amplifiers got there, and we had big amplifiers! – and did it overnight.

– You mentioned that you toured with STATUS QUO but you also toured with RAINBOW when Ronnie Dio was still with them, right?

Yes. When we were in America, we jumped on two or three different tours, and about in the middle we did four or five gigs with RAINBOW, in slightly smaller theatres. We were just so happy to be there and we were having a great time – and we felt more welcomed in America as well: they were great audiences because we were new. And somebody had told us back home: “Hear this band, ELF – you should sound like that!” So when we met Ronnie, who was a lovely guy, and we mentioned ELF, he couldn’t believe it. “You’ve heard of ELF?” he said. “Yeah, we wanted to be like you!” He was really pleased. We met Cozy Powell, who was okay, but we didn’t see much of Ritchie Blackmore, he wasn’t that sociable, although I do remember we met him too, because we’d been touring for about four weeks, and most of us, English guys, would get a bit homesick. It just happened that the keyboard player in our band [Dave Moore] was a really good chef as well, so he arranged, when we were staying at “Sunset Marquis” in L.A. to make a British Sunday lunch for all of us, and some of RAINBOW guys and the crew came, and we had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which was great.

– That, of course, was after your first album for which you wrote “You Can’t Help Yourself” before co-writing a couple of pieces for “2 Faced”: why weren’t there more from you?

I was not that confident at writing, and I wasn’t that interested, because I liked playing a lot and being in a band, but writing was a secondary thing at the time. I contributed to arrangements of the songs with Gary, who was a very good writer, so I handed it in to him and just put in the odd bit. I had little ideas done on my guitar and lying around, but I’d never thought to really push it as constantly as my guitar playing.

– Looks like you liked to base your pieces around riffs then.

Yeah, my writing was not so much the chord sequence; it was based around riffs, as you say. I remember “Shooting In The Dark”: that intro riff – which is a bit Beatley, now that I think about it – was mine.

– And then there was a song called “Silly Girl”: was it a mandolin that you played on that?

I can’t remember but I might have played mandolin. I think it was just acoustic guitar, though, as we dropped everything out and left the acoustic guitar towards the end.

– By the way, how many instruments do you play?

If we’re talking about what I can get away with, I’m fluent on guitar and bass. I played all the bass on my album, as well as some keyboards, mandolin, ukulele, odd bits of little things and some percussion, but to go out and do a gig… I was in a band once, where during a break we jsaid, “Let’s all swap instruments just for one song and see what happens!” and I ended up on bass. I thought, “God, it’s hard work, this bass playing, when you’re doing it for four minutes!” So I can dabble on a lot of things, but not woodwind! (Laughs.) I used to play harmonica a bit, and I like that as well, but I’m not so good at that now.

– Let’s focus on your main instrument, then. There’s a piece on NO DICE’s first album called “Happy In The Skoolyard” which has these layered guitar harmonies. How did you come up with those?

I have to listen and think about what I did, but I think it was a synthesizer and a guitar doing the harmonies. It was like THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND, when Duane died and they had Chuck Leavell playing the harmonies.

– And then there are Harry Robinson’s orchestrations that I mentioned: how did you like working with strings?

I didn’t work with them – they were overdubbed afterwards, and I first heard them when they were recorded and done, and it was great to have them. But then we did a track that didn’t make the album, and it had a string quartet arrangement, although I remember being in the control room to watch them and thinking they weren’t particularly in the groove – the orchestra sounded a bit mechanical.

– Did you feel the same about brass on “Come Dancing” from “2 Faced”?

I wasn’t there because that was done in New York. Rupert Holmes, who produced the album, had that idea and he took the tracks to America to overdub the brass parts. I think “I Keep It To Myself” has got some horns, too.

– But where did the idea of playing funk come from? Not a lot of British bands did that.

Well, I wasn’t against soul music, and I was a huge fan of THE AVERAGE WHITE BAND – I thought they were great, and I used to see them all over London – and KOKOMO, and I certainly liked something like KOOL & THE GANG, COMMODORES, a little disco… I loved their rhythm sections, so I wasn’t so snobby about that at all.

