George Thorogood , songwriter/vocals/guitar

Before Bad to the Bone, we just played obscure blues songs from the archives. But when we toured with the Rolling Stones, I noticed the reaction to their Start Me Up. I said: “Man, we’d better hurry up and write an original song with a catchy intro or, five years from now, people will go, ‘Oh yeah, George Thorogood – wasn’t he good at playing Chuck Berry or something?’”

Bad to the Bone is a male fantasy. Let’s face it: every guy wants to be bad. We were raised on Hollywood movies and all those tough guys, like Bernardo from West Side Story, or Howlin’ Wolf – we opened for him in 1974 and he had a ferocious reputation.

Johnny Cash’s advice for songwriters was to write down a bunch of words that rhyme then work around that. So I started with “bone”. Then I remembered that in our neighbourhood, the word “bad” meant “cool”.…