Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine both reach their eightieth birthdays in the autumn of 2007. Of the many celebratory events, the high spot will be the BBC Promenade Concert, From Bards to Blues, on August 8 at the Albert Hall. Recently I spent a morning at Wavendon, where, John and Cleo live in The Old Rectory, a lovely and fascinating building historically connected with the wartime broadcasts of the Special Operations Executive. In the grounds now stands an impressive 400-seat auditorium, The Stables, where the programming regularly contains something of interest to jazz enthusiasts.

John Dankworth began by remembering his early studies.

'At the Royal Academy of Music [RAM] I went for harmony lessons. I would have loved to have taken composition lessons, but they adjudged me only to be eligible for basic harmony. It was so boring. Once, I remember, it was complete an exercise with a rather churchy first four bars. I had to add another couple of bars. I wrote a thing that I'd heard Art Tatum play. It wasn't millions of notes, but it was one of those Chopinesque turns of phrase that Tatum would do. My teacher - whose name I've forgotten - looked at it. I wondered whether he was going to compliment me on it, or what. He said: 'That's a bit squeamish, isn't it? Don't try that again.' He was totally unimpressed by the fact that at least I'd tried to do something different.'

'Likewise I wanted to play the piano, to be able to play at Grade IV, or something about that standard. So the woman immediately started showing me the poise of the fingers. She went into all sorts of realms that I had no interest in at all. I got so fed up that I used to phone in with a handkerchief over the phone, to imitate what I imagined might be the impressive voice of a father, saying: 'This is Mr Dankworth. I'm keeping John in this morning from coming to the Academy, because he's got a very nasty cold. I'm sure you wouldn't want him to spread it to the other students. Every week I had something like that. I'd phone in and they'd dutifully pass the message on to Miss Maud Hornsby.

'Ten years later, another student whom I met later - by which time I'd risen to some sort of jazz notoriety, so to speak - asked her about me. At first, Miss Hornsby didn't remember me at all, until she said: 'Oh yes, I think I remember now, that very frail boy, who was always missing his lessons!' So that's as far as I got with my piano.

Dankworth chose the RAM without much thought. 'Royal Academy comes before Royal College in the phone directory,' he explained. 'I went for an audition. I played a piano piece that I'd written for my general audition. They were most impressed by that. It was a bit of watered-down Debussy, but easy to play, otherwise I wouldn't be able to manage it. So I thought that if they were impressed by that they would continue along those lines, by bearing that in mind when they chose teacher for me. But it never went any further than that.

'At that time, the doodlebugs and the V2s were going on. They had a hard job getting any males to go into the Academy at all, because they were all being called up for the Army. I was just a bit young to be called up, so I got in.

Dankworth credits Duke Ellington for firing his interest in jazz. 'When I got smitten by jazz, I knew nothing about it at the beginning, of course. I had to ask my Auntie Nell, who was very musical, whether jazz was good or not. I knew I liked it, but I didn't know whether I was being a culprit or a discoverer. She played viola, and horn, and trumpet and cornet, everything in sight really, and played in Salvation Army bands, the local chamber orchestra, and so on. She was actually an art teacher. She said I should listen to Louis Armstrong. So I went on to Louis Armstrong, but also discovered Bix Beiderbecke at the same. I did a paper round to earn five bob (25 pence) a week, to get my records. I discovered in the Parlophone Swing Catalogue that they actually had two bands, one on either side of the record. One was of Frankie Trumbauer, playing Clarinet Marmalade, with Bix Beiderbecke playing a fantastic solo, and on the other side was an early Duke Ellington, called Take It Easy, which got me into flavouring what Duke was doing at that time. But shortly afterwards I discovered records of the 1940s band. Some of the early Johnny Hodges pieces, where the very sparse open-voice accompaniment, with trumpet, trombone, tenor and baritone, enabled me to hear the bare bones of those harmonies, and to go on from there and to experiment myself. That was at the cutting edge, at that time, of course.

'I've always had a pretty good ear. At the Academy they placed me in the beginners' aural training class, because they didn't know where else to put me. They quickly moved me up to the advanced class. In the beginners' class there was a girl who'd played the Delius Violin Concerto, which I'd heard in the Great Hall the night before. She couldn't tell a major chord from a minor chord! Then I realised what a gap there was. Good aural ability always served me in good stead, and continues to do so.