– How was it working with Steve Smith and Phill Brown as producers as opposed to Rupert Holmes?

Different. We were less experienced when we worked with Steve Smith and when Phill was the engineer. We knew that they both had done LITTLE FEAT and Bob Marley, and – in a peculiar way, and with all due respect to everyone – I preferred them. Rupert was a great guy and fine to work with, but I don’t think he was the right producer for us. He was a good producer, but we found him not rock ‘n’ roll enough in what we were trying to put out. He did some great arrangements, though. There’s a thing on the second album, a whole three-piece guitar acoustic thing where he showed me what to play, all these harmonies, and I learned it and I thought it was lovely. And there was a different engineer, Guy Bidmead, on that album, who showed great promise. We carried on being a rockish band with prog edges, but when it got mixed, we were very disappointed: it sounded a bit dull for us, because we played loud. So me and Gary Strange went over to New York to suggest it, and it was very kind of Rupert to remix it with us. That was the difference between two albums.

– You recorded “2 Faced” on Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, but why? Why did you hire that big truck instead of going to a proper facility?

We met this guy called Colin Stone who was a bit of an eccentric millionaire. He made a lot of money by selling garden gnomes, would you believe? True story! He had this huge mansion down on the border between England and Wales, down on the River Wye, and he’d said, “Why don’t you come and record down here?” It wasn’t going to cost us anything, and there were loads of hotel rooms for us all to stay in and a big gym that we could set up in, so we decided to do that. But to do that, we needed a mobile recorder truck, of course, and the management must have found out we can hire the Rolling Stones mobile, and they drove it about 200 miles from London. I can’t remember how long we stayed there, maybe two weeks, to do all the backing tracks for “2 Faced” – and then we did do some vocals. We also did a vocal for a couple of songs in Ringo’s ex-wife, Maureen Starkey’s garden. She lived about twenty miles from London, and someone knew her, so we took the mobile down to her house, parked it in her garden and recorded the vocals in the sunshine on one track. You can just about hear birds singing. By the way, I met Maureen later, when I went down to John Lennon’s old house, when Ringo was living there, to audition for Maggie Bell. She was in Ringo’s Startling Studios, and I was waiting for her to say to come in and play – I was there for about two hours, so Maureen invited me for a cup of tea, which was very nice.

– When was that audition?

Hard to say, but it would be after NO DICE, when I was getting more into session work and I was free. Only I never did the audition in the end, because Maggie said, “I’m sorry, I’m really tired!”

– But was it for her MIDNIGHT FLYER band?

I don’t know, but eventually I played in a band that was left over from MIDNIGHT FLYER. NO DICE was still just about going until about 1982 – we were hanging on by our teeth – so I started getting invited to do various projects, and I got hired to play with two sisters from Australia who called themselves CHEETAH and were handled by AC/DC’s management. They were like a female version of ACDC in a way, and I got called to play second guitar with them, which I did for about a year. We did a couple of tours and some gigs, and a little bit of recording – with Ant Glynne on guitar, Dave Dowle on drums and Tony Stevens from FOGHAT on bass. I auditioned for FOGHAT a few years later, but that’s a different story.

– Why did NO DICE stop?

Well, EMI, or Capitol, didn’t renew their contract, and though the management company could have done a lease deal with the same thing they said they couldn’t keep going. By then, Chris [Wyles], the original drummer, had left because, when punk came in, he was interested in newer music and we weren’t doing so well. We got a new drummer and another guitar player in, and we had a sax player at one stage, Jacko [Peake] – he’s been playing with Paul Weller quite a lot recently – just trying to keep going with what we were trying to do, but it was getting harder because we didn’t have the support of the record company or the management. There were only gigs around London, and it got difficult to do, so eventually we have to give in and split up about 1982.

– The drummer you mentioned – was it Tony Fernandez?

We knew Tony from MARCH HARE, but he left the band to go off and work with people like Rick Wakeman, because he was a great drummer. When when Chris left, Tony helped us out – he sat in, learned the new songs and played a couple of gigs with us – but then we had a guy called Johnny Richardson who was still with NO DICE, when we finally split up. He was in a band called RDB from the East End, which had [pre-IRON MAIDEN] Dennis Stratton in it.

