It was the song that was playing when I had my sudden moment of clarity in South Shields. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being a musician. Those dreams had taken many forms: sometimes I was Little Richard, sometimes Jerry Lee Lewis, sometimes Ray Charles. But whatever form they had taken, none of them had involved standing onstage in a supper club outside of Newcastle, not playing a Vox Continental organ, while Long John Baldry alternately crooned to the accompaniment of a tape recorder and angrily threatened to fine members of the audience fifty pounds. And yet, here I was. Much as I loved John, I had to do something else.

They were also the product of the bedroom at Frome Court. At the time we were writing, two artists were constantly on the Littlewoods stereo. One was the rock/soul duo Delaney and Bonnie. I was completely obsessed with the way their keyboardist, Leon Russell, played. It was like he’d somehow climbed into my head and worked out exactly how I wanted to play piano before I did. He’d managed to synthesize all the music I loved – rock and roll, blues, gospel, country – into one, perfectly natural style.

And the other was The Band. We played their first two albums over and over again. Like Leon Russell’s piano playing, their songs felt like someone switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do what we wanted to do. ‘Chest Fever’, ‘Tears Of Rage’, ‘The Weight’: this was what we craved to write.

People talk about Derek And The Dominos being a real disaster area, strung out on heroin and booze, but you would never have known that if you’d seen them live that autumn. They were phenomenal. From the side of the stage, I took mental notes about their performance. Eric Clapton was the star, but it was their keyboard player, Bobby Whitlock, that I watched like a hawk. He was from Memphis, learned his craft hanging around Stax Studios and played with that soulful, Deep Southern gospel feel. Touring with them or Leon was like being on the road with Patti LaBelle or Major Lance when I was in Bluesology: you watched and you learned, from people who had more experience than you.

One of disco’s big producers was Pete Bellotte, who I’d known back in the sixties: Bluesology had played alongside his band The Sinners at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. It was good to see him again, and the album we made might have worked, had I not decided that I wasn’t going to write any songs for it – I’d just sing whatever Pete and his staff writers came up with. I suspect the thinking behind this idea was influenced by the fact that I only owed my American label, Uni, a couple more albums. I was still furious about them refusing to release ‘Song For Guy’ and had decided that I wanted to get out of my contract as quickly as possible, with the minimum of effort. Not everything on Victim of Love was terrible – if the title track had come on at Studio 54, I’d have danced to it – but making an album in bad faith like that is never a good idea. No matter what you do, it somehow gets into the music: you can just tell it’s not coming from an honest place. Furthermore, it was released at the end of 1979, just as a huge backlash against disco started in the States, with particular venom reserved for rock artists who had dared to dabble in the genre. Victim of Love sank like a stone on both sides of the Atlantic. Once more, the offices of Rocket rang to the screams of John Reid firing everybody, then sheepishly having to hire them again.

I’ve been a professional musician for my entire adult life, but I’ve never got bored with playing live. Even when I thought I had – when I was playing the cabaret circuit with Long John Baldry, or in the mid-seventies, when I was just exhausted – I obviously hadn’t. You could tell by the way I would grandly announce my retirement, then end up back onstage weeks later. Throughout my life that feeling I get before I go on each night, the mix of adrenalin and anxiety, has never changed, and thank God it hasn’t, because that feeling is fucking great. It’s addictive. You might get sick of the travelling, the promotion, all the stuff that surrounds playing live, but that feeling will always keep you coming back for more.