'That's one of the things where I would criticize most of the academic jazz courses. By all means go forward. Train players to do that. But also teach them to keep an eye on what has happened, and rely a bit more on improving their innate talents rather than ones they were boning up on in order to play faster than the next guy in the section.

'When we first used to hear the Hot Seven it was that funny sound that you could vaguely distinguish to be a band. But it didn't connect to the present. Now, you hear a reconstituted record of Louis like he was playing in the next room, and you realise firstly what a wonderful trumpet player he was. Then, if you've got any knowledge of harmony, you realise that he was applying very sophisticated things to very basic chords. He was ahead of the game in the same way that Bix Beiderbecke was. So by hearing things sounding - in quality - more like they would be today, that's been a great lesson.'

The coming of bebop made a great change. 'I think the emphasis was - mistakenly - placed on their dexterity, and the speed with which they did it, like Cherokee, or KoKo, or Things to Come, which were all done at lightning speed. The first thing you realised is that the beboppers were fantastic musicians. But when you heard the slower things, and delved into what they were actually doing, they'd constructed a completely new language for themselves, which bears very little relationship to what went before.

'Listening to Charlie Parker in New York, when I was a ship's musician, in the long hours of night club work he was occasionally trying to play like Johnny Hodges, or Benny Carter. But it never sounded like anything but Charlie Parker. Quite often, those whom we judge to be the most original players are sometimes bad imitators. I don't mean that derogatively. We all absorb what we hear, which becomes part of our language. But the lucky ones who are bad imitators, if they are just that little bit further out, sound as if they are really inventing the things themselves. I think it's a great quality. We all know that of all the hundreds of jazz musicians, there are only a few where you can put a record on and within half a second you can say who it is, or which band it is.

'Kenny Wheeler was here at Wavendon on Saturday. I'd just got out the record of our first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. Kenny took quite a long solo in one of the numbers, which sounded quite different, both from the way Kenny played ten years later (and from then onwards), but also quite different from any other trumpet player I'd ever heard in my life. From the very beginning he sounded distinctive.

'When we were talking about how one can identify some players within the first second of hearing them, together we both said: 'Like Clark Terry'. There's no one who matches Clark. He hasn't taken harmony or jazz phrases and the language any further than it was, but he's put such an individual stamp on it.

'The Charlie Parker influence was so great at that time. Everybody would have loved to have sounded like Charlie Parker! I guess I was canny enough to realise that that wasn't the way to go. However much you learn from him, Charlie Parker's personality wasn't yours. The only one who seemed to be battling that stream at the time was Lee Konitz, who had a different approach, a different sound. I must admit to being influenced by him at the beginning. But there was also a bit of the original Bird inspiration that rubbed into it somewhere, more than it did with Konitz. When Paul Desmond came along he was just someone who was also very special, who was not doing the Charlie Parker thing, or the Coltrane thing, or any other thing. I suspect that Desmond was influenced by Stan Getz. But they were both giants to me, Desmond and Getz. Both had their influence on me as to which way to go.

'When Experiments with Mice was in the Hit Parade, I was 30. I did have amazing exposure by the jazz media very early. But so many of those things come from being in the right place at the right time. There's an element of luck in it, because at the end of the war there was a vacuum in British jazz, especially when bebop came along. There was a good crew of underrated players who were playing in the thirties up to that point, who should be chronicled a lot more. From that point there was a vacuum. It seemed like the whole nation was looking for something, to say: 'We're doing something here, as well.'

'By that accident of nature I just happened to come into the picture at that time, and liked jazz, and created a little bit of a stir in being able to play it quite fluently. At the age of 16 I won the Melody Maker Dance Band Award for best clarinet player. Once again, that means nothing today - and meant nothing then - but it caused the press to keep an eye on me. By then I'd got to Archer Street level, and met Ronnie Scott, and Don Rendell, and Leon Calvert. Ronnie had the idea of putting a band together to audition for the RMS Queen Mary [the ocean liner that sailed the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967]. So I did some charts for that, and we auditioned. I felt that we had no chance at all, because I thought that it was an experienced job. There were plenty of experienced musicians of the previous generation who could do it well. I was probably right, because we wanted the job for purely selfish reasons. We tried to make the dance music as amenable and useful as it could be. We made an effort to make it commercial, but we didn't think we stood a chance. But I think the fact that we all looked so youthful, and couth, shevelled and kempt - as they once said about my band - meant that we got the job.