– But was it Tony who got you the gig with Wakeman?

Yes, it was. I used to see Tony socially here and there, but he called me up in the late Eighties and said, “Can you work with Rick?” I said, “Yes, but no. I can’t play that progressive stuff. That’s far too clever for me, all those timings!” He said, “No, no, it’s a different sort of album Rick’s doing – it’s going to be all in 4/4!” “You have to promise it because I’m not that sort of guitar player!” (Laughs.) “No, it’s all right. I’ll get Rick to call you!” So Rick did call me, and he was great. “Don’t worry, mate. My engineer will sort you out. You’ll be okay!” he said. And it was true: we did an album called “African Bach” which was straightforward and fun to do and easy to play. We even went out and did the video for some tracks in Swaziland, which was an amazing experience! We went out for about ten days to film a video with rhinoceroses and elephants standing behind us around in the jungle. Incredibly good fun!

– Did you tour with Rick?

No. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me to and he didn’t. The rumor was, maybe we’d be doing some touring, but I said that I couldn’t do his other stuff, that I would be up for weeks learning it, and that it wasn’t my sort of thing so I wouldn’t really enjoy it.

– But you played on another album, “Phantom Power”?

Yes, "The Phantom Of The Opera" – we did that in a studio in Rick’s home on the Isle of Wight where he used to live, just off the coast of England. I got a call to do that, so he flew me out there, and I did three or four tracks. Again, it was fun. It was straightforward. I think there might have been one other another album I did some stuff on, but there’s another connection: Rick was looking for a singer, and I recommended Chrissie Hammond who was in CHEETAH and who did a lot of work with Rick afterwards.

– You got back with THE EQUALS by that time, correct?

Yes. The called me in the mid-Eighties to say that they were getting a lot of work out in Germany and not like the old days of having to go in a van on the ferry; now you just take a guitar, get on a plane, do the gig at the weekend and come home, that’s all you have to do. And I said, “Yeah, I’m up for that!”

– So you were playing with them and doing sessions when not on tour? You didn’t record with THE EQUALS?

Yeah, I was doing both – but I did actually record with THE EQUALS. When I first joined the band, they were contracted to do so many albums for [Edward] Kassner’s [President] Records, playing rock ‘n’ roll, so I went into the studio, a place called Regent Sound, and we did a track called “(I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes” – I found it later on YouTube – I’m still really proud of what I played on there. I was good then!

– Let’s talk about a bit about your sessions. NUTSHELL, where you played alongside Kevin Peek and John Gustafson: what was that?

Because NO DICE had toured with Tom Robinson, we were friends, so Tom phoned me up once and said, “I’m producing a track for a friend, and Daniel, the guitar player, is a little eccentric – he’s hiding in the cupboard and won’t come out. Will you come and play guitar?” Yeah, okay, fine. I went down to Redan Studios and did it. Another producer who worked there heard it and asked, “Do you do sessions?” I said, “I haven’t done, but I’ll have a try!” He took my number and called me maybe a month later to say, “We’re making this album. Would you like to play some guitar on it?” Again, I went there, but the MD came out with sheet music and said, “You come in at bar 80-40!’ I said, “Whoa, I don’t read that stuff, I can’t do that! But if you hum me the song, count me in, I can do it like that!” He agreed – and that’s how I started doing sessions and how I learned some of my craft. The first album I played on, the one I’m talking about was “The Passion” by Adrian Snell, a keyboard player and composer who did Christian work, a really talented guy; on this album I was just overdubbing, but I was proud to be there, with Simon Phillips on drums, John G. Perry on bass and Kevin Peek on guitar. I never met Kevin, though, I only heard what was on the albums. This was the early Eighties. when the financial world was going up, and there was a lot of work – jingles and other artists albums, bits and bobs.

– So NUTSHELL and LOVELIGHT with Hugh Burns and Ray Russell were just these small projects for you?

