When I was 14, I heard Otis Redding in a club local to me, and I was blown away. It leaped out at me and went straight to my heart. I set my sights on singing like that.

Live music is where you get the inspiration and the creativity.

In Free, we managed ourselves, and it was too tough for us to handle all of what that entailed when we got to touring America.

I like to be in control of my own destiny.

I look back on the early days of Free with Paul Kossoff with the most fondness of any of my bands, because I met him at a time when I was in London and very hungry, and we believed in each other.

Music takes me where I go. I'm always open to wherever the journey will take me.

I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.

Blues is such a dynamic and ever-changing system of music.

The simpler the message, the broader the meaning, in many respects. I think about a song like Free's 'All Right Now,' which I'm often asked about. It's that sort of song.

There are so many challenges and different parts to the job of singing. When you're in the studio, you have to be really, really, precise. You've got to keep everything clean and nice because that's going to be something that's down forever. And then you go onstage, and it's much more in the moment.

I was conscious of vocalists from an early age.

My dad worked on the Middlesbrough docks.

I come from a working-class family of seven children.

The thing about simplicity is it's not easy to achieve. To many, simplicity can mean repetitiveness and maybe even a lack of intelligence, those kind of things, but simple yet unique is the key.

With Free, we were teenagers, and, ummm, there was a lot of raging hormones.

I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.

My mother said I used to dance to all this radio music when I was a young kid.

Soul and blues were a definite influence on me. It was raw and naked emotion which you didn't get much where I come from.

'When I'm Sixty-Four' hasn't worn well, but George Harrison's 'Within You Without You' is awesome.

I didn't 'join' Queen. We played together and found a strong connection, did a TV show, and carried on - then I suddenly realised I'd been with these guys for four years. If I'd been called up and asked to join, I would have said no.

I still love 'All Right Now,' strangely enough. But then that's probably because I didn't play it for some twenty years.

Free got famous fast, and it was a shock. You're working towards it, and when you suddenly get it with bells on, it is a bit much. I don't know how well I dealt with it.

When Free came together, there was a creative magic around us, something unique and different.

When I went down to London in '67, I had three things in mind: To survive, to find peace of mind, and to make music doing it.