You turned over a new leaf after the biggest war in history, and there we were, on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary in 1947, after it was converted after being a troopship. We were flattered that we were on this first trip. The memorable thing was doing the trials of the Queen Mary. They took the ship out into the North Sea, with the whole crew, the band and some VIPs. They turned this huge boat round, leaning at a 30 degree angle, like a motorbike speedway rider turning in tight circles.

We did the actual first voyage. It was like a black-and-white 1930s film. All the reporters got in the tugboat where the pilot came on board at the Nantucket lightship, at the entrance to the Hudson River. The fire floats were spraying their jets up in the air, the tugs were whoo-whooing, and people were standing on the sides cheering. Reporters, with those big old flash cameras and their pork-pie hats, were all in among the celebrities. What amazed us was that we got into Pier 90, which is still the Cunard pier in New York, and the first street we looked at said 52nd Street. The first thing we did was to walk through all the slummy areas at that time: 12th Avenue, 11 Avenue, 10th Avenue, then you got into the better part of Manhattan, Broadway, which was just before 7th Avenue, then to this hallowed two blocks of 52nd Street, where it all happened. The recently converted brownstone houses were all clubs. The basement, where the kitchen of the house used to be, was the club. The Downbeat and the Three Deuces were tiny.

'Outside every club was a peak-capped guy saying: 'Come on folks. No minimum, no cover charge.' So you could go in and buy a 75 cent beer and sit for three hours. When they said: 'Billie Holiday is just going on the stand', or 'Dizzy is just going on the stand', they were never just going on the stand. Usually the other band was playing, and it would be an hour before Dizzy or Billie emerged.

'When they weren't playing, or when they'd got time off, they'd hang around outside. I can remember the first time we went there, by some sleight of hand Laurie Morgan, another young British drummer who was interested in the new music, had arrived in New York before us. He guided us, saying: 'And this is Dizzy.' I distinctly remember saying, 'How do, Dizzy'. Those words echo in my mind.

'Ray Brown was on bass, Milt Jackson on vibes, all part of the Dizzy Gillespie big band, which of course took up about half the club. There was only room for about forty people besides the musicians. For us kids, from gaunt war-torn London, where half of the buildings were yet to be put up again, it was all so glamorous.

'I was 19, Ronnie Scott the same. All of us were about that age. The weather was so hot. You had to go to a drug store, which was a soda fountain in those days, which had the new air conditioning in. So you froze there for a bit, before you went out and got sizzled in the sun again. New York was like fairyland to us. There was no shortage of any foodstuffs. There were those yellow cabs that you'd just begun to see in colour films. The whole thing of Broadway was fantastic.

'Ronnie Scott was the chief decider of what to wear when you're a young jazz musician. He'd find a shop where they were selling Zoot Suits cheaper than the next guy down the road. Tommy Pollard was the pianist, a very fine player. He counted this as a trading opportunity. He'd buy anything you couldn't get in England. All of us bought American ties. In Tie City you could buy ties for 50 cents, which was about three shillings (15 pence). You could sell them for a pound in Britain. If you took two dozen ties back you could make yourself a bit of money. We were only paid eight pounds a week on the Queen Mary. You'd earn more money per gig in London, even in those days. Pollard was also a model aeroplane enthusiast. He could buy model aeroplane engines and other parts in New York, where they'd not existed for five years in England. He'd go back and make enormous profits.

'The trip was four-and-a-half days each way. It depended when you got in whether you raced for the night clubs or the record stores. We usually had between 36 hours and two days in New York before we had to climb aboard again and go back. We used to raid the record shops, of course, to buy anybody we'd heard the night before on 52nd Street. On the corner there was a place called The Hickory House, which was not a dive like the Three Deuces. It was a restaurant, where the featured pianist used to play behind the bar, in a sort of shop window, so that you could actually watch them from outside. At that time, Billy Taylor was the guy who was mostly in residence. Marian McPartland used to work there for a long while. Duke used to come in. Marian used to study Duke when she would hand over the keyboard.

'We've been close to Marian for a long time. In fact, when Dave Brubeck lost his bass player of long standing, and needed a new bass player, Marian told Dave about Alec. Alec was with Dave for about three years - but he did have to audition for it.

'For a long while, Cleo and I had an apartment in New York. We've only just given it up; we found relatives and friends seemed to be using it more than us. We really didn't need it. Whenever you did a gig in New York, for a non-New Yorker a hotel is in the deal.