I guess so. We also had THE ROCK BAND with Jackie McCauley, Les Binks on drums and John Gustafson playing bass: we did four or five gigs in London, and that was fun.

– By then, you must have had very distinctive style of playing because, for all the guest guitarists on BOX OF FROGS, you were the one featured on most of the tracks.

Yes, I was very lucky. I’d met and got to know him John Fiddler, who did the vocals for this project, but I’m not sure how he knew my style. Anyway, he called me up and said that he and the original YARDBIRDS were doing five songs and they needed some lead guitar: “We’re trying to get Jeff Beck on it as well, but we need to play him something reasonable. So the deal is, you play solo on all the tracks, and then if Jeff gets involved and chooses to play the solo on that track, you won’t be on it…” I said, “Well, I would do that for Jeff Beck. You can’t touch him. He’s the best!” We must have rehearsed – or not – but I was down in the residential studio for about a week or two with them, and we made the first BOX OF FROGS album.

– How did it feel working with Jim McCarty, Paul Samwell-Smith and Chris Dreja?

It was a real experience because, when I was fourteen, I went to see THE BEATLES in London, their Christmas show, and one of the bands on this show were THE YARDBIRDS with Eric Clapton. I didn’t know it was Clapton, but I’d seen them and couldn’t believe how great they were. And then, twenty years later, I’m in the studio with that band, me! Gosh! (Laughs.) But they were fun to work with, and they were really friendly. They have a good sense of humor, and we had a lot of laughs. And I realized that I was as good as them, that I was a new boy, but I’d learnt my trade enough for them to invite me to the second album [1986’s “Strange Land”] as well.

– Did you get to meet the other guitarists?

Oh yeah. I even fainted in front of Jeff Beck during the sessions. We were doing backing vocals on one track, and the guys said, “Let’s get Jeff to join in!” He ended up using my amplifier, and I was very proud of that, so I went to the control room and watched him perform – it was fantastic, awe-inspiring – and then we had Christmas dinner. We went down the pub, and I wasn’t that drunk – I had a couple of drinks, that’s all – but I remember thinking, “Isn’t it hot in here?” and the next thing I knew, I passed out. I woke up to Jeff Beck saying, “Are you all right, Dzal? I thought you’re doing it for a laugh!” I was always embarrassed that he saw me like this and remembered it, because he thought it was funny. I met, briefly, Rory Gallagher, in the rehearsal studio just walking in – very nice, very shy guy – and Jimmy Page, as I went down to watch him play too. I think I also saw Earl Slick, but I didn’t meet Steve Hackett until about three years ago. I said, “Nice to meet you at last, we were on the same album!” and he replied, “Yes, I remember you were with BOX OF FROGS!”

– Did it boost self-confidence, being on the same records with them?

This encouraged me, but I held my own then. There was a track called “Just A Boy Again” on the first album where lots of people said, “Is Dzal a code name for Eric Clapton? It sounds like Clapton on guitar!” So yeah, I was very proud to be on that platform with that range of players.

– Since you namechecked Clapton again, what’s the story behind “Peaches And Diesel”?

When NO DICE did their first album, in 1976 or 1977, we recorded all the backing tracks in Olympic Studios, in the smaller studio, while Eric Clapton was doing “Slowhand” in the big one, and we met him in a recreation room during breaks, where me and Peaches, our singer [Roger Ferris], ended up playing table football with Eric and a few other guys. I don’t know how it happened – I don’t know sports, and I was terrible at it – but it did, and that was that. After we finished there, we went on to Abbey Road to do some more recording, but maybe two months later we saw the tracklisting of Clapton’s new album in “Melody Maker”- and there was “Peaches And Diesel”! We both said, “That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? It can’t be us, can it? Oh, maybe it is!” Fast forward again, and Chas and Dave [“Live At Abbey Road”] were making an album at Abbey Road – it was like a pub album, so everyone got called to be the crowd – and me and Peaches went there, because there’d be free drinks. There was about a hundred people there, and when we saw Eric Clapton over at the bar, we decided to go and ask him. I said, “I’m not doing it!” so Peaches did. They were talking for about five minutes, and when he came back he said, “Yeah, he’d heard our names when we were playing football and thought they were good names to put together, Peaches and Dzal!”

