CHOSEN BY JOANNE SHAW TAYLOR

“Istarted playing electric guitar in my early teens, and my dad tried to find players

I’d like – Slash and Paul Kossoff, guys like that. Then one day he got me Stevie Ray Vaughan’s DVD Live From Austin, Texas, and he got to me straight away.

“Stevie was the whole package. Of course he was an incredible guitar player, but he also had a great voice. Like Hendrix, I don’t think he always thought he did, but on slow blues songs like Ain’t Gonna Give Up On Love and The Sky Is

Crying, he’s got this warm tone, and you really want to hear him.

“I’d heard blues through my dad’s collection of old, scratchy Charley Patton and Big Bill Broonzy records, but as a twelve-year-old white girl from Solihull I couldn’t relate to them really. But I could relate to Stevie. He didn’t reinvent the wheel, but added flair and polish to the blues. He’s a great gateway artist – if you never heard blues, he’s an easy player to digest. I loved the way he injected his personality into every note, and his slinky rhythm-lead playing, where he’d mute the strings, hit them all but only one or two notes would come out.

“The main reason he managed to cross over from blues and get mainstream attention is that he was a pop artist. Pride And Joy is a catchy, three-and-a-half-minute song, with his lovely voice on top. And his work with David Bowie, of course – those first few bends in the solo to

Let’s Dance sum him up perfectly.

“For me, his best album is probably his last,

In Step, which he made after he cleaned up.

And that was an important lesson for me as a young kid. Stevie survived all the drink and drugs, turned it all around, created his best work after he got clean, only to go down in a helicopter crash. It’s incredibly sad. But he was, and still is, my idol.”