Anyway, Alec got a job in a Thai restaurant, a few blocks down the avenue from where we lived, so he invited me. He did every Tuesday there. That's what Alec did before he got the Brubeck job. Even the lowliest places pay £50 or £60 for a gig in London, playing an evening of jazz. In New York, if they get $30, they are very happy to take it. Alec was not doing much. And of course, lots of time he'd just go in and play for nothing, sitting in at a jam, and get to know people.

'I went down. It was a trio. A French drummer, who was really good, an excellent Israeli guitarist, and Alec on double bass. The drummer had been busking in the subway. The Thai restaurant owner was impressed with what he heard, and gave him the job three nights a week. Nobody ever stopped talking when they played. Very few people clapped when they finished, but they could play just what they liked. People tipped them, put money in the bowl. It was wonderful music to listen to. At the end they bought me a Thai meal out of their tips, which was quite touching. On the way back from the Thai restaurant Alec was wheeling his bass up the few blocks. I said: 'Alec, I know it's only $30, and a free Thai meal. You could do worse than take that job three nights a week. People would get to know you there.

'He stopped the bass. He said: 'Dad, do you realise who does that gig on the Wednesdays and Thursdays, when I do it on the Tuesdays?' And he rolled off the names of all the top bass players in New York, who all go there and work for $30 and a Thai meal, because they like to keep their chops going, and they get boring work to do that doesn't challenge them. Some might do it because they might feel the need. For others it was a pleasure. He said: 'I go in and listen to them, to learn from them!' They all make a beeline for New York. New York is swimming with young jazz players.

The first thing the French drummer had said was: 'We are very much in admiration of you, especially your album Windmill Tilter, with Kenny Wheeler. I found out for the first time then that Windmill Tilter has become a cult international album. It dates back to when Kenny was in my band, and had to have several months off because he had a gum problem. A lot of people were thinking that that might be the end of his career as a brass player. So once, when he was at his lowest, I said: 'Kenny, when you get better, make an album, do all the arrangements. Feature yourself only in it, and we'll do it.'

'So we did it. There were such a lot of people in it; I've forgotten who they all were. John Mclaughlin was on guitar. Mike Gibbs was playing in the trombone section. Dave Holland, who played with Miles Davis, was the bass player. I insisted that Ken did all the soloing, because he was very retiring, but I forced him to, and there was only one place where he insisted on me taking a solo. The tenor player Tony Roberts did the only other solo.

'I had a very heartfelt letter from Dave Brubeck when Alec left. Alec felt he ought to be back on duty looking after his teenage daughter, who was at a critical stage of her development at that time. For about the last year Alec would commute to the States. At that time Dave wasn't working a lot - maybe one gig a week, or something - and he used to pay handsomely. Alec used to fly to Chicago, do a gig, and come back with all expenses paid. But in the end it takes a week out of your life. Alec was trying to rebuild his London connection, which he'd been absent from for a couple of years, so he felt he couldn't do it any longer. So he resigned through the band manager. Alec's an easy guy to get along with, and he obviously captured their hearts. I had a letter from Dave just after he left. He said he felt like crying when he found out Alec was leaving. I think he thought - like a father tends to think - that I could say to Alec, who was then 45, 'Don't be such a fool,' clip his ear and say, 'You get back there with Dave!' Since then we've kept very close to the Brubeck family.

'I think of the present scene as I do about all the scenes in all the periods of jazz. There aren't enough people who make a point of making their own statement in jazz. They are happy to adopt the language, and with great skill. In some departments they learn things in their college life and come out ready to do things that took us eight or ten years playing in rotten bands, and increasingly better bands, until we got to the ones that we liked. Fortunately, and it is fortune, I didn't have to go through all that. Very soon in my career I was able to play with the best players available.

'I went to a big band because I thought we'd fulfilled our ambitions. We had three years with the Seven. Some of the Seven came with me into the big band. The agent Harold Davidson, who later did the Sinatra tours, said, 'you must get to a big band now, because you've won your race with the smaller band. So I took his advice, and did what I could. I'd always wanted to have a big band, because I'd written things for Ted Heath. I wrote one chart for him which he was very impressed with, because it did reflect the new music. I did an original big band arrangement, but not a 'blow-up, of Move (by jazz guitarist Denzil Best). Heath was very impressed by that, and asked me to do some more.