But there’s more to this story. Later on, we went upstairs where the recording of the band was playing – I remember it being quite dark, and Peaches got spit up a bit – and I saw Pattie Boyd coming towards me. As she was walking, I heard something going on there – I looked over, and Peaches was standing above Eric, who was lying on the floor with blood pouring out of his mouth, and Peaches was saying, “I had to hit him. He came at me. I had to hit him…” I thought, “What have you done?” And then Pattie seemed to be quite near me, and she said, “Oh, hello. Try some of these blood capsules. They’re such fun!” It was a practical joke, and I don’t know how they arranged it.

– You didn’t play live with BOX OF FROGS, as they didn’t tour, but you must have impressed Jim McCarty, because you took part in this hybrid of RENAISSANCE ILLUSION "Through The Fire" album. How did that happen?

I knew Jim from BOX OF FROGS, and I also knew his ex-wife who became a friend, so we were in touch. He called me up when he was doing that album and asked, “Would you mind playing on some tracks?” Yeah, sure.

– And then you mentioned John Fiddler, who would take part in “Drawing Horses”…

Yes, he played harmonica.

– …which was your first, and to the date, only solo album. I’d assume you had amassed quite a few pieces over the years. So was it sense of mortality, after your health problems, that made you do that record?

No, it was a friend of mine, Steve Ancliffe, who co-produced it. I did sessions for him, and he said, “You should do your own album!” I said I didn’t know how. “I always remember,” he said, “that you know people.” I thought, “Yeah, but I haven’t got any money and all that.” He said I could use his little spare studio that was empty, if I wanted to start getting tracks together. That’s how I started – in the cold winter with a computer, a guitar, not even a microphone. I had to use the mic on the computer to do demos on the small program called “GarageBand” and teach myself to do it.

– So were all the songs were written especially for this album or you just picked the best of what you already had?

Half and a half. Some of the songs I had lying around waiting to be done, three or four of the songs were co-writes I’d done with other people for other projects but I wanted to do them myself, and, to my surprise, I wrote “The One Who Got Away” and “Somebody Left Me” while I was doing the album and was inspired. As for my health… I started the album about 2015, and I was doing demos even back in 2011. It took two or three years to do it all, and the brain operation happened in 2016, so I wasn’t aware of that till then, I wasn’t aware of that sort of mortality when I was doing the record.

– Did the operation, when you weren’t sure if you would make it out alive, affect your view of music and of life in general?

It changed me a bit, but I just had to go with the flow and think, “Well, I have to do this. I’ll just take it as it comes. I’ll come out of the operation after a couple of weeks off and get back gigging again…” But it was six weeks before I even began to think about playing.

– What about the rest of the songs that you had before, those that you had written over the years which didn’t make it to that album? What are you going to do with them?

They’re still around and I’m still trying to work on them, but unfortunately, a lot of things have changed since then. Steve Ancliffe has also been ill and he doesn’t have a studio anymore, but I’m trying because I’m working with John Fiddler, who has his own studio. I did two albums with him, and when there was time, we’ve started working on my track. Whether it’ll be an album, I don’t know – I still have two boxes here of CDs from the old one, and since I don’t go out and play solo, I can’t sell it at gigs, and the music business changed so much as well. But I still love to create, I still want to put these songs down. I have a list of at least a dozen songs I want to get done, but it will take a long, long time to do it this way to any sort of good standard.

– On “Drawing Horses” you sang lead vocals for the first time. You even hired a vocal coach.

