Davy Graham was the UK's most gifted guitarist of modern times. He revolutionised guitar playing in the early sixties and enjoyed a long career as England's greatest: if often over-looked, guitarist.

Revered by several generations of guitarists, he invented the Folk -Baroque style, invented a modal tuning system for the guitar called DADGAD and composed the signature tune of the sixties folk revival, Anji.

‘I don’t want to be misrepresented. I frequently have been discarded as a junkie. I did have a habit but not a big one, so if you ever hear heroin and me in the same sentence remember that heroine has an e on the end and that my mother was a remarkable woman. I never had a big habit, never got blood poisoning or anything like that: I got confused but we all get confused and later I made it up by the judo and doing three hundred press ups a day and ruining the speed of my finger work by doing too many press ups"

I got beaten up one night walking home. At the time of the race riots in Notting Hill, where were you last night ?- Crash! I couldn't do a thing, because although only one man attacked me, it was very ironical really considering my blood group, there were five of them across the road waiting for me to fight back and you know I wouldn’t have had a chance. Oddly enough they didn't touch the guitar.

I had a sort of itch to do as much as I could with the instrument before joining anyone else. Whilst joining bands was very exciting because the group feeling was there, I felt that singularity wasn’t something I was trying to lose. It wasn’t only conceit that led me to work alone, but I wanted to find out everything about the guitar: for myself. I once gave Roy Harper a lesson on the guitar. I suppose some people are born to be are larger than life, so well-adjusted. I have a cynical streak, I can’t help it; I’ll have to ask a buddhist about that.

The other thing was, frankly in the sixties; financially the rewards were there, people had more money to spend. They say if you want to know what money is: try and borrow some. Its pretty simple; If I come to your house you make me a cup of tea, but if you’re not in the mood and I’m a tramp in the street you wouldn’t give me the price of that cup of tea. You know that feeling, you know you can’t look; everyone gets it.

I'd been turned down for a visa to go to the States due to my stay in a couple of hospitals which for some reason is a stigma to some people; to some people it isn’t, it depends on what sort of relationships you form in such places and whether they affect your behaviour when you get out, but I had nothing to do with any of these junkie people for a good three years when I was in Kent so I learnt to read music and somehow its like an arrow that won’t come out. It’s stayed in me now

Anji was composed whilst I was under the influence of some, with the influence I should say of some French pills, I’m not going to describe them; its nothing to do with you, I was sitting alone in Monton, we’d arranged to meet Alex Campbell and we got arrested for being three or four people on a lambretta so we ended up in jail, and it was very amusing because Alex turned up trying to look respectable well; as respectable as possible for a man who had been drinking and playing folk clubs, and had suffered two bad bouts of tuberculosis; I remember he had a romantic novel respectably under his arm; meanwhile he was wearing a denim suit, he was one of us but you know he was the oldest of us and he got us out of jail.