'I did one or two for him, but I realised at that time that it was nearly always for a broadcast. You'd turn up. He'd run it once and you'd say: 'Could we go through letter E again?' He'd say: 'Sorry, we haven't got time. Sounded great, though.' I realised that the only way I was going to be able to rehearse the way I wanted to was with a band of my own. So I was tempted into that big band arena. There again, I had definite ideas about how to make it sound different. I think it did. At the beginning it was rather polite and genteel. We had a later period when I felt it really contributed to the big band repertoire. Fortunately, that was well before the Newport visit.

'We appeared at Newport Jazz Festival in 1959. I've just recently been playing that record. Here at Wavendon we have Jazz Matters. I realised that pianist Dave Lee, trumpeter Dickie Hawdon and Gary Brown, who was a very good bass trombonist, and myself were available to talk about the Newport experience and play a bit. So I got the record out, and played it for the first time for a long while. I was prepared to be rather ashamed of it, really. How could we have compared? We were the only non-American band there, among a who's-who of jazz at that time: Ellington, Basie. MJQ, Dave Brubeck, all of them. To my surprise I played through the whole 45 minutes on the LP. There wasn't anything I was ashamed of.

'So we got to Newport, and played. The critics were very, very enthusiastic about it. At the time, the American bands were becoming more sophisticated, looking for more subtle means of expression, and joining the new musical language, not quite knowing what to do. So their minds were on other things. At that stage we were still influenced by the Woody Herman Third Herd, with their semi head arrangements, where the object was to swing as hard as they could. The American critics said that it was the thing that they missed from American bands. Imagine, we were all kids compared with that lot, thirty or something.

'On hearing the record everybody showed little tell-tale signs of nerves here and there, perhaps that only we noticed, knowing each other's playing so well. Then Dickie Hawdon came in. He's a dour Yorkshireman. He played about twelve bars where he footled quite nicely around, but nothing that you'd write home about. All of a sudden, in the middle of it he hits a high G. I suppose he said to himself, 'Oh, fuck it. Here we go.' Everybody in the band woke up. From that moment there was no sign of nervousness.

Dankworth clearly remembers the first time he met Dudley Moore. 'We were playing a May Ball in Oxford when we heard this upright piano going in the place where we were all queuing up for breakfast at 3:30 in the morning. We went round the corner, saw this little bloke and went up to talk to him. Even then, he was playing very good jazz piano. He said that he was a just leaving Oxford; 'If you've got any gigs let me know.' For some reason or other we needed a pianist. He came in, and started with the band. He was an excellent reader, his jazz heavily influenced by Errol Garner at that time, though he was already writing his own things that were very individual. The band in general kept him at a distance, because they were afraid he'd keep them at a distance, coming from Oxford. That was the old English class system, though Dudley, of course, was from Dagenham, from a working class family. He got there on merits. But he had altered his speech a bit. Also, to be fair, he had never having had any experience of comping for any sort of jazz players, let alone in a big band. In a workshop for a big band I usually go over to the pianist and say that the best thing you can be doing during most of the arrangement is to sit there with your hands in your lap, and find a space where you can be a real help. Nearly everything that's on your piano part is going to be duplicated somewhere else in the band. If, as frequently happens, the microphone is tweaked in your favour, you can drown a whole trombone section by putting a chord in the wrong place.

'So Dudley didn't know these things. He was probably not very good at comping, but he gradually won the band over with his sense of humour. After about nine months, when he could make the whole band laugh, things were getting very nice. Then he said: 'Would you mind if I took three weeks off? With a couple of friends from Oxford and Cambridge I've decided to do this review in Edinburgh. It'll only be three weeks. Could you hold the job open?' I said I'd hold the job open. But I'd already heard little bits about this foursome. I said: 'You can come back with pleasure, if you'd like to Dudley, but I'll expect you when I see you!' This was Beyond the Fringe. All of a sudden they are opening in the West End, then New York and Broadway.

'Dudley was a superstar before he knew it. He went to Hollywood on the strength of that, and sought his fortune, but that wasn't entirely successful. He came to one of our concerts in Los Angeles a couple of times. One day, the lead violinist in the orchestra accompanying us there said: 'I just saw Dudley Moore disappearing to the exit.' So I said: 'Go and get him will you, please?' I think Dudley was at the low of his fortunes. He didn't want to interrupt us. Any way, we brought him back, and things were back to normal very quickly. We were about to do the London Palladium. The previous year we'd had John Williams as the guest artist. I asked Dudley if he'd be the guest. He said he'd love to. We got it all done, contract signed, fee agreed, and all that.