I’d always done backing vocals, and I used to do two or three cover songs in little pub bands – “Desperado” and a couple of other songs – and I had some blues songs I could sing. But for this album, I thought, “Well, if I want to get a great singer in, I’m going to have to be quite possessive and have him say, ‘No, I want you to sing this, don’t sing that!’ And it’s my album. I should try and do it myself!” And so I decided to do that. But my best friend Derek Jeffery – we’re like twins separated at the birth, and he’s the only person I know who likes exactly the same sort of music as I do – and Steve Ancliffe, who’s also a singer, wouldn’t let me get away with anything. They were hard, but fair, which was great for me, and they helped me out my game for singing. They said, “You can do it better!” I said, “No, it’s close enough, isn’t it?” “Nope, do it again!” We did it that way, and I was really pleased. And I really enjoy singing now, because I still have lots to learn. I’m discovering stuff all the time, but I’m not good with technique and I’m getting it just by self-discovery. I’m still surprised when people say that I have a good voice, though, because, like many singers, I don’t like my own voice. I want to sound like Bonnie Raitt or Paul Rodgers!

– Was it only to my ears or did “Drawing Horses” have this American slant, style-wise?

Oh, very much so, because I love American music and I had a real sea change in the Eighties, when I discovered Vince Gill. I thought, “God, this is fantastic! This is what I’d like to sound like!” and I got very much into what they called new country at the time. I did a writing project called TURNER WEST in the late Nineties, where we were very influenced by exactly that and we were trying to write songs for Nashville: that was also a great learning process, because there’s a strict discipline there, and every word has to make its mark and you don’t play over the vocal – ever. I learned that discipline, and I loved it. All my leanings went to John Hiatt, Bonnie Raitt and Terry Reid, funny enough – all that school of Ry Cooder, EAGLES and LITTLE FEAT. I love those things! They’re the things that move me! But I thought, when I was doing it, that there was no way I could compete with those artists, as I don’t have neither the budget nor the musicians, and still I did what I could to try to make it be like music that turns me on.

– Was Terry Reid your bridge to America – given he’s an Englishman but left the UK long ago? Do you think of him as an American singer now?

Oh, no – although he knows everybody and has sung with them. He’s amazing, Terry, because he has lived there thirty or forty years now, but he still has that Cambridgeshire accent, but his style is West Coast-ish. I was a fan of Terry’s albums – that’s why I’m still amazed I’ve been playing with him for so long! This is the strangeness of life and of who you know type: my friend Derek knew a sound guy who worked with Rick Wakeman in YES and who used to go to school with Terry, and when Terry needed a guitarist Derek asked me if I wanted to have a play with him. I did. I learned the songs and went to an audition – I was thrilled, of course, and very nervous – I just sat in the front room with Terry somewhere in London with a couple of guitars and jammed along, and then it was, “I’ll see you next week at rehearsal!”

– For all the Americana-like songwriting on your album, there’s one thing that stands out for me, the “I Can’t Wait” blues.

You think that sounds a little different?

– It sounds like something I expected from Dzal Martin.

That’s interesting you say that, because I often think to myself: much as I love emotional songs and country songs, and the West Coast music, there’s an element of me that’s just an in-built rock guitarist. I like FREE and Peter Green and that sort of things, and I still love to just rock out occasionally. So when I wrote that song I imagined Bonnie Raitt singing it. There’s a track on her “Road Tested” that has a similar feel, and I just love that insistent, straight feel, but there’s another version, the original demo of that song, the way I wrote it, which is faster – I still need to put it online, because Derek sang it before I dared to sing anything – and in a different key, and it rocks, really rocks. It was Steve’s idea to slow it down, make it more menacing.

– Since you mentioned rock… You played in the “We Will Rock You” musical. I went to see it in the “Dominion” in 2002, and the following year I met with Neil Murray around the corner from the theater when he played there too. Could it be I heard you as well?

I did a few shows with Neil, yeah. It was through Alan Darby – him and Laurie Wisefield were the original two guitar players when the show started, and they’d done it for about about eight years – who asked if I’d like to dep for him. I went and watched it, and I said, “Definitely no, it’s too hard!” but he talked me into it. I did a lot of hard work and did it, and I’m pleased that I did it, but it was the most scary thing I’ve ever done.

– You mean, looking at the conductor on screen?

All of that. The conductor, or the MD, as they call them, said, “This is not rock ‘n’ roll. This is musical theater!” And he was right. And I found that I was afraid, because it’s very rigid. You have to think every note, because all those people down on the stage are relying on it being in the right place. Christ, I was so nervous! Still, I’m glad I rose to the challenge, although I lasted only ten or twelve shows, and then they let me go. I’ve never been so relieved in my life! (Laughs.)

