That was the first time I had heard the name!" Then when we'd finished playing Cyril Davis said, 'that was a great set, thank you, and what was the name of the band?' Keith (Relf) said to him, it was The Yardbirds. We didn't have a name or anything, we were just playing twelve bar blues. McCarty recalls "We got a gig playing with Cyril Davis at Eel Pie Island. Later they formed The Yardbirds from two groups performing in the Kingston area, and gave their inaugural performance, supporting Cyril Davies, on Eel Pie Island in 1963. Two of the group's founding members, drummer Jim McCarty and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, who was born in Twickenham, met while attending Hampton Grammar School. One of these highly influential groups was The Yardbirds, who took their name from a reference by the beat novelist, Jack Kerouac. The musicians who performed at the island's Hotel had fallen in love with the blues of the Mississippi River delta, and their music was to become as successful internationally as the Merseybeat sound of The Beatles. Sounds of the Deep SouthMusic fans who descended on Twickenham's Eel Pie Island in the early 1960s witnessed a new style of music so deeply influenced by the sounds of the American Deep South that the area was to become known affectionately as "the Thames Valley cotton fields".
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