'We were just about to send out the publicity when Dudley phoned me from London airport. He said: 'John, I've got a problem. I've got a film in that period, an opportunity that I've been waiting for for years.' I said, 'Have a word with the director. They can usually get around your shooting days.' Dudley said: 'I tried that, but it's for the lead part. I don't get days off.' George Segal was cast for it. He'd dropped out. At the last minute, they got Dudley. The film was '10', with the gorgeous Bo Derek. Ravel's Bolero came into it towards the end. Dudley was a good judge of what he had to do. Again, being in the right place at the right time. That film made his career, of course.

'I said: 'Dudley, you owe us one.' A few years later we were going through Los Angeles, saw Dudley, and said: 'What about making an album together?' So we did, with Ray Brown on bass. I did a few of the orchestrations. It was basically a rhythm trio with Cleo. I think it's some of Cleo's best work, and some of Dudley's nicest playing as well. It's called Smiling Through because that was Dudley's favourite old tune that he'd discovered at that time.

'I certainly wouldn't have toured the States if it hadn't been for Cleo. As we all know, vocalists make quicker headway than instrumentalists in getting known in lots of sorts of music. The charts are dominated by vocalists. I felt particularly fortunate to have cracked it a couple of times, with Experiments with Mice, and with African Waltz.

'For a long while after we were married Cleo and I kept apart professionally. We found that people expected that when they booked one, they'd get the other as a free gift. We did a tour of Australia, the two of us together, more to please our agent than anything else. Australia was a place to which you didn't go, in those days, unless you were on the way up or on the way down. We seemed to have been at the top of our parabola at the time.

'We played the first concert in Perth. At the end, people stood to applaud. We'd never seen this happen before, but it happened throughout Australia. Extra concerts were put on, so we ended up doing twice the number of concerts. People were killing to get tickets. We came back through New York, just to do a chat show. I think it was the Johnny Carson show. While we were there we were quite flushed with pride; we seemed to be better than we thought we were. So I thought I'd try to see whether we could further our career here. So I went round a number of agents. This was in 1972.

'The agent who had sent us to Australia was a classical agent. So I went first to the classical people, to see what they said about allowing us to do a lieder recital, but in modern terms, using Cole Porter and Noel Coward. None of the American agents really understood what I was talking about. I didn't hear back from any of them. Then a friend knew of an agent, Ron Delsener, who had just done a show at Madison Square Garden, with Tom Jones. I went to see him. Delsener was a delightful guy. By that time I'd learned not to go in like a modest Brit. 'If you haven't heard Cleo Laine, you're missing out on one of the great singers of the generation,' I said.

''I think I know what you're talking about. You've got a class act,' said Delsener. In other words, we'd appeal to classy people. He said: 'If I book Alice Tully Hall, we go halves, fifty-fifty, right?' I said, 'Anything you say, Ron.'

'John Taylor was our pianist. We'd forgotten that the Australians are more effusive in their applause than the British, of course, but not nearly as effusive as the New York audience. The New Yorkers went mad at the end. Likewise, the press. The New York Times said something like: 'The British, who have been dropping monstrous rock groups on us with alarming regularity over the last fifteen years, have been hiding one of their national treasures.' That's how they started. They went on in that vein. Just a complete rave. Another one said: 'Years from now there will be people who'll be able to stop conversation at a dinner party by saying: 'I was at Cleo Laine's first appearance in New York.'

'After that concert, Ron Delsener had put on a modest party for friends and the press. Ron came over and said: 'Got our cheque book, John?' I asked him what the news was. 'You owe me $153'. In other words, we'd lost $306 on the whole thing, with the advertising and complimentary tickets. A bargain, I think, for the publicity and attention we got from it.

'The guy who'd run us in Australia, and put on the extra concerts, said: 'That was fantastic. When's Ron going to put you on in Carnegie Hall? If Ron can't help you, I'll help you.' I said: 'What do you mean, help me?' He said: 'I want to book you for Carnegie Hall. That was in September, 1972. He booked Carnegie Hall for the following April.

'It was absolutely sold out. So far, we've done 30 appearances at Carnegie Hall.'