– We were talking about Americana, and you’ve been part of THE TREMBLING WILBURYS, so I assume you love THE TRAVELING WILBURYS.

I do. It’s a fun gig. In the beginning I knew the basic two or three favorite songs, but not really listened to all the others, but when we decided to do it, I thought, “God, of course, they’re all great songs with great production by Jeff Lynne!” This is a joy, because there’s a lot of variety, and I have to dance around my pedals a lot to get different sounds, trying to be about five different guitar players.

– So which Wilbury are you?

I’m a guitar playing Wilbury. I was born one day and ten years after Bob Dylan, that my only connection with them! (Laughs.)

– And now to something very far removed from Bob Dylan: RIGHT SET FRED, a very humorous band. How did you get that gig?

A drummer friend of mine played with them in 1984 or 1985, before they were RIGHT SET FRED – I think they were called IN THE FLESH then, the [Fairbrass] brothers and a girl on sax – and he said that they were looking for a guitar player. So I met with Richard and Fred and ended up playing with them. It was slightly different from what I was used to, but they were really nice people, very funny, as you say, and lovely guys. They were into slightly more arty, New York chic, Andy Warhol side of stuff, not as rocky as I was used to, but they’d written all these songs. I can’t remember how long we worked together for before it got to a stage where – I don’t know why, we didn’t spit it out – they decided to change direction and we just stopped. There was no animosity. They were basically an acoustic act, but they wanted to do that with four-on-the-floor disco rhythms, so they started doing it, and I went in and played some sessions for them to help them out. Then they met up with Rob [Manzoli], the guitar player, and that became the core of the new band, but I remember Fred playing about three demos of songs he’d done to me and my friend and saying, “What do you think? I don’t know about this last one. That’s just sort of a joke thing we did but we like it!” That was “I’m Too Sexy”! I said, “That’s good. I think it’s a hit!” So off they went, and I’m very pleased they did really well. I still see them, very occasionally, and they haven’t changed.

– What about Bernardo Lanzetti albums?

Bernardo was a real nice guy with English sense of humor. John G. Perry got the job of producing the first album [1981’s “Gente Nervosa”] with him, and I got the call to do the session Redan Recorders with Steve Simpson on the other guitar. After that album, we did a short tour of Italy, with Clive Bunker on drums, John on bass and me on guitar, and we did another [1982’s self-titled] record after that, but it just disappeared with somewhere. I bumped into Bernardo five or ten years later. He’s still fine.

– Did you know his previous work?

I’d heard of the name PFM, but I didn’t know their music because I wasn’t really into prog, and I don’t even know what it sounds like now. But his solo stuff was much more straightforward and simpler, and I liked it.

– May I assume that the session with NAZARETH was more your cup of tea?

Yeah, that was fun. I got the call to do, as I thought, one track, so I arrived at the studio around about dinnertime, seven or eight at night. The guys were very friendly and they said that their American producer, Joey Balin, wanted some sort of Eighties-style guitar with wang bars, which I was into at the time. Manny [Charlton] wasn’t that kind of player and didn’t do that stuff, and that was why they called me. I did that one track, and then the producer said, “I could use you on some other songs. Do you have to get back home?” I said, “I’ll need some spare socks!” I got socks, as the studio was out of town, and I stayed there to go in the next day and do three more songs. I listened to the "Snakes 'n' Ladders" album recently, and I thought, “God, that’s a really good production even now!”

– Around the same time you took part in another project, MONA LIZA OVERDRIVE, where Neil Murray was involved too.

I would get calls from a friend called Diane Wagg, who’s a manager in a session agency and who would get me gigs. The NAZARETH one came from her, and the MONA LIZA thing as well. [Kit Woolven] who was producing it, a lovely guy who did a lot of good rock albums, died recently. I can’t remember how many tracks I played on, maybe one or two, but I remember where the session was: in Black Barn Studios.

– And what was the relatively recent Abbey Road session with Mo Foster for?

For a potential USA-produced film called “Music on the Bones.” Mo was the musical director and, of course, bass player. We recorded fourteen Sixties songs, some rearranged, featuring two fantastic singers from America. I so enjoyed it, working with first-call musicians, including Clem Clempson on acoustic guitars.

– After CHEETAH, you didn’t work with a lot of female singers, but there would be two prominent ones later on: Whitney Houston and P.P. Arnold.

The Whitney Houston one was for BBC TV, “The Terry Wogan Show” – it also came through Diane. In those days, you had to re-record the song, not just play the backing track and mime, so they would have to call in musicians. Sometimes we just hung around and didn’t have to do it, but I learned the song and recorded it. They used the track and she sang to it on the show, but me “meeting” Whitney was looking out of the control room and seeing eight tall big guys and someone in the middle, which was probably her. And then she disappeared. But officially I did work for Whitney Houston! (Laughs.) As for P.P., there’s a lunch for music biz every year – for musicians, writers, journalists, publishers that grew from a couple of friends getting together to quite a big event, where you have to get on the list to be invited. I was invited finally to one or two, which was surprisingly very nice, and P.P. Arnold was there too, and when it came to people getting up to sing she had to do “The First Cut Is The Deepest” and I borrowed an acoustic guitar and played it with her and a couple of well-known backing singers. Not really a session.

– But it was a session that you did for Van Morrison?

Again, a strange thing happened. I’d done a session with a couple of good musicians with some connection to Nik Kershaw – there was Gary Wallis on drums, who played with PINK FLOYD, and a bass player, who rang me up out of the blue and asked if I wanted to play with Van Morrison. I said, “That’s very funny, what do you want?” “No, do you want to play with Van Morrison?” “Well, yeah. What’s the deal? He said, “Just turn up at the rehearsal studio and bring your guitar and an amp!” There’s a place called Nomis in London, a well-known, really nice rehearsal studio, and I got there the same time Van arrived. I said, “Hi, I’ve come to play guitar!” He said, “Hi!” I got in and set up, but what I remember is that Van hardly spoke at all: he just sat down at the piano and started playing, and we looked around, picked out the key and joined in. We basically did that all afternoon, and occasionally he’d say, “No, there’s an A minor there!” but he didn’t ask a thing and didn’t record it, and at the end of the day he said, “Thanks very much!” and went. I thought, “What was that for? Am I auditioning? Am I going to be in a band? Would that be nice?” But no one said anything, so I just sent an invoice in and got paid very nicely. That was it – and no one ever knew what it was for. I presume he just wanted to try some songs out.

– Talking about trying things out… For “Drawing Horses” you tried to go back to your love of art. How often do you draw these days?

Very little, but I still draw horses, I know how to do that well, as best as I can. People ask me sometimes, and I say, “Okay, I can draw you a horse!” which I’ve done, and someone even framed it. I’m not van Gogh, but thank you.

– Why horses?

I don’t know if that’s a psychological thing, but I loved horses when I was a kid, I thought they were fantastic, great looking animals, and from five years old I was trying to draw them properly and get it right. The back legs were a problem, but I learned how to do it. It’s a bit deeper than that, the title, but it is to do with drawing horses.

– Can you ride them?

Yeah. The last time I rode was near Okanagan Lake, in Vernon, British Columbia. I was over there for a couple of weeks doing gigs with a guy called Joe Burt, and we met this woman who had two or three horses that needed spring exercising, so she said, “Do you want to have a ride?” Of course, I’m not sixteen anymore and I hadn’t been riding for ages, so I was a bit worried just getting into the stirrups, but I did. It’s like driving a car – there are different ways to get them to stop and steer them, but they showed me what to do, and it was fun. But these days, with a dodgy back, I don’t feel fit enough to control a big strong horse.

– After all these years in business, after everything, how do you manage to not get bitter, like many other musicians, but to stay positive?

What else can I do? I have a sense of humor – many musicians do, because it’s quite a hard business – and I like laughing, because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. I just enjoy it. Much later in my career, I literally learned to realize how lucky I am to have done this all my life. If I had my life again, this is what I would do – there is no other job.